Dana Stephenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Riipen: How Colleges and Employers Can Scale Work-Based Learning

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I interview leaders and innovators for insights into creating a future Ready Workforce.

A 2024 survey from Hult International Business School reports that 89% of companies avoid hiring recent graduates, citing a lack of real world experience as the most common reason. On today’s episode, we’re going to focus on one approach to closing the gap between what employers are seeking and what colleges are teaching with Dana Stephenson, the co-founder and CEO of Riipen, a platform that partners with academic institutions and employers to offer experiential learning opportunities.

Dana recently co-authored an opinion piece in Governing magazine with former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift, making the case that students need more opportunities to apply what they’re learning in real world settings, and that states have a role in making that happen.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Dana.

Dana Stephenson:

Thanks for having me. Excited for the conversation.

Van:

Well, let’s start by asking you what skills or attributes do employers need that they are not finding in recent college graduates?

Dana:

We’re hearing a lot from employers these days that it’s really more about the durable skills. Employers are often citing that technical literacy matters, technical skills matters, but the durable skills like communication, collaboration, leadership, empathy, these have become more important than ever in a world, in an era where AI is beginning to take on more of the entry level tasks that many of the students and young folks depended on as they entered the workforce. The AI can often amplify the human skills, but they can’t replace them. So these durable skills like judgment initiative, the ability to learn and unlearn and deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, these are the things that employers are looking for and we hear over and over and again in our world that employers are looking for that professionalism, the curiosity, and the drive to take initiative. Too often I think that students are just really trying to find the right answer going through the motions. Assignments often just feel like logistical hurdles that they’re getting through to get to that paper and get that degree, but when it gets into the real world, there’s not always a right answer.

Van:

Well, what you say makes sense, Dana. I mean, for any of us who have hired or been in a position needing to hire, as we’re looking at resumes, we of course prefer someone with some work experience as well as the formal credentials. And so let me ask you, what are the challenges colleges face when trying to embed work-based learning experiences into the education process, and what shifts can they make to offer these experiences more as a norm for students rather than an exception?

Dana:

I think that’s exactly right. I think that the biggest challenge that we’ve seen over the last several decades, certainly as long as I’ve been doing this, is that the system really wasn’t built for work-based learning to be treated as a core part of the infrastructure. It’s always been built treating work-based learning as sort of an extra. I think many institutions now are really trying to focus on employment outcomes, employability, ensuring the students are prepared for the workforce, and there’s a lot of research coming out on the impact that internships are having on this.

But the traditional model like internships are challenging to scale. It’s incredibly resource intensive. It’s expensive. It’s often inequitable. Many students — especially students from low low-income backgrounds — they have to be leave a job that they are currently working at for an unpaid opportunity, and they can’t afford to take an unpaid opportunity, so they just miss out on the work-based learning experience altogether.

These are massive challenges that institutions are facing, but what’s exciting is that there’s a lot of different intermediaries that are coming forward to support organizations. Those can be in the form of technology partners, they can be in the forms of community hubs and other nonprofit organizations, but they’re really coming and offering support, offering connections, networks to employers, offering infrastructure to scale, to achieve economies of scale and network effects, and really break down barriers so that more students could get access to these experiences.

The other challenge that we’ve got to always pay attention to is that even with all these new intermediaries coming in and solving some of these big, wicked problems and scaling up these opportunities and increasing access, is that a lot of the funding models out there still aren’t necessarily prioritizing outcomes. They’re prioritizing enrollment over outcomes or even the incentives within an institution aren’t necessarily aligned, where faculty members who are teaching courses aren’t necessarily incentivized to augment their course with high impact practices and high impact work-based learning experiences.

As much as these infrastructure technology platforms and partners like Riipen can really remove barriers and make it easier, ultimately there’s still going to be an additional investment to get that superior outcome and improved outcome for the students in terms of their learning experience and employment outcomes post-graduation, and the incentives don’t always line up. So ,there’s a lot of schools doing a lot of great work, a lot of states doing a lot of great work to change this and we’re excited. But yeah, there’s still many barriers in front of these institutions in scaling up these programs.

Van:

So Dana, before we dive further into the solutions, I was wondering if you could just speak to the other types of flexible experiential learning experiences aside from internship, apprenticeships and co-ops. Give us an idea of what those could be.

Dana:

So the best way we like to think about it is really a full spectrum. On one end of the spectrum you’ve got lower intensity, often lower duration experiences, and on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got higher intensity, longer duration experiences. And so often on the far end, the higher intensity, longer duration, that’s your apprenticeship. Those are your internship programs that are usually quite structured, typically close to full-time, related to your education pathway and off working for an actual employer.

On the flip side of that, on the lower intensity, lower duration, you can start with everything as low intensity as case competitions and hackathons where you’re getting exposure to employers and exposure to experience and starting to really build some of these muscles of trying to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity and problem solving and creativity — some of these skills that employers are very much looking for.

Then as you go over and look at more higher intensity experiences, you get more exposure to actual real problems that real employers are facing. So before the authentic engagement with live clients, we often see simulations. These are highly scalable, larger, often focused on larger employers can scale to reach many different students, but these are lower intensity. There’s no actual live engagement with a real person, not really necessarily developing those relational skills except for within the groups that you’re working with. But then those are really great for preparing you for those live engagements.

Now you get into a live engagement, you’re working with a real employer. Project-based is the most common here. This can be project-based experiences that get embedded directly into a course that are led by a faculty member. We find that when they’re led by a faculty member and they’re embedded directly into the course, you really break down barriers because once that’s in that course, every student in that class is guaranteed access no matter what their background is, no matter what connections their parents have, no matter what their resume says, everyone in that class is going to get access to that experience to put it on their resume and then show it off to future employers.

Then outside of the curriculum, you also have a whole bunch of opportunities outside of courses. So you have the opportunity to do co-curricular. We often are working with student clubs and student organizations who want to create their own consulting programs where the institution wants to create these short, two-week long, eight-week long J-term or summer programs, especially for athletes who might be staying on campus over the summer and are training. They face barriers to getting a more traditional internship. But in this way, you can do a project-based experience while you’re training, while you’re on campus to make sure that you’re getting a well-rounded level of skills in both your athletics and work experience and your academic pathways.

And then you go on to micro-internships. These are very much like a traditional internship, but instead of being 16 weeks long and 30 to 40 hours a week, this could be done over two weeks. It could be 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 hours.

So, when you start to think about this lower intensity, lower duration, all the way up to higher intensity, longer duration, there’s a lot within that spectrum, and what’s most exciting is when institutions start to realize that it’s not an either/or, it’s a “both/and. It’s all-in. And then it’s about really trying to find the right experiences to meet the students where they are, find the right experiences to meet employers in the local community and globally where they are, and break down barriers to increase scale, to increase access in an incredibly cost effective way and ensure that students have the opportunity to scaffold these experiences.

So, it’s starting with lower intensity and building upon those to get to higher intensity, and then ensuring that they’ve got enough experience. If they want to get the internship, no problem, if they’ve got enough experience and social capital and connections to land that. And if that’s not the right path for me because of other family commitments or other job commitments that I have, then I’ve got other models to get experience throughout my education pathway to land meaningful employment.

Van:

Your explanation of the full spectrum is really helpful, and I’m sure our listeners really appreciated that. And so let me ask you, specific to Riipen, how does your approach work into the college pathways?

Dana:

Thanks for asking. We’re very much focused on this flexible approach. We are all live, authentic engagements with real live employers and community organizations. We’re not doing simulated experiences. We’re big fans of simulated experiences — in fact, many of our programs’ students do a simulated experience with another partner before they do the live engagement and we think that’s a really great way of building up to this — but we’re live client and then we do the co-curricular experiences working with student organizations or we work with faculty members to get these embedded directly into the course curriculum.

Beyond that, we work with a number of partners to create micro-internship programs. These are, as I mentioned, 10, 20, 30, 40 hours short-term projects where the students are working with a live employer. The major difference with the way that we often create these micro-internship programs is that we have learned that one of the best ways to attract employers is to remove a lot of the administrative burden.

A lot of the schools that we work with are often really great at getting connections to the larger employers, especially the local larger employers, but they’re not as good at cultivating relationships with all these smaller and medium size and in fact, even microbusinesses. And when you go to those micro businesses and those small businesses and you say, “Hey, do you have an internship? Can you hire our students?” You’re often met with a lot of challenges on their end. “I don’t have the infrastructure. It’s too much work. How do I get this started?”

But if you come to those same organizations and say, “Hey, we have this program that’s set up. There’s some funding available. We can actually make sure that this is a paid experience for students. You don’t actually have to put the students on your payroll. This partner that we’re working with, Riipen, is going to act as an intermediary. They’re going to be the payment facilitator. They’re going to 1099 them on your behalf.” All of a sudden you remove this whole list of excuses or reasons why the employers wouldn’t participate. You reduce the friction, you reduce the risk of them participating. And instead of asking them for an internship, you’re asking them, “Do you have projects? Do you have things you’re trying to solve for?” And the idea just come flowing out.

So, we do everything in between. We do the co-curricular experiences with students, which are often student clubs, volunteer often with community organizations making real impact in their communities; we do curriculum-embedded working with faculty members to redesign their courses and embed real live client engages as part of that course; and then we go to the micro-internships and create these opportunities that are paid experiences, either paid for by the employer or in many cases incentivized by a funding program that encourages employers to participate because some of the payment or the stipends is covered by a fund.

Van:

And how do you address the question of insurance and liability from the employer’s perspective?

Dana:

We have a whole set of terms of service. These are typically remote engagements, so the students are basically set up onto our platform. We facilitate agreements on our platform. We facilitate the project design, the project matching on our platform. There are work logs that are tracked on our platform. The employers come through and approve those work logs as part of the program. And essentially, we run the whole thing on our platform.

Everything’s visible, everything is transparent, like what the student is working on. And at the end of the day, the employer, what’s required of them is that they review the student’s work, they provide feedback — which ends up on a student’s portfolio — they validate their skills, and then the student owns that and can show that to future employers. So from an employer’s standpoint, we have the independent contractor relationship with the student, so they’re technically working for Riipen, but the project itself is offered by the employer.

So we remove a huge amount of this risk, a huge amount of this friction. You’re still getting mentored and supervised by the organization, but the relationship and the 1099 and all that is done by us, removing all of that risk.

Van:

Oh, that’s helpful. Now I have to ask you an AI question. Have you noticed whether the micro- internships or the internship opportunities themselves have begun to shift because of AI and  incorporation of AI in the workplace?

Dana:

Absolutely. I mean, the first thing to mention is you don’t have to look too far in the media — or if are talking regularly to students or talking to educators — you don’t have to look too far to see that students are facing an incredibly difficult job market out there. And a lot of the signs are pointing to AI taking over a lot of those entry level, more manual, rules-based work that AI can easily take over that many students often depended on for those first sort of entry level experiences.

I think the first thing that we noticed is with the announcement of ChatGPT, there was an enormous amount of pushback and schools were really panicking around, should we be banning this? Should we be allowing it? Should we be encouraging it?

But when we reached out to a whole bunch of our faculty members just to listen and to hear them out and to see how they were doing and to see how we could help, the response from our faculty members who were already embedding industry projects in their curriculum was overwhelmingly, “We’re not worried because we’ve already transformed our course into a work-based learning project. Students aren’t able to take AI and just basically program their way through it. Students are encouraged to use AI and they are able to accomplish so much more through this project.”

I was talking to an entrepreneurship professor recently, and he mentioned that before AI came out, the students would work with a startup as part of a competition. We would attract startups to help them work as part of this course. So they would take the fundamentals and the theory behind entrepreneurship in a course and then do a project with a startup in their community or around the world.

In the beginning, it was more like, I will do a competitive landscape. I’ll see what your other competitors are out there. I’ll do some research for you. I will come up with some different target markets that you could maybe go after, and I would give my recommendation on which target market you would go after. Once AI came out, this changed from just doing that to also including a pricing strategy for each target market, a marketing strategy for every target market, a whole distribution strategy.

So the amount of work that a student could accomplish with confidence and the amount of times they could go back and forth with the employer to collect feedback and iterate on that more quickly increased. That really is what I think we’re preparing students for through the use of AI in this new AI dominated world: students have to be prepared for uncertainty. They have to be prepared for shifts. They have to be more adaptable. They have to have this adaptive capacity where things are constantly going to be changing. Skills needed are going to be changing. Roles are constantly going to be changing. Employers and organizations that we work for are going to be trying to transform and adapt faster and faster.

And it’s this rapid iteration. I present a solution to the problem, you provide feedback, I listen carefully to that feedback, I understand that feedback. I might use AI to provide data and improve my analysis but I know I have to interpret that data and then I have to come back with my next response. And then that fast iteration of collecting feedback, again, coming back and forth, that’s been just made possible in a whole other way that we haven’t seen before and it’s building students’ confidence in ways that we haven’t seen before because they’re learning that they can listen, they can come up with ideas. They have AI that can support them in backing up these ideas, but they still have to really use the human judgment. Again, AI can amplify those skills, but it really can’t replace them. That’s how we’re trying to set students up for success with these programs.

Van:

So let’s jump right now to the piece that you wrote with Jane Swift in Governing magazine. Can you share an example of states that are making it easier for institutions, especially public institutions, to embed the experiential learning into their academic journey?

Dana:

Yeah, so I think just to take a little bit of a step back, first, the way that we see it is there’s really sort of three buckets of investment that we’re seeing coming out of the state level that at least are related to work-based learning and related to the work that we do. I’ll just list those quickly. One is direct investments to institutions. So this is typically in capacity building or could be in capital investments. The next is student incentives. So these could be stipends that go to students for unpaid experiences, scholarships, question models, work study programs, and incentives to actually even cover the cost of a program that has work-based learning embedded into it. Then the third one is really around employer incentives. And so these could be wage subsidies, these could be tax credits for investing more and spending more in work-based learning experiences.

I think what we’ve really noticed is that in our experiences, programs that top up the wages after the fact are fantastic. They’re incredible. They’re great for ensuring more equitable access to these work-based learning experiences. But the one flaw in that is that often employers don’t even know that they’re benefiting from this program because the employers don’t have to apply. They don’t really realize that they sort of have earned this funding to support this work-based learning experience. And they’re not really changing their behavior. They don’t have as much skin in the game. They’re just, as far as they know, they’re doing an unpaid internship and they’ll go on and do more unpaid internships in the future, and that’s obviously not the goal.

The goal is we want to change behavior and get more employers investing in paid internships. So we’re really bullish on this employer incentive model that encourages more employers to provide paid experiences, whether that’s fully subsidized or partially subsidized. It’s really making sure that employers have skin in the game, in the forms of wraparound supports, mentorship, training, feedback for a portfolio, actual helping to build up the portfolio and references and so on. And then what’s in all of this is that these models can be delivered in a couple of different ways.

One is we often see individual grants, so one-off delivery grants, that are delivered to individual institutions. Often capacity building is a good example of this. What seems to be a really growing movement right now — which I think one of the challenges of is that it can be less efficient — is really investing in systems change and systems infrastructure where you’re working with an intermediary, where you’re creating a regional hub, creating a state system model, you’re building a network, you’re creating cross agency models. Obviously these can be applied to either employer student incentives or capacity building direct investments to institutions.

But we’re really interested in how these more systems-driven investments are really creating long lasting sustainable change. So a couple of examples. We’re doing a lot of work right now, and it was mentioned in the article, with Virginia. We’ve been having a lot of conversations with them and are really impressed with the Virginia Talent Opportunity Partnership (V-TOP). This is such a great example because it actually combines almost all three of the buckets that I just described. You’ve got your direct investments to institutions. So V-TOP is providing direct investments to academic institutions for capacity building. Institutions can apply for funding, and then they can use that funding to invest in staff and invest in infrastructure that’s going to help them deliver high quality, high impact work-based learning. And to scale that up in a more cost effective way, they’ve also got the employer incentives.

V-TOP partnered with a staffing agency, which is acting as the employer of record, and they developed this wage subsidy program so that any employer across Virginia can apply to be part of this program, find a student, be matched to that student, and 50% of the wages will be covered for hiring that student. So it’s a great incentive to bring more employers to the table. And then when you combine those together, you’ve really got this really interesting play because you’ve got the capacity building on the institutional level — helping build more awareness to students, helping prepare students, helping them get ready to apply to these jobs — and then you’ve got the employer incentives from the wage subsidy programs encouraging more employers to come to the table so that there’s actual job opportunities for when these students are ready to go and apply.

I think what’s really interesting is that as this program evolves, they’re starting to really think now about how do we create more systems infrastructure around that and I’m really optimistic that that will be the next phase.

In Indiana, there’s an earned program that’s also doing a 50% wage subsidy. We’re seeing several of those in Colorado. There’s a lot of investment being put towards industry credential recognition and offering academic credit for work-based learning. So, actual workplace experience. And then we’re working on something very interesting where we are proposing to — and have a lot of institutions across Colorado that are working with us including part of the Colorado Community College system — where we’re doing these paid project-based experiences. So they’re subsidized, they’re through a fund, and then employers are able to come on. They’re able to hire students for a project-based experience that is related to their studies.

We act as that independent contractor in the relationship. We 1099 the students and we remove an enormous amount of barriers on both the employer side and the student side. That’s now got the whole ecosystem thinking, “Why don’t we create systems infrastructure for this? Why aren’t we building this across the entire system, right from K 12 to community colleges, to universities and colleges all the way through?”

Van:

I really appreciated the comprehensive approaches that you’ve laid out for those respective states. Oh, I’m looking at the time. I’m going to give you one minute to close us out, Dana, by asking you what gets you excited about the future of learning?

Dana:

So, I’m an optimist. I believe there is going to be, no doubt, a lot of disruption as AI comes out. We’re seeing jobs being disrupted, we’re seeing the way that we’re teach being disrupted, we’re seeing the way that we learn being disrupted. But in many ways, we’re also seeing AI provide an enormous amount of access to learning that many individuals may not have otherwise had access to.

This is really leveling the playing field and creating enormous opportunities for individuals who are interested in participating in work-based learning experiences to get that bare minimum sort of technical experience and then be able to really bring their human skills — again, the judgment, the creativity, the problem solving — to the table, and have the AI support amplifying those skills, but not necessarily replacing them.

So the future of learning for me looks a lot more experiential. Instead of institutions trying to get every student one internship, every student is getting 20 experiences, but they’re all part of the spectrum. They’re slowly scaffolded up. They’re supported by AI, but really have an opportunity to put the human skills at the forefront, which is what employers are looking for.

Van:

I love that vision of the future. Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Dana. We learned a lot.

Dana:

Amazing. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the next time.

Van:

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.