A University System's Blueprint for Better Transfer

In this episode of Transfer Tea, we sit down with Isaiah Vance, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Advising & Transfer Initiatives at the Texas A&M University System,  to explore how university systems are driving innovation in transfer. Isaiah shares how NASH is working with institutions across the country to reimagine transfer pathways, scale best practices, and ensure more equitable outcomes for students navigating the higher education pipeline.

Listeners will walk away with:

• Insights into the unique role university systems play in transforming transfer.
• Real-world examples of initiatives advancing transfer student success.
• A broader perspective on how collaboration across campuses and systems can create lasting change.

Host:

Loida González Utley

Director, Recruitment and Enrollment Services

Texas A&M University–Central Texas

Guest:

Isaiah Vance

Assistant Vice Chancellor for Advising & Transfer Initiatives

Texas A&M University System

Links:

AACRAO: www.aacrao.org

NASH: www.nash.edu

The Center for Post Secondary Improvement: https://nash.edu/cpi/

Transcript

0:12

Welcome back to Transfer T, the podcast where we dive into the stories, strategies, and innovations shaping the future of transfer. I am your host, Loida, and today we're zooming out to the system level to talk about what it really takes to scale transfer success across multiple campuses. Too often, transfer reform is seen as something that happens campus by campus. But what happens when entire systems step in and say, we can do better together? That's exactly the conversation we're having today as we explore the role of improvement science, collaboration, and system-wide leadership in reshaping the transfer experience. This episode is inspired by the work happening through NASH, the National Association of System Heads, and we'll hear how system-level strategies are helping to make transfers smoother, faster, and more equitable for students. So grab your tea, coffee, or whatever keeps you fueled, and let's talk about how scaling success is not only possible, but already happening at the system level. Here we are again in transportee, just waiting to unpack a whole bunch of things. But today we're going to unpack specifically improvement science and how it is transforming transfer practices from the system level. And I know We've talked about Nash before in previous episodes and what this looks like, but I have somebody really, really special here with me today. I am going to let him, my special guest, introduce himself here and let's do it. All right. Thank you so much for having me, Laura. First of all, it's just always good to be with you and talk with you. Uh, just, you're just such a gem for our system. I'm so happy you're representing us, uh, in the transfer space. My name is Isaiah Vance and I serve as Assistant Vice Chancellor for advising and transfer initiatives with the Texas University System. Uh, it's kind of a mouthful, but essentially what I do is I get to work with, uh, the 11, soon to be 12 universities because we're already a new one. The, the 12 universities across the Texas A&M system on trying to make academic advising better and trying to improve transfer. That's not to say that anything is broken or needs fixing, but we really come into it with the philosophy that we can do better by students and we just, we really do love our students, we want to see them be successful, and I do feel like I have the best job in the world. Uh, this is when I was actually able to design and kind of look at it and say, um, Really what is needed across the system and really across the state of Texas. So, uh, love doing this work and again, really glad to be here with you. How did you even start out anyway? I think that's important, Isaiah, to share. That's a great question. So, uh, professionally, I'm gonna have to actually go back to my graduate advisor in my master's program. Uh, this was sort of a backhanded compliment, and he told me, he said, you're a jack of all trades and a master of none. And so you can take that a couple of ways and say, OK, maybe I do need to specialize in something, but for me, I've always had sort of an eclectic kind of mix of interests. So I, I actually got, uh, started in higher education teaching religion and philosophy. I did that for a couple of years and I was super young. I was the guy that was younger than a lot of his students. I was 24 when I started teaching and, uh, within a couple of years I became department chair and so then I started advising students and that was a whole new world for me. Uh, I became a faculty advisor, loved it, and then eventually I started. Uh, advising the general population. They, we had what's called an intake model of advising. And, uh, so, uh, I would go and I would advise students from other programs and, and other majors, and it was phenomenal. I just loved it. I loved everything about the campus life. I started doing learning communities and first year seminars and everything. That was exactly what my graduate advisor said. It was a, it was just kind of eclectic mix. I was a jack of all trades. And in the mix of all that, I started to come across these things called transfer students that were sort of an anomaly. And I remember the first time looking at a transfer from somewhere else, I was like, what in the world is this? This is crazy. But that was kind of the beginning of my journey, though. Yeah, fast fact here, the institution that I work at now is where Isaiah used to work before he went to the system. So that is really cool. Uh, and, and if you haven't heard other episodes, is that I work for an upper level institution at A&M Central Texas. We serve transfers. That's just what we do. And that's what makes us special. And so that's where Isaiah comes from too, right? It is, yeah, and so when I moved back to Texas, I decided, OK, I don't want to really teach anymore. I want to get into this advising thing and we started, uh, just working with transfer students because again, that's what that university is, it's an upper division university and so we had to learn how to do transfer well and within that you start to see there's some rhyme and reason and eventually, uh, I was tapped to go to a newer campus called the Re. Campus in Bryan College Station. It's a multi-institution teaching center, and we have a community college on campus, and our bread and butter and the lifeblood of that campus is transfer. And when I interviewed for the position, I actually, uh, said this to my now boss and, and to the whole committee, I said, I think the Reli campus can be a petri dish for transfer. I think we can do some things, we can experiment here. And we can try some things out that if they work, great, they can expand across the state, maybe the nation, and that's exactly what's happened. It's been exciting to see how that sort of, uh, sort of progressed and evolved since that time and uh the campus is still doing great. I'm not at Relis anymore. A couple of years ago I moved to the, uh, system offices in my new role, but it's just great to see all these things going wonderfully. Your, your campus there at A&M Central Texas and the Reis campus as well. You're such a trendsetter, Isaiah. Thank you. But there's something like I didn't grow up saying that I wanted to be in the transfer space, right? I wanted to be something else. I'm sure you did too. But there's something captivating about the transfer student population that just naturally draws you to do better, right, and to want to be better professionals. Um, for, uh, students. So, now, you're at the system, and through the system, which I'm, by the way, so grateful that I get to even still continue to collaborate and work with you. So Isaiah moves to the system, and then he starts doing these things called systemic changes, like, Now it's just not, you know, Isaiah managing or, or doing transfer work at a single institution. Now you become the actual advocate and the person who can move the needle, not just at one institution, but all of them. So what is, what is that like, like at the system level? It's been super exciting, you know, I, I've, I've been very fortunate to be able to take that passion I have for transfer students and bring it to the system level. There have been a lot of things I've learned too. I mean, number one is that I can't have all the, all of the answers, you know, you go from being an individual contributor at a campus and trying to make things great, and you have to take a step. Back when you when you move to a system office and say there's a diversity of campuses and universities and students that we're working with and one solution is not gonna work for everybody and so what you quickly realize is that we've got to get people involved we've got to go to the campuses, we've got to listen to the problems we've got to talk to students, talk to advisor, talk to other staff members, faculty and really understand the campus. Culture and it's really sort of a humbling experience if you're not prepared for it because you realize that yes, you are an expert, but you're not the expert and you're not going to solve everybody's problems and that's been wonderful and I've gotten to, you know, meet a lot of great people. I feel like, uh, the people across our system, we have some phenomenal people and, uh, it's just been an honor to be able to work with those folks. Yes, we do. And although we all work in the same state. There are 12 different autonomous institutions, right, and we are all in different regions. So someone might think, well, transfer where you are in the system is the same as transfer at A&M Corpus Christi or West Texas. A&M and gosh, couldn't that be farther from the truth? Yeah, it's, it is not at all the same. There are all sorts of different problems and uh one of the great things about this work that we're gonna get to in just a moment that I'm going to jump ahead on and just say is that one of the great things about the improvement science work is that It has made us realize A, that we are different, but B, we're not permanently unique. We're not as different as we think we are. There are some common things that we have that we can solve together, and that's really been the beauty of a lot of this work.-- We're-- the same but different, and that makes sense. So, previously we had Juliet on here, right, um, leading up to the tech and transfers summit, she talked about um what improvement science is, and then she mentioned Nash, and that's really where, like, Isaiah and I got to work together again, but there might be people that quite still not understand or maybe they didn't attend the conference. So can you give us a little bit of like an overview of what Nash is and what it means to a system? Yeah, absolutely, I'd be happy to because Nash has been such a difference maker in my life. Um, I, I actually got involved with Nash about 3 years ago. I was tapped to be the system lead on this new project and this is one of those things in hindsight, you think, OK, this is always going to be successful. 3 years ago, we didn't know this was going to be successful. We didn't know this was going to work. And so what Nash is, is it's essentially this association that pulls together higher education systems and at the Time it was just university systems, so public university systems, uh, since that time, about a year ago, they've also expanded to include community college systems, um, but really what it is is it's a system of systems and it's people getting together and, um, what's been really wonderful about this work is that you get to talk to other people from other systems, both at the system office level but also the campus level and it's been really phenomenal because you realize that that um system. are not all created equal. They are very different. In Texas, I would say our systems are, are, are fairly similar to one another, but if you look at the Cal State system or University of Wisconsin or, or the Pasche system in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, I mean, it's just, they're just wildly different, um, but then you realize that there are all these other people out there that have some phenomenal ideas and you have this opportunity to get to know them, and that's been the wonderful thing about Nash is it's connected us and it's been interesting because 3 years ago. That group that we had, we had no idea. I think that we're gonna be as close as we become, um, and, uh, it's just been a great opportunity to be able to learn from one another through, through Nash. So Nash has essentially been sort of the broker here, and, uh, they've, uh, they've brought together the higher education systems to do things like the net network improving communities. That's what the Knicks are, and, uh, ours is around transfer, but they've had several others that they've spun up over the, uh, past several years as well. So, uh, you know, kind of breaking down a little bit of improvement science, um. To those that might not understand, because it took me a while to wrap my mind around, why can't we just pilot something? Let's, you know, something needs improvement. Let's just pile, you know, let pilot the thing. We'll, we'll do a test run and, uh, you know, move it forward, and if it works, it works and it doesn't, it doesn't. So how does like improvement science, how is that different than piloting something and what is the benefit? Yeah, so I think there are several benefits. First of all, the improvement science method is, is really built on something called the model for improvement, and what the model for improvement does, and this is highly needed in higher education, is it forces us to slow down a little bit and ask some really key questions. So the first thing that I ask is, is, um, Uh, what are we trying to accomplish? And I would even say there's sort of a, uh, an assumed question before that is, what is the problem? There have been so many times when we've come together to talk about programming and different ideas that we have and different things that we want to accomplish in university, and we don't stop and first ask the question, what is the problem that we're actually trying to solve here and um what are we trying to accomplish by doing this program? So in the case of a pilot like you mentioned. People may have different ideas about what we're trying to do with this pilot. If you're talking about something like introducing a new technology stack, people may have different views on what that's going to accomplish. And so more than anything, I think improvement science forces us to slow down and that first question is really asking what are we trying to accomplish, um, but then the second question is, how do we know the changes and improvement? That's another question that we don't typically ask, right? It's like how do we actually know that the thing. We're doing is, is working. And I think those are both very important questions to ask as we're starting it. And oftentimes we go into a pilot and you get everybody excited and they're just excited to get started on the work and we don't really lay enough groundwork before doing the work. But, uh, so, but like I work in a mote management, right? So like what happens if we need an immediate solution? Like how do we slow down when something calls for an immediate solution? Yeah, that's, that's a really good question, and one of the first things I'll say is that improvement science is not the answer for every problem. I mean, and, and people that have worked in this space, uh, longer than I have will, will absolutely tell you that, but I, I think the, the other part of improvement science that we don't talk about probably as much as we should is that oftentimes we think that when we, when we do a new program, it's going to do good, at least it won't do any harm. But there are times in some of our programs actually do harm if you think about, for example, you work in enrollment management, if you think about your office calling new students and and other offices on campus, maybe student affairs and, and maybe there's another office and students are being bombarded and maybe they're even getting conflicting information. That is harm. That's doing, that's, that is creating problems and what improvement science allows us to do is, is it allows us to slow it down, but not as slow as we, we might think. We typically think that things have to move slow in higher education. It's highly bureaucratic. One of the things I've loved about improvement science and the way that we conduct these rapid cycles of improvement is that they are very rapid. I mean, we've used 45 day cycles in the Nash project. Uh, there are some others that have used 30 day cycles, so you think about. How much you can accomplish in 30 days if you do these sequentially. I mean, you can do quite a lot in the, in, in the, uh, you know, span of a semester. You can do 4 cycles of, of testing there and really figure out if something's a good idea instead of just piloting it and crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. And then if it doesn't, you just start all over again and you wasted resources. Oh my gosh. And the wasting of resources is, is, is another aspect that um You know, recently our system has really started looking at because we tend to think, OK, when we do programming, we think of adding things on, we think of layering and saying, OK, we've got to do something new for students, we've got to help them out. But oftentimes what we discover is there are some things that we've never really stopped to ask if this thing is effective. And a perfect example in the context of transfers, we had one campus that said we, you know, we've always done these tabling events, and a tabling event, as many people know, is when you go to a community college, you set up a table. At the community college and maybe in the cafeteria and you're just sort of hoping to catch some students as they come by and they realized that they had been tabling at this school for 5 years and had never had a single student apply and this is a very large institution and you think, OK. How much time and human resources have we wasted in this, and that's not to say that it's not important or that relationship is not important, and I know there are some political things there when we, you know, say, hey, we may stop tabling at your community college, but what improvement science allows us to do is to really stop and, and ask those kinds of questions and collect data, say maybe there's a better way to actually reach out to these students. Yeah, you know, you're like talking and I'm like, so I'm thinking in my head like, oh yeah, I know tabling all too well, like, duh, like that I did that in my previous job, like, but I don't think I ever understood like why. You know, like, yeah, we did it. Was it just because that's the thing to do? Is it just, I mean, I mean, did somebody ever explain its purpose every time? No, no, you, you mentioned something too, like there's sometimes you have to do it because of partnerships and you know, there's a commitment there, fine, but like those being the exception, like why do we, I always called it like blind recruiting. You know, you're just kind of hanging out there hoping to catch somebody and that you can yield them and if there's no intentionality, then like, are you actually being effective or did you just waste resources, you know, and of having somebody sitting out there for a long time when you could have had him in the office talking to students. Is that an accurate? Yes, that is a perfect point. And what you touched on there at the beginning of your comments was this idea of mimicry, right? And mimicry is a fancy way of saying everybody else is doing it, so we should too, right? It's this idea that there is, um, some, somehow safety in numbers, and if we do the thing that everybody else is doing, nobody's going to call us out. They're not going to say, Lord, why are you not tabling at an event? Um, so there's kind of safety in that, and That's one of the things that we've had to sort of come to grips with, with improvement science is there is a risk factor here and so we've had to figure out how do we align our incentives so that people are encouraged to test things that, that, that might be dangerous. Now, I will press that by saying we. Encourage very small tests of change, so you're not gonna do a lot of harm. I mean, if, if, if you're testing an idea on, you know, 5 or 10 students, it's gonna be very minimal harm. Uh, Juliette, who you said you had on our previous podcast, she always likes to say you should do your first test on a small enough group to where if it goes sideways, goes wrong, you can take them out to dinner and apologize. Everything's right. That's a pretty good way to look at it, but That, that, that still, you know, doesn't take away the fact that there is some risk in, in change, and not all changes and improvement, but every improvement does require a change, and change is hard for people. Yeah, and, and this methodology, which, yes, by the way, it is hard, it makes my head hurt, but I love it, but it makes my head hurt. Um, so there have been several institutions that have participated in this particular methodology. So, um, could you share like some of the examples of how, how things have changed across campuses or maybe like different things. One campus might have changed one thing, looked at another thing, and, and how they correlate or not correlate. Yeah, I will share a few things and I'm going to warn you, um, especially the listeners, as you're listening to this, all of these things are going to seem quite obvious in hindsight, and that's one of the beauties of improvement science is there are a lot of things that we're uncovering that we probably should have been doing all along, but there are a lot of other things. Like the tabling in certain contexts that we realized that these probably aren't very effective, but the things that I'm going to highlight for you here in the next few examples, these are all things that people would look at and say, of course, why would we not be doing this? These are all things that make perfect sense. So one of the things that I, that I love to talk about is, uh, several of our campuses, they started looking at. This is the context of advising, they started looking at students that were trying to go into these highly competitive majors, you know, these majors where you have tons of students coming in and you simply don't have enough seats in the program. So think, think, uh, nursing programs, engineering programs, those sorts of things, right? And they started asking the question, is there a way. That we can help move these students out of these programs earlier and help them find an alternative path. The worst thing for those students in those situations is for them to get 2 years into a program. And then realize that they're not going to be able to continue in those programs. We want to be able to help them earlier, so that's been one of the great, great things and in the context of nursing, we've been able to find some other alternative programs with engineering, we haven't quite cracked it yet. Some people are looking at math and some other things like that, but there's this idea that if we can back up and if we can help to advise students out of those programs earlier, then, um, that's going to be doing better by students. Another really good example and one that I actually shared at the Acrotech Technology and Transfer summit was P B A&M. They have a faculty advising model, and we all know where faculty are in the summer. They are somewhere not on campus and students are there trying to get advised and trying to get registered for classes and so they had all these students waiting in the pipeline and they just stopped and said, what if we actually just had our staff advisors, our professional advisors. All these students get in contact with them, get them registered, and then once the students are on campus, the fall semester starts, yeah, we'll connect them with the faculty, but just to get them enrolled, like let's just get them started so they're not just hanging out there waiting, um, those have been some pretty good examples. I could go on and on talking about this a lot more, but we've also been able to feel, uh, to, uh, really recognize when. When these ideas work in certain contexts, so one of the other ones that I love to talk about is group advising. People feel strongly about group advising in the advising world, and this is for new transfer advising, for continuing student advising. And the truth is, is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and most of us don't know when it works and when it doesn't, but we had a group of, of, uh, folks as part of this Nash work that tested out and said, let's see what some different variables are. And so they looked at new, new transfer students versus continuing, they looked at students by major, um, they looked at all sorts of different things, and they figured out when it was effective and when it wasn't, and, uh, you know. It, it helped them move forward because now they can effectively group advise and they can make sure that the other students that really are in programs and, and at points in their journey that is not conducive to group advising, they can do one on one advising, and that's fine, but we're figuring out what works at the end of the day and that's what's beautiful about improvement science because it gives us evidence-based, true evidence-based practices that we can build on. I'm just going to ask this, what is group advising because I've never heard, I don't think I've ever, I haven't even seen it play out ever. Tell me more. Yeah, I just committed one of the fallacies that I, I hate is, is when we use terminology that people don't understand, we use jargon. So group advising, if you think about group advising, you think about students that are coming in and, um, so orientation is probably a really good example. You have a bunch of new students coming in. Let's, let's picture for this scenario, just first time in college students coming in. And maybe you have a group of biology students, so you get all the biology students together in a room and maybe go over some of the degree plan requirements and other things they need to know, maybe some student organization things, and you sort of do this group advising. Um, for maybe half an hour, 45 minutes, and the idea at the end of group advising typically is that you want all these students to get registered for classes, and so what you're trying to do essentially is you're trying to sort of scale up the advising so you're not having to spend 30 to 45 minutes with each student, you're able to deliver a lot of information, a lot of content that they need to know. Um, in one shot, and so naturally, by the way I just described it, you can, you can already kind of picture what some of the problems with that might be, but also where, where, where some of the time savings might be in that as well. And not every student probably needs to meet with an advisor one on one. Yeah, so my question is, like, does that exist for transfer group advising? Yes, yes, it does. Oh dang, yeah, I could see it like for FDIC for first time in college students, but like interesting because transfer students come in at different times at transfer points and with different credit, but, but, but, but. I don't know, like, will they make it, will it make it comfortable for them to integrate into the campus, if they have peers that they're going through this with, I mean, I don't know. Yeah, so I've seen it work well. So, as I'm describing group advising, and again, I'm, I'm, I'm giving you a very brief description of this, but with group advising, it, it doesn't always have to be the ins and outs of the degree program. It can be. How do you navigate the campus? How do you, how do you access technology? How do you look at your degree on it? How do you, you know, really navigate all these sorts of things. So group, group advising can take a lot of different forms, and that was the beauty of the improvement science work is that we looked at, you know, not just the student variables, but also the content that we were trying to deliver in a, in a group advising setting. So, um, yeah, that, that was really one of the examples that I really loved was. I learned something new today because I didn't even know what that was, but that is really cool. Um, so I, I, I, I can't say enough how much I love and appreciate our system and the way it believes in the student support and the journey and then all the details of their experience, and I think that, uh, the integration of improvement science has enhanced a lot of advising and transfer uh support. Um, also kudos to you for leading all. Of this high level because you're the one that gets to see all of this and, and everybody's, we only see ourselves, right? Like my own participation in this, um, but high level, a lot of our sister schools, system schools have uh participated, and so, what outcomes or shifts from a high-level perspective have you observed? Yeah, there have been several. So one of the early things that we did and um I think most people that are that are working in the transfer space will understand the importance of this is one of the early things we did was we looked at uh credit application, right? So when you're a transfer student, the big question we all know is not does the credit transfer, but how does it apply to your degree program. So we've done a ton of work on that. Um, I've got someone on my staff, Josh Smith, that, that does a lot of work with schools around building up this transfer. Course inventories. Now these are not the headline making things that people are going to point to and say, oh my goodness, like, you know, we're changing the world, but these are the things that matter to transfer students and so we've done a ton of work on that and we've looked at the impact not just on how those credits are applying, which is really important, but also some of the downstream impacts, you know, when I was a faculty member, um, I thought things just worked right? Like when I would look at student records and I was faculty advising, but, OK, like somehow magically the this. Academic history appears for this student. I have no idea how these, how these records are generated. They just, they just kind of show up on my desk. And the truth is, the truth is, is that there is a process to that. And if that process is not good, you could get students that are really, um, they're really gonna have a tough time navigating the future there. And so what we've seen too is that as we've worked on those transfer student inventories, it's helped us to speed up advising, it's. Helped us with even things like course prerequisite overrides, if you think about it, right, if you're coming from a community college and you took calculus 1 and for some reason that calculus 1 didn't come in right, oh my goodness, you're going to have issues registered for calculus 2 and your university physics and all these other classes. You're just gonna have a heck of a time trying to get through your program, and it all goes back to that root cause, and that's really what improvement science has also forced us to do too is look back at root causes and not just these symptoms, it's OK, you know, we're hearing these complaints about this and that, but as we start to ask these questions about why is this happening, we're really digging deep down into some of the core structural and systematic things that are happening at our campuses, and what's really been wonderful about this too is to see the culture shift. So I am not, um, I'm not blind enough to believe that people everywhere love systems and think systems are just wonderful and, and, you know, everyone wants to invite us in, but I, I do think system offices can build really great relationships with campuses, and we've worked diligently to do that, and I do think there's a level of trust that's built up, and when that trust is built up between the campuses and the systems, it's been beautiful just to see how They'll open themselves up to the system and say, hey, these are problems we're struggling with. A lot of times people are hesitant to do that, but it's been wonderful seeing that that sort of culture shift where people are raising their hands and saying we need help with this, and we, and we think if we either get help from the system office or if we get help from our peer institutions, we can make these systems and processes better for students. Well, I, you know, I think that a lot of it, uh, Isaiah, and we talked about at the beginning, a lot of it is because people have seen you as a practitioner, right? Like we've, we're practitioners, we've done the work from the bottom, and so I think there's some credibility, um, you know, our leadership believes in that system-wide and the credibility of the people who have actually done the work. And so maybe, um, there's a certain comfort level, um, you know, when you come out and you talk about, I know for me anyway, when you talk about advising and transfer, I know that you. Understand what I'm saying because we worked the same areas before, the same fields, right? And so when I tell you some of the struggles or some of the challenges that we see, um, I, I, I know that you understand and that you're just not nodding your head. Like I know that you actually feel it in your heart because you've been there. So I think that also speaks a lot of, um, about, you know, the people that are in place now. You mentioned Josh Smith, kudos to Josh Smith because you mentioned him. Um, he was also worked here and he's done a lot of the unsexy behind the scene, uh, work to set things up for our system. So kudos to Josh Smith and all the Josh myths, um, that exist out there that are doing, um, all of this work for us. It's really important, um, but you're, you're right, we've, we've learned a whole lot. Is there something that you have learned from another system that maybe could be beneficial to ours? Yes, there are numerous things, uh, that we've learned. I'm gonna point to the Pasche system for a second, so, um, I'm not gonna be able to tell you what the acronym is off the top of my head, but Pennsylvania. Pasture system in Pennsylvania, they've been phenomenal. Their system lead, uh, Bill Bezer has become a really good friend, and they've done some great, um, work really on metrics. And what's been really good is you're, you're always kind of looking from a system perspective saying, how do we sort of get all of our systems speaking the same language in terms of. Metrics and kind of what we're looking at, they've done a phenomenal job and so they've created some dashboards that look at what I was describing earlier about the credit applicability, and they've had some phenomenal, some phenomenal changes they've made in terms of, uh, going back and, and essentially re-reviewing some student records to, to. Award more credit to students that should have been awarded those credits in the first place. Now, again, I was talking about risk earlier. I mean there, there are some real risk in that because when you're doing that, you're saying, hey, we don't think we did this right the first time, we're gonna back up, we're gonna go and review your record again, and so we're saying that we realized that maybe something was missed there. And so first of all, I've got to give some kudos because that is risky, but it was a huge benefit to students and. One of the things I've loved about that, that work in that project that they've done is that they really did put students at the center, but it was also something that was scalable and other schools in the system could do this, and that's what was beautiful about it is everybody can go back and ask the question, are we awarding enough credit, the right credit, is it applying to the student's major and can we do better by this? Like, are there some things that we can do, we can partner with each other to do that and we've really tried to kind of. Take the same approach in native system. We don't have a nice dashboard like they do yet. But yeah, that's, yeah, that's been one of the systems that that I've been looking at saying, hey, they're becoming a real leader in this space. Collaborative innovation. We love, love, love that. So I'm just curious now because you mentioned that like do you guys like huddle after some of these nicks and say, this is what worked for me. This is what worked for you. Um, have y'all gone, uh, forward with, uh, uh, in any of the systems with implementing somebody else's strategies within your system? Absolutely. And actually, um, recently, uh, Nash began partnering with Acro, and we have a new transfer challenge that was just introduced at the Technology and Transfer Summit, and that was an outgrowth of several different systems. So I'm proud to say that the Texas A&M University system, actually our flagship, Texas A&M University, um, they really led the way with this, and I'm gonna have to give you a brief story here because this is so interesting. Look, look, you can't draw partial tea here. We get, we want all the tea, so bring it on. What was incredible about this is, is when you think about an R1 and Texas A&M is, is, I think the largest, if not, if not one of the largest, uh, or one of the largest, if not the largest, uh, you know, 79,000+ students, and when you look at, at a, at a process there, anytime you look at trying to change something, it's affecting thousands of students. So, What we looked at with Texas A&M is we said, OK, um, with the transfer process, there was wide variation, and so variation is something we look at in improvement science, we say, why is this happening over here one way and in this other place another, a different way. And so there was wide variation in the time it was taking for transfer students to get an admission decision. And we can point to all sorts of different things, and Texas A&M could have pointed to all sorts of different things, but, but you really ask the question. How can we get a decision to students quicker, you know, as a parent, my daughter just started A&M yesterday, actually, she's a new freshman there, really excited, and, um, you know, we wanted information really quick, right? When you apply to a university, you're sort of holding your breath, especially if it's your first choice, and Texas A&M, I'm proud to say is the first choice for many students. And so you're sitting there waiting for an, for an answer, and you may be getting letters from other schools. In the meantime, say, hey, congratulations, you've been admitted, and it's becoming harder and harder to say no. So we said, OK, with Texas A&M, what they did was they raised their hand and they said, we think we can do some, some things to change this. And so what they did, and this was a wonderful person, Shelly Holliday, uh, she's an associate dean in construction science with the College of Architecture, she just said, I already know kind of who I'm going to admit and who's not going to be able to be admissible. Unfortunately, they just don't meet the standards. What if we just automated this? And again, in hindsight, it's such a simple. Concept, it's saying, why would we not automate the decisions that we already know we're going to make, but it hadn't been happening before. And so what they did was they started just automating these things and, and it essentially took care of about half the transfer student population, um, I forget the exact numbers were in terms of who was denied and who was admitted, but they basically said, what if we just had this auto process that took care of a lot of this, and they've tweaked it since then and they've expanded it and it, it, it covers nearly every college now at Texas University. But it all started from that, that, that simple question, what if we could speed this up and what if we could automate some things that that we already know. So I want to be very clear here too because this is really important is it's not taking the decision making and the discretion away from faculty at all. It is the faculty still making those determinations that they always have. But it's introducing automation to this and it was using improvement science to, to really kind of tweak some of those uh auto admit bars, say let's, let's make sure we got the right, um, sort of criteria here to admit students, but back to your original question, is there something that's been expanded? Yes, there are other schools now that are using auto admission and even with our regionals, right, so the regionals within the Texas university system, their admission standards are not as competitive as Texas A&M University. But there is still something to be gained from this concept of auto admission, right? So, many schools throughout the country have standards-based admission, and what that means practically is, OK, you meet these standards and you're admitted, but when you talk to transfer students and their families, a lot of times they don't really know what all that means, and a light bulb went off for me when I was meeting with some faculty from Lone Star College and we were talking about an engineering program and they stopped me and said, wait. You're telling me if students meet this GPA and they have these credits. They will be admitted 100%. I said, yeah, absolutely. I said, wow, that's incredible. Nobody else does that, you know, the other flagships in the state, they don't do this. I said, wow, yeah, it's a good point. And so we started using the term guaranteed admission. That's essentially what standards-based admission is. And so there's even a recruiting aspect in this too. And so Texas A&M has started using this auto admission bar. Other schools have as well, and it's really kind of changing the game. It's speeding up. And so now it's become this nationwide challenge that ACR has issued, and I could talk about this all day, and I know I'm, I'm getting really excited. about this, but this is something I'm very passionate about because at the end of the day, it's really helping our transfer students. We love the passion, especially when it's tied to transfer student success. Um, and because of passion, something has popped up in Nash called the Center for Post-secondary Improvement. Like, how, what is that? And how does that change the game, Isaiah? Well, I think it changes the game a lot because it really shows, first of all, that we're serious about sticking with improvement. So, as I mentioned earlier, when we started 3 years ago with this Nash work, this was an idea. I mean, even the, the, The concept of using improvement science to make change was a was a test in and of itself because we don't really do this in higher education and so the idea was, OK, what if we got 4 systems together, so it was us, it was University of Illinois system, PASH, and the Kentucky Council for Post-secondary Education. And we got 4 systems together and the way I can describe it is we're throwing spaghetti at the wall. We said, OK, what can we do in common, what can we test out, let's see if this works here, and that was our first foray into improvement science and you flash forward. 3 years and we've had 12 systems over 30 campuses, nearly I think 700 tests have changed by this point, which is incredible. If anybody has done assessment and tried to implement changes, doing 700 tests of change is. It is incredible in and of itself and so really we were testing to see if improvement science could work in higher education, and I, I think we have proven that it can work and it does and so the, yeah, the, uh, the new center, uh, we're really excited about it because it really shows that we're serious about using improvement science methods and we think that there's, uh, more to be seen here, not just in the transfer space, but we've already expanded this into academic advising in the texting&M system. And we think other campuses and other systems are going to do something similar in other functional areas as well. That is really exciting. And so I just want to, I just want to know, maybe there there might be listeners out there who want to participate, like how do they get involved with the Center for Post-secondary Improvement? Yeah, so the, uh, the best thing they can do is to, is to visit the Nash website, and I'm sure you'll drop a link in the podcast here. And there's actually a link there on the Nash website, um, for that new center and Juliet Price, who again was one of your previous guests, she is the director of that center, and she's phenomenal, and she's really going to be spearheading this and helping to coordinate it. And we're really excited to see where this, where these next iterations go. Um, it's, it's always interesting when you go from being a startup to trying to have a more sustainable kind of group, right? And I've sort of made a career out of these startups, um, at different places, so it's exciting now to see this going from really being more of a startup, uh, to being something more, more permanent through the establishment of a center. It's great.-- I-- love it. It has so many good things happening. Um, I want to talk about like high level reflections on leadership because I think that's also a very important component, um, like reflecting on what makes system level like leadership unique. How do you balance like policy and structure and innovation because there's some parameters, right? Like. Sometimes you want to be free to go do your things, but there are some parameters. In your case, you work with 12 different entities that are under one entity, but they're still individually 12. So how do you balance like the policy, the structure, maybe the legislation that's involved? Some states have legislation for transfer, some don't. Like, how do you balance all of that and still have the capacity to make those changes at the system level. That's a really good question, and the first thing that we look at within our system is there are, there are different ways that systems are designed and really different philosophies and kinds of cultures that exist there. So the philosophy that we've had, and I would credit a lot of this to our vice chancellor, Doctor James Hallmark. The way that we work with our campuses is rarely to tell them what to do, you know, we really don't like to take the top, the top down approach. We like to coordinate with the campuses and really help them to come to the best arrangement that works for their campus. And so with within that, um, we don't typically do a lot of policy things around transfer. We do have a, uh, a regulation that kind of spells out a few things, but what we really try to do is sort of have this, this kind of um. This cycle that we go through and um what what I typically like to do, especially as we were drafting this regulation for transfer is to really look at what's happening at our campuses first and then go and dialogue with the people and understand what's happening and then. Start to kind of craft maybe some recommendations about sort of some normative standards. What are the things that we think should happen? So to give you a very practical example here with, with transfer credit, especially with things like prior learning assessment, sometimes all these different roles are combined into one faculty member where the faculty member is saying, OK, I'm going to review this course from this other university, um, I'm going to prove it's gonna count. I'm also going to add it to the student record. I'm. Tell you how it's going to count and so all the power is confined in that one person. So one of the things that we said as we were looking at this again as an example is we probably need to separate out some of those roles here. So we should have more of a gatekeeping function, which is typically like an admissions office, um, and then we should have the campus administration even prior to that, they should be establishing the standards for the campus. Who are you going to accept credit from? Who are you not? Why are you going to do these things? Like have some rhyme and reason, have some logic to it. And then that sort of 3rd, 3rd grouping there is we look at the more of the application of that credit, how are the credits going to transfer in, and we think faculty should, should have quality and control of the curriculum. That's a stance that we firmly believe in, but we also think that we need to make this a structure that's sustainable and scalable, and you can't have faculty doing all this work and expect them to just carry the load for transfer. So that's a very real example of this. of process that we went through where we looked at the practices on the campuses, we understood the context, we came up with some basic standards the campuses, uh, you know, should follow, and then we had more of a loose regulation that was established and then we kind of have another feedback loop that goes through and we help students or we help the campuses rather to implement a lot of these changes too and. Again, I, I think it's worked really well relationally because there's a lot of trust that's built through that process. If, if we don't trust the campuses and if they don't trust us, that whole cycle I just described breaks, breaks down completely. Uh, fortunately we have a lot of great folks in our system that have been very cooperative and they've been very collaborative, and I think we have developed some really good systems both for advising and for transfer out of this. So, but there are, there might be people in the system who have not had the pleasure of working with you yet. So maybe another challenge that I want to ask you about is like how do you build buy-in as you're going to the campuses and you're saying, hey, I'm a system, uh, because it could be daunting to like a processor, right? Somebody from system is here. Oh my goodness, you know, so like, how do you, uh, create buy-in even with people who might not know you or, or, um, you know, people, some of the people involved in some of these Nash projects, um, are the processors. They're the Forward facing people who would not otherwise engage with somebody from system on a daily, um, so how do, yes, but this could be true for other leaders, new leaders or emerging leaders, like how do you create buy-in as, as you're trying to make a change at the system level in each campus. Yeah, uh, it's, it's going to sound almost cli, almost cli cliche, but I would say it starts with relationships, and I know it's easy to say, and people can't just snap their fingers and have relationships with other people, but that's been something that we've been very, very deliberate. With, um, we've had a community of practice for advising for over a decade, and what that is is it's essentially we bring all the advising directors together and we talk regularly throughout the semester, usually twice a month at least, and through that we've, we've built relationships, we built trust, um, with the improvement science work. We had to build those relationships and unfortunately just because of, because of some of the structures there we weren't able to do that um beforehand as much as we would like to, but the other part of that kind of comes into play that I'm going to describe is, is also demonstrating what we're trying to ask people to do. So not just saying we're going to put you on an island and expect you to do this. This, this, this all on your own, we're not going to give you a mandate and say go figure it out, we're going to walk alongside you and I think that also builds trust and also builds relationships too so those are two very practical things that we have done within our system to really try to build that, that, uh, type of trust from people that are the most important to these processes, the people that are on the front lines doing this work day to day, because those are also the ones that know how we can make improvements.-- That's really where the-- improvements come in. That's right, yep, absolutely. Um, that's people related, but what about the challenges, you know, at the system level, high level, again, just reflecting on like your role as a leader, um, some of the anticipated challenges that you might experience as you're, as you're trying to make changes, um, kind of like data integration and like data, oh my goodness, the understanding of data, the interpretation of data, the vetting of the data, uh, maybe in terms of scaling when you find something. That works, like how do you take it and, you know, create the buy-in to go bring it to another campus, and then sustaining the momentum, which is really important, like, how do you continuously keep people engaged and, and, you know, that momentum of believing in this um big move that the system is making. Yeah, it, it's, um, it is difficult at, at, at times and so what we try to do is we try to find the early adopters and fortunately we've got plenty of those and it's always great when people raise their hand and I'm always happy when I go to meetings. We have our regents meetings coming up later this week as we're recording this, and I love going to those meetings and having provosts and vice presidents of enrollment and student affairs people come up and, and say, hey, you know, we see what you guys are doing. In the advising and transfer space and if there's anything else on the horizon we want in like that is always a wonderful thing to hear is when people say whatever's coming next, we don't care what it is, we just want in, we want to try it, that's great because now we know we have a test bed and so as we're testing this out, we're doing some tests across campuses and so if you think about it kind of laterally and horizontally, we are trying to do some things across the system but also campus wide. So when we talk about improvement science, um, OK, we, we did this with transfer. Across the system, but now we're trying to build more uh uh vertically, if you will, and say, OK, how can we create this, this kind of culture at the campuses and the buying comes in, I think when, when people see the evidence, and that's what's been really important about this is we're getting away from these sort of gut feelings saying yeah, we, we think this is gonna work and all these kind of impressionistic sort of responses to say, yeah, this, this thing worked really well, you know, we've all had these, these uh sort of um. You know, after action meetings, where people come in they don't really have any data, they just said, yeah, we all feel really good about that thing. Or no, we don't fucking really well, right? Well, how do we know? And so improvement science, because it's built into the structure of it, tells us, well, yeah, this is how we know. And I hate to say it cause it Because it, uh, it doesn't sound as exciting, but when you get to the point where you have scaled something using the improvement science methods, you already know it's gonna work. You're not really surprised. I think sometimes we're shocked and some of our ideas work because we didn't test them and we just kind of rolled it out and kind of crossed our fingers, but with improvement science, by the time you get to the point where you've scaled this, so again, going back to the Texas A&M example with the uh transfer. Transfer admissions processes, by the time that they scaled this out to other colleges, they already knew this was a good, this was a good system. It was just convincing people and showing them the data, showing them the impact on students that you had to do at that point. So, you know, sometimes we like to sort of fire off ideas and then worry about how we're going to collect it later. I think it's always good to have that data collection up front and then that also gets into the other part of your question that we're seeing more consistency in the way that we're collecting data. And um that's, that's also been wonderful too. We all know that in higher education, we love our jargon, we love our acronyms for programs and, and, and it's really hard to look at at a different campus even in your system and say, OK, they have this program, but it's called something really funny, so first of all I have to interpret what that is and then I have to figure out if it's going to work. My context, one of the great things about the improvement science work with Nash is that we stripped out the jargon and just said, what is the thing we're doing? Like, let's just use plain language and talk about it. And that's, that's even, uh, trickled down to the data collection level to say, let's not get fancy with what we're trying to, like, let's just talk about the types of data that we want to collect, and let's be very straight, straightforward with it and let's, let's keep it simple. Look, I, let's talk about the future. Like what is going to happen, and I wasn't going to open this door, but you said credit for prior learning earlier, and we just came back from a conference that was talking about credit mobility and learning mobility, um, as a professional. Not just in transfer and advising, which impact the transfer student as but also as somebody in a system who has to be ready to catch some of these new theme emerging themes like where, where do you see Nash going in the future in regards to credit mobility like transfer is changing, right? And so what does that mean? Like what is your vision or what would be your vision for um for the work that Nash is doing, but also as a system leader. Yeah, so, um I will tell you that I, I think what Nash is doing is they have a new credit credit mobility project that they're rolling out, um, using AI and a lot of this is coming out of, uh, UC Berkeley. Some of the work they've done, there's a project called Coursewise, and there are some other kind of related things that we're doing, but, but really the biggest problem with, with, uh. Credit for prior learning, if you think about it, and I'm using credit for prior learning very, very broadly here to encompass all transfer credits. So traditional transfer credit come from a community college or a university, um, you know, those that are maybe recommended by the American Council for Education. There may be some other types of credits too. The biggest problem has always been scaling this because it's very time consuming to do these things and so part of what we've tried to do is, is sort of look at, at what sort of, um. Uh, data repositories do we have at our disposal? So in Texas, for instance, we have the Texas Common Corese Numbering System, and I'm fortunate to currently be serving as the chair of that. It's been great, and I've learned a lot about how campuses, not just in the A&M system but across Texas are using the TCSSNS data and The, the, the short answer is a lot of them aren't. A lot of them are reporting to the TCCS but not flipping that around and using it to build out course equivalency databases. And so when we can do something like that, you've now taken care of probably 80 to 85% of the transfer courses coming to your institution. So what that means practically. Is from a CPL perspective you've just freed up some bandwidth now for your people to be able to do more of the um what what some might look at as sort of the the uh fringier types of credit where you're looking maybe at joint services transcripts and saying how can we do better by our veterans and actually do the military and when you couple using those data repositories with the advent of AI and some of those tools, I think it's a really powerful recipe to help us to scale it to be able to serve students better because. I was a transfer student. I, I transferred more, more times than I care to admit, um, and the biggest thing that I was always looking at, and when I finally graduated, this is what I had to do sort of myself, uh, was say, OK, how are my credits that I've already earned, how are they going to count towards this degree that I'm trying to get? Like, at the end of the day, transfer students want to know a lot of things, that's the biggest question they want to know, and that, that includes military, that includes any other, um, types of credits that students might be carrying with them, and When we can do all that well, things like portfolio assessments become a lot easier as well. So that was my, I don't know, I don't know if that was short or long, but that was my answer to to where I see CPO going and kind of Nash's role in that too is really helping us to, to level up in a way that we haven't before because of the application of AI. Wonderful, Isaiah. Thank you so much for your time and your energy and your service. As somebody who has worked with you, watched you grow, I see you involved, leading our system now. I'm so thankful for your leadership and kudos to the A&M system for being a leader in this space. Let's continue to lead and do great things. Thanks. That wraps up today's episode of Transfer Tee. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. We'd also love to hear from you, share your thoughts, questions, or even ideas for future topics by emailing us at transferee@acro.org. Remember, when it comes to improving transfer, the best ideas are always worth sharing, and that's the tea.