We talked a little bit about delivery modality and that's very different as well, because frankly, I think you're one of the few schools considered in the Ivy League area who offers these type of online modality.
We want to really own and make it clear that this is, right along with our portfolio squarely and NYU, it's an NYU model, and it's a legitimate way for us to offer additional access. We have both synchronous and asynchronous. And it's really important, especially with these learners, that need the flexibility of online, but also often need additional student support services around it. So the asynchronous course is the most highly flexible and accessible.
But then what is the professional advising team that's wrapped around? How do you make sure that the career services and the career connections are infused into all of that? How do you have the learning analytics and the student progress data that can help you do predictive risk analysis on student success?
So that you can help intervene with a student before they have a problem that might wind them up on probation or have to do all of those things have to be wrapped around your consideration of modality investment. The other thing I would just look at those four things we talked about, if it's okay for me to talk about prior learning assessment, because that's really critical for this.
That was where I was going, but let's not forget, I want to cycle back to this predictive analytics that you're using because I think that's really important, but please, prior learning assessment.
No, that's another evangelistic topic for me. When post-secondary institutions have typically leveraged data, whether it's learning analytics or if it's other kinds of data about successful or unsuccessful academic progress. It's almost usually backward-looking, right? So it's descriptive, and it's, it can only help you react in a certain kind of way, right?
So if we wait until the end of the term to see what's your DFW rate, that can tell you where you might need to look to revise your curriculum or look at instructional quality, but that the student has already had an unsuccessful outcome, and so you're much more on the reactive defense at that point than if you can combine the learning analytics and what you know about the students background that can help you understand and match it against.
So if you've got a predictive risk engine, that's going to give you the ability to look at hundreds of thousands of student profiles, if you're a large university and make some.
Data-informed analysis and see what patterns are so that then if you plug that in and say a student who has this profile and is performing in this type of direction, taking this many credits, and is in this degree, we can predict with a fair amount of certainty that they might, because of some of the factors we see in their data profile, we might want to prioritize an advisor reaching out and seeing how it's going with them. Let's talk about your progress. How's it going?
Have you met with a tutor in your math course this semester? So we can have a developmentally oriented, growth mindset intervention driven by data in the background, but really enables a much more comprehensive and holistic approach to student success.
Well, it sounds to me like you're using data-driven decision making, but you're using it in a predictive way to proactively reach out to students to make sure that they do finish versus waiting till they get in trouble and saying, okay, what do you need for help?
Absolutely, and for us, that's a really, it's a mind shift, and it's a, it, for me, at least, and this is the way I like to talk to the teams I work with, it's a value shift, right? Again, it's another script-flipping experience where instead of saying to the student, which we often do in higher education, here's a syllabus in your course. Day one. Here are the expectations. Here are the deadlines for the assignment. That's what success means.
We point up to the ladder of success, and then we don't put any rungs between where they're standing and the top of that ladder with success. We make them figure it out all on their own and navigate the hidden curriculum that isn't stated but that is essential to being able to be a self-started and metacognitively engaged and successful student. And so what we're saying is, we want to meet the students where they are and help them succeed.
And to do that, we're going to give them as many opportunities to understand, practice, and know what it is that then we'll assess them on. And that means also not waiting until they have some sort of negative experience and respond to them. We're going to try to get out in front of that with them and be a partner in making sure that they have as many opportunities to stay on track as possible.
Something pops into my mind along these lines. What about grit? What about the student, just digging in and getting it done?
We believe in that. I believe in that. I think it's, that's one of those enduring skills, and there's a lot of great research out there, right? Carol Dweck is probably the most prominent researcher, on resilience.
That is important, and we definitely want to create structures, experiences, and classrooms that empower students to navigate on their own and learn the, both intellectual and psychological and psychosocial responses that are important to be active and independent thinkers in life and work. At the same time, especially in the populations of students who are coming to college unconventionally.
They often also come from, backgrounds, experiences, and groups of the population that have been subject to intergenerational, multigenerational, historical exclusions, socially, economically, educationally. And they bring all the grit in the world.
In fact, in my experience, the military learner, the low-income kid from the Bronx, the single mother who's raising three kids and has elder care responsibility, I'll put those students grit up against any other higher education student every day and I would put money in most of the time, they're going to come out the grittiest. Grit, however, cannot fill gaps that have been imposed upon people because of historical injustices and inequities.
And so, if you've experienced inequities of a racial or an economic imbalance in the K-12 system, and that's led to skills gaps for you, we know that there are gaps in numeracy and some forms of communication, for students who experience a lot of educational injustice around race and class. And so if you say to that student, you just have to buckle down and figure out how to do this quadratic equation, don't have the skills, no amount of grit or resilience is going to do that.
So it has to be a combination of saying, when you say, meet you where you are, meeting you where you are says, we're going to tell you what your responsibilities and obligations are, what your opportunities will be for transformation and successful completion. And we want to help understand what are the places where we can, fill in where some of those historical injustices have created gaps that are no fault of the student at all.
Thank you. That's, that really explains it very well. The other piece with that is you're helping to teach students that helps is there, all I have to do is ask for it.
Yes. And sometimes in the case of predictive analytics, we don't even want to wait for them to ask, if we have a reason to think we can help them. And again, one of the reasons that's so important when you're working with populations of students who have maybe multiple unsuccessful attempts at college, psychological research here or educational psychology has been very clear that has an accrued negative impact, and it generates stereotype threat.
And so because they've had negative reinforcements that they're not successful academic citizens, there can be a lot of reluctance to put their hand up and ask for help because they feel like that's going to reinforce the existing narrative that they're not college material. And so we're really trying to intervene in that kind negative feedback loop that often happens around, the degree completion pathway for learners.
Makes so much sense. Let's move on to the prior learning assessment. I think this is also one of those critical things that you guys do very differently than many other schools.
We're trying to, right? And if it's a journey. But really, what I've really asked and invited our teams to think about, across the student experience, is to think about how much learning and ability the student who's multiple unsuccessful attempts at college might bring. The military learner who's had, potentially, decades in different roles as a service member, to think about the students who come from different backgrounds and all the cultural and social knowledge that brings with them.
We have a lot of international students in my division, right? So how can we set up structures and capabilities to maximally recognize, in a formal way as an awarding credit for, as many of the forms of prior learning that our students bring with us. Of course, transfer credit is there. Historically, higher education has said, we'll accept transfer credit if you can show us from a transcript, from another credit and post secondary institution.
Lots of institutions have articulation agreements with community colleges. We do that. Those are some very traditional ways that higher education has thought about it. But we're also trying to open up our thinking about that and say, okay, let's look at other kinds of non college based learning that lots of professionals engage in, and bring with them when they come to us seeking to a complete degree. So if you think about an industry like cyber.
Cyber security is built around industries recognized certifications. There's very specific skills associated with those. And if you're going to ladder up in a cyber security career, you will move through many certifications across your career. If you're a working adult in cyber, you probably already have A Plus and SEC Plus, some of these really "starting out" Cyber security certifications.
And so what we did in Maryland and a version of what we're trying to recreate here at NYU, is to say, if you've taken that certification, passed that test, we've aligned our curriculum to ladder up with the ways that industry has acknowledged that skills get built in that profession, and we will automatically award you those three credits to the A Plus course. You don't have to take it again. You've already completed that learning. You've already have a prior learning experience.
We work similarly with military transcripts. So if you are a sergeant major and you leave the military after 20 years, you've had 20 years of very structured learning and a range of skill domains associated with that military structure. And so we can evaluate that learning. It's very well documented. The military is excellent at documenting the learning and the skills associated with it.
And we can say to that sergeant major, if you come out, successfully, as a sergeant major, we can tell you that you get, I'm making this up, 36 credits toward an applied technology degree. You don't have to submit a transcript. You don't have to do a portfolio assessment. We've done that mapping in the back end and loaded that into our SIS and we can automatically award it because you've successfully already demonstrated those skills are there.
Same things goes with other industry certifications like SHRM, emergent industry certifications coming out of Silicon Valley. Google has certificates around data and UI/ UX and web design. We can map that into our curriculum so that all you have to do is show us you successfully have that certification we can award that credit. Same with boot camps that have documented learning outcomes.
All of those are opportunities to look at how forms of non college learning that are very prevalent in the space of degree completion and professional learning, how can we maximally recognize that to really accelerate time to degree and lower cost?
That's interesting. I've got a, off the wall question. I flew airplanes in the Navy and, I graduated Annapolis, got my bachelor's degree, et cetera. But the army, at least what I recall, trains helicopter pilots, and they don't necessarily have to have a college degree to go through that training. What kind of credits would you give someone who was a pilot for 15 years or something like that and wants to come back to your school
I think it depends. And, we'd have to see how the learning was documented, right? So if it was structured professional development experiences that the military often does that include documented, essentially syllabi or, other kinds of training documentation, and we can evaluate that and see, it depends also on what kind of post secondary program pathway that person would be interested in. If it's in a non-technical field, that would be different than if it were in a technical field.
So how could we maximally figure that out? The other way for that learner, though, another pathway might be a portfolio, to build a portfolio that shows all the different kinds of things you have to know and be able to do and understand, and in a skills-based way to be a military helicopter pilot, document that, submit it to us. We'll give you mentored support to build that portfolio. We won't charge you to build the portfolio, we'll give you some mentored support to do.
it. And for a relatively low fee, we will evaluate the result of that portfolio and be able to figure out based on the skills profile that your experience and background present, how can we maximally load that into the degree that you're interested in?
Thank you. That's helpful it shows a broader picture than I think we talked about before. Let's talk a little bit about some of the support services that you at NYU offer to students who are going through the program. Because I think, when talking about the analytics and being able to be proactive on support, I think the support services are critical for you accomplishing what you want to do.
Yeah, it's exactly right. So how we really try to think about it is, what is the student learner journey, from the point that they express any kind of interest in being part of the NYU community in the division, all the way through all their coursework to graduation to be an alumni? Maybe even coming back and doing additional learning and reskilling.
And so let's understand as much as we can about that journey and then figure out who are the people in teams and what are the tools at each point in that journey that we need to be leveraging to make sure that we're as responsive as possible to them. And so that starts all the way up. And then what I was talking about before, when a. perspective learner, maybe comes to our website and fills out our little interest engagement form that says, I want to hear more about you.
Our relationship starts with them then, and so the marketing and enrollment teams have a piece of that at that point.
We hope that they move through enough interest, maybe attend some interest sessions and fill out an application, and then matriculate, and then that hands them off to a professional advising team in the division that really are doing outreach and engagement to convert the matriculated student into an enrolled student, because every one of those steps is a potential place where a learner can fall out of the system, either because of their own choice or because we might not have
provided the right support and engagement. Once they're in the course, the faculty member is, of course, a primary point of contact, but the advisor also has an important relationship with the student alongside and in partnership with the faculty members. Upstream financial aid has an important. role to play in helping understand how the student can have an economically sustainable model for moving through the curriculum.
Career services has a role to play in helping them understand what their career goals are and how they can get the right career experience around their degree. And so as they moved all these steps, we have to have coordinated, and an ecosystem approach, so that it's not just thinking about the faculty member in the classroom they're in right now And then the faculty member in the next class. Faculty member is always going to be the primary agent of educational transformation for students.
They tell us that. But this is absolutely a collective ecosystem model because there's so many other dimensions of need and opportunity to work with students across their journey with us that we have to be as intentional about those related support services as we are about the learning experience in the classroom.
That makes perfect sense. Thank you. Let's talk because you're not in this alone. You working a number of public private partnerships, the New York City mayor's office, for example. Tell us a little bit about that, and then I really want to dig in on the pricing.
Yeah, so I alluded to this earlier. When we think about being, career responsive and professionally oriented in the way we construct and deliver our programs, we do that as part of a commitment to be a partner in workforce development, because when you do workforce development in the most effective way you're doing it in a way that expands the pipeline of economic opportunity for a more diverse workforce, which has in turn, important social and economic transformational impacts on individuals,
their families, their communities, and the economic and social sectors and security that a more diverse and met economic demand creates for us as a society. So if that's the approach that we're taking, then it's really important for us to think about who are the other partners that have a stake in that. It's not just the post secondary institution. So we have important partnerships with New York City public schools, because lots of their students could have potential pathways to us.
So in building those apprenticeship degrees, we do that really close tandem with the New York City Public Schools. The Mayor's Office in New York City has leaned in heavily to youth workforce development, and so we have lots of connections with them to help understand how we can support the programs that the city is investing in, that create pipelines to college and career. It's not either /or, college and career. We have industry partnerships, right?
So both with industry defining employers themselves directly and also with community based organizations like the New York City CEO Jobs Council and 110 and the Robin Hood Foundation. Agencies and organizations that are also committed to those same goals around workforce and economic transformation and security, and that have roles to play in terms of outreach and engagement, connecting industry, education and populations. And so we see that as important partners.
So making sure that we have a partnership strategy and capacity, that's another muscle in higher education that is unevenly developed and maintained. And so really building the right team of people who can help engage at various levels across that ecosystem, to help support the pathways that can only arise from actively developing and maintaining that kind of partnership strategy.
That makes perfect sense to me. Let's talk a little bit about pricing because as an elite, R1 institution, your pricing is not what you would expect at a community college or even a regional public.
That's right, and it does change and it becomes an important situational factor that you have to factor into the ways that you think about all of those things I just talked about before. That systems level approach of vision, strategy, tactics, operations, all of them have to account for the business model that underpins all of that. If you're not economically sustainable, then none of those grand commitments and ambitions are going to amount to anything.
So for us at NYU, and specifically within the division, for all the reasons I've talked about that it, it has a kind of unique role to play in advancing NYU's mission. We tackle the pricing question in a couple of ways. I mentioned associates degrees before, and that's one important way that we help address the price point for those learners, for whom there might be economic limitations to a bachelor's degree or an undergraduate degree at an NYU price point.
So at the associates degree level, you can complete up to 62 credits toward an NYU undergraduate degree. Both the associate's degree itself, which you can attain and take that to the workforce if that's what you want to do. And if you want to continue with this, all of those credits stack directly into the bachelor's degree. Because of the discounted price, a Pell or a tuition assistance eligible student can attend and complete our associate's degree at no cost.
That then means that half of a bachelor's degree has been attained for half the cost at NYU.
That's really good.
It is. The bachelor's degree completion is at the standard NYU rate, and we recognize that's an investment. We also know from decades of outcomes for our graduates, that the economic transformational impact of an NYU degree in New York City and around the world, is immense. Something like 96 percent of our students graduate with a career and a family sustaining wage. And just go on to do more and greater and more renumerative things in their career.
And while we recognize that can be a limiting factor for some students, we're also, I think, very comfortable to say, while there may be some investment that you're going to have to make in order to be able to complete the bachelor's degree, we're very confident that you're going to have an ROI on that, not just in terms of the economics, but also the impacts in life and work that will have for you, the ability it will give you to be a leader and an agent of change in the world.
We're pretty comfortable saying that's an investment that's worth making.
And Is there a reduced tuition or grants, obviously, can go into this. Do you discount your tuition for these folks
It's not a discounted tuition rate, but we do have considerable gift funds that we can put toward aid for need. And we're very committed to growing that and to continuing to maximally distribute that as much as possible. So while it's not a discounted rate per se, there are a lot of funds that we have the ability in the division to apply toward helping address some of the economic challenges some of our students might have for degree completion.
And as i recall from our previous conversation, NYU makes the commitment to the student, they'll be able to do their completion for under a hundred thousand dollars.
Close. The university recently announced that for first time, full time students, that NYU will meet all the cost of attendance for families that make 100, 000 or less in terms of their stated FAFSA income. So that's a commitment that the university's made.
That's good. That is really good. Wish more institutions were doing this.
Yes.
So let's swap over to presidents, boards. What are some of the leadership perspectives that need to happen to make something like this come into fruition?
It, it doesn't have to be a unanimity of vision across all those stakeholders, but it's really, it's much more effective if it is. My experience in working with boards is, because of the kind of profiles of people that tend to end up in those seats, it's usually not a hard sell to boards to talk about the importance of orienting education to professionally relevant and meaningful curriculum and experiences and the instruction in those enduring skills that underlie all of those outcomes.
That's usually not a hard, a hard sell. What it takes, I think, is a vision commitment to an empowerment from governing boards to executives in leadership positions to give them, what I talked about before is that sort of, permission structure to think in diverse, new, and innovative ways. Not to the exclusion of the traditional commitments that a place like NYU is always going to be invested in. We're always going to be leaders in global education.
We're always going to be leaders in economic, financial fields. We're always going to be leaders in cultural and social equity and empowerment. But so all those commitments that we think of when we think of NYU are always going to be there, and we're going to continue to deliver them in that way.
And what I think you're seeing, in the ways that we've been talking, is an empowerment to also think and create spaces for the exploration of newer and innovative and more diverse ways to think about access that haven't always been traditional and that I think is something that's made SPS really special. I think it's been there since the beginning. We're almost 100 years old.
We were founded during the Great Depression and our initial focus was trying to surge the training and education of social workers to address all of the traumatic and disruptive effects socially and economically of the Great Depression. I love that. I love that sort of speaks to what has infused our DNA from the beginning, and that's just only continued.
So that, I think now what with SPS, especially on the leadership of Dean Kamath, Angie Kamath, who's really just been, a leader in all of those different ecosystem spaces in New York that I've talked about. She's really, I think, just supercharged our leadership role within the university and the community, as a place to innovate at NYU, right? If it's new and creative we're willing to partner with you to try it.
And we'll recognize and learn from the stuff that doesn't work, and we'll continue to invest in and grow the stuff that can have scalable impacts to the commitments that we have in the space we serve.
That's a really interesting point that you bring up is failing and failing fast. If you're going To innovate you can't expect everything to work. You make your best bet that you can, you do your research etc. You move forward. If it doesn't work you either cancel it or you modify it, but you've got to try things.
That's right. And that is not a, again, I think for reasons that are not a discredit to anyone or any institution or culture, that is not a kind of default position within higher ed, right? We're rightly built on centuries old practices, customs and systems of knowledge and ways of knowing and operating. And those are by design. And I think in many cases, necessity, pretty intellectually small C conservative, ways of thinking about change and innovation.
So there's a very careful and deliberate response to the introduction of new or different, or potentially disruptive ways of thinking.
And so part of what we really try to model for ourselves, and we don't always get it right, and for others in our engagement with partners, is how do we get to the critical mass of consensus that this idea is one that's worth putting some time and resources into and then absolutely being, and this is a critical component, I think, is what the rocks on which 1000 innovative projects die, is being willing to get there quickly. Yes, that's almost always there.
You get innovative people together and they want to move fast and learn as they go. That's almost always present in good innovation. What's almost always the fail point for a lot of innovation is it doesn't have a rigorous and strong evaluation plan established up front that says, "What are we actually trying to do here?" It's interesting. Everybody thinks it could be exciting and probably fun in most cases.
But what are the actual, specific outcomes that we're attempting to get to, prove, and understand as part of pilot phase one MVP, whatever you call it, your preferred innovative language. Your sprint, right? I get shout out to my agile people. And then what is the data that you have to collect along the way?
Quantitative and qualitative data, that you have to collect along the way to understand progress toward the specific measurable outcomes that you identified as the reason why you're doing this.
Who's responsible for what are they delivering, what does success look like, what does failure look like, so at the end of your first phase of things, you can then all come together and do your retrospective and say, okay, we didn't hit this mark, that's because of a correctable problem, challenge, infrastructure, whatever. Or we actually didn't hit these metrics, and there are some real key structural challenges around it.
And now's not the time to try to take this thing to the next scale of growth. That all has to be driven, and it gets back to that data driven model we were talking about previously, we all have to understand up front. What is the shared goal, especially when you're doing partnership innovation? Every stakeholder is probably equally invested and excited about the thing you're doing, but they're doing it for a different reason.
There might be a shared goal, but their part of it is the thing they care about. And if we don't all share what we're responsible for and the measurable goals we're driving toward, energy will scatter, right? Emerson has that great line about scattering your force and the lack of shared outcomes and KPIs for innovative projects. That's the best way to scatter your force and, and stumble.
Yeah, you are a true systems thinker, my friend, thank you. KPIs, outcomes, metrics, all so critical to understanding where you're going and, are you getting there?
That's exactly
Doug, this has been fabulous conversation. I really appreciate it, and I really appreciate what you're doing there at NYU, you. and your team. This is just fabulous stuff. Thank you.
Thank you for having me. Thanks for, All you, you do and have done to really keep a focus on the best work that's going on in higher ed and how to make, how to give that knowledge back to the community. I'm really grateful for you. Thanks.
Thank you. Three takeaways for higher ed presidents and boards.
It won't be probably anything new that I haven't said in one form or another already in our time together. But, one is to really know what you're good at and know what you're not going to try to be the best at because, the segmentation and the fragmentation that's going on within higher ed and the economy and in society and in, globally, is only going to continue to put disruptive pressure on the mission and the focus of any given institution.
And so knowing where you want to be good, what values do you want to primarily put investment in is key. And that's true for both governing boards and executive leadership in working with each other, and then in engaging with teams. So be clear about that, and don't be afraid to say, this is the primary box we're working in. So that is the one. A second is to the conversation we were just having.
Yes, to encouraging innovation in a contextually appropriate and specific way, not everybody is going to have a piece of the innovation puzzle the same. But what is it that this particular area, unit, school, college, department, can innovate around in terms of that shared vision that we said we were going to be good at? What are some of those things ?Empower that, yes, but also reward the learning that comes from failure.
The, innovative projects that don't go, and then think about what we tell our students, if we don't help our students learn through productive and constructive failure, then that resiliency, that grit, the enduring skills to survive the transformations that are going to be happening across their life and work won't be there. Same is true for innovation and how we do that. And I think, finally, it is model a culture of humanity and shared civility across our organizations.
The pressure that higher education is under right now, has a lot of human impacts, wherever someone sits, right? That can have all sorts of reticulated negative impacts on how we work together with each other and with students. Sometimes I think these shorthand ways of thinking can be helpful. And I guess I would just reiterate for all of us as leaders to remember that at some level culture is what we tolerate.
And really modeling, for the people we work with, what integrity and professionalism and collaboration look like. Rewarding it and also holding each other accountable for when the pressures and strains maybe, put some, some destructive pressure on the fabric of our communities.
Those are great takeaways. Thank you. What is next for you? What's next for NYU?
Oh, gosh.. I got the shoulder to the plow here. We've got a, we've got a three year plan for how we want to bring all the different components of the vision we were talking about together into being, over the life of our programs. We both know the pace at which even innovative and responsive organizations can move in higher ed. So we know that there's got to be some deliberate intentionality around this, so that's my primary focus.
And I just really want to continue to champion the part of the NYU world that I get the privilege and opportunity to lead and to work with as a leading innovator in how we think about and think differently about the value proposition, the transformative impact, social and economically, of higher ed. So that's where you'll see me for the foreseeable future.
Very good. Doug, thank you so much for being on the program. I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time.
Thank you so much again.