868: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with Valerie Singer⁠⁠, WWPS Global Education Leader, ⁠⁠Amazon Web Services⁠⁠

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to ed up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. And we're continuing to make education your business here at Ellucian Live 2024 in San Antonio, Texas. After a little bit of a... We didn't see an eclipse yesterday. Let's just be honest. We saw clouds. We may have seen a couple of rays through the clouds, but mostly it got dark for a few minutes and then people kind of said, "I'm not doing this anymore" and headed inside.

Which is where the real conversation is anyway. So it was a nice break to get outside, but we're here to talk about Higher Ed, what's happening in higher education and with amazing trailblazing leaders in higher education. And I have another one of those folks in front of me today to talk about what's going on in Higher Ed. I'm going to bring her to the microphone right now, because she has a lot to say. She looks ready. She said she was, and I quote, "born ready." We're going to find out. Here we go. She is Valerie Singer. She is GM of Global Education at Amazon Web Services, AWS. What's up, Valerie? How are you?

Valerie Singer: I am so great, Joe. It's great to talk to you. Born ready. I'm here.

Joe Sallustio: How's your conference going so far?

Valerie Singer: It is great. I love Ellucian, what they've done just with this conference. San Antonio, like you said, we saw the non-eclipse, dropping 700,000 of our closest friends around San Antonio descended upon nothing. But this conference has been really terrific, like listening to just the keynotes and the other partners who are doing such tremendous and innovative things with the SaaS platform for Ellucian. This is all good.

Joe Sallustio: Nailed it. I don't know if you were the same way, but my family sent me a bunch of photos of the eclipse. So I got to see photos of the eclipse, but not the actual eclipse, even though we were in the range of totality. So I got to see it. It didn't matter in the end, right? So it took me right back inside where I had more conversations about higher ed. That's why we're here, like I say at the beginning. And you've been having a lot of conversations this week. AWS, obviously, is a critical, critical partner of Ellucian, of higher education in general. Talk about what's going on. You have this ability to have a more business technology view on one industry on higher ed that when we're looking from the inside out, we can get clouded by the vernacular that we have in higher ed, by some of the inertia that exists, faculty, staff, students, there's so many things happening. It's good to have the perspective of somebody who's looking outside in to tell us what the state of the industry looks like. What do you think about higher ed these days? What's going right? What's going wrong? Give us your lay of the land.

Valerie Singer: I love how you brought in that word "clouded," so that just is a really good entry point for us. You know, it is a good time and an interesting time for education. Of course, I think I'm not the only one who has observations that higher education is in a state of change. And so not only is it that higher education institutions are dealing with retention issues, they're dealing with making sure that students have a lot of support as they enter their institution until the time they graduate. They want to make sure that education is meaningful and has outcomes. And then when you look at the back office of education, what do they do with the data stores that they have? How do they continue to expand their community outreach? How do they continue to expand their alumni outreach? There's a lot of, I think, institutional challenges on the back end. 

And so when you think about all of that, that sometimes you can kind of get, I guess, paralyzed by that or in the case of Amazon Web Services, we come in and we really work, seek to understand what the exigent business problems are, help them work backwards from their problems to solve what we can with technology and then overlay it with just excellence in our partner community, excellence with subject matter experts who can really help us to help transform education.

Joe Sallustio: I love what you said. There's a lot in what you said, right? It sounds simple the way you say it, it's really complicated for us in higher ed. Right now, particularly, data is a thing, right? We have data we need to protect. We have student data we need to protect. We're very, the industry is very open to hacking. You know, there's, I don't know who it was, I probably shouldn't even say the school name, but it was last week or the week before, shut down this school's ability to enroll students for a day. I mean, this industry is really porous when it comes to data leaks and so on.

But we have so much sensitive data for students, social security, I mean, just name it. So we have to protect the data. We have artificial intelligence now and everybody, I was joking with a bunch of CIOs, everybody wants to poke information into an artifact. We want to take all of our proprietary information and stick it in AI and realize, wait a second, now it's public and we don't have control over it, but the average user doesn't know that. You know, AWS has probably been running AI for however many years, right? So when we talk AI and we talk Amazon, it's not like a new thing, but it's new to the general consumer who goes, "I use AI, Valerie, I use AI," right? So how should we perceive technological advancement in an industry that has been somewhat averse to technological advancement?

Valerie Singer: Such a good question. And so let's go back to the Amazon and AWS use cases that you talked about, because of course we've been doing AI for a long time. It's what drives recommendation engines in everything that you buy from Amazon, for instance, and so we've been doing this for a long time. Generative AI is different from AI and ML. You're generating something, generating content.

Joe Sallustio: See there, you already started to... The average layman, we don't know that. AI is AI. Whatever, all grouped together, right?

Valerie Singer: It is, but you know, that's what's important for higher education institutions to also understand is what is the application? What am I really using? Do I need Gen AI for this or is it a chatbot that I can just use AI? Should I use machine learning for instance to do pattern matching on my data? But before we get to any of that and this is super important and back to what you said Joe, is like the data is everywhere. Like how do we... you know how can higher education institutions take advantage of data? They can do it by aggregating their data, by having a data platform, by having a data journey and by really making sure that once they get it all in one place and they're getting a lot of data like we heard on stage today from Adam McDonald at the Hechinger Institute, he's talking about all the financial payment systems and the mobile systems and all that data is coming in. How do we make sense of that so that we know that students as they're coming into the university have already, you know, they've already made all their payments so they're not getting stuck in FAFSA forms and they can, you know, matriculate.

Joe Sallustio: You said something that triggers us all now, FAFSA. It's triggering everybody. Tell them like it is. It's a tough time for us in higher ed to understand what's going on because we're trying to project business models, maybe invest in new technology, move data to a more secure system without actually being able to project revenue because we don't know how many students are going to fill out the FAFSA. It's this really funky time and we're struggling. I think it's an industry. And we look to companies like AWS to tell us sometimes it's all going to be okay. There are business issues you have to work through as an organization, which we are, we're organizations, we're institutions, but we're organizations, we have businesses. It's hard to see that sometimes, you know, and AWS has been there and done that.

Valerie Singer: It's all going to be okay, Joe. So let's talk a little bit about Gen AI and that particular model, why Gen AI is important to students. And so when we talk about student assessment, we talk about student well-being, we have data points that can show us what's happening in the university that we can then take action on, right? So I'll give you an example. We have a university in Canada who is using chatbots to take input from students who may be suffering, who aren't going to class and they don't know why they're not going to class and to point them to the right resources but they can also mediate these challenges for students before they get to be big challenges. And so that's super important for student success. It's super important for student retention. It's also very important for the student's mental health and well-being while they're on campus. And so it just increases the likelihood that a student's going to succeed over the long term. So those are AI and Gen AI capable use cases that have a really demonstrable effect, right?

Let's talk about though another part that you just talked about and that's security. And security is so important, right? And so AWS takes everything we do... it's, it's security wraps around everything. Job one, right? Like if we're not a secure platform from the physical layer, meaning the data centers all the way up to how we help you execute your software development layer, then we're not doing our job. And so we make sure that all of our services, including our Gen AI services, our chips that support Gen AI like Tranium and Inferentia are all very, very secure from the ground up. And so, you know, we also have a shared security model and that means that higher education institutions will help them to architect in a way that's secure. But it's something that we take very, very seriously so that when data is in the cloud, we can be sure that if it's architected properly, and we will help you with that, that it is a secure system in which to operate.

Joe Sallustio: You have like security teams and councils and you know, so like everything's running through some group of people that are trying to poke holes into it to try to make sure that it's secure.

Valerie Singer: Yeah, we also have something called a well-architected framework, which we help our customers really start to look back on some of their controls. Like are they keeping, you know, S3 buckets open? Do they have auto scaling on, you know, just like, you know, basic best practices, exactly.

Joe Sallustio: Right. Because that helps the blocking and tackling as it were, or layup drills since with a national championship was last night, you know, the layup drills are important. You have to run certain checks on your technology. How do we think about AWS, right? So AWS is kind of behind the scenes powering things. If the average user at a university doesn't know what AWS is doing for them, how do I think about that? Look, what is AWS doing for my institution as a partner institution or through Ellucian? How are you powering things in a way that I might understand so that as I do my job, I really get what AWS is doing for me?

Valerie Singer: Sure, so let me talk a little bit, let me go backwards and tell you what AWS is. And then I'm also going to, I also want to kind of go into some other line of reasoning behind this one. You know, AWS is basically pay as you go, compute, networking, storage infrastructure, and a lot of other services behind the scenes. And so our customers can use AWS when they want, they can turn it on, they can turn it off, they can scale up, they can scale down as requirements are needed. 

So let's just say for instance for the sake of higher education you have like times when you have more compute that's needed, when students are coming in in August and September, when they're registering for classes, during graduation maybe there's some other big spikes in overall activity. And so AWS allows you to scale up and scale down depending on what the compute needs are and that means that you're not buying extraneous compute power and you can have it at the ready. And we take care of all the infrastructure behind the scenes.

Joe Sallustio: Epic.

Valerie Singer: We have 200 plus services. We have databases, we have security services, we have information services in ERP. And we have a huge systems integrator group, a portfolio like some that are here at this conference who can help to implement as well. We're not all alone, right? We have a huge ecosystem behind us and so it's really important to take advantage of that. It's a great way to scale and to make sure that you can perpetuate in the cloud for a lot longer and to get the value out of that as your higher education institution advances.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, it's so helpful that you described it in that way. And you all have won a partner award. Have you not?

Valerie Singer: We did. We're Cloud Partner of the Year.

Joe Sallustio: Cloud Partner of the Year. So kudos to you for all the hard work AWS is doing to serve higher ed. You have to have good partners to work with the technology to serve the student, right? It just doesn't happen. There's an ecosystem around a student and AWS is one of those companies. Talk about the value proposition of AWS a little bit. What are those key things that you think are of great value to institutions?

Valerie Singer: Well, you know what, I'm going to change that up a little bit if you don't mind.

Joe Sallustio: You can do whatever you want on this podcast.

Valerie Singer: Thank you. You know, because you kind of touch on something, Joe, that's really important, and that's that, you know, cloud computing is obviously, you know, a very large business, not just for AWS, but there are other hyperscalers in this world, obviously. And one of my biggest commitments is to make sure that the next generation of learners has the opportunity to participate in this environment. And so one of our commitments as AWS is to make sure that we're training those next generation of learners. And so what that means is not just for higher education institutions like two and four year colleges, but also boot camps and groups offering micro-credential post-secondary type of education. Right. Because we really are committed to making sure that we provide educational opportunities that are lifelong and applicable for everybody.

Joe Sallustio: We talk in higher ed, we always say higher education all the time. We're really talking about post-secondary education and higher ed for two and four year degrees are one path a student can take. There's all a lot of other pathways.

Valerie Singer: Yes, exactly. And so we're talking a lot about AI, for instance, but digital skills at its core are really necessary for students as in any really more any domain when they're coming out of their educational pathway to find a good job. And so we want to make sure that we are working with employers, which we do, to map the skills that are required back into curriculum and then that the employers, especially in the communities they're serving, whether that's in Missouri where you are or that's in Washington, DC, where I am or in New York or outside of the United States and various other countries like Germany, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Singapore, we also have tech alliances that we build that ecosystem of employers that are working with our education providers. We're providing the digital skills content so that when our learners come out, they have really good paying jobs that have a high growth potential, regardless of whether that's tech or non-tech. But we're spending a lot of time mapping those skills back to data analysts, software development engineering, cloud support associates, cyber analysts, just to make sure that these students really have a place where they can go if they want to apply those skills.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing! Are there enough workers in those industries to serve the amount of jobs that are going to be coming, I mean probably already here, cloud computing, I mean everything you just said I can't repeat it because you're way smarter than me, but all those tech areas, it's like I know there cannot be enough people to be in those jobs.

Valerie Singer: No and you know what's really astonishing is that Gartner said last year it like kind of like stopped me in my tracks but last year a Gartner analyst by the name of Lydia Leong said at the rate that we're going with this gap enterprises and big companies and even small companies are going to start scaling back their level of innovation if they can't find the workers that they need to continue to adapt right and so this is a necessity right but it's also an area for students to, like I said, participate whether they're tech or non-tech. We're going to need AI skills, right? We're going to need to know how to apply artificial intelligence to everything from recruiting to financial analysis to operations to procurement to marketing. All of that is going to have AI built into it somewhere. And so to have those really strong skills and understand how it's applied is necessary for our students.

Joe Sallustio: You talked about AWS and its impact on higher ed that's only gonna get larger, right? The impact for AWS on higher ed gets larger as higher ed post-secondary education continues to grow. We have two things happening, and you know this, we have the question of the value of a degree, and at the same time we have an explosion of people looking at alternative credentials outside of higher ed. Sometimes, I think we look at them separately, but it really can be a wheel, right? Maybe you're not ready for the degree now, so you go to get a skill and then you end up in a degree later. So people are taking different pathways. How will AWS scale as higher education, post-secondary education continues to look different? Different pathways, different skills, skills of the future. You guys must be looking forward going, okay, this is what, just give me the secret. What are we looking at 10 years from now in higher ed?

Valerie Singer: Such a great question. I mean, I think I've talked a lot about how employers are really having a voice now in how education has to evolve in order for education to be relevant. But we don't want to like break apart the learning and curiosity and sort of the serendipitous nature of education. And so we'll still always have that where students can take pathways that they want to take. But where students want pragmatic skills that they can then apply in jobs for lots of reasons. You really touched on a couple of them. One is the cost of education is high and so the efficiency by which a student goes through that pathway and gets to a job has to be something that we keep in mind. 

So I talked a little bit in the keynote about an example at Portland State University which is one of my favorites where they're taking transfer students and making sure that they're optimizing their credits and pushing students to the best courses to get them through their coursework and to their degree so that they're not wasting three credits or more added time.

Joe Sallustio: Don't add time or credits or years. It's expensive, right? I mean, three credits is not cheap.

Valerie Singer: 100%. We want to make sure that these efficiencies are built into the system. And so we can do that. And our partners like Ellucian help us do that as well, right? With Journey AI and making sure that our students are pathing to the right things that are really helping build that efficiency. So that's one part of it. We still want the curiosity. And we want to also recognize that not every student, like you said, takes a common pathway.

There are some students that with whom we're working who've gone through really strange pathways. We have a student, an example, a student at City University of New York at Queensborough Community College who is a massage therapist and wanted to re-skill with digital skills, came in and did a two-year degree in computer science, is now an analyst at Morgan Stanley. So there's lots of ways that we can help our students adapt to a different framework, a different setup, catch them where they are and often technology can be an underpinning of that to help to just catch the student. I identify the student and make sure that then we as humans can do something with that information.

Joe Sallustio: By the way, the president of Queensborough Community College, Claudia Schrader, she was the first African-American female president we interviewed on this podcast in 2020, maybe 2021, long time ago.

Valerie Singer: You can believe it. So close the circle on that. We're doing a lot of work with City University of New York and they're just doing great work with us, New York job CEO council and the mayor's office. So it's a great partnership. Dr. Matos Rodriguez over there is doing a lot of great work to move CUNY forward. A lot of great schools in the system.

Joe Sallustio: Well done. I love the story. Let's give you open mic. What else do you want to say about AWS, your work leading global higher education, global education?

Valerie Singer: There's a lot of really creative work going on in the United States and there's a ton going on outside the United States. So it's, you know, I think it's a really interesting world. I think we're all sort of grappling with some of the same issues, regardless of whether you're the UK or you're Canada or you're in Australia or you're in Germany, right? I think we're still looking at what is a value base of education and what is it preparing our students to do. And do we need to reinvent a little bit of the experience of our students? And so I think for me, Gen AI is a promise of that.

We need to make sure that for instance we're assessing and diagnosing our students' capabilities as they go versus like a two-week testing cycle. We can do it now as we go so that we can capture students where they are and we can really make sure that they're having the experiences that they need to have. We can wrap our higher education and our other education providers around with a lot of services they didn't have access to before like chatbots and like connected services and you know like call centers to be able to answer basic questions for students. And so like I think this is a really interesting time for education, but what we need to get to is equity. 

Yes, so where we get to with equity is recognizing that students like you said come from all walks of life and they're entering these journeys in different ways. And we need to make sure that we're recognizing that and that means a system change. Which is like I said one of the reasons why we're working with employers, so we have an employer for instance in Texas who said, you know what, we need to retrain our whole HR team because they don't know how to recognize these applications from student learners who look different than we've ever seen before. And so there's a lot of change that needs to happen in the system and we're really seeing that evolve slowly. From the Amazon side, we're able to actually unhook a two and four year degree from our job descriptions if we think that it's not necessary. So that's a power that we're given as hiring managers.

Joe Sallustio: And that's just like an edict that comes down saying, hey, unhook them if you don't think they're relevant and you can hire skills for this job, you're hiring manager, you get to decide.

Valerie Singer: 100%. That's so in our basic qualifications, I can take it off. I'll put in, for instance, instead of that, maybe experience or a microcredential or a badge. And so this is going to happen, I think, much faster than we think. I mean, it started slow. And I think this is really, we're starting to really recognize that that's the way to create equity, to make sure that everybody has a pathway in, regardless of how they learn. You know, just super interesting time to be here and I'm very much happy to be a part of it and having our little, you know, stake in the ground about how technology can actually change that.

Joe Sallustio: I don't think the stake is that little. It's kind of a bigger stake that you're putting in the ground. But I will tell you, you said commonality. The only commonality about people and their pathway to post-secondary education, there is no commonality. Like the fact that it is about it not being standard and straight. It's a little messy. And messy is good, right? Messy is good. Like get things as they come to you, prove out your skills, go back and get a degree if you want to or don't. I mean, that's the beauty. We should be able to choose our own adventure and not be put into a box. I think that's what AWS is really doing is open up the possibilities for us in higher education.

I've been struggling with my outro. My partner said I need to do a better outro. I think I've got it down now, but I want to thank you, Valerie. Let's outro Valerie here. Here she is, Valerie Singer. She is GM for Global Education at Amazon Web Services. Did you have a good time on the podcast today? The information was there, but I want to make sure you had fun.

Valerie Singer: This is the best. This is like the height of my day. Thank you so much,

Joe Sallustio: I'll give you the 10 bucks that I promised you later for saying that. Here you have it. This is another great, see I'm already struggling with my outro. Another episode of the EdUp Experience podcast. Remember, be excellent to each other. You've just ed upped.