Transcript- Episode 128: Redefining Higher Education: Making Knowledge Accessible to Everyone with Shai Reshef, President of University of the People Episode 128
Sep 17, 2024
00:00:00 - President Shai Reshef
We will have a better world if we will have educated world. And I think that any single person who go and get higher education not only improves their lives, they improve their lives, their family lives, their community lives, and in extension, their country and the world.
00:00:23 - Christina Barsi
The workforce landscape is rapidly changing and educators and their institutions need to keep up. Preparing students before they enter the workforce. To make our communities and businesses stronger is at the core of getting an education. But we need to understand how to change and adjust so that we can begin to project where things are headed before we even get there. So how do we begin to predict the future?
00:00:48 - Salvatrice Cummo
Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of Economic and Workforce Development at Pasadena City College and host of this podcast.
00:00:57 - Christina Barsi
And I'm Christina Barsi, producer and co-host of this podcast.
00:01:01 - Salvatrice Cummo
And we are starting the conversation about the future of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner with industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of our highest goals, more internships and PCC students in the workforce. We at Pasadena City College want to lead the charge in closing the gap between what our students are learning and what the demands of the workforce will be once they entertained. This is a conversation that impacts all of us. You, the employers, the policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a whole.
00:01:34 - Christina Barsi
We believe change happens when we work together, and it all starts with having a conversation. I'm Christina Barci.
00:01:42 - Salvatrice Cummo
And I'm Salvatrice Cummo. And this is the Future Of Work. Hi, welcome back to the Future of Work podcast. I am your host, Doctor Salvatrice Cummo. Today we're joined by Shai Reshef, a visionary in the world of education and the founder of University of the People, which stands as the world's first nonprofit, tuition-free, accredited online university. Shai is an American entrepreneur whose career has spanned both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors of education. He founded the University of the People in 2009, and under his leadership, it has grown to serve over 137,000 thousand students globally, providing accessible higher education to individuals from all walks of life, particularly those in underserved and marginalized communities. Shai's innovative model has earned him numerous accolades, including the prestigious Eden Prize of Educational Development in 2023. Today, we'll explore how the university addresses the unique needs of adult learners and marginalized communities, and also discuss the broader implications of democratizing higher education through technology. Shai, it's an honor to have you here. Good morning. How are you?
00:03:02 - President Shai Reshef
It's an honor to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I'm great.
00:03:06 - Salvatrice Cummo
Thank you. Well, that's an excellent start. I had taken a moment to learn so much about you and your background and specifically around all your experiences kind of leading up to this point. And so if you don't mind, I think it'd be really great if we kick off the podcast for you to share with us. What led you to develop and create University of the People? What were your experiences that led the influence of this design?
00:03:35 - President Shai Reshef
So I was involved in for profit education for over 20 years, every kind of educational services. And among other things, I started the first online university in Europe through partnership with the British University of Liverpool, where we delivered their online degrees. For me, it was a great revelation. It's the first time where I realized that through online learning, we can educate people from all over the world, make them get this great European education while staying at home and keeping their jobs. At the same time, I also felt that while it was a great opportunity, most people could not afford it because it was too expensive. I ended up selling that for-profit university, and I came here to New York just to realize that I want to continue and I want to do more. But I also felt that I don't want to do the same. I want to give back. It's my turn now to give back. But it was clear to me that I want to make it in a way that will have an impact on the world. And having impact on the world is obviously through education, because when you think about it, when you educate one person, you can change your life. When you educate many, you can change the world. So I looked around, and they realized that everything that made this European university so expensive is available for free. Open source technology, open educational resources, content that professors produce and put online for the rest of the world to use for free. And the new phenomena were professors came online and helped students for free with their homework. And I said to myself, open source technology, open educational resources, and free professors, that's actually university. All I had to do is to put it together. So I did, and I created University of the People, which, as you said, the first nonprofit, tuition free online university.
00:05:43 - Salvatrice Cummo
And if I'm correct, the mission of the university is really centered around accessibility, as you mentioned, right? I mean, you mentioned it just slightly, but knowing that the accessibility is a massive component to the outcomes or to the experience of the student, how does the university also ensure that its programs are relevant? Because, you know, there's lots of, I'm sure that you've heard a lot of noise around, yes, it's accessible, but are we really developing these programs to position these students for success. And so how do we ensure, how are you ensuring those two things align?
00:06:22 - President Shai Reshef
So you're right, it's a good question. Because the students who come to us, coming from all walks of life, we have survivors of the genocide in Rwanda, the earthquake in Haiti, and we have refugees, we have Afghan women, we have in the US, homeless, undocuments, etcetera. These people come to us in order to have a better future. While we want their experience to be beyond that and to make them well-rounded individuals, their goal is to have a better future. As such, we decided that we only going to offer the degrees that are likely to help them find a job. Business Administration, Computer Science, and Health Science, Associate and Bachelor degree, as well as Master in education, Master in information technology, and a Master in Business Administration, MBA, the degrees that are most in demand worldwide. When we do that, we make sure that not only the degrees are relevant, but also what we teach them toward a degree is very relevant for the job market. We are accredited, which is important to ensure our students that there is a stamp of quality over our degrees. Our advisory boards of the different programs coming from the best universities and industries, and also we make sure to help our students find a job when they graduate.
00:07:52 - Salvatrice Cummo
When you say you help students find jobs after their completion, what does that look like? How does that happen? Is it with, in our traditional model of education, we call it a Career Center. What does it look like for the University of the People?
00:08:07 - President Shai Reshef
So we are not traditional, but we still call it Career Service Center. Let me start by saying that a lot of students work while studying. So finding a job is not the issue, but actually finding a better job and helping get promoted while they study with us. We teach them, like other universities, how to write your resume, how to open a LinkedIn page, how to search for a job, how to be ready for an interview. So we teach them all this. In addition, we are able to offer virtual internship to every single one of our students. So we sign an agreement that enables us to offer a virtual internship to every one of our 137,000 students, including refugee and refugee camp, including women who are studying while hiding in Afghanistan. They get virtual internship of a seven and a half month while they doing it. They study and get credit for the internship when they are done. About 25% of them get job opportunities from the workplace, from the place they did the internship, and others go to the job market with actual job experience. I think that just talking about our graduate work in Google and Amazon and Wells Fargo and IBM and World Bank. We have quite successful graduates who do quite well in their life after graduation. We are very proud of them and we feel that it is our role. As I said, studying with us is part of the way toward their future and we need to help them in their future as well. So job placement is very important for us.
00:10:03 - Salvatrice Cummo
Yes. I want to circle back just a little bit on the alignment of the programs and how you're ensuring that those programs are relevant. I know this information. I think our listener needs to know. The information is it really has a lot to do with the instructors. Can you talk a little bit about how the instructors are curated and their expertise? Because that lends itself to the relevancy of those programs and placement, everything that you just shared?
00:10:28 - President Shai Reshef
Sure. So first of all, in terms of the courses are all created centrally, so we ensure that every course is being written and usually the dean decides who is going to write the course and we have instructors, instructional designers that work with them. Every course goes through peer review and we make sure that the content is very relevant for the job market. Then the instructors who teach for us are coming from all kind of universities, but all of them, in order to teach with us, need to go through screening and through training to make sure that they know the content, to make sure that they know how to use our platform. When they start teaching, they have a mentor spending the first term with them verifying that they know what they're doing. In every single term there is evaluation. There are evaluators, which are also senior faculty that are actually watching every class to make sure that our instructors are up to our standards, so we make sure that the quality is there. If the instructor is not doing as well, well as they should, we simply ask them to leave. So we ensure that the quality is there. It's extremely important for us.
00:11:49 - Salvatrice Cummo
Right. And I imagine that yourself and the team and others are seeing unique needs for these adult learners. You know, outside of the work life balance and their careers. Some of them might be in existing careers, others might be transitioning to other careers. What have been other, you think, unique challenges for these adult learners? And how is the university kind of catering to those needs as they come?
00:12:17 - President Shai Reshef
There are a lot of challenges to deal with. First of all, the majority of our students are working adults. And as working adults, many of them have families and many of them work. Now, how do you fit studying within your life? For that reason, we decided that all of our courses will be divided by weeks, and every week will start on Thursday and on Wednesday, which makes the weekend in the middle of the week. For those who want to study only in the weekend, or those who do not want to study to study in the weekend, because in order to study with us, they need to spend 20 to 30, 30 hours per course per week. That's a lot of time. When you think about it, it's three, 4 hours over the week. So we made it asynchronous to make sure that they can study anytime, anywhere. There is no live lectures. Maybe the professor decides to offer a live chat, but it's never mandatory. So they can study anytime, anywhere. And we are flexible. That's why we have a lot of single moms who raise their kids. The stay-home moms, either single or stay-home mom, or both, who actually during, I don't know, when the kid goes to sleep, that's the time to study. And they study in the evening. They can study in the morning whenever they choose in other places. And that's mainly for our students who are outside, outside of the US. Many of them are coming from developing countries where they don't have broadband. As such, a video is not mandatory with us. You can study, you can have text only for anything you study. Moreover, you don't need broadband. You can use only text. You can download anytime you are near Wi Fi. Study later on at home with any device. So it's any device, anytime. We made higher education accessible and affordable with the right quality.
00:14:24 - Salvatrice Cummo
Speaking of tuition free model, that is absolutely no easy task and endeavor. You and I both know the trials and tribulations of running a university, the business side of a university or institution. What were some of the challenges you faced in developing this tuition free model?
00:14:44 - President Shai Reshef
I'll go back to when I announced the university and I was talking about knowing that there is open source technology, open educational resources and volunteers. And I decided to put it together and create a tuition for university. And I announced it because I ran a university before I knew how to run a university. What I didn't know, and that was the big question mark, was I knew that I want volunteers, but how many of them will actually come was a big question. I can tell you that the day after I announced the university, actually in Munich, the New York Times wrote a page about it the following day. I already had hundreds of emails by professors who said, wow, this is a great idea. We want to help. So these amazing people built the university. We have by now over 40,000 volunteers. So I'm a volunteer, the deans are volunteers, the professors are coming to us as volunteers. So the university is based on volunteers, even though many of them are being compensated somehow or somewhat. Not somehow. So this was one question that I didn't know the answer, whether it will be, it will be sustainable. And it is. I think that the major challenge that we had from day one was how to spread the word. And by the way, we are tuition-free, but we are not free. We should talk about it so people would not think that it's totally free. We expect our students to pay $140 per each end-of-course exam, which turn out to be 5600 for a full BA. But it is a fraction of any American university.
00:16:31 - Salvatrice Cummo
Correct.
00:16:32 - President Shai Reshef
Which means that we don't have budget for advertisement. And how would people hear about us? I mentioned the New York Times writing a page about us. Well, if you are a Syrian refugee or a refugee in Sudan, you tend to skip the New York Times once in a while. So how would you find out about University of the People? Spreading the word is a big issue. UNESCO stated that there are 100 million people who need our services around the world. How do you let them know that there is an opportunity for them? So that has been a big challenge from day one. The challenge that comes with that is that when they come to us, many of them said, we don't even have this $140. Now, we feel that higher education should be a basic right for all and not a privilege for a few. So if you don't have the money, we need to help you. So we trying to have enough scholarships to let all of them in. We do not have enough scholarships. I'll give you maybe an example of Afghanistan. Following the Taliban taking over of Afghanistan, we announced that we're giving 1000 Afghan women scholarship in days with thousands of Afghan women applying. So we said, okay, let's double the number and then we triple it. So we have 3000 Afghan women now studying with us in their home, by the way, behind closed doors with a scholarship. But we have over 20,000 Afghan women who apply to study with us. We can't accommodate all of them. So that's a challenge because it's kind of, it's our mission to help them. We cannot, we cannot help all of that. Besides that, you know, it's like every business, you know, you have a budget and you have revenues and you have costs and you need to manage the growth because we are growing and you have technology that you need to support. So, yeah, yeah.
00:18:34 - Salvatrice Cummo
And so what was the win? Or maybe it was several different wins that helped the university grow to 137,000. Knowing that there's, you know, there's challenges on publications and pr and marketing, there's no budget for that, you know. So what were one of the ways or a way that you felt could spread the word outside of, you know, publication? Are there partners perhaps? Or how do you spread the word to start with?
00:19:04 - President Shai Reshef
Well, when we started the university in 2009 with quite a lot of publications, it drove students, even though it was so unique that a lot of people said, what's going on? What is it? In 2014, when we received our accreditation, it was a sign, you know, it was a stamp of quality. We got a lot of publicity. At the same year I gave a TED talk and with all this we start accelerated growth. So if from 2009 when we started, until 2004 when we received the accreditation, with 500 students, from 2014, now we're in 24, from 500 students to 137. Amazing exponential growth.
00:19:50 - Salvatrice Cummo
Absolutely.
00:19:51 - President Shai Reshef
I think that COVID also helped because when we started in the first few years, a lot of people look at us as, oh, you're on the margin, you're not the real thing. You know, the real thing is the traditional university online is not the real thing. Covid came and all universities closed their doors and look at us because we were the only one who knew how to continue the services uninterrupted. So a lot of students came and the perception of online. Today, every university in the US has at least the program or at least a few courses that are online and we know probably as good or even better than other universities how to make it a great experience.
00:20:38 - Salvatrice Cummo
So, yeah, that's right. You know, just kind of circling back just a little bit on the workforce and programming side. One of the things that came to mind to me was how is the university positioning themselves for the evolving needs of the workforce is continuous. It changes daily. How is the university positioning itself to meet those demands? And what advice would you give educational institutions like ours who are trying to innovate in that space of meeting the demands of the workforce? I want to spend some time there a little bit.
00:21:15 - President Shai Reshef
I talked about designing the courses, but it's beyond every program in our case have advisory board that is pretty much half and half. Half are academics, people who come from great universities, the other half coming from the workforce. And between them they decide of what we need to study next, teach next or what the students need to study. But it goes beyond that. We start offering recently certificates, both certificates from within our program. Take this number of courses and study and you get a certificate. But also we are planning on developing certificates that will be standalone certificates. The beauty of certificates from my perspective is twofold. You take a certificate, take five, six courses, you get the certificates and you can go right to work. At the same time you got credit. So you can choose, you can continue to earn a degree, you can take a certificate, stop your studying and go to work, or combine the two and work and study. I believe that certificate is very important. I do believe that in the long run, universities will stay important. I think that kids will just study a profession, even if it is computer science. Everyone is talking now about computer science, writing, tech. They learn a skill. But what happens when the program that they study become obsolete? Can they teach themselves the next program that is around? I am not sure that is what university gives you. It gives you the tools to study by yourself and be prepared for the world. So I believe that universities are important and will continue being this way. On the other hand, it is clear that young people are now want to get a job as soon as they can. Both because the cost of higher education is very high and because many of them need to work while studying. So they want to make sure that they are ready for the job market as soon as possible. And they think that the job of universities is to answer this need. I want to have as many graduates as possible. From my perspective, the entire world should have an academic degree. It will make us a better world. But if someone wants to study a few courses with us and then go to work, that's okay. If they found a good job and they're happy we have done our job, maybe not the job I wanted to do, but the job they wanted me to do for them, and that's okay. So we should eventually. We are not there for ourselves, we are there for our students. Students. We should look at what they want.
00:24:07 - Salvatrice Cummo
And serve them right, instead of focusing on those metrics that we think are valuable to the students. Sounds like the students are developing their own outcomes and their own metrics on what they think is successful. And if what is successful is gain additional skills, one or two courses and embedding themselves in the market, in the job market, then if that's what works for them, that's what works for them.
00:24:28 - President Shai Reshef
Exactly. Yeah.
00:24:29 - Salvatrice Cummo
So you're saying we need to adapt to that and not really kind of always hang our hats on completions or, you know, any other metric.
00:24:37 - President Shai Reshef
I agree. And I think that the combination of certificate, which gives you credit. So it's not only certificate as a way, you know, the best thing is stackable certificate, study one certificate after the other, learn a lot of topic and eventually get a degree. But along the way, you prepare for yourself for the job market. Yeah.
00:24:58 - Salvatrice Cummo
Well, speaking of the job market and how it's evolving, specifically with advancement in technology, what would you say or what piece of advice would you give higher education on their need to adapt and prepare our students for the future of work? Based on your experiences, past and present, how are we adapting and how should we be preparing the students for the future of work?
00:25:22 - President Shai Reshef
I think that anyone who bet against technology in the last 30 years, lost. Technology is the present. Technology is the future. And I'll answer your question by talking about AI. A lot of people still try to fight against the AI. It's a lost battle. The AI is there. So instead of saying, I'm going to forbid the students from using AI because they cheating, well, they will use AI, so use it in a way that they will not cheat. You know, I look at AI as an amazing tool that can help us improve the courses. Use AI to write the course and then put your input after you get it. Lets students know. Instead of telling them what is the answer to the question and send them actually to use AI to get the answer, tell them, go to AI, ask the question and analyze the answer that you got from the AI. So actually just embrace it and learn how to live with it because there is no other choice. I see the future of higher education in AI because it can improve results of the students, it can improve retention, it can improve the teaching experience. It can improve everything. Just do it right. Don't be afraid of it. I think that we should prepare the students. By the way, how should we teach the students instead of teaching them program, teach them how to use AI to program, because the AI can program for you today. So there are a lot of things that can be done, and I think that we should embrace technology everywhere we can. It's challenging because technology is expensive and you need to avoid making mistakes because they. If you make a mistake, it is an expensive mistake.
00:27:16 - Salvatrice Cummo
Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. This has been such a delightful, lovely conversation, Shai, and I know that there are listeners who are inspired by the mission of the university of the people. I want to really pose this question around. What do you think is the most important thing that they should understand about the impact and significance of making higher education accessible for everyone, regardless of their circumstances?
00:27:44 - President Shai Reshef
I believe that higher education is a basic right for all and should not be a privilege for a few. I think that if the world will have way more educated people with higher education degrees, we will have a better people because people with higher education first of all, they strive for peace because they have a future in front of them. But even beyond that, they have critical thinking. They can differentiate between right and wrong, between facts and set of facts. So I think that it is very important we will have a better world if we will have educated the world. And I think that any single person who go and get higher education not only improves their life, they improve their lives, their family lives, their community lives, and in extension, their country and the world. So higher education is a must. And I hope that we will all encourage everyone to get it.
00:28:49 - Salvatrice Cummo
Yes, what a beautiful way to sunset this conversation. Shai, I genuinely appreciate your time. I can't even imagine the workload on running a university with 137,000 students across the globe.
00:29:06 - President Shai Reshef
It's much fun. I enjoy every minute of it, so I'm not complaining. And it was a great conversation. Thank you so much.
00:29:14 - Salvatrice Cummo
Thank you. And for our listeners who again want to connect with you or the university, what's the best way that they can contact you?
00:29:22 - President Shai Reshef
Uopeople.edu. as simple as that. That's our website and they can find me there. They can ask any question. They can learn everything. They can sign up if they want. They can donate whatever they want.
00:29:37 - Salvatrice Cummo
Excellent.
00:29:38 - President Shai Reshef
Again, uopeople.edu fantastic.
00:29:42 - Salvatrice Cummo
We'll be sure to enter those into the show notes. Shai, thank you so much. Such a pleasure. Have a beautiful day.
00:29:48 - President Shai Reshef
Thank you so much.
00:29:51 - Salvatrice Cummo
Thank you for listening to the Future Of Work podcast. Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite listening platform so you can easily get new episodes every Tuesday. You can reach out to us by clicking on the website link below in the show notes to collaborate, partner, or just chat about all things future of work. We'd love to connect with you. All of us here at the Future of Work and Pasadena City College wish you safety and wellness.