Aligning Higher Education Strategy and Programs with Workforce Needs and Student Value

[Music] Welcome to Changing Higher Ed, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host Dr. Drum McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at ChangingHierEd.com. And now here's your host, Drum McNaughton. Thank you David. My guest today is Dr. Harrison Keller, president of the University of North Texas, and former commissioner of higher education in Texas. Dr. Keller brings an uncommon dual perspective to the question surrounding higher ed, having shaped statewide policy at the high levels and now applying those insights as a university president. As a commissioner, he developed Texas's Building a Talent Strong Texas Strategic Plan. He redesigned the state's community college finance system, watched a statewide career advising initiative, and modernized education and workforce data infrastructure. Today is president of one of Texas's largest public university with more than 46,000 students. Dr. Keller is translating that statewide vision into institutional strategy, demonstrating how the ideas that drive public policy can become tangible, campus level change. And he joins me today to talk about how UNT is doing things differently and making a difference in their students' lives both now and into the future. Harrison, welcome to the program. Happy to be here. It's good to have you here as well. I'm looking forward to a really great conversation to talk about higher education, Texas style. Now, you've been on multiple sides of accreditation on Texas education. You've been on the commission. You're now the president of University of North Texas. If you would give our listeners a little background on you and how you've come to this place. Yeah, well, my path is a little nontraditional for a university president. So I'm just entering my sophomore year as president here at University of North Texas. I got to North Texas last August. And before that, I'd served almost five years as commissioner of higher education for the state of Texas. Before that, I'd been for about 20 years back and forth between UT Austin and the state capitol. So I was a faculty member at UT Austin and a administrator or vice provost. And I was deputy president for a while. But at the capitol, I had the opportunity to work on almost every aspect of state, public and higher education, budget and policy, which was like another graduate level education for me. My training is all fairly conventional and all in academic philosophy, so undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. But I get interested in philosophy because I was interested in ethics and public policy. And so for me, that was great training for this career path to leadership and higher education. Fascinating background. I'm curious. What was your dissertation on? So my dissertation was on respect for persons. And that's actually come in handy a whole lot because what I was interested in are like what kind of respect is going to facilitate teaching and leadership and good democratic deliberation. And sometimes when people talk about respect, they talk about distance, they talk about, well, we're going to have to respect each other's differences and not interfere with each other. But if we're actually going to be able to deliberate, if we're going to be able to teach people, if we're going to be able to lead, we have to be more engaged in that. And so we have to be open to the possibility that other people could say something that would change the way that we think about things. That work on my dissertation is actually being enormously useful throughout my career as we try to create what I call deliberative spaces where people can have conversations and dialogue and really try to change each other's minds and work through tough questions. It kind of reminds me of something one of my mentors told me years ago. There's a reason that God gave us two years in one mouth. They should be used proportionally. This is good stoic philosophy. I've found myself reading a lot of stoic philosophy these days. There's another one from Marcus Aurelius in that things are not waiting to be judged by you. So you always have the option of having no opinion. I understand that is like, this is not my movie. I'm not the author of it. So, you know, maybe somebody else can have some input here. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, what sometimes seems like an even more radical motion is maybe we could have our differences be the starting point of a conversation. Maybe we could actually have a dialogue and see if we can come to some better ideas through that exchange of our different new points. What a concept, a dialogue instead of a discussion. It's very radical. It is very in today's day and age. It's very radical. It sometimes seems that way. And in all seriousness, I think one of the things that's incumbent us in higher education right now is we have to do a better job of equipping students with these skills. And I think we're able to engage in dialogue to be able to hear opinions they may disagree with even that they find offensive and actually have a discussion. And I'm worried about what I see happening where folks will say, well, if you're saying something that offends me now I don't feel safe. I'm not affected from what you're saying as opposed to being willing to engage in a real dialogue and a real discussion. So this is something we need to lean in on in higher education. We need to practice these skills. We need to equip our students so they can be adults who can engage in these kinds of conversations and good citizens. To me, that takes it right to what is the purpose of higher education is it's not only to prepare people from the job market, but it's also to allow a transformation. Kids coming in from high school and then graduating ready to enter to the workforce. And there's a lot of personal skills that need to be learned. And what you just highlighted is the ability to have conversations with ideas with people that truly offend you in your own perspective, but to be able to have a quote adult conversation with those types of perspectives. That's really important, not just so that folks can be adults and live in community, not only so you can be a good citizen. These are actually important skills that employers need to. I was talking with one of our major employers here in the DFW region just in the last week or so. And I was asking about well, what are the kinds of things you think we need to focus on more in higher education or be sure that we're equipping students with. And one of the things that he said that really stuck with me is he said, you know, I've noticed that some of our new hires they don't push back. So if they're in a team meeting and the team leader says, well, I think we should. We're going to tackle this issue this way or that this something's gone wrong. We're going to we're going to approach it this way. What the CEO was telling me is he said, the guy who we just hired coming out of college may have a better idea. He may be somebody who has gotten exposed to technologies. We're not familiar with their ideas. We're not familiar with. And so he may have the best idea of anybody in the room. But we need him to be willing to speak up and put that idea on the table. And he's concerned that new hires aren't necessarily equipped with those skills and they have great technical skills. But are they ready to have those discussions. And for me, that was a really powerful observation that we need to take seriously like for training adults, for training, future citizens for the Republic, but also for equipping our students to be able to help their employers navigate. Rapid change and highly dynamic work environments. We need to equip our students with skills so that they can engage in dialogue so they can engage productively and corrupt collaborative problems all. I think you're 100% spot on with that as was that employer. The challenge is that the responsibility of the university or is that the responsibility of their environment growing up personally, I think it's both. But how do we do that? That's the purpose of a quote liberal education, which most people are saying, oh my gosh, it's got to be all, you know, science related math, all of those heavy technical skills. But that's the purpose of what the GE courses are supposed to teach is that inquiry that critical thinking and in the classroom have the ability or the professor gives the permission the ability for people to speak up because he or she has made this a safe space where ideas can be shared without, you know, people telling you stupid. Yeah, this is a really important point. I mean, a lot of students what they experience in high school is more about reflecting content back to an instructor and it's less about engaging critically with our students. and ideas. And so when they get to college, then they're being asked to do things in a different way so that you might read. Here's two different competing accounts of the causes of the Civil War that they need to bring into dialogue and take apart the strengths and weaknesses of the different arguments. This was one of the things I loved about my undergraduate education and I got a fantastic undergraduate education when I was a student in philosophy at Notre Dame. He spent a lot of time having to learn how to engage with philosophy that sometimes you even find offensive and assignments would be things like, okay, for this next class, you're going to have to identify what's the strongest counter argument against the position that this philosopher's taking. And then you come back to the next class or the next paper, now you have to make the strongest response to that argument and be able to empathize with the position that you were offended by. So that that kind of work is really hard to do and it's a set of skills that you have to practice. I've been really impressed by universities who are asking students to practice those kinds of skills in different context. So in residence life, we're around low stakes issues in the dorm or in the cafeteria or something like that as well as in their curriculum is in their humanities courses where students practice these skills again and again so that that's going to be in their toolbox whatever they end up doing. And that's certainly something here at University of North Texas as we're working on our own core curriculum we're committed to making sure we're infusing attention to civil discourse in our core curriculum. And that is so critical, especially when you take into account what's going on in Texas in higher education, one of the things that you and I chatted about a couple days ago with state level attainment goals. A lot of it has to do with credentials of value, but it also needs to bring into play higher ed's need for the good of society and being able to have respectful conversations without trying to talk past each other's what we're seeing right now in many respects. And it's really it's both and kind of proposition so on one hand what I found is people across the political spectrum can generally agree that higher education needs to add value in the sense of opening doors to economic mobility. You need to be better off for your higher education where you're able to advance in your career to be able to have economic opportunities now that's not the only value of a college degree. And one of the striking things when you talk to employers is they want technical skills yes, but they also want what some folks will call durable skills or soft skills they want people who can communicate and want people who can work effectively in teams. They want people who can think critically and adapt to new technologies. And that's the AAC and you liberal education at least for the ones that I remember because been a while since I've had Ashley Finley on the program I need to get her back on the number one was working in teams critical thinking is always there the ability to look at data draw conclusions etc. I think pretty much everybody is on the same page when it comes to the what it's the how that is and as you know from having been in you know legislature and you know all those type of things there's two pieces to any kind of discussion when you're making a change. There's where do we need to go and how do we need to get there and that's the how that I think is the most divisive of all. I think sometimes the how can be device I guess I might reach back a little bit on that we're clear on the what because in higher education we're used to being able to stipulate the value proposition from higher education and there's something that's important and true about that like you know what counts as doing math ought to be determined by people or mathematicians but. When I talk to employers one of the striking things that I hear is they'll say the workforce needs are changing faster than they expected and some of them are even so candid as to say faster than we understand. And so this is a time where I think actually like we can't confidently stipulate the value proposition from higher education we need to be more closely engaged with the employers to help figure out the what to help figure out what are the scale. What are the skills what's the essential knowledge what are the experiences that are going to equip students to be able to add value to be able to land good jobs to be able to advance in their career. So I actually pitched an idea to the Texas legislature this last session along these lines where it said like we need better intelligence about how our workforce needs are changing that we can feed into our programs. But look university in North Texas we are the largest university in the Dallas for it worth region we have more than 44,000 students. It's an incredibly vibrant institution you could triple the size of you and T and it wouldn't be enough for a region we have to take fundamental responsibility for talent problems but it can't just be us it's got to be us and partnership with other institutions. So anyway the idea that I pitched to him is to say let's stand up sort of intelligence fusion center with employers with chambers of commerce the economic development corporations the technical and community colleges and like-minded universities basically to do two things. First let's bring that data that we're seeing about job postings and then I'm going to stuff like that in the dialogue with the employers to see if we could get more actionable intelligence let's get a little more specificity when you say you want critical to solve what kinds of problems what does that look like what are the kinds of scenarios or communicate how with what kinds of tools would be important. And then the second thing that this alliance proposed to do that's even more radical is what if we actually coordinated across institutions to get more scale out of the system so instead of just joking and competing with each other for the same students for the same programs maybe we could coordinate more to try to work the demand side of the problem and produce more educated graduates for the region. So anyway the legislature got behind this idea and we just launch what we call the Texas talent accelerator at the beginning of this last month and we had more than 120 employers and institutions that were there for the kickoff and I think that's how we're going to have to navigate these issues is we have to let go of the idea and higher education. And that we get to stipulate the value proposition we've got to work more closely with employers and we've got to be willing to bridge those traditional barriers across disciplines and cross institutions. And I applaud the initiative I think it's really really good I think it's very needed it's taking a holistic approach to value proposition what graduates need to know and not necessarily how they get that I think that's still in the purview of the professors administrators whatever but there needs to be some outside guidance for what does a graduate need in today's society. And the most important is the university that I've ever seen do this type of thing was Cal State San Marcos they had advisory boards for each of the colleges as well as for the entire university and yes you pay to be on it what not but it was made up of business leaders who would be advising the colleges this is what we need to see from your graduates. And this with faculty skill sets, etc. And it was an incredibly great program to me it's one of the top Cal states in the San Diego area if not in the state of California. There are some great examples that are out there I'm like I'm a big fan of the old and college of engineering where students have the opportunity to work on multiple projects for industry while they're still in their program. So the students are getting the opportunity to translate what they're learning in the classroom with their learning through their degree program into a real world problem and add value for those corporate partners so that's another example of how. Higher education can leverage these partnerships for the benefit of the students we also need to do it for the faculty so folks will complain about the faculty sometimes it you know I have to say that in most disciplines the faculty have very limited data about what kinds of things their graduates are doing and what happens to them in their career paths or what graduates are being asked to do. So there are some disciplines where you've got very good feedback mechanisms and say accounting or some of the engineering disciplines or in the performing arts we want to the best schools of music in the world here at the university of north Texas none of our graduates go and off to a studio and L.A. and say, well, I never expected I was going to have to play. like that. You know, they have a good sense of what excellence is going to look like in that professional context. For philosophy for English, for history, psychology and biology, any number of disciplines, it's pretty limited information. So we need to do a couple of things. One is be able to equip the faculty where they've got better information about what's happening to graduates and what they're going to be asked to do. Another thing is to get behind some of those faculty innovators. For example, we're looking at sponsoring faculty externships where faculty can be embedded in some of these corporations and learn firsthand about what kinds of things, problems are they wrestling with, how are they working, how are they communicating, and bring some of those insights back into discussions about course design and curriculum here at University of North Texas. Those are great ideas. I hope that the listeners here will start incorporating some of these into their own institutions. Another example from Cal State Sam Marcus, everyone going through and getting a BBA or a BBS, you know, Bachelor of Business Science, they have a program. It's a mandatory three credit hour course called Senior Experience. And they work in teams, they contract out to the various businesses to do projects. So they're working as teams, they're working on real world projects for the businesses. And I think the beauty of it, not only are they getting great experience outside, but it's mandatory. Nobody can slack off, so you have to work in a team and you've got faculty advisors that go with you. So the faculty are getting exposed to these type of things as well. So it's a win-win for students, for faculty, and for the businesses that are supporting these programs and these students. That is a great hands-by-and-law. You know, we've known for a long time. One of the best ways for us to add value to enhance the value of our degree programs is integrating those work experiences into the program. So you have an integrated internship. Are there real world problems that students are working with? I can add tremendous value, especially for a place like UNT, about 40% of our undergraduates are first-generation college students. They're blazing a trail for their families. They may have a little more limited exposure to different kinds of professional contexts. And so the other benefit from this besides the translation of particular disciplinary skills is it also gives the student the opportunity to develop some social capital and get connected with employers. And what we found at UNT is when the employers are exposed to our graduates, more often than not, they hire them. They love our youth tea graduates because they have had the opportunity to work with them and what they found is these are smart, resilient, really students that are not entitled. And when they've had the opportunity to actually have them to work with them in their companies, large and small, the majority of them end up getting job offers. Yeah, and that's important for the graduate, but it's also important for the employer and the institution. So with that, I want to double back to those learning outcomes that are so important. You've got a concept called credentials of value, which in the economy is the person better off, but it's looking at lots of criteria, some of which are the technical skills, some of which are learned through internships and whatnot, but there's also the personal interactions as well. So the work that we're doing at UNT around this carries over from some work and my previous job. So when I was commissioner of higher ed here in Texas, we updated the state's goals for educational attainment. And one of the markers we put down, we became the first state to say, we're going to condition our attainment goals on the value of those credentials in our economy. So we don't want to count any credentials where students are better off, at least in the sense of having a wage premium from those credentials. So that was a big deal for the state of Texas, and we have incredibly rich educational workforce data that even at the state level, we could leverage to take a look at these issues. So when I came over to North Texas, we're leveraging that data where we can look into privileged reports from the state and we can see earnings for our graduates, we can see typical debt burdens for our graduates, and we can essentially see that I get the program level. And that lets us ask some good hard questions about economic return on our credentials. So basically the idea is this, what are the typical earnings look like for a Texan who only has a high school diploma versus what are the earnings look like for one of your graduates that has whatever the credential is in question. And then what you'd want to do is you net out what are those typical costs after financial aid, you net out opportunity costs, we even account for the typical debt payments that a student who has debt would have, and basically ask how quickly do you break even on that investment? Well, we've looked at this for all our undergraduate and all our graduate programs at UNT. For our undergraduate programs, we have more than 110 undergraduate programs at UNT, what we found is the median time to break even on that investment for a bachelor's degree is about five years. So all in on all those out of pocket costs and even accounting for opportunity costs about five years, that's pretty impressive, that's really good. But we have a small number of programs say between eight and ten programs where it's more than ten years. Well, this gives us a sense of where to focus, right? So we're looking at that what we call time to value or all of our degree programs. It's not the only metric. We also look at like what are the costs to the institution of offering these programs. Now, especially with our work through the talent accelerator, we're asking questions about what does the demand look like in the economy in our region, in the state, beyond for certain kinds of credentials. And then we can decide, well, how do we, what do we want to do to respond to enhance that time to value? Are there programs that we should stop offering or other programs that we need to enhance? Maybe they need that internship or you need to embed an industry recognized credential or combine this program with another program. But I have to say the way that we're doing that is in partnership with our faculty. So the idea is not that you're just doing this from the administration side. The idea is you want to do this in partnership with faculty to make sure that your curriculum is coherent and that you've got a clear line of sight to value for the students. And it can be value in a lot of different dimensions, but the baseline needs to be an economic value. If you don't have that, you're not going to be able to realize a lot of the other richer conceptions of value from the credentials that we want to see. Isn't that why they call it the bottom line? Indeed. I want to explore shared governance a little bit because it's been in the news what Texas has done doing away with faculty, Senates. But when you and I chatted a couple days ago, what you're doing at UNT seems to be a model for other institutions. There's a good transparency. There's a lot of communications. You've got consulting. If you use a RACE model, you've got the responsible, you know, countable consultation. You've done a lot of consultation with faculty and you're building really a learning ecosystem. So tell us a little bit about that, please. Though it's easiest to see if we just focus on what we're doing in the context of trying to improve student success at UNT. Perfect. So the marker we put down is we're not going to define success just in terms of reporting degrees from our first engagement students through the time here into their jobs, into their careers. We've got to take responsibility for that broader student journey that broader conception success. All right. So how do we do that? Well, we've learned a lot in higher education over these last 10 or 15 years about different strategies and we're partnering with different organizations and institutions that are working on the frontiers of these issues on data analytics, on advising, on career development. A lot of other institutions have been doing that as well and taking inspiration, say from the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State. And we're working with Bravein and we're working with Data Kind on Analytics and other partners. If you just do that work, though, those are institutional levers and it's independent of what you're teaching, how you're teaching. And in many cases, it's actually independent of the faculty. So the other thing that we've been doing at UNT is we've taken a hard look at like what is that learning ecosystem like a UNT and with the faculty we've designed new kind of infrastructure. And that's got three notes to it. So one is an interdisciplinary institute on learning sciences. So we had people from different disciplines who were working on issues related to the science of learning. So we pulled those together in an interdisciplinary institute. disciplinary institute so we can draw on those insights and also so we can have a better sense of what's more or less effective. The second thing that we're doing we call the teaching hub. Basically the idea is can we provide next generation support for effective teaching. So one of the catalytic projects for that group is around teaching with AI. How do we incorporate AI into teaching and learning? How do we support faculty? But then the third thing that's a little more radical that I alluded to earlier, it can call a curriculum connector. And the idea is we want the curriculum not just to be distributed across the institution where it's not just within the disciplines and within the department, but can we be intentional about making sure that our curriculum is coherent? And also that we've got a clear line of sight to the kinds of skills that students are going to need so that they can add value for employers or as entrepreneurs so they can really realize the value of their UNT degrees. All of this has been designed in partnership with the faculty that's got faculty co-directors and steering committees. And the thing that people don't often want to say out loud is that most institutions have not created structures to get behind their faculty innovators. And that's before we get to criticizing the faculty about whether they're willing to change or not. We need to take a hard look at ourselves and the institutions. Are we really investing in and getting behind our faculty in the kind of training support we provide? Are we asking hard questions about the incentives for faculty? If faculty buy into all this work and they lean into this innovation and then time for promotion and tenure comes around and we say, oh I'm sorry, you've only published two articles, not four articles in this kind of journal and that's really all that we care about for promoting you. Well then we've just pulled the rug out from under the roof. So we've got to ensure the support structures are there that you're aligning incentives that you get behind the faculty innovators so their creative energy can help advance the institution to the benefit of the students in this broader vision of student success. That's our vision at UNT. That's what we're building here. And what I found is my faculty senate has been terrific partners in this. The faculty, invaders, the faculty leaders have been great partners in this because getting back to you asked me about my dissertation at the beginning of the conversation. We operate in a spirit of mutual respect. We're going to disagree sometimes but we're going to take each other seriously. We're going to have open transparent communications and we're going to recognize that we need to put our best ideas together to be able to get the best outcome for our institution. So critical. Our business runs on two premises. One, people support what they help create and second, people want input into decisions before they're made decisions that are going to affect them. You're doing both of those things. I mean, I've turned down clients who say, I want to implement XYZ and it's my way or the highway and it's just like, no, sorry, this is not going to work for us. It's got to be a joint thing because we're all in this together. If we're going to do more than have boutique projects, if we're actually going to make a difference and we're going to be able to make change at scale, that's the way we have to do it is that we've got to work across these traditional barriers between faculty and administration or cross academic departments. And as I was saying earlier, the barriers across institutions, the barriers between institutions and employers. We got to bridge all those barriers, put our best ideas on the table so we can move faster and so we can impact at scale. So true. Harrison, this has been a fabulous conversation. I've thoroughly enjoyed and I really appreciate your taking the time to be with us today. As we always do two final questions. What are the three takeaways that you think are most important for a higher-red president's and boards to do to make sure that their graduates are ready for joining the workforce or anything else that you think is important? Well, to make sure graduates are ready for joining the workforce. Number one, what the bullet is engage closely with employers and not just in the traditional advisory board, but given how dynamic things are right now, we have to have much closer collaboration with employers. Second thing that we have to do that you talked about earlier is we don't treat the experiential learning as a bolt-on where we're doing our traditional courses and then it's nice if students do an internship. One of the most important and most valuable things that we can do for students is to give them the opportunity to develop those skills in the context of their program. And then I would argue the third thing is we need to look also beyond just those workforce skills and think about like how we're taking responsibility for educating students as it is as adults, as critical thinkers who can engage in respectful dialogue, even with people they disagree with strongly. So we can live in community, we can move forward together. Such value-bellion sites, thank you. What's next for you? Next for me is next for me today actually is going to be a meeting with the faculty senate executive committee. So I'm going to be right back into these conversations today, but we have a ton of work that we're doing right now at UNT on our strategic plan and about to roll out November 5th, a bold new vision for university and North Texas. So stay tuned to UNT. I'm really excited about where we're going as an institution. What's coming? Well I'm excited for UNT that they have you as a president. You're a breath of fresh air in many respects and I wish you and UNT all the best in the future. Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation. Appreciate your saying now. My pleasure. I hope our paths cross in the near future. Look forward to it. Thank you. Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest Dr. Harrison Keller. Harrison was a pleasure having you on the show. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk about these great ideas. To my audience, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week. Changing higher ed is a production of The Change Later, a consultancy committed to transforming higher ed institutions. Find more information about this topic along with show notes on this episode at changing higher ed dot com. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the show. We would also value your honest rating and review. Email any questions, comments or recommendations for topics or guests to podcast at changing higher ed dot com. Changing higher ed is produced and hosted by Dr. Drummond Norton, Post Production by David L. White.