Ep. 12: An Entrepreneurial and Global Take on the Fall

Paul Fain: This episode is sponsored by the ECMC Foundation, which supports building a postsecondary education system that works for all learners through its grant-making focus areas of college success and career readiness.

Paul Fain: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Key with IHE. I’m Paul Fain, the host and a news editor at Inside Higher Ed. For this week, I spoke with two experts with broad perspectives on the entrepreneurial and ed tech sides of postsecondary education, as well as on international students. The goal of those conversations was to get a sense of what they’re watching most closely for the fall amid so much uncertainty. First up was John Fillmore, the chief strategy officer for Chegg, a learning platform company that was formerly focused on textbook rentals, but now offers credentials, online tutoring and much more. Fillmore formerly worked for the state of California as a planning and research official focused on education and economic development.

Sound clip: And I think the really smart ones are going to say, how do I think of exporting an American university education globally online?

Paul Fain: I also spoke with Doug Becker, the founder and former CEO of Laureate Education, a large higher ed provider with a global footprint. These days, Becker is leading Cintana, a joint venture with Arizona State University that’s seeking to create a global network of universities.

Sound clip: And so I would say, as much as the sector will be rocked over the next year or two and permanently changed, I do think fundamentally the core for most universities, not all, will still be very much similar to what it is today.

Paul Fain: Let’s get the conversation started.

Paul Fain: All right, I’m speaking with and looking at John Fillmore. How are you doing, John?

John Fillmore: I’m doing all right. How are you today, Paul?

Paul Fain: Pretty well. Thanks for making time for us. Really appreciate it.

John Fillmore: Thanks for having me.

Paul Fain: So a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, and higher education is no exception. Given your interesting perspective from different roles you’ve had in the past, where you are now, what are your thoughts about the level of shake-up we’re looking at for this fall?

John Fillmore: Well, I think the cliche that’s come out, and like a lot of cliches, there’s truth to it, which is why everybody keeps saying it is there hasn’t really been an enormous shake-up as a result of everything that we’ve seen from COVID. I think it’s much more an acceleration of trends that have been ongoing. You know, I’m actually in the bucket of folks who, I would be absolutely shocked if you saw these 15 or 20 percent reductions in college enrollment that some people have predicted this fall. If you look at the FAFSA data, right, what are people actually applying for money for? That’s only down about 3 percent. I think that’s probably likely for the U.S., and you’re going to see a much more significant impact in foreign student enrollments. But again, those are trends that have been ongoing. We have an administration federally that has not been terribly open to foreign students coming in and visa processing. And that is now being extended with everything that you’re seeing with COVID and restrictions on travel, as well as natural student nervousness about what the fall is going to look like. My guess is you’re going to see a little bit of an enrollment drop. You’re going to see an even bigger drop in tuition revenue because one of the underreported things which your publication has been great about talking through is it’s not just foreign student enrollments, it’s that foreign students tend to be full pay. And so while they’re, you know, six or seven percent of total enrollments in the country, you know, they’re probably more like 14 to 15 percent of actual tuition revenue. You know, as you well know, you probably can’t name me two dozen schools in the country that can afford to lose 10 to 15 percent of their tuition revenue and keep operating business as usual. All of those things, you know, and then you add in, states are under greater fiscal pressure than they were even in the Great Recession, which saw an enormous cut to higher education support, which ironically enough is what precipitated all of the reliance on foreign student enrollments. So you’re going to have the cuts there. And I think it all comes down to over time, schools are going to be more resource constrained. You’re going to see less academic support, less student support than they have provided in the past. And then you’re going to have, you know, these different tiers of schools where, you know, to be quite frank, you know, the University of California, Berkeley is high-profile enough that they’re always going to find students who want to fill up their seats, you know, without naming specific colleges. The John Fillmore universities that not a lot of people know about, but are still charging a $40,000 or $50,000 sticker price tuition that are going to be in the most trouble. And again, maybe not this year, but over the next few years, you’re going to see 10 to 25 percent of those schools either go out of business or have to merge in order to be there. And with no offense to a lot of really hard work that’s going on from smart people at all of these kind of traditionally in-person schools, you know, it’s a farce to think that a school that has just in the last literally three months started to figure out how they’re going to do some sort of online or hybrid learning model is going to achieve what someone like a Southern New Hampshire University has mastered over literally decades of working through this model and doing it with a pedagogical view of what actually leads to good student outcomes. So I think it is much more likely that the online models or the hybrid models you see this fall are going to be an awful lot closer to what you saw this spring than they are to be close to what a Southern New Hampshire’s done. Where I think the really exciting and optimistic side of you would look at it is to say, again, it’s an acceleration of a trend, right? If you looked 20 years ago, you know, if somebody did online dating, they were thought of as kind of a pervert. You go now and it’s just thought of as that’s the most efficient way you can actually find someone who’s going to match your personality profile. In reality, online schooling is, I think, going to go very similarly in that 20 years ago it was seen as this is something that’s like a correspondence course and of course it can’t be high quality. You’ve had leaders like Southern New Hampshire already take that out. Western Governors already take that out. Arizona State, Purdue Global, you know, a lot of great institutions that are really pushing this forward. I think what you’re going to see now is a mass acceptance that there is a lot of reason that online can be great and blended can be great, right? So I went to the University of Oregon for my undergrad, so Go Ducks. But the reality is I sat in an intro to business course that had 350 students at it staring at the same professor. And he was an engaging and really thoughtful professor named Dave Dusseau. But the reality is that could have just as easily been online and probably more effectively with easier access and more interactive content that I could have clicked on and looked through while I was in that school. So I think that’s where you’re going to see a lot of the innovation as well as a lot of it’s going to come internationally, right? Just as you saw as from a global and developing country standpoint, as they’ve adopted new technologies, it hasn’t been adopt the American model to take on new technologies, right? Internet access became mobile first in many countries because it was just simpler than having to get broadband access and desktop computers for everyone. I think similarly, you’re going to see as online education becomes more important, you’re going to see a lot of innovation on the global side of this because these are countries and places that don’t have the resources to build up the giant infrastructure of the American university system. They’re going to focus on how do we get the best education, the best skilling, the best job preparedness for our students at the lowest possible cost, and that’s going to be online.

Paul Fain: Let’s stay away from the early adopters, the most successful online institutions, the SNHUs, the WGUs, the ASUs, are all up right now in enrollments. And I would suspect that will continue in coming months. But let’s stick with the John Fillmore U tranche, regional publics, smaller privates. Are there any creative solutions that you’re hearing about to help them still serve international students in a creative way? I mean, your point is a good one. You can’t really take that sort of budget hit when you’re looking at maybe not even getting another stimulus to cover the big hole in state funding. I mean, are they just completely out of luck here with their international students?

John Fillmore: I think some of them, to be totally frank, are just going to be out of luck. And you see a lot of schools right now investing deeply in things like chat-based connectivity to try and reach out to their domestic and international students to say, hey, you really should continue even if we’re just online. But I think, you know, not to belabor the SNHUs and the ASUs, but I actually think there’s a model they have started internationally as well that a lot of these regional universities are going to adopt, right? You see ASU doing a partnership now in India. You see Southern New Hampshire doing some work in Latin America. I think what you’re going to see is a little bit less of the, how do we enroll 200 students at full pay from international? And I think the really smart ones are going to say, how do I think of exporting an American university education globally online to countries and places that are willing to pay for it? And that’s going to mean the ones that are really forward-thinking, it’s going to mean a different type of curriculum in some cases that’s more skills focused than what has been typical in United States liberal arts institutions. It’s going to mean at a lower cost price because you’re going to be competing with upstart education companies in these local markets that know the local markets and know the local market demand. And you’re going to have to see it be much more flexible than what even a lot of the online schools have done. So we’ve gotten students talking to us at Chegg as we reach out to our student base all the time about how you have international students who are expected to wake up at three in the morning because even though their course was online, the course was online and synchronous. So it was set to Eastern Standard Time and they just had to get up and do this in order to be a part of the class. You’re going to see a massive change in the ways that happens. You know, and I think the reality is, Paul, you’ve been around this industry long enough to know most of the institutions aren’t going to be fast enough moving or forward enough thinking to really do that. They’re going to try and take their model that exists, put an online brand on it, work with a 2U or someone, and then say, look, this is an online program, rather than fully rethinking what it has to be in order to be successful outside of our borders.

Paul Fain: Well, you mentioned 2U, and for this episode, I’m speaking with Doug Becker of Cintana as well. I mean, what are, if you’re a resource-strapped institution, you’re not able to develop a flexible, robust program as quickly as you need to, do you reach out to a 2U or another partner to help you do it?

John Fillmore: I mean, I think you’re seeing it in, obviously, 2U is a public company, and you can see their numbers. I think there’s a no-brainer that at least in the short term, you have to do this if you haven’t prepared for it, because you’re competing with other schools that are out there and have been doing this for a long time and have done much more to build a sustainable model. You know, we’ve talked with our students within Chegg, and you see the vast majority of students are massively unsatisfied with what online learning, and I air quote that online learning really was in the spring. And the reality is for a lot of those students, they couldn’t even access it. You know, we talk about inequities in education. At least according to our students, 25 percent said broadband connectivity and reliance or reliability was something that was a big issue for them doing this in the fall. So you have to work with partners who have worked through and solved these problems many times before. I think again, the long term though is, you know, whether a 2U or another of the OPM players comes up with the model or schools have to do it on their own, as you extend out more and more to international, you’ve just got to realize that it’s not American size fits all. It’s got to be customized to what the local market needs.

Paul Fain: Speaking of local markets, you know, I have to say, a lot of what I’m hearing makes me feel even more concerned about the kind of have and have not divide in American higher education. I think it’s a relevant concern though, you know, and not a new one either. It’s an accelerated one, as you say. But you know, one of the arguments I hear from open access college folks, community colleges, four-years, both, is that they know their local markets, they can retool programs to meet local job economies. You know, we don’t even know what a lot of the jobs are going to be in this recovery, and they know how to serve their students, they can be flexible. What do you make of that advantage when you think about the other challenges and barriers those institutions face?

John Fillmore: I think there is a place in the future for the community colleges, you know, whether that’s a Cal State Sacramento, which I’ve lived and been around and worked with many people who got great educations there, or it’s the Portland Community College, which at another point in my career, I had great experiences with PCC grads. The question for those, and the ones that are going to be successful, are truly going to be about how fast they can retool and meet market demands because the skill demands of the market are changing faster than they ever have. You know, there have been more than one local chambers of commerce that I’ve spoken with that have said, We spent two and a half years working with our local community college system on building up what the curriculum should be to serve the local employers. And by the time that curriculum was finally ready to launch, the local employer needs had actually changed. Those schools that are going to be successful are going to have to adopt much more of kind of the innovative ed tech model of driving this, right? And that’s also, you know, part of why, both globally and in the U.S., you’re seeing an explosion of ed tech investment, because I think more and more people are realizing that schools are going to be challenged to do it on their own. And there’s going to be more need for public-private partnerships and for schools reaching out to innovative players to figure out how do I actually make sure that my students are ready to get a job.

Paul Fain: I had Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire, on this program a few weeks ago, and even he was saying, like, we had a three to five year plan here, and now it’s three months, and it’s been hard, you know. And again, it’s hard to be optimistic if you’re, you know, they have such a head start on so many things. Even for them, the pace of change here, and we’re not just talking, I mean, I took your last point as the pace of change in jobs and skills even before this, let alone like, how am I going to plan for a fall when I don’t know if I’ll have students? I don’t know if we’re ready to do HyFlex. You know, when you look at institutions that are swimming upstream, what sort of tools in their toolbox can they really rely on this fall to do the best with what they have, which is no doubt a tough situation? I mean, are there best practices you’ve seen in terms of an institution being able to offer a couple of options to students so they have something that’ll work?

John Fillmore: I think it goes to more a core principles element on this, right? The places that are going to be successful, and look, why has Chegg been successful as an educator, right? And we educate millions of students every year. The ones that have done it have really put on a lens that have said, how do you be student first, right? With all of the many stakeholders that are going to be out there across a university system, it’s very, very difficult for a college president, but she or he has to think of it as what’s the best answer for the students? And that’s going to be how are things more on demand? How are things available online in whatever modality the students are going to need? How are they flexible to whatever the student needs at that point in time? How are you making sure that whatever the answer is, the student is getting the academic support they need when they need it, right? One of the reasons Chegg exists is because the reality is most of our students need academic support at 10 o’clock at night, not between the hours of 10 and 12, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Getting that support for them anytime they need, those are going to be the things that actually distinguish what are the schools that can, within this, actually keep the students they currently have and have a reason that other students are going to want to join them. Again, I tend to be a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. It’s going to be very hard for these schools to do in the space of the fall. I mean, especially the ones that are trying to bring students back on campus, in addition to everything else that we’ve already talked about, you also have to be thinking about literally almost an infinite number of possibilities in terms of what happens with COVID. And, you know, as the brilliant philosopher Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And you can have the, you know, the best 500-point plan you think is possible on COVID. But what happens the first time someone in a residential hall, even if they’re in single rooms, comes down with COVID? Are you going to quarantine that whole hall? Are you going to quarantine not just that whole hall, but everyone in that hall who’s interacted with anybody else? Are you going to quarantine everyone who’s been in a class with that student that has come down with COVID? You know, these are massive problems that the institutions are trying to figure out. And my point on that is they’re trying to figure out that giant problem in and of itself while also trying to figure out how do we play catch up on everything that everyone else has learned about online education. I think you’re going to see by nature a really messy situation there for the next 12 months. But again, the best innovations in education have all come because people saw problems firsthand and started companies or started a new way of doing it. And so I do think if you look five years out, this is going to make us much faster at meeting the skills challenge that America and the world is going to need because you’re going to see much more disruption around people understanding that the traditional model just doesn’t work and it just doesn’t scale.

Paul Fain: Well, I think it’s safe to say, I’ll make one prediction. There is going to be a lot of change in the next stretch. And you’ve given us a lot to think about. And I just want to flag one point you made. I feel like in all the discussion about budgets, be they influenced by public revenue declines, international students and the struggle to get quality online offerings, let’s not forget about student supports online. And you’ve raised that. And I feel like it’s been out there, but I haven’t heard as much about that in this crisis. So I appreciate you flagging that one and for sharing your expertise with us today.

John Fillmore: Very happy to be here, Paul. Thank you so much for having me. Keep in touch.

Paul Fain: Thank you.

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Paul Fain: I’m speaking with Doug Becker of Cintana. Doug, thanks so much for doing this.

Doug Becker: Glad to be here.

Paul Fain: You’ve had an interesting run in higher ed. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just giving us the brief skinny of your bio and where you’ve been.

Doug Becker: Well, I have spent more than 20 years now in higher education and about 30 years in education as a whole, always on the entrepreneurial side. You know, today we talk about ed tech. 20, 30 years ago, we didn’t really have a term for it. And it’s been really fun to see how the industry has evolved. For most of the last 20 years, my passion and my work was in creating and building Laureate Education, which became a global higher education company, still is today, a publicly traded company based in my hometown of Baltimore. And Laureate was really my based on my fascination with how one could bring the benefits of scale to universities, especially small private universities in emerging markets where students just don’t have a lot of choices and where resources typically weren’t being invested into private institutions. So that was a great experience. We learned so much. Laureate grew to about 70 universities in 29 countries, over a million students and over 70,000 employees. So I definitely had a tiger by the tail.

Paul Fain: Yeah, I was always just stunned by the scope of it.

Doug Becker: Well, the scope was great. And what I’m most proud of is the quality of the individual institutions. There are institutions within Laureate today. Now, Laureate’s strategy has pivoted significantly since then. And I retired from the company about two years ago. But I can tell you there are institutions within Laureate today that are not only the largest institution in their country, but would also be absolutely considered one of the best. And many that have received, for example, U.S. institutional accreditation, many that have plaudits from the local regulatory framework. So it’s really, it was never a goal of just getting big. It was about proving that excellence and scale could be done well together. And honestly, what interested me as I was leaving Laureate after 20 years, and I love the company and love the people, I reflected on what I could think of in a new model that would be different than what I had done at Laureate, but still in this vein of supporting the development of private institutions to give students options in countries all over the world where they need and deserve it. And the Laureate model is still fundamentally based on bringing all these benefits to institutions that they can own or invest in. And it occurred to me there are many interesting institutions, including government-linked institutions, private nonprofit institutions and private for-profit institutions that just don’t want to be owned by somebody else. And so Cintana is, in essence, a network intended to bring benefits of scale, access to technology and the capability set of a really remarkable global team to institutions that want to make a long-term commitment to be a part of something bigger than themselves, but not to be over by it. And we started Cintana in partnership with Arizona State University. Another distinction from what I did at Laureate: Laureate is and was a global network of universities with a corporation at the center. And the Cintana Alliance, as we call it, is a network of universities with a university at the center. And in this case, a remarkable university, ASU, as you and others know, ranked number one for innovation in the U.S. for five or six years now in a row, the largest public university in the United States, one of the great leaders in online, as an early adopter in that niche and field, and an incredible partner in Cintana.

Paul Fain: You know, as we’ve reported and others have as well, a good time to be an established online entity to know how to do it right as you’re dealing with so much uncertainty. You have an interesting perspective, global, lots of history dealing with rapid economic transformation in a lot of the places Laureate and Cintana operate. I hate to ask you to speculate, but can you? I’m going to. Would you mind talking about what level of disruption, market shift, just immense change we might be seeing in the next six months in this country?

Doug Becker: I think it’s, of course, it’s going to be huge. I think everybody sees that. But of course, we’ve all speculated on changes for years. And people have talked about the need to bring the cost of education down, micro-credentials, MOOCs, all of these things. And they all, given enough time, do eventually seep into the system and make change. But let’s face it, though, there is something fundamentally powerful about universities, especially research-intensive universities that contribute to the discovery of knowledge, but even, of course, just great teaching universities. There are so many reasons why people seek a university education beyond just the credential. And so I would say, as much as the sector will be rocked over the next year or two and permanently changed, I do think fundamentally the core for most universities, not all, will still be very much similar to what it is today. Maybe a little bit smaller for some institutions, a little bit less demand. Certainly, students are going to expect and demand more flexibility. Universities are going to have to get over this sort of perilous time where they may not be able to be face to face with students, and students are not sure that a fully online education is worth the same investment of time and money as what they signed up for. So I guess my thought would be: yes, it’s huge, and yes, some may not survive, but I would go back to the idea that there are a lot of students and parents that really are seeking something around that university experience, including the ability to help them choose a career, get an internship, the pastoral care to give them the chance to mature, a safe place to go. I reflect on my time at Laureate, our biggest market for many years has been Mexico. In Mexico, half of all universities, well, let me put it this way: half of all high schools are on the premises of universities. Why is that? Because universities are considered a safe place. And so it’s just interesting how many different ways people need and use a university for what it can contribute to their communities. So I’m happy to speculate on how the change might look, but let me just pause there for a moment.

Paul Fain: Well, that’s really good stuff. And I feel like this, like you say, we knew a lot of change was coming, demographic cliff, price pressure, you name it, but the speed of it now is unusual. And, you know, I wonder, having dealt with rapid transformations in countries you’ve operated, you mentioned Mexico, what would be your advice to some of your peers here in this country who are doing scenario planning, like the likes of which they’ve never done?

Doug Becker: I guess the first thing I would recommend, and it was always a guiding theme for us at Laureate and now, of course, for me at Cintana, is to be incredibly focused on what your customers want and need. Recognizing, of course, universities have a unique relationship with their customers, and they are often forming and guiding their customers. But that often means that some people in the university sector don’t remember to ask the question of what their customers actually want. And I think that’s something really important for universities to do. So there are students today that are really questioning very deeply, not whether they ever want a university degree, but whether now’s the time to get it. And that’s because of questions about safety, but especially the value equation of what it means to be offered something online. And while we all know online education can be great, we also know that when a university has only had a few months to prepare for it, it probably isn’t. And we also know that great for a graduate student with a family and a job learning part-time online, which is where the majority of fully online has been done, is not the same as what my 19-year-old daughter, who just completed her freshman year in college and partly in our house. I think what she expects out of an education is different. And so there will be a lot of students that will say, I don’t, I may take a year off, I may go to a different institution. So I think universities need to be flexible and they need to be attentive to that value equation. And there’s a lot that they can do. So I’m a big fan, for example, in internships. We did a lot with it in Laureate. I do a lot with it in our planning for Cintana. And I’m a big fan of it even for my own kids as they’re trying to develop. And I think universities, the ability to offer virtual internships would be so different, a different way of offering value during this moment. And of course, we know that students may be about to come back to campus, although even that will never be the same, or that will not be the same. But we know that students at universities also want to be connected to the alumni. So right now you have alumni trapped at home at wonderful universities. Why not ask them to offer some time with students to, and that can be part of a virtual internship or really just a connection point. Because again, if you are a university, especially the ones we tend to all think of with brand names, students are looking for more than just instruction in that experience. And so the second point I’d say is, of course, flexibility is going to be really key. We know that even for students who do return to the classroom, those classrooms will probably be spaced physically differently. Students’ time on campus will be different. And the demands of society on maintaining safety will be high and scrutiny will be high. So I think the need for flexibility will be strong there. And that’s where online can be helpful. Universities can feather in online instruction even for students who are on their campuses as a way of relieving the need for space and a change in the space utilization.

Paul Fain: The virtual internship piece got me thinking. You know, we at Inside Higher Ed and others have written for a long time about the potential for micro-credentials in a stackable pathway. Do you think this time might give that a big boost, you know, as students look to do different things?

Doug Becker: It is an interesting question. I think it just depends so much on the students. So much of my work is outside of the United States, where the price pressure is very different. Students don’t, students and their parents are really making hard choices because there aren’t student loans in most countries. There isn’t a philanthropic source of income for universities in most countries. So it’s all tuition. As a result, the tuition at the Laureate universities, the Cintana universities, most universities outside the United States is much lower than it is here. And therefore, and yet very important as to what people can afford and families who have to choose which of their kids will go to university, not where they will all go. In that context, though, I think that there’s still, there’s many countries where university education has not tipped over the tipping point on the value equation. So my first point would be: yes, I agree with what you said. I think that will tend to be a more U.S.-centric, not only, but more U.S.-centric where the value equation has been strained past the breaking point. And then I think, of course, it also just depends on the student. If you are, again, a working adult professional, you have so many interesting choices for online, for competency-based, for credit for prior learning experience. There are a lot of things that are available to help solve the problem that are gradually sort of being accepted and understood by students and institutions.

Paul Fain: Obviously, we mentioned that in Arizona State, for example, knows what it’s doing online and has some advantages in this environment. You obviously are in the business of partnerships. What are some of the factors you think your peers in this country might consider as they mull whether or not to partner up to try to be more flexible?

Doug Becker: Well, it’s interesting. Arizona State is very good at partnering, and they are, I’d say, sort of partner-friendly in that they’re willing to engage and consider a lot of bold ideas. And then, obviously, they don’t do many of them, but they do the great ones. I’d like to think, like Cintana. And that was really a bold idea. They have been so successful with online, with research, with the U.S. recognition for their innovation. But I know that Michael Crow and his colleagues want ASU to also engage more globally. And they saw that, given the work that I’ve done in the past and the team I assembled, that Cintana could be almost an execution arm for them in complex international projects that they might not themselves have the resources to pursue. So, I have found them to be an extraordinary partner. And I’d say the key lesson to me in this type of partnership: first, I would encourage any company that’s partnering with the university to realize that you are inherently more flexible than the university partner. And I say that recognizing that I think I have probably the most flexible university partner out there. But think of ASU, it’s vast. It is a public institution with enormous social responsibilities to make education accessible and affordable. They’re a vast research enterprise, and they are dealing with these extraordinary issues around how to reopen. Imagine a university with almost 100,000 physical students, students that want to be there physically, in addition to now 50,000, 60,000 fully online students. So, I wake up every morning thinking, what can I do for them? Because they have so much on their plate. And I know they appreciate that. So, this is more advice to the people who want to be their partners, which is recognize you’re flexible and you need to support these institutions. And obviously, you hope in return you build trust and support and create something mutually beneficial. And then, the other point I’d say is that you need to really understand that university. Each university has different culture and different decision-making framework and different strengths and weaknesses, different political environment. We set up Cintana on the ASU campus. A lot of universities partner with institutions that are not located physically with them. That was the extent of our commitment to ASU. And even though, with ASU’s support, we do intend to have other university partners. They’re our first and primary partner. And through their Enterprise Partners arm, they’re a shareholder in our company. And so we also wake up every morning wanting to make sure we understand what’s happening there, what’s changing, and how we can be a part of it. So those are the things that I find interesting. And then for universities to partner, I would say it’s about alignment of interests, making sure that you really trust your partner, making sure that you really can be very honest about what your objectives are, and ask them to do the same. And I think if you can accomplish those points of view on both sides, you can build a lasting partnership that can be very successful. If not, what you could end up with would be a superficial partnership that just doesn’t make an impact or doesn’t last.

Paul Fain: Doug, thanks so much for sharing your time and expertise. Laureate and Cintana are such fascinating models. We’ll definitely be revisiting Cintana. And also, congrats on getting through an unusual spring semester in your home.

Doug Becker: Thank you very much, Paul.

Paul Fain: This episode is sponsored by the ECMC Foundation, which supports building a postsecondary education system that works for all learners through its grant-making focus areas of college success and career readiness.

Paul Fain: That’s it for this week’s episode. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll be back next week, and I hope you’ll join me.