Rubén Harris and Timur Meyster chatted with our friend Kermit Cook, CEO of Penn Foster, about reinventing a 135-year-old distance learning company for the AI era. Penn Foster was founded in 1890 to teach coal miners in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Today it graduates 93,000+ learners a year and is on a path to graduate 150,000 by 2029. We get into deploying AI digital workers to support working adults at $1,500 high school tuition, why Penn Foster is the third-largest "school district" in the country, the unusual journey from Dartmouth engineering to KKR to Penn Foster CEO, how to stop treating AI as a tech project and start driving real outcomes on enrollment, retention, and ROI, and what it actually takes to modernize an institution that has served learners through every major technological shift since the telegraph. ---------------------------------------------- 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 1:20 Intro: From the Light Bulb to Penn Foster 4:33 What Is Penn Foster? Mission, Scale & a $1,500 Education 12:19 How Learners Enroll & Why Learning Is Hard 16:38 From Reactive to Proactive: The Fear of AI Replacing Jobs 21:01 The Ugly Pots: First Experiment, 70% Cost Cut & 30X ROI 29:30 Why Higher Ed Is Broken: The Academic Calendar & ROI Problem 40:48 Kermit's Journey: A Family of Educators & Taking the Fork 48:32 Why AI Tutors Alone Don't Work 53:55 Rapid Fire: Habits, Displaced Workers & Gen Z on the Phone 1:02:35 Closing: Why AI Misses the Students Who Need Help Most OutRival, Inc.: YC Winter 2019: OutRival Presents - The New Normal
