Something about cupcake cleanliness and truth in cupcakes from an ad mirable entrepreneurial warrior. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you both. That was a discussion with the c. E. Of the Atlantic Aspen institute. He describes efforts to connect people to Technology Jobs and this is almost 20 minutes. [applause] i feel like i won the moderators lottery by getting to interview these two gentlemen who by themselves are phenomenal and together are the super power team. I told them washington is big on once you get past the egos to the staff level we all want to make our country better. These two gentlemen are doing it. Jim, tell us about the st. Louis experiment. We have the same Talent Shortage that is worldwide which is we dont have enough programmers. About a year ago i was invited to a group that wanted to teach a programming class and i said if you teach this its not going to work because students who graduate from this nontraditional class cant get hired because employers have this huge bias. They wont take you unless you have a certain pedigree in certain institutions. I said we should do this experiment and try to change the employment landscape. I personally called all the c. E. O. s at a hundred companies in town and got them to agree to change their hiring practices. The deal i made is i said look. I will give you a hiring person but not someone your h. R. Department will like. Youll pay this qualified person 15 bucks an hour and pair him next to one of your existing programmers then its up to you. Hire him, fire him whatever. No guarantee of a job. Today 98 of those people we placed and there are over a hundred of them so far have gotten fulltime jobs out of this program. These are not your normal placements. These are people over 40, minorities, women, 82 of our people dont have technical degrees. Half of them didnt even go to college. Were placing people into programming jobs. Theyre solving needs for the companies and getting real jobs for people. When we started we were just taking people that would come through the door but we quickly realized there was an education problem. We looked for a resource that wasnt going to rape them like some of the forprofit educational providers have and even some of the nonprofits. My wife was a harvard student and she took this and said it was amazing. She introduced me to an operation and we were like oh, my god this is fantastic. We now refer people to edx and it is a great operation. So enter a nonedex and you had this great quote. You said education should be like air. Everybody should have access. The thing that is kind of stiggering to me as a mom of three young kids, i would have to win the lottery to send my children to the alma mater. What is so neat is you are taking those elite institutions and saying were going to give it away for free. Have you had any pushback . By and large you please, you never hear a university or professor we are all basically nonprofit no professor or university would say lets not give our education to the world . We have 3 million learners from every country in the world. We have 350 courses from some of the best yustse of the world, georgetown, right here, berkeley and these are great courses including everything con receiverable including coding. Everybody really wants to have students take these courses. There has been no pushback in taking the courses but the real challenge is the execution. How on earth do we keep doing this good thing . We are nonprofit. Many of the universities are mon profit. Nobody is looking to make money or provide r. O. I. For any investor but the key is producing courses and supporting courses app building a platform and supporting a team takes resources. The real challenge is how do you build a sustainable model when youre giving something for free . How do you get some sustenance that enables you to continue doing this forever . So atlanta throppy helps a lot. Universities have doan aidd 16 million to the effort and many other universities are also helping us. At the same time were also working on sustaining revenue morals. I firmly believe that in three to five years we will be selfsustaining and our partners will. Thats amazing. Lets go into the st. Louis experiment as youre saying. I know you have plans to replicate this. Baltimore, denver, could washington be on your next experiment list . Yes. So right now washington is severely resource constrained. Me and four people. It was five but one got deported. This is not funny. Good people cant stay in the u. S. And i am about to lose another one if we cant figure out something with his visa. But my staff is all under 25 and theyre all very, very dedicated to this. But we have a lot so we are hearing job and resource opportunities here on the stage so i hope washington answers the call. The city of miami has basically offered us a Million Dollars to open up an operation down there. There are some organizations that said weve got a million bucks if you can bring it down to miami we need these jobs and the employers to have these people. Were using that model nationwide. Were basically saying any city that can come up with the funds well open up a branch there and put people to work. In real numbers. Is there anything washingtons system, you mentioned immigration and deportation. Is there anything that policymakers can do to help you guys . Let us keep some smart people in the u. S. Thats our main thing right now. I dont know much about policy so i dont know what can be done from a government level but certainly if we can keep some of the smart people weve got here that would be a huge help. We can think of many ways the government can help and the most important way is keep out of the way. Keep what . Keep out of the way. [applause] we are doing good. We are a nonprofit. We are educating people around the world. We have free courses from some of the top universities in the world like from georgetown for free that students all over the world can take. A lot of the rules and laws and policies were made in an age where you read things on a piece of paper. You had to work to get an education. You could not get free resources. The internet didnt exist. We are using running afoul a lot of age old policies and things are coming at us from a different direction than learning, all kinds of three Letter Department agencies in the u. S. We said, whoa, we didnt know a that existed. Were doing good, giving things away for free. Here is something you ran afoul of. The challenge is oftentimes you are doing good and can still run afoul of stuff. We need to find ways to get past a lot of these things. The u. S. Government that has helped, leaders in the state department, the department of education leaders have been very helpful. The white house has been very helpful to us. Again, our helpers and godfathers in certain departments of the government have been helping us with some of the other agencies that do not quite understand. And so hopefully our helpers will continue helping us with, you know those that may put impediments in our way. One of my favorite things about your biographies are you overcoming them. Jim, you have a great story we were talking about that id love you to share with the audience about being a little smart ass about your textbook when you got to freshman year. I started in Washington University in st. Louis took an economics class but the textbook was terrible and i was spouting off and said i could write a better thing than this. My roommate said, well why dont you . So thats what i did. Love the dare. On a dare i basically rewrote the textbook for my Computer Science class as a freshman. The thing gets published the next year and the publisher asked for second books so by the time im a sophomore i basically got two textbooks published. That led me to add a Second Degree which was an engineering degree. I got sort of roped into technology because i was a writer. So great. One of my favorite things about you is that you actually failed a physics exam and then 25 years later were teaching it at m. I. T. Well, i had the opposite problem of jim. Exactly the opposite problem. So this College Readiness gap, between high school and college you have the College Readiness gap and between college and jobs you have what is called a skills gap. Everybody seals to be falling into these gaps and i fell into the College Readiness gap. My school joined i. I. T. In madras and had run afoul of the College Readiness gap. I had not learned calculus. So the professors assume that you know calculus. And the 300 students in my entering class and two students failed and i was one of them. So one of my favorite things in life to look at is technology because it is making some things move so fast and other things just not move. Like the price of education has not gone down. Its just gone up. And when is that Tipping Point going to happen . I think, you know, its really funny you have a system where professors that go to a university would not be able to send children to the same university for an education if the professor had to pay the tuition. When something is completely broken about the Education System particularly for Something Like education, which is basically a human right and should be available for everybody, like the air that we breathe, as said. One of the things i think we can do is Bring Technology to education. And i think we can do one of two things. What im convinced about is using technology for the same cost, im convinced we can do a lot better in quality. Either online or in blended models we are seeing results that show that you can do much better, much better pass rates either on campus or online. Second, for the same outcome i believe you can reduce cost. I think its hard to do both. You know, in a large measure. But i think you can either reduce the cost for the same outcome or for the same cost you can improve the outcomes. If you look at the ratio of outcomes to cost, thats efficiency of a system. I really believe that technology can be used to improve the efficiency of education. I love that. And the great analogy, he said we have instant replay in sports. Why cant we have that in education . Some of my favorite professors i would love to play that again. Im not sure i say this here. Definitely say it. I was at a pats game in foxboro in massachusetts. We were up in the nose bleed region. I could not see anything. And so i wasnt sure why i was there. But, you know, if you look at your living room, you have instant replay. Imagine watching football without instant replay. Sports would not be sports. Instant replay has changed sports completely. And why cant we have that in education . I go to class, on the fifth minute mark i would lose the professor. Then i would not follow anything the professor said. Just imagine if you could give students a little rewind button. We can give them a rewind, a not follow anything the professor pause, with online education. We can even give them a mute the professor button. If youre picturing what i was just picturing a room of 19yearolds, its not just people at that age group. Were seeing people that need retraining in their 20s and 30s. We just placed a guy who was 58. Got him a Computer Programming job. It is something that goes throughout your life. What youre doing at edx is profound not just because of the College Campuses but because it makes that learning available life long. And what were seeing, you know in the trenches with job placement is that people need to reskill. Especially with programming which changes every year. If you dont have access to good education or good reeducation, then youll never keep up. One of the things that is so interesting about your success is you dont stop with the education. And you used kind of data and your brilliant mind to say, okay. These people are being passed over by as you said the h. R. Department. Theyre people that either look different or sound different or have different habits or like to work at night. And thats so fascinating. Talk me through how you figure that out as a problem and how the data helps you solve it. So what we realized was that there was a definite disconnect between the demand for programmers on one side, the Companies Want these people, and these are great jobs. Then there are a lot of people that want to take these great jobs. I couldnt figure out why the market hadnt solved the problem. It turns out there are a couple problems in the market. One is that education is sort of broken so people who take the path and want to get one of these jobs can get routed into an Educational Institution that gives them a lousy education. Thats not just the for profits though theyre pretty terrible but there are nonprofits just giving a bad education. And there is no way for the learner to choose correctly. They kind of get screwed in that. The other problem is that the companies themselves are hesitant to hire new programmers because new programs can actually do damage. If i hire you with a newby and let you loose on my data base you could write a query and wipe out some table and screw up my company. Companies are only hiring people who have experience but if you only hire people with experience you never get people with experience. We tried to break this by negotiating with the companies. We have a special way of onboarding new talent that doesnt endanger the productivity of the company. Thats been the key. I can take any firm that needs programmers and i can give them new programmers in a way that doesnt decrease their overall productivity. Since were in washington we have to talk politics a little bit. Guilty pleasure of mine. One thing that is so interesting about you, in any president ial cycle or any race like Small Business is always, both sides agree on lets help startups. Lets help business. You, jim youre a cofounder of square and you just talked about how you solved the problem in your hometown. Why dont you run profits . Great platform. Im here to announce. No, seriously. I never thought about politics. Ive never needed it to solve a problem. I think as i see bigger problems it may some day look like it looks like the problem in from my perspective right now. When it looks like the solution then maybe ill consider it very seriously. But right now im so neutral its amazing. I just dont have any sort of political interests right now. None. Okay. So you are such a well connected individual. I notice that you only follow 23 people on twitter. And one of them is chelsea clinton, yet you dont follow her mom. Do you know something we dont know . What im amazed at is how did you know that . Im a rutgers girl. I do my research. Everybody knows everything about everybody. No. I think i was on a panel with chelsea, but shes been doing some amazing work with education and with children and others. I really follow her tweets in terms of really pointing out a lot of interesting resources and so on. Im not a big i dont follow politics too much unless i see a politician that, you know, really wants to do Something Big and innovative and radical. Certainly when obama first came to the scene i was absolutely blown away. I used to go around saying six years ago that he would be the greatest president. What about now . I think hes getting there. Well, i know were running out of time. Thank you so much for your time and i know well all be following you. I bet youll have a lot of those politicians knocking on your door because 2016 education is a top issue. Thank you, guys. [applause] thanks, guys. Thank you. Our coverage of the 2014 Washington Ideas Forum continues with inventor dean kaman who discusses the state of American Education and efforts to get kids more interested in science, math and engineering. He is interviewed by the atlantic Senior Editor rebecca rosen. This is about 20 minutes. [applause] hi. How are you . Hi, gene. Thank you so much for joining me here. Why dont we start by you talking first about what it is, why you started it, what youve seen in the years since it began. Let me start by what it isnt. Its not an education program. 25 years ago as today, its a topic that most serious people are pretty concerned and passionate about parents, teachers corporations, government but the prevailing concern is we have an education crisis in this country. I think im an inventor. Inventors look at the same problems everybody else looks at and see them differently. Its really quite silly to imagine that america has an education crisis. We have more schools at every level, universities, more money spent on education than most of the rest of the world combined. It is not an education crisis. Its a culture crisis. Its not a supply problem, more teachers, more books, more money. Its a demand or lack of demand problem. We have a culture thats free. Kids are free. And in a free culture you get the best of what you celebrate. Kids celebrate sports heroes and movie stars. 25 years ago i said, why dont we form an organization a not for profit that uses that powerful model of sports and entertainment but the content isnt bounce, bounce throw. That is not a very useful skill set for all but a few dozen people