910: LIVE From the 2024 ⁠Career Education Convention⁠ - with Cid Yousefi - CEO/President, Campus Ivy

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to Ed Up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. And we're already multiple podcasts in here at the Career Education Conference put on by our great friends at the Career Education College and University Group, celebrating the amazing work that our colleagues do in and around career education to serve students. Always with me by my side, at least I think he'll be here today all day, is Douglas Carlson. He's head of partnerships at Lead Square. Douglas, what's going on? How are you?

Douglas Carlson: It's really great to be here on my second cup of coffee and fully awake now.

Joe: Second cup of coffee. Watch out for Douglas, ladies and gentlemen. We're really excited about this episode. We're going to bring in our guest right now. Let's do it appropriately like this. He's Cid Yousefi. He's CEO of Campus Ivy. And let this roll, because Cid looks really good today. He's got the whole pocket square thing going on. Sid, how are you? Welcome to the podcast.

Cid Yousefi: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Joe. And I'm on my third cup of coffee, so I'm ready to go.

Joe: Oh my gosh. So watch out for Sid, everybody. He's going to be... No, tell us, Sid, tell us about Campus Ivy. You're CEO of this organization. What do you do and how do you do it?

Cid: So Campus Ivy is a financial aid product and service company. We've been around for 10 years and we're currently serving about 523 institutions. Mostly in the career college space, but we also have a number of non-profit and community college schools that we also serve.

Joe: Wow. That's a lot. That's a lot of schools.

Cid: It is and we're proud. We're proud that over the last nine to ten years that we've been in business that we've built up from I remember when I had lunch with my customer number one and I'm happy to say that they're still my customers.

Joe: That's good. Yeah. And over the past nine years, we've grown our customer base from my first customer to 523 customers. Now, tell me the truth. Does customer number one remind you that they were customer number one as much as possible?

Cid: So of course. And he's made it very clear to me that he's special and he needs to be treated very special and no price increases can ever go in effect for him because he's customer number one. So all good. And we're, you know, we're really happy to be serving him.

Joe: Customer number one says without me there would have never been a customer number two.

Cid: That's right. That's right.

Joe: That's what I tell Douglas. Like without me there'd be no podcasting. Right.

Cid: Right.

Joe: No, that's fine. You're the godfather. Go ahead, Douglas.

Douglas: Well, and Sid, can you tell us a little about that? Ten years is a really good run, but also you clearly can look back 10 years and talk about your first customer. How did it all start? How did Campus Ivy come to be?

Cid: So I, actually prior to Campus Ivy, I was a CEO of a financial aid company and I wanted it while I was serving as their CEO. I wanted it to bring a lot of technology, advanced technology into the financial aid space. I felt that financial aid space could benefit from advanced technology. There was a fair amount of automation that I felt like we could bring to the financial aid space. And so I went off and founded Campus Ivy. And actually the first two years of Campus Ivy's life, we didn't even market the company. We were just building the product. We were innovating and building the right technology. And then we started marketing the company. So that's how we got started.

Douglas: Organic.

Cid: Yeah, organic. Yeah, absolutely.

Douglas: And how much of a jump was it? You were taking folks from, in some cases, maybe literally paper to digital or were folks largely on a system, it just didn't have as much automations and it wasn't as sophisticated?

Cid: So both, Doug. I would say they're... But majority of our customers, especially in this day and age, they've had some exposure to technology, but it just wasn't the right technology. It's clunky. Right. It wasn't really bringing the right level of automation, and it wasn't creating the efficiency that they needed in financial aid. Financial aid in itself can be very complex, very compliance oriented, and you've got to do things right. It's got to be the right technology. And so we found that... Even though they were exposed to some technology, when we brought the right technology, combined with our service, of course, and expertise in the space, it made a big difference. We saw efficiency improvement, we saw the overall cost going down. So overall, it made us feel good that in addition to running a business, we were also making an impact. And if we're making an impact on a school's operation, we're making an impact indirectly on their students' experience and how they're serving their students.

Joe: Well, and we were talking a little bit before the podcast, you mentioned things are going really well, and I'll let you share what that looks like. But one of the absolute connections is when things go well for you, generally things are going well in the industry. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your success there and what you're seeing in the industry that's driving a lot of that.

Cid: Yeah, so of course, and I think that's probably true with any business. You reach a point where your product and your service do the work for you out there in the marketplace and they're generating leads for you and you don't have to be out there constantly promoting your product because your customers and people in the industry are doing the work for you. So I feel like we've reached that point with our product and services. Again, we're serving over 500 schools. So if 10% of those schools talk positively about Campus Ivy, that's an amazing marketing in itself, right? And so we're, and because we're enjoying a great deal of success, and especially this last couple of quarters, we're seeing tremendous results in terms of onboarding new customers. Outstanding. We're... You know, we translate that into that the industry as a whole is doing better. And of course, in my conversation with some of our customers and some of the people at this conference is that enrollment is improving and there is a sense of optimism about where the industry is going. And of course, all of that is positive. It's positive for Campus Ivy and it's positive for Lead Squared. It's positive for all the players in the space.

Joe: Do you find that your success is measured by the lack of feedback on your product? Like if everything's moving smoothly and people are moving through and automation is working, the feedback is, students are being served, right? And so you find out when things aren't working right, but the smoothness of the process tells you whether your tech is working right.

Cid: Right, well I think we're... We're big believers in feedback is better than no feedback.

Joe: That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Cid: So we go and search for it. We in fact, we have an initiative where all my executives once a year reach out to all of our customers. And all we want to know is how are we doing? How's it going? You know, how's it going? And, you know, are we doing are we providing good service and are we making a positive impact for you? So I think there's a lot of companies that don't do that, right? They just assume that your business is going to be there year to year.

Joe: With that table, it's a little table touch almost like if you go to a restaurant, right? The table touch is how are we doing? And hey, by the way, we want to be your partner for the next year too, right? And for the next year and for the next year. So if we don't hear, a lot of companies, I think they get too comfortable as a vendor, they get too comfortable and assume that you're going to have that business. And colleges are making changes a lot more quickly now. So you have to be at the ready. Are you seeing that too, where there's a lot more searching and wondering because enrollment even though enrollment can be going up, there's a lot of pressure on the space and a lot of pressure on higher ed, people questioning the value. So we have to be tech ready for students. Right.

Cid: And so we're really looking at the technology is advancing and changing pretty fast at a very good pace. And we can't make all the right decisions on our own in a silo, right? So we have to collaborate with our customers. We got to get their feedback. So we're constantly innovating, but we need to get the feedback from our customers that the innovation is on the right track, that we're building the right solutions for them. So if we don't get that feedback, even if the feedback is what you're building needs some adjustment or needs some improvement, that's a lot more valuable than just building something, putting it out there, and thinking that it's just the right solution. I think that collaboration is very important. And I think all vendors, really, vendors who, that are building technology-based product should have an open mind in terms of getting feedback, it's good, that they're not going to be able to, on their own, always build the right solution, and it's going to be perfect.

Douglas: You can't buy that in the box.

Joe: Yeah, well that's the magic of technology is you can iterate on it so quickly, whether good, bad, or in between. And that's what's so important about feedback, is you actually can do something about it. It's not a widget that's going to come out of a factory.

Cid: Exactly, exactly.

Douglas: And the other interesting thing is you have, obviously you have your customers, but there's also a really big constituency out there, the Department of Education, that has rules and regulations. Yikes! And I'm curious, how does that impact your business? Are you proactively keeping an eye on these pieces? Is it really feedback from customers or clients? I'm just curious about how you think about and interact with the regulations.

Cid: Yeah, they're a tough partner, necessary but tough partner, right? So we have to... always stay for our customers, we have to always stay ahead of the regulation changes.

Joe: And interpret them.

Cid: And interpret them.

Joe: And that's a big piece.

Cid: Yeah, and be able to translate that into changes to the product and the services that we provide. I can give you an example, this latest delay with FAFSA simplification that the department rolled out and I think they're still trying to recover from that. We knew that there would be an impact on our customer base. So every time there was a release or every time there was any kind of change, they came out of the department. We jumped on it, we implemented that in our product. And so that when everything got released, we would be able to within, let's say, a couple of days, package that and release it to our customers. So that's something that we, as a financial aid organization, we have to always be on top of. Understanding regulations before they even go into effect and making sure that we're proactive, building and integrating the changes into our product and making sure that we get it to our customers as fast as possible.

Joe: Yeah, it's put the FAFSA simplification has it been anything but, right? And it's still being delayed and so you know one of the biggest difficulties this year has been getting students and families to realize that it's not the school, it's not the companies, it's not the financial aid servicer, it's... Literally the Department of Education, it's the government that's releasing the money. And then you have to have your technology ready when they release something to then flip it at the school, to flip a switch almost. A lot of times without being able to test, right? The whole SAI index from EFC to SAI, schools had need calculators, they had their own EFC calculations they were doing to distribute need. All that had to be redone. Can you talk about how your, I don't know, how do you guys keep it all straight? Really to Douglas's point, because it's still evolving right now and schools are unable, many, if they're enrolling students in a traditional manner, not able to see their top line revenue or understand what that's gonna look like and then therefore it's putting pressure on them and some are making staffing changes and so on. It's causing a bit of disruption, is it not?

Cid: It is, it is. And clearly it's had an impact on the schools, on even some students' decision to go to college.

Joe: Big time, big time.

Cid: You know, and which is unfortunate, right? We're part of a community that also includes Department of Education's technical group and we meet on a weekly basis on the changes. So most vendors probably that are involved in our business, they wait for things to get finalized, the changes to get finalized and released from the Department of Education before they go and implement it in their product. Obviously don't want to do you know double work.

Joe: Sure.

Cid: They want to wait for things to get released Well, we don't do that. We as things get introduced we go and start developing it, but we wait for the switch to flip right.

Joe: Exactly.

Cid: And then we release it. But so we do the extra work and we do it in the interest of being able to release things faster than others. And as it turned out, we were ahead of a lot of vendors in releasing the SAIs and all the changes. And there were major changes, major changes to the way the ISIR looks, the major changes to the way it was presented to the student. The affordability to families and change all of it. I mean EFC going away and all of that. It's just major changes. Even the verification piece.

Joe: Yeah. I mean.

Cid: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, our hope is that when the dust settles and everything is, it's, you know, working as its design that there will really be an impact, a positive impact on the students' FAFSA and ISIR process that they normally go through.

Joe: Tell them like it is. Go ahead, Douglas.

Douglas: Yeah, I mean, that's, I was really curious about the mechanics. I think you partially answered my question, but I'm actually just really kind of curious to dig in. So it sounds like you literally are meeting with, at least the tech side of the Department of Education, almost weekly to stay on top of this. Is that something sort of unique you've developed? Or is it part of just something the Department of Education does? I'd be really interested to just be educated a little bit more about how that works and clearly you're reacting very quickly to it.

Cid: Right, so the department invited, I think, let's just say half a dozen vendors, especially in the financial aid space, right? To collaborate with the department. So we don't just wait for changes to come down from the department. We also provide feedback on things that are working, things that they need to consider in their next release or update. So...

Joe: Aka things that are not working.

Cid: Cut to the point, yeah. So, you know, the department's been actually pretty good at, you know, listening to folks like us.

Joe: That's because they're under quite a bit of pressure right now, are they not?

Cid: Yes, yes they are. Yes they are. So, you know, as the changes are discussed during these... these meetings, right, then we basically run and make the changes to our product.

Douglas: Got it, okay. Yeah, and thanks for walking me through that.

Cid: Of course.

Douglas: I know the admissions and marketing world. You get further in that process and that's why I look over to Joe and say, help, help. So thanks for making me a little smarter.

Joe: You're under here, Douglas. What's next for Campus Ivy? Talk about your organizational outlook. Where do you think you're gonna go in the next bunch of years? What's the plans for Sid?

Cid: So, you know, of course... As I shared with you, we're currently serving 500, over 500 institutions. Our goal is to continue to grow and continue to make an impact. Our core competency is financial aid, and that's always going to be the area that we want to innovate around, the area that we want to constantly look at improving not just our product, but also the impact that we're making out there to schools and the industry.

Joe: I like when you say that you want to, typically innovation in financial aid is an oxymoron, is it not? It's very hard to do. So you have to have the specialty, you have to have the people that are focused on 100% of the time. And if you work in higher ed, you know it's very clear that students most of the time don't start because of a delay in financial aid packaging, because they didn't get the package the way they were supposed to. The communication from the campus a lot of times isn't there and it all revolves around affordability and money. I mean, that's how people make decisions. So getting to that decision faster being able to process that aid faster. Automated giving the student exactly what they need in that moment of decision is all the difference for that school, isn't it?

Cid: It is and you know, so we're leveraging AI we're we're really looking at how AI can impact our innovation and how we'll bring in, as you touched on, Joe, how we can bring some of that financial aid data much earlier in the student's life cycle. Our artificial intelligence. So as a student, if you can get a lot more information about what to expect before you even enroll in a school, what to expect in terms of cost, what to expect in terms of aid that you can expect, and how that aid's going to be dispersed. And then traditionally, or using AI and looking at the data that's been collected, how can we inform that student what to expect in terms of the path, the journey that they're on? So we're looking at AI to help us innovate around serving the student better.

Joe: Yeah, AI might represent the best path for financial aid to innovate ever, all right? Because of the automation that it can provide, the insights it can provide. Somebody that provides great insights is my guest co-host. He's Douglas Carlson. He's head of partnerships at Lead Squared. Douglas, what did you think of this?

Douglas: This is fantastic. And also, it was really fun to have kind of the diversity of different people on. We talked a lot about enrollment, we talked a lot about marketing. Now we're going deeper in the funnel in financial aid. So Sid, I just really appreciate you being on and making sure we have the full life cycle perspective.

Joe: Too many cups of coffee over there.

Douglas: There it is.

Joe: Sid, now you said before we started, this is your first ever podcast. What did you think so far?

Cid: I enjoyed it. And I really, I had a lot of fun guys and really enjoyed chatting with you guys.

Joe: Well there he is ladies and gentlemen. He's my guest. No, he's your guest today. He's Cid Yousefi. He's CEO of Campus Ivy. We're glad that you're here. It's been an honor to host you. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-upped.