857: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - w/ ⁠Richard Rosser, Co-Creator, ⁠Andra Armstrong⁠, Co-Creator, ⁠Limelight Project,⁠ & ⁠Shannon Moore-Zuffaletto⁠, Dir., Industry Partnerships, ⁠Ellucian⁠

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. We are continuing to make education your business here at Ellucian Live 2024 in San Antonio, Texas, at this massive convention center, which if you go left or you go right, make sure you remember where you're going or you're going to get lost. So many sessions around here. This morning, I was able to hear Greg Giangrande and Laura Ibsen talk about Ellucian and some of the amazing things they have going on here. I missed the other speaker because of course I had a podcast. That's what they brought me here to do. 

But I have to tell you guys that this conference is amazing because I get to interact with people that I don't normally interact with. We interview a lot of college presidents. We interview people in and around higher ed. But it's more on the rare side as we come to these conferences. We get to interview a lot of industry partners, things that are happening in higher education from those industry partners. You'll get what I'm saying in a second. I can't even figure out how to say it the right way, but I'll figure it out. You guys will figure out what I'm talking about when I get there. But we do have a lot to talk about, and Ellucian's doing some amazing things in the industry. 

But let's talk about our guests. And I'm going to bring them in one at a time to a standing ovation. The first person is Richard Rosser, co-creator of Community College of Limelight. How are you, Richard?

Richard Rosser: Doing fantastic. You are?

Joe Sallustio: Yes. Good. See, I almost missed your name because I have reading glasses, you know, and I didn't pull them down. So I was like, wait a second. I can't see. So for the next person, I'm going to be more ready. She is Andra Armstrong, also a co-creator at Community College Limelight. Andra, how are you?

Andra Armstrong: I'm really excited to be here. I'm happy to be here. I'm excited.

Joe Sallustio: We're happy to have you here and hear all about Community College Limelight. But I have to get my third guest in first. Here she is, Shannon Moore Zufaletto. She's director of industry partnerships with Ellucian. Did I get it all right?

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: Yes, you did. Hello.

Joe Sallustio: Hi, how are you?

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: I'm very well.

Joe Sallustio: OK, reading glasses off. This is a new thing for me. Last year I could see everything. This year I cannot. Well, welcome.

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: Welcome to the world of reading glasses.

Joe Sallustio: I can't see the sound effect buttons. You don't have to do this. Anyway, first tell us about Community College Limelight. Let's just start right there. Andra, why don't you go first? Richard, anything you want to bring in after that? What is Community College Limelight?

Andra Armstrong: We are a platform that celebrates community colleges through the power of first-person storytelling. We know community colleges build futures for students, for families, and communities. We want the world to know it. So we built this platform along with Ellucian. We have partnered with Ellucian and they have secured our initial funding for this really exciting platform.

Richard Rosser: Yes, so just to give a little bit of background. Andra is Miss Capitol Hill. She's been working in the community college sector with College Promise. She worked for C-SPAN as a producer for them. She's been in the policy community college sector and domain forever. And then I'm Mr. Hollywood. I've been telling stories professionally on shows like Chicago Med, Grey's Anatomy, 24, MacGyver, This Is Us.

Joe Sallustio: MacGyver, one of the greatest shows of all time.

Richard Rosser: Yes, exactly. So we've become very resourceful in our desire to celebrate community colleges. And so we're celebrating community college through four story formats. We create short documentary videos about subjects. Then we also have blog post entries that they write. We have a photo gallery. And then we tie it all together with data visualizations. And so that's really the unique part of our approach is we're tying this whole story viewpoint together with data so that people can then take these stories out and affect change.

Joe Sallustio: Okay, this is cool. So is it individual institutions that you work with? Is it groups of institutions? Is it any community college? Do you have to be a partner of Ellucian? How does that all work?

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: Well, it actually is starting with Ellucian clients, but it's not exclusively Ellucian clients. We're very lucky to have a very significant footprint in community college and that's one of the reasons why we thought this was an incredibly big opportunity for Ellucian to step up and be a partner. We're so grateful for that. We're so excited to be working with you guys and we believe strongly in community college and the power of community college and putting students first and illuminating all the different amazing stories. And it's not just the students. You heard from the presidents earlier in our address how passionate they are to make students successful. And so we're very excited to be the founding funders of Community College Limelight. But it is open to any institution, community college. We would love to be able to give them a story.

Joe Sallustio: Do I like apply for it? Is there a rigorous process of choosing the school that you work with?

Andra Armstrong: Well, we're very familiar with the community college sector. I worked at College Promise. I was familiar with a lot of the stories and a lot of the challenges that people overcome or lot of the initiatives that take place. For our initial two stories, I was very familiar with our first two story subjects. But from this point forward, we're going to be identifying different elements of community colleges that we want to uplift, whether it's partnerships with businesses, whether it's supporting single mothers. There are so many ways that community colleges help students.

What we will do is work with nonprofits that work with community colleges to identify some of these stories. We will work with campuses with whom we are familiar. The point is there are stories everywhere. We're not hurting for story ideas. The vetting process will be the challenge as we move forward because on every campus in every community there's a powerful story.

Joe Sallustio: And I want you to tell it. It's my community college. I want you to tell it please.

Andra Armstrong: Of course.

Richard Rosser: Exactly. So our approach is, you know, when you look at the news and they put on a story, you see a two-shot of the interviewer and the subject, and then you cut in for closeups. But it's all about the interviewer and the questions that they're asking. And we do things differently. We never see the interviewer, which is typically me. I'm behind the camera and I'm asking questions, but that's cut out in the edit. So really we create these first-person videos where the subject is speaking. For instance, in our first video with Ryan Liu, we interviewed him and then we interviewed one of his professors and his parents. And we interviewed each in terms of their approach. His parents, we learned their story about his mom coming from Cambodia as a refugee in the mid-1980s and then his father coming from Taiwan via Argentina. And so we got their experience. It wasn't just about Ryan, about Ryan, about Ryan. It was about them and his parents. His ecosystem around him.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, and it was unbelievable because they had this 15, almost 20 year plan for their two sons.

Richard Rosser: Inconceivable! No, it was conceivable. And they came up with this plan and they stuck to it. They moved here from Argentina to California and they lived in an ADU or back house that they rented. It was a one bedroom for a family of four and they got this place in, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was where the public schools were the best and that was why they moved there. For the schools, right? So they sacrificed lifestyle, everything else for school.

So they got their two sons through public school and then Ryan ended up going to community college, graduated valedictorian, and he ended up transferring to Yale, getting a Jack Kent Cooke scholarship, and then he ended up at Oxford for a master's in education, and then back to Yale Law, and now he's back in Los Angeles, and he's working as an attorney for a firm there, and doing incredible work helping others. And that's one of the things we really find out about these situations is as these folks come up, and again it's not just students, it's faculty and professors at community colleges.

Everyone is in it for helping others. And that's one thing that really blows me away as the, you know, Mr. Hollywood coming to this sector is that that's really what it's about. And I think that's why we're so excited about being partnered with Ellucian is Ellucian obviously cares about not just the technology, but the experience and the students and how they do and helping them succeed with the technology.

Andra Armstrong: And the reason why we use this first-person narrative approach is because it touches emotions in a way a third-person narrative approach would not. You're making an emotional connection with the subject and we say people act with their heads, you touch their hearts. So if legislators are looking at whether or not they should fund community college, if they've seen a story that really strikes at the heart, they're not just going to be remembering the statistics that somebody's putting before them about funding. They're going to be remembering a student who benefited, a community that benefited from a partnership with a community college. And that's something they need to recall, but a link they can have to show other people.

Joe Sallustio: Exactly, emotional link. An actual hard link and an emotional link. Both. That's true too. Because repeating stats, I mean, for a lot of legislators, they have people feeding them information. But in a community college, and we've interviewed, I don't know, how many? Like a hundred community college presidents across the U.S.? The story is always we serve lots of students and there's lots of student types that we serve. There's so many stories in that sentence that you can't possibly extract in a way that makes people understand how relevant when we talk about like the value of a degree and something like that. This says, "Here's how valuable a degree could be," but we have to tell those stories as educators in higher ed because we're under attack too from the outside that college isn't relevant and a degree doesn't have value. This is a way to state that, isn't it?

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: Yes, for sure. You are so right. I think it's exciting to see these two creative forces come together and bring that passion. They are forces, believe me. It's been a privilege for me to work with them so far, and we're just starting. So we are going to be launching our platform. We will tell you what the URL is. Richard, you can actually tell them that. They actually don't know it but you can tell them. And we're going to be launching it this summer and we do want people to utilize this but it's also a huge benefit to the institutions themselves. Many times they don't have the resources or they don't know how to tell their own stories and so this is a massive resource to come in and not just do the story but teach those institutions how to create these stories themselves.

That's the ultimate goal of Community College Limelight, which really inspired me and Ellucian. So you'll continue to see more stories. And we'll be bringing on more partners too.

Joe Sallustio: Like I have this giant network of people, and access to lots of presidents and stories and we can probably work together to help you get more stories and more connections.

Richard Rosser: We love it, we love it. People are already coming out of the woodwork, stories are coming, it's exciting. We didn't mention our other not-for-profit partner. We're very proud of having Phi Theta Kappa as our not-for-profit partner.

Andra Armstrong: Yes, we just attended the PTK catalyst in Orlando and had the most amazing time, met just the most incredible people and heard about so many stories there. And we just produced a story about their former international president who was elected in 2019 only about three years after he was released from prison. He was a student that was incarcerated for participation in an armed robbery as a teenager. While he was incarcerated, he developed a passion for learning, partly inspired by his mother who never gave up on him. And when he was released from prison, Delaware Tech accepted him with an ankle bracelet. They were the only institution within striking distance of his home that would allow him to attend.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing!

Andra Armstrong: Absolutely amazing it is. And he graduated top of his class. Advocated for Second Chance Pell, which are Pell grants for incarcerated or students who are on parole. It's a really powerful inspirational story. But getting to the point we were all making about advocating, if you were looking at statistics about Pell grants, yes, they might move someone, but no one's ever gonna forget James' story. Wait to hear it. When you see it. Either read the blog post or see our video. Or look at the photographs.

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: I think the other nice part about this that was interesting for me to listen to and hadn't thought about it was this is also a site for legislators. So there is a data piece to each one of these stories. So we can arm that advocate. It could be a lobbyist or anything. They can walk in with a single data point. We may just give them one or two, but they're really significant and they follow that story very well. And you also have a written piece by the subject, which is also on the site. So it's a really nice sort of multi-dimensional look at someone's story.

Joe Sallustio: That's really important. The data piece is important. The storytelling piece is important. Particularly if you know a lot about community colleges, a lot of them are rural. And if you're in a rural area, you can't just extract a community college from its community. You would decimate the ability for people to be educated.

Andra Armstrong: Exactly. Andra and I just looked at each other because this is one of our main points is the fact in a lot of communities, the community college is the economic engine.

Joe Sallustio: Absolutely right. It's what's driving the economy. It connects to the workforce. It feeds the local businesses with employees. What will happen in a lot of, this is the difficulty with rural community colleges though, is that graduates of those community colleges move out of the rural areas. And so the talent gets educated, moves out, and you still have this need to fill. So a lot of community colleges are trying to get people to stay through innovative measures to work in that ecosystem to bring more economic vitality to the region.

Richard Rosser: You might not know this, but you just described our next story that we will be producing later in this week.

Joe Sallustio: I did not know that.

Richard Rosser: From Laredo College. That's exactly... You want to talk a little bit about that? Yes, we typically right now we've had two stories about students. And so we contacted the folks at Laredo College. Actually, we've been in touch with Dr. Ramirez. We're actually going to be interviewing her on Friday. But they told us about a story about a woman named Christina. They had during the pandemic, they had accelerated courses so that instead of having to spend 12 months getting a certificate in something, you could do it in three months. Well, her kids heard that on the radio in the car and said, "Mom, you could go back to college." And she said, "Oh, I can't do that. I'm too old." He said, "No, come on." So she decided to do it. And in three months, she ended up going back and having a job in healthcare when everyone else was out of a job because of the pandemic. 

But as we started looking at this story, we realized it's not just Christina's story. And so we're actually going to be interviewing the mayor of Laredo. We're interviewing some business folks who were integral in this whole accelerated program and of course the college itself. And so it ends up being this multi-perspective viewpoint of all the various stakeholders and players in this community. And it goes back to exactly what you were saying. These colleges end up creating programs that create economic means and economic, you know, a pipeline for employees for all these various businesses and employers in Laredo. 

So it's really important. That's one of the things that we're looking to do is really show other communities what's going on in Laredo or Dallas or Los Angeles. Pasadena City College and one of the really great things about community colleges is they don't compete against each other.

Joe Sallustio: Right. If you think about normal four-year colleges, they're competing for all the, you know, the 1%.

Richard Rosser: Geography matters still.

Joe Sallustio: Exactly, because they have their areas. And so we are a clearinghouse for information and practices and initiatives and programs so that someone in Maine can find out about a program in Washington and learn about it so that they can implement that same kind of thing.

Andra Armstrong: We're imagining somebody going before a state legislature where they're getting ready to slash the budget and they can say, look what happened in this other state. Look what they did with this innovative program. We could do that. We could train people in all kinds of new technologies. We could bring a company in. We could stop losing population.

Joe Sallustio: What I absolutely love about what you're doing here is, and I say this a lot on the podcast, Elvin knows this, Higher Ed has a packaging problem, meaning we've allowed outside narrative to devalue the overall value of education in ways that we didn't fight back appropriately. And so we just let it happen and maybe institutions looked at other institutions and went well somebody else will deal with this I'll just keep enrolling students and fine. Then the enrollment started to stop and kids and adults too said I'm not sure I want to go back to college or go to college at all. And then it's like, okay, wait a minute. This is my problem that higher ed has a packaging problem. What you're doing is packaging the value of higher education in a way that we can begin to catalyze, recatalyze that value amongst people that are questioning it. I love it. I love it.

Richard Rosser: And Joe, it's also about the layers, right? Because people have a certain idealistic viewpoint of what college means. And, you know, again, I haven't been real involved in community colleges until this. I've been starting to teach at community colleges and technical colleges. But before that, I just thought, okay, yeah, college means a four-year degree. And community college means so many different things. It can be a certificate, again, a three-month certificate that Christina was back to work. And so these variety of layers of community college and what they offer is really interesting. And that's one of the things we're trying to point out to folks is it doesn't involve four years. It doesn't necessarily involve two whole years.

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: Absolutely. We're excited. We have a lot of plans.

Joe Sallustio: Like I said, we'll hear more about us. Don't unveil everything yet. Tell us where to go to find out more.

Richard Rosser: Yes. Not yet. But right now, it's well known because it's right now we have our staging site. Ultimately, it will be communitycollegelimelight.org. But for now, if anyone wants to get in touch with us to send us a story idea or just talk about ideas and suggestions, they can reach me at richard@cclimelight.org or Andra at andra@cclimelight.org and it's A-N-D-R-A.

Joe Sallustio: Got it. We got it. We'll put it in the show notes too for anybody that wants to check you guys out. Of course, when we publish this episode, we'll have links to both of your LinkedIn if you have it or your social media so people can get a hold of you. This is pretty amazing. How do you feel about this partnership?

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: It's been a complete pleasure and it's unexpected. It's something that Ellucian has never done. And so we're so excited to be doing this and working with both Richard and Andra in this initiative and we are excited about seeing how it goes in the next phase, phases. We're still in the first phase as Richard alluded to, we haven't even launched the site yet but it's already been incredible.

Joe Sallustio: An advanced interview, I love it.

Andra Armstrong: That's right. And Richard and I are eternally grateful to Ellucian for all of your support. It means the world to us because you really gave us our initial boost for what we know is going to be a success.

Shannon Moore Zufaletto: Yes. We're so excited to be partners.

Joe Sallustio: There you have it. Let me outro my guests appropriately. By the way, here in higher ed, I think I'm Mr. Hollywood. So but we'll have to share the tag.

Richard Rosser: No worries. You'd be Mr. Hollywood.

Joe Sallustio: He's Mr. Hollywood. He's Richard Rosser. He is co-creator at Community College Limelight. I gotta do it a second time. Andra Armstrong, co-creator Community College Limelight, and Shannon Moore Zufaletto, Director of Industry Partnerships with Ellucian. Everybody, you know what you've done. You've just EdUped.