Mike Flanagan Shares the E3n Vision in AC25's Opening Keynote
Taking EMA's annual conference stage for the first time as the inaugural CEO of E3n, Mike Flanagan discussed the challenges facing independent schools, why the timing is right for the EMA and ERB merger, the story behind the E3n name, and the vision for our new organization.
Watch his address in its entirety below, including an introduction from Mary Frances "Fran" Bissell, head of school at Hathaway Brown School, and E3n board chair.
Transcript
Mary Frances Bissell:
Good morning, everyone. Welcome. What a joy it is to gather here together, colleagues, and partners, and friends at this moment of both continuity and change. Your presence today is a powerful reminder of the shared commitment that binds us working as a community to help our schools enroll, educate and excel.
The theme of this year's conference obviously is Embracing Change, and I can really think of no better lens for where we stand today. Change asks us to stretch, to imagine what's possible and to align our work with the needs of tomorrow's students. It's never simple, but always rich with possibility. This gathering marks a historic milestone, the creation of E3n. By bringing together the strengths of ERB and EMA, we are shaping something greater than the sum of its parts. E3n represents, not just a merger, but a movement, a bold platform for championing schools, championing leaders in these schools, and of course students, creating exponential impact for independent education.
Leading this new chapter is Mike Flanagan. Give me a round of applause on that one.
Mike brings strategic insight and vision, but just as importantly, he brings curiosity and care. When he first stepped into this role, the very first question he asked wasn't about budgets or structure or strategy. He asked, "What do students and schools need most from us?" That question has guided his early conversations, and will continue to guide this organization forward. It tells you everything about how Mike leads, by keeping the learner at the center of every decision.
As the inaugural CEO of E3n, Mike carries forward the legacies of ERB, a hundred years old, and EMA nearly 70 years old, while also charting a daring new path. His leadership is not just about maintaining the status quo, it's about ensuring that, in this season of change, we embrace not only new structures, but new ways of thinking, new ways of serving, and new ways of empowering every learner, every day, in every school.
This morning, let us begin to lean into the change with courage. Let us remember that together, through E3n, we have the capacity to imagine and to build what education needs most. It's now my honor to introduce Mike Flanagan, CEO of E3n. Please join me in welcoming him to the stage.
Mike Flanagan:
Thank you, Fran. Thank you, Christina. Thanks to the board. Thank you to all of you for being here.
Before I get started, I just want to acknowledge that I wouldn't be standing here with you today if it were not for the amazing work of Claire Goldsmith, who's here, former board chair of EMA. Yeah. Let's give it up to Claire. Claire was one of the visionaries who saw the potential for this union and also crucially, for almost a year, shepherded it as the chief merger integration architect. I just really want to give her a special thanks.
Last night when we were gathered here for the opening reception, a good number of you had ribbons saying you've been involved with this organization for over 20 years. You, of all people, will appreciate that my first independent school conference was an SSATB annual meeting. It was 2010. I had just taken a job at NAIS leading the SSS financial aid group. I didn't know anything about financial aid. I had come from the software world, the world of startups, but one of my co-workers, my colleagues who was helping onboard me, said, "Mike, if you do one thing, you got to go to this event. These are your people. These are the admissions people who are going to use SSS and they're going to be the ones who tell you what you need."
That colleague was Heather Hoerle who a year later left. Because she was not just a colleague but a friend, I got to watch her work with this team over the years and work with all of you to evolve EMA to what it is today, including at the time a controversial name change. Heather's insight, really what I would say was her stroke of genius, was realizing that this organization always has been more than just a test, it's a community. It's a community of enrollment leaders who want to gather and learn with one another and from one another.
What I want to let you know is that no matter what else we talk about today, and no matter what else we do in the future, whether it's the merger, or the new brand, or some things that we'll add as we grow and expand, this is always going to be your conference. This conference is you. You're not just the attendees, you're the faculty. I spoke yesterday with ATI, ADI, FLI, everybody in that room is you. The board here in front of us, everyone from the EMA side, and actually some of the folks from the ERB side, they are you as well.
What I want you to know is that even though it's been a while since I've been a regular attendee at EMA, when I came here yesterday and I was with you in the room, I felt what I always remembered in EMA conference, which was a sense of joy. Joy is unusual for professional conferences. I'm here to tell you. I basically have gone to conferences for a living for the past 10 years, doing fundraising and trying to do keynoting and stuff to grow my old organization, Mastery Transcript. There's a lot of feelings you get in conferences, you get anxiety, you get stress, you get kind of forced networking. Yeah, how are you? Where do you work?
This event, people love being here, because you all love one another. That sense of joy, it's not just nice to have, it's essential because I was chatting with somebody last night and they really kind of reminded me that the reason they make time, the reason they budget to bring their whole team here every year is that it's an essential way of recharging and pushing the start button for yet another enrollment season, which as we all know can be a grind. The importance of reconnecting is part of getting ready to embrace that, because that work we all do, the work you do as enrollment leaders, that has joy as well.
The joy of enrollment management is knowing that somewhere out there today, there's a family and a young person who is a perfect match for your school, they just don't know it yet. The joy is that at any given moment in time, you or your teams could have an interaction with that family or with that young person. It could be a postcard, it could be an email, it could be their first campus tour, it could be an interview, it could be a revisit day. The joy is that if you get that connection right, they will realize that that match is there and you'll get to welcome them into your community. The challenge and the responsibility is that then every day, as a result, every interaction, you and your team have to be at your best.
It's hard. It's really demanding. You can't really have any off days because that off day could be the day where that family's there. It's a challenging world, it's a challenging job. Honestly, it's even more challenging now. This is a tough time to be in enrollment. We know that. We're especially grateful to you for making time here, because it's so hard out there.
It's always been hard filling classrooms for some of our schools. We've known about the demographic cliff for years, but it's only in recent years where we've realized that not only are we having the post-baby boom cliff, but we've actually stopped making babies altogether. Birth rates are dropping in all developing countries. You can't have a school without students. It's a challenge. We also know that some of our most important priorities for building communities that are representative, inclusive, equitable, diverse, where everyone feels a sense of belonging, the practices that we've been using to uphold these values are increasing under attack, not just from our own government, but also from activist groups who sometimes are operating in bad faith.
It's always been a challenge, but it's even harder now. Then, lastly, the very value proposition of our schools, the commitment we're making to families that, yes, if you invest with us, your child will get an experience that is unique and valuable that they can't get anywhere else, that's under pressure from both sides. Families have always wrestled with affordability, but now when the cost of getting a four-year degree will, in the next few years, break half a million dollars for some families, and in turn, the very value of that degree is increasingly under question. Do I really need to go to college? Google says I don't need to go to college. So from both ends, the value proposition for many of our schools, which are explicitly college preparatory, is even harder a case to make if families aren't sure that they're going to send their kids to college after all.
Those of you who know me know that I am an optimist to a fault. Where all of these challenges are, I think if you look at them in a different way, opportunities. I think that's why this moment in time now is exactly the right time for us to come together.
What I want to talk to you right now is about the underlying logic, the case for the merger. Why are we doing this? How are we going to make one plus one equal three? Well, the first and most important thing is just to start with EMA. All of you are here because you're part of this organization and you love it. This, I would submit to you, is EMA's value chain. Christina just walked you through this, and it's pretty straightforward. We have an amazing admissions ecosystem to help you find those best matched families, we've got powerful enrollment tools that help you bring those families and students into your communities. Then everything we learn from being the owner of those tools, we can then feed back into this community so that you can continue to learn from one another and maintain professional growth.
Heather's insight really was that the admissions function could be elevated to enrollment management, and in turn, enrollment management leaders could be elevated to school leadership positions as high and far as they wanted to go. That's something that we want to keep doing. What's interesting about this model, and EMA knows this, is that what we don't address is what happens when kids enroll in our schools. How are they doing then? That's why adding ERB to the mix is really interesting.
Many of you might be ERB schools already. We know we have 500 schools in America right now that are members of both organizations. When we add ERB to the mix, what they bring is information and resources about how kids are thriving on campus. I use that word deliberately. We care a lot about academic growth, we're not schools if the kids aren't learning to read and write. At the same time though, we also care about their whole wellbeing. Importantly, we want to understand deeply, not just anecdotally, how the kids are doing. What ERB brings to the table is more data, and insights, and tools to help us answer that question. When your board asks, "Hey. Those kids that we admitted last year, how are they actually doing?" When someone in the school says, "Hey. Those retention numbers, we're a little worried about them. What's the root cause?" By combining forces, we can bring tools and resources to you and connect a larger community that'll help you answer those questions.
Look, what makes this merger particularly challenging, and I say this as somebody who has been through and led several mergers myself, is that both organizations are in great shape. I'm going to repeat that. They're both in a really strong position. That's unusual for mergers. Usually one partner is kind of limping in and, honestly, it's a lot easier when that happens. You have a disagreement about how you're going to do something, you're not sure whose policy handbook you're going to use, probably the big one, but when you have equals, you need to collaborate and negotiate and that actually adds a degree of difficulty.
The beauty of this merger is that even though both organizations are great, neither of them is great at everything. They have corresponding strengths, areas where one organization could improve are areas of strength through the other, and that's how we get to bring those things together and create more value. That's where the three comes from in the one plus one equals three.
A quick digression. Many of you're familiar with Jim Collins and his book Good To Great. Heather was a fan of it, we read it together at NAIS, was one of our kind of quarterly book clubs. For me in particular, as somebody who was coming to this from the technology world, the concept of what he called 'the flywheel' really resonated with me. The flywheel is a pretty basic idea, which is that if you understand the levers of your business, or your nonprofit, or your organization, or your school, if you understand how you create value, you can set those things up so that they're self-reinforcing. And the more of it you do, the better that you get. But what's nice about the flywheel, and what really made it land with me, is that it's particularly useful for explaining why certain organizations have what we call network effects.
Network effects, it's a little jargony, but it's a pretty basic idea. And it's that your industry, your business has network effects if getting bigger inherently makes you better. Uber is a really good example of an organization that has network effects. When they started, "I got an app and some rando's going to pick me up? And they're going to do it why? Because they'll make money? Well, if I'm the only one out here, how are they going to make any money?"
But once you reach a critical mass and you have scale, once you escape what we call the cold start problem, then suddenly, yeah, if everybody has the app, there's plenty of drivers and there's plenty of passengers and everybody benefits. The bigger they get, the more value there is.
This is not true of every organization. Schools, in particular, are notoriously hard to scale. Imagine right now that I told you next year your school was going to double in size and enrollment. I don't think it would make you twice as good as what you do. I think it would be a real pain. So, some organizations have these effects and some don't.
What's interesting for us on the ERB, EMA side is that if you look at those same components of that value chain and you think of them as a cycle, what you can start to see is that same idea of self-reinforcing. For this example, I'm just choosing one idea, which is the idea of what I'll call student and family interactions. We thought about this, we actually talked about this a lot a couple of days ago in the board meeting. Well, we don't really serve students schools, we serve students, and that's absolutely true. But what makes both of our organizations unique versus other amazing associations that you are probably part of today, like NAIS, like NBOA and others, is that we actually do interact directly with students and families. Sometimes it's through a test booklet, sometimes it's through an application online, but we're always responsible for that interaction. When something goes wrong and they call the customer support center, that's us.
So, each of these are touch points, even if they're not necessarily human interactions. And all of these things feed into this. All of our assessments grow and become more accurate the more data points we have. The power of a standard application grows according to the number of schools and families that use it, the degree to which it is standard. And our professional development is even richer and our reports are better as they grow in terms of the size and power of our dataset.
And I think there's some degree too in which you can do this with community. There was a point where this conference was just a couple hundred people. It's better today because all of you are here. When you leave here and you have a question about something critical, something a little specific to your region or something a little gnarly, you're much more likely to find an expert who knows your region because we're bigger because we have more coverage.
So, what we want to do is use the power of these two organizations to lean into this and find ways to create more value and deliver more value for you. And so, now what I want to do is talk to you a little bit about our new name and our new brand. First, the basic question I beginning all the time, "How do I say this thing?" E3n. We're going to keep it simple. It's not E3 to the N, just E3n. Like I said, I was in the room when they announced that SSATB was going to become the enrollment management association. And everyone on stage that day was adamant, "It's not EMA, it's the Enrollment Management Association." Say it out. We love it. We're busy people. I don't want to say, "I'm going to the Enrollment Management Association Annual Conference." I want to say, "I'm going to EMA."
So, we decided to skip the middle part. How do we get there? I want to talk about it. So, what we did first is bring a bunch of stakeholders together and we had some amazing branding consultants, the whole team, senior leaders. We involved as many people as we could. And the key insight is if you really want to come up with a good name and brand, don't think about the name and brand. Think about your mission. Think about what you do. Get really specific about what makes you unique. And so, that's what we did.
And we started with the basic building blocks, those of EMA. You are a community of enrollment leaders, foundational thing at the core. And we, as an organization, exist for one purpose to serve, develop, and cultivate that community. We want it to grow. We want to serve you. We want connect you with one another. We want to help you become the professionals you want to be. But that's not all that we do, it's not what makes us unique. There are other organizations that do this.
What makes us unique is that we do have data. And we don't just collect it through surveys and benchmarking tools, we generate it. Every application, every question that goes through SAO is a data point. Every answer on an SSAT is another kind of data point. And we can use that to create research and insights that are specific to us and specific to you. It's a real value to membership. And lastly, and most importantly of course, it's student data. Like I said before, we have the privilege, the responsibility of interacting directly with your students and their families in a way that you don't allow a lot of other organizations to do. We take that trust really seriously.
So, I think that's a pretty good description of what EMA does today. What I think is really exciting about involving ERB and adding them to the mix is what else it allows us to do. Not just talk about students, but also to talk about their growth once they're in your school. The most essential thing, as I said before, your jobs are vital because if you have no students, you don't have a school. But it's also a responsibility. If those students aren't growing and thriving, you're not much of a school.
So, being able to get data about how students are growing and thriving in terms of the whole dimension, not just academics, is vital to the work that we're doing. And so, if we bring that all together, what that does is allow us, it gives a standing to work not just with you, enrollment leaders, but also over time to start working directly with academic leaders, the folks who are in charge, who take care of all those students and families you work so hard to bring into your communities. And so, that, put all together, is the full mission statement.
We deepen school impact and foster whole student growth with data-driven insights that serve, develop and cultivate a community of enrollment and academic leaders. That's our mission. That's why we exist together. That's why we are bringing the two organizations together because this describes something that neither organization can do on its own. And then, in turn, we ask ourselves the question, "What if we're wildly successful? What if we crush it? We do an amazing job? We get through the merger, we figure out the mechanics and we're delivering all the value that we promised?"
Well, the power of network effects is that if they kick in, you don't have a linear line, you have a curve. You get exponential impact for our schools, their students and their leaders. And so, that is what allowed us to take this huge pile of over 100 names that we generated and finally land on the one that we thought best represented that. And don't me wrong, we had some great names. It's easy to name startups. There's no history, there's no stakeholders. Honestly, most startups fail. So, the name's only going to be in used for like three years anyway, but we had 170 years of history that we wanted to honor. Yes, we're going to try new things, we're going to expand, but we're not leaving behind what got us here. Again, the commitment to you is that we're going to keep the things you value the most in place.
And so, that is what landed on this. We help you enroll, educate and excel. But again, saying that we enroll, educate and excel isn't much of an organization name. We wanted to make it pithy and have some fun. And that's how we got to this E3n. The E3s are enroll, educate, and excel, that's what they stand for. No mystery there. I will also say it's a little bit of callback, a nod to that idea that 1 + 1 = 3. The first thing I did when I got here was go on a listening tour. I got to go to a lot of the EMLC events this spring. And a lot of people said, "1 + 1 = 3? I don't get it. I don't see it." And so, we're going to prove that. We're going to show you that it's possible, and so we're keeping the three.
In addition, we also wanted to say we're going to honor the past, enroll for enrollment management, educate for Educational Records Bureau, but we're not going to be shackled to the past. We want to talk about what's possible in the future by working together, by bringing great teams together in a great community to innovate. And if you do that right, I actually think your ability to deliver value is limitless. And so, we took the idea of to the nth power or the nth degree. There's no cap or ceiling on what we can do together working with you.
The other nice thing about N is that it's a variable. N can mean anything. And when you put an exponent on something, what you say is, "We're taking it to the power of." It could be to the power of data, to the power of research, to the power of community, to the power of the fall annual conference. "Mike, don't mess up the annual conference," that's what everybody says to me, to the power of that. It can be anything we want and we're going to have some fun with that.
And lastly, all of this, the N, the exponents. It's a nod to the fact that both organizations, what makes us unique, what makes us different from our amazing association counterparts is that we've got a lot of people in our organization who, like me, they're nerds, they're psychometricians, they're statisticians, they're data scientists. Nerd is a term of love in my house, so they're my people. We, one week a year, have the best celebration on Earth for enrollment management in independent schools. We're in it right now.
The way we earn the right to throw that party is that the other 51 weeks of a year, somebody's doing some math. We're crunching numbers, we're making tables, we're calculating, we're placing kids on [inaudible 00:25:13]. So, it's a nod to that as well, what makes us unique. And finally, our gifted graphic designer on ERB, Caitlin Rawls, who's here today, helped us come up with a logo that a little bit of fun in it too. That little doodad in the middle of the E, that's a little selector toggle. It's an acknowledgment of the fact that at the core of what we do when we interact with students and families is we ask them to make choices. "Students, choose between this answer and that." Families, choose this option or that one." We ask students and families to make choices, so we can help them make choices about where to go to school.
So, there's a part of every search process where you're talking to the search committee and they've got these great questions. Spoiler alert, I got the job. But the two questions I always liked the most are like, "Hey, what do you bring to the job specifically?" And honestly, it's a great question because there's dozens of people that could do this job, I believe that.
But the second question is, "Why do you want the job? Why are you excited about it?" And if there's one thing I would leave you today, if I could just... One idea is that I am so excited about this job because it's personal for me. And to understand why it's personal, I got to tell you a little bit about my family and my journey here. So, first of all, this is my family. That's me, that's my wife, Eileen, my son Liam, and my son Brendan. For the record, Liam is not seven feet tall, he's just standing on a rock. We are in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.
Eileen and I met in Hawaii. We lived for a while in the Northwest. At no point in time were we outdoorsy people. We were book people. And yet, somehow as a family, we're now national parks people, that's what we do. We went to one, it was good and we just kept doing it. And what's nice about, if you go to a lot of national parks, you realize that they issue patches or pins for everywhere you've been. And you can see them, they're like a little visual story on people's backpacks or on their Nalgene cups. You can be like, "Oh, Acadia, White Mountains. That's a New England person."
I want to tell you about some of my badges. The first is SSS by NAIS. So, when I took this job, as I said before, I didn't know anything about financial aid. And when I left, I knew a lot about financial aid and that's because of Mark Mitchell. I got to work side by side with Mark Mitchell for about eight years. Yeah, he's the man. If you work with Mark Mitchell for eight years closely and you don't know anything about financial aid, that's on you. But what was great about the time at SSS is that it wasn't just learning the ins and outs in financial aid, it was also an introduction to this community. If I've met you before, it's almost certainly because of the time I spent there and it's nice to be back. Hi. But what's also great about it is the aspects of that business are so relevant to what we do today. We work with over 150,000 families a year. When they had questions and called us, it was a lot of questions, it was a lot of phone calls. We collected information, some of it incredibly financially sensitive, literally millions of documents, and we had to integrate them all into a coherent interface that would help you in the financial aid office do your work.
Being at SSS though wasn't just about financial aid. It was also an opportunity to be in the front row seat for NAIS. I would imagine most, if not all of your schools are NAIS members. I also imagine none of you get to go to the NAIS annual conference because they put it at the worst time of year. I begged them, I swear. I was like, "Guys, what are we doing here?"
What was great about working at NAIS is that I got to have a front row seat with these amazing leaders. Pat Bassett, John Chubb, Donna Orem, Deborah Wilson, Heather Hoerle. I got to see what went into building amazing associations that were really thought about using data and professional development that was laser-focused on the specific needs of members. Not just the today needs, but also the horizon needs. You are very, very busy. You wouldn't be doing your jobs well if you weren't. A really great association partner is one that can look out on the horizon for you. Not 23rd Century futurism, but the stuff right around the corner so you can start thinking about it. That was a really powerful lesson.
I also got a chance to watch some amazing boards of other heads of school interact with one another. That really, by the way, is a masterclass is board management. You have heads of school that have been elevated to that level that have boards of their own. Every single time one of them spoke, it was like that old commercial about EF Hutton everyone goes and listens.
Then lastly, the Mastery Transcript Consortium. Now, this one may be kind of interesting to you because if you've heard about Mastery Transcript in passing you might be like, "Is that the organization, they're trying to get rid of grades?" Isn't that weird to be going to ERB and EMA if you want to get rid of grades? But Mastery Transcript was a startup, I was part of the founding team. One of the things I realized is that, yeah, when we started, we were talking about what was wrong with grading, but like a lot of startups, we learned along the way and we iterated. What we realized is that that wasn't actually quite the thing. What was wrong with transcripts and grading as we know it, it's not the grading itself, it's what we were grading.
Grading academic subjects is essential. As I've said several times, if you're not doing that work well, you're not really a school. But it's not everything, it's not complete. All of you know this because right now on your campus, you've got at least one kid who in terms of of GPA and academics is just getting by, but they're a great kid. Everybody knows they're a great kid. They light up a room when they walk in. They're popular, but they're kind to those who aren't. They're a really good listener, they're really diligent. They're not afraid to work hard. They have great self-management. Maybe they light up the stage or they lead on the sports field.
The grades are important, but they're not the whole story. You know this better than anybody. The reason you take so much time to read folders, why don't you just look at grades and scores? We know that there's more to measure. What's exciting and what I learned about that work, especially when we went through a transaction and got bought by ETS and I got a chance to work inside of ETS, a billion-dollar testing company that was actively in the process of reinventing itself so it could do more than standardized testing. What I learned is that what's possible now with technology is going to help us take some of these skills that used to be ineffable, immeasurable, and we can actually start to measure them. If we can measure them, we can actually then start to deliberately help coach kids and help them grow. Being a great kid isn't just this ineffable thing that some are born with and some aren't, it's something that we can actually teach all of our kids.
Now, if you doubt me, I'll tell you a story that one of the more interesting discussions I ever had. One of my jobs was to go around to admissions offices of selective colleges and universities and explain to them this weird transcript that we built. It was beautiful, by the way, as a piece of technology. Very usable. We got no customer support calls. But still, they have to want to use it, and they were pretty comfortable with grades and GPA. I'm talking to the admissions team at Westpoint. Literally, I've got these folks in battle dress with all kinds of paraphernalia on their shoulder epaulets. They say to me, "Okay, look, Mike, we get it. You're ranking and sorting, you don't like, that whole child. We like ranking and sorting, that's what we do. We're in the ranking and sorting business."
I said, "I hear you, but I think we can find some middle ground where we can agree that leadership can be taught." Leadership is a specific skill. It's a set of behaviors. "You wouldn't exist, Westpoint, if you didn't know that leadership could be taught." They're like, "All right, we'll give you that one."
Thinking about what we measure, what counts inside of school and how we measure it, that idea of whole child is something I care really deeply about. That's the professional journey. Three organizations, three patches, if you will. But now, I also want to tell you why it's personal for me, why I care so much about it. That is a story not of jobs, well, some jobs, but it's a story not of organizations, but of schools.
The first one is the 'Iolani School. 'Iolani's here. Aloha, guys. This was my first job out of college. When I got off the plane in Hawaii, I really was an outsider two-times over. I had never set foot on a campus of an independent school before I went to 'Iolani. I had never been in Hawaii before I went to 'Iolani. I grew up in Long Island, New York, I went to school in the Northeast. I got this job because a guy came to campus and he says, "Do you want to work in Hawaii?" I call my dad. I was like, "I have an opportunity to work in Hawaii." "Say yes."
But when I got there, what was amazing was that even though I had never taught before ... I was a really good student, but I was not a great teacher my first couple months on the job. But what I realized is that that independent school in that part of the world was so welcoming to me, they so intentionally made me feel part of the ohana, the family, that pretty soon I figured out what I was doing and I felt welcome. The personal thing for me is that one of the things that independent schools do so well, one of the things you and your teams do so brilliantly is you find people who might feel like outside and you make sure that they feel welcome. You make sure that they get embraced and part of the community.
The next school is The Cambridge School of Weston. Now, I live in the suburbs of Massachusetts in a town called Winchester. I told you before, I've got two now adult sons. Now, what I didn't tell you is that my oldest, Liam, when he was in middle school, a really bright kid, really curious. Loved building things, loved computers. Loved Minecraft because you build things inside computers. We built him a computer so he could play Minecraft. Was not happy in school, he was not thriving. One of the reasons Liam was not thriving in school is that he was having so much trouble with math. He would come home and he's like, "I don't understand this. I don't get it. What the teacher is saying doesn't make sense to me."
It didn't take long before not feeling great about math led to not feeling great about school, which led to not feeling great about himself, which led to him not going to school. I'm a big fan of flywheels, but they can run in the other direction, too. That's why it was so amazing that when he graduated from CSW several years later, he was absolutely thriving. How did that happen? How did they do that?
Well, one of the things they did is they had robotics. He found his tribe. He found people like him who liked taking things apart, putting things together, and solving problems. They let him take computer science even though his SSAT scores very much reflected the fact that he had been struggling in math. They thought it was more important to give him the chance than to put a gate in front of him.
He loved computer science, he loved robotics, and he also met people who taught him about drones. He loved building, and ultimately racing and shooting videos with his drones. It was competitive side, artistic side. He eventually became a national-level drone racer. We flew all around the country so he could race. He started to feel great about himself. Those are the things that they did. Because of that, he realized, "Oh, algebra, it's just the grammar of programming. Calculus is just the language of acceleration. I like things that go fast."
He graduated last spring from Case Western in Cleveland, Ohio with a degree in mechanical engineering. He now works in Silicon Valley, where he leads mechanical engineering for a startup that makes autonomous drones. My kid makes robot drones for a living. That's because of CSW. They helped him find a match and they helped him learn the way that he needed to learn. They realized that, at the end of the day, he was a kid who liked to build things and they helped him build himself, too.
Now, that brings me to Belmont Hill. Now, my dad was a Marine. He was a Marine Officer in Vietnam, so he was really big on this idea of stolen valor. Stolen valor, by the way, is when people where medals they didn't earn. I have never worked at Belmont Hill, full disclosure there. But I also want to just own the fact that I don't think I would be standing on stage today were it not for Belmont Hill because Aylin, my wife, works in admissions and owns financial aid at Belmont Hill.
Aylin's got an interesting job because independent schools, triple threat. We coach, we teach. Her contribution outside of the admissions office is that she works in the Office of Academic Support. She works with kids who really need help with the curriculum. Kids, honestly, like Liam. She also works with kids because of financial aid who need the most support financially. She's been really thoughtful about making sure that those kids feel a sense of belonging by creating programs that make sure that we're not just covering their tuition, but also the little things like the jackets that the football team get when they win the championship.
The joy for Aylin and her team every spring is seeing their kids walk across the podium. I know the joy is extra for her because those kids needed the most help. But it's a hard job. I'm there on Saturday morning when she wakes up at 4:30 AM because the team needs to get to campus early to set up for the open house. I see her when she's working late at night in the fall to make sure that every interview she had that day is recorded and she's got good notes before it starts to get mixed up with the other ones. Then in the winter and spring, I watch as she stays up late like all of you, reading folders, crunching numbers, processing all of this. It's such a hard job.
Now, one thing you don't know about Aylin is that unlike me, she is a child of independent schools. Her dad was her head of school when she was in high school in Houston, Texas at St. John's. He was her basketball coach, she was the starting point guard, and they won the Texas championship. In basketball season, Aylin doesn't get to go to a lot of games because she's reading folders. As I've watched this through the years and I've gone through these different jobs, and I've been involved in technology and schools, I always thought to myself, "You know, self, if you ever got an opportunity to do a job where you could work to build tools that would make this easier, that would save some time, that would allow Aylin and people like her to go to a basketball game, that would be a pretty great job."
That is why I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here not because my son Liam's story is unique. Because right now, there are tens of thousands, if not 100,000 kids just like him on your campuses. You are giving them something that they were not getting from their old school or a different school. Maybe their old school wasn't challenging enough. Maybe they're a star on the sports field or the stage and you've got a program that can help them really excel and get to the next level. Maybe they just need to be seen. But each of you, that work you do to find what's special about each kid and to get that perfect match is essential and that's I and the team are so committed to making sure that whatever we do together through this merger results in better tools and services to help you do that work.
The good news is that I think change is coming and I think that change can be good. What does it really mean to write up an admissions interview? What does it really mean to read a folder? I said it before jokingly, but obviously if you could just admit kids to your school using test scores and GPA, you wouldn't have to do all of that. You have to do all that work because you know that the real story, the full story is buried elsewhere. Because you get to work with so many families and interact with so many kids, it's essential that you take all of this information while it's still timely and fresh, and you distill it to really concrete summaries that are accurate and specific and actionable so that when you go into committee, you know what you're talking about. And it turns out that this process of taking unstructured data and collating it and distilling it and finding insights in it, things that are unique or noteworthy or specific and doing so accurately, as recently as five years ago was completely beyond the capability of anything that we would think of as software. But it's exactly the kind of work that large language models that AI are going to excel at doing. I chose my verb tense there carefully. Going to. There's a few things today that AI is genuinely good at. I think you could count them on one hand. There's going to be a huge array of things that AI will someday be good at.
What's interesting about our work is that I think the work that all of you do is in that next band of things it's going to be good at next, pretty soon, and that's why it's exciting to be here as we walk that journey together. And look, you already know about this. The state of the industry report will be coming out soon, as Christina said. And what we saw is that already an overwhelming majority of you are at least piloting or experimenting with AI in some capacity. I love that. You should be. Just know that, even as you do it, the thing that AI is most notorious for is hallucinating. By all means, use it to distill, to save time, to condense, but please keep a human in the loop. If they're your notes, you're fine. You can reread them. You'll know whether they got it right or not. But we're a long way from trusting these tools to do all the work for us.
And look, you know this too. One of the questions we asked in the SOTI report is, what do you want to know about? What should we learn about? AI was not a question last year. This year, it was the number one topic. That's the pace of change that we're in right now. And lastly, do you have concerns about AI? And boy, do you? And you should. Data privacy. Efficacy. Accuracy. Transparency. There's so many aspects to this technology. It's a power tool, but a chainsaw is a power tool as well. You got to be really careful in how you use it.
What I want to sort of have us think about is, yes, we're doing this work today. Yes, we have schools. Yes, we have roles in them, but I actually think the really interesting questions for us to work through over the next 10 years when our second-graders are crossing their stage and getting their diplomas is, what does it actually mean to be educated? My first job at Elani, I was an English teacher. I don't think I said that. My job was to teach the five-paragraph essay. I knew AI was going to destroy millions of jobs, but I didn't think that one was going to be the first on the list. What does it mean when every student can do most of their homework with a click? How do we teach in that environment? Everything is starting to change. That also means, what will it mean to be prepared for adulthood?
We used to have a pretty simple compact with kids. Go to a good school. Work hard. Get good grades. Go to a good college. You'll get a good job. You'll have a good life. Now, a lot of those handoff points are getting tricky. It's much harder to predict which kids will get into which colleges. It's even harder to predict the degree to which what they're studying or the degrees that they get will translate into professional success. AI is coming for jobs. And more often than not, it's coming for first good jobs. The kinds of work that, honestly, I was doing a little bit of at Elani. I wasn't hired because they needed an English teacher who had never taught before. I was hired because we had a bunch of amazing teachers who were a few years away from retirement living in Hawaii, and they wanted a bunch of youngins to do everything else. There's a lot of first good jobs that involve all that everything else, and AI is coming for a lot of those jobs.
The good news is that I do think hope is in sight. As I said before, I'm a big believer in this idea of skills beyond just academic skills. I said beyond, not instead of. And at one of the organizations that I worked with the most at MTC was this organization called America Succeeds. And they had done amazing work in looking and processing at 80 million job descriptions. Instead of doing an ivory tower exercise, what should kids know? What should we teach them? They said, what do employers want? And the big insight is that they did not want technical skills. Overwhelmingly, employers said, "The technical skills unique to us, whether it's Amazon or McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or Walmart, we can teach them those skills. They're pretty specific. We don't expect a kid to come in with a degree and have those, but they have to have some of these things. They have to have interpersonal skills. They have to have empathy. Active listening. Creativity. We don't have time to teach them that."
And that big insight is starting to fuel now in the public sector an amazing uptake in extended transcripts and portraits of a graduate and a focus on competencies. Not to replace academic work. Academic work is essential. But because, in particular, public districts, of whom I've worked with many, and states ... They have a different problem space than we do. There are schools in metropolitan areas where tens of thousands, if not millions, of kids are struggling due to years of systemic inequity. Things like employability. Things like literacy. They're really essential. They're hard. And it's forcing those schools to innovate at a pace that is 10 times faster than we are innovating in our space, precisely because they know with extreme clarity and awareness that what they're doing is not working.
In many ways, they are ahead of us in thinking about best practices and pedagogy and assessment. The good news is that, like all educators, they're extremely collaborative. And we can learn from them. They can learn from us. And together, the work that they're doing and the technology can inform the work that we're going to do together at E3n to support you.
Now, what I want to do is just talk and paint you a little bit of a picture of the future. The near future. And one of the things, I had a chance to talk to several groups yesterday, and while I said different things in different rooms, the one thing I'm sure I kept saying was, "This year might, to you, look a little bit quiet because we're going to be laser-focused on all of the essential stuff we have to do inside the house."
When I talk to the team at E3n, one of the things I tell them is that, for me, the best places I've ever worked have been places where I was expected to do my best work. And I was surrounded by people who took that really seriously, and we pushed one another. We didn't settle for mid-level work. And they were great places to work because, even though they were demanding, they were also really rewarding. We knew that if we had stayed there long enough, we would grow. And we didn't have to leave to get new opportunities because every year we were learning new things. We were becoming more and more employable.
But that compact is a two-way street. If you're going to ask people to do their best work every day, you have to empower them and give them tools and infrastructure to do that work. And I think one of the challenges about this merger process is that it's taken a really, really long time for us to get legal approval. Far longer than anybody thought or wanted. For the record, we just got it in August 28th. It was three weeks ago. We're allowed to move now. We're allowed to go forward full speed.
But quite sensibly, both organizations have said, "You know what? That big project, that big decision, that big initiative ... Let's wait until the merger. Let's not do that now." And what at first started to look like a list now looks a little bit more like a backlog. My commitment to the team is that we're going to work through that backlog. We're going to do it all together. The great news is that because both organizations are strong, we have the resources and the team and the skills to do this. For about a year, we'll be a little quiet. Things may look like business as usual.
But when we come out the other end of that, what we're going to be able to do is start showing you results. Research for the state of the industry that actually represents the whole industry. 1,900 schools. We're going to have an approach to an admissions path for families that is unified and easy. If I had one point earlier, it's that every family right now to us is precious. We can't afford to lose any of them to friction or challenge or have them leak out of our funnel because we didn't design the process and systems well. Our commitment is that we're going to take the time to do that right. And then when we come out the other end, and we're doing the work we do today better, then we're going to be able to turn ahead to the future and figure out what's next and add new things, products, and services.
Some of them are starting right now. We have a pilot underway with ERB with an organization called Wild Zebra. Wild Zebra is an AI tutor, but what differentiates it a lot from other AI tutors is that we've given it access to really critical information about ERB tests and assessments. It can be not just a tutor but a specific tutor for a specific child in response to their test results. We are piloting that this year. That's the power of partnership. Even as we work internally, we have other organizations that could do things in parallel. If you want to be part of that pilot, by the way, let us know. We have about 30 slots. We might have a waiting list.
But this is the stuff that we're going to be doing in the future, thinking how we use advanced technologies and additional services to serve not just you, enrollment management leaders in this room, but also your academic counterparts. We're going to bring everybody together and work and grow to serve you.
I am so excited to be here. I hope that was abundantly clear. On behalf of the whole team, I just want to say thank you so much for being here and giving us your time. I hope you have a fantastic conference. I hope you come up and say hello. I hope that question that I didn't answer you come up and ask me. I'm happy to take all of them. And on Friday, I'm doing a session where if you really want to get nitty-gritty about merger mechanics and what's next and what we're doing with IC and SSAT, I'll be answering all of those, and we'll be writing them down and sharing them out with you later. Thank you so much, everybody. I'm so glad to be here.
