160 - Last-Mile Training as an Alternative to Higher Ed with Ryan Craig

In today’s episode, Tom interviews Ryan Craig. Ryan is an attorney, an entrepreneur, and a venture investor — he’s also a leading critic of higher education. When he sees half of the people attending post-secondary failing to earn degrees (and many of them leaving with piles of debt) he sees an emergency. As he would say, “the patient is bleeding out on the table.”

Ryan is the co-founder of University Ventures, an organization that is reimagining the future of higher education and creating new pathways from education to employment. They’re working to make higher education more affordable, helping employers think differently about how and where they discover talent, and pioneering entirely new approaches to learning. His new book, A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College, also outlines a radically different post-secondary landscape — one where everyone has access to free, or at least debt-free, training for a high-paying first job.

Tom and Ryan dive into discussions about his book, A New U; his organization, University Ventures; and why he has set his focus on post-secondary affordability and employability. Ryan also describes the last-mile training programs from UV and how they differ from higher ed courses; gives his 60-second solutions to several big problems in education today; and lets us know if he thinks online learning, microcredentials, and artificial intelligence in education are overrated or underrated.