2 Hot Themes From a Fast-Growing Innovation Summit

If 2012 was the Year of the MOOC for the education-investor crowd, 2016 could end up as the Year of the Mentor. That is, of course, unless 2016 turns out to be the Year of Connecting Students to Careers.

Both themes were impossible to miss last week as more than 3,500 investors and entrepreneurs (and even a few hundred actual educators) gathered here for the ASU GSV Summit — a three-day investor-palooza of panels, company pitches (with start-ups from Academix Direct to Zzish), celebrity talks (including a student-led interview with the rapper Common and an hour of edgy comedy with W. Kamau Bell), and late-night cocktail parties.

The summit, which began as a small event at Arizona State University, has become a key place for ed-tech start-ups looking to land investments and attract potential customers in higher education.

To those in the “disruptor” crowd in education, the popularity of the annual event is a sign that their money and ideas are having an impact. “Technology and the market will change education,” said one venture-capital investor as he took in the buzz of the crowd. By “market,” he said, he meant “dudes like me,” who invest in education start-ups. He wasn’t one of the giddy newcomers to the scene, so his enthusiasm was telling.

Yet even amid all that ebullience — one exhibit hall was called “Tomorrowland” — there were also some important voices of caution. Those included complaints that some companies don’t understand the college world, and even a sense by one investor, Matthew Greenfield of Rethink Education, that some of his fellow investors had “a certain contempt” for academic institutions and “don’t have empathy for what the professors do need.”

Following are some further impressions from the summit:

Mentors Are Hot

Many of the companies that presented at the summit featured mentorship tools. That’s because mentors can be effective, said Rachel Romer Carlson, a founder and chief executive of a company called Guild Education. Guild is an online platform that connects working adults with education programs to help them land jobs. Most of Guild’s lower-income students have the same access to information as their more-affluent peers, Ms. Carlson said. “What holds them back is access to advice.” The most valuable thing you can give a student, she said during a panel on bridges from higher education to the work force, “is the cellphone number of a mentor.”

Pierre Dubuc, a founder of the French company OpenClassrooms, which with 3.5 million users a month describes itself as the largest online provider of vocational education in Europe, considers its mentors a selling point. It offers three levels of subscriptions; individualized mentoring comes with the highest-priced option.

The mentor model also underlies a company called Admissions Hero, which boasts that high-schoolers can “breeze through college admissions with one-on-one consulting and tutoring from our mentors.” The mentors are students who have already won acceptance to college. Another, Graduway, connects students with alumni mentors.

Of course, as some speakers noted, mentorship by itself isn’t enough. “It’s half baked” to think you can just assign a mentor and hope the relationship pans out, said Leah Lommel, assistant vice president at Arizona State and chief operating officer of its EdPlus office overseeing innovations.

College to Career

Sessions featuring coding boot camps and other ventures aimed at helping students get jobs have long been a staple of the summit; those ventures resonate well with an audience making investment bets on companies that challenge the value proposition of the college degree. But this year, the welcome was even warmer.

That was good news for a youth pastor turned entrepreneur named Victor Saad, who in 2013 founded a company called the Experience Institute. The company, which sells a student experience that is a cross between an internship and study abroad, is accredited by the American Council on Education to offer a semester’s worth of credit to students looking to combine online education and work experience.

Mr. Saad said it offers colleges their own “plug and play” co-op program at a time when many students are eager for that kind of real-world work experience to give them a leg up in the job market. Mr. Saad came up with the idea after spending a year taking on 12 different experiences, an adventure he has since chronicled in a book and a TED talk as “The Leap Year Project.” He calls his Experience Institute semesters “Leap Semesters” and envisions that, eventually, graduates of the programs from campuses around the country will create their own alumni community of Leapers, just as Teach for America and Peace Corps alumni now do. He came to the summit looking to raise $450,000.

Elsewhere, an executive from EAB, a company based in Washington, D.C., that has made headlines for its big-ticket spending on data-analytics ventures focused on admissions, student retention, and alumni relations, noted that one of the next areas of interest for his firm is to develop or acquire capabilities to extend its services into the college-to-career market.

It won’t have that market to itself.

At the session on the “Tech Revolution in College Career Networks,” career-services directors at several colleges explained their reasons for experimenting with tech-enabled companies that help connect students with employers, including Handshake, WayUp, and GiftedHire.

“We don’t want them to have an experience that’s 10 or 20 years behind,” said Farouk Dey, an associate vice president at Stanford University and dean of career education. He also noted that the “education” in his title is no accident. It’s part of the university’s broader philosophy. “I don’t want to reduce the purpose of college to that first job.”

Gordon Jones, dean of the College of Innovation and Design at Boise State University, said he too sees the new ed-tech products as useful tools for directing students toward careers, but warned that colleges should not embrace such tools at the expense of their relationships with companies and organizations that employ their graduates. Those relationships are valuable, Mr. Jones said, echoing warnings from college leaders about the growing influence of LinkedIn. “I don’t think that’s something I would outsource.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

Correction (4/26/2016, 9:45 a.m.): This article originally misnamed the event. It was the ASU GSV Summit, not the ASU GSV Innovation Summit. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.

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