People around the world are grappling with worries about the future, as AI continues disrupting (or in some cases eliminating) labor markets. Add to that growing fears of global economic collapse, and it becomes easy for many to feel paralyzed and unsure how to move forward.
Within this challenging economic atmosphere as a backdrop, it’s striking to observe how BYU-Pathway is reaching people in objectively difficult conditions, and — one by one — providing practical education oriented toward a better future.
Viva Bartkus, business professor emerita at Notre Dame, and an expert on helping build impoverished communities, said earlier this year that “what’s really, really unique about BYU-Pathway is it is the only organization that I know of that essentially, under the same umbrella, is both an academic institution and an economic development engine.”
Bartkus explained to me in an interview that for most universities, the education and development of the mind are (in the ideal) the ends of the institution.
“But what BYU-Pathway is doing here is unique,” she said. “BYU-Pathway thinks of education as a means towards ends, a means to look after your family, better means to have the space and time and energy to live your faith, a way to better serve the Lord in your community.”
This represents a view of education attentive to “the means by which you can learn skills that are valuable in an economy and pull yourself out of poverty,” according to this scholar.
At BYU-Pathway, this all takes place at the individual level, one by one around the world.
Individual focus, while reaching many?
As BYU-Pathway continues to grow and redefine what an education is, a paradox emerges. For most universities, the more the institution expands, the more the individual student is lost in the bloating barrage of administrative overload. But with BYU-Pathway, something unique appears to be happening.
According to available interviews and data, the more this institution scales across the world, the greater its reach to lift the one. But this is about more than mere metrics and benchmarks. President Brian K. Ashton, President of BYU-Pathway, said “we are motivated, of course, by our religious belief that we’re all sons and daughters of God, and He loves us, and He wants us to become like Him.
“So education not only makes us better parents and family members, sons, daughters, parents. It makes us better in the community and our nations. And on top of that, it helps us become more like our Savior, Jesus Christ. So it’s really important for us to be able to make education available to not just members of the church, but people throughout the world.”
President Ashton continued, “BYU-Pathway is emerging at really a divinely guided time. Labor markets are changing drastically. One reason was the pandemic where we realized you don’t have to be in an office all the time. The second thing is AI, which is changing how we do things and who can do them. And the third thing is that there’s a need for people who live outside the United States to do work for companies in the developed world.
“So what BYU-Pathway provides is this U.S.-educated workforce that’s outside the U.S., that is relatively low cost and it’s all over the world. We’re in over 180 countries and so it doesn’t matter where you need to go in the world. Our students are well trained. They’re good with English. They work across borders. They’re honest, and we are seeing people all over the world say I want to hire these students.”
The BYU-Pathway economic development strategy
Bartkus explained that the BYU-Pathway endeavor, to both educate and enable the one, starts with the students. “We’ve got trustworthy, terrific employees. Test them all you want, but we vouch for these students and if you place them for 60 or 90 days, we think you’re going to be really thrilled with the result.”
This approach ultimately requires “a strategy that is essentially a three-legged stool,” she said. “The three legs are local jobs, remote jobs, and entrepreneurial activity. And all three legs coordinate.”
Among the many endeavors to economically build BYU-Pathway students around the world, Bartkus highlighted one in particular under the local employment leg of Pathway’s strategy. “One of the things that’s really missing in many emerging markets,” she said, “is good quality data for decision-making. That could be good quality data for business decision-making, for governments, for NGOs, etc. But there’s just a lack of quality data.”
To solve this problem, Bartkus and Briton Moffitt, a director of business development at BYU-Pathway, started a global enumerator project to employ Pathway students and meet this need. “The project began by trying to gather higher-quality data for BYU-Pathway and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints around standard living wages relative to specific countries,” Moffitt said.
“The students were able to gather just under 8,000 interviews in 12 weeks in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda that were typically glossed over because of how inaccessible the data has been.”
Dickson Daniel Korley, a BYU-Pathway student in Accra Ghana, said of working on this project, “this experience has deepened my understanding of how to support others in meaningful ways. The lessons learned have strengthened my problem-solving skills and commitment to service, greatly benefiting my future endeavors.”
BYU-Pathway working with Gallup
The Church Living Wage project led to a second project working with Gallup to gather quality data for their annual World Poll. “Our students working on the fieldwork initiative for Gallup in Uganda and Ghana have successfully completed 1,000 interviews,” Moffitt said.
“And these are interviews quality-controlled by Gallup, so the interviews were very highly audited. The people at Gallup have told me there is a real talent opportunity here,” he said, in reference to the capability of the BYU-Pathway students.
Dan Foy, principal and global research leader at Gallup, explained in an interview about the project that Gallup typically works with firms that are already well-established in the markets where they want to work.
“So it’s interesting going straight to the source with some of these students,” he said. “Oftentimes you don’t necessarily have as motivated of a workforce in some of these roles. But what’s unique with the Pathway students is that they’re not just doing this as a job — as an economic opportunity — but they’re also doing this as part of their education.”
“So they’ve got this extra motivation that you get from students who know that they’re getting something out of it beyond just a paycheck, which I think makes it really unique. And we saw that in some of the data we’ve gotten back.”
Foy added, “We’ve done two countries so far. We’re going to continue into another four countries over the course of the next year. And some of the comments from Gallup’s field teams that have been working with these folks that really stood out is just the willingness and enthusiasm.”
‘Human data in the age of AI’
The theme of Pathway’s Gallup project is human data in the age of AI, a business approach that favors, and oftentimes depends upon human labor and ingenuity, as opposed to moving towards total reliance on AI.
“We should be concerned about AI and impoverished nations that are under the development curve getting left behind,” Moffitt said. “But what I am seeing is you will always have to go to the individual that is not connected, that has no smartphone and no internet. And their voices need to be heard.”
Foy remarked that “you really can’t go do an online study in a lot of these countries because you’re excluding significant portions of the population, either because they don’t have access to the appropriate technologies or networks or smartphones or computers.”
“We really think of ourselves as providing this service of elevating voices from people around the world. And that’s the kind of work that the Pathway students are working on,” Foy said.
“These are the places where AI and online research, it’s just really not viable. I’m really glad that the work the Pathway team is doing is getting the kind of attention that they really deserve.”
Moffitt explained that the project is “about generating insights and data and analysis that you couldn’t do from behind the screen,” all while lifting individual Pathway students through gainful employment.
“We’re concerned about economic development,” he said, “but it has to be economic development that supports the individual and families. And it can’t be work for work’s sake, it has to be sustainable, something people can rely on to build leaders and families and communities one by one around the world.”
President Ashton said in an interview that “this enumerator project fits really well with what The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is doing. We are in the process of starting a medical school which has an international focus, and all of that requires data. It’s interesting that there’s opportunities here that didn’t exist a long time ago.”
And referring to the project with Gallup, Ashton described the research firm as “the best there is when it comes to market research and it’s really unique that BYU-Pathway students from Uganda and other places like that are working with Gallup.”