912: LIVE From the 2024 ⁠Career Education Convention⁠ - with Dr. Art Keiser, Chancellor, Keiser University

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to ed up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Dr. Joe Sallustio here after one large triple shot of espresso. So I'm ready to rock and roll here at the Career Education Conference put on by the CECU group. So excited to be here to celebrate the amazing work done in career colleges across the country and be able to highlight our colleagues across the industry. Of course, with me, as always, this week is Douglas Carlson. He is the head of partnerships with Lead Squared. Soon to be VP. It's effectively the same thing. Make this guy VP Lead Squared, would you? Of course, we're here at the generosity of our great partner and sponsor Lead Squared. And Douglas, thanks for convincing everybody to get us up here. Thanks for your help doing that.

Douglas Carlson: Absolutely. My pleasure. It was an easy conversation.

Joe Sallustio: How many people did you have to convince, honestly?

Douglas Carlson: I mean, it was one or two. It was fine.

Joe Sallustio: All right. That's fine. We have an impromptu guest. He's only been around education for a year or two. No, he's been around education for a little bit longer than that. Both in the career college sector, nonprofit, higher ed. You will know him when you hear his name. Let's bring him on appropriately. He is Dr. Art Keiser. He is the man from Keiser University. What is he these days? Chairman of the board? President CEO, what's your title?

Art Keiser: Chancellor.

Joe Sallustio: Chancellor. I knew it was one of those. Art has been on as a guest probably what, two and a half years ago and then co-hosted one recently. And then I had told Douglas I said tackle him and bring him over here and we got you here. What's going on? How are you?

Art Keiser: I'm good. Yeah, it's a good conference.

Joe Sallustio: How's life?

Art Keiser: Always challenging.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah. As my favorite philosopher was Roseanne Roseannadanna, "If it isn't something, it's something else." Isn't that the truth, though? The more things change... What is the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same. The more things that stay the same, the more they change.

Art Keiser: Yeah. Well, you know...

Joe Sallustio: Art, you did too much philosophy for me this morning. Tell us about Keiser University. You know, remind our audience. I think you've got what? Twenty-five campuses, 17 campuses, maybe somewhere around there. I'm going off memory.

Art Keiser: Yeah. We have 19 on-ground campuses throughout the state of Florida, almost every major community. And then we have two virtual campuses, our online campus and our graduate school. We have two campuses in Nicaragua and we have a campus in Shanghai, China. We now have 13 international partnerships from Sri Lanka to Spain.

Joe Sallustio: And you get to go to all these places or what?

Art Keiser: I've been traveling, it's terrible.

Joe Sallustio: You love it. Look at the big smile on your face.

Art Keiser: You know, it's funny. In South America, we have campuses in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia and you have to take these night flights. There are no day flights. It's just exhausting.

Joe Sallustio: What is your favorite campus location outside of the United States?

Art Keiser: San Marcos, Nicaragua. We have a residential campus that's really... it's up in the mountains. So you think Nicaragua being very hot. Yeah. There's always a nice breeze and we have some of the best students. It's an interesting institution and it's recognized by the Pope, which is a Catholic institution, which we're not.

Joe Sallustio: Attention. That's good. Or just bring the attention to that statement. By the way, you know, I use episode sound effects. I had to remind you of that before.

Art Keiser: I thought it was my stomach rumbling.

Joe Sallustio: No, no, no. That's probably Douglas's need for caffeine.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah, I'm only on my second cup here.

Joe Sallustio: Attention. Tell me, remind me of this statement. You are the largest private university in Florida. It's something like that, right?

Art Keiser: Something like that. It changes depending on how you count. But yeah, we're between Nova Southeastern and us, we're depending on how it's counted. We have a little over 20,000 students in the state of Florida.

Joe Sallustio: It's amazing. We're a not-for-profit independent. Maybe that's what it was, the largest not-for-profit independent university in the state of Florida.

Art Keiser: Correct.

Douglas Carlson: We got there, yeah. And I'm so curious, what prompted you to look outside the state of Florida? So one strategy might have been to expand to additional US states, but you've taken an international expansion strategy. How did that come up on your radar? What was that thought process? I'm just really curious to learn a bit more.

Art Keiser: Well, our first foray international is a person we met. We started a joint venture with Moldova State University.

Douglas Carlson: No kidding, okay.

Art Keiser: In Chisinau, Moldova. Went very well. We're doing IT and students would come to us for a semester and go there. And we enjoyed working in that environment. Unfortunately, the rector of Moldova State became the ambassador to Italy and his vice rector didn't like us, so...

Joe Sallustio: Yikes!

Art Keiser: They took us out. I still have a, I still own the TOEFL office in Chisinau.

Joe Sallustio: No kidding. That's funny. You know, your Dr. Robert Keiser has also been a guest on this podcast a couple of times and I know you guys are doing great work with Southeastern College as well. You've got a long list of accomplishments. You've been around. Talk about the state of career colleges today and the state of the sector because things have been...

Art Keiser: Well, the independent colleges, and that includes both the for-profit sector and then the non-profit sector, we are challenged. It's a challenging environment. If you watch, if you read the press, just this week you had Pittsburgh Technical College, a nonprofit, announce their closure. You had Triangle Tech, which was an 80-year-old family-owned school, the Aggressis, I knew very well. They're shutting their doors after 80 years. You've had the College of Art, 150-year-old school out of Philadelphia closing. Pennsylvania's had a bad week.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, they have.

Art Keiser: And you know, it is a challenge in the private sector, partly because of, I think, many of the regulations which are making it more difficult and much more expensive to operate, holding us accountable for things that we are not necessarily responsible for. There's some who cite the problems with the changing demographics, the quote "enrollment cliff." I don't see it that way. I think it has been more the emphasis on cost and not looking at the true cost and the true value of the educational process and that's scaring kids away. So I think, you know, with all the student loan forgiveness, it's devaluing the, I believe, the critical role that higher education plays. I think it's a horrible mistake and I think these closures, which are critical infrastructure to the future of American higher education, are being dismantled, become affordable housing projects, because they'll take these big campuses and put in apartments and make a lot of money doing it. But it's a shame because this is the infrastructure for American higher ed.

Joe Sallustio: There's so much there. Douglas, did you want to jump in?

Douglas Carlson: No, please keep going.

Joe Sallustio: Because, you know, what you say, it means so much to those that have been in the sector for a long time. If you go back 15 years, we saw so many private for-profits and non-profits close. There was a wave of closures back in '11, '12, '13, '14. And then fast forward, the sector, the career college sector has shrunk a lot because of those closures. Down to 6% of the population. Right, shrunk a lot. The regulations have not shrunk with that population. They've geometrically increased.

Art Keiser: Yep, so the percentage of regs have increased, the percentage of schools has decreased. Then you see a bunch of private and public nonprofits start closing and you wonder, okay, this problem is bigger than a sector of higher education. It is a huge higher education problem. We have, and you look at all those things, what's the cycle? Pittsburgh Tech closes. So all the students in that area go, maybe I shouldn't go to school. Maybe I won't go to school. So they're not going to go to the other private. They're not going to go to the for-profit. They're not going to go to the public. Everyone loses when this happens, not just the career schools.

Joe Sallustio: It's a bigger problem and do you think that, I guess my question is, do you think that policymakers understand that this is an everyone problem right now?

Art Keiser: No, I don't think so at all. I think the politics are such that, you know, the concept of free education, concept that higher education should be free and you'll see a number of states... I think I saw West Virginia just did it or one of the states that made all their community colleges free.

Joe Sallustio: Colorado just did it too, I think.

Art Keiser: Colorado did it and again I think it's politics. There's no such thing as a free lunch. I don't think there ever has been and in fact, Keiser University is made up of those students who went to the community colleges and state universities and it didn't appeal to them, it didn't work for them. And that's what you'll see in this group of schools. We have focused on the adult learners and the adult learners typically have been to other institutions before they get to us and are now focused on a career. Unfortunately, the policymakers see that in a negative light, especially when they own these community colleges and state universities. I had a meeting with our governor's chief of staff and I said, "Why is it, you know, these private sector schools were providing, in Florida, the independent colleges provide 38% of all the baccalaureate degrees, which at one time was considered the key indicator of, you know, of success. For states to progress, for the United States to grow." And I said, "Why don't you support it? Because you don't have to spend the taxpayers' money." He says, "Well, we own the community colleges and state universities." So very interesting in the way they approach it and my concern is these closures, as I said, will ultimately be very very negative for our country.

Joe Sallustio: Go ahead Ben. I can keep going too. You are on a roll so I'm gonna let you go. This is my thing.

Art Keiser: Mine too. I'm having fun listening. Obviously. Back in, I was talking to somebody the other day and you go back again back to the '10, '11, '12 and up to 2015. I worked for a university and part of our strategy at the time was teach-outs, right? Because we had the infrastructure and there were enough colleges closing and that's a, that's a, I did eight of them and that's a skill that people won't get anymore because you don't need to do formal teach-outs, you do transfer agreements and you hope that the students will go somewhere where their credits are accepted. Except for that, not all schools are taking credits, so these schools are closing and then the students going somewhere and their credits aren't being taken.

Joe Sallustio: Well, and again, it's more than just that, it's the disruption.

Art Keiser: Yeah. And it is a negative action. And the kids, when they go through a school closure, and I've done a number of train-outs, more than I'd like, I've been sued a number of different times because of you know being involved when we had nothing to do with it right because the State asked us to come in.

Joe Sallustio: One, I can give you a whole bunch of horror stories.

Art Keiser: It's fuzzy math. Yeah, I can give you horror stories about that, but it really hurts the students. It's not a positive experience in any way. And they really don't meet a lot of the students who don't end up at another institution. And the department has gone... I mean, they just gone the wrong direction. So a lot of teach-outs could be avoided if there were institutions who could go in and take over a school. We had an office in a building in Tallahassee that was owned by, the mortgage was by, I think it was one of the banks in Alabama that went belly up. The FDIC came in. Nothing happened except they changed the name of the bank from Superior to Doral. And the tenants, everything worked out beautifully. We don't have a system like that for colleges and universities. In fact, the new rules going into effect July 1st make those type of mergers, those type of acquisitions almost impossible. It almost takes two years to get it completed. Dealing with an institution, let's say like Pittsburgh that has financial issues, no one's gonna take it on.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah. You know, the banking example's really good. Silicon Valley bank closed, Stifel Bank comes in, or whoever, I think it was First Bank then bought those loans over, because you have to, you have to... You're protecting the taxpayers, sure.

Art Keiser: Right, that was gonna happen.

Joe Sallustio: With schools, right, it's so hard. The regulations make it hard, the accreditors make it maybe not as hard, the department makes it pretty hard. One of the things that I have noticed, and you probably have too, is back in 2019-20, the department said there's no more regional accreditors or national accreditors, there's just accreditors. That's not widely accepted yet. I recently witnessed a situation where the policy was we're going to accept credits, transfer credits from institutions that were formally from accreditors that were formally named regional accreditors with a list. It's a loophole on the regular. What do you have to say about that?

Art Keiser: We call them regional non-regional agencies. Again, credit transfer has always been an issue. It's again a sad process because you look at an accreditor and you say that one's okay and that one's not okay and the students do not benefit from that. All the accreditors have to follow specific standards and they're different in their approach, different in their culture. The students are getting the same kind of education. That's always been a challenge and the more elite schools want to... And there's a financial issue, you know, if I accept credits from a school, I don't get paid. So it's, you know, many cases, it's more financial than real. But the whole issue of creating only national accredited institutions in some respects, I think is there's an advantage, certainly like look at what's happened with the lawsuit in Florida. Yeah, our governor, he had into a conflict with the regional accreditor with SACS and he says, "You want to tell me how to appoint a president? Fine, I'm going somewhere else." So he made all the schools in Florida move to a, within a five-year period cycles, move into other accreditors from SACS. So it's interesting.

Joe Sallustio: And he could only do that since the Trump administration eliminated that regional.

Art Keiser: Right. I always thought it was antitrust, you know, because they divided the country up into the regions.

Joe Sallustio: So then again, so if Keiser wanted to, I like SACS, I think SACS does a phenomenal job. But if I wanted to go to New England because they have a different set of rules that apply to me, that makes sense. What do you, can you talk about your policy and advocacy work again? Just to remind us, you know, what boards, councils are you sitting on to help the sector in this space that you want to talk about?

Art Keiser: Too many.

Joe Sallustio: I know. Well, that's why I want to see if you're a member of all. From the governmental side, I serve on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which is I served as chair for six years and came off chair last year. And I'll continue on, I think my term ends in '26. I serve on the Southern Regional Education Board, which is a policy-making board of the southern states, both in K through 12 and in higher ed. I serve, let's see. I serve on the CECU board. I just got re-elected as treasurer. I've been chair and been involved for, sorry.

Joe Sallustio: That's right. Douglas kicked my mic off earlier.

Douglas Carlson: I did.

Art Keiser: I serve on the executive committee of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Florida. I don't know, a couple of others. So I stay busy.

Joe Sallustio: How long have you been in higher ed?

Art Keiser: Well, Keiser University, 47 years. Then I was a TA and a doctoral program teaching at the University of Florida for a couple years.

Joe Sallustio: So you're going to be on these boards till '26, '27. You ever going to go put your toes in the sand somewhere?

Art Keiser: I'm not a beach person, but I'd probably go up into the mountains. But hopefully, it depends on what my board does at Keiser. Maybe move aside for some younger person.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, you know, you might, maybe, but you know, a little bit longer, the industry would miss you with all of the work.

Art Keiser: That doesn't mean I'll disappear. It just might mean I'd be a little less day to day.

Joe Sallustio: Douglas, do you have anything you want to add?

Douglas Carlson: I do, and to kind of close it out, I'd be curious to understand, what do you think are concrete steps that are possible to take that will remedy some of the issues that you've talked about? Like, is there legislation out there that you think makes sense? Is there a model out there that you think makes sense? And obviously there's no silver bullets, but are there things out there you think would drastically address or engage some of the issues you've talked about?

Art Keiser: Boy, if somebody's going to listen to this stuff, they're going to get angry at me. But I think one of the biggest challenges higher ed faces is the concept of cost and the concept of the use of student loans as the basic underlying financial process in which students can go to school. I think it's a bad process. I think it's a process that's not necessary. Right, especially once we went to direct lending from where the private money was. It's now money coming right out of the treasury. We could be following, and I've advocated for years, the New Zealand-Australian model, which is the payroll deduction system. That if a student wants to go to school, they can not borrow. They basically take an advance on their income, and the government will advance that money. And each and every year, when you pay your taxes or you go to your employer and he deducts it from your paycheck and it's income contingent which allows it to be affordable for students. By the end of the age of sixty-five they will probably pay it off. Most everybody would as you do have to work to survive in this country of ours here but you know you will pay it off and if you don't at sixty-five government can forgive the very small portions yet and very small amount and I think the government to make a lot of money and the public will benefit greatly.

A second issue and again is I am concerned about the triad which doesn't work, which is really a quad now. I mean we've got to really analyze our oversight of higher education. The federal government wants the accreditors to be law enforcement. The states don't want to be involved in accredited schools. The CERA, which made sense, is now being quasi-dismantled. And it's, you know, there needs to be again a re-examination. We haven't had a re-authorization since 2008 and we need one to really get people talking about what higher ed's going to look like in the future because innovation, technology, everything's changing so fast and our system is not kept up with it.

Joe Sallustio: Well there you have it everybody. I guarantee this man knows more about higher ed than you do because he knows a lot. Here he is. He's Dr. Art Keiser. He is the one and only Dr. Art Keiser, Chancellor of Keiser University. Art, thanks for coming back on. Of course, my co-host Douglas Carlson. I'll leave you the music that plays for you. 

Art Keiser: We even use Lead Square at Southeastern.

Joe Sallustio: Hey, there you go. Well, that's amazing connections. And it's all about connections, right? And relationships as we help each other serve more students. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-upped.