What Do People Think About Their College Experiences?

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome back to Future youe and our latest episode. I'm here in Washington, D.C. jeff Salinga with Michael Horn, my co host. And today we're going to have with us Brandon Bastide, who heads up the higher education and education practice at Gallup. And they do polling almost constantly around what not only current students but graduates of American higher education think about their institutions. They've had a number of reports in recent weeks in a partnership that they're doing with Strata Education Network around the relevancy question of higher ed and how people feel 10, 20, 30 years out about the relevancy of their undergraduate experience and what that means for the value of higher education. We talk often about the value of higher ed and what are people willing to pay for it and in some cases as alums, what they're willing to give back. And Brandon has a lot of thoughts on relevancy and how the work that Gallup has been doing over the last couple of years in higher ed can also inform the quality conversation, which is something we'll be talking with him about today.

Brandon, thanks so much for joining us, coming here from Gallup as a partner and the executive director of their Education and Workforce Center. Appreciate you joining us. A question we love to ask our guests when they first come on is stepping back from your day to day now, how how did you get into higher education originally in this crazy industry?

I'm not sure I ever left it as a student and got heavily involved when I was an undergrad at Duke University. I was a class president one year, eventually was elected to serve as a young trustee on the board of trustees there and benefited immensely from the whole experience. I was the first one on my mom's side of the family to get a college degree. My dad was the only one on his side. So I wasn't exactly first gen, but the importance of a college degree was huge in our family and I kind of made the most of it. And so shortly after I graduated from Duke, I mean, as in months afterwards, I started a company called Outside the Classroom that did online education around things like alcohol abuse prevention, sexual assault prevention. And so that was what launched my career in higher education. So I haven't actually worked for a college or university, but I've been in and around the space ever since I was a student and had the unique opportunity to be in the early phases of the ed tech entrepreneurial space and then in the last six years leading all the work at Gallup around Education and workforce development, which has primarily been about 75% of that work we do is higher education for institutions of higher education or foundations that are doing research or studies in the space.

So it seems like almost every week Gallup is coming out with another poll around higher education. You have this partnership with Insider Ed. You have a partnership with strada. So talk a little bit about. You now have several years of findings on a number of issues, everything from career services to the role of faculty to what alums think of their undergraduate experience and the regrets that they might have. As you think about it at an uber level, what strikes you? What interests you about the findings that you have?

Well, first of all, your summary is part of the amazing opportunity we have. We're studying this from almost every angle, as you mentioned, current and former students, staff and faculty, parents, prospective parents. Right. So the things we've been learning are really pretty remarkable. But I would just pause on this point. It's unbelievable what you can learn by asking people questions directly. So in this era of big data analytics, we have a lot of data about people, and there's great value that can be derived from that data. No doubt about it. The signature of our work is that we are getting data from people by asking them questions that quite frankly, aren't knowable in some of that other data, whether it's student record information or whatever. So we always look to try and explore areas that we don't know much about that can only come from those people themselves. Right. Current or former students. And so it's unbelievable the insights that have been derived by that. And we can certainly talk more about those.

Well, I'm curious actually, what struck you most? I mean, you've been doing this for six years, as you said, you've seen a lot of insights. You've driven a lot of headlines. That is for sure. As you look reflect over these six years, what jumps out to you the most?

Yeah. What might surprise you that you didn't expect to find?

Well, so one of the most famous projects that we started with under the Gallup Purdue Index study, a study of college graduates in the US which we started some four and a half years ago, it in essence, unpacked the magic ingredients of college. And what do I mean by that? What are the experiences that graduates either had or didn't have in college that were related to their success later in life, in work, or in just their overall livelihoods? And there's a lot of statements that we collectively have made, all of us right, about the value of higher education. There's a lot of reasons why we value higher education. But when you study it through the lens of alumni, looking back on experiences they had and then correlating that with their success now across multiple dimensions, they were things. And I'll oversimplify, they had a relationship rich experience in college and they had a work integrated experience in college. And those were defined by things like saying they had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams, saying they had professors who cared about them as a person, saying they worked on a long term project that took a semester or more to complete, or saying they had a job or an internship experience where they applied what they were learning in the classroom. So those are specific examples that I put under that banner of relationship rich and work integrated. My point about that is that we need to double down on those things because although those were aspects that doubled the odds of being engaged in your work and thriving your well being later, less than a third of college graduates strongly agreed to any of those things I just mentioned. So we have a lot of room for opportunity again according to the alumni themselves and their long term success later in life and in work.

So you said we have to double down on it. It's interesting to me, especially the stuff you found out about internship experiences or the role faculty play in student success. Colleges and universities are investing so much money in big data and data analytics, especially around student success. And there's these almost simple things we know work based on your data. How are you finding colleges, universities using what you find? Are they using it enough in your opinion? Probably not. And how can they use it or how should they use it in your opinion?

Yeah, Jeff, a lot of this is what I call going back to the basics. You know, this is not rocket science in the grand scheme of things. You know, what works is about these relationship rich and work integrated aspects. And although I do see signs of colleges and universities moving aggressively into those kinds of things, it's still, to me, there's still too many excuses around, we can't scale that. There are too few institutions making a real value statement around this. Right. So the they may say, oh, we're expanding the career center, great, but what does that really mean in terms of how they value from the entire ecosystem perspective, the staff and faculty they hire, the rewards and incentives that they put in front of them? We still have a lot of system level things that aren't aligned with driving these things to scale. And you know, fundamentally you look, I'll give you an example. Research 1 universities score relatively low among their alumni and saying things like they had professors who cared about them as a person, had a mentor. Now that doesn't really surprise me when you think about at a high level the kinds of things they value. They value great research. And this is not mutually exclusive, great research and great teaching. But indeed there are some indications that when you have a reward system built around great research, some of the things that might suffer, relatively speaking, are great teaching, student mentoring, certain stuff like that. So we can all move a little faster and more furiously according to what our data suggests. But I do see many great examples of institutions that have taken this to heart. Large ones, right. And even small ones like Furman University. It's built an entirely new strategic plan around making sure students hit the mark on all these key ingredients that have been uncovered by a study like that.

So let's maybe go deeper on Furman or if you have another case study that you like, what does that look like when they take the findings and what sorts of changes do they make and how do they use the findings as an aid perhaps in making the case for why they need to change?

Yeah, well, the first one is an important message to the faculty and staff that when they make those investments in students, when they take the time to get to know their name and ask them about their ambitions and what they want to do in their careers, I mean, as simple as those steps, those steps begin to move the needle on these long term outcomes, right? But for them to understand how powerful those kinds of steps that they can take are, that's the first battle that sounds really simple. But guess what? This matters a lot. You can make a huge difference in somebody's life. Well then the next thing that has to come online are the various programs and policies and incentives at the university level, right. That help drive more of that. And so you take a place like Furman University. One, they've embedded this as part of the key signature of their strategic plan from the board of trustees across the senior cabinet. Right. And now it is something that they have framed as one of the ultimate goals of what they're going to do with affirm in education years to come. But it has required changes in their entire advising process, changes in how they think about orientation in different ways. Right? Like career services becoming part of of the orientation process. They're thinking about all the relationships they have to build from research, kind of practicum based opportunities for students and internship opportunities. So they're thinking about scouring the entire ecosystem of employers within, you know, a 5 to 10 mile radius of their campus. I mean, things that they really haven't had to do in the past that they're now putting more effort and elbow grease into. So here's the good news. It requires a lot of time and attention, but I don't believe that it requires a ton of money. So, yes, some of this stuff is going to cost money, but it's a relative change in what they value. Right. It's a change in how they're spending their time. It's a change in their incentives. Not necessarily we've got to throw tons of money at this to build a new building kind of example. It's really not about that.

So that is good news. I'm curious, are there pushback, though, to the results from the surveys or people say that we don't believe that narrative or this doesn't make sense to us, so there's pushback on a scalability level or we can't make that change because of the way we're organized, sorts of things. But do people doubt what they're hearing from the polls and surveys that you've put out?

Well, I don't hear a lot of doubt. There's certainly people who will always ask critical questions of any study in research. And that by all means is always going to be the case. And what we have in this research is certainly not a causal study. I mean, very few social science studies are. You know, social studies are causal in nature. That said, the kinds of things we've done to kind of unpack this, I think have been largely valued. The big criticism, if there is, is less about the studies and more about, oh, how do we scale it? Right. And so that's the most often heard response that I get from college presidents. They go, oh, well, great. You know, we're doing a wonderful internship program for in this, they'll talk about one program, they'll talk about, you know, one major, right. Or a professor that they feel like they're doing a good job. What they're worried about is how do you scale it for everybody. That said, you look at a place like Northeastern University, they have been scaling this experience called an internship for 100 years and they're doing it with over 20,000 students. It's not a small institution. Right. And even they are interested, even though 100% of their students have a co op experience, even they are interested in how they can create better connectivity between that job experience and the actual learning in the classroom. Because that's the magic of where this really comes together. You just had a paid job during college, which is one of the questions we ask has no relationship with anything later in life. It's whether you had one where you were able to apply what you were learning in the classroom. So see, it's not as simple as just going, everybody's got an internship. It's also about making sure the quality of that. There's some synapse firing between the work experience and the academic learning that's happening.

So, Brendan, there's a lot of discussion now in higher ed around accountability and how we measure quality as the cost of higher education. As the price of higher education continues to go up, I mean, parents, students, policymakers want to know, what are we paying for and what are we getting in return? There's a lot of concerns about accreditation. Can you see what you're doing? And especially trends over time kind of playing into that in helping not only consumers, but also institutions and policymakers make decisions around, you know, around accountability and around quality.

Yeah, I think there's some huge opportunities to rethink, right. How we value college from the perspective of consumers. And this has been some of the big insights from the Strada Gallup Education Consumer Survey. We're literally running a daily poll about higher education. It includes people with no high school degree all the way through post grad. But when we ask them questions about whether they feel their education was worth the cost or whether they felt it was high quality, the biggest drivers of their feelings that it was worth the cost and high quality are about relevance. The degree to which they felt the coursework they were taking is applicable to the work that they're doing now, or that the things they learned in college were applicable to their day to day lives. Right. So this concept of the relevance of my education becomes hugely important. In fact, relevance in the study we just put out a couple weeks ago with them is a much stronger predictor of worth the cost and high quality than any other indicator we use, including graduation rates, average SAT or ACT scores, even alumni earnings 10 years later, student loan default cohort rates. Right. So those all matter. But then you have relevance. According to the former student, him or herself, it's three times more predictive of their feelings of worth the cost and high quality. And I'll just give you this, a paper that's going to be coming out in the Journal of Consumer affairs is going to show that your likelihood of saying that education was worth the cost to your high quality has nothing to do with the price of the institution. There is no relationship in these consumer ratings between quality and the cost of tuition, which means There are some expensive institutions truly delivering. It also means there are expensive institutions not delivering. And it also tells us there's really inexpensive institutions delivering. So there are great values out there that we really don't know about because we're looking too much through the lens of traditional indicators.

But when does relevance come up for somebody? I mean, in the moment, you may not think it's relevant. A lot of students tell me, why am I taking this core class? And then 20 years later they discover, hey, it actually helped me in what I'm doing. How do you, given the changes in the workforce and where work is going, relevance today might be tomorrow's trash heap on the trash heap. And what is not relevant today might be relevant 20 years from now. How do we measure relevance?

Well, I think one thing we've learned is that people know it when they experience it, actually. Right. And it comes through the lens of a number of things. So one of the simple examples, if you say that staff or faculty member has talked to you, this is the bar, talk to you about your career while you're a student, it increases the likelihood that you feel like your education is relevant, increases the likelihood that you think you're going to get a good job later, increases the likelihood that you'd recommend it to other people. Right. So from a consumer perspective, you're feeling it immediately. Now, to your point, Jeff, there will be examples of things where you go, oh, I didn't realize that until much later. That's fine. But most of those relevant experiences that sort later in life are things like the deep relationships you had with professors or other mentors. Right. In that, you know, how much what you were studying was applicable to something. You know, look, there's good research out there about how little of the content we remember. Right. Even, you know, a few weeks after we take a final exam. But we don't forget those relationships. We don't forget the people who pushed us. We don't forget what that feels like. And that translates into the workplace. If you had a great mentor during college, I'm convinced there's a learned engagement factor that's going on here where if you see that in the workplace, if you feel that from a manager or somebody who might be taking you, go, wait. That feels like the kind of support I had from professor so and so when I was in college. So I think those are things that build us for the preparation for jobs that don't even exist yet. Right. And also the idea that going to college is something that I really liked and benefited from because if we all need to be constantly reskilling, we might not be going back to traditional residential college, but in some form college is going to become something attached to our hip throughout our lifetime as opposed to this, you know, intensive four year experience that happens only between the ages of 18 and 22. But if I had a bad experience with that when I was 19 and I didn't find it relevant, it's going to be harder to convince me to come back and do it in different forms.

Yeah, well, so appreciate all the insight that you continue to glean and glad you are continuing to do the survey and continuing to serve us insights. Certainly not just relevant for those who studied at these institutions, but relevant for us on this podcast Thinking about the Future of Higher Education. So Brandon, thank you so much for joining us today on Future youe.

Great to be with you guys. Thanks.

And we'll be 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.

And welcome back to Future youe. Just fresh off a conversation with Brandon Busted, one of our friends at Gallup who has been doing a series of surveys and actually daily polling of Americans about their views and feelings of higher education. Been able to ascertain a lot of things. And Jeff, I was struck by your comment or question to Brandon about how does what they're doing play into rankings perhaps, or quality assurance and efforts like that. And you've obviously worked and you got your start in the rankings world. What were your reflections?

It really struck me, Michael, because I've just been involved in a conversation with a board around the rankings and how much they should care about the rankings. And it made me realize that so much of higher ed is so focused on rankings. We know schools try to game the rankings and here, as he said, here are questions that we're actually asking. We're actually asking graduates, we're actually asking students about what matters to them. And these are things that colleges and universities can really do something about, right? They can incentivize faculty to become more mentors. Right. They can do more on the experiential learning part of it and know that it actually has not only relevancy to current students, but also has success, you know, after the, after college. You know, one of the things that he didn't really talk much about, but in almost, you know, an underlying theme and all of their findings around alumni is that alumni care more about their colleges and their experience. The more they've had these, you know, these intensive experiences with faculty or with internships, and all of that will lead to more donations. Right. And. Or more, you know, volunteer work or whatever colleges want in terms of their alumni. And so to me, it not only solves the student success problem on one end, but it also helps with alumni on the other end.

Do you think ranking systems should actually incorporate the Gallup questions in some way? I mean, it's a very outcomes oriented way of looking at the world.

They could. I mean, I think one of the problems is that, you know, U.S. news and world Report gets a lot of criticism for using kind of a poll of, in their case of high school counselors and admissions officers around the reputational question. But that's purely reputational.

I think it's also on the front end. Councilors don't see the few high schools track their alums into the workforce.

They could. So the other thing we talked a lot about is just this relevancy in mentors and the importance of mentors. Right. It's not, we don't remember college for what we learned in a specific class on a specific day, but it's for the people, it's for the networks that we learned. We had Laura Hamilton on many, many weeks ago, talking about kind of the experiences of college and how that leads to student success. So, Michael, as you think about your own college experience, I mean, is that something that really resonated with you? Is it the mentors that you had and who were they that really helped you feel to where you are today?

Yeah, I mean, I would say it was helpful for me, by the way, that he broadened the definition of relevance not just to strict coursework. And he talked actually about the vast research that exists around how the sort of degradation of content knowledge in our own heads, or at least our ability to recall it in. In coherent ways. But. And so that made sense. That resonated with me. And I don't know that it was a faculty member, but he also said it doesn't have to be a faculty member. It was certainly administrators right at Yale that I would say took me under my wing and. Sorry, under their wing, and actually led to the career path that I've had. If it wasn't for Rick Levin, the president, who I got to know covering Yale administration for the Yale Daily News. Linda Lorimer, who was the secretary of the university. Her husband, Charlie Ellis, who was my junior year job, helping him write a biography of the founder of Xerox, which led to my job with David Gergen, which led to, you know, on and on and on. Right. And so clearly that mentorship, that interest in what I was going to be as a person truly impacted me and I would credit. I credit completely with the career I've had. So it deeply resonated. As a history major, I've always said, well, I actually use the history of techniques quite a bit in the way I write about things and so forth. But that's almost felt like a story I tell myself. Whereas the mentorship actually deeply resonated with me. How about you at Ithaca?

Same way with me. I mean, there's two mentors that I really give a lot of credit to to where I am today. The first one is Paul Heaton, who was the advisor to the student newspaper, who came from a professional newspaper background and really professionalized the student newspaper at Ithaca, where I was there and really encouraged me as a student, a student journalist. But the other person was, who was head of. Who was in student affairs. Her name was Sharon Policiello. So the first summer after my freshman year at Ithaca, I ended up staying there for the summer, which is the most beautiful place in the world. Ithaca is amazing because, you know, you're there for the school year at Cornell and Ithaca College, and it's snowy and cold and dreary all the time. And then in the summer, the sun comes out and there's no students around. But I got to stay there for the summer, and I worked for the student orientation office and student leadership offices. And what that did was open up my eyes to the rest of the college. I think it's 6,000 undergrads, so it's almost like a mini university, undergraduate college within a university in that way, it really opened my eyes up to other opportunities at the institution. And that's what I think a mentor can do. Right? A mentor, especially at 18, you know, you think you know everything in the world. And I think these mentors really push your belief systems about what. What it is. And I think especially today, you know, I talk to a lot of students about networking, and they tend to think that they have to meet the most famous people, right, that, you know, after I give talks on campus, people are always asking me for my, you know, LinkedIn or my business card.

Really.

I think the best mentors are the people that know you the best. They don't have to be the CEO of the company. I think they're going to be the ones that give you the best advice.

Yeah, I think it's a good point and it's why, again, from that conversation, what I take is there's got to be some organic nature. And I'm not sure. I wonder if incentivizing faculty to care more or something like that is going to be the way you tip it or you create. Sort of a lot of the research you've been doing about how do you redesign campus spaces so that these interactions can happen in more organic ways. I wonder if that's going to be a more productive way actually to create those opportunities for mentorship and to genuinely get to know someone and their interests so you can build a relationship that helps you see what else may be possible and other pathways.

Well, it can't just be technology, right? I know Brandon mentioned a lot of that. You know, most colleges, universities spending a lot of money on data, data analytics, analytics now. And that to me has been the real focus of student success. Recently, as you mentioned, I wrote a paper around the future of faculty spaces. And one of the things we know is that faculty interaction is incredibly important. Well, where does most of that interaction we think happen? It either happens in the classroom and that happens in those few minutes before or after class when everyone's rushing to do something else, or it happens during office hours. And most campuses, office hours are, were totally underutilized. And as I've been thinking about the faculty office is where office hours tend to happen, especially if you're a first generation student or a student doesn't really know about the college experience. What's the most intimidating thing that you can see is when you walk down that line of offices, all the doors are closed and you're like dark and it's dark and you're not quite sure if you should knock and interrupt somebody. So we have to create, and I laid this out in this paper I recently did, we have to create these new places, whether they're in campus centers or they're in libraries or spaces right outside what I called huddle rooms right outside of classrooms. Especially if we can rethink about redesigning classroom spaces on campuses where faculty and students can have real interaction in the time that students want it, because that's the other thing. Students are not going to go off if they have a problem on a Monday. They're not going to wait two days to take the office hours on a Wednesday afternoon to meet with that faculty member.

Yeah, it points to the last thing which I think connects to. He was talking about having a project that lasts more than a semester or research or I would argue the extracurriculars we both did actually filled that role in many cases. So I'm not sure it has to be curricular as traditionally understood. But the point, I think is if you engage and dive deeply into some pursuit that has more lasting presence than any a paper, say, for a class, that will naturally create opportunities for you to connect with adults on the campus for help, guidance and so forth, that'll be very organic. It's not like I'm forcing myself to go to a professor to ask a question that I think he might want me to ask, but the reverse that it's a very organic pursuit. And so I think that points to the other part, which is having work that asks you to apply what you're learning on campus into something that you're actually doing will create these opportunities more and more.

So it was great to have Brandon on with us and. And we are going to be actually going on our summer break.

Yeah, this is a good way to cap our first year.

Yeah, it's great. Like most colleges and universities that they get criticized for this there, we're going to be taking a little summer hiatus and be coming back at the beginning of the academic year. It's been great to be with you for half of this past academic year. So maybe you on your summer vacation, if you haven't listened to all of our episodes, they're all in. In itunes or wherever you happen to listen to podcasts. And we're going to be back in the fall. So thanks again for listening to Future youe. And we will see you in a couple of months.