 Okay, Linda, we're going on. We're going on. No, I was listening to you out there. Okay, and welcome to the first episode of edX live. We're here to address the demands of the future by exploring the juxtaposition of business and higher education. Together, we'll have open conversations in a safe space, cross pollinate ideas, break glass and learn from each other's expertise about how we can transform for the better. My name is Anand Agarwal, edX founder, to you, chief open education officer and MIT professor. I am joined by Rahul Varma, Accenture Technologies chief talent officer, and Arthur Levine, co-author of the book, The Great Upheaval, Higher Education's Past, Present, and Uncertain Future. He's also a distinguished scholar of higher education at NYU, president emeritus, and senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and president emeritus of Teachers College at Columbia University. So welcome, Rahul and Arthur. To those joining live, we are so glad that you're all here. You are welcome to draw up a question for any of us in the chat. We will first have a conversation and then address as many questions as we can during our enlightening round towards the end of our time together. Okay, so thank you again, Arthur and Rahul, for joining us in this inaugural session of edX live. Okay, so let me start with you. Oh, fantastic. So let me start with Rahul. So Rahul, you described a moment when your group's chief executive called you urgently just as COVID hit two years ago. Can you share for us what he had to say? What he had to say? Thank you, Anand. It's a huge privilege to be here with you and Arthur for the very first edX live session. And as you mentioned, I lead HR for Accenture Technology Organization, which is about 365,000 technology professionals around the world. And the moment when COVID hit, which was about this time two years ago, can you believe it, literally within the first couple of weeks of COVID hitting, what we actually started to see was this dramatic impact on our clients and industries all around the world as well as our people. And one of the things that started to happen was travel shutdown, manufacturing got impacted, several industries just experienced an immediate cessation of services. And for a professional services business like ours, which is all that we have to offer is the skills and capabilities of our people, we saw several thousand people coming back because they couldn't work at our client sites. And in that moment of panic, the call was from Paul Daughty, the CEO that I work with every single day. And the question was Paul could actually see through that and he could see that through this entire uncertainty, our clients are going to need help and support, but they're going to need that in different ways from what they needed in the past. And literally over the next few days, we came up with a big reimagination of our learning curriculum. So we could scale our people into what we knew our clients needs for tomorrow versus what they needed today. And we call that program emerged stronger because it was our belief that by investing heavily in the learning of our people and in upskilling them in new areas, we would be able to provide opportunities for them and support our clients in ways that we could. So yeah, that was the moment about two years ago now. Fast forward two years, over 100,000 people got upskilled through that program in the next 18 months or so. No, that's absolutely a remarkable marvel that you were able to move on a dime and upskill this many people. What I did notice in what you have to say was a telling lack of your use of the word university or college. In your whole discussion about upskilling 100,000 people, that word that's so close to my heart, having been a professor at MIT for 34 years, and I didn't hear you say university, but we'll come back to that. So let me cut to you, Arthur. It seems that many companies, universities and learners, just as Rahul explained, saw the pandemic as an incredible opportunity to come out stronger, or in other cases, a forcing mechanism to fully explore their virtual education options. But Arthur, you note in your book that the pandemic only accelerated trends that have been developing for decades. So you're saying all of this stuff that we thought we were doing at edX and what Rahul talked about at Accenture as being some radically new and innovative, you're really pouring ice cold water on our brilliant dreams here. And you're saying that these trends have been around forever, and all the pandemic did was kind of accelerate them. Can you explain what you mean? And that was particularly struck by your writing under my use of the higher education consumer as part of it. So I'd love to hear about what you have to say about that. I wasn't very clear. What I was trying to say was that the pandemic wasn't an interruption. It wasn't like a hurricane. It wasn't like an earthquake. What it was was an accelerator of things that would have happened. And both of you with the cutting edge of what is happened. So in essence, what we saw during that period was in terms of things that might have happened or will happen, more colleges were pushed to the brink in terms of survival, online education, which would have occurred, just occurred at 100% of campuses, greater need for upskilling and reskilling, owing to automation, owing to the decreasing half life of knowledge. And also the pandemic because played hell with the labor market. And finally, what all this did was encourage a whole bunch of organizations for which you two are the models to come into being and provide more content and provide for distribution of that content, which would give students more choice. It would have happened, but it happened now and it happened fast. You mentioned giving students more choice. In reading your recent amazing book, you talk about the rise of the higher education consumer, giving more choice to the consumer, where you have begun to equate a student with a consumer. What's different now about their power in the marketplace? Tell us more about, you know, this kind of thinking where this transition from a student to a consumer, how do they change their power in the marketplace? Well, first the marketplace changed. Many, many more providers and they're not all colleges and universities are out there. They can take programs that edX or Coursera, or any of the other organizations that exist. And those are happening fast and curiously. The other thing that happened is they've had new kinds of experiences. So they've seen Amazon. They've seen Netflix. They've seen all the music options. And everybody increasingly universal is the Internet and digital access. So they're going to ask for exactly what they asked for from the other options that aren't universities, which is to say, I don't want to go to a fixed location. I don't want to do this. I'm fixed hours. I want 24-7. And I want to determine what I'm going to buy. And on top of that, maybe I don't want a whole degree. I want a piece. I want an article, not a whole newspaper. I want one song, not a whole album. And they're applying the same kinds of expectations in terms of individualism and service increasingly universities. I think you're right on, Arthur. It's something I've noticed as well. And I describe this as a pivot to learner centricity. So many of our industries pivoted to becoming consumer centric. Just the fact that you take Airbnb, for example. Previously, I would have to call a hotel and they would act high and mighty. And it's just so hard to get through. But Airbnb, for example, it really makes things consumer centric. I can, with the click of a button, I can decide where I want to stay, compare a bunch of options, and very quickly make a reservation at a decent place. And so similarly, I completely agree with you that just as education becomes more learner centric, our universities and colleges and company training centers for that matter need to be able to meet this new demand. It means that universities must meet student demand to be flexible and create workforce aligned education. In other words, we're going to hear, continue to hear leaders like Rahul talk about training that they have to do themselves without college or university participation, which is not not that good, not great for universities. And so learners want more online options for flexibility and even when they're on campus. So the online learning option is simply more flexible by its very nature. So let me, let me stay with you for a little longer, Arthur. This is pretty scary. If universities ignore the new realities of COVID, these new realities which COVID has introduced to higher education, and you know, many universities are talking about regressing to the past, which is let's go back to the good old days before COVID. You know, I like to argue the good old days are in the future, but what do you see in the future of these universities that regress to the past and do not embrace the lessons of COVID? What do you see happening, happening to them? I just agree with you. You can't go back. There is no back. We can't be 2019 again. So the question is, what do we do in the future with a changed marketplace and also different kinds of institutions are going to be affected in different kinds of ways? So that in the Northeast, in the Middle, Atlantic, and in the Midwest, when we have our demographics going to play havoc with those universities, we have a huge number of universities and colleges, and we don't have the population to feed them. The end result is that we're going to see significant numbers of small private low endowment, low selectivity institutions close. Second thing that's going to happen is some institutions are going to have some institutions like MIT are going to have time to adapt to the changes that are occurring. And those are institutions that have a value added. Research universities, the top research universities, we need researchers. We need to train next generation of researchers. We need research. They're going to survive. Maybe not the numbers we have, but they're going to survive. And 18% of all college students right now are full-time residential and 18 to 24. Well, some people still can want that residential experience and that collegiate experience, and we'll see survival there is evaluated. And finally, if you look at the rest of higher education, they're really in a competition for their lives. The greatest risk are regional universities and community colleges. And the reason is they have the kind of population that's migrating to edX, that's migrating to Coursera, that's choosing the other online options. During the pandemic, higher education was 2 to 4% of its involvement. Those organizations increased. The new providers increased. Some increased by as much as a third and grew by millions and millions of students. So that's really the fate that lies ahead. That's for sectors, not for individual institutions. Individual institutions have options. You know, it's pretty scary and we'll come back and look at what might be some solutions. But before we do that, based on what I'm hearing, we are anticipating that many institutions simply won't get the message. And this is a real shame. So Rahul, in light of this, and for many other reasons, I've heard you call for the global corporate world to become creators of talent rather than simply consumers of talent. So traditionally, universities have served the purpose of creating talent. Now, this is scarier. So what's changed and what does it mean philosophically and practically for a company to move in that direction? Well, this comes from a deep belief. Many times we can actually think of us as silos, universities on the one end, companies on the other, and the job of the universities is to actually create talent that we just go ahead and consume. But I think the rate of change that we are seeing, that is technology driven, that is with all the other geopolitical circumstances and so on that are taking place, I think the rate at which we need to adapt requires us all to come together, but come together in different ways than we have. Traditionally, my peers in the industry would go and believe that their job is to be able to consume talent for themselves. And my realization is that it is not just our job to do that, but we have to actually create talent for the world. A few years back, we had a tech vision. So we published one every year and a few years back in 2013, we said every business, a digital business and many industries didn't get that. Now, to Arthur's point, the pandemic actually accelerated what was already happening with this dramatic increase in cloud computing and digital acceleration. Now, every company needs to be a digital company and therefore almost every professional needs to be a technology professional. So if you have to do that, then I think the core job becomes one of being able to create talent for ourselves, but also for the society. And for that, we need to be able to partner across the ecosystem. So Accenture partnering with Google or Microsoft or Salesforce, along with an MIT, along with government and NGOs, because I think there's another factor that we need to keep in mind is that through the pandemic, inequality has actually accelerated dramatically. And I think when we get to points in human history, where 645 billionaires grow their wealth at 43% at the same time and 160 million people get pushed into poverty, unless we are proactive at changing the models and making the playing field more level, we're actually going to come at a tipping point in society, which has happened in the past in human history. So there are many reasons I believe that we need to be creators of talent, but I don't think we can do it alone. I don't think anybody can do it alone. And that's where I think new models need to emerge. So Rahul as a professor, your last statement gives me some hope that we are going to have a role to play in the future, of course. So I love this notion of democratizing education. I mean, edX has been founded by Harvard and MIT. We've grown to 43 million learners from every single country in the world. And we are democratizing education where we've launched not just individual courses and certificates, but also entire degrees, for example, the data science degree from UT Austin for $10,000. And so we are democratizing education all the way from courses to boot camps to exact care to complete degrees from our edX and 2U partnership. But I also like what you said about how it's not going to be creating talent and not going to be completely by ourselves or by oneself. It is going to be about equitable partnerships and innovative ways of creating new kinds of programming. And then you also talked about how all businesses, and I would say that whether it's companies or universities, really have to go digital. They really have to be thinking digital first because the consumers, our students, are digital natives. And if we don't think digital first, then how on earth are we going to become learner-centric? And so I think there's a key lesson in there. So let me ask you to expand a bit more, Rahul, on what you meant by these partnerships between corporations and universities to create new forms of learning. So tell us about it. How did you get started? Can you share some specific examples? So rather than it being amorphous, we can really get our hands around it. And any lessons you've learned from that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let me share maybe two or three concrete examples, but I'm just actually going to go back in time before we even come to the pandemic because to Arthur's point, I think this trend started to happen much before. So years ago, I used to be the HR director for Accenture in India when we were 200 people back in 2001 at a time when we decided to go into the technology business and then into the operations business. In the seven years that I was in post, we grew from 200 people to 40,000 people in what was then the biggest organic growth story in the world. And when you were looking to actually create talent at the speed we needed to and bring in the technologies that our clients were asking at that time, any amount of corporate training we had couldn't do it. Any amount of trying to take in people from the engineering colleges that I wouldn't have been possible. That gave birth to probably one of our most cherished partnerships which happens to be with MIT, 20 years old now, started with Accenture Technology Academy and some of your peers in MIT started to create courseware for us which we then through a combination of digital and physical means started to give out people. And what we then saw was that people that were working full-time jobs, their desire and hunger to be able to consume that kind of learning and gain certifications when you would have something that's actually endorsed or certified by MIT. That was just phenomenal and tens of thousands of people over the next few years have gone through and gained those certification programs. And when professors would come to India or the Philippines or elsewhere, we wouldn't have, we would have standing room only. There were like 500 people that would show up just to hear these professors. So that was 15 years ago. Fast forward to now how we're creating talent. I think the couple examples I'd give, one is from South Africa. So in South Africa, we were seeing that our technology business, just the demand for the technology business was far outstripping the supply of talent in technology in South Africa. And our technology leader in South Africa realized that this was happening at a time when there was rampant unemployment in the country. So he went out to one of our partners, Salesforce and to a government agency, Capacity is a jobs fund. And together they came up with a co-funded model to be able to upskill in the next 24 months, 500 people and about a thousand certifications that would make people job ready with a commitment that Accenture takes, Salesforce would take and others would take. So that's a real concrete example of how that happens. Another one is an example in India. We have a program called Ahramb in India, which means beginning in Hindi. And what we've said is that technology should be the preserve of all. So we have gone to underrepresented populations, people with disabilities, transgender people, a lot of women centric non-stem degrees. And we've come up with these boot camps, which again, we have course where that we partner with universities on. But the whole idea is to be able to create these kind of partnerships that accelerate people getting into employment and having a career trajectory that people devote. So just a few examples. No, that's fantastic, Rahul. It's really great to see how you've been putting together these cutting-edge examples. And it goes back to Arthur's point, which is many of these trends were started by innovative pioneers like yourself. And what COVID did was really democratize the innovation across the entire industry and accelerated. You also mentioned that at Accenture, you had standing room only because people got good learning and they also got certificates from a top institution like MIT. So you were doing this well before we started edX. And to those of you when you started edX in late 2011, we partnered with some of the top institutions. And today we have 230 of the top institutions in the world, including even companies, offering content to edX from India, IAM, Bangalore and IIT, Bombay, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, RIT, Columbia, NYU. The list goes on and on. Just an amazing group of partners. And what I'm seeing is that the learners all over the world, it doesn't matter where they are, not only care about the learning, but they also love to see the certificate, the validation from top professors and industry specialists that give them the credential. And it's so confidence building and so motivating for people all over the world. So it's completely validating of all that you said. One little question I have for you there is that universities are good at creating degrees. But all that you've talked about so far is about upskilling and kind of the just-in-time learning. Do you think we universities are going to be able to help you with kind of the cutting edge, just-in-time re-skilling? Because one could argue, we are really good at two or five degrees. But you can respond very quickly. Do you think we will be able to help with cutting edge re-skilling? Well, the short answer is I absolutely believe that you can and you already are. But I guess there's a paradigm because, as you said, the universities think longitudinally over a period of time, immersive learning and so on. But thoughts of what you do, I think for anybody to take up a new skill, they have to start with the right fundamentals and the right foundational experiences. And I think that's where the universities come in. And I think those partnerships are going to be more vital than ever. But to Arthur's earlier point, I think it requires a re-imagination at a faster pace. I think that's key. And it's fantastic to see so many at Accenture advancing their careers, whether in South Africa or other parts of the world, the building capacity for nations and keeping their learning pace matched to the pace of technology. So Arthur, our questions for you. In all of this, we're seeing a dominance of time bound degrees diminishing. We're looking for cutting edge, re-skilling and upskilling. But the motivations of learning have been pretty consistent. In light of this, how do you see this new species of consumer demand? This consumer demand for just-in-time learning, for the right size learning, quick learning, how do you see this demand transforming the traditional idea of a university? What universities have done historically, I think, is they've offered just-in-case learning, which is, you're going to study these subjects for four years, just in case you need them. And we think this is what you really need. And suddenly, we find all these people are coming for the reasons we talked about earlier. They're showing up. What they're saying is, teach me Swahili by Thursday. I want to learn this new computer language by next week. And we're going to see this huge uptake. And just as you both said, people want upskilling and re-skilling. And while a degree is a one-off, there you go for four years, got your degree. Upskilling and re-skilling is going to occur throughout your lifetime. And if I had to put my money down, what I'd say is, the new majority of our education is going to be those people who want just-in-time education. And what remains to be seen is the role the university is going to want to play in that. Universities bring real strength to some of these things. I had an experience recently, which sort of underlined who Rahul was talking about. I visited a community college. And this community college had just been given this piece of technology by the corporation down the block. And they were thrilled. The reason the corporation down the block gave it to them is that it was now out of date. It had been replaced by a newer technology. So what that meant was, this university was teaching this area yesterday with technology that was two generations old. Tomorrow, they're going to teach it with technology that's one generation beyond. It's imperative that there be partnerships between higher ed and corporations. But because corporations are getting technology, but higher education may well be added in other subject areas that corporations need. So the partnership would be extraordinary for both. A good point, Arthur. Very briefly, cutting back to you, Rahul. We have some our chat and questions has been lit up and there's some incredible questions there. But very quickly, where do you think the corporate world is going to go in terms of degrees? You know, degrees versus more modular learning, which are focused more on skills. Where do you think the corporate world is going to go? Are degrees going to continue to be the gold coin of the realm or are we going to go to something else? If I were to make a prediction, my prediction is that's not going to be the importance of degree I think is going to diminish more and more as time goes by. And there are a few reasons for that. One is that a smaller and smaller percentage of the world actually can access degrees because access to higher ed and degrees is highly correlated to family income and so on. So going back to my previous point on inequality, but more so, I think we actually don't need somebody to have a four-year degree to do many of the things that they need to do in the corporate world, as long as they have a good mix of professional skills, the right kind of technical skills, and essentially the high learnability, if they can actually come in with those skills, most corporations can prepare them for a career ahead. And then it's again, kind of having modular learning on a continuous basis to continue to keep skilling people up rather than kind of this kind of longer term, longer degrees. I know not a great answer to- No, I think that the risk of firing up some debate and some of the questions related to that is, I certainly think that the degree is not going to go away. I think that some of these new modular stackable approaches like the micro-bachelors, where you complete the micro-bachelors from university chemistry and from Harvard on edX or intro to computer science from NYU on edX, you take that and then you accumulate credit. And then these are skill-focused micro-bachelors or micro-masters programs. And then one fine day when you've accumulated enough of them, you get a degree. So there might be something in the best of both worlds where you get cutting-edge skills along the way and you still get a degree. So here's a question from the audience. It seems that higher education systems as a whole are often resistant to many of these changes, whether it's a modular stackable learning or skills-focused or online learning or digital transformation. What do we need to do? This is sort of like a silver magic answer here. I'd love to hear from both of you very quickly. What do we need to do to help more institutions enact? What do we start with you, Arthur? You know, we've been through this before. During the Industrial Revolution, the classical colleges that were teaching the trivia and quadrillion were transformed into universities because one worked in an agrarian society, the industrial society needed something different. And we did it by stages. First, it was criticism. Oh, my God, these institutions are so far behind. They're too expensive and they were irrelevant. And then higher education responded and they said, no, you're wrong. We're right. What we're doing is good. And then they followed a period of experimentation. And that's where we are today. What we're going to see is lots and lots of experimentation. And as we go along, some new models emerge so that these ideas are terribly important. The reality is higher education, as you were saying, on what happened is we're moving from a time in which the focus was on fixed process, on institutions, on fixed time. And what you said was it's going to become more student-centric. And it is. And when that happens, we're going to focus more on voting. And learning makes more sense to focus on the outcomes of voting than it does to focus on how long we were taught about voting. That leads to exactly the kinds of certifications that you're talking about. It's inevitable. The question's only one of speed. But I'll... Yeah, I completely agree. I think to me, I just kind of hone in on the experimentation over here because I'm very keen to start experiments and scale some of them. So what if we could have partnerships where universities and corporates come together and create something like an enterprise university, right? So where you actually scale up people for specific careers in industries. So those kind of experimentations would be good. And one of the things... Look, I grew up in a university. My parents were PhDs and so I have huge enduring love for universities. Part of what I think the universities also need to see as their responsibility is not just skill building and career building, but character building. And we have seen a lot of the shadow side of progress, right? The big tech product companies coming in. There's a whole shadow side of that when that goes unregulated. And I think more and more, we need to be able to build character and not just skills and people. And I think universities are foundational for that. Here, here. Go ahead, Arthur. I was going to say that one's a big concern for me. And I think universities have always, and the students who've come, have always gone for vocational reasons. They want the jobs. But the reality is, we force them to take other kinds of learning. We call general education, common learning. And in all the things we're talking about developing in terms of certificates, I think there's a grave danger of losing all common learning, which would be a terrible thing in a time in which our country is so deeply divided and puts enormous burden on secondary schools to pick up that learning if post-secondary providers don't do it and students don't want it. I think we just have to be very careful. There's a real lesson in there, Arthur and Rahul, in that we just need to be sure that as we go to more modularization and skills focus in future learning, we need to be sure that some of these modular certifications are in those very character building disciplines. Data from MC Burning Blast shows that people with a computer science degree get jobs at a particular rate. But if you have a computer science degree and you have a proficiency in writing, you actually do much, much better. And so many of the humanities, you know, writing, speaking in the teamwork, team building, these all character building traits will continue to be important. And as we think of modular learning, we need to be sure that some of these modules are in those human skills areas. But here's a very interesting question for you, Rahul. You know, the whole pandemic you know, brought about this huge shuffling of the workforce. Some people call it the great resignation. Some people call it the great talent free shuffle and so on. How do you think in terms of companies retaining people, retention of great talent has become one of the top priorities of companies? And Rahul, for you yourself, you know, as the chief talent officer for a company that grew from 200 to 40,000. That's incredible. So as a chief talent officer, do you think that education and learning has anything to do with retention in this incredible age of the big reshuffle? Yes, it's such an amazing question. As you can imagine, I spend a huge amount of time focused on it because it's a global phenomenon. It's a cross industry phenomenon, of course, in a people business. It's a big deal. Couple of interesting facets to this though. We've had previous cycles of hyper-retrition, right? Go back to the dot com boom era or, you know, whenever we've had Wall Street led cycles, we've seen hyper-retrition before. There's a big difference this time around than what we've seen in any of those cycles. And that is that people are leaving not just for better opportunities, but they're also leaving because they do not want to carry on the lives the way they've had before. There's a disconnect that they have experienced with work, with the companies at the end, with the way that they're leading their lives. And that's a big difference from before because it's a pretty significant percentage of people that are leaving without anything in hand. Yeah, but without a future, people are leaving without a job in hand, right? Without a job in hand, exactly. So when you kind of peel that, there are a couple things that come back. And that's why the companies need to have a different approach towards retention than they've had in the past. And one of the biggest things we've seen is that people are also leaving because they don't feel valued, don't feel valued by their team members, don't feel valued by the supervisor, don't feel valued by the company. They see themselves as the means of production and so on. And so a big thing that we have to focus on is creating an authentic sense of belonging where we show up as our vulnerable, authentic selves, which gives permission for people to be who they are, to be able to live their imperfect lives on screen. Because in the next room, they could be taking care of a COVID patient in the house. They could be homeschooling their kids who are running around in their homes as they didn't need to do. So where does learning come in? I think it comes in in different ways. We have to continue to invest in the learning of our people. We've also got to invest in learning in areas that we didn't before. For instance, the importance of mental health, holistic well-being. These are now firmly within the four virtual walls of our of our organizations. Whereas previously, they were the preserve of outside of, you know, they were not in our job descriptions, we didn't have to do that. No, that's amazing. And I know we're going to run out of time, Anand, but I've had a question in my mind for you, which I'm going to take the opportunity to pose right now. So let's roll life back 34 years and or even more than that, you know, as you emerge from IIT Madras and then, you know, or after Stanford. So if you want to roll back your life, 34, 35 years at this point, but that was in the year 2022, what different choices would you be making today about your career? You know, I've heard about flipped classrooms and so on. But this is the first time I've been on a flipped panel. And I'm certainly taken, taken aback. But, you know, rather than your question, you know, if I were to rewind my life, I think everything was so, I didn't plan a whole lot. And I sort of took it by, you know, I didn't have any long-term plan or vision, never in my wildest dreams realized that I'd be spending the last 10 years or the previous 10 years of my career leading a nonprofit. You know, in India, I come from the community called Banyas. And those are hardcore business people. And so my ancestors are probably rolling in the graves thinking of me as the head of a nonprofit. And so you can never tell what the future is. So all through in my career, I've sort of looked around me at the moment and, you know, done what I thought was exciting and interesting at that moment. And life completely takes you with all kinds of twists and turns that you absolutely never dream about. And so if I were to rewind my life, I just would not, I would continue doing the same thing. You know, look at what's available now. And if I'd watched this webinar session, Rahul, I would have heard this key message from you that, look, we need to be digital first-aid universities. And if I got to be a university leader, I'd be going around saying, oh, my God, what are we doing about digital transformation? And then Arthur, you know, if I was a university leader, I'd be thinking, oh, my God, I have to be more learner centric, more student centric. And then specifically, what does that mean? I would just put myself, I would just go to my son or daughter in college and ask them, you know, what are the things that you think are thrust upon you and try to be more learner centric. So I would just play by played by you're based on the surrounding, surrounding environment. But I do want to go to this. These two questions are, I think these are going to create a fight. So this question is actually from from a product lead at the smart energy water, you know, who says she says, with so many great project management and business management courses like on scrum and risk management and product management, you can get all of these short courses and short certificates. Given that and the high demand for these skills, where does that put the value and need for an MBA? Arthur, you want to take this? Yes, I was really hoping not to have first crack at this one. I don't have a very good answer to this one. I don't, it really goes back to the set of issues that you've raised already, which is that what's the future of degrees versus other kinds of credentials. Certainly business schools like Sloan and the Harvard Business School in your area have made dramatic changes in terms of offering certificate programs. Will the MBA continue to be the jewel? Perhaps or perhaps a whole bunch of certificates will be stackable and lead to an MBA. I think the jury is out on this one. That's a good one. Rahul, completely related to that, one of the people in the audience somehow seems to equate a degree with high price and prestige and privilege, while the shorter programs and certificates are more affordable with like a lower track and saying will society create a two-track system sort of like a first class and an economy class. Now, I vehemently disagree with that. Arthur, I see you shaking your head, but Rahul, what do you think? Will our society get into two classes where the rich and privileged can afford a degree or where do you see this? I would argue that that's where we've been for several years already, that if you look at who actually gets to go into higher ed and some of these most prestigious institutions, there's a very, very high correlation with family income. But what I believe very deeply in the core of my heart is that potential is greater than pedigree. And so I think there's a reinvention to be had where the cost of education cannot continue to be such that it is the highest debt category in the country across all debt categories. I just don't think it's okay to do that. That's why this conversation is just so, so important. And I think these certifications will continue to be important. I think it gives more choice to Arthur's point. I think it brings more inclusivity. But I think also what we would like to see going forward is the price of education coming down and having more accessibility all around. Fantastic. I think this was well put Rahul. And so with that, I'm going to draw us to a close. Can I just one quick comment? Jump in. That's my biggest fear about all the things that are occurring, which is I think there's a very great possibility unless we take policy action that will create two separate non-equal systems of higher education. One for the wealthy and one for the poor. We need to be careful where we merge the two with the stackable, the modular approach where it's not one size fits all. So to wrap up, I mean, you guys were just fantastic, including the flipped panel here. You know, just something that will stay in my mind indelibly seared in my mind is potential not pedigree. Oh my God, I love that. Second one is, you know, the digital university, big time, the Arthur to your point, we need to be focusing on the consumer where the consumer is about the learner. And also that we need to create better partnerships to create skills focused learning where universities help train people and companies and companies maybe come in and offer courses within universities. So create a much better back and flow, a back and forth flow. And so I've learned a lot. I hope all of you who've joined in have been as enthralled as I am by the incredible pearls of wisdom that my colleagues, Arthur and Rahul have talked about. It's just been fantastic having you all. So thank you, Arthur and Rahul again. And I hope to see you all soon. Thank you all. Bye.