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Ringae Nuek: Welcome to Ways to College, a podcast for parents and students who want to understand how college actually works and how to make the most of it, not just get in. I'm Ringae, founder of Waysmith. On this show, you'll hear from higher ed leaders and thinkers doing things a little differently. I hope you'll come away understanding what matters, asking smarter questions, and able to make an informed decision that's truly yours.
Hi, listeners. Just a quick note to let you know that this episode will be the end of season one. I'll be back in the fall with a new season and fresh content. So enjoy your summer and see you then.
Elliot Felix trained as a designer at UVA and MIT, founded a consulting firm, and over the past 20 years has worked with more than 100 colleges, from MIT and Cornell to NYU and University of Virginia, to redesign the spaces students learn in, the services that support them, and the systems that connect everything together.
His firm was acquired by Buro Happold in 2020, where he leads the higher education advisory practice. He's also the author of two books. The first, "How to Get the Most Out of College," is for students, and the second, "The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success," came out last year, and it's the one we're gonna spend some time on today.
Elliot, welcome to Ways to College.
Elliot Felix: Thanks.
Ringae Nuek: I wanted to have you on because, I'm interested in the question of what matters in a college environment and what makes it successful, and who's doing that well, and how families can gauge this upfront.
On your website, you state that 4 out of 10 college students drop out, which is kind of a shocking number, and often for reasons that have nothing to do with academics. So I guess I'd like to start by just breaking that down. Why is that happening, do you think?
Elliot Felix: Well, I think it's unfortunate that not as many students go to college, and it's unfort-unfortunate that not as many finish as we would like, and that, that four in 10 is the graduation rate, uh, nationally. And of course, some places it's much, much higher than that, and some places it's much, much lower than that. And when I look at the research as to why students stop out or drop out, about half of it is financial. And there may be-- that, that may be the primary cause. It may show up as some things secondarily, but an awful lot of it is financial.
And, um, the, the second reason, uh, really has to do with, um, often belonging, not feeling like you're part of something, not feeling that connection to a community or to the college. And so I'm hopeful that we can create, you know, better connected colleges and universities where they're really designed around the student. And so the financial barriers or the other, other barriers are reduced or eliminated, and those connections that keep you in school and on a path and finding a purpose are much more prevalent than they are today.
Ringae Nuek: So if, if a parent asked you, you know, where do colleges most often fail their students? Wha-what are those points or like what are the touch points or what are the areas of the experience that, are really just falling down?
Elliot Felix: Well, I think a lot about how well do colleges set their students up for success, right? My first book was basically how do students succeed in college,
Ringae Nuek: Right.
Elliot Felix: and the second book was how can colleges help students succeed? And they, you know, they go together, and they're drawing from a lot of the same research about how students succeed. You know, there are things like high impact practices, which was created initially by the AAC&U, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and then working later with NSSE, the National Survey of Student Engagement, where they looked at, you know, tens of thousands and at this point, you know, millions of students over time. And there are a handful of things that successful students just do over and over again that are reliably correlated with their success.
Things like, um, uh, being part of a learning community, or, um, working with a faculty member on a research project, or working on a capstone project, or having some kind of common intellectual experience like up through a first-year seminar, or you're reading the same book, or you're doing the same project, or you're having the same experiences. So I look at, how well do, uh, colleges set students up for success by doing those kinds of things. The ones that aren't doing as well, I think are the ones that maybe aren't emphasizing those things or haven't prioritized those things, or maybe are stuck in an old model when maybe those things weren't as important as they are today.
Ringae Nuek: So you mentioned learning community, working with faculty or, or on a capstone project. What are the others?
Elliot Felix: Well, another great study is the Gallup-Purdue Index, which
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: I think you mentioned in another episode. And that's a great, big study, large-n study looking at what do students do in college, and how does that relate to how engaged they are in the workforce and their sense that college was worth it. And that talks about things like an internship, which I think is also a high impact practice, mentoring, working on a semester-long project, right? Where you're working, you have a deliverable, you have deadlines, you're getting feedback, which, you know, kind of emulate what you're likely to see in the workforce. So I think looking for those kinds of things, um, is also really important, and that's also where sometimes institutions are falling short.
If you talk to people and you say, "Do you have a mentor?" Or, "Do you know how to find a mentor?" Uh, you know, that's not a-- You don't flip a switch and find a mentor. It's a process, but how do you set yourself up, uh, to do that? You know, it might be your supervisor at your campus job. It might be a professor that you really click with. It might be an advisor, it might be an older student, but there are ways to, you know, sort of systemize serendipity and to make your own luck, right? So, I'm going to use that phrase. So, colleges that have like a peer advisor program for first-year students, for example, or colleges that have formal mentoring programs where they connect students with alumni.
Ringae Nuek: Is that common?
Elliot Felix: Not as common as it should be. Um, I think it's getting more common and I think there are also companies that are great partners to universities that can help them not reinvent the wheel and scale up success. So like there's a company called Mentor Collective, and I think as companies like that grow in scale and influence, they can also kind of bring college and university partners along with them and find ways to do mentoring at scale. Because at any college or university, you're going to find like great stuff happening.
I think the question is just are they doing it at scale? Are they doing it consistently? You know, like, there's going to be great internship opportunities, probably in the business and engineering schools, but like, are they going to be in other parts of schools or other schools? Or, you know, there's going to be great opportunities for students to work on a class project for a company everywhere. But some places, it's just luck of the draw, whether your professor has those relationships and is comfortable teaching that way, and is really focused on experiential learning. And other places, it's much more systemic and systematic, and those are generally the places that are positioning students to succeed.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, I think in, in one of my previous podcasts, we were talking about how, when something's required and baked into the curriculum, you're going to get a certain level of, attention paid to it and then quality because it is part of things versus something being optional where it can be more hit or miss.
Elliot Felix: I think what you require says a lot about who you are as an institution.
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: Like Tulane requires service learning, uh, Portland State requires a capstone, you know, a senior project with a community group, and how you're walking the talk, those kind of requirements say a lot about an institution, and they're also things that students and families can look for.
Ringae Nuek: So, curious what policy-- Are there a couple policies you could mention that you think are fairly common but aren't student-centered?
Elliot Felix: My favorite one to pick on is at a lot of colleges you have to apply to graduate. So it's an extra step. You know, even, even after you've fulfilled all the requirements, there's, you know, there's effectively more paperwork and more hoops to jump through. And that to me is just like bananas. You know, that's the kind of thing where you should-- like, they should be going to the students and saying like, "Congratulations, you're on, you know, you're on track."
Literally, "Congratulations." Um, but instead they're like, "Hey, here's another step for you to go through."
Ringae Nuek: I remember at my alma mater, Tufts, you had to make sure that you paid off any library fines or you wouldn't-- they wouldn't give you your, uh, diploma. I don't know if that's still common. No?
Elliot Felix: A lot of the reason that those... You know, I talked about roughly half of the graduation rate issue is due to financial stuff. Sometimes those are quite, quite small. That's one of the reasons there have been great-- The University Innovation Alliance, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities have done really great stuff with completion grants. Because people have started to look at the data and they're realizing that, you know, it might only be like a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks that's keeping someone out from, you know, enrolling their last semester or from graduating or whatever, because it's that library fine or it's that textbook or whatever, or they had a sick parent and they couldn't pay their bill because instead they had to get a flight home or whatever it might be.
And, um, and so it's better for, you know, would you rather have another semester of tuition paid and another student graduate, or would you rather like hold fast on a hundred dollar library fine or tuition balance? So I think people are coming around to put that in context and do what they can to support students and get that, you know, that kind of final mile.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Sounds incredibly sensible to eat the cost of certainly a three, three-figure amount. These practices, are these things that have always been really important to the college experience, but we're talking about it now because there's data now?
Or do you think there's something about this moment and, and the students now that make things like working with faculty and internship, stronger mentoring, more critical now?
Elliot Felix: They've always been good practices. I think they're just more important now because of all the, all the external changes. Like, you know, Raj Chetty and Opportunity Insights have done amazing work looking at, um, the fact that, you know, a generation or two ago, an American would have an 80 to 90% chance of having a better standard of living than your parents. Now it's down to, like, a 50/50 shot. So the, the external environment I think has changed, and so colleges have to change too. And, uh, the job market is more competitive.
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: The average cost of college has actually been flat or recently in decline. You have more-- you know, if you have more students that are maybe the first generation, first in their family to go to college, I think they might enter college with less social capital, less of a network.
So you need, again, you need to, like, make your own luck, right? You need to position-- put students in a position where when they do that class project for a company, they're meeting someone who might need an intern that summer, right?
Or they're meeting that mentor, or they're meeting that role model. You know, if 80% of jobs aren't posted, um, they're gonna go to the students who already have the, have the social capital, already have the network, can draft off their parents' network. And so these kinds of practices that help students not just build knowledge and skills, but also relationships become more critical.
Ringae Nuek: You find a job isn't shooting 500 resumes off on indeed.com, you know? But it's, it's sending messages on DMs on LinkedIn or calls even.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. I mean, that was never a good idea, and now it's
Ringae Nuek: Right.
Elliot Felix: an even worse idea because the...
You know, there's no, there's no moat around applications, right? It's
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: frictionless. It takes the same amount of effort to do five or 500 in many ways. That just means there's, there's more noise, and you have to be the signal because you already met that person from this project, or they spoke and you went up and talked to them or, or, or, um, they were in your mentoring program or whatever it might be.
Ringae Nuek: Okay. Um, so mentorship does seem incredibly important, and it also seems like one of those places where there is a decent amount of onus on the student to seek it out. It's not just gonna fall into your lap. But what, what are colleges that are doing this well, what are they doing to support faculty and, like, faculty and, just the college as a whole to s- make, make faculty and the real-- and the support how to do it well?
Elliot Felix: I think certainly formalized mentoring programs like connecting students to alumni or students to faculty, uh, are really important. Um, I think the ways in which students can build those relationships is really critical. So for instance, um, making sure that every class a first year takes isn't, you know, 100 people plus in a lecture hall,
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: I think is really critical.
Like University of Georgia now is requiring these first-year seminars. It takes a lot to approach a faculty member in a room of 100, right? Or after class, or you can go to office hours, but they just become a lot more approachable if you see them in, you know, in your 20-person seminar and you're around the table and they know your name.
So part of it is what are the circumstances in which the, you know, the institution is making more of those meaningful moments possible. And it might be events, an event, it might be a guest speaker, might be a lunch, it might be a small seminar, it might be through a formal mentoring program. But I think it's, it's about creating those, those moments that matter where faculty and students can connect. I think it's also setting the expectation that that's, that's part of what everyone's there for.
And I think it's, um, you know, that's also something that leaders can do and can symbolize. Like I know you had Alex Hernandez from Champlain College, uh, on another episode. Like he teaches a class, uh, to, uh, to students even though he's the president, and he actually teaches that class at a local incubator, uh, as off campus, which does two things, right?
It sends a really powerful message like, I'm in touch with students
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: in a-- at a smaller scale, and b, I'm connected to industry, and we're connected to industry. But I think leadership can also support and symbolize those kinds of commitments as well.
Ringae Nuek: Interesting. Yeah, I've, I've been doing a lot of tours recently, and a lot of the universities have this take a professor to lunch thing, which seems like a, I guess, a pretty easy, easy way to do that.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, those are great. Those are-- Those kinds of programs are great, and just, um, you know, lower the, just lower the stakes, lower the bar.
Ringae Nuek: Um, you mentioned the, the first-year seminars. I guess I, I'd like to talk about first-year experiences.
Elliot Felix: Let's do it.
Ringae Nuek: They, um, they seem to be most popular at the, at the large flagships and large state institutions. Is that, is that right?
Elliot Felix: Well, it's maybe more, um, because, you know, you're trying to make a big place feel small.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: And that was, you know, that, that quote actually comes from, uh, Dan Maxwell, who's one of the folks I interviewed in the student affairs chapter of my, my book, and I think it's just so... such a concise distillation of what it's all about. And I think first-year experience is a great way to do that, and that first-year experience might include a first-year seminar. So that seminar may get you oriented to campus, right? Take you to the library, take you to the career center, take you to the counseling center, take you to the advising center, whatever, whatever it might be, so that you're aware of what the college or university has to offer, which is often a huge problem.
I mean, survey after survey shows that students usually don't know all the great things or most of the great things that their college or university offers. And some of that is on the student, right, to go out and explore, take initiative. But I think universities can also do a better job of communicating that and orienting folks to the things that they, uh, that they do.
I think the other reason the first-year experience, besides getting people oriented and being part of a smaller scale community and finding your people, I think the other thing a, a really coordinated first-year experience does is it helps to bridge the divide that you see sometimes between academic affairs and student affairs. And, um, that can be a real problem, especially on bigger campuses where there is this like bright line between what happens in the classroom and what happens outside of it, when in fact, I think everyone's striving for something that's more holistic and more coordinated and more integrated, right?
It, it may be that you find your mentor through a guest speaker in your class, or it may be that you attend a, you know, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, uh, event, and somebody from industry comes in as a, a, as a speaker. Those are two equally valid paths and, uh, or it may be that you're, you find them through your, um, entrepreneurship club, or it may be that you find them through your living learning community. And, and so I think being really intentional about the first-year experience to both find belonging and get people oriented is great, but it also helps knit together the different sides or the different parts of the, of the university in a way that really benefits students and society.
Ringae Nuek: Hmm. So in, in more connected colleges, is it just that student affairs a- and people more on the academic side are having more conversations? Or are they, are they designing programs together? Or what's, what's different there?
Elliot Felix: Yeah. I think there's much more collaborative programming. There's much more coordinated effort. And for instance, advisors that may sit within student affairs have great relationships with faculty. And so faculty can raise a digital hand or raise a physical hand and say, "You know, this student might be, might be struggling." Um, whereas if they're disconnected, you might have a whole team of people that are trying to support the student, and they're not getting any information from the faculty. Or likewise, you might have a faculty member that sees a student with potential, but, um, encountering difficulties and not knowing who can help them, um, or help them help the student. And so I think the more coordinated it is, the better connected it is, then the easier it is to help students in a coordinated way.
But I think sometimes you see turf wars, right? Like let's say you have staff in the entrepreneurship center and they're teaching a workshop on the business model canvas, right? Which is a great way to conceptualize and visually understand how a business works. Um, sometimes that's great as a separate co-curricular activity, an evening workshop, but there's probably a class that that staff member could visit and teach that module as part of the class.
At a connected college, that kind of stuff is welcomed. At a place that's all about silos and turf wars, it's not, and that's how you get a lot of redundancy. You get a lot of people, different corners of the campus doing the same thing, for students, for attention, uh, competing for funds, and maybe the worst of all, complicating things for the student. Because should they do it over here or should they do it over here? I mean, I opened the book talking about a story that sounds made up, but it's actually quite real.
I worked with a campus that had a writing lab and a writing center, doing the same thing.
Ringae Nuek: I was actually touring a campus here in California, um, which will go unnamed, um, and I had read your book. I think I'd read your book before that, and then they actually had that. They were like, "We've got this tutoring center over here." And then we were walking, walking, walking, and they're like, "There's a tutoring center." It's like, what's the difference between the two? And the guide was like, "Well, you know, they're kinda the same thing. You can sorta choose which one you like more." But it, it reminded me of, of what you were saying. That's-- it's such a waste of resources, 'cause presumably each tutoring center has some administrators that, you know, are a little unnecessarily duplicated.
Elliot Felix: Well, yeah. And it's confusing to the students. Where do I-- where do I go? What happens if you go to one tutoring center for, you know, work on a calculus problem set in week two, and then you go to the other one to work on a problem set in week four, and they have no record of you ever been there?
You know, you're like, "Oh, um, my session with Elliot was great last time. Can I meet with him again?" And they're like, "Who's Elliot?" So, yeah.
Ringae Nuek: This reminds me of, um, health charts, where you get the, the constant churn of, like, a new nurse, and they come in, and they look at your chart, but maybe something wasn't written down, and you get asked the same question, like, five, you know, five times over one hour, and it starts to drive you mad, and it also s- presumably is not really great if they're missing information.
I'm curious, do universities have something like that where, uh, administrators can access notes about a student? Does that even exist?
Elliot Felix: Yeah, most, especially larger universities have some system for that. Sometimes they're using, you know, a CRM like Salesforce to do that. Sometimes they have a customized advising system like EAB Navigate,
Ringae Nuek: Okay.
Elliot Felix: where each kind of interaction with the student is logged. Um, they all have a separate system, which kind of needs to be separate 'cause it's, um, HIPAA,
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: you know, for student health. Um, but, yeah, it's pretty common, and it may just be used more the larger you are. Um, sharing that data becomes more important the more complex the organization is. Um, at a smaller school, you might be able to accomplish the same thing with a weekly meeting,
Ringae Nuek: Hmm.
Elliot Felix: you know? But you can't get hundreds of people around the table at a large university.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Would it be correct to assume that a small liberal arts college is going to be more connected generally than a huge university with many different colleges within it, or is that a, a false assumption?
Elliot Felix: I think it's easier to be connected the smaller you are,
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: but, um, I unfortunately see a lot of the same silos and turf wars at small colleges. They can be just as disconnected. And the root cause of disconnection is usually some combination of strategy, structure, and culture, and those, those are almost scale independent, right?
If your strategy is to be all things to all people,
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: then it's very hard for people to, to choose and for you to focus and, um, and for you to get good at something. Um, if your structure is such that you end up with multiple tutoring centers, or you end up with a bright line between student affairs and academic affairs, then that's gonna propagate down.
I think, you know, there's-- increasingly there are, uh, places where the student affairs reports to the provost, which I think generally is a great thing because you're trying to knit those two things together. And if you have a culture of hoarding data or competition instead of collaboration, then you can have that if you have a thousand students or if you have ten thousand or if you have a hundred thousand.
Ringae Nuek: Okay.
Elliot Felix: But I do think it's, you know, it's easier to be connected the smaller. Um, but then there are, you know, there are-- there are always trade-offs, uh, right? If you're smaller, you might have fewer opportunities, you might have fewer resources per student. Um, you don't have an economy of scale. Um, so sometimes there's... You know, it's that balance of quantity, quality, I think is different depending on what each student or family values.
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course. Another thing I was wondering, whether it's generally true, some colleges are very welcoming of, of, double majors or, uh, you know, minoring in different colleges or, across disciplines. Others seem very rigid and, you know, you're admitted into the School of Engineering, and you're here, and this is where we want you.
We don't want you dabbling in anything across the way. Is that generally the type of school that might be more, um, disconnected? Or is the ability to move across majors a completely separate thing?
Elliot Felix: I think a lot of times that structure is, or that rigidity about majors and your academic path is with really good reason, because that's how you get people to graduate on time, with little or less debt. So, uh, I don't think, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
But I think um, pa- if you create fairly rigid paths that start early on, that can be just fine, uh, as long as you do recognize that some people are gonna realize earlier that it's not a fit and they need to move laterally, and how do they do that without, um, it costing them time or money?
You know, which is why I think that, uh, a lot of times folks-- you know, I was on the board of MCAD, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and we redesigned the first year, the foundation year, to provide way more flexibility, right? Because, you know, someone comes in, and maybe they don't know what discipline within the arts they wanna focus on or what medium. And so if they get a broad base and then specialize, uh, you can still do it on time. Whereas, you know, if you spend three years as a painter and then realize you wanna go into animation, you know, it's probably gonna add some time to degree, which comes at a cost.
So, um, so I think focus is generally a good thing. You just have to couple it with, with flexibility. And usually there's ways to do that. I mean, any 120 credit degree, there's gonna be, you know, 30 credits of general-- gen ed, there's gonna be 30 credits of electives, and there's gonna be 60 credits in your major, give or take. You know, some may be a little bit more. Nursing might be a little higher. Engineering might be a little higher, say 70, 75. Um, but even within the major, you're gonna have some flexibility.
Ringae Nuek: So earlier in our conversation, we were talking about life design. I think one of the-- For me, one of the-- things that I, I guess I'm trying to help students do as they enter college, but I think is also valuable as you're exiting college, is being able to look at your experiences, you know, in, in my case, in high school with extracurriculars and internships and whatever they've been doing, and really tease out from those the things that you've learned and the things that you're good at, and being able to use that to shape your future path, but also your self, self-understanding, awareness of who you are and what you're good at.
And I'm curious if there are colleges whose career services departments and just generally have a focus that is, is a bit more leaning towards that and a bit less purely, you know, here's how you format your resume, that kind of thing. Because it's-- I feel like that's a big missing piece, and this is why executive coaches are so popular i- in, you know, uh, as people are, are more senior. But I think that same executive coach role could be really helpful when you're early career.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, well, I think the way you're using your design background to help students and families through life design and other methodologies, I think is great, and I've, I've been pleasantly surprised to see so many colleges embrace that. I mean, it's my own bias as a designer myself, but I kind of think about design as a mindset, as a tool set, as a skill set, and it just kind of makes sense, right?
Like the idea that one of the principles of design is like understanding people, right? So that you can better meet their needs. So the idea that like you really have to understand yourself, uh, so that you can design your, your path just makes intuitive sense to me, and I think getting people to do that kind of reflection and assessment, um, is great.
And I think one of the other key principles of, of design is prototyping,
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: right? And you quickly understand when you're trying to figure out who you are and what you care about and why, and what you wanna do with your life, you quickly realize those are super hard questions,
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: and some of which are like unknowable without trying stuff out.
Ringae Nuek: For sure.
Elliot Felix: So the idea is like everything is a way-- every activity, every experience is a way to prototype your future. And, you know, if you think you might be interested in accounting, spend a day at an accountant's office, you know? Or do an informational interview or, you know, understand what a day in the life is like. Ask them what they took in college. So like understanding people, prototyping your future, they just like make sense to me, and it's great to see colleges... And I, I think it's awesome what you're doing, and I, I think it's great to see colleges embrace that. I think some of the ones that I talk about in my book that are-- that have really, um, emphasized that, Johns Hopkins, ASU, Tulane, and then s- you know, Stanford, of course.
Ringae Nuek: And at these others, Johns Hopkins, ASU, Tulane, is it-- how does it work there? Or maybe pick one of those.
Elliot Felix: Well, like Johns Hopkins has completely reimagined their career development function as a life design function. The whole building, which is their Imagine Center, um, which is, you know, tripling down on life design and not seeing career development as this like transactional thing, like the way you, you, know, as you're mentioning, like I need a, I need a resume or a cover letter.
But it's like, you know, a resume that says what and a cover letter to go where and why, and what have you learned from your experiments and your experiences, um, as you try and like prototype your, your future that tells you what to write and who to send it to, and how to talk to them and all these other things. And by the way, you know, those experiences are also the way that you're not just firing off a thousand things into the ether, but you're sending it to someone who's waiting for it.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Well, and the experiences are, are the proof, if you like, of the
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Ringae Nuek: skills that you're claiming. You can't just claim them without the experience.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, absolutely.
Ringae Nuek: With... So, you know, we all know that enrollment is declining. Do, do you think-- Have you seen that cause colleges to be more focused on the student experience and on retention?
Elliot Felix: You kind of can't talk about recruitment without also talking about retention, and that's why there's increased focus on the first year, for, for example. And there are things like completion grants, and there is advising redesign, and there's early alert systems and better support systems. So, um, I, I think it's really, it's really great. And I think the other response, I think is colleges are s- you know, trying to stand up new programs, you know, to meet market needs, right? They're creating an AI degree or, whatever it might be, data analytics.
Ringae Nuek: A lot of very, um, and a lot of very interdisciplinary degrees seem to be popping up.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. The unfortunate part is that most colleges and universities adapt by adding, and that's one of the reasons why they've gotten more complicated and more costly. And so there's, um, there's a famous study that, um, Gray Decision Intelligence did, where I think they found that 50% of, uh, of new degree programs have less than five graduates in 10 years. So, you know, most of the new programs that colleges create actually aren't successful,
Ringae Nuek: Interesting.
Elliot Felix: and generally because they might not be playing to their strength. They might not have studied the market. They might not know who they're competing with. They might not be offering something differentiated.
They might not market it the right way. Um, they might have just added it and not taken away other things, so they're kind of diluting their marketing budget. So I think the talking to employers, looking at industry, standing up new programs to meet new needs, is great. And I think that's actually something families can look for is, like, you can ask, like, what new degree programs have you created in the last few years? Um, that's generally a good sign, but it also needs to be cover- coupled with the sort of the discipline to not just keep adding.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: You know, it's hard to take things away. You know, a few weeks ago, University of North Texas was in the news for making some program decisions to, to focus, and where they focused is they really are looking at, you know, where there's credentials of value, not just where people are graduating, but where are they graduating and getting good jobs, where they can pay off loans or, you know, have a rewarding career.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: And if it's not doing that, then those are less of a priority.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Although it's just such an uncertain moment now, right? But it's hard. I think it can be very hard to forecast.
Elliot Felix: It can, which is also where the design comes in. Um, you know, there are definitely ways to prototype academic programs. First, you can offer it in continuing ed.
Ringae Nuek: Hmm.
Elliot Felix: You can offer it as a workshop. Um, you can use that to kind of generate demand among employers and, you know, "Well, here's your talent pipeline," which then entices students to enroll.
Ringae Nuek: Interesting.
Elliot Felix: But, you know, there's, there's definitely uncertainty.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, I was looking at, um, Olin's curriculum, and they, they have this thing where they have classes that they actually label as, like-- in, in prototype mode, but the students can take them. I thought that was cool. I hadn't seen that anywhere else.
Elliot Felix: That's cool. I didn't know that.
Ringae Nuek: I thought we could just revisit, um, more explicitly the question of what, what can families do to ask-- What can they be asking and what can they be researching to evaluate the quality of a, of a college's student experience from, from afar?
Elliot Felix: It's a great question, and I think there's like... It all depends on how deep you wanna go, like how much you wanna geek out on a college. Because the great thing about colleges and universities is that to a large extent, they're open book, and there's a lot of great information out there. So it can start with like really high-level things like the college scorecard, where you're looking at cost of attendance relative to salary post-graduation and graduation rate.
And then at the other end of the spectrum is like diving deep and going to their institutional research and assessment website, where you can find all kinds of reports. You know, they'll have like senior exit interviews, like what do seniors say about their time there. They might have reports on their, uh, student, uh... The National Survey of Student Engagement, NSSE, uh, that has all kinds of different things. It has a whole section on campus climate and is it a supportive environment. And they might have reports there on, you know, whether students are doing the kind of high impact practices we talked about, right? Like capstone projects and working with faculty and being part of a learning community.
Um, I think you can also get a sense, how does the institution talk about itself, like online, on social media? Um, talk to other students. What are they saying about it? So there's a, there's a whole range of things that are quantitative and qualitative. Some are, uh, are more of the feeling you get and the impression you get, and others are much more, um, evidence-based and driven by data.
Ringae Nuek: Well, you mentioned a bunch of, a lot of different data. How much of that is up to the college's discretion whether they put it online versus mandated in some way?
Elliot Felix: Most... I mean, there, there are federal reporting requirements for things like the college scorecard, for your Common Data Set, which is another thing that every college has to post, um, which drives IPEDS, which is where to go if you really wanna geek out. IPEDS stands for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. And there you can, you can even run all kinds of custom reports and compare, you know, graduation rates and the finances across different schools. So there's a lot that's federally mandated, and there's a lot that, um, that is shared voluntarily. Um, and I think gen-generally they're quite transparent. You know, if you go to the institutional research and assessment dashboard of any school, you'd be hard-pressed to find much that isn't there, you know, favorable or unfavorable. It's just that you have to do some digging
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: and, you know, it depends on if you really wanna geek out on that kind of data or if that's how you-- you know, if you wanna do that deep a dive. But it's, it's pretty much there.
Ringae Nuek: Okay. Great.
Elliot Felix: You know, you can read reports about, you know, maybe they convened a committee on belonging or they committed-- you know, they convened a s- they did a study on their transfer student experience. Most of that stuff is, you know, is public, and AI does a great job of scraping that too.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, I think senior exit interviews would be really interesting.
I'd, I'd like to get AI on the job of, um... It's one thing I've been planning on doing actually, is having it look at different schools' websites, especially the mission statements and strategic plans, and look for certain words and, and create a kind of a word cloud of each different college so that you can see what they are saying about themselves and how it, how it varies. That would be a great tool.
Because I think when you look at one in isolation or when you read it, they all start to sound the same, right? But I think what's interesting is how they actually aren't, and that's wh-when you can map them against each other.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the other th-- you know, the other thing is they'll often have a, like a progress update, here's how we're doing relative to our plan. And that can be really telling. You know, we have this, you know, we set this goal to be put students at the center of everything we do, let's say. How do they say they're doing relative to that, relative to that goal? Usually, there's a, there's some kind of sense of the progress that's being made.
And if there isn't, I don't know if it's quite a red flag, but it's definitely a yellow flag because that tends to be indicative of, oh, we wrote the plan and it's sitting on a shelf, but we're not bringing it to life every day to be a high-performing organization, a high-performing institution that sets goals, measures progress, makes adjustments. So, uh, yeah, looking for, looking for progress on the plan is, I think is another great thing.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. What, what are some other red flags?
Elliot Felix: I mean, we talked about these different, you know, the different things to look for, like a one-stop, like a next gen portal, like a library that's a student success hub. I think if you're not seeing those things, that's a real, um... That's a red flag or at least a yellow flag. Maybe there's a good reason why they don't do it.
So certain small colleges, for instance, may not have to have a one-stop because everybody's already in the same building and they work closely together and it's fine, and students don't feel like they're getting the runaround across campus or from place to place or platform to platform. Um, and you might have the, you know, the registrar, the bursar, financial aid all together. Um, and actually that's a, you know, if they're not using, if they're still calling it the bursar,
Ringae Nuek: What's the new name?
Elliot Felix: uh, that's, uh, student financial services
Ringae Nuek: Okay.
Elliot Felix: or student accounts or, or something that says what it is. I think that's the other thing you can look for is these institutions will say they're student-centered and then they don't put things in plain English. Like I do a lot of work w- I do a lot of work with libraries, and you can tell right away if you go to a library, the university library's website, you know, how do they describe what they offer? If they're like, "Places to study, help with your research," you know, that's a, that's like very student-centered, very user-centered.
They're trying to think about people and their needs, right? And find ways to meet, meet them. Um, but if they're like reference services,
Ringae Nuek: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: you know, not everyone knows what a reference librarian is or does. And so things get these legacy names or they get named after a piece of technology or whatever, and no-- and you kind of have to know what it is in order to know that you need it and where to find it, which is the whole like hidden curriculum of higher ed. And I think there, there are telltale signs like saying places to study and help with your research that are, that are really positive.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah, the, the one-stop seems like a no-brainer for sure. The only reason you wouldn't have done it is because you've just, you've decided not to do the building or the whatever it is that you need to bring these people all together.
We even actually visited one school where the library didn't have any books, which was a little shocking to me. But then you also see how it maybe makes sense that you can get the books turned around so quickly now that do you actually need to be wandering amongst them?
Because, you know, how often now are you accidentally finding something versus seeking it out on purpose and then ordering it?
Elliot Felix: Yeah, libraries changed. I feel like I-- Yeah, that I think in many ways, digital serendipity is much more effective and present than physical ser-serendipity in terms of like discovering something, wandering a vast set of stacks.
But I think, um, I think libraries are doing a really good job of showcasing, uh, it might be popular reading, which I think is great. It's like time away from a screen. Uh, there might be showcasing like, uh, new books written by faculty. They might be showcasing, like, as you walk into the library, something that's curated around a topic, um, conflict in the Middle East, you know, elections, redlining, whatever it is. And people still discover things that way based on that curation and exhibition and display, which I think is, uh, is great. But the idea that you're gonna like wander some vast set of stacks and uncover something amazing, um, feels a little anachronistic. But I don't think we should get rid of all the books.
Ringae Nuek: I actually remember doing that when I had assignments. You know, I'd be going, finding the book that I needed, and then I'd check all the ones in that
Elliot Felix: Nearby.
Ringae Nuek: column, and you do, you do find stuff. Uh.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. I mean, I remember I found this, uh, Clifford Geertz on anthropology when I was in grad school, and I was-- I just kind of went to the right section, and in those days, you could look at how many times it had been checked out with the stamp, and it's like, "Oh, okay, well, clearly this is the one to get."
Ringae Nuek: Right.
Elliot Felix: Like, this has been checked out so many times, it's on, like, its third card, and the others are, like, two or, two or three stamps, not a hundred stamps. So, like, let me go ahead and read this one. But I think that we have digital tools to, um, to tell us a lot of that, a lot of that now. But there, there's still a lot of value in that. There's still plenty of value in physical serendipity, you know, which might be as much about programs and events and networking and hackathons and, and such, more so than, you know, um, you know, than a, than a, than a book in the stacks.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Yeah, speaking of being
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Ringae Nuek: student-centered, one of the first points of friction, that I see as a, as an IEC is the financial aid letters. I'm not sure if you've had much experience looking at those across campuses, but they can be-- They're radically different, so doing the apples to apples thing is challenging.
And then some are frankly deceptive, hiding, um, loans as... You know, using other words, let's say.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Yeah. I think those are, those are often not very student-centered and not very transparent. Um, there's a great, uh, service called TuitionFit, uh, which works kinda like PayScale. You know, PayScale, you sort of tell people what you're making, and then in exchange, uh, for building their database, you're-- you can see what other people are making with the same job description. TuitionFit works kind of the same way. You upload your letter, you get a sense of how it compares to other people, and that also helps you understand it a little bit, a little bit better. Um, Niche has something
Ringae Nuek: Okay.
Elliot Felix: similar now, too, niche.com. But, um, but yeah, they're-- those are often not as, uh, transparent or plain English as, as we'd like 'em, like 'em to be.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's actually a place where I think a little regulation might be nice.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was a regulation that you had to have a cost of attendance calculator on your website, and that accomplished a lot insofar as every college created a calculator. But usually those calculators are pretty black boxy, or at least, you know, charcoal gray, and they work, you know, they work very different ways.
So, um, I think the first step is, like, making sure you're meeting the need, and the second is, can you meet it in a consistent, transparent way that allows for comparability and interoperability?
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, okay. So, of course, we have to talk about AI.
Elliot Felix: How could we not?
Ringae Nuek: How could we not? It's all I ever hear about.
I live in San Francisco, every single billboard is AI. Um, yeah, so what, what do you see, what do you see short term? What do you see long term? Mm.
Elliot Felix: Well, my sincere hope is that we don't let AI take our cognitive skills the way phones took our social skills. And so I think where people really need to be focusing as they incorporate and adopt AI is flexing and building those muscles around like learning how to listen to people, talk to people in person, how to ask for help in person.
So for instance, one of the big things that's happening is students are asking fewer and fewer questions of their faculty in a class because they'll just ask AI. And when you do that, I get that it's more comfortable to ask Gemini than it is to raise your hand, es-especially if it's in a, you know, in a big room. But a lot of other people probably had that question. It also tells the professor when you're lost or what's unclear or what's resonating. It also can spark a discussion. So I think we really have to, we really have to focus on that, those in-person, human-to-human communication, empathy, interactions. Um, which isn't to say you can't use AI.
Like ask-- help-- have AI help you ask better questions right before class. What are five questions I can ask my professor, right? Um, and I think the more, the more we're working with AI versus-- and not having it do things for us, so I think it's about with, not for, I think, um, I think the better.
Ringae Nuek: I use it all the time. Sometimes too much perhaps, but I, find it really-- it's such a time saver, and when you get over that initial hump of, not-- y-you use it once or twice, you're like, "Eh, okay, I don't really get it." But then you go de- and then you start building systems.
I think it's once you start really building systems in it, creating little, um, you know, prompts and really uploading your information to show it, so it has all that context, it's, it's hugely helpful, and I, it does feel like a mistake to turn it off or, or be dismissive of it and then launch students out into the world with no AI skills.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I think it's a critical, it's a critical skill to use and-- or to, you know, it's this critical thing to learn and to use, and I think, you know, maybe my favorite newsletter for the Connected College that I've written was one about good friction versus bad friction and knowing the difference. Because I think there's a lot of good friction in higher ed.
Like, by and large, is good for you, right? Like stretch assignments, struggling. Um, that's how you, you know, the, like muddling your way through a complex idea. And that's-- so that's the good friction, but there's an awful lot of bad friction, right? Like we were talking about extra policies, you know, I have to apply to graduation, um, and use AI to cut through that, all that bad friction that's just like creating barriers to student success.
It's just getting in the way. Use it to cut through and reduce the bureaucracy. Um, so I think the trick is really d- is really understanding like where is there friction that's good for you and where is i-i-- where is it not so good for you? Where is it getting in the way? And not just like blindly automating everything.
Ringae Nuek: Do you see it replacing advising at some places?
Elliot Felix: I see it replacing parts of advising. I think the, the tier one advising, and I've talked to and tested like, um, both career and academic ad- uh, advising agents. And for the basic stuff like about networking and testing out, you know, exploring career paths and, um, connecting courses to those career paths, like it's, it's great.
I mean, it's, it's, it's the same level of, of information delivery and, and real-time assessment that, you know, a, a peer career coach, um, or an entry-level person might offer, but it, it, it might not, uh-- but I think it's, it's still missing some part of that relationship building, the trust building, the nuance, the body language, the tone of voice, the, you know, there's, there's, there's so many, um, signals, um, and, uh, that, uh, that I think humans are really good at picking up on amidst the noise and using that to build trust and, um, have better advice.
You know, like there's this, uh, there's this famous study about, uh, referrals to get, uh, mammograms, um, where, um, you know, if a doctor tells a woman to get one, it's X percent actually go and do it. But if, uh, they're, uh-- but if they receive the same advice from like their salon, they're like way more likely to go.
Ringae Nuek: Really?
Elliot Felix: Um, because the, it's a different kind of relationship, and they're like, "Oh, so and so just had one," or, "She just found this out. You should really go." So I think that, I think it comes down to like relationship and context, and we're still gonna need and value people to like build those relationships and provide, and build that trust and provide that context and, um, and in a very complementary way because there, you know, there are certain things that AI, an AI advisor's gonna do better. For instance, I just heard about a, a case study, uh, uh, where students respond better to kinda like more direct, I'm, I'm gonna use the word harsh, like feedback
Ringae Nuek: Mm-hmm.
Elliot Felix: from an agent than from a person, because they're not attaching like, uh, you know, they're not adding an emotional layer to it or feeling judged the same way. So- It's, you know, I think it's, it's all about like finding the right situation, finding the right medium, um, the right, you know, for the right message.
Ringae Nuek: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there are AIs that are being trained, you know, to have the camera on and to look for like social signals and things like anxiety and all of that.
Elliot Felix: I think it'll get better and better at picking up those, those, those signals. Um, and, uh, you know, and the-- we'll keep having the conversation about how to use it in a complementary way. Um, uh, you know, I think when you design for the state-of-the-art, like, the state-of-the-art changes. So, um, an architect, Craig Dykers, I have worked with in the past, always used to say that.
And, uh, I think that's how you create a timeless building. Uh, it's also, I think, how you create, uh, an evolving strategy for student success.
Ringae Nuek: Well, thank you so much. Um, any last things you wanna leave parents with?
Elliot Felix: When I speak to students and parents and they ask, you know, "How do I spot a connected college?" That's usually the kind of a bottom-line question they're interested in. And so I'll just use this as a chance to sum up what we've been talking about, right? You wanna- You want a college that sets you up for success, right?
That has a strategic plan that's focused on students, that's emphasizing high impact practices and they're capstone projects and internships and learning communities that are not optional, but they're expected, where they're bringing together different support services physically in like a one-stop or in their library or digitally in a portal, you know, where they have a really coordinated first-year experience. It's bridging student affairs and academic affairs and, um, they're really keeping the students in mind and designing for them to remove barriers and enable success. And I wish everybody luck in finding those colleges and thriving at them and beyond.
Ringae Nuek: Where can people find you?
Elliot Felix: I think the best place to start is elliotfelix.com. There you can find information about my books or talks I've given, articles I've written, my podcast that talks to higher ed administrators. And, um, you know, if you're interested in speaking, you can find information about that too, 'cause I, I love talking to folks about this.
Ringae Nuek: Great.
