887: Opening the Gates - with Shai Reshef, Founder & President, University of the People

Douglas Carlson: Welcome to the EdUp podcast. We are EdUpping today with a very exciting guest who I'll introduce in just a moment. But you're hearing a slightly different voice today. Our one and only Joe Sallustio actually handed the reins over to me as his co-host today. I'm Douglas Carlson. I lead partnerships for Lead Squared. I'm very excited to introduce our guest today, Shai Reshef, the president and founder of the University of the People. Welcome. Thanks for being on the EdUp podcast.

Shai Reshef: Hi. Thank you for inviting me.

Douglas Carlson: Absolutely my pleasure. This is a particularly exciting podcast today and very much in the spirit of my background. I spent a lot of time at Penn Foster Education Group, really helping with online education, getting access to potentially underprivileged populations. And at least from my very simple background research, and certainly Shai will tell us a lot more about University of the People, but that sounds like a lot of the population that you work with. I certainly don't want to put words in your mouth. So, Shai, can you please introduce yourself a little bit? You have a pretty impressive background and I would love to just get the overview of what the University of the People is all about.

Shai Reshef: Good. So again, my name is Shai Reshef and I'm the president of the University of the People, which is a nonprofit, tuition-free, accredited American online university that opens the gates to everyone who cannot do it otherwise. We started in 2009 with 178 students. Today we have 137,000 students. So we are quite much bigger than we were when we started. But we are there for those who have no other opportunities. So whether it is for financial reasons, geographic reasons - financial is the US, we all know the cost of higher education. Geographic simply means people who live in countries where there aren't enough seats available in the local universities, which is the situation in every country in Africa - for people who cannot do it for cultural reasons. Women would be an example. Women in Afghanistan would be a great example. Or people who cannot do it for political reasons and the refugees would be a great example. So for all these people, we bring education to them through the internet to enable them to have a higher education experience.

Douglas Carlson: That's incredibly powerful. I'm really curious about the geographic breakdown. Are there certain areas where you have more groupings of students? You mentioned it's a US-style education. So is this only administered in English or is it Arabic, Spanish, etc.? I would just love to know a little bit more.

Shai Reshef: So we started in English and we are an American University, so 20% of our students are from the US. We have about 40,000 students in Africa, 40,000 students in the Arab world, even though there is some overlap between Africa and some of our countries. But we have, as I mentioned earlier, 137,000 students coming from 200 countries and territories. So we pretty much have students from every country in the world. But the US is our biggest country. We think that it should be even bigger. But right now, other regions are growing quite fast.

As I mentioned, we started in English, but following the war in Syria that started in 2012, we were flooded by over 100,000 Syrians who applied to the university, but couldn't make it because of the language. So we decided to develop a program in Arabic for them. We developed business administration in Arabic that was geared mainly towards Syrian refugees, but obviously, as soon as you open a degree, anyone can sign up. We now have 26,000 students studying in Arabic, and we just launched a couple of weeks ago an MBA in Arabic, actually the first online MBA in Arabic, the first American university to offer an MBA in Arabic.

We have 16,500 refugees coming from all over the world. I mentioned Syria, but there are a lot of other countries that have refugees that need to be serviced. And we also have 3,000 Afghan women studying with us following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. They are coming out of over 20,000 Afghan women who applied. 3,000 have already enrolled and they're studying with us, and whenever we have the resources we would love to take even more.

Douglas Carlson: Can you tell me a little about how refugees and your students find you? I would think that especially if you're fleeing from war zones or other persecution, maybe education isn't the first thing on your mind. So can you tell me a little bit more about how folks find you, how you're going out and making sure that students know this is available?

Shai Reshef: It's the right question because we are sure that most of the people who need us do not know about us. According to UNESCO, there are 100 million people who need our services. So talking about 130,000 students, it's a big university, but it's a fraction of the number of people who need us.

The way that we spread the word is through some media coverage that we get. But the main thing is through word of mouth. I can tell you the story of Afghanistan because when the Taliban took over and they banned women from studying, we said we have to give them the option to continue their studies because many women were simply kicked out of their universities.

When we decided to launch it, I came to my team and said, how are we going to do that? I mean, you can't advertise in Afghanistan. You can't be on the ground. What do you do? So the solution that they found was amazing. They simply went to Afghan expat websites and started spreading the word there. And in days, we were flooded by Afghan women who applied to study with us.

So word of mouth is big. We also get help from our students who are our student ambassadors and spread the word to their friends and on social media. Social media is a great way for us to spread the word. Obviously, if we had more resources we could have done even better, but we don't, so we are happy with what we have.

Douglas Carlson: Sure, well, tell me more about that. I think one of the things that our listeners may already know about you is, you know, you're a very reduced tuition, almost even down 100% online tuition covered in some cases. So can you speak a little to that? That's pretty impressive to be able to take the economic hurdle out of the way for so many students.

Shai Reshef: OK, so if a student takes BA studies, it's $140 for each end-of-course assessment fee. So they take the course for free, but toward the end of each course if they want to take the exam or if they want to go to the next course, they have to pay $140 if they have the money. That means that the full BA is $5,600 for as long as it takes. And we let them quite some time to complete a degree, up to 10 years because of the kind of students we have.

However, if you don't have the money, we give scholarships as much as we can. And right now, 50% of our students are paying nothing. So we are there. We want to be in a situation where nobody's deprived for financial reasons. We do as much as we can. As I mentioned with the Afghan women, you know, we took 3,000 of them. Obviously, it's more than any university in the world, but we have over 20,000 who applied. If we had the resources, we would have taken all of them. They're great students, by the way.

Our ability to be financially sustainable with this $140 per course is because we lean heavily on technology. We don't have buildings. We have very few programs, very few electives, and our faculty are volunteers. So that's a big saving for us and it's people, professors in other universities who want to help us to achieve our mission, or said differently, to help the students who can't do it otherwise to get a quality education.

Douglas Carlson: Absolutely. The thing that also struck me looking at your programs is, you know, you have a pretty specific and tight set of programs, but the thing that really stood out to me is, you know, business administration, information technology, healthcare science, computer science. These all feel, and forgive the phrase, like these feel like job-ready degrees. Like these are places, and I suspect that's very intentional, but can you speak a little to that?

Shai Reshef: Yeah, that's true. The students who come to us come from poverty, survivors of the genocide in Rwanda, the earthquake in Haiti, people who sell fruits on the streets of Africa, refugees. I mentioned we have 16,500 refugees. We have more refugees than any university in the world. Sometimes I argue that we have more than all the universities combined, but simply nobody said that I'm wrong. So I might even be right.

These people come to us in order to have a better future. And in order to have a better future, we offer them only the degrees that will help them move up the ladder. So these are the degrees that are most in demand worldwide. These are the degrees that are most likely to help them find a job. You know, we teach associate and bachelor's in business administration, computer science and health science and master's in education, IT and MBA. Again, the degrees that are most likely to help them find a job.

But we do, we're still an American university. We are not vocational studies. We are a liberal arts university. So one-third of our degree is general studies. So yes, we think that it is extremely important for them to get ready for the job market. At the same time, we want to have well-rounded individuals with general knowledge, people who have critical thinking. We want to create individuals that will be productive to their community and to society. People who will have the tools for lifelong learning and not just know only one field, so when that field becomes obsolete, they can't survive anymore in the job market. So we prepare them for life.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah. That's really incredible. And can you speak a little bit more to, so obviously you have the programs themselves, but I also noticed you do quite a bit of work to make sure the students are ready for those programs. So whether it be ESL or preparatory courses, what do you do to make sure that once a student enters a course, they can be successful?

Shai Reshef: So first of all, if English is not their native language, obviously they need to pass the Duolingo test, a placement test. And if they are not at the right level, we offer them ESL courses to bring them up to the right level. Then they take orientation and then they need to take two courses that are actually part of their admission process.

So they take two courses. One course is online strategies where we teach them what they need to know about how to study online, everything that they need to know in order to succeed. And the second one is a course in their field of choice - business administration if you want to study business administration, computer science if you want to study computer science. You need to pass these two courses to start with. And surprise, over 50% of the students don't make it.

They don't make it for various reasons. Either because it's a tuition-free university, they think, "I'll send my high school diploma and get a degree by mail." Well, it doesn't work quite that way. We tell them every course that you take is 20 to 30 hours a week. And again, human nature is to say, "Well, 20 hours is for you. I can make it in an hour a week." An hour goes by and you're gone. You can't make it in one hour.

But you know, then comes our pedagogy that they might not like, but then come other things that are important for us. Do you have the self-discipline? You know, you're sitting by yourself, it's asynchronous, and it's 20 hours, 20 to 30 hours a week, which most likely means you need to spend every evening a few hours. Do you have the self-discipline? Do you have the motivation?

And after we say all that, are you up to our academic standards? You know, I mentioned the kind of people that we take in, many of them coming from harsh backgrounds, actually most of them, and sometimes their academic background is weak. So they need to pass these two courses. If they don't pass these two courses, they can take them again, but they can't continue with us. If they pass these two courses and show us that they meet our standards, they get credit for these courses and they can go on.

So this is actually a very, I believe that it's the best screening method. I wish every university would do that because when you think about it, what is better - to give you a test and see if you pass the test, or let you try it live, in our case without paying anything? Most of those people actually pay nothing because they never get to the exam, they just leave us. And if you're good, you continue.

That's the first thing to prepare because, you know, our model is to be affordable, accessible with the right quality. If you don't have the right quality, you haven't done anything for your students. They won't succeed. Then when they study with us, every student has, we put them in classes of 20 to 30. Every time they take a class, it's 20 to 30 new students from new countries. We mix them all the time. It's important for us to make them part of the globe, to be part of the world and to know people from different cultures. It's important for us to teach them how to work in teams from around the world, which is also important for our workforce.

And then in the class for every 20 to 30 students, there is an instructor and there is a program advisor. The program advisor is a person that is with them from the day they sign up until they graduate, for the entire duration of their study. This is the person that helps them with everything that is non-academic, but it goes between "Can I submit my homework late?" "The technology doesn't work." "I don't get along with my peers or my professor." And they move from one field to the other, one course to the other. Every course is eight weeks long. Every ninth week is an exam. And then after every 10 weeks, we start a new term, five terms a year. It's ongoing until they graduate and they go to the job market.

Douglas Carlson: Well, and that's also, I'm really curious for the graduates of these programs, do you work with companies in the industry for placement? How do you help students with that next step of, you know, now you have a job-ready degree, how can you then benefit from it?

Shai Reshef: Okay, so to start with, we have graduates that work with Amazon and Google and IBM and Apple and the World Bank and just name it. So graduates are doing very, very well. Since we are growing and we have more and more graduates, we just signed an agreement to offer our students virtual internships. All of our students are eligible for a virtual internship from wherever they are, meaning including refugees in refugee camps, including Afghan women that are studying in the secrecy of their home behind closed doors, many of them with fake names that we let them use.

They get virtual internships, 25% of them are likely to get an offer from the company where they do the internship. It's a long internship. It's a half-year internship. And the other 75% are coming to the job market with real-life experience. So we are trying to prepare them as much as we can. We develop courses for them on internships. So we are doing quite a lot in order to make sure that they're finding good jobs.

Again, we are a young university, you know, we are big, but we are only 15 years old. I mean, for me, 15 years is a lot. I mean, it seems like we started yesterday, but it's already 15 years. But 15 years in higher education, it's pretty much a baby. So we still have a lot to do.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah, you're still new on the block. Well, I'm curious. So there's a lot of folks that listen to the podcasts that are in the educational space and always want to be able to give back. If someone wanted to be a volunteer instructor for you, what's that process look like? How do you go about finding those instructors or those professors? Just curious about that. Anyone listening might also want an opportunity to be sent your way.

Shai Reshef: That's great. You're welcome. So first of all, as I mentioned and as you mentioned, I'm a volunteer, the deans are volunteers, the professors are volunteers. And if someone is interested in volunteering with us, first of all, they can go online and fill out an application. We have a group of over 40,000 volunteers. However, we don't use them all. We don't have the manpower to use them. Let's put it this way, because you need to manage the volunteers. And shame on us, but we don't use them well enough. But please come and apply and definitely if we have a need we'll use them, we'll approach them.

If someone wants to volunteer with us, they come to us, we start with screening them, see that they have the relevant experience, degrees, experience. We prefer people who have taught online even though it's not mandatory. Then they go through a screening process. And then we have a training process. And after they start teaching, they have a mentor when they first teach, a senior faculty member. And then every time they teach a course, there is someone who watches what they're doing and helps them if they need help. If they need some correction or help, we do that.

So we are, even though we are big, we are very structured. We monitor very closely how our instructors are doing. By the way, if they're not doing well enough, we ask them to leave.

Douglas Carlson: Good quality control and also some good training there. Well, I'm curious, you know, 15 years, it sounds like has gone by in the blink of an eye, but from a couple hundred students to 137,000, if I have my notes right here. Can you give us some kind of key milestones along the way? How did, you know, not most startups don't work and this clearly has worked. So, you know, give us a little bit of that, of your magic, what happened along the way.

Shai Reshef: Well, I think that we pretty much had one milestone, which is never stop. So we're always on the run. And we keep going and we never stop and we push ourselves, meaning our people and everyone that surrounds us in order to continue serving the students.

I think that there were a few milestones. One of them would be the partnerships that we signed with other universities and the president's council that we built. We have partnerships with Harvard Business School, NYU, McGill, Edinburgh, IFAAT University of Saudi Arabia, which is a milestone from two perspectives. First of all, it enabled our best students to move up the ladder, which is very important. Second, it showed the world that we can be trusted and that there is recognition by distinguished professors and universities, which was very important for a university that is not only young but tuition-free.

And you know, when you start a tuition-free university, that's a question that I'm getting up until now. So what's the trick? And what's the trick is going from how do you make money out of it? And I say, I don't. It's an NGO, right? I volunteer my time. And the question is, sure, sure, sure. But how do you make money out of it? But also, you know, there is a question of are you serious? Tuition-free? How can you have a tuition-free university? How can you have a university that will be based on volunteers? How can you have a university that, you know, will it be financially sustainable? Will it be accredited?

And, you know, so then in 2014, we got our initial accreditation, which was a huge milestone for us. And we started exponential growth. Between 2009 and 2014, we had gotten to 500 students. So from 500 to 137,000 happened in 10 years, in the last 10 years. And accreditation was a large part of it.

I think that I might do injustice to some milestones. I beg my milestones not to be offended. But I think that COVID was another milestone for us. Because when we started, again, for various reasons, everyone looked at us like we're on the side. We are not the mainstream. We are on the side. And when COVID happened, all of a sudden, we became the mainstream because we knew what online is and the traditional universities looked at us to know how to actually function and how to deliver their education to some extent.

And to some extent they haven't, and those who haven't because of their ego and because of other reasons, they are losing students because a lot of universities really did not do a good job moving to online. But the main message was online is legitimate and while universities after COVID started moving back and saying, "No, no, no, you have to come back to campus. You have to show your face," students resist because they like online.

When you think about it, it's so much more comfortable. You know, you have a professor that teaches at eight o'clock in the morning, but you drank the night before. You want to sleep until 12. And why should you come to class? You can wake up at 12 and watch the entire lecture. If this professor is talking too fast, you can slow him down. You can move it. So there is a lot of flexibility in online and students want it, not necessarily for all the courses, but at least for some of them. And they ask for it and they get it. So now, you know, almost every student in the US takes at least one course online. There is another question about the cost of online versus traditional universities, but that's a different topic. But I'm saying that for us, it was a milestone.

And I would mention one more milestone. I won last December the Yidan Prize, which is the largest accolade in education. And I think that it is important not only because it's a significant amount of money, it's four million dollars, not only because some people call it the Nobel of Education, but for me, it gave legitimacy, further legitimacy to University of the People, the recognition to say that indeed what we have done is right and give a message to the world that this is a serious university.

Douglas Carlson: Thank you for sharing that. I'm also really curious, it's been 15 years in the making, you're both the president and founder, how did this idea come together? And what did the early days and start look like when you had less than 500 students, maybe even less than 100? I'm really curious what the beginnings looked like.

Shai Reshef: So I was in for-profit education for many years. And I was actually the CEO of a multinational company in Europe with many, many educational programs, tens of them to hundreds of thousands of students. And among other things, we started the first online university in Europe.

Douglas Carlson: Interesting.

Shai Reshef: So University of Liverpool Online was my creation. And it was actually the first for-profit company who gave service to universities. There are many more that followed later on because the degree was - we developed a program, we recruited professors, we marketed, we collected the money, but the program and the degree was the University of Liverpool degree. So the students sign up with the University of Liverpool.

It was an amazing revelation for me because that's where I discovered that with students, let's say from Singapore, they can stay at home, keep their job and still get this great European education. At the same time, I also realized that for most people, it was nothing but a wishful thinking. It was too expensive. In the US, people are used to paying for education, leave aside the size of the payment, but they are ready to pay. Outside of the US, in most countries, it was unheard of.

So for me, it was kind of like a mixed feeling. Wow, here we have an amazing product, but most people cannot afford it. I ended up selling this university and I came to New York on a semi-retirement just to realize that it's not for me. I wanted to continue. My family wanted me to continue. I'm too hyper to stay at home and to be retired. It was kind of like a bad experience for everyone.

So I started looking around and it was clear to me that I don't want to do more of the same. I was for 25 years in the for-profit world and I felt it's my turn to give back. So I looked around and I realized that I wanted to give back. And I also felt that it must be in education because when you think about it, when you educate one person, you can change a life. When you educate many, you can change the world.

And then I realized that everything that made this European university so expensive is actually available for free. Open source technology, open educational resources. I guess that for your audience, they know what it is. And the new phenomenon that I discovered then, coincidentally, that there are professors that are going online every day and help students with their homework for free. And I said, wait a second, that's all you need for a university. So I have to put all of it together and I will have a tuition-free university.

So I did. I announced it in Munich in January 2009. The next day, The New York Times wrote a page about it, you know, tuition-free university. It's something between a wishful thinking and a joke. And by the following day, I already had hundreds of emails from professors who said, "Wow, it's about time. We want to help you make it happen." And they made it happen. So, yeah.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah. Thank you, New York Times, for the skeptical great press.

Shai Reshef: Yeah. So yeah, but it was and since then it was like a roller coaster. But it was a great ride. And look, you asked me about milestones earlier. I remember I announced the university in January. By April, we started admission. By September, we started teaching. So we had already students in September, like eight months after we announced the university.

And I remember the first day, it was September, the first Thursday of September 2009. Actually, I was in a UN conference in Mexico on that day, I remember, because I looked at Facebook and I see a student saying on Facebook, "I'm a student from Kenya, feel today like a rich American kid going to an American university." And I felt like, wow. That's why I created this university for you. And that's what gives us the strength, all these ongoing emails from students that we saved their lives and did not have any opportunity if it wasn't for us. So it gives us so much strength and desire and power to continue. So, yeah.

Douglas Carlson: That's, yeah, thank you for sharing that. That's really powerful. So I don't know if your TED talk in 2014 was a milestone or not, but it seems like that's kind of around the time that you had your accreditation. And I bring it up - one, if, you know, folks listening, if you haven't got a chance to listen to the TED talk, please do. But if you were invited back to do a TED talk today, what would be different from the one you gave initially? You know, would the messaging be different or is it just like, you kind of had the framework and you've been able to scale it? I just be curious about what might you do if you were asked back for a TED talk?

Shai Reshef: It's a good question. First of all, I'll update the numbers.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah. Add a couple of orders of magnitude.

Shai Reshef: I guess that, I think that I would emphasize more - look, one of the lessons I thought, two things that I thought or more than two that I thought would happen right away is one that it will be very easy to raise money. It has not been very easy. It was not then and it's not now. So I think that that's one of the lessons that we learned, that the fact that you have an amazing product doesn't mean that you will have enough money to operate it. And I think that from that perspective, we are very, very lucky that we charge our students close to nothing, but still an amount that is enough to sustain us. And I think that one of the lessons that I learned is that, you know, donations are not easy to get. And by the way, if we had more donations, probably we would have been able to open the gates even better, give our students even more services. So this is one.

I think, you know, I said almost from the very beginning, and I keep saying that we're building a model, a model that shows that higher education can be accessible, affordable with the right quality. And it's a model that others can simply replicate. Because I mentioned the ingredients that we have. We have not invented anything. We took everything that is available and put it together. It's there. Anyone can take it. But I think that one lesson that I learned is that it's not trivial, not only because you need to know how to do it. And, you know, I came from running a university, online university, so I knew. But it is beyond that because I think that existing partners, existing universities, institutions have a hard time building what we do. And it is both because of the bureaucracy and the tradition and we know more than anyone else because we are universities and therefore we know better than anyone but also the model is so different that they cannot deal with it.

And I'll give you one example. When we accept students by telling them take two courses and if you pass them you can continue. But when you think about it, it also means that we don't have admission. I mean we do, but very tiny because we don't need to read their essays and screen them and look at Facebook if they're cheating or not and read their resumes and blah blah blah. Very simple. But can a university afford losing its admission department, the hundreds of people working in admission and say, bye, we're closing your department? It won't happen.

So, you know, even thinking about it. So I think that the one thing that I learned is that it can be done by others, but they can only do it if they put it on the side of their institution, not inside their institution. Even though I do believe that some of what we do, they can take inside but slowly.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I think you answered my biggest question. What are sort of the lessons that traditional universities can learn? And I think that's a big piece is like, you know, you have to have this - if you want to build something similar, it can't be within the university. It would need to be as a separate piece, because this is, I wouldn't say radically different, but just the chemistry of it's so different than the traditional model.

Shai Reshef: And it's a culture, you know, the culture. Our culture is how do you do the right things at the right cost. Not only how do you do the right thing without considering the cost. I think that, well, you know, it's great if you can afford it, you know, and do whatever needed. If you can have a department with 11 professors and only four students, good for you if you can afford it.

Douglas Carlson: How many? And I know at least of one university, I'm not going to mention names.

Shai Reshef: I'm not going to name names here. Eleven professors and four students in one of their departments. Great, good for the students, good for the professors, but is it good for the world? I'm not sure. And I'm thinking that universities, it's not sustainable. I just read that by now, every week there is one university that is being closed.

There is a big pressure. The price in higher education became insane. Talking about universities that are charging 100,000 a year for tuition, this is insane. Look, I don't know how many students, I can teach 60, 70 students with the same, with the cost of one student. And they have in addition to tuition, they have living expenses that we don't have. So it's insane. And it's not sustainable because how many people can afford it and how many people can come out of a university and tell themselves, OK, so I'll come out with a debt of two or three hundred, four hundred thousand. Most people would say no.

You know, we did an impact study a couple of weeks ago, actually. And the ROI of our students who pay the entire amount, not the 50% who pay nothing, is $250 - their lifetime earning is $250 for every dollar they invest with us. In a regular American university, I'm not talking about the 100,000, the average is $8 they make for every dollar they invest. So our ROI is 30 times bigger than the regular US students' ROI. And it doesn't make sense. So there should be done, something should be done to lower prices. And I think it will happen. I mean, I think that I see, you know, universities, if they won't change, they will close.

Douglas Carlson: Sure.

Shai Reshef: So either they merge or they lower dramatically their prices, or they decide, which I think is the first thing that they should do, is decide what makes them unique. You can't be like another 2,000 universities and charge 30, 40,000 a year. People will not come to you. They can come to us for 1,400 a year. So you need either to find, you know, if you come and say, I'm the only university who teaches, I'm the best in teaching ancient Greece. Sure. Okay, I want to study ancient Greece. I'll go to this university. It's the best in the world. What's the price tag for this specialty?

I'm the best university in Northeast Iowa. I don't know which university, but if you are from Northeast Iowa and you want to study with your peers and most likely find a job locally because they are connected, that's the university you want to study at. But what's the price tag for it?

So, you know, it is a market eventually and universities should adjust themselves otherwise, or by the way, merge with other universities, have the power of their size, but otherwise they won't survive.

Douglas Carlson: What I'm kind of hearing as the big takeaway, if I'm hearing there is find out what makes you unique, you can specialize in that. And that will allow you to differentiate yourself from, you know, the 2,500 other undergraduate day universities in the U.S. What makes you unique, or in general?

Shai Reshef: I think that was sort of a recap, but yeah, that sounded like where you're coming from, really specialization and finding what makes universities unique is how they should be thinking about it, would be your advice.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah, definitely, yeah. Well, I know we're coming up on the 45-minute mark here. So my last two questions are one, what's in maybe the near term and longer term future for the University of the People? Where do you want to go with that?

Shai Reshef: Well, a few things. First of all, we want to continue our growth. But at the same time, we feel that we need to improve the services that we give our students, the quality of our services. We believe that we should invest more in their success, partially by using AI. I think that AI enables you to dramatically improve the quality of service you give your students. We want to serve even more marginalized populations in the US and beyond, but in the US there are so many students that either started college and never graduated, but people on the margin that either do not get into colleges or do not graduate and we think that we should help them. We will consider moving into other languages potentially, more languages. When you look at the population in the US and beyond, I mean, Spanish-speaking people, just to mention Venezuelan refugees and mentioning all the Spanish-speaking people in the US, do not go to higher education. And yeah, we have a lot to do.

Douglas Carlson: There's, you know, for opportunities, maybe the wrong way to think about it. There's a lot of opportunity for you to continue to grow, but maybe there's better said, there's a lot of students for you yet to serve.

Shai Reshef: Yeah. Yeah. And again, prepare them even better for the job market. That's part of it.

Douglas Carlson: Well, to sort of wrap our conversation up with a bow, is there anything we haven't covered today or anything you want to leave our listeners with that maybe we haven't touched on yet?

Shai Reshef: Look, I think and it comes from what I said, I think that we believe that higher education should be more open, more accessible, more flexible with high quality. The US higher education is the golden standard of the world of higher education and rightfully so. But in order to remain so, it should be a little bit more open to the changing world to be able to be equipped for what the world needs in these changing times.

Douglas Carlson: Well said. Well, thank you so much for spending time with us. I cannot do it justice as Joe, but I'll say, hey, you've been EdUpped. Thank you so much for the opportunity for the conversation. I'm the guest host today, Douglas Carlson, and more importantly, our guest today is Shai Reshef, the president and founder of University of the People. So thank you so much for the conversation today, and we'll bid you adieu.

Shai Reshef: And thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell our story. Thank you.

Douglas Carlson: What's up everybody, it's time to jam jam jam at Jenzabar's annual meeting at the Gaylord Texan in Dallas, Texas, May 29th through June 1st. Learn, share and connect. The conference offers a wide range of learning opportunities for all Jenzabar users. You can share your experiences to help others increase enrollment, improve retention and meet advancement goals and connect. Find out how your colleagues are using their Jenzabar systems, hear what's coming from Jenzabar, and learn new strategies that can help your institution. Remember, it's time to jam jam jam Jenzabar's annual meeting.