10 years ago, I got screwed.

Like millions of students before and after me, I transferred colleges. A year later, I learned I'd lost most of my college credits.

The cost? $60,000 and another year of my life.

I was so annoyed I couldn't let it go.

So I built a tool leveraging existing information to get my credits back. It worked.

It saved me that $60,000. My friends tried it and it saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars collectively.

Helping each friend should have felt great, but instead, each time I grew more frustrated. Each win furthered a realization: this is all totally preventable.

Why are people running into problems with the education system?

It probably starts when we tell 18-year-olds to make multi-hundred-thousand, life-altering decisions with little to no information.

Then we confuse them more by telling them to go get financial aid. Unfortunately, most dollars branded as financial “aid” are just huge loans with high interest rates that loom over you for life.

From there, we tell them to go figure it out. To no surprise, kids end up making a lot of the same mistakes: choosing the wrong degree, picking classes that don't count toward graduation, losing credits when transferring, and many more.

These mistakes lead to longer time in college, which requires students to take out more student loans, ultimately resulting in crushing debt. Debt that prevents people from buying homes, starting families, or taking risks and betting on themselves.

But like I said, this is all preventable.

So what's the actual cause?

No one knows—literally.

There's a massive information problem affecting everyone in the education system: students and their families, high schools, community colleges, four-year universities, and governments.

Students don't know where to go, what classes to take, or how to save money. Parents feel powerless as they don't know how to help.

High schools are understaffed with counselors, who are already strapped for time. Is it really their responsibility to sift through all the information themselves and create personalized plans for every student?

Community colleges and four-year universities have a lot of important information to manage: credits, requirements, agreements, etc. Unfortunately there isn't great tooling to manage this information internally, across institutions, or with students.

Governments are earnestly trying to help, with states and the federal government collectively spending billions annually—but without knowing where to direct those dollars, their efforts haven't succeeded.

This lack of information between these stakeholders has created an inefficient education system where there are no winners.

Fixing the information problem fixes the education system.

It turns out the classes, colleges, pricing arbitrage, the dollars, and all of the infrastructure needed to make education efficient exist today.

Our first product, Pathways Planner, is the first step toward an efficient education system.

High schools can provide their students personalized college planning. Community colleges and four-year universities save thousands of hours of work, gain increased transparency, and work better together. Governments benefit by helping students, parents, high schools, community colleges, and four-year universities succeed.

Tasseled is an education logistics company building products that follow the same theme: help every participant in the education system navigate and utilize all of its existing resources, making the education system efficient.

But why does this matter?

An efficient education system means we all win.

An efficient system is more meritocratic. Today, you have to shell out thousands for private college counselors or need to be incredibly well-connected to get ahead. Most people don’t have access to that—nor should they need it.

An efficient system means lower pressure. We can stop putting 18-year-olds in high-pressure situations which often put them on a path to crushing debt.

An efficient system means no more student debt. Student debt is a symptom of an inefficient system that has consistently failed to effectively utilize hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal. Making the system efficient permanently eliminates student debt.

An efficient system also comes with a deeply important consequence.

Remember being told you could be anything you wanted?

At some point, we stopped believing that. It probably happened when you got to high school and were fed the same standard script: get good grades, go to a good college, and get a safe (but unfulfilling) job.

Given how the system loads people with debt, it’s a pragmatic script.

Student loans were not initially a bad thing. They enabled us to invest in our future and pursue our real passions and dreams. Left unchecked, these loans have inflated and caused the complete opposite of their initial intention. Now we have to pursue "safe" careers just to guarantee a salary that allows us to pay back these loans.

Making the education system efficient will fix this.

People can bet on themselves and tackle the hard (but fulfilling) problems in health, climate, energy, housing, manufacturing, aerospace, and more. That will lead to more progress and fulfillment.

That was our country’s standard. That should be our standard.

That’s why we’re building Tasseled.