Ep 1: Why College Isn’t the Only Option: How Victoria Chen’s BridgeYear Transforms Career Pathways

Nicole Jarbo:
When Victoria Chen was a high school biology teacher, she taught a student who graduated at the top of his class.

Victoria Chen:
And he actually got a full ride to a four-year school here in Houston because he was valedictorian.

Nicole Jarbo:
But because of family issues after graduating, he wasn't able to take that scholarship.

Victoria Chen:
And what I found out later was that he ended up picking up a job as a cashier at Walgreens.

Student:
That's 39.50. Credit or cash. Do you need bags?

Nicole Jarbo:
Victoria saw firsthand that something in the education system was broken.

Victoria Chen:
Biology was great. You can connect a lot of life things to biology. But it's really hard to care about mitochondria when you're worried that your dad just lost his job and he was the primary breadwinner, right?

Nicole Jarbo:
Victoria created BridgeYear. A nonprofit in Houston that focuses on pathways after high school that don't require a four-year degree.

Victoria Chen:
If the whole purpose of education is to set a young person up for economic mobility, then we have to show them the various pathways they can take to get there. And the four-year degree is one way, but it's definitely not the only way.

Nicole Jarbo:
Hey, I'm your host Nicole Jarbo, and this is Pitch Playground from 4.0. This season, we'll hear 10 ideas from entrepreneurs re-imagining the future of learning. And we'll put them in the hot seat with funders who help them strengthen their pitch. This week, Victoria's idea gets vetted by Molly O'Donnell from New Profit. They support and invest in social entrepreneurs like Victoria.

Molly O'Donnell:
As I think about you all continuing to fundraise, I'd say making sure you're really holding your widespread growth aspiration.

Nicole Jarbo:
At the end of the season, you, yes you, will cast your vote and one of these ideas will get 50 K. Let's start off by getting to know Victoria Chen, our founder, and how her early experiences shaped the pitch she's sharing today. Her story starts outside of Boston.

Victoria Chen:
I grew up in a very traditional Taiwanese-American immigrant family where education was pounded down my throat every dinner and breakfast and lunch or whatever. And my parents really wanted me to be a doctor, or some medical professional. I did the things. I went to college. And I took my very first neuroscience class in college where we got to dissect rats, and I saw the needles and I saw the scalpels and fainted. And that's when I realized the medical profession was not going to be for me.

Nicole Jarbo:
After college, Victoria did Teach for America and moved to Houston. She started teaching high school biology.

Victoria Chen:
Biology was great. You can connect a lot of life things to biology, and yet it still felt so separate from the day-to-day realities my students were experiencing, right? It's really hard to care about mitochondria when you're worried that your dad just lost his job and he was the primary breadwinner and your family is looking to you to start picking up the tab on rent or some expenses. So those were the real realities that I think a lot of my students were facing, and it got me really thinking and questioning about the role of education in economic mobility. If the whole purpose of our public education system is to set young people up for a better life, then is me teaching biology really going to help them with that?

Nicole Jarbo:
After teaching biology for a few years, she started working as a college and career counselor.

Victoria Chen:
So working at the same high school I taught at, but in a different capacity. So I had the really cool opportunity where I had students I knew when they were freshmen now as seniors, and these were students I thought I had a really good relationship with. They sat in the front row of my class. They always joked around with me. They would come and hang out at lunch. And I distinctly remember one of these students literally seeing me in the hallway when I was their counselor, seeing me, not even saying hi and turning around and walking away. I was literally chasing him down the hallway, like, "Christian, hey, hey, let's chat. I haven't seen you all year." He's like, "Miss, miss, I don't want to go to college."

Student:
I don't want to college. Stop pounding me on this.

Nicole Jarbo:
What did that feel like?

Victoria Chen:
I just had this immense sense of guilt. It just felt like we missed the boat on what students and families were telling us.

Nicole Jarbo:
Yeah. And that probably stung too to have a 16 year old turn their back on you in the hallway.

Victoria Chen:
Yeah.

Nicole Jarbo:
Nightmare. Nightmare fuel. This really brings up, for me, the idea of agency. I've always thought that agency was critical to making sure that students could learn and be on their own path to reaching their dreams. And things could be as small as helping people make a decision, offering two choices for students. Do you want to turn your homework in early, or do you want to turn it in late? And letting people really decide what path they wanted to choose. And I think as a teacher you get a ton of opportunities to do that, but they're so critical and can't be overlooked because those are the exact same type of skills, traits, talents that you need to thrive as an adult. I think that's really what the purpose of school should be. Are we giving people an opportunity to practice the skills that they need to make their life theirs? Victoria wishes she could have helped students more back when she was a teacher. One example was a student in her biology class who graduated top of his class.

Victoria Chen:
And he actually got a full ride to a four-year school here in Houston because he was valedictorian. He had some family issues right after graduating and ended up not taking advantage of that scholarship. And what I found out later was that he ended up picking up a job as a cashier at Walgreens. And to me that was yet another missed opportunity where if he had known that there were other pathways, other things he could do that was shorter time commitments, maybe he could have been a farm tech at Walgreens. Maybe he could have done something else other than a retail job that probably didn't have much career ladder opportunity moving forward.

Nicole Jarbo:
But even if Victoria wanted to explore an alternative path for one of her students, she was up against the system itself.

Victoria Chen:
My district mandate was to make sure every kid applied to at least three four-year schools. So when you think about student choice. Empowering students to make decisions for their own future and yet they are bound to some arbitrary three college goal that is exactly the opposite of what they want, of course they're going to run away from me as their college counselor.

Nicole Jarbo:
The system is just one problem. Often educators are also up against themselves.

Victoria Chen:
I think we as educators tended, and I say tended because I think the narrative has changed. I think we had this view of a one path to success because a lot of us took that path. To become a teacher, to become a guidance counselor, you did have to go to college, you did have to get a bachelor's degree. A lot of us had to get master's degrees. And we thought that that was the way to get into the professional workforce. Very few educators actually know what it means to go to a community college or a trade school and have that experience to add to the wealth of opportunities students have.

Nicole Jarbo:
But Victoria started thinking, what if things were different and what if I could help change things for the better?

Victoria Chen:
If the whole purpose of education is to set a young person up for economic mobility, then we have to show them the various pathways they can take to get there. And the four year degree is one way, but it's definitely not the only way. So that's really where the initial idea for BridgeYear came to be.

Nicole Jarbo:
Let's talk about BridgeYear. So just share sort of high level the pitch here.

Victoria Chen:
So BridgeYear is the only nonprofit in Houston that focuses on pathways after high school that do not require a four year degree. They are pathways that lead to well-paying careers, that have career trajectories, have great benefits, and great pay. But again, do not require that long degree requirement or debt.

Nicole Jarbo:
What BridgeYear is most known for is their hands-on approach to career exploration. Their flagship program, it's called the Career Test Drive.

Victoria Chen:
Because you should never buy a car without test driving it. And you should never choose a career without giving it a try either.

Nicole Jarbo:
Picture this, you're a high school student who shows up to school one day. Rather than sauntering into social studies or English or biology, you head over to the gym.

Victoria Chen:
They walk in, they might put their stuff on their bleachers, but they'll see that their gym is completely transformed. So as they look around, each booth is a different in-demand career.

Nicole Jarbo:
Picture something sort of like a career fair. But you're not seeing people with pamphlets sitting behind desks, dividers separate a few different booths where various job-related equipment is set up. In each one you have realistic career-related activities for the students to participate in. So let's say you decide to try out the electrician booth.

Victoria Chen:
There are ladders. And there's hanging pendant lights that they have to uninstall and then reinstall using basics of electrical circuits.

Nicole Jarbo:
Or maybe you decide that's not really your thing. So you head over to the refinery operator booth.

Victoria Chen:
They have a makeshift refinery that they are looking at and writing up work order because there's a leak or a clog in their system.

Nicole Jarbo:
There's even an auto tech simulation. Now you might imagine that they'd be changing tires or doing oil changes. Wrong.

Victoria Chen:
We need to tell kids that being an auto technician is more than changing oil.

Nicole Jarbo:
Servicing the cars of today and tomorrow involves more programming than you might think.

Victoria Chen:
And so they're looking at the electrical wiring diagram of a car to figure out what has gone wrong in the car's electrical system. So the customer complaint here is that the backup sensor keeps going off even though I'm not hitting the trash can, I promise.

Nicole Jarbo:
They also recently did a surgical technologist simulation.

Victoria Chen:
They're actually setting up an operating room for an appendectomy or a tonsillectomy. They're learning the basics of sterility, setting up the room, learning what the basic tools. And that's what they are doing in the simulation because that's what they would be doing in the job.

Nicole Jarbo:
In all of these simulations, students are getting the opportunity to try out a day in the life of a career that doesn't require a four-year degree. I love the idea of trying something out and not just obsessively reading reviews or other things, but actually being able to feel and see yourself in something. As we think about kind of re-imagining the education to career experience for young people, what do you think people misunderstand or maybe get wrong about young people who don't want to take the four-year college prep?

Victoria Chen:
One, I think there's a misconception that just because they don't want to go to a four-year school is they don't have the academics. The valedictorian is a great example of there are plenty of our students who have the academics to go and for life circumstance reasons need to choose a different path. I think the second thing that people often get wrong is that students are ready to make these big decisions at the age of 18. Which sounds crazy when you say it out loud, but I think that's what society makes them believe they should, right? We say, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" They're 18. Their brains haven't formally formed completely yet. I think the best thing we can do for a young person is set them up for the next best step. It's not their final destination, and nor should we treat it like it. Right?

Nicole Jarbo:
Yeah. I know 45 year olds who don't know what they want to be when they grow up. It's a really good point. It's a lot of responsibility for a young person. How would you describe your sort of impact to date?

Victoria Chen:
We were founded in 2016. Since then we've worked with over, oof, I want to say the last number was 42,000 students primarily here in the Houston area.

Nicole Jarbo:
These are the voices of actual students who've gone through the career test drive program.

Student:
My name is A.B.

Student:
My name is Emily Mayorga.

Student:
My name is Eli.

Student:
[foreign language 00:13:40] Carlos Mauricio Arriaza.

Student:
My name is London Cooks.

Student:
Because I like working. I don't like sitting around, I like working with my hands instead.

Student:
I'd say the biggest takeaway was [inaudible 00:13:50]. That's the one thing that sticks to you compared to solving equations or problems.

Student:
And learning about how to take care of patients.

Student:
And during that event, I tried out being an electrician and surgical technician. And I chose to be an electrician and take the electrician program.

Nicole Jarbo:
There were things that this program could provide for students that they weren't getting elsewhere in their schools.

Victoria Chen:
If you were talking about education as a system, it's not set up to reward our students who are real hands-on learners.

Nicole Jarbo:
Yeah.

Victoria Chen:
Our traditional education system, you sit down, you read a book, you write notes, you write essays, you take tests. For all my students who that was not their thing, but labs were their thing, right? For all my students who could not for the life of them sit down and read a chapter from the textbook, of course they're going to get turned off. And of course they're not going to want to go to more traditional four-year education schooling. But what we're doing at Bridgeyear is we're doing these hands-on simulations. They're getting into trade programs where instead of reading about electrical circuits and the theory of electrical circuits, they're actually making their own and testing if it works. That is true to the job that they might be doing, and it just works better for some kids.

Nicole Jarbo:
Do you have a favorite story or just a breakthrough moment about BridgeYear's impact?

Victoria Chen:
I'll share one from this past summer. We had a student who had shared with us that she was kind of going through senior year just going through the motions. She wasn't really going to school that much. Sometimes skipping classes, right? School really wasn't for her. But thankfully she told us that she didn't skip school the day BridgeYear went and she got to do a career test drive fair. She had no idea what she wanted to do after high school, and she tried all of our healthcare simulations. She tried the surgical technologist one. She tried the phlebotomy one where she got to draw blood-

Nicole Jarbo:
For those of you who don't know what phlebotomy is, it's taking blood. And this is cool. BridgeYear actually has dummy arms that students can use as part of the career test drive program to practice how to insert the needle, how to pinch the skin correctly, all of the stuff that certified nursing assistants, or CNAs, have to do every day. This student had an opportunity to try that at the career test drive.

Victoria Chen:
And that's what sparked something in her of like, oh, I'm good with blood. I can do this. She enrolled in a program with us to get a CNA certification immediately after high school. She actually went back and told her boyfriend who had graduated two years ago and was working odd jobs to enroll with her, so both of them enrolled in the cohort. Both of them graduated. And both of them were employed within a couple weeks of getting their certification. She told this story at a recent fundraiser of ours. And she then also threw in, And my younger sister can't wait to be a BridgeYear student when she's a senior." And so to me that's the impact of she just happened to be in school one day. Thankfully, she was at school one day and two other people in her community got impacted because she was at school one day.

Nicole Jarbo:
Victoria's at a pivotal moment with BridgeYear because she's trying to do something that all founders struggle with, scale. To do that, she's using a tech platform that she launched in 2022. It's called morepathways.org.

Victoria Chen:
We know we can't reach every single student here in the Houston area, even though we reach close to 12,000 students every year. But the tech platform allows us to reach students, their families, their church members, their aunts, their teachers, whatever, to give them real information about vetted workforce programs in our area. So morepathways.org is where any Houstonian can go. They can search by zip code. They can search by program. And these are programs that BridgeYear endorses.

Nicole Jarbo:
The tool is still driven by some of those early experiences Victoria had as a college and career counselor where she felt like they just weren't doing enough for students.

Victoria Chen:
When I had students actually sit down with me and say, "Hey, I wanted to get into this career whatnot." I would Google search with them and we'd say, okay, plumber. Plumber training, plumber apprenticeship. And we would rely on good old Google to give us where we should apply to. And we all know the way Google works for vocational programs is that our proprietary for-profit predatory schools get top listings. And so it's no wonder why a lot of our students end up going to those really expensive schools.

Nicole Jarbo:
Students who wind up at these schools can end up in mountains of debt that they're unable to pull themselves out of.

Victoria Chen:
When our students are getting targeted by for-profit trade schools that are charging four times the amount of community college or other workforce programs, that is something that we need to stop so that they can better exercise their agency when they pursue these pathways. And that's what More Pathways helps them do.

Nicole Jarbo:
Tell me how you and your team would use that 50 K.

Victoria Chen:
I think morepathways.org is still on the cutting edge and new for us, right? It's still the only resource of its kind here in our area that allows people to find vetted and trusted workforce programs, and yet it's still in its infancy. One thing that we would love to do is build in an AI chatbot. Build in some more capabilities that really make it user-friendly, that allows students to almost engage with it on its own and take on its life of its own.

Nicole Jarbo:
Yes. Amazing. I'm getting chills, I love this. Morepathways.org is essentially the next iteration of the work that Victoria is doing. Now, Victoria is going to get a chance to pitch her idea to Molly O'Donnell. Molly is a managing partner at New Profit, a national venture philanthropy firm. That means they're an organization that invests in social entrepreneurs. They're focused on making meaningful change across education, economic mobility, and democracy.

Molly O'Donnell:
We select organizations from across the country in those three issue areas. Looking at their theories of change, their impact model, their economic model, their strategy, the strength of their leadership and boards. And then once they're working with us, we support them in actually strengthening all of those things, strengthening their capabilities to be high-impact sustainable organizations.

Nicole Jarbo:
Molly brings some amazing prior experience into her role at New Profit.

Molly O'Donnell:
I came to this work from a mix of different backgrounds as a youth worker for a number of years, and then worked in consulting, and briefly for Senator Kennedy on Capitol Hill. So mix of backgrounds and have been working on selecting and supporting amazing organizations for the last handful of years.

Nicole Jarbo:
She's also personally passionate about education innovation.

Molly O'Donnell:
I'm one of those kids who loved school. My mom was an educator. Went into working in education first in AmeriCorps after Hurricane Katrina. Really saw ways in which schools, but more broadly systems of governance, really failed young people and their families. And kind of fell in love with a set of questions around how could systems better support young people to live lives of their choosing? And also this question of how could nonprofits be better and more effective?

Nicole Jarbo:
We paired Victoria up with Molly for a session to learn how to refine her pitch. Victoria's faced with a challenge right now, how to scale up the work that BridgeYear is doing. There are so many questions about how to do this effectively. Can a tech tool actually help BridgeYear reach more people? What are the downsides? Can they maintain the level of personalization they're known for? Will the business model need to evolve? Molly and Victoria are going to unpack all of that and more.

Molly O'Donnell:
All right. Victoria, I'm stoked about all the work that you're doing with BridgeYear and with More Pathways. One of my curiosities is if you could help me better understand how BridgeYear and More Pathways, how did they speak to each other? What's the relationship? What's BridgeYear doing? What's More Pathways doing?

Victoria Chen:
So at its core, BridgeYear is a traditional direct service nonprofit.

Nicole Jarbo:
I'm going to interrupt Victoria for a quick second here to define what direct service nonprofit means for those of you who might not know. This just means that they are an organization that provides resources directly to communities in need. They do this through their career exploration programs.

Victoria Chen:
The more we did this work, and especially around the pandemic, we started realizing we had a wealth of resources that other students could use, counselors could use, and there could be a spillover effect if we shared those resources. Or we had counselors sending us emails to this generic info@bridgeyear account saying, "Hey, what resources can I use for all my students not going to a four-year school?" And at that time, we were setting them this really ugly Google document that I'm embarrassed to look at today. And then we realized, hey, technology has evolved, maybe we should too. And maybe we should turn this Google document, Google spreadsheet into an actual website that people can utilize in real time and we can update in real time.

Molly O'Donnell:
And so I'm curious how you're thinking about what impact More Pathways itself can have, and how you think about the quality of the experience young people and employers or training programs would have by engaging with you all through the More Pathways work.

Victoria Chen:
I think it's a great question because that's inevitably the trade-off between direct service and widespread impact, right? Is you lose the control, you lose your ability to track very specific metrics, right?

Nicole Jarbo:
What Victoria touches on here is a huge challenge across a nonprofit space, balancing direct service with widespread impact. In other words, it's difficult to balance working directly with communities as you scale the work that you're doing. The way you track the metrics of your impact becomes challenging too.

Victoria Chen:
Some things that we're tracking through More Pathways are user acquisition. How many new users do we get? What channels are bringing these new users to us? We did this huge campaign on TikTok and Instagram. And then also looking at just what is the user behavior on the site. And how can we influence that behavior by making a better product? And then are there apply clicks going on?

Molly O'Donnell:
That's really helpful to understand. Because I think we see a lot of organizations at New Profit, and you are, I think, on More Pathways a little earlier stage than some of the organizations we typically look at. Which is great. Think about the role of technology and how to leverage their direct impact models for broader widespread impact. One of my colleagues calls it impact Jenga. It's these trade-offs that you're making around how tight are you holding the impact you seek to achieve or loose, and then what trade-offs are implied with that.

Nicole Jarbo:
So I love this impact Jenga metaphor that Molly uses here. It perfectly illustrates the delicate balancing act involved in trade-offs as you scale. Trade-offs like quality versus quantity. A custom experience versus a standard one. Or focusing on the needs of a local community versus taking a universal approach. If you can't strike the right balance, it all falls down.

Molly O'Donnell:
When I think about technology tools in particular, it can be quite tricky because, one, they can be somewhat expensive. And it's not totally clear to me if your plan for that is to be fully philanthropically funded with the economic model around it. And then how you want to balance this direct versus widespread impact as you go forward. As I think about you all continuing to fundraise, be out there pitching, I'd say making sure you're really holding what's your widespread growth aspiration and why, right? I'm curious what reactions that elicits for you.

Victoria Chen:
I love the phrase impact Jenga. I'm going to use that. No, I think that makes a ton of sense. Because we thought a lot about our economic model for our direct service model, and we were about 40% corporate funded there which makes sense based on what the program hopes to achieve and who is getting the end beneficiary result. It's actually companies for this entry level workforce.

Nicole Jarbo:
So just in case you miss that, almost half of the funding for BridgeYear comes from companies. The incentive for is to hire workers who have gone through the program. Where will the money come as they scale with morepathways.org?

Victoria Chen:
With More Pathways, I think it is still a little unclear. There's many dreams and hopes and aspirations we have for it. We've thought about making a white label product.

Nicole Jarbo:
For those of you who don't know, a white label product just means that BridgeYear could sell the morepathways.org tech tool to other organizations.

Victoria Chen:
If there's other geographies that could use a core technology that we could scale and monetize in that way. We've thought about tapping into maybe city or county funding for workforce dollars since it's such a geographically local product. You're absolutely right though, the launch, the seed funding did come from philanthropic sources and probably will for probably the next couple of years just as we get it up and going and to a product that we feel really great about scaling.

Molly O'Donnell:
Yeah. And I think that probably will, that makes sense to me. If you're orienting to the quality of the experience of the young person, the quality of the training program itself, you're really orienting to impact. And so I think as you continue to think about More Pathways, I love that you're thinking about options around white label, things like that. So I think for you about who's your buyer? Who are you solving a problem for? Because that's going to help you unlock different pathways to growth and financial sustainability. And it sounds like you have some hunches as to what those might be.

And then I think that the things as you continue to think about your growth, what are you going to be five years from now? Even if it's directional. Is really like in five years we're going to be in a world where BridgeYear will have done these things and More Pathways will have done these things, and really grounding that five-year vision to what's your theory of the case. In the early stages, people are buying into you, your brilliance and how deep your thinking is around the potential pathways in front of you. So really helping paint those pictures is what I would be holding in your shoes.

Victoria Chen:
No, I love that. That's such a good reminder of the role of a founder is to be the visionary, right? It is to paint a picture for our teams, for our investors, for those in the community that want to get on board who see and share a similar vision.

Molly O'Donnell:
Sounds great. Well, thanks for the chat.

Victoria Chen:
Yeah. Thank you.

Nicole Jarbo:
So as Victoria keeps scaling BridgeYear through morepathways.org, she's going to have to keep managing trade offs. It's the balance between direct service and widespread impact. Remember, Victoria is one of 10 people who you can vote for at the end of this season to win 50 K for their idea. Stay tuned for when voting will open. I think there's lots that we as educators and social entrepreneurs can learn from Victoria's idea. First...

Victoria Chen:
"Miss, I don't want to go to college. Stop hounding me on this." The goal that he thought I had for him wasn't aligned with the goal he had for himself.

Nicole Jarbo:
Listen to your students, really listen to them tell you what they want. Second...

Victoria Chen:
We say, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Nicole Jarbo:
Can we just all do ourselves a favor and stop asking kids this question? We need to encourage trying things out. Because honestly, that's more like the real world these days. Lastly...

Molly O'Donnell:
In the early stages, people are buying into you, your brilliance, and how deep you are thinking is around the potential pathways in front of you.

Nicole Jarbo:
Entrepreneurs as you scale have a five-year plan. It's not a contract, but it's essential to explain your idea to potential funders and partners. Thanks for tuning into Pitch Playground from 4.0. I'm your host, Nicole Jarbo. Learn more about Pitch Playground at pitchplayground.com. And leave us a review if you like the episode. Next week we'll be hearing a pitch from Jonathan Teske, the brilliant mind behind Reframe XR.

Jonathan Teske:
A classroom is a system. And in the context of mixed reality or XR in general, you need to be able to adapt the technology to that system not change the system to fit the technology.

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