Transcript
Speaker: I'm Fritz Vandover.
Speaker: everyone and welcome back to another episode of getting stuff done higher education um fritz fanover Kevin Schreiner and Kelvin Bentley are with me as always. And today I'm really excited, we are really excited to have as our guest, Bryan Alexander, higher education futurist and really,
Speaker: an important voice in the world of higher education. So I'm gonna do a little brief introduction, Brian, and then we're gonna talk about how you came to where you are today. So if you don't if you've been under a rock for like the past, I don't know, 15 plus years, and you don't know who Brian Alexander is, at the moment, Brian is a senior scholar at Georgetown University in the DC area and um teaches about the role of of technology in higher education and education general.
Speaker: Steer me if I'm wrong, Brian. Oh, this is correct. In addition to that, Brian is also a futurist who who, like I said, digs into all things related to education, not just technology, but like to think that Brian sets higher education in particular into a a context of all the words of AL except economics. So economics,
Speaker: cultural, political, historical, sociological, meteorological, all the AL words, and then um tries to figure out not only what it means for right now, for the for the current moment of higher education, but forecast out what it could mean in the future. So Brian, you speak to institutions, you provide consult consultation, you speak to organizations about all things related to higher ed, whether it's registrars and technologists and all that. um
Speaker: You also you are a prolific writer. yeah So your website, your blog, You have the Future Trends Forum, which is a weekly gathering of to talk about specific topics in education, or you have experts and ah thinkers and doers to talk about that particular topic. And then ah people who attend, when I attend from time to time, you know they can,
Speaker: interact, ask questions, which is a great setting. The chat is always on. And you you also, Brian also writes really timely and important books about higher education. So just to give everyone a flavor, um his book,
Speaker: Academia Next, the Futures of Higher Education, which was released or published in early 2020, won the Association of Professional Futurists Award. It also had the very timely prediction before COVID landed that, oh my gosh, a pandemic would be very bad for higher education. And within weeks or months of making that ah pointing that out, we had COVID and the all the impacts we had on higher education.
Speaker: His next book, Universities on Fire, Higher Education in the Age of Climate Crisis, came out in 2023 and won the 2025 Frederick W. Ness Book Award. And your new book, Peak Higher Ed, How to Survive the Emerging Academic Crisis, came out this past January and is also getting very glowing reviews and a lot of chatter around the space. So I'm going to stop there because we want to we want to hear from you, Brian. We want to welcome you to the podcast and talk about your path, because there's a lot more to your past. You have a PhD, I believe in medieval literature or something to that effect. And we'd love to hear how you went from that world to this current so this current moment in your professional life.
Speaker: Well, that's a very, very kind introduction. i have to say, Fritz, now I feel a little tired just listening to it. But the and thank you to the three of you for hosting me. I really appreciate it. It's good to see you all again. and I appreciate your hosting and taking the time to ask me questions and put up with my ramblings. um i I got PhD in 18th century British literature in the 1990s, and then my career went on a fairly traditional path. I was hired at a small liberal arts college in Louisiana. I taught there for about six years. And, and it was great. i mean, I was teaching literature and because it was a small college, I was also teaching other things, you know, the whole history of British literature. i invented a class on the American war in Vietnam. I invented a class on multimedia literature.
Speaker: Um, and then I got lured away by a nonprofit that worked at the time with about a 100 small liberal arts colleges across the U S it helped them with advanced technology. And the reason for this was because in the nineteen ninety s as now, The humanities job market is is absolutely horrendous.
Speaker: And i had a doctorate from world-class research institution. i had a great teaching record. I had all kinds of bona fides. But um I was also working in technology. i had my first My first published article was about teaching with email.
Speaker: I had used technology in my classes in all kinds of experimental ways. and This is back in the ninety s so if I described it, it would sound pretty antiquated. but But this helped set me apart. And as a prof, I did a lot of work with technology, teaching with technology, researching technology. I interviewed Larry Lessig then about copyright law, for example, and technology. ah At my campus, I ended up developing an information literacy program, working with about 16 other colleges across the South.
Speaker: and And this led me to get lured away by this nonprofit called the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. And for about a decade, I was working with ultimately in nearly 300 small colleges across the U.S. And I eventually became their kind of lead for emerging technologies. So this is the early 2000s, emerging technologies, we mobile computing, what we then called Web 2.0, gaming and simulation for learning.
Speaker: And I found that when I went to a campus and said, let's talk about emerging technologies for higher ed, I would lose half the audience right off the bat. You know, you'd have people who would say, well, I don't have time for this, or I don't think about emerging technologies. That's why we have the chief information officer. Or I'm at a liberal arts college. You know, we don't do emerging technologies.
Speaker: and this And this stuck in my craw. I wanted to reconnect with all of these people. And I found that as I was doing this work that I was connecting all the emerging technologies with not just pedagogy, but institutional policy, which then connected into vendor relationships, which connected in town gown relations, which kind of get to state policies, federal policies, the broader economy. And I realized what I was doing was the future of education overall, just with a focus on emerging technologies. So I reframed what I was doing. I did a lot of research into the future's fields, which is a course profession that goes back to the nineteen sixty s And when I would come to a campus and say, let's talk about the future of higher education, everybody was involved.
Speaker: Even the professors or staff who called themselves Luddites would be keenly interested. And they'd be able better able talk about technology in a more thoughtful way. So i I eventually spun out of business doing this on my own, not just through that nonprofit. And I've been doing that ever since. I've worked with institutions on every continent except Antarctica. I work with governments, both regional, national and local. I work with businesses, nonprofits, but especially with colleges and universities.
Speaker: That is a compact way to talk about a very expansive journey. You know, This, I think Knightley, but the New Media Consortium is where you and I first connected. think it was about 2009 when I was at Macalester College, just like a year into my role. think it was at an Eli conference.
Speaker: And all three those organizations no longer exist. Yeah. So Knightley, can't remember her last name, Nancy. Millichap. Yes, I got to know her. So I went to DePaul University. I was on a a technology advisory board. This is like 2002. That's how I got to know Nancy, because she was invited to be part of that.
Speaker: So I got to know Nancy Milchap way back then um and when she was part of Nightly and DePaul was part of Nightly. So, you know, you you're very similar to the three of us, really, in that you start certainly you and me because we started in the humanities but kevin you have a ah leg in there too where you were ah you were drawn out of a traditional faculty path because you saw you saw all these connections and things moving forward happening around you that you saw a different a different path.
Speaker: What did they used to call it? Alt, Altac. no I think that term that hashtag has died. That term has died off. But you were you're an OG Altac.
Speaker: Well, think the hashtag has died off in part because it simply describes reality. there's, there's no, it's, you know, there's so many people in the academic space who have burnished academic credentials who work in non-faculty positions, everything from, you know, libraries to program development, to companies, to foundations. It's just, ah you know, we've, we haven't addressed the academic labor problem. And in fact, it's gotten worse.
Speaker: So we just, you know, Alt-Act just describes a big chunk of the real world though. Can I ask a question, Brian? did Did anyone say when you, so you said you were in a faculty role initially, your your first faculty role out of graduate school for about six six years.
Speaker: yeah When you pivoted out of that tonight, did anyone say, either faculty mentors or peers say, what are you doing? Why are you why are you doing this? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. A bunch of folks did. You know, some of them said,
Speaker: This is very exciting. you know We're in a historical revolutionary moment with a digital revolution and we should really, you know I'm glad you could do this. But others said, look, you know you're you know you were headed towards tenure. Now you're you know you're cutting loose from that. You're working for a nonprofit that's based on soft money. And this is all experimental, which means it could all go wrong.
Speaker: But it made sense for me at the time. And it turned out to have been a good gamble. One of the things we talk about in here is, you know, we try to, in the pod here, we try to put out information for early and mid-career hired professionals, faculty or other staff or otherwise, about what were the signals to you that you were, even given those realities, Knightley was based on soft money, and I think that's one of the reasons it sunsetted, is that soft money went away.
Speaker: correct me if I'm wrong, but what were the signals like, yeah, i there's a risk in this, but I'm on the right path. Well, there's a whole backstory to nightly, but the, but a key thing is that nightly launched a funding model, a subscription model in the summer of 2008. And so that turned out to be very bad timing. Yes. It it never really recovered from, from that loss.
Speaker: Um, Uh, one of the signals was simply, and you know, historically with retrospective seems obvious, but that the digital revolution was vast and deep and that, uh, higher education needed to grapple with it.
Speaker: Uh, and, and that was less visible in the small liberal arts college world. It was more visible in the research university world. Um, but for small colleges, this is the biggest trouble with, know, there a, for many, there was a rejection of online teaching. There was a sense that what they had to offer was the small in-person, intimate seminar setting and that technology would simply get in the way of that. and so There was a lot of rejection of it, but but also you know a research university would have a large technology wing. you know They'd have an engineering school, for example, but a lot of liberal arts colleges did not. and so They felt they lacked the capacity to be able to do this.
Speaker: um which is one reason for the collaboration you know to try and pool knowledge uh and to share resources across campuses are but i i think ah another thing to think about is that the what i i would view now is the chronic higher education crisis really started to appear in 2008 when the great financial crash hit and it clobbered among other things a lot of higher ed american colleges and universities still haven't recovered in many ways. i mean, obviously the very wealthiest did through last year, but quite a few struggled.
Speaker: and And then the problems just exacerbated. i mean, four years later in 2012, we reached peak higher peak enrollment in higher education and we've gone down ever since and we haven't come back to it yet. We might not ever.
Speaker: yeah you know And the problems of American attitudes towards higher education, you know, our increasing skepticism, dislike, or outright hostility have only exacerbated.
Speaker: And that was before the second Trump administration, which then ran with it. But also before a lot of state governments really took a lot of steps to what they saw as reining in and reforming higher ed.
Speaker: So I think in in in many ways, you know, this futurist perspective has been, I think, a productive one. Yeah. there's there's There's so much in what you just e just talked about. um cause for I think there's a couple of things. I think one, it's interesting, you know the technology in small liberal arts colleges or even just small colleges or non let's just say non-R1s, right? Like the technology curve or the the inability to have some technology at some colleges and universities. And so I'm just curious how, from your research, I mean, have you found that
Speaker: Colleges by and large, I use the, no, don't even want to use that. i was going say, i was going almost use like a meta type example, but it's it's almost like, so if you think about online and the amount of money spent in online advertising, the majority of that is going to Google and to meta, right? That's where those ads are being placed. And so I wonder if like technology is kind of the same way where there's, there's Microsoft can basically charge whatever they want to a university.
Speaker: And if they don't have the funds, then they're not going to use Microsoft. They're going go with Gmail or or some other technology. Right. I guess so I'm trying to get to like how how do you see tech or tech firms kind of being. i don't want to word bully, but.
Speaker: Kind of like they're they're they're almost not helping the progression. And i may um I may be off, and so correct me if I'm not, but it just seems like tech can control whether or not a university has certain technology because they can price them out of it, intentionally or unintentionally.
Speaker: Do you see those types of like... Is that a concern for higher ed? Like when we start to think about the cost of higher ed and the price of higher and everybody's like, it's too expensive. Well, lot of times that's expensive because we have to buy all these external things that we don't, we can't control those prices.
Speaker: Well, it's, you know, you've described the CIO's world very concisely. You know, they spend a lot of time and not just the CIO, but also a few other offices and campus, namely libraries. um, who, uh, a key function of their job is negotiating well with these external vendors. And, and some of them are quite, quite expensive. You know, thinking about, uh, you mentioned Microsoft. So thinking about say office productivity suite, um, thinking, um, say about ERP vendors, um, cybersecurity vendors, um, you know, there's, there's just a whole stack of these. Um, and, and to an extent we're at their mercy because,
Speaker: We tend to buy as individual campuses, we tend not to buy in pools. There are exceptions, you know, NERC Comp in New England, for example, does a great job of doing collective licensing. And, you know, being a NERC Comp member entitles you to crack at a whole bunch of good stuff, which is great. But most of the time, it's not the case. Most of the time, people are afraid of antitrust. And so they, for which higher ed has been dinged in the past. So they prefer to negotiate individually. And also um at the same time, I think a lot of these businesses really like to work with us selfishly.
Speaker: They benefit from training up customers. So an 18 year old who know goes to Kelvin's class and learns about how to use Adobe Creative Cloud. or Gmail is much more likely to become an Adobe customer or a Google customer when they leave. Uh, but also I think they get really good feedback and I've, I've had a lot of really good conversations with folks from Apple, from Microsoft, from Google, uh, not all vendors. I mean, I've had some awful conversations. Um, but you know, they're really curious because we give them a testing ground that they don't normally get.
Speaker: i mean, if, if I right now sign up and get a, um, a subscription to fill in the blank tool, say Canva and start using it. I'm just one user. But as a professor, I have a class and I can give them a lot more detailed feedback, which they find they can find to be useful.
Speaker: So i think I think there's a lot of room for that and for that kind of negotiation. And I see this when I look at AI, because this is the opportunity for us to really negotiate well with companies like Google, Microsoft, but also OpenAI, Anthropoc.
Speaker: But it is, i mean, and this is one reason for the call for open source tools. So, you know, Fritz, for example, knows well the whole background of using Moodle as learning management system as part of its appeal is you don't have to necessarily go through that negotiation or you do a negotiation for something that's much more limited, say just hosting rather than anything more.
Speaker: but But I think open source is one way to try and reduce that, I think also. Collective purchasing, when you can do that, can really work well. You know, um I really love this topic. there's why by every By so many parts of the higher education enterprise being enabled or, frankly, hosted directly on technologies, whether, like you said, it's the yeah ERP or Learning management tools and all the things inside of that, the LTI tools that are often their own little contract. They all have to be vetted for security compliance, all the important things, but it creates this immense inertia and turning the ship to say a different tool is the even at small institutions, it's brutal. It's a big one. I was at the University of Minnesota when we shifted from Moodle to Canvas over a one plus year time phase and it was
Speaker: we That was our pretty much our sole thing. But I got to say, having come of age in the early 2000s, when there was, to me, there and this is my topic my dissertation, there was more, at least at the small institutions, and this is where Knightley was fun and the the world of Moodle,
Speaker: there was a lot of open source stuff. it was We were scrappy and that doesn't mean it was perfect. I mean, there were plenty of holes when it comes to accessibility and frankly, ah security compliance, because that was still, we were still getting a sense of that, but we weren't locked into things so much because we didn't have a contract with, ah you know,
Speaker: Moodle or excuse me of canvas and then a limit on the number of tools we could use in that environment you know we were and there were a lot I mean there's still are plenty of them but there were so many tools out there that were we could test drive them with faculty you know maybe a one-off like oh this really facilitates how you teach sciences or humanities or whatever um it was i know there's a frontier aspect to it like ah a open planes kind of aspect to it that was really, and really exciting and fun to work in. And frankly, when things got commodified like canvas, it took it started taking the fun out of it. For me, it's as a academic technologist in my former or my first 20 years of my career.
Speaker: um I have to agree. I mean, you know, thinking about You Canvas, of course, took off in part because it looked more recently designed than its competitors. It was externally hosted, so that took a leg a load off for a lot of campus IT shops. And it was reliable.
Speaker: I mean, so it just really won in a lot of ways, really swept the board. But, you know, it's it. It's interesting to think about how the IT, academic IT positions have changed. I mean, so much of this is about external hosting, you know, cloud computing. I remember when this was a bold new idea and now simply we rely on this and we live in the cloud in most ways. You know, there's, and now there's in some ways the, you know enterprise IT grappling with the IT revolution. which is you know right now an instrumentable challenge. i IT departments are not well-funded.
Speaker: And think, Kevin, you were asking about the the cost. And one of the problems with campus IT is that generally speaking, they can't afford to pay staff comparable rates to people in the private sector. So you know so they have to figure out ways of offering um, non-monetary ways of, of, of hiring people. And it might be, oh, you get to be with Kelvin and work with him and he's amazing. Uh, or you get to be with students and the academic life is appealing. Um, but also, uh, I mean, the AI revolution is so broad right now. Uh, it's difficult to follow.
Speaker: It's difficult to, you to keep up with and stay abreast of right. Good intelligence for a campus support right now. There's no winning formula. Uh, every campus I know does this differently. And the stuff is expensive.
Speaker: It's really hard to spend money to get even a decent amount of licenses. And this is happening while we have a lot of campuses that are struggling financially. We saw most recently California State University System did a great joint licensing purchase from OpenAI, they got access to ChatGPT, while at the same time, a lot of their campuses were cutting faculty and staff, which has elicited pushback from the big CSU faculty union.
Speaker: And that's just one example of this. Yeah. Yeah. My heart goes out to everybody in and campus IT, you know, trying to juggle all this because of course this is added to an already growing pile and we almost never subtract something from that pile. Right. Famously, there's always some lunatic who's using word perfect, right? Somebody is running a, you know, their own WordPress install from the windows NT server under their desk. Right. You know, we just keep accreting to this. And and so it's, again, you know, my my heart goes out to these hardworking folks.
Speaker: You know, I um i don't want to derail the conversation around technology. I do... want us to maybe you know pick your brain a little bit in terms of what do you think is kind of the near term, midterm of our use of AI.
Speaker: But before we get to that, I'd love to maybe circle back on a topic that was covered in a podcast with um Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn, where they actually interviewed someone whose specialty is to close struggling colleges and in universities. And so I'm just curious. I mean, you've you've been in this space for a lot for a long time um several years i know you know people invite you to be a guest speaker maybe you're also doing some consulting with some of those institutions what are you learning um like are you learning that schools are still like do you ever like leave a gig and go you know like i don't know if they really understand that change is all around them and upon them and
Speaker: and I don't really see them moving. It kind of speaks to, I know you're a big sci-fi fan, even bigger than I am, because you're you're more of an avid reader of sci-fi than I am. But I think about like the Chronicles of Riddick, where Riddick, you know, is and one of the main characters in that movie, kind of reaches out to him and says, please help us, you know, like, ah you know, the these these people are coming to take over our planet, basically. And he's like, well, you know, it had to end sometime, right? We've been circling the drain for a while. And so I'm just i'm just curious about, um ah you do you feel as if, again, there are just some some you know institutions that are just, you know,
Speaker: not really helping their cause to be saved because they are very kind of stuck in this 20th century, maybe even a 19th century view of what college and university life is like. I know that's kind of a a loaded question, but um I'm just curious about like, what are you learning about the ecosystem in terms of schools and their readiness for change?
Speaker: Well, I have to say, i have to confess, I have seen, Riddick and pitch black, but I have not seen the Chronicles of Riddick. Oh, you, you must see it and see the director's cut, by the way. oh it's very good. Chef's kiss to the director's cut of Chronicles of Riddick.
Speaker: All right. I'm, I'm looking forward to it. Um, that's, uh, And, and, oh, Netflix actually has it. Sweet. Thank you. Brian's weekend is now set. set That and Green Lantern and some other things. What what are we going to binge watch now?
Speaker: Well, the, um the, the thing, the thing that appalls my, my family is that, um, uh, what my wife and I love to watch is horror movies and my, and and my kids are ambivalent about this. Like, what are you watching now? We'll just tell them like, oh God, stop, you know, watch, watch a rom-com or something. No, but the, you know, the short version of of my answer to actually Fritz's original question is I've been a science fiction fan since I was a kid. And i i've I've written, I've published essays on science fiction and taught classes on it. And and for me as a futurist, this is an indispensable tool.
Speaker: And in the futurist community, this is pretty widely held that science fiction gives us visions, which influence us. You know, you could think about, you know, the Star Trek communicator, he inspired the flip phone. and And when Sony and Apple were suing each other about who invented the iPad, someone wheeled in a scene from 2001, a space odyssey, which clearly had a tablet computer, you know, um, and I, I'm always looking for what science fiction now anticipates. So, um, in terms of colleges, uh, closing or, or merging, uh, which is often very common and, and merger is not usually the correct word because, uh, what instead is usually an acquisition. Yeah.
Speaker: When you see two partners, one of them is usually healthy and the other is not, um, And then there's also just cuts. So, you know a lot of campuses have i've been turning to cutting academic programs, non-academic programs, faculty, staff, and in different ways. Some of them go as far as to declare financial exigency, which lets them get rid of tenured faculty. Shorter that, they can also close academic programs, which lets them remove tenured faculty. Non-tenured faculty, of course, are much easier to get rid of.
Speaker: It's a brutal, dark story, one that I follow pretty closely on my blog. And I think yeah in many ways, these stories are unique. Each of them has a different tale. So you could go not too far from Kevin. You can go to Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham Southern College, which closed in part because of financial, I'll just say mistakes for now, which took it down.
Speaker: and And that's a fascinating story. in many ways. I've been there several times. I missed that campus. It was really lovely, great people. But I think there are some overall tendencies or trends across all of these. One of these is that almost in every case, you see an an enrollment decline.
Speaker: A couple of colleagues of mine have a book on managing colleges, and they have this great phrase, which is enrollment is code for revenue. And, you know, the overwhelming majority of American colleges and universities, they get the majority of their funding from student fees, tuition primarily. If they have residential, then residential fees.
Speaker: But most public universities get a minority or a thin slice of their funding from the state government. Milo Modder, the University of Michigan, a former president, had this great line, which I'm going to paraphrase. Fritz, forgive me if I've told you this already before.
Speaker: And Calvin, I may have mentioned this to you. He said, I used to describe the university of Michigan as a state supported institution, then as a state assisted institution, then as a state located institution. yeah And now I call it a state molested institution. I mean, I, you know, no pity here for great world-class university. That's very wealthy, but for a lot of public universities, non-flagship as well, but especially this is a problem. So it all comes down to enrollment and when enrollment declines,
Speaker: You see the problem and and you can break it down a little more. Finally, too. You could talk about the kind of enrollment, the discount you offer. Uh, one university I've worked with has, uh, 2% of its students are Pell-eligible.
Speaker: So they are not hurting for funds, for example. Um, but I, I, I know a college that I've worked closely with where they went from, their discount rate went from about 20% to about 70% in just years. So while they're welcoming students, they were getting less money per student while their costs went And campus costs keep rising, in part because we have some tenured faculty, depends the proportion of the institution, but their compensation continues to rise. There is a kind of arms race in being able to pay for elite or C-suite university leaders, the administrative level.
Speaker: Plus, we have deferred maintenance, which is as unsexy as possible, very hard to raise funds for. And we have medical costs, which we can't raise funds for. And medical costs are just skyrocketing.
Speaker: I mean, so and when you put all these together, i often I do run into this problem, Kelvin, where where some of the leaders will think that they are in the 20th century. um I've had some bizarre conversations about this, but, um you know, I've talked to a bunch of older faculty and staff. who don't realize that student debt is as massive as it is.
Speaker: I've had senior faculty tell me, why can't students pay for a year's tuition with a summer job? Oh my gosh. I mean, these aren't, these aren't seen out of people. They just really haven't, they've been hip deep in their academic work and they haven't seen this transformation that's happened.
Speaker: and and when it comes to online learning uh this is another part of it that the online world is vast in terms of in terms of online teaching and some universities have run with it you know you think of southern new hampshire you think of liberty you think of university central florida arizona state university and they're the giants they're the mega versities of the scale and some have just not and they haven't built the in-house capacity to do it well in terms of staffing and practices. Some of them have outsourced and that outsourcing has worked well or it has not depending on the you know individual agreement of the provider. But I think you you can see this in in other details as well. I often ask staff and faculty at a given institution, what's happening with demographics.
Speaker: And often they say the human population is continuing to expand and out of control level. I pointed out that that was true in the 1970s and it has reversed ever since. And they just, again, they haven't looked at this. that napoleon There's a quote attributed Napoleon ah Bonaparte, which is, if you want to understand the man, look at the world they lived in when they were 20.
Speaker: And I found that to be a good rule of thumb. And as a futurist, of course, this is yeah the opposite of what I want to do. I mean, I assemble information, i assemble evidence about what's happening now and in the very recent present and use that to extrapolate forward. But I think that's that's very challenging. And there's Kelvin's regretting asking me this question now, I'm sure. There's one more thing I would add to this, which is that a lot of academics are running scared now.
Speaker: Sometimes it's political. They may be afraid of the Trump administration or a state government administration that they see as hostile to themselves as academics or as human beings, and sometimes by their identity, be it marked by sexuality, gender, race, or religion. Sometimes they see their institution as fragile, and they're afraid of it going away. They're afraid of being cut. Sometimes they they see their own profession under threat.
Speaker: ah Some people in the humanities, for example, are very frightened of of this. Some people in libraries are afraid of anti-library animus. People in STEM are really concerned about what they see as anti-STEM feeling. And when you're when you're experiencing this, and then there's other threats too. I mean, a lot of academics experienced the AI revolution as a threat.
Speaker: Quite a few people in the these humanities are very frightened by what they see as a degradation in students' reading skills. and when you And there's more we can add to this, but when you wrap all that up, that makes a lot of academics conservative.
Speaker: I don't mean politically conservative, I mean institutionally conservative. I mean, I want to protect 18th century literature, right? I want to protect continental philosophy and I want to preserve it because it's glorious and it's wonderful and everyone should have that. And that makes you less likely to be willing to experiment, to try something new.
Speaker: And so I think a lot of academics are turtled in right now. They're putting up a big shell against the kind of changes that the three of you are so expert in.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I really appreciated you unpacking all those different things. And, you know, my my my ongoing worry, though, of course, is that, you know, as as, let's say, faculty are kind of shuttling in, I feel, like, I feel to some extent that's also happening.
Speaker: you know within other types of positions too, right? So then collectively, it it speaks to what was brought up earlier, that inertia, right, that resistance to change. And then you reach a point where it's too late, right? And and then you have to do more than just cut programs or, you know, as well as like let faculty go, you have to take more drastic means.
Speaker: um But but no I appreciated you kind of just going through all of that because it is complex. and And I don't know within higher ed, if I don't know if we have these kind of like crucial conversations about our institutions and what needs to shift um as well as things that we need to maybe continue to investigate, right, in terms of the role of ai instead of like running away, forcing people to use blue books.
Speaker: How can we you know start embracing these newer technologies, getting ahead of it versus running from them? I you know i think about less, so and maybe this maybe this is where we can start to to weave in, Brian, your your current, I mean, it's not just current. You've been you've been at Georgetown for quite a while now. About six years, yeah.
Speaker: But your current teaching and your perspective on teaching higher education, but I like to, and this is how I, One of my ways to foster um relationships and buy-in with humanities faculty over the long haul in my academic technology career was to talk not about embracing technology, but actually co-opting it, leveraging it, taking the pieces at work that support not only their maybe their scholarship or their teaching or their their their domain, their their field,
Speaker: and then Chucking the rest that didn't exactly work, but not looking at as a tool that you embrace and you subscribe to whatever, whatever about it it makes you uneasy, but actually if it's a lever to to meeting your goals, whether it's like I said, your teaching goals, your, the goals of your field, you know, if you tell someone who teaches a language that is, uh,
Speaker: not getting high enrollments, but hey, if we go online, you can draw people from around the state and the region. You might have, you know, we think you can get 50 enrollments. You're having trouble getting six on ground. Maybe if you get 50 online, we can figure out a way to, and here is a way to foster learning in that setting.
Speaker: The ones who are like, I found that perked up a lot of attention and got people to at least give it a try and turn skeptics into solid, ah solid colleagues and not champions sometimes, but certainly they saw the value in it.
Speaker: Not financial, but just the value in using it to to further what their goals are as a scholar and and and a teacher. Well, that's excellent when that can happen. You remind me, and I'm so glad you're doing that work.
Speaker: You remind me of the Council for Independent Colleges to this fascinating multi-year project where they had a group of, I'm going to get the number wrong, I'm going to say about 17 private colleges and universities, and they took upper level humanities seminars, and they were able to share those seminars across these 17 or 20 colleges and universities. And so these were the ones like, as you said, like a less commonly language, they would typically enroll three people.
Speaker: A good friend who was passionate of a Byzantine art and would teach a Byzantine art seminar, but Byzantine art is, you know, the art world as a whole, it's it's one small piece of it. I talked to another professor who was very keen on one book of Tanakh. I think it was Jeremiah. And he just want to do summary just on that.
Speaker: And they would enroll two students, you know on their campus. But through this consortium, they would enroll 20. And it was just a win all around because all those other campuses could now count that class or several classes as part of their curriculum.
Speaker: You know, hey, if you go here, you can also learn this. And the the professors teaching this were just over the moon because they got to really delve into what they love. And the students benefited from, part, the extracurricular opportunity, but also the experience of getting to work with the different people online. It's just a a terrific project. but Back in 1999, I taught a seminar with two colleagues on the American War in Vietnam.
Speaker: I was at Louisiana College and in literature. One was a historian in Virginia, and one was a political economist in Florida. And we built a joint syllabus, and it which took a lot of work. and the students met. So we had, I think, 15 students in each campus, about 45 all told. And we used cutting edge technology for the time. a lot of email.
Speaker: I used a peer-to-peer technology that then got bought by the Pentagon, so we couldn't use it again. We used Microsoft NetMeeting to do video conferences. And I built a web-based simulation game where students got to simulate the John S. Johnson decision toss administration's decision escalate the war in 1964 65. John S. It was a terrific experience and really changed my life and the you know. John S. Great reviews, and it was really exciting, I mean that kind of inter institutional.
Speaker: John outreach is very powerful reaching out beyond campus walls can be very, very powerful, and this is, I think, if I can go back to an earlier point when we think about the bad.
Speaker: or higher education now has its bad reputation. you know Majorities of people think it's not worth the money. They're skeptical of the output. I think one of the things that we can do is do a much better job in public education and public outreach. mean So, I mean, the two causes for me right now that I keep recommending that we do this on are climate change and AI.
Speaker: These are both areas where The world is struggling. There's no clear answer. There's a lot of argument, a lot of misinformation, a lot of flux.
Speaker: And these are both fields where higher education has so much intellectual capacity to bring to bear that nobody else has. i mean, you think about governments, to put it politely, they tend to lag behind.
Speaker: The typical you know European parliamentarian or the typical Congress critter, I mean, they they work hard, but you know they they struggle to keep up on these fields. And they may have other problems as well. Hollywood will give you some imaginations. So, you know, Kelvin and I can nerd out about those. But they're sometimes terrible.
Speaker: And sometimes it's just wrongheaded. You know, nonprofits struggle to do this. You know, for-profits always have their niche. And they're always, of course, maybe about making money. But higher ed can bring so much to bear. I mean, if if you're worried about What does it mean when someone spends six hours a day talking to a chat bot?
Speaker: We have psychologists, a research psychologists who can talk to you about that. if If Fritz is thinking, what happens to the local job market in my city? Well, yeah we have economists and business scholars you can talk to. What does it mean when the European Union passes an AI act? How does that play out versus what is the Chinese policy versus what is the Trump administration's policy? but We've got political scientists galore and so on. I mean, so you know we we can, I think, really We teach our students, we conduct our research. But I think if we do this publicly, we can really improve our standing and really contribute.
Speaker: And there's there's a thousand ways to do this. I mean, you know, we could have Kevin cutting TikTok videos. We could have, you know, we could have, you know, people being interviewed on local media, you know, you can do face to face workshops, I mean, all kinds of good stuff. But we just have to decide how to do it. So Well, I 100% agree with you.
Speaker: And that the the relationship between United States, the innovation engine that is the United States economy since World War II, say, there was a deliberate there were deliberate policy decisions,
Speaker: the founding National Science Foundation, among other things, to harness the research and innovation capacity, especially at basic levels, basic scientific research, you know, why does that plant grow like that? Why is that pig, that enzyme in a pig's gut do this? Well, that a million accretions a long way became GLP-1s, as one example. So that decision was made
Speaker: So, you know, basically the war happened and the United States government and military needed a massive research engine. And they said, oh, we've got all these universities in the United States. Let's, let's magnify, let's utilize that to our benefit. And then that just kept rolling after the war. Then there's a population growth, yada, yada. I talk about this enough that Kevin and Calvin are probably like, stop talking about it. So something happened. Like, what do you think, Brian, what do you think is the thing that could happen as a futurist?
Speaker: to cause a another decision for the United States economy and government to look to higher ed again, as to me, as it should, as an engine of a flywheel, an engine of innovation and creativity to get us out an additional out of an additional set of messes or find other things that are useful and helpful to the nation and the world, what would that, what would those things look like?
Speaker: Events or developments, et cetera. Well, first, the thing I just mentioned, you know, um, doing a better job of public education and public intellectual work. I think that counts for a lot.
Speaker: Um, the second, and this is where things get hard, uh, is we have to do a better job by higher ed financing and there's no good solution to this. I mean, one possibility that I often hear is for state governments to spend more money on public universities or for the federal government to do something like that. And and the problem being that the the federal government is not interested at the present in doing this.
Speaker: The Biden administration tried and failed, in part stymie by legal problems. State governments right now are they have all kinds of competition for state dollars that compete better than we do.
Speaker: You know, you think about Medicare, Medicaid, you think about pensions, you think about roads. I mean, you know, where where Fritz lives, I mean, roads get clobbered every year, right? I mean, that's a life or death situation. you Think about local policing.
Speaker: A former governor of the state of Michigan once did a tour going around the state meeting with different audiences and asking what in the budget should we cut and should we a big list of items and gave everyone clickers and they had to you pick which one and the the number one thing to cut every single time was public higher education i mean just every audience no matter where she talked to rural urban you know straight up that was it you know K through 12 people, generally speaking, are more fond of and for unsurprising reasons. It educates more people, makes a closer community role, that kind of thing. And there's also children, you um who thankfully we are still attached to. But um but i you know the student debt problem is vast and terrifying.
Speaker: I mean, no other country in the world has done this, which should tell us something. You know, Britain is doing its best now to try and catch up. Yeah, was going to say. and But they have their own financing structure, which is very different. but But they're leaning harder into debt. But nobody else has done this. We have to figure out how to fix this. And this is something, by the way, most academics don't think about.
Speaker: It's just not on the radar. But it is huge. and And part of this is our pricing model. You know, we have the high tuition, high discount model. So for listeners who are familiar with this, that is we we publish a very, not we meaning all, but say the top half to all, but say the top half, the top third of institutions publish of the steeply discount that for and individual families. So it might be that my university, you know, hypothetical university and charges $90,000 a year, but the average student only pays 45. but everyone sees that 90,000. Just this year, between 15 and 20 American colleges universities now charge over $100,000 per year, which horrifies people. Nobody on earth says, well, that sounds fair to me. I mean, everyone gets freaked out when they see that and they don't think about the discount. We we need to address this. I often heard from from people who say, well we need to tell a better story. I think we need a better story to tell. So that funding is a second thing.
Speaker: um and And third, I think a lot of this is politics right now. And we are in many ways stuck with it. There's always going to be, if you have a thousand teaching faculty, one of them is going to say something goofy on social media. One of them is going to have a syllabus that someone finds out about. And a state legislator or Fox News or Newsmax or Breitbart will run with it.
Speaker: And there'll be calls for reining in faculty autonomy. You know, you'll have one scholarship that goes out to two people of color every year and you'll be sued for it.
Speaker: I think this is going to continue for a while. You know, I've heard interesting calls for intellectual diversity in higher education. That usually means hiring people who are conservative in different ways. And there have been some interesting steps for that. Some foundations and some companies have paid for civic centers and some campuses and that might take some of the heat off i'm not sure um but i i think that's a very deep and intractable problem um know on on top of all this i think is the a straightforward thing we can do which is to just massively focus on improving student learning i i don't mean this in a cheesy way i mean this in a coldly calculated strategic way We know how to improve teaching and learning.
Speaker: We have teaching and learning centers all over the world, ah all over the US rather. I'm not going to go into the sidebar about the stupid fight we had this spring and summer where someone published a lousy article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed asking us to shut down and fire all teaching and learning center staff. i'm not going to go there, but I'm glad I helped protect them to what extent I could. But we have that scholarship. We also have the scholarship of the science of teaching, which is fantastic. And almost nobody knows about this, even though it's publicly available. We can apply this and we can increase our standard of care.
Speaker: We can increase the mental health support we give students. We can increase the counseling they get, both in terms of their curricular pathways as well as their mental health. We can do better job of placing them in jobs.
Speaker: I mean, if we double down on this, it's obviously, i think, ethically the right thing to do. But also this is a way to better attract and retain students. And again, if enrollment is revenue, this is a cold-hearted, simple way to try and boost that revenue as well as being the right thing to do.
Speaker: So those are a few quick answers to very deeply challenging question. Tuition always was going up. You know, people were like, oh it was so inexpensive and in the post-war period. Inexpensive. It wasn't expensive, partly because wages were climbing so much higher than tuition was. It's relative to your, you know, as a share of income, tuition was much lower. Yes, you could work like my in-laws did. You worked a full-time job at minimum wage in your summer between somewhere between your years of college, and you could pay for a whole year of tuition, room, and board.
Speaker: That finally went away, I think, in the late 70s as a as a meaningful or is a is a metric that was achievable. so um But what were wages doing then? What was the cost of health care, the cost of housing, the cost of gas? like All these things have gotten so much worse. These are all the things that people are like, oh my gosh, Gen Z, we they can't afford houses. They can't afford so much because as a share of income, because wages don't aren't rising, as it that productivity and wage increases are not being passed back to workers as they were, let's say, pre-1970s, late seventy s Now, a lot of that money goes to the the the people who at the top.
Speaker: And I don't mean to go down that lane, but if you have more money, you can pay for more things like And, you know, and if you contain healthcare costs, that doesn't get passed in tu tuition.
Speaker: University of Minnesota just announced a big increase in healthcare premiums for all staff and faculty who are in collective bargaining agreements and also, ah you know, out of pocket maximums, deductibles, all that after shielding people for I don't know how many years, more than five years, let's say.
Speaker: everyone's lot of people very upset about it, which I totally get. I will bet whatever hair I have left, which very little, i will but I will wager a next time we're in the room room same room, gentlemen, I'll wager the next round.
Speaker: There's gonna be a minimal tuition increase at the University of Minnesota for the next couple of years because the pressure on the institution to swallow those additional costs and either pass it on or do whatever to mitigate it is not gonna get past the students.
Speaker: Now, if state funding collapses, Yeah, that's an impact, but I will, will, there's a very good chance to me that that increase in cost softens any, what would have been and a pressure for tuition increase because now, now the workers, now the staff and faculty university are going to absorb that additional healthcare care cost rather than students, prospective students getting, uh, pass that on. So let's, let's talk about healthcare care a little bit. Um, because Again, this is another thing, by the way, which no one else in the world has copied. You know, our employer-based, privatized method of paying for health care is is unique in the world.
Speaker: Again, that should tell us something. I mean, people like to imitate American practices, and they haven't in this case. so so i remember around 2010, I had this terrible epiphany that the medical system and the post-secondary system had a similar financing opacity and structure. And I thought, oh God, that's that's very frightening. But let's let's think about this for a minute. I mean, healthcare care is something which is obviously of universal interest. I was checking out the Harvard website, the main webpage, harvard.edu, after the Trump administration sued them and and threatened to remove a lot of their research funding. And they had rebooted their website.
Speaker: Gone was directory, visit us in Cambridge, hear all the different people. All that was gone. Instead, they had a constant video playing of here's the research we do.
Speaker: So nothing on teaching, just here's the research we do. And of all the research being done at Harvard, all they showed was health care research. They didn't show astronomy. They didn't show literary criticism. It was just that, which is very thoughtful, very smart, because that is something we do that everybody values.
Speaker: Even, you know, people who are science deniers, people who are anti-evolution, people who are anti-big pharma, whatever, still value that kind of healthcare research.
Speaker: And I thought that was a very canny move. And I think and the on the big picture level, We, it seems to me in the United States, are more likely to consume more healthcare care and to pay more money for it for the medium to long-term future because our demographics are such that we are aging and the older people get, the more healthcare care they consume statistically, right? That's one part of this. But also we have not managed to figure out how to do something like socialized medicine. you know Medicare for all is still a you know ah flag that's waived, but it has no traction right now. So we have this enormous system.
Speaker: And the system continues to grow. So if you take a look at the number of people who work in allied health, so I'm using term allied health to to include everything from hospital administrators, computer scientists, to electronic medical records, nurses, surgeons, people in pharma, all that, it's a huge, huge field. And that just field just keeps growing. And in fact, in a lot of towns and cities right now, the CVS or the Walgreens is something like a community center.
Speaker: Because they go way beyond offering pills. But if it brand it, I have my wife works. She's a physical therapist. It's growing at the bottom. It's growing at the bottom. Yeah. Low paid staff, health aides. Oh, absolutely. PA, physical physician assistants, which is a yeah growing field, less expensive than doctors. So the bottom of the period is growing, yet the cost is skyrocketing. Yes, quite true. I mean, home health care aides, you know, a huge amount of custodial staff who have to do all this work. A lot of the technicians are not well paid. You know, you're thinking about people with sonography, x-ray technology. I mean, there's a lot of people involved, but the total cost, you know, just keeps growing and growing. And I think one reason I mentioned this here is to say, okay, first of all, costs to higher education are just going to keep growing.
Speaker: And one of the things that's interesting is to see the price that colleges and universities charge students for their medical insurance that keeps rising. It's actually pretty significant. Some of the schools where I was looking at that's say five, $6,000 a year, which is pretty substantial. That's more than the tuition and a lot of community colleges. But also, this is a job area.
Speaker: And I think we'll see more and more students taking more and more classes in the full spectrum of allied health. So the you know the philosophy major who will end up doing medical ethics, for example.
Speaker: You know, the economics or business person is going to end up working in an insurance company, medical insurance company, or working in hospital administration. You know, the computer science major is going to end up working in the really complicated, very fragile, you know, can't possibly break, you know medical intelligence systems. I mean, that's to keep growing. This past spring, the National Student Clearinghouse estimated about 11% of students nationwide. We're take were in healthcare care majors right now.
Speaker: One in nine. mean, that's a lot of students. And I keep telling colleges and universities, you can't go wrong, unless you screw it up, you can't go wrong expanding your allied health offerings. And that might mean taking over a hospital and running it like some universities do. It might mean starting up more grad programs in different fields. And it may be expensive because you may have to set up complicated labs with a lot capital costs, but that is much easier to fund.
Speaker: Banks are happy to support that. Donors will bend over backwards for that. i mean, you know older wealthy people are kind of the ideal gift givers for allied healthcare. care Bloomberg pours out money for this and so forth. I mean, this seems like a field which is simply going to continue. to And is your perspective, Brian, that they can use, let's assume those investments create margin for those institutions. Is the thought that they can, it's that's a that's a mission lift.
Speaker: that they can use that margin just to help maintain the philosophy program, the whatever, like the whole institution, not just the allied health or healthcare care unit.
Speaker: They can. If did they ask about it like that, I mean, do they talk about it like that? Like, okay, this is a way to keep the whole enterprise going, which I mean, universities have been a cross subsidizing enterprise since their birth.
Speaker: Yeah. i mean, this is possible if they do, to if, If they do it right. Yeah. And yield that extra you know cash flow. And if they choose to do so. But right now, what I'm seeing is what the consultant Dickinson calls academic program prioritization, where you instead think of individual academic programs which have to support themselves financially. They have to either break even or turn a profit.
Speaker: And so that argument has led to quite a few processes whereby campuses cut back academic programs. Now you can cut academic programs without cutting people. You know, you can cut a major that no one takes, but the people who would teach it should students have designed to take it are busy teaching for other purposes.
Speaker: I think for many ways, the humanities are likely to become more and more of a service sector in higher ed, teaching more core curriculum and teaching less and less in the way of, you upper grad, upper undergraduate programs. I don't think this is a great thing, but I think this is one way.
Speaker: I mean, you probably see this too, Brian, is institutions are really bad about understanding the costs. They'll say, oh, we got to shutter. There's not many majors in this program. We got to shutter it. But they don't understand how many students are taught.
Speaker: They take courses in that. program or that department, there may not be a lot of majors, but they have a ah plenty of they have plenty of revenue coming through that department because it's being taught. So if you shutter that or eliminate that person teaching, whether they're tenured or not, you've closed that lane. or Are they going to still take courses elsewhere are they going to even come to the institution anymore?
Speaker: I find that I find that now in departments and programs I work with, to they don't have a handle. Because this' one thing I do is I come in and make sense of that. Like, are you going to help you support this program? We're going to track down every penny and figure out where it could go if we have new root enrollments and where it's going now.
Speaker: Accounting for all costs. And sometimes they're like, whoa, we we're doing, we're okay. Like, it doesn't take much to float some programs and departments because they don't have a ton of people, even if they're tenured people.
Speaker: Dr. David Well, also, when we're taking look at the humanities and some of the arts they're very, very cheap to offer. David They don't have capital costs they don't need labs they don't you know. David And and that can be done, and that can be supported pretty well, I mean there's there's also micro and macro politics there and you see yeah micro politics, where an individual department is just unpopular, you know, for whatever.
Speaker: Ph.D.: reason there are kinds of reasons, but also the macro politics, which is where some people might either see some of the humanities and the non quantitative social sciences as being too political or upsetting. David The state of Florida, for example, has been going after sociology quite a bit you use nationwide you've seen people going after ethnic and area studies programs.
Speaker: So far, archeology has escaped, you know, but, but you can, you you can see that kind of political attitude, you know, playing a role as well. I think in, in many ways, you know, Kevin, your point about, you know eating our seed corn is, is quite true, but it's really hard for a lot institutions to plan and think that far ahead.
Speaker: All the incentives short-term you know, in the business world, you know, people tend to think terms of quarters. In the academic world, we're pretty close to the semester and definitely academic academic year. And we're also taught to assume that this is all going to continue.
Speaker: yeah We don't have a lot of room for discontinuity and change, but that's something we need to be better at. i This is gonna sound weird, but where I turn for inspiration is a very dark time.
Speaker: I look at the spring and summer of 2020. And you mentioned before, Fritz, that I anticipate the pandemic. Yeah, page 23 in Academia Next is the one that people come to me now and say, what did you know? you its It's a long paragraph. I was able to imagine what would happen if pandemic struck the world.
Speaker: And I was relying on a lot of work that had been done in the futures field, where futurists since the 90s have been working on what a pandemic would look like. In fact, there is a ah crazy, stupid conspiracy theory in early 2020 about Bill Gates causing COVID. And the reason for it, I think, is because at that time, if you went to YouTube and you searched for a pandemic, one of the things that came up were recordings of an excellent tabletop exercise that the Gates Foundation paid for for a simulated pandemic.
Speaker: And it was really good. I mean, staff from you CDC and CIA, I mean, it was really good stuff. But, you know, he must have known something. But people knew this. We just didn't plan.
Speaker: And the U.S. hadn't had a serious health care crisis like that since the 80s with the onset of AIDS. And so we we didn't take it seriously, which is one of the reasons why our our nationwide responses were so catastrophic. But in the higher ed.
Speaker: We did extraordinary things. I mean, we flipped all of our teaching online in weeks. It's not just days. And with no financial support, we just did it. You know, we changed our academic calendar. We changed our housing. We took a look at graduation requirements. We changed assessments. I mean, we just up and down the scale. We rethought and reimagined almost everything we did. We rethought sports. My God, you know, that's a third rail, right? And we did that. all this stuff we did in a hurry and and for me i keep coming back to this yeah we made mistakes uh one of my favorite examples is ah a prof i talked to at new york university who said that she thought she was required by state law to lecture six hours a week and pointed out there is no such law and she was convinced of it like my god don't lecture on zoom of course lecture on zoom oh this is terrible but you know setting her aside there were we did all that innovation on our own for a very conservative institution
Speaker: We really, really innovated at scale and everybody in America has moved on. We don't want to think about the pandemic. Publishers tell me they don't want to read anything on the pandemic.
Speaker: Um, fine, but we should own up to that huge creative capacity in our lifetimes that we showed that we've got. So and we know we can do that.
Speaker: So when we take a look at thinking about our pricing or thinking about our public offerings or how to respond to AI, we are a goldmine of creativity and design thinking. And we can just do that if we choose to.
Speaker: That's some of what keeps me going day by day is thinking about our wonderful capacity for that.
Speaker: I mean, I think that is a beautiful place to bring our discussion to a close. i well Well said, Brian. I appreciate the optimistic perspective you brought to that to those that question and that line of discussion.
Speaker: Any parting thoughts, Kelvin or Kevin? I'm going to make a quiet... ah Okay, not quiet. I'm going tell everyone if you don't, read what Brian writes, or if you don't subscribe to his Patreon profile, and if you're not getting future trends and technology and education, his monthly newsletter, you need to. this is For me, it's required reading. I've been getting it for maybe a decade. Ever since you started publishing it, I'm getting it, Brian. And it's very important because, again, it puts education into all these global contexts in all sorts of areas, economic, historical, technological, et cetera.
Speaker: it's really, it's really grounding and it's, and it's well researched. Everything has a link. Every single thing is linked to something ah with evidence or backing in a world that doesn't do that well all the time right now. It's got, it's got receipts.
Speaker: That's a good way of putting it. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate the kind words, but also I appreciate all three of you for hosting with wonderful thoughts and wonderful questions. Thank you. And a lot of patience. Thank you, Fritz, and Kevin, and Kelvin. I really enjoyed this.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks again, Brian. Thank you, Brian, and have a good weekend. And we will keep reading and collaborating.
