806: What Creates Enduring University Partnerships - with Dr. Joianne L. Smith, President, Oakton College, & Anne Brennan, Assistant Vice President Academic Affairs & College Transitions

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. I've been doing this darn 800 times or so, ladies and gents. When this episode gets released, it will be over 800 episodes. To put that in context for you guys - and I don't do this often where I get on a soapbox, but I will today. Actually, I kind of do do that often now that I think about it. But we've interviewed over 250 college and university presidents from across the world in our 800 episodes that we've released.

Why is that important? Well, we felt nobody was getting to these college presidents the way we could at the EdUp Experience to bring the challenges of leadership to the forefront. We're seeing so many changes in and around higher education. This is even post-COVID. COVID is a thing of the past now, unless you just got sick. Higher education's dance with COVID, where we've evolved from it. What happens next? That's what we want to find out from today's leaders.

And we're passing now in this episode, our four-year anniversary with an average of 200 episodes recorded and released each year, interviewing today's amazing leaders at scale. Can anybody else do it? I challenge you. And if you can't, just come on the EdUp Experience podcast and we'll make it easier for you. That's one of the things we do here and one of the things I am most proud of, and I know Alvin is too, is we interview college presidents and then we say, "Hey college president, you probably want to interview somebody who does a job just like yours. So come back once you've been a guest and be my guest co-host. And you can then pick from our list of upcoming guests and say, I would like to talk to that person."

And we've got somebody here today. This is the lead-in, right? There's a lead-in and he's here and he's one of the very, very few - and I mean few - presidents. I think I was sick or my kids were home from school, which makes it impossible to record. And I missed his episode and regretted it ever since. Ladies and gentlemen, his name is Dr. Bill Heineman. He is the president at North Shore Community College. Bill, welcome back to an EdUp mic.

Dr. William Heineman: Thank you, Joe. And congratulations. 800 episodes. That's incredible.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Thank you very much. A lot of talking, right? So it's a miracle that I could keep doing this. I do mess up quite a bit, though, because that's just what happens here on the EdUp Experience podcast. We leave in all mistakes, right? Except if you forget your institution's name, which you won't do, right?

Dr. William Heineman: Absolutely not. We will not forget North Shore Community College. Really, really excited to have this opportunity to chat with these two terrific leaders from Oakton College today.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Bill, I'm giving you extra points because typically when I have somebody come back to guest co-host with me, they say something similar like, "I'm really excited to interview these guests," but they give the guest names ahead of my introduction. But you did not do that. Well done. So let's bring them in now without further ado. We're gonna bring in one at a time. Ladies and gentlemen, first, we have Anne Brennan. She's the Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and College Transitions at Oakton College. Anne, how are you?

Anne Brennan: Hi, I'm good, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We're excited to have you and let's get your president on too so we can talk to you both at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Joianne Smith. She is the president at Oakton College. Joianne, welcome to an EdUp microphone. How are you?

Dr. Joianne Smith: I'm great. Happy to be here today.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, we're really excited to have you ladies here to talk about Oakton College. Joianne, let's start with you first. Level set for us. Give us the lay of the land. Where is Oakton College? What do you do and how do you do it?

Dr. Joianne Smith: Sure. Oakton College is in the northwest suburbs of the Chicagoland area. We serve about 485,000 residents. We're a comprehensive community college offering students over 100 programs from short-term certificate programs to associate programs that transfer to four-year universities. We have a very diverse student population, which is one of our core strengths. Over 50% of our students identify as students of color from historically minoritized communities. In 2020, we were recognized as an AANAPISI serving institution, the first community college in Illinois to receive that distinction. About 24% of our students identify as Asian American or Pacific Islander students. 70% of our students are part-time. So they are working adults, trying to balance school and lives. And so much of what we focus on is really providing access to students in an individualized experience that allows them to meet their goals, whatever they might be.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Thank you for that. And Anne, I want to go right over to you because your title struck me when I was pulling you up and I go, okay, Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs, and that's the second part, and College Transitions. And I was going, okay, what is this college transitions part of your job? And why is that so important to Oakton College?

Anne Brennan: Well, I think about everything that students bring to us before they come in and want to transition into us, and everything they'll want to transition out of our college into another space. So I'm always connecting those two experiences. In a lot of cases in District 535, students are starting to do our own coursework. So the early college program reports through me and we're out in nine public high schools and two privates and we're teaching over 4,000 enrollments a year in college courses while they're in high school. And then I also talk with them about how other early college experiences like the Advanced Placement Program or the International Baccalaureate would also count for us. And we try and communicate that out to them. And then I am responsible for making transfer partnerships. And that's what we're gonna concentrate on in our conversation today, I think, one of those transfer partnerships.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing. Joianne, before I pass it to you, Bill, I got to go back to Joianne just for a second before we get into the partnership part of this. And I think you said 485,000 residents are somewhere around there and over a hundred programs. That's a lot. Right? One of the things in higher ed that you'll hear is you can't be all things to all people. But one of the demands on community colleges is to be all things to all people, because who else is going to offer these if you don't? How do you balance that from a leadership angle? Programs we have to have, programs we maybe want to have, employer agencies saying we need you to do this, and you go, I guess we got to do that too. How do you keep all that in balance, knowing that you're looking at finances at the same time, you're balancing budgets, state funding, all those things come into play?

Dr. Joianne Smith: It's a really good question. And I think that is one of the beauties and one of the challenges of community colleges. The most important thing is that we are the community's college. So it's really paying attention to our community and the changing needs of our community. So we use data, both qualitative and quantitative, to inform what programs we need to be responsive to the communities that we serve. Our current strategic plan, we're in the second year of our strategic plan. It's called Vision 2030: Building Just and Thriving Communities. We were very intentional about not just being focused on students, but focusing on the community that we serve. So we speak to current employers in the district trying to understand what do they need? How can we serve them? And making sure that our programs are responsive to those needs. Having advisory boards from industry leaders to help inform our curriculum. And then looking at the changing demographics in our community, trying to find out what do students need. And so we're constantly evolving, creating new innovative programming and looking at what programs meet our community and will help us all build just and thriving communities.

Dr. William Heineman: Thanks, Joe. So Dr. Smith, you have a background in student affairs and I'm wondering how that sort of influences the way you approach your job as president.

Dr. Joianne Smith: I think that being a student affairs practitioner prior to becoming the president really allows me to center the voices of students in all that we do. One of the things that I think Oakton prides itself on is having students at the center of all of our work. They are the core. And so I think that background from student affairs really helps inform that approach. Having worked with students directly and helping them manage all of the things that students experience while in school, many of them not academic related, honestly, helps inform the wraparound and holistic student supports that I think are important in order for our students to be successful.

Dr. William Heineman: And what would you say is sort of the biggest change you notice in your students since you started in the presidency?

Dr. Joianne Smith: Biggest change? I think our students' lives have become even more complicated. I think that the percentage of our students who are part-time, I think has grown. The age of our students increases. Even those that are direct out of high school, many of them are leading adult lives, even though their age might not be defined as that post-traditional adult. And so I think the complexity of students' lives has grown.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, really amazing world they live in these days and trying to be college students. Right. They're often parents working or supporting parents while also trying to obtain a certificate or a credential in order to move on in their career pathway. We talk about that all the time about students and needs and we don't say enough about the environment, like the cost of goods is more, the cost of gas. You know, the supply chain disruptions that we still feel. You try to go buy a house now, wood's more expensive and interest rates are high and so everything that surrounds a student is more expensive, which makes partnerships and transitions, if you will - you like that, like what I'm doing here - so much more important. And you, I know you want to talk about a particular - I don't know the word - transition partnership that you've developed at Oakton College and I want to give you the opportunity to bring that up and talk about it.

Anne Brennan: Well, we were very excited when Northwestern University, who has been a partner with us for a number of years on a number of transfer-related partnerships, talked to us about making a very specific guaranteed admission partnership in transfer to their School of Professional Studies, which they started about 30 years ago to offer their fine education to students who wanted to be part-time, because that's not the typical Northwestern experience. Northwestern is there among the elite schools teaching full-time students in a very rigorous curriculum. But it's the same rigorous curriculum and it has been offered through their School of Professional Studies and they offered us as the institution. We're in their district. We're both in what we think of as District 535, which ranges from Evanston out to Des Plaines where we sit and includes many different communities. And we send them more and have sent them more transfer students in their history than any other community college, probably because it's easier to learn about Northwestern and maybe believe about it more when you're so close to it.

So they began to talk to us about it and we were excited to help that happen. Again, we have sent a lot of students to Northwestern over the years and they wanted to define it. In the meantime, they also had many faculty at Northwestern who have been talking about honoring transfer students and particularly students from community colleges. So there've been faculty from both institutions who have been working together probably over the last two and a half to three years. We've been sending our curriculum, they've been evaluating it and they've been listing out on their website how it would transfer and fulfill coursework. And that's for all of their programs because of course the School for Professional Studies teaches all those courses. They've done a lot of work and now this agreement allows us to show students a pathway from Oakton straight into Northwestern. And students have been very excited about that idea.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. Over to you, Joianne. How important was this to you and to the staff at Oakton to ink this deal with Northwestern knowing that they hadn't, right? They didn't have an agreement like this in place before.

Dr. Joianne Smith: It was significant for a number of reasons. One, Northwestern is a top 10 institution. And for many in our district, it is an aspirational goal that for many students feels out of reach. So this puts it in reach. Northwestern has never had a transfer agreement with any institution. So it was the first. And so we were incredibly proud of that. I should say, even before this partnership, we created a partnership agreement with Northwestern for a subset of Northwestern students through the Northwestern Prison Education Program. They teach a program in Stateville Correctional Facility, one of the maximum security prisons here in Illinois. And they partnered with Oakton to offer an associate's degree to students at Stateville on their pathway to earning their bachelor's degree at Northwestern. So that was the first partnership agreement that we had with them. And we graduated two cohorts of students through the associate degree program in November. The first group of those students completed their bachelor's degree from Northwestern University, the first top 10 university in the country to award a baccalaureate degree to incarcerated individuals. So that was our first partnership with Northwestern. And then this transfer partnership followed several years after.

Dr. William Heineman: That is amazing. Tell us where this agreement with Northwestern fits in sort of the larger ecosystem of transfer relationships. Where do most of your students go when they transfer?

Anne Brennan: You know, that's a great question about Oakton. Many community colleges have one big school they send all their students to. And I would have to say Oakton has five big schools. Then another 10 pretty big destinations for our students. And then dozens and dozens, if not a hundred other destinations in a given year. When we look at the output from - and I was just asking for an update from research about that. When we look for the top five, they're gonna, they are, they always have included the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, DePaul University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northeastern Illinois University. And that's where we, those four keep taking different places. And then there's a nursing school that also gets a lot of our RNs in big ways. And so we've looked at that, but we can't just make agreements with them because in the next part of the list where there's 15 other institutions over a five to 10 year period, we're sending double digit numbers to another 15 to 20 institutions every year for over a period of 10 years.

So right now we have over 30 institutions that we have transfer agreements with. They range from guaranteed admission scholarship programs for our honors tracks to program specific agreements that sometimes come with scholarships and sometimes come with the ability to study there before they transfer. Most of them include the offer of the four-year institutions to advise the students while they go through our college. We're so close to so many institutions that we make partnerships that allow our students to come and visit or maybe even take courses during the summer at some sort of negotiated price because financial aid isn't always that easy to share. And so they really range and we try and make students learn about it in a lot of ways. But one way is we try and connect our websites with their websites and our events with their events so that we're putting things up there for students who are in the community college to be able to think about while they're busy earning their grades with us and make progress to the next place.

Dr. William Heineman: Sounds like a tremendous amount of variety to manage. Besides trying to use your website really efficiently, do you have other tricks you can share with the audience about how you manage so many different schools with so many different aspects?

Anne Brennan: It's fuzzy math. Yeah, well, I think that the best ways that I've seen it is really connecting your faculty to their faculty because that even infiltrates the classroom. All of our agreements involve our faculty and they sometimes initiate them. So for instance, we have an agreement with Lake Forest College that was initiated by our environmental studies faculty here and our environmental studies faculty there. I've always said that it just takes two faculty to make a partnership or make a transfer agreement. Of course it has to go through a lot of other, but that's where it can often start. And we've had that happen over and over again at Oakton. We're known in the state of Illinois as not the biggest college, but we do send the most transfer students year after year, not the most, not more than the big colleges. But when you compare us, our population has been interested in transfer as part of Oakton for its history.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Something to be proud of. Yeah, Joianne, come back over to you because I did a quick Google search on you or Google stalking depending on your perspective. No, I did. And I was going through some of the articles that you've written for Evolution. And eight years ago, you wrote an article called "How Students and Administrators Can Transform the Transfer Experience." I don't know if you remember the content in it, but I gave it a quick look. Can you recite it word for word for me?

Dr. Joianne Smith: No, I'm trying to remember what I said.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, so I don't think it matters. But the fact is eight years ago, you were thinking about how to transform the student transfer experience, right? And you're writing an article about how eight years later now, as you're talking about this, you're talking about this partnership with Northwestern, all the work. Anne's position, the title, the nature of the title by itself says focus transition. Do you think that you're achieving that, that you're transforming the transfer experience for students at Oakton to make it easier, clearer, more accessible?

Dr. Joianne Smith: I do think so. And if you look at our current strategic plan, there's only three pillars. One of them is strengthening students' Oakton experience, which really is this whole transition piece, making sure that students as they transition in, experience Oakton while they're here and then transition out is very intentional and seamless for students. You pointed to Anne's position. We didn't have an assistant vice president for academic affairs and college transitions eight years ago. Anne has really been instrumental in helping us build both the early college program at the front end as well as develop innovative transfer partnerships like the one with Northwestern.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And what advice do you give, thinking about what you have all achieved at Oakton, somebody who's coming in maybe in a position similar to yours that is going to help manage these transitions? Transitions is such a broad word when you think about students and all the stuff they bring in with them, all the stuff they want to go out with. How do you pull this together? Where did you start? You know, blank canvas. Did you go, okay, this is the starting point, or maybe I have to start at the end and work backwards. What's your advice for somebody who might be in a similar role, trying to streamline transfer to community college or otherwise to get to the level that you're at?

Anne Brennan: Well, it did take a whole lot of change of the academy, if you will. When I started, I started out in California and California was doing it really well. California was, and I started a long time ago. I'm just, I'm looking at my retirement at the end of this year. So asking me that question is really interesting to me because I remember back in the 80s, I'll take myself back to there, that California was already articulating all the credit from their community colleges to the University of California system, which was ranked among the best in the world. And they were accepting all of the credit. And I was at the University of Southern California, not a public college, a private college. And it was the receiver of the most transfer students of any research one institution in the United States back in the 80s. And that wasn't by accident. They needed to compete with UCLA and Berkeley, and they were taking the transfer students. So USC got busy and started talking to those associate degree granting institutions and saying, okay, we'll take all the credit that UC does too. And they had already begun that, that early. 

In Illinois, we weren't doing that. When I returned to Illinois, that activity was underway, right? And so my work in transfer began my, like I would say, if in any way you're noticing at a college that all the students aren't coming out of high school anymore, they're coming from a lot of different levels and with a lot of different background, that would right now start to pay attention to that. And at Oakton right now, we're grappling with the concept of not just giving transfer credit from the last place that you went to, but what did you learn anywhere? Can we give you credit for what you've learned before? So we're really expanding this concept of transitioning what you learned before and bringing it into us so that we can, and I'm particularly listening and I, if there's any university people listening to this, to accept that credit when they move from us. If we give people credit for training that they got that wasn't from a traditional college, but proven that it's the level of college credit, we're hoping that stays in the record, continues on for students, is honored when they move to the next place. So that's this whole transition like business now, I think. 

Once upon a time it was transfer credit and articulating credit and putting it on a website or joining Transferology in Illinois. That's where we all put our transfer credits so that you could load up your transcript. Those are all great things. And if you're working on any of that kind of stuff, you're doing the work that needs to be done because today's college graduate does not graduate normally without bringing credit from somewhere else. And that is, again, over a career that wasn't it back in the USC was special. It was accepting all these transfer students and had a big effort going into that. A lot more colleges do that today, a lot more universities. And now we have to expand it, I think the next step, which is to really recognize issues of competence and of training that's really springing up in so many ways all over the country and especially online. So again, we're continuing to evolve. I think that under President Smith's leadership, she really has had that idea in her mind, lead the institution in us moving in this direction in lots of ways that are very equity focused. And that has been true of her leadership.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact. You know, a couple of comments about what you said. I worked in Southern California for four years in an institution and everything that California does policy-wise is to keep kids and students within the state of California. The way the transfer credit system is, why California doesn't join NC-SARA and make state reciprocity easier because they don't want to make it easier for you to come get their kids. They don't - and they're adults. And you, I worked in an online institution, I had to go to every single state and try to get reciprocity for online students. So everything is designed to make transition from community college to four-year university easy so you don't even need to look outside the state and a lot of kids don't. That's why they have hundreds of thousands of students within both systems. So what you say is so right, they've really done a good job of making sure that they stay in state and I don't think there's a state out there that doesn't want their student population to stay in state. 

But you're right and the academy can be difficult sometimes when you start looking at things like credit transfer and prior learning assessment. Prior learning assessment for those that go, my learning outcomes are exactly the same as these, and I'm going to take those credits, is very different than I took these five online courses, and I need to really look at this, and yeah, it could satisfy these credits. Do I want them to satisfy these credits? I could say no if I want to. Do I really want them? So there's so much subject, it's subjective too, depending on who's looking, what you get, and that's a hard thing to get over. Anyway, a couple comments. And something we all have to deal with, because if credit transfer isn't easy, if you're not going to, by the way, we're all accredited by the same folks. Why the credits can't transfer is the biggest mystery within higher ed that somebody from Oakton College and you go to this for a year and they go, well, that one right there, we're not going to take it. Well, probably accredited by this one of the regional, what used to be regional accreditors. They all talk, have the same standards. Where's the craziness in this, right? It's still little bit of the Wild West that we live in, especially with non-credit credentials coming in. And that's a lot to deal with.

Dr. Joianne Smith: And it's a huge source of frustration for students. And when we focus on equity, time and money that is lost for students. And so these transfer partnerships and credit transfers, so important to ensure that students are able to finish a degree in not a lot of time and not lose money along the way.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: For anybody who's hanging out there, any college, university, groups that are not on board with trying to make transferring and accepting the credit from other institutions, they should read about the fact that Illinois holds particularly the lead in our transfer students who get bachelor's degrees after they transfer. They do it at a higher rate than most of the country. And in general, if you look at, we look at our top destination schools, I haven't seen all of the data, but I have seen it enough to know that transfer students with associate degrees graduated a higher rate than students who start as freshmen at universities, generally. So we are a valuable market for universities.

Anne Brennan: Again, Northwestern recognizes this after, it just wasn't their mission. They weren't, they don't need to admit this transfer population to make their, you know, their, you know, their bet. Right. Right. They turned down so many students all the time. Yeah. So it is, they really did it for other very good reasons. I think that even the elite institutions will, if they are not already doing it, and a lot of small, you know, liberal arts or, you know, private institutions who haven't really needed to think about, because of their reputation, because they're popular, they haven't needed to think about this population that doesn't start right after high school, that ends up preparing somewhere else before they come. And there's...

Dr. William Heineman: Yeah, you know, Bill, this is probably true for you, too. You know, one of the good consequences that can come from competition. And when I say competition, not just university, university, I mean, whether a college degree has value and should I go to college? Right. Because that's the biggest competition that's out there is that institutions go, well, I might need more students or I need to fill my future pipeline or I need to start thinking about these other populations that I could serve. So I need to make credit transfer easier, right? Because I just don't, my classes aren't full and there's a line. So I could go, well, we'll take that one and not that one. It's, I want as big of a line as I can have. So I better start looking at my policies to see how I make it easier for students. Is that true in your area too, Bill? And some of the things that they're saying at Oakton?

Dr. William Heineman: Yeah, it absolutely is. I think everybody's recognizing that the higher ed landscape is really changing. Certainly in this part of the country, the traditional age college demographic is shrinking. And there's also this tremendous need in our communities for adults that do not have post-high school training or education of some kind. There's all these opportunities out there, really good paying jobs, doesn't always require a bachelor's degree or even an associate degree. So yeah, there's a growing recognition of it. And there's still a lot of old thinking in some institutions that they think they're protecting themselves by trying to keep people out. It's really, it's not very logical in 2024.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yikes. So as we get to the future for Oakton, right? So you've gotten this partnership together. By the way, what was the, before I go, what was the reaction from the students to both of you guys? I mean, did it go, did somebody go, my God, I never thought I could go to North, you know, I mean, what did the momentum, what momentum did it create?

Dr. Joianne Smith: A lot of momentum. I mean, our students are very excited. Our community is excited. I think I heard from our college marketing team that it was in terms of our social media...

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That team better be excited.

Dr. Joianne Smith: Yeah, it was the most shared article this past year. There was a lot of excitement from students and community members who saw possibility. 

Anne Brennan: And you're seeing that? I'm sorry. I was contacted by an alumnus who had gone through Oakton, gone to SPS, and gotten a degree and wanted to say she had seen it and was so excited that her experience was now sort of codified or really well described for students to follow.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Love that. That's amazing. Bill, you have any other questions for Anne or Joianne before we get to our final two?

Dr. William Heineman: So Dr. Smith, if I'm doing my math right, you're gonna be finishing up your ninth year as a president this year. 

Dr. Joianne Smith: Amazing. That is hard to believe, but yes.

Dr. William Heineman: And yeah, it actually is amazing because the average length of college presidencies is shrinking year by year. There's a lot of attention being paid to college presidents these days. How are you doing in your ninth year and how do you keep yourself really engaged and excited about the work?

Dr. Joianne Smith: All good questions. I really can't believe it will be the end of my ninth year. It goes back to what I said earlier. It's about staying focused on the students. That the reason I show up every day is to provide a high quality Oakton experience for all of our students. So if I'm having a tough day, I walk out into the cafeteria and spend some time with students, they ground me. Anne knows this, I start meetings with what I call an Oakton experience moment where we center a student experience to remind us all of the reason that we're here. Our students' pictures and stories are on the walls in our boardroom to ground our work. So it really is about being student-centered. That's what keeps me in the game every day. And no two days are alike. So it is a constant challenge. I like to solve problems. And so I'm proud to continue to lead Oakton almost nine years later.

Dr. William Heineman: Well, congratulations on a fantastic run so far.

Dr. Joianne Smith: Thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: By the way, I love that starting with a student experience because when you do that, and I've done it before and it's hard to stay consistent, you have to be really intentional to find that student story and bring it up. It's actually a lot, it's very hard because you want to have these meetings, quick meetings and whatever and sometimes when you start with a student story, it puts things in a perspective for the person who's coming to the meeting that has some major issue that really isn't that major compared to the student that like went through literally snow and ice to get to class to get, you know, it's like, well, I'm not getting enough resources. I don't have enough chairs. I need a new office chair. It's like, okay, really? So I think that's a great piece of advice to all leaders current and aspiring out there is to make sure that you always frame in and from the eyes of a student because that is real hard work going through that. And we know today's community colleges are serving students that are one bill away from quitting. And Anne, I want to talk about that with you real fast before I get to my final two questions. So much of what you do in transitions is managing retention, right? I mean, there's going to be times when somebody goes, I don't know what to do with this and what do I do? And you show them the path of a transition. And instead of quitting I see the path right I the path needs to be clear to me or else on You know that it becomes unclear and the the uncertainty overwhelms my self-confidence all of a sudden I quit so crystallizing and Clarifying the transitions and the pathways is that an important part so I could see it and believe it?

Anne Brennan: Yeah, we really believe in that here. And I don't think we're alone. We're, you know, as a state, Illinois is a pathway, what they call pathway state. But here at Oakton, we have really striped and we had to move from an old model, old to a new model. And it was under President Smith's leadership, we are putting students on what we call an educational plan. In other words, a pathway toward either the job you want when you leave here or the job you want eventually and how do you get there with this learning that we're teaching you. And so if you looked in the Oakton catalog, which is on our website, you would see that we have shown you a pathway and we call it pre-majors because we don't have majors at community colleges. But if you take our general education core plus some with some very specific recommendations by faculty that have been linked to the next place, then the next place could be a lot of places. You're not going to find yourself only having prepared to go to one place. So I think that's one of the things that Oakton really has done to meet this need to make sure you don't lose any money in the transfer process, that you get all your credit honored.

And Illinois as a state again, and I think because I spent time in California and I'm in these conversations around, you know, that a lot of places are doing this. And I think students should feel optimistic. I see a lot of stories about students who don't get their credit. And it seems to me that that calls colleges to task and should. But on the other side of it, I just mentioned earlier that, you know, more students graduate from college for credit than graduate as having started as freshmen in general. So I think that there's every reason to believe that your credit will be accepted. And one more thing that I would say is community colleges want to accept all your credit, including Oakton, right? We, if you have earned something before, you don't have to worry if it got a bad grade. We don't really care. We really are here to meet you where you are. And that's really become, I think, a loud message of the community college. This isn't not eligible for you. It's eligible for everybody, right? We can meet you where you are in your education, but we take it pretty seriously that we wanna make sure you know how to get onto the next level. So we spelled it out in your advising portal, on the website and catalog and with these partnerships and these pathways.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Something tells me you challenged a few policies along the way.

Anne Brennan: A couple have been. 

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's all good work. That's all good work. That's progress. That's right. Well, let's hit our final two questions and I'll start with you. What else do you want to say about Oakton and tell me what you see for the future of higher education?

Anne Brennan: I'm delighted because Oakton's enrollment continues to grow and it has for the past, I think, two years. And that was a change that made us all hold our breath for a while. And we wondered if these big headlines, and I was just reading the New York Times headline about is college worth it? And there's a big section in there and the answer continues to be yes. And I agree.

For the future, I think Oakton is really on a great path to take what it has been a really great first 50 years and build into it what the next 50 should be in higher ed. They're paying attention to a lot of the best things. Who are we serving and who are we not serving? And let's go after those we haven't been serving to make sure that they know about us. And so I think that the future of education is going to have to be like what we're doing. I don't feel, I'm not getting, I'm not retiring because I'm pessimistic. I'm retiring because I've worked enough. So I want to continue to encourage people. And it is a great field to work in. And I believe that I used to say that I used to sit at the transfer table at the cafeteria all by myself. And now everybody's at the transfer table. It's very popular. So I think that is gonna continue and it will become even, I think will lead the world as we have in higher ed in a new way that we need to.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I'm not so sure Dr. Joianne Smith is gonna let you go that easy, but I think that's a conversation for another podcast. Joianne, same questions to you. What else do you want to say about Oakton and what do you see for the future of higher education?

Dr. Joianne Smith: What else do I want to say about Oakton? I think we're a fabulous place that's really leaning into our mission and our vision to serve our community. And as Anne said, I'm really focusing on who we're serving and who we're not and being very intentional about ensuring access to a high quality education for everybody that lives in our district. And in particular, those who might not have thought that higher education was for them. That's really a significant focus for us and honoring their lived experience when they come to us. So that credit for prior learning that Anne was talking about, a big piece of that is honoring folks' lived experience and what they know and valuing that when they come to us. So I see the future of higher ed in really serving those students that we've not always served. And that's really how as a country I think we'll build truly just and thriving communities. We need educated citizens in order for us all to thrive and for our democracy to survive. So I think we play a critical role in that. And I think community colleges in particular serve that role, given who we serve.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I agree. Bill, what'd you think of this conversation today?

Dr. William Heineman: I think it's a fantastic conversation. I would say amen and amen to both of what Anne and Joianne said about the role of our institutions and the future. I think in many ways community colleges are the future of higher ed in the US.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well there he is ladies and gentlemen, my guest co-host. He's Dr. Bill Heineman. He is the president of North Shore Community College. You can catch him on, I don't remember what the episode number was, was 400 maybe or 500 in there somewhere. If you look up William Heineman EdUp, it comes right up and you could listen to what he had to say about North Shore.

On this episode, we had two amazing guests, one with the best title I've heard in a long time. Here she is. Her name is Anne Brennan. She is the Assistant Vice President of Academic Affairs and College Transitions. Anne, thank you for coming on and giving all the great advice that you did.

Anne Brennan: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And ladies and gentlemen, there she is, Dr. Joianne Smith, President of Oakton College, both from Oakton College, representing today. Ladies, did you have a good time on the podcast talking about Oakton and the great work that you're doing?

Dr. Joianne Smith: We did. Thanks for the conversation and the invitation.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Anytime. Well, that, ladies and gentlemen, you've just had EdUp.