Blurring the Lines of the University

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I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horne. Paul LeBlanc has been president of Southern New Hampshire since 2003. And since then, the university has grown from a tiny New England private College with about 2,800 students to more than 135,000 learners, not just in the United States, but around the world. It's quite a transformation of an institution over the last 17 years, Paul, and it's great to have you on the show.

Great to be with you guys.

So let's start there with this idea of institutional transformation, because we certainly seem to be at an inflection point in higher ed's history right now with the pandemic and the impact not just in higher ed, but every sector. And knowing that we're still in the middle of this, where would you place this moment in higher ed's history? And if you looked into your crystal ball and see what the sector is going to come out on the other side of it, what would be your predictions at the moment?

So if, I mean, you guys have probably sort of observed this yourselves, but in the past, when the nation has gone through a catastrophe such as this, it has tended to reinvent higher ed. So in the ashes of the Civil War, we get the Morrill act and the land grant universities and expansion of public higher ed. After the depression, World War II, we get the GI Bill and the community college movement. Some people would argue that that's sort of the democratization of higher ed. So what's gonna happen now? I think one is you're gonna see technology. So technology has been making its way into our sector much more slowly than other sectors of American society. Now it's going to be accelerated. So this has become conventional to say that the pandemic is accelerating that which has already happened. But I think you'll see now much, much greater comfort with the idea of giving students a greater range of options for how they acquire their learning. And I think we'll actually stop using online. I mean, you know, it's. We have a generation of young people who, when they hear us say, you know, I'm going to go online to look something up, they're like, they're never offline. Like, they live a life that's sort of in a combined reality. And, you know, I think at some point, like, we don't say word processing anymore. Like you don't say, hey, I'm gonna go word process this document, right? Like at some. We did at one point, I mean, I did research in computers and writing. Like what writing doesn't include computers today. So I think we will see this acceleration towards kind of seamless learning. And it may be that for this semester, and it'll be only in classes that are fully online or mostly online. But it might be tomorrow I'm going to be online and then the next day I'll go back to a classroom. And I think that kind of flexibility will serve students extremely well and we'll start to rethink our models. I think the other thing is that one of the great impediments to innovation, generally speaking, is either, you know, a lot of status in tradition which has to be held onto and money. So the bigger your endowment, harder it is to innovate. And now all of a sudden you have huge swath of our industry that's in financial crisis and necessity will be the mother of innovation or invention in this instance.

So Paul, it seems that at least in recent history, when you talk to higher ed leaders about kind of strategic planning and visioning and change, they were always willing to tinker around the edges. Right. But not really kind of change themselves as institutions. And it really seems that this is a moment where they really need to start to set themselves apart as a whole. Right. So where do you think the biggest opportunities are for higher ed to do that? You know, what are the. If you were leading another institution that kind of tinkered around the edges forever, Right. Where would you think are the biggest opportunities for those types of institutions? And you know what those types of institutions are, right. Where are the markets? We'll, we'll speak in a business terms here. Right? Where are the markets? Where are the products?

Yeah, so this is going to be so contextually shaped. So if you are of a small non selective product private in the Northeast or the Midwest, you think about this question much differently than if you are a small non selective private in the middle of a high growth area like California or Florida or Texas. So, you know, I often say that when you take the helm of an institution, it's like being dealt into a high stakes poker game. You really have to be hard nosed about the cards you've been dealt and they do look different. So even though we want to talk about big segments of the industry, like non selective privates even, they have enormous amount of variety. So take that, put that on hold for A second. Like, what do good poker players do? Right. They never chase an inside straight. Right. They never chase a flush. They know like what cards to play and how to play and they know the odds. And I think when I talk to colleagues who will sometimes, you know, they'll sort of ask for a little bit of counselor time just to kind of talk through what they're doing. I was also saying, like, what do you think your best cards are? So the school that has health care right now, like, okay, that's a great car. Like we can see the migration of students into that. The school that doesn't. And they're sort of, you know, and maybe they have no tech or no healthcare. It's like, okay, so is that you don't have that card, you want to chase that card? Can you move in that direction? So I don't, I'm not trying to beg your question, but in some ways you have to be incredibly hard nosed and don't drink your Kool Aid. Your own Kool Aid on your status and why you think students come to you. So I think, you know, Michael, you know, Clay talked about jobs to be done, right. And Bob and West and I was like, what job are people paying and what jobs do you think you're capable of doing? Obviously you can think about market opportunity in terms of segments you don't serve, adjacencies that you might be able to move into. So, God, you know, we don't really have clinical healthcare, but we've got healthcare programs. So I want to make my first foray. Like that was a big call for us. Like we just got eight year approval for an online counseling program. Our first clinical program. That was hard as hell, but we learned a lot. And I think that's the other question I would ask of anybody leading or trying to answer your question, Jeff, is where are they going to go to learn? Like, what do they do? They know what they don't know about the kinds of things they may be trying to do. There's a lot of not very sexy aspects to the work because sometimes I think that question gets answered and you just need creative people to think of exciting new programs. It's like, no, you actually have to kind of look at your student information system, see the degree to which it constrains what you can and can't do. Can you do eight weeks terms? Oh, no. God, our SIS isn't built for it. Well, that's kind of hell right now then. So if you said to me, I'm going to go back to your Question, you know, what would one do? How would one think about this? Where are the opportunities? The opportunity lies in getting the smartest people you can to dig deep under the hood and understand what your institution is built. Don't try to win the Kentucky Derby with a donkey. Right? Like, figure out what race you can run, Michael. Like that.

That's a great line. That's a great. That's a great line. I'm definitely stealing it now and saying it was mine. But let's. So let's go from that macro lens, Paul, into the micro and dig a little bit deeper into your own institutional transformation. Right now. I suspect many look at Southern New Hampshire and say, you all are doing great. Like, why do you need to change? But you've long had this mentality of constantly reinventing, creating new divisions, skunk works, autonomous models to sort of put your previous core out of business and rethink what your own institution can look like. Can you talk about that mentality?

Yeah, I think that it's interesting. I've been. I've been. I almost hesitate. I'm going to stumble over what I'm about to say because I'm talking to two people who are such accomplished writers. I'm working on a book, and I just sort of worked on a whole chapter about curiosity and what I love about. I think it's the quality I prize most and the people I hire now. And I think curiosity is the thing that drives you to say, not God, that went wrong. How could we have done it better? The curiosity I seek is the one that says, God, that's going really well. How can we make it better? And I think it's that impulse we've built into the culture to say, okay, this is good and great. Like, our online numbers right now, like many other largely online providers, are through the roof. And we could simply stay focused on that. And we need to stay very focused on those numbers. But we're also working on a series of new degree programs which are less expensive, accelerated, highly, highly focused on a single job. Like, no electives, no other. Like, you want to be this. We have that degree for you. We'll launch the first of those later this year. And I think it's the sense of the. The market is changing all the time. Our world is changing. You know, there's the. In this piece I just read, like, you know, when do leaders become failed? They become failed when they stop learning. Because you can't rely on what you did yesterday to navigate tomorrow. You can, but you have to be learning all the Time. So I think the thing that drives us more than anything, Michael, is paying really close attention to the world. I mean, it sounds a little fuzzy, right? But there are, you know, twice as many, more than. Twice as many people unemployed right now than there was in the recession of 2009. And that was horrible. So what do they need and how do we learn what they need? And then what can we build that serves those students? And then I think the other thing is we're super laser focused. How do we get better for the market we serve and the mission that's involved in that? So we always say we try to be the institution for the 45% of Americans who struggle to come up with $400 for a car repair. Like that's who we serve. And it's very much rooted in a sense of class and social mobility and creating opportunity. So we know for that market we have to be fanatical about cost. We're not going to know it can't be Walmart. It's education. It's a complicated thing to deliver. But we've got to be fanatical about costs. So that's going to be a real driver for us. So that mission focus actually informs the things you get serious about.

So that's actually helpful because you all made a big splash early on in the pandemic by announcing a new model for campus based education that would cost only $10,000. It's something that you had already planned for, but you accelerated the development of. Can you talk about that model and how you're developing it right now?

Yeah, it's remarkable. You know, we have large teams that have been working all summer. There's a services team that just looks at how do we think about services because services have ballooned on campuses. You think about our wellness centers, our fitness centers, what food looks like on a campus today, what dorms look like, all the support you take a look at. Then we have teams looking at the academic program. So all of that work is coming to the management team on September 18th. So I'm eager. I wish I could tell you, oh, it can give you some sort of insights into what they're doing. But it's three dimensional chess because it's no one piece of that can get us to the $10,000 number. Right. And it's not a cost cutting. Like no one's going to cut costs and get themselves to the goal. It's actually how do we fundamentally rethink and restructure. So if we go from our current 3,000 undergraduates to 4,500. Like is 10,000 so attractive that we could actually, even in a demographically challenged area, grow by 50%? Alright, then the job gets easier. There's more cash at work. How can a single faculty member who now supports x number of students support twice that many or 50% more? And what would that look like? Because we don't want to simply make classes bigger because that you underwrote efficacy. Can we look at the year? Why are we on an agrarian calendar so our campus, you know, is 30% of the year underutilized? Can we go around the clock? Can we bring in four terms instead of three? Can a student graduate in two years instead of four? Recouping the opportunity cost of being in college? If they want to and they're capable. So it's really looking at things holistically. And then the other thing I would say, and this goes back to almost where we started, Michael, which is can we be relentlessly digital in all the places we don't need to be analog? In other words, if you think about where does the impact of human beings matter most and then where especially this next generation of students more than happy to navigate a financial aid process with a voice bot our chat. Right. Do they have to be in an office with somebody? Because then we can start to leverage this big machine we have that's already in the digital space and quite comfortably. So I'll give you just one quick example. I'll stop. We still have people sitting in offices processing financial aid and waiting for students to knock on the door on campus. I have a financial aid operation down in the mills of Manchester that does financial aid for 130,000 students. I'm pretty sure they could handle the 3,000 on campus. Why don't we just leverage that?

That's a, that's a great example, I think, especially in the middle of a, of a pandemic. But Paul, you've talked often in the past about kind of shifting the mindset. You mentioned the agrarian calendar. We've talked about the four year degree. You know, all these things kind of seem baked into our culture though. So what needs to happen or what can colleges do themselves to kind of shift this mindset so that new pathways to degrees can become more mainstream and scale rather than just be these tiny boutique programs that still kind of are added on to the traditional four year residential thing that starts in September, ends in May and goes on for four years?

Yeah, it's the daunting question of scale because even as large as we are, WGU, MD Global, we're just a tiny, tiny fragmented percentage of a very big market. So people say mega, universal. Like seriously, like 1% of the market's mega. Like in what other world would we say that? So we think about scale all the time. And how do you move the industry? So part of what's a huge impediment here is our regulated nature, right? So you can disrupt journalism and music overnight, as happened. Way harder to disrupt regulated industries like healthcare and higher education. They're really resistant. So I'm really pleased to see conversations now on the Hill around things like federal financial aid for shorter term programs, skills based programming, lifelong learning. Like those are the things that start to create opportunity for reinventing the model. So I think that's going to be till we get, till we get some breakthrough on that. I think that's an important piece. One of the things, Jeff, that we found when we were trying to grow our CBE program and WGU's done a way better job than we have at doing this, was that if you, you really have to frame these new models and familiar packaging, like people might be, oh, there. Where are the classes? Well, there are no classes. What do you mean there are no classes? Like, that's weird. Like, this can't be good. So now we talk about classes, but rather than, you know, but they're project based. Oh, well, I get project based. Like, that's familiar. I did projects in high school. I can do project. Right. So you have to start thinking about how we frame these things in a way that makes them acceptable. There's a great chapter in the book Nudge about this, about the. Remember the hit song hey Ya hey was a flop for the first like year and a half that came out and then they figured out how to package it between songs and genres that were more familiar. And it's like, oh, okay, it's got some hip hop in it. So I can put it after a hip hop song. It's a really interesting psychology. So we've been thinking a lot about how we do that. And I think the other thing we're trying to figure out from a scale perspective, the population we want to serve, because we're not trying to build a huge campus. Right. Is for an underserved population of Americans, more and more people being left behind. How do you scale up programs that are broadly digital, but for whom that population needs to have some human interaction face to face. And it can be, I need a place to go that has a reliable computer and connection. I need a place to go that isn't in A crowded apartment with eight siblings who are making so much noise. I can't study. It has might be the place where like it just matters to somebody that I'm here. Like the idea of mattering is really like, how do we replicate that? We have not untangled that. Like we have all these community partnerships and they're great, but they don't scale yet.

So two quick. So two quick questions to wrap up here, Paul. One is the idea of hiring based on skills rather than credentials seemed to have been gaining ground before the pandemic hit. But now of course we have so many people with, with credentials temporary laid off or unemployed. You were mentioning the unemployed numbers earlier. I mean, do you think the college degree is going to kind of remain the traditional college degree, the traditional four year degree, master's degrees, things like that are going to remain as the coin of the realm in hiring and that maybe the proclamation of, of the death of degrees was maybe too premature? Or do you think again, that may be something that the pandemic changes and that this idea of skills beyond based hiring might, might catch on?

I. That's the big question, right? So we know that after the last recession, the college degree became the sort of basic screen for getting a job interview or being considered by the. By 2019, unemployment was so low that skills based hiring got traction because it seemed like an alternative for me being able to find people without using that screen. I'm not sure that we won't see a backsliding by employers towards the kind of degree as a sort of basic entryway they did it last time. And I'm not sure that skills based hiring has taken hold so much in the years 2015 through 2019 that it can sustain the pressure to simply say, nope, I'm going to need a college degree to get in here for this job. So I tend to be a little bit skeptical, even though it kind of breaks my heart because I do think skills based on alignment, pathways and hiring makes so much more sense. I don't think degrees were ever going to go away. The death of degree was greatly exaggerated because what I think that often people forget it matters a whole hell of a lot to students. It's usually people with degrees saying that poor people shouldn't worry so much about having a degree. But I do think so. I think the degrees will remain to be important milestones along one's educational journey. But I think we'll see, I hope we'll see a greater range of credentials that are stackable and are part of a pathway to those Degrees. But as my friend Dennis Lutke, who's the most committed social equity educator I know, would say, you tell somebody who's done 10 years in prison that they're a college student now and that they're going to work on a degree, it changes their whole life. You walk through the world differently as a college student and as a degree holder, and I still think that's incredibly powerful.

Yeah, no, that makes sense, Paul. So, lightning round, last question. What are you most confident about right now and what are you most worried about?

God, like, I am a bundle of anxiety. What kind of question is that? The world's anxious.

Yeah, well, I figured, you know, the paranoid survive, only the paranoid survive. And I know you are adherent to that.

So it's fascism in America. You want to start there, work our way back to climate change? No, I think, I think the biggest worry I have, and this is the thing that I think, going back to Jeff's question about what might change, is that I grew up as an immigrant, a first generation college kid with parents, had 8th grade educations and my access to high quality, affordable higher education transformed my life and the life of my daughters. I think, and I always believe that higher education is the instrumental tool in America's social mobility story. That and entrepreneurial zeal of immigrants to do jobs. Right. But those two things, and it was always part of the solution. And in the public discourse, higher eds almost always posed, posited as part of the problem. And it breaks my heart because I love this industry. I know how powerful it was for you both and for me and for too many people, they're being left behind, they're dropping out, they can't afford it, they're taking on debt. And there is a kind of loss and erosion of trust and faith in an industry that I think has to kind of regain its footing. And I've heard this from the leaders of the most elite institutions in the country. Like they've always were elite, but now they're elitist. Right. And yeah, and I think people still want higher ed for their kids and for themselves. College degrees are still important, but I think they increasingly resent us for the sacrifices we ask them to make to get there. And that. That is not good.

Yeah, let's end on. I was gonna say let's end on a brief up note. What are you confident about right now?

I am struck. And I think critics and people who are not familiar with higher ed write off educators and people who work in this industry far too quickly. And they like to hold up. If you're a reformer, you wanna point to ASU and you wanna point to WGU and you wanna point to us. But the reality, I see enormous smarts and creativity institutions across the country. And I think that, yeah, we're an industry in which it's hard to change and break through, but the dedication and the desire to do good work, I think is abundant. We got to sort of plug back into that and let go of some of the things that get in the way, which includes the kind of status seeking that our friend Clay Christensen wrote about. And. Yeah, so. But colleges and universities are hard to kill, and maybe this is the hard time that sort of breaks us enough that we can rebuild. You know, if I have a statue of a sort of Hindu statue in my office and I sort of think about the sort of circle of destruction and creation. Right. So maybe this is a period we need in order to remake ourselves. I feel that way about the country, by the way.

Yeah, gotcha. No, that's good to have those words. Paul, as we wrap up, deeply appreciate you being on the show. We're looking forward to reading your book. And we'll be right back. Yeah, no, you'll have to come back on at that. You'll have to come back on at that point, but we'll be right back on Future you. Now more than ever, we're seeing the rise of a digital imperative in higher education and a new age of continuous connections across the entire learner life cycle.

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And welcome back to Future youe. After that, great conversation with Paul LeBlanc from Southern New Hampshire University. Michael, we've been talking about having Paul on this podcast forever. And so it's in some ways great that we had them on in the middle of the pandemic, because I think we're kind of in this moment where we're starting to see a lot of discussion around this as a very disruptive moment to higher education. And Paul has been one of the disruptors in higher ed for such a long time. It's great to hear some of his thoughts on that. One thing that I want to pick up in particular on is because he seems to be a fan of a lot of new products that might be coming out in higher ed in the coming years. This idea, for example, that he's been talking about for quite some time about separating out the coming of age experience, for example, from everything else. This idea of the unbundling of higher education from this idea that you're going to live on a campus for four years and also take your classes on campus for four years. He's talked often about the idea of a three year degree. Maybe we could have increased throughput. Talked about the idea of no longer distinguishing, for example, between face to face and online education. But it's just education, period. Let me ask you this question, though. Is this really the disruptive moment? Is, is this as big of a disruptive moment as people are talking about it in the moment, or are we going to come and listen to this episode in a year or two and say, hmm, we kind of overplayed our cards there a little bit?

Yeah, it's a good question. First, I'll say Paul was worth the wait. He, he delivered there. That was, that was a, I learned a lot through the conversation. I think it's a really interesting question, Jeff. I mean, on the one hand, I think the longer this moment continues, the longer it stretches on, right? It increases the odds that people, in trying to fulfill their jobs to be done, make progress in their lives, right? They're going to find new workarounds and look for novel solutions. I think you already see that in the data coming out of STRADA and their weekly pulses about what are people thinking about higher education and where are they going to turn to upskilling. And we see that people, people are looking at options that they wouldn't have considered, for example, in 2008, right in the last recession. And so people are showcasing different behavior. What I struggle with, I think a little bit is I, I don't know that this is going to be the massive sweep that all of a sudden everyone is like, I'm not, you know, doing the four year thing. I don't want the four years on campus in the bundled experience. Experience. I think it's more of a shift at the margins and, and of degrees, if you will, Jeff, rather than like all of a sudden the American narrative that the New York Times writes about is being rewritten. I don't think that's what's happening here when we come back to it. And I, I guess the second thing I'd say is I remain a little skeptical that it's going to be so easily unbundled. The coming of age experience from the academics and everything else, in the sense that at least the students that we talk to for choosing college, like those things are one in the same for them when they're trying to get into their best school for its own sake. Like, you know, this as well. When you talk to students, they will talk about it has to be able to lead to a job and they'll say all the right things. But for that 18 year old, they still don't really know what's on the other side of it. It's like they want college for its own sake and everything that they've been led to believe that they ought to have. And it's still more benefit from their perspective than investment. Now again, I think that's the point, Jeff, from my perspective, which is at the margins, I do believe that that is shifting and that is going to change. And so you're going to see some schools go out of business right over the next year. I suspect more than have perhaps in the previous 24 months. And you know, you'll see the growth of some of these alternative programs that cause us to rethink what is a college education. As those two things happen, you'll see the market percentages shift to some of these alternative arrangements. Does it mean that all high school students are all of a sudden not dreaming of their four years on a grassy green quad? I don't think so. I'm very curious though, your take.

Yeah, I mean I definitely agree with you about that. The unbundling is not going to happen, not only for students, but also for colleges and universities as well or as easily as we, we tend to think it is. First of all, I'm not quite sure there's any secret to the four year degree, but is there any secret to a three year degree? Right. I mean, I don't think we really know what the right percentage or what the right time period is. And we also know by the way that so few students complete in four years anyway.

Yeah, I mean just quickly on that for some students, like time is actually the purpose or the point of the higher education. Right. Like they want the time on campus, this because of what it represents. Right.

And they may need the time. And I don't think Paul's saying it's a three year degree for everybody, but it's for those students who makes it makes sense. And, and that's already possible at hundreds and thousands of institutions. If you really wanted to finish early, you could, I mean, I think, you know, you focused on the students a little bit. I want to focus on the institutions and I think it's really difficult to unbundle the experience from the education or the, you know, outside the classroom experience and all that comes with it, that maturation experience, that residential experience from what happens inside the classroom. And I Think the greatest example of this is right now in this moment, and we've talked about this previously on the, on the podcast is this idea of offering tuition discounts in the middle of COVID And most of the discounts you're seeing are like 5 or 10%. And when you ask college officials, well, how did you come up with that number? And they basically said, well, that's what we can afford, right? It's a number that they pulled out of thin air because in reality, they have no idea how much each of these, you know, they don't do the profit and loss statement on each individual aspect of their institution. In fact, they don't even do a P and L on individual departments. Right. So they don't even know how much it costs to really many colleges don't know how much it costs to deliver an English course to a, you know, philosophy major or a biology major. Right. We, we can't even do all, we can't even separate all those cross subsidies out. So if you want to unbundle the experience, it means you also need to unbundle kind of the delivery and the cost from that. And I don't think, just as students are not perhaps ready for that, I don't think institutions are either.

Yeah, it's a good point. And I would say just two quick things. And then I have a follow on question for you that I'm really curious about. And the two quick things are one, I think for the reason you just said, it's very unlikely that existing institutions pull this off, right? I mean, Clay Christensen loved to joke that, you know, trying to figure out what your English course cost was like the Politburo trying to figure out, you know, production schedules. Right. And so it's just, it's very difficult to disentangle. But it's the second thing, I think also it's, it'll be the institutions like Southern New Hampshire and the leaders like Paul that actually carve out a new offering that is unbundled or the institutions like a Minerva project we've had Ben Nelson on, right. That start to rethink how these elements go together and actually cost them out appropriately. I think it's very unlikely most institutions will make that shift. And I guess that's the point about how it'll shift at the margins. Not wholly, if you will, overnight, but it plays into something that you wrote about recently, a paper that you put out about higher education and the need for marketing to be far more strategic. And Paul essentially said this, right, that higher education needs to do a Much better job of marketing itself, I think he said, to frame itself as a hip hop song. What are your thoughts on that? And what did you learn in the reporting for that piece that you wrote, that white paper? And how should higher ed really, you know, one of Paul's other key points is like higher ed needs to make its case that it's valuable to the American people. What did you learn in the course of that paper?

Yeah, so I think there's two, two pieces here. First of all, is that what we call higher education marketing is for the most part decades behind the rest of the world and other sectors of higher education. And I know that people in higher ed, especially academics, probably hate to hear this because they don't think higher education is a business and thus doesn't need to market itself as a business. But for the most part, marketing in higher education is seen as promotion. It's seen as promotion to prospective students and prospective donors. And they really don't think of it the way that most of the rest of the world does, particularly in the corporate sector as really thinking about products, price per promotion in place, right? This idea that, you know, what are, what are the academic programs and student services that you're offering, your products, you know, what are you charging for those things, your price, how are you messaging those things? That's the promotion. That's what we always thought of as marketing. And where are those programs and services being accessed? Right. The place, whether that's online or face to face, what's traditionally happened in higher ed is that, you know, academics and other officials, other leaders at colleges, universities, develop new programs, develop new services, and then they went to somebody in whatever their marketing department would be and say, okay, now figure out how to sell this. Where in, in other sectors, the chief marketing officer and marketing folks are at the table in the development of these things. Right. They're not only supporting the research that goes behind determining what products to offer, but then they're part of the design teams and then they're part of the promotion teams. And that I think is really what's missing in higher ed. And I think it goes back to what we were just talking about in terms of the three year degree. There's clearly an audience for a three year degree. There's clearly an audience for a lot of the products. And I'll say that word pretty clear here, the products that Paul was talking about in our interview. But you have to know what segments of students you're trying to reach, the jobs you're trying to. As you talk about Often, Michael, the jobs you're trying to do and who you're trying to serve. And again, I think when you have marketing at the table in that early on, it doesn't mean that they're driving it, but that they're a key stakeholder in making these decisions. If I were running an institution now, they would be much closer to the center of this. Because it's clear to me, coming out of this pandemic that most institutions will, will not be able to do all the things that they were able to do before this. Right. Most institutions, it's much easier to add than subtract. And many institutions are not only going to need to subtract coming out of this pandemic, but then they're going to have to figure out how to pivot to new products, new ideas, new students. You're going to need marketing at the table in order to do that. So that's the first piece of this. How do we market our individual institutions? But then I think Paul is very rife from a value proposal perspective. I mean, higher ed is getting killed in the mainstream press. I've never seen a moment where we've seen in the last couple of months where, you know, I could turn on the nightly news and I could, you know, pick up the New York Times and on the front pages and in the, in the, you know, the lead stories on the nightly news are somewhere in that 22 minutes. We're talking about colleges and universities, right? Not reopening or reopening and sending kids home sick. The football team's gonna play, right? They're not giving you discounts on tuition. I mean, and by the way, these students who are graduating are not able to get jobs. Right. On every front, they're being pounded. And I think that there's going to be serious questions coming out of this for some institutions, not all. For some institutions, is it worth it? And that will bleed into a lot larger discussion, I think, about higher education coming out of this. I don't know what, my crystal ball is a little fuzzy right now in that or a little cloudy, hazy, Right. I don't know. Does that mean we're going to see a big drop off in the number of students going to college? I don't think so because of what we talked about earlier, but I think that we might, might see, start to see some different student choices about where they go and what they pay?

Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that, Jeff, because a major takeaway I had from your paper and reading it was that marketing can't just be a function that is done at the end of the funnel, but it needs to be a strategic part of an institution's calculus and deciding what programs they create and so forth. Which from my perspective means that they have to shift from a supply side view of the world, like this is what we're able to offer you, buy it or not, to a demand side of view of the world. Right. Like what's actually, you know, and the bottom line for marketers is you can't outrun your institution's value proposition at the end of the day. Like, you know, you, you're, you are marketing what is real or not, right? And, and it's not just about language and sort of this ethereal version of brand. It's, it's really, you know, what is your value proposition. And I think you're right. You know, the current moment, some hard questions are going to be asked, which is why I do think again, you know, that's where Paul's right. Like, I think at the, a lot of the edges there's going to be erosion in some sort of people's choices about what they hired from, from a jobs to be done perspective, to make progress in their lives. And it goes to this last question that he brought up that, well, rather you asked, but then he dug deep on in a way that I don't think either of us necessarily expected, which is the skills versus degrees conversation. And so my, you know, my quick question to you is like, do you agree with him that employers are going to shift back toward hiring based on degrees or do you think that skills which were starting to emerge might be a little more durable? Where are you on this?

I mean, he really surprised me on his answer to that because I thought that he was firmly in the camp of skills based hiring and I didn't think that the pandemic would necessarily change it. And in fact, in a labor market that's going to emerge from the pandemic, right? Where you have entire sectors of the economy and, and hospitality and travel kind of disappearing and new sectors of the economy emerging, whether it's in logistics or remote learning or remote work. Right. Or advanced manufacturing that companies might want to bring, you know, onshore what they had offshored years ago. Right. All these things are going to require a set of skills that may not be based in an institution or degree maybe based much more on, on skills. So I'm a little, I'm not, I'm not saying that it's, we're going to be all the way on the side of skills based hiring. But I think it's going to be less about the degree and much more about skills coming out of this pandemic. How about you, Michael?

You know what it seems to me is that people are not rushing to go back to the degree in the same way that they did right in the last recession. It feels to me, it feels like people are more open to short term certificates. You're seeing that in the market, people are looking for faster upskilling solutions. So again, to me this seems like an at the margins question, Jeff, but I do think skills is, is making, is showing that it's a little bit more durable and making getting a little bit more traction than I expected where this time around I think the one thing that continues to hold this back is people's lack of understanding of what are the skills that they really need and how to measure them. And so I think Paul may be right in this sense, which is that, you know, ultimately competency based institutions or other types of programs that can package these sets of skills in something we call a degree will have market acceptance in the sense that like people understand what a degree is, even if it's very imprecise and they know how to build a market around it. Whereas when you get in these conversations of micro sets of skills, it gets very specific to a particular employer very quickly and it's not really the same currency that degrees have and that that I think contributes to that durability over time. But we're gonna have to leave it there, Jeff. We're gonna have to continue to dig into this because I think Paul raised a number of questions that we think there's sort of a, on the one hand and on the other hand conversation and worth following, particularly in the course of this year. So to our listeners, thank you as always for listening and if something struck a chord during this episode, we'd love you to send your questions, comments, complaints and suggestions for topics or guests to futureyou podcastmail.com or send us a message on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks so much for joining us. 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 Facebook 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.