The Crisis in Education Podcast - Predictive AI for Increasing Graduation Rates and Leveling the Playing Field for Low Income, Underrepresented Minorities, and First Generation Students in Higher Ed

Predictive AI for Increasing Graduation Rates and Leveling the Playing Field for Low Income, Underrepresented Minorities, and First Generation Students in Higher Ed

04/06/23 • 41 min

There are a lot of students and families who spend a lot of time, money, and effort aimed at being accepted into the college of their dreams. But as CEO and founder of Troove, David Hurwitt, reminds us in this episode, it's not about getting into college. It's about getting out as the graduation rates are too often dismal, especially for minorities.
In this episode, David discusses using predictive AI to gather, mine, and decode experience data from schools and align it with the values, abilities, and priorities of prospective students. His platform, Troove, potentially revolutionary, is FREE to students who are searching for the right University. It only takes 10 minutes. Why not give it a shot?

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Improving Education through Policy Change with Dr. Darleen Opfer

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Policies provide guidelines for the operation of a particular system, especially one that has a hierarchical structure. Education, perhaps the most important system in our nation, is no different. Good policy guides decision making. No policy makes decision-making unreliable and sporadic. And bad policies do way more harm than good. And policy is just the start. What happens after the policy is in place is what is the most important. In this episode, Dr. Darleen Opfer discusses the importance of policies and provides perspective on how stakeholders can improve them.
About Dr. Opfer
Darleen began her career as a special education teacher in Florida and then Virginia. After earning her Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Virginia, she became a professor of education policy. She served in that role at Georgia State University, Ohio State University, and the University of Cambridge. Throughout her career, her focus has been on using evidence to improve schools for low-income and minority students.
In 2011 she joined RAND as Director of RAND Education. In October 2018 she was promoted to Vice President and became Director of the RAND Education and Labor Research Division; she also holds the Distinguished Chair in Education Policy. As the leader of RAND Education and Labor's staff of more than 200 experts from a wide range of disciplines, she is responsible for all aspects of divisional management including business development, financial and strategic planning, staff development, ensuring quality standards, and dissemination of research findings.

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Socratic Questioning and the Habit of Thought with TedX Speaker Michael Strong

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Michael is the most experienced developer of innovative educational programs in the US and the Founder of The Socratic Experience, an online school based on Socratic dialogue that emphasizes personalized and purpose-driven education for students in grades 3-12.

His remarkable career in education spans over three decades, and includes creating many high-performance school programs that promote critical thinking, creativity, and entrepreneurship in students across the country.

Some of Michael's notable projects include a public school program in which minority female students gained four years' worth of critical thinking gains in four months (on the Watson-Glaser) and Moreno Valley High School, a Paideia charter high school, which was ranked the 36th-best US public high school by Newsweek.

He also created The Winston Academy, where middle school students passed Advanced Placement (AP) exams, making it the most academically advanced school in the US at the time. Thousands of his students have been admitted to top universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, and many other post-secondary institutions.

Michael's impact on education extends beyond the classroom, as he is also the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice and Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems, which includes a foreword by John Mackey, the Co-Founder and former CEO of Whole Foods Market, with whom he has collaborated on initiatives related to conscious capitalism and entrepreneurship.

He has spoken at Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and dozens of other universities, and his work has been featured in academic journals (The Journal of Business Ethics, Economic Affairs, Critical Review, etc.), specialty publications (Microfinance Insights, Policy Innovations, Carnegie Ethics, etc.), and popular media (The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Huffington Post, RealClearPolitics, Barron's, etc.).