Higher Ed Trends

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Hi, I'm Jeff Salingo from Arizona State University, and welcome to this edition of Future youe. We're here on the Streetside Studio of ASU's new DC offices at 18th and I Street, and it's great to have ASU helping us in this podcast.

Hi, I'm Michael Horn, chief strategy officer at the Entangled Group. And thanks to them as well for helping us in this venture of Future youe. And we're really excited today to be joined by Goldie Bloomstick, the reporter, renowned reporter for the Chronicle for Higher Education. And Goldie, I'm always struck because I'm on the other side of being interviewed by you, but I get to ask you questions this time. And the question that I'm curious about. Jeff knows you well because you all work together for several years at the Chronicle, but myself and other listeners might not know. How did you get started in this higher education world, this reporting world to begin with? And where does that passion come from for this field?

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Jeff, for having me here. I got started pretty much by accident. I was working as a city hall reporter at the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, and I was sort of ready to leave Orlando. I started looking around for other jobs, got very intrigued by the idea of working in Washington, D.C. and a friend of mine at the time found an article in a newspaper that used to advertise ad for journalism jobs. And there were two jobs open at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. And to be honest, it's like I vaguely knew what the Chronicle of Higher Ed was and sort of had read it in grad school. And I thought, but Washington's good. I like Washington. I applied for the job. When I applied at the Chronicle, I had never actually even covered a school board meeting. I never even like, filled in for anybody at a school board meeting, had never covered higher ed, although as a reporter in Florida, I had covered someone who would go on to become a higher ed fixture, who was a gentleman named Charlie Reed, who was the governor, who was the top staff person for the governor of Florida at the time. Anyway, I applied for the job at the Chronicle, and I got it. And I began a path at the Chronicle similar to one that Jeff would later follow. I began covering state politics, which I discovered was a fantastic way to learn about higher ed and to cover important issues, because I'm sort of really interested in public policy, of course, always have been. That's why you go into journalism for many of us anyway. And this was a way to kind of COVID political issues, but not through the BS of all the political parties and what the Republicans think and what the Democratic strategy is. But you really were talking about the values and the history of a state and kind of, you know, the states express a lot of that through their higher education policy. And that was a really fun beat, not only because it was so interesting, but you got to travel to a lot of states as well and really see and touch and feel the country. It really, it could feel kind of homogenous in some, when you're in some cities. But when you get out to, you know, Columbia, Missouri or parts of Alaska, which I got to go to, you really get to see a lot of the country.

Have you gotten to all 50 states?

I've got four left.

Ah, very nice.

Not all of it on the Chronicle, some of it on my own diamonds.

We used to compare that when we worked at the Chronicle, how many, how many states we had been to. But you beat me.

You got to Hawaii.

And I'm still waiting twice on the Chronicle. So I always thank them for that. But Goldie, we've also, as you've mentioned, we worked together for many years. We spent some time outside the office. What do you enjoy in your free time? I know that we used to do the Seagull Century out on the Eastern Shore, which actually has a higher ed angle. Maybe you could explain it.

Yeah, the higher ed angle of the Seagull Century is that it's based out of Salisbury University. They're actually excellent hosts. So shout out to Salisbury University in Maryland. I'm a pretty avid biker. I'm also of late an avid kayaker. Flat water kayaker, not whitewater. I do a lot of kayaking out at the Eastern Shore and in and around D.C. which has got some really beautiful spots.

No, no. So you're a learner, clearly, as an adult. And I think segues right into the question that I wanted to kick off with you, which is you just wrote this fascinating piece for the Chronicle about the adult student, and I'd love you to give the audience just a sense of basically the primer on the piece and the purpose for writing it.

Well, the purpose was I'd actually been thinking about this for a long time. I feel like the people talk a lot about the adult student in higher education, but nobody really kind of hones in and identifies what the issues are for them and why they're important. And at the same time, I've been following higher ed now for just about 30 years, and I've seen a lot of changes in demography and changes in focus across higher education. Clearly it struck me that the demographic changes hitting the country right now as we've, you know, we're already seeing states where a lot of public and private colleges are feeling the pinch it just occurred. I mean, there were just sort of these two trends that sort of came collapsing at me at the same time. The demographic changes sweeping the country, the great economic need of our country to educate more adults. We've all been reading the same studies from the last couple of years from the Georgetown about how, you know, by 2020, 2/3 of the jobs are going to require some education after high school. Well, guess what, 2020 is like two years away. And so it just sort of struck me like this was a really good time to sort of sit down and dig into this. And I mean, the numbers are sort of staggering. I mean, some 80 million adults have some college or no college right now, but don't have a degree. And another 15 million adults have associate's degree but don't have a bachelor's degree. I mean, by raw numbers enough alone, you would think that colleges would be jumping at this market. And they're. Well, let me stop. I don't really want to call it a market. You'd think colleges would be jumping at serving this population.

I mean, that's what kind of surprises me, Goldie. You know, we were talking about how big of a business higher education is. We're going to be talking in future episodes of future you about kind of the declining market of 18 to 22 year olds, which it seems like every college and university is after. And many of them are struggling to fill seats. And so it seems to me, like, why has this been so difficult? Twenty years ago, when I started covering higher education, people were talking about the adult student market and we're still talking about that market today. And we still have a very small portion of colleges and universities serving them. Yet you would think there's this huge market on one end and few colleges serving them and a smaller market on the other end and many colleges serving them.

I mean, it's, you know, you have to sort of upend tradition. You have to upend a lot of culture on campuses. Those are, as we both, as we all know, those are kind of powerful forces in higher education. And frankly, there's an angle to this which I hadn't fully appreciated. It's not the easiest population to serve. It's not. These are not. Students are walking in with no issues. Some of them come in and they can afford college because their employers are paying for it. But a lot of these are students who started and left because generally for a family reason or for a financial reason. In some cases those reasons are still with them. Very few of them, by the way, who started college and left leave for academic reasons. It's almost never the reason. It's almost always something in their personal lives that keeps them from continuing college. And I just think that really the, the cultural values of the institutions are really oriented towards. It's like a stereotype, right, that we always say this, close your eyes and imagine what you think of a college student. But in reality, even I, who write about this stuff all the time, sometimes fall back into that.

So do you think the financial pressures of the 18 to 22 year old market, and that's not a great market to be serving now for some institutions, do you think that will finally force them to look more closely at this market?

I mean, I think it should. I mean, obviously you can't just upend your entire mission and turn yourself around and start teaching something else. To some degree, what these adult students want is something a little bit different than what the traditional 18 to 22 year old student wants. Not 100% different. I mean, there's a lot of talk about how the adults want, you know, things that are sort of streamlined and accelerated and very focused on the thing that's going to get them to their next job or their next promotion or a better job or a job that's not in retail necessarily. It's true, they want that. They also want a little bit more than that. I don't think we should shortchange adults and just think about this is just career training. It's just getting them to their next level of job. They want more, but they also need it in a package that works with their lives.

I'm curious if you're a university president sitting there, looking at this market, maybe seeing the struggles of the demographics coming up in the 1822 year old segment. Maybe you have a small continuing education school, but that's not the main school or education business you've been in, if we can use that word, business, what's the top recommendation or two that you would coming out of this report that you would say we need to do tomorrow, that we really need to invest in as a school?

You know, there's a lot of very simple things schools can do to just get more adult students enrolled. The one I kept hearing over and over again, which sort of surprised me is make it easier for students to get their transcript from their past experience. I can't tell you the number of times I heard that from people. They have an old bill, you know, maybe a $50 library fine or you know, honestly maybe even a $300 unpaid bill, but that keeps them from getting their transcript. Students are either getting discouraged and not enrolling or they're giving up their old credits and starting school sort of with a, you know, further back than they need to be. That's the simplest thing. But there's a lot of, you know, adjust your services so that more services are available to students on nights and weekends. You know, if your counseling office is advising office is open from nine to five, guess what, you're not going to help. You're not going to be able to serve many working adults. They same with your financial aid office and think about the programs a little bit and connect, think a little. I mean I could come up with this report talks about a lot of strategies and I think that I hope they're useful to people. But there's a lot of things that institutions can do to work better with, not just the companies in their communities, but the industries in their communities. We have a few really good examples of that in this report. So there's a ton of things that they can do if they're willing to do it.

No, no, that's helpful. So one more question on this before we switch gears, which is, I'm curious, we hear a lot from, you know, Under Secretary Ted Mitchell, when he was in the Obama administration, would talk about the new normal student, the emphasis on new and talking about this part time adult student who wasn't there before. And yet when you read through your report, it's actually clear that 30 years ago, as a percentage anyway, it's relatively the same set of numbers. The difference now may be the urgency around the 2020 point that you made. But to Jeff's point earlier, the adult student has been there. They've been on campuses. Why haven't we figured this out?

I think before they've been a little bit more segregated into certain kinds of institutions. I mean, and frankly in the last, up until two or three years ago, probably a lot of these percentage numbers that we were looking at showing a large number of adult students showed them in for profit colleges. They weren't necessarily in the, in the realm of the, you know, in sort of the mindset and in the, in the view of traditional colleges, traditional nonprofit colleges, I think some of that is changing now as well.

So.

But you're right, they've always been there. And obviously, but as a percentage, even at the moment, right now there's a lower percentage of adults in college than there were even just a few years ago. Partly because of the economic turnaround, people are going back to work instead of going to school. That's probably a smart short term strategy for people. But long term it might not necessarily work out.

Right. They need those skills to be able to level up and continue to progress in a changing economy, obviously.

Yeah. And one of the most important things colleges I think need to work on is find ways to not make it always be an either or choice. There needs to be ways adults to continue in their jobs and go to school.

Is there one institution you'd highlight that really has been thoughtful about making that pathway in and out of work or to be continuing to work while learning seamless?

I think there's quite a lot of them. Jeff's laughing because he knows the Chronicle reporter's never going to single out one institution. I mean, we mentioned a few in the report. Some places that I've highlighted. I'll just mention the. We have case studies. Yeah. University of Memphis we talk about because they've done a lot with sort of actually not just recruiting students back, but making sure that they're recruiting students back to something that's a little bit different than what they left. I think that's an important part of this, of any good strategy. We emphasize some programs at Bunker Hill Community College and Northeastern University, sort of two ends of the spectrum on sort of in terms of mission of institutions. And we talk about Shasta College in California. Plus, I mean, frankly, I talked to like 120 people to do this report, many of those college leaders. So there's quite a lot of examples from a lot of colleges.

Terrific. So switch gears maybe a little bit Inside Baseball. But hey, this is Future you. It's an inside baseball podcast to a degree, which is the Gates foundation puts a lot of money into higher education. And you wrote a fascinating story as Dan Greenstein departs, having led the higher education giving there for the last several years about some speculation about some of the back and forth between innovation and funding, status quo institutions and so forth within the foundation. I thought it was a terrific story. Could you give a little bit of that intrigue for the listeners?

Yeah, sure. I sort of joked in a newsletter that it's not quite the battle for the soul of the foundation. But there is, as was explained to me, somewhat of an internal tension at the Gates Foundation. It's obviously very influential. It's the biggest philanthropy in higher education right now. They give out about $125 million a year, roughly. That fluctuates over the years. And there's a sort of a. There's probably a school of thought within the foundation to use that money to fund your kind of crowd, the disruptor crowd, you know, the new kinds of players, the new kinds of colleges, or new organizations like boot camps or, or maybe even efforts to change accreditation and reform accreditation models. And then there's another school of thought within the foundation that talks about really, the only way you're going to make change and be seen as credible in higher education is by working through more established entities. You know, you have to work through institutions because people look to institutions and they, you know, higher ed, being somewhat traditional, likes to see see itself in the change. They don't like to necessarily see change from outside. So what was explained to me was that there was a little bit of an internal tension at the foundation. I don't think that's the reason necessarily that Dan Greenstein has decided to step away. I think he's been there six years, and that's a pretty good tenure for that program that's comparable to the tenure of his predecessors. But I think it's the question of what's going to happen next for the foundation, and will it sort of will it tilt one way or the other, or will it just continue to have this tension within?

So, Guldy, speaking of what's next, what kind of to close out our conversation today, what's fascinating you about 2018 now that you've finished this incredible report on the adult student, I don't think you probably want to give any tips about what you're working on next. But what's the theme you're going to kind of focus on in 2018 as we think about higher education?

Well, it's going to actually, in a way, continue on the adult student, but also sort of riffing off some of the issues that we've been talking about more broadly in the country right now. I mean, the. It's also an issue that Dan Greenstein mentioned as he was leaving the Gates Foundation. I mean, there's this challenge to higher education. What's higher education's role in our society and how is it perceived? I mean, I do. I think higher education could in a way improve the public perception if it was seen more as a public good in a way that people can recognize and understand it. If your college is seen as a place that's helping you, helping your, helping you get a job and helping you advance in your career and helping you become Jeff, this thing you and I always talk about, become a more better citizen. A citizen is these days also a loaded word. But a better member of the community. I think that's, I think higher ed has to start to prove that. And one of the ways, you know, I think these, the adult student issues that I've been identifying and sort of the broader cultural battles hired finds itself in, I think they're very related.

Well, Goldie, it's great to see you again here. You can follow GoldieOldi Standard on Twitter. I'm a follower of her Twitter feed. So if you really want to know what's happening in higher education, she's one of the best people to follow on that. And so we really appreciate you being here today.

Thanks guys for having me in Pun studio.

Thanks. Welcome back to the Streetside studios here at Arizona State University. You're probably going to hear some of the background noise here, the traffic here at busy Washington D.C. part of the ambulance. Yeah, it's a beautiful winter day here. So there's a lot of traffic out here at 18th and I I'm Jeff Salingo. I'm joined by Michael Horn here for our new podcast, Future U. And that was a fascinating conversation with Goldie. She's always pretty interesting on some of the topics she's covering. And, and it's just amazing to me how big this market of adult students is and just how difficult it is to serve them.

Yeah. And I was really struck, Jeff, by in particular, she said the biggest low hanging fruit, if you will, of starting to serve this market is just to deal with the issues that keep them from re enrolling in colleges and universities. And often that's a transcript from high school. And we've heard that a lot with innovative universities that we work with at Entangled Solutions. Re Up Education, which is one of the entangled portfolio companies that re enrolls dropout students. They'll find out that an institution requires a high school transcript for someone who's been out of high school for 30 years. And locating that high school transcript is really, really hard. And by the way, that student was previously enrolled at that very college. And yet they're still requiring this. And there's little things like that that through your own archival work, through other means of collecting this information, you should be able to make it a lot easier on the student to just get in the door to and prove to the Department of Education and others you're not abusing students and enrolling people who shouldn't be there.

Well, you know, also Michael, I mean, many of these students also have ended up, and she didn't mention this, but have ended up going to multiple institutions. You know, and I've been thinking about this. Recently I enrolled in an EDD program at Vanderbilt University. And because of that, I needed to get my undergraduate and my graduate transcripts from two different institutions. And here's somebody who's been covering higher education for 20 years and navigating that process was really difficult. And I'm also kind of surprised that in the year 2018, we're still dealing in a lot of cases with paper transcripts. It's just amazing to me. So I'm wondering if technology, you know, a lot of people have been talking about how technology is going to kind of change the transcript world, whether, whether technology will end up helping us here.

Yeah, and I think that's where you're seeing startups like Parchment, which has been around for several years, obviously Matt Patinsky, who founded Blackboard, but now credly being another one, digital transport, effectively for credentials, even down to micro credentials, so that if you have some college but no degree, you potentially could make that into a currency to be able to enroll into an institution. People are excited about these new things. This is where blockchain gets a lot of print right now in some of the future publications for somebody has to

explain us what blockchain actually is.

Yeah, we'll have to have some more. We'll have to have some, have someone come on the show and actually talk us through that. But, but people are excited about these digital technologies that should make that much more seamless. It begs the question, if you were in college or university 20 years ago, though, you know, how long is it going to take to make that a digital credential such that it can go into these services and make that the seamless experience and quite frankly, something else. Goldie said when I asked her why is this new. I don't understand the new normal student rhetoric, given that the percentages are unchanged and maybe even lower right now. And her answer I thought was a good one, which was, you know, for profit universities used to enroll a lot of these students. And we know about the decline of for profit universities, but part of the reason that they rose so fast was they made these things much easier than traditional institutions. They made it much more convenient and accessible to get in the door to get the transcripts in order and take care of a lot of those services.

And they also took care of the financing piece of this too, which of course she mentions. Right. So it's not just these hurdles. You know, a big hurdle for adults are, is that they're time pressed, they're place bound which so online really helps them there. But they also have to figure out how to pay for this. And so, you know, that's it's, this is, you know, debt and paying for college is not just an issue for 18 to 22 year olds, but it's also an issue for adults. What do you think can be done on that front?

Yeah, I think this is going to be one of the places where we need a lot of innovation quite frankly to align with what students are trying or would be students are trying to do with what employers might want out of the experience and what colleges need out of the experience. And that is to say if we think, for example, lifelong learning is going to be a huge part of this future. Why aren't we having membership models in higher education where you're paying, you know, an annual fee or a monthly fee and it makes it much more seamless to be working and getting education and making that an in and out experience that that almost is, is totally permeable. Why aren't we playing more with, you know, we've seen a lot of competency based education models pop up. What's interesting is all the finance models are still time based in terms of the payments at every six months you make a payment. Well, why don't we pay based on progress?

Because that would also incentivize completion too, wouldn't it?

Exactly. And based on actual metrics that employers presume presumably would value, I think we're going to see a lot of income share agreements gain steam. Obviously there's some for those that don't know.

Yeah, let's talk about what, what does ISA mean?

So an ISA or income share agreement basically means that the institution will take a percent or the, or the vehicle that has fronted the money for the student will take a percent of your future income for the next 5 or 10, 15 years up to a certain amount. And so they basically say you have to pay be earning a minimum base salary and then above which will take say 10% over the next 10 years of your salary straight out. So you don't have debt, but instead it's totally contingent upon what you actually earn with a cap at the end. So that if you're strike it big and make it rich, you're not going to be overpaying the institution. But the idea is that institutions and some of these financial vehicles could share in the risk then of that. And it should align incentives around making sure that you are serving students in pathways that get them into well paying jobs. Right.

It's probably appropriate that we're talking about debt and you hear a drill in the background. We're here at the new ASU DC center here in Washington D.C. and they literally just moved in last week. So they're still doing some work in the background here.

So I won't ask about the DEN financing on the building. But so the other thing I think ISAs will do is this Jeff, which I wrote about for, for Forbes recently, which is create this concept that we coined, renewable learning funds. Where you could imagine foundation, community foundations or even municipalities basically creating scholarship like funds to help bring low income citizens into education programs to get retraining, to skill up, to level up in their careers. And then it would be a perpetual funding mechanism whereby some percentage of that students future income would actually pour back into the fund to fund the next generation. So it wouldn't be a one time scholarship fee, but actually something that regenerates over time. So that when I establish a $30 million fund, say to put a certain percentage of my students through some sort of retraining in healthcare or information technology, whatever field it might be, this isn't a one shot in the dark thing, but it actually continues to replenish.

Well, you know, you mentioned kind of tradition bound universities and one of the things I just recently did a piece of on unemployment for the Atlantic and one of the things that I found that many colleges, particularly community colleges are now experimenting with are non credit courses that get students into jobs quickly. I mean, because the problem with tradition bound in higher education is that everything's a degree program or a certificate program that could take months to complete. And many adults just don't have the fortitude sometimes to do that unless they are guaranteed that they're gonna have a job at the other end. And so what a lot of these colleges and I focused on Des Moines area Community College in Iowa is working with employers to guarantee jobs in these short term kind of bootleg camps that could get them, you know, might take six weeks to get the exact training you need just to get into a job. And then once you're in the job, you could come back and reapply retroactively for that credit and stack your degree over time. But you know, one of the things we have to also think about is not only how to finance this, how to allow students to get over the hurdles, adults to get over the hurdles, to enroll. But also what are we offering them? You know, what are the, and I hate to use this word because I know people in higher education hate it, but what are the products that you're offering to these adult students?

Yeah, no, I think that's right and I think that's where some of the online learning that the traditional institutions have gotten excited about discovering online education in the last five years. It's where it falls short, quite frankly, a lot of times in my judgment, because they've taken the tradition bound education and merely put it online. And I think you have to be much more purposeful and intentional around the instructional design, the features, the convenience, how you're factoring it in. Is it mobile friendly? Some of these mobile learning companies, quite frankly, duolingo for learning language smartly. I'm on the board of IT for getting a free mba. Really beautiful, engaging instructional design that's very quick. And I think you really want to. Your point about the product or service offering, you really want to focus on how do you make this a seamless experience so that learners can feel like they can do this while they're still working. And this is the other piece of it I think we need to give a lot of thought about and this might be a policy question also, which is to say a lot of learners, I think struggle to do school part time while still working and they can't drop out of the workforce because where's that paycheck going to come that pays for the mortgage, groceries and so forth? How do we think of financing not just in terms of the tuition of a program, but in terms of your overall lifestyle? And do employers play a role in that? Do governments play a role in that? Not just financing the tuition, but actually allowing you to go out of the workforce as long as you're learning toward a future job similar to a welfare type concept. I think we need to start asking those questions that historically we haven't.

So Michael, do you think we're at a tipping point now? You know, we talked to Goldie about, you know, there's this huge adult market and there's a few institutions, institutions serving them. And then we have a lot of institutions serving what is we know is going to be a shrinking market of 18 to 22 year olds. Is it going to be finally the fine. What do you think is going to tip it? I have an idea on what's going to tip it. But what do you think is going

to finally, I'm curious what your idea is going to be. But you know, I think we're in the midst, Jeff, of the beginning of a lot of closures of small colleges, particularly in areas where the demographics are shrinking. We've talked about this and you know where I am in Massachusetts, just over the weekend was announced that Lasell College exploring likely to merge with Mount Ida College, both in Newton. Both small colleges serve about 1500-2000 students each. I think you're going to see a lot more of that. And in some ways those are actually the gems because they've already made this transition to the non traditional student in many ways. But I think you're going to see a lot more of that. And so the, the mix of higher ed will look different and those that survive will be those that have figured out how to serve these adult learners. Not just to be a sustainable source of revenue, quite frankly, but to better serve their community.

Yeah. And so I think employers are going to play a key role here. I think employers are increasingly getting frustrated with the quality of higher education and of the traditional students that they're hiring. And they also need to get more of their employees upskill and upskilled quickly. And this idea of sending them off for weeks or months on end or just writing them a blank check for tuition reimbursement, which is the way it's always worked, and just letting them go anywhere is not sustainable. And I think. So you're going to see many more employers going directly to colleges and universities, both traditional and non traditional, and say, hey, design a program for what we need. Right. We see this with Starbucks and the ASU program that they have. And we, and we've seen this with College for America at Southern New Hampshire. We've seen this with JetBlue and some of their partnerships with a couple of colleges and universities. I think we're going to see a lot more of that as employers get frustrated.

Yeah. So just to reinforce that. But then I have a pushback question. So the reinforcement I think is that you're seeing actually a lot of the for profit colleges as they've pivoted and realized they can't just be on the title four federal Uncle Sam Dole, so to speak, and that may not be the right customer for them. Try to get much deeper with partnerships with employers. You've seen Capella, for example, with its work partnerships get much deeper into this work. I guess the question I have is you've written a lot about how increasingly a lot of the workforce is going to be in the gig economy. We're both gig workers. You know, we do time with entangled you do time with ASU. But we're gig employees. We're 1099 workers. Going through an employer is not going to reach someone like us. So what does that mean, if that's where the puck is going to.

No, and that does worry me.

Right.

And I don't think there's anyone out there kind of looking out for the gig workers because you're right, it's not going to be the employers that are going to have to look out for them. I think it's a huge opportunity for traditional colleges and universities if they build this membership model you talked about earlier. Because, for example, I would love to go back to my alma mater, right. If they had a platform that offered not only their own courses, but EDX courses and Coursera courses and, and LinkedIn learning and whatever it might be that beyond there that I can take and use. But I also need a coach and it would be great to have a Sherpa that would help me figure out because I think that's a role that employers play with traditional employees is helping them figure out what do you need next? And as gig employees, it's sometimes hard for us. What skills don't I have or what skills am I going to need to have in a year?

So much more for us to dig on on future episodes about this and much more. Jeff, this has been a fascinating episode with Goldie. Thanks to her for joining us and all we have time for here. So in the intervening weeks, if you want to message me and Jeff and give us more topic ideas, interviews you'd like to hear from, you can reach JeffSelingo on Twitter and myself at michaelbhorn on Twitter and of course go to itunes and rate us and subscribe to us so that we get picked up and more people can find us and we can have a growing community around this show. Future you.

Thank you, Michael. And from the ASU studios here at 18th and I in Washington, D.C. we'll see you next time.