795: How to Lead Innovation in Higher Education - with Dr. Rich Wagner, President, Dunwoody College of Technology

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio back here in my office where I normally podcast from, returning recently from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education Annual Conference in Philadelphia where I got to interview a bunch of people, including the Commission Chair and the President of Middle States at the same time on the same episode, which was great.

One thing is for sure, the relationship between an institution and their accreditor is very, very important as we move forward for the future of higher education, as we really aim to innovate. There isn't anything that we can't do. We just have to do it in the right way, and we have to assess how we do it. But innovation is really key to the future of our industry. And so your accreditor is your best friend along that way. 

One of the other pieces that came out of the conference is really leadership and how hard it is to be a college or university president these days. It's hard. It's a hard job. So many eyes on you. The business model, the stress. Students, frankly, maybe not choosing education. That's a problem we all have to solve. If you believe in higher education and the value of a degree, there's a big competitor and it is the student who's not choosing college. We've got to solve that together. 

And one person that's going to help me solve this with our guest today is my guest co-host. You've heard him before. You'll hear him again. Ladies and gentlemen, he's Greg Clayton. He's the president of Enrollment Management Solutions at Education Dynamics. Greg, what's going on?

Gregory Clayton: Hey, Joe. Good to be here again and looking forward to talking to Dr. Wagner today.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, my guest today - he's your guest today - his name is Dr. Rich Wagner. He is the president of Dunwoody College of Technology. Rich, welcome to an EdUp microphone. How are you?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Well, I'm doing great Joe and Greg. Thanks for having me. Wonderful to be here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Rich, level set for the audience. We always really like to have you just start from the beginning. Tell us about Dunwoody, what you do and how you do it.

Dr. Rich Wagner: Dunwoody College of Technology is a private nonprofit technical college located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We've been around since 1914. So our focus is on career-related educational programs that lead to immediate jobs and careers. So we have everything here from one-year certificates to four-year degrees, everything from automotive, welding, HVAC, electrician, electrical construction, and maintenance to mechanical engineering, cybersecurity, and a whole host of things that are really meant to feed the local and national industry, which is just really desperate for the skilled workforce.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, the first thing you said is we're a nonprofit technical college. Typically, and I know because I used to work in the for-profit sector, when you saw vocational colleges or career colleges, they were of a for-profit nature. So being a nonprofit technical college is a huge value proposition in my opinion. What does that mean to your students, to you running the institution?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Well, what it means for me first, you know, we are a very rare breed, right? The private nonprofit technical college. I think if you look at the higher education enterprise, maybe a couple hundred across the US. So what it means for us is, you know, we can offer a small college experience to our students. Our student population is like 1,300, 1,400 with small class sizes. We're very hands-on focused. We're very student-centric and we're really focused on getting students to graduation. So our graduation rate, you know, ballpark is 60% or so.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing.

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah, which we're pretty proud of. That stacks up really well. Job placement, depending on which program you're in, is going to be certainly 90, 95, 100% across the board. Average starting salary is near $55,000 a year. So you know what I think what it means for us is obviously it comes with some challenges as we get no support, kind of out there on our own, but we do do a lot of fundraising. We have a very generous community here in Minneapolis, but it also means we have the flexibility to really focus on programs that we classify as high need and high pay. So high demand, high pay job market is what we're trying to serve. And there's a ton of those kinds of jobs that are open right now across the nation.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I'll pass it to you in a second, Greg. You said about 1,300 students?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yep.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right. So when you, and a lot of people who are listening know this, but it's always important to point this out and talk about 1300 students in a technical college. Typically, and you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, you're going to have faster programs. The programs might be 10 months or 12 months, a year, year and a half. So the churn is greater because the student is getting out. So to get to and maintain a population of 1300 is really hard. It's not like you have four years to just keep padding numbers. You've got to have constant demand and constant enrollment periods in order to keep that population up. So there's always this speed that comes with working with a technical college.

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah, there's a challenge. And that's exactly right, Joe. Our programs, we have one year, two year, four year. So we're primarily a two-year institution, but even a two-year institution, this every two years, you're losing a group of students, right? So you're constantly, you know, constantly and as a private nonprofit, we're tuition driven. The business model is susceptible to a lot of swings. So the good news for us is we have been growing. Because of the value proposition we have, because of the types of careers that we train in, that we educate students in, we've been growing. But yeah, it's a quick turnover. We're happy that our School of Engineering with Mechanical and Electrical and Computer Engineering, our School of Design with a Bachelor of Architecture Program, we're keeping those students for four or five years. You know, because the Bachelor of Architecture programs, five-year program. So we have some stability there. But certainly compared to four-year institutions, you know, they gradually enroll their first-year students and stay there for years. It's a lot of work to get out and continue to keep the pipeline primed.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, Greg, over to you.

Gregory Clayton: So, Rich, you mentioned skilled workforce before, and there's been a lot, you know, written and read about the skills gap that exists in the workforce and there's workforce shortages and so forth across various types of industries, some of which you mentioned that you have programs at Dunwoody for. How do you see that? Do you still see that as a gap that we're just nowhere near closing now? And is that part of the opportunity for Dunwoody to continue to enroll students and educate them to prepare for the workforce?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah, I'll be honest Greg, I don't see that gap closing. We have such high demand for our graduates and we keep a statistic here where we'll have like how many companies call us and ask for a student, right? And then we'll divide the number of students we have into that. And that could be 13 requests for every one student or some number around there. That sounds great for our students, but you think about the number of companies that are looking to hire talent that can't find it. It is still a very acute problem for us across all the fields that we're talking about. You know, like, I think about the gap in the cybersecurity world right now. Like, I don't know what the number is nationally, but it's thousands of people we need in cybersecurity.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Tell them like it is.

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah, that's absolutely right. That's how it is. I mean, the other night we went and listened to a four-star general that runs the NSA, and that's what he talked about. Like, this is a national defense crisis. Like, we don't have the technicians, we don't have the cybersecurity experts, we don't have the mathematicians, we don't have the capacity that we need to have. And it's not about, like, protecting our data anymore and our information and banking. It's like the whole grid. Our electrical grids are susceptible. Our water treatment plants are susceptible. Any device that's connected to the internet, things are susceptible. So there's huge gaps out there in these really critical spaces. If we want to lead in manufacturing, be the manufacturing capital, we need talent in the manufacturing field. We need robotics technicians, we need machinists, we need a whole host of occupations. And we just cannot fill the number of positions that are open here in Minnesota. And I know it's like that across the nation.

Gregory Clayton: I'm curious about your point of view on, you know, over the, this has built up over the decades, you know, this gap did not come about overnight, but what has been the driver of that? Why these are such great jobs? You mentioned the average starting salary earlier and sort of job-ready skills and there are employers waiting to hire people who can't hire enough of them. What do you think is the driver of the gap?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah, I think it's just this stigma that we as a nation have attached to kind of technical education, right? It's where you go if you can't go to college. Well, you know, really you've got to be able to do high-level mathematics. You've got to be able to problem-solve, handle it, critically think. You've got to, you know, I had a debate once with somebody about, you know, well, you know, how much critical thinking and pressure will the technician be under? Well, if you're manufacturing, the robotics technician, and the plant is down because of a robot, and it's, you know, what's your downtime? A thousand dollars a minute, you know, a hundred dollars. It doesn't matter. You're now the economics of your business model are failing. Right, products not getting delivered and you've got to get that thing fixed. 

So I think that what we've done as a nation is we've done ourselves a disservice by not talking proudly about these types of jobs, you know. An electrician, journey worker electrician today, I think the amount on the wage is about 49 bucks an hour. That's, you know, more of that size, two ballparkish, 90 grand plus benefits, right? What's wrong with that as a career pathway, right? I mean, I just think that, and the challenge, Greg, has always been how do we change people's perceptions about these types of occupations and how do we get people excited about getting their kids into these career pathways because they are rewarding, they are fulfilling, and they do provide access to housing and healthcare and they provide income mobility. I mean, there's just all kinds of positive things that come out of this type of education. 

And yet, you know, over the years, right, the VOTEC kind of concept, right, was where the kids who weren't ready to go to college would go. Well, that's baloney, right? I was a kid that didn't go to college. You know, I got kicked out of my first college and now I have a PhD and I'm president of a college. So it's really, it's about learning style. People like to work with their hands. It's a whole host of things we've got to get people excited about or talking about. It's a topic I'm pretty passionate about. You probably can tell, you kind of hit a button there, right?

Gregory Clayton: Yeah. And I figured that would be a little bit of a button for you. I, in my prior, my, I've got a 30-year career in higher ed and I spent a couple of decades in the skills-based area. And I've actually been to Dunwoody before. It was a while back. And I remember, you know, I visited a lot of schools of, you know, the nature of Dunwoody during that period of time. And I was super impressed with the facility that Dunwoody has to educate these students and the technology that was deployed and like the unbelievably talented and experienced faculty that was there. 

You know, I come back, I worked 15 years in for-profit, VOTEC schools, training for the hands-on careers. Back when, to your point, Rich, the stigma really was there where it was, you know, we were we were serving a student at least many thought that was just not good enough to make it in a college and they were going to get a trade. And I remember the second student I ever enrolled because it shocked me. This lady comes in. She's a vice president of banking services from Wells Fargo. She's been there for 20 years, comes in and says, "I just don't want to do banking anymore. I want to be a massage therapist. I want to do something that I really enjoy. And I just don't want to deal with the numbers. I want to use my hands." And I went, wait a minute, you're making like well into six figures. You're doing this. And she's like, "I'll still make enough money doing, you know, starting my own business. But then I get to make my own hours." And I thought, OK, wait a second. I was brand new. I went, this education is for anyone. Right. And so what has happened since then is two things. One, the government is saying college isn't for everyone. And students should be looking at alternative pathways. And so it's good that students are looking at alternative forms of a degree and going into careers that we, by the way, you can't get an electrician or somebody to fix your HVAC these days. And students are choosing it. So the government is saying...

By what they're doing, they're saying drop the stigma and the student is saying drop the stigma. They're saying I don't want to go over here. I'm well good enough. I'm great, but I don't want to go there. I want to come here because I want to do this career that I know I can succeed in and make money without going into maybe some crushing debt at this University that's going to put me in six-figure debt. Are you seeing that change? You talked about the stigma. That was a big build up for this question, right? But is the stigma changing?

Dr. Rich Wagner: I think it is. I think that post-COVID, right post-pandemic, what you saw was, I mean, there's a lot of pressure on higher ed right now, right? One of the rises has been this idea of what's the value of education, right? What's the value of higher education? I think that there's a group of students who are now saying, "I want an education that leads to a job and a career," right? And they took a look at like during the pandemic, you had some fields that were classified as essential, right? And they stayed open, you know, manufacturing, et cetera. And students are looking to those types of fields, right? Where they can, so we have, you know, I'm sorry, I'm babbling a little bit, but we have seen Joe post-COVID, a swing and greater interest.

You know, like our low point was 1281 during COVID, which was like a win, right? Because it was so challenging to recruit, retain, and do all the things that you had to do and graduate students and et cetera. And we got them all jobs, so that's the important part too. But we, you know, this past fall, we started with 1424. So we're growing and that growth is being fueled by students who see that here is a value proposition. Here's a value I can get in education. So there is a swing and a pendulum. I think that when you hit the nail on the head, there is a national dialogue around, it's okay. There are pathways that everybody should be looking at because they do lead to really good jobs and really great careers. And we are starting to see, we're seeing momentum.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you kidding me? COVID was funny in that the word essential became, you know, you might've thought you were an essential worker. And then the classification came on and it was like, you're not essential. This person right here coming to, you know, make sure that people don't overheat in Florida because the air conditioning needs to work is essential. You know, so it really changed the dynamic of the way we thought about what was essential.

Dr. Rich Wagner: What is it when you look at infrastructure, right? Lights and heat HVAC and you know machinery. If those things fall down, you don't get all of the joys in life that we enjoy.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, end of the line workers are a host of people that really percolate to the top and we realize why they are a very important part of our economy. Is there, well before you go Greg, is there a max out of programs, right? Is that you look at the fields that you're in manufacturing or robotics, you know, you've got all these different fields for students to go into. Is there an end to the trades? Is technology the next frontier? Like, you know, drone technology? I mean, what comes next for the trades?

Dr. Rich Wagner: The answer, I think, is we'll always kind of be in the industries we're in. But the programs we deliver will always be changing because there's just so much turnover in technology right now. It's like 3D printing was brand new five years ago. Today that's called additive manufacturing. And that's changing. So now all of your manufacturing programs have to have some piece of additive manufacturing placed in it. So cybersecurity is evolving and it's a broad topic, but it's so needed in all these industries. Like look at the automotive industry. You know, today, you can buy a car that has more computing power than an Apollo spacecraft. Right. That's one car compared to the rocket that took the Americans to the moon and brought them back safely in the 1960s. Right. That's one car. So, and those are changing - autonomous vehicles, EVs, you know, hybrid technology.

So it's not so much like we have the industries, right? Because I think we do for free based on the economic needs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, right? We have the industry that's correct. But as all those technologies in those fields change, it's constantly upgrading your faculty, constantly upgrading your curriculum, constantly upgrading the technology you have in the classrooms to deliver all those topics. I mean, think about building information modeling, right? You know, like how we render 3D of buildings, you know, including the design and supply chains and all the other things that are necessary to build, not just a building, like a Viking stadium. I mean, the technology evolution is forcing us to keep, well, if you stay in the same industry, but to make sure we're always reinventing curriculum so it's relevant for our students who are graduating.

Gregory Clayton: Joe brought up something excellent, I thought, the change that happened during the pandemic with essential workers and so forth. How has the student population changed? What does it look like today at Dunwoody versus maybe what it looked like 10 years ago or beyond?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah, I think that a couple of drivers here in Minneapolis - demographics have changed radically and we've done a lot more outreach to all communities in our service area. So we're certainly a much more diverse student population than we were 10 years ago. You know, our age has stayed pretty similar. I think that one thing that we did see, and I think this was common in higher ed, post-COVID, especially with all the shutdowns, was there were aspects of a high school education that just were missing, right? So it may have been a student wasn't as far along in math as they should have been, that some of the social skills were missing and all sorts of things. And those would probably be expected outcomes based on kind of shutting down and going online and doing the things we did to try and keep everybody safe. 

So I would think by now, based on my conversations with our faculty, that we've kind of gotten through that phase, if you will. We're kind of back to, as far as preparation goes, preparedness goes, we're kind of back to, I think, where we were pre-COVID. And we also have always had a group of students like you were talking about, Joe, you know, like the example you gave of students that graduate and then they come back to Dunwoody and then, you know, and I asked like, well, you know, I got a four-year degree from so-and-so and such and such. Well, why'd you come back? Well, I want to, I want an education that gets me a job. I want an education where I can be outside. I don't want to sit inside. I want an education that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we typically have a good number of our students who are returning.

We've made really great strides in increasing the number of women who enroll at Dunwoody. When I started at Dunwoody back in 1997, I think it was, as a faculty member teaching the electrical construction program, we were probably about 95-96% male. Today we're about 20-ish percent female. So we've come far. We have a longer way to go. We have a lot of great initiatives. We have a Kate Dunwoody Society. It's made up of women professionals in technical fields who work to not only attract more students, more women students in those programs, but provide mentorship and support for those who are enrolled and then when they graduate, going through pathways. So that's been a success. 

We also have a Pathways to Career program that we've launched to really focus on bringing in traditionally underrepresented populations to Dunwoody and that program's having a significant impact on enrollment of BIPOC students. We continue to work on making these pathways accessible to everybody because we need everybody. The jobs need everybody. The Minnesota economy needs everybody. The United States economy needs everybody. Our cybersecurity defense systems need more technicians. This is a call that we just need to make sure we're reaching out that everybody can have a shot at an education like you can get at Dunwoody.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: By the way, next year I think your 18-year-old student would have been a freshman in high school so they would have been like this peak COVID class is coming in the next year to your point. They're on the downslide of that learning loss. Hopefully. What, how has the circus - I mean regulation of gainful employment played with you or messed with you all, if at all, because it's there. It's not, it's back. It's gone. It's here. It's not, you know, just like you're describing.

Dr. Rich Wagner: Joe, it was there and we complied and we don't have a lot of certificates. And then we only have a handful and those certificates all passed the gainful employment test. So we're not like there's community colleges that have so many. I mean, they probably have a full-time position that's just focusing on gainful employment, and then they are and then they're not. So yeah, I mean, we've kind of we keep abreast of that, but because of the nature of our programs, we just don't have a lot of reporting on gainful employment.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What's your biggest program? What's the one right now?

Dr. Rich Wagner: It's electrical construction maintenance as a program. Our construction program area is very large. And so is our School of Design and our School of Engineering. They're all - I think we have close to, well, I'm just kind of guessing. I'm probably getting pretty wrong on this. The dean listening is going to tell me that I really missed a number, but we're probably close to 200 students, 150 to 200 students in that one program.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That is amazing. Very good. Greg, back to you.

Gregory Clayton: And electrical and construction you mentioned is the largest, is that where the most employer demand is coming from or is it other areas?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah, employer demand comes across all programs. I have a theory and I never really have tested this, but a lot of our enrollment kind of tracks our economy. You know what I mean? So like there'll be a time when construction is really hot, then there's a time when automotive is really hot, then there's a time when manufacturing is really hot. You know, I think that construction is stabilizing now. It's not growing as rapidly as it was. And it looks like manufacturing is starting to come back up and we're just launching new cybersecurity programs. So we're going to see some enrollment there. 

So they tend to cycle, Greg. And one of our keys to successful fiscal management, again, as a private nonprofit, is to have a nice, eclectic portfolio of programs. So we aren't all in one, right? So when I was a faculty member in the electrical construction program, you know, there was a time we had three, 400 electricians all getting jobs. I mean, that's one thing we won't ever do. We'll never saturate the job market. We've got to place our students. And then like five years later, we had like 56 electricians, you know, so it swung that hard. And that was during the great recession of '08, '09, '10, I think is when that moment went down. But because we have manufacturing, because we have automotive, because we have other programs, everything kind of can stay steady. So that's one of our advantages.

Gregory Clayton: Which program in the portfolio do you see technology having the biggest impact on? Joe mentioned AI kind of jokingly earlier, but I'm kind of pointing to that.

Dr. Rich Wagner: You know, there's two aspects to technology. There's kind of, well, actually there's three aspects. Let's say there's one like enterprise technology. Like how are we deploying technology to be the most efficient institution we possibly can be? Because we owe it to our students, right? Because as a private nonprofit, they pay the tuition. So we can be a more efficient organization by leveraging technology through ERPs and CRMs and document management and streamlining processes, et cetera. We should be doing that. 

Then there's this whole societal impact of like, who's writing those reports now, right? Who's doing the essay in your English classes, right? Who's like, how do you know that that resume you're looking at is a real person or not, right? Because an AI, you know, the fascinating thing about AI is like, I listened to a speaker talk about how electricity changed the world in 40 years. You know, it went from something that was like, like we got these motors and then all of a sudden instead of having a steam-driven shaft going through a manufacturing facility that drove a bunch of belts, put a motor on the end of that. And now we have electricity driving it. Then they decided to put electricity, motors on each of those small machines, right? But it wasn't until Henry Ford created the production line that electricity revolutionized the entire manufacturing world. And that was about a 40-year gap, right? And the speaker talked about AI will do that in three to five years, right? The changing and implications on our society of AI are significant. 

And then Greg, then you take all that and you factor it into how is that gonna change all the programs? I mean, like when you say which one's being driven, you know, they all are. People ask, what's the one thing, what's one of the things that keeps you up at night, Rich? Technology, right? Because it's changing so radically. Like, you know, we're machining parts that in five years they might be growing for implementing into the human body, right? I mean, cars are becoming self-driven and all electrical. There's all these things that are just changing in all of our programs. It's fascinating and scary at the same time. So it's a long answer to the technology impact. But I think you have to look at those three areas to really kind of try and understand the impact. What's the impact on society, the enterprise and then the programs.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It's fuzzy math. I will say I think about this a lot of like what programs do I have at my university that will become irrelevant? You know, which AI is going to supplant this? I think about marketing. Right, if there's a target for AI that AI fixes right now with the way it's designed right now without any evolution, I don't necessarily need a program to train people on how to do all of these marketing plans and so on and so on. It's all machine learning. It's all AI. It can produce. You can go to Claude or ChatGPT or any of the others and you can put in, make me a marketing plan and here's all the components that I need. That makes it very tough. But marketing is still human. I still have to have this human component to marketing in order to make connection to get somebody to buy something. So maybe not. And that's what makes it tough because you technically, yes, human-wise, no. So it makes those decisions really hard. And as a president running an institution, you're always looking at both of those, right? Your customer is human. Your operations may not be in certain aspects. How do you balance it, especially when you have limited resources most of the time?

Dr. Rich Wagner: What does that mean about like, we have a radiological technician program. So radiology might be something AI can diagnose, right? Machine learning can look at MRIs, scans, X-rays, et cetera, and make some determinations, but it can't do the actual work of taking the picture or putting the human into the MRI. And then back to your point, Joe, then do you trust the machine? Right? Or do you want the human eyes on it? So how do we kind of think those things through as to where does the curriculum need to be? And it might allow us to have a higher-level curriculum because some of the foundational stuff is AI is capable of doing. Does that make sense? Like I think of accounting, right? Legal. I mean, do you need an attorney? Watch out lawyers. Well, I don't want to get sued. I'm saying this thing is like will preparation. There's very sophisticated software packages that can do that for you. Now, imagine AI can do that. But now you get a very sophisticated estate plan. You probably want a, kind of like you're talking about marketing, there's a human touch to it too. So it's going to be balanced as we try and grapple with how AI is going to change the world because it's going to change the world in the next three to five years.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, this has been fascinating. Greg, do you have any final questions for Rich before we give him our final two to then end the episode?

Gregory Clayton: No, maybe the last question to end on is you've mentioned what keeps you up awake at night, Rich. Maybe the next question or last one is what are you most excited about?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Boy, I'm excited about the future of Dunwoody. I'm excited about my upcoming retirement. But I'll talk about the future of Dunwoody. It's really wonderful because we really have created so much momentum here and we've created so much capacity here. And I'm really looking forward to looking back in another three, four, five years and see where the faculty, staff and board of trustees, new president took us to because there's a whole different level that we can't even conceptualize that we're gonna get.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: When are you retiring, Rich?

Dr. Rich Wagner: June 30th, July 1st will be my last day.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: July 1 of 2024?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Very well.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Congratulations.

Dr. Rich Wagner: Thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's incredible. So you'll spend a few months making a list of all the places you're going to visit when you retire. Italy, Greece, Australia, New Zealand.

Dr. Rich Wagner: We've done a lot of our traveling. So I think for maybe a year, we're just going to decompress, golf, grandkids, spend a, you know, we're in Minnesota, so definitely not interested in another winter here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Fair enough. What else do you want to say about Dunwoody? Open mic, anything you want to say about the institution?

Dr. Rich Wagner: I would just say that for the last, you know, what has it been, 14, 15 years I've been able to be president here. I can't tell you how proud of the faculty and staff I am of all the commitment they have made to making sure that we have the best educational programs with rigor, integrity, and teaching the students the skills that make them relevant in the workforce. And they've been, they've just been doing a great job. So what differentiates Dunwoody is pretty simple. It's our people, people that care about our mission, that care about our students. It's been fascinating to watch all that the last several years.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You talked about it a little bit, but give us your outgoing crystal ball moment for all of the presidents out there that are going to come in or the ones leading institutions now. What do you see for the future of higher education or post-secondary education?

Dr. Rich Wagner: Yeah. I see a lot of challenges. I see better understand your financial model, take care of your students and be willing to innovate and adapt because the future is gonna be challenging.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What'd you think of this conversation, Greg?

Gregory Clayton: I thought it was great. I know I got off on the wrong foot and introduced the guest before you did.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Don't worry, we never forget. We'll remind you next time.

Gregory Clayton: I won't make that mistake again. Now this was fantastic. It was a nice treat for me because I mentioned I had spent a lot of time in the skills-based area of higher ed and visited and spoke with a lot of college presidents that run schools and faculty and so forth. So when I saw you were the guest and I was invited to co-host, it was a pleasure to kind of revisit some of the things I've done in the past. So this was a great discussion and wish you the best in retirement, Rich. It's been a great career.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, he started rough, but he goes out looking like a champ, ladies and gentlemen. He is Greg Clayton. He is the president of Enrollment Management Solutions at Education Dynamics. Greg, always a pleasure to have you. I know we'll see you again. And Rich, it has been an honor. Ladies and gentlemen, he is my guest. No, he is your guest. He is Dr. Rich Wagner. He's president of Dunwoody College of Technology. Rich, we hope that this was in your long career and leading to your retirement the best podcast that you've ever been on. We hope you had a good time.

Dr. Rich Wagner: I did. Thank you very much, everybody.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And with that, ladies and gentlemen, you've just EdUpped.