Welcome to the Tech Policy podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenauer, your host. On today's show, student debt. Can technology help solve the problem of ballooning student debt?

Joining me to discuss this is Liz Wessel, CEO of Way Up. Liz, thank you for

joining me. Thank you so much for having me. So Liz, your company Way Up, the mission is to get

every college student their first job. And recently CNN named your company one of 30 that is

changing the world. So congratulations on the accolade.

Thank you. And just to clarify, not just your first job, but also your first internship and

maybe even your second job and your third job during college. And then your first full-time job.

All right. So you're going to hopefully cradle to grave is the idea, right? There you go.

Exactly. So let's just jump in.

Tell us about Way Up and what makes this different than other sites that could help you get a job like Craigslist or Monster or Indeed or any of those sites.

Absolutely.

So Way Up is the largest online marketplace exclusively for college students to get part-time jobs, summer internships, and full-time jobs after they graduate, or when they're graduating, like right now. And the way it works that makes it so special is that when a student signs up, they fill out a full profile. And on average, they complete a bunch of just information about themselves like then gets structured

into our system, which means that when they start seeing jobs, they only see jobs that they're

qualified for based on the structured data that they gave us. So for example, if you say I speak

Spanish, then any job that requires this person to speak Spanish, those Spanish-speaking students will be

able to see the job, whereas people who say they don't speak Spanish won't be able to see that

job. So as a result, students know that every single job they see on our platform, they can actually

apply to because they're qualified for it. And on top of that, we use their profile almost like a

passport to all of the jobs

where they can just use their profile and not have to fill their kind of same profile over and over and over again.

So most of the jobs that are on way up are actually way up apply jobs, meaning you can use your profile once.

So one of the basic benefits is just narrowing the scope of jobs that you're applying for

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