When Education Innovation Is the Family Business: a Dinner With the Romers

Weekly family dinners are a family tradition for Roy Romer and his children and grandchildren. Creating ventures that challenge the higher-education status quo runs in the family too.

Roy Romer is the former three-term Colorado governor who, in 1995, helped conceive the idea for Western Governors University, an online institution that pioneered today’s focus on competency-based education. On this evening, he’s having dinner with one of his seven children, Chris Romer, 56, a former Colorado state senator and charter-school advocate who co-founded the start-up company behind American Honors, a venture that runs honors programs for community colleges and builds transfer pipelines to four-year institutions.

One of Chris’s daughters, Rachel Romer Carlson, is at the table too; at 27, she’s the co-founder of her own education start-up (her second, actually), Guild Education, which provides mentors to employees and other adults taking online-education courses and is already attracting attention from venture-capital firms and policy makers.

Rachel had just flown back from a day in San Francisco, where she met with potential investors to add to the $2 million she raised in her first round. Roy would soon fly to Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention — he’s a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee — though he joked that he’s long past caring about showing up at places and “acting like I’m important.”

Connections play a big role in the clubby world of ed tech and higher-education “disruption.” The Romers — “the Colorado version of the Kennedys,” as one industry investor describes them — move comfortably in that crowd, not only because of their family lineage but because the organizations and companies created by the Romers touch on several of the biggest themes in reforming colleges: the search for alternative revenue streams, the push to improve access to higher education for working adults, the development of new models of college affordability.

When I joined the Romers for dinner, the conversation naturally bounced from education politics to lessons from efforts past and forecasts for the future — complete with critiques of community colleges, a theory on the failings of today’s ed-tech companies, and one heartfelt F-bomb from the 87-year-old ex-governor.

A ‘Show Me’ Approach

From the moment the wine was served, it became clear that the legacy of WGU looms large for all three of these Romers.

Roy still marvels that “two guys with two different ideas” could cook up a whole a new university. His passion was competencies; WGU’s co-founder, Michael Leavitt, a Utah governor known for his fondness for technology, pressed for the university to be online.

Roy’s push for an institution grounded in competency-based education and assessments came from his experience running his family’s flight school, where pilots didn’t pass unless they could demonstrate that they had the right stuff. He says he was also “frustrated with the costs of higher education” — including at his own state’s public universities, where he says he’d often ask for proof that students were learning but “they couldn’t really show me much.”

WGU was still floundering as Roy’s third term was coming to an end, in 1998, and, as he recalls it, his successor in Colorado wasn’t much interested in the pet project he had shepherded through the Western Governors’ Association. Mr. Leavitt still had two years left to go in his term.

“In order to make it a success,” Roy says, he urged Governor Leavitt to continue to nurture the venture, even if that meant establishing WGU’s headquarters in Utah. “He was Republican, I was a Democrat,” says Roy, and “you know how possessive governors are” about their projects. “That was how serious we were about this.”

Today, WGU enrolls some 70,000 students, and a family connection to the institution has become, as Chris calls it, its own “Romer-family tradition.” He made sure to call on the institution’s president for advice as he was starting up American Honors, in 2012. Last year all three of them made a pilgrimage to Salt Lake City, as Guild sought to sign the university up as an education partner.

In the 1960s, long before WGU, Roy helped create another college, the institution now known as Metropolitan State University of Denver. His role is largely unheralded because, with his party in the minority, he realized he could never get it passed with his name attached. So he asked a Republican legislator to push the bill that created it. Roy called it the kind of cross-party gesture that’s rarer and rarer these days.

Long before politicians and policy makers began regularly talking about so-called nontraditional students, Roy was pushing for a public institution with more flexibility in its schedule that would make higher education available to, as he put it, “the guy who didn’t get into college and had to go to work.”

He still thinks about those students. He owns 40 John Deere stores across five states that employ 1,500 people. With increasing computerization, the heavy-equipment industry is going to change a lot in the next 30 years, he says. Even if they aren’t interested in some sort of college now, those employees “have got to be well educated eventually.”

These days, as often as not, it’s investors and companies that are the change agents. That’s a development that Chris and his daughter more than welcome. For higher education, “the ed-tech world is starting to be the equivalent of the charter-school movement,” says Chris, who praises charters — and most of the ed-tech industry — for the competition and ideas they bring into the education system. “It’s healthy to have change and new partnerships.”

As governor, Roy was an early supporter of charters, despite the controversy that sometimes surrounds them. Chris sees that as reflective of a pattern: “As a family brand, we’ve always been Democrats, but Democrats who were willing to push against the establishment.”

When Rachel was in college — like her father and mother, she went to Stanford University, and got her M.B.A. there too — she recalls writing a paper on what the charter-school equivalent could be for higher education.

But she draws from different memories to define what she sees as the “ethic” of her family. “You two were in public service,” she says, pointing across the table to Roy and to Chris, who in 2011 ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Denver. For the family, that meant weekends “knocking on doors” during campaigns or attending public meetings. “Their job was listening to people’s problems,” she says.

Also the Romers love to talk to each other. “We talk on the phone all the time,” she says. “We have a family that believes deeply in the power of advice.” It was the combination of those two experiences, Rachel says, that first inspired her when she and a friend helped set up the student-counseling program at American Honors, where she worked for about a year before going to business school. It also informed what she and her co-founder would later create at Guild, where one of the key selling points is that all students are assigned an adviser to counsel them on their academics and their job advancement.

“I was born into my advisers,” says Rachel. “I am fortunate that I was born on third base. I’m very aware of that.” With Guild, she says, she’s trying to replicate for working students the advantages that were routine for her and other middle- and upper-class students.

What many other companies and investors don’t understand, she says, is that “most of ed tech is really a tech-enabled service,” and that means they have to be prepared to spend time and money to scale up not just the technology piece but also the service piece. Most investors don’t get that, she says.

Elevating Advisers

These days, Chris works for Rachel. At her invitation, he joined Guild as a consultant a year ago and came on full time in December as senior adviser and head of partnerships at the 26-person company. After a career in politics and public finance, he had been planning to semi-retire and work as a consultant to some ed-tech investors. Instead, he recalls, grinning from ear to ear, he and his wife talked it over, and “we concluded Rachel could be a very good boss.”

Working closely with community colleges soured Chris on how they’re treated in the higher-education system and by what he sees as their misplaced priorities. “They’re completely underfunded, and the part that is most underfunded is advising.” As a result, he says, too often the colleges are content to make their budgets “from the Pell Grants of remedial students” with little regard for the fact that those students are using up some of their Pell eligibility before they even begin taking credit-bearing courses.

As we dig into our entrees, Rachel echoes the sentiment. “Find me a college where the advisers are more important than the professors” in the hierarchy, she says.

Of course, the argument happens to make the case for the kinds of mentoring services that Guild sells to companies and other employers under the umbrella of their tuition-benefit programs.

Aside from the ventures that his family is involved with, and his own continued interest in keeping the essence of the Common Core curriculum from disappearing, Roy says he doesn’t spend much time thinking about education policy these days. But the ex-governor, who also ran the Los Angeles Unified School District from 2001 to 2006, says one thing about the field continues to baffle him: “I don’t understand how in the hell the cost has spiraled to forty, fifty thousand a year,” he says. “Every other industry I’ve been a part of, the competition really drove us to be quite efficient.”

Roy, who says his year studying ethics at Yale Divinity School after college and law school was “the first time I was really pushed intellectually,” remains rather a skeptic about the culture of academe.

Although one of his other sons, Paul Romer, is an academic superstar — last month he announced he was leaving New York University to become chief economist at the World Bank — Roy says the mind-set at many colleges, with a focus on publishing, “blinds” professors and others to the people they are trying to serve.

Before we depart, I ask Roy how it feels to see Chris and Rachel’s work unfold. He pauses briefly, and then begins his reply, in a slow and deliberate cadence, with a profane indictment of the state of the world today. “I think about, what are the things that can really change it, and education is the key to that,” he continues. “So I like the fact that part of the family is working on education, rather than Wall Street, because I don’t think Wall Street has contributed much to the world.”

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.