Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very excited to welcome you to the very first world higher education ranking Summit. And today, we are joined by world's extraordinary leaders, government officials, changemakers, innovators, and everyone who has done so much in the field of higher education and helping the youth. And today, actually, today, we are joined by an extraordinary person. Dennis Yu, Dennis Yu is the Chief Technology Officer at this matrix, a digital marketing company, which partners with schools and trained young adults. And this is amazing because Dennis mission as he is a true visionary is to create a million jobs. And I am really fascinated by Dennis vision and his experience, his expertise, and most importantly, by the things that he has done so far. So, Dennis is an internationally recognized lecturer, and Dennis’s program centers around mentorship helping students grow. Helping students grow their expertise to manage social campaigns for enterprise clients, like the Golden State Warriors, Rosetta stones and others.

What is more, Dennis is actually a recognized Lecturer in Facebook marketing, and has spoken in 17 countries. Also, he has a leadership position, he held leadership position at Yahoo. And American Airlines studied finance and economics at Southern Methodist University, as well as at London School of Economics. And I am I'm truly inspired that is, this is truly brilliant, what you're doing helping us around the world and helping everyone who actually lacks the skills to build that success skill set to build that technical skill set as well that will help them get the job of their dreams.

"Can you could you please tell me more? How do you cooperate with the higher education institutions and what has been your experience so far?"

Thank you, Angelica. What I love about higher education is that all the faculty and administrators that I meet, they all believe in creating jobs, they all are there to serve the students instead of making money and industry which they could do so much more. A few days ago, I flew to Utah to Ensign College, where we've taught there the last six or seven years. And they've brought in other practitioners and social media, other CMOs and heads of marketing and other companies to not just teach real world on what happens in digital marketing and social, but actually to provide jobs and provide exercises. So, we love seeing this. Before we turn the camera on. We were talking about my friend Dr. Karen Sutherland at the University of the Sunshine Coast, and how every year she has 200 of her students not just go through, for course on social media, but have these students in groups adopt local businesses. So, they're actually implementing digital marketing, actually creating social media videos and running ads and driving real results for these businesses. They have to communicate, prepare the results, prepare the case study, be able to communicate with a client. I love seeing this. Because when you look at the young adults, what happens when they like most young adults, what do they say when it comes to higher education or going to college? Right? What's the prevalent thing they say?

It well, most young adults are really confused. You know, they didn't know what to do. They didn't know where to go and they lack mentorship.

And so, because they lacked that direction and the mentorship, it's not because the university is no is outdated or because they should just become an entrepreneur immediately. Or because you know school is no you know; college doesn't isn't relevant anymore because I can just go to YouTube or whatnot. It's because there's not a clear path between going to school and having some kind of employment, right? If you're going to do continuing education, or vocational education to be a plumber, or a pilot or a doctor or surgeon or something that clearly leads towards employment, you become an attorney, you pass the bar, right? All this you're being you'll be an attorney. When it comes to things like social media, digital marketing, the same kind of thing. We equip schools with our educational programs, we provide it completely free. We have 1000s of industry practitioners that volunteer their time, because they believe in creating jobs, it's a great way of giving back. And thus, we've built a closer partnership, we've enabled a closer partnership between the universities, and the social media practitioners in that particular city.

So, we just happen, it's not just me, I'm happy to teach as well. But there's so many other people that are practitioners like me, that believe in bringing industry and higher education together. So that way, the school is still providing the accountability, the school is still providing that kind of infrastructure and program, you know, the accreditation that leads towards a degree. But there's also real experience along the way, because that school can reach out to other real estate agents and restaurants and whatnot that would love to have students that are doing marketing, social media, digital PR work on their business, following the overall curriculum that we've set. And so, this is the partnership that we love to see. It's creating a lot of jobs, a lot of experience.

And what do you think happens with some of these businesses that were able to hire these micro student agencies, while these kids were still in undergrad, while they were still in school? What do you think happens when that student graduates with that business? A lot of these businesses are hiring these students out of the program? Isn't that awesome? They're getting real experience. And the experience is beyond just an internship because it's well structured, because the university is overseeing the overall program, because the training and exercises that they're doing fits into the curriculum and learning objectives that they have for each of those classes.

I love this. This is actually brilliant. And it helps so many people find purpose in their life. And my question is to you,

"How did you decide to do this? Why did you decide to give back to the community and to help use realize their potential?"

When I was 21, which was 26 years ago, I was very, very fortunate to be mentored by the CEO of American Airlines. And his name was Al Casey. And this man opened up so many doors for me. I didn't know anything about business. I was very good at school, very good at math. But I didn't understand how do you apply for a job, I didn't understand interpersonal relationships and meetings. And I didn't really have a direction or a vision. You know, I was very smart. But I didn't know what field I wanted to go into. Because there's just so many different things. And I'm a young adult, and I don't know, and he guided me. He mentored me, he introduced me to other people. I met presidents of the United States. I've met other heads of state I've had dinner with Margaret Thatcher, or Colin Powell and people like this. I have no business meeting these sorts of people, right? But he believed in me. And that mentorship means so much to me a quarter of a century later, that all along I've been thinking, how do I replicate that for other students where they can get mentorship.

And so, I've mentored a lot of students. But I found I found that I can only mentor so many students myself. But I found other likeminded business owners, other entrepreneurs that said we want to mentor as well. We want to do things in our community, we want to be able to give back we want to donate our time. So, we've had all these different entrepreneurs contribute their expertise for free and put it into an overall training program that anyone can be able to benefit. So, I was telling you earlier, my friend Glenn Vo he's a dentist. And he's a very successful dentist been doing it a long time. He teaches at the dental colleges. So, all these new people that want to be dentists, they learn from his technique. And he now has 35,000 dentists that follow him. And now that he's partnered with us, he's teaching these other dentists how he does digital marketing, using our systems and processes. So, what do you think happens when these 35,000 other dentists say this is how Dr. Glen Vo does his marketing, this is how he gets new patients. This is how he trains up the front office staff. This is how he handles the front desk. This is his new patient onboarding process, right? This is how he builds his personal brand. This is how he's active in his church. This is how he's active in the local community and involved in programs to prevent you know, drunk driving and other sorts of things, right? He's teaching all these other dentists how to do that. And these other dentists will say Well, I would like to have the same kind of thing. I also need people working in my office, I also need someone else helping me with my marketing. And where do you think they turn? They say in the group, they say, great, you know, who do we have that that is competent, that has gone through this.

And so, we want to pull that from the university side, we want to pull all these other students, these young adults that know how to do social media and digital surfing these other dentists because think of it this way. You have all these business owners, let's say a real estate agent, the average age is 53. And they're a mom, how likely are they going to know how to use Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok? Versus how likely is that young adult. And they may or may not know how to actually run Tik Tok ads, whatever. But the perception is that young adults understand social media, they just were born with social media in their hand. So, we're bringing these together, what a great opportunity to bring all these so, millions of young adults in contact with these business owners. But if we just introduced them directly, then it's going to be chaos. So, we need the universities to help administer the program, right to have accountability, which is great. The whole point of a four year or more degree program is there's accountability along the way, there's assessment, people have to turn in exercises, they have to provide a report. So, we believe the universities are the perfect vehicle to be able to enable both sides coming together. So, I think the university is the ultimate mentorship at scale. So, in the same way, I was mentored by the CEO of American Airlines a long time ago, I believe universities can enable that same mentorship type of structure for all the students that are coming through now, especially because of social media.

I love this, because when I started this university, I didn't have a mentor. This concept of mentorship has been really popular for a while. But practically, we didn't have that. And having that luck of finding the mentor, it actually saves years, years of mistakes and years that would have could have been put in something more valuable. So, mentorship programs are essential for success, for building confidence for building business connections for building soft skills.

"But what is your opinion? How can universities practically integrate mentorship into curriculum?"

So, the mentorship is something that we are all doing in sort of a non-official and unofficial sense. So technically, I believe that all faculty are mentors, because if you're not, and then you don't truly care for the success of your students. And certainly, there's informal mentorship, because there can be business leaders that you know, they arrange a like So, speed dating a mentorship thing where you can choose a mentor and you meet every month and what that but I don't, I don't think that's as well structured as having what we call these Lighthouse figureheads. So, when we have someone like Tommy Mello, who is the CEO of a one garage, and he has 20 or 30,000 home service businesses that follow him because he's a very successful home service business, or Dr. Glenn VO, or Tom Ferry, who's very successful in real estate, and he has 450,000 Real estate agents. All of these people who are number one in their industry, are mentors. And they're figureheads that allow other people other real estate agents that follow Tom Ferry, other dentists that follow Glen VO, all of these dentists can mentor these other young adults. Right. So now we're talking about creating a group of hundreds of 1000s of business owners that are working directly with these young adults that are in university still. And so that's one kind of mentor who's kind of a client but also mentor because they believe in the young adults, because they understand that the university is supervising this.

And the young adult is maybe not a professional, but you know, they're willing, they're willing to be flexible, because they believe in what we're trying to do. The professor's a mentor. You have other people like me who are experts in digital marketing, or social media, or analytics or building websites, we are all mentors, because we're providing support. So, when you have a multiple mentor situation, because of the teacher, because of the industry expert, because of the functional expert, like me for like SEO or PPC, then that enables the student to be able to go through the curriculum, and complete the exercises and drive sales for the underlying businesses over here on this side. So that means driving more buyers and sellers for the real estate agents they're trying to buy and sell houses, that's driving more patients to the dentist. And when we see that the students able to go through these steps and drive economic success.

That's proof that the combination of the professor the industry expert and a digital marketer, expert together, we have to bring all of these worlds together. That's what really needs to happen. It's I don't believe that mentorship from faculty alone is enough. I don't believe that industry mentorship where you just learn from someone who owns a restaurant who owns a particular kind of is I don't believe that's enough. And I don't believe in mentorship from people that are good at building websites or editing video, or, you know, running LinkedIn posts or whatever. Like, I don't believe that's enough, because that's more tool and specialty and skill focused, I believe that every student should have a mentor, a combination of mentors in each of these three realms. And the beauty is that there's, there's organizations that bring that together, right? For example, I'm speaking at the integrate conference in August, in West Virginia, where we have a lot of professors that are coming together, talking about how they're sharing curriculum and programs, and starting the student loan agencies. So that's the whole higher education side.

WHERs, that's a great way to bring together a lot of players in higher education. But we have a lot of industry associations, right? So here in Las Vegas, we have a lot of people will come in for their big conference, and it could be the American Veterinary Association. So, all the veterinarians that are coming together, right. And so, we can tap into the mentors from here. And then In our partnership with Fiverr. Fiverr has a bunch of freelancers, or our partnership with online jobs.ph, they have 2 million virtual assistants, the world's largest site for virtual assistants, we have mentorship here in different programs. So, I believe that you have to cross all three of these areas. Because if you do just one, you're not going to be able to bring the student all the way through, they're going to have an incomplete experience, just like if the higher education, if the universities, just go through curriculum, and just do 10 tests and exams and papers, they're going to miss these other two components, right?

This is a very holistic and comprehensive approach. Because universities, actually what I wanted to say is that we are being watched right now by 1000s, of academics and practitioners and members of staff, Dean's presidents of universities. So, it's, it's very important to hear the experience and the insights from someone who knows what works, who knows how to secure those jobs for, for graduates.

And my next question would be about the rankings because we see that ranking system today is mostly focused on academic citations, and research, which is exceptional guests as it's really important. However, we do not see the employability as one of the top factors in the ranking methodology. What do you think about this? What is your opinion, where should employability stand? And is there anything else that ranking engines to take into account to give a chance to those universities that actually combine that holistic approach that you've just mentioned, on giving students practical skills, and providing real time corporate or anytime practical knowledge that they need?

Certainly, citations and publishing for tenured professors is great. But to your point, the ranking should align with the objective of the underlying customer. So, the underlying customers, the student, and they get a degree that degree should turn into a job. We did some research the last couple of years, and we polled several 100 universities just starting in the United States on Do they have a digital marketing or social media program? Do they track what kinds of jobs people are getting if they have that particular kind of degree, and how much money is that person making when they're starting when they have that kind of degree. And, you know, we found in this research, almost nobody was tracking employability, they weren't tracking whether the students got a job and what that position was and how much money they were making. Obviously, the amount of money you make is not the most important thing. But it is important to track. And the number was very low, it was low double digits of the number of students that were being tracked. And I thought, well, that's great. You can see what percent graduate and you know, what their SATs scores are or whatnot. But when it comes to things that are practical, and vocational, such as digital marketing, where it's very clear, it's very measurable.

I think that rankings through systems like WHERs should account for what, especially if we implement, you know, adopt a local business, start your own little agency while you're still in school. The success of those programs is going to significantly influenced the employability of the students that come out because we know and Modern Times that merely having a degree is not enough, or having a degree plus an internship is better. But it's not enough. Because employers want to see that students have actually, not just like they worked at some company. But the employers want to see that the students have actually achieved a particular kind of results. And when that happens, these students already have jobs before they graduated. And it just, it makes my heart warm. When I see this happen, for 1000s of the students that are getting not just digital marketing, training, but they're actually working on businesses, maybe it's a hairdresser, they get their hair cut at this one place. And they didn't realize, you know, I could help that person who cuts my hair every two weeks, I could help them with their digital marketing, it's actually very easy, because I can see all the things that are causing them that aren't ranking Google, I can see that their social media is broken, and I can help them. And I can get course credit at the same time. And the university see that there's no cost to be able to apply our training, we've lost millions of dollars providing this kind of training.

So, when you have these other precursor factors that tie into the ranking, so the ranking, the big ranking, I think should be based on what percent of students are graduating, and they already have a job lined up? Is it in the field that they wanted to get a job in? And are they making enough money? Right? Are they happy with the job? I believe that the ranking should be primarily based on the employability job satisfaction and income of that student at the time of graduation? So that's the most important factor, I believe. And then if you trace it back, what are the other factors that lead to that success? Did they have work experience before they graduated? Have they documented this and have references and testimonials and case studies and communication showing that they've done this? Have they gone through some sort of structured career program where they're getting real industry expertise, not just writing papers, does has the school adopted the latest marketing training directly from Facebook and Fiverr, and online jobs.ph. And these other sorts of tools and technology companies, I believe you can take what I believe should be the number one factor in rankings. And you can look at these other pieces that lead that contribute towards the students being successful.

This is brilliant and I do believe that all universities must track that. And this is the measurable thing that everyone can track at universities. However, most of them fail in that. But I do believe that today's session will help many universities to understand the importance of tracking a student's success and students’ employability as one of the most important things. And let me tell you a little bit about UniRanks methodology. UniRanks actually is the new ranking engine that takes into account employability student satisfaction ratio, diversity and inclusion. And it is student centric platform, which is extremely important, because we see situations that were top universities around the globe remain there on their top levels. However, they lack certain support, and a lack of the student’s centric approach. So, this is the thing the new challenge that human rights striving to, to conquer.

And my last question, time has actually, it's been really incredible interview because I was mesmerized by everything that you were saying. And if only I could learn this earlier, this is this is my only regret a but what would be your advice to recent graduates that are just confused when they're trying to get into the real life after their academic experience focused on learning only things that were a compulsory, what is your experience to someone that didn't have mentorship yet, and didn't have that guidance to skyrocket their career or their business and start from the ground?

Yeah, a lot of young adults approach us and they're confused about what to do, whether they've gone to college or not. And here's the one advice I give them. Follow the person who has achieved the thing that you want to do. So, there was a survey that was done last year among young adults asking them what the top professionalist that they want it, you know, what's the number one job that you want? And what do you think the answer was? Dentist or a firefighter or policeman or an entrepreneur, what do you think the number one job they want.

But they polled right lots and lots of young adults asking them what is the number one job you'd like to have? What do you think the answer was?
Entrepreneur?
Close. The answer was influencer, even though that's not an actual job, that's not an actual thing you don't just get it's not like you apply at the office to become an influencer. Right. But that was the number one thing by far that young adults wanted. And I think a lot of faculty and administrators and university presidents don't know that that's the case. So, if these young adults, they want to be influencers, who is it that they look to for their role models? They look to a lot of people on social media, right? And do you know who the number one influencer is for young adults?
Don’t tell me it's Kim Kardashian.

No, Kim Kardashian is very big, but not for young adults. For young adults, the number one is Jake Paul, right. So, Jake, Paul, reached out to me, and he said, hey, let's do a program. Let's train up these young adults and how to become influencers and start their social media agency. So, I flooded Jake Paul's house, and I spent a bunch of time there. And we put together this whole program, working together with universities to teach these young adults how to become influencers. So, if you're a young adult, you know, hey, nothing wrong with following a university professor, that's three times your age. But you want to find out like, maybe your thing is you want to do ecommerce, right? So, follow somebody who has made $10 million plus in E commerce and find out exactly what they did. Maybe they'll become a mentor of yours. Maybe you want to go into the business of you know, website building, find someone who's done that, and they become a mentor, we believe you should follow only the people that have done the thing that you want. So, what do you think has more credibility in teaching how to become an influencer? The world's number one influencer for young adults, or some professor somewhere, right? And so, if you're that professor somewhere, and you're thinking yes, well, I can't compete against social media, because I'm not on Tik Tok. I'm not on Instagram. But you know, I have a master's degree in education and whatnot.

The beauty is that these folks all want to partner with universities. And it's wonderful, this is the partnership that I'm talking about. There's mentors that are here that are very successful in social media, that these young adults already know who they are. But they need to structure right. So, you guys, as administrators provide that structure. That's what a degree So, program is. And then you can put in content from practitioners like me and Jake Paul. And that way, you're allowing the students to move through this program that has feedback and accountability and they're, they're learning the best stuff. And they're taking action because me and Jake, Paul, they're not going to keep each of these students personally accountable. Right, Jake Paul's not going to text each of these students to say, hey, did you complete the second exercise in chapter three? No, they're not going to do that. We need the universities to provide that the whole point of the university is to provide that environment for learning. But you want to bring in practitioners, right? And that's my advice to young adults. So, you can learn from a Jake Paul, and you can watch YouTube videos for free. But how likely is it that if you just watch a bunch of YouTube videos, or follow people on Tik Tok or Instagram, how likely is that going to result in a methodical structured program that leads towards employment? And I think when young adults look at it this way, they say, you know, I do need the accountability of a class of a professor of other students have kind of a cohort while I'm pursuing the structured education that comes from a figurehead someone, I already know who's achieved the path that I want.

I love this. This is just brilliant, and absolutely inspiring way to summarize our today's discussion. And Dennis, I'm really grateful for your time for your inspiration for your invaluable insights. And I know that there are lots of questions that this session has generated. So, there is a chat box where you can submit your question, and Dennis will happily answer this. My, uh, my gratitude and my privilege to be talking to you is incredible. I'm really inspired. And I know that we have a portion of young adults watching us and students and graduates that that would love to get that hands on experience, and find that mentor. So, thank you so much for providing that guidance. And we're really looking forward to seeing you again. Thank you so much, Dennis.

Thank you reach out. Love to see you guys on social media.

Thank you so much, you know, as I listen to each of you, Jamal in East Jerusalem, Omor in Germany, speaking for northeast Syria, and Rushsar here in New York, and speaking for all in the Afghan Diaspora and the women of Afghanistan I'm. reminded of something I wrote over 20 years ago for the United Nations Chronicle and in that essay I talked about education and the freedom from exclusion. I think what we are trying to do in lead impact is to use the possibilities that technology in the community offers us to include all of those voices that we want to be heard to make the invisible visible and to heighten the awareness of the challenges that each of our areas, resp. and collectively face. This is really in my mind the meaning of the dignity of the person in human security.

When we speak about education and the freedom from exclusion, we must remind ourselves constantly of our responsibilities and those responsibilities. I think we all working to realize in lead impact together, and for that, I thank you all so much. It is exciting to contemplate how we can extend our initiatives into M. City, and for that reason, we also thank our partners, WHERS 2022 and Touch Cast all of those individuals in front and behind the scenes who make our dialoguing possible. So on that note.

Thank you all, and we look forward to future work together and to our collaborations.