Edson Barton is Co-Founder and CEO of YouScience, an award-winning platform revolutionizing college and career readiness.
Tell us about your company and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners or educators.
Our company offers a longitudinal platform, called Brightpath, that supports individuals from middle school all the way to their careers, helping them discover who they truly are (including their aptitudes, interests, and motivations) and guiding them to map a meaningful career path from an early stage. Brightpath was specifically developed to improve personal buy-in and engagement by connecting everything to an individual’s career outcomes using the first, and only, revolutionary aptitude-based career guidance system. This enables us to more precisely connect students to courses where they will naturally find the most success and personal enjoyment. This absolutely changes everything for a student – it significantly boosts their confidence and performance in school, and it ensures they are more engaged in their learning and helps them intentionally choose a path that aligns with both their natural strengths and passions.
Too often, people end up in careers that are not personally fulfilling. This is not because they lack talent, but because they were never shown what their aptitudes are and so they struggle to find what truly fits them. That’s a root part of the problem we’re solving. As more students are matched with their personal best-fit classes and experiences, we can now better connect them to their future careers by giving them opportunities to earn industry credentials of value, creating tangible, motivating wins that reinforce engagement and academic performance.
Brightpath is designed to help each learner better discover what intrinsically motivates and connects them with their best-fit educational (college or other) and employment opportunities. In this way, they not only understand their path forward, but can actually see and feel that they’re doing something meaningful, both now and for their future. That sense of meaning and purpose drives stronger engagement now and sets them up for long-term success and fulfillment.
Where did the idea come from to create your company?
The idea for YouScience is rooted in my own personal experience as a student. In January of my first grade year, my thirteen year old sister was diagnosed with a rare form of childhood leukemia. She died six months later in a research hospital in another state. And as you can imagine, I fell behind in my schooling. A few months later in second grade, as a classmate handed me back a quiz she had graded and which I had thoroughly failed, she casually told me, “you’re not very good at math.”
That single comment shaped much of how I saw myself for years. My mother would later joke, “Edson earned either A’s or D’s… and mostly D’s.” Looking back, it wasn’t about whether I “liked” a subject; it was all about whether I engaged or not with the subject. If I felt there was personal value in what I was learning, I leaned in. If not, I disengaged completely. Although I naturally loved to learn, at that time of life I thought I was one of the few that didn’t belong in school and the education system.
But of course, that wasn’t true. After high school I remember reading an article that nearly 70% of students felt just like I did. As I read that, I realized I wasn’t in the minority, but I was part of an unfortunate super majority! That article stuck with me and really bothered me. I started to look at myself and others differently after that. For example, I finally realized and decided in my second year of college that I could learn math! I recognized that I had misjudged myself, and I knew that far too many others do the same. We tend to internalize inaccurate labels, stereotypes, and implicit biases and we then wear them like blindfolds over our eyes and we carry them like rocks that pull us down.
I came to see just how terribly wrong this was and it drove me to ask: why are over two-thirds of students disengaged and disenchanted with school (which is what most people equate with learning)? And, how do we fundamentally change that?
I am passionate about answering those questions and in so doing, helping people discover and prove their true self, their strengths, and their potential.
That passion led me to found Precision Exams in 2006 to develop and provide opportunities to earn Industry Recognized Certifications for every student. Why? Because studies have proven that by doing that one simple intervention, we can meaningfully improve a student’s academic and personal profile. This led to discovering more and more research that overwhelmingly proves a foundational principle to generate rapid, positive, powerful, and sustainable change in students: providing intentional and personal career connected learning and opportunities improves virtually everything for a student and is a key to solving our skilled workforce crisis.
Knowing this foundational truth, we then needed to find a new and better way to help every student find their way to personal career connected learning pathways. So, I started a search to find a guidance tool that could truly benefit every student. Over several years I looked into and took every guidance program I could find, but all of them are based on the same interest or personality surveys and none of them had proven to produce any meaningful outcomes for students. I was becoming discouraged until I met Philip Hardin, the co-founder and creator of the absolutely revolutionary YouScience Aptitude & Career Discovery assessment. Founded in 2013, Philip and team created a patent-pending method to use true performance-based measures of aptitudes (or natural talents that give you your natural propensity to learn a skill) to provide scientifically-backed insights to give everyone a meaningful pathway to a successful career. Immediately, I knew his product was a game-changer.
Today, YouScience Brightpath is the world’s first and only longitudinal education to workforce development platform. Brightpath breaks down barriers, eliminates stereotypes and biases, and helps every student understand who they are, what they can become, and what is their personal pathway to achieving career success.
Every person has genius! It’s our job to help you find that genius and attach it to your best-fit careers.
Tell us about one challenge and how you overcame that challenge.
One challenge I took on was tackling how to streamline the overwhelming number of disconnected technologies being used in schools. While there was no shortage of edtech tools, most tried to solve one or two facets of what was needed, but fell far short of creating outcomes that truly supported students or educators. The tools were disparate, did not communicate with one another effectively, and often added complexity rather than clarity. Importantly, I recognized this couldn’t just be a single point-in-time product, but it had to be something that supported a student in their journey from middle school to and through high school, to and through postsecondary, all while connecting into careers.
The real problem wasn’t just fragmentation, it was and is that these tools were not solving real problems and in many cases are actually causing student harm by reinforcing stereotypes and biases that direct most women away from STEM careers and perpetuate generational disadvantages and poverty. These tools may help check regulatory boxes for educators, but they are not helping our students make critical life decisions and producing meaningful outcomes.
To solve this, we “simply” had to develop an end-to-end platform supporting the entire education to career journey, while replacing speculation with science, removing stereotypes and biases, and producing real outcomes that change lives and improve our schools and our economy.
First, this required us to shake the status quo, not just from an education perspective, but also from a business perspective. Most investors and company boards want to focus on a simple streamlined product set. Pulling off something so large and longitudinal is not a challenge for the lighthearted, and we have had to continuously prove the business case and demonstrate how this really is just one problem to solve, and that it can’t be solved by going small.
It, also, required us to not only listen to customers needs, but dig deeper and understand the psychology of actions/in-actions, department silos and how to breakthrough those walls, determine and map various laws, funding sources and budgets, which are often conflicting, and ultimately determine the difference between what a customer says and what they really need and can implement.
By integrating everything into a single, longitudinal solution, we created a platform that helps students discover their aptitudes, see where they’re naturally wired to succeed, earn credentials that prove their skills along the way, and connect with educators, colleges, and employers to support student achievement. This requires deep data structuring to ensure that insights flow seamlessly, and each stakeholder receives what they need when they need it. And, we gave educators the tools they need to guide students with precision and intentionality, not just good intentions. This holistic approach has allowed us to deliver real value—not just another edtech tool, but the infrastructure that powers meaningful outcomes.
What are you most proud of or what is your company’s greatest achievement?
What I’m most proud of, and what I believe is our company’s greatest achievement, is that we help students find and connect to their purpose. And when that happens, everything begins to change for the better. Grades improve. Discipline issues decrease. Students start building healthier relationships with their peers, teachers, and even their parents. And, college enrollments increase, and more importantly, college completion rates increase. We see it time and time again: when a student understands who they are and what they’re working toward, they become more engaged, confident, and motivated. In turn, we are fostering a diverse and skilled workforce ready to meet the demands of the future economy.
At YouScience, while one of our goals is solving the workforce pipeline challenge, our impact goes far beyond employment. We’re helping students discover relevance in their education and a clear direction for their future. That sense of purpose is transformational, and that’s what we’re most proud to deliver.
Where do you see your company in five years?
In five years, I see YouScience continuing to transform how students discover and pursue their future. We’ll keep investing in our product to make it even more impactful and accessible for every student – no matter where they are in their journey. That includes leveraging AI and other emerging technologies to create a truly personalized experience.
My vision is for every student to have what feels like a personal counselor – “someone” that knows them deeply, guides them through each stage of their education and career journey, and helps them make informed, confident decisions. To do that at scale, we need to build out a robust framework powered by rich data, deep insights, and a broad understanding of what opportunities exist in the marketplace.
