How AI is Changing Career Education Enrollment and Marketing

(upbeat music) - Welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmeier, and today we're gonna talk about artificial intelligence. And we have had a lot of requests to talk more about AI, and it just seems like everywhere you go, that seems to be the subject at hand. It's moving so quickly. And we're gonna talk today in particular about the use of AI in higher education, marketing and enrollment. And the Career Education Colleges and Universities, which is the association that sponsors this podcast, and that I lead, in May put out a report called How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Higher Education, Marketing and Enrollment Management. And it's a best practices guide for schools. It was put together by a large task force of association members, and that task force was co-chaired by our two guests today. And we are grateful to have them both here. They are Dana Hutton. She is the Chief Marketing and Enrollment Management Officer at Southeastern College in Florida. And Steven Arthur, he is the Director of Data Analytics at ECPI University. He's based in Virginia Beach. Welcome, both of you. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for having us. Glad to be here. I think the first question would be, we'll get into the details of what you found with this process, but what prompted the creation of this guide and why do you think that this was the right time to develop it? LLMs, large language models, these AI chatbots, they kind of slowly trickled into public consciousness at the end of 2022 when OpenAI's chat GPT 3.5 model came out and showed a remarkable improvement from some of the old chatbots that had been put out before and been developed before. And these things have been in development for over a decade, but it's not until that point that there was a transformational moment on how well these started working. And ever since then, it's getting more and more popular and AI obviously is not going anywhere. So we figured that the sooner the better for a lot of these things. It took about a year or so for real, tangible applications started being available for just for general use in any industry. And we were working on this document for almost a year. So it's very, very glad to get it out there. We were kind of worried that as soon as we launched it, that it was already gonna be out of date 'cause things are moving so quickly. But yeah, basically the sooner the better. So we wanted to get it out there as quick as we could. - I think from another point as well, is that we had all pretty much been introduced to chat GPT and we knew how to do the basic functions of chat GPT, but there was just so many things that were coming out so rapidly that can make us more efficient in higher education. And we also wanted to show others how to utilize that and how to embrace it. - And do you feel like in the beginning when Stephen was talking about, there was a lot of unknown related to AI. And of course there still is, but it was mostly thought of in higher education as a way for students to cheat. That's what everyone first thought this was all about. But now I think a couple years later, people have come to the realization, no, this is actually a very helpful tool in setting curriculums and helping instructors do the work that they need to do. And you have focused on the administrative aspect of it, of how schools themselves can use the tools of AI specifically with enrollment and recruiting. And when you thought about the creation of this, what was your goal? Like who did you envision as your audience and who do you want this to serve? - Well, the goal was to create as comprehensive a document as possible that shows at a higher level what AI is capable of doing in marketing and enrollment and they're the two most scrutinized areas by regulators. So we wanted to make sure that we are showing ourselves as a leader in the space that we know what is out there right now. And we can be ahead of the regulators and show them like here's some things that are possible and things that we recommend as best practices. And we wanted it to be more just an overview. We didn't want to get into the details 'cause that would start to make this document way too long. But just wanted to make sure that we showed what was possible and we wanted to serve all those colleges and regulators both that we are leading the way on this stuff. - And that what we do enhances the student experience as well with good integrity. And that is why we had a lot of progress and then we would stop and we would go back and we would collaborate with legal and making sure that things were compliant 'cause it's important. And when you both said we, you referenced we and you're talking about the private career school sector. And this does apply across the board to all institutions of higher education. I think there's very valuable information in here that they'll find useful. But Steven, you referred to the fact that there have been instances in the past of regulators and others who have noticed that in the for-profit sector, but it's happened in other sectors that there's been a misuse of the enrollment and marketing tools that are available to schools and that they, some of them in fact, faced legal consequences for that and schools actually went out of business as a result of the more egregious examples. So I think what you're both saying is you felt like it was time for the career college sector to put this forward as a way A, to show that they take that issue very seriously, but also for people who work in the field to use as a tool to effectively use and appropriately use enrollment and marketing techniques. - Yeah, and to show the fact that a lot of people are wondering like what can I use AI for? What can I not use it for? 'Cause I don't want to get in trouble. There hasn't really been any guidance so far from any legal sense. And so one of the things that we point out in the document is that all of the old rules that are already there is, at the very least, make sure any AI implementation you have don't break any of those rules. It is somewhat similar to the same types of things you can and cannot do without AI. All of those things still apply to AI too. - I think also utilizing AI to continue to formulate our rules and making sure that we're implementing it correctly too. There's so many different things that are out there. Policy is very important in process and everything that you do, but especially in higher education. And that was one of the neat things that we were able to talk about on a regular basis was what are you discovering within this project that allows you to continue to perfect your policy and your process within your institution? - And while this does apply to all types of institutions, you've both alluded to the fact that you feel like it impacts career school or career focused institutions, perhaps more so than traditional universities. Can you explain a little bit more about that? - I think that there is, in holiday a lot in the rules and regulations in higher ed, especially there are very regulated rules for career schools. And I think that this right here gave us an opportunity to demonstrate that in anything that we do or anything that we roll out, we try to make sure that it is ethical and that it has good integrity and that we are disciplined and committed to the student outcomes. One of the things that we consistently talked about, I know within the steering committee and also within the enrollment management committee was the student. How are we making this student first and continuously coming back to making sure that that was the number one point of view as we wanted to introduce as much technology or AI to colleagues around the country. We also wanted to make sure that we were consistent in our efforts to make sure that it was student centric. - Talk more about that. Like what is it about what you found or the use of AI or the purpose of this endeavor that is student first that you feel helps the student? - One of the takeaways that I had at conference this year was one of the competitive advantages that we have in our schools right now is your admissions process. There's a lot of schools and there's a lot of options for students. And so with the enrollment and application portions, how complicated are you making your application process? And it can get complicated. There's a lot of moving parts from the application and enrollment documents through accreditation standards that are matching for that, moving through to even financial aid or transfer of credits evaluations. And so utilizing AI, you can make these things very efficient but you can also go back and ensure that you're checking yourself regarding regulations, regarding different rules from accreditors, even programmatic accreditors. And so just sum that up, Jason, I would say that, we wanted to make sure that, yes, there's the interview process, but when it came down to the actual recommendation and enrollment process for a student that we kept it as efficient as we could in ensuring a good student experience for everyone. AI has been improving the student experience for a very long time, much further back than when chat GPT came out. Google and Meta specifically had been using all sorts of AI algorithms in their back end to help students or prospective students find the right school for them to find the schools that are the most related to what they might be interested in. Then you get into the, like at ECPI, we have an AI based transcript reader to help transcribe any transcript. And then mash that to what we offer. And that allows students to much more quickly get and see what their potential transfer credits might be. Yeah, we're using AI predictive models to figure out and predict which students are the most likely to actually succeed. And if they don't reach a particular bar, then we don't let them even start school, 'cause we don't want them to end up failing or set them up for failure. And even then, even while they're in school, we have all sorts of AI things to help improve the student experience, to help them not just graduate, but also find the job. So there's all sorts of ways that AI is making the student experience better. We talk a lot about that in the document. And at the same time, both sides of this are aligned, the colleges and the students are aligned, 'cause colleges are using this to get more efficient in what they do. And at the same time, they're able to provide a better experience to the students. You referenced even the students when they're searching for schools and comparing, looking for opportunity, and they can use AI. Talk a little bit more about how that would work before the student enrolls when they're just trying to pick which school is right for them. - Oh, sure. I mean, this is getting into a little bit of the privacy issues that Google might see, but Google collects information on you all the time. And you can see that as a bad thing in terms of privacy, but like it or not, they're using all of that data to try to predict what you might be most interested in. So when you search for what are some engineering technology or cosmetology schools in my area, then Google knows a lot about you and will use all of that data to predict and serve to you search results that are going to be the most relevant for you. Not just organic search results, but the paid search ads that show up there too. So they're constantly improving that. Just a couple of weeks ago, they had their Google IO event where they announced all sorts of new AI features that they're incorporating into all of their campaign management systems. And it's just continued to get more and more advanced and a lot easier for schools to take advantage of a lot of the tools that Google can offer to help keep to improve their marketing, communication to students to better show them what here's what we offer. Here's what we excel best at and let the student decide for themselves which school is best. - Talk about the process of putting this report together. The task force that the two of you were co-chairs, how many people were on it? You said it took a year. Well, what was the conversation? Like how did you narrow the focus? - I mean, we had well over 40 people who came together to make this document happen. And I have to give props to Mitch Townfield. He did a great job in helping us to all come together and sectioning us out into the four different committees. I worked with Steven and we developed a teams channel for our task force. And we went through teams that we had one communication point to where we could share articles, case studies, where we could chat with one another. And then also, you know, each committee would meet on a regular basis. When Steven was talking here just momentarily about how rapidly things are advancing, that was the catch 22 of the whole project. You know, it was really exciting to see all the new development that would come out, but it was also very tough to keep up with it. And so I know my committee for enrollment, we actually had developed our section. And then we actually went back and started from scratch because there was just so much development that was moving forward. And we wanted to make sure that, you know, we were giving as much the industry best practices that was as relative as the release of the document. - Yeah, I was actually writing a section for the document as little as a week before we actually published it just to try to make sure this is up to date as possible. So, you know, it was quite a process to continue to update this as we went. And, you know, we're planning to keep it updated as, you know, at least as much as we can going to the future. So we're gonna try to make it as future proof as possible. - Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. How do you keep up with the, it's changing so quickly. And you've identified a certain area to look at here enrollment and marketing. How do you keep up with what's coming in the future? And then when you make those updates, how do you ensure that they're the most current version of what's available? - Yeah, so I subscribe to many, many different AI newsletters to see what's coming out in general. And then I also follow, you know, all of the usual news sites for higher education, the Chronicle and such that always have a lot of, like the newest things that schools are doing. Then most of those include the use of AI in various ways. So usually just keeping up with the news as much as I can. - Yeah, and being a student of the profession, right? I mean, these are things that are coming out that are exciting, but also, you know, you have to understand what we can use and how it can benefit the efficiency of everything that we do, but also just continuously being a learner of AI. - So we talked about the process and who it's for and how you're gonna keep it updated and the people involved, but what were your findings? Like can you give some real world examples of advice that you offer and things that you found through your research? - The really neat thing that we got to explore was, you know, algorithmic bias. And we had to be very careful with that too, because there's still not a lot of case studies or anything like that to give the best indication for what's gonna happen or what is actually relative right now. However, what we did understand was that it is important for us to have clean data, because without clean data, we'll never be able to advance into the potential of the AI world in higher education. And so, you know, it's really important that we have some type of, you know, Power BI or business intelligence or, you know, some type of CRM to give us the best advantage of clean data that we can possibly have, because that's gonna be your decision maker when it comes down to AI. And it's important that you have that, otherwise, you know, you're gonna have bias. And that's really tough. - Yeah, we actually have an entire section of the document called the AI adoption and framework for success. So if there's just one section of this that you read, that would be the one if you just wanna, you know, figure out how you actually get this going. The first one was very simply what we already talked about, which is making sure that whatever you're doing and is tied to student success. That should be the mindset always. You know, as our founder at ECPI University, Mr. Dreyfus, said, take care of the students, they'll take care of you. So always make sure to tie it to success, invest in training of AI, you know, prioritize like Dana said, data readiness. A lot of these AI systems have a tough time reading data unless it's presented in a certain way. You know, start small, then scale. It's better to walk before running. And there's a lot more in there. You know, there's all sorts of things that you can do to, you know, begin or continue investing in AI at your institution. And we try to provide as much guidance as we can in this document. - I find that sometimes when you, or when anyone, research is a subject that's changing very rapidly and about which there are great unknowns. Sometimes you come away from the process more pessimistic than you were when you started or more fearful of the outcome 'cause you learned what you don't know. What was the outcome in your minds? Do you feel better after having gone through this about the future? Or do you feel like things are moving so quickly that you're having trouble getting your hands around? I mean, what's your overall perception having gone through this? - That is a very good question. I find myself both optimistic and pessimistic, you know, optimistic because the tools that are becoming available are just amazing. I mean, near magical. And the ways that this is going to improve the world is massive and cannot be understated. But at the same time, things like these that are changing so quickly, that in and of itself is a cause for concern. And, you know, who knows where it's gonna go. That uncertainty in and of itself is kind of what I'm a little worried about. But at the same time, these things are quite remarkable. - Yeah, and one of the greatest opportunities that I had is I worked with a lot of admissions professionals in my section and, you know, we have big personalities and we're not afraid to talk. So everybody was very opinionated and I loved it because, you know, it gave me perspective from everyone. And I'm a glass half full kind of person. So I'm usually running on the optimism. But I think that if there's one thing that I could say that, you know, I would take away from what Steven's advice was and that is to start small because that will allow you to kind of test and see different options that are there for you and your campuses or your staff or faculty or your students. And seeing how that can continue to elevate. You know, I started utilizing chat GPT just to ask it simple questions. And now it's my administrative assistant. So I've kind of mastered that particular AI component, but I've also moved into other things that I'm utilizing for admissions training and making sure that, you know, we're appealing to all kinds of learners, not just the auditorium and giving them training manuals to read, however, being engaged with different options such as podcast and things that are better for everyone. - The name of the document is how artificial intelligence is transforming higher education marketing and enrollment management, a best practices guide for schools. If a listener or someone out there wanted to learn more and find this document and read it, how would they find it? - You can find this document on career.org and the resources section. - Or I presume you can Google and it will come up as well. And I would really encourage folks to take a look at the people involved in the task force. We have Dana and Steven with us here today. Mitch Tallenfeld was referenced. This was his idea. He's the founder and president of MDT Marketing down in Florida. And our guests today have been Steven Arthur, Director of Data Analytics at ECPI University and Dana Hutton, who's Chief Marketing Enrollment Management Officer for Southeastern College. Thank you both for your leadership on this issue and for being with us today. - Thank you, Jason. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter at CQED. That's @CECUED. Thank you for listening. (upbeat music) - That's topica.