A Governor Goes to College

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo along with my co host Michael Horn, and we're here today at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Salesforce.org Innovation Leadership Forum. With us today here we have the president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels. It's great to have you here with us today.

Thanks for having me.

So, Mitch, we normally ask our guests about how they got into higher education, but I think your pathway is pretty well told so far. But when you left the governor's office here in Indiana, you had the choice to do many different things, I'm assuming. Why did you pick academia of all things, and especially a presidency?

In the end I picked it, but it'd be more accurate to say it picked me or someone did. It wasn't what I had in mind at all. I was trying very hard not to make any decision as we entered that last year of my previous job. And when people would inquire, I would usually say, I don't know, but it'll be somewhere in the NDB zone, meaning none of your damn business. I was looking forward to return to private life. That didn't quite happen. No. The trustees had decided they wanted to make a change. They came around privately and then they came around again and again and I straight armed them for a while. But I couldn't quite say, cut it off completely. And in the end I found myself saying yes. I think because I couldn't think of a job other than when I was leaving where if a person did something useful, it could make a bigger difference to the state I care about, the state I wanted to live in. I was not interested, had inquiries from people who might want me to move one coast or another somewhere else, run a company or something. And so it looked like a useful job where I wanted to live among the people I am most comfortable with. And I feel so fortunate that it came along.

So in terms of impact, you've had quite the impact since you've been here. You froze tuition for several years, you created these Purdue Polytechnic schools, Purdue Global, among other things. Right. So you've really transformed Purdue. And now in a way that it's being talked about as one of the most innovative universities in the country. When you think about all that you've done since 2013, what do you think has been the most impactful up until now? But probably more important, when you talk about impact, what do you think is going to have the most impact? Probably long after you're out of this

job, if you mean impact on our school. And I don't think in broader terms than that very often, I don't. We never. I tried very hard not to appear to be evangelizing for anything we've done. We think these are decisions that are wise for our school. The investments we've made emphases some of the new things we've tried we think fit our school. I mean, lots of examples. We were nowhere in online education. I thought we would not get there on our own. So we looked for a quicker route. We have, to me, an unacceptable scarcity of minority students coming out of the public high schools of our state who are able to succeed at Purdue. So we started high schools to build our own pipeline. But these are things we crafted with our own university in mind. And so I'm very bashful in people. I turn down a lot of invitations to go talk to somebody else's board or somebody else's regents or things like that.

How you do it. Right.

Yeah. Because I don't pretend to know what's right for other schools or other places.

Now,

if there is a thing or two that might be and that I might hope will be of broader scale, I would pick out, for instance, our income share agreements, which, if they're going to be a successful and useful phenomenon, will have to grow to scale other things. If nobody else chooses our route on tuition or something, that's for them to decide. But for ISAs to really fulfill the potential I think might be there, you really would want. And we're beginning to see a lot of other places try to do something similar.

So let's dig into that ISAs, because you've certainly started a movement, it seems, in accredited higher education. It was already starting to pop a little bit in the coding boot camp space and so forth, but not so much traditional institutions. Where do you think this ISA movement is going to go next? You see some movement at the federal government level right now with consumer protection law being put in place. You've seen Jason Delisle, who's been on our podcast, talk about the federal government actually putting dollars in and doing an ISA program themselves. Where do you think it's going to go? Where should it go?

I think it should if allowed to, and if properly overseen, which is. Which is. Would be positive, that is to say, certain guardrails, the same kind we've put around our own program.

Yeah. You've put caps in certain areas.

Right. To make sure that there are full disclosures and protections and limits and so forth on what gets paid, then I think it can be a very useful compliment. Not a substitute, but a compliment to the other forms of student financing that are out there. And so I hope that will happen. So we've encouraged and worked with people in both parties. By the way, when I first started, I was aware of the idea, but when I first started talking about it, what really caught my attention was it was one of the few ideas out there in any public policy space where I was finding people from left and right ruminating about it. That was kind of appealing to me. But anyway, I think that if it is encouraged in that way and safeguarded in reasonable ways, then it has a real chance to grow. I'd be very leery. I appreciate the enthusiasm that some in the executive branch have shown for direct involvement, but I just assume they'd be careful, steer clear. Let's see what the market can do here if given a chance.

Gotcha. No, that makes sense. So fair to say that you think that the consumer protection bill, though, going through maybe would make a lot of sense because it puts in a lot of the safeguards you put into the program.

Yeah, absolutely. Just to reassure people and to clarify some of the ambiguity, there were some tax rules and things like that. People weren't sure how they'd apply. So that would all be very, very helpful. But there is a. I discovered when I first just spoke in public about this, I was immediately besieged by people both There was interest from the press, great interest from the journalists, but also turned out there were a lot of people out there waiting for somebody to make the first move. They saw the possibilities. They were prepared to set up administration companies, funds to support students and all that and didn't have anywhere to go. So over the last, what it is, three or four years, we've come to know that community and it's an impressive one.

That's great. So the other piece that I'm surprised you didn't mention as maybe a place that'll have farther reaching impact is your decision to get into online education. You bought the university from Kaplan, of course, for a dollar, famously, with some agreements down the road. How has that worked out so far? Can you update our listeners on where that is?

It's working pretty well. It's doing those things we hoped it would do. And a couple we hadn't even thought about, by the way, we hadn't thought about the fact that we could offer then free college completion to Purdue employees, our associates. We have several hundred of them now. I've had people in tears see me. They say I never thought I'd get to finish my degree, let alone a Purdue degree. So that's an ancillary benefit that we didn't foresee, you know, how important it will be beyond our institution. I don't. I. Once again, I don't. I don't think anyone should overrate or leap to conclusions. We are outgrowing the market, but the market slowed down, as you know, it only grew a couple percent last year. And. But one thing, that's another of our hopes was that not only would we be able to serve what I think of as the third concentric circle for Land Grant University that is now working adults, but very much as a part of our thinking to improve our, I thought, very weak grasp on the techniques, the best techniques for pedagogical and technological, for online education, because there are offerings we can be using, we can be providing to those who did go to college, continuing education of different kind. So we have now a lot of new certificate programs for people who want less than a master's degree as well as master's. There's some real interesting things in aviation, pharmacy, technology, veterinary technology, where we. Purdue, not the old Kaplan. They didn't know anything about those subjects, but we do. But we didn't have the mechanism to reach large numbers of people who might improve their lot in life.

Mitch, one last question and then we'll wrap up. So a number of college presidencies are turning over. Many more colleges and universities are turning to, quote, unquote, non traditional presidents. It seems like non traditional is becoming now the traditional. What have you learned?

It's like we're students.

What have you learned? I mean, higher education tends to have a dim view among some in the public and in some in political circles as well. What have you learned about academia or higher education that maybe you didn't quite understand or appreciate when you were governor?

Yeah, well, we don't have time for all the things I didn't know. That'd be several podcasts full of those, by the way. It's stunning. You talk about the turnover. It's amazing to me to contemplate that I am now past the median tenure of a president of all presidents, and I think public presidents. I've even further passed it, you know, because I still feel like a rookie. And there's still things, so many things I'm learning and trying to learn. You know, I do believe that it's really important that we move past. This sense of skepticism is almost too mild a term for what some people have concluded about higher ed a whole lot of issues around it, but certainly cost and value right there near the top. And you know, we, in an interview like this a few years ago, I just off the top of the head, I used the phrase higher education at the highest proven value and I've never been able to improve on that. Trying to sum up what I hope we can do and what I hope more and more schools will do that is to really work on value the quality of the, of the education product at an affordable cost and be willing to prove it. And that can take forms like being more accountable and putting some skin in the game, trying to measure in ways that we haven't before how much students are learning and growing intellectually, things like that. And we've got to recapture public confidence. And you know, there are good reasons, I regret to say that many in the public have come to negative conclusions and we can't just leave it there.

That makes a lot of sense. We appreciate you being on Future youe with us and we'll be right back.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future. You off a great conversation with Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue and Jeff. I took a lot from it but we also got the benefit of hearing him speak at this conference, the Salesforce conference afterward. And it's interesting how he, he said to us that he originally when he, when he took the post of the presidency, he sort of said well the answer of course is going to become, you know, to become more selective as a university. And now he's totally flipped that on its head. As an observer of politicians coming into presidencies. What was your take on that?

Yeah, I mean there were, there were two takes. Interesting. One is that he understood what he didn't know or assumed he knew some stuff and then changed his mind. And one of the way.

Impressive.

Which is impressive. Right. So one of the things he, in an interview that he did on stage@the salesforce.org forum with Goldie Blumenstick of the Chronicle is that coming into the job, he thought Purdue had to become more selective and that was the way to increase student success, just get better students. One of the things he realized about four months on the job and then brought the board along for was that that was not the way to become, to improve student success. We could improve student success through other means. And that really the purpose of a land grant institution is to serve learners and to serve students. And to do that, they had to grow. And so he decided that they wanted to grow, they didn't need to become more selective. And in essence, they not only grew, but improved all their metrics around retention and graduation rates anyway. And so this, to me is something that we've talked about before that really just frustrates me about the American higher education system is that we have all these needs for increased learning at all different stages of Life, not just 18 to 22 year olds. And the fact is that institutions, the wealthiest institutions in this country, the quote unquote, most successful institutions in this country, at least by the U.S. news World rankings, refuse to grow. Right. Even though they have more demand than ever before. And I'm seeing this even in reporting the book. So even if we just take the 18 to 22 year olds, right. These institutions again, last year had 9, 10, 12%. And I'm talking about these top institutions.

Sure, sure.

Selective institutions, they had 9, 10, 12% year over year growth in applications. Now, you could say, okay, maybe there's a portion of those students who are not quote, unquote qualified.

Sure. And a portion of them that are duplicating.

They're duplicating anyway. But there are, they could definitely take, you know, even at least just a small number, twice as many students, and not change their metrics at all. And I think Mitch said, you know, he said, that's what we're here for. Right. We're here to do that. And we're not only to do that in one way. You know, we talked a lot about, you know, on our podcast here, Purdue Global, they're online provider. So we're not just going to do face to face, we're going to do online, we're going to do hybrid. So there's a lot of ways to do that. But to me, it's making this commitment, like he did, to say we can be big and we can be high quality.

Yeah. And so it's interesting, I really liked his mental model that he said, sort of three rungs, if you will, in concentric Circles with the third circle being adult learners is what he said. It's a model that works well for me because that's how we often, when we're doing the Cliff Notes version of disruptive innovation, that's how we do it as well, is that disruptive innovation is this force that decentralizes to serve these outer rungs of consumers. Liked that mental model, and what I took from it is that he really wants to be a player that is serving all of Indiana's learning needs, if you will, and thinking about them as a community resource for all learners, not just the ones at the top, if you will, and being the most selective institution or one of the most selective institutions within Indiana, that they, that he takes it seriously, that he is a steward of and a citizen of effectively this community, and he's got to figure out a way to serve all learners. The question I'm curious about, and I think you'll have deeper perspective on this, is how does that impact or conflict with or intersect with community colleges and other parts of the system that were also designed for that sort of scale, if you will. How should we think about, you know, when a land grant institution like Purdue that is effectively a flagship, you know, decides to serve a broader swath of the community, which I agree with you, I think it's a wonderful thing. But it also does start to tread into ground that other institutions.

And in many ways Purdue did that with, you know, going online because when Mitch was governor, he invited western governors. Yeah. Into the state. Right. To. To serve a market that his own institution now.

Yeah.

Is. Is serving. You know, I, I think there's enough students out there to. At least for now, maybe that's the answer. And maybe that's the answer, right. That, you know, we're going after underserved populations and that there should be more than just one option for them. There's a low cost. You know, some of this is around cost. There's a low cost option with the community colleges, with the technical institutes and with a, you know, a flagship university. I also thought that what was interesting when we asked him about other public universities. Right. Why are they not cutting tuition or freezing tuition. Right. Why are they not going into high schools? You know, there are all these things that he sees innovation in higher education as solving a problem. Right. Not just innovation for innovation's sake, but his question, his thing was, I have a problem to solve and I'm going to solve it through this method. It may not work for every public institution or every institution out there. And so I Thought it was interesting, Michael, that how he said, because we kind of have this hero mentality around these presidencies and he's viewed as one right now, and he's viewed as one. But he basically told us that he turns down many invitations to speak and write about this, unlike some other presidents who do.

Yeah, I was struck by two things by that one. I literally had a question written down to say, do you think other universities will follow you in the tuition scratch? And I scratch that one right away because, you know, he basically said right there, that's not my decision. They are facing their own set of challenges, opportunities, context and so forth. It's not my business to consult to them. The second thing I thought was a lot of times as a university president who is thought of as this hero and success, you can start to spend less time on campus and spend more time out in the world telling everyone else how great you are and looking for opportunities to serve students outside of your domain and so forth. And I was impressed, frankly. I was, I was surprised. I hadn't known it, but I was impressed that he said, that's not what I'm going to do. I'm here in Indiana to serve Indiana and stay focused on that. I thought it was fascinating and I

thought it was interesting also that, you know, and I'm sure we'll get notes and from listeners who work at Purdue or on Purdue. But it seems as a politician who kind of came into the job somewhat controversial because as he said, he appointed most of the board that ended up picking him. He seems to have learned a lot about higher ed. He seems to be much more appreciated on that campus than at least when I think he first took that job. But he's also been there for a while now too. He even mentioned how his tenure is longer than most presidents and how he still has a lot to to learn. So I think. But this initial pushback against kind of non traditional candidates to be president, I think he was willing to show that he was willing to learn and try things out in a way that I think many other politician presidents unfortunately are not willing to do. Yeah.

Two thoughts. David Gergen, one of my mentors, always says the best leaders are learners. And I think you see that in Mitch. But the second thing is we didn't get a chance to dig into the other side of the tuition freezes, which has been cost cutting. He's known, he's known as someone who loves to cut costs. He did it as governor of Indiana. He had that orientation as the director at the omb, although he didn't exactly always get to carry it through when he was there. But. And he certainly cut costs here, which has impacted pricing and so forth. And I suspect that faculty are not as enamored with that part of.

And probably not. And so we recently co authored a brief on kind of alternative pricing models, you know, thinking about college costs in a new way. Can you talk a little bit about kind of some of the conclusions we came to there about these other pricing models?

Yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing right now is, is, and you wrote this really eloquently in transparency up front is that sort of the current game of just discounting prices is coming to an end. Is coming to an end if it already has. Right, right. And, or if it's, or it's leading institutions off a cliff. And so what else can you do to reinvent yourself? And obviously there's a whole cost equation side of this in business model. But we also said, okay, so what's, what are the new revenue models that might support these new cost models? And we looked at everything from income share agreements, which I was very interested to hear Mitch say. This is actually what I think will be the legacy and an impact across the sector less the other things, even online, for example, secondly, you know, subscription models where you pay as you go. Things like what we've seen at a straighter line. But also we talked about Boise State launching a program like this and then a third one just to, just to pull it out. We had a few in there was, was the competency based education movement has also introduced other pricing models and we speculated. You know, it's interesting, competency based education is a model that is not supposed to be bound in time. It's supposed to be you learn as you master material or you move on as you master material. But the pricing models are still very bound in, still bound in basically six month increments. And we, we asked the question will we see further innovation where it's more as you pay, as you make learning progress. Haven't seen it yet in higher ed. Seen a couple models like this in K12. Actually. Will we continue to see evolution in these spaces?

No, it was great to have Mitch on and as I said, we're at the Indianapolis Speedway here. We didn't get to drive around the speedway.

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately the weather wasn't great the day we were here but, but it was great to have them on and, and thanks everybody for tuning in to this episode of Future youe. And we look forward to having you on the next episode. Thank you.

Hey folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future youe. And just a reminder to please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.