913: LIVE From the 2024 ⁠Career Education Convention⁠ - with David Meek (CEO) & Joe Fisher (VP, Solutions) - Student First

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. Another episode here at the Career Education in College and University Annual Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. Always by my side, at least this week, is Douglas Carlson. He is head of partnerships at Lead Squared. Douglas, welcome back again. In fact, I don't think I'm letting you move. You just keep sitting there.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah, I'm not going anywhere.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, but you did just - if it wasn't said enough - you did knock my microphone over and almost killed the entire podcasting day.

Douglas Carlson: That did happen.

Joe Sallustio: Because if I lost this mic, then there'd be no extra. There'd be no mic for me to talk and I was going to make you take over.

Douglas Carlson: Well, I'm glad it all worked out then.

Joe Sallustio: Well, we've done a lot of these, but there are more amazing colleagues to talk to in and around higher education today, especially those serving career colleges and universities in that space. Let's bring them in one at a time. Here we go. He's Joe Fisher. He is VP of Solutions at Student First. Joe, what's going on? How are you?

Joe Fisher: I'm doing well. Thanks for the walk-up music.

Joe Sallustio: Did you know you were going to have any?

Joe Fisher: I did not.

Joe Sallustio: OK, well, I got to make sure that the next one's even better for your colleague. Let's bring him in now. He's David Meek. He's CEO at Student First. Right. If there are appropriate music. David, what's going on? How are you?

David Meek: Hey, good morning.

Joe Sallustio: All right, guys, the mics are yours. Tell us about Student First. What is it? What do you do?

David Meek: Student First is student information system technology. Joe and I have both been in this world of student information systems for a long, long time. I've been at it about 35 years, and Joe, you've been at it 25.

Joe Fisher: 25, so.

David Meek: By now, I think we've seen and done about everything in the student information systems world. So we have a lot of experience working with bringing these technologies to institutions to improve their workflow, their processes, engage their students. We pretty much have an impact across the entire institution. Our products and our services impact the entire student life cycle. And without what student information systems are all about, schools would have a hard time operating.

Joe Sallustio: Absolutely. Amazing.

Joe Fisher: Well, I was just going to say, for me, it's the backbone. If I was running a company, my backbone would probably be my finance system. But for a college or a university, the student system is that key component to keep the trains running on time.

Douglas Carlson: Well, and David, this is, you know, you've had a lot of success in the past. This seems like a second time around the base, if not more than that. What inspired you to stand up student first as another SIS?

David Meek: Yeah, it's sort of interesting. Of course, my first foray into the world of higher education was now one of my competitors where I was the founder and CEO for about 20 years and then did exit the business back in 2008, 2009, something like that, and began to look for my next venture. And at that point in time, I really began to focus a lot on student retention as the next big frontier to sort of focus on and to try to bring some order to that world of chaos. But in this country alone, I think that retention is just, it's an incredibly large number. Only maybe just under 60% of the students who start in any freshman cohort actually get a degree.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, the recent National Student Clearinghouse said that we're talking about some students - some college, no degree - which basically means you dropped out of school. That's right. Went up 2.9% to I think 37 million or something like that now. So I mean, you're talking almost 40 million students. It's insane.

David Meek: You know, when you start talking about these numbers, the wasted funding is staggering. It's billions of dollars being wasted. So, you know, I began to think about that and how to impact student retention. And maybe I was a little bit ahead of my time. It was back in the 2012, 13, 14, 15 era. Everybody was willing to talk about how to help students persist. But at that time they weren't really sure what to do. And it still sort of was a community that really focused on enrollment and admissions more than in my view retaining those students that you had. But as the pool of available new high school graduates has begun to know, enrollments have dropped over the last decade. You know, institutions have finally begun to say, well, it's time to really focus on keeping those students that are in school. Can't just bring in another.

Well, because when you think about it, they spend a lot of money to engage that recruit and to get them in a seat in their institution. So to let them drop out in the first six months or eight months, which most of the drops occur in the freshman year, a little less in the sophomore year and then sort of if they make it to a junior or senior they're not dropping. But it does occur early on. So I spent quite a bit of time researching that. I got to a point where the product that we had developed where I needed something like what today is known as AI. I needed some technology that was in its infancy back then, and I said, well, you know, maybe I'm just ahead of my time. And so I began to think about shelving that product.

At the same time, coincidentally, I had conversations with a number of people that I knew from the past who were all saying, you know, when is someone going to come in and disrupt this student information systems business? So-called market leaders are all legacy solutions. They've been around for many, many years and we're paying premium prices but getting kind of old stuff. And I thought about that for a while and began to look at sort of the landscape out there to say, okay, well what else is underserved? Who's underserved? And I began to focus on small to mid-sized schools where those so-called market leaders weren't really that focused in serving them. You know, there are plenty of people to go after Ohio State University or University of Texas, University of Illinois, you know, the big schools that offer multi-million dollar projects for for-your-p-sis type companies. But when you start thinking about where most of the business really lies out there, there's probably thirty-five hundred institutions in this country that fall in the say, I don't know, under five or six thousand.

Joe Sallustio: Yes, most of the moments.

David Meek: And that's where the market is. The solutions were really built for that segment of the marketplace. So I thought, you know, there's a great white space here that we could really, really have an impact on. So I kind of put the band back together, more or less. And Joe's one of the people that I brought on board with me, although I didn't know Joe before. I'd heard about him and his reputation.

Joe Sallustio: That's Joe Guy.

David Meek: Yeah, that's Joe Guy. And so I brought people like him on board. We've got some technologists who are second to none that had been with me before and had done a great job. And so I sort of said, hey guys, how would you like to after all these years you spent learning the trade, perfecting your craft, how would you like an opportunity with today's technology to build something brand spanking new, no technology debt, start from a whiteboard and build it the way it should be built, the way we probably should have built it the first time we went around?

Joe Sallustio: Clean slate.

David Meek: Clean slate. And so that was about back in 2021. And we began building what we thought was going to be the next generation student information system. And that's why we sort of say that we're the future-ready solution in the marketplace. And we're not bringing legacy technology. We've brought affordability back into the game. There's some levers you can really pull to make that a reality where most of the marketplace is looking at, if you talk to a school and they say, yeah, I really like to upgrade my systems, or some of them have systems that are actually sun-setting. And they come to you and they say, how long does it take? Well, for most of these systems, it does still take 18 to 24, sometimes 36 months to deliver a student information system.

My vision was to do that in twelve months for a lot of reasons. First, it lowers the cost tremendously. Secondly, the staff at the institution doesn't get as fatigued because people forget they've got a day job as well as learning something new and helping to implement something new. So, we built our technology, our platform, and that's great. But at the end of the day, it's just a fancy tool. You've got to know how to apply that tool, how to use it effectively to accomplish the mission of the institution or to help the institution to accomplish its mission. And that's where we, I think, are very aligned with understanding what most of these institutions are committed to. Joe, I'm doing all the talking.

Joe Fisher: Well, you mentioned something about mission. And I think when you think of the career schools, these folks are extremely mission-driven. They have no choice, right? We are outcomes, we're going to produce a workforce and we've got to show results. The government expects results from us. And so I think when you start an SIS project and you know that you have this outcome that you're going to hit these targets, we have to improve this, we're inefficient over here, our recruiting isn't good. When you have those targets from an implementation perspective, it gives you milestones to hit as you're going through and you have purpose.

Joe Sallustio: That word outcomes. We hear it every day now in higher education, not just in what I call non-traditional education, which is more of the career schools, the vocational schools, the tech schools. But we're hearing it more and more even in the traditional sector. They're starting to warm up to this whole concept of outcomes, which I find refreshing. And hopefully the trend really catches on because, let's face it, very few students, I think, go to school to get a degree. They're really going to school for the open outcome which is a career, which is a job.

David Meek: And if that weren't the case, I think we wouldn't have. What have we got now? 18, 19 million students in school in the US? We wouldn't have half as many students in school if that weren't really what they're after as the productive career. And in fact, I really believe there's going to be more and more focus on that across the higher ed spectrum over the next five to 10 years. I think that's going to become paramount to success for institutions. They're already realizing that that's what success really is, is helping put a person into a productive career to support everything else that goes on in their life.

And we're seeing this more and more that people are not just going to school for two years or three years or four years or five years. They're starting to embrace the fact that over a whole career, which might span their lifetime, they might go to school in a number of different times and there's up-skilling. There's all sorts of things that occur in helping people to better their life. And that's what this is really all about at the end of the day, is helping people, is taking them from young adulthood to sort of the next stage.

Joe Fisher: Well, I think the four-year degree and beyond, I think, will continue to, I'll say, lose value, whatever that really means. But, you know, I think education will get chunked down to smaller pieces, right? It's the upscaling. What do I need to do next? You know, it's that credential, it's that competency. What did I learn in this class and how can I apply that to my job, my next venture? And I think in the career space, they're embracing that faster. It'll be interesting to see what happens because of the universities that offer, let's say, a four-year degree, their business model is not set up to chunk that education down, but the consumer is demanding it. So there's going to be some institutions that make it and there's going to be some that have vested interest in lobbying to keep the value on that four-year degree and more.

Joe Sallustio: You know, I don't know if you guys have seen there's a three-year bachelor's degree out there.

David Meek: I've seen it.

Joe Sallustio: That's what I said, three years. Yeah. It's a, and when we say three-year bachelor's not a four-year bachelor's in three years, a true 90 unit, 90 credit hour bachelor's degree, right? And what you're seeing, and you guys probably know this, there are more experimentations happening with models. Education models and delivery models especially are evolving constantly, being driven by what's now become a consumer space.

David Meek: Yeah, right. Going back more than 20 years ago, this was a totally different game. But nowadays, students are definitely consumers. Institutions to be successful are having to really focus on, you know, what that consumer base wants. You know, what do they want? Micro-credentials? Do they want, you know, short-term programs? In fact, some of the most successful institutions I know today offer variety of different models. And then you've got some that are even getting into competency-based models, which, you know, we've got some. You can see subscription-based pricing on those, flat-rate pricing. And you've got to configure your assistant to be able to handle that. And a lot of schools cannot get their arms around that kind of stuff. And that's the thing, Joe, I know where you're going to probably say something there.

Joe Fisher: The legacy vendors, you're so right. You know, the vested interest, they also have a vested interest to not change their model because their software isn't flexible enough yet today to meet those needs for the subscriptions, the competency-based, you know, those smaller units. Their systems don't chunk down. And I think that, and that's what we do. That's one of the things in my, you know, my career. Having built another company that was focused on more non-traditional education who's really become a bit a force in that market and moved on to a broader market now. It was all about delivering extreme flexibility in terms of education models, being able to handle not only the workflow part of it, but things like financial aid, Title IV, which you really have to embrace the adoption of the rules of Title IV to your model.

David Meek: And so we spend a lot of time forward-looking as to where things are headed, where they're going, because we don't want to become stagnant. We don't want to sit back on our successes and clip the money coupon, but we want to continue to innovate really. We're innovators, we're disruptors in the market. That's what we came back to do and so far it's been a wonderful ride for this last three years of getting to a point where we're really starting to take product to market more aggressively. We had our first 20 or so schools that came aboard and said, we'll be early adopters, we'll be influencers, we'll help you. And now with that, we're moving to a different phase, which is to sort of scale up our operation and serve more and more schools.

Douglas Carlson: And you mentioned there's 3,500 probably good targets in the US. Are you also thinking internationally or are you starting in the US and building out from there?

David Meek: Well, my main focus was to start in the US and eventually go out. But I was sort of, it's interesting because there's some opportunities that have arisen in other markets. So we're currently, we started a channel partner program in Latin America and some Latin American countries because there's been some change in those markets in terms of the product availabilities, there are products that are being sunset out of that market. They're leaving sort of a vacuum and so, you know, it's one of those things where we're getting inbound messaging and calls saying, we've heard about you guys, we've heard that you're multilingual and we are, because we developed from scratch to be that way. Our intention was, our model was, our business plan was always to serve a broader market. So yeah, we are reaching out. But right now, most of our business is going to continue in the US, and we'll, like I said, we'll depend on our channel partners to bring us business in these other markets.

Joe Sallustio: Got it. There's a lot to be said about the right technology in higher education, your stack or your ERP or whatever we want to say it. And there's a lot of different types of technology, right? There's CRMs and SISs and LMSs and how you put all of that together. If you're an administrator in higher education, a lot of times you don't understand how to put those things together to make them work. It's like a puzzle. What do you think? What advice would you give higher education administrators out there listening to this that are just as one. I was swimming in technology all the time. It's like this thing, I need that thing and API here and API there and I've got Google Analytics and I've got all these things coming in left and right and all these data sources. How do we think about the future of technology in higher ed?

David Meek: Well, it's certainly not going to slow down from what I can see. The change is all around us and I think the most important thing for institutions is to always embrace change. And that's not an easy thing, it's a very hard thing. Yes, that's what we focus a lot of our time on is not just delivering cutting-edge, leading-edge toolset but focus on our delivery model, make sure that we understand how to help the institution manage change because that's probably the most challenging thing for them.

And I think that for people out there as administrators and knowing that they want to invest in their future, it's to make sure that the company that they are dealing with is really focused on the future. And they're not all focused on the future. If I were like some of the guys in the business who have, you know, more than $500 million a year in revenue, it's easy to sit on your laurels. But you've got to really evaluate your company and make sure they're committed to the future, not just going to do lip service to it.

Joe Sallustio: I love that you put your money where your mouth is. Going from a three-year to a 12-month implementation is an example of actually implementing that.

David Meek: Yeah, it is. And it should have happened, I think that should have happened in higher education a long time ago. But it didn't serve the interest of some of the bigger companies to, I mean, their model was their model. They were staffed up. It's not easy to shift. I think some are trying, but I sometimes think that some of the products are just too complex because we've got to remember who we're delivering to. We're not delivering our products to be used by the most tech-savvy people. They're not. They're great people. User experience matters to us. We touch an iPhone. We want it to be really easy, right? So we expect everything to be like that.

And some of my technology people get a little irritated with me from time to time because people ask me, tell us about your product. And I say, it's simple and it's elegant. And they go, why do you say simple? It's not simple. Well, we've taken something very complex and we tried to really make it simpler because that's the way that people consume it. And if you don't focus on how people, how they learn, how they can consume, then you end up with one of these highly complex, really high-tech products that people aren't able to put to good use in their daily lives. So we know that there's the necessity of change, but we want to make that change mean something.

Joe Sallustio: Douglas, anything else you want to say to take us out or let these gentlemen go with some outro music?

Douglas Carlson: This has been a great conversation. So appreciate John. And I don't think anything to add. So no notes.

Joe Sallustio: No notes. Thank you. We wish you guys the best of luck as you talk with your potential current and potential clients and partners out there in the space. I think everybody needs a great partner in higher education. I still can't get my microphone stand to stand up after Douglas kicked it off, but I'm let you guys get out of here. We've got David Meek and Joe Fisher from Student First. Gents, thanks for joining us here today. Ladies and gentlemen, you just EdUp.