Bill Kerr: It’s spring semester 2024, and it seems like almost every aspect of college is under the microscope. Access, affordability, and labor market relevance are high on that list. But while the college-for-all approach may have lost its appeal in some quarters, the value of a college degree is still borne out by the numbers in terms of lifetime earnings. Of course, there are caveats, particularly when you consider wealth creation. Can online college, buoyed by the pandemic’s validation of remote work and learning, improve the value proposition for students and employers?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University [WGU], a pioneering online institution boasting a wide range of post-secondary programs and a diverse full-time enrollment of over 170,000. We’re fortunate to have Scott as a return guest to the podcast. In 2019, we spoke about the school’s competency-based curriculum, its specialized instructional model, and its ambition expansion plans. Five years on, we’ll talk about the changes at WGU, including the new academic programs and partnerships and how the school weathered the pandemic. We’ll also talk about how WGU is using artificial intelligence to better tailor its course offerings and mentorship to students. And we’ll look at the public policy issues shaping online education. Finally, turning to the job market, we’ll discuss the affinity between competency-based learning and skills-based hiring and what it will take to popularize this more equitable employment model. Scott, welcome back to the podcast.

Scott Pulsipher: Thank you, Bill. It’s great to be with you again.

Kerr: Scott, we might at several points advertise the 2019 podcast, but for those that may have been first-time listeners here, tell us a bit of your background and how you came to WGU.

Pulsipher: Yeah. Well, I joined almost eight years ago at WGU in April of 2016. Prior to that, and since my graduation from Harvard Business School, I had spent most of my career in technology. I had worked at a software start-up company, and that led to an acquisition, to then I ended up in enterprise software and then later at Amazon and another software start-up before that. While I was at Amazon, I started developing an affinity for the impact that education can have on individual lives, and that led me to participate more with advisory relationships with my undergraduate alma mater, Brigham Young University. And I also participated in other lectures and seminar series. But what came about as more of a serendipitous event, the executive recruiter that WGU hired to seek a new president back in 2015 had previously known me from engaging with me while I was working at Amazon and trying to recruit me from there. He actually reached out and said there was an opportunity to consider joining higher ed and WGU, and it was a great fit.

Kerr: That’s great. And so, Scott, remember in our first podcast you talked about when you met some of the students, and that was really important for you deciding to take the job. And I’d love to just hear that story again.

Pulsipher: Yeah. Before the board decided to extend an offer to me, they did invite me to attend a commencement. Talking with a lot of the graduates, their families, what I recall very distinctly from that experience is that just leaving with the impression that the attainment of their degrees appeared to matter more to them than mine did to me. There was a higher level of just appreciation for having achieved that milestone in their lives, and also just recognizing how impactful it was going to be in helping them advance in the careers and the opportunities that they were pursuing. And it just seemed very emotional. But at the same time, I recognized how important it was, that education truly is a great equalizer. It’s a catalyst to help so many people change their lives for the better.

Kerr: That’s great. And WGU was founded in 1997. Give us what sets it apart. What makes WGU particularly distinctive?

Pulsipher: Yeah, it was established then in 1997. The governors who provided the seed funding for a private nonprofit institution already had their own public institutions, and I think they simply just recognized that there were many of their residents that were not participating in those systems of higher education. But they still knew that it was vitally important, especially if they wanted the talent into their workforce. And so there were a number of distinguishing characteristics. I would say, first and foremost, is probably the competency-based educational model. When we were designing for those adult learners who certainly needed education skills to advance their opportunities, the place-based, classroom-based, time-based model of education was not going to fit into their very busy lives. It was also not going to allow them to leverage the knowledge, skills, and ability that they may have acquired through work experience or other things. So competency-based experience really just allowed us to design to keep the learning standards constant or the outcomes of a particular course in a program—that those you had to keep constant, and proficiency in them had to be demonstrated. And so that allowed us to better design curriculum that was relevant to the work and to the roles that are needed in the jobs. It also allowed us to personalize the journey for so many of these working learners in a way that traditional credit-hour-based models doesn’t. A second big distinguishing characteristic was we unbundled the faculty role. We have faculty, those that have the credentials and the expertise in the subject matter to design and develop master curriculum—meaning regardless of where you are, you’re all learning the same stuff and have to demonstrate mastery in the same learning outcomes. So then those faculty are separate from the subject-matter experts who teach the students in the individual courses. And then we have separate faculty who evaluate the performance of students on their exams, their assessments. And then, probably, the most important faculty role we have is the program mentor—and we call them program mentors because they are individuals who have a master’s degree or higher in the field of study that aligns with the students they’re mentoring. And they typically have eight or more years of experience in that industry or in that field of study as well. But these mentors are with the student from the time they start at WGU to the time they complete. And they’re providing all the augmented instruction. They’re helping the students deal with disruptions to their progress—life events that occur, whatever it may be. And so those mentors are really motivating the students and inspiring them to persist in their education. And those mentors are probably one of the single biggest contributors to our ability to help students persist and complete. And the last thing that distinguishes us is really the online nature. This is now increasingly shared, especially post-pandemic, with many other institutions. But really from the get-go, we designed with a tech-first approach. One of those big things was, how do we leverage the internet to reach and teach individuals where they are, rather than bring them to a campus? Today we are able to serve, as you noted in the intro, more than 170,000 students right now, concurrently. And we’ve been able to do that without building buildings and campuses and everything else. It’s a great way to democratize access to higher education.

Kerr: So, Scott, then what are some of the main barriers that online and competency-based instruction are experiencing right now?

Pulsipher: It’s interesting that, while the pandemic, itself, may have catalyzed a rapid shift to online delivery of education, what it didn’t catalyze was more of a digital-first mindset, in terms of designing for educational delivery or pedagogical design or instructional models, et cetera. And that has actually amplified the perception that online, for some reason, is lower quality than the in-person instruction—that somehow has lower engagement between faculty and students, et cetera. However, there’s still some very encouraging things there, which is so many institutions now are truly investing in this. And, certainly, the increase of the student interest has spiked demand for more online, more flexible options. But there are still some regulatory barriers. Right now, the Department of Education and other regulators are certainly trying to reduce the expansion of online education. They’re trying to limit or control the way institutions utilize third-party servicers, who are often partners with them to do this. There are ways that they’re trying to challenge reciprocity agreements—if a student is domiciled in one state that they don’t want you leveraging, if you will, reciprocity agreements to enroll students in other states if you don’t have a physical presence there or if you don’t have state specific authorization. There are other things that are trying to establish standards for even instructional designs and “regular and substantive interaction,”—like, there are a lot of things that traditional designs of things that trying to be applied to some of these technology-first designs that are still challenging. And competency-based, one thing that’s notable is that the institutions who want to explore competency-based education, the No. 1 reason that they don’t, they cite, is regulation—or the lack of legislative authority or approval.

Kerr: While the regulatory environment’s been slow moving, I’m sure WGU hasn’t stood still. And you had very ambitious plans when we last spoke. So tell us about some of the major changes at WGU over the last five years.

Pulsipher: Some of the things that we’ve seen very promising growth in are the progress and advancement we’ve had for our on-ramp individuals who may not be fully prepared or ready for post-secondary levels of learning. I think more than 10,000 students have completed our on-ramps and matriculated into full-time degree programs and enrolled at WGU. We also have launched our first microcredentials—or those that are credentials that are post-secondary and bear academic credit, but they’re shorter in duration and directly relevant to opportunities—because we know that many working learners who are over the age of 25, that they are seeking pathways to upskill and reskill. Employers need better prepared and more ready workers into those jobs, but these individuals don’t have the luxury of going back to a four-year duration of a bachelor’s degree or something like that. But in the degrees in the programs, themselves, one of the more notable things since last time is in 2019; I think we served somewhere between 110,000 and 115,000 students on average for the year. I think for the whole year we served about 165,000 or so students. In 2024 this year we’ll serve well over 275,000 students. And we’re concurrently enrolled right now over 170,000 students. WGU enrolls students every month. And so we have more than 10,000 students matriculating every month. And we also have students graduating at any time. In 2019, I think we awarded somewhere around 35,000 to 39,000 degrees—I think 39,000 degrees that year. And this year, we’ll award nearly 50,000 degrees. One thing that I like to note, when we were celebrating our 25th anniversary year in 2022, we at that point had surpassed 300,000 graduates. And just five years prior, we had barely reached 97,000 graduates. So you can also see the accelerating impact that WGU is having in terms of the number of new degrees awarded every year. And that’s been really encouraging to note—that, in fact, you can continue to sustain and even improve the quality and relevancy of the education and the curriculum. And you can have a very large and scaled impact for tens of thousands of individuals, proving that education can be a catalyst for people to change their lives for the better.

Kerr: Well, that’s terrific. And Scott, can you elaborate a little bit more to us the variation that’s beneath that? What are the top degrees that people are taking right now? And is that different from what it was five years ago?

Pulsipher: So a bachelor’s in Business Management is still one of the top degrees in field of business, and tens of thousands of individuals enrolled there. Nursing remains a really a large degree field for us. Certainly, the pandemic accelerated the demand for that and emphasized that our strategic workforce area. In the world of teaching, elementary education, special education remain our top degrees. But today, the largest enrollment by far in a single program area is in cybersecurity. And so about five years ago, it was about when we launched our bachelor’s in cybersecurity. In that first year we even enrolled nearly 5,000 students. But today we have 25,000 students enrolled in that bachelor’s in Cybersecurity program. And so that gives you a sense of how critically important some of these new technology fields have emerged across all sectors of the economy.

Kerr: That’s remarkable. I want to come back to growth in a second here, but as you brought up with the nursing, of course the pandemic happened in between our last podcast and this one. Any other ways that Covid affected WGU, both internally and then also externally, or the types of courses that you were building?

Pulsipher: So we actually saw a rapid spike in the number of students who were persisting and completing in 2020. We had more than 49,000 students graduate in 2020. But what was interesting is that then, as it persisted, that more and more individuals were being impacted by the long-term effects of Covid and the disruptions around the overall healthcare workforce where you had a lot of burnout. A lot of working nurses that were in our RN to bachelor’s programs, we saw their time lengthening and their duration to complete their programs was extending. We also saw, just to give the audience a sense of the first half of our current academic year, we saw a 40 percent year-over-year increase in new student starts. And I think that is because the pandemic exposed to so many individuals that, in fact, online learning is quite good. And if I don’t need to be on a campus, and I don’t want to actually be in a classroom, et cetera, even if I want the social engagement with all of my fellow students of similar ages, et cetera, I can actually have much more flexibility in how I access the learning—that lectures can be recorded, I can consume those what I want, et cetera. And so we’ve seen that. And I think students have become more discerning about which institutions have some track record in this. And the younger has actually been our fastest growing in the last three, four years too. And so this to me is evidence that working learners are of all ages—from 18 to 40. And so what we’ve seen at WGU, that in 2019, 18- to 24-year-olds comprised about nine or 10 percent of our total enrollment. But today, the under 24-year-old population is fully 20 percent of our enrollment today.

Kerr: Yes. If we go back to the 10X growth ambition, and we heard earlier that you have been moving quite rapidly up that ambition curve, both in terms of enrollments at this moment, but also number of degrees awarded and the pace at which that’s accumulating, one part of this growth has happened through bringing in the younger demographics and so forth. Other ways that you have both prioritized the growth to date? And then, as you also think about how WGU is going to continue toward that 10X goal, because you’re not there yet, what are the levers that you’re anticipating pulling?

Pulsipher: And it’s probably important to clarify, Bill, that the 10X isn’t really about WGU, itself, serving 10 times more individuals. It’s how does WGU catalyze a tenfold transformation in the sector. That how do we help basically expand capacity and more pathways and more relevancy in those pathways and the higher quality and higher more relevant curriculum designs and competency-based education adoption. How do we really rethink the whole access and delivery and affording and experience of education, so that instead of having 18, 19 million individuals participating in post-secondary education, we can see 25 million or 30 million people regularly engage with post-secondary pathways, because that’s what our workforce needs in the future. Now, having said that, WGU, itself, one of the big things that we have done is that we made a very strategic emphasis on expanding the reach among what we would call “rising talent”—individuals who are in low resiliency opportunities in terms of work, and they have relatively low educational attainment levels. Historically, while 95 percent of our students had some prior college but no degree, they also tended to be older. Our average age was 37, et cetera, but they were actually in pretty resilient opportunities. And so their primary job to be done, if you will, was to advance in the careers that they’re already in. That they were needing a bachelor’s degree to move up into management, into supervisory roles, et cetera. That comprised about 60 percent of our students, where the other 40 percent was split evenly between those trying to change careers or those trying to get the first career. What we saw as a real need out there is that we needed more talent activated into the high-resiliency jobs. That’s what the two-thirds to three-quarters, depending on who you listen to, of the jobs needing post-secondary credentials. And so we made a strategic expansion to serve more of the rising and stranded talent. And what that really meant is that we also then had to really look at the portfolio of credentials. And why do non-degree offerings become more important for even stranded talent, some that may have bachelor’s degrees but are underemployed. Your colleague Joe Fuller writes a lot about this, about those who have post-secondary credentials but are underemployed. But they may not be skilled in the skills that are needed for the jobs that are actually highly resilient. And so can we serve them through those microcredentials? In the rising talent, what it means is we have to address a lot more of some of the key barriers that many of these individuals face. It may be financial, it may be other services and needs that exist. It may also be readiness for a post-secondary level of learning. And how do we really invest deeply in personalizing instruction, personalizing learning, so we can dramatically increase the probability that these highly talented individuals who have a lot of demands on their time, have not had a lot of experience with post-secondary learning, but they have all the innate capacity for learning. But we have to serve them differently than just the standardized model that maybe even WGU had if we expect them to complete at high rates. We anticipate there’ll still be other ways to innovate at the edges of this. How do we rethink evaluation and assessment, validation of skill sets? How do we rethink finance and risk-based sharing affording education? There’s a lot of ways I think we’ll continue to say, “How do we improve access, quality, and outcomes in higher ed?”

Kerr: So Scott, building on that—and both internal to WGU, but also just being a leader in the competency-based learning space, generally—what are some of the things you are seeing that are innovations or stuff that we might hold onto as what could competency-based learning achieve over the next five years or 10 years, and how we, as an industry, as educators, can catalyze that together?

Pulsipher: One of the things I think is most promising today is how artificial intelligence—and true large-data problems powered by machine learning that really emerges as artificial intelligence—the way in which that can truly personalize instruction and really engage with the student in a contextually relevant way, such that your end goal is just competency. It’s not about how much time it took one student versus another or how much you can learn in a set amount of time. Technology, really, I think, is a catalyst for greater adoption of competency-based education. And I think that’s one of those cases where we now start imagining how quickly and how effectively we can develop more relevant content for individuals, because where they are in mastering a certain subject matter, is like, well, what content is relevant to what you’ve already understand, what do you need to understand, et cetera, rather than just the standardized way in which a faculty member delivered it. But we also think about, all right, given your engagement with that content, what is the recommended timely and relevant interventions that a course instructor may have to have with that student? What kind of tutoring engagement? Or how do we design the formative assessments so we can actually see progressive mastery, rather than just some summative assessment? And so how do we integrate more formative assessments? It can also extend to augmented reality experiential learning. So how do you actually provide virtual reality simulations that you can now start to see practical application of academic learning? And so these are things that, in my opinion, catalyzes more competency-based, because it will start to bend time for each individual the way it needs to be bent. Does it need greater length here or shorter length there? Where do I even focus my time, et cetera, to where the whole notion of even seat time starts to diminish even further, and it puts more emphasis on proficiency.

Kerr: Scott, when we talked in 2019, it was obvious already how much technology was central to Western Governors University and how it was delivering to students the services. And your background at Amazon and before was also central toward delivering that. As you think about the things that have happened over the last five years, has it been rolling out according to what you would’ve anticipated? Has it been accelerating? How do you feel like the technology curve for education and for this sector is improving? And is that going to unlock even more opportunities tomorrow?

Pulsipher: In some cases, it’s accelerated; in other cases, I see still real challenges to its acceleration, in terms of impact. The virtual delivery of content of education has been catalyzed, and we’ve seen real acceleration in online. You had so many public institutions and other private, nonprofit institutions coming into this online space because they saw that shift. But there are other dynamics, where I am wondering how quickly the promise of AI and machine learning can start addressing the next frontier of innovation. Democratizing learning really means the ideal of this mass customization, the idea that I can customize the instruction and the learning journey for every individual, and I can do that millions of times. And so the reason I think there’s challenges to that is because there are fundamental models within higher ed that says, “Oh no, the faculty was the one who controlled the syllabus and the traverse of the content and the design of the exam and the scoring and evaluation of students on the exam. To get AI’s real effect in a highly mass-scaled way is like, well, a master curriculum would be more effective. Well, how many institutions have a master curriculum and then personalized instruction against the master curriculum? Some of those things are going to be interesting to see how quickly technology will really be adopted to start to democratize that personalized learning to where we can really see a significant step-function increase in persistence and completion. I just don’t know if we’re going to stall at this 60 percent completion in higher ed as a sector, where we really need to have 70–80 percent completion. It’s like, to get there, we’re really going to have to serve a much more diverse learner profile than we have historically.

Kerr: Scott, if I gave you this opportunity to be either in the state governors’ offices that you work with or in Washington or beyond and ask you the couple of policy issues you would most want to change or address to help WGU and its students, what would those be?

Pulsipher: Well, I think some of the things, certainly at a federal level, we do want to stimulate or at least promote innovation around non-degree offerings. We have the power to leverage demonstration projects, this ability to say, “Hey, we’re going to commit money to experiments that institutions need to have around proving the value of non-degree pathways. Are they academically relevant? Are they workforce relevant? Are they actually resulting in an economic benefit to those who actually have traversed them? Do they have high rates of completion?” We think that modularization, if you will, of the post-secondary credentials is going to be happening. How do you then put federal aid dollars to, not just degrees, but also other post-secondary credential pathways? We would certainly love to see legislation supporting non-time-based educational models; competency-based education is really important. And lastly, I would say you want to have accountability. I think we’re waking up to that, as much public benefit as there is of having an educated population, you should be able to also measure the economic value of it. I think we have to increase institutional and individual accountability that we’re designing pathways that actually result in completion. a job at an economic-benefit level that made the investment worth the cost, that this is worth it to every individual to invest in it. And it’s worth it, broadly, to our economy, to our workforce, and to our society as a whole, and we can measure it.

Kerr: Scott, a key thing in this is also the hiring side with employers. And alongside competency-based learning is skills-based hiring. And there’s been many employer pledges around that. But it’s also been perhaps slow to materialize. What do you think is happening there, and where are you seeing progress being made?

Pulsipher: As much as we as an institution, WGU, for example, can articulate the learning of our students and their mastery on a skills-based—as well as a course-based—transcript, as much as we can put those into a digital transcript and a digital wallet that has all their achievements that we believe communicate relevancy of what they possess for the work that needs to be done, it is fundamentally a hiring problem in my opinion—that the employers do not yet have systems that are identifying and sourcing talent on the basis of skills. They’re sifting them on the basis of credentials and experience and titles and things like that, and it’s not actually surfacing all that “hidden talent,” as Joe Fuller would like to say. And there are some leading institutions out there. I’d certainly love to note our partner IBM in a variety of ways. I think they’ve invested in establishing systems that can truly do skills-based hiring and skills-based development and promotion. But there’s the cultural dynamic that exists within the hiring managers themselves. Guess what hiring managers do? They go, “Well, I don’t know about the credentials of all these institutions, but I know the credentials of my institutions, or I know the credentials of the institutions that I know of that are in the ranking,” or something else like that. And so we tend to already implement bias into our practices of hiring, and the challenge with that is that that bias also exists around a bachelor’s degree versus someone who doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree. Even when it says on a job description that says, “Degree or equivalent experience,” our ability to actually evaluate equivalent experience to a degree is pretty much zero. And so without the skills and without this overcoming the cultural and the systems barrier to it, I think we’re still ways off from really having this skills-based or skills-denominated future of education at work. But we’ll get there.

Kerr: Yeah. Scott, you now have a large and growing alumni network, so if we think about that bias that was sitting inside a hiring manager’s mind, are you seeing some impact just from the sustained growth of online learning and competency-based? Is it going to be its own way of starting to break some of the ice on the employer side?

Pulsipher: Yeah, there’s both a strength there, but I’ll also make just a personal admission of something that I wasn’t paying attention to and a mistake in my own observation of how valuable that network is. But we knew it in some places, but I don’t think we fully leveraged it ,even at WGU. Our top referring source are our current students and our graduates. And those, along with employers and our community college partners, like nearly 75 percent of all of our students that are new students are actually referred to WGU. And so there’s real economic benefit of that, too, because it dramatically lowers our cost acquisition, which lowers our cost of delivery, which allows us to keep our tuition really low for our students. However, what we’re looking at is, if you want to recast the measures of quality in higher education away from exclusivity or perception and things like that—toward does it deliver the value proposition of economic mobility and opportunity, et cetera?—well, how are we leveraging that 360,000 graduate network and activating all of our rising graduates into opportunity? How do we open doorways? How to create social capital? How do we actually engage those alumni into providing peer-based mentoring and support or even instructional interventions where needed? That is how we start to see the real giveback of that network. Most—that’s one of my own perceptions—is that so many institutions leverage alumni networks for giving. We’re actually trying to leverage more of the affinity that they have for WGU because of how it helped them change their life, that what they were really wanting is their time, their access, their input, and their mentorship, et cetera, and just providing doorways for these rising graduates that are coming behind them to gain the social network and the social capital that’s needed to actually convert the education into a job. And so there’s a huge opportunity there. WGU alumni are twice as likely as their national peers to recommend their alma mater to others, and they’re also more than twice as likely to say their degree was worth the cost, that they had faculty that encouraged their dreams and aspirations. We know that they have received a ton of value from their experience at WGU, and they, therefore, have a real high affinity. But now we want to really start to leverage that in creating additional value for these students that we’re currently serving in the rising graduates that we have. And that’s way beyond money. It’s really about time and expertise and access.

Kerr: Scott, going back to its founding in 1997, you’ve had a very, very diverse student population—ages, races, gender, everything across the board. There have been certainly some up and down legal and labor market debates related to diversity. Is that affecting WGU?

Pulsipher: At the core? No. We do think the equity endeavors are not being talked about the right way. Mostly they’re being talked about from a position of scarcity. And because there’s a finite space, that we have to have those filling that space to appropriately reflect our communities that comprise our nation. That is a worthy endeavor. But one of the things that it really distinguishes, I think, WGU is that we come from a position of abundance. There should really be no limit to the capacity. And so our ability to advance equity in access and attainment at WGU does not have to come by excluding somebody else. We’re really trying to increase participation among all. And so we’ve set very clear goals to say, “How do we increase equity in enrollment or in access?” And we have very clear expectations. That over a five-year period starting about four years ago, that we were going to ensure that our enrollment reflected the communities that we serve. We’re about a year ahead of that, but we need to make a lot of progress among our Hispanic and Latino communities and increasing their enrollment and participation. We set a longer timeline—because we know it’s harder work to do—that within a 15-year period from then, we have about 11 years left on this journey, is that we also at WGU want to eliminate disparities and outcomes, meaning completion rates and degree attainment between individuals of different race ethnicities or individuals from different income backgrounds. We want to know that the promise at WGU is that, regardless of who you are, your background, et cetera, that you have an equal probability of success. That, to us, is true equity.

Kerr: Those thoughts are so important, and I think we can all learn from them. Thank you. We have, as listeners, a bunch of people that clearly come from industry employers and so forth, and as we think about the partnerships that you would like to create both now and into the future, where can we help you? Where can the listeners of this podcast join with WGU, and what would you like to create?

Pulsipher: Yeah. From our perspective, education and workforce, they’re going to be eternally intertwined. That, for all intents and purposes, is the talent supply chain. The employers are going to increase in their importance in terms of partnerships with educational development, education and innovation, the expansion of the pathways, the proving out of microcredentials. That, in some ways, the employers become the future accreditors even. That they’re the ones who are truly saying the really valid educational products and offerings out there are the ones that are increasing your competency in the skills that are needed in these jobs. The employers are going to partner more and more with investing in those pathways to make them accessible and affordable, meaning they may become payment providers rather than just the federal government because they see their talent gaps as being a strategic risk to their long-term viability. And so they’re going to invest in that the same way they invest in plants and manufacturing facilities and supply chains for their physical flow. Since we last spoke, we’ve probably increased our number of direct employer partners by 50 or 70 of those. We have some really strategically important ones, around which we’re designing our curriculum and learning outcomes. But more importantly, they are developing the means by which they are funding the partnerships that they have with education. KFC is a good example of that. Any employee, from the time they start, can have their education at WGU fully funded by the KFC partnership there, allowing these individuals who are on the first rung, if you will, in their employment journey, can now start advancing that through highly affordable education that allows them to bend time and flex it to what their needs are, et cetera. So, if that’s one big area, the next big partnership area, Bill, has to be in the technology domain. There’s so much happening in the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Virtual reality, and augmented reality, those are going to be more important. There’s also certain other things that will continue to increase our scaling of certain services, whether it’s evaluation or instruction or even the ability to crowdsource expertise. Just think of what Sal Khan has done with Khan Academy, to say, “Hey, we can even create content that’s relevant for every individual student.” So the technology partners are going to be really, really important to advancing the pace of innovation to reinvigorate the promise of education for every individual.

Kerr: Well, Scott, I hope it’s not another five years until we have you back on the podcast, but I’m sure a lot will happen between now and the next stop-in. Thank you so much for sharing the updates, and we appreciate the exciting work you’re doing at WGU.

Pulsipher: Thank you, Bill. It’s been a privilege to be with you.

Kerr We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.