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Is College Worth It? with Extern CEO Matt Wilkerson
163 Plays9 months ago
Rising costs and uncertain job prospects are shaking students' confidence in traditional education. So, how can we tackle this pressing issue? In this episode of CPO PLAYBOOK, Felicia Shakiba engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Matt Wilkerson, CEO and Co-founder of Extern. Matt introduces externships as an innovative solution. These remote, real-world projects not only help students gain valuable experience but also enable companies to efficiently engage with a broader talent pool. While there are many benefits of skills-based hiring, Matt addresses the challenges of standardization that hinder its widespread adoption. Tune in to discover how externships can bridge the gap between academic preparation and workplace readiness, ultimately fostering student success and enhancing workforce preparation for the future of work. This episode is a must-listen for anyone invested in career development and the changing dynamics of education!
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Transcript
Introduction to CPO Playbook Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
I'm Felicia Shakiba, and this is CPO Playbook, where we solve a business challenge in every episode.
Declining Trust in Higher Education
00:00:14
Speaker
A Pew Research Center survey found that only 50 percent of Americans believe colleges and universities are positively impacting the country, signaling a decline in confidence in higher education's value. The question of whether college is worth it has emerged as a pressing concern for both students and parents, reflecting the heightened skepticism regarding the value of a traditional four-year education, rising tuition costs
00:00:39
Speaker
Escalating student loan debt and uncertainties about post-graduation job prospects have fueled doubts about the return on investment in higher education, with student loan debt surpassing $1.7 trillion.
Introducing Matt Wilkerson and Extern
00:00:53
Speaker
Universities face challenges as potential declines
00:00:57
Speaker
in enrollment threaten their financial stability. Our guest today that is shaping the future of Gen Z in the workforce is MIT graduate and Y Combinator founder and CEO at Extern, Matt Wilkerson. Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Before we get into our discussion today, I want to provide full transparency to our listeners because I am grateful and very honored to serve on your advisory board, Matt.
00:01:25
Speaker
And with that in mind, I'm committed to asking the tough questions that will help our audience navigate the complexities of whether or not college is worth it.
Challenges in Entry-level Job Market
00:01:35
Speaker
So let's dive in. Matt, you're an expert at connecting universities to employers with students who are hungry to learn and gain experience. What are you seeing from employers today? What are the trends you can share about what employers are looking for?
00:01:52
Speaker
Well, nearly two thirds of entry-level jobs require three years of prior work experience. Let that sink in. So you've graduated college. You're about to graduate. You're looking for a job and.
00:02:07
Speaker
most of the jobs out there that are entry-level require three years of prior work experience. Now, how are you supposed to solve that conundrum? I think that's probably the biggest glaring issue.
00:02:23
Speaker
that's out there today. And the student debt crisis really tells you everything about it, which is there's a student debt crisis because the fundamental ROI of college is not paying out. People are graduating, they're not making enough money to pay for the cost of
Disconnect Between Education and Employer Needs
00:02:40
Speaker
college.
00:02:40
Speaker
And so what are employers wanting to see from new students, right? I mean, they're asking for prior work experience. And do most students actually go to school and work at the same time? How does that even work? How do the students who actually get those internships or those jobs come straight from college into the workforce?
00:03:03
Speaker
People go to college for a number of different reasons, but the main reason they go is because they want to come out with this credential, a degree, and that degree is supposed to give them more economic mobility. And the majority of time spent in college and university is doing what the university or college tells you you need to do.
00:03:27
Speaker
And these are mostly academic pursuits, classes, courses that you take to fulfill requirements. And as it turns out, most of that, while important, while furthering one's education, their knowledge of the world, oftentimes though, employers don't care about what you did. And it turns out the best credential for getting hired is real work experience.
00:03:52
Speaker
So there's a reason why your resume or your LinkedIn profile has this big section, probably 80% of the real estate is dedicated to professional experience. And so when a hiring manager or an employer recruiter is looking at a candidate, they're looking at what's filling up that space.
Internship Challenges and Opportunities
00:04:12
Speaker
And most students, they don't realize, let's just take, if you're a student from a first-generation background, your parents didn't go to college, you're the first one in your family to attend, you're probably not told heading in, hey, make sure that you start getting internships on your resume your freshman year.
00:04:34
Speaker
because you need to first of all figure out what it is you're actually interested in, what you're good at, what you're not good at, what you're not interested in. We also need to start building up your resume so that by the time you get to your junior year of college, you can try to get that marquee internship that summer after, in between your junior and your senior year,
00:04:59
Speaker
which oftentimes is the big internship that determines the kind of job you're going to get after you graduate. Either that turns into a full-time job or that is the sort of meaty internship that employers look at. But there's only so many opportunities to do that, right? You might have, in a typical experience, three.
00:05:17
Speaker
maybe four summers. But your first couple of summers, you might take a summer class, you might get what I call a student job, right? You might work at the student union or some on-campus job, something that you should be getting qualified to do. But there are jobs and experiences that you're probably not qualified to do, but that you should be trying to do to learn, to further your own education.
00:05:44
Speaker
Those are hard to get because it takes experience to get experience. If you talk to the typical manager at a company and you say, hey, I've got for you a dozen interns that could come work for you tomorrow, they're probably going to say, now most people won't tell you this,
00:06:04
Speaker
but what they're thinking is, I don't know what I'm gonna do with 12 interns. Now, if they're interested, they might then say, well, what school did they go to? Oh, they went to Harvard?
00:06:15
Speaker
then sure, I might take a bat on that student. Or they went to my alma mater. Sure, I'm willing to put in extra time to mentor that student because I went there and I want a mentor and I care about my alma mater. Or do they already have two or three internships in the field that I work in? Because then I know it's going to be less time and effort for me to have to train them. Essentially, the risk is lower.
00:06:43
Speaker
and I'm willing to take that again. Otherwise, if it's not one of those three scenarios, they're probably not going to be interested. They're actually going to shy away from wanting to take on those interns because they've got a full-time job, they're busy, and it takes a lot of effort to train on board, give feedback, answer questions for a student. And then at the end, you're not even sure if the work output is going to be worth the time in the hassle.
00:07:10
Speaker
So those are all the, I'm kind of laying out the, all of the bottlenecks that exist for students trying to get work experience. And a lot of that rests with the limited amount of time that's devoted while they're in college to these pursuits. And the fact that employers are very risk averse.
Value of Real-world Experience vs. College Education
00:07:30
Speaker
Can you elaborate on how real world work experience serves as a valuable or in some cases more valuable credential compared to traditional college degrees? So what are students learning at a work experience versus just pure college?
00:07:51
Speaker
Well, first, I don't want to make it seem like the college degree is worthless. There are people who are kind of espousing that the college degree is dying and will die. And I'm not entirely in that camp. I think that there are numerous things that you learn going to college, just the social training in and of itself, being around other people, students, colleagues, interacting with faculty. You build a lot of just EQ through that.
00:08:20
Speaker
Academically though, it depends, right? It depends what department you're in, what you're studying. Some departments are like take engineering, right? Very focused on more practical skills that are in demand in the marketplace today. Others in more liberal arts areas are designed to take a more philosophical approach and open your mind to new ways of thinking. All are important.
00:08:47
Speaker
But what's missing is because these departments were constructed going all the way back to how universities were started, even from the Middle Ages, to really produce research, ultimately to produce now PhDs
00:09:04
Speaker
It's kind of this pyramid of you start with your bachelor's degree. If you make it through that and you're selected into a master's and then you're selected into the PhD program, you sort of made it through the gauntlet of higher education to then support higher level research. And if you don't make it through that, you're given a bachelor's degree.
00:09:23
Speaker
and are told, all right, well, this is sort of the consolation prize for not making it all the way through. And this should be valuable out in the real world. But once you make it out there, the degree is sort of the starting point. There are companies like IBM and Microsoft and others that have started to mostly again, in engineering disciplines, forego for people who have technical skills. But
00:09:49
Speaker
Looking beyond that, the degree is the starting point. And so then what employees are asking is, well, all we care about now is how fast can we onboard you and train you so that you can start making a contribution? And if you haven't been in a professional environment enough,
00:10:06
Speaker
If you haven't practiced skill sets in a real work experience, not a simulation, not a course where you have multiple choice or where you're writing a 20 page essay because you were told you have to write 20 pages. So fill up 20 pages words. No. Can you work in a professional environment where problems are ambiguous?
00:10:28
Speaker
where there is not necessarily a right answer, where you have to take a lot of information that may be ambiguous at first and synthesize it and communicate it in a very short amount of time to someone who's very busy, where you have to make decisions based on limited information, where it's not about the volume of what you do, it's about the quality of what you do, the simplicity, the thoughtfulness, the attention to detail,
00:10:55
Speaker
where not everything is a grade and where it's not about necessarily the effort that you put in sometimes, sometimes it is. Other times it's about how smart you were at coming up with a solution or were you willing to put in the effort over an extended period of time and even though you might fail on multiple occasions, you learn
00:11:19
Speaker
you pivot, you iterate, you take those learnings, you improve upon it over and over again until you get it right. These are skill sets that are not often prioritized in an academic setting because the structure of the academic setting is very black and white, right? That's how grades are assigned, right? You either got it right or you did it. And even in the more subjective areas like humanities,
00:11:45
Speaker
oftentimes you're being judged on the, again, the sort of flavor of the day of what might be a philosophical argument that you're trying to convey or that the professor wants you to understand or the belief system of the professor. So there's a lot of other kind of political elements that get involved in higher education. And I don't want to get into all of the more recent political debates that have been happening on campuses, but
00:12:14
Speaker
it can create a bubble where you're not exposed to the realities of the real world. That's interesting. I think coming from my professional experiences and working with employees of large companies and even small teams, I think that repeats itself in multiple different areas and subcultures of the business for sure.
Understanding Externships
00:12:36
Speaker
Now,
00:12:37
Speaker
I want to take a look at the word externship because there's a fairly new meaning to it with or at extern. What are the key differences between internships and externships? And why do you believe externships offer a more impactful experience for students?
00:12:55
Speaker
Internships, I think everyone pretty much knows what it is. In short, it's a full-time job, but in a short amount of time. So let's just take a summer internships, maybe two to three months. You're working full-time, just like any other employee. You got to be trained and onboarded. You're working on projects. You're working with other team members and colleagues. You're typically a W2 employee in the HR systems. You're in the workflow systems, just like any other employee.
00:13:23
Speaker
An externship has had a historical meaning but it's been vague and most people don't really couldn't tell you what is an externship historically. It traditionally meant some sort of short maybe two to four week shadowing experience. Largely it's a term used and it's a program in nursing or law where
00:13:47
Speaker
You're not quite ready to do the work, but it's really important that you're shadowing someone who is doing the work so you can watch them. And you might, they might give you a few things to like assist with here and there that isn't going to do any damage, but you're not really working on something that anybody inside of those firms or hospitals or clinics
00:14:11
Speaker
relies upon or cares about. We looked at the term and we said, you know what, we Paragon One historically was the name of our company and we just rebranded our name to Extern and we're now changed our domain to extern.com. And we did that because we invented
00:14:28
Speaker
a new form of work experience, just to put it something. We literally invented a new kind of work experience that hadn't existed before. And we use the name extra not to mean shadowing somebody, but instead to mean a real professional experience with integrated learning. The way to think about it in a simple sense is imagine a live online classroom experience.
00:14:53
Speaker
But instead of the professor lecture that you show up to, you would show up to spend time with the company. And instead of an academic project, you would have a real work project that employees of that company care about or are engaged with. Externships basically let people quickly build their resumes.
00:15:13
Speaker
with real work experiences remotely while giving companies a sort of expert designed turnkey project to help them drive business outcomes. So you'll have a cohort of students now, we're pulling a group of students together to work on a project. And it's the reason it works so well. And we've had last year, close to 9,000 students do work on multi-week externships across a couple dozen companies that we partner with.
00:15:43
Speaker
And then this year we're on track to serve tens of thousands of students with externships. The reason that students have been coming to do these programs online from all over the US and all over the world is because it gives them, first of all, it's more accessible than an internship.
00:16:03
Speaker
So an internship is usually going to be, although there are remote internships now after COVID, typically they're going to be in person at a specific location at a specific time. And that's usually over the summer. You've got to be able to move to a place. And so it's very constrained in that sense.
00:16:20
Speaker
With externships, we run them for companies year round. So if you're winter, spring, summer, fall, we try to avoid times where there might be holidays or exam periods, but otherwise you can sign up for an externship anytime. It's a, basically a video application. And that's also another reason why it's more accessible. We're not looking at GPA and you already have two internships and what school did you go to, which is, you know, that's typically stuff that a traditional recruiting process would look like at a company.
00:16:50
Speaker
We're saying, hey, if you've got passion, if you've got curiosity, if you can just commit to wanting to complete the experience, then come on in.
00:17:05
Speaker
You can do the work mostly at your own pace in the time that you have during a week. So maybe we try to design these experiences where about 10 hours a week can work. One or two of those hours is either with the company or we have a team of amazing program managers who support students in office hours answering questions.
00:17:27
Speaker
It's essentially you can think of it like this turnkey solution for companies and students. So it's a lot easier for students to do. It's also easier for companies because we now are helping to answer all of those questions that students have about how to do the work.
00:17:42
Speaker
We also have a curriculum team that trains students on, creates curriculum, creates training, helps the students understand what should they be learning to do well at this project. So it could be customer, learning how to do customer discovery or product discovery and product prototyping as part of a product management externship.
00:18:02
Speaker
Or it could be learning how to evaluate startups for investment as part of a venture capital externship. Or it could be working on a strategy project for a Fortune 500 company or a consulting project like we do with companies like PwC.
00:18:23
Speaker
So whatever that project goal is, we're going to train the student on not all the different academic theories about what they're doing, but what's the outcome you're trying to achieve? What are the skill sets you need to learn? Let's walk through that. Let's maybe do some early simulation and training around that, then go do the real thing.
00:18:45
Speaker
and then synthesize that information. And for the students that do really well, we'll have them present their findings to leadership at the company at the end. Those are some of the differences between an internship and an externship. And so for the company, they're probably putting in a minimal amount of time
00:19:03
Speaker
30 to 60 hours a week in some cases and other cases maybe just two to essentially two to four hours a month. And that means more companies can take more students. So you could have 50 students in a cohort, 200 students in a cohort. That unlocks the access.
00:19:19
Speaker
I think I can relate to that because I did my internship with the Center for Creative Leadership and I had to move over the summer for three months and that was exhausting. It was weird because I had to be somewhere for just a short amount of time.
00:19:38
Speaker
I want to know how does offering flexible remote externship opportunities really enable a larger number of students to engage and maximize their impact, particularly among Gen Z? So the key insight that we had, and by the way, I've been working on this problem for many years.
Externships vs. Traditional Internships
00:19:58
Speaker
I originally started with the company before this. We've now rebranded as Extern.
00:20:03
Speaker
But before this, I actually was running Paragon One as a career coaching platform for students to help them get internships and jobs. Kind of like a Kaplan, but instead of helping you get into college and do well in the SAT, it was helping you prepare for getting internships and jobs. Something that we felt that career centers weren't doing well.
00:20:23
Speaker
And through those learnings, it became clear that the students who finished coaching, while the coaching is valuable and the students appreciated the coaching, the reason they were doing that was because they wanted to get an internship more easily.
00:20:37
Speaker
while they're an undergrad. We found that we still had to work with our students to try to help get them matched up with companies after the program. I was reaching out to companies and saying, hey, we've got these amazing students, would you like to interview them? And some got opportunities, but it was very clear the ones that did well in the interview process, they already had internships. And the ones that didn't do well, they have this chicken and egg problem. How do I get the internship? And diving in deeper with the companies, we learned
00:21:06
Speaker
The biggest bottleneck wasn't that they weren't interested in trying to bring on young talent to get trained and to work on projects. They didn't have the time. They just didn't have the time. Even the people who are the best meaning, the people who love mentoring students, they might say, look, I can bring on one intern, maybe two, but five, 10. So we're thinking, well, how do we make it so that
00:21:30
Speaker
Actually, you'd love to bring on 50 students, 100. What would we need to solve for employees and managers and companies? And it really came down to making their time far more efficient. And so this kind of issue of the unscalable processes that come with
00:21:47
Speaker
people and mentorship and guidance. First, what we've done is we built our own team of amazing program managers who come from education backgrounds as well as promoting students who did externships really well previously to teaching assistants. And they've been instrumental in supporting
00:22:09
Speaker
our students, as well as we also have a student support staff answering emails for questions that students have. All of this has allowed us to support students in a way that most companies aren't able to do. Most companies, they don't have the time or the staff to do that. And so focusing on that problem has been the unlock.
00:22:31
Speaker
And it's been a combination of people, but now, technology, software, data, artificial intelligence, what we're moving toward is this idea of how do you give a student the feeling that they've got that perfect manager working with them?
Importance of Mentorship in Early Careers
00:22:51
Speaker
That perfect manager guiding them?
00:22:54
Speaker
And we're not fully there yet, but we're on our way. But that is a big factor. That's a huge factor. That's a huge factor.
00:23:02
Speaker
make someone successful or unsuccessful in the role, especially their first role. Whether or not you're an straight A student or an average student, that manager relationship and experience, I can tell you, is critical. It is. I mean, think about when, I mean, one of the stories I tell, it was my first job out of college. I was an analyst at Morgan Stanley. And nine months in,
00:23:27
Speaker
I got tendinitis in my hands from typing so much. So I couldn't type for many months. It was bad. I went to doctors and therapists and it's not like carpal tunnel. Carpal tunnel is actually, your ulnar nerve is pinched and you can actually get it fixed with surgery. Tendinitis you can't, you just have to relax.
00:23:46
Speaker
which is very hard to do if you're working in investment banking. So I was kind of thinking, wow, my career is over. What am I going to do? Luckily, I had a VP in my group who said, Matt, by this point, the summer interns had started. And he said, Matt, the interns are here. They're lost. They're clueless. Nobody has time to train them. Nobody has time to teach them. Everyone's super busy working on
00:24:08
Speaker
banking deals and M&A transactions. Can you please sit behind them and work with them, coach them, mentor them? So that's what I did. Those interns, they were afraid to ask questions, right? You are. You're afraid to ask questions. And so you sort of sit there. I remember this when I even started, you're working on a financial model, a PowerPoint presentation. You're not sure if you're doing the calculation correctly, something's not footing, and you don't want to bother anybody because everyone's super busy.
00:24:34
Speaker
right? Especially as an intern. And you don't know what's okay to ask and what's not. But I was actually sitting there next to all of these interns and when they had a question, I could get in the weeds with them. They didn't have to be afraid to ask and there were about eight of them. So I was bouncing around throughout the day. It's like they had their own private expert working with them.
00:24:56
Speaker
That's the vision we want to work toward. That's our goal, is to give all students that feeling of support and give companies that extension of the ability to support a far larger number of students because the benefits for them are huge, right? They can, for many of our programs we've worked with, we've been able to help companies reach underrepresented and underserved student populations that they normally wouldn't be engaging with as much.
00:25:21
Speaker
first gen students, international students who go to community colleges and have just different life circumstances than who they would normally be trying to recruit. And that then builds their brand. Young people now see their brand as a brand that is dedicated to training and upskilling their generation.
00:25:43
Speaker
Whether or not they hire these students isn't the point. It builds an employee engagement experience where employees now see, hey, there's an opportunity for me to get involved now with students in a way where I might have shied away from, oh, again, I don't want all these interns because I'm busy. It's now enjoyable. I can show up as a guest lecturer, essentially, in an externship program, share my insights, answer student questions, talk about what the amazing things our teams are working on.
Skills-based Hiring and Work Experience Value
00:26:10
Speaker
And I don't have to feel burdened. So it becomes this win-win, not just for the student, but for companies that invest in externships. In your opinion, why do you think skills-based hiring hasn't become more prevalent in the job market, despite its potential advantages? I think there's a few reasons. First of all, it's been really hard for anyone to agree on standards. And that's because each company
00:26:40
Speaker
They have their own culture, they have their own recruiting process and hiring managers have their own way of determining what they care about. If you normally, you have a resume, you're looking at that resume and you're trying to determine, okay, what does somebody know? So you might bring them in.
00:26:57
Speaker
And oftentimes the best way to do it is you give them some kind of short project or case study, right? To test them on something that's relevant to what you're doing. A lot of, I think a lot of the skill, there's a whole industry of skill-based assessments that are out there. And I think some of them do a decent job. I mean, where they're probably more relevant might be in engineering, right? Where it's like, okay, there's a standard for what you should know about certain things. Let's make sure you know those things.
00:27:27
Speaker
But skills-based hiring, it's not just about hard skills, right? Like I can know some hard skills, but you throw me in a real work environment where again, there's ambiguity. People have different opinions about what the solution should be. I have to show other traits like attention to detail, synthesizing information. And you can get somebody who does well on a skills-based assessment and then just doesn't do well in the real environment.
00:27:54
Speaker
And so I think recruiters, they haven't rallied around this standard and it's just very disjointed. I think the other thing is if you look, now that's looking at companies using internal assessments and tools, then there's externally, there's the whole alternative credential space that has blown up over the last decade. edX, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning,
00:28:20
Speaker
And then there's kind of the whole different certifications in different industries that you have, IT certifications and so forth. And again, a lot of those, while you might learn some things, they don't
00:28:33
Speaker
I always like to say recruiters and hiring managers never hired anybody because they did a Coursera certificate or earned a LinkedIn learning certificate. Or even still in a lot of these cases, I've talked to, for instance, cybersecurity is a category that we're gonna be offering externships in soon. And I've talked to some cybersecurity leaders who have said, there's all of these certifications out there in cybersecurity,
00:29:01
Speaker
but most of the students who get them aren't getting hired. Even though there's a huge demand for skilled jobs and people in cybersecurity, there's a big known gap right now in the demand for talent and the supply of that talent.
00:29:14
Speaker
But there's a lot of people that have these certifications. They're not getting hired because they don't have any work experience, right? They learn something at a theoretical certification concept. And a lot of these certifications exist to make money and they have kind of bureaucracies that are entrenched in schools and different places. Then you put them in a real work environment and they fail.
00:29:35
Speaker
That has been another reason I think that movement has not worked. The movement has failed, I would say, when it comes to transforming hiring and recruiting. And this is where, again, we just go back to the pest credential you can get, which is also the hardest to date, is work experience.
00:29:51
Speaker
So I
Hybrid Models of Education and Work Experience
00:29:52
Speaker
have a very important question. What is stopping someone from completely foregoing the college degree that someone would have to pay lots and lots of money for, spend lots and lots of time at, and really potentially distract someone from getting work experience that could eventually lead to a job that typically most people would get coming out of college?
00:30:18
Speaker
after working maybe for four or five years in a role without a college degree. So why not forego the college degree? Well, I'll answer it in two ways. One vision we have in the future is a student could spend, instead of four years on a college degree, they could spend two years just doing work experiences, small, short work experiences, like externships.
00:30:45
Speaker
We've actually had some students just in the last six months doing four or five externships. So they're doing some of these concurrently, right? They're stacking up.
00:30:56
Speaker
Which is great. So you got to imagine instead of taking four classes a semester, you take four externships a semester. And so eight externships a year, 16 externships after two years on your resume. I don't even know that may not fit on one page, depending on what you did. That's a very compelling hire. If you're an employer, are you going to dwell on the fact that they didn't have a college degree when you see
00:31:20
Speaker
that they've done two management consulting externships, two externships that focus on generative AI, a cybersecurity externship. And by the way, they could be in different fields, right? So the breadth actually creates a story of the different experiences someone has gained. But then maybe the final year, they kind of narrow in on the area they want after they've explored a bit in that first year.
00:31:45
Speaker
So that's one example you can imagine. Now, I would say this, you don't have to nest, that doesn't have to be outside of college.
00:31:54
Speaker
universities, the example I just gave you, that could happen inside of a university. So maybe there are two years of academic courses and two years of doing externships. I mean, there are some schools that essentially do this, that have co-op programs, right? Northeastern, Drexel, Waterloo, you spend a year essentially, or it might be broken up into alternating semesters, just going and working for a company.
00:32:20
Speaker
So more schools could do this. The cost to set something like that up is pretty massive. But if you integrated externships, you could have a student that graduates still getting the liberal arts education, right? They could still important to be taking writing courses. No one's saying that these are not important. There's not important classes to be taking, but a good chunk of their time could be focusing on the professional experience. So that would be my answer is why would a student
00:32:46
Speaker
not forgo college, it would be if they could find a university or a school that still values giving them, building their resume by the time they graduate.
00:32:56
Speaker
Got it. And so let's say someone out there is contemplating whether or not they want to go to college and they're thinking, Oh, maybe I'll just go do a bunch of externships instead of go to college. Or maybe I should just find some work experience at the kind of company I want to work for and work my way up. What is that true value? If you think there is true value and getting a college degree or four year college degree, maybe outside of like a doctor or a lawyer or something like that.
00:33:25
Speaker
I think everybody wants to have an answer like, is college worth it or not? And the answer is it depends. So if you're telling me that, hey, you're going to go and get a degree in computer science, and simultaneously you are building projects and putting them out on GitHub, and you are actively getting internships, building your coding skills each summer,
00:33:53
Speaker
while you do that and you know you can at least even with the student loan I would say you're going to be able to pay that back if you are able to get a good engineering job.
00:34:03
Speaker
Then I'd say, yeah, absolutely. Because I will say this, even for software engineering, there are certain principles you need to go and learn. It takes time. The coding boot camp craze, I think, showed us there were people that went into that and thought, oh, well, I'm just going to become a software engineer in three months. And no, it's a journey. It takes many, many years to perfect that craft.
00:34:28
Speaker
So if you're asking me, hey, I'm not going to pick on any particular discipline of humanities here, but let's just pick a humanities discipline that may not have an obvious job waiting for it at the end.
00:34:40
Speaker
and you're not gonna spend time trying to get internships in the summer. Instead, you're going to travel the world and you have to take out a big student loan because you cannot afford to pay for that college degree. I would just do a gut check there and say, all right, what are we walking into? Because I think that's the situation that a lot of students have found themselves in as they go to college. They study purely what they enjoy doing and they don't think about how is this gonna ladder into a career.
00:35:09
Speaker
And how is it going to ladder into a career where there's demand in the economy? No one's teaching students that. Again, go back to cybersecurity. Huge amount of demand, not enough supply of talent reaching that demand. Now that's changing, but it's not changing in the right way because, again, schools are offering these programs to get people in.
00:35:28
Speaker
but they're not coming out with the skill sets because there's that disconnect with real experience. So as a student, you've got to be asking yourself these questions. What is my intention? Where am I going? What can I afford? What's my plan when I get out with that degree? And will I have had a resume by then? If you go in not planning to build the resume as you earn that degree, I would say in today's day, you're setting yourself up for potential failure.
00:35:55
Speaker
And I will say that I think school college does offer a little bit more than that theory philosophy that you absolutely need in order to be successful at what you do, because I think the community and network
00:36:11
Speaker
the chance to fail without consequences or being fired. That kind of sandbox environment, I think, is still really important. And learning how to work with teams or other peers and students is still very relevant. But what I am hearing you say is that
00:36:30
Speaker
A hybrid approach is probably your best bet, right? Going to college, gaining that knowledge and experience, ability to fail without major consequences versus going straight into work and
00:36:46
Speaker
potentially getting fired because you don't have that base layer of understanding certain concepts or the network that you need in order to maybe be referred to another job from your network and so forth. But having all of the knowledge from school experiences and
00:37:04
Speaker
ability to fail in a safe environment, gaining that network. In addition to creating bursts of applicable experience and really what, for example, software engineers need a GitHub account, that's something that you probably need to do outside of college. Or I think if colleges and kind of, I know that being an advisor on your board, I know where you're headed and what you've been up to,
00:37:34
Speaker
which is really partnering with universities and making sure that universities have this type of hybrid offering to students, which I think is a win-win for everyone.
Partnerships for Integrating Externships
00:37:47
Speaker
That sandbox that you mentioned in the university environment is incredibly important. Having the ability to be in that environment, learn from a diverse group of peers, again, it depends
00:38:01
Speaker
where that is. I'm not going to sit here and say all colleges and universities are the same. Some are great at that. Others, maybe not as much. So you do have to consider that. But even with how we've designed the externship model, we've designed it to be a sandbox. So as a student,
00:38:16
Speaker
Even though we work with amazing brands, Home Depot, AT&T, HSBC, Macquarie, HP, National Geographic, Beats by Dre, Hugo Boss, all of these fantastic brands that we partner with to run externships. But if you're a student and you don't do well, or let's say just a life issue came up, something with your family, your health, or you're just overwhelmed with stuff at school and you have to drop out or you fall behind,
00:38:44
Speaker
Or you turn in work, you submit the work that isn't great. You'll get feedback on that, but it's not going to hurt you with the company. We don't send your name to the company and say, Hey, this student didn't do well. Take note of it. That kind of happens, right? If you go and you do an internship, certainly your first job, like.
00:39:05
Speaker
how you perform or not has a big impact. So we want to create that kind of like safe training space on-ramp, so to speak, for students to just get out there and try, get out there and try. We are working on some university partnerships. I do want to give a shout out to our pilot university partner, Maryville University in St. Louis, who does a lot of great work partnering with industry already. They saw the potential of the externship and we're working now to provide academic credit
00:39:35
Speaker
course credit to students who work on certain externships and we're planning to expand that partnership.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:39:41
Speaker
And we're talking with other universities and colleges right now to figure out how we either integrate externships into existing courses or create new courses around the externship experience. The learning objective being, what do I need to work on and learn in this industry that's applicable? And also how we can provide that for students in our network to get transfer credit into their school.
00:40:06
Speaker
Matt, this conversation I hope is eye-opening and helps people navigate where their next step is in their life as a college student or as a parent of a student contemplating whether or not they're going to college because I know people out there are kind of on the fence. And so I think this was a fantastic conversation highlighting what's important, what's not,
00:40:35
Speaker
what makes sense for them. And I hope people get clarity around this question. So thank you so much for your time and for being a guest on the show. This was really amazing.
00:40:49
Speaker
Thank you, Felicia. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed it. If today's episode captured your interest, please consider sharing it with a friend or visit cpoplaybook.com to read the episode or learn more about leadership and talent management. We greatly appreciate your rating, review and support as a subscriber. I'm Felicia Shakiba. See you next Wednesday and thanks for listening.