Students Are Acting Like Consumers. Higher Ed Needs to Catch Up

[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. [Music] Thank you David. My guest today is Jeff Dinsky, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer for Illucian. Jeff's responsible for driving Lucian's growth strategy and he's done this in multiple ways. He's got great experience. Most recently he was a partner at Titan Partners, one of TCL's strategic partners, where he advised in a broad range of education companies on growth, market positioning strategies, as well as private equity fund sponsoring for acquisitions. Jeff's got more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, an operator, an higher education, technology and media sectors. And he joins me today to share some of those insights with us, as well as to look at higher ed in a very different way, one that I think would be very beneficial, given his background. Thanks for having me, Drum McNaughton. I'm looking forward to a really good conversation. You've got an incredible background, doing all sorts of different things. I would almost call it a serial entrepreneur, but you've actually worked in corporations with one of my company's partners, Titan Partners. Yeah, there's a bit of variety in my background and certainly some entrepreneurial stuff in there. But right now I'm the Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer at Ellucian, which is the largest ed tech company in the world, where the market leader in student systems, we have about half of the US colleges using our system. And as corporate strategy officer, what that means there is a response for our long term planning and driving and allowing our strategy throughout the organization, and then also driving a lot of our growth initiatives around market research, mergers and acquisitions, helping define new product entries, new market entries internationally. And then as you mentioned going back further, I'd spend a little bit of time, most recently as a partner, as a strategy consultant for him called Titan Partners, it's totally focused on the education sector, and then prior to that, as an operating executive at a smaller education technology company called Parchant. But you also were a journalist as well. That's right, I spent, it's awesome that you brought that up. I spent the first six or so years of my career as a TV writer and producer, first at NBC for four years and then two years at ESPN. So I did lots of sports and Olympic stuff, got the travel around the world, meet a lot of famous people, famous athletes, I really enjoyed that time of life. What was your favorite interview when you were a journalist? That is interesting, because we interviewed everyone from Charles Barkley to Barry Bonds. In terms of best interviews, I think one of the cool things we did is we interviewed Michael Feltz before he was famous, before he had Olympics and did a lot of work there. And then personal favorite of mine, but to your point about background and journalism, not a great interview, but we got to interview one time, and this will be a little scare for most people, Buzz Dissinger, who wrote most famously Friday Night Lights, which is kind of the book I grew up idolizing as a journalist, so that was really cool for me as well. That is neat. So you've seen the whole gamut when it comes to education, sports, media. Yeah. What stands out for you the most? So I think one of the things interesting is I spent the early part of my career in the media industry, doing a TV and then some consumer internet stuff. And then I think, you know, transition to education over the last almost 15 years and was really good transition for me because I actually wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be younger and so it was a really good transition and something that I've obviously chose to stay in. And I think like, you know, to bridge the two, I think one of the things that's really interesting where even in this day, I think media and consumer internet are really good at, is really just servicing the customer. I think like, if you think about my days in TV, when I was a USPN, I helped start a morning show there. It was called Cold Pizza. It eventually evolved, forget her bad, into ESPN's first take. And you know, it was a daily show. So like we were really focused and attentive to the readings, right? Your goal was to really produce something that people wanted to watch, right? That's what the business model is. And I think as you move forward and move into digital models of the internet, that's continued. And I think what's interesting to me is we dive in and talk about education is I'm not sure higher ed in particular or the education sector in general. I always thought about their customers, their students, or more modern learners as consumers or someone they need it to service. And I think that's changing in a really good way, whether it's higher ed institutions or even high schools and colleges are thinking a bit more about like, how do we provide what our students really want or what our students really need and how do we meet the needs of those learners. And I think that's one commonality that I think has always been true in media, but I think it's starting to be true in higher ed. I think that's a really good assessment of where higher ed is in many respects. You've got a loss of public confidence. The costs are very high. You've got the politicians stepping in and people have forgotten in many respects. Like Bill Clinton said, is the economy stupid? It's all about the student and making that student successful. Yeah, I think that's right. People talk about the challenges within higher ed now. And I think those vary from the financial challenges of enrollment cliffs, general population demographic changes. And that creates financial strain on the institutions. But I think one of the things we talked about in our interview, that's interesting from the political side, is I don't think higher ed's been done any favors, but I think that's only by either political administration over the last several years. I think obviously Trump is very publicly in the Trump administration, again, for you to know about, has very publicly gone after many of the Ivy schools and other institutions in very specific actions. And I think that is, in my view, degraded some credibility among some of President Trump supporters around higher ed. To be candid, I also don't think the Biden administration helped higher ed in this regard because they spent the last, I don't know, four years of the presidency talking a lot about refunding student loans, forgiving student loans with the very Swiss and statement that, hey, your degrees aren't getting value. And so I think if you kind of add those two together and they're very different presidents, very different politics, right, I'm not equating to you in any way, but I think you have a situation where the general American populace in a way that I don't think has been true at any other point in my lifetime is starting to trust and higher ed or believe in the value of a higher education and degree less than they have in the past. And I don't think that's happened in our lifetimes before. And that's a very interesting perspective. I hadn't thought of it from that from the refund. Yeah, but there were a lot of folks out there that, you know, people were termed bad actors, institutions that the Department of Education said, no, this degree was not worth it. To me, it's a little bit of a leap, but I can see how folks would make it to interpret that to say the degrees don't have the cachet. They don't have the value that they used to. Yeah, I mean totally right like there were bad actors out there and people were getting marketed to and in different ways, but I don't think a lot of people will parse it that finally like a lot of people are listening to messaging. Don't think about sort of don't know what for profit education is even canily and some of the things that happen there. And so I do think it has had an effect right now as we talk about it, I think there's the very possibility that we can come back from that in material ways. And I think this shift is going to be to go to more kind of skills based learning, non degree and that kind of thing and to be clear, I think what I'm saying is I don't think that anyone can we on either side of the political or the American populace at large. That's the value of education right like I think that's still a core tenet to society and I think even some areas where you get aligned with politically what I think has become maybe less valuable than even when I was thinking about going to college is the perception that a college degree will automatically put me on the right track. And I don't think that's the case as much anymore. Yeah, you may be very right on that I think people and this is to be a generational thing put the money aside, you know everybody that I talk to feels like higher ed is too expensive and those are the folks that come down on the side of. the value that there used to be. Even though you can easily show that someone with a four-year college degree will earn three times more than the average person who doesn't have that. But I think the thing is that these pathways are becoming more and more individual, more unique. One size doesn't fit all. It's not like going to the shoe store and saying, "Yeah, I want this pair of hush puppies. I'm sorry. I'm dating myself with hush puppies." But there are many pair of hush puppies, so I know what you mean. Yes. They were very comfortable and then became clerks. I'm sorry, I need to shut up. We should be making. No, no, no, no, we can talk about shoes all day if you want. I mean, you can change the topic of the podcast. Yeah, that might be a little easier to do. But the pathways have become far more unique. It's not like going to a custom shoe store and saying, "Put me a pair of shoes together." Although you certainly do have some of those with your very expensive, some liberal arts schools. Yeah, sure. But in general, higher ed is making the shift to where it is, like what you say, more skills-based learning, more focused on workforce skills. Yeah, I think the point earlier, I don't think anyone. There are certain degrees that people don't question the value of it all. We still need engineers. We still need AI aside. We still need lawyers. We still need doctors. Those are super obvious ones. We still need computer programmers who are going to be accelerated by AI. Those degrees still have a certain set of cash-a both in their field and in some cases out of their field. I think a lot of people understand the value of an engineering degree because they will the person's quantitative. They know they think logically. They know they have some resilience because it's hard, right? I think it's some of the other stuff that, look, I love to read. I happen to have been. It's going to sound like I'm just advocating for myself here. I happen to have been a mechanical engineering major, but I had enough credits to be an English major and really love that. I don't think if I had decided to do one versus the other, I would be any less prepared for my existing job. As long as I had. The math classes matter. As long as I took the same set of classes, if I came out with a BA in English as opposed to a BSE in mechanical engineering, which I have, I'm not different as a person. To be clear, I think those degrees are super valuable. To go back to where we started on what the consumer wants, I think there's a trend away from that in terms of what students, both traditional students are coming out of high school and non-traditional students who are 25 plus or going part time, which is a bigger part of the population now are looking for. I think they're looking for more specific skills training and I think in order to meet the needs in the market, higher ed is going to have to continue to shift that way. I think you're right. In many respects, students coming out of conversation with someone today who was telling me when they came out of their degree program, they had learned the skills that they needed to, when they got into the workforce, it was very different than what they had expected from their degree. I think there needs to be more of a merging of the two and I've got a lot of examples of institutions who are doing this type of thing where freshmen, sophomore, juniors, seniors even are getting definite work for skills by actually working jobs as they're doing it. It's not an internship or an externship where folks are saying, yeah, go get me this cup of coffee, you can learn from me by osmosis. No, they're actually getting in and doing the work that they would be doing at a corporation. One of the things we try to do is help schools go in that direction. I think a couple of things are going to happen over the next year that I think will materially shift the market. I think anyone who listens to this podcast, maybe not anyone, but in all likelihood, knows that kind of workforce pallegrants are coming. That's going to be the first time we've seen the federal government in a meaningful way, essentially fund non-degree courses and everyone's waiting for it. It's not like this is a unique thought by me, but the details are important here. I think that's going to have a profound shift in the market. I think you're going to see, we talked about some of the financial challenges. I see it in our job a lot. One of the great benefits of working at Olucian is we work with a really broad set of the market. A lot of community colleges, a lot of our lawns, large state schools, small privates, they all use our platform. I think you can see the breadth of good things that are happening in higher ed and a lot of the challenges. It's very clear that for some segment of the market, I think traditionally people would think about small privates, mid-sized state schools, maybe depending on funding, that they are really in some real financial hard times. You see it in the number of mergers you see across schools over the last couple of years. That number is ticked up pretty consistently over the last several years. I think what you're going to see, we didn't talk about it beforehand, but when we were talking about the TV stuff, it ties back to the comment I made there. I think what you're going to see is particularly small private institutions mean pretty heavily into non-degree programs funded by workforce PAL because I think they're going to need and we'll see that as a way to drive revenue and support their offshore operations to be candid, right? Because it's going to be funded. And so then to go one step further, I think if we agree that's going to happen to go our very first comment, I think those non-degree credentials, whether it's in statistics or AI prompting or data analytics or engineering or numerous other things are actually going to meet the needs of the market, right? I think the schools are going to specifically structure them based on just that community colleges have done the story, we based on what the needs and either their local area or their target demographic are. And I think you're going to see that gain traction in a very real way. And I think that's going to be really good for higher ad because it will get them in the habit of being responsive. As I said, when we started thinking about their learners as consumers and trying to meet those needs. One interesting piece with that is the faculty. The faculty are the, quote, experts in their fields. But there's always the, you know, call it a calling out, you know, faculty are not in touch with the marketplace. What's going on? Things along like this. I see more of a perspective of faculty working, I wouldn't say closely, but working with business folks to find out what in fact is going on in business and how they need to update courses, curriculums, things like that. Do you foresee this? Yeah, I think so, right? I think one day you have to always be careful about. And it's true with all sort of groups of people, right? But I think we tend to paint faculty with a broad brush. Like it's one sort of homogenous group of people. And it's not, right? I think you see many of the people I know, I have friends who are professors, they are among the most progressive, active, like new cutting-edge futures thinkers I know. But then you do also have a big population of that that came up as academics, right? Went to college, got a master's, went through a PhD program, really believes in the value of those traditional education. So I think, and to go back to our point, I think you'll see a little bit of a, may not be a bifurcation in the sense that it'll sweat 50/50, but I think you'll see a little bit of a split of progressive professors cutting-edge, more innovative professors willing to embrace this. And I think a great example of this, we're really proud to have a big chunk of the community colleges using a Lucy and student. And I think historically that's been the role of community colleges, right? To identify specific workforce needs, historically in their local geographies, and we've got the virtual that's changed a little bit. But meeting the needs of the learners they had locally, right? I do think because short courses are a little bit easier to put together, they're going to be a little bit easier to get accredited and approved, I think at some places. I do think you'll see innovative professors saying, "Hey, I really want to do this." Like, I want to teach something for my own good, for my students good, that's going to directly lead to skills that are going to get them jobs. And I think you're going to see those sort of innovative first wave professors really go after that, and as you said, me into thinking about what the workforce needs. And you're already seeing that at places like Southern New Hampshire, Arizona State, Western Governors, people know these places, but that's how they're thinking already. I think with the advent of workforce Pell, where you get funding, you'll see that thinking kind of percolate out. And then I think what you'll see happen. The second wave is some of the the more conservative professors, or maybe less innovative, depending on how you wanna look at it, we'll see some of that success. And I think like anything else, even if you're not the first wave or the early adopter to use a marketing term, like if you see your colleagues having success and empowering students, right? 'Cause that's what a lot of faculty care about, right? They wanna be known as a leader in their field, right? That's a lot of reason you've become an academic. And for a lot of other faculty, they wanna teach students, right? They wanna change kids' lives or change learners' lives. And I think when you see that impact happening, which I believe it will, right? I don't think it's gonna be perfect. It's probably gonna be messy at times, but I think in general, the idea of moving to more shorter skills-based learning is really impactful. I think you'll see some of the faculty that we would never have thought do this follow on eventually. - Yeah. And I think it's gonna require a different skill set to do that other than the traditional way faculty come up through the ranks, get their PhD, et cetera. - What do you think will be different about the skill set? - Well, I think it's gotta be more in touch instead of research-based, I think it's gonna be more application type things. When you stop and think about how a faculty member gets qualified, they go up, you know, bachelor's degree, master's PhD, they come in, and they, you know, maybe they're taught how to teach, maybe they're not, but it's a complete academic role, but if you go for a DBA or a doctor of business administration instead of a PhD research-based type of thing, you're more in touch with the practical. Then you've got to configure the courses differently and get the input from the outside versus research-based. So I think it's gonna be a different pathway for faculty qualifications to do this, but is it wrong? I wouldn't say that it is. It's just gonna be different and faculty who have come up through the traditional ranks, it's gonna, I think, gonna be a bigger change for them than it would be somebody else. - Yeah, I think that's totally right. And look, I think going back, like I think, higher ed can learn from some of the things it's done in the past, right? That I think will apply to these things. So great example, obviously, if you take places like most obvious ones is business schools, right? Business schools for years have been using practitioners to teach, right? Certainly some of the people who teach at business schools are academics and PhD and operations management or strategy, whatever the case may be, but a lot of those people, like I went to business school, a lot of them were, you know, they had worked at Walmart or Danahher or GM or Take Your Pick, right? And I think there's already a model within a lot of these higher ed schools. I think last week's medical schools will do this some two, right? I mean, people were teaching in things like internships and then fellowships, obviously, they're practicing doctors, right? There's a model here. I think you'll start to see, to your point, about different types of professors as we get some of these workforce training programs. I think you'll see schools sort of adopt that model more broadly out of like business schools, right? And I think that could be pretty good for all of us as well. There's one model that I've seen that I thought was just brilliant. It was a master's program and they had their core faculty, their tenured faculty teaching the base courses, the requirements. And then they would have adjuncts come in and it was, the institution was located in Silicon Valley. They would have adjuncts who were doing the latest and greatest out in the valley, come in and teaching the higher level courses to where they're getting both the baseline knowledge that they need as well as what's going on. To me, that seems like a really good model. Yeah, yeah, totally. So we've also got a lot of things. And you alluded to this just a little bit ago, moving schools to being financially viable. We're seeing a lot of institutions going out of business, the finances are driving mergers, digging back to your experience with Titan. What are you seeing? Yeah, I think you said it. I'm not sure it's that much more complicated than the idea that we have, depending on how you look at it, a flat or maybe eventually, the crying enrollment base in the US. And then you have, for all the reasons we've talked about, the desire to work with a more professional rating, I think you also have people making different choices. I think you're hearing more about a apprenticeship program. So as a result, traditional higher ed, even if you broaden out the population beyond like 18 to 22 year olds, I think you just have less people being able to pay for it, right? And so I think the reality is that doesn't affect big state schools who have funding, who scale. It doesn't affect rightly or wrongly for really prestigious schools that are always going to have demand. If you look at sort of the US news and world reports kind of acceptance rate and yield rates, it doesn't affect the really prominent community colleges, annually, who have a really good product, because they have a product that educates really well for a relatively low cost compared to a lot of the other things in the market, right? And so who it affects, to be honest, is the smaller private schools who maybe aren't differentiated. And I think they have two problems. One is not clear differentiation around value. IE, there's maybe not that much perceived difference between one or the other, right? And that's why I mentioned the community colleges, because people think of community college sometimes as not being very great education. And so they say that's just not true, but even given that, they have a clear defined sort of differentiated teaching model in terms of where they are. And so what ends up happening with these smaller private schools is they have two things, not a differentiated value, and then they have problem two, which is lack of scale, right? Because there is overhead at institutions, whether it's a president salary or the football field or the student center that is easier for you to pay for, you have 15,000 students than 1,500 students, right? And so I think what's gonna happen is the demand impacts those schools the most. And as a result, those schools are looking to sort of merge and combine, right? And we've seen record numbers and not in 2025. I think that's gonna continue. And I think to go back to our broader point about higher ed being disrupted with workforce, pal, and I didn't use that word before, but I think that is what it is, and non-degree kind of learning. I think in some ways that merging sort of accelerates some of that disruption because by definition, when two schools merge, one or both of them is gonna have to change or give up on some things that they see as synchrosack, right? And I think while that will be painful for schools, it'll be hard for some alumni who really had great experiences there. It does get us thinking about new models, right? And if you've been forced to merge or forced to sort of look at a different economic model, that also opens up your eyes. And I've seen this with presidents we talked to on like how can I do things differently? And I think the reality is a lot of whether it's presidents or faculty or provost, a lot of those people wouldn't be asking if we need to do something different if they weren't forced to. And I think some of the combination of the economic challenges and then some of the consumer demand issues shifting, I think, are gonna force that. - Yeah, I think so. From where you sit, and lots of experience in various areas of higher education, but also commercial, what should institutions, strategies be going forward? As a general rule, I know it gets very nuanced, size, demographics of learners, et cetera, but what should they be focusing? - If we're being honest, I'm happy to pine on this. We're in a great spot where we have, you know, 3000 customers on a Louisiana, we're super proud of it. I talk to those customers all the time. So I have one perspective. There are certainly people who know a lot more about institutional operations and how you run an institution than I do. I wouldn't claim to do that, but I do think it goes back to kind of, if I were sort of advising a school on thinking about strategy, right? I do think, and I'm beating a dead horse here, but I don't think it's a bad point to repeat. I would go back to really two tenants. One, can I look at creating new programs or revising my existing programs to make them more relevant to the workforce that I'm pushing my students into? And that's gonna be very, for some places, I mentioned Community College, it could be the local workforce for other schools that could be just a specific industry vertical that you played, whether that's, you know, fine arts and dance or computer science, right? So it's thinking about, hey, where are my students going after school? And then how do we give them the schools that those, employers want. You hit it on it, right? And I think that's where we've talked a lot about kind of workforce panel as sort of almost isolated from a degree. I don't actually think that's how it'll play out in practice. I think what you'll see is students who are already enrolled in college taking incremental kind of programs on top of it to get those workforce skills. Like a great example, like AI prompting. Now we could maybe make an argument that given how things have played out over the last three years, 19-year-olds don't need help in AI prompting, but there'll be other things that'll come along and there'll always be modern technology. So I think you're going to see people layer use those workforce palgrants to layer really specific skills about presentations. Another great one, like that's something when we bring students in from out of college and hire them, like almost inevitably they need help with presenting and all sorts of those things, right? It's a real learn skill. So I could see schools doing some of that. So I think it'd be one, think about where your students are going or where they want to go from an employer standpoint, and to tailor programs, even if they are non-degree programs, around the skills that are going to make them competitive there. So I think that would be tenant one. And that's going to look different for every school to your point, early most schools, right? Tenant two would be kind of what I said, which is ultimately, and this is the hardest thing for me when I came from consumer media to higher ad is ultimately you should be thinking about your students as consumers, right? And so we talked about one half of it, the what your workforce needs are and applies what the content is. And then I think step two is to think about who your students are and think about where you can meet them, where they are. This is no longer about like I come and talk and you have to come and listen, because an 18 year old will just as easy learn to change or oil on YouTube or play guitar on another online source as they will go to medieval history class, right? And so I think you have to think about not only the content, but meeting your students or your learners where they are in terms of format, modality, time of day, all of those things and really reprogram your thinking to be like, hey, what is this base? If I think of them as my consumers, my customers, even if you want to use it a different way, what do they need? And how can I best service them? And I think if you do those things, you have a potential to really find a niche and excel as we go through what I think is going to be a pretty significant disruption to higher ed. And the irony of that is you do those two things and service them well. You may not need to change your model that much, right? It just may be tweaking some of the content and the modality and you may be able to continue with some of the same things you've always done. I think if you refuse to do anything, you know, you probably won't long term. Very sage advice. Thank you. Sure. Well, Jeff, thank you. I've thoroughly enjoyed this. I always enjoy talking abstract theory, things like that. But this was beyond abstract theory. This was some real tangible things that somebody who is originally from outside of higher ed, you see it from a different perspective. So thank you for sharing this. Of course. And it's great being on. I love doing stuff like this. And I know like, you know, you've endless other people, you could probably get to be on some very honored that you allowed me to come on and talk today. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. As we always do, two final questions, three takeaways for presidents and boards. What do they need to be thinking about in this age of disruption? Three takeaways. One, experiment with non-degree courses, right? I think we talked about it. Two, find workforce partners that you trust because I said earlier about matching classes with workforce needs. That's a little bit hand wavy. Like if we had more time, like that's a high level answer. And it's not a fair answer because you can't just conjure that, right? So the way you do that is you find actual people who are hiring and you talk to them, right? So find work, first point, a partner's you can trust. And then I think three, think about how you encourage your faculty to embrace new models because I think what is historically going to be true of US colleges universities. And I think it will continue to be true for a while despite all this potential to eruption worth on. And it's like, if you can't get the faculty on board with doing stuff, it's hard to move the needle. And I think there are enough people that as we talked about, early adopters or innovative thinkers that well. And so I figure out a way to make sure I'm working with the faculty rather than trying to work outside them. I guess would be the way I describe it. Sage advice, thank you, sir. Yeah. What's next for you? What's next for Lucian? Exciting time for us in a couple ways. We just completed the acquisition of anthology, one of our competitors. So I think our mission, I exquisitely, is to power higher education. So institutions can empower student success. We really think of college and universities are customers, but think about how we can help them drive what they really care about, which is the club of student student success, right? Whether that's retention, graduation, or finding jobs, like we talked about. And I think that is how college and universities think about it. And so I think for us, it's really exciting. We bring on almost 300 new customers that were able to help sort of in that mission with our tools that we do believe are the best in the market. I think two for Lucian will continue to see the rollout of the Lucian student, which is our our cutting edge sad solution that we think is the best solution in the market. And you'll see in April, we'll announce a bunch of big stuff there. It's going to be capabilities and module based. So we're really excited about that. And then I think we talked a lot about workforce. And I talked just now about sort of meeting students where they are or identifying the needs of your customers. I think that's what we try to do as a business to. And so the third thing I'm really excited about in 2026 for us is we rolled out last year our sort of non-degree and continuing ed court management solution called Journey. That's designed to help start and run programs exactly what we talked about, non-degree, continuing ed, workforce power in it. That sounds great. I look forward to seeing all this new project and new toys coming out for our institutions. I'm excited about it as well. Jeff, thank you so much for being on the program. I wish you and Lucian all the best going forward. Okay, thanks for I'm really appreciate it. Thanks for listening today on a special thank you to my guest, Jeff Dinsky. Jeff, thanks. I enjoyed having you on the show. Great conversation, especially talking about all of the ideas that you're coming from outside higher ed. So thank you. For my listeners, thanks again for joining me. Look forward to seeing 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. Drummack Norton, post-production by David L. White.