CEO Conversations: The State of Higher Education

Episode Transcript

Episode Transcript


[00:00:00] Host:
You're listening to Filling Seats, the state of enrollment marketing in higher ed, hosted by StudentBridge. In this podcast, you'll learn what's working to grow, shape and sustain enrollment at colleges and universities directly from fellow enrollment marketers, thought leaders and Ed Tech innovators.

Hi. Thanks for joining this episode of Filling Seats podcast. It's one of our roadshow ones. We are in Dallas at the RNL conference. I'm joined today by two esteemed colleagues and fantastic CEOs, Vanessa Didyk, Dave Becker from CampusESP and ZeeMee with Vanessa and I'm Jonathan Clues, your host today from StudentBridge.

So yes, let's jump straight into it here in Dallas at RNL. It's a great conference. So if you're not an RNL customer, they're one of the larger consulting firms in the space, and do a great job, and we're all proud partners with RNL. Go and tell me kind of what are you sensing from this show today? What's the kind of general vibe out there for our customers? We got joint customers and partners, we might call them. But how's it looking out there?

[00:01:08] Dave Becker:
You want to kick things off? I would say a lot of great energy. I think people love coming together. This is always a great show, because there's so many great sessions. I think one of the big trends is AI. It's almost at every single show that we go to right now, and it's definitely on display here at RNL. So that's it's been interesting just seeing how AI has kind of gotten so into the industry, how it's being used. And I'd say that's probably the main theme that we're seeing.

[00:01:35] Vanessa Didyk:
The keynote is happening right now on all of RNL, so yeah, super excited to hear about that.

[00:01:42] Host:
Oh, are they recording, hopefully? So, yeah, well timed, our teams are in there. We're in our little meeting room here, so we're in a secret little bunker, hidden away from everyone. But okay, so you're seeing a good attendance. I think they were hoping for about 1200 which I think is what they got. That's super busy. Yeah, busy people are back out, walking around. I think, you know, we're all in the same space. We're trying to provide our services and solutions to people. It's been challenging for the last couple of years. But are you seeing more interest, and is that kind of what you kind of saying as well people walking around, but overall, the interesting sentiment?

[00:02:14] Dave Becker:
Yeah, I think people are excited to, like, I don't know, get back to normal. This always feels like there's something that's next, whether it's FAFSA or, I don't know, the election coming up, I just feel like there's always something. But there are these, like moments, you know, with conferences like the RNL National Conference, where I think people just have a chance to, like, reconnect, bond everybody in higher education, almost like everybody knows everybody. So it's just a great opportunity to just hit the reset button. I think in a lot of ways, just see each other.

[00:02:44] Host: 
Yeah, yeah. No, no, you've been CEO for how long with ZeeMee?

[00:02:47] Vanessa Didyk:
I think it'll be six years in October.

[00:02:50] Host:
So you've been coming to them. We will be coming to these for years, and we go to other conferences as well. I kind of, I think, for our own experience, couple of years ago, it seemed like pens were down, like, hey, you know, we want talk, but we're not really doing anything. Yeah, seeing a little bit more of a push into like, let's go fix some problems. Is that kind of what you're seeing?

[00:03:08] Vanessa Didyk:
Yeah I've seen, I'm seeing a bunch of energy in the session. So some of the sessions that I've been sitting in on, people are raising their hand, they're talking, they're participating. It's everybody seems a lot more excited, bringing in lots of you know, snapping pictures. Yeah, it's great.

[00:03:22] Host:
Tell us a little bit about ZeeMee kind of, what, what solutions you bring to help? What kind of issues?

[00:03:28] Vanessa Didyk:
Yeah we are a student engagement platform. We build community for students as they're going through the recruitment process and as they land on campus. So we're involved kind of full funnel, but recruitment oriented so from inquiry all the way to, you know, their first months on campus.

[00:03:46] Host:
We talk a lot about, like, kind of sentiment. They might call it demonstrated interest, but yeah, sentiment to buy effectively. So that must be a huge indicator, right? Hey, if you're there, like trying to find new friends or affinity groups, that's a pretty good sign that you're probably coming to that school.

[00:04:02] Vanessa Didyk:
It really is. It's both. It's sort of the conversion fuel that that will energize students and kind of push them through that conversion fuel. I can't take credit for it. Nobody on my team thought of it, but I think it was freedom, actually. Yeah, right, so, but, and actually G on our team, who mostly is, like famous in higher ed now, he says that ZeeMee is both the thermostat and the thermometer, so you can take the temperature and figure out how interested they are, but you can also kind of turn up the heat and push them, push them through.

[00:04:37] Host:  
Do you obviously part of your your value is going to be, the data of what they're talking about, yeah, how the student conversations moved? Have they shifted?

[00:04:46] Vanessa Didyk:
They were really struggling through this FAFSA delay, and I think that that was something actually just came out of the session that Raquel and Sue were doing on student sentiment and feelings. We did this huge survey. Of all these students, 9000 students in the app, and kind of like assessed sentiment over we've done it two years in a row now, but we were seeing the conversations in the app. Students were really feeling the FAFSA delay personally. And I think a lot of us were thinking of it more as just the impact on the college side, or the impact to the parents or but it was actually the kids who were probably the least prepared to manage that and deal with that and have the perspective of how this fits into their lives, and they were completely rocked by it this year.

[00:05:32] Host:
I think over the last since pandemic, we've all been kind of getting used to navigating uncharted waters. Yes, so with FAFSA. Same thing, the delay. No one was expecting it. No one knows how to navigate it. So you're seeing that community come together and support each other.

[00:05:47] Vanessa Didyk:
Absolutely, yeah, that's the best thing about ZeeMee, is seeing students support each other and community support each other. It's, it's amazing, amazing to watch. I'm hoping there's no big grenades for students next year, but you know there will be, yeah.

[00:06:05] Host:
When you see how we might call it water cooler, talk, right? So you see students engaging with other students. Is there, an outside authority ever coming in? Go, Okay, listen, I know that's what is being said, but this is actually what's happening. Or is it very much Student to Student?

[00:06:21] Vanessa Didyk:
Authority, like from the college? Yeah. I mean, yeah. So we, we create spaces sort of for both. So there's, there's these spaces that colleges create that are very student oriented and that are very much just for them to communicate with each other. I mean, they're talking about everything they're talking about, you know, the latest movies that are out, who's on tour, you know, right now, and the Swifties all bond, and, you know, like all of that happens, and then there's also spaces where the colleges can really interject and get involved and answer questions and do all of those things to provide the support students need and information.

[00:06:52] Dave Becker:
I've been surprised how much autonomy students have in the process going into college. I have twins who are who are enrolled and are going to attend in the fall. And even the roommate selection process, I think, is fascinating, because when I went to school, was just like, put your name in line, and it gets assigned. Now they're they're communicating with each other, they're networking through social networks like ZeeMee, and they're finding their own roommates. And there just feels like there's a lot more autonomy and things that they need to know about.

[00:07:24] Host:
Makes sense. Let's move to you, Dave. I mean CampusESP, doing great, helping with more the parent engagement. Parents, we talk about the students. How are you seeing trends with the parent side?

[00:07:35] Dave Becker:
Parents are very, very engaged, as everybody knows. One of the stats that we actually are profiling at the RNL conference, with Raquel Bermejo, who does a lot of the research here for RNL, is that the average parent wants to hear from the college about weekly. 80% of parents want that weekly communication. So it's a lot more. It's a lot to keep up with. And then there's always the Facebook issue, like they're on Facebook, and so trying to manage that communication on a platform like Facebook, which is just creating tons and tons of collisions with a lot of times incorrect information, it's very difficult. So we provide a platform to help colleges get the right word out to parents and family members to better support their students.

[00:08:20] Host:
So you've probably seen, like, a bit of a pendulum swing with, obviously, the drive for first, first generation students. Yeah, the parents probably weren't that engaged potentially. Well, I don't want to misspeak. Do you see certain populations have more parental is there the helicopter parent versus the absent parent? I mean, where's it go?

[00:08:41] Dave Becker:
It's really fascinating, because everybody has their own perspective of how much engagement is the right level of engagement from the parent level. But generally, when you look at students and how often they communicate with their families, it's highest for first generation students. It's highest for black students, Hispanic students and lower income families.

A lot of times they have the least college experience, so they don't know how to best support their students. So if we can act as that intermediary and connect the college with those families, and then the idea is that when, when the students having those conversations with their parents, which is frequently, then the parents better prepared to support the student. Such good work.

[00:09:30] Host:
We talked about RNL, and that we, I think we all help sponsor and partner with RNL for the e-expectation report. Yeah, Raquel's been a guest on the podcast, like, full time, so, yeah, so she's, she's been great, kind of spinning out some data. The data is really supporting a lot of our businesses now. Like, you know, the effectiveness of what we do and how we as a vendor, and you're a vendor and you're a vendor, how can we work together? Like, I don't think this industry loves buying from 50 different vendors. I see it important that we know we had a nice conversation yesterday. What do you see, as far as helping the institution more holistically, like, if you will, because you're doing something very specific, you're doing something very specific. We're doing something very specific. Do you see that as kind of being part of the future for our customers? It's kind of coming together and creating. Are we announcing that here?

No announcement today, but, but even if it's not us, just like do you see the vendor consolidated vendor network just working well? Do you see that?

[00:10:27] Vanessa Didyk:
I think so. I mean, I think that the three of us work quite well together, because we don't we just complement what each other is is doing, and I don't think that there's a lot of overlap, and it's easy to kind of use each of our solutions. And I think that that is only beneficial to a school if, if they can kind of have one point of entry and then get access to all of these different solutions.

[00:10:52] Host:
I see that as well, because, like, we're kind of very top of the funnel, so we're kind of that early awareness. We're trying to cultivate that relationship. Then it's like, well, look now you want to go and, yeah, hey, parents want to jump in. It's, this is a long funnel. We quite often status between two and a half and three and a half years, two and a half of boys, three and a half girls. And so where do you where would you say your superpower sits? Where are you really, kind of, is it kind of in the early kind of, you said to me before the show. Hey, actually, we get involved quite early. Yeah, that was news to me.

[00:11:23] Vanessa Didyk:
I know that always surprises people. We're kind of the whole funnel. I mean, we are really powerful the whole way through. We if a student is in ZeeMee, connecting with their peers as they're just working towards an application, thinking about submitting an application, they're actually twice as likely to apply, but then they're four times as likely to yield when they're in ZeeMee. So we are, like, kind of through that whole funnel, impacting, and, yeah, having, having some great impact.

[00:11:51] Host:
and then CampusESP, when did the parents get involved? Oh, every step, everything, yeah, it's, I've got a six year old.

[00:11:57] Dave Becker:
It is crazy, and everything's more complicated now than it was, like 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Information overload.

It's information overload. I mean, the FAFSA sure, but since the college application process, everybody's not everybody, but a lot of people are getting college advisors because it's so confusing. There's just so many different competing messages out there. So I'd say the parent journey completely mirrors the student journey. So we help parents support their student and like finding the best match for an institution, also helping from a student retention perspective, getting parents information once their students enrolled, and then we even see parent giving like they become a donor. They're excited to be connected to their students institution, and support their institution, not only through tuition payments, but also other way they want to be involved. So that dynamic is absolutely very it's a huge generational shift, and it's probably one of the reasons why we always are at a lot of the same schools together, because that that communication and that engagement cross the student, the parent, and back again.

[00:13:08] Host:
So it's when of schools see the value in that they kind of bring us in, right? So yeah, and Vanessa already brought up FAFSA delays from a student's perspective, how to try and navigate that. Have the parents done?

[00:13:19] Dave Becker:
They, everybody's confused, yeah, yeah. I mean, it used to be one of the things you could rely on, which is the FAFSA comes out October 1, right? Set your watch to it. And now, I mean, even with this year, we're not, we're not really sure, so we, we've done a lot of webinars to one of the things that we do is we send out content to parents through the portals. So if you're a school and you're not sure what information to send the parents, we have that. So we pushed it out to the schools, and the schools can approve or reject or adjust the content. And then we've been strengthening it with AI as well. So it's fun.

[00:13:53] Host:
Well you brought up AI, and that's how I was going to finish today. Let's talk AI. David, I actually shared a quick conversation yesterday. If you don't have AI in your name. It seems like you're irrelevant, but I think in some ways, we've been using AI covertly, if you want to call it like, it hasn't been like, oh my gosh, marketing, I'm sure you've been running some form of intelligence through your platforms. But I just want you to go first, kind of, how are you seeing the drive for AI? What might be some ways that you're kind of adopting that?

[00:14:30] Vanessa Didyk:
Yeah, we, we have tons just like you. I mean, tech companies have probably, we've all been ahead of this for a while before it was sexy. We have tons of AI running, kind of behind the scenes in our app. So from everything from what we use to keep students safe on a social platform, so we have a lot of sophisticated AI running that we built to kind of comb through all the profiles, all the content, everything that's created, everything that's published, we have a predictive model that can anticipate how likely a student is to enroll based on the activity in the app, and that's changing minute by minute. So anything that they do live, anything they do in the app, will will adjust their predictive enrollment score. We have an engagement score again, similarly, using, using AI. So we've got a lot of like, under the hood stuff operating, and we've, we've done a ton of research recently just to really understand, because it seems like a lot of people are releasing AI features, student facing AI features, and haven't really thought about what students want and what students are looking for, and how students want to engage with schools, or, you know, with these other companies. And so, yeah, so it's been, it's eye opening, very eye opening to see what what students are, how they're feeling about it, and how suspicious they actually are of of AI getting involved.

[00:15:54] Host:
As three tech CEOs. I imagine we all kind of just play around with AI, just ourselves, as you see, much benefit. Prompt it correctly. I see that as being a problem with consumer facing AI, like when we're building AI to power our own platforms. We can, we can prompt it the right way, engineers, but, but I see that as being a problem when you kind of give the reins over to the consumer to start doing. You've got to make sure that a) the artificial mass, is actually intelligent?

[00:16:21] Vanessa Didyk:
Yes, there's so much opportunity, though, too. Like, if I think the real personally, the real opportunity is less about the student facing stuff and more about the stuff that makes the work that everybody does behind the scenes more efficient, so that there can be more face to face and real person interaction, more time for that.

[00:16:39] Host:
Yep, makes sense. How about you? David?

[00:16:45] Dave Becker:
You know, I think when a customer signs up with StudentBridge or ZeeMee or CampusESP, it's not just the technology. It's sort of like the relationship, and they trust us to kind of guide them through the technology. They're not generally technology experts trying to keep up with AI is crazy, because it's not just chatgpt, it's not just generative AI. There's so many different types of AI. So you know, what we try to do for customers is just make sure that we're adding it responsibly and that we're using it to solve actual problems that they should care about, and then they trust us to let them know when they need to lean in and learn certain features, when it comes to AI, and then when we're just kind of using it in the background so that they don't have to worry about it. So I think AI could definitely be overwhelming, especially because you hear about it everywhere. But it has been in our vernacular. It has been in the industry for at least five plus years, just more behind the scenes, and now there's definitely more of a hype cycle about it. So but for customers, I really think they rely on us to help us take them through that technology journey.

[00:15:51] Host:
Now we aren't in the world of machines yet. You said a fun deal saying yesterday, I said, AI Artificial Intelligence. AI actual intelligence, because I know it's AI and I said human intelligence. I was always trying to think about, like, some sort of, like, friendly way to do it. But, yeah, I mean, let's, let's hope the robots don't come for us. And, you know, we're just like, waving bye.

So, so you leave here feeling good you're leaving here, kind of, heads held high, I think, as a vendor, I always say, I just had a meeting, now, I think we're all pretty mission based as well. There's probably easier industries to work in. There's probably more revenue to be had. It was all about revenue in other industries. But, you know, we kind of all, we all kind of hang our coattails or hats on higher ed. We'd see some issues with it. We're hoping together we can solve it. Any kind of talk about AI and HI. What would be some of your looking at maybe another FAFSA delay, maybe not 12 to 24 months out. I mean, where do you see? Is there any kind of amazing hook you can give us, or vision of anything that you might see coming down the road?

[00:18:59] Dave Becker:
Vision, hopefully, prediction. I think people ask me to like, where do you see higher education going? I'm always like, you know, it's, it's really tough to predict. But one thing that we're seeing everywhere is that people are leaving higher ed so that institutional knowledge that exists that usually, you know, there might be like a registrar that was there for 20 years. People aren't in the same role as long as they used to be. So that's a really big challenge for folks in higher ed when people are leaving constantly. And so I think our hope is, is that like technology can can service like the continuity when people leave the system smart enough through AI or through great teams behind the scenes that kind of keep things rolling in the right direction. I definitely think the big shift in higher education right now is people are leaving higher education. They're taking that knowledge. Really get them hard, yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. They're just exhausted, and they're being asked to do more with less, and it's a really big challenge in higher education.

[00:20:01] Vanessa Didyk:
I think, from you know, we're always thinking about the student perspective, and we're seeing more and more students as something you guys plug into. I think Dave, but seeing more and more students with entering with massive amounts of social anxiety difficulty. So not only are people in the college, you know, on the staff side leaving, and faculty side, and that the students are leaving because they're really struggling to make it all the way through and attend the things that we did when we went to college that we thought were so fun, all of the social events and the things that kind of lit us up and kept us going and made those like very hard classes, made us able to endure those very hard classes, and those are the things that are actually making students feel more anxious, and those social events and those and that is something that I think we need, and we're trying to figure out how we plug into to address but how do we turn that around so that this generation doesn't enter the real world still feeling like.

[00:21:04] Host:
I mean, obviously I don't want to misquote the percentage, but it was a high percent of students have learning disabilities that were very previously unrecognized, or anxiety and mental health. The schools, in my mind, haven't been great at kind of catering to audiences, whether the LBGQT, they're just they're not great. They kind of treat everyone like vanilla. Everyone's the same. It's like, no, these are individuals that have unique challenges, but they're kind of, there's 500 of those unique challenges. So that's that's kind of falls into, then, I think, social and the web and the advent of the everything's one click away. Cyber Bullying, all time. There's a lot of stuff that we didn't have to deal with. Absolutely. We go to the corner of 20-30 years with our bicycles and and have a maybe a bad word with someone, but that was the end of it. And now it's like, Nope, there's trolls, there's stuff going on. So I can see that it's going to be here to stay for a while. Yeah. Great work with you doing this AI for the profiling, keeping safeguards in place. So great. Well, look, thank you very much for joining me today. We'll go and see the opening keynote today, but RNL, but look, thank you for joining us today as well. And listeners and viewers join us for the next episode, we've got an exciting guest, Mark Forehand, former dean of admissions for KSU graduate school. He'll be joining us in the studio. But for now, I'd like to thank Vanessa and David, Dave for investing their time. Give me a bit of their day today here in Dallas, and we look forward to seeing you all soon. Thank you.

This is the Filling Seats podcast hosted by StudentBridge, where we help enrollment teams achieve more by fusing authentic storytelling with industry leading technology and personalized digital experiences. To connect with this episode's guests, check out the show notes. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a rating and review and don't forget to subscribe. For more information about StudentBridge and this podcast, go to studentbridge.com/podcast.