QuestBridge: Scaling college access

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Copy LinkIf that letter from QuestBridge never came…

CODY COLEMAN: So, I was in my grandmother’s house in South Jersey. It was my senior year of high school. 

I got this letter in the mail about QuestBridge, this program that would help students from low-income backgrounds go to the top and the most elite universities in the world on a full ride. I almost thought that it was spam initially. I read it like three times to make sure that it actually said what I thought it said. 

REID HOFFMAN: That’s entrepreneur Cody Coleman, taking us back about 15 years, to a moment that changed everything. That letter? The one inviting him to be a QuestBridge scholar, with all his college expenses paid? He still doesn’t know why it arrived.

COLEMAN: Like, why me? I’m just like some kid from South Jersey going to a poor public high school. I wondered if it was my trigonometry teacher, Mrs. Chantal Smith Winslow. She was kind of like my unofficial adopted mom. So I wondered if it was her that kind of put in a good word or saw this and was like, “Oh, you know who needs this? It’s Cody.” I did pretty well in math on my SAT score. So I was wondering if that was like something that happened. I had never even heard of QuestBridge. And I think when I went to my guidance counselor, they hadn’t heard of it either.

I came from a super humble background. My father left before I was born, and my mom was in prison when I was born. So I actually grew up with my maternal grandparents. 

My grandmother only had a fourth-grade education, and my grandfather only had a second-grade education. So this whole notion of college or anything like that, they had no idea about. So I was completely on my own in deciding what I wanted to do. 

HOFFMAN: He decided to apply, on the fly.

COLEMAN: I think it was like an all-nighter that I pulled to get it done, and then I completely forgot about it until the decisions came back, I believe later that year. I didn’t have a computer at home. So I actually had to go to the county library in order to check my email, to even check on the status of the QuestBridge application, and I got this email that I’ve been selected as a finalist for the National College Match program. And I was like, what? This is impossible. 

Something happened there where, all of a sudden, I was, ‘Oh, wait, people think that I’m capable of going to elite schools like this. Someone reviewed my application, they read those essays that I wrote up in a blur, and they selected me as a finalist for the national college match?’ I realized that someone like me could actually go to a top school like this.

HOFFMAN: As he looked into schools, he let his interests guide the process.

COLEMAN: I loved science and technology. I was a kid that was glued to the science and Discovery Channel. and I was really into computer games. And I remember finding out that there was this major called computer science. And I was like, what? Computer science. Those are like my two favorite things combined together into a single degree. I have to go and do that. And then I remember looking up what are good schools in computer science. And at the top of the list, there was this place called Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.

HOFFMAN: Cut to a few months later, decision day. 

COLEMAN: MIT releases their decisions on Pi day, 3.14.

HOFFMAN: Cody’s at the library computer again, staring at an email.

COLEMAN: And I’m like starting to read it, and it’s like, congratulations, Cody Coleman. 

And in that moment, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ I got into MIT. I got out of my chair, and I’m about to, like, yell, “I got into MIT,” and then right before my mouth could open, I realized like, wait, I’m still in a library. I happen to work at the library as well. So, I got up from the computer, and then I went back to the break room where all the librarians were. And then I was like, “Oh, I got into MIT!” And they were all so happy; they couldn’t even believe it because as the first student from my high school to go there, to actually pursue this dream. I’m going to be able to study computer science at the best school in the world for this.

HOFFMAN: Cody went to MIT and thrived. He continued on to get a Master’s degree there and then a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. Today, Cody is CEO of the company Coactive AI, which he co-founded with a fellow QuestBridge scholar.

COLEMAN: It’s hard for me to even imagine the alternate reality of if that letter from QuestBridge had never come or if I had never applied, I can’t even fathom it given how everything has turned out.

Copy LinkIntroducing QuestBridge

HOFFMAN: Cody is one of more than 30,000 students who have gone to college through school partnerships brokered by QuestBridge.

QuestBridge is a true scale story. From a local summer program for high schoolers, it grew to a national force to fully fund undergraduate degrees at dozens of colleges and universities. This year, QuestBridge helped a record number of students, with 2,242 accepted to its partner schools. QuestBridge Scholars make up significant numbers of the incoming class at schools like Princeton, Caltech, and the University of Chicago. Over the course of its history, it’s matched students with 5 billion dollars worth of scholarships. 

The QuestBridge story holds important lessons for founders and entrepreneurs of all kinds, around focusing your mission — and why growing your impact can mean letting go of what you thought you were setting out to do.

I’m Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. 

As students at Stanford, Ana Rowena Mallari and Michael McCullough became passionate about how to tap the potential of motivated students from low-income backgrounds. 

The co-founders transformed their not-for-profit, called QuestBridge, from a summer program on campus into a scaled organization that transforms the lives of high school students applying to college. Over 30 years, QuestBridge has carefully evolved and grown as an important platform in opportunities for higher education. Today, co-founder Ana Rowena Mallari is also CEO of QuestBridge, and she sat down to talk about its journey.

HOFFMAN: Ana Rowena Mallari, welcome to Masters of Scale.

ANA ROWENA MALLARI: Thank you, so wonderful to be here, Reid.

Copy LinkLaunching QuestBridge’s MVP as a Stanford summer program

HOFFMAN: We started by exploring her original motivation. Ana was the first in her family to navigate the college admissions process in the U.S. She went to high school with students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. She had close friends from less well-off neighborhoods — including areas in Stanford’s backyard. 

MALLARI: I went to a public high school. We were within 20 minutes drive of the university Stanford, and the amazing resources that that university had were so enriching and empowering to the students who attended, but I realized that the students I went to high school with, that I had classes with, that I played on sports teams with, from all over the surrounding communities, East Palo Alto, East Redwood City, many of them were never going to be able to access those kinds of opportunities without being able to attend a Stanford or a similar institution. 

HOFFMAN: Ana felt so fortunate to be at Stanford. Yet, knowing that others she grew up alongside would maybe never have such an advantage prompted a deeper question: what did she truly want to achieve with the opportunity she’d been given? Ana found herself animated by a specific challenge: how to use Stanford’s resources to help students who might otherwise never experience anything like it.

So what was the first iteration? What was the first like, ‘Okay, let’s do this. Let’s try this,’ and why, and what was it?

MALLARI: Yeah, it was a very small residential summer program on the Stanford campus. 

We had 20 students from all over the country. They were high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds, and they were high school juniors, and we lived with them for almost six weeks in the summer program. They had classes with Stanford professors, we went on field trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Hopkins Marine Station. We went to symphonies, and we had picnics in the park. All the sorts of wonderful educational opportunities that Stanford and the Bay Area offer.

And we realized very quickly that these amazing students were just as bright as any other student we ever encountered and were totally impressive because of what they had experienced prior to coming to this summer program. I mean, they were extremely hardworking; they were very compelling humans.

And then we saw what happened when they applied to college, which we helped and supported them in the process. All of them were extremely appealing and attractive candidates, and like 90 percent of them went to Stanford over years of time.

And actually, I will say, that very first summer program, when they first walked in, and I just saw their faces and their spirits in many ways, I was like, I could do this for a lifetime. And I didn’t know that I would be here today.

HOFFMAN: That you would be doing this for the lifetime!

MALLARI: Exactly!

Copy LinkScaling QuestBridge’s summer program into an organization

HOFFMAN: What was that next, you know, kind of turn of the card? What was the, ‘and we should now create an organization?’

MALLARI: After five or six years of doing this small residential program, we realized that in fact, these students were extremely attractive to institutions, and not only were they highly successful in the admissions process, but they were also highly successful as undergraduates.

At that time, we were supported by a number of private individuals and foundations in the area, all of whom, when they came to visit, said: “Something really special is going on here. It’s got to be more than just 20 students a year, you’ve got to scale this thing.” And so we ended up exploring multiple models of scale.

One of them was actually just replicating this little program that we had at different campuses. We tried that on one campus on the East Coast, which was extremely successful in terms of the outcomes of the students, but also an incredibly hard lesson learned that scaling that way was not going to work.

I was traveling eight times a year back and forth and just trying to manage two campuses in different places. It was just a very high-touch program and really hard to scale. 

And at this time, we had something like 3,000 applicants for 20 spots. And so, we ended up having to sunset the summer program, which was heartbreaking. People would say that the program doesn’t exist without this thing, but we realized, and we knew from our lessons trying to scale that actually we couldn’t scale if we insisted on holding on tightly to this particular model. 

Copy LinkQuestBridge’s first pivot: “Everything we did had to be scalable”

HOFFMAN: It can be painful to sunset beloved aspects of your business, especially areas where you’ve been incredibly hands-on, and that you enjoy. 

For QuestBridge, the summer program was the original product, bringing underserved students to an elite college campus to enrich and inspire them. But it was incredibly expensive — and not scalable — to pay for travel and expenses for a five-week residential program that required nearly 1:1 staffing with each student. 

Yet it proved the students’ potential, as they would so often go on from that summer session to apply for and get accepted to elite universities.

To that end, Ana and her team had already started another program to sync up high-potential students with college admissions help and scholarships. It was called the National College Match. They decided that the match program was the part of the Quest program that could scale. In the mid-2000s they brought in a new executive, Tim Brady, to accomplish that. 

Many of the company-scale journeys involve bringing in key executives. So like I did with Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn, so, talk a little bit about how you connected with Tim Brady and Tim’s early contributions.

MALLARI: I consider that a pivot point for the organization because he had come from Yahoo!. He had already had lots of management experience and innovation, and he was plugged into technology. But he also brought a very rigorous management and leadership style.

He was questioning everything we had done before, but he brought this clarity around what we shouldn’t worry about and what we should worry about.

And this was so revolutionary for us because as founders and people who cared about every little piece, he was like, you know what, I understand you care about that, but we’ve got to focus over here. I always remember he kept on saying: we need this to be sustainable, and we need to have interchangeable parts.

Everything we did had to be scalable. And so it felt sort of counterintuitive to all of us who had felt like this essence of this program is that personal touch. It was like, wait, you’re telling me I can’t, you know, call the student and talk to her mom, you know, or whatever it is. 

He was able to convince us in a very compelling way that actually we could do much more if we just stepped back a little bit and allowed our energies to go toward a larger number of students at one time. 

Because at any given moment you can pour a lot of time into one or two and then suddenly you don’t have enough time for, you know, the larger questions. He was absolutely right. And I feel so grateful for his wisdom then and now.

HOFFMAN: Ana and QuestBridge did find ways to foster and maintain relationships with many individual students. They didn’t just give that up. She’s even officiated the wedding of two QuestBridge scholars. But the guidance to step back and not tend to every detail for every applicant opened up a new chapter for the organization. It allowed the time and space to consider how they could reach exponentially more students.

MALLARI: Our back of the envelope calculation, which we just literally did on the back of an envelope was like, wait, there’s not just 3,000 students. There’s actually more like 30,000 students out there — much more opportunity, much more talent out there across the country. 

HOFFMAN: With its mission now centered on applications and funding for college, QuestBridge set out to match thousands more students with schools that would pay for their education — and potentially change their lives. 

After the break, hear how that wasn’t the easy sell you might think it would be.

[AD BREAK]

HOFFMAN: QuestBridge got laser-focused on college acceptance and scholarships. Its model set out to match supply and demand. Accomplished, motivated students with scarce financial resources applied to be a QuestBridge scholar. And if a participating school accepted them, their degree would be fully funded. Amherst, Grinnell College, and Rice University were the first partners for the QuestBridge National College Match. 

Copy LinkHow QuestBridge builds trust with students

‘Where could there possibly be friction in offering free college?’ you might think. But reaching potential scholars and convincing them to take part in the process involved major trust-building. Ana expected this. She knew her customer.

Since I had the fortune and privilege to be with you on parts of this journey, to dig in a little bit, like one of the things that I learned from you guys was that it was also a key thing was trying to get these young, talented students to realize this could be part of their future. Because like “that elite college for, you know, rich people, outside my community, that’s not for me, that’s for other people.” 

MALLARI: Very much that.

HOFFMAN: How did you get to them and say “No, no. This could be for you, and this could be magical for you, your family, your community.” What was the way that you built that into the scale journey?

MALLARI: Yeah, absolutely. A few things were really interesting. One of them was, this is like something I wouldn’t have expected, but we used paper mail quite a bit, and we actually surprisingly still do, and it’s interesting because to your point, even to this day many people say: “There’s no way this could be true, this is a scam. Stanford University giving me a complete full ride? Are you kidding? I’m from this kind of background, and everybody around me says this is impossible.” And if you look at the sticker price online, it looks like that to attend, in many cases, would cost more than their family income for a year.

So, the barriers are really profound. Even if you can convince them that as a student they are qualified and would be attractive, the paying for it part is really challenging. So, one of the things that we did was on the paper mail, we always made sure to use the logos of our schools.

Because the logic was: the schools would never let them use the logo if it wasn’t a real opportunity, right? So that’s one, just like literally the signaling that actually this is legitimate, and this is real. The other one that is really important that we continue to employ because it’s so effective is this near-peer effect. In other words, to say look, here are 10 students who really did go through the same experience that we’re trying to tell you is available to you.

And their voices are very important. 

Copy LinkHow QuestBridge convinces schools to invest in their students

HOFFMAN: The program needed to build trust with other stakeholders, too. With the colleges who’d be accepting QuestBridge scholars, the program needed assurance that they understood these students’ needs. Partner colleges had to agree to cover scholars’ full tuition — and then some. From working closely with lower-income students, Ana and her team knew nothing less would do. QuestBridge approached schools from a position of strength; they deeply believed in the value of their students.

MALLARI: I am deeply inspired and energized when I think about our students, and who they are, and how amazing they are. It’s not hard to convince the schools just how much they are worth bringing onto the campuses. In the early days, we had to translate in some sense for the schools the importance of making the financial aid offer simple enough and clear enough, and sort of categorical enough for a family to take a risk to send their student to a school like one of these schools.

The vast majority of our students, 70 to 80 percent in any given year, are in the first generation to college, so their families are not familiar with the college process. We had to say to the schools, “Please, we need you to offer a full financial aid offer.” That includes not just in many cases not just tuition and room and board, but also additional expenses, maybe some plane tickets for the family to come or the student to come.

Maybe it’s, if they want to do other activities like art or photography, you know, they don’t have this sort of discretionary funding to just pay for whatever equipment they might need for their activities. And the schools actually have been very generous in this regard for our match students. 

Schools really do offer a guaranteed full four-year scholarship. But in the beginning, we had to convince them of the importance of that. We got a lot of no’s in the beginning.

A lot of folks were like, “Nope, we can’t do that. Sorry. Aren’t going to do it. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Try someone else. Try that school down there. No, forget it. Never going to happen.” And I think it’s because it was unconventional to say, “This has to be what you offer them, or they’re not going to apply, and they’re not going to go.”

We also had real examples of incredible applicants that we could say, look, this is a real applicant that could go to your school if you just offered them this type of aid.

There were a few early adopters who were willing to listen to us. One dean in particular took like four or five of our applications, brought it to his board of trustees, and he said, “Look, do you want students like this on this campus?” And they said, yes. And he said, “I can get them. But we need to offer these things.” And many times they had to go up to that level, to the board or to the president to get approval, to offer this type of financial aid and this type of guarantee — that was really important. But I think because the students were so compelling and are so compelling, the schools are willing to do that. 

Copy LinkProviding the space for students to tell their authentic stories

HOFFMAN: Today, more than 50 colleges and universities partner with QuestBridge, and fund their scholars. 

The unique QuestBridge application has become a key component of the organization’s work. The partner schools are big believers in the QuestBridge process for finding and vetting high-potential students. And while the big shift to college applications back in the mid-2000s meant QuestBridge had to leave its summer sessions behind, its celebrated application is so rich because it was originally designed to bring together that cohort of summer scholars, in-person.

MALLARI: We asked questions like, what are your favorite books? What do you like to listen to? How do you rejuvenate your spirit? And we asked those because we thought we were going to be living with these kids over the summer. And so we wanted to make sure that we could have a really good community.

So originally those questions were not really intended for the college application itself. 

And part of it was we realized we wanted them to have space to actually tell their authentic stories. 

And these colleges realized those questions are actually really helpful and seeing more of the person, right?

Over the course of time, what happened was the colleges realized they’re getting more information through the application to QuestBridge, and the students are spending so much time putting together these things that they actually didn’t need additional information from them to apply. 

Our application is the main instrument that they use to evaluate candidates now; we never expected that to happen. 

HOFFMAN: Not only has almost every partner college stopped requiring QuestBridge applicants to submit a second, school-based application. Schools found the QuestBridge insights so helpful, they started adding similar questions to their own applications. 

This is something Ana did not foresee as part of the mission, but it’s an important lesson in feedback. Colleges were so impressed by the students that QuestBridge brought their way, they wanted to dig deeper into the process that delivered them. And in that, the program has not just had an impact on its students, but on higher education as a whole. It’s led schools to consider new ways of uncovering which students might be a good fit to add to their community.

Part of QuestBridge’s impact is to expose more and more high-potential, under-resourced students to a broader idea of where they can go and what they can do. Ana says, even for those who aren’t accepted, QuestBridge is designed to benefit anyone who comes into its orbit. 

MALLARI: I think of it as like the student experience through QuestBridge.

We consciously, intentionally designed our process for the deadline to be early in the fall so that if they didn’t get in through QuestBridge, they still had multiple other shots on goal. 

We wanted it to be possible for them to have other options. So that’s why our application is due so early and because it’s so intense — the QuestBridge application is so long, it’s so demanding — that a lot of times our applicants will say, “I was so ready for the rest of the college application season because in completing the QuestBridge one, I was pretty far along my process, even if I had to go through another application process afterwards.”

The experience of being an applicant, I think it does open people’s eyes to the possibilities even if they don’t end up going to QuestBridge schools. And we hear that all the time that they just feel grateful that QuestBridge’s messaging kind of inspired them to open up their opportunity set wider, and bigger, and larger, even if they didn’t get in.

Copy LinkExploring the network effects of QuestBridge

HOFFMAN: Obviously I’m a huge fan of networks unlocking talented folks to connect with huge opportunities where they can bring a big difference. It’s another scale amplifier. LinkedIn’s obviously a version of that. When did you realize that one of the things you were actually doing was creating this network that had these kinds of compounding network effects? And then what are the things you’ve been doing to strengthen each of these network loops?

MALLARI: The ability for a four-year investment in a school like the schools we work with is one of the most effective uses of time to change your family’s social mobility, and we see often that our students are buying their family their first home ever, one of my students said the other day their opening salary of their job was higher than their parents ending salary when they retired.

It’s just a shift for these communities. So we often say, while we’ve connected and supported these, 30,000 or so individuals, there’s a much bigger impact on the communities, on the families, on the schools. 

To your question, I started to see that that actually is part of a key to thriving in life is having connections to incredible people networks. 

So then I realized that we needed to really leverage the power of this larger community. At the same time, I became very interested in what we can learn from them.

What do they have to teach us as society around how to navigate all that they have in life, and so I started to explore the question of resilience and thriving, and what makes these unique students who they are. As you know Reid, you were a wonderful keynote for our conference back in 2019 when we had 1,300 scholars and alums there, and your conversation with them and a number of other experiences we’ve had, have illuminated for us just how much they would like us to be involved with their next step in life.

So that’s career, that’s grad school, that’s being an independent adult outside of the college community and experience. And so we’re doing a lot around career partnerships as well as graduate partnerships. We now are starting those two areas in earnest and, really excited about those directions, a very sort of natural adjacent step.

How can we empower this community to serve itself in many ways, we don’t need to be in the middle of making connections. Those connections are happening on their own. And at that conference, for example, I’ve heard a number of folks say, I met somebody there that led me to my next job. Or, I found a mentor and or somebody inspired me to pivot in my career, or whatever. The power of being a part of this and then enabling it to become self-sustaining is really one of my dreams. 

Copy LinkThe business lessons behind QuestBridge’s ability to find talented students

HOFFMAN: What would you say would be the lessons from QuestBridge to companies recruiting, deploying, engaging, and finding this kind of high talent from diverse communities, because you know, you’ve worked at McKinsey and Shmoop and a bunch of other things. So you’ve had some commercial experience. What would you say would be some of the pointers that you would give people for their own talent in companies?

MALLARI: Yeah I think learning how to listen to diverse experiences. I read a story just the other day of one of our graduates who went to USC as an undergrad and then got three degrees from Harvard.

He’s getting his medical degree, but he also has, I think, a Master’s in public policy and a third one. He experienced homelessness when he was an immigrant to the U.S. with his family. How do you talk to a student, a person like that, and understand how those experiences translate to what they can bring to your workplace?

There’s something about how they are able to address and handle uncertainty, questions, fast-evolving circumstances and adapt to those that are so valuable, and that is so incredibly worth something in the workforce. So I would say, how do you listen for that? 

What happens is in the university, for example, they feel a little bit different and like not everybody understands them, but when they go home, that’s actually also true because they came from a place that their families aren’t always going to be able to relate, as much as they might love them and want them to be happy. So similarly, it translates to the workplace or to the lab, or wherever it is that you are.

In fact, I just talked to two wonderful UCLA PhD students in neuroscience, and they happened to be sitting next to each other in the lab, and they’re both Quest scholars, and knowing one another as a Quest scholar is pretty great because they’re like, “Oh, I can tell you how this lab, my experience here is completely different than anything I ever grew up with, and you understand me in a different way,” right? So being able to create spaces where those connections can be made, even if it’s not inside your own company, to be able to do it across multiple companies or whatever, however that works.

But I do think that’s a really important piece of retention and of enabling people to feel seen and valued for who they are as a whole.

HOFFMAN: Ana, thank you for being on Masters of Scale. Awesome. As always.

MALLARI: Thank you so much.

HOFFMAN: I’m struck by the concentric circles of impact QuestBridge has had. When Ana and her co-founder Michael McCullough started, they understood only the direct benefits they hoped to confer, by redirecting some of the vast resources at Stanford to a small group of students they brought to campus for a few weeks. Now, QuestBridge has helped at least 100,000 students, across all its programs. It inspires countless young people to dream bigger, even just by filling out its application for a college match. It’s changed the way universities perceive and measure applicants, by bringing them students who add immeasurably to campus life and beyond. And those who’ve had their education funded by QuestBridge see further advantages to their families, their alma maters, their communities, and their companies and colleagues. It’s a network effect of the best kind, and shows that when the mission is clear, an organization can scale in ways the founder never imagined.