Rethinking the Regional Public

Hey there Jeff. So it's not only the presidential candidates that seem to have barnstormed Pennsylvania in an election where the Keystone State played such a critical role, but we're heading to your home state in a way in today's episode as well.

We sure are, Michael. Even if it's virtually regional public universities, those former teachers colleges that dock communities all over the US and get this, because they educate 40% of all American undergrads, are really critical to the future of higher ed. So today we're going to talk to the chancellor of the Pennsylvania System of Regional Publics, Dan Greenstein, about what's next for these 400 plus institutions across the country on this episode of Future you.

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I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. And welcome to future you.

Today's guest, Dan Greenstein, who became the fifth chancellor of Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education in 2018. He's been overseeing Pennsylvania's 14 public universities which serve nearly 100,000 degree seeking students. And he arrived at an important time in the system's history with regional public universities really not just at an inflection point in Pennsylvania, but nationwide. And his state system has been a bellwether of sorts for some of the most important trends impacting those institutions that educate so many of American students. Dan previously led the post secondary success strategy at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and before that he was the vice provost for academic planning and programs for for the University of California system. So I think it's going to be a very good conversation. Jeff.

So Michael, I'm particularly excited to have Dan on because Pennsylvania is a state that I covered for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s as part of a team of reporters at the Chronicle of Higher Education that wrote about state higher ed policy. It's a state I also know well because I grew up there in northeastern Pennsylvania. Many classmates from my high school went to one of the campuses of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education where Dan is chancellor and what and is known by shorthand in higher ed as Pasche. Now let me quickly pause here to give our listeners a bit of a lesson about Pennsylvania higher ed and then we'll quickly zoom out to talk about why the trends in the state are similar to what's happening elsewhere when outsiders think of public Higher ed in Pennsylvania, they might first think of Penn State or maybe the University of Pittsburgh. That's not Pasche. Penn State, Pitt, Temple and Lincoln are what are called state related institutions. That means they receive state appropriations but are less state owned and controlled for example, than the Pasche system is. Pasche is made up of the old normal schools that prepare teachers across the state and across the us. They later became teachers colleges and then the state regional universities, adding graduate programs and schools of business and nursing, etc. In Pennsylvania, as you mentioned, there are 14 of them. Places such as Bloomsburg, Westchester, Edinburgh, Slippery Rock. There's even two named after other states, California and Indiana. As you mentioned in the intro, the 14 universities enroll nearly 100,000 students, 94,000 to be exact, which is down by 22% or 25,000 students from just a decade ago, with some individual campuses suffering losses approaching 50%. It's part demographics. Pennsylvania, like many states in the Northeast and Midwest, are losing high school graduates and that's going to be particularly true by the middle of this decade. It's also part price. The average price for a Pennsylvania student living on camp of the Pasche campuses is around $22,000 a year. As Dan is fond of pointing out, the system really lost its price advantage over the last few decades. When I was covering Pennsylvania for the Chronicle, Penn State expanded what are known as its Commonwealth campuses, which are essentially branch campuses around the state. Those were two year feeders to its main university campus and State College. Those regional campuses turned into four year campuses where students could complete their degrees going to the main campus in State College. And I remember covering it for the Chronicle. It was quite a fight. Both private colleges and universities in the state fought the plan, as did the regional publics. But without any sort of coordinating board of higher education in Pennsylvania, no one really could stop it. So now at Penn State you could get a degree at one of these Commonwealth campuses or regional campuses for just a few more thousand dollars a year. And some might argue that it carries the brand name of Penn State. What's more, home to more than 100 private colleges, some of which because of the demographic decline, offer substantial discounts that bring a student's out of pocket costs close to what the state system charges. Indeed, Chris, one of the students I followed in my new book was accepted to East Stroudsburg University, which is one of the Pasche system campuses. But it would end up costing him more than Moravian, a private school in the state. And he which he where he was accepted, as well as Gettysburg, another Private, where he eventually enrolled. So while this crisis was accelerated by the pandemic, it was really decades in the making. Dan argues, like his counterparts in other state systems, that rising tuition has made up for the share of state dollars that have fallen over time. State support today is around 25% of the annual operating budget for pashe, which leaves the institutions within the system really dependent on tuition revenue. Before the pandemic and before Dan became chancellor, many were speculating that the state might have to close certain institutions, which is really challenging from two perspectives. One is politically, again, like many of these regional publics in the Northeast and the Midwest in particular, they're really the only thing keeping their college towns going. And suggesting one shutters to the state legislature is like shuttering a factory in the town, as many of our listeners probably got to know too well in recent weeks, as they learned Everything about the 67 counties in Pennsylvania from the maps on CNN and Fox and msnbc. Pennsylvania is essentially Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and a whole lot of nothing in between. Growing up there, my part of Pennsylvania was dependent on coal mining for decades. Others were dependent on other parts of the state, were dependent on steel mills. But as Billy Joel told us in Allentown, they are closing all the factories down. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and even Allentown have been able to diversify their economy, in large part thanks to meds and ED's, but not other parts of the state. So Dan came in, and he basically said he has two goals. Financial stabilization and evolving the curriculum to be in line with the economic needs of employers in the region. Given the dramatic changes happening in the state, a big part of his plan is enclosures, but mergers, or what he's calling integrations. As the plan is described, six campuses will become two. There's Bloomsburg, Lockhaven, and Mansfield in the middle of the state, and then there's California, Clarine, and Edinburgh in the west. And the plan would pool the resources of each trio of these universities into one. But it's yet unclear which two campuses will emerge as hubs for the new entities, or even what they'll be called. But both will have a single chief executive, shared faculty and staff, and one enrollment strategy. As Dan has remarked, scale does matter in higher education. And by combining three institutions into one, it will allow them to have, say, 13,000 students enrolled rather than three or 4,000, and therefore offer a wider suite of course offerings to serve a population that has different needs.

Yeah, it's quite a backdrop, and I'm really eager to get into this conversation. Not Even just to talk about the situation and dynamics in Pennsylvania, which are fascinating and important in their own right for the reasons that you just laid. But also to think through what this means more broadly for the system of regional comprehensive universities, which is a topic that both you and I have written about, you know, writ large across the country. Because as you said, most of these institutions started as these normal schools have evolved over the years. And now we're at this really inflection, interesting inflection point where they serve so many of America's students. But a lot of the dynamics around them are fundamentally changing. And so with that, let's, let's welcome Dan into this conversation. And Dan, thank you so much for being with us today.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

And we see a lot of systems around the country considering similar moves. Right. Avoiding the closures, looking at how do we combine efforts and so forth. As you talk to your counterparts across the country, you know, their systems all got here in similar ways. Right. There's that storyline. So is it the pandemic that's, you know, triggering folks to realize that you need to take action, or are there other dynamics that are really triggering this in your mind? What's sort of pushing this over the edge to make it politically feasible because even the integrations have had their challenges in the past?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And Jeff knows this. There's a bunch of us are kind of on the phone and finding each other involved in these considerations, let's put it that way. And I think maybe the challenges that we're facing, they're long term trends that have been developing and getting to a kind of a crisis point. I think Pennsylvania got there before the pandemic and maybe one or two others did as well. Certainly the pandemic has accelerated the path. And I've said out loud in other ventures, I'm really glad we had a two year head start in advance of the pandemic. I wouldn't want to try start all of this planning for this sort of system redesign now. So I think it's been an accelerant. It was certainly not the, it accelerated things here. It was not the cause. And I suspect that would be true in other places which are considering this.

So, Dan, it's interesting. I covered Pennsylvania as a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education as I did many other states. I started as a state reporter when I was at the Chronicle. And it's interesting to me the evolution of these types of schools that you lead these types of universities. They started out as normal schools, teachers, colleges, then they became these regional comprehensives and they really occupy this space between community colleges and state public flagships. It's this middle ground and they're never quite sure what they're supposed to be. Are they supposed to be more like the community colleges? Are they supposed to be more like the flagships? There's not a really good definition of them, unfortunately, because they serve so many students and there really needs to be a better definition of them. But they also don't have a lot of differentiation between them. In all these states you have 10, 12 of these or whatever it is in North Carolina and Pennsylvania and New York and et cetera. Do you think there has to be more differentiation between your institutions going forward?

I think actually potentially between the institutions within the system and across between other sectors? I think so. But I also think it means that public higher education at least needs to be thinking about how to fund pathways rather than sectors. As we think about sectors, secondary, community college, different sectors of four year space, it tends to build up these friction full walls that are very difficult for students to navigate and move between. And yet we know from a student's lens you need to navigate between because you're going to be going in and of education in the workforce probably throughout your lifetime. So I keep advocating in the kind of policy advocacy space for thinking about how would you fund public higher education around pathways rather than around sectors to begin to sort of break down some of these walls?

Dan, I'd actually love to double click on that because as you think about the regional publics or state comprehensive universities, traditionally known and thought of as the access institutions, you've already addressed about, you know, about why they've lost the affordability edge, if you will, with declining public support. And I think there's sort of two interesting parts of that. One is the question of, okay, so where are these would be students going instead? What's their alternative? Is it education or something else? Right. And then the second thing is, if you thought about the pathways point, funding pathways or funding students through these systems to, you know, cut through what are somewhat arbitrary, definite or definitional lines right between some of these structures, what would that look like from a policymaker's perspective? What would you tell someone in the Pennsylvania legislature, you know, to do? Or you can think federally if that's easier.

Right.

To cut through this?

Yeah.

I'll send you my testimony to the Higher Education Funding Commission in Pennsylvania. We talked at great length about this. You know, we think about. So imagine performance Based funding. Right. We think about performance based funding as something which would improve student completion. Imagine a performance, performance based funding model, which institutions, for the extent to which they align their programming with pathways and their students were able to sort of matriculate from other places, secondary school, community colleges in our place, but also go into programs sort of externally, and that there was some financial incentive for doing that. So that was one of several examples. There was another part of your question, Michael, which I dropped completely in my enthusiasm.

No, no, actually I'm just gonna geek out one more second there with you because I think it's a really interesting idea which you would actually incentivize. I mean, that would start to solve some of the credit transfer problem and a lot of the leakages. Right. Because now you would benefit financially, right, from that.

And then imagine if I'm. I'm going to come back to the distinctive value proposition of the four year space. But imagine if I'm one of our institutions and all of a sudden I have an opportunity to integrate into my general education curriculum. Doesn't matter whether it's a student studying history or chemistry or education, it doesn't matter. I integrated into that curriculum certificate competencies that enable them after a year or two years to achieve a certificate in digital foundational skill that's sort of recognized by Fortune 500 Technology companies of which exist and which can be easily integrated because we've seen it done at places like Duke or George Macy. So now I have a really powerful incentive to make sure that my students, whenever they decide to go somewhere else, are able to go somewhere else and they take something with them into the market that has some value and it's then transferable into their next credential. Right. So I mean, you could do some. Anyway, I could riff on that. The one thing I do want to say about our four years, they're wonderful places and I know you've covered them, Jeff and Michael, that you know about, but one of their distinctive advantages is that they, you know, we talk about sort of putting a technical layer, sort of a skills based layer on top of a general education curriculum as actually a new kind of gold standard in post secondary education because it allows people that breadth of knowledge and, you know, inquiry in the soft skills, but it also allows them to get their first job. We've been doing that actually, we've been doing that for years. You know, since we started as normal schools. We were career oriented. Right. And so we've evolved, right. So we offer, you know, a variety. Most of our students are in stem, business, health and education, I guess. And that's what we do, the general education sort of foundations and then you layer on it the technical skills that allow people to launch into their careers, which is, and I think it's a distinctive value that has incredible importance.

Distinctive value, Dan but has it been inexpensive enough, affordable enough for students?

And I think that is our given where we, and I mean all of us in public higher education in this space stand with respect to state funding in most states, no, the answer is it's no longer. We don't have the kind of affordability advantage. And so I think our biggest challenge is how do we regain, how do we recapture that affordability advantage, how do we introduce that whatever the multiple thousand dollars of gap should be between our net cost of attendance or net price of attendance and the next possible compet.

So in the absence of that right now, given, you know, reality what it is, and I'm glad, by the way, you, you made the point that you just did about the integration of general ed with technical skills and that being the history of these institutions, because I think a lot of people who come from different parts of higher ed ignore that history, if you will. So I think it's an important point. But I'm curious, you know, in the absence of those structural changes that you're talking about, where are these students going right now? You know, that being the other part of question, what, what is the alternative at the, at the moment and where do you see them going, if not state system itself?

So in a high employment economy, which we were in a few months ago, they were going a lot of them directly into the workforce. I think that was one of the reasons we were losing, you know, the number of students coming into post secondary education, at least in this state, was declining faster than the demographic would suggest. So that suggests to me that they're going into the workforce. There's obviously people are going to community colleges, although the pandemic seems to have flipped, that we have actually experienced stabilization, or maybe stabilization I'd call it that. Whereas the community colleges, at least for this semester across the country as well as in the state, have experienced a significant impact. So what the longer term trend is I don't honestly know. And as you both know, the alternative credentialing market is still pretty wild, wild west. So it is there it is strong and very narrowly focused industry, domains, verticals, I guess, but it's not yet comprehensive enough to be viable. That to me is the interesting. That's why we're at such an Interesting watershed moment because again, you go back to that public policy framework and you're creating pathways approach to funding. You have an opportunity now to integrate a much broader range of providers and to engineer partnerships between existing legacy institutions and providers, those who are offering short course credentials, for example, in some kind of partnership revenue share type activity.

So Dan, I want to wrap up on question about your own career because again, covering these systems over the years, you tended to have people lead them who kind of grew up in them. So they maybe taught, they became a president of one of the institutions within it and then they became head of the system. Or maybe they jumped across states and led another system or in some states you were serving the legislature or you're a lieutenant governor and you became head of the system. So there's like the political route or kind of growing up in the system. You took a very different route, obviously an academic route, but then a philanthropy. Do you feel like there needs to be kind of a different. First of all, has that been helpful to you? And do you think there is a different model for leadership not only at the system level, but also clearly at the institutional level of your institutions within the system?

Yeah.

So actually it's a subject I talk about a great deal with my colleagues, the presidents here because we're all involved in this massive transformation. And I think one of the things we realized that we all have different backgrounds, some traditional, some lesser. One of the things we realized though is that the tools in our toolbox are not necessarily the tools we need to address the challenges that we're facing. And it's fascinating. You could have these, some of them, some of them still work. So that's good. But I think one of the biggest challenges we face in a kind of transformational activity like this is how do you know, are we thinking big enough? Are we actually thinking the right things? Because you're always drawn to what you know. And that's as much true of me, given my background. You know, I've still been in around higher education for a while. It's still a question that I have. So I think one of the things that I've become to really appreciate is the collegiality of my peers, my colleagues, my presidents, their vice presidents, great faculty leadership as we're all trying to explore what might work. And it's fascinating, I think, to the leadership question, what's critical about today's leadership is that ability to just say, okay, maybe I need to look at the other side of this envelope and frankly have the resilience to this stuff is not easy and it is not for the faint of heart. I tell you that for a fact after this week. But to be willing to just keep your eye on the prize, which to me is the pathways that we're offering to students and the ability that those pathways provide for students to be mobile socially, to support social mobility and also to support the state economic development. And if you continue to think about the students, you can take the hits. But those couple of things, that ability just to push yourself to get outside your comfort zone and to think outside, I don't want to say outside the box so Pat, but to constantly look for new approaches and to have the resilience you're going to need to have to make the very difficult decisions that need to be made.

Well, Dan, we're going to be watching closely what you're doing there because I also think that if you're successful, and I know you will be because I'm cheering you on also because I may I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, so care a lot about what's happening in that state. But I also think it could become a model then for the rest of the nation for other similar systems. So thank you so much for joining us on Future you.

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And welcome back to Future youe, A fascinating conversation with Dan there, Michael, about a state that is obviously near and dear to my heart and particularly a state of system that is as well because so many of the students that I went to high school with, so many of my classmates ended up in that state system because it really is the only alternative for many students who couldn't go to, you know, Penn State. And when I was growing up, Penn State's regional campuses, as they're known, most of them were two year programs that actually transferred into State College. There are now many more four year programs too. But we'll talk about this probably in a little bit, but the affordability of both systems is not great. But you know, so he talked a little bit about this idea of funding pathways rather than schools. And I wanted to dive a little bit deeper on that because we don't really talk often about this in higher education. But I'm wondering if this is going to become post Covid something that policymakers in particularly look at. Can you talk a Little bit about what that. What, what he meant by that.

Yeah, I. So I was fascinated by this. It's obviously something that Dan has talked about before in others in other settings, but I think it doesn't get enough attention because there's so much obsession over the integration conversation within Pennsylvania. But the basic notion, right. That he said is performance based funding, which is somewhat simplistically, in my view, Jeff, been funding based on just students completing programs. So it doesn't worry about whether they learned anything or that they get placed into jobs or anything like that, but just completion alone, you know, tying funding to that. And what Dan is talking about is, well, what if we also tied some portion of the funding to how well the programs align to each other so that we could see a student start in a community college and then go out into the workforce and then seamlessly re. Enter, say, in the Pasche system. Right. And not. And not have to redo credits or take classes over that they had already taken. But all those credits would transfer because there had been a seamless alignment between the systems. And that would actually pay off for the community colleges and Pasche. They wouldn't. It wouldn't be lost revenue, in other words, because they would get something for having been aligned for that student, in essence. And I think it's a really important idea. It goes also to the heart of, you know, what competency based learning advocates hope for, which is that if we can measure the learning itself at the level of competencies, all you got to do is focus on that. And where it's earned is far less important. In other words, and it's sort of this idea that we wrote about recently at the Christensen Institute when the pandemic started about creating seamless credit transfer. It's the same idea of trying to align these incentives to focus on the learning, not where it occurs, which I think is a pretty big idea that Dan's in onto.

Yes, but you've mentioned a word twice there. Seamless. How important is that? Because right now it's kind of a. It's Apache in some ways. It's Apache system that, you know, students would have to have a lot of agency to navigate. So how do you. How do you kind of get over that challenge of the. Of the patchiness of this.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think this is one of Dan's other important sort of points that he made, which is. And I think it comes from his work at the Gates foundation, frankly, Jeff, where he got to see and look at this whole question of getting students the Credentials that they need regardless of their background. Right. And from diverse low income backgrounds, making sure that they get credentials and skills. He was able to see that the volume of, you know, coding boot camps and these alternative providers that have come up and say, yeah, they're really exciting, but they're not serving large volumes of students compared to these public systems that are serving, you know, 80% of undergraduates in the community colleges and regional comprehensive universities. And you say, well, but they're not nimble at creating curriculum for the current needs of the workforce. So how do you move to a Pathways view that can sort of allow them to complement each other rather than compete with each other, I think is the big idea. And I think that's really clever of how do you create something that, you know, by looking at the skills that you learn? And you talk about this all the time, Jeff, like how do we move away from a credentialing on degree to skills itself? And then you can basically use these systems that are growing from below but are still, but still lack volume to really pair nicely with the volume and degrees that the existing system is able to, is able to hold and hopefully make a much more seamless experience for a student so they don't have to worry, you know, if I get a credential from a boot camp, will anyone recognize it if I then try to convert it into accredited a higher ed institution? Because as Paul LeBlanc told us in a past, you know, past podcast, degrees still matter against this. So I think it's a really important thing and it also relates into a question of affordability. And Dan obviously talked about this from a certain perspective. But, but Jeff, you're thinking a lot about the affordability. You've been talking to a lot of students as they're grappling with affordability. To me, anyway, Dan's comments suggest that we shouldn't just think affordability on the price tag of an institution alone, but more from a Pathways perspective of what's it going to take to get in the economy. But I'd love your take on that.

Yeah, I mean it really does have to have. I think that's a building block of any institution coming out of this, out of this pandemic is not only the price tag, but the return on the investment that you're going to have. By that measure. Pennsylvania just does not rank very well. These are not affordable institutions. As Dan has talked. They lost their price advantage among the privates in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, like much of the Northeast, has a very robust private system. 100 plus private colleges and universities, many of which are also in these rural communities throughout the state and struggling and as a result have heavily discounted their tuition. So in some cases you might be a student in Pennsylvania and the cost of going to a private university with its institutional aid, and if you add a Pell Grant on top of, may be a loan is actually going to be less than expensive than going to one of the public universities. And that just shouldn't really be the case for many of these, many of these students. And by the way, they also can get in and out of these private institutions faster. So the whole idea of student success, which obviously Dan is pressing much harder on now as chancellor of the system, but you can also get a degree that may have more currency in the job market. And so to me, affordability is not just a measure of the overall price tag, but it's also this measure of the return on investment.

It's a really good point, Jeff, and I think it's an important one for another factor because there's all these fights over, right? What caused the affordability crisis? Was it a disinvestment by higher ed or was it costs run away? And I think both sides have some really compelling points on this. From my point of view, I don't think it's a straight line straightforward as Dan makes it about disinvestment, I don't think it's as straightforward as someone makes it about, gee, those institutions can't reign in costs. But ultimately I think it's, if we can reset the conversation around return on investment, then it's, it's not a question of like affordability in some mythical vacuum of what should this cost? It's like, can you pay it back in a reasonable way? Because it's actually going to help me get a job and prepare me for life success. That makes it justify costs because, because you know, something expensive that pays off, like that's a good investment and we, and it's affordable as all get out if it benefits you in the long run. Which I think speaks to the other piece of this which I just, I'd love to have you hammer for a moment, which is, you know, regional comprehensive universities, they play a critical role in developing technical skills and they are a big part of these institutions histories. And there's so many people in higher ed, Jeff. I mean I, I've been, I was in some classes, classes recently where people were saying, oh, higher education has never been in the technical skills business. And I just look at this and I, I, that doesn't seem to me to be the case at all. If you look at the history of these institutions.

Well, and that's particularly true at these, at these normal schools and you know, teacher education, which is in some ways was the, the first technical education piece of, of this. And all of them of course, have a liberal arts core that is, is critically important. And I think one, one of the mistakes that these regional publics have done in other states is to get rid of that liberal arts core. But most of these, if you look at the largest programs, it's still going to be teacher education, business, nursing, very practical, skills based, job focused programs that are coming out of these institutions. I think one of the things that they haven't been great at in the last 20, 30 years particularly is their nimbleness. I think when they, they first became these comprehensive institutions, particularly in the 60s and 70s and reacting to the changes in the job market, particularly as more women entered the job market, they were much more nimble and they haven't done really a lot of academic prioritization in the last 10 or 20 years. I think going back to your cost point earlier, Michael, is that we talked about the enrollment in the Pasche system, for example, which decreased by something like 30%, but the teaching faculty only decreased by about 10%. Right. So you naturally, and I think we're seeing this by the way, in a lot of colleges now where the enrollments have been dropping, but they haven't been trimming the academic faculty or the academic programs even as they've been trying to grow new programs. And to me, this whole idea of really looking at academic programs and prioritizing them in a way is going to be a big piece of what's going to happen at most colleges and universities over the next year. And I think that's particularly important in these regional publics. They really kind of get stuck between the flagship universities in Pennsylvania, something like Penn State, for example, and the community colleges, which are largely locally funded in many states. And they're kind of in the middle as I've described them before. They're kind of the stepchild of higher education, but they Enroll More than 40% of undergraduates. So it's a huge sector of higher education that we shouldn't just ignore.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I'm curious for you as a Pennsylvania native. You know, before Dan stepped in, there was a lot of conversation about the closures here. Right. And I'll note that obviously his plan, you know, he's calling it an integration, but it's a merger by any other name there's, it's going to go from six accredited institutions to two accredited institutions. So new accreditation. Right. It's not like, even though they're keeping the campuses, it's accreditation. So in my book, as I keep count for me and Clay, right, of our consolidating colleges, that's. That's a 42% decline. Six out of 14. But, but I'm more curious about this, the emotional side of this, Jeff, and sort of like, you know, politically, how you get that through is. Is still a tall order for Dan right now. Right. This isn't straightforward. And so I love your sense of this conversation, of this consolidation and, and how that's going to play out and how it resonates right in these communities.

And, and, and, and I think for listeners who are in states where these universities are tucked in every corner of their own state would probably understand this, but I don't think you quite get how important these are in their communities. You know, one of the campuses that they're going to consolidate is Mansfield, which is not that far from where I grew up. It's in north central Pennsylvania. Edinburgh is another one southeast of Erie. I was actually on that campus with Dan about a year and a half ago. And it is the only thing, you know, Mansfield and Edinburgh and some of these other places. It's the only thing in these communities. It is the, it's the employment center. So it is like that factory. It is the cultural center. So if you want to go see a play, that's the place you go see it. If you want to have a community gathering, you have it on that campus. It is an economic engine for the community, students living there, parents coming to visit their kids, you know, spending time in the restaurants and in the community and the grocery stores, renting house houses, etc. And you know, they also have sports, so it's kind of a center for sports. It's not Penn State football in that way, but it still provides kind of this engine of that the town is still there. And I don't think, again, if you live in the industrial Midwest and in the Northeast, you know that these towns used to be centers for other reasons. They had interest, industry there, big farming communities and things like that. And now they are really rural and in some ways decimated, except for these universities. And so if these universities were to close or go away, there's nothing else there. Now, I'm not saying that that is the reason higher education institutions should exist, right? They should exist, obviously, to educate students and produce good graduates. But there is this aspect of it that I, I don't think can be lost, particularly in the political environment that we live in.

Yeah, it's a good point, Jeff. And the only snarky comment I guess I'll make as well, Penn State football, I'm not sure is Penn State football this year either, but, but I think it's a really good. Exactly right. So it sets it off on an interesting note to begin the year. But it's, it's a good conversation and it's a good place, I think, for us to leave it. Jeff and for those listening, we'll be right back with a conversation with our sponsor, Salesforce.

And welcome back to Future youe. Joining us now is Natalie Mainland who is a senior vice president and General Manager of education cloud@salesforce.org Natalie has more than 15 years of experience working in technology and education with organizations including Blackboard, Autodesk in Pearson. It's great to have you with us today, Natalie.

Yeah, it's great to be there here with both of you, Jeff and Michael.

So, Natalie, technology is clearly shaping the future of higher education. Right now everybody's talking about the technology stack at colleges and universities. But as we look beyond this current moment in higher education, what do you think is going to stick from what is happening right now in technology and higher ed?

Yeah, I think it's a really good question and one that we are also trying to understand in this incredibly fast paced environment that we find ourselves in right now post pandemic and in this economic crisis. We're probably looking at another political crisis too. So the one thing that's for sure is we're seeing digital transformation accelerate. This is actually a very exciting trend because I think institutions have been doing work on this for years. But what we've learned from our customers is they are doing things now in a matter of days or a week that literally they had on their roadmap and their plans that would have taken two or three years. So I think it's very exciting where this is headed. And there's a few key trends I think that are also part of this. One is taking a look at the digital divide and this equity gap. I think this pandemic has just exacerbated this. But I think there's an opportunity now that is really critical to provide support services and think about supporting learners who holistically in K12 certainly, but all the way through higher ed and into the workplace. I think institutions are going to have to think about broadening access to education and to survive, they're going to have to think about new markets and attracting these lifelong learners. But also inherent in that is personalizing the recruiting and admissions process to really be able to compete effectively in the education marketplace. You know, I think this crisis puts tuition and fundraising at risk. This is, you know, nothing new. But schools are going to be have to become a lot more efficient, effective, how they transform their business models. Look at new modes of tuition, acquisition, retention, and even fundraising in order to, you know, survive in this environment and thrive. And then it's pretty clear, you know, that the future of work is demanding lifelong learning and that this is a lifelong endeavor now. And I think that's especially true with millions now that are unemployed globally or displaced economically. So this need to learn anywhere and then easily validate that learning as part of the lifelong learning approach is becoming, I think, incredibly critical at this point.

Natalie, you mentioned the points about access and equity right in that conversation, and there's no doubt that this year has shined a bright light on the issues of inequities within higher education. And in some ways, technology has often been talked about as part of that challenge right now. Right. Digital divide and so forth. But flipping the script a little bit, how can we design intentionally so that technology can be used to really resolve these issues, not just uncovered them?

Yeah, I think, you know, I love the quote by, you know, the head of the Oakland Unified School District. You know, she talks about using technology to help operationalize equity and equality. And again, I think there are so many ways that technology can be used to help build community, especially in the K12 environment and higher ed as well, to connect students, parents, staff to the support services within the community that are critical. You know, food insecurity, housing insecurity are true not just in K12, but higher ed. And how can we leverage technology platforms to build better connections to bring in those support services to help students be successful, graduate on time, get through and achieve their learning objectives? There's critical ways here. Community is just one of them. And connection to support services. I think there's also ways, as we get farther out into types of technology like AI to really help us focus on those students that need the most to be able to catch up to their peers and graduate and minimize debt as they go through their higher ed journey. How can we support and identify critical needs for those students that need it most?

Natalie, it's clear to us that higher education, like many industries, had to pivot online when the pandemic hit. But as we all know, education in general, Both K through 12, and higher ed really struggled with that transition, while the tech industry, because was ahead of the curve, especially around the digital infrastructure, was able to make that pivot much more easily. What can higher ed learn from the tech industry coming out of this pandemic?

Yeah, I think there's certainly a myriad of ways, but a couple that come to mind are being able to, quote, quickly move to a remote work environment, I think is something that now the tech industry is looking at as, you know, a more permanent solution going forward. They were quickly look at Salesforce, was quickly able to pivot and move, you know, their 50,000 employees into a work from home or remote working environment. And now we're looking at options to say, okay, maybe a part of that workforce wants to continue in that mode. So how do we provide again, kind of all the tools that we need to do our jobs in that kind of hybrid environment, if you will. And I think higher ed can also learn from the approaches that technology is taking in that realm. I think on a broader scope, looking at the types of business models they need to evolve to potentially, one is looking again at that lifelong learning approach. Could they potentially offer subscription offerings to these lifelong learners so that they could kind of dip into learning offerings throughout their career? I think that subscription approach is also intriguing and something that higher ed should be looking at as well.

Well, Natalie, it's always great to catch up with folks in the industry about what's happening in higher ed, but also outside of higher ed. So thank you so much for joining us today. And that does it for this episode of Future youe. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

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