1721 – School Goal with Troove’s David Hurwitt

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0:58with us right now it's dave herwitt dave you are the founder and ceo of truve truve is found on the web at truve.me that's t-r-o-o-v-e.me dave it's so great to have you thanks for having me josh all right uh give us an overview of what truve is the truve is is a modern approach to finding your best fit in college. This is something that we all do, either individually or then as parents. And the system that I think most parents find or will find with their own children is that it's not that different from the one that we used decades ago, and our parents used decades before that. And so what we're trying to do is to use modern matching technologies, use the kind of decision-making algorithms that help us to find the right kind of music, the right food, the right products online to help us find the right place in higher education where we are going to learn best in the classroom and engage most happily outside the classroom.

2:02Yeah. And why is this needed right now? Talk about maybe why the old way of trying to pick a college is just, it's not ideal. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, I just gave you a quick statistic here. the percent of students who stay and graduate from the first school they enroll in is 51%. So it's essentially a flip of the coin with today's system as to whether or not you have found the right place for you to begin with. And so we really think we can do better than that. We can help students to find the right place, the right things to study right out of the gate. And from the school's perspective, they are seeing fewer students coming towards college, and that number is decreasing.

2:47And the way that schools have reached students is also crumbling around them. We are all familiar with the junk mail model that pervades in college admissions. Tell me about it. I got a kid going into his senior year right now and it is nearly every day. And he looks at all this, especially like all these out of state, he already knows where he wants to go. He's like, he's been pretty set on it for a few years. It makes a lot of sense. It's local, wants to just live at home. So it's just like, you know, we look at this piles. I mean, he's also done exceptionally well. So, you know, I don't know if the, you know, the higher test score kids get a lot more junk mail, but he's getting a lot.

3:29Yeah, it's, and that's how it's driven, right? So what happens today is that schools will buy the names of about 250 students for every one student they need to enroll. So an incredibly wide, inefficient funnel. And schools will specify, like you suggest, show me the graduating seniors in this class or the juniors, show me the kids in my state or within 100 miles of my school, and show me the kids that have a test score of better than X. and then they just blast away. And they know from decades of history of just blasting away junk mail that that inefficient model eventually produces enough students.

4:10And the problem is, I mean, A, the spending inefficiency is stunning and every school knows it, but they just don't know what to do about that. But B, there are simply fewer students in the funnel these days. There are 1.5 million fewer students enrolled in U.S. undergraduate schools today than there were at the beginning of COVID. And those students have not come back. So we saw this drop-off with COVID. The other thing that's happening is what in the industry they refer to as the demographic cliff. So in the 2007 recession, the birth rate dropped. And that often happens in recessions. It's a macro trend we won't get into here.

4:49But birth rates drop and typically they recover. But the American birth rate has not recovered. And so there are simply about 15 % fewer students headed towards college in the coming decade. And so schools are pinched. And the other problem, and this is a huge problem that's just come up in the last year or so, those SAT and ACT tests are going to be administered digitally starting this spring. stunningly they're still done with a number two pencil that most students don't carry around on a regular basis but what happens when when that goes digital means that the that student's data goes from being the property of the college board so it can be marketed and sold to the college to the local school board whose wi-fi whose system is being used to administer the test and so the source of most schools leads is the college board, the SAT, or the ACT.

5:48And those are going to really struggle in the next coming years because they're losing their monopoly on those student sources. So if you're an enrollment officer and you've typically solved your problem by just buying more names and overpowering the system with more junk. Spray and pray. It is the ultimate spray and pray and the supply of spray is going away. And so the increase in pray is really not a strategy. You know, when we think about, you know, just the acquisition costs, you know, what that costs, the average university and how much that that just gets baked into tuition costs as a result of, sorry, kids, you got to pay more to come to our college because it costs us a lot to acquire you.

6:33How stupid is that? It's very stupid. In fact, I was just looking at data this morning, a recent consulting study that happens every two years, suggests that the average private college will spend almost$3 ,000 to enroll each student. And so, you know, if you have a thousand student class size, you're talking to$3 million budget, and you the VP of enrollment at most schools would admit to you, maybe not on camera, but they would admit to you that they know that 75 % of that money never reaches its intended target, right? You're marketing to your son, who is doing his level best to avoid all of that junk.

7:15And instead of being able to engage in a very modern way that these students today expect, schools are continuing to just blast away with mailers and with junk mail and college fairs and emails and text messages and things that the students are just delete, delete, delete. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, colleges, you know, I talk about this frequently. You know, this is the same stuff that a lot of marketers are facing is, you know, for example, in B2B sales, lead gen tactics are burned over. The fields have been decimated. They no longer work. Using LinkedIn sales navigator just simply because it's been abused for so many years has created a hyper-resistant population.

7:59So I talk with VPs of sales every single week that are struggling because they're like, how do we get new top of the funnel conversations because the old stuff just isn't working anymore? Okay. So the idea, and I'm a big proponent of spending more time with fewer people and those fewer people being the right people. But Dave, can you maybe talk about what this could end up looking like then when an admissions department is partnering with Truve? Yeah. So the two big insights here that we are bringing to market that are different from what exists today are number one, the goal should not be day one freshman year.

8:41The goal should be graduation, right? So most of the enrollment metrics, all the focus and analytics are, how can I grow my application base? How can I, you know, get more students to submit an application to us? And that's just not the right approach, right? Your goal, when an amazing restaurant opens up, your goal is not to secure a reservation. The goal is to enjoy a wonderful meal. Yes, you need a reservation. Yes, you need to enroll students. But what happens to those students is far more important. So what Truth does is we look at the actual graduates, recent graduates of a school, and we figure out what were the set of conditions that were important to them academically and socially.

9:23And then we are able to find those same qualities, the same characteristics and conditions that are being sought by incoming freshmen to say, this is the place where you are most likely to find the set of conditions academically and socially where you're going to thrive over the long-term. Okay, so the shift from let's worry about day one to worry about graduation is the first piece. The second piece is, let's stop having every single school create their own unique prospect pool. So a school that might buy 250 ,000 names to enroll 1 ,000 freshmen, they're only seeing and trying to communicate with 250 ,000 students out of a U.S.

10:08high school senior class of about 3.7 million students. Now, not all of those students are going to be perfect, as you suggest. With your son, there's a geographic element. But basically, most schools are seeing and being seen by only a tiny fraction of the market because they're excluding all these other potential students. So what we're doing is we're saying we have a better filter to show you which students will enroll and stay and graduate with you, which creates a lot more value for the school and for the student. And secondly, we have a platformed approach to this so that a school who joins the true platform, we establish what their graduation code is.

10:47And then we apply that code against every student who comes onto our platform 24-7, 365. And we simply find the right students that match with their culture. And then we send those over to the school and say, here is a really interesting match for you. You should reach out and speak to that student. And then we do the same on our part to reach to the student and say, you know, hey, Josh, we saw you just matched with the University of whatever. And you should check them out because you said you wanted this, this and this. And they have that. And so it opens up the line of communication. It opens up the basis for why you would be a great fit.

11:24And that makes it easier to speak to your guidance counselor, to speak to your parents and say, this is what I'm looking for. This is what they have to offer. This is what they don't have to offer. And this is why I'm interested in these schools. And so we're at the top of the funnel, helping to expand the reach of every school and to show them here are the students globally, not just domestically, but globally, who fit really well with your unique culture. Yeah. So does this require, and forgive me if you mentioned this and I missed it, but so this requires the student to kind of design and build a profile within Trove?

12:01Not really a profile per se. It does require them to take about a 10-minute quiz about their academic and social preferences. And so we need to ask them a series of questions. And from our experience, and we developed this with industrial psychologists who were looking for psychological safety kind of in and out of the classroom, right? So what are the set of conditions where you feel like your best self academically? And so we ask questions like, how important is a relationship with your teacher? And when you have a problem in a class, how do you solve that problem? Do you go see your teacher?

12:37Do you talk to your classmates? Do you Google it? And so you can see a pattern of behavior that is the kind of learning style that you have as an individual without having to be overly articulate about what that is. You can just answer some questions you know the answers to. That creates a pattern and then we match that pattern with how the alumni, the recent graduates and current students of those schools, answer those same questions. And when we have a match, we show the student the schools where their particular answers match pretty well. Yeah. Dave, tell me about your company itself, like how you've brought this to market, how you continue to grow.

13:16Yeah. So, you know, having a two-sided marketplace here that serves both the student consumer and their families and the schools, we made a decision early on to focus initially on the schools and monetize this business through the schools. Schools are collectively spending about$15 billion a year to market to and admit students. And so we see the enrollment, the admissions office, as the$15 billion gateway to the trillion dollar higher education industry. All right. So really pivotal point. The student side is ultimately something that interests us significantly. But as a startup, we have to start somewhere.

13:54And so we chose to market and monetize our business through the school channel and make our service free to students so we could try to build that side of it with less friction. But ultimately, I think there might be a model where we have a relatively small consumer price, but still have those dual revenue streams of both sides of the market contributing. Yeah. Okay. So how does the university engage with you? How do they begin that process? Yeah, it's really simple. We have priced this to be sort of an add-on, if you will, an extension to what they're already doing. And what we do is we administer our quiz with a small representative sample of their recent grads and current students.

14:40And then we integrate that data into our matching algorithm. So the platform that exists today allows a student to log on to Trove.me, take a 10-minute quiz, and then get matched against any one of 4 ,000 schools that are on the platform today. So the consumer experience is really broad-ranging. You can get matched with any school. and we have hundreds of data points about every school that are sort of come openly available. And then we add to that, we supplement to our data stream, the specific unique answers to your school when you become a true partner. And then, like I said, every time a student comes to Truve, we compare them to your unique data.

15:20And then we send you all the matches all year long, not just in single buys, but every week we're delivering new matches of highly qualified students to schools and reaching back out to those students to say, these are the schools where you really should fit. And the consumer experience is great. Kids can come back in. They can like and favorite and create a college list off of that. So it's designed to be very friendly for the students and very functional for the schools. And we send them only what we refer to as the green matches. And that was one of the principles. I just really quickly, I read a study about eHarmony several years ago.

15:56And eHarmony is not the sexiest dating site anymore, but one of the pioneers in the online dating business. And they were responsible in their heyday for about 5 % of all the marriages every year in the US. So massive sample size. And what they did is they said, let's not make this about first dates. Let's make this about marriage. Right? So from my perspective, not about getting into college, but about graduating from college. and so if marriage was there was the goal of eHarmony is the goal of eHarmony they ask you a series of questions up front about what type of person you're looking for and what type of person you are and then they match you with whichever people best fit your particular personality and then what's interesting is they only ever show you then those people so you're looking at a you know a whole bunch of people you might be able to date but they have been selected just for you and eHarmony did a study to say, what was the divorce rate for the hundreds of thousands or millions of people that met and married through eHarmony?

16:59And what they found was a divorce rate with that methodology change of 3.9%. So more than an order of magnitude improvement of outcome when they moved the quiz up front and made the quiz about long-term compatibility. And so we modeled that and said, okay, if we move a quiz up front and make the quiz about graduation and sort of lifetime engagement with a school as opposed to, will I get in? And then we said, okay, we're only going to show the schools the positive green fits. We're not just going to send them any kid's name. We're going to try to cut down on this inefficient junk mail-driven system and simply make the connections that both sides can see are really tangible, good connections.

17:40Yeah. Well, that makes a lot of sense to me, Dave. I love it. And that's the response we get from schools. I totally get it. Now, you and I both know that some customers are early adopters and some are slower to adopt and most are going to wait and see what the whole industry does. And the admissions industry is no different. It might, in fact, maybe a little stodgier about this. And so we're in the business right now of seeking out the early adopters, the change makers, whose first question back to you after they hear the pitch isn't, how many other schools are on the system. How many students do you have?

18:19Because when they ask that, I know my answer is, hey, you're not for me. I'm going to cut this short and say, you and I are going to speak again six months, a year, two years from now, and I'm going to charge you a whole lot more money. And you're going to want this because everyone else in the neighborhood is going to have it, but you're not my early adopter. And that's okay. That's all right. But I'm not going to waste my time on schools that are going to want to wait and see and look for company before they make a decision. Yeah. All right. David Hurwitt, again, your website, truve.me. Anyone involved, you know, and again, I think especially if you are connected with innovators in education, you're right.

18:59There are a lot of things that are broken in education. Admissions, absolutely one of them. And again, it just seems so inefficient. It seems so old school. We have the technology. That's right. Yeah, we do. Dave, next steps for someone who is a decision maker in the admissions world. You can reach me at david.true.me. You can go to true.me and reach out to us through our website. We're going to be, we're at most of the big career school conferences and things. So we're easy to find and happy to engage in a conversation. Yeah, awesome. All right, David Herwitt, again, founder and CEO of Truve, found on the web at truve.me.

19:39Dave, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

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