The End of a Crazy Year

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn. Welcome to Future youe. I'm Michael Horn, coming to you from my home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

And I'm Jeff Salingo coming to you from my home in the suburbs of Washington, dc.

Now, Jeff, we've been sheltered in place for a number of weeks now, along with much of the rest of the country. Now, I shouldn't overstate that you've gotten away a couple times, and I'm a little jealous. But it's hard to believe that we've been doing these shows for the last several weeks remotely and striving as best as we can to give folks the latest and greatest thinking on a variety of perspectives for how higher education ought to handle this pandemic and recession and general unrest in America. And I confess, Jeff, I had lost count of how many episodes we had done together since this all started. So I went back and looked, and this is the 11th episode we've recorded remotely since this all started together. And as it's our last episode of this season on, I thought it would make sense if we did two things. So first, I thought maybe let's offer a brief couple takeaways from what we've learned over the last many weeks as we've recorded all these episodes for Future youe and had some illuminating guests on. And then when we come back from break, I want to interview you and put you on the hot seat about your book that's coming out in August. Who Gets in and why A Year Inside College Admissions. Because there's no question that the ground in college admissions has. Has shifted considerably since you wrote the book. And frankly, I'm just personally curious what your take is on a number of questions that educators and parents have.

Yeah, Michael, that sounds. That sounds good. But also be curious to ask you a few questions when we get to that second segment, because of course, you've been part of some news as well. Recently, the Entangled group where you were head of strategy got acquired by Guild Education, which those listeners who might not know Guild helps large Fortune 1000 employers offer education benefits for their employees to a portfolio of online academic institutions. And of course, you came out with a policy paper with the Christensen Institute almost as soon as this crisis started. So sometimes that's unfortunate that I think our listeners should go back and look for that.

Yeah, we started cranking on that, like, the crisis hit, and I was like, oh, my God, there's an idea here. And just started pulling all night for like four nights.

And that paper pushed policymakers to rethink pretty significantly how credit transfer works and the opportunity for competency based education. And the paper was called Creating Seamless Credit Transfer. So it's something that folks should definitely look for.

All right, well, that sounds like a good plan. I'd love to talk about it because it's made for this time. So. But let's start with the takeaways that we had from our podcasts and guests over the season. So maybe two takeaways from you first,

Jeff yeah, so I'm going to go back to guest that we had on before COVID To me, this season's kind of split in two, pre Covid and after Covid. And as you mentioned, we've done a lot of episodes apart since COVID hit, and hopefully we've been a good resource for our listeners. And I expect going into our new season in the fall, it's probably going to be Covid again, given that most people are going to be trying to get back to campus in some way. And so there will be a host of new issues to deal with. But the two to the two guests that I wanted to talk about, or pair of guests in one case, was the Edmond co founders Sabrina Manville and Nick Dukhoff, who we had on probably over the winter, I think, and they talked a lot about the future of higher education, particularly of small private colleges. And analysis I know you were part of, and I think that's even more critical now is what is the financial sustainability of higher education institutions? And in fact, in recent weeks, as I have done these evening office hours with our friends that grown and flown and we've had tons of parents, high school parents and students and counselors on the number one question I get, or maybe the number two question after testing, which I know we may talk about later, is how do I know the college my son or daughter will pick and is going to be in business in four years or or probably more so how do I know that they're not going to be financially struggling in the near term, that my son or daughter won't get the resources that they need? And it's really unfortunate that Sabrina and Nick and in that episode and I encourage folks to to go back and and listen to it, unfortunately, you know, their data has not really seen the light of day in the way I think both of us wish that it had and the transparency that we need to have around institutional financial sustainability. So I think that's one one pair of guests that I that that I encourage listeners to go back and go to that episode. And the second one was one that we had from a series of episodes we did from Arizona State University in, in downtown Phoenix or at the downtown Phoenix facility. And that was Louisiana's Commissioner of Higher Education, Kim Hunter Reed. And we had Kim on soon after LSU was in the national championship game. And Kim was talking a lot about state higher education and the master plan in Louisiana, which brought in employers around not only the completion agenda, but also upskilling the workforce in Louisiana. The reason I bring up that episode is for two reasons. Higher education is going to clearly have to work more closely with employers coming out of this pandemic, given that entire sectors of the economy may not recover anytime soon, if ever. Hospitality, you know, travel and tourism. And, you know, there's a number of other industries that I think are going to be impacted, retail by this pandemic. Also other industries, health care being a big one, I think will be transformed by this telemedicine and so forth, and so will higher education. By the way. The other reason I bring up Kim is because she talked a lot about state funding. State funding has actually kind of stabilized in recent years after a big downturn in the 2008 recession. And now as we go into this summer with many state fiscal years ending June 30, and we start to new fiscal years, you know, so I'm, I'm associated with Georgia Tech in Georgia, and I know that coming out of this fiscal year, they're going to have a 14% budget cut. And that's just one year for the public universities in Georgia. And so I think we're going to see this across the country. Public universities after the last recession, it took them years to recover from that. And the question for me is, what's going to happen with state budgets going into this fall? We know that public enrollment, enrollment in public universities has gone way up in recent years, and we know that that also may happen coming out of this pandemic as students and parents and adult students look for less expensive options. So the question is, what is the role of states are going to play in that? And are we going to see the same thing happen a second time around where we see this big state disinvestment in higher education that takes years to recover. So it's something I think not only should you listen, go back and listen to Kim Hunter Reed's interview with us, but also to looking at the fall episodes. It's an issue I definitely hope we can get into. So, Michael, what are your takeaways from the episodes that we recorded this year.

So I think it's interesting that you went existential, if you will, with both of yours in terms of the future of higher ed. Mine is more around how leaders at higher ed institutions should respond amidst all this and sort of how they continue to plan for the future. So the first one that I had, as I looked back was when we had Mike Armini on from Northeastern and he talked about, he talked, I thought it was actually one of the best interviews we've, we've had, period. But he talked about how Northeastern created not just a committee to focus on the here and now logistics of moving the spring semester to remote learning and all that went around that, but how the president, Joseph Ayoun, who's also been a guest on Future youe, created a second committee really looking at the future implications for Northeastern so that as early as March when this hit, they were able to start thinking about the fall semester and beyond of all of the different scenarios, logistics, questions that they ought to be thinking for different stakeholders so that they could just actually be really go into the summer, if you will, already having identified a lot of issues and being able to troubleshoot them. And I just thought that was so smart to dedicate a group of people who don't have day to day responsibility for the here and now, to be able to be forward thinking about something that if you're not thinking about, it's going to be around the corner from you really quickly. And we're seeing that now, right, obviously with a lot of institutions trying to make plans pretty quickly. The second thing that jumped out to me was we had Jon Katzman and Ben Nelson on an episode and Ben, who is the founder of Minerva Institute and the Minerva Project, the Minerva Institute being a nonprofit, first elite liberal arts college created in the United States in many, many decades, and the Minerva Project being the for profit arm that sort of creates the technology and pedagogy behind it. He had this comment about how even as universities are really staring down existential threats as you talked about, Jeff, that many of them and many of their faculty are still sort of debating that are the faculty being listened to enough in the shared governance model that that rules higher ed, if you will, and having conversations about process which is holding up institutions even as many sink beneath the weight of a really damaged business model in these times. And he was sort of saying, can you believe that they're griping even as they need to be figuring out how to swim? And I guess my overall takeaway from both of those and so maybe I'm going to cheat and give three here, Jeff, but was that, you know, having the right process for the problem at hand is really important in higher ed. And all too often we sort of just revert back to the set of processes or traditions we have in place without asking what problem were they designed to solve or why were they created. And I've just been so taken by those leaders on our podcast. But you know, in general, like mit, for example, that has crowdsourced its reopening plans that have been incredibly transparent about what they do and don't know and when they know it with their various stakeholders to help create a more robust process to think through all these, you know, different challenges that higher ed frankly is facing. So hopefully you'll forgive me for sneaking in a third there. But we're going to take a break there because I'm excited to gear up and grill Jeff for his new book that's coming up. So when we come back on Future youe, we'll get right to that. This episode of Future youe was made

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higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. Welcome back to Future youe and I'm excited to get into it. Jeff, you wrote this book who gets in and why. I recommend everyone go ahead and pre order. We'll go a deeper dive on it in the fall, obviously when we come back for the next season once it's out. But right now, pre order it, it's a great read. I I will say, even as an insider, I I learned a ton from the reporting you had done and I personally I I know you've been worrying a little bit about how much things have changed since you reported it, but I personally think it still has a ton to offer folks and is hyper relevant even with the changes in college admissions right now. But I am curious to start with because I know it's on your mind so much. What what has changed the most since you wrote the book, in your opinion?

Well, the process itself hasn't changed. I mean students will still get recruited, apply to college and the gatekeepers, especially at the selective colleges, still have a process of trying to figure out how to select a class. But the entire junior year, at least the spring of junior year for rising seniors for the class of 2021 who will apply for admission in the fall of 2021, clearly there's one big asterisk for a lot of what they did. Extracurricular activities, grades in many cases went pass fail jobs, summer internships, all that stuff that rising seniors would largely put in their portfolios for admission largely disappeared. And probably the biggest change is testing. We've seen over the last, particularly over the last couple of weeks as the satisfaction the College Board announced they couldn't, they couldn't develop an at home sat, which I think was probably going to be a disaster anyway. There were a lot of complaints about the at home AP exam, say based on the. Yeah, and I think that, I think the pushback that they got on that realized that they couldn't, that was a 45 minute exam. They couldn't do a several hour sat at home version. They just couldn't develop it. Meanwhile, the ACT is also just like the SAT has canceled tons of testing dates. The ACT actually had a testing date recently and the talk among the proctors was just how much of a disaster that was in terms of social distancing and everything else. I'm just, I think everyone's really concerned whether they're going to be able to have an SAT and ACT this fall. Both companies have essentially loaded up September with tons of dates for testing to try to get to make up for what they lost in the spring. But what has happened in the meantime is you have had a ton of colleges go test optional at least for next year, including almost the entire Ivy League, even Princeton and Yale and others, Stanford, talking about this idea of a test optional for a year, which means that if you don't have a test number, if you don't have a test score, you don't have to send it in and it's not going to affect your admission. Now there's a lot of skepticism. And so I think that parents and students, especially those trying to go to the most selective colleges, if they think they're going to test well, they're going to try everything in their power to at least get one test score. Because you know, one of the things I note in the book and when anybody ever asked me, well, your book must have changed a lot because of COVID 19. I say that parents and students have always put more emphasis on testing than the actual admissions officers admitting them have.

Just to pause there for a moment because I was really struck by that. And my takeaway was that because there's a lot of people right now on Twitter and social media who are not so subtly cheering sort of what they view as the end or demise of the College Board and things like that, which is another question that I'm curious about your take on. But what I was so struck by in reading your book was that the impact of the SAT and act, particularly for those who, you know, go to high schools that are known, tend to be from upper income parts of the bracket and so forth, it doesn't seem to actually have that much impact. It's much more useful as a check for those high schools or, excuse me, for those students applying for high schools where they don't have as much information about what the GPA actually means.

Right. And that's the part of the equity argument in, in terms of using some sort of test where, you know, mostly selective colleges have feeder high schools. They always have. They have more feeder high schools than they used to have.

Right.

It's not just the New England prep school. Right.

It's brought in.

Right. It's not just the New England prep school sending their kids to the Ivy League anymore. Right. So now you have more schools across the country, but for the most part there's, you know, you don't have 30,000, you know, students from 30,000 high schools applying to the top colleges. You know, probably a fewer than 10,000 high schools. And so they know a lot of these high schools and where they don't, that's where they use the SAT or the ACT kind of as a check in. They still don't use it as a determinant to get in, but as a check in. And so I think that institutions want some sort of national norming, particularly these selective colleges and universities. So coming out of this, could we potentially see a new test, a revised sat? As you know, Michael, in the last couple of weeks, the University of California system has decided to do away with the SAT altogether or the ACT and the ACT altogether over the next couple of years for in state residents. And one of the things they promised is potentially develop a new test. I'm still questioning whether that will happen, but it may be it will. You know, I. There's still a lot of focus on testing in high schools at the state level. So I think that that's going to perhaps we might match those two things up where kind of the graduation exit test becomes more of the college admissions test. I doubt we're going to see testing go away overall because I think that it's kind of built into our psyche in the country and I think that there's going to continue to be a movement for some sort of testing and admissions. Just one other quick point, because you Know, I make it in the first chapter of the book where I talk about marketing and higher ed. And one of the things we haven't talked a lot about about test optional is if fewer students take the SAT and the act. There are, and all those exams have been canceled this spring and some of this summer is those are the names colleges buy to recruit students. So without test takers, there are no names. And it really changes the how do colleges now find students to market to going into this fall. And so that's going to also change as well because those name buys are going to be very different for colleges.

So I want to push on. The testing point. The marketing point is fascinating. And so all the downstream impacts of College Board having fewer names and so forth and playing less of a role isn't just in admissions. There's two other sides. You just pointed the marketing, but there's also the awarding of merit scholarship and rankings and things of that nature. So I love to hear your take on that because we know US News is dropping SAT ACT from its rankings, which I think accounted for 7.5% of its ranking and its most recent methodology, if I, if I understand correctly. So I'm curious there actually. Let's start there because. And then I'll ask you the existential question for the College Board.

Yeah. And I think a big part of this is what is going to happen this fall if they are able to do some testing. And so a decent amount of students still submit scores even to test optional schools. And the, you know, and I think all of these schools that are going test optional for a year will see what their class looks like. You know, we may see some of them stay test optional. And a number of colleges, including Davidson are doing a three year test pilot test of this idea. They're not coming. You know, some of them won't come back. Some of them will. And I think it depends on who comes back and who doesn't. Part of this is a competitive nature of this. Schools that compete against each other if, if they're all test optional, they'll go test optional to compete better. If most of them accept tests, for example, in the Ivy League, I think they're all going back. So I, we should revisit this in a, in, in a year.

So, so just one other point on this because the College Board, they actually, I, I don't think most people are, are aware or want to be aware that they overhauled the SAT a few years ago and made it much more in line with the Common Core standards and what and the curriculum actually taught in high school. So that potentially it could be one of those exit exams that you just talked about for high school. And maybe some of the fees associated with it and some of the testing conditions, if you will, of it could be absorbed into the high school schedule in some way. And that burden could be shifted from individual families to taxpayers writ large. I guess would be some of the thinking. I'm curious your take on that. Does that increase? It seems like you're loath to make a strong prediction right now in the future of the College Board. But I'm curious, does that feel like a realistic insurance policy for them?

Yeah, I don't see the College Board going out of business. I'm probably a little bit more worried about ACT because, you know. Right. Because they have some other products. But, you know, the College Board is a billion dollar organization. They have the ap. The SAT has really come back in terms of its competition against the act. To me, we should all look to California. What the University of California decides to do is going to be critical in this because as California goes, really, so does the nation on testing.

And they essentially made the SAT to begin.

They made the sat. The changes to the SAT over the years have largely been driven by the University of California because they're such a large system, because California students are more likely than many other states to go out of state for college. So when they apply to the University of California, they're also applying to the Ivies and other places. So they tend to drive what happens on this. So where the University of California goes on testing over the next couple of years, I think will drive much of the nation. I also think what happens in admissions over the course of this next year and how institutions use testing, if they use it at all, is going to drive their decisions going forward. Are they going back to the test or not? So I think we will know a lot more. I'm loath to make predictions because I think we're going to know a lot more in six to eight months in terms of the testing. So, Michael, now switching to the other end of the spectrum here, which isn't so much about admissions for high school graduates, but thinking about students who are seeking to transfer. This is a major issue right now. As we know, a lot of people with some college credits but no degree will be coming back to school, likely online, and seeking to finish what they started. But it's also very likely that it will occur at institutions that they weren't previously enrolled in. Right. We know this is a huge problem but you basically say that the experience in health care, for example, suggests we won't fix this unless we do something really different. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So in the paper, we hearkened back to the last recession where Washington was abuzz about the promise of electronic health records to basically simplify that and streamline, if you will, the delivery of information right around the conditions that patients had and so forth, and just eliminate medical errors, save costs and all these things. And so Washington, when it, when it passed one of its stimulus bills, it put a lot of money, several billion dollars into electronic health records. And now, a decade later, they have not moved the needle one bit at all. In fact, many people are now really upset because they've created different errors, they've created different costs. And the biggest thing that they've created is lock in. And what I mean by that is essentially Kaiser Permanente, they have their own version of an electronic health record that is designed to keep you inside the electronic, excuse me, inside of Kaiser's system. They do not want that to be interoperable with, say, intermountain healthcare or any of the other large hospital chains and systems because it's just another way of, hey, our doctors know you, theirs can't. And we actually don't want to lose you or your money that you represent. And it's very similar, I think, to higher education, right? It's. It's very similar in the sense that higher education institutions, we always talk about credit transfer, but they don't want to accept a lot of credits from other institutions because it means, from their perspective, potential loss of revenue. They have all sorts of ways of saying, yeah, we'll take some credits, but it's not going to count toward the majority of, or we have a cap on it, or we don't accept credits from nationally accredited or community colleges or whatever it might be. And all these barriers, you know, policymakers have just been, you know, smashing their head against a door over and over again to try to create common numbering systems and all sorts of things. But ultimately, faculty and institutions don't want to accept these credits, and not just for economic reasons that I explained, by the way, Jeff, in terms of the business model, but also for legitimate academic questions. Right? They don't want to accept it because. Because they truly don't know. Is the coursework you took at Institution X equivalent or rigorous enough to count for credit at our institution? And there's, in the current system, there's no way to know. And so, you know, a big argument that we advance in the paper is the notion of using third party credentialing organizations that offer assessments to basically have someone sit for, I know this is irony coming off of a testing conversation, but essentially sit for an assessment or have their portfolio of work judged in a rigorous and valid way from an outside organization. So like a Salesforce certification or digital marketing from Facebook or what have you to basically signal that you have actually mastered those skills and so forth, or this basket of courses. And then an institution could opt in and basically say, hey, if you have that, well, we know you've, you've mastered these sets of skills, we'll accept that the credits that you earned at another institution and basically solve the credit transfer problem by not relying on the institutions to do it, but these third party bodies.

Yeah. So Michael, one of the things I was struck as I was reading was that your way into the issue was not was through credit transfer. And this is really was not a paper about credit transfer. It's really about competency based learning and helping shift federal policy to paying for outcomes, not credit hours, which has been really hard. I mean, this has been your pet issue for a long time. Can you talk a little bit about your proposed solution?

Yeah, it's a good point. You know, credit transfers, obviously I think it's significant right now in particular given the numbers of students will be flowing back and forth, but ultimately, you know, that, what was it, six, seven years ago, everyone predicted competency based education would overhaul higher education, it would disrupt and so forth. And here we are, and there's sort of still the same number of institutions are approved for competency based learning, or direct assessment, as it's called and in the Higher Education act and it's very capped still in terms of its growth. And I think a key reason why is that credit hours were created to be the coin of the realm, if you will, the currency to judge quality in higher education. But they're fundamentally input based. And the very cool thing about moving to a system that has third party credentials totally separate from the higher ed institutions themselves. To say yes, Michael has in fact mastered this basket of knowledge and skills is that we create a sort of a gold seal of approval, if you will, that is more robust, it's outcome oriented in a way that credit hours is not. And then we can start to say, hey, institution X, if Michael passes this assessment, we don't care how long it took him to do it, we'll pay you your fee that you charge because we actually know he actually mastered it and demonstrated mastery. And we were paying you for the outcome instead of the input of time, basically. And so I think it's a clever way for part of higher education. And I want to be clear. I think it's part of higher education to help stand up a competency based system that's focused on outcomes. But I don't pretend, Jeff, that it's going to sort of overtake all of higher education. And, you know, if we were to make this move, I think it's a part of higher ed where we can actually quantify and really understand the skills that we're actually teaching and students are demonstrating mastery of.

Okay, so we're about to end this episode and a final episode of this season. So, Michael, one final prediction for what we're going to see when we come back with the new episodes of Future you this coming fall.

Yeah, I should have prepared for this question more because I knew it was coming. Right. But the. Here's the test for me. Look, I'm, I am, I am still very skeptical as we stand here today that despite the number of institutions, I think it's roughly 2/3 have said that they will open on campus in the fall with very strong presence. And then, you know, a lot of them have said, oh, students will go home after Thanksgiving break or, and we'll shift to online for the remainder of the semester and things like that. I am still very skeptical personally that that's going to be the final word on it. I think there will still be shifting in terms of the modality and delivery and plans for higher ed in the fall. And, and, and I, I, and my other, my second prediction, Jeff, is that I don't think we're going to see college football in the fall either. Right. Despite everyone saying, you know, right now teams are starting to ramp up. But as we're recording this, a lot of teams are reporting incidences of COVID among their players. I just, I don't see it happening personally. And I think that's going to be a reckoning. What about you? One final prediction?

Well, I, I think this is probably a safe prediction and this is what happens when we spend too much time apart is that we end up making the same predictions. Because I think this is probably a safe prediction in that I don't think either that we're going to be back in the way that many universities are planning. And in fact, one of the things I'm really disappointed with this summer is that it seems like so much time, energy and effort was spent on college campuses with task force and tons of people spending what is the physical campus going to look like in the fall rather than spending time on how to improve remote and online learning? In fact, I just recently put up a poll on LinkedIn asking this question, should colleges focus this summer on getting students back on campus in the fall or improving online learning for the fall? And most of them talked about a hybrid approach or improving online learning was by far more than planning to return to students to campus. And so my feeling is we're going to perhaps get back to campus in September. They'll be there for a couple of weeks and, and be sent home is, is what I think is going to end up happening. And, and I think that's a fairly safe prediction to make here in, you know, June, early July of, of. Of 2020. Let's see where we are in, in August or, or September.

Yeah, no, I think you're probably right, Jeff. It's going to be interesting and I guess the existential part of this is going to be interesting as well to see, you know, will colleges, as Sabrina and Nick have predicted, start to go out of business in the ways that we talked about earlier? When will we start to see those announcements as well in any real volume, if that materializes?

Yeah. And one final thought, that if there's any positive piece of coming out of not maybe being back on campus in the fall in the full way is that as we already know, a lot of institutions are experimenting with their academic calendar. I actually think we might see new models come out of, of this. And that's, that's the positive I could take out of. Out of this fall. But, but that's. Michael, that's all we have time for for today's episode. So thank you all of our listeners for all that you've done for us this year, especially the second half of this season when we were kind of in COVID 19. Michael and I haven't been able to record together in a very long time. But, but thanks for your feedback and your suggestions and I hope that we've been helpful to you in this period. We're really looking forward to being back in the fall with new episodes of Future you and to the early signs of what higher education will look like not only in the fall, but going forward. As always, thank you to our sponsors over this last year, our audio producer, Steve Shigeris, and all of you. Until next time, stay safe and stay strong.

Hey folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future you. 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.