Jeff Silber: Okay. Appreciate the color. Thanks.
Jeff Maggioncalda: Sure.
Operator: We will take our next question from Brian Peterson with Raymond James.
Brian Peterson: Hi, gentlemen. Congrats on the quarter. Just one from me. So if we think about the professional certificates. I’d love to understand thinking about maybe sales cycles, maybe that’s not the right term, but the late-stage pipeline, as people see what you are able to do and the scale you are able to reach, has it become easier and quicker to get more professional certificate partners out of the platform? Thanks, guys.
Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah. Thanks, Brian. It is, if you look at the rate of increase in professional certificates out there, we are at 44 now and it’s kind of a number of things. Step one is identifying which jobs do we want to offer a professional certificate for and then making sure you design it to have the skills that managing that hiring managers will need and then you look for a partner and then you produce it, you launch it, you promote it, et cetera. I would say that the interest among industry partners wanting to create branded professional certificates is high and increasing. I mean the more that we have from world-leading brands, the more other brands are like, hey, I’d like to do this too. I want to put my brand into the world where it’s not just on a TV ad or billboard, where my brand is something that my customers interact with and my brand helps create opportunity.
I mean it’s the level of engagement and impact that’s a pretty powerful way for employers and businesses to engage their audience. So we are seeing I think increased interest in this. I think with language translation that will also open up new markets that many of these brands are looking to engage. And so we do see that this cycle of identifying, sourcing, building and launching is on a positive trend. I don’t want to overestimate how quickly we can get these built. But I will say that generative AI will make it easier and less expensive and faster to build content generally than before generative AI. And so we see increasing demand and likely increasing speed in reducing cost as we march forward with professional certificates.
Brian Peterson: Great to hear. Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah.
Operator: We will take our next question from Ryan MacDonald with Needham & Company.
Ryan MacDonald: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Congrats on a nice quarter. Jeff, maybe to start with you. On the — as we think about the Pathways Degrees and sort of the rollout — continued rollout here. If you look at the existing sort of the portfolio of degrees that you have, how many of those university partners are exploring or showing interest in the Pathways from that perspective? And then, are you seeing any signs on the early stages of the ones that you have already launched where you are seeing sort of a better ability to convert maybe a Consumer learner to a Degree learner from some of these Degree Pathways?
Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah. On the first question, we do see growing interest in the — from universities saying, this is an interesting concept. The more that we have ACE credit recommendations, ECTS credit recommendations and other quality standards that universities and post-secondary education institutions have looked to in the past, the easier this gets. The more that we have states, University of Texas, and the whole UT system and other major university systems doing this, others look to that and say, well, hey, if they are doing it, this seems like a pretty good thing. I will also say that in the U.S., especially when it comes to public institutions including flagship public universities, there is a state mandate to educate people on a much broader scale than many of these universities are doing.
And when you look at the demographics with a generally declining population of young people compared to say the millennial cohort that came through, helping to educate working adults is becoming a bigger imperative and these Pathway Degrees, which don’t require you to stop what you are doing and move to a Campus, clearly fit the needs of this older working adult population that needs to get reskilled because technology is changing jobs so quickly. So we do see a lot more interest and a lot more openness to these more flexible Pathway Degrees even from fairly elite universities. And I’d say, not just in the U.S., of course, globally as well. In terms of conversion and I kind of mentioned this a little bit, we are not happy with the Degrees segment.
I mean it’s not — as I think Josh maybe asked, it’s not what we had said at the beginning of the year. We are not going to finish up on target there. But when you look at the performance of Degree programs that have these Pathways, you do see an ability to make a proposition that resonates with the learner, that helps convert them from the Consumer open content onto Degree, at better rates than just a plain vanilla traditional degree. We have a lot to prove out, we have got to do it more at scale. Part of what we are also doing is looking to existing degree programs that don’t have pathways and architecting pathways for those degrees. We are trying to create pathways from those types of certificate programs where we have a lot of learners who are seeking jobs because of those professional certificates that would benefit from a degree and you get a wage and a wealth premium if you have the degree.
So there’s a lot of work to do. The logic is very clear and the intuition certainly resonates and when you put the proposition in front of learners, it makes good sense. So for early stage…
Ken Hahn: Logic, the intuition and the early result.
Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah. Yeah.
Ken Hahn: We are seeing positive signs on the strategy.
Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah. But obviously, it’s still early and we have got a lot to improve.
Ryan MacDonald: Super helpful color there. And maybe just as a follow-up, I wanted to touch on the translations. As we think about how this sort of translates, if you will to business performance moving forward. I mean from the regions and languages that you have already translated or how should we start to track success in this area? Is this more registered learners on the platform coming from countries that are speaking in those languages? Should we start to see that more in terms of paid conversion or expansion opportunities within the, perhaps, the Coursera for Business segment? How should we track this moving forward?
Jeff Maggioncalda: Yeah. So separate from what we actually reported and I will talk about what metrics that we report might move first. But just so you understand the intuition of kind of how we are seeing the translation show up as demand. Currently, part of our business where we are seeing the most immediate response is Coursera for Government. And a lot of it is governments serve their citizen populations, and in many cases, those populations don’t speak English or few of them speak English as a second language. When we are able to go to a government and say we can help you skill up 100,000 people who speak Arabic and maybe only 10% speak English, but we have a full catalog of high quality brands and credentials in Arabic or in Thai.
