Dr. Sabrina Kay, CEO, Fremont College

Dr Sabrina Kay's Background and the Beginning of Fremont College - Dr. Kay is one of the many for-profit operators visiting the forum to talk about operational strategies, funding do's and don'ts, and to present firsthand case studies on how to build scale in for-profit higher education.

We have a series of three videos from Dr. Kay, and we start with this one today.

The beginning of Sabrina Kay's education mission

Please visit visit the registration page for the Education Industry Investment Forum. Use code XU2175SK to achieve a 15% discount on the current registration rate.

You'll have a chance to meet Sabrina Kay and several other for-profit operators at the forum, including:

New York City Education Investment Business Breakfast

We are going to be running a live Twitter feed at the Education Industry Investment Forum in New York City this morning. If you are investing in education and you have questions, you can ask them here, or on Twitter.

I am @Douglascrets on Twitter.

The agenda for the business breakfast can be found here at the Education Industry Investment Forum page.

Listen to these individuals speak about Education Investment

Daniel Pianko, Founder & CEO, The Noah Fund
Stephen Gilfus, Founder of Blackboard, President and CEO, Gilfus Education Group
Josh Schwartz, Managing Director, East Wind Advisors

Here are the questions I am going to ask:

Here are the questions that I want to ask:

1. Teacher development -- many people talk about creating better initiatives that benefit teachers by teaching them new models to enhance the value of their teaching and to improve the completion rates of public schools. In K12, are there any scalable models for teacher development? What can be done to make teacher development a profitable business and how is that done?

2. With all things being equal, and if anything is possible, at what point does K12 education become a feasible investment for a private investor or a public or private company? In other words, can each of you give your model for a highly profitable education system with all your favorite bells and whistles?

3. Are there any areas that are not exactly directly education-focused that seem like viable investment areas during Race to the Top fund allocation?

4. In Higher Ed, where should private investors put their money in the next one year to 18 months?

You can receive US$100 Off Your Phoenix Registration

If you attend the January 20, 2010 New York City Education Investment Business Breakfast, you are eligible for US$100 off the March 1-3, 2010 Education Industry Investment Forum.

The business breakfast information is found at the Education Investment Business Breakfast website.

Speaker faculty
Daniel Pianko, Founder & CEO, The Noah Fund
Stephen Gilfus, Founder of Blackboard, President and CEO, Gilfus Education Group
Josh Schwartz, Managing Director, East Wind Advisors

Schedule for January 20, 2010
8.00 am – Gather and Breakfast, Networking
8.45 am – Introductory Remarks, Education Industry Investment Forum Director Doug Crets and Moderator
9.00 am – Panel discussion begins
11.00 am – Questions & Answers
11.30 am – Business Networking and Card Exchange
12:00 pm – Business Breakfast Ends

Location
Omni Berkshire Place
21 East 52nd Street at Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
(212) 753-5800

Security Checks and Empty Planes

Up until today, the security I experienced at airports rarely reached the level of uncomfortable. There was the flight out of China where I had my keys questioned and my body patted down, and my belt buckle examined, but that was easy breezy.

Today in Narita, I am waiting for the New York flight and the flight next to our gate is getting the full kahuna. They are going from passenger to passenger in the lobby area and giving them pat downs, going through bags, and then sealing off the entire gate, so nobody can leave or enter.

It's very interesting. Probably will do the same to this gate. Flights have been really sparsely filled. I am hoping for a long row of empty seats on this flight, so i can lay down and try to sleep, something I rarely do on airplanes.

Stephen Gilfus to Speak at NYC Education Business Breakfast

Important Update: Stephen Gilfus, Founder of Blackboard, speaking at Business Breakfast

I am posting this again. You can still register to attend the Business Breakfast at the Omni Hotel on January 20. Stephen Gilfus has agreed to step in for Ron Packard, CEO, K12.


Register now.


In what will be a continuing series of business-focused breakfasts in NYC and possibly in other North American cities, Education Industry Investment Forum is reminding everyone that the signup period for the January 20 breakfast is nearing a close.

Here's the reminder:

Announcement from Education Industry Investment Forum: Register for the Industry-Focused New York City Business Breakfast January 20, 2010

We hope you can join some of your colleagues on the East Coast for an important regulatory and financial-focused business breakfast discussion on January 20, 2010.

We will be talking about regulation, financials, mergers & acquisitions, and creative innovations that are bringing more value to education investment.

Register now.

Cost: US$95 per person

Speakers include:

John Bailey, formerly Special Assistant for Education, George Bush Administration

Daniel Pianko, Founder & CEO, The Noah Fund

Doug Mesecar, Vice President, Scholastic Publishing

Ron Packard, CEO, K12, Inc.

Josh Schwartz, Managing Director, East Wind Advisors

Schedule for January 20, 2010
8.00 am – Gather and Breakfast, Networking
8.45 am – Introductory Remarks, Education Industry Investment Forum Director Doug Crets and Moderator
9.00 am – Panel discussion begins
11.00 am – Questions & Answers
11.30 am – Business Networking and Card Exchange
12:00 pm – Business Breakfast Ends

Location
Omni Berkshire Place
21 East 52nd Street at Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
(212) 753-5800

You can visit our site and get more information about the Education Industry Investment Forum business breakfast.

After China

Spent a day in China visiting old friends and sitting in on a digital convergence lab that was set up by my old journalism school director, Ying Chan.

The school of journalism there is backed by Li Ka Shing Foundation, so it's an interesting case for China. Its probably the only public university in China funded by private dollars. Lots of implications here.

What does that mean for American investors who want to put money down on building up private education in China?

What happens with American or other foreign money in China? Just because you put private money into a state run and state-funded operation, it doesn't mean you are going to get that money back. There is always that risk.

So how can Ying Chan do it? Aside from having the backing of Li Ka Shing, Asia's richest man, she's also got ties to Hong Kong and is backed by solid partners. It's an interesting education about education in China. I am glad I got to see it first hand.

I learned two things about this:

Shantou University is on the cutting edge of how education will be done in China. I will be writing more about this later, but in a nutshell:

First university in China to use an open source, Chinese language-friendly digital publishing and curriculum tool. It started out in the Journalism School, but now the university itself wants to run it for the whole institution of 8,000 students.

If that is open source, there is no problem to think that they would make this expansion down to other schools in China and in Asia. Jeremiah Foo, CTO of the school said that he is already in talks with Malaysian schools to spread this technology.

They are working with Apple to launch something in March. More on that in March. I can't talk about it.

It is totally feasible that corporations in the United States can partner with a school like this and actually teach classes on the corporate culture, on business, and on everything from engineering, to accounting and more to these students. It's very possible we might see a day where actual global companies have teaching units inside some of these public universities in China. What does that mean? It's hard to even fathom how revolutionary that kind of education system would be.

There is so much more to talk about, and I will be mentioning some if it off and on in the next few weeks.

Now it is time to go back out into Hong Kong, and have some yum cha and talk with my friends. Good to be back "home" again.

By the way, for those of you in New York, it's 55 degrees today and I got sunburn. Suckers!

Someone is Happy so Let's All Be Happy

Just wanted to spread this around because I liked the idea behind it.

"East 6" The engagement of Ashley and Chris from One Small Instrument Pictures on Vimeo.

I'm Doing this the Right Way, which is the Wrong Way (for a Little While)

Coming back from a long time abroad, you get slammed with cultural idiosyncrasy. And that's not so bad. It means you are sitting on the front, looking at what you used to be and seeing it backwards. You are on the other side of the mirror.

I was muddled for a while. So to take my mind to a focus, I started reading more.

Two books have recently affected my thinking about business, education and the business of education.

In one, "The Global Achievement Gap," I am reminded once again what six years overseas taught me:

Despite the best efforts of educators, our nation's schools are dangerously obsolete. Instead of teaching students to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers, we are asking them to memorize facts for multiple choice tests. This problem isn't limited to low-income school districts: even our top schools aren't teaching or testing the skills that matter most in the global knowledge economy. Our teens leave school equipped to work only in the kinds of jobs that are fast disappearing from the American economy. Meanwhile, young adults in India and China are competing with our students for the most sought-after careers around the world.

Currently reading, "The Power of Unreasonable People." It's by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan.

The point?

Renowned playwright George Bernard Shaw once said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." By this definition, some of today's entrepreneurs are decidedly unreasonable--and have even been dubbed crazy. Yet as John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan argue in The Power of Unreasonable People, our very future may hinge on their work. Providing a first-hand, on-the-ground look at a new breed of entrepreneur, this book reveals how apparently unreasonable innovators have built their enterprises, how their work will shape risks and opportunities in the coming years, and what tomorrow's leaders can learn from them. Start investing in, partnering with, and learning from these world-shaping change agents, and you position yourself to not only survive but also thrive in the new business landscape they're helping to define.

Also, just found this Education Futures web site that a friend picked out for me and sent me in an email.

Haven't read enough of it to give you a sense of the entire feel of the site, but it's definitely trying to make something of the Obama's huge focus on education going forward. I'll read through and extract some points later. For now, I liked this:

This is a great question: Does the government’s vision of education output products that are meaningful in today’s workforce? My hunch is that research will show that NCLB is failing to produce workers of the caliber the United States needs. NCLB is great at producing automatons that can parrot back responses required for tests (or make great assembly line workers), but not creatives that will power our growing imagination- and innovation-driven economy. Who will hire graduates from the NCLB generation?

You can read more on how NCLB will affect the workplace.

To answer the last question here? I imagine that developing world economies will hire these students from America, unless those students are willing to go to those areas themselves and start their own businesses. But are they capable of starting their own businesses? Aside from the question of, Do you know accounting and the tax laws that determine the success of a business, the real question is can you interact with someone "Other?"

You can go back to the earlier comment I made about the achievement gap. So, are we learning things or teaching our students in primary and higher ed the right things, not only for work, but for work in a wider world? Are we teaching them how to do business outwardly rather than internally, worrying and focusing on what happens in a company?

Work for me has never been about thinking hierarchically. It's been about lateral thinking, making huge jumps in logic, and following intuition, more than it's been about having a strong business plan. Why?

My customers help me do this. A client is the lifeblood of a company. If the client is saying that doesn't make sense to the business model inside a company, then there is something wrong with the business model. The client is the business model.

I can figure out the business mechanics of anything, or simply hire an intern or another employee to focus on those things, but the most important challenge for a manager of a product, who wants to sell that product to the increasingly important client, is to have deepening relationships with people outside of the workplace.

These are the people who can eventually accentuate the worldview you bring into the workplace, and in the end, that worldview is what you are selling, especially if you are selling knowledge products like the kind I sell -- forums, business meetings, information.

As the century deepens, it's the accented worldview that will help you sell, manufacture or develop meaning and products. And in this century, a product without meaning is not a product. It's toilet paper.

I can only get that way by reaching out. It doesn't much matter to me if I don't know accounting.

House of the Roses

A conversation last night brought me to House of the Roses.

It's a volunteer dance company for underprivileged kids in New York City. Are we allowed to say underprivileged anymore? I don't know what is politically correct anymore. Any way, they are kids that don't have the resources that your typical dance company patron might have.

Point being, they are trying to do something good. They use positive reinforcement to encourage a child's use of creativity for change and constructive life-living. And I mention this because I am reading two books that are bringing this method to my attention.

Data Dump

Here's a little data dump for all of you. I like to do this from time to time on other blogs, but I have never done it on this one. People have been asking me where does site traffic come from, and what are some of the interesting search terms that bring people to the Education blog.

Geographic Interest

Traffic comes from 1,310 cities around the world. Here are the top twenty cities, and then some unusual cities or locations thrown in for fun

1. New York

2. Charlotte

3. Washington

4. Chicago

5. San Francisco

6. Los Angeles

7. (not set)-- This is probably several cities in China, Blogger is blocked in China, and people use proxies to get to the site, leaving it anonymous.

8. Delhi

9. Phoenix

10. Boston

11. London

12. Baltimore

13. Mumbai

14. Singapore

15. Toronto

16. Philadelphia

17. Arlington

18. Seattle

19. Brooklyn

20. Houston

And for the really interesting cities: Paris, Chennai, Hyderabad, Givatayim, Petaling Jaya, Vancouver, Abu Dhabi, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh, Zurich, and Karachi

Search Keywords

These are a list of the top 20 keywords that direct people to this site and then some odd ones that make me wonder what people think we do here. People in the entrepreneur space are hot on this blog.

It seems that people are coming to this site sometimes to learn not only about the education industry but about people who have started ventures, tried something new or different, and are looking to connect with people who have made an impact in some measurable way in education. Here's a sample:

1. daniel pianko

2. john katzman

3. venture capital for the education industry

4. education industry investment forum

5. education industry investment forum 2009

6. jordan goldman

7. jordan goldman unigo

8. shai reshef

9. knowledge investment partners

10. university of the people shai reshef

11. india has more honors kids than america has kids

12. eiif

13. howard block

14. education investment forum

15. tabula digita

16. eduvest

17. keith oelrich

18. inetoo

19. dan madzelan

20. arthur benjamin ati

And then the other remaining umpteen dozen thousands plus search terms that have led people to this blog give you a great sense of the zeitgeist in the global economy and the viewpoints of people in the education industry:

"how bad is the american economy right now?"

"philanthropy is the gateway to power"

"fastest growing continent"

"number of honors students in india"

"arne duncan"

"grand canyon university ipo"

"will we need teachers in the future?"

"what is barack obama's education agenda?"

"explain education as an investment"

"90:10 education obama"

"inspector general's warning to accreditor raises fear"

"three year cohort default rate"

Much more later. There's a whole series of stories to be written in these search terms. If you aggregate them according to time and date, you can pretty much track a pressure cooker economy blowing up and then settling into recession and perhaps, maybe, generating a recovery?

Stay tuned. I will blogging on here while I am in China.

The Visa Office, and Standing in No Line

Something happened to me today that I thought you might want to know about.

I went to go submit my Chinese visa at the Consulate on 12th Avenue in New York City. I rushed over in the taxi, got out at the curb and walked in, expecting a huge line and hordes of people, or at the very best a bureaucratic nightmare. This has been my experience at other visa offices around the world -- especially in Hong Kong at the Indian Consulate and the Consulate of Myanmar.

Just past the security barrier, where the two officers screened my jacket, my phone and my Kindle, is a small room divided in two by two very wide pillars. There are about twenty chairs, blue colored, arranged in neat rows. And scattered in the chairs are a mix of about a dozen people, some of them Chinese-looking, waiting patiently. It was hard to figure out what they were waiting for, but they seemed to have been there for a while.

There was a rope cordon that directed traffic to windows, but at the end of the cordon corridor, another cordon had been erected, blocking any exit from that corridor. So, where was the line.

I reflected on this for a moment. It was so interesting that I anticipated and looked for a line. In China, and in fact, in many situations, there's no sense of a line. My China instincts kicked in. I moved around the back of the room, around the two large pillars, and just stood in a proximate way, next to two people I thought to be in what would probably be a line if there were more than two of them standing there.

One of them moved. He went to a window. Then the other person moved, and she went to a window. And then the first man who went to the previous window moved away, and then the woman in the window looked at me expectantly. I moved to the window, submitted the application, was given my form, and told to come back tomorrow.

What does this have to do with education?

We figure things out on our own, I think. I have learned from my time in Hong Kong, and my occasional trips to China, that my best laid defenses -- wanting and expecting order, following order, and looking for lines -- don't really work when you are on the move and in a new territory. It pays to plan ahead, but it also pays to let those plans slide, and do what is necessary in the moment.

Standing in the Chinese consulate, I was back in China, literally. I was on their turf. It is so refreshing to give up one's sense of order and adopt the expectations of another group.

Can we do that within our own culture? Can we practice a kind of capitalist compassion for the order that others wish to force on us, our schoolchildren and our teachers? Let's turn that into a passion for disruption and the creativity of disorder.

Sometimes decision makers, like presidents, policy makers and legislators and other lofty people want to make decisions for us in education. They want to tell us what to read, or how to learn. They want to tell us where to go to school and how to build that school model.

There are great people out there, don't get me wrong. But there are so many people out there with great business ideas that are not being heard, or, having been heard, cannot realize their dreams because of what amounts to a love of structure and a distaste for disruption.

A calm and business-like approach to passion for disruption should create a dignified and powerful conversation.

And if you want to talk about this with me personally, or with people like Ron Packard, CEO, K12 and some other professionals in the space, you can find us on January 20 in New York at the collaborative and worlwide Business Breakfast at the Omni Hotel.

Register, and get into the disruption.

How to Get Some Awesomeness in College

The New York Times wrote today about how colleges and universities are trying to serve up a fresh batch of awesome.

The point is to make that degree worth more.

Are for-profit schools more successful than non-profit colleges and four-year universities in producing value for the money?

My Profession - My Passion

This post is from Surabhi Dewra, our correspondent in India. Please enjoy.


"Harry works at the airport's ticket counter. It has been years since Harry has been checking the tickets of the passengers who wait in long queues for their turn. On one side, most of these travelers are tired or just too impatient to stand in the long queue. On the other side Harry too is always tired and bored of his work, and doesn’t bother to exchange a 'Hi' with them - each time he has to repeat the same process. As a result, Harry is slow at work, which in turn makes the travelers wait a little longer.

On the other counter is Harry's colleague, George. There is a long queue too here, but many travelers in this queue are wearing a smile. Because they don't have to wait for long- their queue moves pretty fast. And once they reach the counter where George is checking their ticket, they are happy and exchange a couple of words with George. George is really quick at his work. In fact he is the fastest among the staff.

Why is the difference between Harry's work speed and George’s? And why are travelers not unhappy when they are standing in queue at George's counter?

Because George does not see his work as mere work. George enjoys his work - checking the traveler's tickets, conversing with them, and making them feel happy about the travel. Yes, George is passionate about his work."

How relevant the above story is in our lives! Contentment in a profession comes only with passion for that work. Else a profession turns into a forced job, where there is only stress and tension of meeting deadly deadlines, torturing targets and running in the rat race to get to a bigger cubicle. But bigger cubicles don't happen without passion for one's work. All that can happen is the death of a career or profession trapped within in the lifeless walls of cubicle.

To drive the above mentioned point among Indian Students we at MeraCareerGuide.Com have created few assessments which talks about interest based career selection and personality based career selection. These career assessments helps in understanding the fact that personality is also helpful in career planning. For example, an introverted person is unlikely to be successful in sales!!

These tests give personality profiles, which will give insight to identify the work environments that suits best.

Whatever work you are in, pause for a moment. Ponder over if you’re doing justice to work. Be George who is passionate towards what he is doing. Who doesn’t crib when he sees a long line of travelers standing at his counter. Nor is he bored. He has found the fun of seeing every traveler’s ticket and striking a conversation with them. He waits for his work to begin every morning, and not look for excuses to avoid work.

Make your work your life. And not your life your work. Be another George. It’s worth it.

Some more of those Stephen Tave Comments

It was a pretty compelling interview, so I've dug back through stuff to pull out the fun comments that might mean something to education investors and entrepreneurs. Here's just a little bit more Tave love.

Question from EIIFOperators of schools have complained in the past about the costs of marketing and it's a true that marketing is not easy. It can be expensive and it can be cumbersome, and not to mention completely ineffective if the right media are not leveraged. What out there is compelling to you as a marketing solution and how do you think it will be managed, purchased, or built?


Tave responds

The whole marketing thing has to be looked at. Google has to look at the way they are doing business too. It's bait and switch the way Google does business. Nobody brings this up. It used to be a nickel a click. Today, if they [a content reader] clicks on culinary school it's probably 25 to 35 dollars a click. This happened in ten years.

Why has it done that? It's done that because people have created companies that bid on that, but they are not in the industry. They collect the leads. I sell that lead that I paid 20 dollars for for 20 dollars to a hundred schools. Those leads are not focused leads. They are getting a huge amount of them and they are working their admissions people at levels that are very frustrating to them.

So, then EIIF asked if using students to leverage a different marketing strategy is a more compelling business idea.

If you have a good school, it sells itself. They talk about their results
and they talk to their friends, and it's word of mouth, and it's huge. At the culinary school, more than half of the students came by referrals. Getting that message out there is important. If your operation is not right for that area you are training in, then you will have a tough time no matter what. You will pay a lot to get the wrong students, and your results are not going to be acceptable to the accreditation bodies. We have to do a lot of self-monitoring.

Stephen Tave Interview: The Fast Economy and Career Colleges

Interview with Stephen Tave, one of the speakers at the 2010 Education Industry Investment Forum.

Practitioners in for-profit higher education administration tend to be off on the side, compared to how education in this country is viewed generally. Focused on growing companies and creating value for students, it's quite often that you get a good deal of skepticism about the role of for-profit education. That's because of the relative newness of the for-profit school in a hundreds of years tradition of socially-driven education.

These are some of the most interesting points that I have found in Tave's interview with me in New York City last week. I had come to his offices at 2 Penn Plaza to ask him about the future of education. His focus: structure and offering students what they need to survive in the marketplace.

What can a school do to prepare itself and its students for the future?

Schools should have think tanks that focus on what to offer students for the future.

What's going to be popular five or ten years from now? You have to have a certain part of your organization that just focuses on that. You have to have a think tank working on the green opportunities coming on down the line.

Tave points out that the Wind Energy Association just made an agreement with some career colleges to provide education support and job training. Taking a risk like that, without proven return, is a necessary risk and could help your organization in the long run.

You are jumping curves, but it shouldn't stop you from putting the infrastructure in place and constantly testing if that is going to be the case.

Taht constant testing, if accreditation limits didn't stand too much in the way, would enable a career college to do more than be competitive against traditional four-year institutions. In fact, that is not so much the point as it is to just be as flexible as the real marketplace. The marketplace is filled with people who are testing limits, creating new ideas, and immediately putting them out there in the market to test and to generate a return on investment.

The career college vertical is synonymous with that marketplace rigor. In the past, we have talked on this blog about the Ivory Tower mentality of education. Tave went a little further and said that he saw that kind of flexibility in place already, even though it needed to be tweaked and assisted to perform faster and more rigorously:

Our schools are very precise in what they train for, and the rate of return on what you invest in is measured every day. The way we have the ability to efficiently to bring new curriculum is that we have to be able to do the "here-and-now" when it occurs, and not have it in some committee for ten years, and then its all antiquated and isn't necessary for the actual job market that is out there. It's exciting to work in that type of environment.