Transcript
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Welcome back, everybody. It’s your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience Podcast where we make education your business on this very special episode, one of many that we’re doing here. The title of this group of episodes is called Education Elevated: Creating Durability with the Modern Learner, brought to you by EducationDynamics. I got to ask you first, if you’re listening to this, what comes to your mind when I ask you to describe today’s modern learner?
What springs to mind is likely quite varied, and depends quite a bit on your institution, program, role, and experiences. It’s not as straightforward as you might think. The modern learner can be working adults, parents, veterans, lifelong learners who are juggling multiple responsibilities, while pursuing their education. The modern learner is also younger, recent high school graduates on a direct path to graduation. The lines between adult and traditional students are blurring, as both education and students evolve, and it’s changing the game for higher ed.
Welcome to this special six part miniseries on the EdUp Experience, where we’re diving deep into the world of the modern learner. I’m your host as always, Dr. Joe Sallustio, and I’m thrilled to be your guide as we explore the challenges and opportunities these learners bring to our campuses, virtual and physical. Joining me on this journey will be friends from EducationDynamics who’ve spent the past 35 years serving, supporting, and engaging a rapidly evolving higher ed ecosystem.
Over a series of several months, we’ll be bringing you periodic episodes of this miniseries, where we’re going to talk to some of the brightest minds in higher education about how to adapt, evolve, and thrive in this new landscape. We’ll uncover strategies for building a more durable, agile, and energized approach to serving modern learners. We’re going to discuss everything from enrollment and marketing, to student success in the future of education.
As you know, I don’t like to do any of this alone, so I have an amazing guest cohost returning again, ladies and gentlemen, let’s bring him in appropriately. He’s Greg Clayton, he’s the President of Enrollment Management Services at EducationDynamics, AKA EDDY. What’s going on, Greg?
Greg Clayton:
Hi, Joe. It is great to be here. Great to be here. Glad to be back. I think I remember all Rules of the Road for being a co-host.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Well, you know what? We’re going to find out how your memory is, Greg. We’re going to find out here live, so don’t make no, don’t make… It’s all good and it’s all fun. I always say that this podcast, the work that we do in this podcast, much like you do at EducationDynamics, is all about iteration. You test and you make some mistakes, and then you get better, and then you get better.
We like to leave in those mistakes, because it helps us learn for the next time. After 900 episodes of this podcast, I’m still learning, Greg, how to be a good podcast host. I’ll take my cues from you this time.
Greg Clayton:
Don’t forget, optimize. We optimize.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Oh, yeah, yeah, optimize. By the way, let me just quick plug. Nobody asked me to do this, but obviously, for those that know, I’ve started a new role. I’m the Vice President of Industry Engagement at Ellucian, and I recently came from an institution where I brought on EducationDynamics, and you guys helped me absolutely kill it.
In fact, I can tell you that the institution that I came from currently now has nearly doubled their online population directly due to the efforts of EducationDynamics and the support that you gave us. I can tell you that my colleague that’s there, still at that institution, they’re just doing incredible work with you all.
Greg Clayton:
Yeah, thank you, Joe. We’re super happy you brought us on, and the work has been amazing. They’re great partners at that institution, and the sky is the limit with how far we can go with them.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Well, speaking of great partners, I think we’re bringing him back for a fourth time in this podcast, but the first in a while since we did a panel together, in fact, at Insights EDU this last what, March, April, it was? We had a good time and a back and forth, talking about the future of higher education. I said, “We got to have him back here and we can talk about what is this modern learner? How do we think about the learner?”
Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, back for another time on EdUp Mic. He’s Dr. Melik Peter Khoury, he is the President of Unity Environmental University, America’s Environmental University. What’s going on Melik? How are you?
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Hey, Joe. Hey, Greg. Thank you for having me back on the show. Always up for a good conversation.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Good things happening at Unity. Every time we talk to you, Melik, it’s like, okay, we’re going to bring Melik back. There’s some good things happening, let’s catch up with him. Then it’s like, wait a minute, there’s some more good things happening. We got to catch up with him again. Then more good things happening and we got to…
It’s like, the growth is just not stopping. Can you give us a little bit of, first of all, for anybody that hasn’t heard of Unity, just give us a quick two-minute elevator, and then tell us some of the good things happening.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Sure. Unity Environmental University started as Unity College in 1965, like many of the small private residential colleges back in the day. Over the last 65 years, we’ve always been at the forefront of trying to figure out how to best serve those individuals out there who really care about the environment, but understand that it’s a green career, and not just the more traditional concept of and ethereal conversation.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve evolved from being primarily residential freshmen. Earlier, you talked when you introduced a show about all different kinds of students, to what would the environmental science university look like if it had a private system with multiple subsidiaries, each supporting a different kind of learner in a different kind of modality, in a different kind of personal situation? We’ve really growing to become more of the most affordable, and accessible, and flexible private environmental science institutions in the nation.
A lot of my teams say we are becoming the real online STEM school with both in-person, remote, and residential options For those who want it.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Changes is easy in higher ed, right, Melik? All this has just, it’s been super easy for you to do. Now, it’s funny, I interviewed another president a while back, I can’t remember where, but I remember him saying that he was “assassinated.” There were two assassination attempts.
I don’t know if that’s in poor taste now because of what’s recently happened, but he was speaking of it figuratively, as in no confidence votes, as in backlash, people trying to get him out of his role because he was trying to enact significant university change. Can you talk a little bit about the experience to get from A to B, and what it’s been like for you?
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Sure. I think, as you know, the higher education model was ported from Europe from the 1800s, and until about 70 years ago, was really designed for 5% of the population. The governance structure, it really was you send your students to the monastery, they come back four years later, transformed. In 1965, we as a country decided that this type of education should be afforded to everyone.
We took an unscalable, highly privileged model that really only worked for the heavily subsidized and those institutions with huge endowments, and tried to mass produce it. 65 years later, we are trying to create a model, a monolith of a model, if you will, that as if all universities are the same. Joe, let’s assume you and I went to college together. I’m going to get to your question. You are the child of a trust fund, and I…
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
I wish that would true.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
I know, right?
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Yeah.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
I was a child where basically, I needed to get a job in order to pay my bills. You and I, our lifestyle can’t be the same, right? You can stay in and play guitar, and follow your passion, and all of that. I have to get a job in order to pay for tuition and pay my bills. I think sometimes in higher ed, we created this governance structure that was always designed to protect something.
As these tuition driven institutions have grown, the Department of Ed, the accreditors, the institutions, we look at all of us as a monolith. I’m not surprised that that individual had a hard time, because my guess is their governance structure was designed around having a president whose job is to protect the status quo. They never updated their policy, their governance, their structure, their decision-making paradigm to be a tuition-driven institution.
Yeah, if you were to ask a monarch about a democracy, it wouldn’t work. If you were to ask a democracy to run as a monarchy, it wouldn’t work. We as an industry have to diversify and look at each institution as, who are we? Are we a highly subsidized, are we a tuition driven? Who do we serve? I think that’s where your colleague faced that, because this one size fit all has been, I would say, the reason many colleges have closed.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Greg, I want to come over to you to take over here, but I want to just say that that recently, and you’ll have to clarify when, EducationDynamics came out with the naming of the modern learner, I don’t know what you call it, the main naming or the packaging of the modern learner, because more of the behavior of the learner, not of the characteristics or the profile, so to speak, but the way that we’re behaving with technology, and choosing, and wanting different things. I got to tell you, I think it is brilliant.
I think it’s brilliant to describe the type of student that we’re working with. In fact, I was telling our colleague, Eric, that I’ve been using it in episodes to describe, because I had one university recently, a college president I was talking to, some of these things you guys won’t believe. He’s describing things to me, and he says, “This is who we call the adult student.” I went, “Wow, we got to catch up, all of us.”
The adult student’s kind of an old way to say it. Over to you, where did this whole idea of the modern student come from? How’d you pick it? What does it describe? Then you can take it from there.
Greg Clayton:
Yeah, great question. We have been studying, researching the preferences and behaviors of, let’s just call them learners for right now, for over a decade, 13, 14, 15 years. We produce studies we release to the market. There’s one called the Online College Student Report that we release every year. You can go download it from our website. Over time, we really look at what’s changed year over year from the different studies that we do, and just observed things.
What we observed over the last five or six years, and it really accelerated during the COVID period, is that the average age of the learner was becoming younger and younger. It got to the point where the phrase behind the term modern learner is a phrase that we came up with that says that age is no longer a predictor of learner modality preferences. Our advice to the industry is to stop thinking about learners in the context of age. Start thinking about them simply as learners. We came up with the term modern learner to describe it.
It does not matter how old the learner is, or where they are along the journey. What matters is how they engage a first time freshmen student, whether they’re first gen or second gen, or whatever, they engage in points in time along their journey and path through high school. An adult learner engages much faster than that, within two to three months. They want to start very quickly in all the things. The overarching message to learners about the benefits of higher education, about the benefits of learning, are all the same.
Some of the same questions arise from the learner that they want to have a conversation with an institution about before applying and enrolling are all of the same. There’s more of a unified approach that we see and a unified message to addressing the needs of that learner. We think that what Unity has done, Unity was doing this in 2019. They were thinking, actually, Melik was thinking about this before that, before 2019. We first started engaging with Unity in 2019, and it was a great match for us because we think about the learner in the same context that Melik was thinking about it at the time.
I’m curious to ask Melik, how did he develop the vision for Unity Environmental University? I think when the first time we spoke in 2019, Unity had somewhere around 500 students, and you were really trying to get that pivot off the ground to go online and address the modern learner. You had a real vision for it, in doing it in a way that no other institution has done. How did you come up with that?
Dr. Melik Khoury:
I think for me, without going to a very, very long story about my experience through college and universities, from R1s, to small private residentials, to online schools, I think what you and Joe are talking about about the modern student is key. I realized very, very quickly that access to education did transcend market segment, and we wanted to put specific age groups tied directly to specific modalities. We were confounding modality with age.
We were also looking at anything that was not a residential lecture-based education as a secondary form of education that was there to support the real education. When we came up with the enterprise model, what we said is, “No, some folks are looking for residential, some folks are looking for commuter, some folks are looking for remote, some folks are looking for online.” By creating these kind of don’t confuse quality with modality, and really look at the lanes with which people were looking for different flexibility based on where they are in their lives, allowed us to really lean into differentiated calendars, differentiated pedagogy, differentiated tuition.
A 37-year-old woman who has a full-time job in California would care less about a football team. Why does she have to work within the same governance structure, the same approach as somebody who does? Your concept in EducationDynamics about the modern student kind resonated with us a little bit, because we really started to look at each and every one of our subsidiaries for, it didn’t matter how old you were. It was more, how did you want to learn? I use the example of music.
Do you like your music live? Do you like your music in vinyl? Do you like your music stream? It doesn’t change the song. I think over time, we’ve confounded online to mean keyboard, when in reality, it just means untethered. For us, Greg, what we were trying to find out is Tinto came about, said this, “Most students don’t complete their education, not because of the academic readiness, but with things outside of academia,” and we’ve ignored that.
It was really more about that. Greg, I think your company knows this about us, we also made some really interesting assumptions that were proven wrong. We just assumed that the adults would want to be more flexible and remote. We found out all of our students, regardless of age, liked the one course at a time. We found that when students were able to just take a hybrid model of where they might take a few courses online, take a few courses in person, that was more preferable to the all or nothing.
It was about creating a model that was iterative that allowed us to make assumptions, but not get so tied into those assumptions that when we were wrong, we saw it as such shame that we would rather close or fail than adapt. You remember, we picked a term model that we changed after six months. We changed a tuition model that we changed after a year. We picked a service model that now, each and every one of our subsidiaries has a different level of academic and student support.
I think too many times as higher ed, we just create these perfect product, and are looking for people to buy it instead of saying, “Where are our students? What are they looking for?” Even though the science is science, chemistry is chemistry, where, how, when, and the modality in which that they want to learn it, can be different. That, I think, is where you and I started this journey. I remember we were hoping to have a hundred students a term. Now, we are talking about a thousand students per term, with the same level of anxiety as a hundred.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Suffice to say, there is demand for quality education. I would say stop looking at what is the real university and what are the ancillary pedagogies, and look at each one as if they were their own lane, their own faculty, their own staff, their own pedagogy. I think any institution, if they look at that, not what is the main and what is the secondary, I think has a better chance of adapting to the modern student.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Boy, I got lots of questions, Greg, so keep going if you want.
Greg Clayton:
Yeah, one more. I think Melik said a key word there, accessibility. We talk about that a lot, and everything that Melik was communicating there points to the thinking of students first, or thinking student centric versus institution centric thinking, and accessibility is like a real key to it. Keeping the, how do you keep the whole system efficient? How do you keep it affordable, and how do you make it accessible, and even more accessible to all? All the things Melik just checked off as we’ve learned, and as Unity has learned over the course of the work.
One thing that struck me, I did get a chance to go to Unity’s commencement in May, and as part of it, they had something really I thought was brilliant. There were a lot of graduating students there from their Distance Education Program, from all over the United States, and some from all over the world. They had a map of the United States, and the graduating students could go and put a pin in the map with where they lived. They had a globe, and you could stick a pin in the globe from what country you were from.
The pins were all over the place. It was fascinating to watch those students come and put a pin in the map of the globe, wherever they were. That really drove the accessibility point home to me, that this set of programs is reaching a universe of students that are looking for what Unity has to deliver. Everything was captured in that in terms of what Melik just said, about being student-centric in the thinking.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
By the way, I’ve never, one of the states I’ve not been to is Maine. I’ve yet to have anybody invite me there. I don’t know-
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Well, Joe, let me be the first on air to invite you to our May graduation. We are actually going to have a high profile graduation speaker that you’re going to want to meet. Consider this an invitation, and I’ll work with you on the logistics.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Maybe we’ll podcast live from the graduation at Unity Environmental University.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
That would be awesome. Consider it done, let’s work out the details later.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
That subliminal message wasn’t so subliminal, but I do want to bring this up, and this is something that I see, Greg and Melik, I want to see what you think about this. Let’s come back to the concept of the modern learner. This is a learner who has certain behaviors that I believe are evolved from behaviors of the past. Just like anything else, technology evolves, behavior evolves. Universities typically, though, and the ones that, when we think university, we think 200 years old, and blah, blah, blah, but those universities, and I want to know what you did here, they don’t market the right way.
They’re very traditional in their thinking. They do this, billboards, and they do this, and they do that, and they say, “But we want more students that come from the some college, no credential group, but we’re going to get them by doing mature email campaigns over the next six months.” It’s like, “Well, wait a minute. The thinking about marketing and how to market to students has to evolve too. How did you move Unity from the traditional marketing to evolved marketing?
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Sure. Greg loves this story, because one of his colleagues tells this story every chance we get. I think, Joe, it is amazing how many universities, if you ask them about the cost of acquisition, they would have no idea. I remember being a director of admissions, bringing in 200 students, and my president said to me, “I need you to bring in 400, but your budget is the same.” Cutting my cost of acquisition in half, but having no idea what I meant by that. Many institutions don’t even understand the concept of you can’t have a regional recruitment and marketing strategy, and hope for a national draw. A lot of folks don’t differentiate the idea that some programs are more expensive to recruit, some programs are more expensive to teach. This concept of market segmentation, national versus regional, this idea that… I know the amount of institutions who are struggling, because with SAT being optional, you can’t buy names. What do you do?
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
So right.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
I think for us, I went through a couple of years of frustration because I worked with a lot of firms, trying to help us really get our message out there, and we were a nail and they were a hammer. If I hear one more time about discount rates, and, “We need to analyze your student population,” I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. My student population is dwindling. If you actually get that persona, you’re going to find these students who don’t exist. Everybody is into a drying well, you can’t look backwards. You have to look forward.”
Finally, when I was talking to Greg, they were the first organization that actually didn’t mock us. They didn’t laugh at us. They didn’t look at us as a small player, because back then, we wanted like 50 or 60 students at a time, but said, “Look, there is a population of students out there that doesn’t even know we exist.” We know how much we can afford to pay for recruitment and marketing at our tuition price point. We started to experiment. I bet you a dime to a dollar, there are many institutions who don’t know the lifetime revenue of a student.
They don’t know the cost of teaching, they don’t know the cost of acquisition. I think that’s the problem, because up until now, Joe, everybody went to college. Everybody knew the value of a college. Well, that was the case when only 5% went and when it cost you 600 bucks to go to college or you got a scholarship. I think people sometimes get mad at me because they say I talk about students in such statistical terms, right? Cost of acquisition, market segmentation.
I say, “Don’t get mad at me. Get mad at your government for not funding education to the point where we don’t have to change, but until such time as education is free, I am not going to let education, especially environmental science education, only be accessible to those lucky enough to get a scholarship or go to a residential program. Until you fix the global issue about education or at least the US issue, I’m going to try to find a way to get that.”
For that, you have to understand, are you regional? Are you local? Are you national? What is your competition spending? What is your value proposition? We are, for our Distance Education, for example, we retain at an average of 65% a year. That is unheard of in the online open world, but we did not take a residential model and put it online. We changed our learning design, our instructional design, dedicated advisors. There is a lot of work that goes into taking a gasoline fueled car and creating an electric one. It’s not simply using the same engine.
Joe, I know that was a very long answer to your question, but at the end of the day, you can’t assume that your recruitment budget is static, and you cannot underestimate the cost of your vision, whether it’s local, regional, or national. That’s kind of where I think people make a mistake.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Yeah, and Greg, I’ll pass back to you, but I want the second part of that is the identity politics that have to be worked out. Even getting to that point where you want to go after a different segment of students, you have a group of people internally that go, “Well, wait a minute, we don’t want to do that. Here’s who we are.” Then you get another group of people that go, “Well, that’s not who we are. We’re this school.”
Even within colleges, you have different opinions of who the target student is, and then therefore, you have a bunch of policies that back into one type of student, to Melik’s point. Then you can’t do what you set out to do, which is to recruit a different type of student, Greg. Those are just some of the things that I have written about and get frustrated with. It’s really nonsensical when you think of it.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Joe, before Greg goes, you raise a point where I think has been the fundamental game changer for us. Think about this. If you are a small, private, residential tuition-driven institution, your faculty and your staff are good at that product, right?
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Yes.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
They are also having full-time jobs. No matter what new audience you bring to the table, to a hammer, everything is a nail. If you seriously want to create a new audience, a new market, a new demographic, the idea that those people have to do what they do, and also do that, is part of the problem. Sometimes it’s a lack of investment. For example, with us, we told the folks who cared about that side of the house to stay doing that.
I actually made the promise that anybody who jumped into this new pedagogy and this new audience, that we would backfill the positions. You can’t have your people think that is a sense of loss, but you can’t have a university that is a single product university. What I mean by that is residential, the four-year, lecture base, and try to recruit people who are looking for different experiences into that, and wonder why.
Think about this. If I’m a 42-year-old man, do I really care about that ice cream social? Do I really care about this idea that orientation is about something that geared towards a freshman? Nor should a freshman have to sit through an adult orientation. This idea that you talk about recruitment, but even the experience, we cannot sell an iPad as a laptop.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Greg?
Greg Clayton:
Yeah, and back, Joe, some of the things you were talking about with the marketing element of it, I think when we started up with Melik and Unity to try to figure out what path we were going to take to generate the demand, and capture it, and so forth, there was no particular persona that existed for this. That can be a very scary thing for both marketers and for college presidents, even those that are as forward-thinking as Melik, but there was confidence there that it’s there, no one has ever found it before.
It won’t show up in a zip code, in a research report, or anything like that. We blaze the trail together. I think finding the right message and delivering it to the prospective student in the right place at the right time was the key to it. We had to blaze a trail, and Melik talked about the iteration, the iterative part of it.
Not all of it was figured out from the beginning. There was definitely vision and a commitment, which was really important to getting it done, but kind of blazing that trail, and figuring out the parts and pieces of things that we didn’t know, and iterating on it, and then finding what was there along the way, and doubling down on it was a key to it. The audience was there. The audience was looking for what Unity had to present to it. The results that are being achieved today are a testament to it.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Yeah, to Greg’s point, you hear a lot of institutions talk about being innovative, but then the first question they ask you is, “Who else is doing it?” They ask you to be-
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
That’s so right on, by the way, that’s so right.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Right? They ask you to be innovative, but then they say, “What are the benchmarks?” They ask you to be innovative and they want to know, guarantee, you cannot try something new but only be willing to do… This is a higher ed thing, right? Pre like 60 years ago, I understand that, but we are an industry that is predicated on taking two years to make a decision, where adding a new major is the pinnacle of innovation.
By saying I can’t be innovative and be bound to tradition, be bound to what has come before me, be bound to pedagogy that is tried and true, then don’t ask me to be innovative. Tell me to drill more in this particular well, and that well is dwindling. I think that’s the issue. All of these colleges who are talking about innovation are using, they’re looking for certainties that don’t exist. Many, at least for me in working with some of my peers, having an initiative fail is such an affront to our reputations.
There’s a university, Joe, that closed recently that had more students than we did, and I can only guess that the fear of their reputational hit for actually trying to make profound change was less desirable than just closing. That’s wrong with our industry.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Yeah, that’s a really good point about universities right now, because you do wonder, from a board of trustee standpoint, from a digital experience standpoint, is it easier to just fold it than really innovate with the risk? You said it, Melik, and you know this to be true, and I do too. “Oh, we’re going to be innovative. We would like to know the other five universities that has done this before we do.” It’s like, “Okay, well, wait a minute. If you’re going to be innovative, that means doing something nobody else is doing.”
We are, as an industry, designed to prevent innovation. When you talk about two years, the pinnacle of innovation being a product or new program, it’s because we designed it to be two years. Even if you took out everything and you just went right to the accrediting body, it’d still take a little bit of time, but not the amount of time it takes to go through committees, and update this person, and update that person. We designed that.
The reason why it all looks the same is because this university took the idea from that university. It took the idea from this university, and so on. It’s like a domino effect to self-fulfilling prophecy as it were. It’s very hard to break. You said something earlier, you said quality and modality, right? Quality can be maintained with different modalities, but you have people, that the minute you say, we’re going to offer this in a different way, will say something like this.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Right? You’ve got faculty that just go, “Well, you can’t get the same outcome with this program online. It has to be taught on ground.” That is the ingrained culture that we work in, and it’s very hard to break. I’m bringing this up because you speak about this, you speak about this model of change that you’ve achieved at Unity.
You speak about it like it was preordained, almost, but it is not been easy, and you have to have a steadfast leadership style of breaking glass, so to speak, to get to that point.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Do you know what’s the number one question I’m asked, which is really annoying?
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
How did you do it?
Dr. Melik Khoury:
I wish. It’s, how am I still here?
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Well, yeah, well, I could see that, right? The system is designed to take out anyone who pushes the envelope too far on innovation. It’s the way system’s designed.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Correct. What’s been really interesting for me is the first question isn’t, how did you do it? The first question is always, how did you survive that?
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Then many presidents would go, “I’m not going to put my reputation.” You saw an article I wrote not too long ago, where I really got upset at all these presidents who are going out there, saying everything on their campus is okay, get a consulting gig, and then say their campus is crap. Really? Seriously, how are we going to change? To be fair, most presidents, if you were to ask 17 people on a campus what their job is, some of them tell you they have fundraisers, some of them…
At the end of the day, we were always built to be facilitators, because it was never about revenue. It was always about protection. You talk about not designed to change, absolutely. Your idea or your question about modality and quality, I have seen some really poor in-person learning courses. I once knew somebody who taught, the textbook that they would teach was out of print, and they would photocopy it and give it to students. This is not here, this was at my old-
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Greg, you weren’t the instructor, were you, Greg?
Dr. Melik Khoury:
We also make it so unfair for faculty members, where they graduate from these PhD programs, they’ve got no pedagogical training. They go to a university, there’s no instructional designers, no learning designers, no curriculum designers. Then we say to them, “Save the world.”
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Figure it out. Yeah.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
To be fair, we were never designed to be anything but what we were 18th century ago, and don’t get me wrong, the R1s are always going to be R1s, right? The small private elite schools are always going to be there. They are really hedge funds, and they’re looking to perpetuate their mission. For the other regional state schools, for the private schools that are tuition driven, I would say up till five years ago, it was still even, who’s going to survive? Now the question is, is higher education as is currently constructed, going to survive the next 10 years, especially with AI?
It’s not even who’s going to survive anymore. Think about this, Joe, the first institution to figure out a new currency that is not based on the credit hour, and to create a rigorous, and affordable, and accessible curriculum that is not dependent on Title 4 is going to be the new university of the future.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Yep. So much to think about there. Greg, I do kick it to you. I do want to preface something that we haven’t talked about, but I think it’s important, because you can’t do what you’ve done with Unity, if you go all the way back to what Melik said at the beginning, when you talk to these marketing companies that have their entire product design is the traditional learner, and the traditional high school learner getting these things, getting this communication, being nurtured for a year.
Then what those companies will do is they sell an upgrade. Like, “Okay, we’ve got you. You work with us on this traditional learner, we’re going to go after the adult student too. We’re going to sell you this upgrade.” EducationDynamics is sitting over here is basically the market, not basically, the market leader for accessing the modern learner. Where do we get stuck in higher ed? Do we just do the same old because it’s easy, instead of taking what makes sense?
Greg Clayton:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, going back to some of the comments I’ve made about the modern learner, thinking has to evolve. We sometimes look at, talk to different institutions and presidents, and there are so many institutions out there that need to be working with us and having conversations with us, similar to the ones that Melik was having with us five or six years ago. We looked at a school that has a similar profile to Unity in Wisconsin, I believe, that was on the brink of shutting down.
It’s just traditional campus. It’s an environmentally focused oriented college, private college. Their enrollments had been flat for 10 years, and there was no pivot to online. There was no vision or strategy that we could see there. Took a look at that, and we took a look at Unity’s trends in enrollment from 2010 through, I think we had data to 2022 or ’23 at that point. It’s amazing. Those two schools would’ve been along the same trend line, except something happened in 2019 and Unity’s enrollments went due north on the grid.
It was interesting to compare those two things. I think for a lot of schools, the moment has already passed for them to be thinking along those lines, but for others, it’s not too late to do it. It takes an evolution in thinking, and cutting against the grain, and taking the risk of Melik is still here. We’re glad that he’s still here, and I think he will be here, but you got to take that risk and do it.
Doing the same old, same old is going to result in what we’re seeing every day, reading about a new college that’s having to close its doors. That is no good for higher ed, and it’s no good for students.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Joe, if I may add to Greg’s point, because I agree with it, and I know the college he’s talking about. I think a lot of schools think if you actually spend more money just on recruitment and marketing, that you will solve this problem, when in reality, there is a product issue as well.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s so right.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
I think where I sometimes get upset for Greg and his team is when I hear secondhand that the colleges they’re talking to want to create an online program to create enough money to subsidize their residential program. You have to look at them at differentiated product lines. You have to have your own P&Ls for all of them. Maybe one of them can be a lost leader, but this idea that is the real school, and then we have to work with Greg to do the online so that we can pay for the real school, is fundamentally why these colleges fail.
Those who see the two as different but important, different faculty, different staff, different pedagogy, different services, I think are more likely to be successful, because this idea that it’s online, but has the residential ethos is part of the problem. Yamaha is a good example, right? Yamaha is one company, but you want to tell me the designers of the pianos and the designers of their motorcycles are the same designers? No, but it’s still Yamaha.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Or the other bit is, let’s say you have an online version of an on-ground program that an institution is selling now. A lot of them have those because of COVID. Instead of going after the modern learner with dollars, you can’t just take a program that nobody’s already buying and put more money behind it, and more people will buy it. They’re already not buying it. It doesn’t matter how much money you put in it.
You have to evolve the educational product to the point where the modern learner wants to buy it. There’s a whole ecosystem of things that you have to consider, Greg. I think we saw that too a little bit in our work together, where it was just trying to take something that exists and boost it. I’m going, “You can’t just do that. You can’t just…”
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Joe, find me the best salespeople in the world. Now, go have them sell a 100 million units of Betamax.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Then give me the dumbest salesperson and then have them sell a Netflix subscription. To your point, though, just to put a more final point on it, when we did our market research internally at Unity, especially in our core programs like marine biology, which never had more than like 48 students at a time, or animal care, which never had more than like 70 students at a time, what we realized was our curriculum, the market, the industry wasn’t the problem.
People wanted marine biology, people wanted animal care, but we could not get more than 50 to 60 students at the college, because the people who wanted it couldn’t afford it. When we changed our model to say, “Those who want that can have it, and those who can’t and are place bound, we are going to create a completely different product, but keeping the true sense of the curriculum in place.” We now have like 3,000 marine biology students who focus in aquaculture. What’s changed?
The delivery mechanism, allowing them to use their own local fauna, their own local flora, their own local communities and economies, where they can work in small aquaculture farms all across the country, instead of waiting four years and paying that extra $15,000 in alternative loans for room and board. Don’t get me wrong, I love those who could afford it. I am glad for those who get a scholarship to experience it, but I’m not going to deprive 10,000 students from getting that knowledge because they can’t come and spend four years in Maine.
I think that’s where some of these colleges get it wrong. It’s not a lesser product. It is a different product. I would argue that the technology that goes into the learning designers, the curriculum designers, figuring out ways to assess them in their local community, that is why our residential, our face-to-face and our online programs are not identical, but they do map in outcomes, because it’s different. That’s where, I think, people sometimes miss the mark. It’s not a singular product.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Greg, I’m guessing this is why you put me and Melik on the panel together, because we work each other up, but he’s highly productive. He’s one of the people that I know that can out-talk me about change in higher ed, so gets all the credit in the world.
Greg Clayton:
Agreed. He’s great for a cohost, too. I just get to sit here and listen to him. It’s amazing.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Well, Greg, why don’t you, anything else you want to add about the modern learner, since this is really a podcast or a series of six episodes where we want to cover the modern learner? Is there anything else you want to add from your work, your research?
Greg Clayton:
There’s one last thing that I would love for Melik to touch on for just a minute. We barely scratched the surface on new product development, but one of the three things that we always come back to, it’s what is a modern learner looking for? It’s how much does it cost? The affordability question. How fast can I get it, which covers a lot of ground in terms of how fast can they access the program, and the flexibility, and modality, all of those things.
The last thing is the ROI, which covers a lot of ground as well. That ground is partially tied to what kind of return can I get on my investment of time, and money, and so forth? That is something that does require innovation, especially with the pace of change and technology, and the pace and change in need of skills within the employer universe.
When you think about new product development in terms of programs for a higher ed institution, Melik and I have talked about this before just together, but I love the way he thinks about it, and I’d love for him to share it. I’ll steal a little bit of it. It has to do with failing fast and failing often.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Absolutely. We launch products, majors, for example, modalities with the understanding that we design the measures of success prior to launch, so that the decision to kill something or to launch something is not an emotional one. One of the things that I love about my academics at Unity is we actually don’t care anymore about majors. My faculty don’t identify their value based on our majors, but by the disciplines, because a major is nothing more than an amalgamation of different disciplines that lends you towards a career.
To Greg’s point, one is we don’t invest enough in launch. When I look at a program launch, I don’t look at what I’m going to lose money in year one, but what will this major, or this program, or this subsidiary be in the black once it’s fully matured? If I’m launching a program today, let’s say engineering, and I need 250 students for it to break even, I can’t assume that because in year one, I’m not going to break even, I can’t launch it. I think a lot of people at universities make decisions on annual cycles.
Greg and I work on this all the time. We have a series of programs that are established and those, we are looking at them on an annual cycle. We have programs that we are trying to launch, and we cannot look at the cost of acquisition. We can’t look at profitability, we can’t look at net revenue in the same way, because it’s going to take two to four years before it’s fully matured, but we have to have gates along the way.
The ability to invest, the ability to understand the lifecycle, the lifetime value of a student based on your program, and the willingness to have an objective lens in which we can cut something, no matter how much passion we have into it, is a level of discipline and system that most higher education, in a very relational and social capital sort of way, have not been able to adapt to.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
By the way, if you offer, no matter how good your product is, if you offer only once or twice a year and you’re hoping to get some profitability out of it in year two, and you have students, don’t wait, by the way. Students don’t wait for those cycles to come around. You have to offer a frequency of start date that allows you to put in enough mass so that you can achieve some profitability in year three and four, which you talk to schools about adding more start dates. It’s like, you’re breaking brains.
That’s one of the keys, I think, is the modern learner does not wait. We know their consideration set is very small, two to three schools, and the amount of time they want to wake is one to two weeks before, so maybe a month. That’s it.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
To give Greg and his team a compliment, one of the reasons why I’ve worked with them as long as I have is because they are not obsequious. They are constantly telling me everything that I’m doing wrong. They’re constantly pushing back at some of the decisions we want to make. They’re constantly showing us the data.
For example, we know now that if we can’t package a student on their financial aid within 48 hours, if I cannot get my team to package daily, if I cannot get my team to do transcript evaluations and give a degree audit within 48 hours, I can beat the small private residential school that’s going out of business, but I will lose that student to a number one of our competitors.
To your point, Joe, this idea that, and imagine if those decisions had to be made by a committee, and had to be made by people who are going to feel a sense of loss. At Unity, one of the things that we’ve done is each and every one of my positions has something called rule, scope, and authority. What decision do they get to make? When Greg is working with somebody who has the ability and the authority to launch a program, killer program, move a process, he doesn’t have to wait for them to go create a committee and come back in six months.
He can get an answer in 48 hours. That’s where I think a lot of colleges who have not had to make that change are still doing well. Once they hit that cliff where they actually have to change their process, that’s when you’re going to know if they’re resilient enough as an organization. I think that’s where Greg’s team has been very, very good. They tell us, we don’t always agree with them, and it took them a few years to figure out that they weren’t going to lose our business for being honest with us.
Greg Clayton:
We also, I think we held Melik back a little bit too.
Dr. Melik Khoury:
Yeah, I know. It’s really fun when the partner is like, “Slow down, dude.” Like, so serious. Love to take… We’ll get there, I swear.
Dr. Joe Sallustio:
Well, there you have it, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Education Elevated miniseries on the EdUp Experience podcast, brought to you by EducationDynamics. We hope today’s conversation has sparked some ideas and given you a fresh perspective on serving the modern learner. If you’re looking for more resources and insights, be sure to check out EducationDynamics, and mark your calendars for the InsightsEDU 2025 conference in New Orleans from February 12th to 14th.
I know I will be there, and so will Elvin. Valentine’s Day is my birthday, so we’re going to have a very good time. It’s the premier event, Insights EDU is the premier event for higher education leaders who want to stay ahead of the curve and master the art of serving today’s modern learners. Register today at InsightsEDU.com. Of course, we’ll be back next month with another episode of Education Elevated: Creating Durability with the Modern Learner miniseries event.
Until then, of course, we’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that with brand new episodes of the EdUp Experience podcast. I want to thank my guests, my guest host, he’s Greg Clayton, and our guest of honor, Dr. Melik Peter Khoury of Unity Environmental University, and of course, thank you EducationDynamics for sponsoring this miniseries. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve just ed-upped.
