Joe Fuller: It's almost universally accepted that education is essential for upward mobility. But paradoxically, half of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed nationwide, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. In today's economy, students need more than just in-demand technical skills. They need networks of professional and social connections to succeed and to develop the professional skills required for them to succeed in their workplaces. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I'm your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. I'm joined today by Kalani Leifer founder and CEO of COOP, a non-profit whose program combats underemployment through a combination of digital skills training and the cultivation of peer connections. However, they go beyond just building their candidates' technical skills. They also work to build a peer-to-peer network, linking current enrollees with COOP alumni to create the type of social assets that are so essential to professional success. Kalani, thanks for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Kalani Leifer: Joe, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.

Fuller: Kalani, there've been a lot of social entrepreneurs and efforts that have tried to introduce tech education and learning to all sorts of communities that have historically not had the opportunities to get on career paths to be in that sector. Tell us a little bit about your thinking in founding COOP, and what's different about it.

Leifer: I grew up in California. My family's from Switzerland, though, and I've spent some of my childhood and adulthood there and really came to understand the Swiss apprenticeship system. I graduated from college in 2008 and was fortunate, unlike many of my peers, to have a job offer, to be a high school history teacher at a small public school in the Bronx. I fell in love with a group of students and I promised them if they worked hard and beat the odds and earned a bachelor's degree, that would mean something, that it would be enough to, nothing fancy, but to have a middle-class career and have the American dream. I think that's effectively a social contract that we have in our country: go to college, earn a bachelor's degree, and you at least have a shot at a meaningful career. Though I still believe deeply in higher education, especially public higher education, I have come to conclude in the 12 years since making that promise that it's a hollow promise or a broken promise, and that for so many young folks in America, and not so young folks, who earn a bachelor's degree, they're never going to get the huge bonus of higher education—even though they are the ones who need it most and have the most riding on that promise, will never enter a career that required a bachelor's degree. And they'll remain underemployed in service jobs and restaurant jobs. And there's nothing wrong with those jobs, but it's certainly not why they went to college. In 2014, I moved back to New York and began COOP in an incredibly modest, humble way.

Fuller: Well, certainly Kalani, in our research here at Harvard Business School, we've seen that the historical promise associated with a college degree, that it almost ineluctably led to individual economic success, has been wearing thin for a long time. And it's a function of everything from the difference between starting a program and finishing a program, and what you study, but also actually where you live and where you go to school, that there's a real uneven distribution of attractive economic outcomes based on where you attended college. You introduced this notion that you realized for your students that maybe that implicit promise wasn't going to be honored. How did that inform what you did with COOP and how is COOP designed to make a new promise that's a durable one?

Leifer: To me, a lot of this whole conversation is framed in the skills gap narrative, this idea that, “okay, if young folks are graduating and they're not getting good economic outcomes, it must be because they have the wrong skills.” In Switzerland, almost two thirds of young folks go through a formal apprenticeship system. They're going through this long and challenging journey together. And when they finish the apprenticeship, sure, they have a lot of the right skills. But I think much more importantly, they have these casual, warm connections that lead to upwardly mobile careers. And so, I think in the U.S., when we look at the bachelor's degree, we're completely focused on “is the college doing the right thing, is the university system doing the right thing, are they teaching the right skills?” I think the most important thing we did at COOP was begin on the assumption that our young folks aren't broken. And, sure, there's more skills that they could learn, but everyone has more skills they can learn. I think much more of the job market than we like to admit is driven by casual peer-to-peer relationships. And that's what some colleges really specialize in and they're just pressure cookers of social capital. And I think that's why their graduates do so well economically. And so, where COOP really tries to come in is at the very end of college, whether you're graduating from CUNY or San Francisco State, or CSU Dominguez Hills in L.A., and it probably took you more than four years to graduate. Maybe you transferred from a community college. Maybe you commuted the whole time and you're not graduating with dozens of friends who are in the same boat. Where COOP really tries to connect is right around graduation—maybe a year after—is bringing young folks together and connecting them to each other so they don't have to go through this experience of underemployment alone.

Fuller: Well, I can imagine, Kalani, that there'd be several different ways being in a cohort with similarly situated people with similar backgrounds, similar ethnicity, would be helpful—everything from just the moral support to get through a program where there's hard learning to do—but to seeing that other people like me can be successful doing this, to moral support. When you talked about kind of the traditional path through university and talked about the social assets, those social assets link to people with some economic power—relationships that would lead you to be introduced to somebody that had a job to offer. How does that play out with your cohort, because given the population you're serving, I wouldn't have thought those were type of assets they brought to your network.

Leifer: You can create new social capital. Society looks at young folks who are not fully employed as if they're somehow broken or empty vessels that need to be filled with someone else's social capital. And my absolute favorite thing at COOP is that we bring 16 young folks together [with] four captains, as sort of near-peer coaches—all alumni who are working in industry. And they spend 200 hours together over four months. I think when we look at the labor market, we think of it as some top-down thing planned out by CEOs, and maybe at meetings with college presidents. But it's actually really bottom-up, and it's a bunch of young recruiters and hiring managers with big ambitious quotas they have to fill, and they're running around their company, asking their colleagues, who are also young professionals, maybe just one or two years into their careers, “who do you know, who do you trust, who can we interview?” And so, I think something special about when COOP operates, right at the end of formal education and the beginning of careers, at this tipping point where you go from being quite isolated and feeling quite powerless, to the moment you have a full-time job and you're on the inside. You are actually the source of immense economic power and you can swing a $50,000 job in someone's direction. And that is the power that runs COOP.

Fuller: I think just as we have a kind of stylized narrative in our head about how one makes it in America. You work hard to school, you get into competitive university, you graduate on time. That describes a small minority of today's 18- to 25 year-olds. But we also have a stylized impression of where jobs come from, as you were just saying, and how networks work. So, your alumni are both involved in teaching the next cohorts, but also in hiring them. What are they being taught?

Leifer: We have three program pillars: head, heart, and hustle. Head is what most people would call hard skills. Our first career track was digital marketing. We also do data analytics and tech sales now, but in this time is when we're teaching essentially digital skills. The most important, I would say, in all three of those tracks, and probably any track we ever do, will be Excel.

Fuller: I was just going to say, there's no doubt about that. If you look at job postings data and who actually fills the job, there's a direct correlation between, specifically, competency in Excel—but broad competency in Microsoft Office—to people getting entry-level positions in companies. And very often, job applicants don't know that and don't feature it, or don't even work in a program like yours, or get online and find some free courses to bolster those skills so they can make that claim and pass an aptitude test in the recruiting process.

Leifer: We teach a few different tools and we're not spending more than 10, 20 hours on any given tool. That's not enough to reach mastery but it is enough to build a schema to kind of understand the right words, to know what a pivot table is, to know what a keyword is. That's a good segue to heart and hustle. We have 50 hours focused on heart. A lot of days, you'll walk in, we'll have a social worker there. It'll feel like group therapy. Hustle is the last 50 hours, and that's all about getting a job. So, great resume, great cover letter, great email etiquette, awesome LinkedIn profile, and then a ton of interview prep. We don't do job placements. We tell our people on the first day of the program, COOP is a multiplier of the energy and time and love you invest in this thing and anything times zero is zero. So we're not going to be there with them in the final interview. We're going to give them the confidence and the skills, and most importantly, I think, the connection to get that interview, but then they're going to have to earn the job.

Fuller: They've shown, obviously, a lot of persistence and self-efficacy. They've a little older, obviously, than someone probably coming directly into the workforce out of a high school experience or even a technical degree. So, what are the demographics of a COOP cohort? Are they mostly students of color from lower economic status like you taught when you were a teacher in New York?

Leifer: As we've grown to San Francisco and L.A. we've had to really come to understand how do we serve the local community? So, COOP, there's two things we're looking for. You are underemployed, which means you have earned a bachelor's degree, you're working in a job that doesn't require a bachelor's degree—so typically a retail or a restaurant or logistics job, maybe driving Lyft or Uber. And, finally, that you're earning less than a living wage. So, in New York, that's about 33K for a single adult, California or in the Bay, at least, it's about 39K. That's what we're looking for on the underemployed side, and of course that can include unemployed. And then on the other side is underrepresented, and there's really three identities that are overlapping—of course, as identities often are—that we think are underrepresented in upwardly-mobile careers, good solid middle-class careers, especially in California and in New York, where these jobs are plentiful. And that's that you're the first in your family to graduate from college. Second, that you grew up in a low-income household—we'll use Pell Grants as a signal for that. And finally, that you're from a historically marginalized community—so, Black, LatinX, and Indigenous. They're almost all first-generation college graduates and they're almost all graduates of the City University of New York—actually, where I earned my Master's in education, and an institution with a quarter-million undergraduates. We're so proud to work with CUNY. Then, in the Bay and in L.A., most of our graduates are from Cal State Universities. And so, typically they're sort of three months to three years beyond graduations. So they are out of school. Many of them have sort of lost their link to their alma mater, maybe never even had that strong of a link. Maybe they went to a few different schools and commuted, and almost all of them worked during college. One of the most important things about COOP is when we do it. We do it during when underemployment is happening. And we know that underemployment is like quicksand and it's harder and harder to get out with each passing year. Your formal education is over and you're in this big, messy labor market, and you submit hundreds of applications and you're not hearing back from anyone. That's when the rubber hits the road.

Fuller: So, tell us a little bit about the results. This seems like, to borrow a line from popular culture, a bit of a pay it forward model—that you create a qualified candidate, you do that with working learners who are a huge category of people in the education system and the higher education system in the United States. They get a position, they pay it forward by nurturing COOP participants in the course, and then looking for employment options. So the whole thing relies on your alums getting in those positions. How are you doing against that standard?

Leifer: As I said, we started in 2014 with one cohort that fall, just 12 students. This fall, we will have almost 1,800 alumni. Let me share pre-pandemic: we were reaching 80 percent full employment within six- to nine months—so, from program completion to full employment of those cohorts.

Fuller: Kalani, that's employment in field of study—employment that puts their skills to work, the skills they learned in COOP to work?

Leifer: Yeah, absolutely. I'd say, Joe, that's sort of 90-, 95 percent going very narrowly—if we taught digital marketing, kind of going into that track. We've had a handful of people who say, "I want to become a teacher," so we don't need people to go into exactly what we want them to. We want them to build careers, but each of those jobs pays at least 40K. Our average first-year is about 50K now, and they're jobs that require a degree.

Fuller: Well, certainly we've got research that supports a couple of your points, Kalani. One is that increasing number of jobs require a college degree, and the computer systems—the applicant tracking systems by which candidates are evaluated and sorted—use that as an absolute kind of a one-zero variable. You continue on in the process being considered to hire or not, literally based on does your resume or does your application say BS or BA, or “we have a degree.” On the Covid front, is it affecting your ability to engage your alums? Is it affecting your ability to recruit incoming students, or it's just simply that that fewer companies are hiring?

Leifer: My team, heroically, like a lot of people were forced to do, right, figure it out, on that fateful day in March, over the course of really 36 hours, how to switch from doing everything in person, doing everything virtually. And then the recruiting team had to figure out how to do that, our alumni team, our partnerships team. I'll say partners are more engaged than ever, in part because is it's easier. It's easier to take an hour out of your day and jump into a Zoom link. We feel deep engagement from them. Our alumni are super engaged, as always. They run this thing. The challenge is going to be jobs. That's what it comes down to. COOP, as I shared, we don't create new jobs out of thin air and they're not fake jobs. These are actual jobs on the labor market. And so, what gives me hope is that, at some point, these companies will start hiring again, hopefully at a real clip. And my suspicion is that relationships—informal, casual relationships—are going to matter more than ever because they're going to be fewer good jobs to go around. And as you know, every year, another two million people earn a bachelor's degree. And so, there's gonna be more people than ever, including some with real privilege, who I think were pretty well taken care of before the pandemic, who now are going to be in that line as well. And so I think these connections to people who are already on the inside matters more than ever.

Fuller: Well, certainly, history suggests that when the hiring spigot just begins to get turned on, those early stages of recovery, that social assets and networks are particularly important because there is a queue of applicants. There's an over-supply of people who might apply for a job. But I think one thing that can be hoped for given what you're teaching in your different programs, is that Covid is accelerating digitalization and a very high rate, and so your graduates who have backgrounds in things like digital marketing or project management are going to be, I think, entering into an eventually pretty buoyant market, and that the consequences for people that both don't have degrees and don't have these types of skills or assets are going to be pretty dire.

Leifer: I think the divide between a good job and a not good job is just getting wider and wider. I think you're right that the bachelor's degree is this great sorting mechanism. And by great, I mean, powerful, not good. But the reality is there are so many people, even with a bachelor's degree, who are sorted out at the very next sort of filter point, which is, “do you know someone on the inside who has a job that that can put your resume to the front of the line?” I think what we've struck upon at COOP, and I didn't anticipate, is that nepotism is how the workforce operates. It's certainly how my career has unfolded, now that I have the perspective to understand, and actually that's not something we can change. I think that's human nature. I think people want to do favors for each other. The problem is when you combine nepotism with really deep, profound school segregation, residential segregation. It's those two forces together that mean when the recruiter goes to her team and asks, “who do you know, who do you trust,” they're going to energetically recommend people they know and trust who look exactly like themselves. I think that multiplied a hundred million times over—that's how the professional labor market operates.

Fuller: Kalani, you at COOP are building on the work of City University of New York, CUNY, of the Cal State system. So you're supplementing what your students learned and how they benefited from those programs, but nonetheless, you're supplementing what they did. If you were to give those chancellors or those campus presidents a couple of ideas about what more they could be doing while those students are enrolled to advance them closer to achieving that type of economic independence and viable job that's going to sustain household formation, what would you say?

Leifer: This is the best question and the hardest question, in part because the easiest answer for me is, “let's find a way to work together, let's partner,” and I mean that. For me, it would really be to focus on peer-to-peer relationships rather than on skills. I actually think it helps not to assume that higher ed is broken. I think for generations to come, we are bought into the bachelor's degree. I think we should teach a lot more Excel. I think that would be fantastic, but that's a small technical fix. My favorite moment in COOP is sort of a week in, students are sitting around a table, or now they're around the Zoom squares, and they're sort of slowly realizing one by one, "Oh, shoot, I'm, I'm not broken. I'm not the problem here," because they spent the last year submitting hundreds of applications and never hearing back. They see these ambitious, smart, so-much-to-offer peers around the table and it sort of dawns on them that they're not broken. So I would sort of take the same approach to my students and to my faculty and to my staff and assume maybe we're pretty much there, and what we really need to do is mobilize our young folks through peer-to-peer connections, so that as they transition from college to career, that they're doing so together.

Fuller: We know a couple of things. One is that competence is very often expression of confidence and if you've built skills in a setting where you've gained confidence that you know what you're doing, but also you have the confidence to ask a question, to get help, to acknowledge that something's hard for you and you see it's hard for other people as well, and you've got some role models—in this case, it's your alums—that can be a great boost to confidence. The other thing is something that I think is profoundly important in what you said. Research really is beginning to indicate that we've gone off the deep end a little bit on hard skills, that the notion that we if just train people to do specific tasks, they're going to be work-ready and successes when, certainly, the path-breaking research by my colleague and friend here at Harvard, David Deming, indicates that the jobs that are growing as a percentage of the workforce and are disproportionally growing in share of total compensation, are jobs that require social skills—the ability to interact with others, to enter a team that's unfamiliar to you, be productive, to negotiate with a stranger who might be a customer complaining about something, or to be able to communicate in real time in written or oral fashion, to a supervisor or to a colleague or to customer or supplier, something that happened and what you need to do them to do to help you. Those are not things that are learned doing problem sets. They're learned in your community, but they're also learned on the job, so the type of experience you're giving your students makes a lot of sense to me and certainly is consistent with our research that you have to build beyond those hard skills and instill that confidence and those higher-level social skills in order to get in the workplace so you can build even further on those foundations. So Kalani, tell me, where do you see COOP going?

Leifer: So, as I shared, we're at about 1,800 alumni this fall—so closing in on 2000—and our big vision for COOP, at least as far as I can wrap my brain around it right now is to reach 10,000 at the end of our first decade, which will be at the end of 2024. But I really want to stress that that growth is only possible because when we did that jump from one to three cohorts—so, 12 to 36 students—that was only possible because of our cohort captains—those are alumni who serve as coaches. We are able to grow now because we spent our first five, six years growing gradually and building up an alumni community that is big enough and deep enough to be the source of all of our coaching, so much of our connection to the labor market, the people who help us revise our curriculum every six months. We need about 10 percent of our alumni base to be activated as cohort captains, as recruiting specialists, as alumni specialists. We have a bunch of part-time roles that, everything happens in the evening, but if we have 10 percent of our people activated, that's what allows us to almost double every year. When I started COOP, I had no idea that we would be alumni-led, because we didn't have any alumni, by definition. Every important innovation we've made has been inspired by them, but also then executed by them.

Fuller: Well, it's going to be fascinating, Kalani, to see how your hypothesis and the momentum you’ve built around it unfolds in subsequent years, because it's clear that this kind of pay it forward model, relying on alumni, only gets stronger with every cohort you graduate. Kalani Leifer, founder of COOP, thanks for joining us on the Managing the Future Work podcast.

Leifer: Hey, Joe, this was a real honor. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you and your team. Thanks so much.

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