Our Story
How It Started
Ella Epshteyn, EdD, spent close to twenty years in higher education — largely in faculty support roles. From that vantage point, she watched the same thing happen again and again: highly educated, deeply capable people struggling to find sustainable work, juggling part-time jobs just to make ends meet.
“This wasn’t only an adjunct problem.” Instructional designers, administrators, career-changers — education professionals of every kind were facing the same underemployment, pay disparities, and lack of flexible options.
In 2020, she wrote a book — You Are HigherED! — about using collaborative entrepreneurship in teaching and learning to build better career outcomes. She interviewed people across the field about their struggles and their wins along the way. Even those who pivoted into adjacent fields, completing every additional training asked of them, often still struggled to land work that paid what they were worth.
Plenty of organizations offer education and professional development. None offered holistic career support — the kind that accounts for every facet of the problem, and meets people wherever they are in their journey. So she built the one that should exist.
