The Edge: Is an Idea for Fighting Poverty Worth a Billion Dollars?

At the ASU GSV Summit, a pair of ideas for helping low-income students get an education stood out. [The Edge] Was this newsletter forwarded to you? [Please sign up to receive your own copy.]( You’ll support our journalism and ensure that you continue to receive our emails. --------------------------------------------------------------- I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week. Amid celebrations of big-money deals, some ideas for alleviating poverty. Money is the subtext — and the text — at the ASU GSV Summit, an annual draw for thousands of education entrepreneurs and investors looking for capital or new strategic partners or clients. Some show up simply to send the message to their colleagues in the industry that, yes, they’re still out there kicking. Like all good journalists, I adhere to a maxim: Follow the money. When I heard that the innovation arm of the nonprofit group Jobs for the Future was announcing the winners of its [$1 Billion Wage Gain Challenge]( at the summit in San Diego last week, I figured I had found the motherlode. I had. But that wasn’t because I stumbled upon some new Silicon Valley “unicorn” ed-tech company suddenly valued at a billion dollars. It was a find because the contest gave me a chance to better understand the two winners’ approaches to helping at least 100,000 people in poverty get the education they need to raise their incomes by $10,000 or more by 2021. (That’s the essence of the challenge, which was supported by [Schmidt Futures]( So yes, my first big takeaway from ASU GSV is about poverty. The two winners are an organization called EmPath, which teaches clients how to keep from being overwhelmed by health or financial stresses, and a company called Cell-Ed Works, which provides low-tech training via cellphones in three-minute bites. I don’t know if their ideas will work. But they made me stop and rethink some of my assumptions about the factors that make it so hard for poor people to start and finish college. By sharing those here, along [with information on the other five finalists]( I hope to help college leaders stop and rethink their assumptions too. Some 90 organizations and companies had entered the challenge. And although there was “no actual prize” for the winners, as Maria Flynn, Jobs for the Future’s president and CEO, told me, the organization and its JFF Labs subsidiary plan to work with the winners to help them attract financing or policy support from other organizations. JFF is eager to learn more about the “interplay between skills, and credentials and wages,” Flynn said, so it may eventually champion some of the ideas itself too. Unsurprisingly, career planning is an element in both of the winners’ approaches. [Cell-Ed]( founded in 2014, provides courses like “English on the Go” for non-native speakers, along with other microlessons aimed at building specific skills. The program, which Cell-Ed’s founder and CEO, Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami, describes as a “teach, nudge, and coach” model, is offered now to some 50,000 people through a network of 50-plus libraries, employers, and even a few community colleges. “Sometimes it’s just a few gaps” in knowledge that knock a student off track, she says, and just a few minutes of instruction at the right time can make a difference. (For the challenge, Cell-Ed is teaming up with two other ventures, Workbay and Wizenoze, to match clients with jobs within a 30-mile radius of where they live.) [EmPath]( — Economic Mobility Pathways, in full — is a 10-year-old nonprofit that provides a set of assessment and goal-setting tools as well as a framework for training human-services professionals on how to help their low-income clients set priorities for their life challenges. It focuses on education in a different way. Its approach, says Elisabeth D. Babcock, president and CEO, is to teach people to multitask even when crises hit. “Families who are under stress think about the thing that hits them between the eyes,” and which can derail other important plans, like going to school, she told me. “We deal with tons and tons of families who know that the way out of the crummy life they have is more education.” But when people are desperately “keeping all the plates spinning,” education often falls by the wayside. Both directly and through its partner organizations, EmPath tries to help families avert that fate. It helps clients make decisions about health, housing, and education that are in their long-term best interest. Babcock gives an example: The organization’s training might make sure that someone considering an expensive program at a cosmetology school also gets information about careers in fields like ultrasound technology, in which hospital-paid training programs might be an option. For the challenge, the group plans to use a new proprietary tool called Career Compass to help clients identify career opportunities by ZIP code and then get information on the training needed for those jobs. I’m not so big on the magic of “apps” as a cure-all, particularly for people struggling with personal and financial challenges. But one of the things about Cell-Ed’s approach that I do appreciate is its recognition that many low-income people can’t afford pricey data plans. Its tech doesn’t require internet access. The underlying notion might seem a bit obvious. After all, growing numbers of colleges (but still not enough of them) recognize the need to help students deal with health, hunger, transportation, and housing issues, not just academic concerns, and have created one-stop offices on campus to help them negotiate with all those service providers. EmPath’s idea of teaching multitasking as a coping skill, however, seems smart to me. It’s potentially longer-lasting than some other interventions, in the teach-a-man-to-fish vein. Of course, that alone won’t reduce the stresses of being poor, but as Babcock told me, when you “help people sort their lives out in a holistic way,” it’s a good start. Mark Day, challenge director at Jobs for the Future, said the judges chose these two as winners because their approaches were oriented toward education rather than, say, reliance on a policy change. The judges were also impressed by the plans’ ambition, particularly that of Cell-Ed, which has said it wants reach not 100,000 but 300,000 people by 2021 — and to achieve an overall wage gain of $3.2 billion. Anyone looking for unicorns would be pleased with a number like that. (Correction: A company in last week’s newsletter was misidentified. It is GetSmarter, not Getting Smarter.) Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at [goldie@chronicle.com.](mailto:goldie@chronicle.com) If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past editions, or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so [here.]( Subscribe Today Get the insight you need. [Purchase a subscription]( to The Chronicle for unlimited access to breaking news, expert analysis, tools, and practical advice. Goldie’s Weekly Picks [Food, Child Care, Rent: This College Goes the Extra Mile to Serve Low-Income Students]( By Katherine Mangan and Julia Schmalz Amarillo College’s “No Excuses” program has become a national model. ADVERTISEMENT [Colleges Are Banding Together Digitally to Help Students Succeed. Here’s How.]( By Alexander C. Kafka The institutions are upgrading learning platforms, bargaining with vendors, trading course offerings, and collecting and analyzing vast data that could change how they teach. PREMIUM [Rolling With a Changing Industry]( By Julia Schmalz The Amarillo College Truck Driving Academy keeps an eye on automation while filling demand for drivers. Latest Jobs Visit [ChronicleVitae.com]( to view the latest jobs in higher education. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( [Stop receiving]( this email. [Sign up]( for other newsletters. [View]( our privacy policy. © 2019 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037