876: A Panel Discussion from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Karl Daubmann, Dr. Melik Khoury, & Dr. Joe Sallustio

Tracy Kreikemeier: All right, everyone, good afternoon. We're going to go ahead and get started since we're already just a little bit late. Before we kick off our "Navigating the Future: Placing Students at the Heart of Higher Education" panel, we want to make a quick announcement. We'll be in New Orleans next year at the Ritz, which is never a bad day. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. I am so excited about this panel, and I promise you that my moderator skills will be better than my choice of footwear. It will be a great afternoon and great discussion. 

We are going to dive deep into the realm of student-centered marketing and enrollment management approaches where institutions align their narratives, programs, and services to resonate harmoniously with the modern student journey. This session brings together visionary marketers and industry experts who have championed the cause of student centricity. So I'm going to introduce our esteemed panel. 

Dr. Melik Khoury is the president and CEO of Unity Environmental University. He holds a doctorate in business administration from the University of Phoenix, an MBA from the University of Maine, Orono, and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from the University of Maine at Fort Kent. During his time as president, he has led efforts to transform Unity Environmental University into a sustainable, student-centric institution of higher education by focusing on three core principles: affordability, accessibility, and flexibility.

Karl Daubmann is the Dean of the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University. He is also a professor as well as the Dean. His teaching areas include design, digital design, robotic fabrication, construction, leadership, and multidisciplinary design. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and won the Founders Prize in 2015. 

And last but not least, Dr. Joe Sallustio is the chief experience officer at Lindenwood University as well as a famous podcast host as you've seen in the hallway. He has led a broad range of educational institutions giving him a unique and effective breadth of knowledge in on-ground and online higher education administration. With over two decades of experience in higher education operations, Joe has led teams in marketing, enrollment, finance, financial aid, student services, student affairs, human resources, accreditation and Title IV compliance, business to business relationships and product strategy for on-ground hybrid and online universities.

We are going to kick our panel off with some audience participation because while being student-centric is something I think we all strive to be, it can be somewhat of a controversial topic. So I want to know how many in the audience think of their students as customers within your university system.

That is a good representation. Does anybody want to share how you do that or why, or if that is controversial amongst your groups? It's a safe space. Sharing is caring.

Audience Member: In my experience, I think we strive so much to create a relationship that goes beyond the transactional, which is good, but yet we forget that they are, at heart, paying for a product of some sort. And if we lose sight of that, we cannot treat them as we would expect to be treated when we go to a restaurant or a department store. The experiences aren't exactly the same, but at the heart of it, they are paying for education, skills, something, and we should not lose sight of it. So you have to balance both, I think, ultimately. But I do feel like it is controversial sometimes.

Tracy Kreikemeier: Absolutely. Thank you. So I think taking that and leading into some of our discussion topics, Melik, I want to start with you. What is an important but often overlooked component of retention for online students?

Dr. Melik Khoury: I think when you're looking to engage your online students, there are a couple of things. I think most of us have been trained on a residential campus. So when we think about what we want to do, we want to duplicate a residential experience online, trying to create online clubs, online organizations, and really look towards this, I would say, 18th century model of having those students build a community with us. And I think you have to really look at it a little differently. Who are your students? What time commitment do they have? We very rarely sometimes actually ask them what they want. And I don't think anyone has cracked this nut yet. But what is the 21st century engagement? Is our job to build community with our brand with them? Or is that our job to help them build community where they are and be their guide on the side? And I think the concept of what is student engagement and retention in the online world is something that is new. And I think sometimes we look at it through a very traditional lens.

Can I add to that, if I can still talk? It's a fascinating question - is a student a consumer or customer? I don't know how many people raised their hands, but not as many as I thought. Maybe because you just didn't want to put your hand up, but maybe because you don't believe it, which is the most fascinating part of that for me. I mean, myself and my partner, Alvin, over there, we've interviewed like 260 college presidents. I'd tell you like 258 of them believe students are customers. 

In a world where a student can transfer really easily - you might have the portal by the way, you might have the portal at your university if you have athletic teams, you see it there - like you can just enter the portal, if you don't like where you are, you can go somewhere else. Online students can do that really easily, which means you have to sell to them every day. You have to sell to them services. 

Now, no one ever said, and I don't know who it might have been I was talking to just a little bit ago, no one ever said if the student got a bad grade that you got to sell a different process to give them a better grade. No one ever said, you know what, we have student consumers and student customers, we should reduce our academic quality and requirements. We should do that because we're going to serve our customers. Nobody ever said that. What we did say though, and what people say is, what happens before that? What happens after that? And if you believe that your student is a customer, you have the right mindframe to sandwich the services. If you don't believe a student is a customer, you can lose sight of what you add to make that student improve. 

This is divisive, it is a divisive conversation, because there are people still, in my opinion, that believe a student is not a customer. But that mindset, your execution of how you serve a student is completely different depending on how you see it. So that's what I see.

Tracy Kreikemeier: You make an excellent point about the rigor piece because sometimes by trying to meet a student where they are, by trying to say we are going to give you a chance to succeed, the rhetoric is always you are reducing academic quality, right? Or you mean we can't... Nobody has ever discussed that a student doesn't have the right to fail. You can go to Disneyland and if you don't behave in a certain way they'll kick you out. You can still suspend students for conduct, right? No one is telling you not to have codes of conduct and this is what it means to be part of the university or the college. But the idea that these students have no choice except be at your institution and the fact that if they leave, somehow then they are the problem, I think is the heart of what you're driving at. We tend to create the rigor conversation to shut the conversation down. No, fail them. Kick them out if they misbehave. Live up to your standards. But meet them where they are and don't assume that simply because we call them a customer that they are a VIP that cannot be touched. We're not talking about diplomatic immunity. This is not what we are talking about. It's just understand that they have a choice and you have an obligation to support them.

Karl Daubmann: I agree. Well, if you had asked any of us, I didn't raise my hand. Although I'm on this panel, and maybe there's more nuance to it, because I think the other part is that the customer's always right, and maybe this is your point about not having diplomatic immunity. As architects, we don't have customers, but we have clients. Or I think about your title as well, like a trainer, or someone like that, or a sherpa, someone that's gonna lead an experience. It still means that the student experience is valuable, that the student input is valuable, but I have a hesitation when it comes to giving them customer status, right, with the idea that, you know, that notion that the customer is always right because they're in many ways, at least if we talk about undergraduate education, they're not yet educated in what they want. 

I'm not a parent and I don't like talking about students as children, but the "you have to eat your vegetables" as well, right, and in that notion of being a customer it's like, well I only want to have dessert, right. We don't have that luxury because there are other issues, there are other things that we need to teach and so it's maybe that slippery slope which is maybe a little bit of that resistance for me of elevating them entirely to what we understand as customer status.

Dr. Melik Khoury: But you raise an excellent point because I think what Joe and I agree with you on, but isn't this what we do very well in academia? We are going to spend the next 10 years in this industry defining what word we should use. And maybe we'll create a focus group, maybe we'll create a committee. A whole industry. But to your point, whether it's a client or it's a customer or it's whatever the word is, right? At the end of the day, I think what we are all saying is students have choices. We as a nation have decided that this baseline for education is no longer free. And we, higher education, have to straddle a fine line of ensuring that we graduate responsible citizens. And as an environmental university who are environmentally aware, career ready, it's an "and". But at the same time, we can no longer treat them like we are the only game in town. 

And so I think while you used the word customer, I love the word client. I mean, this is about being student-centric, giving them every opportunity to succeed, finding out how the digital native student of today, the adult student of today who has... I mean Tinto has been talking about this since the early 90s and we ignored him because he said most of your students are leaving not because they can't do the work but because life happened. And we're still trying to define the word instead of saying if I am a military vet with two jobs, three children, could be deployed at any time, I might need a different kind of support. It doesn't mean I'm gonna pass you. I mean, thank you for your service, but you're still getting that F if you don't do the homework.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You make a good point about words. I wanna just hit on that, because obviously I hear a lot of words from people on the podcast, and it amazes me still how word-averse we are in higher ed, right? Customer. What happens if I said, who works in enrollment management here? Anybody? Okay, one, two, three, four. You work in sales. You work in sales. I mean, it's true. You could take out the education part and put in widgets. You work in sales. Any marketers in here? You work in sales. Any faculty in here? You work in sales.

I mean that's just because we're higher education doesn't mean that we haven't created a process to retain a customer, a client, student. We sell. We sell education. It's easy to say for me because I came from the for-profit higher education sector. That's where I cut my teeth. And boy, you were selling in for-profit. And you know who's really, really good at selling now? Big, big nonprofit universities that went and hired a bunch of for-profit people. Who do you think works at some of those big online colleges now? They're really not the big... University of Phoenix was big back in the day, half a million students. That was big. 180,000, who's got that? Western Governors, Southern New Hampshire, that's mildly big.

But you went out, they went out and got a bunch of for-profit folks and business and industry, Amazon employees, people from for-profits. But you can't say sales. It feels dirty somehow to us in higher education, yet we're doing it every single day. But we don't pay salespeople like they're in sales, that's for sure. We don't pay marketing people like they're in marketing. That's the adverse relationship we have in higher ed. But in this room right now, boy am I getting tuned up for something when I talk about this, you know as well as I do how hard it is to keep people. You've seen these universities lately that go, you know what, we noticed that we have a hundred million dollar deficit. We didn't know where it came from, but it's here. And it's like, how do you lose sight of that? And a lot of it is people. It's people, it's not taking care of people, it's the turnover, and it's not selling. 

We're all in sales, you don't wanna admit it, but we are, and I know that might be hard to hear for some, I don't think that's hard to hear for you, but retention sales. How do you retain a student? You build their self-confidence. You are empathetic. That's things you teach in car sales or selling houses. Am I saying things that trigger you? Because it triggers people when I say it on the podcast sometimes. But it's true.

Dr. Melik Khoury: Joe, I'm a walking trigger if that's the case. No, to your point, we actually just had an internal team of 50 people at the university just last week talk about the idea... if you saw a job ad today and it said provost, you saw a job ad that said VP for enrollment, you saw a job ad that said chief marketing officer, intrinsically which one do you think it gets paid the most? In most institutions, they'll think the provost does. Let's be honest. Your least paid people are your admissions people. Your second least paid people are your advising people. But at the same time, the conversation we are having at the institution about taking care of students, I'm not talking about demoting all of us brilliant people to the salespeople. I'm saying giving them an equal seat at the table. Because at the end of the day, a faculty member will teach a student. But it is an advisor who will help them through that day. It is the residential life director. It is the campus safety person. 

So this idea that sales is bad... I mean, the Catholic Church, it's called missionaries. They sold. I mean, like all over the world. Richest sales organization in the world. Exactly. You know, what happened to the Roman Empire? It's called the Vatican. The church. So the idea that we cannot discuss a transactional relationship, but even the best restaurant, everybody, you know, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, but they still charge you for the beer. So I think we need to shed this idea that we are such puritanistic in our approach for education that even the elites sell. What do they sell? They sell network. Who are the primary audience? Donors. Everybody sells. Maybe if we stop kind of crapping on that a little bit, we can have an honest conversation. What does the third daughter of our Hispanic family need in order to be supported for the distance education program?

Tracy Kreikemeier: You said crapping, but what did you really want to say?

Dr. Melik Khoury: No, we won't go there.

Tracy Kreikemeier: I think we prepped 15 questions. Maybe we get to two with these guys. I want to see, does anybody in the audience, do we have any questions from the audience right now? Who got triggered? No, okay, so we can go on. So one of the things that we talk about with everything is data, data, data, data, data, data. So what metrics or what signals should we be looking at to see are we a student-centric organization?

Karl Daubmann: I'll go first. I think if we talk about student experience, I've been looking at different things. We all share some of the big data and other types of things. But as an example, and I think we talked about it on the podcast, was our student attendance at extracurricular lectures. And basically, we saw a declining number, that has a lot to do with where students are, what they think, that they can see most of these online. We held a focus group with students and we moved it to lunchtime and we included lunch as part of it, right? And we kind of adapted who we were inviting and what the format was as a way to increase that. 

And I think it's in that, right, as we talk about students, like the agency of students, to have a say in some of the things that we do. And maybe that occurs at all levels. Like we just had some committee meetings with our board and it was brought up that there was no discussion of the students at that very high level related to that, right? And should there be a student government as part of that, or how do the students bring their agency to that discussion and what they look for? And I think it's back to balancing the rigor, whatever term we use related to that, but to the experience of that. 

And for me, maybe that metric has to do with trying to find moments in the student experience about, for us, it's a design education, and so much happens in peer-to-peer interaction in the design studio. And so are there students there at midnight? Are they working together? Is there a productive set of relationships between them? And how does that play out? Sometimes it's harder to track some of that. It's harder to get quantitative metrics for some of those things. But sometimes you can just feel it by walking through the building.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I'll add, is my mic on or is this just how loud my voice is? Inputs and outputs is the way I think about it and I focus more on the inputs than the outputs. Data is a consequence of everything that comes, everything that feeds it, you get a consequence. And a lot of times we will get the consequences of the data and we say, we were successful or we weren't as successful. What are we doing at the front end? And so I look at things like how many abandonments I had on my website. All right, that tells me I have a bad user experience on my website. How many applications got started that didn't get finished? That tells me that perhaps there's too many questions. 

Whereas Nate and I work together, it's like, take questions off the application. If people aren't finishing our applications, get rid of the questions we don't need. How many processes can we eliminate? Not change, how many can we just eliminate?

Brent over here, Brent Fitch is president of RIMCAD in Colorado, ex-UOP University of Phoenix, we're in Phoenix. You know, they're experts at serving the adult student and I have the honor of being close to one of their former presidents, Bill Pepicello, and he always tells me, do not embrace complexity. It is the exact thing we do in higher education. We look at data from all these complex systems, we have to simplify or eliminate the systems that are clouding our ability to look at the data. So, you know, yeah, I use data, but I'm looking at the people and the inputs that produce the data to try to be proactive, because I think just reading the results is very reactive.

Dr. Melik Khoury: And this works whether it's online or even residential. When I used to be the VP for enrollment and marketing, I was told by the student success people, we have about 100 to 150 people that come to every event out of a college back then of about 900. The reality is with the same 150 students going to everything, and we never actually tracked the other 600, 700 that never went to anything. And one of the consequences of that, speaking about data, is most institutions don't share data.

Advancement has its own data. Student success has its own data. One dean or student has his own Excel sheet because he doesn't trust the registrar's... And I see I struck a nerve. Admissions has their own data, but we don't take the admissions data and put it into our current student data because who cares about that number? And so the idea is how can you do business analytics? How can you do data? How can you turn data into information to support your students, whether it's in student success, retention? How many of us don't, our academic data and our LMS don't actually sync in with our CRM and SIS because it's somebody else's data. 

Now think about the power if you had a prospect-to-planned-giving centralized database that is completely accessible to your entire organization as one source of truth. Now think about how you can tie in the recruitment experience with the academics experience with a student success experience and how you can make connections with alumni and the like.

We do not use data in higher ed as well as we should in most institutions. And those who are are over 100,000 students right now. And I think that's the problem is we are an industry that has been built on social capital with a sprinkle of hubris. And nobody's questioning the integrity of the architectural courses, but the student has changed. 25, 30 years ago, only five to 10% of America went to college. It tended to be the upper middle class, it tended to be those who have the scholarships, and we get to own them for four years and then release them to the wild. No one forced us to create the 1965 Act to say all Americans deserve an education.

And now we're trying to create a student experience that only worked for the top 5%. And we're wondering why 43 million Americans started college and didn't finish. No amount of ice cream socials is going to fix that.

Tracy Kreikemeier: Well, and I saw a recent article, too, that most schools are designed by people that get A's in school. So not most of us. Oh, is that just me?

Tracy, can I ask you a question? I know you're moderating, but it's kind of like, what does student centricity mean? I've been trying to get to this. You know, maybe we could ask you guys, because everybody says they're student centric. Everybody says they're student first. Somebody said earlier, I don't know who it was, like online, affordable, flexible. Like institutions used to say that and it was some kind of value proposition. And now if you say we're online, affordable, flexible, it's like you and everybody else.

So what else? But when we say student centric or students are at the heart or students are at the heart of higher ed, how do you do that? Like, is it a phrase? You say like, you go to a meeting and say, before we make this decision, we're going to look at it through the students' lens. Are we going to create a student persona and walk through this process? Is it that you started meeting with a student story before you go into the operations? Like, how does this thing define? You know, I have a hard time figuring out what it means. I say it too. I'm like, yeah we're student-centric. I say it, my institution, we're student-centric and I'm like, okay.

What makes my institution student-centric and Melik's institution isn't as student-centric? So I mean, I don't know, but I think that's a big question. What does it mean?

Tracy Kreikemeier: We have the privilege of getting to work with a lot of clients, a lot of partners, and I will say the ones that you can feel being more focused on that are the ones that try. I don't know about you, but I know within my organization how I think things work. Right? This is how I think billing happens. This is how I think our account teams are running their status call. This is how I think people are responsive and getting back to their email within two hours, you know, like all these things. This is how I think it works. And then I actually have to go figure something out myself. And I realized that a process that I was like, it has to be simple. We paid a bunch of money for this ERP system to be able to do all this stuff. And I do it myself. And I am like, I don't know why anyone would do this twice. 

And I think that the institutions that go through and like you were saying, figure out what is the student experience actually like... Or do we really need this application deadline at this time or do we really need these transcripts by XYZ date? Like how many hurdles? Because sometimes I think there's like a pride in the hurdle.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You mean that's deadlines so people think we have demand?

Tracy Kreikemeier: Right, exactly. And there's just this pride in being like we are the best because we make them take 17 steps instead of 14. So that means that the rigor of the process is that. And so sometimes I just experience that. A lot of the schools that are focused on that, they give a damn and they're going through it and figuring out what is that experience actually like and how can we then improve it?

Dr. Melik Khoury: You make an excellent point, but I also want to say to your question, Joe, I think how many of us have sat down at our universities and colleges and says, how do we define that? Let's define what that is, right? So for example, every university has a price point. You can never be as student-centric as you want because you don't have unlimited resources. Therefore, you have to understand your tuition price point. You have to understand where your students are. But there are many things that you can do. 

So for example, how many of you talk to your students, if you're not asynchronous online, and say, if most of you are working, should we be offering classes at 10 o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday? Or do you say nobody wants to teach on 10 o'clock on a Tuesday, therefore, you know, we can't offer it in the evenings or whatever it is. 

Student-centric means do you understand the math and English competency of your students coming in from high school or other colleges and what kind of academic support can you provide for them? Student-centric could mean where, you know, your tuition might be affordable, but maybe a student can take one course at a time because they have a full-time job. Is it four courses before your institution recognizes them as a full-time student? 

Maybe student-centric, you know, it doesn't always have to be kind of the social aspect of it. It means how many of your students need a job after they graduate and what are you doing in your career services in order to maximize access to employers or grad school? So student-centric doesn't have to be a student success issue. Student-centric has to be in what can you do to meet your students where they are based? If you've got 25% of your students are military, do you have a center in your institution that dedicates to veteran needs? If most of your students are Native American, do you have that? If most of your students are geniuses, do you have that? 

So I think student-centric needs to be defined as what can you do at your price point that puts the student first in your decision making. Not, I'm a fully residential campus, but everybody but dining goes home at four. And then the students are left, that's not student-centric. That's just, you know, screen saver.

So for me, define it. And there are many things that you can do to reach a student that involves curriculum, that involves scheduling, that involves tuition, that does not take a lot of work as long as you put the student at the forefront. But first, you have to define it.

Karl Daubmann: And I think it's also how you access them. A couple of examples for me. There's no expectation that I teach. But I do. And I don't get paid any more to do it, but it's an opportunity to interact with the students and understand where they're at. As a dean, I also give tours to prospective students and talk to their parents and understand where they're coming from. And something that we did, which is kind of controversial, is that most architecture schools and design schools have a portfolio for entry. But what we started to see is that public high schools, the first thing they cut is music and art.

So all of a sudden we talk about wanting to diversify the field, but if we still had a portfolio for entry, there would be students making a selection process before they even came to us. And so I think coming from the last session where they were talking about prospecting as well as surveying students, I do worry sometimes that we don't always articulate the reasons why some things are happening. And so if we're too quick to take someone's word for it, and this I think has to do with being careful that we look at and track experiences or get to know them better and really understand some of those motivations. 

But we also try and prototype things and put things out there. We did, we actually, I haven't seen the results, but we surveyed our grad students and wanted to find out if they wanted classes on Saturday morning. And I'm curious to see the results. Even if everyone says no, I'm tempted to run a session to see what happens. To see if even though they said no, maybe it fits in their schedule. They can do something, something else happens. And so I think we don't always know what we want. And it's sometimes hard to articulate it. And how do we start to find some of those things?

Dr. Melik Khoury: How many people will run the same class on three different times to see where the students actually register versus what they tell you? One evening, one midday, one weekend. So to your point, I don't think we define. I think there's a lot of stuff we do in higher ed that is just tradition. And sometimes taking a step back and saying, how do we define? Are we in the business of weeding them out or weeding them in?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, one way you do that is write a list of all the sacred cows and start slaying those suckers. Break your academic calendar. You want to be student-centric? Pull off the traditional term structure. That's table stakes. You want to serve an online adult student? You have to run non-standard term, non-term, CBE, something else other than fall, spring, summer. Why? Well, that report told you. I don't need to tell you. The students ain't waiting for you to turn your classes around. Frequency of start date is how you achieve scale. 

I find that scale is one of the terms that's really hard to understand. How do you achieve scale? Well, we have our definitions of scale. We're gonna increase enrollment by 6% of scale. No, 60% might be scaling. The only way to do that is to offer what students want. What are those? Frequent. Your adult student wants to start right now. And if you don't have those options, and I say that as somebody in an institution right now that is working very hard to create the right now against some significant inertia. It's not all rainbows and unicorns. And everybody goes, yes, let's serve these students. It's like, well, what about me? What about cannibalization? If I heard that word one more time. You're gonna cannibalize your own programs. So?

So what? So then the consumer, customer, dare I say it, will tell you what the demand is by choosing it. But if you only offer it one way, they're going to go to the other way somewhere else. So the academic calendar for me is the ultimate sacred cow. And the other one is the word accreditation. Somebody and I have written this and talked about it. It's like, we're going to do this. Somebody goes, accreditation. Can't do it. Accreditation.

That is the biggest lie in higher education.

Dr. Melik Khoury: It is? I think I remember throwing a phone at somebody once for saying that. Not at them. You were a stapler, I thought. Sorry, Amy. I had to call you out on that one. But all joking aside, accreditation is the currency right now in which we evaluate quality. And there is no substitute. But read the rules. They want you to follow their process. The accreditors and the Department of Ed don't tell you you have to be semester based. They don't tell you. 

And so to your point about breaking the calendar, to your point about sacred cows, I think sometimes what you have to do is figure out who your students are. How many of you have students and then the folks that you teach? Our real students are, and then there are those. If you are having that conversation, you are having the wrong conversation.

Your residential students need the same level of attention and care and prioritization as your online students, as your CBE students, as your part-time students. But many of us will actually design our institutions. You talk about student-centric, you talk about customer-centric, you talk about putting students first. If you're saying all of our investments is based on one subset of students and all the other audiences and market segments have to fall to that because that's the real experience, you are limiting your institution because your adult students online need a different definition of student-centric than your residential students or your athletes or your alumni who are looking for lifelong learning. Am I the only one who's ever heard "our real students" and the online or "our real students" and the remote location, "our real students" undergraduate?

Then we have a problem in this industry because we are saying one student, all students are created equal, but some students are more equal than others. And that means most of your decisions are predicated on supporting that student. No wonder the other student's retention is worse.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, you left off real students and C students.

Dr. Melik Khoury: And C students, yes. That's true. I'm a big fan of like, let the student fail. Don't decide that they can't have a shot.

Tracy Kreikemeier: Just be transparent. So you bring up a good point. There are a couple of questions in the app about retention, and that we've talked a lot about prospective students and selling to them. But being a big part of being student-centered is serving the current students, the students that chose us. So do you have approaches or strategies when it comes to retention that you can share?

Dr. Melik Khoury: First, let's define how outdated the concept of retention is. Because for those of us who are online students and adult students, IPEDS really cares about first time, first year in your retention. I used to work for a president of a state university. Bring in 50 freshmen, give them $100,000 each, claim 100% retention.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Because you have athletes, you might just be doing that.

Dr. Melik Khoury: Yes. So that's number one. That's why the NCAA has retention rates higher than universities. Because the NCAA actually measures retention based on where the student graduates from while your institution gets to fail that student because, they did not graduate from your school, you don't get to count them. So the very concept of retention actually does not help most of us succeed at institutions because it was designed during a privileged time. 

First you have to define what you mean by retention. Do you mean how many students persist through from when they transfer into when they graduate? Do you care if they graduate from your school as long as they graduate from somewhere? Or are you talking the traditional sense of your freshmen? I have a fundamental disagreement with the word retention because it is one of the most I would say gaslit words ever used to keep people in check about the value of their institution. So what are you asking me when you say retention?

Tracy Kreikemeier: Yeah, Tracy. Man. Come on, Tracy. I would like whoever asked that question in the app...

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Skip to the next question.

Tracy Kreikemeier: I guess we'll just move from it. Sorry. What if we would define it as how do we get a student who starts at the institution, say they're a transfer student, and then we want them to not fall into that "some college no credential" category so that they end up with the credentials so that they can get a job, they can repay their loan, they can have the value of a higher education, they can have that higher earning potential because they got the credential to be able to do that.

Karl Daubmann: I mean, I'm still thinking about retention. Don't say it. Which is maybe also part of that, though. I'm triggered maybe in a different way. When I got to my institution, retention was being used by many people without any definition for really, what I felt were really bad practices, like we'll get this student through no matter what, right? And that student graduates with a ton of debt and doesn't have a viable career trajectory given how low their performance was within school, right? But, you know, it's driven by cost of marketing, then we've got the students so we want to keep them. 

And so I think we share a similar belief that I eliminated... I want a very open admission process, right? We're very accepting, eliminating the portfolio, but then students have to prove their ability to stay there, right? And that's part of the culture, that's part of other things related to that. And I think it's also part of your question, which is the success of the student, while at least in our undergraduate degrees, even our graduate degree, right, they're very professionally focused, we're very connected with industry advisory boards, we don't necessarily have credentials related to these things, but 100% of our online graduate students are working full time already when they're in school. 

And so we don't have a concern about finding jobs for them when they graduate because when I meet with them in a class, they're meeting from the conference room in the office that they work at, or from their desk, or from other places. And so at least I think within my discipline area, that's a slightly different issue. And that's been an argument that I've also been having at multiple places about are we really student-centric?

Dr. Melik Khoury: If your school is failing a course, you're more likely to drop them. If a student in your school can't afford to pay the bills, then we basically just keep stacking them with loans. Because we want them to... But are we actually being student-centric by forcing a student to take alternative loans when they can't afford it? Are we failing a student if we help them graduate from another institution?

One of the fastest growing populations at Unity is non-degree students. Students who have no desire to take a degree from us, but they're taking courses from us because they are on a waiting list at their school. And unfortunately for those students, they don't get financial aid because, you know, Uncle Sam, well, you've all heard about the FAFSA. That's just the tip of the iceberg. So I asked the question, is it ethical? Is it supportive? Is it student-centric to just keep racking on loans for that student because you want them to graduate?

We actually passed a very controversial policy at Unity that was not well received, but now I swear by it, you cannot owe more than $750 on your bill and sign up for another class. And I was told our retention was going to go, because I could not in good conscience have them graduate with $20,000, $13,000 debt that they couldn't afford. Guess what? Our retention did not go down. When we were residential, our retention rates, based on the traditional definition, was 65 to 75%. It's currently 65 to 75%. Students were graduating with $30-$40,000 debt. Right now, less than 2% of our students take alternative loans. Is that student-centric? Or is it more student-centric to give them the $50,000 loans? You've got to cover up for that discount rate. Definition is key.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I don't have much to add other than that what I like about what you're saying is you're driving it from the top. You drive change from the top in higher ed. Change has to be driven from the top or else it's really, really hard. There's so much inertia. I love talking to a room of marketers and enrollment professionals because I do believe that you're the disruptors in higher ed, right? Because it's designed, I wrote this article not too long, a couple years ago called the assimilation culture of higher education.

It's designed to assimilate people who disrupt it. It's the way the structure is designed. And you know this, and here's how you know, because if you ever try to enact a change in your institution, and you get inertia, and you go, you know what, I don't know if I'm going to fight this one. I don't know if it's worth the fight to make this change happen. And you don't fight that fight, you've then assimilated into the culture, right? Because you've stopped pushing. And I think to get to the change that you're talking about, you have to get the buy-in from the top, but you have to keep pushing and not get tired. And it's tiring. 

For anybody that's trying to create change in your institution right now and tell me that it's not tiring, I will not believe you because I'm trying to do it and it's tiring me out some days. I'm like, man, this is, how could this, you know, there's a, when you create change in higher ed, I guess it's probably all businesses to some degree, but there is this feeling of what about me? You know, what's gonna happen to me? Am I gonna have a class to teach if they go to do this academic calendar? Am I going to lose my students? Cannibalization? Am I going to be able to retain students? Do we care about this metric? We've been reporting this metric for 50 years and Melik wants to change it?

No, don't, does he know what he's doing? I mean it creates all these questions and it's very easy to assimilate and it's very hard to get to where you're taking it. And not everyone is, not every institution has the top down vision. And so many of us are fighting bottom up and it's hard. It's really hard to get to that change. So when you go to what's at the heart of higher education, it's the students and sometimes it's not. You want it to be and you say it is, but the inertia stops you in your tracks and that's when you give in to the assimilation culture.

Dr. Melik Khoury: What you call assimilation culture, I call, you know, a reputational culture. Our reputation is more important than student success as many institutions. When I tried to enact change, I was told, I was literally taken into the woods, like literally, and said, we will ruin your reputation if you don't step down, if you don't back off. Nobody will hire you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: How close were you to other houses?

Dr. Melik Khoury: Not close enough. I want to start getting worried. When I talk to, you know, one of my, I said this at my talk earlier, one of my biggest frustrations is when presidents talk about how wonderful everything is on their campus and then get hired by a consultant and then talk about how awful. You've got the pulpit, right? Use it for change. But as long as the currency of your institution is social capital and not performance and not students, you're never going to make this change because if I had a dollar for every time somebody says I agree with you, but if I get the vote of no confidence, if the whisper campaign, doesn't he look tired, happens, then all of a sudden your reputation is damaged and you have to go spend more time with your family BS, that's how they keep us in check.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: But how many put them in a box?

Dr. Melik Khoury: Listen, I almost lived in a cardboard box. But all joking aside, most of us in academia hold our reputation more than our student success. So when you want to put a student at the heart of student success, make it less about your reputation and more about their success. And I think that's the heart of the matter.

Tracy Kreikemeier: How long are we supposed to go? Do we keep going? Question two? Question two? Anyone have any questions from the audience? Don't ask about retention. Or customers. All words will be banned.

All right, well we've been talking, I mean, one of the things that I think all of you have been talking about is just this friction that there is that you have to overcome and how you can get around these challenges to continue to innovate and advocate on behalf of current and prospective students and just student success in general. So what advice do you have? What advice can you give our audience to walk away with, to be able to feel empowered in how to go and address some of those challenges within their institutions?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I'll go first. I would say the best thing you can do to enact change in higher ed is to continually compare it to other industries. Remember that time, you guys? Remember the last month when you walked into your bank? I mean, you guys, Netflix, anybody? Netflix? All right. How many of you watched the intro, the whole intro to the last show you watched. Did you hit the skip intro button? You did. I did. When you look at other industries, and banking is my favorite example, you could take $50,000 like I do every day and move it between accounts just to move it and show that I can do it.

But you can't get your transcripts turned around in 24 hours. You can't get a transcript review in 24 hours. But you can move 10 grand through bank accounts. It's ludicrous, right? Our systems are built to be slow. And so my advice to you all is get some sleep, drink a lot of coffee, and be willing to not give up on the fight.

Do not walk out of a meeting where you know that the students were not first, because if you do, you've accepted it. And it's hard to come back to that and go, hey guys, when we talked about that last week, I'd like to bring that up, because it's just gonna be discarded. For anybody that is a change maker, you're going to get tired, it's going to get hard. I'm kind of like projecting my own emotions on you right now. Maybe I'm self-talking a little bit and trying to convince myself at times. But if you really wanna create change in higher education, you have to be a bull in a china shop. You can't, you know, you, this,

And I'll probably, somebody is gonna report back to my campus here. But pull people along with you, coalition building, let's get collaboration. I'm like, I don't wanna do any of that. Because that is what we have done to get ourselves here. We gotta be a bull in a china shop. We need to pilot. We need to pull it to the side. We need to innovate and improve models. Pilot's a good word to try something new, but also implies that it may not work. So try to find a new word other than pilot. But the point is, get some sleep. Don't stop fighting the fight. That's my advice. I don't have any better advice than that. It's hard work.

Karl Daubmann: I was thinking there was a panel discussion in here this morning and just trying to think about that, you know, it was said that faculty are insulated from much of what's happening out in the world and so I was thinking maybe I get like a faculty book club, right? There were a couple of books that were mentioned or like how do we, because, and even the question was brought up that there's faculty governance, there's a lot of resistance in that area if you really wanna make change. And so, you know, I wanna go back, it's like do I talk to faculty senate about do they engage some of these topics, do they see these things? I'm in a small private institution.

The faculty have to see other small private institutions closing. And so I mean, love your point too. It's like, we're all smiling, happy, and we're all looking for another job at the same time while these things are going on. That's not a productive model. And so just how we maybe enact change. I've been in my role for seven or eight years. I have had moments where I was like, I'm not going to fight this. And I was like, maybe it's a moment to step down because that's that assimilation culture related to that, but are there other ways to enact change? I think I was certainly the bull in the China shop for the first few years.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We can get you back, I know it.

Karl Daubmann: Maybe, but maybe it's also just me maturing and saying there need to be other voices at the table, there need to be other things happening, and at least for me it feels like, at least at the dean level, the relationship with the faculty is important, and if I could energize the faculty or challenge them to think about some of these things. Maybe there are some new ideas that might come from that. But I think it has to do with getting them out of that sheltered mentality that they're in this kind of protected space, which is the legacy of higher education too. It hasn't had the other business models that it looked at because everything was great. We've always seen the great white shark. We've never had to evolve. Godzilla's in the room, but we don't have a roadmap to change.

Dr. Melik Khoury: For me, my advice is look at your rules. The reasons that you can't do this is because your rules don't align with your ambitions. Your rules don't align with your goals. If your rules are that the prioritization goes to an institutional perspective of decision making and not a student decision making, you can't be mad that your process outweighs your outcome. My advice? Use some time to define success.

Do your processes meet those outcomes? If not, change your processes. Work with your cabinet. Create definition. Understand role, scope, and authority. Understand what is collaboration versus what is consensus. Understand engagement versus right of veto. And say that if we are defining success as X and our process won't get us there, what is the way to change our process to meet that? Not what I see in many institutions where as long as we follow process, the outcome is secondary. Because if we keep going in this direction, then we will have generationally failed a group of students who we promised that education is the weapon that will change the world. And we will go back to a model where ignorance is powerful and we can't discern fact from fiction.

So maybe change the rules of your institution. And that will mean people will leave. That will mean people will uproar. But at the end of the day, there are people all over the country who will then join you and you will create new life. But if you don't know what success means and you're only following it because it is tradition, it is what we've always done. We've always prescribed cigarettes for hypertension. We've always used leeching. And we don't question what is modern technology and what is modern medical practices. Use the same lens in higher ed. If it doesn't work, don't do more of it. Change the rules. And if your cabinet isn't involved, you're never going to convince people to give up power. You have to change the rules or accept the status quo or go find somebody who is just crazy enough to look at the best idea, not the best process. But I'm sure somewhere right now there's a conference on employee-centric organizations, right, which sounds like you're not, right? Like, change the rules, they leave, screw them, we'll hire other people. You didn't say that, right? But I did.

Karl Daubmann: But I wonder, like, I remember a moment, too, where we were writing a new mission statement for our college, and like you said, I struck everything that every institution says, and we were left with, like, a couple of articles and prepositions, and that was it. And so this notion of, what maybe is, well, one, tell me an organization that that part of their motto is that we're not student centric, then we could actually have a debate about these things. Or but I think what you're also talking about is almost a... it's not for me the rules, but more the definition like radical student centered, right means that you can fail them, right means that you can do these things means that you don't continue to throw money at them in loans so that they stay. This is the opposite of what we typically mean by student centric, right? All those things that we've done to placate the customer to keep the student there.

Dr. Melik Khoury: It was the 18th century model, right? It was back in the day when a few students were lucky and we could do anything to them and they just wanted to get that degree. But I will say to you, just to push back a little bit on the employee centric, what I've noticed in higher education is you've got employees from different areas of presidencies and provosts that all have different definitions of success.

And so what you're doing is it's the Tower of Babel. We don't all speak the same language because with turnover in leadership, there's turnover in expectation and people are frozen in time for a differentiated definition of success. You know, we're doing it, where's Nate? Are you in here? He's not. Nate. What's that thing called from Elon Musk that we're going through? What was the thing called, his six, can't remember it. If you guys look at his bio, Elon Musk, there's a point in there where he says, put a name by the person who proposed the policy.

That no matter what policy it is it needs to have a name next to it and most of the policies were created by people who don't even work there anymore. Yes, so if you want to change up put a name next to it and I believe to my core there's no such thing as a bad employee. There are just employees that have a philosophy that no longer aligns with the institutional direction. So help them find a job somewhere else, celebrate them, right? You know give them a recommendation and then but they are employees in those other organizations who will come to you because they want to be in your organization.

I will end with your comment about, didn't know you almost did that, but one of the things we did at Unity to Change Culture is how many of you have been in organizations in your campus where the word "the faculty", "the administration", and my question is always who? Who? Me? It's Carl. My favorite one, "the community". How do you define community? We use this ambiguous language to put you in your place while being able to say we didn't mean you.

So specificity is the friend of change. So when somebody says the administration didn't, I once pushed that, and it was a dean of students who hadn't been there for 15 years. But his legacy held on. So to your point, put a name on it. It's difficult to hate something you name, and ambiguity is the friend of people who don't want change. And respect the employees that do not like the change that you've made and actually create a positive way out. That is a lesson I learned too late. Now I meet with my employees and say, hey, who wants me to help them get a job somewhere else?

Karl Daubmann: Look how excited he was getting out of the woods. But I like your point too, because I was recently in a meeting with a couple of deans, and they agreed on something. And I listened carefully, right? I was like, you guys don't actually agree. Because the language was so abstract, and so in terms of academic leadership, it's always important to try and specify those things, right? We talk at this level. When it comes down to the staff, it gets implemented in a way that is a very strange swerve related to what we were trying to accomplish. I think going down, talking to different groups, understanding what that means to them, and being specific about it.

I think the student centered aspect is like, what does it actually mean? Ambiguity allows us all to lie to each other and ourselves. And when the stakes were low, because failure meant going back to the faculty, failure meant just having a bad year, it didn't matter. But now failure means a generational failure of having a global workforce that is competitive. The stakes are too high for this to be an academic exercise. So be specific. Don't let ambiguity be your friend. If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, "the powers that be". I heard a rumor. I have it in good authority. A little birdie told me.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: A little birdie told me. That is how we stop change, is we create doubt and leaders in higher ed don't tend to have the conviction to get punched in the face.

Dr. Melik Khoury: So we compromise.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Or be led into the woods for some reason.

Tracy Kreikemeier: Yes. So thank you panel. This was a very spirited... We can keep going if you want. No time for question three?

Yes. So I guess our takeaways are change is hard, evolution is necessary. Stay out of the woods. Put a name by every policy. You put a name by every policy. And honestly, we care because the work we do really, really matters. And so I think that's the other thing. When you're drawing your energy, what we do and what we have the privilege to do really matters. So keep that in the back of your mind as you go back to your institutions to be able to do all of that. And now we have snacks in the lobby outside and then we'll have our last presentations of the day down on the lower level. So thank you guys.