The Arena Inc.

COVID has accelerated reliance on online education -- which can often be more flexible, efficient, and cost effective -- and the deterioration of the higher education system. The Arena stepped in to meet a growing need for information and guidance by building a Career Pathways Tool. The CPT aims to be the “Glassdoor” of online career aligned training, a database of options with centralized filters to support students, alumni, parents, and counselors across the country in grappling with the need for plan b during the pandemic -- and beyond, as it reflects a growing trend toward digitization and alternative training. The team launched version 1.0 in 2020Q4 in order to serve users and collect data on development needs and growth potential with a lean budget. The team will develop new features (support and matching, reviews and training provider data, and careers and employer partnerships) and focus on traction and growth.

The pipe that connects high schools to colleges to companies contains many leaks: a lack of postsecondary preparedness, postsecondary attrition, unemployment and underemployment, and barriers imposed by hiring requirements. 2 in 3 students from low-income backgrounds who graduate high school do so without meeting college-readiness requirements, 1 in 2 of those who go to college fail to earn a degree, 86% of new college graduates report having no job offers, and 49% of graduates report not needing to go to college to do their current jobs. We need more connectivity between educational institutions and industry partners and more meaningful pathways that secure economic stability. 

Our solution, the Career Pathways Tool, is a product we've developed at The Arena Inc. in order to respond to the real-time COVID-19 imposed needs of our students, families, and school and employer stakeholders. Our first version is a registry of online training options with empowering filters and aims to evolve to be the Glassdoor of online career-aligned training. It contains high quality hard-to-find information on online programs in healthcare, IT, manufacturing, education, and business, with filters for structure, outcome, cost, funding and financing. It contains over 650 programs from 150 providers and is open source. It creates centralized access to information that is traditionally fragmented, and in the coming months it will contain more features for matching, reviews, and careers. The three most valuable parts are the dataset, the product organization and marketplace, and the relationships we have to propel it forward meaningfully. 

Our primary users are high school students and alumni, more precisely in the near term 16-26 year olds who underperformed academically for a variety of reasons, have fewer traditional college options or are working or in credit recovery schools and need more realtime solutions for training to careers. We consider this population overlooked talent whose strengths were not always praised, and we aim to support them before the data shows they will fall through the cracks and need alternative paths and up-skilling services 5-15 years down the road. Our secondary users are those who support the primary users: parents, school administrators, counselors, and teachers. We have a robust set of student and school partners that are part of our advisory council and user research groups, and we consistently collect data from them to co-create and drive product growth. Our op ed (https://medium.com/@claire_131...) reflects that our students in all performance quartiles need help, and we will continue to try to support each group while focusing on those most vulnerable in general and exacerbated by the pandemic 

While data shows the value of a four-year bachelors degree on lifetime earnings, the high percentages of young people with some college and no degree and dislocated from the workforce and wage earning years lost means we need a better systems that proactively block leaks. We have seen an uptick in up-skilling organizations, ones that train adults for specific upwardly mobile jobs with accessible entry points. These are awesome, and they also serve a population that has been underserved by the school system and employers in the past. We want to support these young people before we risk failing them.

Eight people work on the solution team. The CEO focuses on product management and partnerships, and the COO focuses on reliance on systems and technology. We also have four other members of our product launch team serving as volunteers, working on marketing and user acquisition, user research, and data analytics. 

We also work with several web developers and designers on a contracted basis, two of whom we have most recently worked with to refine the first version of our product. 

We believe it is critical to empower those we work alongside: our team members, board, and partners. As we grow, we use scorecards to ensure we have diverse representation of perspective and identity, build relationships and search in new networks to expand our circles. We consistently share resources, interrogate our practices and the assumptions each of us bring into the work, which has prompted us to create a young professionals board, for example. Within our organization, we create spaces to provide feedback and circulate ownership to create space to have dialogue and build in a distributed manner. We have a long way to go! We are committed to growth and will continue to push ourselves and others in the space (op ed here from the overdue visibility on race and inequity this summer (https://blog.usejournal.com/an...), as we have a unique opportunity  with the way we operate in partnership.

There are a few components of our endeavor that are particularly unique: 

1. The Dataset: We feel confident in the substance and uniqueness of the information we have collected (online training programs with program information and centralized filtering aligned with industry, outcome, structure, and funding/financing eligibility), the way we are organizing it, and its growing potential to empower traditionally disempowered users -- 16-25 year olds from marginalized backgrounds who have tended to underperform in school.

2. The Marketplace: COVID-19 has accelerated the need for training alternatives, and we are moving toward a world in which higher education is a conduit, not an end in and of itself: enter the need for platforms that illuminate pathways and match candidates with employers. There is a growing set of upskilling organizations focusing on adult learners, and the younger audiences we aim to serve are often left behind.

3. Our Relationships: We have strong relationships with charter school networks and school districts across the country and a relationship-driven approach to serving and partnering with training providers and employers who are mission- and values-aligned.

Our competitors are focused on adults, in-person options, or fragmented. We think our ability to work with young people and position online training in an accessible way is valuable to our individuals and stakeholder groups. 

We have built an online tool that allows for access of an online registry. The process for finding the information in this first version is reliance on a site our user design and development team built that has user friendly filtering, saving and sharing, and data collection for our next phases of build out. Our reliance on React, MongoDB, Microsoft Clarity, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and our social media channel analytics allow us to pull information to develop insights about user behavior that influence build out of new features in the matching, reviews, and career spaces. 

The design and coding tools used build our site are widely used, and our data was manually collected and organized on Microsoft Excel. Our tool is open source and live in its first version at www.enterthearena.org for verification.

We are a nonprofit organization that strengthens the school to work pipeline to ensure young people can build reliably stable lives. We act as an intermediary between educational institutions and industry partners, founded in 2018 by Stanford GSB and GSE graduates and former teachers, consultants, and school administrators who believed in the power of schools but saw the limitations in their ability to secure students stable futures. We embed within organizations to build programs and broker thin, aligned partnerships among public schools, online training providers, and employers. While those partnerships create critical proof points that strengthen pathways, they are less scalable than will achieve the mission of the organization. We wanted to ensure we could serve students and families during the pandemic and saw the context as indicative of an acceleration in the digitization and alternative pathway spaces as well as a deterioration of the traditional higher education system. 

We have always believed that information and transparency empower people, especially in a space that has traditionally been fragmented and opaque. As our society becomes more accepting of alternative training and routes into careers with growth potential, we want to ensure people have information that’s easily accessible for discovery and decision-making. High school counselors, two- and four-year college counselors, teachers, advisors, and parents are doing the hard work, and we want to be there to support them. The path from school to work presents many transition points where it is easy to fall through the cracks and often we make decisions based on aspirations without considering practical implications; we wanted to present more training opportunities with more information on structure, industry alignment, and cost to empower primary and secondary users.

Some resources we have used to articulate the need for more connectivity in the space are: https://www.bain.com/insights/... and https://www.entangled.solution... among others as well as COVID related need to address loss of learning: https://credo.stanford.edu/sit...

Our goals for 2020Q4 are to develop strong perspectives on and playbooks for marketing and user acquisition, user research, and data analytics. We have used this beta launch to gather data on what our customers want and the intricacies of employing effective distribution channels. 2021Q1 will be focused on product development and partner relationship management, and 2021Q2 will be focused on version 2.0 launch and distribution at scale, reaching several thousand users and a path to sustainability with affiliate marketing and ad revenue by the middle of 2021. By 2025 we want to reach 100,000 users and have more secure partnership within institutions and geographies.

The capital required to build an effective consumer-facing product, the effective channels for distribution and fit especially in an exhausted world and school context given the pandemic, and the willingness to pay for some of our stakeholders are all barriers in the space. Furthermore, the workforce space has a problem with mindshare not reflecting marketshare; there are lots of entrants in the space so there is some exhaustion among partners and funders, while there is a great need and many operate at a small scale or with small scale interventions.

We will focus on a few selective aligned partners and grow with them, relying on them later for scale and partnership referrals. We will also explore licensing and other methods of sharing our dataset as well as providing a comprehensive suite of solutions for our partners: tool, dataset, and strategic partnerships.

There is a long time horizon on the economic stability work; we would like to be able to have clearer data on which trainings are validated by employers and which trainings reflect substantive skillsets that protect users throughout their careers. We need better proxies for benchmarks on this as well within our organization and in the space in general.

Our leadership team is lean and scrappy, and likely above all else our advantage is our determination and commitment to the mission and our students above all else. Our CEO's unique advantage is her teaching and administrative experience, understanding of the landscape, and propensity for building relationships and connectivity in the space. Our COO's unique advantage is his educational background and path, nonprofit and consulting experience, and propensity for systems and details. Their respect for the young adults they serve anchors them in the work and guides decisions. It has allowed for them to attract volunteers and talent to the team within their budget for marketing and user acquisition, user research, analytics, and business development, building the network of people who will continue to be mission aligned and driven as the organization and tool grow.

We have 10-30 organizations we work with on our strategic partnerships vertical. Separately with this product, across the country we have 6 college access organizations, 10 public schools (charter and district, all high FRL), and 2 districts that we are working with to build out the tool with focus groups and user interviews, an advisory council, and beta test fellowship. 

Our business model is a nonprofit institution with B2B and B2C services, a comprehensive solution to strengthening the school to work pipeline with our tool, dataset, and strategic partnerships. Our primary customers are young people ages 16-26 in and around high school, especially those in the lowest two quartiles with few postsecondary options, and our secondary customers are those who support them: parents, school administrators, counselors, and teachers. The institutions we serve are schools, training providers, employers, and affiliates in college access, policy and government, and funding. We will focus on scale with our B2C model with the product and depth with our B2B model with the partnerships.

We will earn revenue through affiliate marketing and advertisements as well as licensing our dataset. We will focus in 2021Q1 on product build out with the matching, rating, and career features before relaunching to scale and build our path to sustainability mid 2021. 

We have raised funds from Stanford GSB's Center for Social Innovation and from the Walton Family Foundation Innovative Schools Grant. 

The 2021 budget for CPT-related activities is $322K. No confirmations have yet been received for the 2021 CPT budget, though Stanford GSB Center for Social Innovation and Walton Family Foundation have funded The Arena Inc. 2020Q4 efforts were funded by:

1. COVID-19 related extensions from prior funders (~45% of total)

2. The Arena general funds (~55% of total)

The MIT Solve capital would go to personnel costs across product development, marketing, user research, and data analytics. The balance would go toward technology tools required to scale. Please see attachments for more detail. 

The Arena Inc | Budget -- attached is a breakdown! 

We seek to double down on our product strength and growth, and we need financial and human capital to do this. Being part of this community would also allow us to strategically partner rather than building from scratch.

We would like to build out or team and focus more on product feature build, marketing and user acquisition, user research, analytics, and partnerships with mission aligned institutions to effectively build traction with our second product phase. In our third phase we would like to build out our employer partnerships to launch the two-sided marketplace. Amidst all of this, it would be useful to have assistance with licensing models and technology.

We would like to partner with scaled college access organizations like the ACT and College Board to build out their suite of services and help us grow. We would also like to partner with large healthcare and IT employers as beta testers of the two sided marketplace with employers in order to truly build out the career pathway part of the tool rather than simply a training database.