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When I was a biology teacher I once thought it would be funny to replace the word experiment with the word asparagus for one period. We were doing a lab about osmosis, and as I described the lesson to my unsuspecting third period class, I referred to the 'asparagus' over and over again. When doing a science 'asparagus' you always have to wear your safety goggles. Some things to keep in mind during the 'asparagus' are to read the instructions carefully before beginning the 'asparagus'.
Some kids didn't notice at all, perhaps more of a knock against my teaching style than their comprehension, but I could see that some students were noticing. A few students looked confused, a few started to chuckle, and I could tell one girl in the back was getting noticeably agitated. After I explained that each lab group would need to appoint an 'asparagus' lead she loudly turned to her neighbor and said "why does this man keep saying asparagus?"
After she said it, the veil was lifted and we got to have a nice little laugh together as a class that most students just shrugged off as Mr. Ifshin being weird again. It was a real 'the emperor has no asparagus' moment. I tell this story because I was thinking about those times when a bunch of people notice something but it takes one person to say it out loud before the rest of the community will acknowledge it.
The first platform WhereWeGo built was the New Orleans Training Navigator. The purpose of the platform was to help any person explore all the training programs in New Orleans. We populated it by picking up the phone and calling coding boot camps, community colleges, driving to union meetings, and getting every piece of information we could collect about the training programs in our city.
One question we would often ask ourselves is 'how do we help our community determine program quality?' In other words, is it our job to tell people whether we think a program is 'good'? We decided that to become an honest and high quality intermediary our responsibility would not be to make calls about the quality of the program but instead be the best at the quality of the information we provided. The cost, the length of the program, future earnings, the verifiable data we could aggregate about each program would surely provide students and workers in New Orleans with enough context to make great decisions about their futures.
I still believe deeply in that idea. But I now think we confused transparency with trust.
Transparency can tell you what a program costs, how long it takes, what graduates tend to earn, and whether people finish. Those facts matter enormously. But transparency is still just access to information. Trust is something different: it's confidence that you understand what an experience will actually be like for you. A dataset can tell me the average wage after graduation, but it can't tell me whether the program was worth it for a single mom working nights, or whether an instructor actually showed up for students when things got hard. We thought that if we made enough information transparent, trust would follow. I'm no longer sure that's true. So maybe we need to find a way to score training programs on what makes them good.
In 'The Score,' philosopher Thi Nguyen writes about what happens when complicated human values are compressed into scores and metrics. The danger is not simply that the metric might be inaccurate. It is that the metric can slowly replace the thing we actually cared about. A five-star "program quality" score would inevitably encode our definition of quality as though it were universal. But every worker possesses a form of expertise that WhereWeGo can never reproduce: expertise about their own life. Someone who attended a program knows whether the schedule worked while raising two kids. Only a graduate could tell you if the instructor cared when they fell behind or whether the promised employer connections were real. After they finished, did the credential actually open doors? Were they the only woman or person of color in their cohort? Did they feel welcome? And did the experience feel worth the money, time, stress, and opportunity cost? And only the individual considering that program knows which of those things matter most to them.
WhereWeGo's platforms and websites should still be the best place to find transparent, verifiable information about training programs. But rather than trying to manufacture the definitive measure of program quality, we should become the place where the people with the most important missing expertise, the people who actually attended these programs, share what they know. In other words, we should be the place where any person can say 'why does this man keep saying asparagus?' Except instead of saying asparagus they could highlight the best and worst of the programs they actually attended. That's what we're working on now! Look at me bring this thing home!
I'm wondering if anyone who reads this has had a 'why does that man keep saying asparagus' moment recently?
