The 50/50 University Model that Leaves Grads with 2.5 Years of Work Experience and $75k - Dr. Robert McMahan, President of Kettering University

Is the traditional university model failing today’s students—and the industries that depend on them?

Dr. Robert McMahan, President of Kettering University, shares a bold, workforce-driven vision for higher education.

From co-op rotations that give students 2.5 years of paid, professional experience before graduation, to integrating trends like artificial intelligence and sustainability across all disciplines, McMahan outlines what it takes to future-proof students for a rapidly evolving economy—and why most institutions will fall behind if they don’t evolve now.

In this episode:

• Why Kettering students graduate with 2.5 years of paid, full-time professional experience—and often earn $75,000+ before they even walk the stage
• How a 12-week rotation model between classroom and career builds both technical mastery and real-world adaptability
• What five interdisciplinary trends are shaping the future of Kettering’s curriculum
• Why McMahan says the real customer of higher education isn’t the student or their family—and how that changes how we deliver learning

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

1. Kettering University’s 50/50 model gives students 2.5 years of paid, professional work experience
Through alternating 12-week rotations between classroom and career, students graduate with a résumé that rivals experienced professionals—and often $75,000+ in earnings.

2. The university continuously evolves its curriculum around five workplace-driven trends
Every discipline includes elements of advanced mobility, sustainable energy, intelligent manufacturing, AI, and new engineering vehicles—keeping students aligned with real-world needs.

3. McMahan redefines who the true customer of higher education is
It’s not just the student—it’s the employer who hires them. By working with over 450 industry partners, Kettering ensures its grads are future-ready and in high demand.

Resources in this Episode:

Learn more about Kettering University's model: https://www.kettering.edu/co-op-experience

See what companies have partnered with Kettering.

Read Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie

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Transcript

Matt Kirchner: 0:00

Matt, welcome into The TechEd Podcast. I am your host. Matt Kirchner, we say it every week in our introduction that we love people who are disrupting the model of education. I think most of us that spend time around higher education recognize that a whole variety of factors, some of which we'll talk about today, are having a huge effect, not just on higher education today, but in the future. We have changing attitudes around higher education. Certainly there are demographic realities that are taking place that are going to have a huge impact on higher education as well. I like to say, in some cases, that there are two types of higher educators, those that are innovating for the future and those that are not. There's really only one type of higher educator, and that is those who are innovating for the future. Because I'm a believer that if we don't innovate, if we don't disrupt that model of higher education a little bit, the organizations that don't do that are probably not even going to be around to talk about it in five to 10 years, we are around this week to talk about that very topic, and we're doing so with Dr Robert McMahon, who is the president of Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. We are going to learn all about what it means to truly disrupt the world that is higher education. With that, Bob, you've given me the permission to call you Bob, Dr McMahon, thank you so much for joining us here on The TechEd Podcast. It's great to have you here.

Bob McMahan: 1:26

My pleasure. I'm looking forward to the discussion today. So as we just

Matt Kirchner: 1:29

said in the intro, higher education absolutely has to innovate, and I know your model is all about innovation. It's all about disruption. But let's start with this is the model of higher education? Is it broken in the first place? And if so, what are we not getting right, and what do we need to do about it? That's a

Bob McMahan: 1:45

great question. I think it worthy of an hour of conversation, probably in and of itself. I mean, I think it absolutely significant aspects of it are broken, and it's in part because it really hasn't as a model, it really hasn't kept pace with the evolution of our economy and the evolution of the needs of society in some really fundamental ways. I mean, I always like to say to people, we're so forward looking as a sector that we wear regalia that was designed in the 1300s we put some bling on it, but pretty much it's the same. You can trace the academic regalia back to monastic gowns in the Middle Ages. That's awesome. It's a place where stability has value. And so it's not just kind of a generic resistance to change. There's reasons why in academia that that resistance to change, that that kind of long term stability is a value, but what it has given rise to are models that are increasingly discordant with the needs of, well, society, of industry and of the economy more broadly. And so in that sense, it very much. There are aspects of it. They're very much broken, really,

Matt Kirchner: 2:58

in some ways. And it's cool, the pop and circumstance and the robes and the so on that you would see on a typical commencement stage, and kind of hearkening back to the origins of higher education, and there is certainly that history and that gravitas, if you will, that goes along with being an institution of higher education. But to your point, with some of the changes that are taking place in our society and in our marketplaces, we haven't evolved along with those changes. So looking forward to diving into those topics a little bit more deeply, or over the course of the podcast today, but before we do that, Bob would just be interested. You know, I did a little bit of homework on your background and your history, fascinating career history that led to you running this great institution of higher education. So touch on that a little bit. What are the highlights of your career and how have the experiences that you've had in your unique path to your current job influenced your views on higher education? That's

Bob McMahan: 3:50

an interesting question. I would characterize my career in one way. I said it only makes sense in the rear view mirror. When you sit where I am today and you connect the dots in reverse, they connect in some interesting ways, but you wouldn't necessarily do that looking forward, I've had a career that really spans a wide variety of sectors, but always with roots and always with strong ties to the university and to the university community. I have been a venture capitalist. I have started companies. I have grown those small companies from literally kitchen table entities to multinational companies organizations. I've been involved in mergers and acquisitions. I've probably hired as many engineers as I've trained over the course of my career. I've been involved in the public policy sphere. I've worked very closely with the governor in a very progressive state, North Carolina, which uses science and technology to re engineer its economy on an ongoing basis, all of those things I've done while still being connected to the university, always a professor, always with students, always really the first love being edge. Education. And so in that combination of things, I have really seen education from both sides. I've seen it from the producer side as well as from the consumer side, and also from the public policy side. So I've seen it from the three legs of the three legged stool that we always talk about in higher education, and I think that gives me some interesting perspectives on things. No question.

Matt Kirchner: 5:25

What a fascinating background to lead you into this world of higher education. Now, our producer, Melissa Martin, knows right now that I am mustering every bit of discipline that I can muster not to go down the venture capital rabbit hole, because she knows that that is, that is a topic, and we can hijack an entire episode of the podcast, just talking about PE and VC models. But we're gonna avoid that temptation. And rather than talking about that discipline, let's talk about the discipline that goes along with really forming your strategy as an institution of higher education, your approach, I know it incorporates these five interdisciplinary trends. They're all workplace driven and driving those into every single academic discipline. So what are those five trends that you have your eyes on that are having such an impact on how you're thinking about the future of higher ed? Can I divert

Bob McMahan: 6:13

us a little bit here? Yes, let's go down the

Matt Kirchner: 6:15

venture capital Hall. It was interesting.

Bob McMahan: 6:18

I was actually a venture capitalist for a non profit venture capital firm that served the intelligence community the United States. It was really, it's called in Q tel, okay, fascinating model in and of itself, one of the few truly national venture capital firms. So, yeah, we can go down that route. What we want. What's really relevant to your question is this Kettering University as an institution is unique in the United States. It does not work like or look like any other institution of higher education in the US, and that is because of the way it was founded and by whom it was founded. And that really speaks to your question in a very fundamental way. We were founded over 100 years ago here in Flint, Michigan. When Flint Michigan was the Silicon Valley of the United States, people were pouring into this area. This is the home of General Motors. It was right, in a very real sense, the home of the automotive industry. And they were pouring in from all over the world, 1000s, 10s of 1000s per year. And the folks who started the automotive industry in the US, whose names are brands now, were, at that time, young entrepreneurs trying to create businesses. I have a picture in my house, or the president's house here, of Louis Chevrolet, about 20 years old, doing some really stupid things in these vehicles that he was designing, just like you would expect someone of his car doing, right and they were that, but they had the pressures to understand long before McKenzie ever wrote a piece on the war on talent and all these things that what was really going to be fundamental to their success was the ability to take this large group of largely unskilled, uneducated people flooding into this area and educate them and bring them into a level of understanding and technical competence that they could contribute In this industry. And so they did this by forming a school, and they brought in Charles Kettering and others who were huge proponents. But they also brought in some people from the northern parts of Michigan, up in the UP sure the mining community, which was very heavily oriented around apprenticeship programs and the like. And they had several individuals who went on to be very prominent engineers from that community involved in the creation of this institution as well. Interesting, why that is relevant is, is they started from a very different model. Now, this is 100 years ago. They said, Okay, in order for somebody to be a fully educated professional that's going to contribute to technical industries and technical disciplines, a lot of what they need to learn to be fully educated, they cannot learn in school. They need to learn some things in school, but they cannot learn them in school, and we translate that today with all the discussion about soft Guild and teamwork and communications, and that's all that piece. It's not enough to be a smart engineer. It's not enough to have brilliant ideas. You can have the most brilliant ideas out there, but in isolation, they don't go anywhere. So in order to be effective, you have to not only have brilliant ideas, but you have to understand how to use organization to move those ideas, how to develop them, how to work with other people to mobilize research. Sources to be those ideas come to fruition and to develop those ideas. And so with that understanding, they built a university. I built a school initially, which became us on a very different model. They said the students are going to spend half their time in an intense and it is intense, rigorous academic curriculum, and they are going to spend the other half of their time in professional roles in their discipline, practicing that working

Matt Kirchner: 10:33

in the private sector. In that case,

Bob McMahan: 10:35

working in the private sector, working at it, federal research labs, private sector industry nonprofits across all sectors, but they are going to be working in their discipline. And they're not just going to be watching. They're going to be participating members of the staff and members of the team. So when a student then and today, when a student enters Kettering University. They enter a rotation every 12 weeks. They spend 12 weeks in classrooms, and these are rigorous programs. We're one of the highest ranked undergraduate engineering programs in the country. And then they leave the university after 12 weeks, and they go for 12 week into a professional, paid professional role in one of our partner companies and organizations. And we partner with over 450 companies worldwide to provide these opportunities for our students, and they practice as part of the professional teams in those companies for 12 weeks, and then they come back, and they enter this rotation as freshmen, and they continue it throughout their entire career, so that they are here, away, here, away. We have two cohorts that move in opposition, so only one half of our student body is on campus at any given time, and the others in their professional placement, and then they switch. And what this means is they're able to realize two and a half to three years of professional domain experience. At the same time, they're getting one of the best technical engineering educations in the country, and at the same time, they're getting paid 75,000 or more dollars for that work. Now, why is that relevant? To your question, it's relevant because our students leave us every 12 weeks, and they return 12 weeks later, having spent time in some of the world's leading technology companies, some of the most sophisticated company around you. We have students at SpaceX, we have students at NASA, we have students at General Motors. We have students at Libby. We have students across disciplines. We have students who are in venture capital firms. We have students who are in finance organizations, depending on what their major is, and when they come back, they tell us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. We get evaluated every 12 week, and so we wind through our curriculum things that are highly relevant to what we are seeing in industry and in technology and in science and the trends that we need to support and we need to educate our students. So you asked about our five areas of focus, right your five trends? Yep, right now. They're advanced mobility, which is all encompassing with autonomous vehicles, etc, new energy and new energy vehicles, intelligent manufacturing, artificial intelligence and sustainability. Those are intertwined into all of our curriculum. So you can go to any one of our majors across the university and see pieces of those in each one of those majors, who decides

Matt Kirchner: 14:02

what trends you're going to embed? Because you talk about things like advanced mobility, you talk about, certainly, energy, artificial intelligence, intelligent manufacturing, or we call it smart manufacturing industry, 4.0 what have you. Certainly all those are elements of sustainability. But those are all examples, I think, of technologies that change over time, right? We weren't talking about probably at least three of those 10 years ago. We probably might not be talking about three or four of them 10 years from now. Who decides what those trends are?

Bob McMahan: 14:29

We constantly evaluate those, and we work collaboratively with our industry partners to help define those. One of the things that we as I'll say something a little sacrilegious in this probably has to do with that background we were talking about earlier, is I have a kind of a different take that many people have on higher education and who is the customer. If you ask most individuals in higher education, who's the customer of higher education, they will say, reflexively, the student is the customer and the families. Of the customer. I disagree with that, and I'll tell you why the customer is the person or entity or thing or organization that defines the value of what you do, the person that buys the product that's the customer. Now the student and the family, in some sense, is the customer, because they are the purchasing the product, but the organization that actually defines the value of what you do and purchases the ultimate outcome, which is the educated student, our graduate schools, companies, industries, organization that hire those students, they define what the value of what you do is. So when I point to the fact that we have one of the highest starting salaries of any university in the United States, we're in the top 20. It's not uncommon for our students to be starting at 8090, $100,000 a year when they come out of school, sure, but that's a measure of outcomes, right? That's a measure of value. It's a measure of what is the return on the investment that you're making in higher education that communication with our partners enables us to stay current. So those five areas will change, because they have to change, right? And we have to modify what we do accordingly. For

Matt Kirchner: 16:29

sure, let me ask you this, one of the changes that we've seen over the course of the last, let's call it five years, is I used to joke that we would hire whether it's a co op student or we hired a lot of college interns. We used to try to impart our grand knowledge onto the intern, right? So we would bring the intern in, and it was a job of an engineer or a marketing person or a business person to make that person more more intelligent, make sure that their skills were more appropriate and applicable through this experience of working in a applied environment. And what we're finding now is that rather than us imparting our knowledge and wisdom to the interns, because the technology is changing so fast, and they're learning about things now in their education pathway, especially when it comes to things like AI, data science, analytics, programming, coding, these kind of things that they're actually teaching us. Are you hearing the same kind of things from your employers, where you have students that are through their academic journey learning things that are maybe so cutting edge, whether it's advanced mobility, whether it's smart energy, smart manufacturing, that the student is actually teaching the employer. You starting to hear that from your employers, absolutely.

Bob McMahan: 17:36

And that happens a lot. You know, we had a recent graduate, a young lady who was actually from Michigan who was an industrial engineer. Her first job, her first job out of school was to lead a team of 30 engineers to transition product line manufacturing facility from Germany to the United States. Okay, that was her first job. And the reason she could do that, for one reason is it wasn't her first job, yep, but it was also reflective of what the skills that she brought to that. But, you know, there's a danger there too, because when the labor if you want to think about the labor contract kind of in the abstract, the labor contract between employee and employer is very different today than it was, say, 30 years ago. How so?

Matt Kirchner: 18:24

What are the key ways? Would you say? Well, the idea of lifetime

Bob McMahan: 18:27

employment, for example, is no longer

Matt Kirchner: 18:30

dominant. Hardly a reality, right? It's hardly a reality.

Bob McMahan: 18:34

It's much more transactional. It's much more skills based. It's much more you can bring. It's a employee as free agent at some level. Model, very much in the California Silicon Valley. We need this talent. We need this skill. Let's go out and hire it when we don't need it anymore, we let it go. We get the skill that we need next, right? Which means that the danger is, and what we try to help our students understand about future proofing their career is that the skills that they have today are very perishable, and they are fleeting, and they have a limited shelf life. And what really we're trying to educate them. I mean, if you start with the assumption, you say, Well, you know, some big percentage, half or quarter, whatever number you want to use, of the knowledge that they gain when they are students will be obsolete by the time they graduate. Interesting. Yeah. Then what are you trying to teach them? You're trying to teach them instead habits of mind and the discipline to constantly retool themselves and understand that that's a fundamental part of being an engineer or scientist is constantly educating yourself, constantly reinventing yourself. Retooling yourself so that you don't get into the situation. Well, we had that skill like, I'm the world's best cobalt programmer, right? Yeah, congratulations,

Matt Kirchner: 20:11

congratulations,

Bob McMahan: 20:13

yeah, I saw one of those machines in a museum recently, right?

Matt Kirchner: 20:17

Exactly. Have you read Kissinger's book Genesis yet, and if you have it, it's Fauci you'll love it. So Henry Kissinger, of course, passed away November ish of last year. I believe it was and obviously incredible American statesman passed away at the age of 100 years old. Wrote a book with two other folks, one of whom was a former CEO of Google, as he was, you know, entering the last year of his life. And the whole topic of the book, called Genesis is, it's about artificial intelligence, but it's really and I'm about halfway through it, and I'm getting to something here, but a fascinating book of its own right. It was actually Todd wanick, who's the CEO of Ashley Furniture industries, is a really good friend, and recommended it to me. So when Todd recommends a book, I buy it because every single recommendation is great, good. But this one they talk about in that particular book how human beings, you know, the traditional model of education is rote memorization, you know, download information into your brain, go back to an exam and and, you know, spit it back out. Maybe we're doing some applied learning in the form of an essay or a project and so on. The whole premise of that part of the book is, look the human brain, the human beings. We're not programmed to memorize information. That's not what we're here to do. We're not even very good at it, you know, save for very, very few of us. It's not about how much information we can necessarily pack into our brain and regurgitate at some point in time. It's about what we're able to do with what we learned. And as you were walking through that and saying, you know, there's a significant percentage of what we're learning as we're going through our academic journey. And I think it's that that percentage is increasing as the years go on, because technology is changing so fast that is saying, Look what you learn you're fresh from your college in a, you know, four year university that might not be even relevant by the time you walk across the stage with those people in their fancy robes and get your diploma. Is that kind of what you're getting at that we need to be doing something

Bob McMahan: 22:01

more Absolutely. I mean, to your point, the important skills are not rote memorization or rote regurgitation, in fact, right? You know, a quick session with chat GPT can give you just about all the factual data that you totally right, right? Yeah, so, but what we are teaching them is, is synthesis, integration of data, connecting disparate dots and create. Because after all, you know, you work venture capital, you see this all the time. Real invention occurs at the intersection of domains. It doesn't typically occur incrementally from something that exists. Real invention occurs from people connecting dots across, and that integration and synthesis is the most important element of learning, I think, and that's what we really are teaching. We're teaching the habits of mind that allow people to be active, engaged, contributing, inventive professionals throughout their career. And that comes from being able to pull thing together, to reinvent themselves, to say, okay, COBOL is no longer the language of choice. There's this thing called C, or there's this things called Java, or this thing called Python. I've just got to keep learning right? But I can do it. I know I can do it, and I will do it, and I reinvent myself. So it's like a startup. Most startups don't end up doing what they start out to do, right? And most people don't end up doing what they train to

Matt Kirchner: 23:49

do, right? Yeah, think about Amazon, right? I mean, Amazon was a bookseller, exactly. And look at what it is now. And I think Jeff Bezos certainly had a vision toward what that could become, but without question, the evolution of business models and that intersection to your suggestion, where I've got somebody who's got subject matter expertise or experience in one area coming into a new area and saying, Hey, wait a minute, if I did this that I did in my old organization, in this new space that nobody else is thinking about, that's where that innovation comes from. That's where that next great idea comes from. And you're you're actually teaching students the process of doing that. One of the questions that I have for you, Bob, as we're thinking through this, because I totally getting the model right, 12 weeks of academic experience, 12 weeks of Applied Learning, taking what I learned in the workplace back to the classroom, taking what I learned in the classroom back to the workplace. And so we've got this symbiotic relationship between work and learning, and it's a cycle. So do the students come to you with an employer already selected? Do you select that employer for them? How does that work? How do you connect the employer and the student? We

Bob McMahan: 24:55

have all process for that, for starters, to prepare the student, because most. Students are not an increasing number of students coming to us from high school have very limited work experience, right? And so we have a whole process, which we call onboarding. In fact, we don't have a student life function. We have a Chief Student Experience Officer here who guides the student through the entire process, beginning with before they get to campus. How do you dress professionally? How do you communicate? You know, in a generation that's used to sending tweets and, you know, and Tech Talk videos, how do you communicate with the CEO or the vice president of an organization? Not in a tweet?

Matt Kirchner: 25:46

Yeah, not all. Lower case in six, six letters or six words from a text, right? Yep,

Bob McMahan: 25:50

that's right. So we start there, and then we have a whole process by which companies come to the universities and recruit our students heavily. We'll have several what we call job fairs, but are essentially speed dating exercises between students and companies. And we'll have 200 companies bringing, you know, four or five people, recruiters at a time, to our campus to recruit our students for these Co Op positions, for these placements, and then we work with the student to match their career goals, what they're looking for and the opportunities in industry. And it produces some interesting results. I mean, you know, sometimes the most powerful knowledge is to know what you don't want to do as much as what you want to do. So for students can go through this process, find a position, think it's what they've always wanted to do, and then they get in, as we all know, who've got a few gray hairs on our heads, sometimes the practice of a discipline isn't the same thing as the theory of a discipline,

Matt Kirchner: 26:57

for sure. Yeah, lots of time. So how tragic

Bob McMahan: 27:01

is it for a student to go through an entire education, go through four years of mechanical engineering, only to find out that they don't like being a mechanical engineer? And

Matt Kirchner: 27:11

it happens all the time, if we hear those stories all the time, all the time,

Bob McMahan: 27:15

but our students, they find that out in their freshman year or their sophomore year, and then they change. And so there's a whole process by which we manage that that looks kind of like the academic support process at most institutions. We have that too, of course, but we also have this whole parallel piece that works with the professional lives of our students and how that integrates into their academic discipline.

Matt Kirchner: 27:41

Is there a certain profile of a student that works well in this model, as you're looking at a student, for instance, coming out of high school? Are there certain mindsets, if you will, on the part of a student that work really well and others that are like, Oh, maybe this model isn't right for you. There's

Bob McMahan: 27:55

a fairly broad profile of students that we see, but I would say, if if I had to drill it down to some attributes, it's students that like to build things. They like to create things. It's not just about building with your hands. It's about creating things. It can be software. It can be conceptual. But students who are driven and who loved, you know, first robotic students, Vex robotic students. These students are are ideal Kettering students, because they've already shown they like getting out there. They like doing they like building. They like competing. They like pushing the envelope. A lot of our students kind of fall into that. Students that are in the garage on the weekend, building stuff or sitting at the computer, designing new systems, or soldering, or it's that insulation cords creation that's a very powerful

Matt Kirchner: 28:49

I love that you know, as we're recording this my I post on LinkedIn several times a week and try to be as creative as possible. And one of my posts from yesterday was a picture of myself as about a nine or 10 year old, maybe 11, and my best friend and my younger brother and we had dragged home, it was a refrigerator box from the appliance store, and we turned it into, like a stand up arcade video game, which wasn't a video game at all, but it kind of worked like one, right? And I was just reflecting on that over the weekend about, you know, we didn't have that wasn't like a formal process. It was like, All right, it's July 13, or whatever the day is, and we got to fill our day with something today. Let's do this, right? And so we just went off and we found this project to do. And then I think about, you know, as you're mentioning, things like VEX robotics. And FIRST Robotics, highly creative, and there's all kinds of elements of, you know, engineering, but also marketing and business planning and creating the competition environment where the robot is going to do its thing, and planning the trips to the competition, all the strategy, I mean, learning all those things. And then, you know, there's this new we've been involved with this effort called discover AI, which is like getting students while they're still in high school. Yes, let's understand AI and machine learning, but let's do it in the context of growing. And unmanned ground vehicles and 3d fabrication and scanning and so on. It kind of feels to me like we're on the we mentioned the word Genesis the before, like we're at the beginning of this process of, kind of an evolution and a renaissance in K 12 education as well, where we're finally starting to get back to, you know, probably never going to have the day where the where the two kids walk on their own across the busiest street in town to the appliance store and drag a box back. Right? I don't even know if that was safe, but it was fun, but at least to this point where our young people are going to be having these types of experiences in their middle school and high school journey, and even in elementary school, Are you sensing the same thing? Absolutely,

Bob McMahan: 30:37

absolutely and it's exciting. It's so exciting. I'll give you two quick examples. I was walking past we have a large music studio here that was built and at the practice studios that was built through the generosity of one of our alumni. And we did that because so many of our students have very strong artistic and musical talent as well. You know, the correlation between math and music is very strong. So, you know, I was walking past one day and there's a student playing this incredible concerto on the piano. And I walked in and and I said, that is spectacular. It turned out student was in, you know, Junior symphony concert soloist. But, you know, they were really interested in the software architecture of game design. You know, that's what they were there to do, but they had this whole other side of their personality to them. We built a building a couple years ago here on campus, which is really unique in the US. It's really built around our model of interaction. And one of the things you see students over there all the time, they'll be sitting in a room, they'll have an idea. They'll go down, they'll walk down one flight of stairs, get a piece of pizza, walk over 50 feet and pick up their 3d printed model of the thing that they were talking about, you know, before they went good. And you see that kind of fluidity now, across technologies, across I think it's incredibly exciting. It is,

Matt Kirchner: 32:02

but it totally speaks to the need for a different model of higher education, right? Because, I mean, your model is innovative to begin with, right? I mean, you think about this, the typical, you know, four year university experience of the, whatever it is, the 13 week quarters, and the, you know, 26 a week semesters, or whatever, they end up being less than that. But then you and then we're doing our internship in the summer. We have a job or whatever. Maybe we do a co op for a semester, and you've got this ongoing relationship between the two of them. But what are some of the other ways that higher education needs to innovate so that we can meet that student, where they are the one that's innovating on their first robotics course and or their first robotics team in high school, and then they are going off and having that piece of pizza and walking back to the 3d printer, and there is that part that they designed and engineered on their own. You know, what are some of the other ways that we need to innovate higher education?

Bob McMahan: 32:48

That's a great question. And it really comes from a perspective of, I think, understanding that one of the things we need to think about higher education, and we need to start designing higher education in this country, to recognize that it is a spectrum. It is not a model, and we have treated it as if, as it is a model. And if you look across the country, you know, there are some 4000 colleges and universities in the United States, a huge majority of which look effectively, essentially the same, totally, with the exception of the architecture of the campus and the food they serve in the union. What we need to think about, I think, seriously, is a consolidation of higher education in this country around the notion that there are different forms of higher education and they serve different purposes, and we need to think about how we optimize individual institutions to those missions. And that's a bit of vigorous hand waving in your answer, but Kettering is a perfect example of what that looks like when you do that, and what it produces when you do that. And there are others. There are others in the arts, there are others in the sciences, there are others in across disciplines. Are there

Matt Kirchner: 34:13

other ones that you would point to, in addition to Kettering, that are like, wow, these folks are really, really coming up with a creative approach to higher ed. Yes,

Bob McMahan: 34:21

there are. When it comes to the kind of model that we have, we see a lot of partial implementations, if you will. There's a lot of programs that have Co Op programs or are internship programs, but there's no modification of the core structure of the university and the academic delivery. I mean, we deliver our service differently in a different way than everyone else does. Our calendar is different. We have to get special exemptions from our accreditors because of the nature of how we deliver credit to our students, and we have to go through all. Sorts of hopes to demonstrate that ours is equivalent or better than the traditional institution. And so there are other programs that are are similar to us, but none that are that integrate experiential learning to the degree that we do. And I think that's the real power of the model. But there are other domain specific institutions, especially in the arts. You have schools like the College of Creative Studies in Detroit. You have schools like the California Institute of the Arts. You have specialty schools that have tailored their curriculums to specific domains, in this way, but it's driven in large part, or driven fundamentally, by defining who the customer is, and what are they telling you? Absolutely

Matt Kirchner: 35:46

I had I won't say the person's name, but I've thought about this so many times. About four years ago, we had a dean at an institution of higher education who said he asked the question, is our job to create a job for every student, or a student for every job. And his argument was, his job was to create a job for every student, or to have a job for every student. And I'm like, Well, wait a minute. I mean that that to me, seems a little bit back, right? So not that you have to find a student for every job, but should we look at where the careers are going and find, you know, find talent to be able to support those careers. And if those are innovative companies, or if those are employers that are looking for talent that's been, you know, trained and upskilled and educated in a different way. It feels to me like that's the market we're after and after, and it seems like you're looking at it exactly the same way. Certainly, you're going to do well by your students, but you only do well by your students if you do well by the people that are employing your students in the communities that are benefiting from their existence in the and the skills and the competencies that they have, I could continue on this path for hours. I do want to pose two final questions to you, Bob, and they're ones that we ask every single guest here on the podcast, and the first one we've dove into already, and with your conversations about how we disrupt higher education and your different views on education in general, might be even hard to top some of the things that we already talked about. But what is one of those things that you believe about education that would surprise a lot of people?

Bob McMahan: 37:04

I kind of came up through the traditional structure of education. I think what would surprise people is how fluid I do believe education and education should be. In the United States, we do the community college level within our economy, within our society. I think we do it grave disservice. I think they are a very powerful contributor to the solution of this problem, and we don't leverage them in the way that we should as a society, and that many countries actually do. If you look towards countries like Germany, for example, the way that they view higher education as a spectrum and as a lifelong activity. I think it's a very healthy one and, and perhaps that's the thing that people would surprise from a traditional university project president, yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 37:54

for sure. Agree 100% and I know, and I've I'm a big believer that it's all an and not an or right? It's not a four year university or an advanced degree or a technical college, certificate, diploma, you know, what have you, it's we need all of these, and the more fluid to use your word that we can make. The process of education and the choices and the on ramps and the off ramps, and people not making life decisions necessarily, and knowing that you can, you know, to your earlier point, you can step back from a decision you made, if you decide that that decision wasn't the right one for you as you look to your future. So all these different options, but to hear that from a university president really gives me optimism for the future of education, because partnerships in those regards, really, really important thinking about optimism for the future. I want to take you all the way back to when you were a 15 year old young man with your whole future in front of you, and we're going to ask you our final question that we again love to ask every single guest here on The TechEd Podcast. And if you could go back to that 15 year old sophomore in high school version of Bob McMahon, everything that you've done, the experiences you've had, everything that you've learned, all of the different sectors that you've spent time with, knowing that you've got that huge variety of experience and wisdom. Now, what would you share with that 15 year old version of Bob McMahon, if you could give him one piece of advice, how

Bob McMahan: 39:09

long you got the thing, I look back on those things, is nothing ever happens fast enough when you're that age. And this is something I tell students when I talk to them, when they come to me and talk about, well, you know, I've been doing this for six months now, and it's just not going. I said, Well, okay, okay, but things never happen fast enough. They never develop fast enough when you're that age. And so probably the one thing I would counsel is that in patience and and an understanding that the future you, everything you learn along the way, and every experience that you have is a piece of the future you. And you will only know how to connect the dots and revert and they will connect you. If you're open to those experiences and open to that, but I think that's probably,

Matt Kirchner: 40:06

yeah, absolutely, it makes 100% sense. And, you know, I talk and I've got my kids are now in their 20s, and I can't tell you how many times at every juncture of life when you know when, when I'm one of them, and all kids deal with one challenge or another, was dealing with a challenge. And I would always say, You know what? This doesn't make any sense right now, but I guarantee you, in two or three or four years, looking back on it, you'll understand why we had this experience exactly. So connecting those dots so, so important, and so I think apropos for our audience as well. Bob, so appreciate that you're right now. Things never happen fast enough when you're a 15 year old kid. I'll tell you something that happened too fast, was this episode of The TechEd Podcast. We I mean, I can't believe that our time disappeared as fast as it did. I feel like we have so much more to talk about. We'd love to have you back sometime in the meantime, though. Bob McMahon, who is the president of Kettering University, Dr Robert McMahon, officially, thank you so much for joining us here on The TechEd Podcast. Thank you. Had a wonderful time. I appreciate it, and thanks to our audience for being here as well. A great conversation with Dr Robert McMahon, president of Kettering University. We covered a lot of great information. You can find information about Kettering and many of the topics we talked about here on the podcast at our show notes. You'll find those at TechEd podcast.com/mcmahon I'll spell that for you, TechEd podcast.com/m, c, M, a, H, A n, when you're done there, of course, check us out on social media. We are all over LinkedIn. We are on tick tock. We are on Facebook, we are on Instagram. Wherever you consume your social media, you will find The TechEd Podcast, and we hope you find us here again next week. We will be here and looking forward to seeing you then, until then. My name is Matt Kirkner. I am the host of The TechEd Podcast, and thank you for being with us. You.