High-quality Education Doesn’t Have to Mean Small and Selective

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Michael Horn, joined by my colleague Jeff Salingo and really excited for our guest on today's episode, the president of Western Governors University, Scott Pulsifer. Scott, welcome to the show.

Thank you for inviting me. It's great. I'm very glad to be here.

We're thrilled to have you here. As obviously Western Governor is really the innovative university that put online competency based education on the map has grown to over 100,000 students. You talk a lot about the outcomes that you get for your students and so forth. But before we get into the nitty gritty of what is Western Governor's University and what does it mean for the future of higher ed more generally, a question we love to ask our guests when they come on is how did you get into this crazy world of higher education? And I know in your case it's a little more recent, so we'd love to get your story and passion behind it.

Well, it definitely is unconventional one, I would say. And my collective leadership experience in higher education is the full time I've now been at wgu, which is all of two and a half years. I have long had an interest in changing the lives of others and a lot of that's been through just my personal engagement and service and things like that. So the passion I've had for education is probably something that was rooted in me a long time ago and it allowed me to participate with my alma mater, my undergraduate alma mater, Brigham Young University. But in reality, for most of my professional career it's been in technology, software startups, Amazon, large mid sized software company called Sterling Commerce. And that experience actually allowed me to really see how technology powered change and innovation in a variety of different industries, whether it was banking or retail or manufacturing, etc. And as you know, Western Governors University, so much of the innovation that's been driving in education has also had its underpinning, if you will. The foundation for that is the investment in technology and how does technology power the learning, design and everything else like that. And I suppose that when they were looking for a successor to Bob Mendenhall,

who was the founding president, who was

the founding president, they were looking for someone who was atypical. And I just happened to have already relocated from Seattle to Salt Lake City for a software startup, the recruiting firm that they had hired to do the search actually knew of me and knew of my interest in that regard. And it turned out that their interest in hiring someone who understood how technology could power innovation was really important to WGU and to WGU's future. But they also wanted to know that they truly had someone who was passionate about how education could change the lives of others. And so that resulted in my opportunity to join as the president.

So Scott, one of the things you've talked about since you joined us as president is kind of impact and scale and you've talked about Moving to this 10x impact from where you are today. So what does that vision mean and, and what will it look like if you achieve it?

Yeah, it started with simply contemplating what the future of WGU would look like if we just maintain our current course, if you will. And I played that out. We aren't the only institution that's already large and continues to scale. But if I played it out, even if we were twice or three times or even four times our current size, the reality was as an institution that would still only have a single digit impact on the total need that exists. When I think of that need, I simply define it as education is the single biggest catalyst to change people's lives. It is still the surest path to a self reliant and a provident life for almost everyone. And we all know from the workforce perspective that 2/3 of the need that will exist in all sorts of jobs in the future is going to need post secondary education as a fundamental part of it. And I just looked at the problem of the math that says if 2/3 of the workforce are going to require post secondary education of some sort and only 42% of adults have it, it was 25% of 160 million workforce in the US alone. And so that 40 million plus adults who need it. And I considered the fact that there's only 20 million in the system, 4 million graduating a year, three and a half million leaving the workforce every year. Like it's going to take us four or five generations to solve this problem. We need to think bigger. And so our notion of like a tenfold impact really started to formulate around how do you really utilize WGU's innovation, the innovation of other institutions that are out there, to really start having this transformative effect on the system as a whole so that millions of lives are actually changed. And I think that will make us contemplate other related higher education services and functions that go beyond just the learning. Because even in creating an institution, we have to also do everything else related to that.

So we've talked a lot about scale on this podcast in the past. We had Michael Crow on who talks often about scale. But in American higher education, scale is seen as a negative. Sometimes the more you serve, the lesser quality people think it is. And the group that you talk about, these tens of millions of adults, some of whom have college credit and no degree, and others who have no college experience at all, have been there for the kind of the picking of colleges, universities for a long time. And either they chose not to do it, but some have chose to do it and have failed. What about your strategy do you think will allow you to succeed where perhaps others failed? And obviously you don't probably mind the competition. You want others to do this. What do you think others should be doing to try to also serve this market?

Yeah, I think one of the distinct, truly distinct things I believe about WGU is the fact that we are heavily student centric. I don't think we have any confusion about what our purpose is. And by that what I mean is you could argue there are two fundamental purposes to higher education. To advance knowledge and to transfer knowledge. WGU is decidedly in the transfer of knowledge and that our endeavor is to provide access to high quality education so that people can and better their lives. And the reality is that I bring with me also that experience of Amazon where scale actually works to the betterment of quality, that you actually can leverage the innovations that come about because you're serving a much larger population, but doing so in an individualized way instead of thinking about larger class sizes or expanding a campus. Everything else you're actually trying to figure out, well, how do I actually serve more and more individuals, but doing so in a way that the whole of the institution feels like it was exclusively designed for one. And if you start to endeavor to personalize the learning and the journey and ensuring that you are not ensuring, but necessarily increasingly increasing the probability of success for one individual, then you start to see that you can actually scale pretty well and leverage the scale and efficiencies to increase the quality. It's actually works to our advantage. You kind of blow through some of the constraints exist in other contexts. Why do I think WGU along with others? I would definitely su Southern New Hampshire, but there are others that are doing some innovative things like Northeastern and Purdue Global. Surely I think we just realized that there wasn't any really system before. Scott Carlson even just wrote about this this week. He's like, I don't think there really was a system, but in reality, for the promise of higher education to be true for all adults, we need to start thinking more in a platform context. What are the true innovations that can provide an underpinning for the access to high quality learning, the portability and transferability of it, the recognition and the value that can take into the workforce, etc. And we need to be thinking about what are those things that can be invested that have a title effect for the whole, rather than just aggrandizing an institution.

So that takes me a couple places, but I guess to start that means that you guys are not going to just be serving education potentially, but also investing in the parts of the ecosystem that create the technology enablers, service enablers, various components that allow this scale to be done not just by wgu, but potentially a lot of the other universities you just mentioned. And spreading the impact of that as well.

That's right, yeah. I think back to this point of when we, when we endeavored to establish a new type of institution and having reinvented that, what it meant is we also had to reinvent many of the underpinnings of that, whether it was how prospective students actually go through the process of understanding what their pathway should be and enrolling them. Well, you have to develop the capabilities and the technology to power that, or whether it's new learning design, clearly, and competency based education, the technology that powers that, we recognize that those capabilities that we've invested to serve WGU as an institution of learning, that those are also very valuable in the broader context of other institutions who are looking to reinvent themselves, expand access, etc. And invested in the right way can actually provide more platform type capabilities to the whole of the sector rather than just a singular institution.

So stay in that for one moment because sort of the online competency based model that you all have pioneered, there have been a few imitators of, but no one doing it near the scale that you're doing at. Do you see this ultimately as a model for all adult learners? Do you see it for all of higher education? Like where does the vision for that model that you do, and maybe some variations of it, who is this for ultimately do you think, in 10, 20 years?

Well, there's two things maybe that come to mind in answering that question. One is I don't think there's any particular context where we think it couldn't apply meaning. Regardless of whether it's general education courses or liberal arts degree programs or skills based training and the competency needed around certain technical trades, et cetera. I don't think we've thought of anyone that said, sorry, it won't be able to apply in that context. We may meet one at some point, but we just.

But it hasn't happened yet.

It hasn't happened yet. And I think that it would be wrong for anyone to assume automatically that, sorry, that one was not going to work. I think I'd rather endeavor to see if it works first and prove that it doesn't rather than the other way around. The second thing that comes to my mind is that the future of learning and the traverse that adults of all different types are actually going to do. I was reminded of last night, considering the context around the notion of jobs to be done. And the reality is that students that are entering into their post secondary pathways, they have different jobs to be done. And one thing that we are not solving for is what I would call that emerging adult experience. There is a job to be done in that. But for most of the adults actually that exist in the U.S. the emerging adult one is not one that has to happen on a campus that you're going to go to find your, you know, find your spouse or whomever and your partner or figure out how to make your own decisions and be accountable for. Like that actually can happen in a lot of different ways. Like we are not solving for that one. What we are trying to solve for is the learning and what are the competencies that you need to have as a result of the learning that can be applied in an opportunity that you want to pursue? Because the promise we believe fundamentally of learning is that if you attain it, then you attain opportunities. So I think when we consider competency based education, you focus on the job to be done around learning and gaining competency to an opportunity. Like we're not going to solve for a lot of things that other students or adults have.

Scott, we've talked on this podcast just recently around online education and the rising costs, particularly of marketing and student acquisition. Even traditional higher education, particularly at the graduate market, student acquisition costs are rising. We were on a panel many months ago in Washington D.C. and you gave a figure that just blew me away. Is it more than 50% of your students are referred to by alums, other students, faculty, staff. Tell me about that. And how much does that help you in terms of controlling marketing costs? But what does that mean? Because I think for alumni and others to refer the institution means they truly believe in it. Right? And I think most colleges and universities would love a figure like that. They probably haven't measured it the way you have. So talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, it starts with the premise that growth and scale is actually an outcome of objectives related to quality and student experience and how learning really drives a return for the students that we serve. And think of it this way, which is if we are obsessively focused on improving the quality and expanding the experience and reducing the cost of access and everything else, then you're going to have really happy customers. In this case, our customers are students. And when you do that and focus on that really well, then guess what? They tend to actually have a high degree of affinity for the institution. They tend to be great refers, meaning they're much higher probability to recommend others to the institution. And that's true when you consider not just your direct customer and the student, but also when you consider the customers that those students serve, including employers, including the colleges and other universities that they're a part of, et cetera. And so when we focus there, we think the demand is actually just a function that we forecast and we try to do our best to project. And so this last year, I think I mentioned that. Is that over 60? I think the number was actually 68% of our new students were.

68%. Wow.

And they aren't all from students or alumni, but the three top kind of sources were friends or colleagues that are students or alumni of wgu. The second are employers, and the third were community colleges. And I think we have great relationships with all three of those stakeholder communities. Is that when you deliver value both for the students and also the employers, then the referrals are going to be a high source of growth.

So does that help on your marketing costs? Does that reduce your marketing costs?

For sure. I think it's fair to say that we're probably somewhere at a half or a third of what I think most institutions pay for a new student to enroll. And if you consider the fact today, especially when those adults are seeking online programs, they aren't a, oh, I heard of one, and so I'm going to enroll at that one. They tend to consider three or four institutions. And when they start doing that research online, invariably wgu, I think today is going to come up in those options. And so when you have a high, high affinity among the population out there, then it helps even when others are advertising their institutions.

Last question, I think from us, as I see the counter winding down on our time together, but which I suspect a lot of our listeners are curious to hear, you talk about the inspector general who came out, obviously about, I guess, a year ago or so at this point and said wgu in effect, has been flouting the regular and substantive interaction clause and should return over $700 million of federal financial aid. We haven't heard anything from the administration to say that they're going to agree with that or disregard it. The question I want to ask is less about the IG report and more about what do you think it means for the future of higher education policy? And what changes do you think should this should be a rallying cry, if you will, to change higher education, the Higher Education act, and what would you like to see happen?

Well, I think the reality of where we are today is that in the last decade we've seen dramatic changes in terms of how education is accessed, experienced, delivered, paid for, you name it. And what I do have a general opinion about is that regulation and policy tend to lag innovation and that the institution of learning, the students who are pursuing it, the employers who are part of that too, because they're hiring the students or outcomes of that system, that the innovation that's being driven in the space will continually influence the right policies and regulation. I think the best thing we can do on the Regulatory Policy Fund is try to catch up with that as quickly as we can, that you try to keep that lag between the innovations.

As short as possible.

As short as possible. And arguably reauthorizing something like the Higher Ed act is like you can't wait a decade or two to do it. In today's pace of change, with technology underpinning so much of it, you kind of have to, you know, if you applied Moore's Laws, you would say, well, it has to keep shortening by half each time you do it. And so it may be five years, four years in the future, or you may shift to a different model, which is you have to always be advancing policies in small increments rather than like

a whole massive reauthorization.

Massive reauthorization. And that would be wise. I will say the one key thing that we would always tend to bias for, which is innovation with outcomes is the only innovation worth anything. And we should be careful that we don't unbridle things in a way that says all of a sudden innov isn't driving what we really want, which is more adults being able to access high quality education with great outcomes.

And I think that's a great way to end it. Scott, thanks for being with us on Future youe, 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 and 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, Jeff Salingo, joined by Michael Horn and that was a great conversation we just had with Scott. And you know, he said that Western Governors hasn't met a thing that CBA hasn't worked for yet, which is why now he kind of wants to double down or 10 times. Yeah. And extend that idea. Do you agree that, you know, there's kind of unlimited potential for CBE for a competency based education? I sometimes, yeah. We forget that our, that not all of our audience knows exactly what some of these letters mean.

Sure. So maybe let's actually step back and just define it even more clearly. Competency based learning, broadly speaking, is as opposed to moving on based on time or credit hours or Carnegie units, whatever unit of measure that is synonymous with time, you move on as you actually demonstrate mastery of competencies or skills, being able to apply knowledge and skills in certain ways. And so Western Governors is, remains one of the only institutions that's allowed to do competency based learning. And they do it online. They've been doing it since 1997 when they were founded. And from my perspective, I'll just make an editorial first, which is if you think about this just from a pure learning perspective, which is like, what's the best way to construct a learning experience? From what we know in the cognitive science literature, Competency based learning is a better way to construct it because if students just move on regardless of what they've mastered at the end of a lecture, et cetera, it sort of, it gets to be a house of sort of a house without a very solid foundation. And at some point those gaps come to haunt you. And so the really cool thing about doing competency based learning well, as opposed to sort of just like a, you know, multiple choice factory, I guess, but you know, really looking at deep performance tasks in rich ways as Western Governors does, is it's really fundamentally about learning. And then the criticism I think you often hear about it is people say, well, it's just about getting jobs and sort of training for the workforce. It's not about liberal arts. But I think he's right, that fundamentally you can construct philosophy, ethics, history, and say, what are the learning objectives we want students to know and be able to do at end, the, at the end of this program course, whatever the unit is, and how would we know that they've mastered that and actually then assess at the end have students mastered and if they can't, they can keep working on it. And our friend Ted Mitchell, who is the former under Secretary of Education and before that, further back in his career, he was a professor at Dartmouth. He used to do a class on the history of education reform. And in that class, I think he gave you two papers for the class and he basically said you can, you have to keep working on them until you get a B and then you get the choice to keep working on them if you want the A. But it was basically he did within a semester a mastery based progression. And that's a liberal arts institution. And I think it works well. So on the one hand, totally agree with him and then on the second hand, I'm really glad that he made that point about the job to be done. Not only because it relates to the, the book that I'm working on, but I think he's right that while if we would call it in the help me step it up job, I'm ready to step it up in my life. This minimum wage job or dead end job or whatever it might be is no longer working for me. I'm ready to step it up and get some education to help me get to where I want to go in my career. Competency based learning. Not only is it a great learning way to get an outcome for the employer, it also may be far more efficient because you can test out of things you already know and speed the time to degree.

There also could be an efficiency on the other side, Michael, that we actually didn't get to talk to him about is how they're structured, right? So they have no full time faculty. They have a set of, they have an army of these course mentors who work closely with students throughout the degree program to kind of design their schedule and access the learning materials that they need. Then they take these assessments and then there's a whole separate cadre of people that assess, that do the assessments. And what's interesting about that is that in a traditional college, first of all, one of the issues to scalability in traditional higher education is grading and assessment, right? You could teach hundreds of students.

But then the number one complaint, I have to read their papers.

I have to read their papers, I have to Grade them. The first thing this does is separate the teaching part of it or the mentoring part of it from the grading. Also reduces, by the way, potential for grade inflation because those are two very separate entities. And, and you're also doing things that where again, jobs to be done. You know, somebody who is better at the assessment piece of it and someone who's better at the mentoring piece of it.

Totally.

It's kind of like teaching in research at a college or university. Some people are great teachers and some people are great researchers. Not a lot of people.

You're not forcing them to do both.

Doing both. So I think again, that goes back to the jobs to be.

I totally agree. And then the second thing I guess is, you know, he called it the coming of age. We're sort of coming out and help me, help me get into my best college because I deserve my best college experience. Sort of a circular job, if you will, or help me do what's expected of me because I'm supposed to go to college. That sort of fits off in those maybe quote unquote, traditional age students. We see that a little bit more there. And he's saying, you know, maybe competency based learning isn't for them for the entire experience because they want the parties, they want the dorms, et cetera. And that's definitely consistent in our research. But I imagine you could impose the two together. You could have a learning experience that's competency based, imposed on a residential or experiential set of experiences that gives you that immersive nature and the networks that are so valuable of colleges and universities.

And I think it gives traditional colleges and universities some ideas here on how they could reach new markets. Because I think traditional colleges tend to think what they're doing works well or they don't quite know how to reach these new markets. And I think that he offers, that offers some ideas on how to do that well.

And so another thing I think that's interesting about it is we like to say that when you nail the job to be done, you don't actually have to spend on marketing because people start referring your program for you. And I think Western Governors is the best, maybe the only, but the best example in higher education of that they have nailed the job to be done of I want to get into employment. So he's, you know, he doesn't talk all that much about the 100,000 students that they're serving. It's a lot more about where he helps them get to in their lives. What Western Governors does for the Adults who are seeking more education to transform their family trees and they really focus on outcomes. And I think that from my perspective, that shows in that referral rate, which is shocking. I don't know. Have you seen anything like that?

I haven't seen anything like that. I know, I'm not quite sure that colleges, traditional colleges and universities measure. Measure that. No, but in online they do.

Right?

Because we know that cost of equity acquisition and online education is higher than ever before to buy keyword searches and everything else. And it's even true as more competitive, just more competitive than ever before. So when you have referrals, you're definitely reducing your costs. I just don't think it's measured now. One of the things we didn't get to talk to him about is that they're using that power of referral now and kind of the love that their alums particularly seem to have to start to fundraise. And this will be an interesting experiment because we. There's not a lot of evidence out there so far that you can really fundraise an online education. People tend to think that. And even we had Chipaw Sik on from 2U recently and he was talking about even online. People who are taking online classes love the physical piece of this. Right. They come back and they love graduation. They want to do the immersive. And that tends to be that. That nostalgia tends to be what college universities fundraise off of. So it'll be interesting to see if Western governors is able to do that.

And obviously we didn't get a chance to get into this with him. But one of the reasons they're fundraising is so they can do all these other investments for the ecosystem. I kind of wonder. I'm curious your take, especially since you've been immersing yourself a little bit more in the declining alumni giving rates and sort of the preponderance of big gifts. I kind of wonder if it's more likely to, rather than getting $10 from 68% of alums or something like that, that they will get big gifts from major foundations and benefactors and corporations that want to improve the pipeline, whether it be in the state, nation or into their company.

I mean, I think that's probably where their best bets are going to be. And it's clear their model has, you know, they have now a lot of evidence. In some ways it's a perfect time to be fundraising because they now have a decent amount of evidence from their work since the late 1990s. But you're right, I mean in most traditional higher education now, it's becoming more difficult to raise money. Small donors are being asked to give to a multitude of causes and political candidates, of course. And at the big donor level, they want stories, right? They want to give to ideas and passions, in some cases buildings, but they really want to give to big ideas. And for the most part, a lot of colleges and universities lack for those big ideas. So I think this kind of 10x model that he was talking about I think could garner a lot of support, whether it's from individuals, but I think more so it's going to really be interesting to CEOs and other companies out there that really are worried about the talent pipeline and finding the talent in this economy.

Well, I, I would say is perhaps the most successful disruptor out there. They have stories in spades and so that'll certainly help them and it'll be interesting to follow the WG story as they try to. It sort of feels like as he's come in, it's sunset their first 20 years of their history and now they're embarking on that innovation path for the next 20 years as they strive for this 10x impact. Not just a number served, but really an outcome. So so be fascinating to watch. And until next time, thanks for joining us on Future youe, of course, if you're listening, wherever you are listening, please subscribe, rate us on itunes and the like. It helps other people find us and continue to write us in with ideas. It helps both Jeff and I brainstorm for future episodes and we appreciate all of you. And until next time, we'll see you on Future youe.