Future U Mailbag

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo and this is going to be our last episode of season two before we take a summer hiatus. We're going to have a slightly different format today. We're going to be answering reader questions that have come listener questions that have come over the last couple of weeks over LinkedIn and email and Twitter. But before we do that, I want to welcome in my co host joining us today via Skype from Boston, Michael Horn. Michael, it's great to listen to you again. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. Excited about this last episode and all the questions we got to.

I know we got a great number of questions which shows hopefully that people are listening to us. But before we dive into those, given that this is going to be our last episode before we take our usual summer break, wanted to find out what your plans are for the summer. I know you have a book coming up and so I'm assuming that that will be your focus.

Yeah, exactly. Finishing touches on choosing college how to make better learning decisions throughout your life which will be coming out this probably as we come back for season three of Future youe. It'll be coming out September 10th, so already up for pre order. But as you know Jeff, they give you a little bit more time to make last tweaks and edits and so forth and think about the college admissions scandal and so forth. But very excited about that book and starting to gear up for the conversations around really why do students choose the college that they do or any post secondary program throughout their life? And excited for that second part of that conversation that it's not just college when you're 18 years old, but that it's really about learning decisions throughout your lifetime, which is we've discussed quite a bit on this podcast is something that is becoming more and more important. But on that topic, you actually got to have a pretty neat weekend where you got honored with an honorary degree and given some advice to graduates as they walk into that lifetime of learning. What did you tell them? And tell us about the honorary degree.

Well, thanks, Michael. Yes, I dropped out of my real EDD program at Vanderbilt, but now I have an honorary one. And it's clear on the degree that is honorary. And as our friend Bridget Burns has told me, please do not list that she said under your education component on LinkedIn. She says some people do it is an award, but no, very proud of it. Got it from Merrimack College yesterday in Massachusetts And Meramec is led by Chris Hopi, who I've known for a long time, worked at the Penn EDD program, actually, and was at Northeastern, was vice president there, and ran their continuing and professional education program last decade, and then went to Merrimack about a decade ago. And as he was telling me, you know, Merrimack, like Mount Ida and like a lot of other colleges in Massachusetts, were kind of on the brink of closure, not in great shape. And he's really. It's a kind of a turnaround story. If you want to know about a turnaround story in higher education. I was really impressed with. It's the first time I was to their campus and really got to catch up with him for the first time in a long time. Really impressed with what they've been able to do up there. Graduation was terrific. They had about a thousand students, both undergrad and grad, that walked yesterday. Of course, it was sunny on Saturday. And then the rain came right during the middle of my speech.

Right.

Actually at the beginning of it. So. And they were. It was outside ceremony at their football stadium. I was undercover, but I focused on kind of really three pieces of advice. You know, talk to them about embracing their searching mindset.

Right.

I think students think they have to have it all figured out at graduation, and they think of it as a weakness. And I said, turn it into a strength by becoming, you know, more flexible than your peers, by being continually curious and. And committing to the lifetime of learning and embrace that uncertainty. I talk to them about the more comfortable they get with it, the better they're going to be in this job market, which we both know is changing drastically. And they're probably going to have multiple careers and multiple jobs over their lifetime. And then I told them to focus on the work that is most meaningful to them. And if they don't know what that is, keep trying to. To discover it. You know, I talked to them about. I became an author almost by accident because I left the Chronicle and was trying to figure out what to do, what to do next. So. And so anyway, so I told them to embrace that, and hopefully they, even through the rain and the wind and the cold, some of that message was able to get through.

Well, they say it's good luck to have a little rain during graduation, I think. So it wouldn't be totally excitement. There is some sorrow about leaving a place where you've had, obviously a lot of excitement and a lot of fun over several years, but it sounds like good advice to me. I love the uncertainty. Embracing that piece of it. And it, I think, bleeds into the first of our questions rather nicely actually. And I apologize in advance if we mispronounce names, but Trista Tremper sent us a really thoughtful email a little while back about the future of public regional colleges and community and technical colleges and acknowledging that the topic is broad as the health of these institutions can vary widely depending on their geography and their political situation and so forth. But a lot of times she pointed out that these sorts of institutions don't get a lot of conversation within the mainstream higher education media. We obviously saw that as the college admissions scandal played out over the last several months. Very few people talked about the fact that, you know, these colleges aren't where the majority of Americans are actually even educated when they go to post secondary education. And so she was saying that Even as the R1 universities and elite colleges and universities, they get a lot of attention and speculation around the challenges that they're facing. The business models of the regionals and community and technical colleges might be even more challenging with high need students that they're serving small endowments, dwindling appropriations, in some cases restrictions on tuition rate increases, that some of them are facing less than competitive compensation packages for well qualified faculty and staff. She said, and they're also facing the same demographic shifts as everyone else, but they're really serving local populations and they lack the brand recognition often to compete in the online market. And so she's curious, do we believe that there's still a future for these institutions within the post secondary ecosystem, or do we think that there will be an inevitable hollowing out of the middle of the same nature that we've seen in so many other industries and facets of society. And it's an interesting question, Jeff, because you and I actually wrote about this topic several years ago. I'm curious your take on this.

So, you know, I'm worried about them as well. I've spent a decent amount of time over the last year at regional publics in Kansas and in Pennsylvania and further out west in Montana and other places. And so, you know, it's something that I worry about. I mean, I think the first point that we need to make is that not all regional publics are created equal. Some of them, you know, the California State University system, while they have funding problems at the state level, you know, they're overwhelmed with students. The same is true in Florida and North Carolina. You know, the ones that are, I think most challenged are the ones in the Northeast and the Midwest where you know, exactly where the Privates and other publics are struggling because of demographic changes. I think that, you know, these are institutions that have had been transformed before, right? These are institutions that started as normal schools and then they transformed into teachers colleges, mostly educating the state's teacher population. And then after that, you know, they focused on becoming much more comprehensive colleges serving the local economy. I think the problem is twofold. They became much more expensive in many states and we'll talk about affordability later. But I think that they kind of lost sense of their primary mission, which was to educate mostly local students who needed a four year option. So I think the first thing that they need to figure out is how can we either cut costs and cut prices. The second thing is that they became, most of them became part of a system and in doing so they became very similar to each other across the state. You know, I know Pennsylvania the best because I grew up there and Dan Greenstein now is the chancellor of that system of the Pennsylvania state system. But when I go to some of those colleges, right, they, their offerings are very similar, you know, in the northwest part of the state, up near Erie, down to the southeast part of the state, near Philadelphia. And the thing that I think has to happen is like most colleges is around differentiation. So I think that these colleges could, could survive if they focus on their knitting, which I think part of that is continuing to be the places for teacher education in particular. And a lot of them have also gotten into health care, incredibly important in these communities. And then think about and working with their local development boards and their local community colleges, if they have one, is to figure out, okay, what are the primary economies or primary industries in our economy, where is their potential for growth and what is the right size for these programs? Because the other thing is I think they also all felt like they had to be of a big size. And as their populations shrunk in their neighboring towns, they didn't necessarily right size with that. They just tried to steal students from their other public regionals across the state or in some cases in other states. So I think that if we did those three things, we stick to our knitting, focus on teaching. Second thing is look at the local economy. Third thing is to right size these institutions. I don't think we necessarily should close them, at least not yet. Some of them may have to be, but I think that we should right size them first.

Yeah, I think those are a good set of points. I agree with all of them. I think the one thing that I would add is there are going to be some new forces, for lack of a better word, that emerge in their regions. I think we're going to start to see more and more disruptive programs that emerge for training teachers, for example, to try to do it at a much lower not just price point, but also cost. And so I was intrigued that with Minerva launching its new platform that can scale its active learning pedagogy, that one of the first schools to adopt it is actually a new teacher academy for training rural teachers in places like Alabama, the Oxford Teacher Academy. And so I'm curious as they, you know, if that works, you know, what impact will that have? And things like the Relay Graduate School of Education could shake up that market more if they're allowed to do the original training and credentialing of teachers. And so all to say, I think actually really focusing on your knitting and the cluster and the economy where you are in right. Sizing is going to be even more important.

JEFF so Michael, we've gotten a couple of questions on the future of online program management companies, or known as opms. We also got some questions on outsourcing. Kevin Bentley asked us about OPMS. Robert Gibson Emporia State University asked us about kind of the outsourcing of higher education, including the opm. So let's focus for a couple of minutes on these two questions, outsourcing and OPMs. Let me start with you on OPMS. What is the future of OPMS in your opinion?

OPMs are interesting because we've obviously had several varieties of them on this podcast. We've had chip palsik from 2u on a couple times. We've had Dan Sommer from Trilogy on a couple times as they got acquired then by 2U. So it's been a topic we've obviously gone to a few times. And there was a big article that we talked about on the podcast by Kevin Carey in the Huffington Post around online program managers and centered on, I think the headline was something around the capitalist takeover of college that has triggered a lot of these questions about the viability of the model. My sense is what people are really objecting to is the revenue share piece of it. So the notion that these companies, in exchange for putting a pretty sizable upfront investment of a couple million dollars to help create an online program for a college or university, they then take 50 plus percent revenue share on the other side of it. And some critics have said, well, two challenges with that. One that has aligned incentives of the online program managers just to enroll students regardless of the value or quality of the outcomes and secondly, it makes it very hard for the colleges or universities to reduce prices to students because they're giving away so much money up front. My own sense is that there's some merit to these arguments, but it's sort of the place and time in which they're made, if that makes sense. So up front, when the OPM market started going online was a true risk. And so to compensate companies for putting up several million dollars of investment to help schools innovate made some sense. I think the market's obviously changed now. Online learning is maturing quite a bit. I don't think this is a question of good or evil. It's just a question that as the market has matured, I think you're seeing new OPM type providers come in that don't necessarily take a revenue share or look like a full service online program manager. You have companies like Coursera, nonprofits like edX, companies like extension Engine, companies like Noodle Partners, where full disclosure, I'm on the board, are coming in and unbundling the OPM model in some interesting ways and doing fee for service arrangements that are fundamentally changing the nature of how a college or university can go online and making it far more affordable. And to me, that's just a natural evolution of disruptive innovation in higher education that these new players are disrupting sort of these full service bundled OPM players. And it's not a right or wrong or moral question, but just that colleges and universities don't have to give away the store increasingly to go online. And over time, I think they'll start to build up their own capabilities internally, frankly, as they start to make these shifts that will better position them to innovate directly. And then, you know, who knows, 10, 20 years from now, I don't expect that we'll see the same dominance of OPMs, but instead, I think a lot of colleges and universities will be able to handle this on their own, which maybe plays into the larger question of sort of this. You know, Robert Gibson used the phrase, what is your take on the corporatization of higher education? It probably plays into that. What's your take on this question of insourcing and outsourcing more broadly? Jeff?

I mean, obviously colleges and universities have been outsourcing a lot of stuff kind of outside of the academic core for generations. You know, food service and even now housing. It's interesting. I serve on the board at my alma mater, Ithaca College, and this year they've announced that they're going to insource food service. Right. The sodexo contract was coming up, they're now going to bring it in house because they think they can do a lot more around affordability. They can also help improve quality. But also food insecurity, a big issue on most campuses where students are picking kind of the cheapest option and really having trouble just eating because of it. And they also think they could do a lot around student jobs.

Right?

Student jobs. Food service is a big student job on campuses and they think they can make them better. And going to this idea of the work college model where you give students job jobs that actually provide them skill sets that they can use after college. So I think what's going to happen is it's not going to be a difference between insourcing and outsourcing. But if we want to insource, is there an, is there an institutional priority that we want to tie to it, that we actually want to take this in? Because there's other reasons like this food service stuff that we want to do it for. And so I think that's where this is going to come down. It's going to be less about academic and non academic, which I think it has been for the last 20 years. And it's going to be now more about we're do these pieces of the university or the college fit in with our overall priorities for the college and the strategic plan going forward? So with that we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to be talking about boot camps and associate's degrees and college affordability. So we'll be right back after a short break with Future you.

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.

And welcome back to Future youe. I'm Jeff Selingo. I'm live in Washington D.C. today at the campus of Arizona State university here at 18th and I. And I'm joined by my co host Michael Horn, who's in Boston and we're taking reader questions today on this last episode for the season, Season two of Future youe and Michael, we got a question from Brendan Marschner who asked about your opinions on where the boot camp market is going in terms of disruption in higher education as well as general growth.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think the Christensen Institute actually put out a good paper on this called Betting on Boot Camps. And they basically laid out five scenarios by which you could judge whether boot camps are going to be disruptive or not. And in the first scenario they basically said, you know, look, they could stall out employers and others just might not get excited or boot camps might not be able to expand beyond the world of coding and technical technology questions and training. And so nothing happens. Scenario two would be that Democrats and Republicans alike seem to have an interest in extending federal dollars to boot camps. And, and that actually could backfire because while it might extend access, it could also put some really counterproductive incentives in place just to serve students regardless of outcomes. And I would say if that happens, it would reverse course on the boot camps and they wouldn't disrupt. The third scenario that they painted was where boot camps start serving wider swathes of the market by expanding into lifelong learning. So not just that last mile training, but actually then staying with students throughout their lifetimes, which would have a pretty disruptive impact because it would start to serve more and more adult learners. The fourth scenario is that they escape beyond the fields of technology and where there's clear employer demand, but a shortage of labor supply, which would have a pretty disruptive impact, I think, if they're able to do that. And the fifth is sort of the all encompassing where they do both of these things at once. And I'd say the jury's still out. We haven't really seen a lot of boot camps get beyond the technology space. They've all made a lot of noise around the lifelong learning and serving corporations. But I think the jury's still out in that. And those are the five scenarios that I would watch and depending on which one materializes, you could predict whether it's going to happen or not. Switching on this question though, of labor market value, Jeff, we got a really provocative question from Mike Amerik who asked, can we in good conscience recommend that people get associate's degrees anymore or should we push them toward other solutions like a credential from a skill academy like a boot camp or a college bachelor's degree or higher. What's your take on that?

Well, I think there's a lot of follow up questions I would ask on this and the real big question is who are we talking about, what type of student here? So if we're talking about kind of the traditional 18 to 22 year old student who would pick an associate's degree over a bachelor's degree, I would say again, it matters what their outcome is, right. If they're going into a program. And Mark Schneider, who's now with the US Department of Education, but in his previous work has done a lot of study of labor market outcomes of associate's degrees, found out if you're going into an associate's degree program that is more technical and leads to a job, the labor market outcomes are great. But if you're going into an associate's degree, that's more general. So an associate's degree in liberal arts studies or general studies and you're not going to transfer, you might as well not even go to college at all because you're going to get a degree that's worth about as much as a high school degree. So I think the question is, I think the associate's degree out of high school still worth it if you're either planning and going to transfer if you get a general degree or that you are in a program that has specific labor market outcomes. I think on the other side, on the adult side, you know, if you're returning and you never had any college experience, I think the associate's degree is incredibly important. But we know again from studies that it's, it's really hard for adults to, you know, to go back for a two year degree. I think shorter degree programs or shorter credential programs are much more important for them. If you already have a degree, I'm not quite sure. Again, the full blown degree is really what they need at that point. I think these alternatives there are going to be much more useful to that portion of the market. So I'm not on the adult side. I'm probably a little more skeptical of, of the associate's degree in terms of labor market outcomes than I am on the, on the traditional side.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I think the stat is 28% of associate's degrees out earn their bachelor's degree counterparts. And so, you know, it depends on the technical endpoint question I think you raised is the right one and gets into our final question of the episode, which is everyone's probably favorite question. It's from Nick Dukhoff from the company edmit, and his question is, with top line college costs rising but net prices flat, whose responsibility is it to educate students and families about what college really costs. Nick obviously has an interest in the question with his company providing that role itself. But Jeff, this is a question you've been confronting very starkly with the students you've been following for your latest book, what's your own take about the responsibility of educating students and families about what college really costs?

Oh, I think affordability has become a much bigger topic in the book than I ever expect it. When I started to write a book about admissions, right, I wasn't writing a book about financing college or paying for college. But what really surprised me, I guess, is that affordability is a big issue among students and parents at every income level. The problem is that while for low income students it tends to draw them away from schools that I think would be good academic and social fits for them, but they think they can't afford, and by the way, they probably actually can afford it in the end at the middle and upper income levels. What's happening is that students think, oh, I don't really need to think about affordability until I figure out where I got in right after applications are over. And so those conversations, unfortunately, I think are happening way too late in the process. And so I saw not only in the students I was following, but in schools I visited in April, when students were trying to make a decision about where to go, they were in some cases really surprised by how little aid they got or about the amount of gap that they would have to fill. And so now they were starting to have those affordability conversations I think they should have had back in October or in the previous summer when they were trying to put together their list. It's really important when we're talking about fit in college that you think about where am I going to fit academically, where am I going to fit socially, and where am I going to fit financially? And unfortunately, I think that too many students are waiting for that last piece of the conversation. Of course, affordability until it's too late. Now, I don't want to place all of the blame on the students here because college has truly just become unaffordable for way too many people. We know that while this job market is hot, the wage gains have really just gone to the very, very top. And so students, I think that would be when I went to college 25 years ago, would have been able to afford most of these colleges on a middle income, just like my parents did. They just can't do it anymore. And I think that's not the blame of the students. I think it's a little bit of blame of the federal and state governments which have been pulling back on financial aid, but I think a lot of it goes to the underlying cost of college.

Yeah, it's a fascinating answer and something that's probably not covered nearly enough and something we can explore more next year, Jeff, when we come back for season three. But for now, we're going to take a break for the summer and we invite all of you to catch up on past episodes of Future youe over the summer and of course invite you to come back in the fall and listen to the new episodes as we jump into season three. Thanks as always to our producers Steve Chigaris and Lauren Dibble. Appreciate your support all year helping us do this podcast. And as always to you, our listeners, wherever you listen to us, please rate us. And until next time year with Jeff Salingo, I'm Michael Horne. Thanks for listening to Future Years.