From Tradition to Transition: Rethinking the Student Experience

Jack Suess: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE Integrative CIO Podcast. I'm Jack Suess, vice president of IT and CIO at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Cynthia Golden: And I'm Cynthia Golden. Each episode, we welcome a guest from in or around higher education technology as we talk about repositioning or reinforcing the role of IT leadership as an integral strategic partner in support of the institutional mission.

Cynthia Golden: Welcome everyone to the Integrative CIO Podcast. I'm Cynthia Golden. I'm here with my colleague Jack Seuss. And today we are going to be talking with our guest, Dr. Scott Bass of American University.

Jack, why don't you tell us how you know Scott and introduce him to our audience?

Jack Suess: Well, I had the pleasure of actually working with Scott for, I think it's about 12 years, Scott, at UMBC. Scott came and was our inaugural graduate dean. And then he ended up being the inaugural vice president for research. And he left UMBC to become provost at American University. And so I've kept in touch with Scott over the years while he was at American, but when I read this book, it resonated with me really nicely and I thought Scott would be a wonderful guest to be here.

At this point. Welcome, Scott.

Cynthia Golden: You know-

Scott Bass: I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Cynthia Golden: No, we're glad you could join us today. Today we are going to be talking with Scott about his book Administratively Adrift. Jack just mentioned it. And this is... I have on my desk, I have a copy of it. This book focuses on a few topics that we thought were of really great interest to our community. The first one is the academic culture and the challenges that this creates for top-down change. The second is really how the complexity of higher ed and the proliferation of systems can make it difficult to have a complete picture of a student and what a student needs. And the third is why we have to fundamentally reorient our institutions to be student-centric if we want to address issues with student success. So that's the plan for the next hour or thereabouts.

Jack Suess: Well, and Scott, I'm so excited to have you here. And I'm going to take a minute and just sort of talk about your background because I think you're one of those people that is really uniquely qualified to be talking about these issues.

So Dr. Scott Bass is professor of public administration and policy in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He also serves as executive director of the Center for University Excellence. Scott has served as AU provost from 2008 to 2018 and was named Provost Emeritus when he retired. His latest award-winning book, which Cynthia showed, Administratively Adrift: Overcoming Institutional Barriers to Student Success, has been widely recognized as something that is important in higher education.

Prior to his time at American University from 1996 to 2008, Scott was at UMBC where he was vice president of research and dean of the graduate school. And his first faculty appointment was at the University of Massachusetts at Boston where his early contributions were in the field of gerontology, social gerontology to be specific. He's written many books, chapters, articles. He's also had a Fulbright research scholarship to Japan and a visiting professorship to Stanford. And he earned his PhD at the University of Michigan.

And so Scott, you have this background of being a faculty member, being an administrator in many different roles. And when you were a grad dean, I know you were a tremendous advocate for graduate students. And so as we think about student success, we often talk about it at the undergraduate level, but you've also been leading that effort in the graduate side. And so I want to sort of welcome you. And my first question that I really wanted to sort of see you talk about is, we had this great conversation as we were planning for the podcast where you convinced me how critical it is to understand why academic and institutional culture is hard to change. Could you talk about this?

Scott Bass: Sure. And let me first say, both Jack and Cynthia, how I'm just thrilled to be able to have this conversation. I've been wanting to discuss these issues with the IT community. They're an important part of the entire operation system of higher education, and so this is something to treat for me. So I am looking forward to it and I want to answer your question.

I should also mention that in terms of my training is to look at the role of institutions on human behavior. So being in these roles and having a view of the university of the entire university has provided a unique perch in the discussion of how we've become who we are and how history is so important in any organization and certainly in the higher education business.

So actually, the structure we have today was really built by 1920, over a hundred years ago. And prior to that, it was a more authoritarian kind of model and we really adapted our boards and the president offered relinquishing some of their authority to this barbarian concept of a classic bureaucratic structure. And that means that you have decision making at the appropriate level of the organization by experts making those choices and decisions.

And even in 1920, that long ago, the principle of shared governance for faculty was instituted by 1940, the concept of tenure and protections for faculty so that they would not be dismissed because some administrator didn't like them or some politician didn't like them, giving them this notion of academic freedom. So the faculty by, if not earlier, but in 1940, really had these, what I would describe as almost superpowers in terms of intervention and role in terms of both authority over curriculum, authority over hiring, and breaking down a little bit the structure of a classic bureaucracy.

However, on the other side of the university, and it was bifurcated back then between faculty and administration and service provision to students, was that that was a classic bureaucratic model decision-making within the various units because they were experts. And recognizing the university is a very competitive environment for faculty. It's not just competitive within, its competitive externally. By that 1920 date, the national associations were developed for faculty. And you can be assured in that environment, the professionals on the other side of the house sought to develop similar kinds of structures, similar kinds of identities, similar kinds of expertise, and created their national organizations that created in many cases their journals and their ways of communicating, standard setting, expectations in the field.

And so just like the faculty, there were parallel but totally separate entities but in a traditional bureaucratic structure. So that took place early on. And then by the time of the G.I. Bill in 1944 is really the explosion expansion of higher education within that structure. So all of those years, including the golden years of great growth in federal funding and higher education, we arrive today really with the same basic structure, the same autonomy that exists for a faculty in the way decisions are made, the notion of shared governance, all of that plays out today when you speak about any kind of change and the difficulty, the limitations on the executive in making decisions and the belief by the community that they own the institution, a sense of professor feels that they're going to be there for their entire career.

Now there's some mobility, but primarily it's their home and the administrators come and go. And we have seen more recently even that that duration is getting shorter and shorter in terms of the ability and the demand that's expected of the executives from external groups, internal groups, it's enormous pressure kind of position. So that's a little bit about the framework and why it's so complex and so difficult to work in. And one really needs to understand that culture if one's to be successful and survive in it.

Jack Suess: So Scott, as we're thinking about that context, I think another element that makes the problem hard is the fact that we have today's students are really very different from students in the past. And could you talk a little bit about why it's important to understand this change and what that's going to mean to higher ed from your point of view?

Scott Bass: The students really are different. And anyone who's in the classroom or visiting understands this is a very different situation on campus. I have to recall that the generation, if we're talking about traditional age students who perhaps on a residential campus, they have grown up in a time period that is rather unique in history, growing up in a time that technology is ever-present, and that in 2007 was the introduction of the iPhone.

And so these are individuals who have been at the beginning of the generation Z, maybe nine years old and immersed totally in a world where information flows in a very different way than for other generations. And along with that comes with the benefits and the consequences. And so bullying, doxing, body image, all of those kinds of things through social media, they have been peppered with and they become some cases totally addicted to the phone and their time on the phone.

It also means on the benefits is that they have had access to goods and services that we all greatly appreciate that didn't exist before. We didn't have to go through all of the steps to even order a good from a store and wait for its arrival. It's a more immediate world, it's a more of a responsive world. And quite frankly, that's a plus.

Nonetheless, they are also growing up... And every generation has had its challenges in terms of growing up, but they have grown up in some very unique challenges, including the pandemic, which is isolated for them for as much as two years. Again, relying on technology during that time period and fear and anxiety and seeing death among loved ones as they're growing up.

There is, I would say very present in this generation, this concern about the climate and the fires and the floods and the tornadoes and the hurricanes and the heat that they see. And there's some not just concern, but even frustration that they're inheriting a world that we have left in this circumstance. They've gone through a period of racial reckoning and then the backlash to that. They've gone through some terrible stressful wars going on in the world and a time of extreme polarization in terms of politics.

So this creates a different situation for students growing up and coming into the university. And we have now seen whether we talk to the surgeon general, we talk to different studies that have been done that are done every year for 20 years or our most recent study by inside higher ed, a healthy mind study is the classic. We see that students are really having a difficult time. They're really stressed and they're coming to an institution that not just for first generation students, but it's one that is just different in the way it works and the way you interact in that setting. And for some students, they're just not willing to play in it. That's not what they're willing to do. It's not worth their time. So there is a different experience that they bring to the university and one that we need to pay attention to. And I have argued it's not in the past, it's been how we get students to adjust the university. I think the question now is how does the university now start to do our business? So that is sort of my response to your question.

Cynthia Golden: So along those lines, Scott, as a former provost and a former dean, how did you work with your departments and units to recognize these changes and to then implement change? And I think about the higher ed IT folks. How should IT leaders think about it?

Scott Bass: Well, first of all, a primary culture among faculty is the ability to critique whatever comes before them. We are trained to be suspicious and suspect pretty much anything that's put before us. And it has to be verified many times over and repeated over and over again and answered all kinds of questions and challenges by faculty when any minor change is brought forward.

So one needs to not only understand but embrace that's the culture, and for IT to also understand, "Have no fear. This is the nature of the dialogue." And that if you have a good idea and it merits coming forward. And if it doesn't, you should accept that from your constituency.

But to understand that you have to repeat things over and over and over again, and in our setting, I have taken on some things that people would say is nearly impossible. I have changed the gen ed program to be an entirely different program and required several years of effort to develop a whole different structure for... Because every department has an important role to play in the general education program and it could affect their resources and faculty. So did that over a two-year period and rewrote the entire faculty manual, which took several years, raised standards and required a vote of the entire faculty to support it.

And as one board member said, we had 87% acceptance of the faculty. He said, "I can't imagine 87% of any faculty agreeing on anything." The answer is patience. Patience. And so for every IT person, understand this is not to be critical of them or their ideas to understand that. And let me say if there's some problems with your ideas, you need to make some adjustments. But to understand that's the nature of the process. And the institution does move, it does change, it does incorporate many things. But if it's done where people are really involved and have ownership and really have ownership, it works.

Jack Suess: Scott, as we noted, your book's been receiving a lot of positive feedback. How have other academic leaders responded to this challenge of change that you're putting before them? And I want to sort of preface that by the fact that within the IT community we often talk about change management, but it's really coming from that traditional corporate change management that came out of Harvard in the late '80s, early '90s by Kotter and others as they were thinking about the theory of change management. And I wonder if that completely resonates with what change management needs to be in higher education given what you just said.

Scott Bass: Well, I think I've indicated that this is a deliberative and dialogue process that takes time. And if faculty are complaining about the process, that means that you have not given it sufficient time its code among the faculty. I may say, "Oh, their process has been good." What they're really saying is that's the internal code that has not been done well.

So change management is a long process, perhaps even longer than any single presidency. It needs to have the involvement of the full board as well. But it does move. And that the challenge is working within that culture, respecting it.

Now in terms of presidents, now you ask about how they're reacting to the work. And I have spoken to many different audiences. And to my surprises, there isn't a negative reaction or a critical commentary. I think people have accepted that this is the reality, that it is a very, very highly siloed, turf-oriented, internal-protected community. And that's an accepted known, where presidents in particular or provosts and in the whole cabinet for that matter, are in their respective areas. We have so many crises that come up in our... We have a pandemic. You have conflict on campus, we're losing presidents left and right.

So when people talk about change management, yeah you can create another online program. There are degrees of change that are reasonable and accomplished within a president's time period. When you get into really difficult change like changing the faculty manual standards, you really do need a much longer runway and a much more resilient. It's not worrying about your next position or what's going to happen. You're going to have to repeat things, you're going to have to go over things and you're going to have to be extraordinarily careful in moving that agenda. And that agenda will likely exceed your time in the position.

And when I talk about change, honestly, I look to a 20-year window is what I think about when I talk about institutional life and organization. There's progressions along it. But remember, generation Z will come and go and there'll be another generation. And we need to have change as part of the life of the institution. It is a dynamic that's ongoing and persistent. And as people come into these positions, you understand that that's their job to both understand the footsteps of those who have come before and what are then the pathway that they've led and make sense for the institution. So that's my sort of commentary.

Cynthia Golden: Well, that makes me think that if you have established good relationships so that those kinds of discussions are happening, then when you're faced with something where you don't have a 20-day runway, but like the pandemic you've got like a 20-day runway, then you've built up the relationships such that everybody can work together.

Scott Bass: Cynthia, the real word is, how do you establish trust? It's so difficult to build among, again, a skeptical community, particularly when you come in from the outside. And it is so easy to have it destroyed in minutes. It is about building trust and developing that relationship with leaders on campus and then following through. So that's the art. We can talk about the science and the mechanism forms and the different committees that you're going to create, but it is understanding... I mean even in with the change that I have done, I do remember I had one person who was just totally opposed to the direction I was taking the institution and said that repeatedly. But when I left 10 years later, he wrote me a note and he said, "Scott, I disagreed with you constantly, but I respect what you did because you stayed to your word and did exactly what you said you were going to do." So I think that was really rewarding to receive from a harsh critic. And I think that's what faculty really do care about.

Cynthia Golden: So one of the things I wanted to ask you about is that in the book you talk about how compliance and regulatory requirements as well as technology changes that came with software-as-a-service for example, how these kinds of things have encouraged individual departments to go out and purchase their own systems to optimize their own work. And I think we in the IT community know that this often results in important information being unavailable to people and like advisors or other people who are supporting the students. And so could you talk a little bit about that and maybe elaborate on some of the examples you had in the book?

Scott Bass: Let me give two examples, one where there's an overabundance of information passed to students and a second where it was under the recording of information about a student experience. The first was in the time period between when the student expressed that they're going to put a deposit down, there's several months before they actually arrive on campus, it's often referred to as the summer melt where you really worry about it. One of the things that takes place is a lot of the units because they have access to student information, write the students, send materials, send forms. Certainly if you have a CRM or in the CRM system that are registration, all kinds of communications.

And in our case actually we all assembled and actually on sheets of paper wrote down what each unit was actually doing during this time period. And it turns out nobody had any idea what the other units were doing or sending anything in terms of similar look, feel of the institution. So what does the student learn in that time period? They learn what not to do. They say, "I'm not going to read all this stuff because I only told what's important I guess when I go through orientation." So we overwhelmed them.

So we all, all got together, we said, "It's terrible." And we put a website up and hopefully simplified that process. The year I was leaving, another unit just decided to take another check of how we were doing. We had 90 different pieces of communication going out in that time period. 90 pieces, totally unrelated. It turns out years later we now have 130 communications going out at the same time. So lack of coordination, lots of information. And is it useful? I don't know if it was really being useful. So these are the kinds of things that yes, they have control, yes, they have access, they have information and they're using it for their... build their own relationships and the like, but it didn't work very well.

The other side has to do with the systems we have in place, the personnel we have in place to help students. And part of a major effort, a four-year effort, we did around, we called, reinventing the student's experience, it's RISE, R-I-S-E, Reinventing the Student Experience. We asked many meetings of students and in fact the whole initiative really got rolling when we met with students and they started talking about some of the things that we didn't realize were problems.

But anyways, one of the things we asked students to do is to volunteer for journals, journaling project. It was anonymous so I have no idea who wrote the journals, but they were done and then read after the project, that phase of the project was over.

And so, one of the journals was from a transfer student who turns out such her dream was to come to American University and was not admitted as a freshman, as a first year student. So she went to a community college, did extremely well at the community college. Participated in various clubs and activities and volunteerism and then reapplied and was admitted. She was so thrilled to come to American University. Came in. We have a process for transfer students, we have a team that works with transfer students. She selected her courses and just was thrilled, joined the various clubs, met people. But she was having some difficulty, different than what happened at the community college with relations with students and she was finding some difficulty in the coursework. And that persisted for a while and she was writing weekly in this journal. And as the journal progressed, she started saying that she's getting a little discouraged. And then it said that she just wasn't getting up in the morning now, just pulling the covers over her head. And she went home.

And she got home. She wrote in the journal that she just broke into tears and her parents were very reassuring. And she came, said to come back, got on the bus and she says she got to campus, she just broke into tears. So this is all in the journal. Then within the next day or so, she gets a call out of the blue from her community college advisor just checking to see how she's doing. And she said it was so invigorating, so rewarding, so engaging that she dove back in. And I don't know what happened but I'm sure she actually graduated.

The point is, here we have a formal process for a transfer student. We have full records, we have a process with professionals on the transition process with data about the student. We have five faculty members in courses and we have a process where you can put in a notice if a student's having any academic difficulty to get help. No one filed any academic progression issues at any time.

We have a counseling service, we have a career advisor, we have someone who is the administrator in the department, we have an associate. All these people and nothing was ever reported about this student. So yes, you can create the systems, you can create the people. That doesn't mean that when it really matters, that it is working. So I want to point out these are human issues within a systems' dynamic. I hope those are two examples there.

Cynthia Golden: Thank you. Yeah.

Jack Suess: Now, that's a great example of the fact that... And one of the things that has been noted here at UMBC is that a lot of the infrastructure that we put up to support students is really consumed by our scholar students and by our best students who are competing to go to the best grad schools and other things. And so you may see if you use traditional metrics of how many students come in or what number of hours are they doing things, you may not see anything and it may even be growing, but you may not be hitting the populations that you were originally targeting around some of these kinds of supports and other things. And so it's a great message that at the end of the day it's around people and through that.

I did want to ask you briefly about as we're thinking, one of the things I've been looking at here at UMBC is the fact that we now, we're starting a privacy effort and we had to look at all the software-as-a-service systems we've purchased. And we're up over 200 software-as-a-service systems that we've purchased.

Cynthia Golden: Wow.

Jack Suess: And what has happened is, I remember in 2010 when as a community, we're just starting to meet and we were talking about, "Well, we need to be able to support going to the cloud." No one in that room back in Tempe, Arizona in 2010 said, "Oh, and in 15 years we ought to have 200 software-as-a-service applications at each of our universities because that's going to be the best thing for students or for the universities."

But what's happened is, is we've seen this surge of innovation, new companies, others come in with point solutions for every office known to man so to speak. And one of the things that I noticed with that is that we often have these islands of data, where unless you're have access to that software-as-a-service, as an administrator, you have no idea what data has been collected on the student. And so we often may be missing signals.

And I'm wondering as provost at American and as you're thinking about this space, if one of the areas that we ought to be stepping back and looking at is what do we have in place and are there signals that may be coming that you would have noticed something about this student that you just described that was missed that we could be capturing. And we may not be presenting lots of specific data, but we could be providing indicators or other ways that might be ways of identifying whom we should be reaching out to and trying to check up on in ways that may be able to catch issues before. Right now we often see these things when we look at the after semester effects, what happened with grades or DFW rates or things like that.

Are there any thoughts that you have as to how we can be talking to Provost about thinking more holistically about the kinds of systems were implemented? Because they're so inexpensive that they often are under the radar screen, these software-as-a-system.

Scott Bass: So what would be most important for other CIO coming in, and I know we'd meet regularly with the CIO in terms of... As all cabinet members I would meet regularly, is asking the question, "What do you want to know? When do you need to know it? Who needs to know? And who has the authority to act on?" Without asking the right questions, we end up buying products. And there's people who are eager to sell us products, training programs and the like. And that's not what we need.

What we did 40 years ago is we developed a data strategy to provide us with financial information. And we know our enrollment, we know our financial aid packages that are given out. And we can then calculate how we are meeting our budget through a business intelligence process. I'm sure it's cumbersome, but we get pretty good idea by this time of year what's going to happen with this budget as students are coming in. There is no strategy.

What is the digital strategy on the student service administrative side of the house? And without asking that question, we are simply buying products. We are responding to immediate needs.

Let me mention that I have the good fortune of meeting, to discuss this very topic, with the IT leaders, the vice presidents of a large international hospitality company. They brought in a number of the key associate vice presidents or whatever to the meeting. And I described a number of the issues that you know well of that happen on campus to students and just that the irony and the frustration of being bounced around the different offices and where they're going to go and where they're going to get an answer and how it can get resolved and it doesn't get resolved. All the bureaucratic issues.

I asked her about what kinds of... Because they've gone through this as a company, they have gone from a traditional... It's still a bureaucratic organization, but it became much more focused on their clients and customers. And listening to me, finally the vice president shook his head and he said, "Scott, you don't have a problem with technology. You have a management problem. And until you deal with that management problem, it doesn't make sense because we have lots of solutions for that. The problem is you're not clear on what the structure is, who's accountable and who has authority."

And in our situation, I'm sure it's true at every major college and university around the country, is that we have people in all of these different offices we have. You have your spiritual advisor, you have an advisor in the department, you have associate deans, you have people in the housing, you have a coach. We can go down the list of 30, 40 people that are all involved, but who's accountable? We lose students heavily in the first year and then also in the second year. A little less, but we lose students in those first two years. Who's accountable? Everybody's responsible, but nobody, nobody is assigned and has accountability.

So when you ask me the question, we're not asking the right question. Question has to do with we have a difficult structure. So how have other organizations... And by the way, I think the responses and the solutions are in other organizations that have gone through this before that say that they had to become more responsive or in a time period when customers and respondents are saying unless they get good service, timely service, they'll go to another vendor.

So we need to understand the way they do that is often what we deal with generically the notion of a case manager. There's somebody who's accountable and deals with the specialists that are whatever's happening to your car or whatever, that would then deal with the technical side and get back to you with an answer in terms of case management.

So if you have a person who's accountable, which we don't have, then what they need to know? They need to have actionable information instantly. And so the volume of information that we have would bury anybody in terms... And it's different... What we did on the enterprise system is there's a common language, common definitions that had to be worked through the different divisions. This side, it's no common definitions. Each of their own professional languages and many times protected by security clearances.

So how do you extract that information? To answer the question, what does someone who really has responsibility, which we don't have, what do they need to know? When do they need to know it? And how do they have the authority to act on it? Or do they have a different system? But that's what's happening in the private sector. We can't import what they do because of the shared governance and because of the deliberative process.

So the goal here is to get the community to own the problem. Community owns the problem, we'll work through a solution that makes sense for us. And there are literally hundreds of proposals out there to develop student success and support students. They're all good. I don't have to pick any one of them, but none of them deal with this effective structure. And that's what companies that had to deal with today and why we're much more happier as consumers.

Cynthia Golden: So like the digital strategy needs to support the direction that the institution is going to go in to solve these issues?

Scott Bass: It needs to also be a digital strategy that connects to the student because it's not connecting the professional.

Cynthia Golden: Right.

Scott Bass: The student would get the same information. There's no reason when you file that the student's having problem in class that it eventually goes to the student, but it goes to the advisor and it comes back to the faculty. But I've already told the student they need to go to the writing center and get help with writing. I already told them that. So I tell them I'm going to file this, goes into the system, comes back to me, and they haven't gone to the writing center.

There's no reason that that couldn't be a digital piece that goes right to their cell phone saying, "This has come in. You have an appointment at 2 o'clock. You choose between 2 or 4 o'clock with the writing advisor." And that's instant. And if you're in the e-con course and the FPA doesn't write it to.... Maybe they see some problem made by the fifth week, by the time they get any tutoring, you're already in the seventh week, midterms, and you're toast. So yes, we have a system, but it doesn't work and it doesn't connect. And we could do that. So that's going, again, back to authority, what do you need to know and how do you respond to it?

Jack Suess: Right. So Scott, we've been talking a little bit now about student success. And I think that your book is really helpful because again, it's trying to be having groups face some of these structural challenges.

As you think, do you have some sort of key principles that you would suggest that institutions think about as they're trying to start on their student success journey?

Scott Bass: Yes, and there's two answers to that. There's first is the potpourri of specific things you can do as a community, which are within the small change, easy, kind ideas. Most important, however, is for a dialogue with students. And I'd say there's two categories. There's what we learned, again, this was our learning experience. We formed a leadership committee including the entire cabinet, including representatives of the senate involving many other knowledgeable people on campus, faculty, staff. And our goal was to talk to students to learn from their point of view, excuse me, what are the issues on our campus.

And on campuses there's sort of an internal dialogue about terms they use for different offices, whether it's the Bermuda Triangle where things get lost or it's the such-and-such, or shuffle, or they got their own lingo and they know where there's problems. And so the first category, which we were not prepared for and feedback from students was what it's really like to be a student on the campus. So I think the first part is to walk in their shoes to understand that the stresses they're under, which we've already talked about, it's not just counselors that are going to solve this, it's a community issue, the stressors they're under and what it's like to deal with whatever office it is. And so campuses always have some weak links. And so I'd call those pinch points. And we identified some pinch points and there were some many that we could improve. Some were more difficult, some were understaffed, whatever it may be. So pinch points are one thing.

The community, what we did is, again, over this four-year process, is to create a variety of different committees. It may be eight or nine committees, which the leadership team often chaired those subcommittees. We spent time in retreats. One retreat was two days with 350 different people from campus. We had smaller sessions, we had workshops, we had round group meetings, we had students getting together on a regular basis and talking. And I mentioned the journaling project, all providing data. It's understanding the institution, just like we would do of any project, we would do an assessment.

So assessment is the first phase. And what that does, it gets buy-in. It has the community understanding, "We thought we were doing great, but the feedback is not what we expected and we've got to make some adjustments."

The next is clearly that we have silos. So even we had one, not in my shop, gave an annual a Silo Bustering Award to a faculty member or a staff member on campus. So it really became part of a culture to think through. And then there were some big changes that I proposed, which were very expensive, in the multi-million dollar effort category. It doesn't need to be, but it was our proposal. It was our...

And the board of course was involved throughout this. We would have regular meetings with the board, regular meetings with cabinet members to each other. And we would also look to ideas outside the universities, outside our immediate culture to see what the real world was doing. And I thought health care was a good one. We actually packed everybody in a bus and went from Washington, D.C. to Cleveland to learn about what they were doing at the Cleveland Clinic. And part of the reason to go by bus was with these people who really don't know each other that well, that talked to each other, a must. And we would rotate on the way back about what we learned and actually stopped in Pittsburgh.

I remember it was one of the chair of the board came and we put up an easel and we wrote down some of the things we were learning and then we had more discussions, rotate chairs on the bus on the way back. So I'm saying it's community building and identifying a problem. So without that process, yeah, there's lots of things we can do that have to do with early relationships with students in a meaningful way with an adult. So lots of things to do. The point is you got to own it and you're going to own in your school. It'll be a little different than in our school. But I bet you'll come to the conclusion somebody's got to have accountability and authority in that. And that's done elsewhere called the case manager. You call whatever you'd like, a guide or somebody. And they then need the information that is dissected from these wide array of data sets.

Now the next piece to that, which I did not get to do, again, it's a 20-year agenda, is we're now at a point where we could have... Someone knows, I don't need to know. I never even looked at what is the financial aid office and when a student is having difficulty with their financial aid. That information is protected by law and I don't have access to it. Only the officers in that group have it, which means that nobody else knows.

I went there within the last few months and sat down with the officers there and said, "Look, would it be okay for me to know, meaning anyone, to know if the financial aid had changed?" They said, "Yes."

"And is it reasonable to know if it's gone up or down?"

"Yes."

And I said, "So you would have no objection to us pulling that sort of information, having that available if needed?"

"No problem."

So with the technology we have, with smart technology, wouldn't it be possible across these wide range of offices, of specialties that exist to have the ability to pull essential information without violating any rules?" And again, there's even ways around those rules that we get into, but I'm just saying without that, that would give the information, not too much information because you've got to act on it. It's got to be timely and actionable such that if the student needed, lost amount of money, okay, what can we do from a discretionary fund immediately? Not a month from now, because it's too late.

Even simple things like a student is in a conflict over... That's too easy. There's ones there where there's simple resolutions, but it takes so long to do. But I'm saying let's take the more serious ones like the young woman who was writing about her experience coming into a new institution. If I had that information as a professor in the unit, I'd be very different. I would be more attentive.

Now I can say that, by the way, faculty have written in surveys that in terms of the mental health issue, that they would like to be more helpful, but they need some training. And it turns out two-thirds indicated that they would be open to such training.

So I hope I'm answering your question, is that, there is a process. And to jump to solution, jump to a product, jump to a specific technique is probably what we can do and politically pull it off. If you want to really do something meaningful, going back to the president, the board, and the provost and the cabinet, you need to have inclusion. And you need to build it and you recognize it's a long process. And I didn't finish in four years.

Cynthia Golden: So we're getting close to the end of our time here. But just quickly, Scott, do you have any suggestions for how our listeners, who are mostly technology experts on campuses, could be engaged in this effort?

Scott Bass: Well, in the process I've identified, they're explicitly included in the process because all units, every single unit on campus is included in a meaningful process if you want to improve. It's not just the student success, it's the student experience. Let me just give you an example, is that we have students who drag across the finish line with a diploma and they disliked the experience, the way they were treated and resented the duration, but they finished.

So I remember what became so vivid to me is that one graduation, you know how students dance across the dais and they shake hands at the president and they're thrilled and they're in cheers. And so one year, one student crosses the stage, takes a penny from his pocket, puts the penny in the president's hand. Does not shake him. Put the penny in the president's hand and says, "That's the last penny you'll ever see from me." And that's not what higher education is about. We are to enlighten students, to prepare them for the complexity of society and the challenges they're going to face. And this is a learning experience that they grow from, not resent. And they'll become great alumni and great citizens as a result of what we do in higher ed. So it's not just student success, it's an enriched learning experience as the student experience. That's the goal.

Cynthia Golden: Thanks, Scott.

Jack Suess: Scott, I think that's a great place to end on right now. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great conversation. And we're thrilled. And we'll make sure in our show notes that we give people links to find out about your book and really sort of explore some of the ideas that you have in that book, which I think are really helpful for people who are trying to be thinking about both change and about student success in gen ed.

Scott Bass: Thank you, Jack. And thank you, Cynthia. I really enjoyed the opportunity.

Cynthia Golden: This was great. Thanks.