Google’s ‘Education Evangelist': Students Are Changing Faster Than Colleges

This is the second episode of our new podcast series on the future of higher education. You can subscribe in iTunes to get prior and future episodes.

Google’s frontman on education is a guy named Jaime Casap. He grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. That’s before the hipsters took it over. He was raised on welfare. There was no guarantee he’d go to college. That background informs the advice he gives to young people today.

“Really what I tell students is to be proud of who they are. Oftentimes, kids who are growing up in poverty hide their poverty or don’t talk about their poverty, don’t talk about the way they grew up. I encourage them to own it to be who they are.”

Mr. Casap is one of the most visible people on the education innovation circuit. Not surprising. After all, he’s a top guy at one of the country’s most powerful tech companies. But more than that, Jaime Casap has become an important advocate for low-income and minority students. He even has the ear of the White House.

Here is an edited transcript of Mr. Casap’s conversation with The Chronicle.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Hello, I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast, a weekly look at the changing education landscape.

If Silicon Valley was looking for its Horatio Alger, Jaime Casap could be a perfect candidate. Son of a single, immigrant mother; some of the kids he grew up with in Hell’s Kitchen ended up in jail. He found his way to college at SUNY Brockport, and after some jobs in finance and consulting, he landed at Google 10 years ago.

When he gives talks, Casap doesn’t usually mentioned Google email for colleges, or Google Scholar, or any of the other products the company sells. He talks about himself. That’s deliberate. He puts himself out there as an example to other young people growing up today the way he did. People for whom the idea of going to college and getting a meaningful career still seems like an all-too-impossible dream. I caught up with Jaime Casap at an education conference last month, and I asked him if he ever worries that his success story makes it seems like the education challenges young people face today are already solved.

Jaime Casap: More than anything, one of the questions I get all the time is “How did you get out? How is it that you got out?” I get that question all the time. I try to redirect that question back to this idea that it’s not just me. I’m not some super genius, that there are millions of me out there, and it’s a combination of working hard, getting your education, and luck. That shouldn’t be the magic formula. It should just be education and hard work. Luck we should be able to manage better. I talk about my upbringing a lot because it demonstrates how important education is. It highlights that with education you can really accomplish anything.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Casap got his master’s at Arizona State, and he teaches there now — that is, when he’s not flying around the country doing talks or sitting beside Michelle Obama at a White House summit. He’s a big fan of ASU’s president, Michael Crow, and what that university has done to increase access and create new academic disciplines. But he said a lot of the rest of higher education still has a long way to go.

Jaime Casap: I think that there’s a tide turning in terms of innovation. I think a lot of what you see in innovation in education is happening in K-12, but we’re starting to see a switch into higher education. I remember talking to a CIO 10 years ago, and he said that technology would never be a differentiator for a student selecting a college. I think that that’s relatively still true, but I can give you a quick example my daughter has experienced.

She started her career at one school, and I won’t name the school, but every time she went into a class they told her, “You can’t bring your laptop into my class. You can’t use your laptop in my class.” That happened with three of four classes in her first semester, and she’s like, “I can’t do this. I spent four or five years in eighth grade, ninth grade, and high school using my computer to take notes, to write things, to look things up while teachers were speaking. It’s just part of who I am.” She left, and went back and got into Arizona State University, and so I think you’re starting to see more of that where innovation that’s happening in K-12 is starting to trickle up into higher education.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Have you ever walked to the back of the classroom, though, and looked at what the students are looking at when they have their laptops up? It is a lot of, sometimes, Facebook, and shopping, and you know —

Jaime Casap: Yeah, but part of that is, one, they have their phones. They can do this anyway. But the other part of it is — I experience this firsthand every time I get up to speak. When I get up to speak, there are no professors in the room that are there to tell you to shut down your computer. If I’m looking in the room like this, I get up to speak, everyone can have their devices. It’s up to me to engage my students. It’s up to me to engage the audience and hold their attention. And if you’re standing up on the top of the stage preaching down to a bunch of students every single day, eventually there will be times with kids will just wander off. It would make more sense to have those kids engaged in project-based learning. Have more collaborative-based learning. Maybe that’s really the issue here. It’s not that a professor can stand up on stage and talk for an hour, but instead having the kids more engaged in that education process.

Goldie Blumenstyk: I’ve heard you speak a little bit about Generation Z, the generation that’s really raised truly digital. And you said they want to go to college. They want to design it for themselves, but they don’t know that they can’t. At one moment I thought that was a really poignant, very sad commentary on higher education. On the other hand, I thought, “Well, no. If you didn’t go to college, you shouldn’t be the one designing it. You don’t know.” Aren’t the professors still the ones who know what’s going on?

Jaime Casap: Yeah. I think what they’re saying is “I want a little more autonomy in that. I want to be able to create my own degree. Not necessarily create classes, but for me to be in film I want to take history classes. I want to take these other electives. I want to design what my learning looks like.” I think that that’s really the point that they’re making.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Casap says he was pretty lucky to have found his way to college. He did it mostly without the help of advisers, except for a high-school basketball coach. He eventually found his way to Arizona State for his master’s. He says the system shouldn’t be built on just luck.

Jaime Casap: I talk about this all the time. I didn’t even know about schools like Harvard. You heard about them, but they were these far-off fantasy places that a kid like me would never be able to go to.

Goldie Blumenstyk: You spoke at the White House with Michelle Obama — one of her Reach Higher events to encourage young people to think about going to college. Is there some sort of standard advice you have for young people? Maybe even a better way to think about that is, is there some standard or advice that colleges should be following right now to make sure that they’re actually doing the right kind of recruiting for students?

Jaime Casap: Those are both great questions because I think that’s really what it comes down to. One is the recruitment of students. Oftentimes we look at students and we use grades as how we determine whether they can go to school or not. We don’t know why those grades happen. There could be lots of reasons. I encourage colleges to look at other ways to recruit students. How do you do a real assessment of a person’s, not just what they can do, but their potential? What’s their capacity for potential? How do we create assessment programs like that where schools can look at students? Maybe they didn’t have straight A’s in high school. Maybe they worked full time. Maybe they were taking care of their brothers and sisters. Maybe they had a crackhead mother. All these other issues that these kids are dealing with — how do you do real assessment to determine potential? I think we need to figure that out.

Goldie Blumenstyk: That’s already assuming that they’ve applied.

Jaime Casap: Right. That’s assuming that they’ve applied.

Goldie Blumenstyk: How do you find them? Have you come across ways, organizations, even maybe institutions, that seem to be doing a very good job doing outreach?

Jaime Casap: Again, my rose-tinted classes with Arizona State University. Arizona State University’s approach is “Let’s get everyone in, and then let’s help them. Nobody should ever fail out of college. If they come in and they don’t do very well, what’s the support that we can give them?” Some people end up dropping out and not being able to do school at all. Maybe there’s other things for them to do. But it’s that idea that you get them into school and then help them along the way.

In terms of advice that I give students, especially kids who are growing up the way I grew up — one of the things that I tell them, because they don’t get to hear this and I wish I heard this when I was that age — I tell them that who they are, where they come from, their experiences, these are all powerful competitive advantages for them in the future. Their experiences are going to give them a different point of view, and if they can work hard and they can get their education, they’re going to be in a room and they’re going to have a different point of view, a different perspective. I find that to be my case. Really what I tell students is to be proud of who they are. Oftentimes kids who are growing up in poverty hide their poverty, or don’t talk about their poverty, don’t talk about the way they grew up. I think that I encourage them to own it, to be who they are and accept who they are but also be proud of their family and who they are and where they come from because that’s a competitive advantage for them in the future.

Goldie Blumenstyk: We’re here at South by Southwest, and there’s a lot of people wandering these halls right now who think college needs to be changed, it’s the “end of college,” it’s the “disruptor” crowd. What do you make of that movement? Sometimes I wonder about it, frankly, because sometimes it feels like these people who are professing DIY college and all these options for people — it seems like it’s for other people’s children, not necessarily for their own. They still want their kid to go to Yale.

Jaime Casap: I find that to be true, too. And I won’t name names, but when people prominent in education say things like, “Not everyone needs to go to college,” I want to ask, “Did your kids go to college or did you go to college?” You look at the numbers. I’m a data-driven kind of guy, and if you have a high-school degree you can make $30,000 a year. If you have a college degree you make $46,000 a year. Until I see those number equal, I am not going to tell people not to go to college. I think college is still important, especially for minorities. Especially for Latinos and African-Americans, we have to level the playing field a little bit because there’s 13 percent of us who have a college degree and 4 percent who have our master’s degree.

Goldie Blumenstyk: That’s for Latinos?

Jaime Casap: For Latinos, sorry. If you’re telling them that they shouldn’t go to college, then you’re just keeping things the same. We need more people of color in college with college degrees to level the playing field a little bit. At the same time, a company like Google, we don’t actually require a college degree to work at Google. We’re trying to do it on competency so far. I think there is this shift to think about, What is education? Is education a piece of paper?

I think what’s different today than in the past is that when you and I went to college, we went and we just assumed that we would end up OK on the other side of it. Kids today see that that’s not necessarily — they see their brothers and their sisters come back from college and spend a long time in their basement or in their living room or just in their bedrooms. I think what kids are looking for is a competency-based experienced where they’re going to get a skill. They’re going to learn something. I think they see college as important.

The other thing I’ll say about this is, Why do we end with college? I talked to Michael Crow about this, and I say, “Why did you abandon my daughter who graduated six months ago?” He looks at me funny. Because you haven’t contacted her. You haven’t said, “Hey, how are things going? What are you learning today? How can we help you?” Lifelong learning is a lifelong learning thing. When you go to college, it should be forever, so that you can continuously update your skills and continuously learn.

Goldie Blumenstyk: They have to find a way to pay for that, though, don’t they? I mean they can’t necessarily afford to keep serving that student once they’ve graduated.

Jaime Casap: Right. You take classes. There’s lots of — I’m not going to come up with business models for universities — but the subscription service models. Pay up front and take a class every semester. There’s lots of different models that you can use that lots of learning organizations incorporate.

Goldie Blumenstyk: So, yes. New business models. But Casap says colleges still don’t fully get it. Students are changing. They’re more digital. They’re more diverse. And that means colleges need to catch up.

This has been the Re:Learning Podcast. If you liked this and want us to continue the show, please review us on iTunes and subscribe there, or on your podcaster of choice. You could also follow us on Twitter @relearningedu, or like us on Facebook. Today’s show is produced by Jeff Young. Our theme music was by Jason Caddell. We’ll be back next week with more stories and analysis about the new learning landscape.

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.

---

Join the conversation about this article on the Re:Learning Facebook page.