Wong: Universities manage work-study via fragmented software or spreadsheets
Kathy Wong · The $1.2 Billion EdTech Opportunity Nobody Saw · Mar 12, 2025 · at 30:16
FolioWorks founder Kathy Wong outlines the fragmented state of higher education work-study distribution software to hosts Josh and Lisa Muccio.
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“Every university has different software to facilitate work study or they have no software and they do it in a spreadsheet.”
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“Around three billion dollars in wage subsidies comes from the federal government and the state government. So each year there's a program called Work Study. It's about 1.2 billion dollars. In 2020, they opened it up to for-profit companies because college camp…”
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“And so they opened up to for-profits and we became the first company to be the employer of record on behalf of any other company.”
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“I don't think that means they're going to cut us out. I think that it would take a lot of effort for them to do all the reporting that's required to Create a work study-approved job, and then do all of the reporting that's completed by us, but we're building t…”
Wong: Converting an intern to full-time costs employers $50,000
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“We built this platform about a year ago, and since then, we've served over a thousand students, 500 companies, we've built a 1.2 million dollar annual run rate, and we have over six hundred million dollars in subsidies from the government.”