Student Success & Equity with Dr. Rob Johnstone

Learn why labor market data needs to inform changes to the college student experience.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Welcome to the Student Success Podcast. I'm Al Solano, founder of the Continuous Learning Institute, or CLI, a higher education online resource focused on providing community college and open access university educators with practical information on how to get results at their campus. As a resource within CLI, the Student Success Podcast is focused on just that the challenges, opportunities, failures and successes of practices intended to improve student success and equity. The goal is to leave you with thought-provoking ideas, nuts and bolts, information and or lessons learned from the field so you can consider how you might apply them to your institutional context. Them to your institutional context.

Speaker 1 0:47

For today's podcast, it's a pleasure to have Dr Rob Johnstone. Rob is a national leader in the higher education reform movement and is the founder and president of the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement, ncii. He created NCII in 2013 to help two-year and four-year colleges create structures, processes and cultures that increase and make equitable student completion, learning and labor market outcomes. His unique and engaging approach to inquiry and improvement fuses the world of foundations, initiatives and system-level policy changes with the ground-level work of college practitioners and senior college leaders. He has worked on the ground with over 450 colleges around the country in 43 states and brings an energy and passion for authentic change to optimize the student experience, to improve outcomes. Welcome to the Student Success Podcast, rob.

Speaker 2 1:42

Well, we just got past the worst part of it my friend Al, which is someone reading my bio, so I'm glad we've made that hurdle. So it's great to be here, good to be here with you.

Speaker 1 1:50

Are you kidding me? I memorized it. I'm not reading it off of anything.

Speaker 2 1:54

Yeah, that's a sad story for you if that was anywhere near true, but it's good to be here, Al Good to be chatting with you.

Speaker 1 2:02

I've been wanting to have you here for a while. I'm so excited to have you here, rob. So I like to start all the podcast episodes with guests telling us a little bit something about outside of work perhaps a hobby, some kind of story or something. Could you share something?

Speaker 2 2:18

Yeah, absolutely. We're not on video. So I usually make this joke about seeing my current physical frame and then revealing that I, in most parts of my life, was a pretty active athlete and have been a sports fan and a was a gym rat in basketball, and so I spent up until even when I was working at Foothill College in California and at Skyline College in California, I'd go hang out and run on the basketball court with the basketball players and with the young kids, and it was only when my orthopedic surgeon said, at age 40, you have two choices Give up those three avocations now or have your first of many knee replacement surgeries. So now I am a golfer and a walker in these days in my life, but I still follow sports. It's a fun time of year where we happen to be recording this with the NBA and NHL playoffs, so it's just a good time, and I like to distract myself outside of work by watching sports and being involved however I can.

Speaker 1 3:25

Well, thanks for sharing. So back in the day, when you were active, before Issues with your Knees, did you have a favorite sport?

Speaker 2 3:32

Yeah, I would probably say that I was probably best in baseball, but I probably loved basketball a little bit more. At 6'2", my basketball career was limited by size and height, but I was a pretty good corner infielder in baseball and I've been playing golf for a long time as well, just because it's something you can do as you get older and still play a lot now. So now there's not a lot of other choices, but I do find, as I get older, that following baseball and the length of the games is a lot harder than it used to be, especially although they've done a lot of things at MLB to try to make that quicker. But it's still.

Speaker 2 4:06

I grew up in the Bay Area, so I am a long suffering A's fan. I'm a Sharks fan. I note that we do have the number one pick in the draft, which is always a great sign that you were horrible last year and a little bit lucky, so I'm looking forward to that turning around some, but maybe Celebrini will come in and help the Sharks a little bit. But it's fun I just still enjoy. I used to do broadcasting. Actually when I was at Stanford I did live football and actually this is probably something interesting I called the Women's National Championship game in 1992 when Stanford beat Western Kentucky in the title game at the USC Sports Arena. So I enjoyed that little chapter of my sports career doing a little bit of broadcasting, and so it was fun.

Speaker 1 4:48

Oh wow, Rob, Very cool. So to get us started today, you've been working for many, many years on gleaning labor market data and its implications for colleges as they evolve in their Guided Path pathways work to be more focused on equitable post-graduation success. So can you take us through a little bit of this journey of your work?

Speaker 2 5:13

Yeah, alan, I'd even go back farther. I mean, look, I've been 22 years in higher education now and I came out with my doctorate in social psychology, went and worked in industry for a while and was really focused before we had this term in the field of analytics and how do we use data as the foundation for people to make decisions and for organizational change? And so when I look back at my time as institutional researcher from 2002 to 2005, and I was a VP for a while then I was a researcher again I mean the questions at those times around data were around in California, what we nationally would call developmental education reform, which we call basic skills in California, and around starting to just look at the movement of students through our systems, how many of them do we retain? How many of them are making progress? I mean, if you look at the early days of the Guided Pathways movement, all the great research that Davis and all the folks at CCRC did studying what the barriers were for students as they moved through our systems, and you know the original lost momentum framework of the Guided Pathways movement was around you know, as students connect to the college, as they enter the college, as they progress through the college and then, as they complete in advance, what are some of the markers of success, both on the positive side and also the challenges? And so the data always helped us look at those things a little more closely.

Speaker 2 6:28

And if you go back to those early days of the Guided Pathways Movement, which we had the good fortune to be involved in along with our friends at CCRC and Jobs for the Future and other organizations which eventually became AACC and the National Project before we got to California, it started with a very simple mantra from Davis and he may have even shared this on an earlier podcast with you that it was start with the end in mind. And the end in mind even in those early days was direct entry into the workforce towards a living wage, job and career either direct entry or on the path to it, or transfer with junior standing that also would lead us to those jobs that would provide students the living wage. So in any ways, it was the underpinning of the Guided Pathways movement from the get-go. What I would say happened, though, in the kind of early to mid part of the movement, is we focused a lot of attention on what colleges could do within their four walls. Right. What do we do? How do we get the students, how do we get them into programs? How do we make sure they're getting on paths, keeping them on the paths, and I think one of the things that might have happened during that time was we lost a little bit of the overall frame of this was always about not getting students through our colleges, but getting students through our colleges so they could advance and have post-graduation success, and so I give a lot of credit.

Speaker 2 7:41

Ccrc again re reemphasized this as this movement unfolded, but I'd also give a lot of credit to the Aspen Institute and the Aspen College Excellence Program, which, from the early days of the prize also back in 2011, has years ago, I was asked to be part of a national project that the Bank of America Foundation was funding called the Jobs Initiative the Signature Jobs Initiative, and this started in early 2020, which was obviously a very interesting time to be starting a national project as the pandemic hit, as the George Floyd murder occurred. As the pandemic hit, as the George Floyd murder occurred, bank of America funded 21 colleges with a million dollars each to work on better connecting Black and Latinx communities to high wage jobs and careers, and so this was my first foray with a corporate foundation. They were great to work with, but they also come with some things that are a little bit different than working with the foundations that we often working with in higher education. A question early on now came that was basically so why don't these colleges just track their graduates and tell us where they're working and how much they're making? And I chuckled and said, yes, they would love to be able to do that, but they actually don't have the data from their own Department of Labor or from the federal department later that lets them track that and, by the way, some great work going on in states including California to try to create those data systems.

Speaker 2 9:10

I know that that's good work that's happening in the state of California and a couple other states right now, but for most of us, the way to get at that question has been through data aggregation services burning glass, what used to be EMSI that is now Lightcast and so I actually got back into this in 2020 in the labor market data to try to solve a very specific problem was that one of the colleges we work with 21 colleges, 11 are community colleges and 10 are four-year colleges and in fact, the four-year colleges are classic pub broad access HSIs like Baruch in New York City or Florida International or Arizona State, as well as public HBCUs Morgan State, delaware State, florida, a&m, prairie, view and so I may let's take Baruch, for example. I live up the road from New York City now in Connecticut, and so I may not know where Baruch's graduates from their business program are working exactly to tell you what they're making. But I know what accountants make in New York City or financial analysts make in New York City by looking at Lightcast data. And so that's actually what started me down this road, al, was to kind of think of how do I answer this question to the corporate folks. Are these things that the colleges are doing, leading their graduates to careers that at least pay family sustaining wages? And so I will be totally honest with you. That was the original purpose.

Speaker 2 10:26

But as I got into it a little bit and I was maybe 10 years removed from my classic data analytics roots and we had been doing a lot of organizational change, work around the Guided Pathways and other movements, so it was actually exciting for me to get back into it and I realized that this seemed to be a piece. I don't know that it was missing, but it was a piece of connective tissue to the Guided Pathways movement that really could help it take the next step. Some colleges had already been doing a great job connecting their work to post-graduation success. So I started a painfully slow at first process of figuring out how to take this data I was looking at and transform it into kind of attainable infographics or charts that colleges could use to really understand their labor market. And you know, one of the things that happens is a lot of colleges use Lightcast or use Burning Glass or use EMSI, but they use it most often in a very specific way.

Speaker 2 11:18

Someone asks the question hey, should we have a dental assisting program? So we go look at the labor market data on dental assisting programs and say, hey, how many people are working there, how much are they making? Should we have this program? Which, by the way, is an excellent use of labor market data. But what I was seeing is, if you looked at the kind of higher levels of what are called SOC codes, which are standard occupation classification codes, there's about 850 at the most granular six-digit level, but they roll up into 450 at the five-digit level, into 100 at the three-digit level, into 20 or so at the two-digit level. If you actually start from the less granular level and start asking some questions about where are our graduates going, you actually can dive deeper later. But you get a lot more of the campus interested in labor market data. That welding example I give is great. If you're in the welding program or you're the dean of CTE, no one else cares about what the dental assisting graduates' wages are or the welding graduates are.

Speaker 2 12:17

If we start talking about what the labor market outcomes are for psychology majors or for humanities majors or where people are working in the labor market, now the whole college can be interested in this and it was a hypothesis that I had that people would be interested in this. And then really in the last year and a half we've kind of arrived on a way it's very kind of slide story and slide-based PowerPoint decks that we run for colleges and it has gone so relatively well on many of our projects our Rural Guided Pathways Project, which is national California, the Spank America Project that we won't work with colleges anymore without running it first so that we actually can have people understand and have this initial foundation of what's going on in labor markets. We have a lot of hypotheses that we have about. We can talk about one of them later if we have time about this idea that you don't need higher education anymore to get good jobs. Well, you start looking at this data and it turns out that's not really true in most places, and you actually not only do you need higher education, it's almost in many, especially more expensive areas like California and New York it's almost a condition for entry to living, wage, jobs and careers. So it's been an exciting journey.

Speaker 2 13:26

We're still, I would say, in the early stages of it, but thinking of how to connect a lot of the great work colleges have done on guided pathways, work on student financial stability. Our colleagues Kelly Karangia from Priya Chaplot here at NCII are very fond of saying we can do a great job helping our students with things like basic needs, mental health, while they're with us, but if they then enter into jobs that are reifying intergenerational poverty, we've only provided this brief respite. Right, we really do have to be thinking about our underserved communities and our communities of color. And, frankly, another thing I've found women who are still entering into fields that are paying less than their male counterparts. So these are the type of things that this data unlocks so that colleges can have conversations about it and then do some strategic planning and goal setting around where they'd like to go with it.

Speaker 1 14:12

Thanks for sharing your journey, rob. As you have been looking at the data again, re-immersed yourself in it, could you share some key ahas findings that you wouldn't mind sharing?

Speaker 2 14:27

Yeah, I mean this is a lot easier visually than it is auditorily, of course, but since we're on a podcast, I'll just describe some of the things. One of the early things I looked at is we talk a lot about equity in this country and I know that you have subscribers from all over the country and a lot of them in California, and just the pendulum has always swung on how much we can talk about equity or not talk about equity in this country, and we work in 40 some odd states and the conversations are very different in California than they are in some other states. And I would say to those of you who are in California you're in one of the states that you can have these conversations a lot more easily. I would also observe it doesn't necessarily mean that those states who can have the conversations more easily have actually done more to change the outcomes of those students who they're talking about in more equitable ways or using the right language. And so, for example, one of the slides I landed on early on is I looked at the top so we're looking at two digit occupational code, so very broad strokes like business and finance versus healthcare practitioners versus management, versus personal care versus sales. If you look very broadly and then look at what are the five of those? There's like 20, 20 or 22 of them, the five of them in any market that are the highest paying and the five of them that are the lowest paying. So if labor markets were equitable or balanced is a term I used a lot more now because if I'm working in other states, balance doesn't have the baggage association but if labor markets were balanced by race or by gender, you'd expect to see the base rate of the population have equal representation in the high wage jobs and the low wage jobs Right.

Speaker 2 16:02

So let's do gender first. 50 percent of the population is female. Certain markets it can roll to 52% or 48% of the workers are female. It's very rarely higher or lower than that. So if you look at the five highest-paying occupations, you'd expect to see, if this were balanced, roughly 50% participation with some sample-size variation around those occupations. You do not see that. In fact you see that management is still 60-40 male. You see that STEM is more like 75-25 male. You see that architecture and engineering are more like 83-17 male. And then you go to the lower paying jobs and you find ones that are disproportionately female culinary, personal care and service, and so you have these.

Speaker 2 16:49

By the way, the gender one is less clear than when you look at it by race. And when you look at it by race and what's fascinating about this, al, is to stay apolitical about this I've looked at markets in red states, blue states, urban, rural markets that are suburban, everywhere from LA to Atlanta to Missoula, montana to New York City to Mobile, alabama. What's interesting about the slide that disaggregates this equity by race, or this balance by race, is it's highly consistent that the gaps exist in all of these markets, whether your politics are progressive or conservative, whether the state is blue or red. And so if you're in LA or you're in Atlanta or you're in Charlotte, north Carolina, you see these really large gaps, and they're between. What changes is? Of course, the base rate of the population that is Black or Latinx is going to vary from like 5% in Missoula to 60% in LA, so you're not going to have the exact same size gaps, but you do see, these gaps are amazingly persistent in the high wage jobs, the low wage jobs.

Speaker 2 17:51

So it suggests to me that some of the things that we need to do to wrestle with this have been things we haven't tried, historically kind of from either side of the political aisle and, I would argue, the intersection of education with some of this data, and I think for community colleges and for broad access four-year schools, this is an incredible opportunity for us to help make these labor markets more balanced.

Speaker 2 18:14

We're going to need employers. This Bank of America project one of the great things about it is it also is helping colleges work differently with employers, because employers need to do their part too. At the end of the day, they're the ones who are hiring, they're the ones who are writing job descriptions, they're the ones who are creating either a supportive or non-supportive environment for communities of color or for women in environments that were traditionally neither of those things, and so it's a panoply of things that we can work on, but that particular finding is one of two that I always really maybe two or three that I really center in on right now around the imbalance of labor markets, around things like race and gender.

Speaker 1 18:50

Fascinating Rob, and not that surprising.

Speaker 2 18:55

It's not surprising, but it's a lot easier. I would say what it is when you see this visually on this slide is very powerful, like when you see this visually in your market. Everyone likes to think that there's, you know, their college, their market, and these are, by the way, not about the programs at the college. That's actually a different question. This is about the labor market. Everyone thinks their area is different, right? This is the classic thing. When people think it's C data from another college, they think it has to be different.

Speaker 2 19:18

At my college, seeing this and seeing that, yes, la or San Francisco or Santa Clara County, you know, or whether you're in Charlotte, the colleges we work with in Philadelphia, baltimore, new York it's just seeing it in your customized area takes away any of the. This isn't our data, this is somebody else's data, and so I think there's a power to that. And I also think that, although it's not surprising, it's pretty stark. I mean it calls us to action on some things and I mean I think sometimes we get wrapped up in the rhetoric and language around these things rather than what we actually are seeing, the products of the work we're doing. And I think and this is why I think this post-graduation success frame is so important because if we aren't getting at intergenerational poverty and the effects of that by things like race and gender, the first generation in college we're going to reify these things unintentionally. And I do think there are some we can talk about this a little later some things colleges can do to address some of these challenges with the lens of post-graduation success.

Speaker 1 20:18

As well about this podcast is that it includes show notes. So if you have links to anything slides, I can share them all so they have the visual. So I see you are, in essence, providing reminding campuses of, I would say this is a very strong why, our why, why we need to do this, and then the end in mind, right. But there's that in between, like how do you go from talking to saying yes, I get the why to actually moving to action, making change? Because reform, when you think about it, it's in education, even in K-12.

Speaker 1 20:57

Reform, sometimes we think of the word reform, we think it's this one-time thing or three-year thing or five-year thing, but reform is actually continuous improvement, right, which, by the way, unfortunately, many campuses I'm not pointing fingers, it's just, in many ways, higher ed programs kind of fail us in this but there's not really that culture of continuous improvement. There's just initiative to death and just trying to stay above water to manage all the different initiatives, right. So they end up going kind of an inch deep and a mile wide. From your experience, though, with this why, reintroducing this why and creating that sense of urgency, what are some things that you recommend and that you have seen they've actually moved forward with action and not just you know, here you talk, it's great, and then they go back to their day-to-day and never do anything.

Speaker 2 21:53

Yeah, and let's be super clear. I mean you and I have talked about this. I mean I would agree with you a thousand percent. I use this line all the time. I mean higher education institutions are not set up to be change organizations. They're actually set up to preserve the status quo, and so the number one thing is the next step, after one looks at data like this and says we have to do something, is how. It's not actually what it's how.

Speaker 2 22:22

And I think immediately the great thing about people in higher education, and particularly in community colleges, I would argue is they're very solutions focused. But what the challenge with that is is they often jump to solutions too quickly without actually trying to even, for example, name the problem they're trying to solve or think about what a structured brainstorming, exploration, understanding the root causes A lot of the stuff that you do with the people you work with. You have to operationalize this change process in a way, and NCII kind of has some tools on this that we use. I mean, they're not magic, but what I would say is and what I know that you're doing and we and some others who've wrestled with this directly are doing is you have to break the structures that have existed that are designed to serve the status quo right, and you might argue and look, there are counter examples to this. So look, I have the good fortune of working on the Aspen Prize. They just named 20 semifinalists. We're about to get together and name the 10 finalists.

Speaker 2 23:09

I get the joy of going on some of these site visits to learn from these colleges who've broken these cycles and actually are changing things at scale. What you see is that they've had to do things fundamentally differently. They don't necessarily need an org change model from industry, but that sometimes helps. What they need is is something disruptive to the practices that have kept things going the same way. So I think you've mentioned this. Like you can never state the why enough. It's why I actually enjoy this new way to be able to restate the why, because it lets people see this is what we're working towards. And when I've put it in front of colleges, one of the things I've heard back is that some of the leaders of these colleges it's the non-traditional people in the change process that are now excited about this that weren't in it before that help generate different energy. Having said that, it still comes back to this issue what is the structure for change going to be an organization and you and I and no one can see this, but I'm wearing a very bright Hawaiian shirt and not very buttoned down, and that I'm not a very overly formal structure guy but I acknowledge that that can often be a way to break these historical cycles of doing things the same way.

Speaker 2 24:18

So I think colleges need to think first of all about which piece of this puzzle they're going to take on. You don't just work on we're going to combat intergenerational poverty, right? I mean, that's a pretty 38,000 foot idea, or even post-graduation success, like. You have to break some of these things into their component parts, and you know we have some things we suggest that colleges can look at, like how do we make the career paths more clear to students? By the way, before you make the career paths more clear to students, by the way, before you make the career paths more clear to students, you got to make them more clear to the people at the colleges, right? What does that look like? How do you operationalize that into where? And look I'm from the social science whether your average person teaching psychology understands their role in affecting change that's eventually going to lead to post-graduation success for their students. There's a long way from where we are now to that right.

Speaker 2 25:04

So I think that the notion of a change process, it has to be something that colleges wrestle with. I mean, at the end of the day, fundamentally, the easy answer is you have to do things differently. We can't do things the same way or only change it for small numbers of students, but I do think for a lot of colleges it's helped to break themselves out of these cycles and whether's you know 90 day design windows, we've borrowed some of the tools and, with attribution, repurpose some of the tools from industry around design thinking. But to be able to break those cycles of kind of staying static, even with new ideas and the question at the end of the day always is what's fundamentally changing in the student experience? I've told you this before. Like you know, one of my questions I was always fond of asking in the Aspen Prize interviews or when I'm talking to a college is all right, walk me through the experience of a new student at your college this last fall, so let's say, fall of 2023. How was their application to onboarding, to first day experience, different than a student that started your college in fall 2018 or fall 2013? Yeah, because if the answer to that question isn't significantly different, why would we expect their outcomes to be any different, right? So, at the end of the day, all this talk and all of this theorizing we do has to translate into fundamental changes in the student experience. And, by the way, that's a very hard question for a lot of colleges to answer, because we do a lot of things.

Speaker 2 26:29

I mean, I used to joke about this in the Guided Pathways world with meta-maj, like whatever you call metamajors. Like you know, this idea came down. Yeah, we get, we've got 300 majors. That's too many. We need this organizing idea so that people can experience something before making another choice. So, all right, so this process starts. So we got to argue about what to call them. We don't want to call them metamajors.

Speaker 2 26:51

So that's three months of meetings to decide whether we're going to call these career fields Nope, we need academic in there, so they need to be career and academic focus areas. That's the wrong acronym. So that's three months, all right. So now we know what we're calling them. The next three months is how many of them are we going to have? We're going to have three, we're going to have five. We're going to have seven.

Speaker 2 27:17

Related to that is another discussion of who goes into which. That one is usually three to six months. Am I in a career field, b or C? You get the requisite. Someone wants their own meta major. You get the other requisite I want to be in all of them because no one's finding me right. So all of that happens and you're nine to 12 months in this.

Speaker 2 27:30

Using your points, that could be two years, because there's only three months in the year people actually work. So if you're nine months to two years into this, you say cool, we have seven academic focus areas here at Al Solano Community College and we have mapped everything to them and we're going to have students pick from. As of yet, you've done nothing to change their experience. You've done a lot of stuff on your end. Now again, there's lots of colleges who've done many things. I mean, look at San Antonio Alamo Colleges have done some amazing things with this. The Trailheads at Norco American River's done some great work. A lot of colleges have done great work with making this an experience. But I would say too often our change processes are circling around what we do rather than what we're having the students experience.

Role of leadership and processes

Speaker 1 28:14

That's right, rob. We see the eye to eye on all of this. I have a question for you about. So you present this, why again? And you provide suggestions. What do you recommend from leadership? And I'm defining leadership as the presidents, the VPs and I always include the academic senate president and, to some extent, when there is one, a classified professional president. What are their roles? How do they collaborate? How do they move the rest of the campus? And then, what do you do when these four people are not getting along and don't see eye to eye?

Speaker 2 28:57

Yeah, I mean this is a it's not a uniquely California problem, but the structure is uniquely California. You have, by definition, an academic Senate president, you have faculty, you have maybe 1725. You have all of these things that are legislatively driven in California. All colleges wrestle with this If faculty and staff aren't aligned with senior leadership, and so I think part of the issue goes back to what we were just talking about. How do you operationalize a design process that is inclusive of those various sectors of the campus and treats them as equal, like when we're designing something, I mean, and we're brainstorming, no one's idea is better than another idea, right, so we and that. That sounds great in theory, but in practice that's, as you know, very hard to break down the power structures that exist. I mean, we just ran our last California Pathways Institute in the two phase two, and we had some classified leaders talking about the challenges they have, having their voice heard, and so that I do think academic Senate leaders and VPs and presidents have to make sure that there is an equal seat at the table for those leaders who are from classified very often, by the way who know more about what students are struggling with because they're on the front lines of many of those support processes. And so I think it's this idea of and I like to think of it as you know building muscle right, building problem-solving muscles at higher education as institutions, where I would argue again that historically we haven't really had problem-solving muscles at scale. We've solved problems for small numbers of students, we've nudged problems for large numbers of students. So I think that getting everyone on the same page that this thing we're talking about is a challenge, which is again why I like the data being so kind of pervasive and so powerful is it gets people all right. This is clearly a challenge. What are we going to do about it? And so that gets you to these ideas about where we might be able to go. So you know, if let's just take that one I just mentioned One of the we have like eight steps that we suggest colleges can. This isn't a to-do list, it's just things to think about. If this post-graduation date is so important and you're not happy with what you're seeing, well, yeah, maybe we should make this more clear to students so they're making informed choices. What does that look like? How do we operationalize that? What would the process look like? And business process re-engineering may not be sexy, as a colleague of mine likes to say, but it is, in the end, the determinant of whether or not the student's going to experience something different and the college is going to be able to understand and react to it. So if you're going to say how do we make classrooms more career connected which is one of our other suggestions and, by the way, we're not talking about CTE classrooms no one's sitting in a Python class, a welding class or in a surge tech class wondering what they're going to do when this is over. They all know already. If you're sitting in English 1, psych 1, non-majors biology, you know algebra 1, or statistics. Those are the courses where we need to be more career connected. But what does that look like? So now, how do we get? That's probably going to be more of a faculty driven question, although everyone could have a seat at the table. So I think it's.

Speaker 2 32:04

I put a lot of weight into the idea of what is a clear problem statement that we're working on. That we can agree to. You do as well. I know this. We do this slightly differently. I don't know that the mechanics of it matter, but I think too often we rush to. You know we need more career services. As an example of something, what does that mean? Career services at what point in time, to solve what problem? And so I just think, at the base level, being much more clear about what problems we're trying to solve at any point, and then bringing those groups that you mentioned together.

Speaker 2 32:35

You can't do this without senior leadership being on the table.

Speaker 2 32:38

You've run into this, I've run into this. We won't name colleges, of course, where we've worked with some really good people in the faculty and even the middle leaders level, where we thought they had the buy-in of senior leaders and they didn't. And, at the end of the day, what they've done gets erased or they're not able to get things that they have recommended implemented. And look, you know, we've worked with colleges where we had eight or nine design teams going at once, which is way too many, by the way. We told them not to have that many, but this one college I'm thinking of had this, and we said to their leaders okay, if you want to try this, you've got enough people to put on nine design teams. Great, but no, the first thing you have to agree to is you're going to get 35 to 50 recommendations total from these nine design teams and if you're not ready to implement at least some of those, don't set nine design teams off to go make recommendations that you're going to then ignore, right?

Speaker 2 33:30

We're not saying you have to do everything, but that college, by the way, if I remember correctly, ended up implementing somewhere around 90% of the recommendations they got from their design teams, because we worked really closely with them to make sure that they had good rules of engagement, good design principles, that they couldn't just suggest things that cost large amounts of money, and so I think a lot of it, there's a little of this. That is the how do you align those leaders at the start, whether it's senior, from the presidents and VPs, to middle leaders, to faculty leadership, to classified leadership? If you don't agree that we're trying to solve the same problem and how we're going to go about solving it, you have no chance, or you have a chance it's just random chance, right, and so I do think that that's set up. But we've learned this, and that painfully, from working at some, by the way, good people at good colleges. But if you're not on the same page with agreeing and we actually suggest even formally, writing the problem statements down and getting them approved, and writing down a series of five to 10 design principles and getting those approved, because if you don't have that, this may go in directions.

Speaker 2 34:35

You can't hold yourselves accountable within design teams. I'm just using design teams as a framing example of how colleges can go about this. But I think a lot of the trouble outcomes when you don't agree to it at the start. And so you have. Look, I'll tell everyone listening right now you're better off not putting people out to work on a problem than design solutions.

Speaker 2 34:54

Then putting them out to work on a problem, design solutions where you never intended to implement any of them. That's much worse for morale than not doing it and it leads to this feeling over time that no one's ever going to support what we do on the ground because we make these recommendations. Now there is a flip side to that is, the people on the ground also have to understand that the college doesn't have infinite resources. We're going to have to make decisions about what we can do and can't do. But you have to get that out there first. And those groups you mentioned if they're not all in alignment, I think you have to make decisions about what are we going to take on. That has enough agreement that we can kind of work towards a common goal on them.

Speaker 1 35:33

Yes, that leadership is so key, Rob. As you know, California and I think Washington also received a good amount of money to implement Guided Pathways and I've done some heavy, heavy duty, embedding coaching at a few and remarkable work. And now new leadership comes in and they are actively dismantling it. Yeah, you can have design teams. I love that point that you made. Don't have them if they're going to make recommendations. That never. But you do make recommendations. There are implementing and someone comes in and says we're done. And that's just so sad. It's just a reality. There's really nothing we can do about it, that much.

Speaker 2 36:20

Yeah, and I agree with you. I mean, I think that there is this is, I mean, if you step back from that for a second which I, by the way, totally agree with the way you just assessed that is that new leadership. And look, I think, coming back to Aspen again, the work they're doing on presidential leadership training around the country. Part of it is about creating a vision that's inclusive of what's happened before now, rather than redirecting things 90 degrees every time there's a new leader, just to make a name for yourself or to do things your way. I mean we have to be realistic also that sometimes there are other. The converse to the case you mentioned which, by the way, I have had happen with colleges I work with as well is previous administration wasn't paying very close attention to the budget. There are lots of skeletons that are uncovered, and new administration has to fix a bunch of things before they can, and that means undoing some things, and that happens as well. I mean I don't know which one happens more, I haven't studied it, but I think that this issue is around leadership transitions. It's a problem everywhere. We're at this end of the second wave, in the middle of the third wave of community college leadership and there are very few people from that second wave still anymore. And we're in this third wave where there's a lot of look.

Speaker 2 37:33

I don't think you don't have to look very far in the media to know these are not easy jobs to be senior leaders at these colleges. I mean the four-year schools get a lot more press on what they're dealing with. But community colleges, I mean, have always wrestled with a much more complicated mission than your average four-year school. I mean I've been saying for years it's easy when you work at a four-year school because the students who come to you, who are undergrads, have exactly one goal. First, let's get a bachelor's degree, enter a community college.

Speaker 2 37:58

It can be anything from non-credit to adult ed, to short-term certificates, to AA degrees, to bachelor. I mean you have 8 million possibilities there. So these are challenging jobs. So the turnover is large. But I think what one hopes is that if the focus is on the student experience and the student outcomes and creating, you know it'd be really hard to dismantle things that had led you to have outcomes that were 10 or 15 points higher than they were before you started doing the thing. So I do think that this focus on outcomes can help one modulate that a little bit, but it's still a reality and you're very I mean it's a very savvy point to pull it out.

Speaker 1 38:40

Hubris, hubris, hubris.

Speaker 2 38:43

Yeah.

Speaker 1 38:44

Yeah, I have a question for you because I would. I actually stopped kind of debating for me it's just let's do the work and let it speak for itself. Kind of debating for me is just let's do the work and let it speak for itself. So in the beginning, some years five, six years ago and a little bit more background I used to do, in addition to coaching, a lot of evaluations Title III, title V so in that work I did a ton of student focus groups and they tended to be mostly with students of color and because these grants had these are five-year grants, multimillion dollar have these outcomes that we needed to show right and they had to be about completion. And did we get them out the door and were we able to track them? And every focus group I've done with students of color they said they're there because they need a job, they want to make money, yeah, and they're really realistic about it and they're also very honest that, hey, I have family pressure that says what am I doing here when I can already start working and making money right, when I can already start working and making money right?

Speaker 1 39:54

So the reason I bring this up is, as you're reintroducing all this labor market data. Are you getting again, like we used to do some years back? Well, rob, come on. There's so much focus on completion and career. This is you're some kind of Bank of America or Gates Foundation operative. Shouldn't it be about exploring and all that? Are you still getting that?

Speaker 2 40:26

I'm laughing to see how far I want to go with my response here my friend, of course and so it's interesting. I have a slide in this talking about slides that people aren't seeing, although I'll share it with you to have in the notes. I have this slide where I really address this and I tell colleges all the time like if I am in front of your entire group of people. I'm going to spend a lot of time on this one slide, and the slide is titled to our students. And the next line is it's true that, to us, higher education is about more than just economic mobility, and what I usually do is ask folks what are those things that we find higher education should be about other than just economic mobility? And, by the way, I agree with all of the responses because I also work in higher ed and I love so. It's a love of learning, it's an educated citizenry, it's things like and this is interesting because when I was back at Foothill, we had, when we were doing our institutional learning outcomes, it was the four Cs, because I needed something I was a VPI at the time we needed something pithy to call it. It was critical thinking, computation, communication and citizenship. I've since added a fifth C, which is creativity, and I still use these, and so I think people will say those without my calling them the four or five Cs. They'll say, yeah, critical thinking and problem solving. I say all right, awesome. So, yes, those things are all critically important and if you want more evidence of why you think they're important, go look at your last employer survey you did of your graduates about the things that your graduates struggle with. Every employer survey, whether it's done at MIT, a community college or a four-year school, says exactly the same thing. On the discipline-specific content, your students are really strong. There's maybe this one thing titration, arc welding they could work a little on but where we really see the struggle is in things like problem solving, working in groups, communicating, thinking critically, being able to solve problems. So the irony here is, the things that we hold dear in higher education is the heart of a liberal arts education are the very things employers are telling us our graduates can't do in the workplace. So the good news about this is we all care about the same things. So this focus on economic mobility by the way, this is all in a semantic discussion until you say the part of this that's really important is ask the students why they're here, right. And so I joke like what percentage of your students are actually at your college? Because they say they love learning.

Speaker 2 42:45

And I've been doing this shtick for like 10 years, al, and a faculty member came up to me like six years ago. It was a faculty member in Texas, at Alamo, which is a transfer-focused institution, by the way, and I think she was a social faculty. She said, rob, I love your whole bid on why students are here is because of family sustaining wages and they want to make money. And, by the way, I also say very quickly, right after that we should try to do all of those other things. We should try to create a love of learning, we should try to create an educated citizenry. Even if I hadn't done the shtick on what employers want and what we want, we should create a liberal arts education because our students are going to change careers five, six, seven times. They need all those five Cs, she said.

Speaker 2 43:23

But I have this multiple choice question. I give a survey, like a 10 question survey, to all my students on day one of class and one of the questions is what's the primary reason you're here? And I'm just going to make it San Antonio College? Oh, I don't remember which one of the Alamo colleges it was. What's the primary reason you're here? 10 item multiple choice. One of them was because I really love learning, and I joked with her. I said oh, when you get about 10% of the people to say because they love learning, it's one of 10 items that are multiple choice. And she laughed and she said Rob, in 13 years not a single student has chosen that item and I did some math and there's about 3,500 students. I usually, by the way, when I'm doing keynotes, get a big groan at this point because everyone's like no, I didn't. And my joke about this is I would have thought someone would have just clicked it accidentally in that time.

Speaker 2 44:08

But the point is that's not why they're here. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to catalyze that love of learning. But the reason they're here is exactly what you said, and so I think this goes back to taking the student lens. There's my bulldog saying she also agrees Taking the student lens into the work versus our lens, and I think there's a best of breed approach where we incorporate both. It's going to help the students as well. But do we still get this, yes, but I think that this labor market data helps bridge this some when you start talking about and, by the way, one piece of this is that there are a lot of people who major in the humanities and social sciences who do very well down the road, not doing jobs in the humanities and social sciences, right, and so this is something I've gotten some more recent data on the share with colleges. Like you know, there's a 10 to 1 psych one. A third were majors, a third were taking it for a GE, a third have no idea why they were there or they like to pick a prof rating, right. And so of the third 33 who were there who were psych majors, what percentage of them are going to grad school? Call it 20. I don't think it is. So that means, if it's, 27 of those hundred students in my class were going to grad school in psychology. Yet I would argue that too much we teach to those seven rather than the other 93. So this is the thing I don't think some of these things are huge shifts, right.

Speaker 2 45:45

What I should have been doing when I taught psych one is explaining to people why the fundamental attribution error is so relevant in every job they're ever going to do. What's the fundamental attribution error? It's that when something good happens to you, you say it's I work hard, I'm a good person. When something good happens to someone else, you talk about the situation and how lucky they were to have that good thing happen. Something bad happens to you, you will talk about the situation and why all those unfortunate things happen to make the bad thing happen. Something bad happens to someone else, we attribute it to them. That's the fundamental attribution here. If you don't think, you see that every day in community college settings, you're missing it because it's there every day. That's what I should have been saying to folks. You're going to see this everywhere rather than teaching it, and we have some wonderful faculty who, I'm sure, have been doing this for years.

Speaker 2 46:29

But this is an example of the type of thing of being more career connected, and I do think that this is a really big deal, that the disconnect between what we love about higher education and what our students need out of it are two different things. I mean, you and I, I'm sure, would be perfectly happy to get PhD after PhD after PhD if someone paid us to do it right, but no one's going to pay us to do that. So the question is what do our students need to succeed in the workplace and find something that both sustains them from a financial standpoint? I have this other slide. I'm a big Maslow fan. Right, I love self-actualization, but if you're dealing with food and shelter and the ability to provide it for your family, no one's self-actualizing. We got to handle the base of the pyramid first and make sure that these cycles of intergenerational poverty get broken. Then we can get people to be self-actualized.

Speaker 1 47:20

So, Rob, as you know, I was a reentry student and I went to a community college and I didn't know. During my high school time I worked like 40 hours a week. I was really super busy. I wasn't an academic, but I had some faculty that kind of put me under their wing and say hey, you're actually, you can write decent, why don't you apply to these colleges? So, long story short, I did end up as a community college student who was like a C plus B minus high school student at Cornell, right, and I was a social.

Speaker 1 47:52

My major's in the social sciences. I double majored, it was in the social sciences, but what I found it was in the social sciences. But I found so interesting about Cornell and I started to learn about similar universities. So, as a transfer student and they did this already with their second year students they kind of give you a checklist and they told us specifically because we were part of this college. So whether you're in the humanities or social sciences, we want to show you where our graduates go, what they do, and it was the first time that I thought oh, okay, if I'm going to be a history major, I don't necessarily. Not that it's a bad thing, right, but I'm not pigeonholed. To work, let's say, at a museum or something, or if I'm a political science major, I don't necessarily have to go into politics or campaign or anything like that. And they were showing us how they gave us data, how most of their humanities and social science students were going into consulting, were going into nonprofit management, government management, all these right.

Speaker 1 48:58

So my eyes were opened and I think some years back, LinkedIn had some data that showed that the majority of leaders from the corporate sector to the nonprofit, to government sector are not business majors. They're social science majors, actually, right? Yep. So I'm curious in your data. Let's take psychology for a moment. When you were looking at labor market data, are you seeing, where are you seeing, for example, psychology majors go? That will help them earn a living wage and for them to know, hey, you can do something besides trying to go get a PhD? By the way, I would not. You can pay me all the money in order. I'm not doing more PhDs. Man Like the Hulk has like six PhDs and that's why he's angry all the time, right? Yeah, I was wondering what you thought about that.

Speaker 2 49:54

So I'm going to answer your question somewhat differently than it was asked, because I actually the analysis you're talking about is a very specific one, where you look at individual majors and then go find what those people are doing in the marketplace.

Speaker 2 50:05

One of the problems that we have with labor market data is that it is not unit record data. In most cases it is aggregated data. So I get asked this question all the time. So when I gave that example earlier about disaggregation by race and gender, someone will say well, what about for women of color? And I'll have to explain excellent question. If I was working at a college, I could disaggregate the data to answer the question about women of color, but this is not where I have one line per record describing a student or a worker. In this case it's basically what's the overall percentage of workers in an area. So the reason I mentioned this is that it is harder to ask the question that you are mentioning, which is of the psych majors what are their six? What are they doing in the workforce? Now LinkedIn and I use Lightcast, which I mean they'll both argue who's the gold standard? I think Lightcast is probably ahead of them on the data front. Linkedin of course has a lot more on the job posting skills front, although Lightcast also then scrubs that. So they both are perfectly databases to kind of take a look at.

Speaker 2 51:12

What I would say is, if you come from the other direction and ask the question, where are people working and that's the way I've answered it for now is I actually have a slide that basically says I went and coded because I'm psychotic. I went and coded all 850 six-digit SOC codes into what I would consider career fields. So they're almost the metamajors from the other side, right. Metamajors are about what are our groups of programs? This is how do these jobs classify together into IT or to color or to management or any of those things? When you go from that direction, you find that number one in nearly every market I've looked at is business, because people kind of get there from other places, right, and so I think now there have been studies like the one you're talking about, where people have been able to match the data. Linkedin can do that a little bit, because what they do is they scrub the resumes and the job postings and they kind of match them together. Linkedin is, I mean, sorry, lightcast is adding this service. I actually haven't used it yet. So there are probably some people out there listening to this who've done farther than I have on it. It's on my list to take a look at. To this who've done farther than I have on it. It's on my list to take a look at, but what I get out of looking at it the way I've looked at it, is I think I ended up with 16 different career fields like coding, these 850 jobs. When I look at where arts and humanities and social science jobs fall on that list, it's third from the bottom and fourth from the bottom nationally. Yet those are once you get past business. Business is still the number one major in the United States for undergrads, but if you add together all the social science and humanities majors, they're much bigger than business probably a three to one ratio and so what's happening is people are majoring in things like my family all did in history and they're ending up doing other things. I mean, the obvious ones are always teaching and lawyers, which you can get into from doing anything. But I think what you're getting at is it really is happening that the critical thinking skills all of these things we talk about that are the hearts of social science, humanities, education do prepare people for jobs in other fields.

Speaker 2 53:15

Now, here's the deal, here's the kicker, though. So I'm going to take my experience. I went four straight years undergrad, right into two years of a master's, right into three years of a doctorate, running up student loans that entire time, which I just recently finally paid off. But I went nine straight years, and so, after organic chemistry knocked me out of being a medical doctor which I'm sure everyone is thankful for I was for seven of those years a psych major, undergrad, master's in psych, doctorate in psych. Not once in those seven years did a single human being at three supposedly excellent institutions Stanford, san Jose State University of Oregon say hey, rob, here's what you can do with a degree in psychology other than be a professor or a clinical psychologist Not once in seven years. And I don't think that experience and what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 53:59

Cornell is actually, I think, the exception rather than the norm, and it's probably also that I was doing this 30 years ago and people, I think, are a little more attuned to the connection between higher education and career now, but that didn't have to be that way.

Speaker 2 54:12

I happened to find analytics. Before it was a thing like I was programming an SPSS in 1991. And I liked it no-transcript. But that transition I was lucky to make it shouldn't have been happenstance. Like we should be helping people understand these connections. And this is where I say to my colleagues who teach in the social science humanities and are deans of social science humanities you can't just sit back and say, see, we knew our degrees were valuable because our people are getting these jobs in these other areas. While that is somewhat true, what I would argue we have to do as higher education institutions is connect those dots, because who are least likely historically to connect those dots are first-time and college-served students and underserved communities of color who don't have the historical reliance on other people being able to make those connections for them. That's not because they can't, it's because we're not just offering the same services but that we're making sure people see the same connections between what they are doing in higher education and what they will be able to do in their careers.

Speaker 1 55:54

So, Rob, as we wind down here, I have one last question Going back to what you said earlier about baseball and basketball. Could you use one of those sports as a metaphor to help wrap things up, to summarize our discussion today?

Speaker 2 56:13

Yeah, it's a great question, Hal. I could go either direction. My initial response is to go to the interminable length of the regular season in baseball and talk about how organizational change actually does take that long. But I think maybe the basketball analogy of a single game might be a little better If you think of the change reform movement in community colleges.

Speaker 2 56:34

So you know, you could argue it had its genesis in the 90s. I mean, I started in fall of 2002 at Foothill College as the first institutional researcher and those of us who've been around I mean there's certainly people been around longer, but I came knowing nothing about data in higher education or data in community colleges. So I was a fresh mind six years out of my doctorate, six years working in industry as a strategic consultant who had some analytical skills and some data summary skills. But, for example, one of the things I pretty early on realized is people hadn't been looking at data ever. I was the first institutional researcher at Foothill College. You know, think about this. We didn't really have the data in formats that we could analyze it until maybe the early 2000s. So I would say the 2000 to 2010 range when thinking about data as a foundation for change was the first quarter. It was the first quarter of the game and you could argue and I think you could beat any kind of framework to death. But if it's the first quarter of the movement of data as a foundation, I would say we've probably reached halftime on that one, like we've done some work in the time since, say, 2010, where we've started looking at other data. On success, I mean, if those of you around in fall I don't know how many of you knew what your completion rate was at your college in fall of 2002. I mean, no one at my college did. That's not because Foothill wasn't good or bad, it's because that wasn't something we talked about. And then accountability came in, the data systems came in. So I think we've gotten much more savvy with the data. I mean, california has amazing features, like the RP group, who are able to kind of help people converse with the data, be more conversant in data analysis.

Speaker 2 58:16

So the second thing I would say if you think of the reform movement overall in higher education, I don't think we're much past halftime either. There's various people who have various models about norming and storming and forming and all these various models of change, but I think we're still in the earlier stages of that, I do think we know a lot more than we used to. Take the Guided Pathways movement for a second the Guided Pathways movement has probably gone into the third quarter in its kind of its movement stage. But I think the question for then is is how does this kind of regrounding and reformulation of post-graduation success, as the lens with which we view success, help that movement in its next kind of couple of quarters? And the bad thing about this analogy is the game is never over, right? You talked about this earlier. This is continuous improvement.

Speaker 2 59:06

I guess the way to talk about is there's always another thing to work on. If each you know each unit of change is an individual basketball game, there's a season and at the end of a season you move on to the next season. And you know we talk about seasons five years ago in basketball and we talk about things we did in 2004. You know, money ball was the newest thing in baseball in the early 2000s, when my beloved Oakland A's actually, briefly, were very good, again with no money. But then everyone learned how to do that, and so there was no competitive advantage for VAs to do things the way that they did it, and so I think that there are the colleges and movements that jump out ahead and then others kind of come along.

Speaker 2 59:50

But I do think that where I would send a message to folks of hope I've been at this 22 years Change is slow, it just is, and it's slow in a lot of areas. It's particularly slow in higher education, but the mindsets are changing. At colleges all over the country. People are paying more attention to these outcomes. They are understanding that, while we don't own every piece of this process, we have a lot more agency than we believed in changing these outcomes for our students, and I fundamentally believe that we're on a great path right now, but there's a lot of work to do ahead of us. There are more games, there are more seasons in front of us, so I'm excited to be part of that work with you and the many others who are listening to these podcasts.

Speaker 2 1:00:31

And I think, in the short term, that this notion of either recapturing, regrounding or evolving our frame for what makes our students successful, as being grounded in this post-graduation success lens, building on the great work of Aspen and CCRC and others, is really a huge step forward. By the way, it's an equally huge step forward. For colleges who've been quote unquote great guided pathways colleges to colleges who've been quote unquote a little behind on their guided pathways work, it doesn't matter Like if we reground ourselves and kind of like the colleges I've worked with, there's been great examples in California who've gone the farthest. See, this is the next step. How do we take this next step? What do we need to do to make sure, for example, our onboarding processes aren't selecting out communities of color into low-wage programs?

Speaker 2 1:01:15

You could have done great guided pathways work. Maybe you should argue that it would have been come on earlier, but if you frame this in post-graduation success, that's a question you can ask, even though you were getting them into programs of study. Are they the right programs of study? These are the type of questions that I think can be the next evolution for even colleges who've done great work, and I think you and the mindset of continuing. That's what this is, man. It's trying to get better every year and help colleges getting better and we all getting better and learning more together, and I'm honored to be part of that with you and everyone else who's listening to the podcast.

Speaker 1 1:01:44

Beautiful man. Thank you for that. The most important question of all is so your bulldog. What's your bulldog's name? How old?

Speaker 2 1:01:53

That would be Cleo. Cleo is trying to let me know that there are neighbor kids playing in our backyard, as I'm guessing what was happening. That is, Cleo is a seven-year-old rescue bulldog. She was a breeding mama and she is very, very spoiled now after having given the world a lot of bulldogs.

Speaker 1 1:02:09

So we're happy to have her, oh, awesome. So feel free to send me a picture. I'll include Cleo in the show notes. So thank you, rob, so much for participating in the Student Success Podcast. Thank you, thank you for participating in the Student Success Podcast. Thank you, thank you for listening to the Student Success Podcast. Each episode has show notes which include helpful links and necessary follow-up information to help you get results. Please consider subscribing to the Continuous Learning Institute website. There are no advertisements. It's simply updates about articles, tools, resources, podcasts, etc. All tailored for you, the practitioner. Thank you.