How Higher Education Struggles to Evolve

Gil Rogers sits down with author Brian Rosenberg to discuss his new book, “Whatever it is, I’m Against it!”

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Who is Brian Rosenberg?

Brian is a recognized thought leader in higher education and a published author.

In this Episode

Brian Rosenberg, author of the book “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about the seemingly paradoxical nature of higher education, known for transformation yet resistant to change. Brian’s expertise touches on the inability of most institutions to undergo major change, the sustainable economic models required to address affordability, and the importance of serving students effectively to increase graduation rates. 

Gil also asked Brian to weigh in on curriculum design for leadership development, the future of Higher Ed, and how to solve some of the problems with the difference between the cost and the price of college, and what goes on behind the doors with some merit scholarships.

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Episode Transcript

How Higher Education Struggles to Evolve with Brian Rosenberg

Publishing Date: January 30, 2024

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, we’re going to listen in on a great conversation I recently had with Brian Rosenberg. Brian is the author of Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. We dive into many of the themes of his book, including the drivers that keep us from change, including reputation, incentives, shared governance, and more.

Let’s listen in and have a chat.

[00:00:38] Gil: Brian, welcome to the podcast. How are you today?

[00:00:41] Brian: I am good, and I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:44] Gil: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I’m sitting here. For our podcast listeners and for our YouTube viewers, you’ll be able to see this, but our podcast listeners, I’m holding a copy of your book, titled, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.

And I think that title alone is going to get a lot of downloads in the podcast world, because I feel like that’s super compelling title. We’re going to talk about the contents of the book here in a little bit, but before we hop into that, Brian, I would love if you could share just a little bit about your backstory, you know, what you’re doing right now, where you are and, backing up, how you got there. How did you get involved in the community of higher education? And what’s led you to this point to where you’re writing this book?

[00:01:26] Brian: First of all, again, thanks for having me. So, I decided pretty early on in my college career two things. One, I did not want to be a physician, which is what my mother wanted me to be. And two, I really wanted to be a college professor. I fell in love with reading literature at an early age, and that was reinforced when I started college.

And so, my goal was to go to graduate school, get a PhD and teach English. Fortunately, I knew nothing about how bad the job market was. Otherwise, I probably would have made a different decision. But I went to college, I got a PhD in English from Columbia, and then I spent 15 years as an English professor in Northwestern Pennsylvania at Allegheny College.

And I loved the work, but I also found myself deeply curious about how these institutions function. And so, when I had an opportunity to move into administration, I was nominated for a dean of faculty position at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, I took it. I served as a dean of faculty for five years, and then I was fortunate enough to become president of Macalester College in Minnesota, where I remained for 17 years.

Retired from that job in June of 2020, which, if you’ll recall, was the first really bad COVID semester. So, the last things I had to do as a college president was send all the students home. So, that was a tough last semester. Then, I came to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They have something called the president-in-residence position, and I was invited to serve in that role. I did that for a couple of years. I started doing some teaching here, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it. I just loved to teach it. And so, I’ve continued to teach a course or two a year here to students in the grad, mostly students in the graduate program, the master’s in education.

And then, the other thing that I do that is a real passion of mine is work with something called the African Leadership University, which is a startup university in Kigali that was founded by a Macalester graduate, and is trying to provide high-quality, low-cost education in the most underserved continent in the world.

So, I split my time between the two extremes in higher education, Harvard, and a startup in Africa. And it makes for a really interesting set of perspectives on what higher education is and isn’t and could be.

[00:04:07] Gil: That is amazing background. And before we clicked record, we were talking about my background. And I have insights of inside and outside the higher ed community based on the roles. You’ve got insights from the whole spectrum of institutional types when it comes to the profile of a school in the industry.

One item that I want to give a shout out to is, you mentioned you worked at Lawrence University. One of our most popular podcast guests last season was Teege Mettille, who is now at Enroll ML, which is a data firm that helps institutions with analytics on recruitment and marketing. But he hosts a podcast called the Admissions Directors Lunchcast. And he was at Lawrence University for a very long time. When I started in my career, we were in parallel together. So, I’m just giving Teege a shoutout, in hopes that he re-shares this podcast someday.

But I have to ask you, you know, you mentioned you knew very early on that you wanted to be a college professor. And I feel like that’s, one, obviously, a noble calling, in a lot of respects. I would love to understand what your mentality was to come about that decision to, to start down that career path.

[00:05:15] Brian: I loved reading books, and I wanted to do something with my life that allowed me to do that, and not just in my free time. And I was fortunate enough to have some wonderful teachers when I was in college. And I could feel the impact they were having on my life, not just on what I knew, but in the way I thought about the world and in the way I understood myself. And I thought, given my particular interests and skill set, if I could do the same thing for other young people, that would be pretty good.

So, I was always drawn more to the teaching side of it, I will admit, than to the research side of it. When I was a professor, I did what you had to do. I wrote a couple of books, and I published lots of articles and it helped me get tenure. And I enjoyed doing that, but where I really felt like I was making a contribution and where I really felt most passionate was when I was working with students. So, it was, I really wanted to read books and I really wanted to teach. And college professors who teach English, if you’re fortunate enough to get that job, you get to do that.

[00:06:26] Gil: There you go. And really do appreciate commitment to the student side of things. I know a lot of the listeners of this podcast work in admissions, student affair, enrollment, academic affairs. And so, they all have that lens of, one of our most popular. episodes recently was, the president from Odessa college, Dr. Gregory Williams, was on and we talked a lot about student belonging and student persistence. And so, I know that, sometimes, it gets lost in the shuffle of higher ed, that students need to be at the core of all of our conversations and are really the reason why our institutions exist in the first place. And so…

[00:07:05] Brian: It’s remarkable how often we forget that, isn’t it?

[00:07:08] Gil: Yes, right? Why do you think that is?

[00:07:12] Brian: You know, it’s an interesting question, but I think that the short answer is that, I think, colleges and universities, at least in the United States for the most part, have been designed around and continue to be built around, for the most part, the interests and priorities of faculty and not students, which I get, I was a faculty member, but I was just talking today to a provost who said he sat in a two-hour meeting about improving higher education in South Africa. And the entire two hours was spent on improving the situation of faculty. And he pointed out that South Africa was one of the countries in the world with the greatest inequality and the most underserved students. And in two hours, they didn’t mention the students. And so, it’s not uniquely an American problem, but I really do believe that we have designed, in many ways, colleges and universities around a crucial group—the faculty—more than we have designed it around the group we’re most meant to serve, which is the students.

[00:08:14] Gil: And I think part of that is, like, I want to put out there that I don’t think there’s any type of nefarious perspective that people don’t care about students. It’s just like you said, it’s the processes. And I think about the conversations I had recently with Paul LeBlanc from Southern New Hampshire. And his books, his recent books, are all about this kind of challenge where these systems are in place and they’re supposed to help students or, you know, in this case of health care or case of correctional facilities are great.

These are all industries that have challenges with actually achieving their mission. And it’s because you become behooven to the process or behooven to the machine. And the machine is the, you know, you can’t have colleges without people teaching at them. So, you try to bend over backwards to make sure that the people who are tasked with teaching are happy and fulfilled and taken care of. But then, that can’t come at the expense of the “customer,” which is the student, right?

[00:09:07] Brian: It’s interesting that you mentioned healthcare. I just finished serving for 10 years on the board of a very large nonprofit healthcare system. And I think that the challenge is very similar. We’ve designed a healthcare system for the most part around the priorities of the provider, rather than around the priorities of the patient.

And anyone who’s tried to navigate the healthcare system in this country knows what a nightmare it is. And it’s very, very difficult to change, because you have, you know, a long-standing set of practices and entrenched interests and people generally don’t like change. But we have to remember that, whether it’s healthcare or education, at the end of the day, the goal is to serve the public. That’s the reason these things are nonprofits, for the most part. And I think it’s pretty easy to lose sight of that.

[00:10:01] Gil: Yeah, isn’t it? Again, I think it’s the we’re behooven to the system and, and the process. And when you’re in it, you think… I’ll, I’ll use admissions officers and student affairs people as good examples here, right? These are very people-focused people, right? And they, they care very deeply about supporting students and supporting their success. And then, they’re tasked with managing spreadsheets and reports and writing reports and all of these things that end up taking them away from actually working with and dealing with students and prioritizing, right?

And so, they come into the job wanting to do their best work at that, but then they end up in the administrative side that takes them away from that, right? And so, it’s a, it’s a challenge to think of.

So, the homework assignment for all of our podcast listeners is, now, this is like a two, two-book assignment. One is you have to read Paul LeBlanc’s book, which is titled, Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them. And then, you have to read Brian Rosenberg’s book, which is, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It. Because I feel like the challenges that are being… that the solutions that might be being posed in, one, might run into the culture of not wanting to make those adjustments and make those changes, right?

And so, I think this is a good, kind of, opportunity to, kind of, transition to your book, right? And so, I mentioned to you before we started the recording that a colleague of mine was reading it, mentioned it to me when I was talking to her. And I said immediately, it was like, first of all, that title is super compelling and aligns with most of my experience is in ed tech, trying to help drive the institutions and drive the industry forward when it comes to measuring and data and marketing and messaging and all of those sorts of things. And this speaks to a broader cultural challenge that institutions have in the industry of higher ed, in general.

Tell me how you came about deciding to write this book. What was the genesis of, “All right, I got to put pen to paper on this and get this out there?”

[00:11:59] Brian: Well, I’ve, for a long time, been puzzled by what appears to be a paradox in higher education, which is that, virtually, every college and university speaks in its mission statement about the importance of transformation. It’s filled with people, and this has generated a lot of controversy, but it’s filled undeniably with people who tend to skew very progressive and talk a lot about social change. And yet, it is an industry that itself is among the most change-resistant, of all industries in our society. And there have been lots and lots of people who have pointed this out. Higher education has probably changed less over the last century than almost any other major industry.

And so, I’ve really thought a lot about why this is the case. And I think two things, since I stepped down from a college presidency, have allowed me to think more deeply about this. One is teaching. You know, I teach classes in higher education now. And when you teach something, it gives you an opportunity to step back and really examine it.

And the other, as I mentioned earlier, is working in a context outside the United States and outside established systems of higher education and working, in effect, in a startup. And it’s seeing what kinds of things in a startup environment you keep and what kinds of things you don’t keep from legacy systems.

And so, that combination of teaching and working outside the U.S., being able to step back a little bit from the world in which I’ve spent my life, has allowed me to examine more fully that question. And so, rather than just trying to point fingers and complain, what I really wanted to do was answer the following question: what is it about the structures and culture of higher education that makes it so hard to change things in anything more than an incremental way? I don’t think you can blame it on individuals who don’t want to do a good job. I think most faculty I’ve met want to do a good job. Most administrators I’ve met want to do a good job. When something is so pervasive and longstanding, I tend to look at structures and cultures. And so, you know, that’s where I began. And that’s what led me to think about the things that I think about in the book, like the role of reputation, the incentive systems, and some of the, the governance structures that exist within higher education that are designed to work well if you need slow incremental change, but not to work so well if you need change that is more transformational.

And I guess the key question is whether you think higher education has reached that moment. I’m someone who does. But if you believe that higher education does not need anything more than incremental change, then I suppose you could be satisfied with the way things are right now.

[00:15:00] Gil: And I think for the… to speak on behalf of the listeners of this podcast, I think many of the listeners podcast are people that want to drive the right type of change to better support student success and outcomes, right? And that’s the, the most popular topics that we run into are all about—student persistence, sense of belonging, completion, retention, driving, positive outcomes. But to your point, a lot of the systems that we have in place to better support those have only seen incremental change over the past 15, 20 years.

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[00:16:29] Gil: And so, let’s talk about that first section on reputation for a moment, because I, I feel like there’s, I like to call it, and our listeners are going to hate this because I bring this up a lot, but I call it the annual higher ed hype machine, right? And the annual higher ed hype machine consists of release of the U.S. News rankings on manual basis. And there’s always the debate about, are they valid? And what does it really measure? And I, I did a research when I was at a prior company on even the makeup of things like the U.S. News rankings and how 80% of the methodology doesn’t even apply to currently enrolled students. It’s all faculty and reputation and peer assessment and all these sorts of challenges.

And that’s, that’s just one piece of that cycle. And then, it’s always like, is college worth it? Is the cost worth it? ROI. And now we have things like skills and how institutions need to adapt. But then, at the end of the day, for many, it’s still the same process year in, year out, from a delivery perspective.

When you talk about reputation in the context of your book, what are some of the key things that you see that are keeping institutions from having radical, paradigmatic change versus incremental?

[00:17:39] Brian: Well, I think that one of the barriers to change is simply the stability, the ossification of reputation in higher education. One of the things that I point out in the book is that the U.S. News rankings and the Fortune magazine rankings of the most respected companies in the world both started in the same year, in the early ‘80s. And if you go back to the early ‘80s and look at the schools at the top of the U.S. News rankings and then you look in 2023, 2024, they’re the same schools. In the university world, it’s Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Yale. In the liberal arts college world, it’s Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley. If you conversely look at the Fortune list, not a single company that was in the top 10 in the early ‘80s is still there. And many of the companies that are there now didn’t even exist in the early ‘80s.

And so, there’s been a tremendous shift in reputational strength in all of these other areas—in tech, in entertainment, in pharmaceuticals. Higher education, Harvard is still Harvard. Stanford is still Stanford. And so, if your reputation does not depend upon the actual work that you do, if it is that stable, if, as I say, Apple could roll out the iPhone 7 every year and not only sell out but only be able to meet the need of 4% of its desired customers, which is essentially Harvard, they have no incentive to create an iPhone 8.

As long as a Harvard or a Stanford or a Yale can keep doing the same thing, get more and more applications, get more and more gifts, and their reputation doesn’t suffer in any way, what’s the incentive to change? You know, as I said earlier, change is hard. People don’t like it.

And at the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a struggling institution and you know that, “No matter what I do, qualitatively, there’s no way my reputation is ever going to significantly move up in the U.S. News rankings because of the particular metrics they use,” it can be pretty dispiriting, right? What’s the incentive to try to work on quality when you know that the consumer, really, is not going to be able to recognize it?

So, it’s an almost unique world in which there’s a complete disconnect between what you actually do and the reputation you have in the marketplace. If the iPhone sucked and it was really bad every year, people would probably stop buying it. But when it comes to higher education, people don’t even have the information they need to determine whether a particular college or university is good or bad. And so, they go on things like U.S. News rankings, the opinions of experts, because there’s not a lot else to go on. And so, I think that stability, that rigidity of reputation, provides no real incentive for institutions to change in anything other than very small ways.

[00:20:53] Gil: Yeah, and I think, to that point, I used to joke that back before Twitter was on fire and people were all leaving it and it was a, you know, and it was a great community to have conversation and engagement on, I used to kid around that, on Twitter, everyone would always talk about how U.S. News rankings are not a good measure of institution’s validity. It’s about fit. It’s about a student finding the best place for them, etc. But then, when you go on that same person’s LinkedIn the year that their institution goes up 10 points because they contracted a consulting firm to help them get more applications in their pool so they can publish a more selective admission number, they are touting the press release about, “Hey, our institution went up 10 points,” right? And so, it doesn’t mean anything until it means something, but it really doesn’t mean anything, right, is the challenge.

[00:21:41] Brian: Right. And U.S. News, in particular, is almost directly correlated to institutional wealth. If you look at the most highly rated colleges in U.S. News and then you plot them along some sort of a graph that charts the institutional wealth, it aligns almost precisely.

[00:21:58] Gil: Yeah. And it’s an element of inputs versus outputs, right?

[00:22:03] Brian: Right.

[00:22:03] Gil: When the ranking is based on our class rank and how many students we deny versus ranking an institution by how many of our students have meaningful jobs within six months of graduation, those numbers change.

Now, with that said, the top of the top, they’re still going to be the top of the top because, when those students go there, they find a way to be successful, for the most part, post-graduation because of their network, because of the, the family and community, etc. Whereas, when you look at the, the institutions that bring in… I like to look at the schools that bring in a, a lower “academic profile” and actually have higher retention, persistence, and graduation rates. Those are the institutions that are really driving outcomes and delivering on the promise of higher education. And I don’t think we talk enough about those types of institutions. We’re always talking about that top 10 number. And that’s part of the higher ed hype machine, is all the conversations are driven by that top 10 institution graph, not the vast majority of institutions that are serving the majority of students. And I think that’s what gets forgotten.

[00:23:11] Brian: Yeah, and there is… I mean, Raj Chetty at Harvard has been doing some really interesting work, looking at things like the social mobility that is generated by colleges and universities. And unsurprisingly, what you find is very consistent with what you just said, and that is that greatest amount of social mobility doesn’t come from the universities at the very top, because they disproportionately enroll more affluent students and more well-prepared students. And so, of course, they graduate students at a higher rate, and those students move into a high socioeconomic class.

The schools that really make a difference in students’ lives are… the one that comes to mind is Pace University in New York, which rates very highly on taking students from lower two socioeconomic quintiles and moving them up one or two quintiles when they leave school and move into the workforce. That’s really making a difference. If it’s well-prepared in, well-prepared out, you’re not really learning a lot about what goes on in between. If it’s underserved-in and much-better-prepared-out, you know you’re making an impact. And I think it’s pretty clear that the schools that are making that kind of impact are not the ones at the top of the rankings.

[00:24:33] Gil: Yeah. And I think that’s the… when it gets into the, the challenge of the hype machine when we’re talking about value of higher ed, and there’s always… that’s the biggest driving conversation in the media every year is, is college worth it? And the data consistently does show that, when students finish their degree, it is worth it, because it does help with that social mobility aspect. And so, it’s just a matter of supporting students through that process. And again, that’s why conversations about persistence and completion are really important because it’s not just about getting students to enroll, it’s about getting students to enroll, persist, and complete their degree.

And so, I think that thinking about other components from your book, I think, when we talk about, what are some of the takeaways that you’d want to share in that vein, right, in supporting of completion student success? What are… and what are some of the things that are getting in the way and you’d propose, we really have to look at these two or three things to really see change in the short term?

[00:25:34] Brian: Well, I mean, first of all, we need to figure out a way to bend the cost curve of higher education. I mean, if you want to point to a single factor that is both threatening the stability of most institutions and making higher education inaccessible to many students and difficult to complete for many students, it’s cost.

And we have very, very few serious conversations in this country about the cost of higher education. We talk about the price, and we talk about who pays.

[00:26:06] Gil: Yep, thank you.

[00:26:06] Brian: So, we have discussions about things like, should community college be free, should public institutions be free. Those are conversations not about cost, but about price, about who pays. It’s the federal. But unless we begin to have serious discussions about cost, we’re just going to be moving those dollars around on the board. And we know there aren’t enough dollars.

So, we have to figure out a way to, as we have in other industries, make a quality education less expensive to provide so that it can be more accessible to more students who don’t have a lot of money. And unless we get to that giant elephant in the room, it’s going to be hard to make a lot of progress on any of these other metrics. Obviously, there are other things that are really important, but for me, at the end of the day, I’m an English professor, I’m not an economist, but it’s pretty easy to see that, when you have something that is very expensive that most people can’t afford and that people are losing faith in, and when demographics are working against you, you’ve got a problem.

And so, the first thing I would point to is just we’ve got to wrestle with that economic model of American higher education. It’s just not sustainable over the long term. You have an average discount right now among private colleges of 56%. So, basically, it’s higher education in America is on sale. And every year, it’s on sale at a, at a larger markdown. And you can’t… sooner or later you get to zero in revenue, right?

[00:27:45] Gil: Yeah.

[00:27:45] Brian: You can’t have that. And the other thing that I’d point to is that the graduation rates are unacceptable. In that four-year, for some reason, we give colleges a little bit of extra room, and we give them six-year graduation rate, even though they promise a four-year degree. But the overall six-year graduation rate in the country is, what, around 60%? And if you look at the graduation rate for African American students, it’s under 50%. And that is related to cost, but it is also related to the kinds of experiences and services and support systems that colleges and universities are providing.

So, I begin, I think the single biggest thing we could do to make college more accessible is to make it less expensive. But we could also do a better job, once students are in college, of providing them with the kind of support they need to graduate.

[00:28:36] Gil: I think, to your point on the discount rate component, is this goes back to just consumerism, in some respects, where high cost equals high quality, right, is what people think or believe, because that’s what we’re trained to believe when we buy things off the shelf, right? Like, there’s a difference between discount stores and named brands.

Now, some of that, with the next generation of students coming in, is going to shift a little bit in that perspective with, maybe, their perspective of price on things. But it’s still, I go, this, this hasn’t changed since 15 years ago. I was, I was meeting with the vice president of enrollment at an institution once. And this was a high-cost, low-endowment regional college. And his perspective was that the discount rate is driven by merit aid, which is essentially funny money. That’s not real. It’s just taking a discount off of the… and I’m not saying anything, any of these podcast listeners don’t already know. But the reality is, is that is a recruitment tactic, where, like, mommy and daddy at the swim meet or mommy and daddy at the soccer tournament or whatever, they want to be able to say, “Timmy got a scholarship,” not, “Timmy is going to a cheap school,” right? If everybody got rid of merit aid and just charged what the cost is, then college would be less expensive, but they lose that lever from a reputation perspective.

So, that’s where all these things are linked in a lot of ways, where they need that price to be artificially inflated so that they can discount it via a scholarship, because that’s a recruitment vehicle for them that impacts their enrollment yields. Does that make sense? 

[00:30:18] Brian: Yeah. Colleges have been very reluctant to lower their posted price. And it’s for exactly the reason you described. There’s something that’s known as the Chivas Regal effect, which is the assumption that, if something is more expensive, it must be better. So, if a, a bottle of scotch costs three times what the bottle of scotch next to it on the shelf in the store costs, it must be better scotch, even if you know nothing about the brands. If a car costs $75,000, it must be better than a car that costs $40,000.

And the assumption in higher ed has been that, well, if the sticker price of a college is $60,000, it must be better than the one whose sticker price is $40,000. And this is actually remarkable evidence that I cite in, in my book, that in years when colleges see a dip in enrollment, selective colleges, what follows the next year is not a decline in price, but an increase in price. Because they think that, by increasing the price, it will create the impression that they’re providing a better product to the consumer.

Now, as you say, we’re beginning to see, I think, some change in that. I think that the lure of high price is beginning to wear off. And I think people are paying a little bit more attention to just how expensive these institutions are. You are beginning to see some colleges that are abandoning the high price, this high discount model, and just cutting the sticker price. But it is not anything like a tsunami. It’s still a trickle of institutions that are doing that.

There are also complexities involved in that strategy. If you’re simply going to go to a system where you’re charging all students the same and giving no aid, that’s actually regressive, in some ways. You’re going to be providing the biggest discount to the most affluent families and you’re going to, you’re going to shut out a lot of the least affluent. So, it’s complicated, but the current model of high price, high discount, losing its luster, and for most institutions, it’s not sustainable.

[00:32:22] Gil: Yeah, it’s interesting about giving the biggest discounts to the more affluent, because oftentimes, many of these institutions, when they place their merit aid is based off of standardized test score for the students that were applying and their GPA and the higher prep kids, oftentimes they’re coming from the more affluent communities anyway, right? And so, they’re still getting the higher-level academic scholarships because they’ve gotten the test prep, they’ve gotten the, the resources to be in the position to, to be there.

[00:32:51] Brian: Yeah. And look, most people have no real understanding of what merit aid really is. Merit aid, as you know, is a misnomer. I would describe it as enrollment management aid. And the thinking, and there are lots and lots of consultants out there who you can pay lots and lots of money to, who will advise you about this. The thinking is really very simple. Let’s say my sticker price is %70,000 and I have someone who could afford to pay that, but my discount rate is 50%. So, the average student is paying 35. Well, if I offer a $15,000 “merit award” to that affluent family and they come in and they pay me $55,000, then it’s a bonus for me. It’s more than what the typical student is paying.

So, these awards are used to try to entice affluent families to go to institutions. And those families have become smart enough to begin to play colleges off against one another. I can’t tell you how often, when I was at Macalester, we would admit a student and the family to come back and say, “Well, our daughter has also been admitted by Oberlin, but Oberlin is offering her a $15,000 merit award and you are not offering her any. And she really wants to go to Macalester, but that $15,000 is too big a gap. So, would you match it?” I can say with all honesty, our answer was always no, we did not bargain over merit awards. But other schools do. And the parents were smart enough to realize that, if they shop around, they could probably get a better deal.

[00:34:29] Gil: And that’s something that, much to the chagrin of the VP of enrollment, you can’t necessarily have a hard line on, “We don’t negotiate aid packages anymore,” right?

[00:34:39] Brian: It’s certainly not if you’re a school that’s trying to fill seats. Unless you’re a highly selective affluent institution, you do not have that luxury.

[00:34:49] Gil: In that respect, they’re not necessarily giving the merit aid to those families because they’re enrolling anyway, right, because they want to go to that school. And that’s no longer a tactic that they need as often.

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[00:35:48] Gil: So, let’s fast-forward ahead to five years from now. Everyone in higher ed has read your book and they’ve internalized it. What would you say is the end goal with publishing this book at this time? What would the biggest changes be that would drive the most impact, aside from the cost piece, which we talked about?

[00:36:09] Brian: Yeah. So, I’ll tell you about the goal. I could also, if you’d like, tell you about what I think is the most likely scenario. But I think my goal would be for colleges that are struggling to be willing to take some risks and to offer something to the marketplace that is different from what every other college is offering. Right now, if you look at the curricula at most colleges, the majors at most colleges, they look pretty much the same. They tend to offer a gigantic menu of different options. And what I would love to see is a set of colleges that were more narrowly focused on doing one or two things really well, that relied more heavily on things like technology and experiential learning to lower the cost of what they offer and, also, potentially, expand the reach of what they offer, and even improve the quality.

So, you know, if you think about both technology and experiential learning, clearly, if you’re going to expand your market and reach groups like adult learners or what we have usually called non-traditional learners, they’re not going to show up on a campus five days a week at 9:00 in the morning. You’re going to have to reach them in other ways. And technology is providing us with ways to do that. So, I’d like to see more schools reach out to some of these other underserved audiences.

And then, one of the best ways of both teaching and reducing cost is experiential learning—allow the students to become the owners of their own educational journey and break down the walls around the campus, so that the only people doing the teaching are not just faculty in classrooms but all those people in the world around us who have lots of knowledge to share and can share it by giving students really interesting experiences and want to share it.

So, I would love to see some colleges experiment with these very different models. And it’s going to take a while, but one of the things you can say about higher education is that success is often copied. And so, if there is a handful of colleges that try something different and it starts to work, then you will probably see other colleges emulate that.

So, you know, give a very specific example, I mentioned the African Leadership University. The mission of that institution is to educate ethical and entrepreneurial leaders for Africa. And the curriculum is designed very specifically to accomplish that goal. Imagine an American leadership university. We certainly don’t have an overabundance of great leadership in this country. Imagine a college that said, “You know, we’re going to design a curriculum to try to educate students to be leaders and to be leaders in both the public and private sphere. And here’s the curriculum we’re going to offer to accomplish that.” To me, that would be really interesting and might be really appealing and a lot different than saying, “Come to our college. We’re offering 40 different majors. We’re going to meet any interest you could possibly have.”

So, I would like to see more colleges try some of those different things. And they may be forced to do so by circumstances, but constraint drives innovation. And I’m hoping that, in this case, constraint in some of these institutions will, in fact, drive some innovation.

[00:39:50] Gil: I think that takes bravery on behalf of existing leadership, right, to move forward and not continue with the status quo, because it’s cliche, but that’s the way things have always been done, right, is what we always say.

[00:40:04] Brian: And it takes bravery, but bravery in the face of structures that prevent change can only take you so far. And that’s why, I think you’re seeing more interesting experimentation right now at newer institutions, at institutions outside the U.S. If you look at places that have been founded in the last, say, 20 years or so, Olin College of Engineering, Soka College, these places are very different from the universities that were founded 300 years ago. Yet, they’re doing really interesting and successful things. Olin has no tenure. Soka doesn’t have traditional academic departments. They’re experimenting with these things, but they can do it because they’re startups.

The question is, can a place that’s been around since 1850 do the same thing? And that’s, to me, the, sort of, central existential question right now about American higher education. Because most of these institutions have been around for a long time, can they change in the way that newer startup institutions change? And my fear is, if they don’t, then change is going to come from outside. And that’s really risky, because a lot of that outside change could be driven by for-profit institutions. And I am very uncomfortable with the notion of for-profit institutions in control of essential social services. I feel that way about healthcare and I feel that way about education.

So, I’m hoping higher ed can do it from within, because otherwise we have to worry about… and we also have to worry about political actors from without, as we’re seeing, come in and enforce change. So, if we don’t do it ourselves, someone is going to do it to us. And I think we would all be better off if we did it ourselves.

[00:42:02] Gil: Awesome. Well, we will leave it at that point. And for our listeners, again, the book is Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. Brian, thank you so much for being here today and for sharing your story, as well as giving us the highlights. We encourage everyone to pick up a copy. We’ll put a link in the episode notes for you to be able to, to grab your copy and, and start the good work. So, Brian, thank you so much.[00:42:26] Brian: My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

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