How AI Can Remove Friction From the College Admissions Process

Wes (0:22): Welcome to the President’s Forum Podcast. Today I’m joined in studio by Ashish Fernando. He’s the founder and CEO of Edmo, and the newest collaboration partner of the forum. Edmo is focused on higher education institutions, working with them to improve admissions, enrollment, and student experience through AI. So, Ashish, welcome to the podcast. More importantly, welcome to the forum.

Ashish Fernando (1:07): Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for the invite.

Wes (1:11): Not all of our listeners know about Edmo. So, like give us a 101. Start like very basic. You started Edmo, and you were looking at certain things that you wanted to change, things you wanted to improve. What are those things? How did this come about?

Ashish Fernando (1:31): Yeah, it’s a great question, and you know, I always want to start by saying I never intended to start an AI company. What I think the intention was, was to solve a human problem in higher ed. And that problem stems from my own background. So, I came to this country 12 years ago to get my MBA, right? And I applied to a lot of schools and and I saw a lot of friction in that process, especially as an international student, where you have all of the challenges of domestic admissions, plus visas and travel, and you’re leaving your family, and…

Wes (2:12): Yeah, that makes sense.

Ashish Fernando (2:13): How do you get a place to stay in a different land? So, there are so many things, and I went through that whole process myself, and I realized there was something that I needed to shift there from… And it didn’t seem like a challenge around, you know, people knowing what’s needed. Like, institutions knowing what’s needed. Institutions precisely know what an international student needs, but it’s a challenge of friction. There’s like, I mean, you most schools, 30,000, 40,000 students admitted, but only admitted. How many of them are applying? More than 100,000. How do you cater to each one, personalize the attention, and get them to do what they want? That’s where I thought, you know, technology could could drive that change. It could help operationally, making it more efficient, frictionless, and that’s kind of the journey from trying to help the student to figure out how to do things to like, oh my god, aha moment. If I’m on the institution side, I can do better. Yeah.

Wes (3:23): So so this like stems from your use case.

Ashish Fernando (3:28): Yeah.

Wes (3:29): You’re out there, you’re thinking this could be so much easier. Give us an example of the friction that you encountered. You’re you’re working on this and you’re like, this is wild. Why do I do this?

Ashish Fernando (3:40): Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I only half joke about it when I say my my Indian mother would, you know, if you asked her still, she would say, “No, he probably should have gone to Yale,” still, even after she sees my 10-year trajectory, right?

Wes (3:55): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (3:56): Because it’s very societal. Like, you want to go to a high-ranking institution. So, I’m like, fine. I’ll apply to a Yale, I applied to UBC in Canada, again, another prestigious institution in Canada, because I didn’t know if I’ll get a US visa.

Wes (4:08): Right.

Ashish Fernando (4:09): And then I applied to a few that I thought were right for me, right? And one of that was Bentley, which is where I went to school. But, you apply to all of them at the same time, but they respond to you at different times.

Wes (4:23): Right.

Ashish Fernando (4:24): Right? They ask different questions. There’s different documents. Yale had an MBA interview, but Bentley did not. Bentley instead had an interview with a committee that wanted to know what’s my extra extra-curricular.

Wes (4:37): Okay.

Ashish Fernando (4:38): So, in all of that is where I saw there’s there’s there’s a lot of like time gap, friction, lack of understanding as a student of what I need to do. Like, how can I get this across the finish line?

Wes (4:53): So, yeah, this makes sense that, okay, so you’re seeing all of the disparate requests, you’re you’re seeing how inefficient it can be. Did that impact your decision making? Like you’re thinking, I got to hear back from these institutions while I’m still working with this institution and when to I just remember, you know, you got to put a deposit down at some point. You don’t want to do that if you’re not sure you’re going to go to that institution. So, all of those things kind of wrap up into your thinking where, hey, this could be a lot easier.

Ashish Fernando (5:27): Yes, absolutely. You know, like for instance, the last admit I got was from from UBC, right?

Wes (5:35): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (5:36): It was too late for me. Even if I wanted to go there, I couldn’t because I put my deposit down for another institution. But beyond that, you know, it becomes a question of not just the friction, but also like, you and I talked about access.

Wes (5:51): Yeah. Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (5:52): You know, I always try to think access is not just a a cost issue. Access is also an issue of does information reach me at the right time? Do I know that there’s an institution out there that’s fit for me?

Wes (6:06): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (6:07): Right? There might be like five schools that, you know, I have let’s say $15,000 in the bank, I could have five institutions. But I don’t know they exist.

Wes (6:16): Right.

Ashish Fernando (6:17): So, that’s that’s the problem I try to solve because I had that problem when I came here.

Wes (6:22): So, you’re on the front line of this right now. And and access is a big issue with the forum. Always looking to improve access. What are you seeing out there right now that you’re that you’re just saying, this this kind of friction or barrier should be unacceptable. We we need to change this in our system. What are you seeing now that that are the big issues?

Ashish Fernando (6:47): So, before we talk about big issues, I’ll tell you what I’m the one thing that I’m seeing that for me is my silver lining.

Wes (6:54): Okay.

Ashish Fernando (6:55): I think we’ve gone from especially domestically, right? If you ask an Indian family, they’re still going to say, “Yeah, my kid needs to go to Harvard,” right? But I think domestically we’ve shifted in terms of how we think of education and access to it. And you you see the, you know, the advent of the big onlines and they’re starting to do well and you actually, I mean, some of them are are our customers, and when I see that, okay, now I can actually, I’m a single mom, I don’t have enough money to go to even, you let’s say, the U, right? But but I can do this online while I’m doing my job. So, not just offset my cost of education, but also fend for my family, right, feed my child.

Wes (7:43): Which is a reality that most people deal with.

Ashish Fernando (7:45): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Wes (7:46): They they really have to deal with this.

Ashish Fernando (7:48): Most people, including me, we wake up late to say, “Oh my god, I should have done this,” and it’s like you’re five years late, right?

Wes (7:55): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (7:56): And so so I think, that’s my silver line. Like, I did I did my undergrad and my masters in biotech. And nowhere close to doing anything in biotech, right? Running tech because I realized where my my mojo is, and where I think I can contribute more to society. But now coming to where I see some of that that challenge, right? So, um yeah, this is the silver lining and and things are happening well. I feel uh I feel what students are lacking is not just, “Oh, okay, I I need this education,” but what they’re lacking is an entire end-to-end funnel to say, “Okay, what do you want to achieve in the end, and then play that back, reverse engineer it,” because so many times we’ll have students go through an entire education and be like, “Yeah, I had $15,000, now I went through my bachelor’s degree, but you know what, it’s not what I want.”

Wes (8:53): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (8:54): Yeah, so it’s education is not trying to solve access to learning. It’s actually trying to solve access to livelihood.

Wes (9:02): Agreed. Yeah, I mean, well, 90 plus percent of the reason people go to school is that the the outcome, right? Being able to provide for your family or being able to be actively engaged in the workforce. So, I’m hearing you say that needs to be the focus, work back from that, make decisions that are informed by where you want to be there.

Ashish Fernando (9:29): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Wes (9:31): I I couldn’t agree more. I we we had this conversation, you know, before we started rolling, but the conversation about brand in in higher ed and it seems to be, you know, alive and well, that brand bias is out there. You see rankings all the time, you see, but you also see the cost for the major, you know, major educational brands are significant. They’re they’re barriers for for a lot of people. And now we have all these alternatives and I still see people out there complaining after the fact that it costs so much to do X, Y, or Z. But as a consumer, like you have more options than just, you know, just the high brand, you know, the high dollar. It’s kind of an interesting like, we’re in an interesting spot now where we can make different decisions. Everybody has that information. We, it could be better, but people have that information. Does Edmo have any role in in that access? And how would you see what you’re trying to do as kind of leveling that playing field for institutions and for students?

Ashish Fernando (10:55): Yeah, it’s a great question. So, you know, when we started we were on the student side, right? We were like, okay, we’ll help one student at a time. That actually used to be my like common lingo. I would always say we’re going to do this one student at a time.

Wes (11:08): Right.

Ashish Fernando (11:09): And we’re going to say, okay, you’re one student. What do you need, okay, financially, like for your career, like where where your skill sets lie. You may want to be a pilot, but do you think you can garner the skills to be a pilot? Maybe you’d be more successful being somebody else. So, that’s where I started.

Wes (11:27): Okay.

Ashish Fernando (11:28): In the process, we actually put together a a gold standard data of every institution, not just in America, but Canada and Australia and across the world, all of the programs they have to offer, the courses within those programs, and what they all mean and what they all do, right? So, what we have is now this core database…

Wes (11:49): Okay.

Ashish Fernando (11:50): …of everything. So, what what that helps us do today, I’ll just fast forward, like we were helping students so we were gathering all this information, but today, I can sit on an institution side and let’s say, you know, I’m working with a university here, right? And there’s a student coming in saying, “I went to this school, I dropped out, and then I went there and I dropped out, and then I went worked here for a year and I dropped out. Can I do something? Like, can you help me?” Now my system has the ability to say, “Okay, I know exactly what you did at the school you went to and dropped out. So, I know partly what you did there. I know partly what you did at school B.” And I can put that all together, and instead of a human having to spend 5 days, which we don’t have the time for. I mean, some of our institutions recruit more than 150,000 students. How big can your team be to be like one… So, with a machine, I can now look at that student personally and say, “Yeah, based on what you’ve gone through, your successes, failures, certificates, competencies, and skills, here’s the right fit program for you at my institution, and here’s what you should do and here’s your trajectory.” And that’s where we’re really seeing the value of AI coming.

Wes (13:14): Yeah, everybody’s talking about AI, right? Everybody everybody’s like, “Oh, yeah, we use AI. We’re doing this, we’re doing that.” That seems like a really productive use of AI. You’re you’re getting compiling this information and using it to give really good direction to consumers.

Ashish Fernando (13:30): Yes.

Wes (13:31): Um, we we can get it right there. I’m interested in, are there places where you like ways that we talk about it right now where we get AI wrong? I’m just like looking for the, what’s how are we using it right, how are we using it wrong?

Ashish Fernando (13:44): For sure. You know, um and I talk to presidents and and teams, like C-levels, and we, I always like to have wear a consultative hat. I’m like, forget about what my product does, right?

Wes (13:57): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (13:58): Can we talk about where the friction is? And you know, you’ll constantly see, not just in higher ed, but everywhere, even us as consumers, we think of AI as one-off products that will solve a problem.

Wes (14:12): Right. Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (14:14): Right? And where I like institutions to go is in the direction of AI is like cloud. You don’t say, “Oh, I need a chatbot and that’s AI.” Today, that’s how we talk, but AI is infrastructure. You know, it’s like cloud. There used to be a day when we’d be like, “Oh, we got to move to the cloud.” Today, it is the standard. Right. We don’t set a data center in at the institution. You go, if you build anything, you build it on the cloud.

Wes (14:38): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (14:39): That’s how AI is going to be 5 years from now. It’s the infrastructure. Anything you build for your institution, be it in admissions, instruction, career, you got to think of how do I build this in a way in which a machine can just eat up all this information and tell me, on a personalized basis for each student, what’s the right direction. Be it for a lea- for a prospective student of like, what’s the right direction for them to get admitted,

Wes (15:06): Right.

Ashish Fernando (15:07): for an admitted student, what’s the right path to graduate for successful outcomes,

Wes (15:11): Right.

Ashish Fernando (15:12): and then for a graduate, what’s the right path to a job and become a successful alumni alum who gives back, right? So, that whole thing today is very manual for us. But think of like retail or automobile and automotive sectors, they’re all automated. Like they can, so, that’s where I’m trying to make a difference is, uh and and I picked admissions specifically, and there’s a reason for that. Why am I not saying let’s automate everything, right? Because I still have to get an answer to one important question about AI, which is, in admissions, it’s mostly operational friction, right? The students at home, right, staff and then there’s a lot of like paperwork and blah, and you can fix that.

Wes (15:58): Yeah, that makes sense.

Ashish Fernando (15:59): But when it comes to post-admission, will AI hamper the human-to-human connection in any way, is a big question I always try to answer because if you put AI everywhere, what’s the meaning in that for us humans, you know? So, like, it’s really hard question to…

Wes (16:15): There’s a little more risk post-admission.

Ashish Fernando (16:17): There is a little more risk, yeah.

Wes (16:19): Pre-admission, those were designed to be automated. I mean, they’re ready. It’s fertile soil to say, okay, we don’t need to keep hiring to manage on these particular tasks. We just need to leverage technology in a way that allows us to do it better and faster.

Ashish Fernando (16:41): Better, faster, and all the people who are there, they can do a a much better job, other things, maybe post-admission, or maybe during admission, but manage the human-to-human connection.

Wes (16:53): This this is clearly like something we talk about all the time in AI now. And that is, and and you’re seeing new cycles of this. Um, people saying, well, the the job loss because of AI, the like, what’s what’s going to happen to all these people? But to your point, these people are going to be used in ways that are more helpful within the system. It doesn’t mean you have to you don’t have to cut jobs, you have to cut job duties.

Ashish Fernando (17:21): 100%.

Wes (17:22): So, you can still focus on, hey, engage with the students, work on mentoring, work on, um, on on the teaching side, the instructor side, but you just know exactly who and when you need to instruct or help them with these decisions as opposed to, you know, that’s where you get into personalized education. You get like, we know personally what this person needs.

Ashish Fernando (17:49): Yes. Yeah, in the end, it’s the value for the customer, right? Bank of America, for example, like look at banking as an analogy because they’ve automated a lot of stuff. We do all of our banking on our phones,

Wes (18:00): Right.

Ashish Fernando (18:01): including depositing checks, which is kind of crazy. But, they went from, they’re almost still the same head count, roughly.

Wes (18:08): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (18:09): But, they went from being everything brick and mortar. You went in and you did everything at the single window, uh you know, deposited money, talked to a teller. Today, it’s all online, but that doesn’t mean people have lost their jobs in banking, you know, and it’s the same, it’s just the nature of, in the end, you got to focus on the customer.

Wes (18:29): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (18:30): Does my banking customer wants stuff on their hands, like palm of their hand? Yes. With education, it’s the same.

Wes (18:36): From a communication standpoint, I always thought it was awkward and weird that AI leaders were always talking about a massive job loss coming. It just doesn’t make sense to me, especially in education.

Ashish Fernando (18:48): Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Wes (18:49): Like, especially where uniquely human touches are highly impactful. And it just it just means that, I mean, the the things that are are like, if you just shrink it to the most basic level, you know, the things that teachers do in the US with regard to an elementary school.

Ashish Fernando (19:10): Yeah.

Wes (19:11): It’s so most of it’s not teaching. Most of it is administrative. Most of it is, I mean, they’re doing so much work that is not what they could be doing and spending that time. And then, you know, that just scales on every different, you know, secondary and and then you get to, you know, post-secondary, you get to your higher ed stuff that we don’t, you don’t need people looking at gathering paperwork on admissions.

Ashish Fernando (19:39): No. Yes.

Wes (19:40): It’s not inherently the strength of the human.

Ashish Fernando (19:43): No, it’s not. Yeah, it’s like we don’t have to we don’t have to do that. We can we can figure out better ways, more effective ways to get all that information and then we can spend time on utilizing that information, what it means on how to impact the student.

Ashish Fernando (19:56): And how, absolutely. And here’s the irony of it, right? Our average institution, across the board, actually has a lot more students who are like roughly 8,000 to 10,000 students, and you look at the admissions office, five people.

Wes (20:13): Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Ashish Fernando (20:14): Right? So, like, what how are they going to lose their jobs? There’s going to be enough for five people to do. The challenge they’re trying to solve is actually not how to safeguard five jobs, but it’s like, how do I serve 10,000 applicants and students with five people? Much…

Wes (20:29): In a in a in a much better way.

Ashish Fernando (20:31): In a much better way because we’re strapped for budgets, like higher ed budget cuts and whatever, like that have happened. Now, those five people with Edmo’s AI can actually do so much more for those 10,000. Like, that’s kind of how how I look at it.

Wes (20:44): Yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense that I like your reasoning for the focus on admissions. Like, that’s that’s the most fertile area. It’s ready to it’s ready to, you know, be impacted by technology and be more efficient. Post-admission is a little bit more tricky.

Ashish Fernando (20:59): Got to think about it, yeah.

Wes (21:00): You got to figure that out. Um, okay, so, new partner with the President’s Forum, we’re glad to have you. Tell me what, um, what can we accomplish together? What are your hopes that that Edmo and the forum can work on together?

Ashish Fernando (21:16): Yeah, you know, I, um, people like us who when we’re trying to like bring some change where we say, you know, um, oh, I think here’s a human problem that I want to solve, usually most of us are reactive. Right. And so, so I have a lot of conversation where it’s react like, oh, other verticals are deploying AI and so let’s deploy AI. I think with the President’s Forum that shifts from being people who are reactive to what’s happening in the industry,

Wes (21:46): Yeah.

Ashish Fernando (21:47): and and and making it, you know, kind of as a reaction to change versus being the change, right? These are individuals who will like sit there and be like, what do we need to do to bring that change? Therefore, what do we do for policy and and I think they’re just sitting at that table and being able to say, you guys understand the mission of the higher ed institution, the mission for the student. Uh, I think technology can be a huge driver, and so I want to just be able to say, here’s what I think tech can do, and then have that marriage of like, yeah, we know the mission, and plus here’s some tech and, yeah, that’s my goal.

Wes (22:31): I love that. The the idea of, these presidents have really great vision on what the future education system needs to look like.

Ashish Fernando (22:40): Yeah.

Wes (22:41): And what they don’t have all the time is, um, the EdTech to, now don’t get me wrong, I mean, huge portions of budgets are now EdTech.

Ashish Fernando (22:51): Going to tech, yeah.

Wes (22:52): But, I’ve been around long enough in higher education to understand that EdTech is the most complicated area of, you know, modern day higher education.

Ashish Fernando (23:02): For sure.

Wes (23:03): And there’s a lot of risk in in moving in specific ideas and projects. Having partners that are already moving in that direction, in in that space, and can share kind of the visioning that the presidents have as a starting point, and then, and then be the builders,

Ashish Fernando (23:25): Mhm.

Wes (23:26): to me, that’s like an ideal marriage of collaboration partners and presidents saying, okay, we’re going to work on this together.

Ashish Fernando (23:31): Yeah, well said. It’s, yeah, you, it’s thinkers, movers, and builders. And yeah, like, being on the build side, yeah, that’s that’s that’s our bread and butter. You know, it’s…

Wes (23:44): Yeah, and that’s and that’s really what what these presidents and these institutions need now is partners that are saying, let us take this incredible technology, let us apply it in ways and then perfect it with you. Like, let’s partner on these things and move it together.

Ashish Fernando (24:02): Yes. Your best business analyst is your customer. That’s, you know, and so every time we build we’re like, you know, our teams will sit and be like, oh my god, Ashish, look at this proof of concept, looks great. Well, did you talk to a customer? If not, then I’m not even looking at it, right? So, just being here to just kind of understand all of that and just say, let’s build in the direction that we as a combined unit think is is the right direction. I think we’ll move, not just us fast, but also all of these institutions, presidents. Yeah. Yeah, I’m pretty excited for it.

Wes (24:37): Agreed.  I think that’s one of the strengths that the forum has is our partners are experts in different areas, especially in the tech world.

Ashish Fernando (25:09): Mhm, yeah.

Wes (25:10): And being able to have that expertise on hand to give counsel, advice, thinking, best thinking, to presidents is really valuable for us. So, we’re looking forward to doing that.

Ashish Fernando (25:21): Absolutely. Same here. Thank you for having me.

Wes (25:23): Thanks thanks for joining us.