Day two of the 27th Annual Needham's Growth Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald. I lead Needham's EdTech Research efforts here. And I'm pleased to be joined in this session by Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz. Nathan, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having me.
This will be a fireside chat session. We've got about 40 minutes. I've got a list of questions for Nathan that we'll run through, and then we'll try to save the last 5-10 minutes for audience Q&A. So if you do have some questions, we'll make sure to get those asked and answered. But we've got a lot of interesting topics to talk about today, so let's dive in. Maybe just a quick overview of Chegg for those who might not be familiar with the business.
Absolutely. Happy to do it. So 17 years into this journey, February will be 18 for me, so deep love for education and what I can do for students. Chegg originally founded with this pretty simple mission: help students save time, save money, get smarter, and over the last few years, really thinking about how Chegg can be a coach in their corner. I think we're probably. We all probably believe the college student of today is 18- 21, but the reality is somewhat different. Chegg, we do a global study every year of about 11,000 students, 15 countries, to really deeply understand them. What you find out is that about 30% of students are working 20 hours a week. About a quarter of those students are above the age of 25.
And so the idea that the only way to kick your 17-year-old out of the house is to send him to college isn't necessarily the truth anymore. And the modern student has a lot of different things being pulled upon them. When we do that study, what we find out, for particularly the U.S. student, almost 70% of them say they deal with daily anxiety related to their education. They're incredibly sleep deprived, and they just have this feeling that college wasn't built for them.
And so we at Chegg have really been striving to be that coach in their corner and really building a product and service that isn't designed to just help them at that one time that they may have a question, but really be this learning coach that is with them through the 130 days of a semester to 260 days of the year. And so it's this learning journey that we've put so much time and energy into that really makes our product something that students use. And we teach millions of students a year and have billions of learning interactions on our platform, so we're really excited about that. And we're excited about continuing that journey as we've kind of spent 2024, I would say, thoughtfully but urgently introducing how we're going to use AI in our product. But now we're in 2025.
We're thinking about how do we actually build an application layer that leverages all that learning, all that learning science, all that personalization that we've been building over the last decade.
Excellent. Yeah, I love the point about there's no such thing as a traditional student anymore. I mean, you could see it in the fall data around enrollments. First-year students were down, but overall enrollments were up quite a bit.
Yeah, 3%.
Yeah, 3%. So it shows that it's not only a 17-year-old graduating high school and going right into college.
Absolutely.
So you've been, like you said, with the company for over 17 years now, but the last seven now in the role of the CEO spot. We're just curious, in a time where there's great change going on with the company and in the industry, what's the last seven months been like? What have you learned, and how's that informing your sort of strategic vision for the business moving forward?
Yeah. I look at the last 7 months. Radical times call for some radical change. So we've done a number of things to make sure that we can kind of set ourselves up for success in 2025 and 2026, really getting to a place where we can stabilize the business and eventually start to regrow. Some great examples in 2025, obviously had to make some tough choices on kind of right-sizing our expenses for the market. And for this year, we'll be able to reduce kind of the OpEx by around $100-$120 million. We completely converted our Q&A platform over from something that used to take hours to get a solution, cost a number of dollars to get a solution, to something that's completely instantaneous and is coming in at costs that are 70% plus less than what it used to cost to service a student.
We really started to build out that personalization layer even more, and so students are starting to get experiences that are well beyond just the solution. We're prompting them throughout that entire experience to transform the content from a question to a flashcard to a practice problem, and we're starting to see, as a result of that, driving much stronger engagement with our customer set, and we've done a bunch of things to upgrade our tech, particularly on the commerce side of things, where we know we're going to have to lean into in 2025 into new packaging and pricing programs in order to make sure the traffic that we're getting in is traffic that turns into traffic that starts to engage with the product, starts to get that wow moment that we can create for the student, and then starts to be much more relevant in the consideration.
Finally, we've really been much more focused and directed with our marketing dollars versus just only putting them into performance programs and leveraging SEO. We're starting to leverage a lot more of brand. And so you saw in the fall of last year, we had this Small Steps, Big Wins program that started to really start to drive in more quality traffic, start to get us more relevancy with the student audience to make sure we're part of that consideration. We did a lot of work on TikTok. We started to do explorations on YouTube Shorts and Discord, all making sure we're part of that consideration set where we're where the student is. And so whether one of those channels goes away or not, we'll let the Supreme Court figure that out over the next couple of days.
We're making sure we're relevant in the student's world so we can be at the top of the funnel. You're seeing this year, we've already rolled out our latest marketing program called Get a Grip. We've got a new mascot. It's named Ace. It's an octopus, hence the grip. Students kind of need eight arms and eight legs to get through college, and so we want to be there to support them. That's getting a lot of fanfare on social. It's really this march to be relevant. You're seeing all these things that we're really pushing hard to making sure that we're just part of that. That's been the drive. We came in. We knew that there was headwinds in the business. You got to embrace that. You got to acknowledge it. You got to move on, and you got to charge forward.
Absolutely. And from a product and services perspective, this is not the first time that Chegg has, as a business, had to evolve its strategy, right? It started as an online textbook business and then moved to one that's focused more on products versus driving student success. So I mean, you've talked recently about creating a more personalized, individualized experience. So maybe help us understand from a product perspective some of the investments you're making there and what's to come on this next transition of the business.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've always had competitors. And frankly, some of the competitors that we've had in the past have really validated our service. I still remember the day when Amazon came in on, with textbook rental, and there was a moment of like, well, Amazon's coming into this. And well, the reality is all that did was make more students be attracted to textbook rental. So in the end, it was a good thing for the business. We pivoted at that point to become more of a student success company and a learning science company. And through some acquisitions, started to build the backbone of what you see Chegg Study is today. And as a result, there was a lot of kind of follow-ons. We had Brainly. We had a number of kind of Q&A platforms, questions and answer platforms come out.
So this is another time where we see, obviously, with AI, I mean, the ability to generate a solution fine. We're leveraging it. Obviously, I talked about that just a minute ago. But it is this personalization that really matters to students. When you look at the stats, when students are really around the thing that I focus a lot around, which is willingness to pay, 75% of students in the U.S. will say they're willing to pay for a platform that is going to effectively get them better grades, make them feel more competent, make them feel more confident. You look at our self-reported efficacy claims, and you start to see 89% of students feeling more confident when they use our solutions, 87% saying that they're getting better grades as a result of using our platform.
Our value props are very much in line with what will drive some willingness to pay from students. And so what we want to start to show students is, though, is that as they move beyond just generating a solution, and we think this kind of goes into where I think the puck is going in education in general, teachers are still. There's a population of teachers that are still teaching in very much a pre-AI way, giving 50 problems for a math exam, lots of homework. We're starting to see teachers, though, kind of change their grading rubrics and how they teach in the classroom, particularly how they grade in the classroom to a post-AI world where grading for homework isn't a thing. Homework is a thing, but there's no more grades. The grade isn't on the exam.
If all you've done for the last 130 days is kind of phoned it in with solutions that you've generated from GPT for your homework, then you go into the classroom and you have to take an exam. Well, it's pretty much a fait accompli what's going to happen at that point. Students are realizing, I've got to get to a level of competence and confidence in that. That's where we see this personalization happening. For us, what that looks like is a student coming in, leveraging our platform by engaging in some questions and solutions. We're easily able to start to implicitly understand what subject you're studying. We're able to start to say, OK, well, these are the concepts you're learning.
We've got a 15-year history of watching students in their semester and that arc of, well, if you're using this concept today, the likelihood of you using this next concept is pretty darn good. And we're able to automatically present that. We call that internally our next best action. And so we're prompting these students both on the site in session and, even more importantly, post-session with sending some information back to the student. Great job, Johnny, today. You did this well. These are the areas where you need to improve. And now we're starting to leverage that in actually the creation of content for you. And so if you've used four or five solutions in your session, instantly the next day, you're getting a practice exam on those. You're getting them added to a study guide.
So the more we start to leverage personalization, not just to know your name and know your school and know your subject, but to really push you at the edge of what you're learning, we're getting a strong response from students who are really doing the job of being a student, which is to get to the level of confidence. We're seeing that result. What's that resulting in? You're hearing us talk about that in earnings statements around more students engaging in solutions, longer time on the platform, increased retention rate.
Absolutely. Yeah, so as you mentioned, so the ChatGPT in general is changing the way students learn, how teachers teach. And it's clear that there was a bit of an inflection point in 2024 about the comfort, specifically with students. We saw it in our data using ChatGPT, willingness to pay with ChatGPT. You're obviously working on the personalization, but one of the interesting things I thought was an email you sent to students yesterday about sort of what's to come in terms of product innovation. And one of the most fascinating components of it was this comparison tool that you're planning to show the dependability of Chegg relative to GPT, to Gemini, to other tools. I'd love to hear more about that.
And also, I mean, that's a lot of confidence to be able to say, we're going to put our money where our mouth is and actually show how we stack up 1v1 versus some of these other solutions. So can you provide a little more color on that?
Absolutely. So remember the mission. And one of those things in there was save time. And students, they don't really have, frankly, they've got a lot on their plate. They don't have a lot of time. So we look at what are the ways that we can be an efficiency multiplier for students. We know that students are going across multiple platforms when comparing solutions. They tell us this in all the work we do with students. We bring them into the office a ton. We interview them a ton. And it's an inefficient process. And they're really trying to do that not only to figure out how are they getting this answer, but what is this question trying to teach me? Why am I even learning this? Why is this question even being given to me?
And so there's lots of questions they're trying to do through this process of validation through multiple sources. So they're using Chegg. They're using GPT. They're using Brainly. They're triangulating all over the place. And it just ends up in a waste of time. We've spent the last basically 15 years understanding the learning science of questions and the learning science of how to best understand a concept, whether that's a procedural or a conceptual concept, and how should you teach it, and what type of learning materials should you build around it? Does this need a graph? Does this need a chart? Does this need to be turned into a flashcard because that's the best way to do it? And we said, well, we're very proud of that. And we see that. We see when we apply that into our customer base, well, they engage more.
They've been retaining more. We've been talking about that quarter over quarter over quarter. So we said, well, our job is, part of our mission is to save students time. So let's bring it together in one single universe for them. And not just about, let's just show it on a page. Let's actually take our science that we've built and our technology that we've built, leveraging AI, to instantaneously do a comparison between the solutions to help the student understand why this solution would be using this type of methodology versus that methodology. And we started to put that out in front of students, and they were just like, OK, that's great. And so you'll see solution comparison coming out in Q1. I'm super excited about it. And we know it's just one of those things that our user base is already going to love.
We're going to figure out, well, how do we use this as a growth loop so we can have our user base tell the rest of the student base about it? Very excited about that.
Absolutely. So there's obviously a lot of new functionality that's rolling out. I'm curious, as we try to translate this into the fundamentals of the business, how is this impacting whether it's student retention or how are you drawing new students in here? What are some of the metrics we should track? And is it too early? Maybe it's too early to sort of get actual quantification here, but any trend line?
Sure. I think let's step back into 2024 a little bit. And we'll talk a little bit more about 2025 and the new products. And 2024 was a big transition year from asynchronous answering to synchronous answering, lowering the cost, increasing the quality, rolling out a, I think we've referred to it as a kind of a satisfaction guarantee, but it's a quality guarantee for students. It was kind of our first kind of push out on saying we're going to stand behind the quality of our content. It's been a nice kind of boost. And we were measuring that through our, this has really made it rolling out to our customers. And so we were seeing kind of greater engagement rates. We're seeing greater retention rates. And the answer is yes on that. So I look at customers in 2025, sorry, before I get there.
In 2025, solution comparison we talked about. We've got a practice feature coming out that's all about creating content that's hyper-personalized to the questions that you're already using on our platform. We know that generally the questions you use on our platform are also related to the ones that you're going to be using on an exam time. And so the ability to instantly press a button and get a practice exam and get step-by-step instruction on that practice exam are something that students really, really want as they get back to the job of learning. So we see a lot of this future. That's a 2025 improvement. How we're measuring it, two different ways. Let's talk about non-customers first. Obviously, I talked about making sure we get these students to start to engage in these products.
It's going to be. I'm not so obviously going to be looking at traffic, but I really look at kind of the monthly active users more from a user standpoint because I want these students to be coming back multiple times. I want them to be engaging in the product. And I want that monthly active user to become someone that engages in the product and ultimately converts. So that's on the user side. On the customer side, we're obviously looking also at the customer monthly active users, the frequency that they're coming back into, the depth of the use of the platform, and retention rate.
And so those are the two. If I split those two audiences, that's how we'll be trending them in 2025 to see, are we getting to a place where we've always been. We've been fairly stable in kind of our current customer base in terms of its engagement rate. And the retention rates have been improving. But obviously, on the acquisition side, we're going to be looking at how do we stabilize there? And then ultimately, how do we grow there?
Excellent. That makes sense. Maybe shifting, so we've covered ChatGPT. One of the other headwinds, obviously, has been Google AI Overviews. It had a pretty large impact on the web traffic to Chegg in third quarter and early fourth quarter. Can you just talk about how you're evolving the marketing strategy, either to better drive web traffic through this new AI search environment or shifting spend to new channels?
Yeah, and this is talking a little bit about this earlier, so some of this work started, fortunately, before AIO really launched, which was about two years ago. We started to invest heavily in TikTok. Obviously, we see for those users who are on TikTok, and let's kind of be honest, just about every teenager is on TikTok, so everyone in college pretty much is, and so those who are on TikTok, we see about a 17% greater awareness of Chegg and what Chegg stands for and the value that it has than those who are not on TikTok, so we've then used that learning in the second half of last year to start to explore new avenues on Instagram as well as YouTube Shorts.
And we launched kind of our own Discord server and are starting to work with Discord in ways to integrate our products so those who are customers of Chegg and have their own servers can actually leverage the product inside of it because Discord, actually, there's a lot of studying going on on that platform. So another area. So we look at that as saying, kind of the theme there is, how do we be hyper-relevant in the places that students already are if we're going to be slowly kind of eroding down the total number of SEO that will come to us? I don't think SEO stops. Google AIO, even though those AI overviews happen, it doesn't stop the traffic from coming to us. It's just less traffic. And so we're just going to be relevant in the other places that students are going.
And Google will figure out some monetization strategy eventually on AIO. And we're experimenting with what they have out there. So you're starting to see ads already appear on the right-hand side of AI Overview s. They're starting to do better citations inside of the overviews. And so I think that world will evolve in 2025, but we're not going to wait for it. We're going to continue to push on how do we be in the places where students are.
The second area is what we just talked about a minute ago around our own brand and getting out ahead of that and being full funnel in that program and the launch of the Get a Grip campaign this year and the Small Steps, Big Wins campaign in fall of last year. All are a sign of us using the marketing dollars in more than just performance, but in ways to kind of grow the funnel again.
I don't envy the role of a CMO this year. What's changing in social media bans? I think her job is very easy.
I think her job is actually great. I mean, she's got, I mean, it's the time when you get to try so many things, frankly. The team is doing a wonderful job on that.
Yeah. And maybe just to put a finer point on the additional channels. It was interesting early this week, for I think the first time in, I forget how long, Google's search traffic market share dropped below 90%. And obviously, we've seen SearchGPT come out and some of the others. Are you doing anything to sort of explore some of these other search avenues outside of Google?
Other than the ones I've mentioned, I mean, that's kind of our focus because that's where we know college students are. And we're getting a pulse from them on where they are going for these things. And still, number one in their world is TikTok for just about everything. YouTube is the second place. Discord's third. So for the off-channel stuff, obviously, that's where we've got to follow where they are. That's most important.
Obviously, you're probably going to have to shift spend this year if whatever the TikTok ban goes into effect in the US here.
I mean, then this is why we started to fire up those other channels of Instagram and YouTube Shorts and Discord. I mean, it's just a shift, right? Obviously, time will tell on that. Yeah.
Absolutely. All right, maybe moving on. As a part of your strategic plan earlier this year, you outlined sort of the Small Steps, Big Wins campaign, as you talked about, alluded to a little bit earlier, as well as the Discord and Chrome extension as a way to kind of continue to drive the brand awareness and meet the student where you are. Can you talk about those initiatives in particular, how they're progressing, and then maybe what some of the KPIs you're looking at there?
Yeah. So obviously, I want to see that traffic's coming to Chegg, traffic from those channels, and that we're getting really healthy click-through rates. And so what we saw and what we continue to see and why we continue to invest is that those click-through rates are performing equal to, if not better, than some of the SEO stuff. And our conversion rates are improving on those channels. And so they're not going to function like a traditional performance channel. And they're going to be a little bit different. But we're seeing healthy traffic. We're seeing healthy awareness growth from the students who are on those platforms who know us. And it's very important to be part of that consideration set. And so when students are thinking about, it's time to study, OK, where do I go?
We want them to say, well, I used this thing on Chegg, or I used this thing on TikTok, and Chegg really helped me, and so we're part of that, so we're watching that metric. And I just gave you the stat earlier around the awareness increase we're seeing, all 17% increase over those who aren't using those channels. On top of that, we're looking at that on that click-through rate from those channels and then ultimately the conversion rate.
As you think about, as you grow brand awareness earlier in the student life cycle, which is something that obviously maybe some other brands started as a freemium offering to help as the student progresses through, are there any other channels or ways to tie in with maybe the traditional education system or be a supplement to in-classroom at an earlier age that you can help to drive that awareness at a younger age?
Yeah. So the answer around the institutional model, which I think, so if I could fast forward Chegg a few years, I think we would, from a business standpoint, from how we generate revenue standpoint, the diversification of revenue. I'd love to see us be playing to our B2C strength, which is kind of our DNA, but also start to really establish a strong B2B channel. We're starting to see, and we have a number of pilots in the market now with institutions. And we've got a strong sales pipeline that we're starting to build. Schools having a greater willingness to introduce third-party providers into their ecosystem around the areas of student support. Schools are getting very serious about how they retain kids, how they persist, how they matriculate, and ultimately how they graduate.
And you're seeing this because the enrollment trends, and we talked a little bit about the FAFSA fiasco, but enrollment being up by about 3%. But if you kind of look over the next 10 years, there's not a bigger freshman class coming in than the year before and the year before and the year before. And so historically, where schools were churning out sophomores, juniors, and seniors before they graduated, you look at some of these schools, the average graduation rates are somewhere between 40%-upper 50s%. Well, it means you're losing students every year. But if your freshman class is not bigger, you're not overcompensating for that loss of students. And so you're starting to see schools actually establish a function inside the school that they refer to as the Student Success Function.
There's an organization, the National Institute for Student Success, that is pioneering work on what type of support we need to give students. This aligns very well with Chegg's move to functional support as well as academic support, and so we're starting to see schools saying, well, what if we had Chegg in the classroom? What if we got Chegg closer to the student, got it integrated into our learning management system, got it integrated into our curriculum, and obviously, not just 10% of the campus can use Chegg, but 100% of the campus can use Chegg. Can you have an impact on retention rates and persistence rates and graduation rates, and so we've got pilots out there right now. As I said, they're all designed to be working inside the classroom and designed to ultimately go from a couple of classes to the entire campus.
It takes time to do that. But we're also actively building on a sales pipeline of new pilots that we'll be launching in 2025. So I actually see a bright future in that because I think that the universes are somewhat aligning in terms of what needs to happen in order for, I think, the tertiary system to be financially viable is they've got to get more students to graduate. I mean, you're just losing tuition because you're kind of not supporting the student holistically.
Yeah. It's sort of been a boiling issue under the surface with the American higher ed system, is that you have declining enrollments just based on demographics. You have an oversaturated market, too many universities per capita. And then pricing pressures with student debt obviously remaining an issue. It seems like these higher ed institutions need to find a way to be competitive and still drive enrollments. And I think some of these more innovative out-of-the-box thinking is, I think, creates an interesting opportunity.
Absolutely does.
Yeah. If we think about 2025 in particular, you mentioned, obviously, the demographic change where we're seeing steadily declining enrollments. But we did see that 5% drop in first-year enrollments this year related to FAFSA. Was that a big impact on the business that maybe investors don't realize? And do we have a potential for a one-year correction in 2025 where it becomes a potential tailwind?
It's hard to say. I mean, there's 18 million students in the higher education system in the U.S. Chegg's got millions of customers, but we're not over-penetrated. So I look at that and say, listen, there's a little bit of drop because of FAFSA. It's probably all in kind of the noise. It's hard to say that that is a reason for Chegg's performance or any ed tech company's performance, given the fact that it's still such a large TAM that's addressable for us. And we've got a lot of headroom in there. So I look at it and say, OK, well, we've got to, while we're still servicing millions of students, we continue our focus on building the right product and getting the right brand out there. We've got a lot of room to stabilize and a lot of room to grow. So maybe there's a correction.
That's not going to change the trajectory of our business, in my opinion, given the fact that we're not really over-penetrated in the market. We've got 18 million students that we can service in the US. We've got international we still have to focus on, with about a quarter of our customers coming from international markets, and we've got some deep focuses in places like Mexico as a kind of a beachhead as we think about the Spanish learning or learning in Spanish and how we can leverage that in Mexico and eventually kind of move it down.
Yeah. You took the next question out of my mouth.
Apologize.
This is great. No, you're usually.
Apologize.
You know where I'm going here. So international is a really attractive opportunity. And from our survey data over the past several years, Chegg's always been sort of a first mover internationally and has good adoption and usage. Can you just kind of talk a little bit more? You talked about Mexico, but your localization efforts. And then after Mexico, where do we go next? How many countries are you targeting? What's the kind of timeline here, progression?
Yeah. So there's a couple of things in there. First off, the great news about education, I think, especially higher education, is the material that a U.S. student is learning is very similar to the material that a student in Mexico or in South Korea or Turkey or U.K. or Canada or Australia, which now I've named all of our key countries, that they're learning. So when we start to make improvements in the platform, whether that is on the instantaneous solutions or around the next best action or around practice sets or around solution comparison, that's not going just to one geography. We roll it out to all geographies. Even though we've got some separations in our technology stack in order to allow for localization, every product improvement that gets rolled out in the U.S. is getting rolled out everywhere. So it's good for us in that sense.
So we're leveraging ourselves. So we see for this year, we're putting a lot of focus on the product and the product functionality. And we're kind of continuing to leverage the localization efforts we made in 2024, kind of watching that pan out in Mexico. And then we'll figure out, OK, how do we start to apply this? And do we need to apply it in such detail and such depth for more locales? But obviously, still a great student opportunity there. And when you look at, even if you don't localize and you stay just as English as a means of instruction, there's still 50-plus million students kind of around the world who are learning in that way. And we're really focused on countries where that ARPU can still stay pretty healthy.
I mean, there are a number of countries that you can go into that have large student bases. But the willingness to pay is very low. Or if they pay at all, it's also very low.
Makes sense. And not all growth strategies need to be monetized. And so I think that brings us to sort of the Chegg Perks program and sort of how it evolves and sort of fits in with supporting the whole student and that initiative. Can you just talk a little bit more about some of the progress you've made there and how that impacts student retention?
Yeah, and the Chegg Perks program is born out of this desire to and this idea that students really need much more than academic support. If you want to do a 360-degree of student support, it looks something like where you have academic, you have functional, and you have mental or emotional support, and so versus just building a bunch of things, we said, let's go partner with some great brands. We've activated over 500,000 students in 2024 to the partners. The majority of them are brands like Tinder, so clearly, dating is important to college students, so Tinder, DoorDash, Max, as well as we've got some really great ones around mental health as well, so it's been a great kind of value prop for us and kind of a builder of the brand.
And we're happy to have students be able to connect to these additional services so they can feel more complete around the product. And now we'll leverage that in 2025 to continue to figure out how do we transition the service to be more functional. So if we're going to be with that student 130 days of the semester, 260 of the year, how do we not only just, in all the communications we provide them and all the advice we provide them, how do we not just make it about the solution you're working on, but also the student journey that you're on? Because that's what they're looking for.
Yeah, absolutely. OK. So new marketing strategy and exploring new channels, international localization efforts, more personalization on the product, more support of the whole student. So kind of these are sort of the core initiatives sort of trying to support a drive and a return to growth on the top line for Chegg as we move forward. How should we, to put a finer point on it, how should this success in this area translate to subscriber counts, ARPU trends over the next several quarters here?
Yeah. And obviously, I wish I had the crystal ball and wish that product innovation could be a light switch. But we've kind of, we have consistently said the product journey we're on is going to be one that takes some time. So while we'll be watching it quarter by quarter, and we'll be looking at, are we getting high-value traffic coming into us? Again, it's not just about total traffic. I think in a world where SEO was the game, total traffic was a more meaningful number. In a world where you're kind of diversifying your marketing channels, I think the quality of the traffic matters a heck of a lot more, particularly when there's not just as much performance opportunities out there anymore. So quality of traffic, engagement with that traffic, and then ultimately conversion rates. How we will look at regrowing the acquisition funnel.
And then on the customer side, we're really loving what we're seeing on the engagement rates that we're seeing, the amount of questions people are consuming, and as a result, the retention rates. So I want to make sure that base stays stable while we continue to try to add to the top of the funnel on the customer side. I don't want one to erode and one to grow. I want both. I want one to stay stable and one to start to grow again. That will take some time. But we saw some green shoots on awareness. That's kind of our first step in 2024. We saw some green shoots on click-through rates. We saw some green shoots on some conversion rates in certain marketing channels. So we're going to continue to watch those.
Excellent. We've got about five minutes left. I want to save time for questions from the audience. Does anybody have a question for Nathan? Go ahead.
Yes. Have you looked at it from the other side or other point of view? In other words, Harvard has no incentive to see that everyone who applies goes through. It's the same to them. But in nursing school, and there are 255,000 nursing students as we speak, they have to.
Yeah.
Or they get their problems with their.
Accreditation goes away. Yeah, yeah. 100% agree.
So going to them and saying, hey, listen, would you like to buy our services? Maybe we can make some money. Both of us can make some money. What do you think?
Yeah. So we do have a strong nursing and allied health vertical inside of Chegg. And a lot of that, the nursing schools are set up all around the NCLEX, which is the nursing exam. And it's really a number of years in order to train you to pass that exam. That's a market we haven't explored to build a specified product for. But we certainly service those students on the, I think, on the fringes with kind of our Q&A platform. It's a great avenue we should take a look at, but we haven't developed a strategy for it.
You don't need to sell your product to students on an individual basis.
Yeah, predominantly direct to consumer, direct to student. But we are now exploring our partnerships on the institutional side, starting to explore how do we work directly with that institution. The institutions we are talking to today are more of your traditional four-year liberal arts or STEM-based schools. They're not specialized like a nursing school.
Are they incentivized? Really incentivized or kind of incentivized?
I think they're getting really incentivized. I mean, Ryan was saying this earlier. I mean, given the current dynamics and the current KPIs that schools have around their graduation rates, there's a lot of schools that will be in a situation of insolvency at some point because there's not enough kids to go to them. You're starting to see, generally when you see in a newspaper, they talk about it as, well, rural demographics are shuttering the school. Then you look up the school and you realize the school's got a graduation rate of 40%. That's not rural demographics. The issue is that you're not graduating students. Schools have increasing costs. They've got faculty that want higher pay. I think they are very incentivized to start to figure out.
And we're starting to see schools that show, I mean, Georgia State University is kind of the lighthouse in this storm, if you will. And gentleman by the name of Tim Renick, who runs the National Institute for Student Success, he's taken that school and applied a student success methodology. And we're starting to see graduation rates that are the tops in the U.S. And as a result, you're not hearing financial problems coming from schools like that. You're hearing, how do we grow our enrollment? And I absolutely think as schools realize the financial pressures that they're under and that third parties can help persist that freshman to sophomore to junior to senior and ultimately graduation, that's great. You look at California and you look at the California State University system.
The new chancellor is now just about to, is starting to roll out basically a system that is going to measure the schools not based on graduation rates, but actually by employment rate, so gainful employment rates of students. So you start to see these trends are starting to pick up. CSU system, the California State University system is not a small system. They start to do that. They start to employ it. Once a rubric gets built around how do you actually rank your CSUs based on gainful employment, things really start to change. Well, if half your students aren't graduating, they're not getting employed. They're not getting employed. You're not getting more money from the state. I think it is a self-perpetuating cycle that will start to take over. People are getting serious about it. Hope that answers your question.
Adequately, more than adequately. Thank you.
Maybe just with the last minute here, because we've got on the topic of more specialized content. This is an area where, let's call it the test prep and the certification market has historically been very print material focused in classroom learning. Now that the investments you made on the tech platform, how much easier is it for you to build out maybe more of that specialized content on Chegg with the generative AI kind of functionality you have now?
Yeah. I mean, the answer is incredibly easier. While we still need subject matter experts to move from being creators to being moderators and trainers of models, the ability to actually generate content is instantaneous. And so we can upload just about anything, whether it's mechanical engineering or biology or some pathology class for nursing, and we can generate content that's relevant and accurate for it. It's really about.