Everyone, welcome to Coursera's 2023 Investor Day. I'm Cam Carey, Head of Investor Relations. On behalf of the entire team, I wanna thank you all for joining us in person. It's great to see so many faces. You're gonna be hearing this morning from several of our executive leadership team, starting with a strategic overview by Jeff. Shravan's gonna come out and talk about how we put this strategy into reality through our platform. Leah is gonna cover how we are growing across our customers, our paid enterprises, our institutions, our learners, and of course, our degree students. Ken's gonna wrap up the formal presentation with a better understanding of how our historical performance is gonna translate into the roadmap for the future. Before we start, I must let you know, we'll be making forward statements in today's presentation.
Any statement that refers to expectations, projections, outlook, or any sort of forward commentary is a forward-looking statement based on today's assumptions. With that being said, actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties in our SEC filings. You can find them. With that being said, let's welcome Jeff to the stage and get started.
Thank you, Cam. Thanks. I was not expecting analysts to be applauding when I get on the stage. Thank you all for coming. It's a good day in my life when I get to talk about Coursera. My wife will tell you that, somewhat, despairingly. My colleagues will tell you that, my daughters will tell you that. Anytime I have an audience who's interested in Coursera, I'm happy to talk about Coursera. I think you're gonna like what we have to say. I'm really excited about where we are and what we're looking forward to here. I'm gonna start, as Cam said, to talk a little bit about strategy, and then Shravan will talk about the product, the technology, the platform. Leah will talk about growth opportunities.
Ken, one of your best friends, will talk about financial models and kind of how we're thinking this might model out in the coming future. I like to start my presentations with this. These are the 15 UN sustainable development goals. The 17. They were put together in 2015 to basically kind of align countries on what it will take to create human prosperity and to protect the planet. I'm kind of biased, and maybe you are too, but I think that one of these is more important than the rest because education has been historically, and continues to be, the path towards human prosperity. Education is the thing that helps to reduce inequality, reduce gender bias, create more equal opportunities for people.
Of course, education is a source of an awful lot of opportunity, knowledge and skills, economic opportunity, the ability to create better circumstances for more and more people. Education is also the way that we understand how our climate works, how to produce in a more sustainable way, how to consume in a more sustainable way, how to build strong institutions that can better serve the human population and also address the other sustainable development goals as well. I like to think that from education, like all good things come. To be at Coursera, and not only to be a platform that helps educate, but to work with educators, is really a thrilling privilege for me. Now, where this started is a couple of professors, probably not surprising, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller.
They were both at Stanford, in 2012 when they were teaching computer science and data science courses. Andrew had a very popular course on machine learning, oversubscribed to Stanford, so they started putting the videos up on the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of people came. They said, "We should start a company dedicated to making this kinda high-quality education available to everybody." That really was the genesis of Coursera. When I think about this, I think my job and the job of the exec team is to basically be the stewards of this mission and to build a valuable company for our shareholders. But it really is both of those things. I think what really motivates us is the mission. You know, the world's changing really fast. It's a, it's a hard job.
It's a hard sector to be in sometimes. This kind of, I think, passion really provides a lot of energy and purpose to all of our team members, and certainly to me, to try to honor what these founders have created. It started with Stanford, but pretty quickly grew to a lot of universities who started putting courses on Coursera. That was sort of the MOOC revolution back in the day. What this did is it attracted a lot of individuals. The individuals, they came for University of Illinois and Michigan and Penn and Princeton and Stanford, and now there are universities all around the world.
When the learners all came, a lot of industry partners started saying, "You know, we'd like to provide some education to people as well," especially the tech platforms who realize that the value of their platform is heavily dependent on a developer community who knows how to develop value on their platforms. The ability to certify that so that their customers, the customers of Salesforce and the customers of Google and Microsoft and AWS could say, "This person is certified to be a cybersecurity analyst or to be a software architect on this platform." As platforms have relied on developer communities, the tech players who build the platforms have gotten into the education space. It's not just the skills, it's the credentials that really matter because it's hard to know who knows what.
Credentials are a really important way of showing employers and showing other institutions that this person knows something at a level of quality that's required. The industry players come on, and now, you know, we serve over 100 million learners all around the world, 80% of whom are outside the U.S. We're still growing at a good clip today. Leah will talk to you more about that as we go forward. As I back up and say, "Well, okay, that's a really sort of inspiring and noble mission," but what is the fundamental predicate of the investment thesis? Like, why should Coursera exist and why should it do well? A lot of it has to do with fundamental forces that are driving the need for education, skilling and upskilling.
This is a great chart, based on some data from Oxford that talks about, I think, the kinda the prime mover of Coursera, which is change. The world changing creates threats and opportunities that require humans to learn new skills and develop human capital. What the chart shows is jobs that are most vulnerable to technology and automation. These are generally jobs that are predictable and repeatable. Predictable can generally done by machine learning, repeatable can generally be done by robotics. These are low-wage jobs held by people with no formal education. These are waiters, cashiers, retail sales, freight movers, personal care aides, et cetera, whose jobs are at risk of being automated.
This compares to those blue bubbles, people with college degrees making high wages, doing knowledge jobs, which are generally, at least until recently, thought to have been far less vulnerable to technology and automation. A lot of what we need to do is to help upskill and reskill all these people whose jobs are gonna be automated so that they can take advantage of the new job opportunities being created by technology. Now, the big what about is generative AI. I've been absolutely obsessed with ChatGPT, probably most of you have as well. My view is this is a fundamental game changer. Like, I don't even know what society is gonna be like in 18, 36 months when every major software platform builds ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies into their software. It's gonna show up before people even know what to do with it.
I don't know if generative AI is gonna take a lot of these knowledge jobs and make them more vulnerable as well. In any case, the rate of change driven by technology and globalization is creating major change in the way that people do jobs, the way that businesses run, and the skills and the knowledge and the credentials that people need to effectively add value to these companies. As Bain said in 2022, I think this is more true now than ever, the big challenge for all of us is trying to figure out how to transition workers from declining occupations to jobs of the future, especially in a world where a job of the future that we thought like six months ago might be now a declining occupation. I mean, it is changing so fast, it's mind-blowing.
Our developers are using GitHub with Copilot. They're like, "This completely changes the way I code." My daughter, she's 25 years old. She graduated from Duke, computer science degree. She works at Duolingo. She's using Copilot. She's like, "Dad, this is totally different." I'm glad she's a computer scientist now because I don't know what the future's gonna be for entry-level computer scientists and software engineers. The world is changing really rapidly. What this is gonna really impact is, of course, almost the whole global population, but especially young people. This is a chart we just put together recently that I kinda like. Cam, nice job putting this together. What this shows is in different regions, what is the number of people in the region who are between zero and 14 years old? Okay? That's the big number here.
67 million young people in North America, 155 million in Latin America, half billion in Africa. 42% of Africa's population is younger than 15 years old, okay? 26% of India's population is younger than 15 years old, 364 million people. These bubbles are the gross enrollment ratio. What percent of people today start post-secondary education? Here you have Africa, half billion young people, only 10% of them today go to college. If that number goes to 50%, which is the goal, by the way, that India has set out in the new education policy, you're gonna be seeing tens and hundreds of millions of people around the world trying to get access to good, high-quality, credentialized higher education. There's a lot of focus on what's happening in North America. That's fine. It's important.
There's a lot of money being spent on higher ed. This is a global challenge that deserves, we think, a global platform opportunity. How well-equipped is higher education to deal with this? They're struggling. It's hard. Here's a survey from HolonIQ. This is a global survey of higher education. This is among universities. Last year, this was the survey results in 2021. In 2022, universities said the number one challenge for their university is dealing with digital adoption. You might have thought, "Oh, during the pandemic, it was really hard to deal with digital adoption." The problem is getting more severe, not less, as the world changes faster, and now universities realize it's a hybrid world, and that's really, really complicated. Number two is budgets and funding cuts, and number three is changing workforce needs, right?
This is a world in change, putting a lot of pressure on one of the biggest industries in the world unaccustomed to being able to adapt very rapidly to change. We think that this is a really big opportunity that society needs to be addressed, and we think we and our partners are in a good position to address it. Now, it's not just threats that technology creates. When I look at what's happening, and I've been traveling all over. In the last five months, I have worked in 34 countries. Since January, I have been to 20 cities. I talk to the businesses there, I talk to the governments there, I talk to the campuses there, and sometimes I meet with the students at the schools who are using Coursera.
One of the things everybody knows, like, oh, the pandemic drove people online for online learning. What I think is underappreciated is what the pandemic has done for remote work and what we call the globalization of talent. When I was at Financial Engines, 20 years ago, we had an office in India, but here's how we had to do it. We're like, "We need to hire a bigger labor pool. Where should we go? Where should we open an office? Oh, let's do it in Noida," is where we had our office. We opened up an office in Noida, and we hired people in Noida who could get to the office within, like, 45 minutes by car, which is very difficult 'cause there's a lot of bad traffic in Noida. That was the old model.
Where do we open an office? Here's the new model. Where I have digital jobs like data science, computer science that could be done remotely, where is the best talent at the most affordable price? Coursera has moved to a work-from-anywhere policy. We hire people everywhere. I was in Kerala the other day meeting with some government officials. I didn't even know it, but they're trying to create a remote work environment for people in Kerala, India.
I said, "Hey, does anybody at Coursera live in Kerala?" Two people said, "Yeah, I live in Kerala." I said, "Come down, and I wanna interview you in front of these ministers." I didn't even know we had an employee in Kerala, and here we had someone who's an enrollment counselor, came down and talked about his life story and how with a single mom, not going to college, he took courses on Coursera, learned skills, got hired by Coursera, and now he's speaking to the ministers who are trying to create a vision for the state that is basically his life story. The big difference is that any company can now post jobs to anyone in the world. When I was down in Lima, Peru, at UPC talking to the students, the students know that these jobs are now available.
They don't have to go through the career services center. They're like, "If I learn English and I learn data science, I'm gonna get job opportunities, not just in Lima, not just in Peru, not just in LatAm. I'll get jobs in the U.S., I'll get jobs in Europe, I can get jobs all over the world." This globalization of talent, I think, is a massive opportunity for lots of folks. It's definitely an opportunity for people in emerging markets to develop skills and more dramatically rise their ability to gain economically from technological change. It's a great opportunity for businesses to play for a global talent pool, it's also a great opportunity for Coursera because the value of learning is way higher when there's a lot of job opportunities that are available to you that are beyond your local place that you live.
You can now get skilled from anywhere at any time. Increasingly, you can get job opportunities that are no longer place-dependent. If this continues, then I think the value of coming to Coursera and earning a credential is gonna be bigger and bigger. We're very excited about the globalization of talent. Let's talk a little bit about Coursera and, like, how are we playing into some of these trends. As I mentioned, it started with Andrew and Daphne, educators. They put on some courses. It drew a lot of learners. Like, this is the beginning of a two-sided platform. That attracted a lot of university partners. That attracted a lot of industry partners. It was really the fact that a lot of learners came for the brands that helped us get this platform started in the first place.
In about 2016, we started offering Coursera for Business. You know, businesses started saying, "Don't just offer these courses to individuals, offer them to us. We have to upskill our people. We're moving to the cloud. We're trying to do machine learning. We're trying to do agile, you know, project management and leadership through change. You have a lot of great courses." We started offering Coursera for Business. A year later, we offered Coursera for Government. Originally, this was to upskill public sector workers. During the pandemic, we saw a big shift. Government started saying, "I don't have to just upskill my public sector workers. I need to upskill my citizens," because youth unemployment is destabilizing for governments and for societies.
Now what we're seeing is governments are recognizing that online courses with credentials can help skill people at much lower cost, prepare them not only for jobs that are available in the country, but importantly, especially for any Like, if you wanna see a list of what I'm talking about, go to the list of all the countries that offer digital nomad visa programs. Those are generally nice climates where they have a lot of tourism. They're trying to get people to come and work and stay there. One of the things I say to all the heads of state of those countries is, "Why don't you train your own people to stay here instead of leaving whenever someone gets smart and wants to go find job opportunities?" The ability to train citizens with great online programs is something that's becoming more and more clear to governments.
The final thing that we launched in October of 2019 is Coursera for Campus. Turns out four months before a global pandemic closed basically every school in the whole world, we offered a solution that helps universities and colleges integrate online courses into their college curriculum. This is really what we call our enterprise segment, Coursera for Business, Coursera for Government, Coursera for Campus. A lot of people think about just Coursera for Business when they think about enterprise, but it really is all three. Basically, it's the same solution, but a pretty different set of buyers and a very different competitive landscape when we think about who's playing in each of those verticals. The final side of this triangle, which you're all probably like, "Well, what about that?" It's how do we connect learners to jobs?
If we're saying that there's a demand for skills that has been unprecedented, and people who have those skills can now work remotely in other geographic regions, wouldn't it be really valuable to help learners who have skills find job opportunities and help employers who are looking for talented, low-cost employees in emerging talent pools get connected to the learners who have those skills? This is kind of where we're going to be focusing for the next, you know, three years or so, is connecting these learners to job opportunities. Now, since the IPO, you know, we've grown a number of these things pretty nicely. About 40 million registered learners, about 100 new educator partners, and about 750-ish new paying enterprise customers.
The question like, "Well, what do we really offer and how is it different?" You know, content can become a commodity, and with generative AI, I think there's gonna be a lot more content. Anything that is not distinguished, I think, has a risk of becoming more commoditized. How do you distinguish things? Well, we think that the catalog of content and credentials on Coursera is very unique and valuable. We have been growing it over the years, and it's not just courses. We have lots of different formats now. We have formats that go from a five-minute Clip, 200,000 of these Clips that are embedded in these courses. These are Clips of, like, expert lectures and industry's experts in the courses, but you could take them. We just launched this in May of last year.
A five-minute clip all the way to a four-year bachelor's degree in computer science. Then there are other things we'll talk more about. Hands-on projects, these professional certificates that are really appealing to job, career starters and career switchers are also seeing good traction. It's not just the content, it's the credentials. It's the idea that I could start with the five-minute video. It's part of a 10-hour course. If I finish that course, I get a certificate. That course is part of a professional certificate. If I finish the professional certificate, I'm more qualified to have an entry-level digital job. By the way, built into certificates are these hands-on projects. I've built these 10 projects, which now become a portfolio I can show to an employer. If I want to, these professional certificates can count towards a college degree.
We call this stackability, the idea that one piece of learning and credential can turn into a bigger piece of learning and credential, each credential becoming more valuable in the advancement of somebody's career. All right, what does this look like in terms of execution? If you wanna think about our strategy in the most simple way, it looks like this. Try to find every career starter and switcher in the world. Go to consumers, go to campuses where all the students are gonna be starting when they graduate, go to governments who are trying to upskill their citizens, go to businesses who are trying to figure out how to skill up and reskill their employees. Offer the best catalog of world-class content and credentials in a stackable format. And the Career Academy with professional certificates is turning out to be a really foundational piece of our catalog.
I'll talk more about that in a sec. With the content and skills that have been developed, and with the credentials and projects that are evidence of knowledge and skills, help people get jobs, we call these career pathways, and help people get degrees. We call these degree pathways. We're doing a lot of work with ACE, this is the American Council on Education, to do credit recommendations where they sort of certify these professional certificates and recommend to universities to issue college credit degree for any of these professional certificates that have been completed on Coursera. It opens up a vast new array of opportunities for someone to come in, start in a flexible, affordable way, and have that be a pathway to a job and a pathway to a degree.
I'll talk about that more in a moment, a number of our degree programs accept as credit work that was done in these open courses and these professional certificates. That's what we call degree pathways. All right. Let me talk a little bit about how we've made some progress on our content and credential catalog. We have brought on 35 new university partners since the IPO. A lot of these are in non-U.S. markets. The key thing about our university partners is, number one, these are trusted institutions. Number two, they have the most valuable learning credential in the world. It's called a college degree. Yeah, some people say that college degrees are broken. I think that they're gonna be fixed.
We'll give you some idea of what that might look like, but they're valuable, and they're trusted by employers. Even though there are micro-credentials, employers still say that the number one credential that they'd wanna see is a college degree. Like, that's the best signal that they have in hiring a new employee. They are also good, these universities, at teaching durable skills and creating community and collaboration in the way that they teach. The brand, the credibility, and the credential are incredibly important. Now on the industry side, we've been making a lot of progress. 65 new industry partners since the IPO. These are trusted institutions. These institutions have branded industry credentials. It's not a degree, but these are industry certifications. These certifications are recognized by employers. You can get the theme here, right?
Institutions offer credentials that employers are looking for to figure out who has which knowledge and skills to do the job. They are a little bit more job relevant and understand what kinds of skills and tools and knowledge needs to be taught to do a job, and they also are really good at the tool-based training that you see in the projects that are on Coursera. What we have is a wide array, not just of content, but of credentials, and not just degree credentials or professional certificates. Stackable credentials can start small and can get bigger and bigger and bigger over the course of someone's career and lifelong journey. What we wanna be is the single place that any learner in the world can go to get access to the most relevant, trusted, branded, credentialed learning to help advance their careers.
In a world of change, the number of career opportunities that will be threatened and the number of career opportunities that will be created, we think is getting bigger and bigger as technology progresses. All right, let's go to Coursera Plus. This is on the consumer segment. Very quick update here. As many of you know, we've been pushing more and more to move to a pricing model and a service model where learners can actually subscribe to 7,000 courses, projects, and other job-ready certificate programs on Coursera. We're making good progress. In 2022, we had over $100 million in consumer revenue coming from Coursera Plus, and we're making continue to see pretty good progress in making this more of a subscription-based segment. On to entry-level professional certificates.
We've been talking about this ever since January of 2018 when we launched our first Google IT certificate with Google. Before I talk about the certificates, I just wanna give you some survey results, and we have the full reports if you're interested. We commissioned this huge global study of industry micro-credentials, where we basically asked 3,300 students and 1,600 employers in 11 different countries for their perception of industry micro-credentials and how they might fit into university and other college degree programs. What we found is that students said, "I really like these, and I really want these. I want to get a professional certificate as part of my college degree experience." 90% of students said that they thought if they graduate with both a degree and a certificate, they would stand out in the hiring process.
76% said they'd be more likely to join a degree program that offered professional certificates as part of the degree. remember that statistic because we're gonna show you what we think is gonna be, you know, a good design for working adults in terms of what does the future of the degree look like. Leah's gonna be talking about that in a little bit more detail. This is what students think. Well, what do employers think? What employers said, and again, across 11 countries, 88% of employers said, "Yeah, if there were two candidates and one had a college degree and one had a college degree plus a professional certificate, that would really favor the person with a professional certificate. I'd rather have two credentials than one.
Well, they said, "I would be 72% more likely to hire someone who had both a degree and a certificate." Do we have evidence that they do hire? No, not yet, not in any substantial way. Clearly, employers are looking for something to distinguish graduates more than just the college degree. I think there's really gonna be more of a hybrid credential that most students are trying to earn and most employers are gonna be looking for when they're thinking about who to hire into these attractive positions. How we've built these professional certificates over time, I mentioned in January of 2018, we launched the Google IT Certificate with Google and the IBM Data Science Certificate with IBM.
Since then, each of the circles represents a new certificate, and the logo is the company that issued it. We basically now have 31 live entry-level professional certificates. These are job training programs for high-demand jobs that pay well, do not require a college degree, do not require prior work experience, and you can learn the skills online. Those are the four basic criteria that we look for when we actually decide which professional certificates do we wanna build and with whom do we wanna build them. Today, we have almost six million cumulative enrollments in these professional certificates. When you think about our degree segment, kinda remember that number 'cause these will increasingly be part of degree programs all over the world. That's our prediction, and that's what we are working to make happen on a global basis, is a hybridization of the college degree.
We expect to have 50 professional certificates live by the end of 2023. We've already announced these brands here. Today, I'm announcing, you know, Epic Games, Zoho, Fractal, Keller Williams, which is a real estate firm, is gonna be putting together professional certificates, and they're not just gonna be in IT. These are gonna be for any entry-level job in high demand that does not require a college degree, does not require prior work experience, and you can learn the skills online. How do we actually sort of merchandise these professional certificates? We wrap them in something that we call Career Academy. On Coursera, Career Academy is branded Coursera. When you go to Hawaii Pacific University, Career Academy is branded Hawaii Pacific University. If you go to Kazakhstan, Career Academy is gonna be branded with every university in Kazakhstan.
I'll talk about this in a sec. It's like a turnkey academy that can be branded by any institution that wants to upskill or reskill people in these entry-level jobs. The basic idea is work with an institution who is trying to help a career starter or career switcher provide professional certificates in these job-aligned training programs with hands-on projects that could be shown to employers and have great industry brands, and then help train them for specific high-demand, entry-level digital jobs. These are a selection of the certificates that are available right now. The dotted line is coming soon. The non-dotted line is there. The ACE are those certificates that currently have American Council on Education credit recommendations, which makes it much easier for these to be integrated into college degree programs.
You could see a wide range of IT roles. These are job roles. This is a cybersecurity analyst, an iOS developer, an IT support professional, a data warehouse developer, a bookkeeper, a digital marketer. Of course, we work with brands who are truly expert in the field and who have a brand that a consumer would say, "I don't know what cybersecurity is, but IBM probably does. Like, maybe I'll take the IBM Cybersecurity Certificate or Microsoft. I don't know exactly what a web developer does, Microsoft probably does." The fact that the brand not only conveys the domain expertise but also really is a good signal to the individual learner that this is valuable is important.
These brands, when we go to colleges and universities and say, "Add these as what we call career electives to your degree program for credit," it really helps that we have ACE Credit recommendations. That's about duration, rigor, assessments, and also the quality standards that ACE basically checks for. The universities also wanna have good brands. You know, they don't wanna be giving their students certificates and degree credit for, you know, random content from random sources. They say that the brands matter, and the learners say that the brands matter as well. All right, onto enterprise vertical. I just wanna show you one example. I mentioned it briefly. This is Kazakhstan.
A couple months ago, here in New York at the United Nations meeting, I met with the president of Kazakhstan. The Minister of Education from Kazakhstan came out to California, met our team, and we have announced a big relationship with the country. Particularly the Minister of Higher Education, who, you know, I won't read the quote, but basically what they're doing is they're recognizing that to really move, remember that bubble chart, to really move knowledge, skills, and credentials at scale and help a whole system of higher education adapt to a changing world, buying Coursera for 20,000 students and putting this into 25 public universities all at the same time is a way to uplevel entire education systems.
I would argue that you couldn't really do that without the quality of the brands, the quality of the credentials, the ACE credit recommendations, and of course, the domain and particular skills that they're looking to teach. Machine learning translation is gonna help us become even a lot more effective in being relevant to, you know, primarily non-English speaking populations. We're really excited about this. It was in one of our earnings calls a couple of quarters ago. The University of Texas system did something almost identical, except it's not Kazakhstan, it's Texas.
Basically, governments are looking to say whether it's at the state level or whether it's at the country level, "How can I uplevel my entire education system to deal with the pressure that's on these institutions, serve the individuals, and also help employers find talent in my country?" Finally, I'll give you sort of a sneak peek and Leo will go into more detail about degrees. Our degree growth was not good last year. I mean, none of us were happy about how we failed to continue to the growth that we saw during COVID in degrees in 2022. We did notice, though, something kind of interesting, is certain degree programs were performing pretty well and some weren't. We started talking to a bunch of customers who are in the degree programs that perform well.
We said, like, "What is it that makes this work?" Then we started talking to a lot of learners who are looking for a degree, but they haven't enrolled in one. What we heard them say is, "I'd like to get a college degree, but for working adults, I don't wanna waste my money. Degrees generally are expensive, and it's not always clear that you're gonna get a good return on that." That's all over the news, right? You go into a lot of debt, and you don't get the income often to pay for it. "I don't wanna waste my time. It's not just money. You know, I'm busy. I have a family. I have a job. I can't afford to waste time getting a degree that's not gonna be valuable to me.
I don't wanna spend my time trying to get letters of recommendation, try to get my GPAs and all this other stuff. I put all that time in and then maybe don't even get into the program. If I get into the program, I'm worried I won't finish because I have kids, I have a job. If I get busy, I have to be able to pause. I have to be able to kinda learn at whatever pace I want. Even if I do finish, am I really gonna get a job that's worth it? I mean, after all that time and money I spent." If you look at the equation, at least for U.S. degrees, for a lot of U.S. degrees and a lot of working U.S. employees, the equation just doesn't quite add up enough for most people.
They're like, "It's too expensive, too inconvenient, and too uncertain that there's gonna be a payoff." What's the answer? We don't know for sure, but this is the kind of pattern that is really resonating with working adults. This is the Master of Science in Data Science from University of Colorado Boulder. We launched it in 2021, but we've been actually refining the characteristics of this with CU Boulder. You can see Jane Wall is the faculty director of this program. The fact that it is in data science, a lot of jobs in data science that pay well. By the way, those jobs are also really flexible remote work. I mean, kinda a lot of people wanna be data scientists now. It's affordable. We brought the price down to $15,750.
You can start any time for $49 a month. You're like, "How can you start a degree at any time for $49 a month?" Start with open courses on Coursera. You can do a course on Coursera anytime you want. Well, if you start taking some of these courses, which are available just as courses and specializations on Coursera, that can count as credit if you decide to go into the degree program. This really makes it a lot easier to say, "I'm just gonna get started. I don't have to do an application. I don't have to pay a lot of money. I don't have to take out debt. I don't even know if I'm gonna like the program. I'll just start.
$49 a month, I can get started and see how it goes. Once you get started, we have sessions that they do six session starts per year. Once you get into the actual cohort-based part of the program, they do six starts per year. You can scale back, and you can start whenever you want, so you can flex the number of credits as you go. There's not an application. You earn admissions to the degree program by your performance in the courses. It's performance-based admissions. Especially if you're in a different country, you don't have all the resumes and all that other stuff, you just perform well. If you perform well, you're in a program. They are building in content from IBM into the curriculum.
Now I'm in a program that's not only teaching me data science, but it's also teaching me tools from IBM with IBM instructors, almost as guest lecturers, who can not only teach me, but help me build a portfolio that so when I graduate, I'm like, "Yeah, I got a real degree from CU Boulder. I built all these projects from experts at IBM. And now I have, you know, all the certificates associated with completing the underlying courses, but also a master's degree in Data Science from CU Boulder, and it cost me $15,000." We're really excited about this model of degrees. Sometimes we call them learner first degrees because this is what working employees seem to really want.
Just to kinda summarize, you know, why I'm pretty excited about things, it's just a vast and important, let's say, opportunity. It's one of the biggest challenges the world is facing. How do we help people keep up with how fast the world is changing? It's a big societal need. I think it's a really big business opportunity. I love Coursera's brand. I love the brands of our partners. I love not just the content, but the credentials that come and the ability to reach, you know, hundreds of millions of people and thousands of institutions. Shravan will talk about the scale of the platform, that's really what gives rise to unit economics and sustainable differentiated advantage. Ken will talk a little bit about the revenue growth, which comes from multiple segments, you know, not just one.
I like where we're going. The world is changing rapidly. We're pivoting here and there, but we see the fundamental tailwinds looking more and more promising and our ability to differentiate looking better and better as we go as well. All right. Thank you. I'm gonna now hand it over to Shravan.
See if you get any applause.
I know. There you go. I can dance for you guys if you want. Thanks, Jeff. That's really hard to follow. I mean, sign me up for Coursera for another five years.
That's exciting. Hello, everyone. I'm Shravan Goli, Chief Operating Officer. Before Coursera, I spent more than 20 years in product general management and operations at large technology companies. Over the past five years, I've also helped scale our consumer revenue segment here at Coursera. Today, I lead talent, talented teams across Coursera in product, engineering, data science, design, and services to make our vision and strategy that Jeff laid out to be a reality for learners worldwide. The Coursera ecosystem includes individual learners, institutions, and educators all served through a single unified platform. My team asks ourselves every day two key questions. First, how do we drive more growth? Second, how do we get better leverage out of our assets?
Our data, content, technology, services, and marketing system are leveraged across this unified platform to create great efficiency, scale, and competitive advantages. These core capabilities are deployed across all of our key three segments. For today's discussion, I wanna focus on three of these assets. First, our growing data. Second, our accelerating content engine. Third, our products and technology that are distinct and that bring our strategy to life. Let's start with data. Data fuels our platform, and it's a core differentiator for our business and consumer experiences. We're able to use data broadly to make learning and skills development more accessible and relevant, and to allow institutions to understand the impact of the learning on their investments, and then also to enable educators to teach and support students at a massive scale. All of this starts with Coursera Skills Graph.
Our founders were professors. They understood the learning measurement actually requires assessments embedded in structured content. Their decision over a decade ago allowed us to build our proprietary Skills Graph, which really leverages the data from over 180 million learners and 500,000 embedded assessment questions in all of those courses, and then 200 million assessments taken to date. We use this data to power our skills solutions, not only from mapping our content to skills and job roles, but also to provide content recommendations and sourcing priorities. This is the foundation of how we're gonna link skills-based learning to skills-based hiring. As we focus on driving stronger outcomes, both for learners as well as for better ROI for enterprises, I wanna highlight several key data-powered products that we have created. First is SkillSets.
Today, we offer more than 300 SkillSets for in-demand jobs. This allows the institutions to set target proficiency levels by individual skill and job role. Job roles are mapped to target skills and recommended content with the ability to track skills development in real time. We initially created this as a Coursera for Business offering, and then later on, we extended it to universities using Coursera for Campus. Using the same technology, LevelSets help learners understand where to begin. You know, we have over 60 LevelSets assessments that span data, technology, marketing, and finance, and business. This is basically powered by the same in-course assessment questions. These 15-20-minute assessments are designed to help learners very quickly map their current proficiency level to a clear development path at the appropriate difficulty level.
Learners who take a LevelSets are, in fact, 85% more likely to enroll in a course. They also spend 50% more time learning on the platform, essentially speaking to the personalization that it's offering. When a LevelSets is completed, it generates skills data, and that can help businesses identify both their weaknesses and then also strengths. That can help establish clear learning ROI and then ultimately inform future talent investments. This brings me to Skills Dashboards. These were created for talent managers and learning and development leaders. Because of our data, Coursera is able to offer some of the best-in-class and most comprehensive in-depth skills reporting on the market.
Dashboards help companies understand their employee skill proficiency across more than 100 skills. This can also be tracked at an individual level over time, in real time, and then also can be benchmarked to chosen industry or peer group. For many companies, talent is often the biggest investment. Benchmarking allows them to not only be able to understand, and compare the skills of their own employees in their own company, but also to those of the learners across Coursera who are employed at their peer companies. The next advantage I wanna talk about is our content engine. Our catalog is unique, featuring content from over 300 of the world's best-known brands. We believe that gives us three key benefits. First, there's strong organic search benefit.
Second, learners benefit from and pay for the signaling value of these credentials. Third, long-form content actually takes time to develop and the efforts of these institutions to develop. Let's discuss how we're actually producing high-quality learning at scale, starting with our flywheel effect. The Coursera's three-sided ecosystem continues to reinforce our platform's advantages. First, our branded catalog attracts millions of learners each year, with the vast majority of them acquired for free. This large global learner base attracts more educators who are looking to teach the world. These partners earn the revenue share both from our consumer and enterprise segments. In fact, they earned about $135 million last year. This growing catalog ultimately attracts more individuals and institutions. This in turn creates sort of this feedback cycle on the job-relevant skills that are needed for today's digital careers.
Ultimately, this allows us to track more than 300 skill sets today. Our content strategy centers around a proven methodology to source high-quality learning at scale. First of all, it's based on the data that underpins our platform. We're able to identify those which are in-demand skills, and those are most requested by both our learners and employers, and then match the demand with the educators who have that expertise. These educators produce their own content. Leveraging our self-service authoring tools and the ingestion tools, it allows existing content to very quickly be imported between their current learning management systems and Coursera. We use, on top of it, machines to monitor the performance of these courses, the quality of these courses, and then we're helping these educators to optimize and localize and improve our catalog for the international markets.
I wanna make sure you understand the important strategy that underpins our approach. You know, Jeff talked about ChatGPT. We believe that as machines are increasingly capable of producing content, our educators and the catalog will play an important role in trusted learning. We see this technology as actually an important tool to further unlock the value of our catalog. High-quality content will get further enhanced with our platform's capabilities. I'd like to share a few examples of how this strategy is coming into play today. First, we launched Clips. Clips, last May, as Jeff mentioned. There are about 5,000 courses on Coursera today, and these courses are comprised of more than 200,000 individual video clips.
Now these are about five to 10 minutes long, and learners can very quickly directly access Clips in a course without having to take the entire course. Our data shows that over one-third of learners that viewed Clips for immediate needs have gone on to enroll in at least one course for deeper skills development. Now at launch, we started with 10,000 Clips and very quickly expanded to over 200,000 by the end of the year. Most importantly, this was all possible and done through technology and leveraging our existing catalog. Next, high-quality long-form credentials take time and expertise to create. I would like to say we've become really good at it. There is value in more transformative learning as these credentials can unlock real career opportunities, as we talked about earlier.
We've been focused on significantly reducing the average production timelines for two of our most valuable credentials. First is the entry-level professional certificates, and then second is degrees. I'm also excited to share that we have a repeatable playbook here, and that comes out of leveraging our unified support model, best practice methodologies, and technology like our ingestion solution. We've been able to scale the frequency of launches every year. I would say it's a win for our entire ecosystem. Individuals and institutions get access to the latest credentials sooner, educators are able to bring in revenue faster, and then we can sustainably grow our business. On the other hand, historically, one of the challenges with producing content at scale was language dependencies. Educators tend to produce in their local language, but learners are coming from all around the world.
They're seeking high-quality education, and they deserve this opportunity to learn from these experts. However, human translation of a course today costs a lot, approximately $13,000 on average. Now we can actually slightly reduce the cost through machine learning and post-editing. What's exciting to me is the recent advancements in the quality of machine learning technology and translations are beginning to solve these barriers at a fraction of the marginal cost. I'm also excited to share that our team is working on building a scalable translation engine for the Coursera catalog. For us, the goal is to rapidly expand the availability of fully translated courses. What we mean by fully translated courses, a course consists of modules, which consists of lessons, which consists of items. An item can be a video, a lecture, a quiz, or a project, an assessment, all kinds of things.
It takes a lot of effort to translate the course into fully into different languages. Our goal, you know, we ended last year with about 900 fully translated courses, and this year we're targeting to expand this to about 14,000 courses, starting in about seven key languages. I wanna share a few highlights for how we're delivering on our product and technology vision. Jeff earlier shared our pathway vision for the Coursera platform, and what I would like to show is how three of the products and technology actually make it possible. First is Career Academy, second is Guided Projects, and third is stackability into degrees. Let's start with Career Academy. We announced Career Academy at our conference last year. It was possible because of this growing catalog of high-quality entry-level professional certificates and Guided Projects.
Career Academy was essentially designed to equip learners who do not have any college degree or prior work experience with two most critical elements to help them in landing a good job. First is a branded credential that's created and endorsed by an industry leader and that provides employer that signaling value. Second is the ability to kinda build a portfolio of these hands-on projects using the software applications and the very specific tools that are actually required to do that particular job. The great thing about Career Academy is that it's constantly being enhanced with new entry-level professional certificates, as Jeff shared earlier. The next thing is, career pathways through Guided Projects. Coursera today we have over 3,400 Guided Projects, which kinda tripled over the last two years.
For digital skills and software tools, hands-on learning can be most effective than just passively watching videos. To interact with software though, an enormous amount of time gets wasted in downloads, installations, and configurations. This is why we acquired the Rhyme technology that powers Guided Projects several years ago. In Guided Projects, learners get a virtual cloud desktop with the software and the data fully pre-installed. Most importantly, learners will have a tangible output at the end of these projects, including a downloadable portfolio they can actually use to showcase and demonstrate their abilities to actually a potential employer. Now, it's part of our vision for connecting skills-based learning to skills-based hiring, leveraging Coursera technology. My last example is degree pathways, linking our open content discovery experiences to degrees. Last year, we started rolling out enhancements to our catalog search and discovery with credit-eligible filtering and badging.
What it allows is to learners for very quickly identify content and credentials that count as credit towards a college degree. Additionally, our degree description pages now include stackable credentials that allow learners to earn credit for the completion of a certificate. As an example, the Google IT Support certificate stacks into two bachelor's programs on Coursera. One is from the University of London and the other is from University of North Texas. This allows learners to start with an industry micro-credential and then our university a specialization, and then get credit towards their degree when they're ultimately ready to take on that next step. As much as I enjoy seeing our vision come to life through these products and technology, the most inspiring part of working at Coursera is the impact we have on learners around the world.
Education for knowledge sake is wonderful, education that creates opportunity is truly transformative. I want to close my remarks today with something special. This spring, Coursera will publish our 2023 learner outcome report. To date, we have collected nearly about 50,000 responses from learners in around 190 countries. Because our mission is so deeply ingrained in our business, I wanted to give you an early preview of what we're hearing from these learners. First, 74% of all learners intend to continue learning through enrolling in another Coursera course or program. Second, 77% of all learners report that learning on Coursera has benefited their career. That may have been a new job, that may have been a promotion or completely upskill into another domain.
Then 37% of these learners intend to continue their learning through enrolling in another online or in-person degree program. What I found most remarkable is that in every response, learners in emerging economies actually responded higher, underscoring the importance of our mission to learners around the world. With that, I'd like to invite Leah to the stage. Thank you all.
All right. Thank you so much, Shravan. I'm super excited to be here. I've been at Coursera for the past seven years, and during that time, I've seen this business expand into new verticals, into new segments, launching new products, and most importantly, impacting the lives of millions of learners around the world. Before assuming my role as CRO, I led our enterprise business and grew that business rapidly into many new channels and segments. This morning, I'm going to tell you how we are going to grow in this next phase. There are four key takeaways I want you to focus on in the next 15 minutes. First, one of the things I love about our model is its diversification.
Jeff asked me the other night, "Leah, do you like your new job as CRO?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Why?" I said, "Because I have multiple levers of growth to drive this business to the next phase, and that is enhanced by the underlying platform that Shravan just told you about." This is especially helpful in a moment like now where there are unpredictable effects of the economy, and we have to respond in different ways. Second, our consumer segment is vibrant and growing at scale, and I'm gonna share more about that. Third, enterprise is a massive opportunity, and we have unique assets that specifically cater to additional verticals. Lastly, our degrees segment is back on track. We care deeply about this segment.
As Jeff mentioned, we spent a significant portion of last year figuring out what our learners want and the types of partners that can help us accelerate growth. Let's go into more detail on each. As you know, the Coursera platform has three segments. All of them have different revenue models and are each at different stages of maturity. Consumer, our B2C segment, accounts for the majority of our revenue today, and it's increasingly sold on a subscription basis. Our enterprise business serves three verticals: businesses, campuses, and governments. This is a traditional enterprise software model, including our own direct sales force and multi-year contracts. In degrees, we earn revenue when learners take a program on our platform over a series of years from one of our partners, who in turn pay us in a percent of tuition.
Our ecosystem allows us to participate in several going, growing markets, but also provides cost advantages in how we compete in each of these segments. Our growth starts with the top of the funnel. Traffic to Coursera has remained durable over the past two years as we've added an average of five million new learners each quarter. The value of those learners extends not just to consumer, but also to our degrees segment. At the time of our IPO, we shared that a large portion of our enterprise leads and degree leads students come from our learner base, and I'm happy to report that those advantage have continued to scale with our business model as we've grown. Let's dive into consumer in detail. Our global learners are diverse. They come from all corners of the world.
We saw strong growth in the largest countries as well as fast growth in the emerging markets. We expect this to be important part of our success as the demographic changes that Jeff described continue to take hold. Our survey results show the vast majority of learners come to Coursera seeking career outcomes specifically. That could mean landing their first job, switching into a new field, or advancing skills for upward mobility. No matter their needs, we seek to serve learners at every stage of their career as they return to the platform. As Shravan shared, we're focused on driving outcomes, and we believe our branded credentials, our platform capabilities, and now these growing pathways Jeff described, will better serve Coursera learners as they learn throughout their lives.
Our partners continue to rapidly expand our world-class catalog of content and credentials, which we offer at a range of price points. As Shravan Goli discussed, we start with the highest quality content and leverage technology to accelerate the expansion of this catalog. Our freemium model and catalog continue to allow us to have advantages with nearly 75% of our learners finding Coursera organically. Then once learners land on the platform, we use data-driven marketing to increase paid conversion. For example, paid learners are 10 x more likely to convert into a degree student. That's why we've been focusing on driving more paid learners in our consumer segment, then driving more linkages between our content and degrees. This strategy has driven our growth and resulted in a mix shift within consumer over the past two years.
I'm happy to share that over 90% of revenue is now coming from monthly subscription offerings on the consumer platform. This includes Coursera Plus, entry-level professional certificate subscriptions, which can be subscribed to on a standalone basis, typically taken over the course of several months. It also includes specializations and advanced certificates. We're really proud of the strong performance on consumer, and we believe that there are many more opportunities around pricing, around packaging, around subscription tiers that will play into the strength of our learner base and catalog. As you saw earlier, we have a large international base. We see that geo-pricing in combination with local payment methods is one opportunity. Additionally, Coursera Plus is currently only offered at one monthly rate.
We expect there to be additional levers as we offer new subscription tiers that can drive new paid learner acquisition over time. To recap, we believe the opportunity in consumer has never been more attractive. The freemium model is scaling to serve many more new learners with unique advantages. Two, the catalog continues to grow at a rapid pace, particularly with professional certificates. Our subscription offerings have driven more paid conversion and better retention. Lastly, the international learner base allows us to continue serving some of the world's fastest-growing markets. All right. Let's move over to enterprise. As you know, the corporate learning market is large and growing. Companies are investing in their talent skills to remain competitive in a fast-changing economy. This trend has been underway for some time, and it's accelerating.
As Jeff believe, we believe we are entering another wave of reskilling and upskilling imperatives that will be driven by automation and enhancements in AI. Our enterprise segment serves three verticals, businesses, campuses, and governments. As Shravan covered earlier, we get leverage across these markets by using our assets across our platform. One platform serves all three. We also see synergies in our go-to-market practices as our sales force benefits from regional network effects. Coursera for Business is the first vertical we entered. When we started, right there in the middle, that's where we focused. Our advanced content and technical demands provided deep skilling in business units or departments. Last year, we launched Clips and our catalog has expanded rapidly, and we now have introduced products that enable company-wide transformation, allowing us to compete in this much larger portion of the market.
Specifically going after L&D buyers that are interested in better understanding, partnering, and fueling much broader talent needs of their company. One example of this is our academies. We now have academy-specific SKUs in domains like leadership, technology, and data, this allows us to land in an enterprise at a price point that enables high-quality training from all employees and then expand with other parts of the catalog offerings. In addition to business, our government and campus verticals provide incremental levers for growth. Over the past several years, we've been able to define our land and expand motion in each of these verticals. Businesses can start with an academy and expand to a site-wide license as a talent benefit for their entire organization. Governments can upskill their public employees and then expand their programs to the workforce at large.
Campuses can start with career electives or by providing job-relevant skills to their Career Academies and then expand our full catalog for for-credit curriculum integration. Let me share a few examples now of what some of these customers look like today. Our relationship with PwC started as a global industry partner in 2016, and this past year we expanded our relationship. PwC India is now a local partner offering entry-level professional certificates, and they also use Coursera for Business to provide deep data skilling, in particular to drive data literacy in their workforce. I'm a proud resident of New York, I'm excited about this next example. New York State lost nearly two million jobs during the pandemic, and at the same time, we launched our Workforce Recovery Initiative that provided governments free access to skills training on Coursera.
The New York State Department of Labor later converted to a paid customer and has expanded over time. We've logged over 600,000 enrollments and 1.3 learning hours in the state of New York. Key to this partnership is a few unique things. One, industry credentials that signal trusted brands and skills to employers. Two, ACE Credit recommendations, which are particularly important to the local colleges and universities that want to recruit these students. They provide pathways to students for future learning. This is really a prime example of a government can invest in the local economy through workforce development training, but at a scale that is really unprecedented and at a low cost. My final example is a curriculum integration use case with FPT. FPT is a university in Vietnam. They're our largest campus customer.
FPT needed an international partner that had high-quality content because they were looking to double the number of students at their university every year over the next period. Today, 20% of all academic credits are earned on Coursera. Students can develop critical emerging skills, learning from international experts that help build their English proficiency. I hope this gives you a real feel of the business. Each of these use cases highlight the type of customers we're trying to bring on as we grow our enterprise business. We have very unique capabilities across different verticals and land and expand motions. Our product innovation allows us to serve a broader section of the corporate learning market today than we did earlier. Governments and campuses provide additional growth levers that specifically align to our platform strengths, and our international opportunities continue to grow.
I'd like to expand on what Jeff launched and talk about the long-term opportunity in degrees. We continue to believe that degrees is a massive opportunity. Today, online degrees and micro-credentials are a small but growing part of the overall addressable market. While enrollments and our growth were challenged in 2022, this is a massive market that we are uniquely positioned to serve. Enrollment trends show growing demand for programs with strong job prospects. Specifically, business programs still account for a significant portion of online students, and domains like computer science and data are significantly outpacing total enrollments due to the demand for these roles and skills in particular. Today, our portfolio and revenue is largely concentrated in elite universities. That's been the focus of our strategy prior to the past year.
There is a much broader opportunity for Coursera to address by working with universities that wanna take full advantage of our platform capabilities. As Jeff discussed, we spent much of last year really stepping back and digging into what kind of degrees do our learners on platform want, and what sort of partners would be most willing to provide these type of degrees. Specifically, we were looking for partners that are aligned with these learner first priorities, with the unique aspects of our platform, and that partners that want to drive scale at a low cost. I'd like to share an example of a partner working today. The University of Colorado Boulder, they launched a Master of Science in Data Science in 2021. This included a vision to use learner performance and a series of open courses on Coursera as admissions criteria.
The program also has a flexible schedule with six academic sessions each year. They recently made two changes that we requested of them after doing this learner research. The first is to make their tuition more affordable. Boulder decided to cap tuition at $16,000, and importantly, the program does not rely on student debt because learners can pay as they proceed through the program, nor does it rely on them using financial aid. Second, they've integrated the IBM Gateway, specifically Applied Data Science Professional Certificate, into the program, which means that students can now apply data science methods from a top industry teacher during their course of study. Most specifically, they can graduate with two credentials. They can graduate from a degree taught by university faculty and a professional certificate from a leading industry brand.
What's the impact of these changes? Well, since making these changes, we're super excited about the early indicators. First, new learners are converting at 70% higher than they were last year, and recruitment for the spring cohort for 2023 is up more than 50%. Big impact. We believe it's increasingly clear that student demand exists for degree programs that have the right attributes specifically for working adults. That's really the focus moving forward. As you see, by partnering with universities like CU Boulder, we're able to use our stackable credentials, our technologies, and our channel to scale their ambitions to reach students who want a degree that has tremendous ROI. I'm really looking forward to adding more partners just like Boulder in the years ahead. We also continue to ramp our degree efforts in international markets.
Last year, we announced 14 degrees, with 10 coming from outside the U.S. In particular, we're excited about India, I wanna share some early details about the program from BITS Pilani that we launched earlier this year in the fall. India, as you know, has a large and growing population in need of technical talent. An online degrees are really a critical way of opening up job prospects for that population. BITS Pilani, in particular, is a globally acclaimed institute in science, engineering, and management. This fall, we launched a bachelor's in computer science with many of the attributes I've discussed through the presentation. It had affordable tuition for learners, capped at $4,000-$6,000, depending on where learners are coming from, no entrance exam. What was the result?
Well, this fall, we recruited over 300 new students in just nine weeks. It's a record for our platform in terms of both speed and rate of conversion. Our revenue, you know, that, yeah, that was a tremendous show. What does this look like going forward? Our revenue model for degrees takes time, but we expect this focused strategy and strong recent enrollment performance to accelerate our growth. We shared in February that we expect approximately 10% growth this year in degrees with a strong 2nd half. Today, we expect degrees to grow more than 25% in 2024 as the key changes I've just discussed begin to translate into our financial performance. To summarize, we're focused on scaling our existing programs by leveraging our large learner base at a low acquisition cost.
We're focused on sourcing high ROI programs for working adults. We're focusing on ramping up our international portfolio. Lastly, we're focused on creating much more seamless pathways from gateways and MOOCs to degrees for learners from our consumer catalog. I'd like to now turn it over to Ken to tell you how this growth translates into our financials.
Thank you, Leah. Hi, I'm Ken Hahn, Coursera's Chief Financial Officer. I know you all anyway, so that's not news. Before we get to Q&A with the whole team, I'm gonna discuss a little bit historic financial results as well as Coursera's financial framework and share a little bit more data with you. With that, at a summary level, first, we're a growth company. As Leah covered in detail, we have multiple levers to navigate both the trends shaping the education landscape and the evolving macro environment. Second, we have with our freemium model, our large learner base, our global reach, our multiple channels, we have significant cost advantages that allow us to compete uniquely. This includes our organic consumer traffic, enterprise leads generated from the consumer learners, which you just heard about, and low degree student acquisition costs.
As an example, degrees student CAC, it's a critical part of what we've been talking about, both Jeff and Leah. Having that lower student CAC allows us to open new markets, including lower priced, affordable U.S. degrees as well as international degrees, which come at lower price points. Third, we have an evolving mix of revenue amongst our segments as well as within our segments, in the consumer segment in particular, where we've expanded our subscription offerings. I'll talk a little bit about visibility in just a minute with some data. Finally, while making investments in our long-term strategy, we're committed to continued ongoing leverage. Again, I'll share a little bit more, including an announcement. Let's start by talking about the historical financials. Sorry, our markets and the diversification of the business.
At the time of our IPO, we discussed the $2 trillion education market generally. There are specific examples that you've heard where it crosses our different segments, areas like consumer, we're breaking down the traditional units of learning with open content, as well as Coursera for Campus, which integrates the catalog directly into the universities. Let's take a closer look at the specific markets. We go to a consumer segment, it participates in the growing demand for online open courses, with training that's affordable for the latest skills, especially in digital jobs. In enterprise, it's a training market, we believe is a long-term attractive space. Despite the near-term headwinds with corporate spend, the long-term skilling imperatives, we believe have long legs.
Finally, the online degrees represents a growing subset of their overall higher education TAM, and we expect that to accelerate again. As Leah just mentioned, we expect to see +25%, we've not given that kind of guidance before in 2024. We hinted a little bit that we saw it getting better, we're committing to it today. We can see that accelerating already. Great visibility. We've delivered strong revenue growth over the past several years. Our diversified offerings and global distribution have exposed us to multiple tailwinds, created by the need for these new skills. Our growth also reflects the ability to serve learners and grow with them throughout their studies and throughout their careers. At the end of the day, the product fosters human capital development for our learners.
That defines our value proposition with learning that can take place individually, at the corporate level as part of the job or on campus. Okay. If we go to each of our three segments here, there are different stages of maturity. Since the IPO, we've had a positive variance, certainly on the consumer side, which with its head, durability in demand despite macro ups and downs. As Jeff mentioned, we have 118 million registered learners today versus 77 when we went public. We've been very happy with that. It's a base for a lot of what we do. Enterprise, again, we believe continues to be attractive. Though the corporate spend's been muted more recently, we've tripled the number of paid enterprise customers over the past couple of years.
There's been a specific move towards campus and towards government, where the catalog plays particularly well, given its attributes. Degrees did not perform the way we wanted it to in 2022. Again, that's not for any lack of appreciation for that market. We think it's an exceptional. It's our largest market over time, and we're excited about the progress we've made recently. You've heard some of that innovation. Again, we're committing to growth in 2024 at a level that we hope to increase, as Leah just rolled out. With multiple levels of growth, including within the consumer business, this is a breakout we haven't shown before, and it shows the subscription portion. It breaks out consumer for the subscription portion of that business.
You can see the one-time courses, if you go back to 2020, one-time enrollments was 11% versus 55%. That's of total Coursera revenue. That's the top of the bar is 100% of total Coursera revenue. You've seen we've been growing that. Enterprise, the first blue bar, of course, are contracts that generally last from one to three years, and degrees are very long. The visibility around degrees is amazing. What you can see in this graph is increasing visibility, and especially as degrees re-accelerates, we're gonna have better and better visibility around our revenue and the quality of our revenue over time. In addition to segment diversification, we also benefit from exposure to global markets. You've seen a lot of this in the previous presentations. Today, roughly half of the business is outside the United States.
As we see growth internationally, and we expect to see growth internationally, particularly with the demographic trends that Jeff shared earlier, we think this next decade is gonna see a fairly large expansion there, where we expect to have quite a bit of opportunity. We continue to invest in these large and growing markets, but it's important that we demonstrate scale and leverage over time. We've consistently improved our leverage. It's something we've talked about since the IPO. It's something we've been focused on since long before that. At the start of the year, I'll remind you of our methodology, which we maybe beat to death. Our methodology is, at the beginning of the year, we do our plan, we set a target that we communicate around our adjusted EBITDA target margin for the year.
Depending on the results, we work within that. If you look historically, when we've had bountiful years where we've exceeded top line, we've used that as an opportunity to invest more as we get to the same percentage of margin. In other instances, like last year, when things slowed down, we pulled back the rate of our investments to still hit that target, showing cost discipline. It's all part of the commitment to demonstrating leverage. You should expect to see that from us. We'll continue to commit. Year-over-year, we will show more leverage. We've done that over the past couple years. Let's move on here. I'm sorry, the framework. That's okay. Thank you. To talk a little bit about our overall framework.
At the end of 2023, we expect to have delivered more than 900 points of basis improvement while growing 34% CAGR. Longer term, this is where we expect that to go. We'll shift that focus as we look at. Sorry, this is a little bit out of order on the capital allocation. Do you wanna go back? Yeah. Sorry. Thank you. Sorry. My notes are out of order with the slides, so this will help a little bit. We wanna talk a little bit about capital allocation. We looked at it as we look at it, and one of the important things to understand is it emphasizes our investments in organic growth.
A lot of what you heard today from Shravan and Leah both comes from what we've been investing in from a technology standpoint. We've been able to scale our content engine because of that, and it lets us produce credentials at an increasing pace. The acceleration has been pretty amazing. A lot of that is because of our investment in the infrastructure. We leverage investments like Clips and the translation software we talked about before. With those, we believe we can unlock additional value that builds on our existing assets and does across the portfolio. The education industry is changing quickly, as I think you all know very well. Having the strategic flexibility to pursue additions to our platform, we believe is important and an important opportunity for us.
As Shravan described, the technology that powers our guided projects comes from an acquisition that we did several years ago, pre-public, of a company called Rhyme. It's a perfect example of an asset that has brought value to the entire business, particularly in how we help learners get hands-on skills needed for jobs. Again, as it relates to our capital allocation, the way we think about it, we firmly believe in the value of a strong balance sheet, and particularly in harder and more variable economic times. As well as considering our competitive assets in these large and early markets, we think that the strategic flexibility is of particular value to Coursera today. With that, we'll move on to the longer-term model, and where we see more leverage to come.
At the start of the presentation, I mentioned that we're a growth company. We believe that our markets provide ample room for growth. On average, we expect to target 25%-30% growth. Less than this coming year, as you know. We don't like that. You'll hear that we don't like that. We believe it's 25%-30% growth, and that we have the opportunity to do that. The long-term gross margins we expect to continue to expand. These are some of the things before we had the outsized performance on consumer earlier that we talked about with a structural mix shift to higher margin degrees and enterprise. We're excited about degrees re-accelerating. It's our largest market over time, and the business model is outstanding.
When we take into effect the scaling opportunities within operating expenses, we think we get to a 15%-20% EBITDA margin over time. That's our long-term model, 15%-20% EBITDA. We'll double-click there to do a little bit of a walk from where we are today. As we discussed on the February call, we had $25 million of excess costs in this current year related to the renegotiation of our largest industry partner. I wanna emphasize that that is one time in nature, what we're seeing this year. While we did show some pretty nice leverage with what we committed to for 2023, we could have shown yet more. That doesn't affect the long-term trajectory of the model.
We've had some questions from people around, you know, what might happen with our other partners. Will we see similar things? I wanted to share some more data to make that clear. 99% of the revenue for our consumer business that comes from our top 15 partners is essentially on target. It's the same as our standard rev share. 99% of consumer revenue fits the standard model now that we've made that shift with our largest customer. We have a clear path, we believe, to that Adjusted EBITDA target. In 2024, we expect to be break even. We expect to show positive EBITDA in 2024, which is something we have also not committed to.
It's an important thing, and if and as we achieve it in 2024, we'll be very excited to tell you more about it, and we will be proud of it. Lastly, to me, this is a chart we added at the last minute, and it pretty much says everything I was just talking about. It summarizes it. One, we're a growth company. We've had 34% compound annual growth rate. Two, we're getting increased revenue. We continue to deliver some years better than others, but we continue on this path as we talk about these markets and the three-sided business model. This has been the result. We've done that while we've had a focus on creating a real business, one that scales. That's why the EBITDA is so important to us.
It's not just about what we report to the street quarter- by- quarter and year- to- year. It's because we're building real business with scale that generates profit so that we can reinvest. With that, we'll move to the summary.
Before, again, we're gonna move right to Q&A. First and foremost, we're a growth company. We believe that the transformation in higher education is just beginning. We're a growth company. We're operating the company to win in these large markets. We believe it's a huge opportunity and that our investors will do best if we win in these markets. Our platform represents a unique set of assets, many of them coming with the founding of the company and others which we've developed over time. We think it's very hard to compete with us the larger we get, especially given the three-sided business model. It allows us to compete differently, and it allows attractive unit economics at the same time.
Strategically, we love that the position we're in, and we're doing everything we can to execute towards that vision and continue to evolve. It's how we plan to create a larger valuable company, that again, it'll benefit our shareholders but also benefit society at large. With that, I'd like to have the team back up to answer any of your questions.
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It has the power to transform our lives for ourselves, for our families, for our communities.
No matter who we are or where we are, learning empowers us to change and grow and redefine what's possible.
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that anyone, anywhere.
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Good. All right, everyone. Just a couple reminders for folks in the room. We've got mic runners on both sides of the room. If you raise your hand for a question, please wait until you get the mic so that the online audience can hear you as well. Additionally, we've got some folks that are joining us virtually. We're gonna preserve a little bit of time at the end. If they can queue up, and we're gonna queue to them, and you'll see them on video in the room as well, so they can join us. Let's go ahead and get started and maybe the first question from Rishi right here.
All right. Wonderful. Rishi Jaluria, RBC. Thanks so much for this. This has been super helpful. Appreciate all the detail. I'll try to keep it to two questions. First, I wanna ask the big question that everyone's talking about, which is generative AI and ChatGPT. Really just thinking through the puts and takes, right, in terms of what does this do to maybe accelerate automation and more job displacement, growing skills gap. You know, maybe do you see an opportunity for yourself to not only benefit from that but maybe the amount of need for skills around generative AI and ChatGPT, maybe an OpenAI certification over time. Maybe you could just walk us through the puts and takes. That would be really helpful. I've got a follow-up for Ken.
Yeah, I'll take. Hi, Rishi. Thanks for coming. I'll take the first stab at this. We've really been very, very focused on this. It's hard to say in my opinion. I don't know what the puts or takes are gonna be. I mean, I don't know how many of you might have your jobs deeply impacted. I think honestly, my job is being deeply impacted. You all are Your all jobs are being deeply impacted, we're just seeing the beginning of it. I don't really know. It's exciting and terrifying at the same time to me. I do think that leadership will be more important than ever 'cause we don't know where the world is exactly going. That uncertainty really can be paralyzing for an organization.
They look to leaders to figure out where are we going and how do you get me there. I think it's good to bet on leadership. I would definitely bet on leadership. I think everybody else, including leaders, y'all gonna have to learn really, really fast 'cause it's an overwhelming situation I think that we're facing here. Okay, anyway, with that preamble, I think it'll fundamentally change the learning experience. When we look back and say, "What was the nature of online learning back with YouTube?" I'd call it passive learning. You watch a video, and you sit back. Pretty good, better than nothing. When Coursera launched with two professors, like, they said, "It can't just be passive. We need active learning." There's a lot of good pedagogy built in from day one with assessments, reflections, projects, engagement.
That's a really big part of learning. We introduced active learning. I think what's gonna be next is interactive online learning. It's not just watch a video and do an assessment. It's watch a video, do an assessment, get some feedback, ask some questions about the feedback, get an example of why that's relevant for me. I wanna explain it a different way. Show me another clip that does this. It's gonna be like having a personalized tutor. I think it's gonna be pretty amazing. The prototypes that we've been building, I think are pretty amazing. There's gonna be more personalized interactive learning. I think not just on hard skills. I think the ability to assess soft skills is gonna be much better than it's ever been. Think about generative AI. You take a video recording.
We can trans today with OpenAI just launched the Whisper API. The Whisper API is very good at taking a video with audio, transcribing it into text. Once you have text, you have voice inflection, you have facial, you can start actually getting a pretty decent assessment of someone's communication skills. What is the content of what they're saying? What is the voice inflection, articulation of what they're saying? What are the facial expressions that they're making? I think the ability to really understand and provide personalized feedback on how people are learning is gonna be huge. On the content generation space, this is gonna be completely different.
I don't know how many of you have generated stuff on ChatGPT, but if you look at a lot of stuff on Coursera, whether that's a video, whether that's a transcript, whether that's a Guided Project, whether that's an assessment, whether that's a reading, whether that's interactive role play, it can do this stuff not perfectly, but amazingly well. I think we're gonna see more content than we've ever seen in our lives. There was just an article in The Atlantic last night or this morning talking about the gray goo of text. They're like, "There's gonna be so much text polluting every unmediated social media network that we're not gonna know who is saying anything." I mean, these bots are gonna be generating massive amounts of text.
I'm really happy that our platform is moderated, not anybody can publish on it, because I don't know how you stop, I don't know how you stop that stuff, frankly. What that's gonna mean for our content engine is that the ability to produce content, the costs are gonna go way down, the quality is gonna go way up. I think when you have real quality stamps of approval, and it's not just like let the bots go generate stuff, it's have assistance in creating content that is still approved and still designed by the experts, I think you maybe get the best of both worlds. You get the quality and brand stamp that says, "This is true. This is high quality. This is the leading edge of what we know," but the cost of producing that's gonna be a lot lower.
We're really excited about the learning experience and the content generation piece. Now, if in 12 months someone says, "Wow, Jeff, you just got hosed by ChatGPT," I'd be like, "Did I see it coming?" We have certain things that we think about in terms of the competitive pressures. Overall, if I can be sitting here today and say, if a genie could say, "You could postpone ChatGPT from existing for three more years, would you take that?" I'd say, "No, I would rather have it right now." I think this is gonna be good for the world. I think it's gonna be good for Coursera. Additions or other thoughts on that?
I would just add, as I mentioned in my presentation, the trust matters to the point about there's gonna be content everywhere, everybody will generate all kinds of content. The trust comes from the brands and the experts. I think what we're doing to the point about Jeff talking about we're building some prototypes on how we can leverage generative AI to enhance learning experiences. That part is still built on trusted content, so the context is from Coursera catalog content, and that's what makes the answers. When I'm asking something, I get the answer back, I can trust it. That's a big part.
All right. Awesome. Quick one for you, Ken. I appreciate the long-term operating model. I guess, can you dive a little bit more? Number one, is this comparable to the kind of growth phase targets that you laid out at the IPO time? How should we be thinking about timeframe without putting a specific line in the sand? Maybe last piece on that, how should we be thinking about cash conversion for Adjusted EBITDA, and what does that look like on a free cash flow basis? Thanks.
Sure. We intentionally didn't define, we talked about this actually, the period of time. Is it a 10-year model? It's out there in the future as after we've had time for the different segments to have reached, you know, a more steady state, particularly with the difference in the margins, which you can appreciate from the models themselves. If you were to, say, put a time, I'd make it a 10-year model, not a seven year model, if that's helpful in any way. Free cash flow from the operating business is pretty close to Adjusted EBITDA. There's not a huge difference. Our Adjusted EBITDA doesn't have a bunch of funny stuff. It's just plain vanilla, mostly stock-based comp. From a free cash flow, operating cash flow standpoint, they'll be pretty similar.
There may be some puts and takes with grants on the degrees market down the line, depending how big it gets, that's money that tends to come back, and we'll talk about that more as that evolves. That's the only thing I can think of, you know, out into the future that would make much of a difference. Expect it to track with EBITDA, as it has actually historically.
That's great.
Sarang Vora , Telsey Advisory Group. Thank you for the presentation. Very helpful. You know, I'll start with the degrees program. You know, there is a massive acceleration happening in the degrees in the 2nd half of even 2024, you had a very strong growth number. Can you help us understand, is it, one, any color on markets like U.S. coming back or and the contribution from international? The second one is, you know, just broader color on enrollments versus revenue per student, which I noticed was down in some of the foreign markets. Just any color on what gives you confidence of that very strong growth? You know, is it enrollment driven?
Yeah.
in the degrees?
Yeah, great question. The degrees business as a whole is driven by two factors. One is the growth of the existing degrees on the platform and how those cohorts are expanding. Two, the layering of new programs that are added to the platform. We're constantly looking at how are we doing at both factors, both in international markets and domestics. If you look at the past year, you know, when we step back and look at the strategy, we analyze those four key areas that we thought would lead to programs that are most demand for our learners, and then looked at the portfolio and figured out which of our programs match those criteria or closest to that with a few shifts.
That's why we're starting to see programs like CU Boulder start accelerating with the changes that we've made, and that's one instance of confidence. Yes, it's very clear that's the growth in enrollments as well as conversion rates. The second factor is the growth in sourcing in new programs. We're feeling excited there, one, because of new programs that have already launched or are launching like Georgetown and BITS Pilani, as well as the pipeline of new degrees coming onto the platform. Those are really the three layers, but all of it stems from learner growth and conversion rates.
Leah, just in terms of their modeling, if we think about our 25% revenue growth, how much of that's coming from 25% enrollments from new students versus some growth that's coming from higher revenue per degree student? Do you think revenue per degree student will be higher or lower in 2024 than it was in, say, 2023 or 2022?
Yeah. To be fair to Leah on the financial model, a couple quick things on the financial model, Sarang. As you point out, we looked for degrees revenue to grow 10% for the year, but we said the first half would still be shrinking. This is for everybody's benefit what Sarang was referring. The 2nd half implies pretty nice growth to get there as we move into. Then as we just discussed, the 25% growth in 2024, we feel good. The way the model works broadly with the visibility we have to get to the 2024 numbers, we require virtually no new additions of programs. We need to launch programs that we've currently signed. We need to see that we can fulfill those cohorts and build them.
In the 2024 numbers even, and that's the visibility this model creates, it doesn't require very many new contracted additions for programs.
Ken, on the question of revenue per degree student, when we think about.
Yeah.
These affordable degrees, we're saying affordable and we're saying international. Generally, that means...
Yeah.
A lot less revenue per degree student.
Yeah.
Right?
Look, yeah, I do expect revenue per enrollment to come down. It's two factors. One is the growth in the international programs. You saw the price point in that BITS Pilani degree, which was $4,000-$6,000 per learner over four to six years. Two, you see we're lowering prices, the type of degrees that we're targeting, as well as lowering the prices of our existing degrees.
We're definitely betting on a scale play for online degrees. We're not gonna go for really expensive niche programs.
Just staying on the degrees and, you know, linking it to your long-term growth outlook, 25% growth. Degrees have to outperform in the long term. Is that still the assumption? It will be north of like 30% in the whole mix of three segments that you have to reach your targets?
Should degrees grow more than 20% to 30% of the target? Yes, absolutely it should.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's our largest market. We're earliest. Some of these new introductions we're talking about right now are just getting legs, and we're seeing real momentum there. We believe it just makes sense that it's where the industry is going as well. Yes, we expect an increase in mix shift towards degrees within that 20%-30%. It should have outsized growth to take share from the other two.
You know, I'll just add, it's probably obvious to everybody sitting here. It's really hard to know exactly where this whole thing's going. I mean, there's a $2 trillion market with global demographic trends that are saying a rising middle class in India, LatAm, and Africa. Are they gonna need college degrees or not? To me, I cannot conceive of a world where they don't, but maybe they won't. Will Coursera not be able to get that opportunity? I mean, maybe we won't, but I think we're best positioned to. I don't wanna overstate like exactly how predictable it is, but we're discovering things that learners want that we believe that we can uniquely provide with our partners into a really large market.
Now to Ken's point on 2024, yeah, we have some pretty good visibility. When you look out the long-term model, we want degrees to be on the fastest segment by far because it's so big and we think we're so uniquely situated.
I'll just add one more point. Like, one of the key implications of the strategy shift is before we were going after a much smaller TAM focused on elite degrees from our existing partner base.
Yeah.
In the online market. Now we're going after that overall online degree market. you know, whenever we go through our strategy process, the question of like, what's the unique advantage of Coursera?
Yeah.
Universities want to get on Coursera. They wanna build their online degrees with Coursera. It just really opens up the aperture of the types of degrees we can search, source, and the volume of programs that we can bring on the platform.
Another thing, Leah, you talked a lot about it, but just to make sure it's clear, this idea of degree pathways, we think it's a really big idea.
Yeah.
Learners really seem to want it. It seems to be being borne out in the numbers. The most elite university degree programs are a bit more hesitant to say, "I'm gonna give academic credit towards my, you know, really fancy elite degree for something that came from, you know, one of our industry partners." Once you go to a high-quality program that maybe isn't top 10 in the whole world, this ability to open up these degree pathways from industry content, it's something that learners really want. A lot of universities are very excited to do it, but it's not the elite niche online degree market that really opens up that degree pathway opportunity, and that's what we're leaning into pretty hard. We're seeing, wow, we have a lot of these professional certificates. It's almost six million enrollments.
A lot of the folks taking these are interested in degrees. If you can help bridge that gap through credit transfers, there's an unlock that's possible that was not really possible with the elite degrees.
That's great. My second question, Jeff, it's for you. You were in India. It's one of your second largest markets, I think, in terms of enrollments, learners. Can you provide color? It seems like the education policy has become more favorable to online learning. You guys are stepping up investments over there. Can you provide color on where you are in terms of developing that market over there? Some milestones you can share, and then, how do you see that market evolving in next maybe three to five years?
Yeah. I would say clearly it's a big market. You saw the demographic numbers. We looked at the gross enrollment ratio is like 29%. The government said that they wanna get that to 50% by 2030. That's like 30 million more learners per year in India to hit the... I think it's 30 million more per year. Maybe it might be total. I feel like do we have products that are relevant? Yeah. Definitely mostly English-speaking, definitely awareness of Western brands in Europe and in the U.S. We have those. Those are good. Definitely interested in credentials and career advancement through credentials. We have those. Until 2022, we didn't have a lot of big Indian university brands, but I'm...
You know, we've been saying it in every sort of call, and I've been going to India a lot because we think to really unlock this market, there are some crown jewels in terms of the tech of the IITs and the IIMs in India. We now have, I think, 10 university partners, maybe 12. Literally, IIM Ahmedabad, IISc, ISI, IIT Bombay. These are the best universities in India. Have we built and launched programs that are exhibiting great scale and great economics? Not quite yet. There was a glimmer with BITS Pilani. We feel good about it. On the consumer side, top of funnel with freemium is looking pretty good. Monetizing, that's pretty hard. I gotta be honest, like that's pretty hard. I'd say I like the basic demographic and opportunity.
I love the regulatory environment with the new education policy that basically allows, I'll say mandates, but certainly encourages universities to incorporate 40% of the degrees on the degree credit online. Like it's not can I, it's the government saying, "We want you to have at least 40% of the credit towards your degrees online. We want it to be multidisciplinary." For engineering programs, it's not just engineering. Make sure you have multidisciplinary programs. Of course, that really helps when you have a broad multidisciplinary catalog. We think we're set up nicely. There's still a lot to figure out, actually, in terms of turning that into a really predictable high revenue stream. I mean, is that a fair answer?
Yeah, that's fair. I can also add, I was in India as well in December, talking to a number of these universities and enterprises. Clearly, there's an opportunity from a Career Academy standpoint. The entry-level professional certificates are really resonating with the students from a lot of these campuses. Guided Projects, one of the highest number of enrollments in Guided Projects are from our Indian learner base. There's a lot of appetite for students to, end learners to differentiate themselves in the market. I think when I think about the kinds of the brands Google or IBM or Microsoft, et cetera, they resonate really well in the population there. I saw a lot of excitement from universities to sign up for Career Academy, as well as for students kinda engaging in Career Academy.
There's a lot to be figured out, but it's very positive.
Thanks.
Let's go to Stephen over here.
Hello? Yep. Okay. Hey, thanks. Stephen Sheldon from William Blair. Thank you so much for doing this today. On the degree side, clearly seems like that's gonna be a big growth opportunity for you guys. A little more scrutiny currently in the current environment than maybe there has been historically. I guess as you're out there talking with universities, how forward-thinking do you feel like the universities are being in terms of both, one, the structure. Thinking about tuition, thinking about the flexibility, so structure, and then also the skills. How much are they scrutinizing what their graduates are walking away with in terms of both the discrete skills, I guess, and then also the soft skills?
Yeah.
Are you seeing a wide range of how universities are thinking about this? Just any detail on that.
I'll give you a quick start, because it was in my slides, the HolonIQ survey, which I thought was really helpful. They do it every year, and you can see some of the deltas. This is global. What we saw is, like during the pandemic, everybody had to go into emergency mode and move things online. We were a huge beneficiary. Our revenue grew 59%. Y'all know that. 2021, degree segment revenue was really strong. When things opened up, it was kind of like, how do we shut the campus? Now, how do we open the campus? What's gonna be the future of technology? I think it's starting to become clear, certainly among U.S., but honestly, internationally too. Like, everyone's now realizing it's hybrid.
Like, the future forever is hybrid, we're gonna have to meet the needs of students and employers better than we are today. How do they do it exactly? Not real clear. The three top answers there was digital adoption is the number one challenge and grew the most since 2021. I think that's indicative. Number two was budget cuts, number three was meeting employer demand. It's basically both of the things you said, Stephen, we're starting to see that. They're starting to say, "Hey, Coursera," like, "I need some help here." I think it's looking good, it's still a very dynamic environment. It's, I mean, it's really hard for folks to figure out exactly whether...
I will say, by the way, the very top elite schools and their residential programs, they've never seen so much demand. The value of going to a top school, living on campus, it's a really wonderful educational experience that people are willing to pay a lot for. The most elite schools in their top residential programs are like, "We really like this kind of a product offering to the market." It's master's degrees, it's second and third-tier schools, it's global, where they're seeing a lot more interest in reinventing things. Any.
Yeah, no, I would just say, like, there's two places where we care about the pace of innovation in the university space. One is on the campus business, where we're betting that universities will rely on our credentials to provide job-relevant skills and attract new students. The second is in the degree space, where I think you led off. The beauty of this higher scale learner first degree model is you don't need hundreds of degrees in the next few years. You need a set of large programs. What we're finding as we look forward into our pipeline is there's universities that are looking at collections of degrees that they might wanna launch with us, all with similar patterns, all with stackable, gateway credentials, all with pathways, all at similar price points.
That's really the key, figuring out those few institutions that wanna go for scale over a set of job-relevant degrees, that's where I think the enthusiasm is coming from.
Then just as a follow-up, as you think about the margins, you know, you guys have given some good gross margin detail by segment. If you think about the three different segments, do you guys think about profitability across each of them? Are you expecting more monetization to come from certain segments versus others as we think about Adjusted EBITDA? Just any detail on how you're thinking about almost segments.
Yeah. As you mentioned, Steven, of course, we provide by segment the, essentially the content margin, if you wanna think about that. That's what I would look to primarily. I say that because below those lines, a lot of the costs are shared, right? It's the triangle, and we get a lot of benefit. You know, it's one of the things that makes it a more attractive model over time, right? Each contributes to the others. We don't really think about it from a product line contribution margin standpoint. That said, you look to degrees at essentially a 100% margin without the content. That scales pretty quickly without a lot of additional costs.
Consumer, which if you look at with the lowest gross margin, the consumer, the registered learner that primarily comes in through consumer, comes in through business as well, but it comes in primarily through consumer, that feeds a lot of the rest of the business, right? It feeds enterprise, and it certainly feeds degrees when the key... They're blended. You can't really break that out. Our CAC on the new student front is what's going to enable, at the end of the day, these lower priced degrees. Other models, you can't do that. You have to have a high priced degree with a high percentage rev share because it costs so much to market to get a student. Given more than half of ours come from free from a registered learner base, it's part of the model. It's a little...
It'd be artificial if we tried to separate it.
Well, I can even a step further. During financial planning, anytime there's an investment proposal that is only for one segment, we're all like, "Where's the leverage?" I mean, we really try to invest in content and data and technology, even in certain marketing programs that cut across regions and cut across segments.
Ryan.
Excellent. Hey, Ryan MacDonald with Needham & Company. Echo my thanks for the great day so far. We're talking a lot about degrees. It's great to see the 25% growth target. Obviously, you know, in the U.S. right now, that landscape is evolving quickly with the Department of Education's updated guidance. Can you talk about how you're sort of underwriting the risk domestically of a potential change in the revenue model away from revenue share agreements to fee for service, and maybe what impact that has on sort of the as you look at the outlook for 2024?
Yeah. You know, I think I just testified yesterday. One of our partners, Brooke Elliott, who is the dean in charge of the University of Illinois Gies College of Business, the accounting and the iMBA program, also testified. We think that what I said, what she said, both are like this, these are great programs where the university is totally, they're totally in control. They set the curriculum, they do the instruction, they do the admissions. They're the ones who award the credential. You know, we're a technology platform. We help deliver, you know, students who are learning to them.
I think that, well, we're not super concerned about our exposure to this at this point.
To the question of how are we diversifying, part of it is international, but your question was how are we diversifying domestic degrees revenue. I would say a lot of it is the inherent structure of the relationship and the economics of that. If you look at these, the degree sort of design that we talked about, I think that's even more consistent where, with where if there were a policy change, kinda where things would be going. I personally think that the days of kind of a university saying, "I'm gonna outsource my degree to this for-profit company" is, has been collapsing for the last couple years, probably never to return. We were never really doing that. I'm feeling like our model is pretty well tuned to where, you know, a lot of the pressure is saying things wanna go.
If we had to find an alternative model that was not rev share based, you know, my sense is we would be able to manage that.
Comfort color. I'll go be crazy now and go away from degrees. Maybe ask about consumer. Leah, I think you had talked about some of the great conversion that you're seeing on Coursera Plus on the subscription and obviously on the pro certs. Can you talk about what learner conversion has been to paid and how that's helped then? You know, you talked about a couple of different strategies here around pricing or different subscription tiers. How should we think about when those start to be tested or as they, how should those be rolled out into the model?
Absolutely. We don't share the actual conversion data publicly, but I'll give you a feel as I look at the strategic priorities for how the team is focused. One, you know, the core value that we think is a majority of the thing that future consumers want is this gateway catalog. Moving from, you know, 30 to 50, almost doubling that gateway catalog is gonna give a lot more options to many different career seekers who don't just wanna go after the 30 paths that we have, but many, many more paths. We see that will be a boon because it'll be able to serve a much wider base of learners.
Now that we have put those subscription foundations in place, the first place that we're gonna test is actually looking at lower tier of subscription learners, people who are not gonna go $49 a month, but something significantly lower. We have a lot of assets to play with in terms of what would go into that tier. We're actually very focused on that now and testing, and I'm not gonna share any test results. We're not ready for rollout, but that is a major priority for H1.
I would say that's coupled also with, you know, we've seen consistent strong organic growth at the top of the funnel, consistent number of new registered learners, but we also have an active top of funnel strategy where we're launching Shravan shared articles and different types of way to enhance our SEO, but also in ways that leverage, that drive leverage to the platform. Shravan, for example, mentioned these articles that we've created.
If you Google different career topics, you're now likely to not only find a video lecture from a Coursera professor, but potentially an article giving you career advice that's actually built by us. What we're seeing is that learners value this asset, and we could even bring it into our core catalog as, again, another way of giving value to learners, not just when they're doing short-form video lectures or longer learning, but more of episodic learning that'll encourage learners to come back and engage with Coursera on a monthly, on a daily basis, all with the goal of driving retention in that subscription base. These are some of the things that we're thinking about right now.
Maybe Brian over here.
Awesome. I'll read it. This is great content, guys. Thanks for taking the time. Brian Peterson from Raymond James. I wanna follow up on Ryan's question. As we think about degrees, I know there is some kinda regulatory scrutiny here in the U.S. How do we think about kind of the domestic versus international balance of that opportunity at maturity? It sounds like it's becoming more international. I know we don't know what we don't know, but at a high level, what does that look like in that kinda long-term model?
You want me to answer that?
Sure, yeah.
I think Ken will give you the 10-year take. My take is there's still a lot of opportunity in the U.S. I don't think anyone has really figured out how to build these scaled online degrees. You know, you see the big four in the degree space, SNHU, the WGU, these folks providing very specific types of degrees. I think there's an opportunity to attract much more of the online degrees market in the U.S. Internationally, I think we're gonna follow a lot of the demographics, and that's why the first focus internationally is on India. We also see some opportunities outside of India in non-India APAC with universities looking to build at scale.
I don't know the exact mix on a 10-year basis, but I continue to believe that the U.S. will be a big part of it, followed by probably, Asia and India.
I mean, that is why we talked about the demographics in Jeff's section as well as mine. We see that evolving. One thing to keep in mind is the registered learner base today is broadly international. Our model continues. 20% of it is India. It lends itself naturally to us being diversified and being in the right place as those demographics shift.
At a really high level, more like where are all the human brains.
Yeah.
Where we have to develop human capital.
Yeah.
If we could be the first touch point there and help earn one of those first credentials become a gateway to all that global talent that's emerging in all these different regions of the world, we've done a great service to the talent in those regions. We've probably done a great service to employers who are looking for that talent. Not exactly the financial answer, but the big global answer is the young people, you know, are not in the States, but the wealth currently is, and the degree system is. It's gonna be some balance over time, I think, as the U.S. becomes, generally speaking, a lower portion of the opportunity and revenues just globally in the degrees tuition space.
The rest of the world, as the wealth builds and the population builds, I think it's gonna become a bigger portion.
No, that makes sense. Ken, maybe following up. I know there's been a lot on degrees here, but, you know, in the 25%-30% growth framework, how would you qualitatively look at the other segments? Are they, you know, in line, a little below? Just, you know, any high-level commentary there.
Sure. I'll start with, again, it's a little bit hard to say, but, you know, we've seen a slow as everybody has across SaaS as well in the enterprise space. More recently, there's just slower corporate spend, as everybody's broadly aware. That's been muted in the near term. That market, if we just look at market sizing, it's a huge market. Again, as we said, we think the demand for skilling workers, it's how companies get things done increasingly. We think that is going to be persistent over time, and especially as our offerings evolve. We think there's the opportunity to grow there more than on average across. I'd expect a shift away from consumer. Although consumer continues to do really well. Be clear about that.
The consumer is important to us. It's the smallest of our markets. It's starting to blur into the other markets as well. Enterprise, as the economies rebound, we think we're gonna do particularly well. It should outpace. We're getting excitement around degrees again as we've talked quite a bit about historically. Does that help? We'll take Taylor over here.
Hi, Taylor McGinnis from UBS. Thanks so much for the event today, everyone. Ken, my question's for you. I think in the past you guys have talked about Adjusted EBITDA potential more in the mid-20s, and today the framework you gave is for 15%-20%. Just when we think about, you know, what might be some of like the biggest differences there. The second question is on, you've talked a lot about strategy changes in relation to pricing, where lower pricing, right, in degrees, you talked a little bit maybe about it on the consumer side. Does that influence at all the new margin outlook?
Sure. On the EBITDA margin, I think the model as it went public was +20%. You weren't with us at the time. The long-term model that we shared was 20%. We've said 15%, 20%, not because of any necessarily, it's just it's a shorter-term piece. This is our first Analyst Day. We're rolling it out. We don't want the question, "Well, that's pie in the sky to go to +20% from you're just getting to break even." The opportunity is there, it depends what you wanna believe. Well, I can make you a case for +20%. What we're trying to do here is communicate where the leverage is in the model and what we see. I wouldn't if you could do a +20%.
I think there's a lot of leverage in high-margin product add-ons over time. We could start to talk about what that might look like, that's a future, future. We have a lot to execute on before we get there. I feel a little bit silly doing that. It's real, don't get me wrong. I think this audience could probably develop seven answers better than the ones I would give if you were to ask me. I think it's pretty obvious that over time we can layer on top. We need to win in the initial phases so that we can develop those. If there's, again, yeah, it was I think +20%, if I remember right. It feels like a long, long time ago, two years this month.
15%-20%, can it expand beyond that? Yes, it could. Absolutely. As it relates to the degrees and the pricing and lower pricing, it's a very good question. We talk about, again, kinda ex content for GAAP purposes. We talk about our gross margin for each of those and degrees being 100% because there is no content cost 'cause it's a service, of course, just to reiterate all of it. A service, of course, to the degree providers. At the same time, there is some back-end fielding. When we break out that segment-level detail below that, there's another 1,000 basis points to get to total company gross margin. Sorry to be really geeky about the accounting here, it matters, right? It shows specifically.
It's the one thing, in my opinion, worth going to look at the filings and the Q and the K to understand the business from a real business standpoint. Within that, you're serving students still as well. On the margin, yes, there's a little bit more cost than that if you lower price to get to the same revenue with more students. Is it material? It's not hugely material, so it doesn't have a big impact. Yeah.
Maybe Tom over here.
Perfect. Yeah, thanks. It's Tom here from Citi. I've got a couple of questions. I suppose one is directly about capital allocation, the other one is indirectly about capital allocation. The first one was to do with the speed at which you're getting the courses online. You've made some amazing progress. Do you think just the total content base at this stage is not Well, is it acting as a constraint on your ability to grow, and how can you resolve that via more dramatic action? Is it just simply a question of adding more partners or, you know, is there a pathway at some point to you guys, directly creating and owning content yourself?
Yeah. Let I'll take that one first and would be interested to hear you guys, the answers too. I think there is sort of a minimum scope, like a minimum critical mass of content that you need in order to solve certain customer problems. When I. Yeah, I was just two weeks ago, with the Prime Minister of Greece and his Minister of Education and his Minister of Labor. Like, we're sitting there talking about a program to do upskilling for citizens and upskilling in the universities.
If I were sitting there with two professional certificates, I think they'd be like, "Why are you even here?" When you get to 30, it's like, "Okay, that's a pretty wide range of jobs." When that gets to 50, it's like, "Okay, now that's a lot of different kinda job opportunities for my people." I do think there's a sort of a minimum scope required. I think it's a lot different now with 30 than it was at, with five professional certificates. It'll be different at 50 at the end of this year. At some point, I do think that there's, you know, diminishing returns. Probably every new certificate will still be valuable, but I'm sorta guessing that a 100-ish probably certificates will be like, all right, now you can create a lot of career opportunities for people.
Another 100 on top of that will not be as valuable as the first 100. In terms of the cost of producing this, that's gonna drop dramatically. I'm almost positive. Just even just my own playing around with ChatGPT and what we're doing, like, you can create content a lot more cheaply than you could before. I think that quantity will become a commodity, and I think quality will become the prize. People will look for quality, the quality content, so I'm not wasting my time learning this, and the quality credentials so it can actually help me advance my career. I think that that's kind of where we are. I will say that our content engine now, it does have some gaps, and those gaps do kind of hurt us.
In particular, things that are changing really quickly that are less what a university would work on. Certain things in the tech sectors. I think the game is changing pretty quickly. I think the ability to produce that kind of content is getting easier and easier. I think the technology is really playing right into us being able to cover some of our gaps and not necessarily commoditize what our core strengths are. That's why I like GPT for us. I think that's a good thing. Leah, what were your thoughts on that?
I'd add. Look, when I think of the comprehensiveness of a catalog, I ask, have we covered the core careers and career paths that we think are most in demand?
Yeah.
Do we have it in multiple languages? Are there other core skill areas which might not be full career paths but are current and upcoming, and are we filling those gaps? One thing I would say is that opening up Clips, short-form learning experiences on the catalog, has transformed not only the learning experience that we're able to provide to customers, but the type of things that we can source in our catalog. So if you look at, we just brought on a new Chief Content Officer, Marnie, and if you look at her sourcing list, a lot of the sourcing list is not on, you know, six to nine month courses now. It's on filling short instances of relevant skills with Clips, which can be done much more rapidly and sourced from a much wider variety of experts.
I think you're seeing the speed at which we source speed up, the speed of production speed up, not just on these long-form professional certificates, but also on these short relevant sort of skills-.
The short stuff's not gonna give us the big advantage. It's just gonna help close gaps that we currently have with our current content. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think just to kinda reiterate the point, I was making earlier in my presentation, these long-form content actually takes time to produce. That's what is needed for transformative skill development.
Yeah.
When I think about sort of these, the jobs of the future and the kinda change you were talking about, ultimately, you need to be trained and actually have the relevant level of depth in both the knowledge but also the applicability of the knowledge. That's where the Guided Projects come into play. When we're thinking about this content, we also think about, like, all of these different assets and how they kinda come together to kind of create sort of that holistic product experience that the end user needs, both in terms of the knowledge as well as the portfolio.
When we are looking at this, like we talked about Guided Projects tripling in the last couple of years to 3,400 Guided Projects, and a lot of these projects are getting mapped to these Professional Certificates, again, based on the tools and the skills that are needed to be done by that job. That's what I think it's kinda continues to create, like, what I would say is the uniqueness in terms of Coursera's content offering. Where there are gaps, we're able to now kind of figure out, like, how we can actually address some of that through either, you know, potentially GPT or through parts of this technology that provides the shorter durational experiences. I think having this long form is gonna be a very big advantage for us because that's so hard to replicate.
By the way, with GPT, you might be like, "Wait, isn't that a commodity?" Our partners are gonna become much better at creating content.
Yeah.
Universities are gonna be able to create really good content much more easily with their grad students, their professors, and everything else than they do today. I think that they're gonna have an enablement that's gonna be considerable. You don't have to forfeit the brand to get lower cost, higher productive content generation.
The second question is actually gonna pick up on a thing that Leah mentioned, which is, English. U.S. and U.K., we obsess about data science, all that sort of stuff. You go, you know, other parts of the world, one of the biggest sort of variables in determining your earnings power is your ability to speak English. I suppose you mentioned, Jeff, you've got a sleeper agent at Duolingo. On a serious note, I mean, why isn't Coursera teaching English as a foreign language?
These guys are laughing because every time I travel, I write my thoughts from the road, and a lot of these are like, "Hey, folks, we have a huge opportunity here." I mean, first of all, we like to stay focused on what we're really good at. University of Pennsylvania and University of Arizona, there are some good English teaching courses on Coursera. We do have content that teaches English. It's just not been the biggest thing that we've been pushing on. What I've been hearing a lot of professors and students, especially, when I visit campuses around the world and talk to the students, they're all saying exactly what you say.
I gotta learn English to get that job at the international company. It's not just learning the stuff, it's being able to work on an international team where they won't sometimes only hire you if you can speak, you know, reasonable English. The students wanna be learning English. What they're saying to us is they're like, "I'm listening to these courses from these great companies in English, which I love. The subtitles help me along. I'd rather it actually be in English, but I wanna have the subtitles so that I can actually make sure that I'm getting through the material. I don't wanna learn English, like how to order at a restaurant.
I wanna learn English on how to do marketing campaigns and how to do the job I'm trying to learn how to do." I do think there is an interesting opportunity for us to do a bit more in teaching English as a second language. When I think about the globalization of talent, ESL is a big unlock for these learners. I mean, if you have the core skills and you're proficient enough at working on an international team that speaks English, that's kind of the big unlock. This is something that we're definitely talking about.
Good. I know we're just coming up on time, but maybe the last one from you.
All right. Thank you. Yun Kim, Loop Capital Markets. A lot of focus on the degrees program today, which is good to hear 'cause we don't get to talk about that too often on earnings and whatnot. Obviously, the mix of the U.S. or non-U.S. degree programs continues to increase. Does that fundamentally change the way that you acquire students? You know, do you have to rely more on the organic basis? 'Cause obviously you've got to bring the CAC down for that business. If you can go kind of run through some of the strategy behind that to get that number down?
Yeah. Leah?
Yeah. Look, I think when we're thinking about where to grow the business, we're starting by figuring out where are the learners on our platform, and that's why we're going to India, given the volume of learners there, as well as the demographic shifts. The truth is that we're still early in the international markets and figuring out. You know, the first question we ask is: how much of the existing learner base can we convert to how do we wanna shift the way we're growing the top of the funnel to bring in more career-interested learners who will take those gateway certificates and proceed into degrees? Third, you know, there's other types of off-platform paid or brand marketing to bring learners in. It's starting with those two first things. How do we convert the learners on platform?
How do we get top of funnel learners to come in and get into career pathways or MOOCs that would stack into degrees? Probably will take a year or two even just playing with those levers before we figure out, what's needed.
I can-
beyond that.
I can add a little bit. I think in my presentation, I talked about the key assets that go across, right? Data is one of the biggest one, and then AI-powered marketing system. When we think about the learner, we think of it as a learner life cycle and a learner journey, not just like, you know, they're just coming in to do one thing. Learning is episodic, we all know. It comes and goes. You know, today you may wanna learn a specific subject, tomorrow you may wanna actually go deep and get a professional certificate, and then in the future you might say like, "I am in this career now, I wanna get into a degree." What we're doing through data, we're actually tracking the learner along this journey, and we're starting to accumulate a lot of that data.
When we think about it, we don't distinguish you're an international learner or a U.S. learner in the context of that. What is powerful, in my opinion, is we're aggregating, collecting all this information, talking about the stackability model, like who is looking up the search filters, who is looking at kind of the potential programs. We can also look at like programs that they were interested in, but they may be too expensive in their region, but now they're kinda clicked on some of the program. We're tracking all this data and we've built what we call as a degree marketing system.
That marketing system is actually what is kind of helping us lower the CAC effectively to kind of find people who have the propensity to pay, but also have the need to get into a degree program as well.
Yeah. The other thing I put on the bolder slide, I think the title was start your degree at $49 a month. How could you start a degree for $49 a month? Only if the marginal cost is almost zero. The traditional degree models have been built on really high upfront costs, millions and millions of dollars to build the degree, really high customer acquisition. Even in India today, a lot of the degree OPM type players have very high customer acquisition costs. We just decided we're not even gonna go down that path. It's just not gonna work. Until we can find a model that inherently has low customer acquisition costs, let's not try to scale anything.
When you look at this basic idea of Career Academy with Professional Certificates stacking into degrees, that's part of the acquisition cost that says those Professional Certificates have very low marginal costs to deliver. If that's the way that you acquire a pipeline of degree students who then you can monetize once they decide to do the degree, that works pretty nicely in sort of emerging economies where, you know, someone's not gonna write a check for $10,000 to buy a degree.
We think the design that we showed you that we're excited about with University of Colorado Boulder is the kind of design that also might work well in emerging markets where we have to be sensitive to CAC, but starting in these low marginal cost professional certificates is the kind of design that we think might be well-tuned for those types of emerging markets.
Okay, great. I got a real quick follow-up on that. How long does it take for a particular university, once they sign, for them to ramp and start offering the degree program? Just wanna understand the deployment cycle.
In terms of the launch, I think we've now... It used to be 12 to 18 months. Now we're actually looking at six to 12 months. Like, once the degree is signed, we actually have a very well-designed playbook. We have a teaching and learning team, we have services team that actually work with these university partners. They've also kinda have the ability to help them design the curriculum. Part of the, you know, also the curriculum, also to kinda think about when do they kinda... I would say it's just like milestones, right? You don't have to launch the whole 18 courses or so of a degree program overnight. You can actually think about, like, how do you launch them over time.
They kinda help really think about articulate the curriculum, figure out milestones, and then also work with subject matter experts outside if they need help. We've identified certain companies with those experts to help these university partners as well, as they need. Combination, I think we've really helped reduce this time to producing the degree as well.
A couple of other quick things, though. I mean, our competency is getting better. We're getting better at doing it. The competence of schools is getting way better. I mean, the pandemic taught a lot of schools, like, how do you film a course online? It's not perfect. They need to do better. Like, they're building the capacity to do that, and not just the capacity, they're building a lot of content. We announced in 2022 a lot of ingestion capabilities.
Ingestion tools.
One of the reasons is there's a lot more digital content being created by universities now than there was three years ago. Way more. We don't have to start from scratch every time. If we can ingest what's already built and then shape it rather than create from scratch every time with a university who's never created online content, it's a lot faster. The final thing I'll say, the tooling is gonna be way better with GPT and these other things. Like, not only will they have a little more experience, the universities, in creating online content, they're gonna have a set of supercharged tools that are gonna help them create this stuff too. I expect quality to go up, cost and time to go down for almost every university.
Hey, Jeff, maybe just some closing comments, to round us out today.
Well, I mean, I've talked so much. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I kinda warned you at the beginning, we love this stuff, and we don't always know exactly the path, but fundamentally, we feel good about the role that we're playing in society. I feel great about the business that we're building. Feel great about the team that we have, and I really thank you all for coming here and listening to us share this with you. Thank you.
Thank you all.
Thank you.