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Ringae Nuek: Welcome to Ways to College, a podcast for parents and students who want to understand how college is evolving and how it actually works, not just how to get in. I'm Ringae, founder of Waysmith. After 20 years in product design, I bring a strategist's instinct to this: understand yourself, understand the landscape, then decide. On this show, you'll hear from higher ed leaders doing genuinely different things: rethinking curriculum, student support, career integration. You'll come away understanding what actually matters, asking smarter questions, and making a decision that's genuinely yours.
So, I was really excited to have you on after listening to, I think it was Transformation in Higher Ed, a podcast you were on. It was just a very thoughtful conversation, and so I thought I'd reach out.
So I've spent 20 years as a product or UX designer, and I recently pivoted into college admissions consulting, and so I think I approach admissions through a design lens. And so I want to help families think about both the admissions process, but also the college experience through a similar lens, where you can really take ownership of this thing and be intentional about how you go through it, both admissions and college.
I think that feels more empowering, and it also takes the pressure a little off of where do I get in, and it's more about how do I succeed once I'm there. So I think we maybe have a similar way of thinking there. So, I'd love to talk about that today, but before we get into that, I'd love it if you could just tell the listeners a little bit about your own higher ed journey and then how you got to where you are.
Brandon Busteed: I'm currently the CEO of Edconic. We partner with iconic organizations to develop industry immersive learning experiences for students, and it runs the gamut from high school students to undergraduate college students to master's degree programs. We operate Sotheby's Institute of Art, the School of the New York Times, Vogue College of Fashion, and Manchester City Sports Business School. So it's world-renowned brands and organizations across a number of industries.
I've been there for the last two-plus years. Before that, I was the global head of learn-work innovation at Kaplan, the large global education company. Before that, I was executive director of education and workforce development at Gallup, the world-renowned analytics and research firm. My only step before that was I was the founder and CEO of a company called Outside The Classroom that did online courses around things like alcohol abuse prevention, sexual assault prevention.
So I've been an ed tech entrepreneur. I've helped build a research analytics consulting-based practice in my time at Gallup. I've seen kind of a global, highly diversified education organization in the form of Kaplan, and now feel like I'm really in the sweet spot of all the things that I care most about, which is this intersection between education and industry. I think in some form, I've always sat at that intersection, or at least I have the last 15-plus years of my career. And to me, it's the most dynamic space to be straddling between. If you can take the best of both worlds, the best of what makes education great, and the best of what makes industry-immersive learning experiences great, that to me is a pretty exciting place to be.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, I was actually recently at a Study in Canada breakfast for IECs. You know, there they have, it just seems so established, these co-ops like Waterloo, Concordia, all of them are doing it, and it seems more common than not. I'm wondering, why is it so much less here?
Brandon Busteed: I think it's a good question. On one hand, you know, you use the example of Canada, and certainly at University of Waterloo, where co-op has been a staple from the beginning. The U.S. has had similar examples in the forms of Northeastern, or Drexel, or Cincinnati, right? So the co-op model has existed for over 100 years in the U.S., but I think to your question, right, why isn't it more ubiquitous? Why aren't more doing that? And I think that's a good and fair question.
You know, certainly as you look at other countries, like you think about what the U.K. is doing right now around apprenticeship levies, where they're essentially taxing companies and putting those dollars towards apprenticeship programs. It's been an incredibly beneficial talent development program, both for the companies and for the individuals who have been part of it. So the question about why we don't see more of that at the U.S., I think it's around a couple of things.
One, we have built a system around accreditation standards that have had nothing to do with work-integrated learning. And when it's not part of how you build programs, how you measure and hold programs accountable, or how you hold colleges and universities accountable, if there aren't established norms or rubrics for how to evaluate the success of those things, you know, we are what we measure. And I would argue we're not really measuring any facet of work-integrated learning, whether that's a co-op, an internship. We use a lot of different terms that have some important different meanings around there, but it's not part of the staple. And so it's been part of a model like a Northeastern, which has been a co-op institution for a long time. But it's not broadly part of our intentionality around how we think about college in the United States.
We focus much more on traditional academics. We've focused on traditional measures of things like grades and test scores. And although those things matter and have value, they're very different in kind than, for example, a long-term project that a student might do that mimics something closer to a real-world work environment, or an internship, or even case-based projects that students might do that are derivatives of challenges that businesses or organizations have faced.
It's a sprinkling across the U.S. And just to define it really quickly, about a third of all college graduates in the U.S. leave college having had a job or an internship where they were able to apply what they were learning in the classroom. So it's not that it's not happening, but it's only happening for a third of our graduates. And so our issue is we're not intentional. We haven't scaled it.
And I think it's fundamentally around you are what you measure, right? You measure what you value. And right now we're not measuring, and I would argue not fully valuing, work-integrated learning as part of our model.
Ringae Nuek: If someone started measuring it, that then U.S. News started measuring it, you could see suddenly.
Brandon Busteed: Yeah, it was a good example. I posted about this in the past several days, where right now most colleges and universities report the job hiring placement rates of graduates six months post-graduation based on a voluntary survey that they send to recent grads. But what's interesting is I've only found one university that reports the percentage of their graduates that have a job waiting for them upon graduation. Now, not six months later, like what percent of graduates have a job on the day they graduate? Now, that's a higher bar than how many had one six months later.
But if you're going to improve the percentage who have one six months after graduation, you'd want to move the needle on the percent who have one upon graduation. And so it's a classic example, like our standard is a voluntary survey six months post-graduation. I've found one university in the country that reports how many of their grads have a good job waiting for them upon graduation. But that should be the goal.
Ringae Nuek: It's a little bit like the graduation rate, right? I think most parents certainly, when they see the graduation rates, they assume it's four years because that's what you're buying, you know?
Brandon Busteed: Yeah, it's a six-year rate. I mean, you're right. You should have visibility as a parent and a student to the four-year rate. And similarly, you could also show the three or three-and-a-half-year rate because there are a number of students who are finishing bachelor's degrees faster, especially in competency-based degree models. And so why not also report what percent graduate in three-and-a-half years faster than the typical four, right? That would be interesting to know as well.
Ringae Nuek: This conversation presupposes the importance of work-integrated learning. Why does it matter? Why is it important?
Brandon Busteed: It's a great point to start with the why behind this. It matters greatly, and I'll define that in a few ways. So for a college graduate who had a job or internship during college where they were able to apply what they were learning in the classroom, right? There was some connectivity between that internship or work experience and what they were learning. It doubles their odds that they have a good job waiting for them upon graduation, and it doubles the odds that they end up engaged in whatever that work is that they do.
Work placement engagement is a measure that Gallup studied for decades, and so it has a lot of scientific validity behind it. And in simple terms, it's do you enjoy the work that you do? Do you show up and get to use your strengths and talents each day in that job? So regardless of what you're doing, right, are you engaged in that work? Forget how much money you make. Are you engaged in that work? Are you meaningfully, emotionally connected to that work?
The simple point is a graduate who had an internship during college doubles their odds of having a good job waiting upon graduation, doubles their odds of being engaged in work throughout their lifetime, which means it's a total game changer of an experience.
Now, relatedly, a graduate who says that they had a long-term project during college that took a semester or more to complete, it also doubles the odds that they are engaged in their work, right? And you say, okay, well, why do you bring up long-term project? Because long-term projects mimic a lot of what we do in the workplace, right? Most of us aren't taking pop quizzes and writing five-page papers. We're involved in projects that take weeks and months, and in some cases, years. We're working on teams with multiple people. We do something, we get feedback on it, we go back to the drawing board, and that iterative design process is a critical part of it.
So, the simple point is there's a lot of research and evidence that students who had these work-integrated learning experiences, whether it's a long-term project or an internship during college, they're as important as almost anything else they do in college. And that's something that I think most parents don't fully recognize and understand, although those who had an internship in college, if they had one, certainly know how valuable it was.
I think most students aren't thinking about that because right now they're geared around things like, well, you got to get good grades. Good grades is the sole path to a good job. And sure, you want to try and get good grades, but if you had to make a choice, and I'll give you this data point, employers, for example, would rather hire a B student with an internship over an A student that doesn't have one. So, they're not saying grades don't matter, but they are saying that internship or work experience is really important.
Ringae Nuek: Okay, so there's data on that?
Brandon Busteed: Absolutely, yeah. All those things I mentioned, that's all from a strong research basis, and part of the impetus for why I care about it so much is that this stuff really matters, and it's not as valued or obvious to the student or the typical parent as it should.
Ringae Nuek: I feel like what both of those things, the capstone or year-long project and internships help you figure out besides how to collaborate and how to successfully be productive in the world, but also where your strengths are and what you like to do, right? And so I think there's this missing piece, both in high school, where so much of it is about how much can I do? I feel like a lot of students fall into the impressiveness trap of how impressive can I be? How amazing is my resume? And it's less about who am I and how can I supercharge that and then point that in a direction that I'll be fulfilled by and that will serve me well.
And I wonder what colleges could be doing more of to help both the student who is farther along the path of figuring that out, but just help them tell that story more effectively. And then there's also the student who isn't very far along. They're completely undecided. I don't know what I want to do. But I can see how these sorts of experiences, like internships, are a much more effective way of helping you figure yourself out than taking a lot of classes.
Brandon Busteed: Yeah, so I think there's a few good points and observations that you've made there. You know, one is you say, well, why does an internship or why does a long-term project have so much value? And I think under the hood of those things, you start to realize, like, for example, in an internship, a student is getting exposure to a particular industry. They're getting an understanding of the various skills that might be necessary, right, even the software tools or the frameworks that that organization uses. They're also getting exposed to what people do in jobs.
And that's something that's usually missing for most young people is that if you ask them unaided to name all the different kinds of jobs that exist in the world, you usually get maybe eight, nine, ten answers. But yet, if you look at job classifications, there's about 40,000 different types of jobs in the world. So the typical young person has a very limited understanding of the various jobs that are out there.
And even if you know, for example, that, oh, there's engineering jobs. Okay, well, there's a lot of different kinds of engineering jobs. What does a mechanical engineer do different than a chemical engineer or electrical engineer? I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. So I think it's that awareness, the understanding industry, the understanding of jobs, even that at a very basic level.
But it's also, importantly, iterative feedback, right? If you're working on a long-term project, there's usually points of feedback where somebody says, you're going to really need to sharpen this up. Or this is a weak argument. Or you need to go back and redo this part. And in most educational environments, we don't do iterative feedback at all.
A student does something. They get a grade on it. It's either good or bad. And they move on to the next thing. Rarely does somebody say, hey, I've reviewed your paper. Here's some feedback. Go back and redo it and come back again.
So those things are really, really important, I think, to understand as you think about making choices about colleges, right? It's not just, what's the name brand of the institution? It's not just, oh, did they say they offer internships? It's to look carefully and to ask questions. The major that I'm thinking about doing, is there a capstone project? Is it optional or required? There are ways that I think parents and students can better investigate this.
But I think back to your point about the advice they're being given now to, you know, get involved in lots of extracurricular activities or, you know, pad your resume with a whole host of things. In some ways, the evidence actually points to the opposite, which is to get deeply, meaningfully engaged in at least one of those activities as more powerful than being very lightly connected to a whole handful of them, right?
So even if we're talking about an extracurricular activity, those students who are extremely involved in an extracurricular activity on campus are more likely to be engaged in work later. But there was no correlation to that if you were simply a member of an extracurricular activity or organization. So it is truly about the depth and the level of involvement in that type of extracurricular activity that matters as well.
So I would rather see a student who shows me that they were a member of XYZ organization for all four years of high school. They then became an officer. Or if you think about volunteer work, right, like they volunteered at the same place over three consecutive years. There's somebody there who would give a glowing reference to the time they spent there. Those things would jump out on a resume to me as opposed to seeing a long list of 17 extracurricular activities because I get suspicious when I see that it probably comes at the cost of being deeply, meaningfully engaged in any one of them.
Ringae Nuek: So that segues nicely, actually, to a question I had for you, which is what questions should parents be asking when they're on the tour, they're in the info session that maybe they aren't thinking to ask?
Brandon Busteed: I would ask the question pretty directly, you know, how many or what percentage of students get internships here? Are they internships that all students are participating in or is it just in a couple programs? Because usually, you know, when colleges and universities say they have internships, everybody does, right? But the issue is it's usually in a handful of programs or majors. It's not broadly across all majors for all students.
And then, you know, is it a requirement? Do you get academic credit for internships here, right? A college or university that gives academic credit for internships, there's colleges now that are investing in funds that will support students to do low-paid or unpaid internships. So you could ask if that funding is available for students.
And then I think you can ask them about the degree to which there are other work-integrated learning opportunities, right? To ask the questions about some signature capstone programs. Some majors have it. The major that I was in had it, but I didn't ask that question before I majored in it. But I would now, now knowing what I know now, I would ask those questions.
But I think where it gets really interesting is that every college will say they have internship opportunities for students. The real question is, okay, well, what percentage of students get those? And is that just in one major or program or is that across the board? Those are the tougher questions that I think parents and students can ask.
And the universities are doing a really good job at it. We'll have great answers. And the ones who don't will go, I'm not sure. I'll get back to you on that.
Ringae Nuek: I think most people can imagine what that looks like for, let's say, an engineer. But what does that look like for a humanities major?
Brandon Busteed: There is data that suggests that arts and humanities majors are less likely to have an internship than, say, STEM majors. Okay, so that's true. But to me, that's a lack of imagination on the part of the programs in the universities and also a little bit on the students, right? So, like, I don't want to put this all on the shoulders of students, but you could be an English major and your program doesn't have any obvious internship programs, but you could be a real go-getter and make sure you've got an internship. And so the individual student is still a powerful player in all this. But I think back to your question, there's no reason why arts and humanities majors shouldn't also have internship programs.
I was a public policy major, and there was a program that I was part of called the Hart Leadership Program that did a summer opportunity in leadership and was prepared with a spring semester preparatory course before that summer internship opportunity, followed by a fall semester reflection course where you actually did a project on what you did over that summer opportunity in leadership, so on and so forth. And most of those internships were with nonprofit organizations, right?
And, you know, I'll give you a good example of what employers are looking for. Employers very much value graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled. So they value liberal arts majors or arts and humanities majors, but they also want to see that they built some sort of recognized industry skill set.
So I'm going to give you a classic market research example. This is real data. When hiring managers were asked, knowing nothing else about a candidate, which would you rather hire? The options were an English major, a cybersecurity major, and then an English major with a designation in cybersecurity. So the English major lost out to the cybersecurity major considerably, but the English major with the cybersecurity designation was four times more likely to be hired than the English major with no designation and three times more likely to be hired than the cybersecurity major.
So it's a really important point because what it says is the English major, long live the English major as long as it's paired with either a valuable work experience or, in that case, an industry-recognized credential. And so I think it says a lot about what employers want. They want the broadly educated, specifically skilled or experienced student, and the combination of those two things is really powerful.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, arguably, it's even more important for humanities majors to get internships, right, because the major itself is not pre-professional, right? So it doesn't point you in a specific direction. So you need to be doing more of that. The onus is more on you to do that, I would argue.
Brandon Busteed: And there's some truth to it. So although I said arts and humanities majors are less likely to have an internship than STEM majors, those who do have equivalent career outcomes to STEM majors. And, you know, to your point, it is incredibly valuable for an arts and humanities major to have some sort of an internship experience. And I would argue in some ways they actually differentiate themselves with employers even better than a STEM major alone. It's a really important point for students and for parents.
Ringae Nuek: I have to ask the AI question. How do you see AI impacting what students should want out of college?
Brandon Busteed: I don't know that it should change what they want out of college, which is valuable experience and really stretching their intellectual capabilities, their understanding of the world, etc. I think those are still fundamental. Most Americans value college for one really important reason, that's to get a good or better job. I don't think that expectation of college or what you want out of is going to change. But I think to your point, how college is being experienced is certainly changing.
There's a lot of data that suggests that students are using AI more as a crutch than an augmentation. And that's especially true for younger students, upperclassmen maybe, who have already had some experience with college, right, are using AI in some slightly more responsible ways, if you will. That said, more and more students are using it just as a total replacement for schoolwork, right? Like, I'm literally going to have it write my essay or it's going to write 92% of my essay and I'm going to polish it up.
So there's folks who are concerned that AI is actually de-skilling students, meaning that some of the fundamentals of trying to understand the sources of information in a research project, right? Is it a legitimate source? How would I track that down? There's growing evidence that even published academic journals have citations that have come from AI that have hallucinated the sources, right? Even faculty and academic journals are challenged with the same thing.
What I would say, though, is that regardless of how prevalent AI becomes as a tool for students or as something that's used in teaching, I think the important things are that students still try to seek as much of the relationship-rich aspects of college as possible and the work-integrated learning aspects of college. And why do I say those two, go back to my time at Gallup, I helped lead the largest representative study of college graduates in U.S. history. The key findings were that the graduates who had a relationship-rich experience during college or experienced some of those work-integrated learning pieces like an internship or long-term project did far better off in their careers and their overall well-being later.
And so we haven't talked about the relationship-rich aspect, but I think this is really relevant in the age of AI. Students who said they had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams, very strongly worded statement in the research, but those who said that doubles their odds of thriving in their well-being for their entire lives, right? So again, another one of those game changers, or that they said the professors at their alma mater cared about them as a person, or that they had at least one professor who made them excited about learning.
I think the fundamental value of a relationship-rich experience, a culture of mentoring, a culture of great classroom teaching, a culture of faculty who want to invest in and develop the talent of young people, right? And, you know, there are research-one universities that are so focused on the publish-or-perish model of how you get ahead as a faculty member that it's actually the opposite of what they would be doing in terms of spending time mentoring students, right? Because I get ahead here by bringing in more research money or publishing more journal articles and me taking time with students is kind of a nuisance.
And there are other colleges and universities where it's clear their mission is teaching, it's classroom teaching, it's the experience of students there. And so in the age of AI, I think we're going to see an increased yearning for that relationship-rich aspect of college.
And I think that's another thing to test institutions on when you visit them or when you're thinking about where do I want to go? Is this a place that values classroom teaching? Is it a place that values mentorship for students? And those are other questions and things that you can tease out about the culture of the institution.
Ringae Nuek: How do you think you can ask those questions? Because I feel like if you just ask them, do you value teaching? They're going to say yes.
Brandon Busteed: So I think it comes in a lot of forms. You know, there are a lot of campuses that will actually state that, right? You know, that our faculty are here because they're passionate about teaching, right? You know, I think it's also stated in the form of how they recognize great classroom teaching and mentorship. Are there prominent awards for faculty there that recognize that?
I'll harp on my own alma mater, but when I was an undergraduate at Duke University, there was a distinguished teaching award for the best faculty member, according to students. And just like the evaluation was classroom teaching, right? And the winner of it got, at the time, a $5,000 prize. Okay, no big deal. $5,000 is better than zero, but like a $5,000 prize.
I remember one of my professors got the award and I remember being like, hey, that's awesome. Congratulations. And I'll never forget what he said to me. He was like, Brandon, he's like, you don't understand. He said, I'm now guaranteed that I will never get tenure here because the award was looked at as a negative because it was like, well, you're clearly not publishing. If you got that award for classroom teaching, you're clearly not doing the stuff that's really valued at a research one university, right?
And so I think there are ways to tease it out. But I think the ultimate thing is it's a feel. What do I mean by a feel? I would maintain that you could walk onto any campus in America and you could just start asking students who are the best professors here.
You won't see it on the website. You know, you might see case studies of different professors, whatever, but like you ask that question to a handful of undergraduates on a campus and you will hear immediate answers, right? They will talk about the professors there who are just famous because they're so loved by the students. They're so dynamic. They're so engaging.
And so to kind of ask those questions when you're on a visit, who are the rock star faculty here? What are the most engaging classes? You can sense the energy from those types of questions. Again, it might not be a list on the website, but everybody knows that.
Like if you had asked that question at Duke when I was there, students would have talked about Professor Bonk who taught chemistry there for years and years and years, so much so that they renamed chemistry Bonkistry at Duke, right? Who are the really famous teachers who are just famous for the fact that they were the most engaging, inspiring teachers on campus? And that would be a way that I would try to feel it out, so to speak.
Ringae Nuek: You know, they're there because they love their subject and they want to instill in their students a love of learning and that's their focus. They're not focused on ROI or on work integrated learning or any of that, I guess. Whose job is it to support that side of things? And should faculty just be behaving as they always have or should they be doing something different?
Brandon Busteed: That's a great question because this is one of those things where you say, people will ask the question, what's the purpose of college, right? And there are some people who are in the camp of it's to get a good or better job, period, full stop, nothing else. And there's others who are in the camp of, I'm going to oversimplify here of, it's to teach critical thinking and prepare engaged citizens. I'm very much in the camp of both and. These are not mutually exclusive. It's not an either or.
And I think to your question about who's responsible for the work readiness of college graduates, I think it's everybody. If it's just the student affairs division or it's just the career services office, it is never going to go anywhere. It's one of the reasons why it has never gone anywhere is that we've kind of contained it to like, oh, that's career services. No, no, no, no, no. This needs to be core. It needs to be seen as, and it has to be core to the academic mission of the institution.
Back to that, one of the things we talked about before, do you offer internships? Do you have, do students get academic credit for internships? Well, if they get academic credit for it, it means it's core to the academic mission of the institution. If you're an institution like Northeastern or Waterloo, the co-op experience is core to the entire experience at those institutions. It's a, you can't miss it as a student. It's not optional or maybe or kind of, sort of.
And, and so as it relates to faculty, it's been really interesting because, first of all, faculty are really bright, intelligent and capable people. But a lot of them, and this is just fair statement, it's not a critique, have never worked outside of academia, right? They've come up through academia. They've been a graduate student. They've been a TA. They got a job at a university. And so their, their only view of the world in the form of jobs is inside of academia, right? So a little harder for them to think and have experience outside of it.
Now, some faculty obviously have had other jobs outside the academy, right? And so it's not all of them, but I think that's one of the challenges. And I think it's a limit of our thinking and our definitions that's holding back more faculty engagement in work readiness for students. And what do I mean by that?
Well, I've had a lot of faculty who, after I've given a keynote on this topic, will come up to me and say, my job isn't to get students a job, it's to prepare them to be critical thinkers over their life. And I go, okay, okay. I said, I understand that. I said, we're, we're actually, we're on the same page here. And I said, let me just ask you a question. I said, would you agree that one of the outcomes we don't want is an unemployed critical thinker?
Maybe it's an unfair question, but I think it's a really important framing of this because people need a livelihood. They need an income. Unless you come from an independently wealthy family where you just don't need to work or you choose not to work because of personal choices you're making. The reality is that we want to make sure graduates get good jobs, family sustaining wage jobs. And so again, it shouldn't be thought of as mutually exclusive.
And I think the view among a lot of faculty is, oh, you know, it's either the liberal arts or it's vocational training. You know, like these are just two totally different things. And they're really not like, if you think about broadly educated graduates who have specific skills, it's a little bit of both, right? And back to what employers want most, it's what those arts and humanities faculty members are helping train students on. But it adds some work experience, some specific skill set that translates, you know, to a job opportunity.
To me, for example, there's no such thing as an engaged citizen who's unemployed. That's somebody who's looking for work. They're strained financially. They're stressed. They have worse well-being when they're unemployed, right? We need to focus on this employment outcome as a really important indicator.
And I think the silly distinction of like the liberal arts or vocational training is one of the biggest things holding back higher ed right now. And very specifically holding back the mentality and the culture within the faculty ranks.
Ringae Nuek: I think especially vocational training can have a bit of a taint to it, right?
Brandon Busteed: Yeah, we treat it like that. Like it's beneath in the academy. Oh, you know, that's been, you know, I do something much more important than that. And sure, great. Believe that all day long. But the English major with a cybersecurity, you know, industry credential is four times more likely to be hired than the English major without.
Anyway, I think the either or has to go. We need to embrace the both and. And I think we also need to be careful about belittling vocational training. It's linked to, you know, where higher ed has been critiqued as being elitist, especially the most selective private institutions, right? There is a real critique and backlash to elitism. And it's also educational elitism, right? We're like, well, I've got my PhD, so I'm far superior to tradesmen X, Y, or Z, right? And you're like, pump the brakes on that attitude a little bit.
Ringae Nuek: There are different ways of doing experiential learning, right? There's the co-op. There's bringing industry into the classroom and running a project like that. Do you have any opinions about which are more effective or do you think it just depends on the setup?
Brandon Busteed: It's a good question. I mean, let's turn to what we know from the research literature, right? The length of an internship matters, right? So any internship is better than no internship, first point. But the longer the internship is, the more higher quality the experience and the impact is.
And then, you know, what happens within those things, right? Like if your internship consists of making coffee and, you know, bringing some donuts into the meeting, that's probably not as valuable as a real project. That's a meaningful, you know, thing that the organization is trying to accomplish. And you're playing a role in developing it and delivering it. And you've got a manager who's been coaching you and giving you feedback on it. Like that's a very different internship than one where you're like, yeah, can you just, you know, make sure the coffee pot is full, right? So there are huge swings in the quality of those experiences.
But I think one of the things that you get to the question of both quality and scale, and I believe we can do both. I think we can create high quality experiences and scale them. But one of the things that I'm most bullish on as a pathway here is the idea of co-teaching. And I know this sounds so simple, but this is something that all colleges and universities can do. It's something that all faculty can do is to start to think about co-teaching between a faculty member or an education expert and an industry expert.
In all the programs that we run at Edconic, that's part of the magic combination that we've unleashed is that every one of our programs is co-designed and co-taught by an educator and an industry expert. So it's not just an industry expert to do, you know, a guest lecture. That has some value, but sometimes those industry experts have no ability to connect with undergrads or high school students. They don't have that skill set, right? And they're not thinking about how to come up with maybe a thoughtful case study or project that the students could engage in.
And so that's where the combination of an education expert, teacher or faculty member, and an industry expert can create some real magical examples. They can come up with great case studies for students, project-based learning opportunities for students. And it takes the pressure off of both of them. As a faculty member, I don't need to be an expert in X industry or job. That's so-and-so's role. And as the industry expert, I don't need to think about, oh, I need to create an assignment. What would be a project-based case study that would be great here? How do I create a rubric to grade it?
So anyway, the reason why I bring up that example is that, yes, every college and university should work to build partnerships with employers who have internships. And those employers can benefit from the structure and support that a career office or an internship office might provide for them, et cetera. But I think where we can scale this for more students is thinking about more opportunities to co-teach. And that seems to me to be way more approachable if you're a university. That seems more accomplishable than, oh, how do I get an internship for every single student?
You can, by the way. But I think this idea of co-teaching, you know, how can we bring in industry experts, partner them with faculty, whether that's for a whole course or a week-long segment of it or a capstone project or whatever, it seems very doable to me. And I've seen magic from that in my own work and at Edconic that tells me that that's a really, really powerful way to think about it.
Ringae Nuek: Interesting. I did a master's in design. Design is applied, right? So you need to bring in industry. And yeah, I didn't think about it as co-teaching, but that's what it was.
As part of my practice, I've been trying to explore getting startups to hire high schoolers for internships because I live in San Francisco. The high schoolers are very hungry for this. Their parents are hungry for this. The startups are not so interested. I get it. Hiring a high schooler, you're going to probably put in a lot of work. I mean, it's obviously different with college students, but have you seen that, a reluctance on the part of industry?
Brandon Busteed: Yeah, and it's really sad, right? There is reluctance and it comes from really one big source and maybe one small source. But the biggest is the idea that like, oh, this is going to be overwhelming to manage, right? Or I don't have a meaningful internship for a high school student because like, what does a high school student know? And so I think we have this very infantilized view of what a high school student can't do.
A lot of high school students that are capable of doing some very advanced work and some very sophisticated stuff. I had high school interns at my startup years ago and they were better at data analysis than a lot of the staff that I had, entry-level staff who were coming out of college who hadn't had any experience in Excel. It's like, if you've got a really bright student, they can learn it pretty quickly. It wasn't like you were being taught Excel spreadsheets in college back then either, right?
So anyway, my point is, I think employers have thought specifically about high school students as like, oh, I can't give them really advanced or meaningful projects. No, that's not the case. And then it's also, oh, there's so much work in managing that. Those are the real big hurdles in their minds.
But to say that the organizations that have just started down the path, one internship, two internships, just a six-week internship, just a summer internship, they quickly get to realize that actually it's not as hard as they think. They can come up with meaningful projects. The more of their managers or teams that start to utilize interns start to come up with the realization that, yeah, I actually do have a lot of projects interns can help with. And they're providing a lot of value to us in addition to us providing this young person with the value of the experience.
I always use this example when I was running a startup in the Boston, Massachusetts area. I had co-op students from Northeastern and at the time, the first one that we hired as a co-op student, I only had 11 employees. And so she became one-twelfth of my workplace organization. And we didn't have a director of marketing at the time. So I just said, hey, Kim, you want to be the director of marketing? I had nothing to lose. And nor did she. Yet she provided so much value to our organization that I was like, I don't know where we'd be if we didn't have this co-op student enroll, right?
And so my message to especially small employers and startups is that internships and co-ops can be an incredibly valuable part of your workforce. In addition to it's altruistic and paying it forward and, you know, that type of stuff. And I would say those students, they're capable of doing much more sophisticated work than you're thinking they are.
Ringae Nuek: I certainly believe that, but it has proven to be tricky to convince them.
Brandon Busteed: Yeah. We just need to keep pushing on that, right? And I hope we get to a place sometime soon where it's the patriotic thing to do, to offer more internships, because the need for it, for our talent pipeline in the United States is so important. And then on the flip side, you know, startups or companies that aren't offering internships, it's looked upon as unpatriotic to not be doing so. We need to get to that place where that's how important it feels or how guilty somebody might feel for not participating in it. It's that important.
Ringae Nuek: All right. Great. Any questions for me?
Brandon Busteed: No, but I want to hear more about your master's project and the design work you're doing. It certainly sounds pretty interesting.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, so I did a master's, this was way back, in Italy, in a place called Domus Academy in Milan. I'm Malaysian and I moved to the U.S. for college. I went to Tufts, actually studied IR, moved down to New York kind of as soon as I could. Took the LSAT, worked at a law firm, got into Columbia, was going to go there, but knew that wasn't right. And I had always loved art and taken a lot of art at Tufts, which has a great art school associated with it. And this was during the dot-com boom.
Managed to teach myself Adobe products at night, talked my way into a web design job, discovered user experience design, which wasn't really a thing yet. Nobody was using that phrase. My employers didn't care about UX. They were all just about marketing design. So discovered this field, applied to this master's degree.
And in Italy, design is very apprentice-focused. You have someone and you're under him, usually him, and they shepherd you through your beginning years. And so they bring that mentality into school. So we had Nokia was one of my companies that I did a project for. European Air Traffic Control was another.
Brandon Busteed: Wow. You've got a fascinating background. As you tell that story, you're very much the example of the arts and humanities major who developed some very specific technology skill sets. And you've got a great background to be advising, I think, students, too, just in thinking about, like, a lot of these career pathways and college pathways, they're not linear.
Ringae Nuek: That's why I'm interested in this storytelling piece. And, like, I feel like so much of career services is more about here are your skills. Go shop them around.
But I feel like if people have more of an internal story, and by story, I don't mean something made up. I mean something really tied to who they are, their values, what they're good at, but then they know both internally and externally how to tell that story to employers so that the resume makes sense in this really coherent way. And then inside themselves, when they decide, okay, I don't want to major in English, I want to major in history, that pivot makes sense because the story inside is coherent, you know?
Brandon Busteed: Yeah, that makes sense. I always think about the, well, story may be one term to describe it, right? But, like, what's the through line in your career, right? And, you know, I've always had one. I mean, you know, but I haven't always been able to articulate it.
But I think about, you know, I've always been in work where there's high mission and impact, right? And I've always, although I've worked with lots of nonprofits and universities, whatever, I've always technically been inside of a for-profit organization, right? Like Gallup, people don't think of it as for-profit because it's such a unique mission, but it's a family-owned company. The business I work for now is a family-owned company. When I was at Kaplan, it's Graham Holdings, which was the former Washington Post family-owned company.
The mission impact thing has been a major theme and also talent development. Like, I would have never used the words talent development 30 years ago or maybe even 20 years ago, but that's fundamentally what I've been most passionate about. So, yeah, it's that story. Like, if you just look at my resume, my titles, the company, you're like, do you, you know, some of it's obvious, some of it's totally not, but like there's a through line.
Ringae Nuek: And by the time you're our age, you can look back and see it. I feel like it can be powerful to have more insight into it when you're 20.
Where can people find you?
Brandon Busteed: The one place that I spend any time is on LinkedIn. There's only one Brandon Busteed on LinkedIn. I'm the one and only. So, you know, search Brandon Busteed on LinkedIn and you can connect with me there, follow me there. I also write for Forbes.com. And again, there's only one Brandon Busteed there, so I'm not hard to find.
