895: De-risking Higher Education - with Dr. Amy Smith, Chief Learning Officer, StraighterLine

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to Ed Up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is your guest host, Dr. Laurie Shanderson, and the guest I have here today with me is the wonderful Dr. Amy Smith. How are you, wonderful Dr. Amy Smith?

Dr. Amy Smith: I am doing great today. So excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Well, I am more excited to have you here than you are to be here. Anyway, I was impressed when I read your bio because a lot of what you do is in spaces that I've occupied in the past, especially in terms of higher ed. But just so that our listeners know a little bit about you, you are an academic innovator devoted to increasing access to higher education for all learners. And that's, I mean, that's a lot right there, but you've had a lot of leadership positions at different institutions. You have expertise in online education and how to negotiate and navigate that space. You were the associate provost at CSU online. You've been a dean. You've served as a curriculum language and literacy chair at Concordia, and you've had nearly every role possible within education in K-12 and higher education. So that is impressive in itself and you are well-credentialed, having earned a PhD in educational leadership, curriculum and instruction. And we are just thrilled to have you here with us today.

Dr. Amy Smith: Thank you. It's a nice introduction. It sounds busy. I've been busy in education in a good way and very privileged with some just great people and key roles. And at the end of the day, working in education, we get to impact everybody. I mean, everybody gets an education to be different on the other side. You go to higher ed to build a career, create a life, meet a goal. You graduate from high school to keep moving. You send your kids off to kindergarten hoping that they will love their teacher. I mean, it's just such a human endeavor. It's very cool.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: We're going to circle back on a lot of what you just said because you and I, I'm guessing, have been around long enough to have seen this change in higher ed that sometimes can be inspiring, but other times, especially of late, can be a little terrifying. You talk about the hopes and dreams for those, you know, I have a little one I'm about to send to kindergarten. You want them to have this awesome educational experience. They're just so wide-eyed and excited about the educational process and learning new things, and you get excited by watching them become excited. You know, a lot of that has changed in the last two to three decades, but mostly, I'd say significantly so in the last 10 years at a feverish pace.

Dr. Amy Smith: Agreed. Agreed. Definitely has. I look forward to having our discussion around the changes in higher education. It is an incredibly dynamic space right now. Scary space. I mean, when you're talking, I think the recent statistic I read, and I apologize for not being able to quote it, 40% of leadership roles in higher education last year went unfilled. So yeah, you're now in a space where everybody's dream job might have once been a dean or a provost or a president. And now amongst colleagues, a lot are returning back into teaching. The dream job is actually being in front of students. I would argue that it always has been. That was always my favorite. But it's interesting. It's the word disruptor or being a disruptor in higher education that seems to be just current state of being right now. It's just disrupted.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I will tell you, I had the opportunity in my career to, you know, you get the fork in the road, administration or teaching. And, you know, teaching wasn't something I love to do, but I feel like I was good at it. I won a faculty of the year award and I think I'm inspiring to students, but it was frustrating for me with some of the challenges that came along with teaching. And I really love to problem solve where the answer came more directly than the teaching. I just felt like that was a skill set that I needed to leave to those who were extremely passionate about teaching. And I was more passionate about administrative tasks. But just to see how those two things have changed and why people are making the decision to say, as much as I love administration, as much as I'd like to help move the needle forward, there's a safer space for me in the classroom now.

Dr. Amy Smith: Totally. I think people often ask sometimes in education, you know, Amy, what was your favorite job? And there's no favorite. It's been an amazing career, right? There's no, every job has its challenges and its successes, things that we celebrate. But I always tell this story. I was teaching high school in North Denver in an incredibly urban setting, a little bit of a fish out of water, relatively new, maybe fourth or fifth year teaching and I was the department chair of this high school English department. And we would take in 400 freshmen and graduate 100 seniors. So we would only get to graduate 25%. How is that even possible? Like the numbers to me are staggering. What I loved about the job is I consider it one of my favorite jobs of all time. It's just the human relationships, the human impact of that.

And while administration is incredibly important, the leadership of any educational endeavor or institution makes or breaks it, quite honestly. It really is the people in front of learners that actually make it all happen. And so I just love it. I love it. You mentioned that all of these roles, these leadership roles are left empty. It could be those one or two leaders that are not aligned with the institution at all or anything else that's going on that could really have a negative impact as well.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: But you mentioned the different roles that you've had and the different opportunities you've had to have different skills in your toolkit. So how have those diverse experiences shaped your perception, your perspective on educational access and equity?

Dr. Amy Smith: Good question. Great question. Thank you. I think of access as opportunity, right? The ability to not only find and locate continuing education, be that K-12, good education for whatever your family and your community defines as good, right? But I also think of access in post-secondary world, in higher education, you have to, and access is not only can I find the right academic program, be it a career-based program, the right institution, a community college, a college, a four-year, whatever that looks like. Access is also financial. It's also about meeting your goals and it's fit. It matters where you go and do they know your name and are you a human being there to the people who are trying to help you honestly reach your goals.

So the thing I love about access now, I think it's broader than it's ever been. Students have become, everybody hates the term and I understand why, consumers, but they are, it is their dollar, right? And it's their goal and their life. We are just in higher education, a vessel for them to get from A to B, whatever that goal is for them to define it. That's the beauty of it, right? So if that's the goal, then ultimately it matters. Can I be the vessel for you to get to where you want to go? Like that's ultimately the job.

We're seeing, you know, the largest increases we've ever seen in Hispanic populations and African-American populations, first generation, lower socioeconomic. We were talking earlier, the last 10 years has probably seen the most significant change in higher ed. I'd say that's some of the most significant positive change. I think higher ed is because there are so many varied models of how to continue to go to school or how to continue to learn, be it your company that educates you in workforce development, the community college program, the two plus two program when you were a senior in high school or a junior and wanted to take college courses while you were finishing your high school degree to traditional four-year, you know, pack your bags and go away to college at the age of 18. Everything in between the models that created access.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: You know, I was looking for a graduate program. I'm sorry to go on.

Dr. Amy Smith: Please, please interrupt me. Absolutely.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: At the time, if you wanted to earn a doctorate degree, programs would only take, they took 12 students, that was huge, right? They would take six, they'd take four. And then, you couldn't work. You could not have a full-time job. They told you that. You could not have a full-time job you had to focus on. And just to see how much that has changed, that mindset has changed to your point about students being consumers, you also, well, it was also not a good thing to say in the past, you're going to earn a degree to get a job. Do you remember those days? You couldn't say that. You couldn't talk about things like that. You had to say you were learning critical thinking, analytical thinking, but you weren't going to college to get a job. You were going to college to get the skills. Times have changed so much.

Dr. Amy Smith: No, I would agree. I just, I remember being a Dean at Capella University and we had the largest doctoral program in the globe. I had over 6,000 doctoral students. That just sounds insane, right? And I remember taking on that deanship and thinking, what's the quality there? Can you really educate that many doctoral students at the same time? And they were all working adults. These people had full-time jobs, full-time family lives. How were they ever getting their homework done? When do these people sleep? And in reading dissertations and watching research agendas develop amongst all of these learners, these doctoral students, they were incredible. These people are brilliant, brilliant.

But I was like you, I had to not work. I had to scrimp and save. I can remember friends bringing over dinner and my mother delivering casseroles, literally, right? While I was a doctoral student and I had been a principal prior to going to get a PhD. So I was used to a salary and a life and a level of prestige that I had thought I had earned. And going back to school, it was a little bit of starting over again, right? It's a little humbling.

But if you don't mind, back to your question, if I can answer the equity one as well. So we talked a little bit about access and equity. I don't think we're at equity. I gotta be honest with you. I think we have a really long road to go. I say that with a chuckle, but it's actually quite serious. So anybody can go to an Ivy League, but anybody can go to a community college. So we've definitely created access and equity for open enrollment systems. And we have moved higher education into secondary school, into high school, 100%. We're really good at it. The outcomes, I think, aren't there. I think the value of a community college associate's degree is really high, depending on what your goals are, right? Like what do you want to do and be? I think the value of an Ivy League four-year education is different. I don't know that it's better or more. I think it's just other. But I would argue that equity to what we perceive as top-tier education is not equal. It is not yet democratized.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: What are you going to do with that education? So we were looking at different populations. Right. You can access higher education at the community college level. You're probably going to stay local to where you are. You're not going to enter into a residential, even though there are residential community colleges, but you're going to learn a skill or a trade or to have an ability to have a better financial outcome, a better career prospect, a better gainful employment opportunity. I think maybe the goals are very different. And I think that's why they focus so much on community college students and the special needs of that population, because they're not the ones who are packing their bags, going off to study and in the dorms and having these luxuries. Yeah, they're not the ones that you and I probably, when we started out, we didn't talk about going to college to get a job.

Dr. Amy Smith: Grow, develop, build skills, and then we would graduate and figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. So college was an exploratory activity, where I think the conversation around higher education now is much more workforce development, much more career-centric. I also think it's a little more individualistic, more student-centric as a conversation. You know, we're not talking about pulling in, I remember at Colorado State, we didn't talk about pulling in any student. We talked about pulling in the right fit of student. And could we help that student meet his, her, or their goals, whatever those were.

We do that at StraighterLine now. We have 45,000 students a year. You can't earn a degree with us, but I can keep you moving. And I also can get you started. And what I love about that is when you have 45,000 students, I mean, talk about the data set of that, right? But we've learned about equity in an incredibly humbling way. So what if you are a full-time working adult, you're trying to complete some level of post-secondary education, whatever that is that you've decided. You've got two kids, you work full-time and you have to figure out how to fit all this in. And the system in higher education tells you your start and stop semesters, tells you when you have to show up for class and tells you when you have to sit in front of your computer, be it online or hybrid, right? Or high flex. But yet it doesn't always fit your life. So where is it where higher education wraps around your life, not your life wrapping around higher education? I think we have a lot of, I think that's where equity and access have room for growth.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I think we have. Tell us what you're doing at StraighterLine because it sounds like you've coalesced all the experiences over your career into what you're doing now. You seem excited about what you're doing now. We talked about what that exactly is.

Dr. Amy Smith: Right. So I'm currently the chief learning officer at StraighterLine and I have the luxury and the privilege of kind of, of honestly spearheading and help driving how we serve two populations. One, we serve higher ed institutions, meaning you've got a student who's trying to graduate on time and you're, they need one class left before graduation. This happens all the time, by the way, one or two classes left before graduation, but the class isn't open and it hasn't come around yet. They can't get into ECON 201. Where are they going to get it? Well, they could ideally get it at their local community college, but they may not be open. Right? When does that start? Can they get it on time? How can they do it asynchronously at midnight after they, you know, finish working and put the kids to bed? That's us.

So we're that space. We help people get into school, get through their program, keep moving, persist, or honestly, graduate and complete on time. So we have thousands of students who use us for a variety of reasons. I have a whole population that's high school. So if you are rural or urban or suburban, but you may not have a school that has a well-developed AP or IB program or your community college doesn't have enough openings to offer you college credits, can you get dual enrollment? You can with us. And so people do.

It's fascinating that people, I always call it kind of hacking your degree, right? You sort of hack it. You got to DIY your college education. There are absolutely people who still maybe like you and I did, we packed our bags at 18 and we went off to college. And I remember thinking, okay, I've got to get this done in four years because if I don't, it's going to get really pricey. It's going to get expensive. But that's not the norm anymore. The four-year degree, it still exists and it's incredibly valid. But that's not how everybody does it.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Everyone can do it. I mean, probably access then can you sit there and complete 12 to 15 credits a semester for four years in a row? Well, that doesn't fit the lifestyles of many right now.

Dr. Amy Smith: Yeah. And the lifestyle isn't a lifestyle of luxury. It's a lifestyle of work and trying to build a life, you know, and education is absolutely a part of that life building, but it's not easy and it takes a long time and very rarely do people finish in four years. The journey is no longer linear. It's much less linear than things than it used to be. And I think the question for higher education is how do we wrap around a student's life, not the other way around? I'm not sure we've answered it, to be quite honest, for all of the right reasons, for accreditation and financial systems. I mean, there are all these reasons for the structure. These are not bad reasons, but that structure no longer really always fits the millions upon millions of people who are trying to finish, get a degree, get in and get through whatever that learning program is.

This is what we wonder about and worry about at StraighterLine all the time. How do you take your final exam at midnight on a Monday? You can with us and what if you need to get to the - like how do you wrap student supports? Because think about it, when you're on a college campus, regardless of what type of school, you can go to the math lab. You can get tutored in math on Tuesday and Thursday from two to four o'clock, which is a good thing. But what if that doesn't fit my schedule? What if I'm not available? What if I want to do my math homework Saturday at midnight? 

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: How do you all do it at StraighterLine? How do you wrap that support around students that have taken classes after they put the kids to bed and when they wake up at the crack of dawn?

Dr. Amy Smith: Exactly. Which is exactly what I did in my PhD too. Like I literally 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. was prime time. So much before everybody woke up. I laugh as I say that. We have, you can get tutored in every single one of our classes 24/7 from a live person. Like you want a writing instructor.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Yeah, a live person.

Dr. Amy Smith: Yeah, you actually can. You also, we have live proctoring for exams so you can take your test whenever you want. Like you literally can take it Tuesday at 3 a.m. or your lunch hour on a Monday after you've crammed over the weekend. It's a very popular time. So you fit the learning into your life and then we fit the supports 24/7. You can even call advising for us on Sunday. We are Sunday through Sunday. We are early mornings and late nights and everything in between because you got to do it when you can do it and still have a family and still keep your job, still put food on the table and still pay your bills and do your chores and mow your lawn and all of that life and be in your community and go to your kids' soccer game and show up for your church on a Sunday or your family on a Friday night. Like all of that matters, right? That's the stuff that keeps you going. So we have to do it when you do it, not when we decide you should. It's a very cool thing. It really is.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: And so 45,000 people a year do it. They're successful. It works. How do you partner with other institutions? Or do you partner with other institutions to help their students persist by offering them maybe services that they don't have, but you have at StraighterLine?

Dr. Amy Smith: Right. We do actually do that. So we have about 170 partners. And they're former, they're just, honestly, they're just articulation agreements. Like, hey, we have an English class, you have an English class. If you have a student who gets out of cycle and needs it as a prereq, maybe you could just have them take ours. And so they'll refer a student to us and the students never are student. It's actually their student. Like we always think of all of these people going to higher ed institutions, they're not ours. They're yours. They're the institutions, right? So how do you keep them tethered to the institution and keep them persisting, moving, graduating, keep them going? That's us. So institutions will refer a student to us to take bio 101 or go take your physics lab, because you can't get into a lab at StraighterLine. And they do. And then they finish their course and the credits on a transcript go right back to the institution and get applied into their degree. Yep, all the time. That's pretty much what we do. So we serve students, but we really also serve institutions. We have two real consumers, if you will.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I mean, what type of trends are you seeing emerge relative to what you're doing at StraighterLine? There have to be things that you're constantly exposed to and things that you're seeing that make you curious about the direction and the support that you provide. I'm just curious to know what you all are seeing relative to all of the students you have. You have endless amounts of data that are great insight. I'm just curious to know what you've gleaned from that.

Dr. Amy Smith: So I think probably three key things we see from all of those students. One, lots of conversation around risk. When I say risk, everybody has a different way to define risk in higher education. But for a learner, risk is I paid a lot of money for a course and what if I don't pass that class? Then I have to pay twice. We all have our story of a class we didn't pass, it didn't go well, that we repeat it. The other thing that people often don't talk about at risk, but we talk with students about is, if you fail a class or you have to withdraw fail, right? It goes on a transcript and that follows you forever. So just because you didn't do well at 18 doesn't mean at 25 or 26 when you go back to school, you're not going to do well. And why does your 18-year-old self have to follow you? Right? So we actually don't believe it should follow you. So at StraighterLine, we've de-risked it. Not only is it incredibly affordable, you can take a class for under $200. It's a three-credit course. So do the math on that cost savings. But we also don't transcript failure. You only get a transcript when you actually pass the course at 70%. You've done all the assessments. You've done all the work. You pass it. We'll put it on a transcript for you. But if you don't pass it, nobody ever knows. Nobody even knows that you tried.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I have to tell you, that is part of my teaching philosophy is always about, I kind of don't care where you were. I care where you are. And I always felt like students should be able to benefit from how much they've learned and how much they've grown because the higher ed process, the learning process should be about how you've learned, how you've mastered, how you've advanced, how you evolve. So to focus on what you didn't know how to do in the early stages when you probably should not have because you're here to learn, I think was a useful way to look at it. And so I love what you're saying about we transfer success, we celebrate success, we're not gonna let that hold you down. And why should it? Because you've demonstrated that you can do this and this is what, I mean, it's the only thing that really matters.

Dr. Amy Smith: Right. And it doesn't matter if it took you one, two, three, four times to do it. You still did it. You still mastered the content and the knowledge and the skills and abilities. You got it. So let's just give you that record and let's let you keep moving in your life and the way that you have decided rather than building systems that can hold you back.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: I mean, does this work with graduate courses as well? I know you talk about K through, I mean, the college. Yeah.

Dr. Amy Smith: So graduate level courses, are you bound by discipline or? It's a great question. So we actually only offer 100 and 200 level undergrad. But what happens is I have a huge population that comes to do prereqs to change career or to get their master's degree. Example, you're working in your first job, but you've decided to go get your MBA. Awesome. Well, did you take finance as an undergrad? And you probably didn't. If you majored in the humanities, you might have, right? You might have taken econ or something, but you need, honestly, you need a finance course just to brush up to get ready. And the school is requiring that you walk in the door with X number of content.

So funny story. When I first got to StraighterLine a few years back, I had this huge population of people that would literally my finance class would just surge in enrollment at these periods throughout the year. And I'm like, what is this about? It's not for a CPA sitting exam, right? Like, what is this? These are people getting their MBA at Harvard and Harvard was sending them to us for the finance prereq. I can't make... And then letting them in. So we find people getting a master's degree in nursing will come and take anatomy physiology with us. So we end up being a prereq for master's programs a lot and often for career changers. Like you're really doing a new discipline when you get your master's or as a refresh, you want to prep so that when you walk in the door for that grad degree, you're successful. You're ready to go. You've brushed up because it's been a long time since you took a chemistry class and you might need it for your master's. So we see a lot of that actually. It's kind of cool.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: It's really cool. And it's cool. And to your point, affordable. Yeah. And then you are one of those individuals that started school a long time ago and you're nervous about coming back, it's risk averse. If you fail, it's not going to follow you. You're able to earn it. I love all of that. I think that's so important. I have, I'm mentoring someone right now and not doing it extremely well in an experiential learning type of course. So the program is saying, well, you know, we're going to have to just kind of re-evaluate your ability to be successful. And that is so heartbreaking to me because I think students come to school to learn. If they knew how to do everything already, they wouldn't be at school. And I just love the forgiving, welcoming, wraparound nature that StraighterLine has relative to your approach to student success.

Dr. Amy Smith: Yeah, we think, I mean, learning is messy, right? And learning isn't, learning is personal and everybody learns differently. So how do you set up the systems and the structures to be not time bound, to be low risk, affordable, and to fit everybody? Like that is the coolest challenge on the planet, right? You get to design learning structures and supports that fit everybody, anytime, any place. It's kind of like on-demand learning, right? And you get to do it with open arms. We are open access. Anybody can do it. You'd be just shocked and people's life stories. And, you know, I get everything from, honestly, we're having our first baby in our family and we get phone calls for, hey, can I pause? I'm in the middle of my Western Civ class, but I'm having a baby. Sure. We just pause your class. And then when you're ready, you call us back up and you start right where you left off. You don't have to take the class over again and start over. You've already learned it.

Two, I decided I want to go in healthcare. What does that look like? I need to explore that career. They just take a class to explore. Do I even like it? Two, I want to graduate and I'm not calling my parents telling them I can't get into this course. Everybody's coming to graduation. Oh my gosh. We have that as well. It's just, it's a space where we find every walk of life is able to be successful.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: What is on the horizon for StraighterLine? We're always looking for how to expand access populations, relationships with schools. We're really trying to figure out how to best work with community colleges. That's a question for us. We also have explored and gone into most recently early childhood space. Think about people who go to work every day. Who takes care of your kids if they're not school age? Right. So what do you do with your two-year-old? Well, that's childcare. So who teaches those teachers? Who teaches the childcare?

Dr. Amy Smith: Yeah, right? And so, and the professional development and getting them comfortable and confident, and they're always learning because they're always serving toddlers and infants and little ones that really, really matter. That's the most important part of everybody's day. So we have merged with CCEI, which is a childcare provider. And we've also merged just recently with ProSolutions, which is a professional development, childcare worker, teacher provider, and this is PD for teachers.

So we're in early childcare space a little bit. We're very much in healthcare space. We educate thousands upon thousands of people who want to become nurses or dental assistants or hygienists or technicians, but those early careers in healthcare, we're seeing a huge rise and surge in those populations, honestly, because the world needs it, right? Healthcare is a growing industry.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: It is. And again, roles go unopened, unfilled, right? The nursing shortage is nightly news once a week anymore.

Dr. Amy Smith: So we see that. We're in education space, business, my Harvard example space, and IT space a little bit. So there are some verticals in industries that we focus on. Not because we don't focus on Western Civ and you know humanities and English and all the other things, but we find that people come to us typically for a specific reason. Either I'm in a degree program and I want to keep moving or graduate or I'm coming back to school and I'm a little bit nervous so can I get started or I want to change or go into a specific industry. Do you have a class so I can take a prereq so I can get into the nursing program at my community college? So we serve in those ways. So we're agnostic and content, but we find people find us to serve usually a career or a life goal. If that makes sense.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: It does. And I love it because we know that all of these other structures are in place at traditional types of higher ed institutions, but we and we talk about having services and we do a good job sometimes not as much as we'd like to relative to supporting students, but it just really sounds like StraighterLine is really intentional about how they want to support students that are not traditionally routed and that is really impressive. So I really love hearing about that.

And, you know, as we wrap up, I would love to give you the opportunity to mention anything that you think we didn't cover in this podcast. I mean, I could have you on my podcast for session two, three, four, and five. I am fascinated. And, you know, because I stepped in at the last minute, I didn't get to learn as much as I wanted to about what you do, but I am, I am gob smacked.

Dr. Amy Smith: It's very kind. I think the thought I would leave all of us with, you know, we're talking about higher education, which feels very disrupted right now and very politically potentially polarized and just challenging space. The beauty of that is it's an awesome time to be in higher education. And I have colleagues and friends and neighbors, right? People in my community ask, how is it now to be in leadership in higher ed? And my answer is always, if you just focus on what's right for the student, the rest of it falls into place. That is ultimately the nugget of what we do. Focus on the learner. What does the learner need and how can we meet it? That's it. The question just feels so simple. And what I love about that statement is that's in every education's mission. Students and learning. That's what we do. So just focus on the student. Just be student as student-centric as you can possibly be. And I have this cool job where I get to do that. I mean, it's awesome.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Yeah. Thank you. That's great inspiration for many who are considering going into leadership and those that have had those days where they say, why am I doing this? I think remember to focus on the students and their best outcomes. Well, there you have it, everyone. We had the wonderful Dr. Amy Smith on with us today representing StraighterLine. And I could not be more happy than to have met you and I'm sure you and I will continue our conversations relative to what you do and what you are doing.

Dr. Amy Smith: Thank you, Dr. Shanderson. Thanks for having us. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Thank you. Thank you.

Dr. Amy Smith: No, I just want to say thank you. It was really, it was an honor and a privilege to be here. I always feel lucky when I get to share what we do with the rest of the world.

Dr. Laurie Shanderson: Well, I mean, I now have a story to tell and I can't wait to dig more into what you're doing. But there you have it, everyone. You've just been Ed-Up'd. And again, I am your guest host, Dr. Laurie Shanderson. And I'm happy to have spent this time with you today, Dr. Smith and everyone who's out there. Just remember to go and listen to the many podcasts that we have on the Ed-Up'd Experience. I mean, you'll find podcasts on accreditation or admissions on ed tech and everything. Just a wonderful resource for any of your higher education needs to just know about timely conversations, trends, and everything I can go on and on. But just check us out on the EdUp Experience. Thanks again, Dr. Smith, I appreciate you.

Dr. Amy Smith: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Laurie. It's really good to spend time with you, Dr. Shanderson. Thank you.