What Would We Refund?
A friend recently sent me a story about Founders School, a new high school in New York that runs on the Alpha School platform. Tuition is reportedly $150,000 a year, and the school promises a full refund if a student’s business hasn’t generated $1 million in profit by graduation. We both thought it was wild, and it left us with the same question: what would have to be true for an independent school to make a promise like that?
It’s easy to poke at. Profit is a narrow way to define a good education, and a money-back guarantee makes a great marketing line. Still, Founders did something most schools avoid - they named the outcome they care about, told families how they’d measure it, and put their money behind it.
That got me thinking about GOA. What outcome would we stand behind? If a student didn’t reach it, would we give their tuition back?
The first thing I thought of was one of the numbers I’m proudest of. A few years ago, we started asking students whether their GOA course influenced what they’re considering studying in college. For many semesters, about 66% agreed or strongly agreed. Over the past year, that’s climbed to about 73%. I love that our courses are shaping what students care about and can’t think of anything closer to a holy grail in education than helping a student discover what they love, or get clearer about it.
I think that number says a lot about our teachers. Our Educator Growth Framework names content expertise as one of the three domains of great teaching. We usually talk about that expertise in terms of design: the activities teachers choose and the work they ask students to do. Students experience it as passion, and they see it every day. A teacher’s love for their subject should be visible in the questions they ask, the assignments they create, and the feedback they give. It shows up in how they stay current in their field, in what they’re reading, watching, and listening to, because all of that makes its way into class. Students catch that excitement from their teachers.
So here’s my answer. At GOA, we’d stand behind this: students leave our courses more passionate about the subject than when they came in, which is harder to measure than profit. Our end-of-course survey asks students whether the course helped them discover or deepen an interest they plan to pursue, and almost 3 in 4 say it did.
I don’t expect any school to put its tuition on the line. As a thought exercise, though, it’s a powerful one. What do we value? What outcomes would we stand behind? And how are we measuring them?
