Welcome Back!

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

And welcome to Season two of Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo and I'm really excited to be with all of you for another year of talking to the change makers and thought leaders shaping the future of higher education and breaking down the latest trends with my partner in crime, Michael Horn, who's joining me today from the great city of Boston on Skype.

Thank you, Jeff. And excited to be with you as well, of course, and excited also for our lineup of episodes already coming together for season two of Future youe. A lot of folks have been reaching out to us over social media, over the web, email for the show and so forth, suggesting interesting higher education leaders to talk to. And I think we're going to get to dive into some interesting and meaty topics. And of course, to those listening, keep your suggestions coming.

And Michael, we also have some big news from our summers to share with folks. And so we thought we're just going to make this episode about that really kind of a catch up episode since we've been on break for the summer and talk a little bit about all the news that's happened in both our own lives and the lives of people in higher education over the summer.

Yeah, I think hopefully that people will enjoy this episode that we're doing. We'll get to do a catch up. Like you said, we've had some big news on our own ends, so we'll do some news from our own summers, but then we'll also run down some of and the headlines from higher ed more generally over the summer just so we can catch back up as we dive into this new academic year and into this new season of Future youe. So maybe the first question, Jeff, is that I'll jump to you is how was your summer?

It was great, Michael. It gave me a chance to spend some time with my two girls who are 8 and 6. And my wife was on sabbatical from her job this summer and so we got to do a little traveling and play a little catch up with spending some time with the girls. This is just a great as you know, with the kids and so it was nice to spend some time with them this past summer. And how about you? What did you do this summer?

Yeah, that's awesome. So got to spend time with my two girls as well. My wife is launching a modern version of an ice cream truck which should be arriving any day now to our house. So a lot of recipe testing, a lot of tasting for my girls who are just about to turn four years old and I this summer. So it was a lot of fun. And then we got some time to do some writing as well for both of us and getting to sort of jump into our next venture.

And Michael, of course we also have some pretty big news from our summers in terms of work. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your news first.

Yeah, absolutely. So got a new book in the works and really spent some time over the summer finishing a draft manuscript of a book that's tentatively titled Choosing College. Should be out next summer as these publisher timelines are. But very excited about the book. We took the jobs to be done methodology of Clayton Christensen and created over 200 mini documentaries of why students choose college. And when I say college, I mean any post secondary experience, from a boot camp to an online program to a four year flagship or elite institution and really dissected why students are making these complicated choices that they are and basically have a book now that can give some really good advice, I think for parents, students and the institutions themselves about how to better choose and design their college and post secondary experiences.

So why this book? Why now?

Yeah, good question. So a couple things going on. One, we started to do this work at the Clayton Christensen Institute a couple years ago where we started interviewing hundreds of students. And what was striking to me, Jeff, was a couple things. One, the stories emerging from these students, as you know, when you talk to actual students, they're just not what the popular meme, if you will, around choosing colleges, it's much more complex, textured and so forth. And when we started to do the jobs to be done analysis, what we saw was that students were making some really unfortunate decisions, not understanding the progress that they're actually trying to make and the circumstance that they're actually in. And if you had a better sense of the circumstance you're in, what you're trying to drive toward, or if you quite frankly, aren't ready to know what you're driving toward, we think we can give you a lot better advice. And now is a really important time to give that advice. Because the stakes of choosing the wrong college or erring in some way along that college search are just so much higher than they've ever been. Given the extraordinary price tags we see with college, given the retreat of public dollars from college, and given the uncertain job prospects and pathways in many cases out of college. And so giving people much sounder advice, I think is really, really important right now. And hopefully on the flip side, it can really help Institutions design far better experiences that better serve these students as well.

So anything you can tease us with from the book, any interesting stories, anything that surprised you in terms of reporting it?

Yeah. So I would say three headlines right now that are on top of my head. I'm not sure these are the biggest ones, but one, you know, the UCLA job survey gets a lot of. Excuse me, the UCLA freshman survey just teased my. What I was gonna say gets a lot of attention for saying, you know, 90% or so of students now say that they're going to college to get a job. And yet when you talk to these students, a job is a faint part of why they're going to college, but it's not the overall picture. And so what emerges from our research and the five jobs to be done that we found is a much more textured picture that defies sort of the traditional stereotype that has emerged of students just want a job now and so forth. In my mind, the reason on a survey you might say, oh, I want a job, is sure that's a part of your decision making, and it's something that, you know, you're sort of supposed to say, and if someone gives you that language, you'll say it. But most of the students we talk to who are that traditional freshman demographic, they don't have a clue of what a job really entails or is. And as you've reported, Jeff, countless times, a lot of students aren't even taking paid work now before they jump into college or even leave college. And so they don't really have a concrete sense of what a job is. And so there's all sorts of problems that we found in that narrative. I'll give you two other really quick ones. One, from our research, I would say the college campus is definitely not going away for a slice of the population. It's just a huge gravitational pull as part of their decision making. And while online and hybrid and boot camp and all sorts of unbundled experiences, I think will certainly continue to grow and have their place, from my perspective, for a large percentage of students, they'll continue to attend brick and mortar campuses, as many of us did. And then the last thing I would say is the sort of theme of college for all or tracking people in the career and technical education and sort of these false dichotomies we weave for ourselves. I think this book is going to be a real statement that it sort of misses the point. It's when is college right for you and in what circumstance? And how do we allow ourselves to consume Education in certain times in much shorter bursts where we won't be sort of strung out with a lot of debt or a lot of risk that is inappropriate to where we are in our. So those are a few of the things that are emerging right now as I'm now going back into the process. And as you know, Jeff, once you have a draft, all of a sudden you see all the things wrong with the draft. So I'm going in right now and ripping it up completely, which is a fun part of the writing process, but pretty excited about the conclusions. And the other thing that I think was interesting, Jeff, that emerged is over your summer, you, of course, have come out with a new book contract as well, and it's remarkable that I think we're landing in very similar places of the college going process, if you will, about reporting on it. Do you want to talk to folks about what you're now going to be working on?

Yeah, and I'm kind of now knee deep in it. I'm working on a new book about college admissions. It's tentatively titled the A Year Inside College. Who gets in and why. It's going to be published by Scribner, which is part of Simon and Schuster next or actually in 2020, it will come out. I have to finish it by the end of next year, and I'm excited about this. The editor I'm working with there is the same editor who did Angela Duckworth's Grip book, which of course got a lot of attention in education circles last year when it came out. And my goal really is to explain the modern American college admission system, you know, how it's changed in the last several decades, where it's going in the near future, and kind of discuss the broader implications for a society where college is a sorting mechanism in the job market and in life. You know, I think there's a lot of college admissions books out there when you go to Bar, Barnes and Noble or Amazon Bookstore or browse online, but most of them kind of how to. And there will be how to elements here as well. But it's really going to be kind of a narrative book to explain the system that we have today, which of course to many people is a black box.

Super interesting. So if you think about a book like Frank Bruni wrote, the where you go is not who you'll be an antidote to the college admissions mania. How does what you're working on sit alongside something like that, which is less of a how to book and more of a, I would say, a guide to reassuring people yeah.

And I'm hoping that this will be a little reassuring. I'm not trying to add to the anxiety that I think some people have around college. As we both know, most people who apply to college get in, even though you won't know that from reading the New York Times and other publications. But I really kind of want to explain the system. The truth of the matter is that most of the students applying to college today, at least the traditional 18 year olds, their parents went to college in the 80s when the system was much different. So in some ways this is going to be very similar to the Gatekeepers, which is a book that Jack Steinberg, who used to be with the New York Times, came out with many years ago and followed the admissions process at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. But the thing about that book is that that book was really written before kind of the rise of technology and the common app and everything else that has made applying to college so much easier. It also is in a very different period that we know about admissions. You know, given what's happening at Harvard just down the road from you. As you know, as many people on higher ed know, Harvard's in the midst of a lawsuit right now over Asian American admissions. And as a result, a lot of documents have come out in the last couple of months about how they operate admissions there. I'm probably going to get into that. And I'm also looking right now I'm talking to several schools to kind of get into their admissions system. So it should be a great year. I'm going to kind of tell this story through people. So I'm going to be following a group of high school seniors. I'm going to be following a couple of admissions deans, high school counselors, but I'm also going to follow what I call the business of admissions. I'm going out to. I'll be out at nacac, which is the big admissions gathering in Salt Lake City. And that's where I'm going to be talking to a lot of the companies that make admissions work. They run marketing, they run enrollment management. And I kind of want to get into how a lot of what happens in admissions offices these days, like many other offices on campus, are actually run by outsiders and not by people on campus.

Super interesting. Do you have any. And do you have any hypotheses around what that means for how admissions has changed and so forth? And it's probably early for you to say these are going to be the couple takeaways, but it sounds like you have some insight into what you might find.

Yeah, I mean, I think part of by looking at these outside companies is that the admissions process now is like selling anything. Right. And I guess admissions has always been part of a sales. But the admissions calendar now we used to think of admissions following a calendar of the year and now admissions kind of never stops. That admissions infrastructure is constantly going. There's constant contact with students because it's all about kind of getting people and students and their prospective students into the funnel, keeping them engaged all the way to the time they make their deposit and even after that to avoid summer melt. And so it's really going to be kind of looking at that system. It's interesting. One of the books I read over the summer was Crafting a Class, which is a book that was written quite some time ago around admissions at liberal arts colleges back in the starting basically in the 60s, the 50s and 60s. And what's interesting about that book is that admissions deans essentially came from the faculty. It would be that person and maybe a part time person ran admissions at these colleges. It was like a two person job and they kind of went back to teaching in the middle of the year. Now, of course, it's an entire system, dozens, hundreds of employees, plus all these outside companies doing this. So it should be an interesting ride and really looking forward to it.

That's fascinating, Jeff. I think let's take a break right now. When we come back, let's actually talk about some of our summer reads that we would recommend for our audience. I'm sure you had a big list of books that you poured through. So we'll take a break right now from Future youe and we'll be right back.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo and I'm joined by my co host Michael Horn, who's joining us today from his home in Boston via Skype. And so staying on the topic of summers, Michael before we dive into some of the headlines of summer, summer gives us a chance to, I think, catch up on a lot of reading. So could you talk a little bit about some of the books you might have read this summer that might be of interest to our audience?

Yeah, absolutely. Like you probably poured through a number of books this summer. It's a great opportunity to catch up on things that you have not read as well as things that are just coming up and you want to read. I'll highlight three books that I think are interesting, probably for the audience. The first one is a book that will be coming out called the Expertise how the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed by Kelly Palmer and David Blake, who are both a degreed. And Kelly Palmer before that was with LinkedIn, their chief learning officer. Really interesting book, I thought, thinking about how do companies think about and quantify the skill levels in their companies and how do they then position themselves to help them skill up? And where do you want to invest and how do you want to invest in a lifelong learning culture within your company, as well as a strategic competitive advantage, not just because it's a way to retain employees or something like that. So that was interesting. A second one I'll mention, who you know that just came out by Julia Freeland Fisher and her husband, Daniel Fisher. Julia was my successor at the Christensen Institute, and she just came out with this book looking at how disruptive innovation could radically rethink how we form social capital in education. So this notion that who you know is often more important than what you know actually in terms of life outcomes, and yet schools outside of certain elite schools have largely been structured with an idea of keeping the world outside of schools and not letting it inside. And yet there's a tremendous set of experts, mentors, guiding lights that if you harness them in really interesting ways using technology, you can allow students to really build social capital in neat ways. And so that I would fully understand her book, I also reread Bowling Alone by Bob Putnam, the famous book Thinking about Social Capital in Our Communities from a Societal Perspective. The last one I'll mention that you just reviewed, Jeff, so maybe a good segue to asking you what you read. But by our friend Ryan Craig, a new you, which I thought was a very when I blurbed it, I said it was the book that I wish I had written because it was really an aggressive, disruptive take right on. How could colleges themselves get disrupted? And I kind of think Ryan's a little ahead of his skis, as you said in the Washington Post. The disruption really seems much more of masters and professional programs to this point, whereas he makes a pretty aggressive argument about how it could cut into overpriced colleges that are not distinguishing themselves in some way with the value that they impart. I think he's a little bit ahead of himself on that, but I really loved the hypothesis and thought he made some really good and sobering points. What about you, Jeff?

Yeah, it was a great book. As I reviewed in the Post. I read several books this summer. Two of them I'll talk about. Of the three are non education books, but I think they offer lessons for people in education. I think they're just well written. All three of my books are actually written by journalists or firmer former journalists. The first one is Janesville, which is actually a couple of years old. It's about the story of the GM plant in Wisconsin in Paul Ryan's district that closed. And when I was reading it, I read it through the lens of regional public colleges, which we've talked a little bit about on the show, which are under a lot of pressure right now. These are the former normal schools, the former teachers colleges, many of which, including in places like Wisconsin, are in the corners of the state. They're the largest, usually the largest employer now in their towns. They're kind of at the central part of their towns, not only in terms of education, but in terms of culture and obviously employment. And it made me think of these places as almost factories and if you close them down, what does that do to the community? And I don't think we sometimes think about that because we only think about them as educational institutions. And so that's the way I read that book. The second one, which I loved was Bad Blood, which is the book by a Wall Street Journal reporter around Theranos, which is the blood company out of Silicon Valley, which of course now is totally done and returning some of its money. But this was one of the Silicon Valley darlings. We were supposed to be able to just take a prick of our finger and be able to do all these blood tests in the Walgreens and the safeways of the world, and even at our home. And again, when I was reading that book, I read it through the, through the lens of the edtech world. We're both kind of in this world, Michael, where we go to all these conferences and everybody promises the world in terms of a revolution in higher education thanks to technology. And I think this book in particular gives me pause to say that not everything is what it appears. Sometimes when people are trying to sell you on these ideas. And then finally, the third book is True Gentlemen, which is written by John Hechinger, which I had mostly read last year when I interviewed John at Politics and Prose here in D.C. but true gentleman is kind of the inside story of fraternity life in American higher education. It's a great book. And what I think it reminds you is that how much tradition in higher ed drives a lot of what we do. And the reason why, despite all the issues with fraternities at colleges, universities over the last couple of years, whether from alcohol, sexual assault, even student deaths, how they continue to kind of be central to American higher education. And he explains why in sometimes very disturbing detail. So three books that I highly recommend. So let's talk a little bit about some of the headlines of the summer. And the first one is this news out of Purdue. Purdue University Global, which of course is the new arm of Purdue University, kind of got a little hot water recently because it was asking itself professors there to sign non disclosure agreements basically protecting their intellectual property so that they couldn't basically take it somewhere else and go work for Southern New Hampshire or ASU or anybody like that. Eventually. There was so much press about this in Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle, they eventually dropped that requirement. But it brings up an interesting point, Michael, in that you know, who owns the intellectual property. It used to be that professors would essentially run their class from the front of a lecture hall and lecture to dozens or maybe a couple hundred students. They would go home and that would be the end of it. But now professors work kind of gets relayed around the world via the Internet and online classes. They run them multiple times. The professor could leave the institution and the institution could still be running that class. What kind of issues does this bring up for the future of online education?

Yeah, I think it really is going to challenge in some ways the statement of principles of academic freedom and tenure from the American association of University Professors, of course, which were the ones that really came after Purdue for holding this non disclosure agreement on its professors. And I think the reason it's going to be such an issue is because institutions like Purdue University Global that are online serving 30,000 students or so, and that's not the biggest of them. Of course, faculty as we've traditionally understood it, aren't always the ones creating the courses. It's not the lecturer at Yale or Harvard who's at the bleeding edge of their field and you're hearing their direct research from their mouth right on high to the students. In many cases, it's a team of people coming together to create a course, to put together content in certain ways and so forth. And so the question is, what product, if I leave the institution, am I allowed to take with me? Becomes a much trickier one, I think. And can the institution continue to benefit from the intellectual contributions that I made? My take on it is that where a professor is actually doing research and contributing new things to the field, you've got to respect that academic freedom principles. I just, I don't see how else you do it, quite frankly. Even when we publish a book right now, probably a lot of people don't know this. The copyright is often the authors and the publishing house get significant rights of what they can do with it within that medium, but the author often has significant copyright on it still. And so I think you're going to have to still default to something like that. The question is more when you're producing knowledge that's really been in the public square, if you will, and out there, and it's not in the cutting edge, but it's to build, building block knowledge, maybe basic econ 101 or something like that, that I think gets a lot trickier. And I'm sure a professor should be able to take the intellectual contributions and repackage them in new ways. But to take the actual content itself that's been created, I think is going to be a lot trickier because there's some sort of competitive advantage and not clearly an intellectual property issue in the way that it's traditionally been understood.

Right. The second thing that came out this summer, or actually right before the summer, was this new report from Georgia Tech, Deliberate Innovation in Lifetime Education.

Yeah. And I mean, I thought this was fascinating because it hit on a topic that we've talked a lot about in this show, Jeff, which of course is the integration between primary and secondary schools into post secondary education, the notion of flexible learning options, school not being a place that you go to one time and then exit into your career, but something that you're continuing to come in, into and out of as you're mixing career and learning through a lifetime, really. And there's this Georgia Tech commitment they talked about in the report of changing from learners. No longer saying I got out of the institution, but instead saying forever, that I'm forever in. And of course you're close and part of this process of building this report. So I'd love to hear your take away on this and what you think the big ideas are and where the impact of this report might be on higher Ed more generally.

Yeah. As you mentioned, lifetime education was a central tenet of this. I'll focus on two other pieces that I think are critical for people to read, and you could go to the Georgia Tech website and find it. One is this idea of what they call the atrium in these learning stations, this idea of distributed learning around the world in a physical place. Georgia Tech started a master's degree in computer science, and what they found was online. And what they found was that most of those students wanted to be associated with a physical university in some way. They would come to alumni events in their cities, or they would come to graduation in Atlanta. And so the idea is that Georgia Tech would set up these centers, which in some ways think of them as Apple Stores. Right. Where you could come, you could take a master class, you could go to the Genius bar and get career advice, and you could network. So I think that's one interesting aspect of the report that's described. And the other piece is that they dedicate an entire section to how to become a deliberately innovative university. Right. So they didn't just talk about what they're going to do, but how they're going to do it. And I think that's absolutely critical because they realize that without creating the culture to be innovative, they're never going to be able to do all the ideas in the first two parts of the report as they're described. So it's definitely something that I think is useful for other colleges and. And universities.

Yeah, sorry. I was going to say definitely themes we're going to have to continue to explore on this season. Jeff?

Yeah. So we have just a couple of minutes left to go here. There's also been a lot of news out of here in Washington in terms of regulations from the federal government. What. What most caught your eye this summer?

Two takeaways. One, I think when Betsy DeVos came into the department, she came in as a K12 person and not knowing a lot about higher ed. And ironically, it seems that most of the activity in the Department of Education is not in K12, but actually in higher ed. They're looking at everything from the credit hour rule to requirements for online education, scorecard data, gainful employment borrower, defense and accreditation. One of our favorite topics on the show, what I think was interesting is that they're really saying, how do we lessen the burden on accreditors to have them pay attention to fewer things, but things more closely tied to outcomes? And then my question from that is, if they make that change, will accreditors actually be able to change in the way that they hope that they might. So I think it's a lot of activity there and really interesting to watch in the swamp where you live, which I guess relates to maybe, maybe not a swamp, but it's another huge tidal wave coming into higher ed that you just wrote about, which is Gen Z, this new generation of students. You want to tell people about that report, Jeff?

Yeah, we call them Homeland Generation iGen, Gene Twenge's moniker for them, or Generation Z. I just finished a report that the Chronicle of Higher Education published around this new generation of students, how colleges can recruit, teach, and serve them. There's a lot of talk about generations, and I think there's a lot of contradictions in generations. And I found that in terms of my research, and not only in talking to experts, but also looking at a lot of the data and surveys that have been taken on this generation. But it's clear to me that the generation of students coming into college now, traditional age students, are very different than millennials in a couple of key ways. One of them is around amenities, right? They're less interested in the amenities of college, and they're much more interested in the services, particularly career services. And that harkens back to something you said earlier, Michael, about what students want out of college today. They want a job. This is really a generation that's been hugely impacted by the Great Recession, saw their parents, in some cases lose their jobs, possibly lose their homes. And really what they see college as is providing them financial security. That has a lot of implications for how colleges serve them. Second, I think it's around teaching. This is a generation, obviously, that are digital natives. But what was interesting to me in not only looking at the data around surveys, but also in talking to a lot of people, is that this is not a generation that necessarily wants to learn fully in a digital way. They still want the physical presence, but it's the toggling between those two worlds that I think is absolutely critical for colleges and universities. So it was a fascinating summer finishing up that report and not only talking to Gen Z, but talking to the experts around them and really looking forward to kind of diving a little bit deeper in that when I do my new book. So, so much to talk about in the coming year, Michael, and looking forward to our second season here of future. You.

Yeah, Tremendously excited about it. Tremendously excited to be with you in person for our next episode as well as we kick off this season and get it rolling. And of course, our next episode will go back to our traditional format where we have a guest for the first part and then we dive into commentary and breaking down what they said in the second part of the podcast. But until then, thank you all for joining and we'll see you next time on Future You.