We founded ADTC on a few simple principles.

1. Help the millions of people left behind by the current educational system find careers that dramatically increase their career choices and earnings trajectory.

2. Solve an enormous and worsening problem for employers: A severe and growing shortage of diesel mechanics.

3. Do this in a new, innovative way that got people quickly trained up, and into jobs without a mountain of student loan debt. (See broken educational system that works for some but not most.)

Numbers one and two were relatively easy. Our first-class in July of 2017 proved that we were really onto something.

Number 3? A brutal slog. The ENTIRE U.S. system is built on two principles.

-College for all. (We quickly dispelled this myth.)

-Funding education via government student loans, aka Title IV funding. (No way were we doing this.).

We tried every financial model on the planet.

1.) Charging employers directly. It sort of worked. But why would an employer be willing to shell out thousands of dollars for an unproven individual who may not stick around?

2.). Private student loans. (Are you kidding me? Most professionals could not qualify for a private student loan.)

3. Collecting monthly payments from grads. No way can you maintain our scale doing this.

We've met some true characters along the way. Some good, some not so good. But we learned from them all.

It wasn't until we met the folks at Social Finance that things really came together.

I say it in the piece, but I'll say it here as a tease. "If we don't do a good job training our students, placing them into jobs and making sure they make their payments, Social Finance will go away and find another program in which to invest.

And I'm fine with that.

Here's the crazy thing. Our work with Social Finance has allowed us to develop a program to solve another huge problem. RETENTION!

So take a look at this great story that just ran about ADTC and Social Finance. Jessica Jallings Gomez and her team did a phenomenal job in telling a really long story in a short amount of time.

(WATCH VIDEO HERE)

There are a few...very few programs like ADTC. Where we have skin in the game, long after our grads leave.

Why are there not more?