SEASON 2, Ep. 1 Redefining Education: An Interview with Catherine Whelburg, President of Athens State University

Catherine, president of Athens State University, reflects on her 30-year journey in higher education, moving from faculty roles to administration and eventually the presidency. Her early passion for assessment and its impact on teaching and learning guided her career. After positions at Stevens College and TCU, she joined Athens State as provost before stepping into her current role.

Athens State, an upper-division institution for transfer and adult learners, focuses on aligning academic programs with workforce demands, particularly in high-growth regions like Huntsville, Alabama. Catherine navigates challenges such as balancing workforce alignment with a liberal arts foundation and addressing state diversity and inclusion laws. Her leadership centers on a clear strategic plan with measurable goals, prioritizing student success and personalized online learning. She also emphasizes program-specific marketing and connecting donors with impactful initiatives. Catherine advises aspiring leaders to embrace failure as a learning tool, communicate effectively, and stay grounded in their values while remaining open to new ideas.

This podcast is sponsored by Viv Higher Education

About Viv Higher Education

Viv Higher Education is a Boston-based, female-owned comprehensive marketing agency specializing in higher education. With expertise in strategic planning, creative asset development, and media campaigns, we focus on enrollment-centric initiatives. Our approach is grounded in industry best practices, ensuring precision in reaching target audiences. We have extensive experience in marketing to diverse groups, including high school students, Hispanic, military, LGBTQ+, international students, and online learners. Navigating the complex landscapes of university environments is second nature to us, and we prioritize fostering collaborations that yield mutually beneficial outcomes. With a personable, nimble, and highly responsive approach, we deliver tailored solutions to empower organizations to achieve their objectives.

Website: https://vivhied.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/viv-higher-ed/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:34 Catherine's Higher Education Journey
• 4:07 Role and Impact at Athens State
• 8:02 Strategic Planning and Challenges
• 12:57 Marketing and Advancement Strategies
• 19:04 Advice for Aspiring Higher Ed Leaders
• 22:44 Final Thoughts

Transcript

Hi Catherine. Thank you so much for being on the show. Welcome. How are you today? I'm doing wonderfully and thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to it.

So I would love to hear about your higher education journey. You've been at several different institutions. You were a faculty member at Stevens College. You were an administrator at Texas Christian University. Now you're president at Athens State. How did that all happen? Tell us your journey.  

It's been over 30 years now, of a journey. I started like you mentioned , at Stevens College right out of grad school. My first year I was actually ABD and so trying to write my dissertation and teach a four, four  course schedule.  But , I was at Stevens for 11 years and,  went through the tenure process. I was able to have a sabbatical. I was able to do a lot of things. And one of the things I found when I was at Stevens College is that, I was very interested in how we measure learning. And so I got involved in accreditation through the world of assessment.  And  got very involved with assessment of learning and the accreditation piece of that.

 I was also very interested in how we use assessment data about learning to inform our teaching.  And to me, teaching and learning and assessment were always kind of part of the same conversation, but at most institutions, they're separated and one is more administrative and one is more academic .  I had the opportunity to go to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth to become the founding director of their teaching and learning center.

I ended up being TCU for about 16 years and I did several things, including moving into the provost office an associate provost.  And still was doing some teaching and of those kinds of things. Then I moved into a dean position for a couple of years and then was able to come to Athens State University as the provost and vice president for academic affairs, which was where I thought I wanted to be as a provost.

 I love that world of talking about teaching and learning and how we can improve the lives of our students in the classroom and the connections we make and all of that.  I had been here for about a year and a half and our president retired.  So I became interim president and found out I really love this world as well,  because I get to talk to more alumni and I get to talk with donors and I get to look at big picture let's build a building or let's renovate for our health sciences or things like that.

And so I have , really enjoyed moving into that president role, and Athens State is a great, place to be. That's awesome. It sounds like accidental presidency, but everything else was really planned based on that realization that you  love assessment and teaching and learning and that's really inspiring to because we need more of that focus and higher ed administration.  I'm just really curious because I know Athens state is in North Alabama, what conversations are you having with community members, with families, with students, with the people on your campus about higher education and the future of the institution and the sector? What an interesting time to be in higher education. There are so many things happening right now, good and terrifying, and kind of everything in between.

 Athens State, as you say, is in North Alabama, and Athens State is a bachelor's degrees and master's degrees, but we are an upper division institution, which means we don't have freshmen or sophomores. So all of our undergraduate students are transfer students. And, then we have master's program.

So we have two main populations. One are transfer students who are coming to us mostly from community colleges,  which means that we have wonderful partnerships   we work closely with them. Our other main population are adult learners.

And so these are students who are often employed and are looking to either continue on in where they are, they just need additional whether that's a degree or micro credential in a particular area, or just to be updated because the discipline has  continued to change or they're looking to change their  field and go in a different direction.

 So our average student age is about 30.  North Alabama is also a very unique place in that we are growing.  In Huntsville, which is about 20 minutes from where Athens, Alabama is. Huntsville is the home of the space and rocket center.

We have a very large arsenal that is there as part of an army installation.  There is so much happening in Huntsville and the surrounding areas.  We are  bringing in engineers and a lot of the FBI headquarters are here. We've got all kinds of things happening from a research perspective.

So we are growing. And what that has done is allowed us to do a lot of work on aligning our academic programs with the changing needs and the growing needs of our community. So we work very hard on making sure that when we have a program, it is aligned with what those students in that area are going to need to do.

 So that alignment process is very important and allows us to connect more closely with the community so we work with advisory boards for our colleges so that we've got places where we can have students  intern and because many of our students are already working; we want to make sure that they are prepared for that next step.

 Our role is in advanced workforce preparation. Now it's still a liberal arts school degree. Our students still have general education, and that is very important because we do want our students not just to be prepared for a job. We want them to be prepared for a career.

Which means they need to be able to think critically and problem solve and, have, read widely and can communicate well and all of those things that come with a liberal arts education, but we are doing it to align those programs with what's happening in the growth of our area.

  I will also say that there are challenges and some of those challenges involve work with diversity and inclusion. Alabama is a state  like many other states, has not been seen as a positive step in institutions. And so we have had to look very closely at what we offer and make sure that we are aligned with the state law.

We're a public institution, but that we are also fulfilling our mission, and that mission is to provide the best education to every single student, recognizing that our students are not monolithic. Our students come in with different backgrounds, with different experiences, and that is crucial  to what we do.

 So there,  are a lot of challenges in what we're doing as well. Fascinating. I agree. It's a great time to be in higher education because there's so much opportunity and there are so many challenges that need strategic leadership. And  in this season, we're focusing specifically also on entrepreneurial leadership,  so how are we doing things to pick up the pace, align the stakeholders, make decisions with imperfect data, focus and say no to things that don't align.   I'm really curious as you are further aligning your degree programs with the needs of the community and the workforce, how are you facilitating that consensus, and how are you picking up the pace, and how are you making sure that things just make strategic sense and that there is focus?  I'm assuming it hasn't been easy You're nodding along as i'm speaking. So i'm just so  fascinated and curious to hear more from you on that as well.  So one benefit that I have is that while I am a new president I was still here for a year and a half before I took on the interim president role and now the not interim president role.

So there is a lot that I understand about our institution. So I did not come in as just a new president.  A year and a half is certainly not a very long time, and I understand that, too. So I certainly don't know everything. But I did have some knowledge of our institution and who we are and what our mission is.

 The other thing is that as a new president, part of what I can do, and I am doing is creating a strategic plan. And that strategic plan is really our framework that is helping all of us walk through the challenges that we're facing, and finding the way to balance change and change management with stability is I think the biggest challenge that any leader in higher education or any leader in general, but especially in higher education has and so as I've worked with faculty and staff and students and alumni with our strategic plan, we are keeping it very focused and relatively  small.  One of the things I found over the years is that a lot of universities have strategic plans that aren't strategic and they're not really a plan, and they're just a lot of paper, and it looks really nice.

And so our strategic plan is very focused. It is a three year plan and there are very specific  measures and metrics and  goals in each of the four areas that we have. These are things that we are doing anyway. This is not something new necessarily.

Some of them are new, but they aren't new because we have to put them in the strategic plan. They're new because this is something that we need to be doing as an institution. So our strategic plan is really that framework that we're looking at as a way that we can be successful in our mission.

And so certainly focusing on student success and how do we help our transfer students? How do we remove barriers? How do we look at that transfer process and make sure that a student coming in does not have credits that they feel have been wasted because they don't transfer, they don't transfer well into what they need.

 Also working with our adult learners. They may have a lot of work experience and we we work with credit for prior learning. And do that prior learning assessment so that we can bring in adult learners and recognize that they bring with them a lot of expertise that may not have happened in a classroom, but that doesn't mean they don't have that.

 So we have created crosswalks in our adult learner services office, which if you look at the acronym  because our students are also parents and employees and all of these things. And so what we try to do is make sure that they're education is as personalized and specific as we can make it while still giving them what they need, to go out into that next chapter of their lives.  We're also looking at what is good teaching look like? A lot of our classes are online because we need that flexibility for students. How do we do a really good online course that isn't just a correspondence course? How do we make sure that there is engagement between the student and the content, between the student and the faculty member, and between the students themselves within that class, so that they're building that connection.

 I'm an educational psychologist, and I know that learning is something that you construct, and that means you can't just take it in. You have to take it in, and do something with it, and share it, and talk about it to make it so that it really resonates with you. So we're looking at what does quality online learning look like for our students in 2024?

 And that's not what it looked like three years ago. So that has become an important piece of our strategic plan, right? I'm hearing the principle, of be obsessed with your customer reflected very strongly and what you just shared, but to just take the marketing language down a notch.

I think what I'm hearing is, radically human perspective on how human beings experience learning in general, learning on your campus this particular moment in our time, because things are changing. There's lots going on in the 2020s and it'll probably not get any less complex.

So that's really cool to hear you talk through. Who are your students? What are you doing to make their decision easier to attend to make their experience a positive one and to help them then take it into the world and make a positive impact? 

 How are you working with your marketing and enrollment team and your advancement teams to bring those stories to prospective students, families and donors as well? I'm curious. That is an ongoing challenge and as we look at the way we market , we certainly can market Athens State as an institution and we do now if we had more marketing dollars, we could do more of that, which would be wonderful, but, you work with what you have and so we do some of that institutional marketing to show, that, if you are 32 year old single parent you're actually our student.

You look like our students.   One of our great success stories is a man who came back, he retired from the railroad industry and decided he wanted to take some classes in history because he always liked history. He ended up getting his bachelor's in history, went on to get a master's, has done substitute teaching in the schools, teaching history, and he is now actually teaching college level classes in history, and he has completely transformed his life and what he does, and he loves it.

 And so he's also our student, as is a 20 year old student who's coming from a community college but is also, in many instances, working and taking classes part time because of the other commitments that  student has in their life. So we can do some of that, but we also have to do very program specific marketing.

 Because knowing that Athens State is an upper division institution and has students like you coming is one thing, but do we have what you want is the next question. So if you want to go into cyber security, do we have that?  We've got to be able to talk to those people in the cyber security area and let them know we do have a great cyber security program.

We have, a new master's in cyber security. We've got an undergraduate degree in cyber security. We just opened an experiential cyber security lab where we can actually have students doing real time hacking and  protecting from hacking in a very isolated network where they can learn how to do these things in real time.

 We have just opened  a crime scene lab where our criminal justice students can go in and actually learn how to analyze a crime scene, how to collect evidence and the forensics that go along with that, and work with police officers who are some of our adjunct faculty. So if people don't know that.

They won't come to us.  So we also have to do this program specific marketing, which is much more complicated because we don't want to just blanket that across everyone because not everyone needs to know that. And so using social media, using some of the more targeted  marketing techniques where we can actually look at how we market to a particular persona.

 We are able to try and become much more intentional about that program specific marketing. Yeah, that's definitely a combination to balance, right? You have the brand story and that transformation stories that are happening on your campus where people are making real comebacks in their lives , and are really putting themselves ahead. And then at the same time, there are these very specific skills that they're looking for, and it's not enough to tell stories about necessarily personal transformation, you have to tell stories about well, what can I change in my life by getting a cybersecurity degree?

How much does that increase my earning potential? And how do the marketing dollars stretch the furthest? And what about on the advancement side? I'm curious, too, in terms of how you're activating, perhaps, your alumni, but also prospective donors beyond your alumni base around the really awesome impact that you're having on the community.

  📍 Yes, an advancement is  another area. I think that a lot of public institutions are actually going to need to be functioning in a business model more like private institutions. And one of the benefits that I think I have had is that I've been at private institutions for all of my professional life.

 I was a student at a public institution, but I've always worked at private institutions until coming here.  And so one of the things that I have learned is that when we look at advancement as a tool ,as a way to connect donors and alumni to the things that are important to them that gives us a whole nother area of funding that we didn't necessarily have before.  And that is a really important piece to all of this. And so we have been working to revise the way we're doing advancement at Athens State to use our deans a little bit better as people who can go out and talk about very specific academic programs and really connect better with the community.

 So that advancement piece is going to become more and more important in higher education as state funding and other kinds of funding continue to  decrease across the country. Yes, and activating donors that are not necessarily in the alumni base and very active yet around mission, purpose, impact.

It's interesting, this kind of dichotomy between public and private institutions, because at the end of the day we need philanthropic dollars to a certain extent, whether a public or private, and we need to activate donors who are maybe not already giving in large amounts, we need to activate new donors who fall outside of our traditional active alumni base and the best way to activate them is through mission and purpose and impact and your institution is making such a great impact so telling those stories to donors seems like a great opportunity to just broaden, where the support is coming from in addition to government and tuition dollars.

And having the data to do that is crucial. And so one of the things that we have had to do is redesign some of our data systems so that we can better tell those stories. So you can understand what's having an impact versus where you're maybe deploying resources without seeing the results that you want to see.

That makes a ton of sense.  So data driven decision making a principle of entrepreneurial leadership, right?  So what advice would you give someone who is currently  on a path to a higher ed administrative position, whether they have their sights set on residency one day, or , they want to become a VP and a leader of a division.

What advice would you give them? What should they focus on? What principles and values should they be paying attention to? So I think one of the things that has been very important to me, and I think is a lesson that I've surely wish I had learned a lot earlier is to not be afraid to fail.

If we're afraid to fail, we're not going to jump in and try something completely and wholeheartedly. And I think we need to not be afraid to fail. And that,  is a big piece. Success doesn't mean you always get everything right. Success means you continue moving forward. My background is in educational psychology, and so that research piece and that scientific method is a part of what  I do. And so as we're looking at changing and growing, we have to look at it from almost a research perspective. Try something. Did it work? Yes. Keep doing it. Did it not work? Change it, stop doing it, but you have to know when something isn't working and that is not a failure.

That is just knowledge and information that you have to go into that next one. So don't be afraid to fail. Failure is actually a good thing because that gives you that opportunity to learn. And if I'm doing everything right, that probably means I'm not trying hard enough and I'm not pushing the envelope enough.

 So I think that is one big thing I would say to anybody who's interested in going into any kind of entrepreneurial leadership position is don't be afraid to fail. Look for those opportunities to fail, as a matter of fact, because that's where we really grow and learn. So that's one lesson that I wish I had known before.

The second thing is, as you're doing these, whatever it is you're doing, you cannot communicate enough. You have to tell people in different ways and in, different formats and say it again and again because someone will always say I didn't know and, or I didn't hear, we need more communication and I can argue back and say, yes, but I sent out that email three times and I also had it on the website. It doesn't matter. If, they say they didn't understand or they didn't know or they  weren't included, then we need to go back and look at that so you cannot communicate enough, and that is always something that needs to continue to happen.

The third thing is to focus on what's really important to you. What is that mission? Not necessarily just the mission of the institution. Even though that's certainly a piece of that. But what is truly important to you? If I'm making a decision, what is going to let me sleep that night knowing that I did the right thing, even though it may have been the hard thing.

And in the short term, it may have been very difficult and I've had to make some very difficult decisions and had conversations about those. But I also know that I did them for what I believed was the right reason. And what maybe I learned something later that shows me that wasn't the right reason.

But at the time, I know that I did that for the right reason. And I think that is, holding to that, whether you call that, your mission or your soul or your center is so important to know what that is and make sure that you don't ever leave that behind. I love how clear these are incredible and very powerful.

The don't be afraid to fail, but also look for opportunities to fail. And over communication, of course, can never communicate enough. That's hard to hear, but it's true. And but then also the piece around, okay, be sure you're aligned with your values, but also be open to the possibility that  there might be a new data point in the future that makes you realize, oh, maybe that wasn't the right decision at the time, but you made it from a place of values, that's really powerful as well. And I bet a lot of people who are listening to this feel comforted by that and feel emboldened at the same time, which is a great impact to have on other leaders.

So thank you so much for sharing that. And I will say that in my life, I have been fired from a job. I have not gotten a job, and all of that is okay. At the time it was really rough. But I know that I learned from every single one of those experiences.

And that has made me a better university president today because I've gone through those things. The pain and the discomfort at the time are actually symptoms of learning, although it's so hard when you're in it. Exactly. I love that. Symptoms of learning. Yeah. Symptoms. Symptoms. I love that.

Side effects. That's exactly right. Yes. Yeah. Wow. Very awesome insights that you shared and just so appreciate you being on the show and sharing your wisdom with us.