Good morning, John,

10 years ago, when we first started making Crash Course, I had a pretty specific idea of what kind of help students needed in high school and college. They needed better tools for learning, and they do, and I’m really proud of the work that Crash Course has done in that space. But also, during those 10 years the outcomes for your typical high school junior have not been great. 84 percent of those kids want to continue their education after high school but only about 66 percent of them will. And of the people who go on to college only 60 of those people will actually get a degree. And so yes about 40 of Americans with student loans are not gonna get a degree.

My first impulse when hearing this is this is a learning problem, we need to teach these kids better. And that is part of the problem, but arguably the larger part is just understanding how this tremendously complex system works. Admissions, financial aid, credit transfer, degree paths, a huge variety of institutions with a huge variety of systems. Only 20 percent of students receive counseling on how best to pay for college. Only 30 receive counseling on how admissions work. And worst of all of course the people for whom this is hardest are the ones who get the least support from their institutions and systems. And they're also the ones who, on average, have the least time and money to deal with it. If you need more aid and more loans, it's much more likely that you have a full-time or part-time job during the period during which you are applying for school. You're also much more likely to have unpaid work doing child or elder care. And you're less likely to have other people in your life who have gone through and experienced these systems who can give you advice. Everything from loans to majors to transferring credits from community college, class selection, career counseling, financing, this is a big messy bureaucracy. And anybody who interfaces with it, even people inside of it, will tell you this they know that it's hard the less you know the more likely you are to end up in a situation where you've boxed yourself into a bad outcome, or you may even be being taken advantage of by bad institutions.

 

The inability to make an informed decision when it's one of the most important decisions you're ever gonna make, is a big reason why so many students end up with loans but no degree, and we understood none of this when we were first making Crash Course. So, over the last couple of years for you and me and a lot of people who work at Complexly, we've undergone a bit of a crash course in understanding how higher education actually works in this country. And we’ve had a little bit of help with that, so I am excited to be telling you that in partnership with Arizona State University, we are launching a new YouTube channel called Study Hall. And also, we are launching a new course on Crash Course it's called Crash Course: How to College, a course that takes on all of the options a person in the U.S. has to face when considering their future from financial aid to admissions to majors and careers. Now we already made a series of courses with ASU under the name Study Hall with a specific goal of helping people with the subjects that most interfere with a student's ability to succeed in early college. But now we are launching the Study Hall project as a whole YouTube channel, starting with a series that I’m extremely excited about, it's called fast guides. The fast guides are a quick but pretty deep dive into what you're getting yourself into when you're choosing a major; what work can you expect, what skills do you need, what are good alternatives if you want to switch majors from that major, and what do graduates in that major end up doing after graduation. I am so excited about these two new things; I have learned so much about why they are necessary. So please check out Crash Course: How to College and the Study Hall YouTube channel and send them to everyone you know who might be going to college in the near future, including yourself. I have seen the tremendous amount of work and thought and care that has gone into these things, and I know that when good people work hard together, they really can help to solve hard problems. So, tell everyone you know, there are links in the description, and also probably right here.

John, I’ll see you on Tuesday