Closing the First-Gen Underemployment Gap with the Founder of Basta, Sheila Sarem

Welcome to an Educated Guest, the podcast that dives deep into the innovations and trends shaping the future of education. I am your host Todd Zipper, with over two decades as an entrepreneur, executive, and investor across K-12, higher education, and workforce development. I bring together visionaries, innovators, and operators from the education industry to explore the solutions that are transforming learning and work. On today's podcast, we are talking to Sheila Saran, who is the founder and CEO of Vosta, a nonprofit dedicated to closing the employment gap for first generation college students of color. Before founding Vosta, Sheila led recruitment and hiring for DC public schools and the KIP Charter Network. It was there she realized that, while the first mile, getting kids to college, was a major focus. The last mile, launching them into careers, was a systemic failure. Today, she is using data-driven coaching and deep employer partnerships to ensure a college degree leads to a choice-filled life. The top five highlights from today are, first, why nearly 50% of first-end students of color are under-employed after graduation, and why a degree alone is no longer a level playing field. Second, how Vosta uses proprietary diagnostic tool called Seeker to identify exactly where a student stands in their career journey and where to intervene. Third, the psychological transition required to move a student from seeing themselves as a learner to a professional candidate. Fourth, how Vosta creates "proximate networks for students who don't have a professional network at home." And lastly, why Vosta is moving into the Carolinas and Philadelphia to build deep, region-specific enroads with colleges and employers. Sheila, welcome to an educated guest. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right, so let's get started. I would love to understand your background and what eventually became the burning desire and the impetus to start Vosta. I started off my career working in tech in early 2000s, so before it was cool. And I lived abroad and worked abroad in Western Europe. I'm first-generation American. I'd always wanted to do more mission-driven work, but that was not a career that was really encouraged in my household and by my parents. But in 2008, we had when I thought would be the most consequential election of my lifetime, and I dropped everything in Europe, came back to the States, and worked on political campaigns. Did that for about two cycles, and was happy that I was doing more mission-driven work, but really realized campaigning was not the lifestyle for me. And so by luck and chance, got a job with DC Public Schools during a period of pretty intense educational reform, and that really set off the next chapter of my career. So I spent about eight years leading hiring first at DC Public Schools, and then for the Kip Charter Network. And so two things were happening at that time. I was deeply immersed in who you hire, how you hire, that's practices around hiring, hiring strategy, and I was hearing as tell an entire generation of young people just go to college and everything will be fine. In my own work, I was saying, gosh, I'm seeing the same kinds of people make it to the final rounds of hiring processes over and over again. And so something about the message and the practice just aren't connecting. So in 2016, I, you know, really had a moment where I thought what I fell in love with, and when I joined the education reform movement was this notion that this would be this great equalizer. And what I'm realizing is it's education plus this other stuff that sets people up on a path of economic mobility. And so I looked at my own practice. I understood hiring. I understood the corporate sector. I understood education. The messages we were sending young people. I knew the young people had everything it took. And I myself was first gen and experienced the role of luck in my journey. And so all of that came together in this beautiful way. And it was either launch Basta or Basta. It was a thing that I just absolutely had to do in that moment. Basta or Basta. I absolutely love that. And so, so I guess you can lay out because you've just seen this education to labor pipeline, play out for many different angles. What do you think some specific data points or moments that you realized the system was was failing first gen students or maybe you saw some first gen students succeeding in it. And they and you saw something that they were getting that maybe was the gap that you could help fill. Walk us through that challenge a little. I'm happy to. I mean, I think there were a few things. One was, we were starting to hear when I was working at the KipTarter School Network. We're starting to hear principles who had been a principal of the middle school saying, hey, you know, this young person went to my middle school went to high school graduated college and they're coming back to us to be like, wait, where's this job? How do I get this job? More times than I think they were comfortable with. So I think like always that people closest to the ground were saying, hey, like we're starting to see a trend or pattern here. How much how might we support? So that was something I was seeing quite regularly. Again, I'll go back to my own lived experience. The folks that were making their way to the final rounds of hiring were often very similar. I wasn't seeing a lot of the first-gen talent that I knew existed out there. And that felt problematic to me. And then I think the third thing was there's hiring on paper. There's what you see on the job description. And then there's what a hiring manager tells you. I only want to see people with these GPAs. I only want to see people from these schools. I only want to see people who rode in college. You know, you start to hear all these things and you're like, wait a minute. All of these are closing doors for young people in particular. First-gen action college graduates who because of their lived experience have everything it takes to succeed in the world to work. And so those, I think I was seeing lots of different signals from lots of different dimensions of my work that were showing me this isn't working for a whole group of people. That was mentioned to you before we started. I started my career somewhat. I guess my free time and a nonprofit called Mines Matter started not that far from where you started. Bosta in New York City. And we really found that that transition point between high school and college really challenging for the low-income students that we we service. But the value add there was tremendous. And I think that to me I see a beautiful synergy or a quarlery between the Mines Matter model. And we interviewed the CEO of Mines Matter here and I did get it. Yes, a few months ago. And the Bosta model where you have this friction, this massive transition point between college and to career and needing a whole bunch of skills. I would say like those organizations the college access and success organizations, they're the reason we really knew an organization like Bosta needed to exist. The first few conversations I had was with college access and success programs. And we were like would you like a service like this? Would this be helpful to you? And it was like a resounding yes. So you know when the folks working most closely with young people and the young people themselves are telling you we need this. It's a pretty good indicator that you're on the right track. Yeah, we'll we'll get into career services and we've talked a ton about that on this podcast. But I want to zoom out now for a second and those that are unfamiliar with Bosta, what is it please describe us the mission? What is the service the products that you ultimately offer? So I would say for the last decade we have been singularly obsessed with one question that's if we believe that first-gen college students have everything to succeed in the world of work because of their lived experience. You've gone to college as a first and navigate ambiguity with tons of resilience tons of great. You're going to find your networks. Everything that we hope a young people bring into the workforce first-gen college students have had extra time and capacity to build those skills and nice well in college. So if we believe that first-gen college students have everything it takes to succeed in the world of work and that there are employers that do want to get competitive and higher cross lines of difference than how do we build that connective tissue? And that single question and that single belief has animated everything we've done over the last decade. So we exist to make sure that first-gen college students secure those strong first jobs that launch them on a long-term path of economic mobility, provide them access to choice-filled lives and we don't espouse a belief that there's a single major or high wage growth area is necessarily going to test the stand the test of time. And what we do believe is that first-gen college students if they have the right social capital, if they have the right networks, have the opportunity to really understand what is the breadth of opportunities that are out there available for me? What are the things I'm uniquely good at? How am I? I put my strengths interests and drivers together to get those jobs and so we've really built an opportunity for students to be able to do that through our program model. And I will just say this because we've been talking for more than four minutes that we haven't used the word AI yet. So it has to come up now. I think what AI has done to our job market is made it possible for folks to apply to infinitely more jobs than they did previously. And so what does that mean for our employers? Well, they're bumbling. They've got thousands of applications coming. And so it's never been more important for job seekers to be precise and smart about what they apply to. And then I think the second part of the equation that Basta does not ignore is the network part. We need employers to know about Basta and to know about first-gen college students so they don't get left behind in this application explosion they're experiencing that they see the young people we apply that we bring to them as valuable for the job market. So practically speaking, you're a senior or junior in college, walk us through how do these students find out about Basta? What is the what is the program look like from their eyes in terms of doing career assessments working with mentors? Just help us get an understanding of that that model for the student. This is interesting because you brought up Nines Matter. I think we would say that one of the there's so many parallels I agree between figuring out your college plan while you're in high school and figuring out your career. and I'm a slam-wire in college, I would say the one real difference that I've experienced over the last decade and enormous what we do at Boston is a young person can go all the way through their college experience and never once talk about or think about what they're gonna do after. And that's the biggest disconnect. A young person can go through the entire college experience, four point of student and never have had an opportunity to explore careers. And we've seen that in our data. We've collected data on over, you know, I think 45,000 students at this point and whether they're high performing students so 3.5 GPA or above or students who are struggling academically, 2.4 GPA and below, demographics, type of school. All of that we factored all of it in and just writ large first and cost students to not get great exposure during their college experience. It doesn't matter, take all those variables and you still see a compositive students that have very low exposure to different kinds of career opportunities. So we believe that young people need to be factoring career into their college journey from the moment they step foot on campus. And so I name that because I think we work with freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. We work with students all across the college spectrum. The very first thing they do is they take our secret assessment. That's the gateway into the best of ours for any young people who's walking through our doors. The reason it's so critically important that they take the assessment first is that two students who can look exactly the same on paper, same major, same GPA, same year in school can be in vastly different places around their sense of who they are, what they're good at and what careers are out there. So we can't use like year in school as a way to serve up content or support to a young person. Though we can do that quickly through our secret assessment. So our secret assessment looks at both your inventory, your skills, your interests, your strengths, your drivers, but it also looks at your knowledge gaps and your false assumptions to help us get a better picture of who you are so that we're connecting you to the right resource and the right moment. Students take seeker, they immediately receive an assessment for themselves. So if you've ever done a strength finder or an in-eogram or at MBTI, you've received one of these assessment-like reports. They're then immediately welcomed onto our learning platform where we have live workshops. Those workshops are taught by coaches and they're sitting in classrooms. I'm putting that in quotes with young people from across the country who had really similar pain points as them on the secret assessment. They can take as many sessions as they want. The sessions are everything from helping you find your strengths to building your LinkedIn profile. We are doing exit tickets on that and making sure young people master the content they came to master. We see repeats. The people will come back to our interview sessions over and over again. You can tell they're using it for interviews. And then the last part of the platform is a job board. So the other thing we've learned over a decade of doing this work is that young people are overwhelmed by job boards as they should be. The internet cannot tell the difference between like an entry level bus driver, entry level lab technician, and then the entry level job for a BA degree holder. And so when they come to the Boston Job Board, they know they're seeing exclusively entry level jobs for a BA degree and only paid internships. So that's like the thing that I think makes the job board unique and something young people want to come back to. And the other is that we use a recommendation engine. So we've collected over 5 million data points now using our Seeker assessment. So students, we take the really novel data set we collect through Seeker that goes far beyond proxies like GPA resume location to rev up opportunities to young people that are a good fit for where they are. That sounds like an incredible tool that I think everybody can benefit from, especially first gen, from doing that assessment up front, which is what you do, to then giving them a set of tools and recommendations along the journey to their best positions. It sounds like you're focused on both also helping people get internships and full-time jobs. It really just depends on when a student enters the Boston Network. That's right. Great. So I wanted to touch on a phrase that I've heard you use around making the invisible rules of hiring visible. What do you think some of those examples of invisible rules that first-end students don't necessarily learn when they're travels throughout life? Yes. So the first is the breadth of jobs that are out there. We launched Seeker back in 2019 before a tool, like before there was the words career navigation tools. So you can imagine how fun it was trying to blind to people what this thing was. We launched in 2019. When the first 5,000 students had taken Seeker, we looked at the data and thought, is there anything interesting, anything provocative? We can share with our ecosystem. And the one data point that was just very clear in our data was having what we called a high exposure score, which simply meant a young person self-reporting. I know a little bit about a lot of industries. Was the single's Larry with getting a great job or internship? Coral Larry was stronger than a singular internship, because an internship is really just one way of getting exposure. So we knew exposure mattered immensely. So then we looked at what is the exposure of first-end college students. And what we found was not surprising, I think the careers they were picking were often the careers they came into contact with regularly. So we were seeing a lot of social worker, teacher, government administrator, lawyer, these things that you just know and see on a regular basis, regardless of where you've grown up, and what you've been exposed to. And the things we saw underrepresentation from were also the things that you wouldn't come into contact with regularly professional services, consulting, finance. So that data point in and of itself would tell us that young people aren't getting to make choice-filled decisions, because they're not getting access to a whole world of work that they could possibly be pursuing. I'd say the other data point I'd put on top of that that was super interesting is when we then asked young people, what drives you? What are you going for after college? No, we all have drivers. And obviously they change over the course of our lives. But we asked you out, do you care about income, search for meaning, creativity, having status, getting to use your expertise, we saw what we called patterns of misalignment. So young people who were saying they cared about making money were disproportionately picking careers in medicine. Students who said they cared about a career with status were disproportionately picking careers in HR as an example. Again, we were finding both limited purview of understanding on the jobs that were out there, and also a total mismatch between what drove young people, why they were going to college, what they were hoping to get out of college. So exposure is huge, and we need to figure out how to make jobs, careers, different functions, more visible to young people as part in their college experience, not an afterthought or a hope. So that to me is one, and that ties in so nicely to the second, which is around social capital. So if you grow up in a household with either one or two parents with white collar jobs, you're hearing about these fields. At the dinner table, through your parents' friends, maybe they help you get that first internship. And that social capital is, for this part of their lives, for their professional lives, oftentimes not as prevalent in the lives of first-gen college students. So those two things go really hand in hand. How are we creating opportunities for exposure for first-gen college students, so they are truly making choice still decisions? And how are they getting access to those networks that help them know what jobs that are out there, but also help give them a leg up? What we've heard so many times from young people who successfully finished fostering and get great jobs is I didn't know everyone was helping each other. I didn't know that's how this worked. And so making that business, making it okay to ask for help, not just okay to ask for help, but that's just how the job market is run is really important. This is not my quote, and I love it. So I will say it here, I cannot remember who said it to me, but years ago, someone said to me, the labor market is the trust market. And so how can we make that trust market work for the folks who most deserve for it to work for them? - That's great. You have essentially three constituents that you're focused on, the actual students, which is what we've been talking about, but then there's the campuses, the higher education institutions, and there's the employers. And so let's get into the higher, like the relationship, what does it look like to have formal relationship with the schools and then how does that relationship evolve? You talked a lot about that exposure, and I guess on the podcast, talk a lot about work integrated learning and that gives people a ton of exposure versus like you said, you could literally go through, get a four over school, and have very little to no exposure to employers, which is scary, versus work integrated learning. You can't even tell the difference between the work and the actual academic side. So, love to understand, let's start with the higher ed side. What does that campus college relationship look like for Bosta? - I will jokingly say this to you now. We run both a B2B2C model and a B2B model, which I think is why we're a nonprofit, 'cause I don't think both of those are super attractive in the four-profit space, but really rocked in for getting impact. So, yes, we, our customer on one side is the higher ed institution, the students own the beneficiary. So, they don't pay, they have unlimited access. That's the B2B2C of it all. And yes, the higher ed partner is our customer, in part because almost every young person who's ever walked through our doors went to their college first to get this support. So, we wanna be really impactful. How can we embed ourselves in colleges such that they're using Bosta in ways they need Bosta versus us like super imposing a specific way for them to work with us. And so, it looks different college to college. We have a college in, you know, on the East Coast, who has said yes, we give it, we've really figured out freshman retention and our career service has, service offices does a pretty good job with our seniors. Can you all work with our sophomores and juniors? Like continuing to make sure they feel a sense of purpose. Why are they here? How are they getting the right work-based learning opportunities in those middle years? We have a call down. West who they have 12,000 computer science majors and they increasingly have more and more first-gen computer science majors and they feel like the guidance they were giving those students isn't as applicable as it was years ago when they had a bunch of students who are multi-generational college students. So in that college we're just like dedicating ourselves to our concise students. So that's what I mean by like by betting ourselves with colleges. We can augment their capacity in the ways they know they need versus trying to superimpose a very specific approach onto their model. So that's sort of how we work with colleges. We so all their students take seeker and so what we're able to share with them is an incredibly rich data set that they then can use internally to deploy their resources differently. So in addition to what we think we're doing with their students they may be able to pull out some insights they're really useful to them. They may be able to see for example we have a group of freshmen in our at our college who have a really strong sense of what they want to do. They have some previous experience their skills their strengths their interests their major their salary expectations all of this align these are some high-fliers let's get them going really quickly versus oh no we have this group of seniors who's major salary expectations GPA lived experience all of this is out of whack if we don't help this group like we're very likely to see them fall fall off a cliff of under employment and I think the beauty of our data set is oftentimes what I hear from higher ed leaders is we have 200,000 students you know we have a hundred thousand just how are we supposed to give them the individualized support they need and on the flip side we hear one size can't fit all okay totally agree with both those things how do we segment and deploy smartly and we can do that it just requires a different way of thinking about the work so our data is super powerful we hear over and over again from our higher ed partners that they have deployed their resources differently in response to the data they receive from us and we think that that that sort of ability to to support them in shifting practice and deploying resources smartly and that's very resource constrained world we live in is is a real bonus to the data piece is huge we also you know we make the job of the career advisor I think a lot more student centric so some examples of what we can pinpoint in the secret assessment in 20 minutes and they can take a advisor to three maybe ten conversations to figure out are things like a young or some who's telling you I want to go into accounting six months into supporting them they're not really like showing up they're not doing the things they said they're going to do and you finally get them to tell you like almost someone told me I should be an accountant once or you know a student who says they want to go into social work and they're turning down job offers and you're like what do you do and and they're like well I thought I was going to get a salary earning 80k year you know or a young person who says they want to go into finance and has the right major has the right GPA getting first round interviews they're not getting the second round interview and you realize oh they're saying to the in their finance interview I want to go into finance because I want to help people these are the things that ruin a job search and and oftentimes we're relying on an advisor to pick me to meet a lot of a haystack to pinpoint what is going on with this student seeker does that under 20 minutes and so we're able to share that information back with advisors so that they're starting the conversation at the root cause exactly where the young person is instead of trying to find their way to that root cause so just means that we get to really shorten the path of root cause to solution for advisors and they get to use their time really well I want to highlight a couple points from what you just said first is that the the average I don't know what the number is career advisor at a school is probably four five hundred to one and it's just it's uns it's not scalable it's not effective I've spoken to a lot of experts in this field and maybe 20 or 30 they can handle like a real caseload if you will at any given time and they they can handle 100 students and give them the white glove service that everybody wants and they're paying a lot of tuition the taxpayers funding it and so I think that's a huge gap in the market and it sounds like you guys are helping to alleviate some of that gap either by providing some tools that allow them to quickly get to the high value add like you said student centric part of it but I also do provide any support services as well do the schools just say hey boss you handle the career advising and we will just kind of you'll take it off our hands so the I want to just name the paradigm of the like one counselor to 500 because it's either these giant caseloads or boiling the ocean like 500 people maybe on your caseload 500 people don't need the same amount of support and like you guys were trying to say like they don't need the same things that they may not all need this individualized support and so how can you break down the 500 number into segments that are manageable so we're gonna go back to that because it's like a really hard paradigm shift and I think it's the same thing that happened in K-12 education right like is the whole notion of data informed making and practices at a really hard paradigm shift so what yes what services do we provide the college so it really depends on what the college is asking us for we love when we're getting to work with a group of advisors augmenting work that they're doing on a campus or with a specific group of students we have across the country a lot of examples where there's a first gen experience at the college is putting together and Basta's embedding themselves in that experience so it's a semester long course or a year long seminar and Basta is part of that journey so that we really are plugged into how the college is working with their students we have examples of training advisors on the secret tool and reading the secret results so then we're they're really sort of taking on the the advising and that the the using the career lens on their advising and then we have examples of where we're just reporting back hey here are your students who signed up for and attended sessions here's their mastery of you know content using exit tickets and then all of our partners I think one of the things that they're really excited about in any of those examples is our job board and the fact that we are opening up the aperture for their students to apply to more jobs and internship to see if we see universal appeal around the job board. So I want to get to the employer's side in a second but one of the things and you talked about earlier so I just want to make sure we underscore it is around these these incredible skills that these these individuals had to demonstrate in supporting families and navigating new and complex systems and not having the you know examples to look at so those that are making it through the system are like you said I think your word was quite resilient successful but that might not look like they had the internship that is a perfect segue to then the full-time job how do you help them translate those unique and in quattly challenging experiences to what would resonate with an employer. I really love that you ask this question because I think a lot of career navigation starts at resumes and networking and ignores really valuable work of helping a young person excavate their own stories and recognize the value in those stories it's incredibly hard to show up to an interview with I've got this energy if you don't believe that about yourself everyone a boss to sessions has that component to it we spend a lot of time helping and people excavate their strengths and understanding why they're valuable you know a quick example I remember there was a young man who participated in our programs a few years ago and he was really devaluing his skills he's like I just had a job at H&M like I've just had this job at H&M so we kept asking questions no he worked at the top highest grossing H&M in the country times square he was responsible for the register at the highest grossing H&M in the country so he was like counting down the register and reporting the numbers up to HQ every night and that's a huge responsibility and he had not processed it that way because it wasn't an internship and so so much of our work is helping young people rewrite the narratives that have been just listed upon them and helping them understand okay how do I reframe this how do I position this in a way that my interviewer can understand now is that fair that they have to do all that translation work I don't know I don't however that is the way the world we live in and so our job is to help young people figure out how they really surface the incredible characteristics qualities experiences that first-gen students possess that I believe on its own without the social capital so I know we're getting to the employer part but out this building these employer networks is very difficult just doing a supply side model and that's why we really to the point around the other piece of our model is B2B and so also not attractive for a world is like how do we bring those employers into the fold as well so that we're helping to build that social capital helping to change mindsets about what it means to be first-gen so that when an employer sees a first-gen resume they're going oh this is exactly what I want in my job and we don't have to do as much translating over time I didn't want to understand how you measure outcomes you've been at this a decade or so you've probably seen a lot of fellows which I think is the word you go through the program graduate college get jobs how are you seeing these students perform in the job market yes so we look at job attainment internship attainment and then for our legacy program which has been around for a long time we've been able to track retention and so right now for the young people we work with about half first-gen college students across the country secure high quality employment within a year and so we have that by about six months so our young people are getting those same outcomes within six months and we're now tracking where they'll land or where we'll land a year out and we're seeing about double the internship at Tainman Ray for the young people who complete our program as compared to their peers. We also look at wage earnings. What we know to be true is the time to get a job. So the time from graduation to securing that first job is incredibly important. And the longer you go without securing a job after graduation, the more likely you are to be under employed. So time is of the essence. Gotta get that great job big Lee. The reason that matters is if you start off under employed, you're highly likely to remain under employed. They've looked at the data 10 years out and the numbers are pretty a bit small for those who could not get themselves out of under employment. And so time is of the essence. You need a great job and you need a great job best. So we're constantly looking at wages, job placement and internship placement as a way to take the tires and make sure our model is doing what it's supposed to do. The team looked at out years and starting under employed, starting in a job in which you're under employed, leads to a lifetime earnings gap of over a million dollars, 1.2 million dollars. So that's an incredible amount of money. That's a downpayment on a home, making sure your kids don't go into debt, go into college, all those things that matter a lot for building generational wealth. That's just a huge value proposition that Boston offers. And now to the employer side of the equation, how do you think about that? I know you've developed some really cool partnerships with Bloomberg and Comcast and a few others. So we work with employers as our customers on the other side of our model. And we work with employers in a couple of key ways. One is supporting hiring. So whether that's internship hiring or full time hiring, and the other is employee engagement programs. And those two things are really interconnected as you can imagine. When you get a lot of employees at a company meeting with and working directly with person college students, inevitably, they're like, wait a minute, we need more research college students working here. So those two service offerings or verticals work really well together. I'd say like a third thing that our employers appreciate is that we have students all across the country. And so they can meet students earlier in their journeys. Oftentimes if you are a tech company whose office is right next to Google, you're like, I need to get in front of young people so they know about me and Google. We love Google by the way, but for the sake of comparison, or if you're a smaller bank in Charlotte and you are trying to compete with the bank of America, how do you get in front of students earlier? And so Basta provides employers an opportunity to get to know young people and have young people get to know them earlier in their college journeys as they're starting to think about internships and full time jobs. That's great. And so one and a half think about how you expand across the country. And so originally I saw that you guys signed two really exciting partnerships, one in Philadelphia, one in the Carolinas. Help us understand how you think about growth and it seems like it's a region by region playing. It really is. So in 2019, we developed our Seeker Assessment Tool and that just created such an opportunity to think about what it looked like to work directly with higher ed institutions and in 2020 we were often running. So in 2024, we looked at our footprint and we had users at more than 300 college campuses across the country. And that was incredible. We realized we can work with small colleges, big colleges, HBCs, BWIs, private, public, you know, you name it and our model is sufficiently adaptive. And so in that moment, if we were a for-profit, I think we'd be like, "Check, this is awesome. We've achieved the scale." I think I had to look at our North Star and say what we really want is job outcomes and internship outcomes. And so then we had to acknowledge that entry level hiring is a local affair. Employers don't want to spend their recruiting dollars. They want to be spending their recruiting dollars, recruiting young people from across the country and employers, excuse me, in higher ed, increasingly is interested in the placement outcomes for their students. And most importantly, perhaps students don't typically move across the country. Most students are picking up first job that's within a 90 mile radius of where they consider home. That could be where they went to college. That could be where they grew up. So we looked at the behavior around early career hiring. We realized if we want to be truly impactful, we need to plug into these regional ecosystems. That is a far more impactful approach than just widespread scale. So we made that decision in late 2024. And then North Carolina in South Carolina emerge really beautifully. There are more HPCs in North Carolina than anywhere in the country. You have two vibrant hiring hubs, Charlotte and the Raleigh Durham area. So banking and tech and you have an unbelievable talent pool of students and a really like I think committed cross collaborative group of philanthropists, educators, red leaders, you know, and then we were really lucky that the Leon Levine Foundation provided us the $1.2 million grant to expand into the HPCs in the Carolinas. And now we're fundraising for the rest of it. So that that piece was really what drove us into North Carolina. The belief that the real change in this part of the hiring market comes through regional ecosystems. And then Philadelphia, we were super, I do not use word humbled a lot, but super humbled to be invited into Philadelphia through an investment from green light as you may know, green light funds brings together community members. And they both identify a problem in the local community and then scan for great organizations across the country. So we were really thrilled to that invitation through green light to come into Philadelphia. And do you hire people on the ground there? Is that how are you thinking about using the resources that can then work with the employers work with the colleges to make sure that the students have a place to go, not just doing the services and product model that you have for the students. So North Carolina and South Carolina with Carolinas being our first market in Philadelphia being our second. These are the two places where we are building our best practices and our blueprints to understand what's similar. For so what can we learn from New York? What applies as we are building our growth strategies in these new places and then what's really unique? What is super community context and what is Boston turnkey. We're building those playbooks now in each place having someone on the ground with hyper local community context is unbelievably helpful. We're very lucky. My co founder lives in Philly and has she's a delay native. She's she's on the ground there. We're hiring someone now and we immediately started working with two players on the ground in North Carolina when we launched there as well. But the beauty of our model is in what we learned over from 2019 to 2023 is we can deliver our program virtually. So one of the things I wanted to ask you is some of the data is coming out for the 2026 hiring class for kids graduating college now and it's not looking great. They're talking about the worst job market. Now I feel like every year they say somewhat doons day type things but this year seems to be especially bad and it's getting blamed on AI and just that AI is coming to eat all the early the early career jobs. What are you seeing out there do you think it's a tough market right now and how are you preparing the first gen students to combat that maybe it's just doing a lot of the same but just want to acknowledge the current job situation. Marin is quite different this year. I couldn't agree more it feels like a like protracted May 2020 like May 2020 was really difficult. This just feels like it's going to be May 2020 for a long time. 2020 was really difficult to COVID is anyone doesn't remember I told I read this headline the other day that was like for a low higher low fire market and that's not even actual AI that's just the anticipation of AI that's going to be really fun. So I think we're going to I think we're seeing it now what I am seeing most acutely right now is something I mentioned earlier. I'm just seeing the number of applications they used to see what is that naturally do or what is that trigger folks go to what they know I'm going to hire Todd's nephew because I know Todd and he vouch for his nephew or I'm going to open up my applicant tracking system and I'm going to look for those proxies that I can hope will guarantee success a high GPA and a. So what I think we have an immense challenge in front of us to do is make sure that the first in college students that this moment of this technology leap we're experiencing does exacerbate the inequities that we face today so that I think is fastest challenge getting even closer to our employers. How do you need even better and quicker ways to share talent with them so that as their applicant tracking systems are being just are buckling under applications were able to say hey prioritize these 50 applicants as you're looking through your talent pool and we have the capability to do that because of the data we collect and away we work with young people so that's thing one I think the second thing thing to for me is that I hold very true and very firm that first and college students have. Everything it takes and more they are uniquely positioned for first jobs they're uniquely positioned for uncertainty they're uniquely positioned for this moment and as we are thinking about a shrinking job market they should not be the first ones to suffer and that is really critically important for me. So I'm starting to get questions like should we really be doing this given the shrinking job market and I think about what's what's under that question who deserves to be prioritized in a shrinking job market and that just reenergizes me to do this work better. That's great I like that thing one and thing to just reference there. Yeah well we're getting close to our wrap up here and so I didn't want to get a sense of of, you know, where do you see Boston in 10 years? Are you thinking about impact from number of students you're working with and jobs that they're getting? I mean, what does success look like for you in 10 years from now? Five to 10 years from now? - In 10 years from now, right? If we were doing our job as well, we won't need to exist as the whole. - No, for Elizabeth non-profit, that would be ideal. I think we have a pretty lofty goal of reaching a million first gen college students in the next five years. And what we've seen and heard from our colleges is that Boston's product and service offering goes far beyond their first gen students. And so I think starting to think beyond that as well, our goal is, we'll stay supporting first gen college students and getting great jobs and internships. And I think thinking beyond those first gen college students in terms of the value we're adding to colleges is new and exciting place for us to think about our impact. But that one million students, we will continue to look at job placement and internship placement and total wages. And I think from a systems level, gosh, wouldn't it be great if we in 10 years looked back and went, we just use GPA and where someone went to college to assess whether they were a good fit for the job market. That feels really imprecise and incomplete. So I think if we can shift how we think about who brings value to the job market, that would be such a win. - I think we're scratching at this idea, just read a blog about talent marketplace and using AI to better understand people's skills. I think it's hard, right? It's easy to have the signal of you went to this college, you majored in this, you had this GPA, okay? I can place you that you'll do the job here. But the reality is we're much more complex, individual, all of us are, and it usually doesn't tell the full story. And it's getting gained. It has been for decades just playing that, and it gets rid of a lot of the population for certain jobs as well, which is what you guys are combating. So I think that's fantastic. So as we wrap up, is there any two last questions, any anything you want our listeners to come away with from this conversation? - I think I would double back on what you just said that social capital doesn't need to be inherited. It can be engineered. We can find ways to increase, who has access to the pie, that is perhaps the most important takeaway. So answer the DM if you're a senior executive that you get from a first-gen college student. So those responses, those moments, those shortcuts are absolutely consequential in the lives of first-gen college students. - And I will say, 'cause you touched on it, I think the skills that you're teaching are invaluable to that age group regardless. 'Cause there's not a lot of people, Mrs. I have the connections, whether they're first-gen or not. So I think you're teaching some incredibly valuable skills that college students need writ large. And I hope like you said, you might be able to get into a larger part of the institution over time. So that's great. Final question for you, and I asked this of all my guests, who has been a learning champion for you, and how is that person helped you in your life? - When I was, Basta was just a twinkle in my eye. I reached out to a woman that I had really admired. I reached out to her on LinkedIn, seeing her at different panels and conferences, and asked her if we could have a conversation. And that conversation turned into a year of weekly conversations. I think for me, taking the leap into entrepreneurship was not a foregone conclusion. I'm not a serial entrepreneur. I had this one burning idea that just got hotter and hotter, and I had to take the leap. I think the reason she still remains the most consequential learning champion I've ever had is the first time I finally uttered the words, I'm gonna do this. She showed no hesitation, right? Her response in that millisecond was great. Now what? Are you sure? Have you thought about it? And I had she not responded exactly how she did. I would not be talking to you today. I'd never had someone like that in my life. I know that happens for some people. I, in mine's matter on the way from high school to college or college there for job. Mine was this 32 year old woman fully enanced about whether this was the right choice. And I needed someone else to unequivocally say yes without hesitating. - Right, validate and show the confidence. - Right in that moment. I will never forget that moment. It was life changing. So she remains someone I really cherish and always keep updated about where we are at Basta. - That's amazing. We can all use someone like that in our life. Let's show him this has been a great conversation. Until next time, this has been an educated guest.