Helping Community Colleges Achieve the Dream of Student Success

John O'Brien: Welcome to another community conversation here at EDUCAUSE, and I am super excited today to be joined by Karen Stout, who is the head of Achieving the Dream, an organization focused on student success that I have been interested in, admired, and now I'm really excited to be joining the board of a TD. So welcome, Karen.

Karen Stout: Thanks, John. I'm so excited that you're coming on our achieving the Dream Board.

John O'Brien: When you're in a, let's say, three floor elevator ride, how do you explain achieving the dream to people? People?

Karen Stout: That's a hard one. I say in a quick sentence, I say that we are a nonprofit that works with community colleges across the country to build their capacity to help more students get into their colleges, through their colleges, and into a career with meaning and a career that contributes to their community.

John O'Brien: And how long I remember achieving the Dream when I was a community college president. So I feel like this work has been going on for how long?

Karen Stout: 20 years. This is our 20th anniversary year. And I too remember achieving the dream at the beginning as a community college president. I think we probably served in our presidencies around the same time. And from my perspective, when my college joined achieving the Dream, I drank the Kool-Aid. That's what got me into this role. And now I'm starting my 10th year as the president of Achieving the Dream.

John O'Brien: Yeah. Isn't it funny how the time I'm in my ninth year and I go, when did that happen?

Karen Stout: I feel like we're living parallel lives in a lot of

John O'Brien: Ways. Yeah, yeah. Well, and you mentioned your presidency. Which campus was that?

Karen Stout: Montgomery County Community College outside of Philadelphia, the Montgomery and Pennsylvania,

John O'Brien: Where I've been twice I think, because one of the major influencers in the EDUCAUSE community is Celeste Schwartz. And so you work directly with her, so she's kind of a I

Karen Stout: Did. Sure. I did. Wonderful. And coming into the presidency, I had a deep appreciation for data and technology because of my previous role at Camden County College where I actually oversaw information technology and institutional research and institutional effectiveness and planning. And I saw all of the connections of those four things. So when I started at Montgomery and Celeste was in a role that was leading it, and I immediately spotted her talent and the contributions she had already made to the college. And by the way, Celeste is retiring this year. Oh, good, good. I moved her immediately onto the executive team. I'm a big believer that the CIO, well, I made her CIO, moved her onto the executive team that the CIO has to have a seat at the leadership table if we're really going to move our organizations forward.

John O'Brien: And I think that's when achieving the dream started was technology on the radar. Very much

Karen Stout: Technology was on the radar because data was on the radar and data was on the radar because we were really trying to understand the student experience, and we were asking our colleges to look at their current student data and to disaggregate it. That was back in 2004. That was probably the first time there was a national move to ask colleges, community colleges to disaggregate their data and then to ask questions about why some students were succeeding at different rates toward completion than other students. And technology, of course, in the systems that help the colleges to get to that student experience. Data became a very important part of the work of achieving the dream. And when I was at Montgomery, a TD started to partner with Ed way back on, you'll remember this, the IPAs work. And that IPAs, I think had a lot of built, I think so our thinking around advising redesign. Now, back when we started IPAs, we really looked at it as a technology solution, I think too deeply and didn't understand that systems, processes and attitudes all have to work together to get to the transformational change. We were looking to get to,

John O'Brien: Well, I'm thinking back to, I'm trying to think. When I first was appointed presidency, I think it was 2010. And when I started at the campus, I was asking about what kinds of interventions do we do and what tools do we use? And I, I said, we have an early alert system. And they said yes. And then I waited a few months and said, Hey, can I see that early alert? And I swear it looked, it was a single page, it wasn't technology and it was a form that was filled out to the student letting them know they were in trouble signed by the registrar of all people. So, we've come a long way and I think that when a TD started doing, it’s some amazing work, technology wasn't on the radar, but I think you're seeing it take off as a key. Oh,

Karen Stout: Absolutely. Back in 2015 is when I started at a TD. We took everything we were learning in those first 10 years of reform and we made a big bet that there were seven capacities, fundamental capacities that were essential for colleges to develop to drive student success and data and technology was one of those. We joined them together. Then now 10 years later, we're pulling them back apart data and we're calling it data Digital transformation and really focusing on the digital transformation piece and not the technology itself.

John O'Brien: Yeah. Well, I think the exciting thing is the growing understanding that the role technology has to play as in the student experience, that our students are expecting it and colleges, universities are going to need to do that. I mean, the sense of urgency around this hasn't really changed. I mean, these needles are so hard to move.

Karen Stout: And I think community colleges have some interesting barriers that a TD does help them with. For example, limited IR staff,

Karen Stout: Very challenged with building IR teams. And so we help them organize their data and craft coherence from their data with our coaches, with our data coaches, the strategy that we use when colleges come in, we're just coming off of our kickoff. 15 new colleges came into our network and we spend four days with their teams and a data coach looking at their data, their early momentum data, how students are progressing through that first year, which is really important, some of their program data. And then we've introduced some new data for them to look at, which is around their community, who or what learners are being left behind in their communities, where are their disconnected youth, disconnected adults and subpopulations of students that can benefit from a post-secondary education pathway that we're not reaching. So we're bringing internal and external into that sense making.

John O'Brien: You touched on the real sticking point for two year campuses is staffing resource limitations, bench strength. And the exciting part of what a TD does is to provide a layer of support that you wouldn't otherwise have. Do you think that technology is going to help with the lack of staff to involve, I mean, the story we tell ourselves is that technology can lead to improved efficiencies and find ways to do things cheaper, better, faster. And are you seeing any of that? Or is the work of student success still a very people hands-on? Do you know what I'm saying? No,

Karen Stout: I see there are opportunities in technology, certainly ai, which is a whole other topic, but we really help our colleges identify the technology that they're using and try to reduce. We have colleges, John, that might be using 40 different types of technology to touch students with no integrated strategy on how that technology is supposed to operate. So we do help them because they have to develop the kind of common data sets, common data warehouses and the proliferation of tools is while it looks like technology is the solution, it becomes a barrier. It becomes a real issue with implementing strategy. So we try to help colleges look at all of those pieces of technology and map that technology to the student experience so they can identify which pieces of technology they want to keep, which ones they need to integrate, and which ones they want to put sunset.

John O'Brien: Yeah, you're so right, and I hadn't thought about that, but one of the results you get when you don't have that staffing level to do the integration and coordination is pockets of excellence all across the organization and then undoing that becomes really tricky. Are the products getting better, more sophisticated, more comprehensive, more able to do some of this? Or is that still a struggle?

Karen Stout: I think the products are improving. The interoperability of the products is improving, and I think Ed Calls has an influence on that. Certainly the ed tech community is always ahead of where the community colleges are. And the temptation for the well-resourced community colleges is to jump into using a new piece of technology to be the solution.

Karen Stout: So I think that really is the struggle. The products are good, they continue to get better. The ERP systems are, I think the vendors are listening to the community colleges. We deeply than they used to. So I see there being improvements, but I think there will always be a disconnect because of how it is hard for us as community college and maybe this is all of higher education. You'd have a better sense of this can't quite keep up and therefore don't know the questions to ask when they're going through the procurement processes for some of these pieces of technology.

John O'Brien: It's certainly not limited to one sector. And we probably should talk a little more about AI because it has to some extent, sucked the life out of every room. It's like you can't have a conversation anymore without thinking of ai. And what a great example of, I know a grand total of nobody who feels caught up there. That train is every station and it's probably left prematurely and everybody's rushing to market and well, we all know what about ethics, what about bias? What about all these things that community college students, faculty, staff, are living on a daily basis? So that is continually a concern with all of this. So are chatbots sort of settled science now? Does everybody agree that chatbots are a tool for good in the student experience?

Karen Stout: A lot of our A TD colleges are using chatbots and improving their advising systems. They're concerned though deeply concerned about bias in the chatbots. And I have a concern about we're well-resourced colleges are able to use them because they can afford them, the less resourced and therefore the less resource have to continue to put more people to the work. And it's very difficult then to figure out what becomes a first tier, second tier and third tier student issue that needs a human intervention rather than chatbot intervention. So I don't think they're settled.

John O'Brien: It's a question of every technology, the technology, it depends how you deploy it, how you execute it and how you use it. You remind me of probably one of the things that truly keeps me up at night is digital divide. And back when we were presidents, everybody was talking about digital divide, right? And it's so weird that now you just don't hear about it the same way as if we solved it. Brian Alexander wrote a great piece in Ed Review a few years back on the history, the story of Digital Divide. And now with this rapid deployment of ai, I'm so concerned, I mean digital divide on the one hand for students, because at least right now, these advanced AI platforms were require license that students may or may not be able to afford and probably those least likely to afford it are community college students for obvious reasons. And then there's this institutional divide, like you were saying, it's the institutions that can afford the enterprise systems and solutions are moved up and those that don't are going to fall behind. So I think it's a policy issue really.

Karen Stout: Absolutely. And then there's the faculty divide, the faculty that have the professional development resources and tools to learn how to use AI and pedagogy and those that don't, I mean that's going to become an issue too. But when you talk about the digital divide to me in the community college space, there's still a lot of conversation about the digital divide because covid and the Pandemic brought it so closely to life and issues of broadband still exist for a lot of our colleges and access to hotspots and computers. And that still is an issue for our students too.

John O'Brien: Yeah, it was a wonderful moment during covid where we sort of pulled out all the plugs and we're doing super creative, lighting up parking lots and doing amazing things and finding ways to get laptops in the hands of students, but it's not probably sustainable.

Karen Stout: One of the things that CCRC just did a study of how community colleges use their COVID money, the federal COVID money. And I was fascinated with the amount of dollars that went to technology and I thought, great, that's great. We're getting to some of that, the digital divide piece because those dollars were widely available, touch 950 community colleges. And yet, so I thought, wow, this is great. And then I said, uhoh, what happens with Lifecycle? What happens three to five years from now? How do we duplicate that kind of massive investment in technology? Again, that's going to be a concern if I'm sitting in a college presidency that I'm worried about

John O'Brien: And every CIO watching this is not on because they know. I mean, there's the technology you can buy, but then there's the technology you can sustain and integrate and support and that plate seems to just keep getting added onto. And so, well, going back to you, you made a comment earlier about sort of your experience and that a key part of using technology for good was elevating the role, creating a CIO position, having that position be on cabinet. I'm tempted to ask you, who are the inspirations for a TD when it comes to this work? Who do you point to, but maybe the not asking you to make that choice? What are some of the features you see institutions that have really fully embraced the achieving the dream strategies and are using technology, knowing our audience today in an effective way, what are some, other than having a CIO position that's part of the strategic fabric of the campus, what are other kinds of features?

Karen Stout: It's a good question. And we haven't really looked at the technology features independent of the overall characteristics of strong colleges getting to strong results. So the question makes me think about those high flyer colleges in our network. And now in the back of my mind I'm thinking, so what does their technology structure, organizational structure look like? What is their degree of technology investment? And as I think about it, I think they're pretty solid. They've done a good work with building out the fundamentals, but the colleges that are really driving outcomes around student success in the network do five things. Really. There are five characteristics. They've clearly defined a North star. They know what their student success gaps are and they've set targets and everybody in the organization knows what those targets are. So that's the first thing. So you need data and technology in order to understand that.

Karen Stout: The second thing is that they really have strong fundamentals, and that means they've built out a data infrastructure. And one of the things I see from a leadership perspective is that we build silos. So, we have it, we have it, we have institutional effectiveness, we have planning, we have the student success work in verticals instead of bringing them into horizontals. And I think the best of our at d colleges have brought them into horizontals, which means that that CIO or that data analytics person needs to be in the middle of the cabinet driving those conversations and connected conversations and making really good resource allocation and reallocation decisions to help make sure the college is putting dollars to the interventions that can work. So they've built strong fundamentals. The third thing is that they use a framework to organize their student success work. That brings us to the guided Pathways movement and the loss of momentum framework and those kinds of things.

Karen Stout: The fourth thing is that the presidents understand what levers to pull at scale. And that's to me is where technology is the enabler. If we really think about technology strategically, that's how we get to scale. And so that is full scale overhaul of advising systems that can only be done by thinking about technology and the platform that you're going to use. That's really thinking about really in an integrated way, personalized courseware. And what is your strategy for implementing that in the classroom? For what courses? In what programs that gets to OER. Are you going to have an OER strategy? What does look like? So it's in that area, that fourth area where leaders have to think about those big levers, what are your big bets? And then figuring out how technology enables the movement of that big bet. And then the last thing we see is that these colleges understand how to move with what I call strategic patients, a sense of urgency with patients. They're not tempted to take on that one small thing that might get immediate results, but actually could end up undermining the long-term results that you're trying to get to. And so those are the five things we see our colleges that are high performing really embrace. Do any of those resonate from a technology perspective? A scale one I think is an obvious one.

John O'Brien: Maybe all of them. Yeah, though my big takeaway is urgency with patients. I know you just wrote a great article for EDUCASE review. Maybe your next one is going to be titled Urgency with Patients. I love that. I

Karen Stout: Love that. Okay. Well I will try that.

John O'Brien: No pressure. No pressure. Does achieving the Dream have or work with another organization to have any kind of assessment tool for technology readiness?

Karen Stout: No. We have a high level tool in our ICA institutional capacity assessment tool, but we don't have a partner to go deep.

John O'Brien: That might be something as we're, we're just our fates are going to be connected for. How long did I agree to be on the board for? Three years. Okay. So we've got three years to figure this out. One thing I would say that might be worth looking at is either, well, I'll just say we have I offering called the DX journey map digital transformation journey map, and it's dx.educause.edu. And it's kind of a very straightforward sort of tool for asking you questions about your institutional readiness for transformation. And then it doesn't matter where you are, it just matters that you know where you are and where you want to go. And then you can start. So the journey map helps you identify where you are in this journey and then give you some pointers for, so that might be a tool that would be useful. And of course, so much of what EDUCAUSE does is providing resources to support this work. So it'll, it'll be great fun to work with you to think how we can bring our organizations closer together. Our new vision statement is inspiring the transformation of higher education in service to a greater good. And I can't imagine a greater organization for us to be working with than achieving the dream. So we've got our work cut out for us.

Karen Stout: You just reminded me of some of the work that our colleges are doing in shortening terms. We're dismantling the academic schedule just to create more on and off ramps for students, especially the students at Community Colleges serve and all of the technology that's required in reassembling a scheduling mechanism and even understanding what the current scheduling mechanism is. So there's a lot of intersections here that if I think about the technology piece to that framework I just described, I could go deeper on. We probably should talk about how we want to

John O'Brien: Well, it's funny you can point to areas like that where I have a clear memory of, remember Rio Salado was one of the first campuses that was doing that allowed students to start a course at any time. We were like, that is so innovative and wonderful and we could never do that because our technology wouldn't allow us to. So there's times where the technology is an obstacle to being able to do amazing, innovative things. What I think is super exciting about the technology landscape now is that technology is sort of moving us to do things we didn't think we could do. And technology is sort of freeing up our ability to think creatively as the technology becomes more interoperable and flexible and agile. And as ai, if it doesn't destroy the free world, if it does the good things, we hope it will is going to add an element of agility and flexibility to this that is going to be unprecedented. So a good time to be alive.

Karen Stout: It absolutely is. I also think that the best a TD colleges play offense with their data mindset. So they're not thinking just about compliance or meeting accreditation standards, that kind of one year heels kind of approach. They really are thinking more strategically about how to use their data and the data that they don't have about the students that aren't on their campus. I mean really opening up understanding their community in deeper ways and all of the primary, well, all the secondary data that's out there now about the communities that they're serving, that in the past they haven't really paid attention to or clearly mined for thinking about strategic enrollment management and other. And that's the only way to really get at the equity gaps that are still deep in many of our colleges and in our communities.

John O'Brien: When I was a provost of a system and we would, once a year, we would talk about the achievement opportunity gap in the state where I worked. And every year it was so discouraging because we could identify that those gaps start in third grade. That's what we're up against.

Karen Stout: Exactly. They start earlier than they get, than the student gets to. The college is important for us to understand and they persist after a student completes. And we have to understand that too. And we can influence beyond our campuses as leaders and we need to begin thinking that way. So we have to understand the data, what happens before, what happens after.

John O'Brien: So it's clear to me that part of the secret sauce of achieving the dream is data and that your approach is all in on data. And of course, we are deeply concerned about cybersecurity and privacy at EDUCAUSE and we have lots of tools and resources like the HECVAT for campuses to use. The HECVAT is the higher education, higher education community vendor assessment tool, something like that. I keep saying it's an acronym only a mother could love, but it's a tool that helps campuses when they're buying these. Because every time we keep talking about solutions, these are purchases that are made and we have some role to play in making sure that what we buy shares our values for privacy. And I'm guessing that that's a big part of your work as well. We don't

Karen Stout: Do a lot with influencing. We will often get asked about vendors, but we're agnostic and we don't really get into the cybersecurity details, but I do know our colleges are, it's top of mind for the A TD colleges because so many of them have gone through attacks, ransomware attacks, several of colleges brought to their knees for several months and then lose their student data. And they're almost starting all over in some of their, they can't benchmark anymore and they're rebuilding systems. So it would be great. You're making me think about the tools that you have that we should figure out a way to make also available to the A TD colleges. I mean, I know the community colleges are highly engaged in EDUCAUSE, but probably not to the degree that the sector should be. And I only say that based on my previous experience with EDUCAUSE. I remember as a president, I attended several EDUCAUSE, but not many community college presidents go to EDUCAUSE But they should.

John O'Brien: No, it's true.

Karen Stout: They

John O'Brien: Should. And walk through your gender. Yeah. Community colleges are the largest SEC group of institutional types by Carnegie classification, but as a proportion of how many community colleges there are, it's not the penetration. So I think it's incumbent on us to partner with you and vice versa. And what you were saying was so true earlier you said that you've arrived at student success organizationally when it works across all the divisions. And so if this works like it should, you can rest assured that the CIO is deeply interested in security and privacy. You can be assured if things are working well that the procurement officer is aware of the need to buy products that support those. So it really does involve, it just goes back to that whole, it's a cabinet effort and if the cabinet isn't aligned, it's not going to work. But if it is, that's where you can really start to get traction. Absolutely. Well, I feel like we're just starting what will be about a three-year conversation as I get more acquainted with the great work of achieving the dream and our colleagues on the board become more familiar, what EDUCAUSE can bring to this. We're all trying to make a difference and the stakes are so high in the sense of urgency is so intense. I'm just excited to work with you and take on all this challenge.

Karen Stout: Well, since a TD has been anchored for now 20 years in data and has played in the technology space with IPAs and digital courseware through the Every Learner Everywhere network and in OER and now working in the short term space and doing a lot with some of the scheduling vendors, I think the partnership between a TV and EDUCAUSE is a perfect one that we need to work to develop. It's the right time to really pull our resources together.

John O'Brien: I agree. Well, with that, I'll just say thank you, Karen, for joining us, making your impressions available, and we'll talk to you soon. Great. Thank you.