Katie: [0:43] Hi, my name is Katie Zandbergen and I am the Community Manager here at the Forum. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Paul LeBlanc, who is in his sixteenth year as President of Southern New Hampshire University. It might surprise you to learn that SNHU is now the single largest university in the United States. But this is testimony to the incredibly work Paul that and his colleagues have carried out over the last decade and a half. Paul is hands-down one of the most influential people in Higher Education, and if there’s an award in this field that Paul hasn’t won, we’d be surprised. Paul and Clay [Christensen] have been friends since grad school, and students of the BSSE course will see evidence of the frameworks that we teach all over the work which Paul and his team are engaged. Our conversation touches on Paul’s own background, innovation and higher education, students’ Jobs to be Done, Competency-Based Learning, SNHU’s work in refugee camps, and new initiatives currently on Paul’s radar screen. Those of our listeners hoping for shining examples of Clay’s theories in action or wanting to learn more about the future of higher education won’t be disappointed. Without further ado, let me bring you to our conversation.

Katie: [1:48] Welcome to the podcast, Paul. Last July, in an article in which you reflected on 15 years at SNHU you wrote, "So much of the innovation for which SNHU is known was created by applying the work of Clay Christensen, the famous Harvard Business School professor, long time board member, and friend of 35 years. When asked to share our story, I often begin with Clay's work and how we applied it." Can you, first, tell our listeners a bit about your own background, and also about your friendship with Clay?

Paul: [2:13] Sure. My own background is as an immigrant first generation college graduate who grew up in the Boston area. My parents had eighth grade educations and we grew up in a neighborhood where we didn't know anyone who went to college. So that story is one that drives a lot of my work and a lot of my team's work, in terms of reaching out to people who might not otherwise find their pathway to higher education, at a time when they need it more than ever. In doing so, we really have felt that we've needed to rethink the way higher education works.

Paul: [2:42] It works really well for some folks, but not so much for others. Clay's work's been very influential. And that’s a, that's in some ways a conversation that extends over 35 years, because I was in graduate school at B.C. and was looking for a place to play hoops on Saturday mornings. Clay was at the gym that I had discovered in Cambridge, and we started out together playing basketball.

Paul: [3:01]The joy of that really has been the opportunity, over years of conversation, to see his thinking and his work unfold, and the research that illuminate theories that he was testing out.

Katie: [3:12] So what awaited you when you first arrived at SNHU, and how have Clay's theories helped to shape the development of the university since that time, particularly in terms of the disruption of higher education?

Paul: [3:22] Sure. A small, regional, probably more accurately, local school that was not very well known, maybe not known at all outside of a pretty tight geographic circle. About 2500 students, mostly traditional undergraduate, living on campus and studying there. And a small online program that was doing good work, but really wasn't a major part of the whole. It was kind of chugging along and doing its thing. When I arrived, I will say, when you assume a new presidency you have to treat it like you've been dealt a hand in a poker game.

Paul: [3:54] You might want to think about, "What would be my best cards to play?" My best card, I thought at that point, was to take the online division, really run with it. But to do that, and this is where some of Clay's work pertains, I knew that there would be a lot of resistance to the kind of changes we would want to make. So the first thing is, I moved it away. I moved it a couple miles away into the milliards of Manchester, where I got some psychic distance, if you will.

Paul: [4:17] And then I gave them the permission to think about new rules. We didn't have the jobs-to-be-done language at the time. That research came later, as you know, but we started thinking about, "Who do we serve and how do we have to serve them differently? And how do we build, how do we optimize what we're doing for that audience?" So we gave that group permission to do that, and part of my job was to buffer, right, to stand between the mothership of the traditional organization and the thing we were trying to build.

Paul: [4:42] Because, as Clay would say, the incumbent organization treats this new thing like foreign tissue. We either incorporate it, or we sort of kick it out some way, and my job was to prevent that dynamic from playing out. After that, we really used a lot of the work of disruptive innovation, of course. The internet is sort of the mainstay, but thinking, what was the core that we were trying to change? How would we think differently about those core functions? And then, of course, reaching audiences for whom there was not another great option. So again, Clay talks about under-consuming and non-consuming audiences. So all of that work played out in that effort over those years.

Katie: [5:18] I noticed on your website that SNHU makes a distinction between the online experience, the campus experience, the military student experience, and the international student experience. Could you tell us a bit more about those distinctions, and in particularly through the lenses of jobs-to-be-done theory?

Paul: [5:34] If you think about a traditional aged student who comes out of high school and comes to our residential campus, they're certainly looking for an education, and they want reassurances that it will lead to meaningful work. But they're also looking for a coming of age experience that includes playing on teams, being in student government, falling in love, sometimes drinking too much beer on a Friday night, study abroad, leadership opportunities, that whole package. Right? And so we would call that the coming of age job. Then, if you shift over to our online students, typical age 35, they have a couple of kids, 86 percent of them are working full-time. They are stuck, which is why they're coming back and doing this hard thing. They've had all the coming of age they can handle. They have other needs that they ...

Paul: [6:13] They need us to be more convenient. They need us to be affordable. They need to get to the finish line as fast as they can. They need all of that package, and the 18 year old on our campus doesn't care that much about those things.

Paul: [6:25] So I think one of the mistakes we often see with institutions that try to move into the online space is, they take the policies and systems and the way they deliver education for 17 year olds, and they often just try to put it into virtual space. But it's a different job, and you have to think differently if you want to optimize for your audience.

Paul: [6:45] There are, again, military students. They have a similar job to our regular adult learners. They want a degree that's going to make a change in their life. They want it to unlock opportunity, but they often want a kind of understanding of their experience that they often struggle to get in the nonmilitary populace. So most of our advisors and our staff who work with military are themselves veterans or of military families. And there's a different kind of authority they can bring to the conversation because of that. So for each of those populations, different job, and we optimize ourselves differently.

Katie: [7:17] So you touched on different groups of students having different jobs-to-be-done. Thinking about that from the point of view of the support that the university provides students, one of the features of your model that we're particularly intrigued by is the central role that advisors play in the success of your students. Can you talk to us a bit more about the system? For instance, how does it differ for the students on campus and those who are taking courses online? Who makes a good advisor? And why is this system so important for a student's success?

Paul: [7:45] Advising is really critical to our success, particularly for our online students, because if you're a student on campus, there's a whole lot of apparatus built around you. One of its key messages is that you really matter. Right? We're going to sort of build for you.

Paul: [8:00] If you are studying online with us, that can often feel like an isolating experience. Right? It's 9:00 at night, you're in your dining room. You're working on a paper. It's hard. In the next room you hear your spouse and your kids laughing at whatever TV show they're watching. And it's really, can feel sort of separate and isolating. So the advisor, in many ways, is the critical piece that says, "You matter," because they're the one who knows you, knows about your work life, they know about your family life, they know what you're struggling with, they know where you're succeeding. They're checking on you.

Paul: [8:33] And part of that, of course, is to keep you on track, and part of that is to get you the support you need to be successful. But the secondary benefit of that is really the sense of, "No-no. It matters to me that you're in this struggle. It matters to me that you're progressing." So I think it's a really critical piece of the human factor, if you will. We, in higher ed, tend to talk about the what, so curriculum, what courses, what programs, what outcomes, what competencies? Those are really important.

Paul: [9:00] We tend to spend less time on the how we make people feel in their learning experience. I just listened to Danny Meyers, the great restaurateur from New York, talk about this. He would say, "Really good food and really good service is table stakes." Like, that's what you're supposed to do. All right? But the atmosphere and the feeling you get when you walk into one of his restaurants, how you leave, how you feel when you leave, is actually the magic.

Paul: [9:25] I would argue that the educational experience is the table stakes. It's critical. It's what we have to do. If you're not doing that, forget everything else. But a lot of people do that well. It's really what have the transactional human interactions, the support, that sense of how people feel about their experience, is the critical piece for us. Advisors are the linchpin of that.

Paul: [9:49] We see this at graduation, where thousands of our students fly in from all over the country, and sometimes around the world, for graduation. The most emotional moments are when people who have worked with this advisor for two, three, five, six years, where they meet for the first time, physically.

Paul: [10:03] Right? Because they know about each other's kids. They know about their families. And we think, "Was that really the job of an advisor?" And it's like, "That's exactly the job of an advisor." So they need to make sure you're on the right course. They need to make sure you get the right prerequisite. They need to make sure you're getting help you need. But they really need to make sure that you feel part of something bigger than yourself.

Katie: [10:21] From an administrator's point of view, could you elaborate on the online versus the traditional classroom experience, in terms of the technology that you have available, the analytics and the data, the numbers that you're interested in?

Paul: [10:34] If you think about the traditional delivery of academics, or traditional higher ed, we hire really wonderful faculty, full time faculty mostly. We put them in classrooms and we have a sort of a leap of faith because we don't really see very much once they close the door. We get a little bit of optics at midterms, with the grades, and maybe if someone complains. Then we sort of do student evaluations at the end. But by and large, we're trusting that the faculty are doing a great job. We know some are. We know some maybe not so much. And we know there's probably a lot in the middle.

Paul: [10:05] Contrast that to online where we have systems and processes that allow us to look at every section, 24/7. We know when students are in, when they're out, what they're spending their time on. We know when faculty are engaging. We know what the response time is to student questions. We know how long it's taking people to complete assignments and then to get the grades back to students. All of that is monitored. There's a big data analytics team, 75 people who run all of that analysis.

Paul: [10:31] Separately from that we have, every single week, a master teacher look in on every single section of every single class, thousands of them. So they do a qualitative assessment. And you know, an experienced teacher can take, in about 15 minutes can pretty much know if good things are happening or if there are issues. If there are issues, we flag those and people follow up with a faculty member. That's a level of quality assurance that we can't touch on a traditional campus. In fact, if we tried to do it we'd probably be burned in effigy. Right? That's just a different culture.

Paul: [12:00] But we have to do it because of just the very different modality in which we work. It's the way we can reassure ourselves that there is rigor, high quality, and the students are having a good experience.

Katie: [12:11] In positioning SNHU as a disruptor in higher education, what has the impact of this been on your business model, and how have you scaled your program? You had mentioned that you set the online learning part of the university up as a separate unit, but I was reading, for instance, that you have been setting up cross-functional teams and so on. So what other impacts has it had, from a business model perspective?

Paul: [12:34] We have a relentless focus on, "How do we create more affordable pathways for people?" In each of those instances we send a sort of cycle through Clay's playbook again. Right? So when we wanted to grow our online enrollments in our program, as I described earlier, we separated off from the traditional campus. When we wanted to invent direct assessment competency based education, this was the first program of its kind to be approved by the U.S. Department of Ed.

Paul: [12:58] It was interesting because the online folks like, "No, we can do that. We can do that." And we're like, "No, we're actually going to separate this out because it's quite different, and we're trying to do something different here." What's interesting about that notion of the incumbent wanting to control the new thing is that it's not about ill intent. It's not about people not wanting to do the right thing. It's an organizational dynamic that's just really powerful.

Paul: [13:18] So we knew that if we need to do this and we need to look very different than traditional online, we couldn't let the online folks do it, because the natural inclination is kind of reinvent it in your own image. So in each of these cases we continue to work at finding new models, more affordable models. We know that too many people are being left out, and too many people are being left behind. As we do that, and as we try to lower costs, we have to deploy technology in new ways, and more sort of radical ways.

Paul: [13:43] We know, for example, they're probably going to be using a lot more voice bots and AI in some of our administrative processes. We have stood up an assessment center in Kigali, Rwanda, which lowers the costs of assessments in our CBU program by 60 percent. So we're constantly tinkering with the business model and the underlying financials and systems. The challenge we've put out for ourselves today, there's a team working on it and it's a nearly impossible one, is how do we lower the direct cost of delivery to $100 a month?

Paul: [14:15] Because that's the cost we need to be at if we're going to continue to serve refugees, as we do now in Africa and the Middle East. It's the price we need to be at if we're going to be in Latin America. And these are places that desperately need the educational experiences that we offer, but we have to be able to do it in a way that's sustainable.

Katie: [14:31] You mentioned the competency-based model of education, as opposed to the credit-

Paul: [14:34 ] Credits-based, credit.

Katie: [14:34] ... the credit hour course based. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

Paul: [14:40] Sure. Most of higher education has been built around the credit hour. And the credit hour was never invented to do what we ask it to do. It was invented by the Carnegie Foundation, as you probably know, to figure out how to pay pensions to retired faculty members. This was early in the last century. But if you think about it, the credit hour is really good one thing. It's really good at telling you how long someone sat. Right? Three hours a week, in a classroom. It's actually not very good or effective at telling you what they actually learned.

Paul: [15:08] So the thing that gets fixed in a credit hour world is time, and the thing that's variable is learning. If you and I are in the same class, we're both going to sit for 14 weeks. You get an A; I probably get a C. The thing that's variable is the learning. So in competency-based education we flip that variable, and the thing that becomes fixed is the learning, and the thing that becomes variable is time.

Paul: [15:31] So if you're really good at math, maybe you work in a family business and you've been the bookkeeper for 20 years, and you look at the math competencies and say, "I got those. I can do those today." It's like, "Show us. Do the assessments." If you can, if you show mastery, then we move you on to the next. That could be a week. If it takes me a year and a half to do the math competencies, then it takes me a year and a half. What's not negotiable is that we both will end in the same place in terms of mastery.

Paul: [15:56] And that's really critical to the world at large. Right? Employers feel like they hire too many college grads who can't write, who can't do math, who can't do some of the things that they used to expect, or that they used to associate with a college degree. So that's the fundamental piece. And when you change that, you change everything. If you think about it, the credit hour as it's currently constituted is how we unitize knowledge. Courses are three credit hour chunks, and we kind of know what that looks like.

Paul: [16:21] Faculty workload is apportioned in three credit hour chunks. How many three credit hour courses are you teaching? Our resources, our classrooms, are allocated on three hours of meeting time every week. And most importantly we give $153 billion of federal financial aid every year based on the credit hour. None of that has anything to do with learning. So when you flip that, it's almost like the Higgs boson particle. Right? The credit hour is the dark matter that holds together higher ed. If you flip that polarity then you can start to think about education in a very different way.

Paul: [16:51] We have somebody go from zero credits to an associate's degree in 100 days. And we could radically lower the price because we're not doing a lot of things that you do in a traditional delivery model. So he did that, he got his associate's degree in 100 days for $1250. Now, he's an extraordinary case. Most people take two years to do an associate's and they chip away at it like everybody else. But it's affordable and it works and it's proven.

Katie: [17:16] You mentioned the skills gap between the competencies the graduates have and the skills that employers are looking for. There's a lot of headlines about this right now, the skills gap in the U.S. I recently came across an article in Inside Higher Ed that was called, "Next for SNHU, Gain Based Learning and Digital Badges for Middle Schoolers," which touched on how the university's online division is hoping to create a seamless pathway between K-12 education, college, and post college employment.

Katie: [17:39] The article discusses how SNHU acquired the Chicago-based nonprofit called LRNG, that helps young people to find job opportunities by encouraging them to acquire digital badges on its game-based learning platform. Of this announcement, the former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has said, "The merger of LRNG and SNHU is exciting to me because both have demonstrated a fierce commitment to underserved youth, both excel at linking learning to work, and both know how to scale." Could you tell our listeners a bit more about this up and coming initiative?

Paul: [18:14]Let me put it in context first, which is, our thesis, really, is that we have to move to a model of higher education that we might better think about as a platform. It's a platform into which people will go in and out of all of their life, because the nature of work is changing and accelerating. And we want to be able to create a kind of learning ecosystem that isn't a single transaction. It's not us talking you into a two year degree and then saying goodbye and hoping you'll write us an alumni check occasionally. It's not a four year degree. It's actually a system or a platform that you can go in and out of as you need.

Paul: [18:46] We keep talking about, can we build a platform that gives people just the right learning at just the right time, in just the right amount for where they are? And that could be an 11th grader working on their associate's degree or a 60 year old formerly incarcerated adult who needs a high school degree, and everything in between. In that model we think about a greater range of credentials and more granularity. So we stop thinking about two and four year degrees and master's degrees. We think about badges and micro-credentials and micro-master's and all kinds of learning that could be just in time.

Paul: [19:16] I need to go to YouTube for an hour," to being, "I need two years of head's down work to get this degree. So if you think about this sort of broad platform in which you have much more fluidity and flexibility than you have today, then you think about what needs to be built out. So we have the higher ed piece of this. We have the traditional degrees. We are building the micro-credentials that we also see as needed in the workplace.

Paul: [ 19:41]For example, in Massachusetts we worked with Partners Health, which is the single largest employer in the state, to create a Partners micro-credential for frontline nonclinical healthcare workers. So it's not a degree, but it's an entry way credential that allows people to progress within Partners and show that they have some skills. LRNG fills in a piece of the platform for us.

Paul: [20:02] They work with low income youth, middle school through early 20s, overwhelmingly urban, overwhelmingly students of color, overwhelmingly poor. What they create are learning sequences. We might say curriculum in our world. They would say playlists, because young people understand playlists. Playlists are curated sequence of learning that result in a badge. A badge unlocks an opportunity related to work.

Paul: [20:27] So they teamed up with The Gap, for example, to do a workforce readiness, or workplace readiness playlist, sequence of learning, some 20 minutes, some longer. When students or young people finish that playlist they get the Gap endorsed badge. That badge unlocks a guaranteed job interview at a Gap store. For many of these kids, it's their first job.

Paul: [20:48] They teamed up with the Chicago Summer Youth Employment Program to do a financial literacy playlist. In that playlist, you again move through a sequence of learning about personal finance, and it unlocks your first paycheck. So if you get employed by the Summer Youth Employment Program you literally can't get paid until you've earned that badge. Why is that important? They see a significant uptick in kids, poor kids, having their first checking accounts, and not having to go to a check shop on Friday and pay a percentage of their salary to get their check cashed.

Paul: [21:18] So this important stuff. In all of these cases, you're linking a engaged learner where there's a payoff at the end with a credential that someone recognizes. LRNG works with Apple on Swift coding, through their Everyone Can Code program, so it's not just these sort of basic things like workforce readiness, it's also higher technical skills. We see the ability to work with them to engage young people earlier, to kind of reach upstream from where traditional higher ed typically goes, to engage a middle schooler or high-schooler.

Paul: [21:50] We hope what'll happen is that, as these badges unlock opportunities, students will increasingly want to move into things like our affordable competency based program and the kinds of degrees that could lead to even more meaningful work. So it's part of an ecosystem, and it fills an important piece of that. What we also like about what they do is that they have a youth-inspired, youth-informed design principle. We tend, in higher education, to design learning for the way we liked to learn, or the way we like to learn.

Paul: [22:17] There's hubris in that... It's not clear to me that a 16 year old in inner city Chicago wants to learn the same way I did. And I think what LRNG does really well is to bring young people into their design principle process.

Katie: [22:30] The article mentioned the relevance the libraries might have, in terms of promoting education and acquiring skills. Could you tell us a bit more about the potential for libraries?

Paul: [22:42] When we created College for America in that original 2011 whitepaper that I wrote on a long flight from Malaysia, part of the notion was that we would democratize higher education in the sense that we would be able to reverse this, "Come to us and come our campuses and learn from us," to, "Let us give you the tools to educate people in your community, where you are." And I think we had a sort of idealistic vision. So it would be like, the folks who teach ESL in church basements could now offer an associate's degree. Social service agencies could now offer college education to people who aren't going to get themselves to a campus.

Paul: [23:18] And we've seen some of that, of course. We've been working with a lot of charter schools. But we had this notion that, if you think about libraries, they make for the ideal partners for us. Right? It's a great space in which to go and do work. For a kid in an overcrowded, noisy apartment where it's hard to concentrate, you can get to a learning space that might have a better internet connection and a better computer than the one you may have, or may not have at home.

Paul: [23:45] When you think about librarians, they're deeply wired to help people. So they make great learning coaches. And in some communities, libraries are underused. Libraries are reinventing themselves, I think, in interesting ways. In Birmingham, Alabama, we're rolling out one of these city-level ecosystem solutions, where we work with employers and the mayor's office and other educational partners. What we hope to do is to be able to work with the library system and maybe even co-locate an office in the main library, kind of a We Work for Education.

Paul: [24:14] So, when I say office I don't mean a traditional office. I mean a kind of cool, flexible learning space in that library, because libraries are well distributed. They tend to be in all the neighborhoods. They have great people, as I said. And they're a municipal resource that we could leverage very powerfully, I think.

Katie: [24:28] You mentioned the idea of bringing learning to where people are. You had also briefly touched on refugee camps where you guys are doing a lot of work. Could you tell our listeners a bit more about what SNHU is doing, for instance, in Rwanda?

Paul: [24:42] Sure. We started in Rwanda, in Kigali actually, with an on-the-ground partner, Kepler University. They grant our competency-based degree program. It was during a visit to that program that one of their key people said, "You know, I volunteer in a refugee camp called Kiziba, a couple of hours away, three hours away and would love to take you there."

Paul: [25:04] So we went to Kiziba, and it was one of the most searing experiences of my life. This is a camp of 17,000 people, mostly Congolese, who have fled the fighting. Almost everyone there has been there for all of their life, so it's mostly young people. The camp has been there 24 years. So they have people who have never known any other place. They live on 33 cents a day. There's no modern infrastructure. The camp is remote and the level of poverty is extreme. I remember we naively brought, because of tons of kids, we brought soccer balls and toys and things to play with. They have nothing. And near riot broke out over the plastic wrappers, not just the toys, such that security guards waded in with sticks to beat children to break it up. And it was shocking, and we were naïve and hadn't thought about what that looks like. We could never bring enough toys for the thousands of kids. Right? So we created this scene. And It was a sleepless night. We sort of made our way back, this rocky road down from the mountain where the camp was located and to the local town.

Paul: [26:00] In the cars, all you could hear was either silence or soft sobbing. I think everyone was shocked. I remember a sleepless night, and someone who had stayed in the hotel before had left an old Vanity Fair, so at about 3:00 in the morning I just gave up on sleep and I was leafing through and it was obscene. Right? We had just come from this camp, and now I'm looking at magazine ads for $5000 handbags and $3000 watches.

Paul: [26:21] The next day I said to Chrystina Russell, who now works for us but who worked for Kepler at the time, she was the one who brought us. I said, "You know, I can't solve refugee crises. I can't solve food. I can't do a lot of things, but we do education. Is there something we can do?" and I think this was always her nefarious plan, was to know that that would be the result of our visit. So we agreed to give it a try, and we piloted the program. And it's met with remarkable success.

Paul: [26:45] We have 50/50 gender balance, which is really hard to do in the camps. We didn't start that way, but we learned how to do that. We've learned how to bridge, so that we give people the requisite language skills and academic skills to be successful in the program. We have managed to do internships in the local town, even though it's a long slow walk down the mountain. And those internships are so successful that 93 percent of our refugees have jobs after graduation. It's really remarkable. And 97 percent of them complete.

Paul: [27:12] So that good work, and in third party exams, compared to their counterparts in the Rwandan university system, our refugee students outperform their peers by a wide margin at every single category of the exam. So, they're great, and they're some of our best students. This work got on the radar screen of a group of mostly Silicon Valley philanthropists who came to us and said, "What could you do with $10 million?" That enabled us to, just earlier this year, expand into Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, and Lebanon, where we now operate.

Paul: [27:45] The goal is to eventually educate 50,000 refugees a year. We hope to be there in five years, if all goes well. But it's challenging. Every camp is different. The technology challenges are profound. Every camp has its own political, safety, and other concerns. Not every country has the same right to work that Rwanda offers, so we're working with companies to do things like digital internships and digital jobs. And we've had some great responses from people, but this team does amazing work. I take no credit. This team is fearless.

Katie: [28:17 ]Thinking about the future, both here in the U.S. and also abroad, which challenges and opportunities jump into your mind right away?

Paul: [28:26] When we think about challenges, no revelation to anyone, but the world is changing very fast. Technology and AI are having profound impacts. We've been spending a lot of time on what we've called the SNHU 2030 project where we're trying to identify themes that we need to think about or address in some way as we look to the future. Those themes include things like the impact of AI, the impact of VR and AR, learning environments, the impact of immersive gaming environments. You know, what do they tell us about the way learning could look in the future?

Paul: [28:58] We think about the need to educate students to be literate in multiple realities. So I am of a generation, Katie, you may be of a generation, that still thinks about going online. Generation Z is never offline. They live in a hybrid reality. But if you think about AR becoming pervasive, where you have a digital overlay on a physical reality, navigating all of that is going to look very different. What does work look like when we all have algorithmic coworkers? What does home life look like when we have algorithmic housemates?

Paul: [29:32] And the questions start to pile up and become rather profound. So we're trying to take all of those things into account. We think about the end of traditional demographics. You know, we live in an age already that, in which we know race is a social construct and on a spectrum. We know gender is a social construct and on a spectrum. We know sexual orientation is on a spectrum. So if you think about a world of spectrum demographics, where people refuse to be pigeonholed, or they present and understand themselves differently from day-to-day, that has a lot of implications because we do a lot of human societal interaction based on where we place people and how we place people.

Paul: [30:08] So these are the kinds of big questions we grapple with. Those are the fun, complicated, hairy problems. And then there are the immediate issues, you know, as we look at the math problem this country faces, which is we quite simply will not produce enough college graduates to meet the needs of the workforce in the next 10 years, so we have to educate a lot more people. We want to educate people in these new and interesting ways and models, but we don't want to lose the magic and the human values that informed the education that I loved, and I suspect you love. Right?

Paul: [30:43] So, in an online world where we get much more focused on alignment with the workforce, where's the role of the mentor? Where's the role of the person who ignites a new passion of fire in you about something? Where's the space to fail, and learn from failure? Where's the serendipity of lucking upon a novelist that you never knew before, and you read that first book and it changes the way that you think about your life? Education has to be about that, as well.

Paul: [31:10] And I think we're all coming to grips with, and are trying to understand, the ways in which education is either feeding into the inequity and disarray in our culture, in our country right now, and the ways we can be part of that solution. I see higher ed sometimes, and I'm wearing one of those hats, and sometimes wearing the other.

Katie: [31:29] Do you have any closing thoughts for our listeners? I mean, you've been talking about the role of higher education, what it is now, where it's potentially going with AI and so on.

Paul: [31:38] So, I think Clay is fond of saying that data is very good at telling you where you've been. It's a rearview mirror. I think in many ways a lot of the debates we have in higher education, a lot of the ways that we still think about higher education, are sort of a rearview mirror look at the world when we know the world is changing quickly and in dramatic ways, some of them we've talked about.

Paul: [32:01] I think the one size fits all model, which is most of higher education, if you and I enter the same institution and choose the same major, we'll have largely the same experience, as opposed to what we know about almost every other endeavor in human society, which is that it is increasingly individualized and customized to who you are.

Paul: [32:21] In an old model of higher education, higher ed was a sort of gatekeeper. We'd use some kind of averages to understand who you are. So, "How did you do on the SAT? What was your GPA?" Those are average based markers. And as Todd Rose, here at Harvard, has told us in The End of Average, average is sort of a construct that doesn't have any scientific basis. We now live in a world where we can measure, can know how you like to learn. We can measure your grit. We can know a whole lot about your life constraints and circumstances that might shape the choices you make, or should make, about how you learn.

Paul: [32:55] If you think, then, about all the ways that learning is now available to people, why would we have the hubris to think that you have to come to my institution and learn in my way? Can we build a higher education that is able to pull from all of the ways that people learn? And you don't stop learning when you step out of the classroom, obviously. In fact, on many campuses some of the best learning, we all will recall, happened in between the classes.

Paul: [33:17 ] So if you are the treasurer of student government and you're 19 years old and you manage a $2 million budget, there are some real competencies involved in that. Can we know what they are? Can we measure them? Can we give credit for them? If you are the captain of a team that's overcome tremendous challenges and went on to win the league championship, probably have some leadership abilities that employers would love. That's why employers hire athletes, in many instances. You've learned some things along the way.

Paul: [33:42] So can we broaden our understanding of learning? Can we broaden our understanding of how it happens? And can we recognize that the delivery of content is increasingly free and universal and easily accessible, and probably available now in ways that learners prefer, than the ways that we often do it in classrooms?

Paul: [34:02] If all those things are true, then the role of the university starts to shift to being one of making sense of all those ways of learning, assessing people's learning, and certifying the learning. And that really shifts the spotlight from the traditional place where we mostly talk, which is, "What do we teach? How do we teach it?" Well, those questions become a lot less relevant to, "How do we know? How can we tell what you know? And how can we give value to that? What credential can we attach to that?

Paul: [34:29 ] That's a pretty fundamental shift in the role of the universe and the way we think about the university. You don't go from being a gatekeeper, you shift that model to really understand the individual student. You don't put the student on a one size fits all track called “a major.” You have an individualized learning pathway. And you really embrace the role of assessment, because higher ed mostly does a terrible job with assessment. So we have to get good at something we're not good at.

Paul: [34:56] I don't think we own people's credentials anymore. We've done our first experiment with watching credentials. Right? Because you earned your credential. Why do you have to pay me $10 every time you want proof that you earned something that you should own? We saw this with our refugees in Lebanon, for example. The ranks of the refugees are full of doctors and lawyers and nurses, and they can't prove it. Right? The entity that owns their credential is gone, or won't talk to them.

Paul: [35:23] So we're rethinking everything about that student lifecycle and the role of the university. We'd love to be in that. If I can go back and finish with that notion of higher ed as a platform or an ecosystem, right now higher ed is transactional in the way that movie studios are transactional. Right? I'm going to talk you into coming to me for your associate's degree. I'm going to talk you into coming to me for your bachelor's or your master's. When you finish you will go away.

Paul: [35:45] We’d like to think, like a movie studio, every time I come out with a new movie I need to persuade you to come and buy it. And the next time you need another movie I'm going to have to persuade you all over again. Contrast that to Netflix, which says, "For a low monthly fee, you can have everything." So, can you imagine a learning ecosystem that says, "I'm going to make it affordable. I'm going to make it a constant in your life, and you can have anything you want, whenever you want it." That's sort of the model we're trying to understand, if that's even possible to work towards.

Katie: [36:13] Well, thank you so much, Paul, for really an insightful and an inspiring podcast. It was great to talk to you.

Paul: [36:19] Oh, my pleasure, Katie. It was really fun, fun to be with you.