Under Pressure Unpacking the Strain on U.S. Higher Education

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
Picture this, a digital experience so personal, prospective students feel like they're already on your campus. That's what StudentBridge delivers, helping you attract, engage and enroll students like never before. Get started at StudentBridge.com, and start filling seats.

Speaker 2  0:18  
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.

Host  0:36  
Hello. Thank you for tuning in today. I'm Jonathan Clues, CEO and founder here at StudentBridge, we are tuning in for Filling Seats episode 53, of our podcast series, and today, quite different from our usual podcast, it's actually going to take us longer to do all the introductions than it will for the podcast itself, because I've got four amazing ladies that have got a wealth of industry knowledge that are going to bring some amazing insights to you. And with that, without further ado, because I want to get on with that, let's start doing our introductions, and I'll start in the order on my screen. That's alright, so I'll start with you. Dr. Jen Riley,

Dr. Jen Riley  1:10  
Hello everybody. Dr. Jen Riley, I am a marketing professor at Vanderbilt University, Owen School of Management in Nashville, Tennessee.

Host  1:19  
That's a long business card, so that's very nice. Thank you. Jen Riley, next on my screen is Dr Amy Watson, hello.

Dr. Amy Watson  1:28  
Dr. Amy Watson, I'm an Associate Professor of Marketing in the Harley Langdale Junior College of Business, trying to outdo the length of Jen's and I'm in Valdosta State in Valdosta, Georgia. Fantastic.

Host  1:43  
Next my screen is Dr. Kate Scott. I would not even though my wife is Polish, so should probably be Nicewicz, Nicewicz Uh, Scott, I will let you introduce yourself.

Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott  1:54  
Very good, um, that you've very well done. I'm Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott.  I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing and the MBA director at the Gordon Ford College of Business in Western Kentucky, at Western Kentucky University.

Host  2:10  
Thank you very much. And last but so not least, just in order of screen, is Dr Morgan Bryant. Dr Morgan, if you'd like to do a quick introduction yourself, please 

Dr. Morgan M. Bryant  2:20  
Absolutely so I am Dr Morgan Bryant. I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing  at the Hobbes School of Business at St Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Host  2:30  
Great. And the first thing we're all going to notice I'm the only non doctor. So I'm definitely among esteemed colleagues today in this episode, we're diving into the mounting pressure on the US higher education system. The five of you, I know that one of your colleagues missing have created a resource or written a paper for the United States education structure is under stress, explore the destabilization of academia, system settings. So did I say that part correct as well? Yep. Okay, together, you're going to unpack the critical challenges facing institutions today, from financial instability to the shifting enrollment patterns. And we spoke always about the perceived value, the misconception or of perceived value of education and further education, higher education. So welcome to the show. Let's start by discussing your research, what led you to explore the destabilization of academic system settings?

Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott  3:27  
Well, thank you so much for the warm welcome. I was just thinking about that before we jumped on and remembering fondly when we had the idea for this paper, and it was really one of Amy's it was Amy's kind of ingenious idea to look at the system of higher education from a macro marketing perspective. We were looking for opportunities to publish, and there was a call for papers focusing on Roger Layton's system setting framework. And we thought that it would be interesting to apply this framework of, okay, how does the system operate when you have inputs or disruptions to the traditional kind of day to day operations, and how does that influence the outcomes, and if the outcomes are undesirable, what do we do at the front end of that system to change the outcome? And Amy mentioned to us that we might consider looking at the system of higher education and the value of higher education as an outcome. I think that's kind of the history, the brief history of the paper. 

Host  4:48  
And how long ago was this meeting? 

Dr. Morgan M. Bryant  4:57  
2022? No, this was 2022 this was the Nashville

Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott  5:01  
this November. 2022 November 2022 Yeah,

Dr. Jen Riley  5:05  
it was actually AMA summer 2022 before we went to Nashville because we put together a panel on teaching excellence that we submitted and presented in Nashville at AMA the winter AMA. And then we were like, we've done all this work because we all the team really values education, obviously, but we also value, like, the art of pedagogy and really getting students invested and interaction. And we really like focus heavily on the excellence of teaching, and we thought about it in this conference that we submitted to did not do a whole lot of programming or sessions about teaching excellence in the innovative and the innovativeness in the classroom. So we put this together, and then we presented and said, well, we need to do something with it. We don't, you know, we want something to come out of it. That's not just a conference presentation. And that's when Amy said, Well, I have this special issue, and then everything that Kate just ran through. So that's kind of like where it came from originally, and then we tied it to that special issue. We looked at that framework, and we were like, we think we have something here. So that's kind of how it started.

Host  6:26  
Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but you're all marketing professors, and so that's just because you're at an event for marketing. Probably there's other professors in the world that probably could have added value, but you've gravitated towards each other. And why? The why the doctors of marketing, Professor marketing, taking the drive of this.

Dr. Morgan M. Bryant  6:48  
So I'm not sure if it's just that we felt like, as marketing, we would take the drive. So I think part of it is, as you might imagine. You know, things are structured around majors and things of that nature. So our research tends to have different streams and areas of focus, so we end up at similar conferences because those conferences are centered around our particular area. Now, while we are all marketing professors, we don't all teach the same types of classes. Some of us focus in some areas, like sales. I personally happen to be an analytics person, so I teach like research methods and applied analytics from a marketing perspective, right? We get strategy. We have all these different kinds of expertise. So while our bucket is the same and marketing umbrella expertise, yeah, and and perspective that we bring to it is different. What makes it interesting here is everything that they've just said. Why that's an interesting thing to look at from a marketer's perspective is, let's be quite honest, your you know, secondary education, higher education is one of the most important purchases that you will make as a consumer, right? And so it's got, you know, it's going to require a lot of thought and effort and consideration to the different options. It's one of the more expensive purchases, you know, larger price tags that you're going to make. It's going to have a lot of, you know, long term implications for you right? So there are a lot of aspects of consumerism, of marketing, positioning and things that come into play with higher education. So, as Kate was mentioning, when we think about these concepts, from a macro level of marketing, this high level, the actual product of higher education becomes a really attractive specimen for which to study a theory that could be applied to anything when we could have, honestly, you know, for this special issue, we could have looked at that and said, Oh, let's look at, you know, housing, let's look at automobiles. Let's look at, you know, consumer packaged goods. We just happen to think that higher education itself was an excellent sort of platform, or excellent product, really, of market to apply to this particular theory that we wanted to investigate. I really like that background, because

Host  9:15  
I'm actually, I've become a student myself of human behaviors in the buying cycle. I believe in the Dagmar philosophy of buying a marketing which is awareness, comprehension, conviction and action. And I looked at 20 years ago applying that logic to large emotional purchases. And you just mentioned three of them, the large emotional purchase, a car, house, education, buying a new LCD TV on online. LED TV isn't that large, emotional. It's still quite pricey, but these things, when you buy a car, you kind of stuck with it for a while. You buy a house, big commitment. You go to it and you say, a large purchase. I would argue that at the age of these. Were making these purchases at it's the largest, unless you are silver spoon club and you've got a Ferrari for your 16th birthday. It's the biggest purchase they've made at 1718, years old, and they probably haven't bought their first house or six figure car yet, and so, so it's huge. And of course, the other element of education being emotional is you're going away from home. You can buy a car and stay in your parents basement. You can't you can get a job and stay in your parents basement. What you can't do is, typically go to university. You can stay within, you know, 50 miles, but, but a lot of people will go and see that as part of the the value of education higher education is that right of passage as well. So beyond the academic side, it's just that whole social side of it as well. So look, let's talk about some of the structural challenges in academia that hinder innovation and adaptability. What I'd love to be quoting back to your paper. So please take it away. I mean, let's take some of the key points, key takeaways here for our viewers and listeners.

Dr. Amy Watson  11:01  
I'll start. I'll take the first stab at this one by also answering this question and giving my take on the last question, as well as what was the impetus, the impetus for me of really being interested in this I've been thinking about this topic. I've been talking to anybody who will talk to me about this topic. I marched into my dean's office whenever I got a new dean, and I was like, higher education is in trouble. What are we going to do about it? I have plans. And she was like, Okay, you're a little intense about this. But my impetus, and this is one of the big disrupt disruptors, is it was a huge red flag for me whenever Google entered higher education. So whenever Google entered higher education as a legitimate, direct competitor to the programming that my university and many universities were offering. And what do I mean by that? You can get your Google Analytics, you can get your, you know, Google digital marketing certificates. So whenever they started offering more than just the brief little certificate, and they started offering a what they called, like Google careers, it was like a six month course, all for the whopping price of $249 Oh, and they are the biggest, most innovative, the lead player in digital marketing. So you're basically getting this information directly from the horse's mouth. Whenever I saw that, I was like, Oh my gosh, we we are in trouble like my the traditional model of education is under direct threat from what is a known make your tech disruptor, and at the same time many so this was right around COVID, and, you know the again talking about macro factors, the employment situation was very different. There for a brief time where they couldn't hire people fast enough to grow to ramp up for digital marketing, and they started offering a whole bunch of different types of benefit packages. And one of the big benefits that started coming out was education benefits, where they would pay or they would reimburse for you to enroll in higher education. And so I was like, Oh my gosh, this is great. We're going to get all of these adult learners who are working and are non traditional students. They're going to enter the workforce. And so whenever I kept seeing the commercials on TV, I went to read the fine print because it said something about, like, oh, through, like, you know, approved programs. So I was like, I want to know who those approved programs were, and so whenever I started digging and I learned about guild education and how all of these like, I mean, we're talking hundreds of 1000s of adult learners were being funneled into these education benefits that were completely being brokered by guild education and were only then available to a small subset of universities who were part of their program. I was like, so now we have these third party vendors or brokers like guild, we have Google or Salesforce, or these programs who are industry leaders, and they're creating their own curriculum and delivering it directly instead of going through universities. And for me, that is like the biggest systemic disruption that one of them, we list several. So I'll let somebody else talk about one of the other ones. But for me, that the shift in the power players and who is actually delivering higher education and brokering it was a massive disruption.

Dr. Morgan M. Bryant  14:42  
I think something that goes along with that, in tandem with what Amy just talked about, is we have to think about sort of the generation cliff, right? So what's also happening at the exact same time is we had a decrease in the birth rate. You. Um, particularly here in the US. So we had this, like, you know, this aging cliff, where the or the demographic cliff, where what happens is we have less fewer numbers of students who are people who are going to be, you know, college age, there's a fewer number of who are graduating from high school, and when your population numbers are lower in that age group, you've got this cliff where the number you know, our our addressable market, through no fault of our own, has shrunken, and at the same time, we are seeing this increased competition from these other sources, right? So you see two things, your competition has increased. You've got more competition for a smaller pie. So it's not so much that you have to Slice the Pie up in more slices. There's less of it in general, before you ever get to start to start slicing. And so when those things are converging and happening simultaneously, it intensifies the impact of both, right? So they're much it's a much stronger threat to consider, as you know, in the combined focus, than it is for either one of them, while they are each very, you know, credible, intense things for us to be looking at in terms of long term implications for higher ed, especially if you just start to think about enrollment numbers, right? But collectively, it is even more so 

Host  16:29  
Correct me if I'm wrong, and Kate definitely one here for you guys, but correct me if I'm wrong on something. We've had downturns of economy many, many times, right? I've lived through several not giving away my age, 52 but like so we've been through a lot every time there's a down economy, whether there's a good economy, job market's hot, you don't need the MBA on your wall to get a job in his certification. So hey, you know what? Versus me, spend X $100,000 of a four to six year course going over here, I'll go and get my certification from Salesforce or Google. I can get a job. But when the market, when that and every seven to 10 years, there's an economic shift, the economic shift comes back, job market softens, and now there's a need to do something with your time. Maybe now there's an opportunity to say, well, actually, this that certificate is not enough anymore. It may surprise you, not only am I not a doctor, I didn't graduate in high school, I dropped out for anyone just listening. I'm doing the air quotes. I dropped out to go car racing. I was a race car driver for my first career. You didn't need a degree for that, he just needs to be brave or silly mixture of both. And I won two championships. I was having a great life. Everything was going great until I aged out of that, and my career ended. And then I'm back on the heat, and I'm like, Whoa. Now, so at StudentBridge, actually, we, I think it would be highly ironic if I, if I ask people to have a degree to go work at StudentBridge when the CEO doesn't have one. In fact, one of our great partners, we've got about 300 partner schools wanted me to go and do their MBA program. And they were, oh, we can't actually accept you if you don't have a high school equipment, right? So I left school 17 and so, so basically, but I can't even me without my prejudice, I will tell you point blank, if I got two resumes in that looked almost identical, but this one went to a college and got a degree and this one didn't, I would just naturally sway towards one of the degree. Is it an element of discipline? Is it an element of structured learning? Is it an element of anything but like and I'm an so I'm talking as an employer that didn't that doesn't have a piece of paper on the wall saying what great degree I have. And yeah, I'm still biased towards the degree. So I think that look to correct me if I'm wrong, I guess I was gonna ask for is this cyclical? Are these certificates and these the threats from the Google, Google, the world, and Salesforce coming in very certificate conscious to their own businesses. Get a certificate in CRM management, rev ops, get a certificate in digital marketing. But are they enough for people? And I guess my question is cyclical, if it's been hot for the last couple of years, because the job market's been at 4% unemployment, where it's been down to as that's now swinging and still more layoffs every week, and every week you read, more layoffs. People want to go back for traditional four year courses. Our certificates could be enough.

Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott  19:31  
I think it's it that kind of heavy author piggybacks off of what Morgan was saying about the demographic cliff that we're dealing with when the market shifts and jobs are more readily available. Are those companies going to have time to wait for people to complete a four year degree, or are they going to. Start being okay with the certificates and the other less traditional forms of learning, given that we, number one, have fewer people just being born and available to go to college, and then, number two, the length of time it takes to complete is that going to be something where universities can combat that and produce the talent that's needed in the amount of time that it's needed? On top of that, we know that when demand goes down, so we have fewer students demanding. You know, higher education cost goes up, and cost of higher education is already pretty astronomical. On top of that, we have a reduction in public funding for these institutions, so we've got rising tuition costs, number one, because we have a lower demand. Number two, because we don't have public funding or or any access to that funding, and then we start to have parents saying, Okay, what are we actually paying for? You know, what are we? What are we? Are we getting a return on this investment after four years, you know, is this? Is this too much? Are we paying too much for the four years of time when companies are saying, well, that, you know, we could just hire someone with credentials more quickly and get them started. So I think all of it really works together. We, we certainly hope and believe as educators that certificates and credentials like that are not enough, that there is the value of the higher education, but we are up against the funding and changing populations and things like that. 

Host  21:56  
That's great insights. Now you lead me on to another jonathanism, and I'm going to directly set Jen because we haven't heard from you as much yet. So the person that didn't go to university, we've established that, but I did visit a lot to enjoy myself with my friends that were at university the UK. My accent is a smaller it's a smaller country, so you can visit two or three different universities pretty easily and get around. And get around and obviously you still have the opportunities on the Carolines and Boston. There's areas where you can have a condensed lot of university in one area. But this is my point. I believe that the value of education is incorrectly marketed as purely the value of the education. And I believe that, and, and I've gone a limb on this one, because I've thought often about creating I get asked to do speaking engagements at trade shows as well, and I quite often want to go in there and kind of call out my client base, which is the wrong thing to do, right? But it shows you as a thought provoking thought leader, right, against the grain. But why don't universities embrace the other parts of the value of going to college more than just the education? Because education is really important. But this is my weird data point, and I've tested people. If you go around in a room 100 people and ask, Did you follow a career for what your degree was in, you get a number back, right? You then go and ask, have you stayed friends and or married someone that you met at college? And it's a higher number. So the social aspect of that well being and being part of something is in that way more important than the education. I'm saying is just saying the in the data saying that, yeah, I ended up kind of doing history. I never did that. I went and did something else, right? I did politics. I ended up going to politics. Marketing is one of the ones actually marketing Interesting enough, when people go to a marketing degree, end up going to marketing. It's one of the ones that we found more people stay in that as a career, yeah, but not always right, because marketing's an umbrella. So you can go to Sales as you go to data, there's things you can do. What I guess my question now, why don't universities, colleges, the whole education system, get behind this? You've got a huge you you can't enjoy sport doing a sales force accreditation. You can't enjoy the the feeling of the athletic department. You can't you can't do the intramural sports. We don't have a d1 team. You can't do that. This, the freshman parties. You can't do the affinity clubs, all the stuff that is important beyond the actual education. Did you have any thought on that Dr. Jen Riley?

Dr. Jen Riley  24:38  
Yes. So I think that's definitely part of the experience. I remember in undergrad, one of my peers was just like, so discontented at the higher education process. He didn't want to go to class. He was like, I don't understand. Like, it's no point. And young Jin explained it to him that college. Is where they teach you how to learn in a condensed way, in a fast way, right? You have 16 weeks in some instances, for the most part, generally, right? Sometimes you only have seven weeks, I think seven. Sometimes you only have two weeks. But it's kind of teaching you, like trial by fire, how to learn. When you go to a company, they're going to tell you what they want you to do. They're going to want to do it in a different way. They're going to do things differently. Yeah, and want you to do it the way they want you to do it. When you change companies, same thing, but we're teaching you how to learn. We're teaching you how to condense the information. We're teaching you how to study. But there's also a very large social aspect of this, teaching you how to get along with other people, broadening your perspectives, of your worldview. Maybe you're from a small town with 100 people in your graduating high school class, and now you're at this university with 30,000 people with 30,000 views, right? So I think there is definitely a a social component to it, of what we're learning and what we're teaching students. To answer your question of why we don't focus on it more like that's we can't really control that, right? So if you talk about an MBA class and you talk about how students are learning from each other, yes, we know there is value in community. There is many aspects of the class and education process where you are learning from other people, in addition to the professor, but we can't necessarily control that. We can't say, Okay, you're going to have this many CEOs in your class, and this many CMOS in your class, and you're going to learn from them all like, we're not policing that part of it. We can't control that

Host  26:50  
the students in an undergrad world don't have those initials yet. Then they're not CEO, right? They're all high school students. So, yeah, so

Dr. Jen Riley  26:57  
you're, you're kind of learning, and I you know you're not to to marketing is definitely appreciated, because I feel like studying marketing is really how you start to understand the world and how business integrates into the rest of the world. And I feel like college, especially at the undergraduate level or the secondary education, is how you understand more about the world and how you understand more about interactions throughout the world. One thing that is definitely a threat that we all, I'm sure we, you know, AI is going to come up because AI is coming up and everything. But to not the AI part of it, even though that is part of it, but technology in general, right? So YouTube University has been a thing for a while. You can go to AI and tell it to tell you about something, but you can't validate that that information is correct, or you might not really understand it. You might not really be able to do it. And I think that the community that higher education helps provide students, in addition to the technology, or in addition to the curriculum, is that explanation, right? The professor is part of it, like of the learning process. You can go on YouTube all day long. If you're trying to to repair a washing machine. You can mess up your washing machine, and you can have to go buy another one because you did not have somebody teaching you how to do it. That's part of the value that higher education has, is that I spent 10 years in industry. I know digital marketing. I did it now I'm teaching you how to do it right? I think that's an important part that cannot be replaced with all the things and all the disruptions that we're experiencing. But I think that's definitely part of the value add of higher education.

Speaker 1  28:50  
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Host  29:07  
All right, love to start talking about some of the kind of talking points I know you had kindly put together, like the structural challenges we talked about, bureaucratic inertia and fragmentation, silos. We see this by the way, would love a short answer on this. So let's start going through some of the kind of the key takeaways from your research and and help the the audience. Kind of what quite often these podcasts, I feel like, look, we, we kind of want to give the the audience some some empathy. We understand the pains, we understand what they're going through. We we want to say that they're not alone. But then it's, I want to end the kind of podcast with a couple of, like, key, key takeaways. Have we thought of, like, you know, we can't wave the white flag and give in and surrender. We're going to we're going to win this battle, right? We have to evolve. So, yeah, let's just go around the room. Who wants to talk a little bit about the structural challenges? 

Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott  29:59  
Well, I. Think I could probably speak to that a little bit following Jen's comments. And again, this all ties together. I feel like you find that all of these disruptors kind of work together in some way, or go hand in hand, but we talk about the possibility of embracing the importance of the social interaction and all of the maybe intangible things that we get from a college education. And most unfortunately, if we look at that in conjunction with the funding issue, there aren't a lot of donors or public funders who are super excited about funding. The idea of funding, you know, Greek life and social interaction, funding follows things like student learning outcomes and accreditation and research status. Are you an r1 institution, an r2 institution? So the bureaucracy of higher education, in that governance structure which kind of drives the funding, is not maybe what you know, where we're not getting funding for maybe what we see the value to be, or the added value to be now with that social interaction and things like that,

Host  31:24  
no, that's fantastic insights. Thanks. What about moving along to the financial pressure sustainability?

Dr. Amy Watson  31:34  
I will take that one.

Host  31:38  
Morgan, you kindly gave us kind of talking points here about the high level. So do want to hit on those? So, yes, financial pressure, sustainability.

Dr. Amy Watson  31:47  
Let's talk about this. So I like to talk about this structural, you know, systemic issue and in terms of economic development. So obviously that is what communities are expecting our output to be or these, you know, labor ready, workforce ready graduates. And as we talked about, before we started recording, we were talking about the publish or perish model and how, you know, we are 50% or more of our contract is actually for research and not just instruction. And so I think one of the big solutions that would solve several things, it would solve kind of the innovation crisis in some universities, in terms of, you know, some either outdated teaching, and we touch on this in the paper, where there are many professors teaching marketing who have, like, never seen the back end of a website like they have never been into Google Analytics. They have never been into a meta business profile, like a meta business page, like dashboard, and so all of these things, the public funding, the kind of lack of currency in our innovation as instructors, some obviously not a blanket statement, but many and then producing workforce ready grads. We're going to have to develop stronger public private connections, and that may be in the form of something like professors doing sabbaticals in companies that are at the cutting edge of what is happening in that discipline, so that they know what research they need to be working on. They're partnering with that, with that private company, and doing that research. They're bringing it back into the classroom, and there is a permeable wall, instead of kind of this rigid boundary between the university and the economics, you know, development or forces. And again, this is actually nothing new. This is why land grant universities were created. This is why the Tuskegee Institute and George Washington Carver with crop rotations, it was all about bettering the economic conditions of those black farmers in the South. It was meant to be for everybody's betterment. And I think if we get back to that model where we're really focusing on the differentiation, what does the state of Georgia want to what? What are our economic drivers? What do we want those economic drivers to be? How can we foster those public and private partnerships so that our faculty, our students and the private institutions that are driving that economy are actually working together to produce those outcomes? I think that that is one of the directions that we're going to have to take, especially as we're seeing some of the public funding be slashed so drastically, right?

Host  34:45  
Obviously, it's in the news every day, right?

Dr. Morgan M. Bryant  34:48  
And I would love to to follow on that. So I wholeheartedly agree with everything that Amy just said. I think there are some models of that that do exist in how. Education that can be replicated across areas. So kind of speaks to the silos. Some places do it and others don't. So an example at the institution I'm in, we have a huge emphasis on the health sciences. So we've got a College of Nursing, we've got a College of Pharmacy, we've got programs in physical therapy, physicians assistants, right? Those are traditionally those programs, professional programs. A lot of your faculty are still industry practitioners. If you've got a counseling program, you've absolutely got, you know, clinically active counselors on staff who are teaching and instructing your students in your education program, students have to have, you know, teaching practicums in real time in order to, you know, go back and forth with this actual tie to industry on another side. You know, at the institution I'm in and in the department I'm in, we offer both a sports marketing and entertainment marketing major on that entertainment side, we look a little different because we're in a business school, but a lot of our counterparts at other institutions that music business and entertainment space and film and and sports and things of that nature, often faculty who are teaching In those types of programs are still practitioners themselves. If you're teaching an audio engineering course, you're also, you know, in an in an audio engineering you know career, you're recording albums and scores and stuff in the evenings and on the weekends, right? Or you might be doing in the daytime and teaching the courses that you teach for students in those areas in the evening. So there are models for that that exist in the higher education space. I think, you know, it's the silos where, oh, well, that's what they do in that area, or that's what they do in in that space. And it can be replicated in other areas, the you know, not just your you know, your clinical side be the ones where you're having this public, private, you know, partnership and engagement towards instructing students and having outcomes, towards keeping your teaching staff actually, industry relevant, industry current and aware of what the current best practices are, right, and often on the business side, you see that much more fragmented on case by case basis. You see it sometimes in smaller schools that you have to be able to attract, you know, instructors, they're attracting folks who are doing both right, but you don't often see that in some of the higher programs, and it's definitely a model that can be replicated to help keep the product of higher education in all of these different areas relevant and current and adjusting to what what The market is looking for in students to make sure that our faculty are actually preparing students to enter tomorrow's workforce, right? 

Host  38:12  
Not moving on to point three with the shifting student expectations. Uh, Kate, would you like to walk us through that one a little bit of we talked about that part from your research? Yes,

Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott  38:21  
Absolutely. I will just say about what Morgan said. I think that ties nicely back to just the premise of the paper. When she said that there is a model that can be applied, we rooted this paper in the idea that there is a systems framework that we have to alter in some way to affect the outcomes. And that's what I think Morgan is saying, is that this model and how we adapt to or adjust kind of this systems framework can be applied in other places if we as decision makers, so choose to do that.

Host  38:57  
Do you have to adjust for the funding, or do you adjust for the audience? That's good? We all know that's often do different things.

Dr. Kate Nicewicz Scott  39:04  
Well, I think that's, that's kind of the the the challenge, right? We need to find a way to provide value to our audience, right? We have to find a way to adjust for what, you know, what our audience sees as valuable, and we're doing that in a in an environment where funding is driven by maybe other maybe there are other drivers to funding. Yep, and Amy may be able to speak a little bit more to how the model itself flows and operates. But what we have realized in crafting this paper is that we can't work backwards in the model. We can't We can't stop the disruptors. We have to make adjustments so that those disruptions are changing. We can't fight against. Am it's our, our job as decision makers, to to make the decisions that will in turn change kind of those, those disruptors. Now,

Host  40:11  
yes, so you make us. Are you the influences on the decision makers? 

Dr. Amy Watson  40:15  
We are the influencers, which is why the research was so important, and why at the beginning, you know, whenever Kate said, We just, we wanted as many decision makers to read this as possible, because, to her point, whenever you look at the model in the paper, the arrows are unidirectional until you get to the end, and then it loops back. And the outcome that you finally, once it has worked its way all the way through the system, then that outcome is what changes the inputs. And so right now, we are in the middle of it, so we're feeling the pressure of all of these disruptive forces in the first couple steps of the system. And we can't just like to exactly what Kate said. We can't work backwards. We have to work through the changes in the model and So real quickly with that point of value and the notion of social interaction and those intangible skills being part of that value 1,000% but then that creates a real disparity between who can afford four years of social development and who cannot afford four years of social development, and then it continues to widen this gap between those who can fund it with the increasing costs that are associated with it. And then, whenever you talk about that funding, and yes, social social development and participating in those intangibles at a university with a student rec center with a lazy pool and a lazy river is amazing, but whenever we have a smaller number of students with access to those to fund that, then that that disparity is has much more and contributes to other systemic issues that continue to drive These systems as well. 

Host  42:01  
I think that systemic issues aren't only in education, though, the difference in those that can afford those that cannot seems very wide. I mean, it's almost binary at this point. It's zero or one. It's not many. Gray area in the middle, say, air travel, Eric waits full, but for the first time ever, all the first class seats are for the world has changed into this kind of those that can, those that cannot. Education is part of that. Obviously, it's a huge industry in the US, and so, you know, I definitely do see that. I do see that concern like, you know, under underserved minority in the rural America, they come forward four or five years for social education. Isn't this great? Of course not. Then you're gonna do a job and you can help their parents out. What very different. It's such a big problem that I'm not saying we shouldn't try and fix it. It's just that, what point do you to try and cater for different I saw one of your LinkedIn when I was looking up one of your pictures said something that not segmented. Segmentation, not something it was something I can't remember exactly. It was you, Morgan. And it was like, it's true, right? It's like, we can say segmentation is kind of putting people in their hot, their buckets, but it's like, it's really kind of like, you've still got to provide value to different people of different walks of life. You can't force everyone to drive a BMW or a Tesla, right? There's many people that have to buy a $500 car of the lot, and there's people you can't force the people that can drive a billion 100, $5 million Bugatti to drive the $500 car. Because it's like, that's just, it's life, right? And we've got, I think education also has that situation. We've got community colleges that you can allow to come in, you've got certificates, you've got vocational schools. They've got the large four years that have huge, 75 grand a year educate. I can't who can afford that? But 300 grand to get a get into play that that's exactly so let's talk about it. About I think, Morgan, this is your notes, enrollment, marketing, institution strategy, data driven, enrollment strategies. I'm a marketer racing cars. You only drive the car, literally 40 days a year, the other three days a year, you're marketing yourself. Every race car driver out is a marketer and so and then StudentBridge is a marketing platform. That's what we do. We help college and universities tell of thought provoking stories, unique stories that allow a student to gain an interesting insight that university that might help them think of the fit, the emotional side of the purchase, data driven enrollment strategies. Who want to talk about that for a minute? 

Dr. Morgan M. Bryant  44:48  
I'm also the resident data head in our group, so it was very nice lob that you just gave me there, you know. So one of the things I have to stop and say, one of the things I loved about Prop. Preparing for this was talking about data driven, right? And so having evidence based, having data driven, making sure that you're able to take a look at those kinds of things, I think part of how this works, right, is, you know what we're teaching in our classes for our students, particularly as marketing professors, right? And we're talking to a fellow marketer here, is that everything that you're doing there has to be informed. You need to make sense of what your market, where are your segments, where are there? Is there good alignment? What are you know, there is this concept of what's a viable market. When do you go after a market? Even if it doesn't meet the traditional viable parameters, it doesn't mean that it is not viable for other reasons, right? And so you have to track data, understand there's sort of this concept marketing is not this static thing you don't like do this marketing and campaign, and you go, I've marketed, and you and you move on, right? That is not something that happens part of the 

Host  45:57  
Sadly, though, having employed a lot of marketing people, the workforce themselves, have not always want to be too totally accountable to the data behind marketing, but you can't escape it now. It's everywhere, right? Because your board marketing or newspaper, you have to go with the like, the kind of the numbers they gave you, the ABCs. It was like, Yeah, but now we know exactly how many people went to your site, exactly where they came from, exactly what they clicked on,

Dr. Morgan M. Bryant  46:24  
yes, and I love all of that, right? And we should be taking those same approaches when, when we're talking about what we're looking at from enrollment perspective, right? So where are, where is the population, where is the segment? What are they interested in? How are they matriculating through the different things that they're doing. We have to start looking at so one of the ways that you bring in some of those social aspects that we've talked about before, we start to look at at outcomes. We start to look at higher education the same way you would look at micro funnels for a campaign, right? How many people are ultimately getting all the way through? And where are the biggest places that I'm losing folks where? Where are things most sticky? Where are things not sticky? Those give you indications as to where you need to go back into your process, whether that's your recruiting process, your retention process, whether that has to do with some aspect of how you're getting students through financial aid, some aspect of how you're structuring your programs, right? So we bring all of our students into a business school, because we're all inside of business schools, right? But you know, which majors are the ones that most students are applying to, but which majors are the ones that most students are actually completing, right? Yeah, where are there synergies around the coursework? Do we have courses that need to be sunsetted? Do we have courses that need to be developed and implemented? Do we have courses that should remain but need to be overhauled because there's different components and things that need to go in it? It all speaks back to can we connect with industry to help us keep some exactly so, you know, we have ways of what we're looking at what we're pushing out to the market, but we also need to look out into the market and say, Well, what are the skill sets that employers are looking for in students in these various areas, and how do we back that up into what it is that we're covering inside of our courses? So it's only data that's going to help us understand that this is no different than how you're looking at a campaign that you're running for something that you have, we have to be looking at that as well. It's that sort of, you know, rinse and repeat, right? Like we we put it out there, we see how it's doing. We need to track the data. Did that work? Did it not Where did it work? Did it work with us, with a specific sub segment? Did we miss one. Did something else come up? Right? Because it's, you know, we are facing dynamic market dynamics in just the same way, and so we have to be tracking all of those sorts of things. We don't necessarily get to make decisions in a way that moves as fast as what industry is able to respond to, right? Sometimes it takes a little bit of evangelism on our part to point to the data and say what we are seeing, and it can take these processes that we have to get it through to see the change. But it doesn't make the data any less important. And in some cases, being able to point to really significant and kind of eye catching data can be the thing that's necessary in order to either get the ball rolling or push a rolling ball across the finish line. 

Host  49:30  
Absolutely. Look, I hate these words. That's what we have time for. We've gone way over. Quite often they say to us, how long should the podcast or piece of content be? I've got a very straight answer. It's as long as it is interesting and with you group, I think we had gone for a very long time. If you're listening to this podcast in your car, I hope you hit some traffic so you could capture all of it and and enjoy this time. Where can people find this, this research paper?

Dr. Jen Riley  49:58  
Google Scholar, is it is. Available there. It is also available on the journal website, The Journal of macro marketing, and we all have it pinned on our LinkedIn as well. 

Host  50:10  
I would like to thank each and everyone of you for investing the time today to share some of your insights and thoughts. It's fantastic. I know we literally just scratched the surface. So thank you very much.

Speakers  50:21  
Thank you so much.

Host  50:25  
And you know where we are, so look, that's it for today. It's been a very interesting podcast, a huge topic, and really about four or five topics rolled into one, I believe. Thank you for joining us, as you know, if you want to find out more content, more resources, go to www.studentbridge.com we will have a podcast page where this will be up as well. So if you're getting your podcast on Apple or Spotify, do go to studentbridge.com to find more notes and more links to these wonderful guests we've had today again. Thank you very much, and we look forward to hear from you again and to our listeners and viewers, drive safe. Isn't safe, and we'll see you soon.

Speaker 2  51:07  
This is the filling seeds podcast hosted by student bridge, 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.