SPEAKER_00
For me, AB, I'm Matt Pelish, and this is Office Hours. Liberal Arts colleges in America have always had a strong reputation for the way that they approach education, help students examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, collaborate. But for some time now, the core values of liberal arts have been under a very intense scrutiny.
Students, society, everybody seeking specialized programs, stackable credentials, certificates directly connected to corporations and industry. On today's episode, AB's Thomas Fringer sits down with Denison President Adam Weinberg to talk about the challenges facing liberal arts colleges. They'll discuss the ways Denison has embraced changes in the industry through innovation, like Denison's Launch Lab, to give students boot camps, skill building experiences, to make them stronger job candidates.
They're also going to dive into the three most important focus areas that every college university should commit to, regardless of mission, if they're going to survive in the future. Thanks for listening and welcome to Office Hours with EAB.
SPEAKER_01
Hi everybody. This is Thomas Fringer, Senior Director with EAB. Welcome to this week's episode of Office Hours with EAB.
I'm joined today by Adam Weinberg, President at Denison University. Adam, thanks so much for joining me today. Oh, glad to be here.
Thanks for inviting me. So we're just about two months post-opening of Denison University. I believe you began your fall semester on the 17th of August.
I noticed you recently wrote in the Hill about how colleges and universities can reopen safely and how Denison University did it. Do you mind talking to us and to our listeners today a little bit about how you went about this process and what the first few months have looked like for Denison? Sure.
SPEAKER_02
I think I have jokingly and have seriously said in the Hill piece that every time I talk about our success, it feels like I'm tempting fate. So let me just kind of start there. But things have gone well.
We've been at this about two months. We've had fewer than 10 COVID cases on campus. We tested the entire student body, recently wound up with no cases.
So it's been good. I would attribute our success to a couple of things. One is, I think like every other college out there, we just did a lot of planning.
We had access to top epidemiologists and research scientists who worked with a cross-organizational team that we put together over the summer. We followed the best science that's out there. We worked across the college.
We put good plans in place. But I would actually argue that what's made the fall so successful is a couple other things. One is, despite what you read in the media sometimes, students have been spectacular.
Our students absolutely showed up committed to making this work. And they said over and over again, look, we want to be on campus. We want to be with our friends.
We want to be in classrooms with our faculty. And we're willing to sacrifice a lot of other things to make that happen. I also think our faculty and staff have been spectacular.
We've had lots of rules. We've really restricted students' inability to visit each other, residential hall rooms. For the most part, restricted students' ability to travel off campus.
So there's been a lot of restrictions, kind of a bubble around campus in some ways. I think I also may mention this in the hill piece. But I will also say as a college president, I am a product of the liberal arts.
When you are a product of the liberal arts, you learn a number of things, one of which is a lot of intellectual humility. You learn that at any given moment about any given topic, you might be wrong because you might be constantly want to seek out alternative data. You also learn creativity, problem solving, the way to work, and diverse teams.
I never in my professional career have I had to lean into my liberal arts skills, values, and habits more to be successful at something. But we've been successful because everybody in our community, our students, faculty, and staff showed up committed to making this work and making the sacrifices we need to make. And I will finish by saying, and we've had a lot of luck.
I think what we all know from what happens is that it just takes one super spreader, one wrong event, and you're off down the rabbit hole.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I really appreciate you pointing out how in your career you've perhaps never leaned into your liberal arts background more than you have over these past few months. And I think that's a perfect time to where I want to spend the bulk of our conversation today talking about how liberal arts colleges in particular can rise to the challenges confronting them and that are accelerated, accentuated by this pandemic. So we talked about your piece in the Hill most recently, but in the prior few months, you've been writing quite prolifically about how the pandemic is going to shape higher education.
You've identified some of the shifts coming to the industry in the wake of this crisis and how liberal arts colleges in particular will be impacted, but can position themselves to thrive. So first question that I want to propose to you on this particular topic is this long standing question about is a four year degree worth it? This has been something that different stakeholders have been asking for quite some time, but COVID-19 has really amplified this quite a bit. The experiences that students value on campus like the spontaneous connections, the community that forms, those are now jeopardized in this more virtual world that we're living in and what you have to think about compliance to help safety protocols.
How do you think President Weinberg that colleges and universities can demonstrate the value proposition at this time?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's such a good question. So I would start by saying that I think we make a mistake in thinking about higher education as kind of a single industry, right? Because I think if anything, higher education has always had distinct sectors and I think COVID is kind of exasperating differentiations between different parts of our head, right? So if you're talking about a community college or a large R1 or a liberal arts college or a more regional college university, you know, we're talking about institutions that do serve fundamentally different purposes. I would also argue that one of the real strengths of the US higher education system is the diversity of different kinds of institutions out there, which really serve the different needs and interests of students.
I think from liberal arts colleges like Denison, right, your kind of classic, private, fully residential, almost fully residential four-year liberal arts education, we are being challenged. I don't think the trends are new, right? But I think that what COVID has done is it is exasperated trends that have already existed, but trends are kind of like water. Is they move faster? They tend to cut deeper and they tend to combine in unexpected ways.
So I do think we're going to be challenged. I think we're going to be challenged on the price front, right? There's just going to be fewer and fewer families out there given the shape of the likely recovery we're going to face who are going to be either capable or willing to pay what they often perceive our cost to be, right, which may be very different from what it actually costs. We're going to be pushed on the value front, right? So it's not just about price.
I have to talk about demonstrated value, which is what sits at the intersection of price and outcomes. I mean, families are going to really want to know, you know, for the investment of time and money, what are the outcomes going to be for my kid? We tend, I think, incorrectly to reduce that to careers, which I think is an important piece, but I actually think what families really want to know is two slight variations on that. One is they want to know about life launch, right? At the end of these four years is my child going to be fully ready to launch, right? Which means knowing what they want to do professionally and launching it successfully into a career profession, but also means about having the emotional agility to deal with modern life.
It means having the ability to live autonomously, you know, all those kinds of things it takes to kind of fully be an autonomous adult in a really challenging world. I think the other piece that families want to know, we often talk about how many students succeed, but I think what families really want to know is what's the failure rate, right? You know, if I send my child to your institution, what happens to those students who don't take advantage of every opportunity or who don't immediately find that faculty mentor? You know, is this going to be a place where very few students fall through the cracks, right? So that a lot that, that a lot, so we often say that we want 100% of our students to launch successfully. So I, you know, I just think, you know, it's going to be about demonstrate value.
I think the other challenge for liberal arts colleges is I think before COVID, but but exasperated by COVID, you know, higher ed in general may very well go the way of the cable television industry, right? It's going to get unbundled and people are just going to be much more willing and much more and demand maybe much more education, how they want it, when they want it, they're going to be open to, they may be open to degrees that aren't for years, right? They might be open to, to programs that are part-time, that are online, that are in hybrid, that are blended learning. I just think people are going to want more choices and at different times of their life. So I think, I think, you know, I think, I think on the flip side, liberal arts colleges are uniquely positioned to thrive at the back end of COVID, but it's going to be, it's going to require us just to ask really deep questions about what our value proposition is and how we deliver on it.
SPEAKER_01
When we think about price and think about demonstrated value, that of course brings to mind increasing competition in higher education. And it's not just traditional universities as we thought about them, but as you wrote in one of your pieces, alternatives to traditional higher education institutions, Google career certificates, for example, you wrote a bit about this. I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit more about what you see as the threats that Google career certificates and other non-traditional players in higher education pose to traditional colleges.
And what you think higher education leaders might do and how they should think to keep college as a first choice option for students.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so, you know, not surprisingly, after I wrote that piece in Business Insider, I got a phone call from a friend who's the chair of a computer science department saying, what does this mean for places like ours? I actually think that Google certificates are really good for private liberal arts colleges. I think if you're offering students a more technical education that may be two years, three years, four years, then I actually think that Google certificates is a threat, right? Because it kind of begs the question, if I can get from Google in six months, what's going to take two years or three years to get a year institution and the outcomes the same, why do that? But for places like Denison, I would actually argue just the opposite, right? Because I think the trick for liberal arts colleges is to move beyond a conversation of or to a conversation of and, right? Because I actually believe that across higher ed too often, we're forcing students to make a false choice, a really false choice, between getting a broad based education that's going to serve them well across their life course, but particularly across their professional lives or a more technical education that allows them to launch quickly and successfully. And in fact, liberal arts colleges have the opportunity as should all education to do both.
What the Google certificates do is they allow us to say to students, look, come to a liberal arts college, get a broad based education that's going to serve you well. You're going to learn all the kind of, not just skills, but also values and habits that it's going to take to adapt across your life, across your professional career. And here's some certificates, right? That you can kind of stack on top of your BA that may round up your education.
So as you and I talked about before, I'm super interested in what people are calling last mile programs, right? Those programs that close the gaps between what we teach in the curriculum and what students need to launch professionally. I think we need to close those gaps, but we don't do it by retreating from liberal arts. We do it by embracing things like Google certificates.
We do it by using the entire 12 months, right? Students are only in classes 60% of the year, maybe a little bit more. How do we use the winter and summer months more strategically so that a great liberal arts education is a 12 month, four year kind of proposition?
SPEAKER_01
Forces we've been talking about, so questioning the value of college demonstrated value as you framed it, right? The proliferation of alternatives, competitors that are non-traditional. It all comes back to the sense of best preparing students for what you've turned life launch, right? So we're thinking about broad based education, but also deep technical expertise in a particular area that will equip our students for future success in the workforce. I want to spend more time talking about this idea of life launch.
And I also want to talk a little bit more about what Denison University is doing specifically. I understand there have been some recent announcements about your work that you are doing in this space and new initiatives that you're standing up. Can we spend a little bit more time here and maybe you can tell us a bit about what Denison is specifically doing in this space?
SPEAKER_02
Yes. We've been walking this path now for about six years and we've done a lot of different things, but let me talk about three that I think are pretty exciting. One is we took a look at our curriculum, right? We stepped back a couple of years ago and said, we're fully committed to a liberal arts curriculum, but we also think a liberal arts curriculum can have a pragmatic edge, right? So we, our faculty kind of sat back and asked, what are courses that we mostly already teach that we could put together in new and different ways that would still be rooted in liberal arts, but would prepare our students to thrive with where the world's going? And our faculty actually came up with 18 ideas and we wanted to launch in a global commerce program, which is in some ways really our response to undergraduate business degree, but more deeply rooted in the humanities and social sciences, a program in data analytics, a program in financial economics, narrative journalism, health exercise and sports studies, global health and politics and public affairs.
So one is we just, we looked at our curriculum and just said, are there different pathways through our curriculum that might give students a little bit more of what they need? The second is we launched what we call our Knowlton Center for Career Exploration. And without going into a lot of detail, the Knowlton Center was really built on a couple principles. We wanted to say that we want to reserve the semesters for our students to really focus on their liberal arts education, but we're going to really recapture January and the summer months.
The second, and in those months, we're going to kind of close the skills gaps. The second is we're going to get students involved early, right? So the career exploration, and we talk about it not as career services. This isn't about getting you a job, but it's about helping you use some of your time at Denison to ask three questions.
What kind of life do I want to live? What kind of human being do I want to be? How do I use, how do people use careers and professions to become the architects of those kinds of lives? And third is how do I use part of my time at Denison to start to develop the skills, the values, the habits, the networks of experiences to launch successfully, right? So the Knowlton Center is getting students involved earlier in their Denison experience so that they're using part of their time across the four years. It is very much based on relationships, right? Connecting our students, not just with our alumni, but with business leaders and other folks throughout the Columbus region. So the Knowlton Center was kind of a fresh look at how do we complement what we're doing.
One of the most interesting things that Knowlton Center is doing, I think, is they're doing a lot of work on student employment, right? Like every other college, we have a lot of students working on campus. And now we're asking how do we make sure that every student who has a job at Denison, that that becomes part of their career exploration, career preparation journey? And how do we just make small changes to our student employment program to capture that? The last thing we did is the one you were alluding to that I'm super excited about. We announced the opening of what we're calling the Denison Launch Lab.
And this is really an attempt to capture for liberal arts students the last mile in upscaling spaces, right? So it's the target audience is any student enrolled in a liberal arts college from the moment they matriculated that college through their fifth reunion. Last mile programs are really programs that close those gaps between what a student might have gotten as a liberal arts student, right? As an English major, a history major, a philosophy major. And the few profession specific skills they need to get that first internship or job, right? And so the launch lab will be delivering really short one week, two week, three week courses to close those skills gaps.
And our intent is not for Denison to deliver those, but to partner with ed tech companies, entrepreneurs, business leaders and others who are already in this space and have really good programs, but often don't know how to access liberal arts students. The upskilling is at the other end, right? As a student graduates as a, you know, an English major at Denison, they get a great job, they love their job, but they wish that they'd listened to their academic advisor and just taken that one stats or finance course so they can understand some things that are going on at work. They don't quit their job, but the launch lab will be a place where you can go back and very quickly upskill and get that very particular skill.
And so that's what we're doing at Denison, right? It started with the curriculum, the Milton Center really pivoting our camp, capturing the 12 months, pivoting our campus culture and now the launch lab, really making it easy for our students and students at other liberal arts colleges to close those skills gaps, either through last mile or upskilling programs.
SPEAKER_01
I'd be curious for your take on location at President Weinberger. I know Denison is located 45 minutes an hour or so from Columbus, Ohio, a thriving city and a much more suburban quaint setting. The launch lab that you're referencing, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, it stood up in Columbus.
And I'd be curious to think about how you are thinking about opportunities to take advantage of location, of place now, how that undergirds some of the efforts that are afoot and where you think unique opportunities might be for similarly situated liberal arts colleges.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so when I arrived at Denison almost eight years ago, one of the things I quickly realized was that our location was a real differentiator for us in a positive way. The first thing Columbus visited our campus, we have a beautiful campus, right? Your quintessential, fully residential, four-year liberal arts college located on a beautiful hill with a big sense of community, large footprint, lots of fields in this kind of really quaint, beautiful village of Grandville where there's nice restaurants, coffee shops and all that stuff. But what was new is a new highway connected us to downtown Columbus.
We're actually 25 minutes now to downtown Columbus. And once the highway went in, most of the business growth, or a lot of it, has now come out our way in New Albany. So we're within 15 miles of about 40 global companies.
That combination of your quintessential, beautiful, fully residential community that's also connected to the fastest growing city in the Midwest is huge for us. And the launch of that is in downtown Columbus, students will easily be able to go back and forth with our data analytics program and our global commerce program. We have students kind of working in and around businesses and other organizations in Columbus.
So they're able to do internships now with COVID. One of the things we found is virtual internships, right? And so faculty are starting to think through, can we actually embed virtual internships into some of our classes, almost this kind of class projects? We launched something called the Red Frame Lab, which is our center for entrepreneurship and design thinking. And students are now using design thinking through a new program that we launched this summer when all the internships dried up called Red Frame Consulting, RFC, where students learn design thinking.
They work in teams on real world problem solving for businesses and organizations in the Columbus area. So it's just, yeah, our location is huge. And colleges are located in all kinds of different locations, and they each have their distinct advantages.
But I think for us, our connection to Columbus is huge. And it's one that's only going to grow as Columbus continues to prosper in the ways it has. But it also required us to think differently.
It required us to kind of, we traditionally thought about ourselves as not part of Columbus. And so when I arrived and started saying to our faculty, with this great city here, how do we leverage it? Not to supplement the liberal arts, but to really connect the liberal arts better to the kinds of things students want to be able to do when they graduate. Which is a different question, one that opened up a whole world of possibilities for us.
SPEAKER_01
I want to shift a little bit. We talked before, President Weinberg, about when addressing emerging challenges or long standing ones. Oftentimes colleges and universities will think about creating brand new initiative, creating new support for students to use to address whatever the particular challenge might be, right? Whether it might be preparing themselves for future career, so on and so forth.
You and I have talked a little bit before about perhaps a way of thinking about it is universities and colleges that often have a lot of these resources, a lot of the support already existing on campus. It's a matter of helping to make it visible and navigable to the student body. I'd be curious for your take on as you're thinking about helping students prepare themselves for the future of work as you're thinking through navigating through some of these challenges that the pandemic has accentuated, how you and your team have approached making this all easier for your students to navigate so that they can get access to the things that already exist on campus and that could really support them in their work.
SPEAKER_02
So objectively, you can walk on just about any college campus in this country and be awestruck if the opportunities students have. It's not that we don't offer what students need. It's too often that students don't have the roadmap to be able to know how to take advantage of it.
Too often, they don't ever find that roadmap or if they find it, they don't really find it to their junior or senior year. We spend so much time and energy in this country preparing students to get into college, but then once they get in, we all kind of wipe our hands and say, okay, job done. No, no, job just started.
So I just think a lot of the work we've done at Dennis in the last couple of years is about being much more intentional, it helping students kind of understand what that roadmap is and then trying to connect them really early with mentors on campus who can help them kind of navigate it. And so my own view, and I think the Gallup data was really, really smart on this. I think whether or not a student finds a mentor, particularly a faculty mentor, is probably the single biggest differentiator, right, or predictor on how much a student is going to get out of college.
And we know it happens for far few students. Right. So we've spent a lot of time at Denison trying to increase the odds that students will not just engage with faculty during their first year, but actually find faculty and staff mentors. We've been much more intentional at kind of talking to students about what the romance and pathways are made it easier for them to find those pathways.
And then we've also just put things together in new and different ways, right? So I talked a minute ago about our new academic majors. What's interesting is we launched seven of them, but we mostly did it by taking classes we already offered. We just put them together in new and different ways, which I think had two benefits.
One is I really worry that too many students who are in liberal arts colleges are actually not getting a liberal arts education because one of the fundamental principles of liberal arts education is going wide across the curriculum. And students wind up double majoring, triple majoring, double majoring with a minor, and they wind up not going across the curriculum. So our new academic programs actually really embrace the liberal arts.
They take students wide across the curriculum. But the second is we're actually managing to do that in ways that also I think does a better job preparing them to kind of explore different career options and then be ready to launch professionally when they graduate.
SPEAKER_01
Can you talk a little bit, President Weinberg, about some of the long term changes that you anticipate Dennison will be making based on your experiences since the middle of March? We talked a lot about ongoing initiatives, areas of focus, but I'd be curious if we project out three, four, five years from now. What you expect might look even more different than it does right now.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so I think you'll see us focus on probably three or four areas. The first is one we've not talked about, which is keeping the college accessible and affordable to students. I just think that's been a big project for us at Dennison.
We doubled the amount of need-based aid we've given out the last couple of years. By that I don't just mean the tuition financially, but I also mean really being much more intentional about what the financial stressors are that prevents students or make it hard for students to fully take advantage of their college experience and closing those as well, whether it's increased in book budgets or having small grants available for students when they run into healthcare needs or whatever it is. So one is on the financially front.
I think every college in the country is just going to have to do more to make sure that our colleges stay accessible and affordable to students. I think the second is, I think given the diversity of different kinds of institutions of higher education, every college and university needs to be really clear on what its value proposition is. And for a place like Dennison, that's about the liberal arts, but it's in particular about the relational piece of the liberal arts.
So we're going to really focus, as we have the last couple of years, on doubling down and protecting the things that make a Dennison education life-shaping. So that's things like having a full-time faculty, a world-class faculty who are fully committed and dedicated to undergraduate students. It's about focusing on mentorship and student-faculty relationships.
It's about focusing on small classes that use active pedagogies and engaged learning. It's about really taking advantage of the wide range of diversity of students on our campus. So our residential halls on campus becomes a design studio for students to learn to live and work across difference.
So that's going to be a secondary focus, is not retreating from what we've been doing so well as a liberal arts college, but actually doubling down on it. Because that's what makes a Dennison education different from the kind of education you can get at a larger public or other kind of institution. It's what differentiates us.
I think the third is what we've been talking about, which is within that framework, also really putting our flag on the ground to say, we're going to do a better job than any other college, or at least we're going to aspire to, in helping students figure out what they want to do professionally and then making sure that they launch successfully. We can do those three things. We can keep the college accessible, both from a tuition standpoint, but also from a financial stressor standpoint.
If we can really double down on things that have always made liberal arts colleges so life-shaping, those relational qualities, that broad-based curriculum, that being exposed to a wide range of people and ideas, and then give it a slightly more pragmatic edge by really focusing on what do students need to successfully launch. We're going to remain strong and mission-focused.
SPEAKER_01
What do you think is at risk for university and college presidents that underestimate the moment that we're in right now? What would you share with them as advice or perspective given your past seven years at Dennison University?
SPEAKER_02
I mean, look, this won't come as any surprise to any college president. One of the interesting things about COVID is I've spent more time on the phone with college presidents over the last six months than I did during my first seven years at Dennison. And in different configurations, the Ohio college presidents are talking more liberal arts college presidents are talking more.
And I think college presidents are tuned to this. I think we're trying to help our campuses be more tuned to this, that higher ed is not going to go back to where it was. A chronicle earlier last week, I think announced that 7% of all jobs in higher ed have been lost since March.
And some of those will come back, but it is a deeply disruptive time. I think how people, whether it's students or their families, but also employers, think about higher education is changing. I've now heard from a, I sit on a number of CEO roundtables.
And one of the things I'm hearing CEOs talk about is that they're not so sure. They care as much as they once did about credentials, right? What they care a lot about is certification. What are the skills that students are going to show up with on day one? To be able to add value to my company.
So I just think colleges can't underestimate two things. One is how rapidly things are changing. They're not changing necessarily new directions, but trends that were slower now accelerating.
But I think the second is that we have what we need on our campuses to address the challenges we face. We're just going to have to be willing to be a little bit more self reflective and embrace some change.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think that is a good place for us to wrap today. President Weinberg, thank you so much for your time and for offering your perspective on the challenges that liberal arts colleges in particular are facing in this environment. I appreciate the time.
We wish you the best of luck with this fall semester and the rest of the academic year. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_00
Thanks again for listening. Next week episode is one you don't want to miss. When EAB's VP of partnerships, Tom Sugar is joined by a very special guest to talk through a bold new effort between EAB and a handful of two and four year schools in the Milwaukee area to erase equity gaps in higher education.
Until then, I'm Matt Pelish for Office Hours with EAB. Thank you. Thanks.
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