Concourse Global & the Quest to Flip College Admissions on its Head

College admissions has been criticized for being opaque and confusing for students and their families. Concourse Global is a startup aiming to change the equation so that colleges must do the work to reach out to students and students get to choose where they enroll. Its founder, Joe Morrison, joined me to share its mission and progress. As always, you can also watch our conversation here, but in a new feature, you can also listen to it as a podcast or at the embedded link above.

Michael Horn:                When I wrote Choosing College with Bob Moesta, a major message from the book was that we needed to really flip how students thought about the college admissions process. Rather than hoping that colleges choose them, realize that as agents, as individuals, they have power in this equation and they ought to be choosing the school that makes sense for them, with their fit, with the progress they desire and so forth. But in some cases, easier said than done. And so my guest today, Joe Morrison, the founder CEO of Concourse Global in my mind has really created a platform to begin to reverse that equation in some pretty fundamental ways. I will let Joe tell us way more. And so by way of introduction, I'll, I'll bring him up to the main stage, so to speak. It's good to see you, Joe. Thank you for doing this.

Joe Morrison:         Yeah. Thanks Michael. For inviting me to this show, I'm excited to have this conversation.

Horn:                You bet. And for those who are joining, you can certainly ask questions. I will be monitoring the chats and bring them in where it makes sense, but Joe, you can disabuse me of where I'm wrong, I guess, on my vision for what you're doing in the system as we go through this. But let's just start off with, we're getting to meet here for the first time as well. Tell me about your background, and how did you come to recognize that this was a problem and your inspiration for creating Concourse Global?

Morrison:         Right. Well, first in terms of personal background, from a young age, I was obsessed with computing. So I was writing code most of the time. I studied computer science at Waterloo and MIT. And my first job out of college was actually writing computer music software. I loved that job. Didn't pay very well, but great job. And later on, I landed on Wall Street at a FinTech consulting firm, kind of building software for investment banks. And eventually, I landed on the commercial side of that company.

                        And I started getting interested in education actually, because my wife who's also an entrepreneur. Started a company to help universities put teams on the ground in Asia to carry out either recruitment activities or alumni development for institutions to build their own teams. And when that company started getting big enough, we started having the discussion, was it time for me to maybe pivot and join the family business? Which in your 40s is kind of a huge deal?

Horn:                That's a big daunting pivot, yeah.

Morrison:         It was. It was a terrifying decision, but we decided to go for it and go into the family business together. And it was just fantastic. We had a blast building out her company together, which was called Grock Global. And I ended up kind of unexpectedly spending my lunch hours surrounded by university recruiters from all different colleges and listening to their. And that was the experience that kind of created the ideas... That led to the ideas behind concourses. Because I started hearing the same complaints over and over again.

                        "None of these software platforms are helping us enroll the right students." And at the same time, I was meeting parents and teachers whose kids were really struggling with the university admission process. And you probably found this when you were working on your book. Kids at every single level academically were all racked with anxiety about college admissions. Didn't matter how smart you are. And I'm a person who loves learning. And I sort of thought the route to college should be a gentle extension of what you're doing. It shouldn't be this huge deal.

                        And then the other thing that I got really obsessed with was the inequity problem, where I was kind of shocked by how much people were spending on college counseling. Upward of $200, $300 an hour for two years to coach your kid through everything, essay prep, test prep, ed application strategy. And there's a lot of families who that's completely out of reach. And they're not making informed decisions about where to go to college. They're just kind of throwing darts.

Horn:                Yeah. I think the point you just made also about the anxiety racked through that, that leads to that market developing. And frankly, then there's a bunch of people that do pay for that. There's a bunch of people who wish they could pay for that. There's a bunch of people who don't even know it exists, right? But they're all racked by this anxiety is very true even if you're applying to open enrollment schools largely it's still racked by anxiety, which is interesting out of this. So I'm curious then to go directly into this Concourse Global story itself, what was the problem specifically you were seeking to solve with it, and why do you think it's such an important problem if you will?

Morrison:         Right. So first why I think it's an important problem, I feel like we live in a knowledge economy. Our national competitiveness, for any country really depends on having well educated people entering the workforce and you can't have a two tier system, where a whole population or subpopulation is kind of not making the right decisions about higher education because the system is so complicated. And then I was looking around me seeing so many solutions trying to navigate the system as it is. And maybe because I wasn't that... I was new to the industry. So I sort of, wasn't making the same assumptions as everybody else, I guess, I thought, "Why don't we just change the system so it was not so complicated?"

Horn:                I'd love to actually just pause you there for a second because I'd love to do deeper on when you say there's a bunch of other solutions out there, you had different assumptions, can you sort of name those a little bit because I think the contrast will be interesting in really illuminating the fresh approach you decided to take with sort of standard day to day business as usual.

Morrison:         Yeah. Well, so for example, one of the platforms I ran across early on was Naviance, where I feel like there's a piece of software that's been around for a long time, and it's a set of tools for navigating the process as it is. And it's a huge platform. They have these scattergrams that everybody knows about, which are trying to help you guess, "Which colleges might let me in." And then all these tools for picking colleges and searching for them, and then pulling together documents. And it dawned on me that there's like 1,000 tools that are needed to navigate this process.

                        But if you just made the process simpler, so for example, the first thing that's I think kind of at the root of what I saw as a problem in the marketplace is the idea that an application takes a long time to put together and it costs money. So people ration them. You can't send 100 applications. The wisdom is you send 10 or 15 maybe, but that means that if you only get a few, then you've got to guess who's going to let you in.

                        And I saw everybody sort of trying to guess, "Who will let me in, and I'm going to use that to decide where to apply in the first place." But you don't really know. It's still just a guess, even if it's educated. And in fact, I saw Naviance getting misapplied, for example, for international students where those scattergrams actually were not giving correct data because they were designed for... Anyway, all that. I sort of had this mental model of like you're trying to cross this giant river and everybody's teaching each other how to swim and how to build boats. And I'm just thinking, "What if you just build a bridge and just walk over the river?"

Horn:                Well, that's a good segue I think, right? I love the analogy though, because it strikes me on two levels, frankly. One, a lot of these artifacts, these software solutions, whatever else on top of a challenge, they're addressing symptoms, if you will. You're basically saying, "Let's go to the root cause itself and flip it on its head." So that gets us, I think, perfect segue into what is Concourse Global? What is the solution that you have fashioned?

Morrison:         Right. So to basically explain what it is, we saw these two problems, right? One is the student challenge navigating their way to university. And the challenge on the university side, trying to find the right students to build your enrollment pipeline. And our idea was, what if you saw those as two sides of the same problem? What if you had a single platform where students in universities could meet and almost transact. And then I think the biggest idea we had was, when we realized there's an information asymmetry. The universities have all the information, so why don't they make the first move?

                        So that's when we came up with this idea, let's flip it around and say to a student, "What if you put out who you are and just created a profile." We do a whole bunch of things to make sure those profiles are trustworthy, but then create an environment where universities can come in, find students that are a good fit, and then just admit them through the platform. So instead of saying, "We like you should consider applying," just say, "You're in already. Can we have a chat? And would you like to learn more about what we have to offer?" And then the student, we created an environment where the student is anonymous at that point because we have to protect their privacy.

                        So we thought, well, they can decide whether or not to allow the conversation by deciding whether to share their identity. So the student starts getting offers and they can say, "I'm interested in this one, this one and this one, so I'll release my information to them." And then you go straight to kind of a high quality, much more personalized conversation at that point because both sides have now winnowed down the field. The student already knows a few institutions that have admitted them. And the institutions know, "Well, this student is admissible and wants to talk to me." So it actually becomes worthwhile to have a conversation.

                        And maybe I'm sort of going on too long about the details. I could talk about this all day, of course, but I realize that part of the reason the traditional enrollment system is a little bit problematic is because there's no good way for both sides to zero in on the right counterparties early. Then it has to be based on mass mail. You can't take 10,000 leads and have a phone conversation with every single potential student. This idea of the enrollment funnel, which starts with leads that get sort of moved along a conveyor belt until the last step is the admissions' office says yes or no.

                        Then the only way they could have come up with a more personalized student-centric approach is to create a way to quickly narrow the field so both sides are talking to the right people. So that's how we did it, is we filter the students to meet the requirements of the admissions departments. They decide who to make offers to. Students decide if they're interested, and then they go straight to a conversation, rather than kind of the whole traditional email based mass marketing.

Horn:                Makes a ton of sense. And I like several aspects of this, but the information asymmetry piece that you brought up early on, that opacity is something that frustrates so many on the student side when it comes to this process. But I think it begs the question because many commentators have noted, "Well, the opacity serves a lot of these institutions. Well, they get to sort of control supply and demand in funny ways and doll out applications to shape, if you will, their class, both in terms of makeup, but also frankly in terms of dollar amounts that are coming in revenue management." So I'm curious what type of schools are adopting, who's not adopting the platform as they look at this solution?

Morrison:         Right. Well, first I'll talk briefly about that information asymmetry kind of angle to this. You can't shape a class out of students that haven't made it into your enrollment funnel. If they're not in your applicant pool, they're not available to you. And so, one of the things that's kind of a key element of this platform is, universities need to be able to reach out and connect to students who might not have considered them. That's part of how we approach that problem. And then in terms of the information asymmetry, universities also know more than the students are likely to about scholarships that are available, about the exact right majors that are right for the student.

                        So this reversal of the process kind of solves those too, because instead of the student having to kind of swim through a giant website saying, "How much scholarships could I be eligible for and how do I get them?" In this model the university says upfront, "We're making you an offer and it's got this much scholarship in it." So yeah, and then you talked about kind of what kinds of universities are embracing this? We have over 100 universities already on the platform. So pretty exciting. We've only been around for two years. And so we're accelerating.

                        About two-thirds of them are US based. And about two-thirds of those are private. And then about a third are public. 20% of our universities are Canadian. The rest are kind of from UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia. And just to give you some specific examples, University of Missouri recently signed on, Kent State, Colorado State, those would be like big publics. Privates might include Tulane, The New School. We have liberal arts colleges. So anyway, that just gives you like a sense.

Horn:                No, that's a pretty good flavor of it. When they do so, are they abandoning their traditional process or this is alongside of initially? How does that work from a market adoption perspective?

Morrison:         Yeah, that's a really good question. It's not an abandonment of the traditional process. Partly that would just be too big, a leap to make.

Horn:                Sure.

Morrison:         And so the way we approach institutions, is we say, "Look, we're going to help you get populations of students that you want that you're really having trouble reaching right now." So for example, on the international recruitment side, kind of our specialty is diversity. If you want to get students from countries all around the world that you probably can't travel to, from everywhere, Africa and the middle east and south Asia. There's some markets that are well understood, but some markets that are just too small to access the traditional way.

                        Concourse works great for recruiting those kinds of students. And then inside the US, it's more about underrepresented students. First generation and students from low income families. Those are the kinds of students who are hard... It's hard for institutions to reach. And so on our platform, they're right there. We work with amazing organizations like College Green Light, which is part of EAB. We have a partnership where we're working with them to bring students into the Concourse ecosystem so that universities can discover them, make offers.

Horn:                Super interesting. So talk to me then about the student side, because part of that promise then is that you'll have students from which these universities can look out and see who might be a match and offer that acceptance on the front end. How are you getting students, what's the traction look like on that end?

Morrison:         Yeah. The traction is, it's really been growing beautifully. One of the things we did that's, I think, a secret to our success is we decided that college counselors are key to unlocking this ecosystem. And we realized that if we were just trying to reach students, we didn't want to be playing the same games where we're trying to reach them through ads and traditional marketing. Costs a fortune anyway. We thought, "Well, what if we worked with college counselors in schools, and we made their lives easier, and we provided them with tools that helped them solve problems?"

                        And that gave them a reason to bring students into the ecosystem. Well, if we can make one counselor happy, we can have them for their whole career, and get students year after year. And the other thing that's wonderful about counselors is both sides trust them. So if a counselor invites their class to Concourse, we set it up so that any offers received by their students, the counselors are always notified. They're part of their conversation.

                        They can help advise the students on whether these are good offers or not. If the counselor doesn't like them, they can tell their students, "Man, you should decline. I don't think these are the right offers for you." But if the counselor likes the offers, they can actually help saying, "Johnny, come on, this is a great opportunity. Go talk to these guys." And the universities trust the counselors as well. So they sign off on the data. That's part of the magic that kind of makes all this work.

Horn:                Makes sense. Sorry. Keep going.

Morrison:         Yeah. Well, so we go by, "Are we making counselors happy?" And then once they get hooked on the platform, for example... Well, we've only been around two years, but the old timers doubled their usage basically going from year one to year two. So we thought, that's a good signal. We have more and more counselors. We launched a program called Blue Skies, where counselors can basically schedule an onboarding session with us and bring their whole class onto the platform. We've tripled the number of Blue Skies signups in year two over year one. So, so far I think we're on the right track. Counselors seem to really like the platform, and we're really listening to their feedback.

Horn:                That's terrific. And it's an interesting strategy then, because you're not looking for share of budget from the schools or the guidance counselors themselves, but instead giving them this free tool. And the freemium model is the students that will come on the platform matched with the universities and colleges on the platform, which is clever.

Morrison:         Exactly. And on the college side, we can save them so much money. Right now, colleges are spending $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 on travel to visit random countries to try and recruit students. That money could be so much better spent just directing it into the platform and in the form of scholarships to students that you're trying to attract.

Horn:                Yeah. It's interesting. I imagine this may not be something you'd want to talk about publicly, but especially as a lot of schools have moved to SAT/ACT optional, and a huge part of the business of those entities has been to sell leads essentially to schools that they can then mass market. With those potentially going away to some degree, you give institutions another way and a far more affordable way than actually to reach out to a lot of these students, I would think.

Morrison:         Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And it's true, I think. The test optional movement has been an interesting development. I think we're probably going to see some of those standardized tests coming back, but I do think that paradigm of kind of taking those names and kind of selling lists and those search services, I think that's kind of played out.

                        And students they're already getting hundreds of messages saying "Apply here, apply here, apply here." I think it's just not working anymore. And furthermore, I don't think it's that respectful of their privacy so we're really, really careful about student data privacy. And we say, "You put out whatever you want in your profile to be assessed." And the students are anonymous anyway through the process and only authorized universities can look at them, "And you'll decide whether to reveal who you are, if you get an offer you like.”

Horn:                That's interesting. That's interesting. So it really is them choosing the college after they've been reached out to, at that stage.

Morrison:         It really is actually. And it is probably a little bit of a challenge sometimes if you're on the college side, and you make an offer to a student and then the student says, "I'm sorry, I respectfully decline your offer, because I chose someone else." And they're receiving rejections. And I think sometimes it stings a little bit, but maybe it reminds institutions what it's like for the students.

Horn:                Yeah. Well, I was going to say, and hopefully makes them more learner centered ultimately to create more reasons for those students to come if they thought that they were a good fit, but for some reason, the student concluded otherwise. As we sort of wrap up here, Joe, I'm curious, just as you think bigger vision, five, 10 years down the road, what success, what do you want to see this look like? How should we judge success, if you will?

Morrison:         Yeah. Five, 10 years from now, I would like to see Concourse in every school be part of every counseling curriculum. I don't think it should be the only route to college. I think there's always going to be room for the application in the process, but I feel like there should be a baseline system where if you're enjoying school, you're enjoying learning, you're academically talented. It should just be expected that in your senior year, you start getting admission offers from colleges that want you and scholarships. It should feel natural. And then if you want to apply to more, great, but I think concourses can and should be ubiquitous.

Horn:                Makes sense. And so we'll keep an eye on just that. I was going to say the other piece of this, I suppose, is that we see a lot less friction and maybe anxiety around this process in the long run as well with schools, maybe better understanding what the progress is that students are desiring, and students having a better sense of what their options really are out there, and that they are far more empowered than they are today.

Morrison:         That's what I want to see happen. I want students to feel more of a sense of power in this process, less anxiety, and keep the love of learning at the forefront. It should be, "I love computer science. Great. Here's three places I could go continue my studies if I want."

Horn:                Well, I've put the website up here for those watching, concourse.global, but how else should people stay in touch, follow what you are doing, and keep abreast so that they can follow this pattern? Because it seems like, this could be a disruption along the lines of what the common app in many ways did, except that you're actually changing the process itself. So I suspect a lot of people who tune in are going to want to keep up to date with developments.

Morrison:         Right. Well, I appreciate that. The first thing would be to follow our social media channels. We publish updates on what's going on with Concourse. If you're a college counselor, I encourage you to come to our site and just ask for an account for free. We can get you up and running super quickly. And the best way to get to know how the platform works is try it on one of your students. We have so many who try one or two students and then think this is great, and then they bring a whole class the year later. And for higher education institutions, if you're looking to recruit populations that are hard to reach, diverse, international students outside mainstream markets, or within the US, underrepresented students, we're doing a regional focus, but it's not too early to kind of get in touch with us through the website and we can get to know each other.

Horn:                Terrific. Well, we'll keep an eye on it. Joe, thank you so much for what you're doing. Thanks for being here. And for all those tuning in who've enjoyed this, give us a thumbs up so that people can find more content like this out there, and follow the progress of promising innovations like Concourse Global to create a more learner centered feature. So Joe, thank you again. And for all that you watching, thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next time.

Morrison:         Thank you, Michael.

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