by Lucie Greene
UnCollege was founded by Dale J. Stephens in San Francisco in 2011. The story goes that Stephens—homeschooled between the sixth and twelfth grades—joined liberal arts institute Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and grew frustrated by the standard of education. He worried that college wasn’t teaching him the right skills. So he took action. In January 2011 he created UnCollege.org, first as a learning community and then, in 2013, as a fully fledged gap year program. UnCollege is backed by two venture-capital firms, Learn Capital and the east coast firm Charles River Ventures, as well as by 1776, the incubator seed fund, and other organizations such as Women 2.0 and General Assembly.
The mission of UnCollege is to teach life skills to students before they start university: “The experience-based program we’ve created teaches young adults the practical skills they miss in most conventional classroom settings through a blended approach of self-directed learning, accountability training, mentorship, and deliberate practice. This method, called Supported Self-Directed Learning, equips participants with the essential cognitive skills, confidence, and professional aptitudes they can utilize in all future endeavors.”
At UnCollege, class groups are “cohorts” and each group begins the gap year with a “Voyage,” living, traveling, and volunteering in India, Indonesia, Mexico, or Tanzania. This is described as Immersive Service Learning and students are taught about social impact, empathy, community, independence, adaptability, and reflection.
“You go to some weird place that’s not anything like home and you unlearn, basically,” says Vaughn R., a bearded, plaid-shirted hipster in the promotional video (he’s now an entrepreneur and aspiring filmmaker). “You unlearn your old routines and patterns. And your old self.” He explains that you then come back to the college and join the “Launch” phase “with your slate wiped cleaner, a bit. You still know who you are. But you re-evaluate a lot of stuff about yourself. Like opinions that are not so necessary.” He describes diving, dawn hikes up mountains, and seeing monkey forests. “I learned as much about myself as I did about other people.” (I imagine today Vaughn R. is taking sonic baths in L.A. and has invested in a recreational marijuana startup. Or he’s working in a bank.) But you get the point. They take people, probably fairly affluent kids, out of their comfort zone and send them on a multidisciplinary program of experiences designed to home in on their skills, learn some basic professional aptitude, and identify long-term career aspirations. If only UnCollege had been there before I squandered a directionless year on an experimental arts course, sneaking out early and creating unintelligible textile pieces before opting to study for a history degree.
In the Launch phase, students at UnCollege live with their peers in San Francisco “while learning new skills, networking, and enjoying life in the most entrepreneurial city in the world.” The workspace for learning is not a school but a mixed-use coworker startup space. There are workshops and discussions based on three pillars: curiosity, creation, and self-advocacy. Students are mentored by other professionals and industry leaders in UnCollege’s network. The final phase is a three-month work internship at a company matched with the student’s professional aspirations. The entire program costs $19,000, including national and international accommodation.
The core focus of UnCollege, says Stephens, is to equip students with personal and professional skills so that when they start university, they hit the ground running. So UnCollege is a primer, if you will. It is unique in its focus on helping individuals become well rounded, so they understand other cultures, empathize, gain self-reliance, and develop self-directed learning skills.
Stephens says: “I asked why there isn’t an institution that directly teaches the skills that make you a better learner; like how you negotiate, communicate, set goals for yourself, give and get feedback. All of these are basic skills that, if you go through college and have the right background, you might pick up, but no one bothers to teach you. The basis of this program is ‘Why can’t we teach those things directly?’—our hunch being if we teach those things explicitly, and make the implicit explicit, we can accelerate learning.”
Stephens says a lot of the work done in the nine-month program, in particular the mentorship component, is “really social and emotional in terms of reinforcing someone’s self-confidence and self-awareness, in terms of how they give feedback and how they advocate for themselves—things that are really touchy-feely. When we see students come out of the program they have an understanding of who they are and a comfort in that.”
This is not a substitute for higher education, he emphasizes. “There are certain students who use it as such, but we think of ourselves as a complement; 70 to 80 percent of our students go on to college after doing our program. They do so with direction and intention. They have a clear understanding of what they want to do.”
Will this be a growing trend? “Right now, people mostly choose to do our program because of a philosophical alignment,” says Stephens. “But we’re getting to the point where we have parents say, ‘I don’t buy into the philosophy of this program, but I know that it took me six years to get through college, and paying $19,000 per year for you to figure yourself out is way cheaper than paying $40,000.’ People are starting to make the decision to come to our program strictly on an economic basis, and as the cost of college continues to rise, I think what we’ll start to see is people starting to piece together different programs.”
UnCollege is one of a group of new skills-based programs, including General Assembly in New York, Galvanize in Denver, and Dev Bootcamp in Chicago, which target candidates of varying ages. Some focus on personal transformation. Some (aimed at companies) focus on teaching existing employees how to code. Others position themselves as short-term, skill-focused alternatives to taking a full degree. All are an effort to supplement or supplant traditional degrees with something more practical and applied. “I think there’s a category that doesn’t even exist yet, that we’re starting to see inklings of, that is essentially onboarding to employment programs,” says Stephens.
If Silicon Valley Built a School
It’s a stunning day in San Francisco. For a fleeting moment the mists and damp fog typical of the city have disappeared. The gridded mansion-lined streets are bathed in sunshine. Trees are verdant, their leaves piercing green, and the sky is clear blue. (Days like this, my taxi driver tells me, are why people live in the Bay Area.)
AltSchool’s headquarters is in the South of Market neighborhood better known as SoMa. The school’s exterior looks like a shop front, complete with logo—‘Alt’ being a reference to the computer keyboard key, rendered in bright blue, even brighter today in the sun. Except the windows are misted. A class on ground level is in session. Visitors are signposted to a side door. Climb the stairs behind the classroom to the offices, and the open-plan office with its large mezzanine balcony has all the trappings of a startup, with exposed brick walls, industrial steel beams, and rows of stand-up desks populated by millennial staff. None of the staffers look over thirty-five.
But it’s not a startup. Or at least, not a typical one. AltSchool’s ambition, or, rather, the ambition of founder and CEO Max Ventilla, previously part of Google’s founding team, is to rethink how education works. Backed by Silicon Valley venture capital including Andreessen Horowitz and Mark Zuckerberg, it has created a group of “lab schools” developing technology for streamlined personalized learning, which will be franchised to sell to other schools so the project can be “scaled” (always the Holy Grail). Unlike Minerva or Udacity, AltSchool has picked the tricky area of pre-kindergarten through to eighth grade, children up to the age of thirteen. Rather than working from a platform or app, it has built actual schools, which range in size from thirty-five to one hundred and twenty pupils. Look at the HQ “lab” classroom from above, and some of the children are reading in one corner. Elsewhere a group is sitting around a table, in discussion. Prerequisite drawings are on the walls, and there is a row of computers and models.
It all looks both functional and human. And surprisingly low-tech—the only obvious presence is three iMacs and a monitor suspended from the ceiling. Like Minerva and UnCollege, its approach is “lean”—no libraries and expensive facilities. AltSchools take over spaces such as former stores and gyms.
What’s different about AltSchool? Aside from personalized learning—a Silicon Valley mantra—it’s the use of technology. Lessons are assigned on personalized “playlists.” (Ventilla specialized in online personalization in his previous tech jobs.) Playlists, which have garnered AltSchool most of its publicity, are described as “a set of tools that enables educators to manage what each child does to meet his or her personalized learning goals and functions as a customized workspace for students to cultivate agency by managing their own work. Educators create, sequence, and remix curriculum units to curate playlists where students can view assignments, communicate with their teacher, and submit work generated on- and off-line. Education teams provide feedback and assessments that update students’ portraits in real time.”
Tech monitors progress via data and regular assessment. There’s an attendance app that students use to check in and out of school; wearable devices to keep track of students off campus; AltVideo, a camera system in the classroom, recording sound and motion. (Ventilla has said that at some point this data could be used to replace testing.) Though of course, there have been criticisms about issues of privacy with this scale of data collection. If a child’s behavior and development, or lack thereof, are all documented in granular detail by a private company and used in assessments for university, for instance. Or if facial recognition can monitor changes in your child’s height, weight, and health. Or conversations, by children, recorded and sold as consumer insight.
New Yorker Max Ventilla quit Google to start AltSchool in the spring of 2013. He was trying to find a preschool for his daughter and grew exasperated with the experience. He opted to set up his own version, using technology to respond to children’s interests—not out of altruism but as a credible new business that could eventually transform education. The technology and software will be where it makes its money. Ventilla has no experience as a teacher or an educational administrator, but wanted to create an “educational ecosystem” that would focus on skills children would need in the workplaces of the future, not on an education determined by historical antecedents. The first AltSchool “micro-school” opened in September 2013 in San Francisco and has continued to garner attention—from parents, the tech community, and the press.
AltSchool’s education model is built around the idea of personalized learning, as opposed to standardized testing in the U.S. Common Core State Standards (a set of widely adopted educational metrics in English and mathematics between kindergarten and twelfth grade). One of its goals is to improve the assessment of student learning and teacher performance through data collection. At AltSchool, teachers monitor students’ progress daily, if not hourly. Every task card on a student’s playlist takes into account not just academic skills like math and literacy but also social and emotional skills.
AltSchool seems to share much with Minerva’s approach, which focuses on developing problem solving and analysis capabilities, as well as more fact-based learning. The company employs more than 150 people: educators, technologists, and operations managers. Its fast growth has been funded by $110 million in venture capital since 2015, one of the largest investments ever made in education technology. AltSchool’s capital comes from Silicon Valley investors including the Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and John Doerr. Last year the philanthropic Silicon Valley Community Foundation invested $15 million through a fund financed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. AltSchool also generates revenue by charging $20,000 annual tuition fees.
This is not Zuckerberg’s first foray into funding education. His first was in 2010 when, in front of a cheering Oprah audience, he pledged $100 million to transform the underperforming schools of Newark, New Jersey. The plan was to make Newark “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation,” in partnership with then mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. It was stymied by political mismanagement and, controversially, little was achieved while millions were spent on consultants. The initiative was also criticized because it was not done in consultation with educators or local communities. Since then, Zuckerberg—it’s fair to say burned by the initiative—has focused on efforts closer to home. While Ventilla says his backers are not closely involved, there are distinct aspects of Zuckerberg’s underlying philosophy in AltSchool: paying competitive salaries to get better talent; the accountability of that talent; and using technology.
Surprisingly, given the rapid expansion of AltSchools’ physical schools, Ventilla says these will not be the focus going forward. Rather, they are test beds for the IP, software, and technology. “The schools that we run today are really there to codevelop our platform with the product engineering and design team that we have, and to provide a very high-quality education to the kids, while building the next version. And the next version of the platform will serve not just those schools but other schools as well.”
Ventilla is quick to point out that AltSchool is not creating a new model of education, but rather using technology in a new way to make an existing methodology more effective. It’s not an entirely new educational philosophy, he says: “There is a pretty established and pretty inspiring progressive education model that exists already, and a number of different curricular approaches within that progressive umbrella. If you take a step back, progressive versus traditional education requires a much greater degree of flexibility while you deal with the inevitable complexity of enabling and educating children. That’s a place where digital technology can serve a real purpose . . . We’ve been waiting for digital technology to come along and be sufficiently advanced, certainly not so it can replace people and relationship-driven learning, but so that it can enable students and teachers and parents and administrators to operate in the highly complex educational setting with greater flexibility.”
One would imagine that the version of AltSchool’s tech that eventually gets rolled out will have “using less teachers” as a selling point—in other words, quite different from the physical lab schools it currently runs. Less human interaction means connection with a human teacher could yet be even more of a status symbol and economic divider.
Ventilla describes tech at AltSchool as a “third layer” that makes existing functions easier. “The intent is to create, ultimately, an ease of effectively personalizing education that is far above what exists today,” he says. “Today you’d find very few schools that would say they don’t want to effectively personalize education—very few, bordering on none. But you’d also find very few schools that would say it’s easy to do. We would like to see a future where a lot of people say ‘it’s not that hard.’”
A criticism sometimes leveled at AltSchool is that it is private and fee-charging, and therefore elitist. Ventilla believes—as many Silicon Valley leaders do—that economies of scale will eventually bring down the price of this tech-led, personalized approach, and thereby potentially offer a solution for every child. It’s starting as an elite model, but only temporarily. “Our mission is to enable every child to achieve their full potential. The word ‘every’ is right there, and requires you to be part of a very different kind of experience at scale,” he says. “And one that has a real network effect. The average education should be better than the best education was a generation ago. And today it’s not better than the best education was a couple thousand years ago, right?”
There’s an undeniable appeal in combining “social good” with making money, and it has become somewhat of a mantra among Silicon Valley. But is this altruistic? “None of our backers are approaching AltSchool as a primarily altruistic purpose,” says Ventilla. “Some of them are very interested in the sector because of the kind of social impact that business success in the sector would have.” In other words, i
t’s viewed as a win-win. The profit potential is the driving force, but the opportunity to do good is a bonus.
There’s also money to be made from the sheer number of children who need educating. “If your mission is to enable every child to achieve their potential, there’s a lot of children out there and a huge amount of dollars, in the trillions, that are spent on educating children and aren’t spent as well as they could be spent,” says Ventilla. “There’s a big market on a multi-decade timescale for products where it’s very expensive to make the first platform for the first user, but then relatively inexpensive to make the next thousand and the next million and the next billion, and at some scale those businesses are very profitable to run.”
Is education broken? In terms of preparing children for the future, Ventilla believes so. At the least, it’s not moving with the times. “You have this irony that the industry which is probably farthest behind the present state should probably be the industry that is the most ahead of the present state,” he says. “To prepare a child for the future, you not only have to be contemporary, you have to actually be prescient in some sense. I don’t think that schools are getting worse; I think that schools are getting better.”
Part of the problem, Ventilla says, is not a lack of awareness among educators, but a lack of investment in evolving methodology. Education policymakers are behind in understanding where wealth is generated, where skills are needed. “There isn’t any R&D in education. The White House estimates that less than two-tenths of 1 percent of expenditures are on R&D. It’s hard to improve your future performance if you invest so little in it.”
