Aspen: three things we could post

Katie Couric asked me what AI is going to do to work, and I said I don't know.

Nobody does. Economists don't. The heads of the frontier labs don't. I asked her and she didn't either.

That sounds like a dodge until you try to build something on top of it.

If you can't say which jobs survive, you can't design a four-year degree around the jobs that survive. So we stopped trying. Our programs run in months instead of years, and people can come back and do another one when their work changes again. That isn't hedging. It's the only honest design when the forecast is worthless.

The other thing you can build on is that whatever comes hits the people with the least cushion first. Less savings, fewer credentials, no network to fall back on. That's 53 million Americans in low-wage work without a degree, one in four working-age adults you pass on the street.

I don't know what's coming. I know who it lands on hardest, and you can build for that.

A guy named Mark was changing bedpans in a hospital for minimum wage. Three floors below him was an IT support desk.

His coach called him three times. The third time she told him she was not getting off the phone until he went down there and introduced himself, and she stayed on the line while he rode the elevator down.

Three months later he was working at that desk and had doubled his salary.

The part that doesn't fit in a clip: that coach wasn't being nice. That was the job.

Our learners apply to about 100 jobs to get three interviews and one offer. A hundred. Nobody grinds through that alone at the end of a shift, which is why we spend real money on coaches instead of more content, and why we get around 5,000 applications for every coach role we post.

It's the least scalable thing we do and the least optional.

I think I offended a room full of higher education people in Aspen this summer.

Katie Couric asked why Merit America needs to become a college when our learners already finish in four months and double their salaries. I gave the honest answer: there's about $250 billion in federal funding for higher education, it goes to accredited institutions, and after ten years we still can't get in.

Then I looked at the front row and apologized.

They have a fair point, so let me make it for them. Accreditation exists for a reason and most of the shortcuts around it have not covered themselves in glory.

So we're going through it instead of around it. Meritus College launched this year. Same short programs, same coaches, same focus on what people earn afterward. The difference is federal aid can follow the learner into it, which is what takes us from serving tens of thousands of people to hundreds of thousands.

(This is, technically, the announcement. Nobody approved it as the announcement.)

If you work in higher ed and think we're doing this wrong, tell me why.