Hi HN,<p>I'm Kevin, co-founder of Pathrise (<a href="https://www.pathrise.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.pathrise.com</a>). Pathrise is an online replacement for career services that helps students get better jobs and make more money. If and only if they get hired during our program, students pay us back a tuition fee of 7% of their income for 1 year.<p>For more context, you can read about us here: <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/09/pathrise-wants-to-be-the-y-combinator-for-tech-students/" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/09/pathrise-wants-to-be-the-...</a>.<p>The problem: universities aren't directly incentivized to get students good jobs since they make all their money in upfront tuition. As a result, college career services centers aren't results-driven and can't properly support their students. Most students are essentially left to figure things out on their own, and they think to themselves, career services are useless. The easiest way to verify this is to ask your average student how many times they've visited their career services center in the last year.<p>In reality, career services (that actually work) are probably one of the highest value things a student can receive. You can take any step of the job search (e.g. online applications), train students on one technique (e.g. lead gen and cold emailing), and produce significant and measurable returns (e.g. we've measured that this technique in particular can 4X response rate from under 5% to over 20%). Pathrise does this with every step of the job-hunting process, from training students from a 2/6 to a 5/6 in technical interviewing scores based on real company rubrics to helping students get a 10%+ higher salary through negotiation.<p>In this sense, we're kind of like YC for students instead of startups. Founders give 7% equity to YC because they know YC will increase their company's prospects by more than 7%. Students give us 7% of their first year's income, and our program is designed to increase their job prospects by more than 7%. They know we'll do everything in our power to provide them that value because we have aligned incentives - we only make money if they do.<p>What this ends up looking like is an online accelerator for students that takes place in 12 monthly batches a year, followed by an average of 3-4 months of support until a student is placed. Instead of focusing on a technical education (like our friends at Lambda School), Pathrise is entirely about optimizing your job search. This involves services like resume review, prospecting, referrals, interview preparation, and negotiation advice. Again, unlike career services today, we track every data point so we can hold ourselves accountable to actually produce significant and measurable value for our students.<p>Thanks for reading! I'd be happy to answer any of your questions and would greatly appreciate your feedback.
> because we have aligned incentives [with our students] - we only make money if they do.<p>If you sign up all students and do nothing further, you still get your 7%. That is not aligned.<p>To align incentives you would have to align the students payments with how much you improved their outcomes - much harder to do of course.<p>I think your model has the same risks as real estate commissions where the selling agent is highly motivated to sell quickly and they have little motivation to get a higher price.
I would advise them to not cold-email students about 'Engineering fellowships' which upon further inspection are just resumed workshops and interview prep. If you want students to take your company and service seriously, don't send out disingenuous emails about 'impressive backgrounds'. It makes your company look like one of those pay-to-join academic honor societies whose emails everybody[1] ignores.<p>[1] Obvious not everybody or there wouldn't be a business.
Cool idea, my university has a stellar co-op program for Engineering and Computer Science students, and other universities in Canada do as well (Waterloo, UBC, etc.) and I am curious as to what differs you from universities that have these co-op programs because co-op is mandatory at UVic and Waterloo and has helped fund my way alongside many other engineering students ways through their degree.<p>Also 7% of first year salary seems steep, considering co-op costs are around 8k at my university (don't know about others off the top of my head). Which are covered pretty easily with mandatory 16 months of work experience.
Love the idea and I definitely see the problem and need. If you are able to answer, I have a few questions:<p>1) You say that you will track every data point to hold yourselves accountable. What metrics do you intend on tracking to prove the value of your service to potential customers?<p>2) Do you screen the customers prior to accepting them into your program? If so, what kind of characteristics are you looking for in an applicant?<p>3) What experience/skills/connections, etc does the company bring to the table for the customers?
I once visited a career office at a community college that I wanted to hire out of. What I saw was crushing - a small office run by a <i>student volunteer</i> with nothing but a few binders of reading materials.<p>I'm excited for private companies like this to help students who want to put in the work.
May be a silly question but I didn't see it in your FAQ -<p>Is this only open to currently enrolled students?<p>Would be very interested in applying as a self-teaching job seeker.
You should tier this by industry or career goal more closely. For example, many students want to do high-profile consulting or banking gigs after undergrad. These have relatively similar starting salaries so you don’t need to worry about adverse incentives as mentioned below. Basically get the student to say “I will give you 7% of my salary if I get a job at McKinsey Bain or BCG”. That will be a lot of value for many students (7% is probably low pricing frankly). You’ll probably need to do more work on screening and the addressable market is probably much smaller. But the value prop for that market I think is way big vs. just “I want any job thanks”. Those interviews and prep are trainable and there is a pretty robust set of providers there already. Could also add investment banks, larger tech cos, etc. just get specific on goals.
This reminds me of Holberton school (<a href="https://holbertonschool.com" rel="nofollow">https://holbertonschool.com</a>) which has the same "free until hired" business model. I'm very interested to see how both of these pan out.
Very cool!<p>Some questions:<p>1. How do you know the student's income?<p>2. How do you know if they're hired or not?<p>3. What if a student is hired and then is laid off?<p>4. What if a student is hired and promoted within the first year? Do they give you 7% of the income per their original job or 7% of total income received?
I really like this concept for college tuition or for funding people who haven't already gotten a degree. However if just focusing on soon-to-be/recent graduates, I don't get why a student would be motivated enough to use your service with a non-trivial fee over going to a university provided one that they have already essentially paid for.<p>Even going to a state college, the schools are still quite driven to have very high job placement statistics, and the career services offered were quite helpful if you took the effort to go.
You say you're able to achieve 12k over the industry average, and take 7% of the first year salary. It's hard to assess how much of that 12k is due to selection, and how much is due to your work. In other word, what value you actually deliver.<p>Let's say the industry average is 120k (in California). If you deliver 12k extra, and take 7% of the total, you're actually taking more than 9k out of this extra 12k.
I am curious as to how narrow your scope of industries/requirements will be in the future.<p>I have a friend with a BA in Photography and a MA in Collaborative Design. She is very talented and intelligent, but has trouble explaining exactly what it is that she excels at. (I've known her for years and I still only get the gist of it. Think creative work mixed with formalized systems thinking.)<p>Is this a possible customer down the line?
Can you clarify the percentages for internships? Equivalent annual salary as in, if a student is making $20/hr at a 3-month internship, then their equivalent annual salary would be $20/hr * 40 hr/ week * 52 weeks = $41600, and your payment would be $2912? Or is it just 7% of what they earned over the summer ($9600, and payment would be $672?)
What you guys are doing is really awesome! Definitely in the same spirit of Holberton School, a two-year coding program I'm currently attending that's an alternative to a traditional CS degree. Tuition is also deferred