In this episode we speak to Dayana Kibilds, Strategy Director at Ologie, about different barriers to higher education beyond sheer cost and into areas of communication. How hard is it to even know how to apply if you don't read at a graduate level already? We get into the very assumptions baked into higher ed, why it isn't always a great idea to emulate the big players in a space, and how major demographic shifts should also be shifting our approach to recruiting students yet somehow...aren't.
Resource from this episode: Rating colleges by economic mobility
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
In this episode we speak to Dayana Kibilds, Strategy Director at Ologie, about different barriers to higher education beyond sheer cost and into areas of communication. How hard is it to even know how to apply if you don't read at a graduate level already? We get into the very assumptions baked into higher ed, why it isn't always a great idea to emulate the big players in a space, and how major demographic shifts should also be shifting our approach to recruiting students yet somehow...aren't.
Resource from this episode: Rating colleges by economic mobility
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)
David Dylan Thomas
Welcome, once again, to ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’. I'm your host, David Dylan Thomas, and I am here in lovely Edinburgh with the brilliant Dayana Kibilds. Dayana, why don’t you tell the good folks here what it is you get up to?
Dayana Kibilds
Hi everybody! Thanks for listening. I'm Dayana…and what do I get up to? All sorts of things, but I'll answer professionally. I'm a Strategy Director at Ologie. Ologie is a marketing branding agency based out of Columbus, Ohio, serving primarily higher-ed clients, non-profit clients in the US. My job there is basically enrollment strategy. I do dabble in other types of strategy, like brand and fundraising, but I would say I’m the resident enrollment expert at this point, and that's because I've spent 12 years in higher ed enrollment. Now it's what I get to do for fun.
David Dylan Thomas
Cool. I love the idea of you just dabbling in different strategies. So, Day, let me ask you the million-dollar question. What have you been thinking about lately?
Dayana Kibilds
Well, I have been thinking about this topic nonstop since I think March, 2022 maybe. It's basically the barriers to education that no one talks about. So, if I ask you – maybe not you, you might have a great answer to this, but if I ask the average person, what do you think is the biggest barrier to education in the US? What do you think they’d say?
David Dylan Thomas
I'd probably say cost.
Dayana Kibilds
Cost, yeah. That's the number one answer because it's true, I mean it’s a huge barrier. But what I think that does, we say that – and when I say ‘we’, I mean us, university professionals, the folks doing enrollment, the people that work at universities, we say that, then we wash our hands of it and it's not our problem. We can't fix it. We can try to fix it with scholarships, we can raise funds, etc. But you know, that's the barrier. There's nothing we can do about it.
The problem I have with that is that then we don't try to do what we can do, which is think about other barriers to education.
So, if we were to think, okay, money's not an issue – and it is, I'm not naïve, it is – the process is still so complex that if money weren't an issue, there would still be many barriers to education. The one I'm fixated on, one could even say obsessed about, is language. It’s language and it's process.
We're in Edinburgh together because my talk here is going to be about language as a barrier to education and I am getting more and more kind of angry over time at how we're just not doing anything about it. So that's what's on my mind.
David Dylan Thomas
I've seen the smaller version of your talk - or the faster version depending on how you look at it. It's a great talk, it has a righteous justified anger to it. I'm glad you're angry about it. I'm not glad you have a thing to be angry about, but the passion I think is warranted . There’s a piece of it that I still think about to this day, that is this kind of brick wall analogy. Do you mind kind of giving folks a word picture of the brick wall analogy?
Dayana Kibilds
Yes, so here’s the brick wall analogy where it came from. In order to prepare this talk – and it’s this topic I’ve been thinking about for a while – I started looking across various university websites in the US. I think I might have picked about 10 or 12 different types of institutions, private, public, big, small, state, non-state, whatever. I looked at specifically kind of their admission process pages and the information that they put out there to explain the admission process.
It turns out that of course we intuitively know this, it's not clear, it’s disjointed, it's all over the place. But what I found most striking is that in order to ‘make a complicated process less complicated’, what universities do is they publish more content about it, which is more complicated when you think about cognitive load.
Then I specifically looked at some of these pages. In this instance, the brick wall analogy instance, I was looking at a page that is supposed to inform DACA students, Dream Act students, how they can enter an Ivy League University, an unnamed Ivy League University. You open up this page that's supposed to explain this process.
Let's think about our audience here, these might not even be first generation Americans. They might actually be immigrants themselves, where their parents are illegal residents of the US or they don't have the status, whatever status they need to stay or whatever it is. So they probably don't speak English to a postgraduate level. They probably don't have a support system that can help them interpret complicated information.
So, you're looking at this page and it's a giant block of text. No line breaks, long sentences, full paragraphs. What I did is I took it, I took this page, I copied the text, and I pasted it in the Hemingway app/website, which if you're not familiar, it's essentially just a site that tells you how readable your content is. It tells you if it's a grade seven reading level or postgraduate, and it tells you which sentences are really complicated, which sentences are really simple. The way it does this is visually, so for complicated sentences it highlights them in red.
When I pasted this page in there, this information to help students that want to stay in the US to study, it all came back red. Almost every single sentence on this page that is supposed to help someone without the support system, it almost all came back red. Red means you need a postgraduate degree in order to be able to understand this information, that's the reading level, and when I looked at it, it looked like a red brick wall. So that's the analogy. The pages that we're putting up supposedly to help the students that are equity deserving, marginalized minorities, immigrants, first generation, whatever it is that we're writing in our D&I statements – they're brick walls.
We're not actually helping anyone because what we're creating are more barriers, more confusion, more steps, more complication instead of the opposite which is make it simpler, don't put up these red brick walls.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, and it's a striking image. If this ever gets committed to video, you should definitely check out the talk. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that happens?
Dayana Kibilds
That's a great question. I think part of it is I feel in our industry there's this pride or history of education isn't actually for everyone. You must pass some sort of test; you must be meet some sort of bar in order to enter an educational institution. Right now, we say, ‘well, it's so that we can ensure that students can be successful.’ I have a lot of thoughts about that.
I think there's this kind of just elite history of entering university. I say this from experience, I have been in the admission offices when a student is asking a question because it's not clear on the website. The internal reaction to that is, well, if they can't understand that, they're not going to make it. So internally, we make no effort to actually open up the doors because we are using the process as a barrier. If you can't even successfully apply, how are you going to succeed in university? It's messed up because the students that are actually able to figure out this process, they're not doing it on their own. It's not that they are figuring it out. It's that they have a parent or two or another family member or a guidance counselor that believes in them and is not in an underfunded school system. Or maybe their parents have money and are paying for an agent or a tutor. It's not the student themselves. I think there's a little bit of that. There's just this cockiness, this admission cockiness that is so irritating to me, where, ‘well, it's on the website and they need to be able to figure it out and we don't take responsibility for it’, which sucks.
I think also, quite honestly, it seems simple, I think there's just this lack of content strategy awareness in the US in general. I always compare it to Amazon. I know Amazon's not a great thing to compare to from an ethical perspective, but their user experience and how easy they make it to buy something, if we really wanted students at our university, wouldn't we make it easy for them to apply and do what they need to do?
So, I think there's this lack of empathy. When I'm thinking about content strategy, I'm thinking about who your audience is, thinking about what they need, thinking about the next task they need to complete. We don't actually design higher ed websites following any of those principles. Somebody decided this is what higher ed websites are going to look like 20 years ago, and now every single university is like, well, this is what higher ed websites look like and no one deviates from the mold, but the mold doesn't work anymore. Nobody's thinking about users and top tasks and minimum friction and readability levels and empathy etc. when they're designing a higher ed website anymore or at all, they haven't.
So, I think there's that kind of just professional component. I think there's a general admission cockiness, and I don't want to say this, I don't know if it's true, but maybe it does force you to think about how genuine is your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion? Is it just lip service? Everyone's putting it in their strategic plan. If it were true, would you be cleaning up your website? When you ask, ‘Hey, what's your commitment to recruiting students from historically excluded groups?’ ‘Well, we created a scholarship’, so we're back to that cost answer again. But what about the other thing that we can do, which is actually help them through this?
David Dylan Thomas
Which actually costs less money.
Dayana Kibilds
So much less! Even with the scholarship they might not even make it to the door because of this process.
David Dylan Thomas
I want to go back to that cockiness and that elitism, because there's a weird value prop paradox there. I mean, even the word ‘higher education.’ It's not lower, it's higher. And ivory towers and Ivy League, all these words sound very white, they sound very colonial. But that's the thing, it's meant to instill awe.
When you hear words like Harvard or Cornell, you're meant to sort of tremble – or Yale. We tell you how many presidents have attended this university; you're meant to tremble. It seems to me if that is the value prop, it is not about getting an education so much as it is about getting into an elite club. It sounds like country club advertising, not ‘We want you to be smarter’ advertising.
Dayana Kibilds
We're trying to bring up society, right? That is true, but here's where that's interesting. There are institutions like that. There are the ivory towers, the Ivy leagues, the super elite, selective institutions. Let's imagine they can just do their thing. Every other university in the country though is trying to be like them. Why?
David Dylan Thomas
Oh my God. You know what this reminds me of? I was in Germany at a conference and meeting people from Brazil and all over the world really. And a lot of them were sort of lamenting the state of affairs because of rise of authoritarianism. There's a country that's got some authoritarian shit going on. And what I kept hearing, which was very frustrating, was basically, ‘well, basically the people in our country want to be like America.’
My immediate reaction when I hear that is like, why? Oh my God, I live there. Let me just reassure you! You do not! You should look at what we do, but then do the opposite, that's what you should do. Oh my God! But yeah, it's this thing for reasons passing, understanding, if you're in it, there is this idea of, ‘Oh yeah, well if Harvard does it, we should do it because it's Harvard. If America's doing it, we should do it because it's America.’
Dayana Kibilds
Yeah. I have worked at the Ivy League and I have worked at state institutions and worked many with many of them now, through Ologie. These institutions, oftentimes the way you get leadership to make decisions, you have to say something like, ‘well, so-and-so institution is doing it’,
When I was still in higher ed directly campus side, I remember one of my greatest frustrations being why don't we invest in our staff? Why aren't we investing in thought leadership from an operations perspective? Universities talk a lot about their faculty. They talk a lot about their students, but the staff, it's not really a group, a cohort of constituents that are the best in their fields or they're hired for what they can do or celebrated in any way. Operationally at an institution, innovation at a staff level is never rewarded. There's not usually a lot of investment in IT. There's not a lot of investment in content strategy. This is of course personal experience, but the battle and I think part of the burnout and the higher ed great resignation is kind of cost by this. We don't want to change. We don’t need to change. We’re stable institutions.
From my personal experience, I remember when the pandemic started in 2020, I was ready. I was like we are going fully digital; we’re going to go hard on the digital. This is the moment where I’m going to transform the way we do this because nobody can tell me no right now. No one can say anything. I don't have to convince anyone that I'm going to take resources for my school visit budget to do more webinars. I don't have to because we have no choice right now – fantastic. I think every institution went through this, it was about two years of innovation in six months, we all did that. So, the effects of what we had to change in the way we practice started to go away.
Things started to go back to normal in 2022. You would think that that would've been the moment where institutions would say, ‘oh my gosh, we kept our numbers, we did all that despite this pandemic. So that's cool, let's keep doing the cool stuff. Let's keep innovating.’ But what happened, at least to me, let's go back, let's go back to pre-2020 stuff. Innovation is not celebrated. Oftentimes roles are not filled for how they can completely revolutionize the way things are. Roles are filled looking at exactly what you've done and if you can do exactly the job description as it was written and just repeat, rinse, and repeat what is the proven way. That's a common thing in higher ed. So why do I think this is the case? I think it's because no one really wants it to change and the people that do want it to change are not working at universities.
David Dylan Thomas
I mean that’s the thing, during the pandemic, the height of the pandemic – I’ll call it season two of the pandemic, you could definitely tell the difference between people who were seeing the opportunity for change and kind of embracing it and people who could not wait for things to get back to normal. And when people cry out for change, there comes a moment where you have to say, are you sure? Because when people think about change, they usually think about outcomes. They don't think about the cost or inputs for change. How they would have to behave differently. Or things that they're doing that would be strange or different. I think that's kind of part of resistance too. The other thing – and I wonder what the incentive structure is in higher ed, because the other reason I could say it would make sense to be persuaded by, oh, Harvard did it, let's do it, is because no one ever got fired for following Harvard.
I wonder if there is a cover your ass element to decision making in higher ed. Where, and again, I literally wonder, in terms of, okay, if I don't make the right decision…this project, if it goes wrong, I'm going to be the one who gets blamed, so I need to make the most conservative decision possible. Even if it does go wrong, I can say, well, what do you want? Harvard was doing it. You can't blame me.
Dayana Kibilds
But at the same time, it's one of the most difficult jobs to get fired from. Getting yourself fired from a university is near impossible.
David Dylan Thomas
Wow! That is so weird to me.
Dayana Kibilds
It is. It's not like a business where it's like, oh, you're not meeting quota, bye! As a person that's managed more than a dozen employees at a university, you have to be a consistently just terrible performer for five years, or steal something or kill someone!
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, burn down the university! What that makes me wonder then, does the job select for conservatives? In other words, are there very things that would put you in a position to have that kind of longevity the kind of things that would also make you say, well, this is the way we've always done, or this is the way Harvard does it.
Dayana Kibilds
That's right. I think there's a lot of that. There are people that are not that, and they're the ones that get really frustrated and try to find another way. The other reason I think things don't really change is this perception that equity means lowering standards, which I hate.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh my gosh, it's so arrogant.
Dayana Kibilds
Isn’t it!? This is the theme. Higher, cocky, arrogant. right? So, I've had these conversations once upon a time, internally, and, and these institutions were talking about equity, diversity, inclusion policies. We're talking about what that means in admissions, and there's always someone around the table that’s like, ‘we don't want to lower our standards.’
It just happened recently too. I was reading something and asking to clarify the goals of a certain objective. It’s like are we trying to recruit more students from low income backgrounds, Pell Grant receiving students? Lo and behold you get the little comment, ‘but, I just want to make sure it says talented students.’ Oh my gosh!
Okay, that’s a given, but what does that mean to you? I have a physical reaction to it now. Thank goodness I work remotely from my computer, because what does that mean? Now I do client work, so I can't just be, ‘tell me what that means’ because then that be bad. That would probably get me fired. But what does that mean? When I was trying to make some of this change when I had a campus job I did ask, what does that actually mean? How are we actually measuring what you think talent is? How are we actually measuring excellence, what you think excellence is or whatever. How are we measuring?
At least in Canada, it's a very simple measure. It's your grades in the final year of high school. That's the metric. That's the single metric. That does not measure talent. That does not measure excellence, right? That's one flag, one signal.
In the US you also have grades. There might be another component to your application, an essay or some sort of thing. There were standardized tests. Again, three different signals. Also not really measuring talent excellence, whatever that is.
So, I think a lot about why don't we redefine what talented means? Or let’s define it, actually not redefine. Let's define what excellence means to us. Let's define what talent means to us, and then let's get creative about how we're measuring it.
The same measurement is not going to be the right measurement for every single student. There’s a lot out there right now about test scores being terrible. It’s a messed-up industry etc. But for some students, test scores are the only thing they can use to prove that they’re “talented”.
So, I have a personal example. I was a grades kid. I had a straight A's my entire life. I never missed the day of school, I don't think I had a single absence in my entire schooling era, so grades were great for me. My husband, who is now a university professor in economics, brilliant man, he had terrible grades because he was too smart and didn't go to class and didn't care. He would show up to exams in university after not having attended a single lecture, take the test in a third of the time it would take to other another student and get an A. But his grades were terrible because of attendance and he didn't do the homework and he didn’t do the projects. So he is an exceptional test-taker but also extremely knowledgeable. He had perfect math SAT’s but not perfect verbal because English was a second language.
So, for him, we can measure talent through the standardized test score. For me, we can measure talent through my grades. For some other student, we might be able to measure talent by, what is your life situation? Are you working part-time to support your family? Do you have to take care of someone at home, maybe an elderly person or your siblings? Are you paying for yourself to be in university? What are these other metrics that we don't even think about to actually measure excellence, talent, grit, success, whatever that is?
The role of an admission office, at the core, it's an office that you're supposed to somehow assess if someone's going to be successful at university. Why aren't we looking at other ways to assess that?
David Dylan Thomas
This is interesting because I'm tempted to try to break this a little. First off, that whole are we making sure that it says talented? That’s like tell me you're a racist without telling me you're a racist.
Dayana Kibilds
Oh my God, right! It's like well, tell me why you think this correlates or doesn't. I know.
David Dylan Thomas
But to that, that there is something about the assessment, the base assumptions of the assessment process itself – and this going to sound extreme, but it’s what I’m feeling, it smacks a little bit of eugenics. What I mean by that is there's a notion of, especially when you do sort of limit it to just, ‘you will take the SAT and from that I will determine if you will be successful.’ There is an idea of the ideal student. That ideal student has these identifying characteristics, this score on their SATs. These after school studies, there's a picture of a person that doesn't have a ton of variance. Once we set that, basically if you can fit through that hole, you can get into my university and then that then builds up around making sure that your child is able to fit through that hole. That on its own is sort of just moral hazard of gameplay and now I've basically just created a way for people to make money.
Dayana Kibilds
Oh yeah, totally.
David Dylan Thomas
But it is based on an assumption that there is an ideal student. I guess where it gets tricky is, and where I'm tempted to try to break it, I'll step out one from that so the next step forward would be sort of saying there's a perverse example which is to sort of say, how do you educate for a plurality of things that could identify someone as talented. Then the next step that just breaks the whole model is, oh crap, what do you do if everyone is talented? What do you do if you start with the assumption that everyone actually is worth educating, could be successful, and even if they're not successful the first time, we can give them enough chances to become successful?
Dayana Kibilds
Yeah, exactly. Well now you're breaking all of higher ed!
David Dylan Thomas
That's the thing, I am, but I also feel like I'm fixing it!
Dayana Kibilds
You are! So here's the thing, and you and I have talked about this before, so I know where you're coming from. Here’s the thing, as you’ve said, higher education is higher, it's exclusive. It's not for everyone. I feel like what the industry has done is it has made it a requirement for everyone to be successful. You need that bachelor's degree. But these institutions, the way they currently exist or are, the process is not designed for everyone. It just isn’t. So, we have these pressures. The society pressure that everyone does need a bachelor's degree to reach a certain level of whatever in the workforce.
I would ask, does everyone actually need a bachelor's degree? I don't know. Society puts this pressure on people and the institutions are not made for that. So, what should the system look like? Should we educate for specific trades or jobs or just skills education? Does everyone actually need two years of general education credits in philosophy and art? Then there are the people that are going to go and discover the cure to cancer and win Nobel prices. Those people still exist too and so those people need an incredibly academically challenging environment where they really are at the very limit of human knowledge and trying to move it forward. They need their environment because we progress.
What I think what's funny about higher ed right now is that they think of themselves as the places where that ground breaking knowledge is happening – and it's true in some places. But they're also trying to serve the, ‘I just need this degree to get a job’ student. They're stuck because they can't do either one very well. So, I think the great reckoning that needs to come to higher ed is what type of institution actually are we, who are we actually serving? Focus on what you do best kind of thing.
I see this from what is expected of a faculty member. A research faculty member is expected to publish, do research, and 80% of their time is that. But there's a little clause in their contract that's like, but you have to do service – and service is teaching and also administrative stuff. They have to attend meeting departments and be on a hiring committee every now and then. When we think about higher ed outside, we're not a faculty member. We think professors are there to teach. They're not, they're there to do research.
So, this is what I'm saying. It's push and pull of what universities think they are and what we as a society think they should be. Every university is trying to be both of those things and clearly, we're seeing it. Things are falling apart, it's not sustainable.
These super elite admission processes could potentially make sense if what we're trying to do is hire a bunch of chemists that are going to find a cure for something because you have to have a strong background in that in order to be able to jump right in and do the research, but it doesn't make sense if you just need to figure out how to do your job and talk to people. If we want to break the system, I think we have to think about what universities even should be.
David Dylan Thomas
That even speaks a little bit to the perverse part of it too. It's just sort of to say, well, if there are many different kinds of knowledge, if there are many different kinds of learning, if there are many different kinds of needs around that learning, the skill set to be a neuropsychologist might require different inputs than the skill sets to fix a car – neither of which I'm capable of doing.
Basically, Harvard just coming out and saying, ‘look, we're here to introduce you to billionaires and if you want to get introduced to billionaires, if you want to come to our party, you’ve got to look a certain way, you’ve got to talk a certain way.’ They would still make money, they'd be fine. And they'd probably waste less time. I know people at Harvard who are actually very much against that idea and God bless them, they're working to make it different than that. But to your point, making a decision to say, look, we are going to be this, and that's what we're going to be, but we're not going to be this but then say we're that. I think that's where the frustration comes in where we say, oh no, we are simply here to provide an extra education above and beyond what you need. When the job market says no, if you don't have a bachelor's degree, I don't want to talk to you.
Dayana Kibilds
Yeah, exactly. The institutions can't pick. They want to be everything for everyone, and with the resources that they have, it's not possible. So, the folks that are getting excluded are the ones that don't fit the mold. We're not even talking about getting in and then not getting through, which is an even bigger problem because now you might not get to the end, you might not get the degree, but you for sure have the debt. So that's terrible.
So, if we’re going to break the system, Dave, let's just completely redo it. What should it even look like?
David Dylan Thomas
That introduces another question, which I think is interesting, which is what do universities owe America? In terms of tax-exempt status – I don't know if universities have tax-exempt status, but the degree to which we have a system, as a chicken and egg, we have a system that requires a certain level of education. Is there a certain obligation for higher education to fulfill that by making it as easy as possible to get this thing? Almost like a government service?
Dayana Kibilds
I mean, I don't even know when this whole thing started. I'm imagining, if we think back a couple hundred of years or a hundred years, not everyone needed a bachelor's degree to have a successful job, life, etc. Right? So, this model then makes sense. Anyone that wants to come here is because they want to learn for learning's sake. I think about them as the Greeks or the Romans that just sit back on a chest and think about theories, like, ‘oh, I think the earth might not be flat.’ Maybe that’s initially what it was and then somehow the society thing shifted first, there’s more people than jobs, so how do we select? Well, who opted to learn for learnings sake, as a flag at that moment in time? And then, it just became an expectation now. I don't know. I'm not defending universities, but trying to think about how we got here.
David Dylan Thomas
Here’s where we can both play armchair anthropologists. As always, I'm unfortunately finding some way to bring it right back to slavery, because what I've been thinking this whole time is when did intellectualism become cool? When did learning, when did smartness and elite-ness come together? If you go far enough back, you certainly have societies where power is tied to power. It's tied to ‘my army can beat your army and that's why you're doing what I say. It's not because I'm smarter than you. I'm stronger than you.’ Power and strength kind of comes together.
One factor I do think about is there comes a point at which labor becomes the thing that strength is needed for. When you're thinking about slavery and you're trying to separate yourselves from the slaves, one myth you tell is that these black bodies are good for work, That's again, eugenics. That’s literally what they are bred for. That work then becomes associated with a lower, working class. Then intellect now becomes, ‘well, why? Why are you in charge of the labor?’ ‘Oh, I’m smarter, I can count. I can read.’
It's no coincidence that pretty often when you have slaves, they're not allowed to read, because if they can read. they can get smart and as we've already said, smart makes you better.
So, I wonder if that narrative kind of bleeds into, because this is also where in many of America, at least America's major universities, are growing up. I wonder if some of that narrative bleeds into education to sort of say, education is this thing for the elite by design. However, you want to define the lower classes, we don't want them being smarter than us. So even when we're sort of forced into playing a hand of, well, everyone really deserves an education, we'll let the lower classes in but we'll make it really hard…
Dayana Kibilds
…And we won't change anything while they're here. I mean, then you think about the student experience. The student experience for a typical undergraduate four-year student – typical meaning majority – you are a student full-time, you are here the entire time, you cannot work, you cannot think, you have to move here. Obviously, you don't have dependents or anyone to think about, so how do you make it through that? You can't.
The other thing I've been thinking about from this perspective is the demographic shift that's happening in the country. So, I recently looked into all these stats, the demographic shift, what does it say that in the next six years – so up to 2028, I think that's when the predictions end right now, the proportion of college-going students that are Hispanic, is going to grow. I think it's two digits, 14 or 16%, I can't remember. And at the same end, black college-bound students are similar, like 12% - just slightly below Hispanic, and then just white, non-Hispanic, is actually going to decrease by 6%. So, in the next six years, we're going to see this shift where there's actually more college-bound, black and Hispanic students than white students.
Specifically, I was looking at the California market being such a huge population and so many schools are there. When you look at their K-12 school system, already 56% of students are Hispanic in the K-12 system. So, oh my gosh, that's our market. If I'm a school in California right now, not only is this my market right now, it is my market for the next 10 years. So great, what do we know about Hispanic Latino cultures? Well, not much, most people. And most university marketers, if we think about it that way, every single thing that universities are doing is white centric. We use white channels, we use white language, we use white imagery.
When we're trying to make something appeal to a Hispanic Latino audience, we make that the other version. We put a picture on there of someone that looks a little bit different, or maybe we do things in Spanish, but none of that is addressing the fact that this is an entirely different segment of your audience that maybe prefers a different channel than your little student portal thing. Or maybe it's not so much that they need information in Spanish, but maybe they value different things like community and culture instead of competition – I'm making that up. I don't know. So, you know, I'm thinking about this if I were a marketer right now, I'd be thinking, oh my gosh, the majority of my audience is Hispanic Latino right now, am I thinking about what they need to communicate or how they're used to communicating? Am I thinking about what's important to them out of a university degree or their career success? It's not the same tune we've been singing, it's not the same stuff we've been doing. Something's going to be different. I feel the reluctance, like, oh, we don't want to cater to just…
David Dylan Thomas
And are they talented?
Dayana Kibilds
Oh my God. I know, right. But we have been catering to just white. And now they're not going to be the majority anymore.
David Dylan Thomas
Can you imagine going to the website for a California University and it's all in Spanish and there's an option on the upper right, ‘press here for English.’
Dayana Kibilds
I cannot!
David Dylan Thomas
I'm telling you the first university to do that wins!
Dayana Kibilds
Because it's no longer a fringe group. It's 56% of your pipeline.
David Dylan Thomas
But the thing is we've been doing that for years. 50% of the planet is women. 90% of what we design is designed men first. So, we kind of know how to play that game even when the numbers make no sense!
Dayana Kibilds
I know. So, I mean, and these are the institutions that are going to fall apart. It’s not even the, okay, is it in Spanish or being stereotypically Hispanic Latino? And Hispanic Latino is not just one, there's so many different cultures and subcultures within. What might they commonly share across, what is their orientation to family and success and money? No one's thinking about this. Maybe we need more parents' stuff. Maybe we need events or things where they're all together as a family.
I know WhatsApp, the messaging app, extremely popular across Hispanic Latino communities and international communities. How many universities are embracing that as a way to communicate?
I just recently saw, I think it was RNL, they released a study of prospective student parents and the information that they want and seek. It was really interesting that the parents of Hispanic, Latino or black students or prospective students are much more likely to say that they don't have access or they haven't seen or received important information about financial aid, admissions etc, even though they've received exactly the same stuff as everyone else. They're saying this because, I think it's two things.
One language, back to my very first point. Our language is not comprehensible, and I want to make sure I use the word comprehend instead of understand because it is not a language issue, it is not a translation issue. t is a reading level issue.
Two, it's a channel choice. So, the other part of the study I found interesting is that white parents, white families are much more likely to prefer logging into the student portal, that kind of thing. Which when you think about it, you're at home, you have a computer, you open it up, you log in, you have time to do that. But across Hispanic Latino communities and black communities, it’s much more likely that they have a handheld device, a phone, and that they're using that when they're doing something else. Logging into a student portal on your phone is a miserable experience so they want a WhatsApp message, the quick thing in the email they can just read fast and they want it clear.
They’re all getting the same information designed for white families in the student portal written at the postgraduate level, so they’re saying, ‘we're not getting it.’ And what are schools doing? Probably putting more information on the student portal that says ‘for Hispanic families,’ instead of just actually adapting to your audience. I don't know if it's clear, but I love my job!
David Dylan Thomas
Well, I mean it is actually, because the thing is if you didn't care about a higher ed, you wouldn't give a shit.
Dayana Kibilds
I wouldn't have enough material to have an unscripted conversation for an hour!
David Dylan Thomas
Exactly! Okay, there's this side topic, maybe, so there are two statistics I heard recently, one I knew, one I didn't know. One is that women at this point, I think this is in the States, women are graduating college at twice the rate of men. The other one, which I already knew, is that women are still getting paid a third as much as men. I am trying to reconcile those things in my mind because it's just kind of mind boggling. Going back to the preparing people for the world. It’s like we're trying to make more people that we can pay less? I don't understand what's happening.
Dayana Kibilds
I don't. Well, that's interesting. I mean, I could speculate? My guess is once they enter the workforce, there's some life disruption that might happen like children. The simple act of bearing one sets you back a year compared to someone that doesn't bear one in their body. So that could be?
David Dylan Thomas
But what about the whole women graduating at twice the rate of men?
Dayana Kibilds
That's interesting.
David Dylan Thomas
Because that to me, it feels like a win until you get to the part where they're not getting paid as much when they get outside. I hope it's not.
Dayana Kibilds
The stat of getting paid, it’s comparing men with bachelor’s degrees to women with bachelor's degrees, I hope? Oh, no, no, no. I don't want to know Please don't tell me. I will get mad!
David Dylan Thomas
So, in the last five minutes here, let's fix higher ed. Let's rebuild it from scratch. One thing I do want to note and because I know if I was listening to this right now, I'd be screaming at my radio. No one listens to the radio?!
Dayana Kibilds
I don't know. Hispanic Latino families do!
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah. So, if this is ever is ever on the radio, I'd be screaming, yeah, but what about, and I'm forgetting the name now…So US News has its ranking of colleges, the same characters are always at the top. There is a different ranking measure now that is basically something like social mobility or economic mobility. It's sort of like how many of your incoming students are basically Pell Grants, coming at it from a certain economic level, and then once they graduate, how much better are they doing? A completely different set of colleges, mostly out of Texas and California, score very well there. Purely a bang for your buck scenario are much better investments than going to Harvard. Even if you could get in and afford it, it is a much better investment to go to some of these other universities where you'll actually have a job and actually have an education. I just sort of want to note that there is at least an attempt to re-evaluate this approach.
Dayana Kibilds
Yeah, that's right. I think there is this kind of disparity we were talking about the part of the population that wants to get this degree because they think it's what they need to get a job, because it is what society is forcing them to do. I love the social mobility metric. I think there are issues with it as well, of course, but I think it's great that universities or institutions are starting to embrace that about themselves.
I recently worked with one through Ologie. Every person I talked to, they really believed it to the core that they were improving people's lives and they were improving their local community and that was their ambition. It was not to be the next Harvard, it was open admission, you can come here as you are and we will help you get to where you want to be. And I just love that. I think that's the reckoning institutions have to have is, ‘who are we actually going to serve?’
And I've actually heard Liz Gross say this. Focus on regional. Everyone is so focused on national and being better and bigger. The institutions that figure out that they have to look next door first and work with the local high schools. It's one of my dreams – and if you're a university out there that does this, please contact me – that we start working with local high schools and just admitting cohorts. Every single student. I really believe in this cohort idea and this cohort model because there's also student affairs, student experience research that says if you make a friend within the first six weeks, you're much more likely to stay to year two, and then graduate. If you have this idea of a homeroom or a cohort that's your home base and it's a group of people that you're with that have similar experiences to you because they came from your school, you're much more likely to succeed through the university experience.
So why aren't we doing that? Let’s invest the resources in doing the coaching and the, I don't want to call it remedial, but the catching up learning that might need to happen for that calculus 1 course instead of screening and leaving them out.
David Dylan Thomas
I mean this goes back to the rebuilding. It sounds like part of the rebuilding is an open borders approach to sort of say we are going to assume you will benefit from an education rather than try to predict. Because the other thing that's annoying to me about the notion of we're trying to predict if you're going to be successful, that is not going to prepare you for the real world. There is no challenge you are going to enter into either in a regulated industry or in just something that is known to be purely innovative where you are going to know if you're going to succeed.
Part of it is being in the world of content strategy and digital that embraces this whole, oh, we're going to be innovative and we're going to solve problems. We don't know what's going to happen. We're going to build, measure, learn. You're not preparing people for build, measure, learn if you're saying the only reason you're here is because we already think you're going to succeed unless you believe that about everybody. I feel like if you take that assumption of, we believe you're going to succeed and not make you prove that we should believe you're going to succeed, those are two very different statements.
Dayana Kibilds
And here's the help you might need and one person might need math, and one person might need another type of help and one person might need time management skills or whatever it is. I think the institutions that realize that maybe is where they can actually make an impact, focus on their regional communities and kind of own that identity, that's going to help them survive. Not everyone is going to be one of these scientific driven research firsts discovering the new thing. But that's so much of the messaging that you hear from universities.
David Dylan Thomas
I think we also start talking about, well let’s let everybody in, we start asking questions about scale and where the money from that will come from. Honestly what you were saying about the cohort system, pretty much every social intervention I’ve heard about, whether it’s someone entering society from the prison system, whether it's someone coming in from another country, whether it's someone who's just trying to get an education. The refrain you always hear is it all comes back to the support system. The people who have a support system are 90 billion times more likely to succeed than the people who don't.
It's almost as if I want to do an experiment where it's like, okay, instead of trying to invest so much in the student per se, I'm actually going to send the resources to your support system. I'm going to make sure that your parents have time to spend with you. I want to make sure that whatever your support system looks like, I'm going to make sure that that is strong and assume that if that's strong, I won't need to support you in these other ways. I won't need to give you as much money. The support system is actually going to provide all those things that are, that are needed. If I can keep that cohort together individually, I don't need to give each individual as much help because the support system is going to help each other. I just need to make sure the support system's there.
Dayana Kibilds
And that they have each other, yeah. So, when you think about that, there's an economy of scale thing there too. You invest in the cohort; they invest in themselves. We fixed it!
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, done! All right. So, listen to this podcast, the king or queen or monarchy of education and make it so and we'll be happier!
Day, thank you so much for being with me today.
Dayana Kibilds
Thank you! No, this is lovely. What a lovely way to spend a night in Scotland!
David Dylan Thomas
Yes, it's very cold outside. So, thank you again, everyone, for the ‘Lately, I've been thinking about...’. I'm David Dylan Thomas and we'll see you next time.