Wednesday, May 24, 2023 - In a discussion with George Mason University president Dr. Gregory Washington, Jeff and Michael delve into a few ways to get to and through college: programs that allow students to more seamlessly move from community college to four-year college programs, the difficulties faced by transfer students, and the importance of presidential leadership to improve the situation. This episode is made possible with support from Ascendium Education Group.
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Jeff Selingo:
So as we get to the end of another academic year, it's traditionally the time when students take stock of where they are in terms of getting their degree or perhaps they just completed their degree and graduated this spring, Michael
Michael Horn:
And Jeff, when they do count up where they are toward getting that degree, many students find out that they have a lot of credits, and usually from multiple institutions. But frankly, they don't always have something to show for those credits. Indeed, get this stat. More than two-thirds of bachelor's degree holders in the United States have transcripts from multiple institutions. So today we're going to be talking about how the linear path that we often describe is how you do college is actually anything but straight. And we're going to talk about how we might make that swirling journey more efficient on this episode of Future U.
Sponsor:
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
Michael Horn:
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo:
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
So if credits were dollars, students in the US would be very rich. There are so many ways to earn college credits these days, from dual enrollment in high school to military training, to professional development on the job. The problem however is when students try to turn those credits into something and bring them somewhere to get a degree. In many ways it's like exchanging dollars into foreign currency, Michael, you always lose something. According to the government accountability office, transfer students lose an estimated 43% of their credits when they move to a new institution. That's a huge failure in terms of time and money.
Michael Horn:
Now, this isn't a new issue of course. Students have lost credits for perhaps as long as there have been credits, Jeff. But just as the pendulum swings in ed reform, there's now a renewed focus on this loss. The impetus? They're now, get this, roughly 39 million Americans with some college credit and no degree, and there are so many more ways today to earn those credits.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. Last year, Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit consultancy focused on technology and academic transformation, they put out a brief that presented a new framework for how institutions, higher ed systems, and policy leaders can better serve these increasingly mobile students that they called Holistic Credit Mobility. We're going to put a link to that report in the show notes.
Michael Horn:
And the report of course called for things, Jeff, that we've been talking about quite a bit on this show actually for the last several years. Basically, the focus should be on what's actually learned the outcomes and that we should stop repeating learning of the same content just by different sources. It also called for requiring inter-institutional collaboration. And that's where we're going to focus today's show because that's often where credits are lost as students move between institutions.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, Michael, and let's take one of the common transfers in the US, a two year to a four-year college. According to the Community College Research Center at Columbia, every 100 students who want to transfer to a four-year college, only 31 will and only 14 of those will complete a bachelor's degree.
Michael Horn:
Now, that's why a program at George Mason University made both of us stand up and take notice. The program is called ADVANCE and we learned about it last fall at a dinner we hosted with college and university presidents in the DC area after a stop on our Future U Campus tour. ADVANCE basically turns a cohort of students at nearby Northern Virginia Community College who are pursuing their associates degree into non-degree seeking students at George Mason from day one. There are now 3,600 active students in the program, which allows them to use the library at Mason, go to sporting events, and generally just feel like George Mason students. And that sense of belonging they establish, which Jeff, you talk about so, so often on the show, that goes a long way.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, that's right, Michael. ADVANCE students who come to Mason graduate two semesters faster than non-ADVANCE transfer students. 92% of ADVANCE transfer graduate from Mason in less than two years. And at a time when equity gaps are kind of front and center in higher ed, here are some stats to think about. ADVANCE students are 60% first generation, 68% students of color, and 39% Pell eligible. So with us today on Future U, we have the president of George Mason University, Greg Washington. Greg came to George Mason in July 2020. He's the former engineering dean at the Ohio State University and the University of California Irvine and is George Mason's first Black president.
President Greg Washington, welcome to Future U.
Dr. Gregory Washington:
It is great to be here.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, so we're going to talk about learner mobility. But before we do, we love having presidents on Future U because there are so many issues in higher ed today that we can talk about. And as you probably know, the American Council in Education recently released its study of the American college presidency, and there were several findings that I wanted to ask you about quickly. One is the average tenure of a college president. What we saw in the report was that it has dropped now to 5.9 years from 8.5 just back in 2006. What was really fascinating to me is that a majority of those currently serving don't think they will be in their current role in five years. And among the reasons for leaving according to the survey, the pandemic, the growing political polarization in higher ed have really taken their toll on presidents.
You have led George Mason both through the pandemic and you're a president in a purple state of Virginia where there's a lot of disagreement. So can you talk a little bit about those two pressures, both kind of coming out of the pandemic and kind of the growing political polarization in higher ed and how they impact presidents?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Well, the two are related and they're related in a significant way. Universities have got to be among the most over politicized institutions in the country, right? We did a recent study here in Virginia and asked Virginians who actually think very highly of their public four-year institutions, but told them to give descriptors, one word descriptors of universities. The largest word cloud elements were woke, biased, too expensive, too liberal, elite. This was amongst individuals that we would call our friends. They actually by and large like this.
So what that means when you're a president in an entity like that is pretty much every decision you make is going to be one that angers or infuriates somebody. Or you can do what I've done, and that is make decisions that anger and infuriate everybody, which ultimately has come out in many cases to be the exact right decision. We recently invited the governor to be our graduation speaker and he accepted. The governor has been very vocal in his opposition to critical race theory, his opposition to some of the issues associated with trans students. When we made that decision, it really set off a firestorm amongst our students on the left. We have invited every governor to come speak at George Mason University going back to the institution's founding. And so inviting this governor was no different, but in this politically in charged environment, it was to the students. So we explained that to the students and the explanation made the governor's folk angry.
Jeff Selingo:
So let me bring it back to the ACE survey then. How does this impact you and your job? Do you feel like this is a pressure that obviously you seem to be dealing with, but do you see how it could make people think, "I don't want to do this much longer"?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
The shortness of time that people want to go through this, I can see how that happens without question. You're always on the firing line. I know going into a decision that I'm going to have outcomes in which some groups are not happy because there are very few decisions you can make in the country today that won't shave themselves to the right or to the left. Mason is a little different than most institutions. We actually have a very active and fairly large conservative student body in a number of our schools, our Antonin Scalia Law School being the largest. You are going to be wrong in this job based on someone's political persuasion. And so it wears on you over a period of time.
Jeff Selingo:
Greg, I wanted to ask about two other quick things in the survey before we talk about learner mobility. The one was it found that 72% of college and university presidents are white. And even as student bodies diversify, the presidency seems to be much slower to diversify, much like the faculty on many campuses. And as we mentioned at the top of the show, you're the first Black president of George Mason. And it seems like if we wait until future presidents come up through that traditional ranks, it seems like we probably could be waiting for a while to diversify the top office on campuses. So what else do you think can be done to move that a little faster?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Yeah, if you go to traditional realm, it will take a minimum of 10 years given that you first have to matriculate from assistant to associate to full. And then you have to have some administrative experiences along the way that position you in order to do this. So you got to start looking at non-traditional places. Starting with deans as opposed to provost is one, but also people who manage or lead large research organizations, whether that can be organizations like HRL or some components of NASA, the National Science Foundation. In a number of those places, individuals have transferred over into presidencies. You really do have to be flexible in this environment if you indeed want to be inclusive.
Jeff Selingo:
So you mentioned deans, and I want to drill down on that for one second because I worked on a paper a few years ago with Georgia Tech and Deloitte about pathways to the presidency. We analyzed more than 800 CVs of presidents. What we found was that it was an increasingly popular role to come into the presidency from deanship. And that's of course a move you made. So what are the advantages of making that move from dean to president? Do you feel there were any downsides with going directly from dean to president? Because as you know, many people then go from dean to provost to president.
Dr. Gregory Washington:
So the biggest advantage is that you don't have to be a provost. That's a huge advantage. That's a tough job. But it's also when you say disadvantages, academic units, people at universities, if you haven't been a provost, they then believe that, "Well, because you come from a specific discipline, are you going to favor that discipline when you make decisions that basically have to encompass the whole academic institution?" And being a provost gets you past that because you now have a track record or a history of making those decisions that are overarching. If you've had experiences managing other entities that cut across multiple disciplines, it was a help. And in my case, I led organizations that were cross-cutting. I had lots of experiences where I was actively involved and engaged in the humanities and in the arts. And because I had those experiences, it made me more palatable as an engineer to individuals who are in these other disciplines.
Michael Horn:
So I want to shift gears here to learner mobility now. And although as you know, we have this image in our heads of this linear movement of students through a system, we know it typically actually doesn't quite work out that way. Fully two-thirds, 67% of bachelor's degree holders have transcripts from multiple institutions for example. And lots of institutions have articulation agreements of course with community colleges. But it seems from our vantage point that you have something more unique with Northern Virginia Community College, which is often called NOVA, which you mentioned at the top of the show. This advanced program that you have with NOVA, what makes it so unique?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Well, they're basically three big items. First, the student transition experience is dramatically different in our ADVANCE program than the student transition experience that you have in a traditional transfer pathway. So what we do is what we call dual or joint admission. And that means when a NOVA student is admitted into ADVANCE, they actually also become a non-degree seeking student at George Mason. And so that means that in doing that, we have decoupled the transfer process from the transition process. Students get to learn about the campus, they can come to events on campus, they can use the library. Because they have this non-degree status at Mason, they're pretty much a mason student. Non-degree status actually means you have status, and that status is of value.
The other thing we do is we streamline the administrative process. So students never have to submit a transfer application or pay a deposit once they're in the ADVANCE program. Like I said, if they take their classes, work with their counselors, get the proper grades, they automatically matriculate into Mason. It's very, very seamless. It's almost like it's one institution.
And then the third area is there's a mutual agreement of goals from the outset. And so when the program was launched, leadership from both institutions came together to collectively agree of what we wanted to accomplish. And because we had a set of neutral goals and were able to build a program around those goals, it made everything else a lot smoother and simpler. We wanted to increase the number of students who graduate with a four year and two year degree, right? And so obviously most institutions have that goal, so that was an easy one, but we wanted to decrease the time that it takes to graduate. And both institutions were committed to that. And believe it or not, not every institution's committed to that framework, right? The longer you have a student who's matriculating, the more money you're making from that student, right? The more you shrink that time to graduation.
If a student spends two years at NOVA, that means they're not spending a full four years and paying for a full four years at Mason. So leadership had to come to a belief that was better financially for the student and that was also really good for George Mason University, right? It wasn't always a given that people would have that belief. What makes it work is you kind of make up for it on volume. We got 3,600 students in the program now. It is the largest transfer pathway in the state of Virginia by a long margin. And it's working extraordinarily well in... If you were getting a thousand students transferring in for two years and you'd go up to 3,600, I mean for four years, and if you go up to 3,600 for two years, the resource piece comes out to be essentially the same and the workload comes out to be essentially the same. So it enabled us to grow and to grow significantly. Now about 50% of our new entering students are coming through the transfer pathway. They're not just coming in a traditional sense. So that was really helpful to the growth.
And the other is that everyone was committed to decreasing the cost of a degree because that gave us the opportunity to go to the state and actually generate more money, generate more state support because we were finding ways to creatively reduce students costs, okay?
Michael Horn:
Yeah. So I guess I want to follow up on that because you figured this out. You see the bigger vision for what it does for students for how in the short term it might feel like a hit to the institution, but long term you're actually bringing in more students. Frankly, you're improving the outcomes in terms of people having affinity for George Mason and degree completion and all that. We see lots of institutions negotiating basic articulation agreements, but they don't seem to get further to what you've done with NOVA. Why is that? Is it how much do presidents really need to get involved in this? Or is it something else that will get us over the hump?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
It is a leadership question. That being said, there are national drivers that are going to change the game for everybody, right? You've heard of the enrollment cliff that we know is coming that in many states is already active. Just due to birth rates, fewer children were born that are now college age, right? So it's already happening in many states, but most of the country will be in the throes of this by 2025. And between 2025 and 2036, it's like a 10% drop in the number of students overall, but some states will see 20 and 25% reduction. So it is going to totally change landscape and the academic institutions will be looking for students anywhere because they're going to want to keep up their enrollment. That's going to increase the interest in programs like this. So this game is changing, but it also gets at an issue even before the cliff. We've lost 4 million students in the last 10 years. We're 4 million students smaller in terms of four year institutions now than we were 10 years ago. We lost a million since the pandemic. And that is only going to accelerate.
So there are lots of just external drivers that are going to change the mindset of presidents and they'll be looking for models that have worked. And what we want to be is part of that thought leadership. We want to be able to put almost like a franchise based framework. We started this with Northern Virginia Community College, but we are now expanding it to seven other community colleges in our state. The idea is that in three years we're going to be able to blanket the whole state with a program very similar to this. And when I say a franchise model, we're taking the corresponding components that we have of our relationship and partnership and we make it systematic. When we go to another academic institution, we know exactly what that institution needs to do in order to have a similar set of outcomes that we have with NOVA, and we're going to continue to do that.
And so we think it's replicatable and scalable and so that other institutions nationally can gravitate to the model highlighting many of the things that I highlighted to you earlier. Those three or four components that I highlighted to you earlier, that's transferrable. And so you can do that.
Michael Horn:
So that's essentially creating these templates. And again, coupled with these forces, your sense is, "Look, this is going to happen more-"
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Oh, it has to.
Michael Horn:
... "as institutions wake up." I'm just curious the role of regulators in this. Is it helpful when places like Oregon and Maryland mandate these better policies? Or is it better to have this more organic because of these pressures and frankly folks like you creating templates so that it not only achievable, but I can see a clear path with results to getting this done?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
So I think you're going to need a little bit of both. I would've told you that if you asked me this question before coming here, I would've told you that it will only work if those states provide a push, so to speak. But seeing there is no real push for us to do this here in Virginia. There is no penalty if we didn't. Many of our academic peers in the state don't have a program like this, but they're all moving in this direction because they've seen the success that we've had and because a number of them are being challenged from the perspective of maintaining enrollments. But in California where this estate I came from, it is mandated there. There the rule is thou shall for every two students you admit in a traditional framework coming out of high school, going into college, you actually have to have one student coming through the transfer pathway. And if you don't do it, if you don't maintain that ratio, you actually lose a significant portion of state support. So that happens to work pretty good also.
Michael Horn:
A little bit of the hammer there, yeah.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. Greg, so you mentioned about the kind of blanketing the whole state, this franchise model. Up until now as you said, it's really kind of been this bilateral agreement between NOVA and now you have created this office of community college partnerships. And so it's obviously worked well with NOVA, but how do you know it can be scaled? Are there any risks if colleges and other places think, "Oh, well if this works with one institution, one community college institution, how do we know it can work with other community college institutions around the state or elsewhere?" Because obviously NOVA is a little bit different than a lot of other community colleges, so how are you sure that this can be scaled?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Well, let me back up for a minute. It is scalable, but you have to have the right ingredients in order to make that scaling happen, right?
Jeff Selingo:
Okay.
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Leadership has to set that precedent that this is important, that this is what we're going to... And why. And why it's as important to open up and have more opportunity for as many people as possible. Remember, there are still a large number of institutions in our country that operate on the scarcity model of higher ed. It's how they maintain their elite status, it's how they actually maintain very, very high rankings not by the amount of people they include but by who they exclude. We just have a different way of thinking here, right? It's really about how many students we include, how many we can make successful. That's what we try to do here at Mason. So there has to be a leadership mindset that actually believes in that. And if it isn't, you're going to have a hard time then. And then you have to get a cohort of faculty. There has to be a faculty commitment.
In the end, part of the reason why our program works so well is that Mason faculty and NOVA faculty came together to ensure that the courses are articulated properly to ensure that a student going to NOVA had the right concepts in their classes, were taught and tested in the right area so that when they matriculated over to Mason, there was no worry that the students would be deficient in any area. The Mason faculty had to be open to working with NOVA faculty. And the NOVA faculty had to be open to accepting that partnership. That's a part of that franchise piece that's necessary, right? It's liken to, "Here are the ingredients for McDonald's french fries. You must use this oil, it must be cooked at this temperature and must be cooked for this time." That's kind of a necessary ingredient in this.
And then finally, it requires a financial commitment from both institutions especially in terms of the counselors and in terms of the coaches that have to be on both sides in order to help the students correspondingly matriculate. And so we have academic coaches that are actually embedded at NOVA. They're actually dual employees of both institutions. That's one of the things we will require of our other partners as we expand the process forward. So there are key steps, key ingredients that are needed in order to make this successful. It doesn't just happen because the two institutions sign an MOU and say, "We're going to work together." It does take a little bit of work for success.
Michael Horn:
I'm still thinking about the people who probably want the McDonald's french fry recipe open source so that they can follow it. But the-
Dr. Gregory Washington:
I'm one of those by the way.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. But the other piece of this is, we've been talking about obviously this traditional route of transfer to a four-year university from a community college. But as we know and I've heard you talk about, we want students who are earning credits and credentials in multiple ways today, whether it's through prior learning, military service, workplace learning, we want them coming into colleges. There's this recent announcement from Carnegie Foundation and ETS about moving away from the credit hour into assessing what students know, what I talk about is mastery based learning or competency based learning. And so I'm curious from your perspective, not just on the community side partnership piece, but how can institutions more broadly capture these increasingly non-traditional learners who maybe are coming through these alternative pathways?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Well, look, the reality is this. Again, those external forces are going to come to play. There are 36 million Americans as we speak who have some college but no degree, and they all represent targets of opportunity for academic institutions. And trust me, you are going to see some creative programs that will be put in place in order to engage. There's so much that we can do from a credit perspective relative to learners who are on jobs that require some technical training, some technical skill. There's the ability for us to give them credit for what they do as part of their everyday vocation in many areas. That especially holds true for many areas of the military. And it's a high-tech military that we have here in the country. And oftentimes, individuals leave the military with a significant amount of training that actually can be transferable into actual course credit if you are creative and if you actually take the time to understand and look at the training that members and certain branches of the military actually achieve.
Jeff Selingo:
Before we leave you, Greg, Michael and I both have DC area ties so George Mason's very familiar to us. But I think most of our listeners probably really don't know how big of a higher ed system that Virginia has. There are a few other well-known institutions as you well know, including that one south [inaudible 00:31:41] founded in 1819.
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Selingo:
But I think many of our listeners might be surprised. I was just looking at some of your enrollment numbers. I mean, you're close to 40,000 students now.
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Yeah, we are the largest four year institution in the state of Virginia.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, I mean, I don't think most people know that. So what else might surprise people-
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Okay, well-
Jeff Selingo:
... about George Mason?
Dr. Gregory Washington:
Let me give you the spiel. We are the largest four year institution in our state. We are the most diverse as well. We are what what's called a majority-minority institution. That means no ethnic groups makes up more than 50% of our population. We are by US News and World Report, the most innovative institution in our state. We have started more new academic programs over the last 10 years than all of the other four-year institutions in the state combined. Now you may say, "Okay, well you were developing over that time. We've actually gotten rid of more academic programs than our four-year counterparts combined too. And so we spin up new programs. If they're not successful, we spin them down. And so large, diverse, innovative are some of the attributes that are attached to this institution.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, Greg, again, thank you so much for joining us. Greg Washington, president of George Mason University, and we'll be right back on Future U.
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
Welcome back to Future U and that conversation with the president of George Mason University, Greg Washington. Listening to him, Michael, you think to yourself, "Well, this isn't rocket science," right? Institutions can do this and go beyond the traditional articulation agreements that still seem to not count a lot of credits and really lose a lot of students in the process. But it does require changing the mindset that four year colleges need to have a student for four years. So how might we change that mindset, do you think?
Michael Horn:
Yeah, look, I know I'm the worst broken record on this stuff, Jeff, so I'm going to resist the urge at this point anyway to talk about mastery based or competency based learning here. Instead, I just want to say, I think universities, they just have to recognize reality at this point, right? Like admit it. You can wish reality were the way you want it or just acknowledge the truth. And the truth is what we've said, students get credits from lots of places. As we say, in the jobs to be done, which we always look at what's the job for a student as they hire your product or service, the way you figure that job is to watch what they do, not what students say. So they might say like, "Oh yeah, I'd love to spend four years on this campus," but the reality says otherwise. They're not doing that. And so I think you just have to wake up to that.
And then there's another piece which Greg talked about, which is, we know demographics are declining. That's about to get a lot worse in a couple years. And so there's that second question, where are you going to fill those freshman seats? You're not, right? And so I think there is a real opportunity here, Jeff, for the school that says, like George Mason has, "We are the school that makes it easy for transfers. And you need to lean into and build that brand, build a clear value proposition of we make transfers seamless and easy."
And frankly, you can do it from the other end as well like I think NOVA is like. Be the school that makes it easy to transfer from, right? In choosing college, we had this job to be done of people hiring school to do what was expected of them. And those students, they weren't ready to make a four-year commitment to a place. So what if you said, "Hey, come here. We're the place that helps you explore, figure out what purpose and belonging really look like to you. And then we help you transfer with no loss of credit to the place that's right for you." I think there's real opportunity to lean into that as your brand, because clearly as we've acknowledged, the K-12 system is not preparing students to know themselves well enough to make these decisions.
Jeff Selingo:
Okay, well, so that makes sense, but then there is what I would see as the practicality of finances. So we've been hearing about three year degrees lately. One reason college leaders don't like them frankly is that they don't want to give up a year of revenue. So how might colleges think of this from the financial perspective because they won't have students for four years, and so they won't have four years of revenue.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. Look, it's a great question, Jeff, and I'll be the broken record for part of my answer and then I'll go to the other one. The broken record is that I think I do have great skepticism that traditional universities can do this for this reason, which is that their business model is fully baked around the bundle, if you will, the bundle of the degree, the bundle of the four years, et cetera. I mean, I've heard you often say, and Clay used to always say it, which is, colleges don't even know what their costs are for a particular major in the university. Breaking that out is really difficult for them from an accounting perspective, which I think should lend some skepticism that you are going to need some real leadership to make this happen. And so I think that's an argument for mastery based or competency based learning being part of the answer here.
And obviously, I wrote that paper a few years ago at this point during the pandemic called Creating Seamless Credit Transfer. It basically was saying like, if we shift to measuring learning, what we talked about at the top of the show, and not time, then universities are just starting to accept learning as opposed to credit hours. There's no fighting over whether did they really learn the things that are important to this major or that we do at this university or not. And it frankly actually starts to reconfigure the business model of institutions themselves around which Michelle Wise wrote about in a book years ago with Clayton Christensen called Hire Education, that's H-I-R-E. I guess we'll have to provide some links for all this in the show notes.
So I think that's really important. But I think if a traditional institution is maybe looking to do what George Mason did, it gets back to what I said before, which is, you have to move to a model of almost like cost plus or value plus. So we're not going to be able to fill out these freshman classes on the front end. And so given that they're going to be incomplete, in essence, how do we get marginal revenue in the later years and view students coming in as we're topping off essentially to cover our fixed costs, that it's really hard in a world of tenure and big buildings and sprawling campuses to cut back on. And so this is a way to cover that overhead, cover that fixed cost in some ways.
And look, it's just not easy. I get it. And in some places, maybe it'll be impossible. And that's not just because the financials, right? It's also because you got to get faculty on board. There's this shared governance aspect. But look, George Mason did it, so it's certainly not impossible. And I guess speaking of George Mason, again, Jeff, there's the practical piece of credit transfer, but the other thing that I think the George Mason program seems to really do is frankly decouple the question of credit transfer from the aspect of actually transitioning students successfully from one institution to another. What are your thoughts on that piece?
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, I mean, that's what I really like about this, is that it gives these students the sense that they are a amazing student even when they're not. And in many ways, it's similar to a program that I've written about before called Direct Connect, which is between Valencia College and the University of Central Florida. You're admitted into the University of Central Florida as a... When you're admitted to Valencia, although you won't start at the University of Central Florida until you're essentially a junior. But you know going into your first year at Valencia, that as long as you complete and keep up your grades and so forth, that you're in to UCF. So there's that weight of the transfer that's kind of off of your back.
The other thing that I really like about that program is that UCF actually has outposts on Valencia's campuses. So students don't really even have to leave the Valencia campus in some ways to complete their four-year degree. And in a place like Central Florida where traffic's really bad and many of these students are working, that's a really important thing when they have to be face-to-face. I think as we think about these programs, what is necessary about beyond getting the transfer credit piece right, and obviously that's a key piece here, it is that transition part that just makes it easier. It's guaranteeing that you're in as a freshman, even when you start at the community college. It is about maybe even creating these outposts on the campus of the two-year college.
I think this idea of having a student ID and getting swag even from Mason, it may seem small, I think, to people who work at colleges and universities, but again, you get that sense of belonging and the expectation that I'm a student there. I'm technically in some ways a Mason student. And it's not just some vague promise that there is, like most articulation agreements, that I have an option of going to Mason, right? That you're technically, even though you're a non-degree student at that point, you're still a student in many ways. That you have access to the campus so that, again, you don't feel like a stranger or that you're just visiting, but that you're actually there, that you have advising resources in both places so that again you know what you're aiming for.
And that degree map in particular is important. So you know, "Okay, I'm going to get these credits at Northern Virginia Community College. I'm going to move on to Mason. I have a map for how I get there. We talk a lot about belonging, but it's also purpose. And I now know my purpose at the other side." But I think the question then really becomes how do you scale these beyond these bilateral agreements? So we have an agreement between Valencia and University of Central Florida, an agreement between Northern Virginia and Mason. The question is how do we get beyond these bilateral agreements?
Michael Horn:
Yeah, just quick three reflections on that, Jeff, and then I'll go where I think you're going, which is... But the quick reflections are I love the transparency of what it takes to get the full degree. And so that seems important. Second, it seems like that this goes from a behavioral economics perspective, which is this nudge. The default option is the transfer as opposed to you have to do something. It's the same thing from the retirement savings, right? Make it the default that the check puts something in to your retirement. That seems like a big deal.
And then the third piece you were talking about, I think it says, what's the value here at the institution? And maybe this is a more articulate way of making my mastery based learning point, which is I think it moves away from just the instruction to the validation of the learning. And so therefore it goes against this other thing, which is imposter syndrome I think so many of us have when we show up at a campus. And that's why I think all the swag and all that stuff is so meaningful. Now, I think bigger, you said beyond the bilateral agreements, this gets at what Greg said, the McDonald's analogy. Can you open source the french fries recipe, Jeff?
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. That kind of made me hungry for McDonald's fries to be honest with you. But I think, Michael, it's similar to the strategy that we need for students for four years. Just like McDonald's want to give out its recipe in an era where students are scarce, in some ways, why should George Mason give out its recipe? So I'd like to get your thoughts on this because this is where I think the state might have a role. Can you encourage or mandate that there has to be more of these very deep agreements between four year colleges and two year colleges? In many ways, I think it is in the state's best interest to make credit transfer better. For example, many states are encouraging dual enrollment in high school to reduce the amount of years that somebody is in college. So you're going to have these loss of credits, I don't think does any state very well.
And you also want to increase the talent pool for your state and for businesses in your state. The only way you're going to do that is to get more throughput. And so if you have a lot of people out there with some credit and no degree, it doesn't really do you well as a state. So I believe that we should start probably tying state appropriations to how well colleges do on this front. This is really around performance-based funding in that way. And also require them why not to take a certain number of community college transfers. What do you think?
Michael Horn:
Maybe you're trying to play toward my skepticism of me. But I like everything you've said in the buildup. I think that's right. This is definitely in the state's interest. They should care that people are leaving with meaningful credentials and getting the desired outcome that they want. And I guess I'm skeptical that creating mandates around specific numbers will work in the ways that maybe... I heard Greg's point about California and the ratio, which is clever, but I guess I worry somewhere deep inside me that it might get gamed in some cynical way that I haven't thought of yet. Sort of the Rick Hess' line from American Enterprise Institute, he always says, "You can mandate that they do things, but not that they do it well."
Will colleges take more students except more credits, but then move them along in some way to the next institution? I have no idea, but from my perspective, again, I think from the state's interests, I much rather see them build up an alternative system that's focused on mastery of learning really going to contribute to the economy. And that gives certificates for that learning at much more discreet intervals so that you get something for those credits that can translate into the workforce. Because frankly, that's who needs this more than, say, your student that goes for the residential four-year experience. That's not your problem. It's the students that really need to have meaningful workforce experience and can use that learning, the people, in Paul LeBlanc's words, at Southern New Hampshire who suffer from time poverty in many cases. And I think competency-based education can be super helpful in that vein because it can also give more credit more easily for prior work, so in the workplace itself, and allow students to maybe come into and out of college and the workforce more seamlessly.
So I guess I'm saying that I'm sure you're right, it's possible at the margins, but my gut says it'll be just that, at the margins. And I'd rather if you have limited political capital to start spending it on creating an alternative lower cost and higher value system that's focused on mastery of learning. And frankly, let the forward-thinking institutions like George Mason lead on this. Now, maybe I'm wrong, maybe a state can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I worry about these metrics sort of being gamed. It may not be the answer you wanted to hear, Jeff, but either way I guess the common denominator is we have to escape these short term measures, right? I think.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, I that's right. And all of this requires, of course, the longer view of leadership, Michael. In other words, getting beyond the quarterly outcomes, if you will. If you're so short-term focused, can you really make those trade-offs so that you can create these partnerships that George Mason is doing with the likes of NOVA, for example?
Michael Horn:
Yeah, it's a great point. And I'm not sure you can. I mean, I think you need leaders who are not just thinking about that next job or about looking good while they are there, but maybe not for the long haul or trying to game the US news rankings in the short run, right? In my judgment, the best college presidents of the last few decades have been those whose tenure has been measured in decades because they could take that long-term view. So maybe let's stay with that as we finish up here, Jeff, because if we stay with that short-term view, we can come full circle in our conversation. We started off the conversation with Greg talking about the ACE survey on the declining tenure of presidents. And Greg talked about the cause of the short-term issues. But I'd love to hear from you, what's the ultimate effect of these declining tenures in the presidency?
Jeff Selingo:
Well, I think one of it is that you really focus on the low-hanging fruit. You come in there and you realize, "Well, I'm only going to be here for two, three or five years, so what can I actually accomplish in that time period?" And so you're not going to take on the more challenging things about kind of reforming or changing the institution because you're really going to have one era in your presidency. And as we know, those presidents who've been around for a long time, the Michael Crows of the world, the Jack DeGioias of the world and others who've been doing it for... Freeman Hrabowski, of course, who we had on the program last year, the 30-year presidency, right? They have multiple eras in their presidency and they can look at the low hanging fruit, but they know that that's going to lead to something longer term, and then they're going to have a second era, a third era in their presidency.
I think the other thing you do is you focus... Sometimes the constituencies are really the squeaky wheel and you really have no room for failure then. So we have Jason Wingard at Temple of course, who didn't last very long because he had to deal with putting out these fires, but also had to deal with the squeaky wheels of dealing with faculty governance there, of dealing with graduate students. And so you're so focused on kind of quieting these protests or quieting these groups that are against your presidency that you're so focused on that you kind of lose, again, the longer term picture. Or we just saw the president of Whittier, for example, again, where alumni were particularly unhappy with the president. And again, you focus so much on that that you're not thinking about the longer term piece of the presidency.
And so that to me is the ultimate effect of the short term presidents that Greg Washington was talking about. And so that, Michael, is all we really have time for today, but a great topic on student mobility in higher education, how we improve it, and also on the mobility of presidents in some ways. And I'm really glad that we got to talk to Greg Washington about that ACE survey. And thank you all out there for joining us on this episode and especially to Ascendium for their underwriting of this critical topic in higher education. And we'll see you next time on Future U.
