April 14, 2026 · Episode 307
Building Workforce Readiness Through Real Startup Experience
31 Min · By Changing Higher Ed®
Most experiential learning is too shallow. See what it takes to build deeper, workforce-ready learning through real stakes, time, and cross-campus collaboration.
Experiential learning has become a near-universal claim in higher education, but the claim and the reality are rarely the same thing. Project-based courses, case studies, and capstone assignments are offered as evidence that institutions are preparing students for the workforce. Most of this activity is too shallow to produce the outcomes institutions advertise. Students move through it, complete the deliverable, and emerge with little more capability than they had before.
This analysis draws on the work of Chris Crittenden, founder of Sandbox, a for-credit startup incubator now operating at eight universities. Crittenden’s background spans management consulting at McKinsey, founding and selling an AI technology company to Walmart, and leading the entrepreneur center at Brigham Young University before building Sandbox into a cross-institutional program. Sandbox students earn 18 credits over two semesters by doing one thing: launching a real technology company. Eighteen Sandbox companies have received venture backing with a combined valuation exceeding $205 million. Graduates who do not start companies consistently rank among the most competitive entry-level technology hires in their regional ecosystems.
The central argument is straightforward. Depth is not a feature that can be added to a conventional course structure. It emerges from the conditions under which learning occurs: the amount of focused time students invest, whether they have genuine stakes in the outcome, and whether the program structure requires real interdisciplinary collaboration. When those conditions are absent, experiential learning remains a label rather than a method.
Credit Fragmentation Prevents Deep Learning
A typical undergraduate manages four or five simultaneous courses each semester. Each competes for attention and time. Students distribute their effort rationally across the competing demands, which means no single experience receives enough of it to produce anything more than surface-level understanding.
Sandbox addresses this by consolidating credit. Nine credits per semester, eighteen across the academic year, are treated as a single integrated program. Students dedicate a minimum of 25 hours per week to building their companies; the strongest invest 40 to 60. That concentration of effort is what produces depth. Credit hours and time allocation are not administrative details. They are the structural conditions that make deep learning possible or foreclose it entirely.
Programs that assign three credits to a capstone experience and expect workforce-ready graduates are asking students to do something the structure makes impossible.
Stakes Drive the Learning That Assignment Deadlines Cannot
Most academic projects carry a terminal deadline that functions as an escape valve. When teams hit conflict, students calculate that the end date is close enough to push through without resolution. They collect the grade and move on. Difficult conversations get deferred. Hard problems go unsolved.
Sandbox removes that option. Students are building companies they intend to continue, so the terminal deadline does not function the same way. When conflict surfaces, working through it is the only path forward. Students give hard feedback to peers, sometimes for the first time. They navigate genuine disagreement about vision and ambiguity without a structured problem set to fall back on. The professional skills institutions claim to develop through experiential learning — conflict resolution, independent judgment, sustained effort under uncertainty — only develop when students cannot opt out of the difficulty.
Grades are not enough to produce this. The experience has to matter beyond the course.
Interdisciplinary Structure Requires a Coalition, Not a New Curriculum
Real technology work is interdisciplinary. Engineering, design, business, and quantitative reasoning operate together in practice and almost never together in academic program design. Departments within the same institution frequently have no working relationship. Replicating the conditions of actual professional work requires crossing those lines, which universities are structurally ill-equipped to do on their own.
Crittenden’s approach at BYU was to build the program around existing approved coursework rather than propose new courses. Computer science, math, design, and business each identified courses already on the books whose learning outcomes matched what Sandbox required. Capstone designations, electives, independent study credits, and special section codes were assembled into an 18-credit interdisciplinary program without triggering a formal curriculum review. The process required individual conversations with each department chair, a pitch deck, and a personal willingness to absorb the coordination costs. No structural institutional permission was needed.
The barrier to programs like this is political and coordinative, not curricular. Institutions whose leaders are willing to build the coalition department by department can move without waiting for institutional infrastructure to catch up.
Conventional Assessment Undermines the Ambiguity That Makes the Learning Real
Standard academic assessment assumes predictable milestones. Students complete defined deliverables at defined intervals against a known rubric. That structure conflicts directly with the conditions that make deep experiential learning work. A startup team that spends three months pursuing an idea only to discover it has no viable market needs to pivot and start over. Forcing a graded midpoint deliverable into that process does not add rigor. It removes the freedom to respond correctly to reality, which is the skill the program is supposed to develop.
Sandbox has addressed this with an AI-powered oral examination system. Students enter the platform at intervals of their choosing and are interviewed by an AI trained on all twenty of the program’s learning outcomes. The AI probes their reasoning, surfaces gaps, and delivers structured feedback they can act on immediately. Students return for subsequent sessions when they are ready. The system scales substantive assessment across a lean faculty structure without imposing artificial checkpoints on an inherently open-ended process.
For institutions still debating whether AI belongs in the classroom, this model offers a more useful frame. Used this way, AI is not a threat to academic integrity but a multiplier of faculty reach, a way to deliver the quality of personalized feedback that has historically been limited to small seminars and graduate programs. The professor remains central. The tools extend what the professor can do.
Alumni Are an Underdeployed Teaching Resource
Every institution has an alumni network. Most are structurally ineffective as learning resources. Mentor directories, annual networking events, and occasional guest speakers create passive exposure but not the kind of sustained, specific engagement that improves student outcomes. The friction between a student with a specific need and the alum who can address it is rarely low enough to produce useful connection.
Sandbox has reduced that friction directly. Students can book time on alumni calendars through the platform; alumni are brought into the classroom to build initial familiarity. When the right alum engages with a team navigating a challenge they have faced themselves, the conversation carries a quality that scheduled programming rarely achieves. Institutions that treat alumni engagement primarily as a development function are leaving one of their most practical teaching assets largely unused.
Accreditation Risk Is Manageable by Design
A common hesitation around programs like Sandbox is accreditation exposure. Changes that cross the threshold for a substantive change review trigger formal processes that can take years. That concern is reasonable, but the threshold is more navigable than most institutions assume.
Because Sandbox maps directly to learning outcomes each participating department had already committed to, no individual course’s outcomes change. The program adds what Crittenden describes as connective tissue: a coordinated framework that pulls existing courses into a coherent, immersive experience. The outcomes stay the same; the vehicle for achieving them changes. Staying below the substantive change threshold is a deliberate design choice that allows institutions to demonstrate results before committing to full program redesign.
Key Takeaway for University Presidents and Boards
The resources required to build deep experiential learning programs — faculty, facilities, and students already committed to four years of their time — exist in most institutions. What is consistently absent is the leadership willing to pull them together. That means identifying the faculty who want to operate at the cutting edge of learning, building the cross-departmental coalitions those faculty cannot form on their own, and personally absorbing coordination costs that decentralized institutional structures will not absorb on their own. No additional headcount is required. No new budget line. What it takes is a leader willing to make the case, department by department, and follow through.
Quick Overview
- Most experiential learning is too shallow to produce the workforce outcomes institutions claim
- Credit consolidation is a structural prerequisite for depth, not a design preference
- Students develop real professional capability only when they cannot opt out of the difficulty
- Interdisciplinary programs can be built from existing approved courses without triggering curriculum review
- Milestone-based assessment is incompatible with open-ended experiential learning
- AI oral exams can scale rigorous, personalized feedback without restructuring faculty ratios
- Alumni networks are underutilized as direct teaching resources; reducing booking friction changes the equation
- Staying below the substantive change review threshold allows institutions to experiment before committing
- The barrier to deep experiential learning is coordinative and political, not resource-based
- Leadership willing to build the coalition is the primary variable
This analysis gives institutional leaders a concrete framework for evaluating whether their experiential learning programs are producing genuine capability or fulfilling an administrative requirement. It identifies the structural variables — credit allocation, stakes design, interdisciplinary coalition, assessment architecture — that determine whether deep learning is possible, and offers a replicable model for addressing each within the constraints most institutions already face.
About Our Podcast Guest
Chris Crittenden is the founder of Sandbox, a university, for-credit startup incubator now offered at 8 universities. Sandbox companies are valued at more than $200M and alums make significantly higher starting salaries. From selling a startup to Walmart, to leading the Entrepreneurship Center at BYU, and now building Sandbox into a movement across universities and launching a master’s program, Chris Crittenden has the experience and vision to change the way that universities prepare students to enter the field of technology.
Connect with Chris Crittenden on LinkedIn →
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 307 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Chris Crittenden
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.
[00:00:32] Guest Intro: Chris Crittenden
Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is Chris Crittenden, founder of Sandbox, a university for-credit, startup incubator, now offered at eight universities. Sandbox provides cross-disciplinary experiential education to students the premise is this— students work collaboratively to build actual companies that can receive funding from venture capitalists and become viable commercial entities.
But that isn’t all that the program does. It’s graduates, if they don’t go on to build their companies, are more hire-able because they have far deeper experience than someone with an internship. To wit, Sandbox companies are valued at more than $200 million, and alums make significantly higher starting salaries.
From selling a startup to Walmart to leading the entrepreneur center at BYU and now building Sandbox, Chris has the experience and vision to change the way universities prepare students to enter the field of technology, and he joins me today to talk about these things and how Sandbox students really excel.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Chris Crittenden: Yes, it’s great to be here. Thanks, Drumm.
Drumm McNaughton: Good to have you on the program as well. You’ve been doing some incredible things with entrepreneurship and teaching in a new way different from the sage on the stage, and you’ve been doing it with multiple higher ed institutions.
Before we get into it, please give us a little bit of your background.
Chris Crittenden: Yes. I started I think very traditionally I went to a consulting firm, I was at McKinsey and did some, normal stuff there. But one part of it was spent doing education, which is a nice tie to what I was doing later. I was doing education work with at the time the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation. But after that, I left and started a tech company. So it was a decade ago, over that now.
[00:02:21] From AI Startup to Walmart
Chris Crittenden: And we were doing like an AI version of Pinterest. It was way before people were talking about AI at all at least in the mainstream, obviously, in certain realms, they were obviously talking about it a lot. But did that, ended up selling that company to Walmart. Bought another company after that, grew that a bunch.
[00:02:35] Back to Education at BYU
Chris Crittenden: And then about eight years ago said I really want to get back into education. It’s always been a passion of mine. I wanted to think about how we could do it differently. And so I, went to my alma mater, which is Brigham Young University, and said, hey, if I come and I’m willing to work for free, can I come and just try some things, try some new ways of learning. I had some connections there as well, so I wasn’t just some guy off the street. And they said yes. We started experimenting and that eventually, led to Sandbox and all that we’re doing across all the other universities.
Drumm McNaughton: Interesting. I love it when I get to speak to somebody with a non-traditional background. Mine is about as, without going into details, because listeners have heard it before, mine’s very non-traditional. Everything from flying airplanes and spying on people for a living, to working as a adjunct, to consulting business, et cetera. And working for BCG as a subcontractor, et cetera. Of course, you don’t know BCG, you know, being McKinsey.
Chris Crittenden: I worked for them as well, actually. I interned for them before I worked for McKinsey.
Drumm McNaughton: Good for you. Good for you.
[00:03:42] What Sandbox Is
Drumm McNaughton: Now, Sandbox. Sandbox is really interesting. Tell us about it, please.
[00:03:48] How the Program Works
Chris Crittenden: It’s an experiential learning program, but I think what’s really, really unique about it is that it’s a very, very real life opportunity for students to start a tech company while they’re still in school getting a ton of credit to do it. So in Sandbox, students get 18 credits spread across two semesters. So all the schools we’re at on a semester system, so they’re getting nine credits in fall and nine credits in spring.
All of that program, all those 18 credits are treated as one, basically, giant class where all they do is launch a tech company. They work on interdisciplinary teams. So it’s a big cross campus collaboration. So between computer science, math, design, and business are typically a lot of the typical partners. Their students all come together into one cohort and they get all these credits and they launch tech companies.
[00:04:35] Results Valuation and Jobs
Chris Crittenden: And they’ve been really successful.
So we’ve had, 18 of them so far get venture backed. The combined valuation of those companies is now $205 million. And those that don’t get a lot better jobs. And that was the original thesis. And that was one of the things I wanted to explore when I went back to BYU was, “how do we really take experiential learning to the next level”. Like, every university is doing some form of it, project-based learning, case studies, sometimes simulations. What I really wanted to do is how do we, I said, let’s make your experience experiential learning real, like really, really real. Where they’re doing something, that’s not just a project, but something that’s going to actually go out and exist in the world. And so a startup is that. And what has proven to us is that when you do that, students learn way more.
And so we’ve had the great startup outcomes from it, but we have found that everyone else gets better jobs. Our grads tend to be the most in demand young tech hires in the ecosystems that we’re in because they have this phenomenal experience of going all the way from zero to one of launching a company.
And I don’t, I think, as we’re going to probably talk about today, like there’s, I think there’s a lot of principles here that apply to how you really do experiential learning well regardless of the exact context that you’re in. Our context just happens to be startups.
Drumm McNaughton: Well this is fascinating for me. Having started companies before, my own consulting firm, and then working as a advisor to other startup companies back many, many years ago, in fact, more years ago than I wish to remember, but that’s okay. What you’re doing, I think is a new way, especially with the workforce development initiatives that are going on right now. What you’re doing, it’s a new way of teaching tech and business entrepreneurship, and you’re turning the sage on the stage on its head.
Chris Crittenden: Yes.
[00:06:23] Beyond Entrepreneurship Skills
Chris Crittenden: What I think what I would add to that is yes, it is entrepreneurship, but again, the way I really think about this is what we’re teaching, we’re preparing kids for jobs in tech and, business and tech. Entrepreneurship is just the ground in which we’re doing it.
The process of creation, of launching something, those all are relevant if you go work for a company too, And I think that’s one of the big things that we’ve maybe done differently is we don’t just think about this as entrepreneurship, we think about this as the best learning ground to become an engineer, to become a designer, to become a business student. So. Oh, sorry, a business professional.
Drumm McNaughton: So, so with that, you’re taking, the students are basically from concept up to potentially funding in a year. 18 credits is a year. That’s highly accelerated for a startup company.
But what you’re doing is making this real, more experiential.
[00:07:16] Why Depth Beats Shallow
Drumm McNaughton: You made it you, as we were preparing for this, you said something to me that really stuck is the experiential learning that we’re doing nowadays is too shallow, that students need to go deeper.
Chris Crittenden: Yes.
[00:07:28] Time Commitment and Focus
Chris Crittenden: And I think that was like the first insight is that if you think of a typical student in a day they’re taking, I don’t know, four or five classes at a time during a semester. It just splits their attention between so many things. And naturally they can only get so deep as a result.
And so one of the big learning shifts we made was to say, rather than having students in five different classes that are all disjointed to a degree, we’re going to put them in three classes and treat it like one. And that allows students to now go way, way, way deeper. So our students will spend a minimum of 25 hours a week, building their companies, but the best students are spending 40, 50, 60 hours a week.
And so that just pushes them to a much, a much different level of depth than they typically get in school. And that’s where we found a lot of the big learning gains are way, way, way down. Right. You only get so much when it’s shallow. Right.
[00:08:22] Hearts and Team Conflict
Chris Crittenden: The other piece of this though is that a lot of experiential learning doesn’t really engage their hearts. Right. It’s something they’re assigned to do. So they do it, they get it done, they get their grade. What we’ve done is we’ve said we want them to actually care so much about this, that they push themselves into situations that they wouldn’t otherwise do.
So, for example, a typical class project. Even if it’s a really great, well designed one, the team starts to have friction. Maybe one person’s not carrying the load. Every student student’s experienced this. You’re on a team of three. One student just never shows up, doesn’t do anything. The other two are doing all the heavy lifting.
The project’s going to end though in two weeks, the students are like, look, I don’t want to deal with like, the drama of all of this, and so I’m just going to push through. I’m going to be super annoyed. I’m going to complain to all my roommates, but I’m just going to push through and get this done with. That doesn’t happen in Sandbox,
because these students are thinking about this company for the long term, they’re thinking, I want to build this company for the next 10 years. And so now when they’re having conflict with their teammates, there’s not an option to ignore this. So they now have to go, and maybe for the first time in their lives, give really hard feedback to a peer. Or work really hard through team conflict because they can’t get aligned on a vision. There’s not an option just to say, “Hey, this doesn’t really matter that much. I’ll just get the grade and do what I need to do”.
And so I think that’s a big part of experiential learning. If you really want to unlock the power, you have to get their hearts into it. You have to get them to actually care so that, Yes, so that they’ll push themselves into all of these hard arenas. And that, that, again, that comes with depth,
Drumm McNaughton: Yes.
[00:09:48] Who Should Enroll
Drumm McNaughton: For this, what year, and we’re going to get into how you got into this for just a moment, but you raised the question with me. What year freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, are they doing this? I would guess Junior.
Chris Crittenden: Yes, junior or senior. In our particular context, because it’s startups, we like them to be either a junior or a senior. Seniors are nice because if their startup goes really well, they can just continue and not have to worry about school. If you’re a junior and your startup goes well, often you’re faced with this challenge of like, well, how do I go, investors not going to give money and let me stay in school.
But on the flip side, if you’re a junior and it doesn’t go well, you now have all this amazing experience that you can leverage to go out and get great jobs. Right. So Yes, juniors and seniors.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, I, frankly, I would think that, not everybody is a Bill Gates and can just leave Harvard or whatever the school is to do that. My mind goes back to Michael Dell and, I know he started Dell Computer when he was still at UT.
Chris Crittenden: Yep.
[00:10:50] Launching Sandbox at BYU
Drumm McNaughton: Getting started, you had this idea, you went to BYU.
Tell us about the process that you went through to get this thing off the ground and, and what you did.
Chris Crittenden: Yes. , it’s a longer story, but , I think the short answer is we didn’t start with this, There were all these pieces that I was curious about, I was curious about, some of the learning methodologies. So I actually just started with classes, like a single class that was focused on specific elements that eventually became Sandbox. Right.
But after we worked through that, had a bunch of the building blocks kind of proven out of the, kind of the learning approach.
[00:11:23] Interdisciplinary Coalition
Chris Crittenden: Yes, I basically said, okay, now to really do this right, again if it’s going to be real experiential learning, well in the real world it’s interdisciplinary. You’re never on a team of just engineers or just business students or just designers in tech. Right. You’re always on an interdisciplinary team.
Drumm McNaughton: Especially with a startup.
Chris Crittenden: Especially with a startup. Yes. So I said, somehow we’ve got to get all of these departments who almost never talked to each other. In fact, many didn’t even know each other. Right. To come together behind a unified program. Right.
And so, Yes, I just, I went out across campus with my, pitch deck and I went to the design program first and pitched them on why this would be a great partner or a great partnership. Then I went to the CS program, did the same, went to the math program, did the same, and eventually got them to come together.
Now we did some interesting things to make it work, which I think could be useful as people start to think about and especially interdisciplinary collaboration. But Yes, I’ll let you dive back in.
Drumm McNaughton: when we talked before, you said there were three keys and you’re about to talk about the first one. Is this learning being interdisciplinary and how you brought together the department chairs.
Chris Crittenden: Yes, Yes. So, the department chair is coming together. Obviously like you’ve got to de-risk things, So what we really did is we said, hey, we don’t want to go through a really complicated curriculum review process. So instead of what we did is we said, “let’s look at your existing curriculum. Let’s identify courses that are already approved that meet the learning outcomes that this program will have”. In our case it was fairly easy because a lot of these programs already had capstone programs, that obviously the learning outcomes of their capstone programs were very similar to what we were proposing doing.
And then they had these other, often they have electives or special topics or independent study courses that they could stand up. And so we were actually able to really quickly carve out enough credits from each of the majors that allowed it to come together fairly quickly for each of the departments. Right. Everyone who’s been through a curriculum review process knows how long it can take, and we didn’t want to go through that for something that we wanted to experiment with. Right. And so for this first year we just used existing courses and created special sections and put together ad codes and it came together really, really quickly. Right. It just, it really took the political will just of the departments to decide Yes it’s worth a shot.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:28] Credits Time and Assessment
Drumm McNaughton: And then the second key you said is the students have to have the time and credits to do something meaningful.
Chris Crittenden: that’s right. And so that’s, again, that’s related to the first, but we said, hey, this won’t work if students are only getting three credits for this. You just can’t do something like start a company, a real company, now you can, sure, you can go out and do some business model canvases and whatever else, and do some exploration ideation. But if you’re going to start a real company it’s going to take you 50 hours a week. Right. And so if you want students to have that level of engagement, you got to give them enough credit so that they can not be distracted by other things. And so, Yes. So we, we didn’t know what the magic number was going to be but we pushed for as much as we could get and that kind of was maxed out at nine credits a semester.
Drumm McNaughton: So, and then the last one is assessment. All any academic knows student learning outcomes is king.
Chris Crittenden: Yes. So this is I think one of the biggest challenges of experiential learning. Is that,one of the things we believe, one of the big learning outcomes I think of experiential learning is learning how to deal with ambiguity, and create value.
Drumm McNaughton: Sorry, I don’t, I don’t understand what you mean. Ambiguity? No, I’m just kidding.
Chris Crittenden: Yes. Yes. So , you’re joking, but , to elaborate on it, you think about most of a student’s experience up to this point has been highly structured. Right. It’s like, do this, do this, do this, do this, and you’ll get this. That’s not how the real world works. And so by its nature, we had to make Sandbox a highly ambiguous experience. We needed students to experience that for the first time and to learn to navigate it.
The challenge with that is, is that their paths through it ends up being very unpredictable. It ends up being very hard, so you can’t at the outset say, “okay, by midpoint of the semester, you are going to have done X. Which, like, a typical class would be structured that way. You’re going to have done this thing by this point”. Because that may be the wrong thing to do, and startups in particular, they might get started on an idea, realize it’s not good, and then what we’ll tell them to do is you should pivot and start over.
But if we were enforcing like really rigid learning outcomes by certain points, they’d be like, “well, I can’t, because I’ve got this grade that I’ve got to turn in at this point”. And so, so it’s a really, really challenging situation for learning outcomes.
[00:15:36] AI Oral Exams for Outcomes
Chris Crittenden: And like I can, I don’t know if we want to go into it now, one of the things we’ve really pushed to actually is AI is opening up a whole new frontier of how to assess learning outcomes in these ambiguous environments. What we’ve essentially built, think of it as like an AI oral exam. The students come into our system and our AI just starts to interview them, About what they’re doing, about what they’re building, and it keeps pushing deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, The AI knows all of our 20 learning outcomes from the program, And it then like knows the questions it needs to ask to understand how the student is doing on those learning outcomes. And then when the session wraps up, it gives them some feedback so that the student can go act on it. And then they come back for their next session, whenever they’re ready to come back and have their next session.
So we’ve had to be really innovative on how you actually can, rigorously assess learning outcomes because again, you can’t disrupt the ambiguous nature of experiential learning or else you actually kill the actual the actual thing.
Drumm McNaughton: And a startup, a lot of it, I’d say probably 80% is all ambiguous. You’ve got to be able to step by step by step. One of our favorite sayings around our household is how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Chris Crittenden: That’s right.
Drumm McNaughton: And so what you’re doing is you’re treating these students more like PhD students who are going forward and building something or discovering new knowledge. Versus an undergraduate where your quizzes, you’re really, your quizzes are just, you’re assessing knowledge and understanding. Whereas you’re really going for a synthesis and evaluation.
Chris Crittenden: That’s right. And that’s what’s, I think what’s exciting is that like, , I think a lot of in academia we’re worried about AI and what that will do in the classroom. But actually we’re actually thinking there’s this huge opportunity, because this was a struggle for us.
Because you think about a PhD program, they’ve got an advisor who has maybe them and a couple other undergrad or PhD students working with them is really high student to teacher or really good student teacher ratios, And a program like this, you’ve got, a pretty lean faculty structure over a lot of students.
And so to really give that level of feedback it is really hard. But AI is opening that up, like what I’m saying. Like, so we’ve now got this program where they can come in and do these oral exams with this AI and get incredible feedback in a very scalable way. Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent. I think it’s very exciting.
Drumm McNaughton: Well the other piece with that, which I think is important, is it’s not so much AI native as it is AI enabled. You’ve still got the expert there who’s going to review the questions, are the responses making sense, et cetera. How do we dig forward rather than AI native, where it’s just all AI, that doesn’t work.
Chris Crittenden: I think if we could just give a, we want to make a professor super human right. And the professor still sits at the center of it. But we’re making them super human. We’re like, we’re giving them tools that allow them to engage much more personally with students.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. There was another piece that came to mind about the accreditation, what we’ve already talked about that. You’re not changing student learning outcomes, you’re not changing credit hours, you’re fitting your model within that. So you’re staying below that 25% required for a substantive change.
Chris Crittenden: That’s right. Yes. And so you think about like, again, in Sandbox, the learning outcomes we’re achieving are the same learning outcomes that they’re trying to achieve in all of these other classes. What we’re really doing is we’re creating all this glue, this like connective tissue almost that pulls all of these classes together into a really cohesive framework that allows students to go really deep and to thrive.
So, I would say we’re keeping the intention and the spirit of all of those classes, but we’re just adding all of this other benefit on top of it.
Drumm McNaughton: mm-hmm. And if an institution wanted to put together a program like this, what are some of the considerations they should be thinking about?
Chris Crittenden: it’s funny, like in some ways it’s like really simple to do this, in other ways it’s really, really hard. And—
Drumm McNaughton: Welcome to the world we live in.
Chris Crittenden: —it’s simple in theory and really hard in practice. And the hard part really is that, as you know Drumm, like universities are really like, as many business units as there are professors. Each professor tends to be kind of their own thing, they’re running their classes, doing their own research. And a program like this is not that way. It’s a highly coordinated thing. You’re coordinating with all of these different majors, all of these different advisors, all of these different professors. And I think universities aren’t used to working in these like, really highly coordinated, interdisciplinary ways. And so that’s the first one. So that’s why I think like, if you want to do this, it really takes leadership from someone who can get all of those cats to come together.
The second I would say is that in experiential learning, you have to flip your paradigm. It’s really, a lot of times we think about, class as kind of being the main piece of the learning system. Maybe class in your midterms or whatever. In this model, it’s actually the environment. So you’ve got to create the right environment for people to learn, to succeed, and then you’ve got to really hold them accountable. So accountability now becomes your north star, because without accountability in a really ambiguous environment, you’ll get a lot of students doing nothing. And so you really have to have really sophisticated accountability systems.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. With those accountability systems, do the fledgling businesses, the entrepreneurs working on this, do they put together advisory boards, even boards of directors? Do they go to that? I would assume that if you’re getting, up to $205 million in venture funding, you’ve already got an advisory board put together. Isn’t that an accountability system?
Chris Crittenden: Yes, but that’s going to come later. So you think about the program itself, they don’t even have teammates when they come, most of them don’t even have teammates when they come to the program. So they’re coming all the way from like finding a team to finding an actual good idea.
They’ve all got ideas, like splitting bills with their roommates or something like that. But you got to get into actually a good idea, a big market idea. So that’s actually a pretty long journey. So they raise, either at the end of the program or, in the three to six months afterwards. So during the program, no, they don’t typically have an advisory board. because they’re too early. So that’s not the accountability system we’ve used. We actually, we do a lot of weekly reporting, so they have to do weekly reporting and weekly planning. We require them to do what we call a founder sync, which is like a required like peer feedback session.
Those are actually both things that a startup I would advising, I would advise them to do the same thing. Right. We just make them document it, which you may not do in a startup. And we have a bunch of other accountability things that as well.
And then they also have a local director who’s then taking all the data that’s coming from this, identifying who needs their time and then coming in and spending time with them.
Drumm McNaughton: Sure. How do they interact with the community going forward?
Chris Crittenden: Yes. So this is, , I think we personally have a long ways to go, but I just think in general, in higher ed, we have so much opportunity to, I always call it like make every alum a teacher. because if you think about your alumni network, they’re off doing these amazing things. But how do you get them to engage in deep, meaningful ways with students? If you can do that, you suddenly just, I don’t know, a thousand times, your workforce in terms of like your ability to teach and mentor students. I know every university has a mentor network or wherever, but they’ve just, they tend to not be super effective.
And so we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how do we decrease the friction between a student having a need and getting time with the person or the alum that can help them? So we’ve built systems on our side where they can instantly book time on alum’s calendars and things like that.
But the other piece is exposure. Like, you’ve got to get students exposed to these people as well. So we spend a lot of effort like bringing them into the classroom, so that the students have exposure to them and things like that. It is amazing, I think some alums are better than others, but when you get the right ones engaged in the right way, I was talking to a team last night who was just going on and on about this CEO that’s helping them with their startup. And it’s just, it’s magic. When you can turn every alum into a good instructor or mentor.
Drumm McNaughton: I remember years ago, this is Pac Bell, that’s how much I’m dating myself, and became SBC Global, now it’s AT&T. It was a sandbox, similar to what you have, foundation that they would invest in promising companies. And they would bring their resources to bear on this.
That seems like a model that maybe after they graduate or whatever, that, that’s one way of funding obviously.
Chris Crittenden: Yes, no. So we’ve cultivated that. Yes. I think, , at the end of the day, like, businesses aren’t charities. And so if you create really quality companies out of a program or out of your school, investors will come naturally. You can also speed that up by helping them to understand how great these companies are.
And so, Yes. So most of the companies that are raising, some of them, have to go to the traditional centers, So they’re heading out to San Francisco and doing their raise there. But more and more, if you look at our last cohort, I think all of them raised from their local ecosystem,
And so, Yes, so you build quality companies, you build a track record of investible companies, and they will come. You don’t need, Yes, they’re not going to do it out of charity. Maybe they’ll donate to your school and whatever else, but you start producing things that generate returns and they will come and invest.
Drumm McNaughton: Early in my career after getting out of the Navy, I worked for an business incubator, and it sounds like what you’ve done is you’ve put this business incubator in place within the framework of a university.
Chris Crittenden: And it’s amazing because you think about any incubator in the world, they’re going to take some hefty amount of equity in your company. These kids, they graduate and have all of their equity to now go out and sell to investors and to keep for themselves and it’s pretty special. I guess they’re paying tuition. So that, I guess that is the trade off.
Drumm McNaughton: True.
Gimme some good examples if you would please.
, all sorts, so most of our programs are in Utah, and I think Utah is known for its,B2B SaaS companies. So we have a lot of those, some fun ones so last year we had a company come out called Mention. They are an encrypted Slack. So you think about Slack, it’s, Slack or Teams is becoming ubiquitous across workplaces. Neither of them are encrypted though, and so more and more companies are concerned about their internal communications getting leaked or hacked or whatever else and so they want to move to these encrypted platforms. The only ones that exist are things like Signal, but Signal doesn’t work at the scale of a million person company. And so, they’re building an encrypted version of Slack. That one’s really fun. They had to go really deep into cryptography. They’re at the cutting edge of like these new cryptography algorithms and whatever else. And so that one was really fun. One of the current cohort that’s really fun right now is in the dental space. You think if you go in and need to get like a bite guard or you think about an Invisalign. These things are very, very expensive. So the dentist or the orthodontist or whatever will do the analysis and then they will send off for those devices from some other company, and they come back. They are building software that a dentist or an orthodontist can use in office to create those devices. And then immediately print them with, just standard resin printers or whatever the dentist already tend to have in their offices. And so they can take the cost of a bike guard from a thousand dollars down to $50. Oh my gosh. Wow.
Chris Crittenden: So this one’s really exciting because this involves a lot of, , not just like hardware software integration, but they are also doing, teeth are 3D, So they’re doing a lot of 3D modeling. So they’re actually using some of the game engines that drive like 3D graphics and whatever else to build the product. And so again, you start to think about like that type of learning. Where they might get a little bit of that in their computer science classes, but now they’re having to build a production ready, 3D modeling software for dentists in their offices.
You just think about how much they learn in that environment versus any sort of project based thing you could give them in a classroom.
Drumm McNaughton: Those are great examples.
[00:27:14] Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
Drumm McNaughton: Chris, I have thoroughly enjoyed this. It’s neat to hear new learning models and how they’re working, what you’ve done to it to make it work, and some of the great examples coming out of it. So thank you very much for this. We always wrap up with two standard questions.
First one, three takeaways for university presidents and boards. What is it that they can do to really give this deep experiential experiences to their graduates in a way like what you’re talking about?
Chris Crittenden: Yes, I think the first thing I would say, I mentioned already, is leadership. Universities have incredible resources. Facilities, their faculty, the fact that students are there dedicating four years of their time is like in this enormous resource of things that you can do with it. But it takes real leadership to pull all of those resources together in a way that is deep, and connected, and exceptional. And so that’s the first thing I’d say is like, we need university leaders to really step up into that role, to really pull together the coalition of faculty members that want to be at the cutting edge of learning and to get them to do these things. Not, It’s not every faculty, but there are a lot of them, that want to, that want to be doing that. So, that’s the probably the first thing, leadership, recognize that you’ve got the resources there, and then go get it done, again, it’s been shocking to me even the outcomes that have come from this sort of thing, so.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. That’s neat. Thank you for those. What’s next for you? What’s next for Sandbox?
Chris Crittenden: Well I mentioned a little bit already. I think we think, if you talk to any professor and say what’s the worst part of teaching? I would guess that 80 something percent of them would say grades. And just , every professor hates that. No matter what you do on grades, you’re going to lose,
Because either you’re not going to be rigorous enough, you make all your students happy, or you actually introduce rigor and now you have to deal with 20 students complaining about their grades. And the same time it’s actually really hard to do grades in a really good way. And so again, this is where we’ve been investing and this is, , back to the learning outcomes thing, we think there’s a huge opportunity for AI to solve this problem, right. To basically partner an AI agent with a professor to do things we can’t do at big public universities in particular, where you got too many students. Like really in-depth oral exams that push a student’s learning way deeper. It’s also important because with AI you never know what’s there, but in an oral exam setting that takes it away.
So we’re very, very excited about it. Super bullish that there’s a big a big thing to be cracked there.
Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, Chris, thanks so much for being on this show. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I wish you guys the best of luck going forward.
Chris Crittenden: Great. Thanks Drumm. Appreciate it.
Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Chris Crittenden. Chris, thanks for being on the program. It’s great to see a new learning model out there, and thank you for putting this together. I look forward to hearing more about it going forward. To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in.
See you next week.
