801: Why Speed Matters More Than Ever - with Dale Vander Wall, Higher Education Industry Advisor, Salesforce

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio back with you here on another episode of the EdUp Experience, which I have said over 800 times in the last four years or so. I gotta tell you guys, when I think about my career over 20 years, 22 or 23 years - I started when I was 10 in higher education, so I'm still on the younger side - when I think about my career in higher ed, one of the greatest honors of my time in higher ed is the honor of being able to interview so many amazing people in and around higher education to find out what's going on in the industry. We'll call it post-secondary education because there are so many pathways that students can take now to get an education. I think that's one of the points of distinction that we should be making a little bit more clearly in 2024 - multiple pathways, which means we have multiple guests, we have multiple perspectives. That's what makes the EdUp Experience so amazing in my opinion, which is completely biased because of course, I am the host and co-founder. I should say it's good, right? And if it wasn't, I wouldn't do it. 

So with that, I'll get off my soapbox. I'm really honored to bring back my co-host who was a guest - he's back. It's been a couple years, I think it's probably been two, two and a half years, and that's just a guess, but I'm really happy he's back. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, he's the one and only Jason Altmire. He is the president and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities, better known as CECU. Jason, what's going on?

Dr. Jason Altmire: Glad to be back with you, Joe. I don't think you need a co-host, but I am happy to do it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: No, I really do because sometimes I couldn't get my words out in that introduction. If you're listening closely, I keep messing up but I leave all those edits in because podcasting is not easy. As you know, Jason, you make mistakes, you lose your train of thought and it's part of the job. So it's good to have somebody else along for the ride that can clean it up when you get in trouble.

Dr. Jason Altmire: Happy to do it. I think you double the chances of one of us making a mistake, though, by having us both.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: No doubt about that. No doubt about that. Jason, just quick before we jump to our guest, I want you to remind the audience, if they haven't heard you in a little while, you're the president and CEO of CECU, which is a membership organization that is passionately advocating always for career and technical colleges, of which I had the privilege of working for one for 15 years when I started out my career in the sector. But before that, you wrote this book and you did something in government. Remind our audience what you did.

Dr. Jason Altmire: Well, before the book, I served in Congress. I come from a business background. I've been a senior executive at two different multi-billion dollar healthcare companies. But in between those two stints, I served three terms as a US Congressman, and I served on the Higher Education Subcommittee and became very involved in issues related to career education. After I left Congress, I wrote a book about political polarization, just the epidemic that we have in this country - different subject for a different time. 

Now at CECU, CECU is an acronym, it's C-E-C-U and it's the National Association that represents private post-secondary career schools. So we have about 1100 campuses across North America representing everything from culinary and cosmetology to aviation and auto technicians to the skilled trades, truck drivers, welders, all the things that you think of when you think of career and of course, healthcare programs, allied health and nursing. And it's very fulfilling to see these folks, many of whom are first generation to higher education, have gone through tough times in their lives, and they're making a difference with their education. They go out and they find work and they're able to grow their income and help their families and make a difference for their communities. So I really find fulfillment in the role.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, it's funny, and I think back to a huge shift - and I'll hit my sound effect button in a minute - but COVID, as terrible as it was for higher education, one thing that I really thought was a positive byproduct out of it is the term essential workers. So all of a sudden, all of these people that were trained in career colleges and technical colleges that were maybe have been looked on by nonprofit higher education in some instances with their nose up as these less than jobs, all of a sudden were the most important people you could find. When your HVAC went out, I remember in California in COVID and my AC went out and you couldn't find anybody to fix it, you went, wow, the essential workers that we have. Let me just say, for anybody that wants to put more regulation on our career colleges and tech, career and technical colleges, I would just say this, this is lunacy. No more regs. Let those schools do what they're supposed to do. That's all I got to say about that. Let me get off my soapbox, Jason.

Dr. Jason Altmire: I would just say before you get off your soapbox, if you're sitting on an airplane, and you're looking at those workers outside working on your airplane, you want two things: you want them to be really well-trained, you want them to be good at what they do and you want there to be a lot of them. And those workers come from our career schools. That's where those folks come from. And if you want to rebuild America and rebuild our roads and bridges and infrastructure, locks and dams, interstate highways, airports, you're going to need skilled trades. You're going to need truck drivers. You're going to need welders. You're going to need all the people who do that infrastructure improvement. So if you want to talk about high demand professions, I don't think there's any more high demand or more important profession than the people who do that work.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well said. Well, one person that's going to need all those skilled workers is our guest today because he's flying around the country. So he's not going to be going anywhere without some skilled workers. But he's got a lot to say. Let me bring him to the mic right now. Here he is, ladies and gentlemen. His name is Dale Vander Waal. He is a higher education industry adviser at Salesforce, a little company called Salesforce. Dale, how are you?

Dale Vander Waal: I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So what do you think about that little soapboxing that we did? I mean, higher ed is just - some of this training that we're doing for individuals out there is so important, right? And you don't know you need somebody, especially a trade and somebody that's skilled in trades until something breaks in your house and then you can't find an electrician. Right. I mean, it's just an important conversation.

Dale Vander Waal: No, I couldn't agree more. And I'm one of those people that grew up, lived my whole career at one of the highest level of those institutions at the University of Maryland at College Park. But I'm also one of those people that fully understands the complexity of the needs that are out there and how every part of higher education is contributing to our society, to the needs of our people. And so every part of it is important. I was not one of those people that stuck up my nose. I applauded everyone who was doing great work and would challenge anybody who wasn't doing great work or was sitting on their laurels trying to do stuff that they've always done. Tell them like it is.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Love that, Dale. Thanks for saying that. Salesforce is one of the biggest organizations like ever. It's massive. You're a higher education industry adviser. So I'm going to ask you a profound question. Advise me, Dale, what's going on in higher education? What are you doing with your clients? What's your job look like? What is higher ed saying? Give us the lay of the land.

Dale Vander Waal: Gosh. There's a few things going on. Just a few things going on in higher education right now. I mean, it goes without saying that higher education is going through incredibly disruptive change and probably also true that there's a lot of resistance to change within higher education. And then there's just incredibly changing expectations of higher education. And so I talk a lot about how our students, our faculty, our staff, their experiences outside of the university or outside the college is informing what they come to their work and to the classroom with. And so those experiences really, I talk about the Amazon experience or the Netflix experience and how that informs their expectations of what they think they're going to get, the value that they're going to get. And unfortunately, there's often a huge gap between what we're telling them they're going to get and what they often get. 

And so I think technology is a really important part of that conversation. And that's why I'm at Salesforce. I believe in the mission of higher education. I believe in what everyone is doing. And I think we need help. And I think technology is a huge force multiplier, enabler, all of those things. And I think Salesforce is in a place that is at the engagement layer of those relationships. I think we're all in the relationship business in universities, and we need to build great, long-lasting trust-building relationships. And that's why I'm at Salesforce.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Before I pass it to you, Jason, I want to ask - when you say you're a higher ed advisor, are you advising Salesforce based on what higher ed clients are saying? So you're going back to technicians and coders and everything, you know, in terms of design, or are you advising higher education on product build-outs or both?

Dale Vander Waal: Both. Yeah. So the answer is yes. I value both of those parts of my jobs. I love both of those parts. So I work across Salesforce, across our teams to help them understand what I often say is how higher education works and doesn't work because there are incredible nuances to higher education. I'm steeped in them. Sometimes I don't even know what I know because I was in there so long. But then I also work with our customers because they don't always understand what technology needs they have, how to think about how things are changing so quickly, and how a product like Salesforce can support the really important things that they're trying to do with their students, with their faculty and staff, with their constituents, donors, supporters, and you name it. Whatever relationship you have as an institution, you need to manage, you need to build, need to improve those relationships. And so you need something to help you do that. And that's why I do what I do.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So you're like a bridge.

Dale Vander Waal: I'm a bridge. I call myself a translator. That's what I really do. I translate higher ed to Salesforce and Salesforce to higher ed. And that's a really important role. And it's something important that I probably don't even know how I do it sometimes, but I love doing it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Love it. Jason, over to you.

Dr. Jason Altmire: Keeping along those same line of thinking, one of the things I like about Salesforce is the comprehensive nature of what you do. The services you provide start at the marketing recruitment stage with regard to the relationship with students, working all the way through their educational experience at the institution, keeping that relationship going and taking advantage on both sides of the relationship, moving forward, all the positives that can benefit that student and the institution over time after graduation. And it really has become something that, you know, all institutions of higher education understand the importance of that relationship, the one-on-one student relationship. And I was wondering what you have found at Salesforce related to artificial intelligence and how that has potentially disrupted that relationship. So much has been written and said about students using it to, to put it nicely, help themselves academically, potentially maybe outside the scope of the rules, but not as much has been said about the positive ways AI can be used to help the student relationship with the school. What is Salesforce doing in that regard?

Dale Vander Waal: I'm gonna start with where you started, which is something that I believe really strongly in and the power of the Salesforce platform versus what is almost ubiquitous. I would say it's ubiquitous in higher ed, doesn't matter where you are of point solutions. One little piece of technology that helps you do X, Y or Z. A lot of times those things are great. We know there are a lot better than we used to do, and so it's natural that higher ed has adapted some of those to whatever they're using and whatever they're trying to do. But what I love and the value that I saw when I was a customer and in higher ed was that end-to-end single platform that connects all of those parts of the journey. The student journey is complex. It's hopefully long, lifelong in some cases. And so you want to be able to connect those experiences and connect those data behind the scenes to help every institution do those things well. And so that's really, to me, the incredible enabler.

AI that you talk about, Jason. And AI for me, oftentimes we talk about AI in the abstract. I like to define two terms, two parts of AI that I think are really important. Generative AI is what we're really talking about right now. It's so hot. Everybody's thinking, my goodness, ChatGPT, it's going to change the world. It's going to destroy everything we know. And then the other is predictive AI that's been around for a while. And so there's two parts of those things. I'm going to start with the predictive part. That's been around a while. It's part of - it's just integral. It's been integral to what we do at Salesforce. It's part of a lot of technology, but it helps us and it helps institutions be able to predict when a student may be going off the rails. They may be having problems that we don't even know about, and it's starting to bring data in that a human being on their own wouldn't be able to do to be able to say, you might want to reach out to this student because there may be something going on that you can help them with. And so in that world, that's a really positive thing to help our students understand their best course of action because there's so many options for them, so many variables for them to consider. If we can help them do that, that's great. For our faculty and staff, if our predictive AI can help them take away a lot of the noise and focus them on the stuff that they really need to do, that's a really great outcome.

So I think that's not gonna destroy the world. That's not going to change. That's only going to empower, enable, improve the life of everybody at institutions. On the generative side, I break that down. There's a lot of stuff going on in the learning process and in the classroom and the things that are happening. I don't talk as much about that, but I understand how critical that is because of the plagiarism issues. Are you really doing the work? And are you really learning? That's really critical. Those are important questions. The trust issues, the ethical issues, those are all really important. The piece of generative AI that I get really excited about is as a productivity enabler and it's really a force multiplier. And for me to be able to use generative AI to be able to take some of the weight off of me, if I'm an advisor for a student and I got to coalesce a lot of information about that student really quickly, wouldn't it be great if the technology did it for me? And I could walk into a meeting with them with the 10 bullet points of the ways that we as an institution have interacted with that student, supported them or not supported them over the last few months. You know that to me generating that first email that you're going to send to your student, generating the case summary of all of the things that are happening with their financial aid and with their academic life. Those are all things that to me are incredibly exciting and part and parcel of what we do and integrated into everything we do at Salesforce. It's really gonna be the thing that propels us forward and it's gonna get really exciting.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact. You don't just do higher education. I mean, but perhaps you in your role, but Salesforce does not only do higher education. You as a company are involved in pretty much every conceivable type of industry from financial services to energy to consumer goods, manufacturing, the public sector issues. So I think it's interesting that you as a company put forward this customer relationship management piece, which is the core of what you do. You help companies and businesses and nonprofits and public sector entities, all of your clients, you help them manage that customer relationship. And in higher education, in education generally, the customer relationship, a lot of people don't necessarily think of students as customers in higher education. You know, so I maybe explain a little bit about that terminology and how you view as a company, but also you personally view that relationship from the higher education perspective.

Dale Vander Waal: Yeah, there's such a rich conversation around that because I think as a company, relationships, relationship building, relationship management that runs across every industry. So you're right to point out as a company, we support everything that's out there. Because relationships are everywhere, every organization, whether it's a nonprofit, for-profit, education, government, military, it doesn't matter. Everybody is struggling with how to build those and manage those relationships. I think in higher education, the issue is really understanding how we can do that in the best way possible to make sure that the relationships that we're building - as you're right to point out that the customer word is often a dirty word for us. We don't like to think of our students as just customers. 

But I would say that if we don't, and this is my personal opinion, I think this is something we talk about as a company, that if you don't think of your students as customers and that they're coming to you paying a lot of money, expecting something for what they're paying for, then you're going to miss out on a lot of things. It's not just a customer relationship. Hopefully it's much richer. There's a lot more to it, a lot deeper. But I think we as a company would say, at the very least, you need to understand your students and the people that you're serving as customers, because they have expectations of you.

And they rightfully expect things that you ought to deliver in as meaningful and as easy a way as possible. One of the things that I love, one of the quotes that I love from one of our presidents, not Salesforce, it's one of our higher ed presidents is, we ought to make life in the classroom as rich and rigorous as possible. Everything outside the classroom is a service and we ought to make it as easy as possible. And I believe that to the core. And so I can understand why faculty members shy away from wanting to call their students customers. They have a different kind of relationship with them, but parts of that relationship are certainly customer-based.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you kidding me? The minute you brought it up, Jason, somebody somewhere that you said customer, somebody went, we're going to have a problem here because right. I mean, this is like an age old conversation within higher ed. However, I will - one thing I would add that I've seen happening over the last few years is as you shift to online, a lot more online learning and for those that are not going online, institutions are coming up with much better prior learning assessment policies for transfer credit. So all of a sudden, this student who was blocked out of institutions because, well, they didn't accept these credits, so why would I transfer there? Or they can't take me in as quickly, and I don't want to take a gap. Now that student can shift so easy. Even think about the portal, like for athletes. You don't like the classroom service. You got - well, you know what? I'm just gonna go be an athlete somewhere else because of what happened in the classroom. So all of a sudden what happens in the classroom reverberates in this decision-making process and students have the quick triggers man. 

I'll tell you guys I'm at Lindenwood obviously - well, not obviously maybe you didn't know but I'm at Lindenwood. I'm the chief experience officer. My job is to keep everybody happy. These students have quick triggers and they come in and they say, Hey, I had a bad experience. I'm not so sure I should be here anymore. And I go, you should, because I'm going to put your feet in cement and you're not allowed to leave. But you're there. The decision making process and back to Jason's question, Salesforce being an organization that is about swift delivery, right? You have this technology, we have an API, we can put an API on it. And all of a sudden you're able to get all the data you want. You know, we can integrate all these systems. You have a baseline platform in higher ed, which is an industry not built on speed. It's not. We're trying to build speed into it. The career colleges defined speed in higher ed. My opinion, we're seeing it replicated now in other institutions. But how do schools that you're talking to think about speed now? Are they thinking about speed? Are they thinking about a transient customer or whatever you want to call them? Is there more thinking around these guys can just get out of here as fast as they came in?

Dale Vander Waal: Yeah, that's a tricky one for sure. I wish I could say that the customers that I talk to have that as top of mind. I think some of my business friends who have interacted with higher ed folks would say that change in universities is glacial, probably at best. So even if, I don't know what's, don't know what's a little bit faster than glacial, but even if you moved that way a little bit, you'd still be awfully slow. And so a lot of institutions, a lot of our customers would say, yeah, of course, we want to do things faster and better. But I still think relative to the need and relative to the expectation, most institutions are still very slow, very, very reticent to make big changes. We are built on incremental change, not transformative change. And I think that -

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well done. Yeah, it's okay.

Dale Vander Waal: Yeah, I think we really need to be thinking about transformation. I just think that - a good friend of mine, Mike Smith, he's a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon. He just wrote a book called "The Abundant University." He talks about his experience with the entertainment industry and what the entertainment industry went through when kind of online streaming services and places like Netflix and content providers that were different than Hollywood - the disruption that that caused and all of the things that came about because of it. And he took that learning and he applied it to universities and to higher education. And I think we're still in the middle of that transformation. I think that we're not - we're at the very beginning of it, but I just feel like we're at the precipice. And it's just going to get faster and faster and people's needs are going to, you know, really be changing. So I don't - I don't predict - I'm not a futurist, but I just feel it in my gut, my soul that we're on the precipice of a lot of change.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, Jason, I'll hand it to you in a second, but I always think about streaming video and I related it to higher ed, right? Once upon a time on streaming video, you had to wait for the introduction of the show, right? The minute and a half. Now you can hit the skip button if you don't want it. Right. So we have these skip buttons all around us. You don't want to watch this advertisement. You could skip. You don't want to watch the introduction. You could skip. What else can I skip? So we have this built in like ingrained, I don't know, expectation that you can kind of skip the things that you don't want to have. It's really interesting because higher ed is not about skipping in any way. It's an interesting paradigm to use a higher ed word that we have to think about, Jason. And I know you have some thoughts around this stuff about speed. I'll pass it to you.

Dr. Jason Altmire: Similar to that, I was going to ask about the cloud. A lot of work goes into creating data for, in your case, universities and educational entities in every possible way, creating a platform where you can slice data and look at it in meaningful ways. And you at Salesforce talk a lot about how that data is on the cloud and the benefit of that. I'm guessing there's a lot of people out there, perhaps including me, who don't really understand what the cloud even is and why that is such a benefit and moving forward into the future, what kind of role that is going to play. Can you kind of explain what the cloud is with regard to the work that you do?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Let me just set the stage for anybody that thinks they know. You must unlearn what you have learned. Okay, now tell us.

Dale Vander Waal: All right, so I'm going to preface my response to say that I am not a technology person. I didn't grow up as a computer science guy and all of those things. I learned it late in life. But what I would say to your question around the cloud, the value of the cloud, what I think we've seen in higher education, what we've seen across industries is kind of this evolution from on premises - you know, you have to go through regular updates. If you don't, that's fine. You're going to be 10 versions behind your security. Again, data security, system security is going to be potentially at risk. And so what the cloud does, this is really simplifying it. But two things that I think that the cloud does is it gives you almost limitless boundaries to work within. And it gives you kind of regular ways to get updates and innovations without you having to do a lot of work. So those are two things that are really important. 

And then there's a really, at least at Salesforce, I won't speak for all cloud providers, but at Salesforce, an incredible focus on system security and data security. And in this day and age, that's incredibly important. And I think it shouldn't go without saying trust is our number one value as a company. And so being able to trust that your data are secure, that you get to decide what you do with your data, somebody else doesn't get to decide it for you, particularly around issues of students and student information and student privacy. All of the things that we know about our students, those are really important. And it goes beyond that - constituents, donors, all of those things. Those things shouldn't be public and they shouldn't be at risk. And so I think the - we talked about speed - the speed that you now have accessible to you in the cloud and this incredible amount of data that you can put in one place allows you to do all of those things. 

I don't remember if I said it related to the AI question, but AI is meaningless without data, right? And so we and institutions of higher education love collecting data. We love analyzing data. We don't always do such a great job of doing something with those data. And we just like to analyze it. We just like to talk about it. We just like to see the trends and not do anything about it. So I think, unrelated to the cloud question specifically, but it enables institutions now to do things with their data and bring it to user levels that allows individuals to be able to really serve students in new and different ways that they haven't been able to do before.

Dr. Jason Altmire: And can you talk about success when you engage in a contract with a client, in your case in education, how do you know that the services you've provided have worked? How do you quantify success?

Dale Vander Waal: Wow, that's a really good question, because I think it really depends. It depends on where you are in the student journey. And it really depends on the institution. I talk a lot about, and this is actually a question I just talked about with some of our internal folks, because what is important to an institution is unique to them, right? There isn't kind of a one size fits all. And that's what again, what I love about Salesforce is it allows you to work on the areas that you need the most help in. So I will give you examples across the student journey. 

So within recruiting and admissions, return on investment success would to me be, did you give your students a recruiting experience? Did you give them a personalized experience? And did that then translate into more students admitted, more students matriculating to your institution? So all of those things are, you can quantify those things, right? Are you doing better this year than you did last year in terms of the number of students that you're bringing to your institution?

Once they matriculate and getting them through to graduation, we talk about persistence and retention and - that's where there's so much focus today because you guys know about the enrollment cliff. There are just fewer graduating seniors from high school that are eligible to go to college and so there's just greater competition for those students. So the focus has to be if you get them, you better keep them. And you better get them through and give them value for what they're paying for. And so a return on investment, their success to me would be, did you increase your retention rate? Did you increase your persistence and graduation rate? Those are all important things. 

And then once they graduate and they become active alums, hopefully active donors, that returns on investment would be around, are they actively engaged with your institution? Maybe mentoring students, maybe hiring students if they're business owners or in companies and actively doing those things. You can quantify those relationships and quantify, are you increasing that engagement or not? You can obviously quantify, are you increasing alumni donations, amounts of donations, endowments, all of those kinds of things. Those are all really important benchmarks for institutions. And I think they're all important indicators of success. And I will be the first to say that Salesforce is an enabler of those things. They're not just the reason, right? So you could have the best technology. And this is often true. You can buy the best technology and do absolutely nothing with it and not see any results and blame the technology. When in fact, you just didn't do things that you needed to do as an institution to change how you were doing business and use the technology to superpower whatever you're trying to do.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yikes. You know, I, Dale, as I look at the landscape of higher ed, you know, there's an ongoing conversation about value, the value that an institution provides, whether it's the programs that they have, the degrees or certifications that they have. There's a lot of conversation about - you don't need a post-secondary education anymore. You know, you can do these other things. I think it's scary. It's a very interesting conversation. Scary, I think, for some students that, especially coming from maybe less means, less privilege to go, what do I really do with my life? Some adult students, maybe that they want to make a career change and they're wondering if going to school and getting that education is going to get them to where they want to go.

It makes it really confusing. And I think institutions are, if they're not freaking out about it, they're definitely talking about it. I know we are. How do you serve these students where, now for a lot of institutions, students that leave, they don't go anywhere. They just leave higher ed. It's not like they decide to go to another school. So we've failed them somehow. And you add up all those failures and all of a sudden somebody says, what the heck is going on in higher ed or post-secondary ed? How do you at Salesforce think about the thought leadership part of this, the higher ed part, the value part? What kind of conversations do you have internally around that?

Dale Vander Waal: Yeah, the kind of the - you know, I'll go back to a couple of things. One, the mission of higher education, the value of higher education, just as a concept, it has never been more important. I mean, it's just, it's still maintains a kind of front and center to our society and to the people that are involved in it. Those are really incredibly important things. They drive what I do every day. I can get really passionate and emotional about it because it changes lives, right? But it can also just destroy unfortunately, and either it destroy you because you got really close, some college but no degree, you got just burdened with incredible debt, whatever it might be, you know, you have to, we have to take that seriously. And we talk about that a lot. How can we help institutions do better and be better with the things that they do. We at Salesforce can't do the things that they do. We just want to help them do those things better. 

Go back to the AI, that predictive analytics that we talked about. Man, if we could figure out, there's so much data nationally around that idea of some college, no degree. A lot of times it's students who got really close and it was a few hundred dollars that kept them from getting over the finish line. Man, if we could have predicted that before they walked out the door and said, hey, we're seeing some warning signs that really worry us, how can we help you? Let's work with you, because they often don't have the resources, knowledge, the support, the background. We know these from the data. Research is abundant about these things. How can we help you as an institution? That's the personal touch. You have then the, talk about a lifelong advocate. If you as an institution had the ability to help that one student and you did, and you change their life, right? And they are incredibly grateful for that. The reverse is also true. If you didn't do anything about it, shame on us. I mean, it really is, to me, it's personal to me because I don't want to be part of an institution that could have done something and didn't. And just chose not, you know, like that's on them, that's not on us and let's blame the students. Now I think this is a shared burden, a shared partnership. And that's why I think if we can give them a great tool like what we have, then that's an awesome thing.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Any final questions for Dale?

Dr. Jason Altmire: When you think about value, keeping on that same subject, one of the big policy debates that's happening right now is about the outcome of a student's educational experience and whether or not they're making enough money after graduation to, in the minds of the regulators, justify the cost of the education that they just went through. What are your thoughts on the different types of education? The Wall Street Journal the year before last did a comprehensive series on master's degree programs and how the cost of going through the education greatly outweighed the payback on the other end. Does that mean then that it was a waste of money? You're doing what you want to do. It's your chosen life profession. And yeah, maybe you're not making as much as if you had majored in finance and were working on Wall Street, but you have a fulfilling experience and you're enjoying the work that you do. Where do you come down on that debate between, you know, how much money you make is the sole determinant of whether or not your education was worth.

Dale Vander Waal: I don't think it should be a surprise that I don't think that that's the sole reason anybody should go get a degree or get a job. It is really important. I mean, if you're not taking that into consideration as one factor, and a really important factor, in your decision about either going for your bachelor's degree or for your associates degree or a master's degree, PhD, whatever - I mean, PhDs. Look, I'm ABD, so I wouldn't have made any more money by getting a PhD.

Dr. Jason Altmire: ABD or soon to be?

Dale Vander Waal: Well, yes. Not soon to be. I chose to get off that crazy train. 

So I think that level of transparency, that's one of the parts of the conversation, Jason, that I know you know about. The level of transparency that institutions have that I think is really important with their students or prospective students about what is this actually going to cost? What is a reasonable outcome in terms of, you know, when you graduate, you might get a job like X, Y, or Z that's going to pay this amount. Those are things that are really important to students. A lot of students come from backgrounds where that's pretty obvious. A lot of students don't. And we need to empower them with that information. We have the information at our fingertips. There's a lot of people who don't want to share it. I think shame on them for that. 

I think transparency and openness about these things and going in with your eyes wide open about it. Look, if people want to do that, they want to go get a - I won't even name names - go get a degree that costs you $150,000 and you're going to make $40,000 a year. If you went in with your eyes wide open, more power to you. But hopefully you knew that going in.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's such an important question that - the debt, you know conversation is one where we won't get into it. But I always wonder like - you knew - some people knew - you were good. I just actually - I say this because I finally paid off my student loans for my bachelor's degree that I carried because I had a low interest rate. It was a moment to be able to pay off those loans and go okay, paid them off and I carried them for years, years and years and years. And it's like you knew you're gonna take out loans and the whole loan forgiveness piece is - I'm gonna stop it there because there's so many ramifications or something like that. 

You know, we have so many choices and where we go to school now, some are low cost choices with distinct ROI. There's the, we'll call them the high academic choices that come with a higher price tag. If you know how to go, if you know how to go, you can go exactly as you wanna go. That's the difference between today and the past.

And speaking of the past, we look to the future. Dale, and I want to leave you with the last two questions that we ask every guest. Number one, first, anything else you want to say about Salesforce? Open mic for you. Take two minutes. What do you want to say about the work you're doing, the work Salesforce is doing for higher ed?

Dale Vander Waal: Well, one, it's an incredible place to work. It's one of the reasons - I love the ecosystem that we have. And when I say ecosystem, it means our partnership with our customers and the commitment that we have as a company to our institutions. This isn't just a way to make money. We really do see it as an opportunity to improve our society, improve institutions. Our CEO, Mark Benioff, talks about business is the greatest platform for change. I love that because I think that fits in with the mission of higher education. We're in the business of changing lives and changing people and helping them be the best they can be. And so I love that. And I love that we get to do that with our customers. We're not just selling them a widget and walking away. We're going in with them, helping them do the things that they want to do. And we're in there with them in the long haul, right? We're not just cutting and running. 

So the ecosystem, not only that we get to have with them, but they get to have with each other. As a customer, I got to call anybody across the country who was a Salesforce customer and say, hey, I'm having this problem. How are you dealing with it? What can you help me with? And everybody's sharing. That doesn't happen in industry. Everybody at Salesforce, when I was a customer, that blew them away. They were just like, you guys talk with each other, you share everything you're doing. Why are you doing that? That's so cool. And we - you - it's just what we do. It's part of our DNA in higher education that we don't just protect, we wanna share. And so that's a beautiful thing. 

The other thing that I would say about Salesforce, I mentioned it, but I think it to me is so important in an era of - Jason, you talked about the polarization in our country, the lack of trust. You know, the mistrust of every institution, every data point, every news story. You know, it's not unimportant that trust is our number one corporate value. And we live that out. We really believe it. I believe it. It is built into our products. How can we create trust and build trust and work with our customers in a trustworthy way so that we bring an incredible amount of value. You know, Salesforce and specifically for higher ed has so much value. We're just scratching the surface. I want every institution of higher education to be on Salesforce. I do. That's, you know, it's something that drives me and drives my colleagues. We'll get there eventually.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What do you see for the future of higher education?

Dale Vander Waal: Well, we touched on it, and I would just say disruption and change and becoming better at what we do going back to our mission. I mentioned Mike Smith. That's one of his principles and things that we need to - we need to think about. What is our mission? Irrespective of how we're delivering on that because that doesn't mean, I think, Joe, you're the one who said it, doesn't mean 14 weeks sitting in a classroom necessarily. It might be, but that doesn't equal mission fulfillment. Mission fulfillment in terms of educating and changing lives can happen in lots of different ways, and we all need to embrace modalities, better modalities, and make sure that we are meeting the expectations of the people that we're serving. Because right now, I think there's a gap, there's a trust gap, there's an expectation gap, there's an experience gap that we ought to change. And I think that we're on the cusp of really doing that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I love it. Jason, what'd you think of this conversation today?

Dr. Jason Altmire: I thought it was great. Dale, thank you very much for joining the show. I learned a lot and it was a very productive conversation.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: My guest co-host - he also hosts a podcast. If you want to learn more about what's going on in the world of career education, you can check out Career Education Report podcast hosted by the one and only Jason Altmyer. That's offered through the Career Education Colleges and Universities. You can find it on Apple or anywhere you get your podcasts. Jason is a pro podcaster now. Are you not my friend?

Dr. Jason Altmire: If you say yes, then yes.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, his name is Jason Altmyer. He is the CEO of CECU. Please check out the work they're doing. It's very, very important work for post-secondary education. And it's been an honor to have Jason alongside me as we interviewed the one and only Dale Vander Waal. He is higher education advisor at a little organization called Salesforce. Dale, we appreciate your passion. We can tell the passion that you brought to the table, which I love passionate educators and we hope you had fun along this ride today as we talked about higher ed.

Dale Vander Waal: So much fun. I really appreciate you having me. I love talking about this stuff and I love meeting other people that are as passionate as I am. So thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-uped.