906: LIVE From the 2024 ⁠Career Education Convention⁠ - with Elizabeth Herron, VP Sales & Solutions and Andrew Benson, VP Operations - CARS

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We're here at the Career Education Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, put on by our great friends at CQ or CECU, depending on how you want to say it. We're here due to the great generosity and partnership of our friends at Lead Squared. And I've got my guest co-host or co-pilot, depending on how you want to put it. Here he is.

Douglas Carlson, he's the VP and head of partnerships. Douglas, what do you do? You're head of partnerships, are you not?

Douglas Carlson: I am head of partnerships.

Joe Sallustio: So I'm not sure if I have to put a beep for bad words on this because I said "hell." But yeah, we're not going to do that. Douglas, you've got a big job and that's to what? Stay in touch with all the partners that Lead Squared works with both in higher ed and health?

Douglas Carlson: Absolutely. We span both sides of it and we have some pretty amazing partners here today. So I'm excited about it.

Joe Sallustio: Including the EdUp Experience. Is that not true?

Douglas Carlson: That is absolutely true. Yeah, you're one of the folks I have to manage.

Joe Sallustio: I do refer to you as my handler and I do not yet have a drink. So you're not handling it very well, I have to be honest. Let's get our guests in right now. Here they are.

We've got Andrew Benson, he's VP of Operations, and Elizabeth Herron, she's VP of Sales and Solutions at Collegiate Admissions Retention Solutions, or CARS for short. How are you guys?

Andrew Benson: Great.

Elizabeth Herron: I own it.

Joe Sallustio: Well, we had to rename our company CARS because we're here in Indianapolis. So, you know, normally we're just Collegiate Admissions, but we're CRAS. Well played. Elizabeth, let's maybe start with you. Tell us about CARS and what you do, how you do it.

Elizabeth Herron: Awesome. Thanks so much for having us. We're really excited to be here. We have been partnering with post-secondary institutions for about 30 years across the student life cycle, trying to break down hurdles that impact students' success in higher ed. We do this by providing proactive multi-modal contact campaigns where we're really partnering with the institutions to support their students from pre-enrollment through to graduation, financial aid, help desk. It's partnering with the college to help them serve their students and make the student experience a more positive one. And we do this through amazing integrations. Andy, take it away.

Andrew Benson: Yeah, so we actually integrate with every single client that we work with so that we are a fully transparent layer to the organization. None of the students know it as anything other than actually employees of the college. So all of the work that we do to support the admissions efforts at the school or the financial aid efforts at the school, all the way through student retention, it all appears to the student as if it is employees of the institution. So we help to bolster them and to support where they might need additional support or to replace staff where they've had shortages.

Joe Sallustio: Define student experience for me a little bit. Go into what that means. I ask this as a former chief experience officer at my institution that I came from. And every day I would go, "OK, what counts as student experience? What doesn't?" It seemed like everybody would go - all the students would go, "You're the chief experience officer. I had a bad experience." Anyway, no one ever said, "Let me tell you how good that was." What do you mean by student experience? Give me some examples of that.

Elizabeth Herron: Yeah. So from our perspective, anytime the student is interacting with the college, we want the experience, that interaction to be as seamless and as frustration-free, like frictionless.

Joe Sallustio: Nice. I like that word. Do you have a little button for that?

Elizabeth Herron: So we remove friction, we remove hurdles that impede the students' movement through the cycle. And by making the students' passage from pre-enrollment to enrollment, to picking classes, to re-registering for classes, to seeking out resources they might need, like tutoring support, or if they have housing or food insecurity, directing them in the right direction, if they have technology issues, by partnering completely seamlessly with the institution, we can escalate issues that a student is having across departments. We're breaking down those silos, and we do that a lot with our IT integration. So it's not just being the college, like we're the student success coach or we're the financial aid help desk, but we integrate so seamlessly that we can actually see the notes the college is putting in their CRM and they can see the notes we're putting in. Andy, could you explain that a little bit more?

Andrew Benson: Yeah, so we typically use systems of API calls or some kind of a point-to-point integration where we actually publish in real-time the activity and the outcomes of those activities with every prospective student. So if Elizabeth, for example, is working at the financial aid office at the school and we've worked with that student, she's able to see the full context of the conversation we've had in addition to anything that an employee of the school has had. It allows everyone to have that really robust support for those students and to see the full picture all in one place.

Joe Sallustio: And Douglas, I'll hand it to you, but I just want to make a quick comment. I feel like what you said, Elizabeth, about frictionless is so important, right? Everything else we do is frictionless except for higher ed, right? Some of us probably called an Uber to get here or a Lyft. It was probably pretty easy for us to get to the hotel from the airport. When you booked your flight, you didn't need to call the airline. You just did it online and looked at all the times. In higher ed, it's not that easy. It's just not. And getting to that is very hard.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah. And you need help. And to the extent that you can meet students where they are, you had made excellent points that the students of any age right now are utilizing multiple forms of technology to move through their day. And so by utilizing multiple ways to communicate with students, whether it's live chat, text, email, Slack, by meeting them where they are, you can make the experience feel more what they're used to, right? So that's also important.

Elizabeth Herron: What they expect.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah, what they expect and what they're seeking out, right?

Andrew Benson: Yeah, I think to build on that, I think there's nothing more jarring for a student than - they're used to Amazon-like experiences. They're used to Netflix-like experiences. And they show up to college thinking this is where they're going to get their education and advance in their career. And then it ain't like that. Are you kidding me? That can be pretty jarring.

Douglas Carlson: And I'm really curious from a CARS side, when schools or universities, colleges are looking to partner with you, are they typically looking to replace services or add on services or a combination of both?

Elizabeth Herron: That's a great question. When we first meet with a prospective partner, we do some pain point evaluation. Sometimes people perceive that their pain point is in one area when really it isn't there at all. So we kind of do a holistic review of what's going on. Are people using self-help tools you already have or are your self-help tools on your website so buried that people can't find them? We've deployed some live chat bots for some of our client institutions where they can get a lot more proactive with their self-help. So we kind of do a holistic evaluation of what they think is missing or what they think is not happening as smoothly as it could. So in some cases we're adding like a student success team or we're adding a financial aid help desk. In other cases, we're helping put fingers in dikes where they have staffing shortages.

Douglas Carlson: Got it. Well, and I want to go down that road a little bit more because that seems interesting. I hear that more and more. It's not only their staffing shortages, but it's really hard to hire the right and good talent either geographically or even remotely. So I'm really curious just to get your thoughts on that.

Andrew Benson: Yeah, it's definitely really difficult to recruit in today's age. For us, the difference is that we're able to operationalize all of these things where it's step by step and it's automatic. And so for all of our employees, the job is what they're doing all day long. Somebody in admissions might be entertaining appointments and everything if they're on campus. Whereas our folks are on the phones, everything's popped up, everything's scripted where they're able to see the context of every conversation. And as they move through, they're assigning different dispositions that even determine the next time that person is called, if they need to be called again. And so for us, we're able to recruit people and keep them focused on one single task. It doesn't have to be the maverick that comes on campus is taking appointments now and going and packaging students tomorrow. It's somebody that's doing the same thing and fulfilling one role.

Elizabeth Herron: One of the unique things about our company, though, is that we keep our individuals that we hire fresh because we offer such a variety of services so that we don't have someone only sitting doing admissions calls all day. They might spend a few hours supporting admissions, another time that might be supporting placement or career services, they might be working in retention or financial aid.

Joe Sallustio: Is it hard to find people who can do all those different roles in higher ed? Because you'd have people who would argue, sit on the other side of the table and say, those are very different roles. You can't have the same person do that kind of stuff, can you, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Herron: You can train people to do just about anything. But with us, it's building blocks. Like someone comes in as admissions, then they get upskilled to these other areas. So we can put them in where we need them.

Joe Sallustio: Education within education, as it were. Very well done. You know, retention in general is a hard business to be in right now. National Student Clearinghouse comes out, I think it was last week or a couple weeks ago, says that some college, no credential populations up 2.9%. You have more adults going into higher ed, popping back out. I know that's also true of a lot of career colleges where it's just hard to keep people. What are some of the retention challenges that schools are dealing with that you guys are seeing?

Elizabeth Herron: So interestingly enough, I did a workshop this morning on boosting retention. And when I polled the group this morning, they all shared that the single greatest cause for attrition for all their students is conflicts with life schedule.

Joe Sallustio: Yikes.

Elizabeth Herron: So, you know, you work part-time or you have a family situation or your car breaks down and then you can't get to drop the daycare off. As you have traditional students, 18-year-olds, they have fewer life challenges, but when you get up into the older populations that are coming into these skilled programs to get re-skilled, to increase their position within an existing employer or to find a new occupational pathway, they have more they're juggling.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah. A lot of challenge. Douglas?

Douglas Carlson: So I want to kind of continue down that path because there's a lot of rhetoric around colleges can be saved because there's so many people out there that have some college, but not all of it. And I haven't really seen folks do a great job activating that. So yes, they may be better at the older, non-traditional population, but I feel like it's kind of like this unicorn that's out there. It's like, we have all these people with some college, but not enough. We want to bring that in. And like that all of a sudden is going to fill our gaps in our holes. Do you see anybody doing it well serving the non-traditional student? That's kind of a broad stroke, but that seems to be one of the big holes there is just really serving that population well and they would come back and ultimately actually complete.

Elizabeth Herron: I think that you see some of the community colleges really working in that area harder than the traditional four-year universities. I know that we have one partner in Minnesota and the state of Minnesota has come up with a grant called the North Star Grant. That specific focus is bringing in people who have started and stopped out to get them in to at least get them through a credential. Get your associates and then figure out what you want to do with your life. But what it does beg the question, there's all these people out there with some college no credential, is it because the credential lacks the panache that it used to have? Is it that people are realizing that it might make more sense to learn how to drive a truck and go make a bunch of money driving a truck or welding or some of the other career paths that are more finite and obvious?

Joe Sallustio: Sure. What about this artificial intelligence? What would you do with that?

Andrew Benson: So right now we're not really utilizing artificial intelligence in our operation. Where I think though the biggest role in our industry and in our vertical is analyzing some of those retention behaviors. Everything from the initial marketing and the behaviors that that student undertakes as they engage with admissions and financial aid. You know there's a lot of data there that has not been digested to the extent we can have a machine learning model that can analyze all of that and correlate all those factors to the students who are most likely to complete, not just to enroll. Because I wonder if they are separate and distinct populations between what we see are students that will enroll at a high rate and sit at a high rate. Are those the same ones that are completing at really high rates?

Joe Sallustio: Good questions. And I guarantee you there's somebody out there that is listening to this going, I want to find out more about what these guys do and how it might be able to help my institution. Where do we find you? Where should we go to learn more about CARS?

Elizabeth Herron: Thanks for that. We are a US-based contact center with all of our employees stateside in Birmingham, Alabama. You can find us on the web at www.collegiTRSVP.com or you can connect with us on LinkedIn, Andy Benson or Elizabeth Herron.

Joe Sallustio: Connect with them, find them. Douglas, anything else you want to add? How do you feel about this conversation?

Douglas Carlson: This is fantastic. I think the one thing I want to make sure we don't miss, because I think both of you, Andy and Elizabeth, have a really unique vantage point working with so many schools and seeing what actually they need and being able to serve those needs. Where do you think higher education is going? I know that's a huge broad stroke, but you have a really interesting vantage point, so I'd love to just kind of get your take on that.

Andrew Benson: I think that the next wave is going to be in competency-based education, where you're looking at some of those short-term certificates and things that somebody is able to immediately enter the market and earn a very fair salary. And then the next step is going to be looking at those same students for re-enrollment and additional education, especially where employers are able to come back and subsidize that cost for them. Because that's a huge obstacle in the non-traditional market, which is the primary focus for this industry as a whole.

Douglas Carlson: That's a fantastic answer.

Elizabeth Herron: It's perfect.

Joe Sallustio: Perfectly well done, Andrew. How do you like that? A compliment from Elizabeth to end your day here at the conference? Ladies and gentlemen, this has been an incredible episode. I want to encourage you to check these guys out, Collegiate Admissions and Retention Solutions. I always say that you don't know what a company can help you do or can't help you accomplish unless you check out what they actually do. One of the great highlights of what I do here at the EdUp Experience and what Douglas and Lead Squared have allowed me to do here is to highlight these great companies working with career colleges and other colleges across the country. So maybe you need that help too to serve students. First, let me out here, my guest co-host. He's Douglas Carlson. He's the only one that gets this music. Douglas, how do you feel about our podcasting day today?

Douglas Carlson: This has been a lot of fun. It's a long day. It's an exhausting day, but I can't tell you how many good insights we had, just how many good conversations we had. So I'm really excited to have finished this up with CARS and you know, Andy. That was a great answer. So that's something to kind of take away.

Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, our guests. He's Andrew Benson. He's VP of operations and Elizabeth Herron. She's VP of sales and solutions at Collegiate Admissions or Retention Solutions or CARS. Thank you for being here, you guys. You have a good time.

Elizabeth Herron: Thank you. It was awesome.

Joe Sallustio: All right, ladies and gentlemen, you've just EdUp.