Scott Carlson: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that’s the huge motivational piece of what drives any student through college, um, or could drive any, any student through college. I feel like though the current crop of students are ignoring those inner callings, ignoring those wicked problems, but they’re also being pushed away from them by the institutions themselves. Because, you know, because of that focus on the major, because of the focus on what, what job pathway does this lead to because of the focus on what’s the utility of this particular field of study. And you know, for us it’s all so malleable in, in so many ways that there’s so many ways that you can go at these different problems.

Keith Edwards: Hello and Welcome to Student Affairs. Now I’m your host, Keith Edwards. What if everything you’ve been told about picking the right college major is wrong and hacking college? Ned Scott Ned Laugh and Scott Carlson argue that the obsession with choosing the right major has left generations of students with what they call empty college degrees.

Today we chat with the authors to find about how students can stop jumping hurdles. And start hacking the college game. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in and alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse archives@studentaffairsnow.com. This episode is sponsored by Evolve. The Evolve Institute for Higher Education. Leadership offers a series of leadership coaching journeys, specifically designed for various levels of senior higher education leadership for leaders and leadership teams.

As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his, I’m a speaker, author, and coach, and I empower higher le higher education leadership for better tomorrows for us all. You can find out more about me@keithedwards.com, and I’m recording this from my home here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples.

Let’s get to our guest Scott and Ned. Let’s learn a little bit about each of you and then we’ll get into the contents of the book. Ned, tell us a little bit about you.

Ned Scott Laff: I used to be retired until we put together this book. I bring about 35 years of experience that ranges across the university or college setting.

From Academic Affairs to Student Affairs, from running interdisciplinary studies programs to working in living learning centers and in residence life. And it’s allowed me to get a really interesting perspective on the relationship between undergraduates and how they engage the campuses they’re at.

Scott Carlson: Yeah, for me I’m a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve been there since 1999. I’ve covered a range of things in that time there. But in the recent, I’d say in the recent decade, what I’ve been covering has been things related to college’s. Path to career is a big thing that I’ve been doing along with.

The financial sustainability of higher education and what troubles it. And now I’m in this role where I have this somewhat fuzzy beat, but it’s where higher education is going is what I read about. Yeah. So I’m supposed to be someone who can predict the future at a time when no one seems to be able to predict the future.

But IU mainly use that to, to focus on, the current challenges that higher education is dealing with right now. But also I have a friend who at the Chronicle who used to say that I, what I really actually cover is how we’ve lost our way. So I do focus a great extent to a great extent on what we’re losing in this moment of higher education as we start to strip it down.

Keith Edwards: I love that. And I think this moment, there’s a lot wrapped up in this moment. And yeah, anticipating the future and planning for the future, I know so many higher leaders who are the distant future feels like next month. Looking back a month ago, things feel pretty unrecognizable, so that’s a fascinating beat to be covering.

We’re here to talk about hacking College. Book came out a little bit over a year ago. I’d love to hear how the project came to be and what’s the central problem you’re exploring. And Scott, we’re gonna have you lead off here.

Scott Carlson: I was covering stuff related to college to career. This is.

Probably 20 17, 20 18 I had come out with a a long report. The Chronicle had started churning out these long 60 page, 70 page reports about various topics. And one of the ones that I’d written about was the Future of Work. And I had this guy Ned Laugh, who kept hitting me with emails. Saying, there’s a better way to do this.

Colleges, they could be talking to students differently to, to make the connections better and got the emails as I do from people outside the Chronicle and kinda looked at them but didn’t really reply and then I eventually replied to him. We had a conversation and then a couple of years later I went to Chicago and we sat down for a long conversation.

And I think what I saw in what Ned was describing, which is what you read in Hacking College in terms of field of study, that’s the method we describe in Hacking College was what I recognized was the way that I went through college in some ways. And what I saw worked. From my reporting on college to career.

There’s this pattern that successful students go through when they go through the college process, and it’s really a random pattern. But what Ned was hitting on when we talked about it was what are the commonalities of those stories? How do students actually line up the real opportunities and how do they actually make sense of their college career?

I was fascinated with that. I wrote a story about Ned. And how advising and this may offend some of people in your audience, but how advising was inadequate in a lot of ways to talk about some of the things that Ned was talking about.

And that ended up being a very popular story.

And so we were approached by some people to turn it into a book. Eventually we went to Johns Hopkins Press. But what we were initially pitched on was, why don’t you write a book about advising? And I didn’t. I went to. Now, this was early 2020. That Ned and I got together, and then later in 2020 we had a conversation again.

Okay. So people want us to write a book. And I remember we were sitting outside of my friend’s house in Chicago. The pandemic was on full. And we were sitting by this across from this fire from each other in the backyard of my friend’s house, and we just started talking about what would this book look like?

And what we really wanted to write about was how. How college colleges fail these students in helping them or not helping them, and how they wind up creating what we call in the book empty college degrees. And so we wanted to write about this bigger process of where things go wrong for students in college, not simply about advising and how you could advise them better.

And that was the beginning of hacking college. And over time it, it evolved into. This book that encompassed and included all of these different stories of students and then how those, the stories of those students reflect some of these main problems that are in higher ed right now.

Keith Edwards: And as we move to you, Ned, a big part of this is the challenge is exacerbated by first gen students and minoritized and marginalized students who don’t have access to the kind of cultural capital. Of someone like Scott saying, it reminded me of how I actually navigated college and what worked for me, and being able to share that.

If your parents didn’t have that experience, then how do you, or you don’t know people or have family it’s even harder. You just as you write about, you just go through the hoops. What do you want to add here, Ned, about how this came to fruition? Besides the fight in the backyard in Chicago.

Ned Scott Laff: Yeah, it was an interesting conversation because one of the things I wanted to focus on in the book was specifically the students that you’re talking about, and specifically students who, if I can’t, if I can’t cover my tuition with my Pell Grant, I can’t go to college. Because we, my argument is, or where this all got started is when I started working on this at the University of Illinois in Urbana.

I was playing with this model and everybody said, yeah, here at the University of Illinois in Urbana. And that was a tough question.

Keith Edwards: And

Ned Scott Laff: so I started testing it in all sorts of different environments. And what we began to realize was that. First generation low income students, that whole population that you mentioned is a wealth of uncapped palette and it’s a wealth of students who are choosing not to go to school because they don’t see any rhyme and reason to their life in going to school. And yet. These students bring with them incredibly incredible talent, great insight and incredible potential, and all we need to do to help nurture them is just change the types of conversations we have and open them to the idea of that crazy idea that you’re thinking about.

It’s not so crazy. Here’s how you can put it together.

Keith Edwards: So there’s a bit of this that is really inviting students to dream big, connect with what their genuine interests are. Not play the game, not anticipate the job, but just really connect with their authentic self and then build a path towards that in some ways, right?

Ned Scott Laff: Yes, absolutely.

Scott Carlson: Yeah. To identify it in some ways early on. And we feel that this is the way that students would be able to navigate the rest of their lives. They’re paying attention to what motivates them and how they can find that in the world. That’s a skillset for life, because as as we get out of college, 10 years, 20 years.

We often run into situations where we want to change what we’re doing or change what we are or pursue something different. How do you do that? College doesn’t teach you how to do that. And so we wanted to talk about a method that would teach you how to do that both in college and after.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. I still remember being in sixth grade and someone telling me that I would have seven careers in my lifetime.

And I said seven jobs. I can’t imagine someone having seven different jobs. And they said, no careers. So like completely different. And I just thought, this is. This is a boon dial. Not all of us have kept the same job for 27 years, Scott, but I have moved around from different higher ed roles and now working on my own and who podcasting didn’t even exist back then.

And there seems to be a lot of relevance, particularly as the pace of change keeps escalating.

Scott Carlson: And I think that’s important. Even if you stay with the same job like I have for 27 years, I’ve had to reinvent myself within this job a number of times. And so that, I think that’s an important piece too, of what we’re talking about.

How do you shift yourself even if you stay at one employer.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Ned. A central part of what you are bringing to this is this field of study method and tackling wicked problems. Just unpack some of this for us. Yeah.

Ned Scott Laff: When when I was in Urbana, I was working in a program individual plans are steady.

Where a student could come in and design their undergraduate education as long as they could not do it in any of the colleges at the University of Illinois. Now, that was an interesting challenge in and of itself.

But for every student who came in to individual plans of study. We talked with maybe 30, 40, or 50 students who we helped figure out how to do their program underneath the rubric of a traditional major, and how we figured that out was an academic.

Undergraduate degree is mostly blank spaces.

Even when you’re in a major, it’s mostly blank sta spaces. So in many majors there might be three or four required courses, especially in the liberal arts, social sciences. And in the major. And then pick a course outta column A. Pick a course outta column B, take five courses and there’s your major.

And then finish gen ed, which is mostly blank spaces unless a certain course was acquired for the major. And then there’s the electives and what do you do with the electives? And so many times students would just pick something that sounded marketable and hopefully would land them a job. And what we showed them, what they could do is you could design this, you could create these clusters around of courses.

We call them badges now. And you could. Design this around the issues that you are interested in. Now, these don’t have to be giant issues, right? They could be something personal to a student. They could very likely be something that’s a traditional job. So what students began to realize is something like this.

What does it mean to be a major in psychology? And the answer is, it depends. Because you could take psychology into advertising. You take psychology into organizational leadership. You don’t have to necessarily be a therapist with a psychology degree. And the same thing is true when you look at programs across a campus.

And what this does is it actually mirrors. What faculty are faculty? There are no generic historians, generic sociologists, generic engineers. They’re field of study specialists and they’re looking at these multidisciplinary problems and trying to figure out the answers. And they’re having interaction with colleagues in different departments and that sparks ideas.

And so all we’re doing the field of study is. Modeling that process at the undergraduate level and helping students begin to ask different types of questions. We also ask them to go out and do research and this is critical. They’re actually doing research. They’re interview, they’re interviewing people who are doing the types of things they want to do, and this is not an informational interview.

It is a research question interview. I understand you’re working on this particular issue. Where do you see the problem spots? Where do you see where new initiatives are coming in? I wanted to work in this area. What kinds of skill sets do you wanna see in my background? And the question that opens up everything is what keeps you up at night when you’re thinking about the challenges you’re facing.

This opens up so many different possibilities for students that they never thought about, and it clarifies something that we call the translation chasm. I have this idea, or I’m interested in X. How do I translate that into the learning opportunities that are available both on campus and off campus?

That’s what constructs the field of the study and it’s integrated around a students. Critical interests.

Scott Carlson: Yeah, I think that’s the huge motivational piece of what drives any student through college or could drive any student through college. I feel though the current crop of students are ignoring those inner callings, ignoring those wicked problems, but they’re also being pushed away from them by the institutions themselves.

Because, because of that focus on the major, because of the focus on what job pathway does this lead to because of the focus on what’s the utility of this particular field of study. And for us it’s all so malleable in, in so many ways that there’s so many ways that you can go at these different problems.

You can attack them from various major disciplines and various sort of angles. So why not open that up for the student in various ways, for lots of the students that we talk to when we go on talks like we just did a talk at Metro State. We did a talk before that in Kansas City for a bunch of honors students at Johnson County Community College.

What resonates with these students every time we go out to speak, is the fact that they can work on these wicked problems in college. I think many students are. Just come to college with this mindset that I’ve got a major in business, or I’ve gotta find something useful, or I’ve gotta find my identity through whatever useful major is out there.

We’re saying, look, there are all these different. Problems that you want to attack and very various ways that you want to improve the world. This is what motivates you. How can you find that meaning within the college curriculum?

Ned Scott Laff: And at the same time, at the same time, we blow apart concepts. You’ll always hear this a college wants to prepare students to work in industry.

Great concept. What’s an industry? From our perspective, everything is an industry. So Burton Snowboards is an industry, right? Cost play is an industry. Industries are all over the place. It isn’t just tech. It isn’t just major manufacturing. It isn’t just finance. It is everything that is out there. And so when students begin to blow apart those concepts, they begin to see possibilities for what they care about and how it can fit into the world that they’re actually living in.

Yeah.

Scott Carlson: And you think too about how this helps the institutions themselves, how the institutions can now connect what the students want to things within their curriculum. And how it could be a recruitment effort on the parts of co, on the part of colleges, right? How they can go to students and say, Hey, you wanna solve this problem in your community?

You wanna solve this problem in the world? We have the means to help guide you toward those things. Here, you can work on that here. And that for students is quite motivating. Much more than. Let’s find a dream school or a name school that we want to go to, and that’s gonna be your destiny.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. I’m curious ’cause I do a lot of leadership and executive coaching and those clients often come to me and I say, we’re gonna figure out what you want and we’re gonna help you get it. And they go, I know what I want. I need your help to help you. But when you really get into it, figuring out what you want is really difficult.

’cause we’re inundated with what our parents wanted first, what society wanted first, the messages we get about people like this, what we see in the media, and separating out from all these external messages, external shoulds, and finding out what do I really want? That’s a challenging thing. How do we help students get past all the, what everybody else thinks I should want, or I’ve been told I should want to really figuring out, as you said, what keeps you up at night?

What’s your inner motivation? What’s your inner calling? I love this and it seems like it would be challenging. It’s challenging for 50 year olds to get to, I imagine, a 17-year-old. How do you help them get to that?

Ned Scott Laff: You create permission zones. You create permission zones for students to feel free to talk about those things they care about. Now, those pre permission zones are everywhere on campus. When I was working in the Living learning Center at the University of Illinois in the residence halls, it was a, it was 650 students in a residence hall in a giant permission zone.

And you give ’em a simple question like. If you could do anything that you wanted to do, no matter how crazy you think this is, and we could guarantee you a comfortable life, right? What would you do? Now the first thing they get hung up on is job titles. So we sit down and say, no, we gotta, let’s start this over again.

If you wanted to be the best halfpipe snowboarder in Aspen, Colorado, that counts, right? Because that opens up this whole giant industry that they don’t think about. And once that you start that process, then give them permission, right? They’re in the residence halls, parents aren’t around. And what parents want for their kids really is they want ’em to grow up, have a good life, and be healthy.

Parents don’t necessarily have an understanding of this massive hidden job market, this hidden world that’s out there, and giving ’em that opportunity to begin to think and explore and then to be able to look at the campus as this collection of people, faculty who are all into these really interesting, crazy things that they’re doing, their research opens up possibilities that students are never introduced to.

When you take ’em on those, welcome to campus, let’s give you an orientation.

Keith Edwards: We gotta help them, we gotta guide them, we gotta prompt them, we gotta question them, and we have to pull some of these things that they’re Yes. That society’s put in their way out of that. Yes. Scott what would you add?

Scott Carlson: I would go at a little bit, let me go at the structures a little bit. I think.

Keith Edwards: Let me say that the next question I’m gonna ask, and maybe you’ll build this in, is what are the institutional barriers to doing this? Create your own experience. So maybe you can build that in together.

Scott Carlson: Oh I would say just first of all, one of the, one of the big structural problems here is that K 12 has oriented itself toward re, results and assessment. And that doesn’t give students a lot of time for open exploration. And I think that’s one of the things that’s missing from the, pre-college experience right now, that a lot of students are just jumping through the hoops.

Checking off the boxes. There’s a whole rubric associated with whether you’re doing well in this particular course in high school or not, or in middle school or in elementary school. And a lot of students, even in their coursework, are saying what do I need to do to get an A? Or, what do I need to do to get a B?

Right? Instead of engaging the process to really discover, oh, I really like this, or I don’t like this. And so to some extent I feel like. Students who struggle a little bit in school or students who are, you might call slackers. Who are, who do what, they’re interested in school, but like don’t do that well at the rest of the courses.

That was me in high school. I think that was Ned in high school as well.

Ned Scott Laff: It was definitely me in high school.

Scott Carlson: I think to some extent those students through their abstinence actually are better off because they aren’t just leaping through the hoops like an achiever would. And they aren’t, they also aren’t.

To some extent completely disengaged just doing what they need to do to get by. Those students actually are engaging in the kinds of things that they might like, maybe discovering what they might like, and we need to reserve room for that. I think the other thing that we need to do probably as parents or as people who are guiding young people, is give them opportunities.

Just to be alone and to get away from other influences, you have to, you have to think quietly about what actually motivates you in those moments. And I don’t think we give students enough quiet time to sit and ponder and meditate and think about themselves and think about what really, what they really care about.

There’s so much pressure on students to achieve and to get to the next. Milepost, whatever that is in the minds of the parents and the minds of educators. We don’t know what students want and the students don’t know what they want either, and so we need to give them opportunities to explore.

Keith Edwards: No, that really resonates.

I, we’re gonna talk about this hypothetical 16-year-old here in a little bit, but I get to witness this all the time and. There’s a lot of how to play the game in high school and how to be, learn how to be successful, which I think is an important life skill. But not very fulfilling.

But then also it might be sports. It might be music right there. Even in those realms, there’s a achievement, reach the goal, hit the result kind of mentality that keeps them from play and and exploring and and connecting. Let’s play with this. Very hypothetical 16-year-old who may might listen to this.

’cause I’m thinking about her all the time. Let’s imagine a 16-year-old who lives here in my house here in Minneapolis, who is planning to go to college in a couple years, has really no idea what she wants to do and is really open to lots of things but isn’t narrowing in on anything, and she’s, how would you, what advice would you have for someone who’s in this place, who’s about to seriously begin?

Where do I want to go to college? And applying. And then we’ll seriously choose and then we’ll begin college. So as we think about this applying, choosing, let’s say she has a choice and then beginning a college experience, what’s the suggestions would you have for someone like that? Let’s begin with you, Scott.

Scott Carlson: I think first of all, to retain the. The attitude of exploration and exploration, not just in the curriculum, but exploration of what’s around this particular college that you’re choosing, right? What’s in the, what’s in the community around you? Where can you take advantage of experiential opportunities?

What interests you in that sense? Within the curriculum, I would say retaining the ability to explore there in terms of picking out courses that you might think are. Useless. I’m writing about useless courses right now. Love it. It’s one of the things that I’m doing because you know those useless electives in gen ed.

Courses that we talk about in, in Hacking College as quote unquote blank spaces. Those are great opportunities. If you’re directed great opportunities to add value to the major and to fill out the depth of what you’re doing in college. But there are also opportunities for you to think about something that might be unexpected and to find something in that might connect to what you already care about. And so if you have students that are coming into college and thinking I’m gonna major in this particular thing and then I’m gonna find other things that are definitely directed to toward the major or are still even within the major program.

Those are gonna be my quote unquote electives. I think that’s a mistake. I think you have to get out of that box a little bit to understand what else is possible. I think again, too to get out of your dorm room and to start to talk to people out there in the world and to start to find, who are these various experts that you could talk to on campus who might be valuable to you first?

As Ned talks about, the professors are not necessarily just history professors or English professors or psychology professors. What is their actual field of study and how does that resonate with what you are interested in? But then also to look at the staff members that are on campus. We talk about how the college is this vast, corporate complex corporate organization that has not just professors and the president of the university and other people attending to them in student affairs, but.

But others who work in say, sustainable energy in the facilities department or people who work in investments, in finance in the foundation, or people who work in HR and handle employee relations problems. Those all might be practical things that you could learn from to enter the world that you want to enter.

Keith Edwards: Ned, what what guidance would you offer this hypothetical 16-year-old.

Ned Scott Laff: It’s not necessarily guidance, it’s so I should tell you, I’m a trackie. So one of the things that I have fun with is so when somebody says, I really don’t know what I really want to do. I’m working on an assumption that are they open to possibilities or are they constrained because we’ve taught them how to be constrained and the titles of things out there aren’t.

Resonating with them, right? And so I’ll ask him, so you don’t really know what you want to do. So at night you’re like data on Star Trek. You click off and then your si your cybernetic brain has an alarm clock and click, you turn on, and there’s nothing in between that you do, right? So the issue might be that there is a translation chasm here.

And that translation chasm is also exacerbated by how we actually present a college to students. And I was showing a student this yesterday she was interested at she’s either going to the University of Georgia or the University of Texas at Austin. So I got her, I was talking to her online. I said, let’s go to the undergraduate side of the game.

If we go to the undergraduate side of the game, and you know what she can’t find there, who the faculty are and what they’re into. So now I said, wait a second, let’s go to the grad school side of the game. So you click on the grad school side of the game and all of a sudden, here’s the list of faculty members in this department and here’s what their areas of specialty are.

And all of a sudden it’s in the specialties. It’s in these crazy ideas. It’s I love numbers and I love baseball. Right? What does that translate into? There’s this. Whole field out there, right? That looks at all these numbers and statistics. It’s the basis of Moneyball, right?

It’s the basis of the work that Bill James did, but students don’t know this. Now. What this does is, wait a second. You are telling me I can actually watch sports. And actually do cool things with it, and I said yes. Who should I talk to on campus? Tell me how many times you’ve seen this.

You need to go to the athletic association.

You need to talk to the coaches. You need to talk about how they’re profiling this. We never introduce students to this. These colleges, even small colleges are a wealth of all these people doing these crazy things that don’t translate into, I’m going to be a sociology major, or I’m going to be a business management major.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Ned Scott Laff: What, when you say business. If everything is a business, what do you mean when you say business and getting students to begin to think that way and think that it doesn’t matter what I think about, I can translate this into something. There are people out there who will talk to me who are both in the field and on campus.

Wait, I can open up possibilities that I never thought about. And in these conversations that students have, it opens the door to other possibilities and that opens the door to other possibilities. And so they have this idea, and then it’s a question of how you sort the learning opportunities that people say you should have into this thing called a degree audit.

Scott Carlson: I think what Ned’s getting at, I think is important, which is he’s saying what you want to get the students to think about is think about the granularity of the world. Think about it in smaller bits. Because so much of what the institutions are trying to do is to slot the students into these bigger buckets and so they hear what the students says, I’m interested in sports, or I’m interested in media.

And they, they immediately think newspapers or athletics in some way, shape, or form, but they don’t think about like the depth of what could be there, what that actually leads to in all these different ways. And that’s in part the function of the institution because the institution is just trying to move the students along.

It’s easier for the institution as a large organization to categorize people. And we’re saying to students. Resist the categorization at some level. Try to think about your life in this more granular way and think about your interest in this more granular way. And that’s actually gonna open up opportunities and help you to see the various opportunities that are out there.

Keith Edwards: Could you talk a little bit about the hidden job market and how students can access.

Scott Carlson: Yeah, the hidden job market is huge. And we discover new things in it every day. Yeah. One of the thing that we bring up all the time in our talks is you might not know this, but there’s, there are consulting companies out there that work with.

Fashion companies that predict what next season’s colors are going to be with remarkable accuracy, which allows those companies to produce clothes in those colors. Pantone is one of the companies that does that. There, there are we talked to a student from the, from Central Michigan University who was in philosophy and she was interested in death.

And the world of death is huge. There’s all sorts of. Jobs that are related to death out there. You can work in palliative care, you can work in neuroscience to examine what happens to the brain during death. You can work in therapy even. Therapy that’s connected to hallucinogens and psychedelics.

At Johns Hopkins, they give people with terminal cancer, LSD or mushrooms to help them cope with the fact that they’re gonna die in time. There’s so many things that you can do with these jobs and allowing students to see that granularity of the world of work helps them to see the granularity of what’s offered in college and what relevance it has.

Ned Scott Laff: Or to see the granularity in the things they’re already doing. For instance, if you go to Comic-Con, right? You look at Comic-Con and it is this, it’s a, it’s actually a gas going there, right? But how many students look at it as we’re looking at a $500 billion grade show? And at this trade show, right here are all these opportunities and all of these opportunities are behind the black curtains.

So once you go behind the black curtains and start talking to people. All of a sudden you begin to see the possibilities in all of this stuff. I was at C two, E two in Chicago, and a gorn passed me. It’s a character from Star Trek and I had to go up to this person. Where did you get this costume?

It was just perfect. It was cost play, right? That individual pointed me in a direction and I started talking to somebody who’s making six figures in cost play.

Cost play does not come to a career development center. The hidden job market does not come to a kid, to a career development center, but.

You’re in Minneapolis. Tell me something. You can’t do.

Keith Edwards: Something I can’t do.

Ned Scott Laff: Yeah. Isn’t that a crazy question?

Keith Edwards: I don’t know

Ned Scott Laff: now. If you can imagine it, there’s somebody doing it. And all you need to do is use your favorite buddy Google to find out who’s doing it in Minneapolis. And then you connect with somebody and all these students will say.

Why would they wanna talk to me? And I tell them, because they’re all parents who are frustrated ’cause their kids don’t listen to ’em and they’ve got all this information to share is very true. And they’re more than willing to share it. Yeah. And all of a sudden that’s very true. Students begin to, and this is important for first generation low income kids, all of a sudden they start building out their cultural capital.

They start building out their social capital, they start creating networks. I had one student who was African American male loved hockey.

And here’s this, here’s an interview that this kid set up with the director of fan development for a professional hockey team, and all of a sudden is in an internship.

Who would think about fan development and hockey? And the best thing is. Got to go to all the home games free. Yeah. That’s a great perk.

Keith Edwards: Nice.

Ned Scott Laff: All of this is possible out there if we help students realize that crazy thing you’re thinking about. I’m giving you permission. It’s real.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Ned Scott Laff: And people are doing it. And let’s see how it connects. And once students begin to do the research, all sorts of other possibilities come up. The key part is they become agents, they create their opportunities, they create their preparation, and it just looks lucky when it happens if you’re standing on the outside.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Go ahead Scott. Then we move to our next question.

Scott Carlson: Two points I would make. One is the great thing about the hidden job market. What Ned just described with in relation to the Chicago Blackhawks is that what we talk about with the hidden job market is that it opens up possibilities for students because you’re identifying these hidden employers that don’t necessarily have a line of students at the door waiting, asking for an internship.

You have an investment employers. Yeah. Yeah. You have employers that, that are, would seek student help if they could get it, but they just don’t have the personnel to approach a career center. Or a university to get help. So in that sense, it opens up possibilities for students. I would say on the downside of this, something that, that I worry about, we talk a little bit about in some of our talks is that, given what’s happening right now with AI and with.

The Trump administration, cutting a lot of the federal grants, cutting a lot of federal funding for things like the NEH and so on. This does end up shrinking the hidden job market at some level. So if you have a less vital economy, that does affect the possibilities for students.

This’s just natural, but I think, this is just it’s an environment. It’s going to grow and shrink over time. You have to teach students how to adjust to what the environmental factors are.

Keith Edwards: I, it also seems it might be an environment where people maybe don’t get a job where someone else employs them, but they do their own thing and there’s greater, I think with all the tools and technology, there’s maybe greater capacity to do that sooner.

I, in reading some pieces in the Chronicle in reading the book and reading some of the other podcasts and webinars that the two of you have been on a lot of the conversations and we’ve talked about it, about the nature of higher education. What should institutions do? How do we change majors and minors and the course of study in the classroom?

Of course, we’re student affairs now, and so many of our folks are focused on life beyond the classroom. So what are the implications here that you would suggest for those of us who are focused on learning beyond the classroom? Ned let’s start with you. What’s the implications here for beyond the classroom?

Ned Scott Laff: It’s huge. It opens up the possibilities that are actually vital to a college and vital on both sides of the game. And this is interesting, this is where people in student affairs can actually help those faculty in the humanities who look, feel like my department is gonna go away, and so am I right?

There’s all these possibilities out there. So the implications are all of a sudden a student will find out, wow, I never realized that this English degree or this philosophy degree could fit into this other world. If I put together the pieces in a different way, somebody help me access people who are out there working in something like I’m in community affairs at a hospital.

And now all of a sudden I’m beginning to see why foreign language might be important as a major and how I could put different pieces around it. And all of a sudden I have this career in community health, which I would’ve never realized. And the student affairs side starts pushing this, and all of a sudden the students start going over to a department and Where did you get this information from?

Oh, those crazy people in Student affairs. And all of a sudden you start to build connections between the academic side and student affairs side. That could lead to a better, healthy, as Scott would say, a stronger academic ecology on campus that opens possibilities for students they would’ve never thought about.

Scott Carlson: Yeah, I think we have to start looking at the college as a holistic entity. I think what’s happening at a lot of colleges right now is you have in demand majors in certain departments, starting to suck the oxygen out of the room for the less in demand majors in departments.

And I think that does affect the biodiversity of the college campus overall. Somehow we need to get leaders of organizations to, not to have this sort of laissez-faire. We’ll let the market decide what, what’s gonna be offered at our college, but to be more thoughtful about how we integrate.

Different departments together. I was talking to someone from a Spanish department the other day who had talked about how at her particular college, they have nine faculty members and only 30 majors in that department. That’s unsustainable. But if on this particular campus, the international business program run by the business school, in that department, they want to offer Spanish to international business students, but they hire an adjunct who only teaches these business students just Spanish terms and or just business terms in Spanish. So how does that help the whole organization? How does that help the student become. More acclimated to the culture of Spain or Mexico or South American countries where he’s going to, he or she is going to do business.

If they’re just learning, the most instrumental kinds of things from that business program. I think we need to have a situation that combines. Business philosophy, communications, English literature to discover the things in these different disciplines that, that holds value for the student and allows the student to, to find his or her own shade on business that they want to pursue.

Keith Edwards: Yeah I think it’s such a great point because, in business, not only do you need to talk about finance and stocks in Spanish, but you also need to have dinner and ask about their family and how they’re doing and what art do they love and those kinds of things that any business person will tell you.

Those are such critical parts of business and connection and all of that. And so how do we, how are we integrating all of this together? And I love your point, Scott, about a holistic student experience. 20 years ago, learning reconsidered talked about. Students don’t have a classroom experience and an out of classroom experience.

They have a college experience. They’re in class thinking about who they hooked up with this weekend and whether it was a good idea or not. And they’re in the dining hall arguing about economic theory, right? They’re just having this holistic experience, right? And yet we’re still organized in kind of these bifurcated ways.

How do we get out of. Our own ways as we go,

Ned Scott Laff: and this is a way where student affairs hybridizes itself because student affairs plays a more critical role than they’re ever given credit for on college campuses. And they’re working with students. I was working in a living learning center, right?

When are the hours really that students work at? It’s 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM, right? Things happen in those moments and how we can help student affairs hook into this hacking college model all of a sudden. Changes how they help students rethink themselves within the college environment and discover things on the college campus that they’re not really getting.

From other places we like to talk about faculty advisors. What do most faculty know about what’s outside of academia?

Not many do. Student affairs can walk in and all of a sudden they’re presenting a much more integrated and a holistic sense of how the different pieces come in.

That changes the dynamic on campus. That impacts retention, that impacts things like DWF. It affects the number of students who are going on probation. It affects the health the entire campus.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Ned Scott Laff: And so these are things that, that any upper level administrator needs to be considering as they’re thinking through how hacking college can affect what’s going on their campus environment.

Keith Edwards: Thank you Ned, for that student affairs pep talk that really feels good to hear today. Thank you so much. We are running out of time. The podcast is called Student Affairs now and we always like to end with this question of what are you thinking troubling or pondering now? And also folks wanna connect with you where they can do that.

So Scott, what are you thinking troubling or pondering now?

Scott Carlson: Boy, really the future of higher education. And how sustainable it is. Just given the pressures. And I think these are, I think what’s happening to higher ed right now is both self-imposed, higher ed institutions have not attended to some of the things that the public cares about.

And it hasn’t messaged around it effectively. I think. The way that higher education attached itself to the career outcome in the 1980s. And that’s only grown since then. I think maybe made sense at the time, but has since been a big mistake. Because it’s simply just isn’t about, it isn’t about the career at some level, but it isn’t about the career.

At some level, we’re gonna change through life. And so I think if higher education institutions can. Recapture the notion that the college experience is this. It’s similar to what we would I talked to a professor the other day who said, we respect retreats for corporate organizations, or, for other sorts of pursuits in life, right?

Why can’t we respect the quote unquote four year retreat? For students in their late teens and early twenties, or even their early twenties, if they start college age, 21 or 22 as my son, he’ll still be going to college probably in his mid twenties. Why can’t we look at that as a kind of retreat?

My editor Dan Barrett talks about how this is the hardest time in life. And so if we can as a society, preserve a moment when students can. Or young people can separate themselves a little bit, go off into a world, think about themselves, think about their pathway, and then use that time to reflect on for the next, 40, 50, 60 years.

I think that’s a tremendous value to society. Unfortunately, we look at college as this math problem. Major plus skills equals lifetime job or lifetime employability. And that I think is not the purpose of education.

Purpose of education is to discover yourself and to figure out how we carry forth some of the traditions of who we are and what we are.

And that’s not tied to any particular employment outcome in my mind.

Keith Edwards: And a lot of Ben harm has been done in the world by very smart people who learned a lot of skills but didn’t learn how to apply it or the consequences or to think through that. So

Scott Carlson: that’s an that’s anti-intellectualism right there.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Scott Carlson: Is what we’re talking about. And we cover that in the liberal arts chapter in Hacking College.

Keith Edwards: Where can folks connect with you, Scott?

Scott Carlson: Oh, I’m active on LinkedIn. If you wanted to find me on Instagram, you could follow me at Scott Carl Sonics.

Or we also have a, we also have a hacking college Instagram page, but it’s, it’s not terribly, it’s not terribly active, but

Keith Edwards: Okay.

Scott Carlson: Come find me on LinkedIn. That’s not probably the best way to do it or find me at the Chronicle.

Keith Edwards: All right. We found Ned found you at the Chronicle and look what that led to. So who knows? Who knows. We might get a whole bunch of pitches over your email that you can navigate through, ned, what are you thinking troubling or pondering now and how can folks connect with you?

Ned Scott Laff: I’m looking at the dynamics that are taking place on college campuses and how these dynamics are playing out in our country as a whole. I keep thinking about when I started to get into this, I was looking at the relationship between Thomas Coon’s structure, scientific Revolution, and Perry’s Intellectual and Ethical Development in the college years.

One of the things that we’re, we have lost is our ability to talk with each other, and I think colleges can prove to be a ground. Where people, they don’t have to agree, but they can engage in productive civic discourse. So I’m guessing I’m the oldest person on this podcast. I remember those days when people would work across the aisle and they were bent on solving problems.

And so I think colleges can be this environment. Where regardless of what your philosophical, political, religious affiliations are, we can learn to work across these aisles in order to solve problems that are common to all of us. And I’m genuinely worried that with the decline with programs being cut, especially those programs that challenge us to think about these issues.

That we are somehow losing this. And I think we need, especially right now, I think we need to gain this back.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Terrific. Terrific. Thank you. Thank you both. This has been awesome and thought provoking and certainly helpful for me as the parent of that hypothetical 16-year-old. Thank you for your leadership in this space.

Thanks for your, all your work and for the book Hacking College.

Keith Edwards: We also wanna thank our sponsor, Evolve. Of Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership, we empower senior higher education leaders with the capacity to turn these very real challenges into possibilities and lead with and through them.

At Evolv, we help leaders develop the capacity to lead with clarity, confidence, courage, and compassion. We offer leadership coaching journeys for leadership teams and individual leaders. Design specifically for the leadership needs from directors to VPs and presidents. You can visit evolve institute.com to learn more.

As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. And we also wanna thank you, our community for joining us and being a part of this. These conversations, you can reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter.

You can also join us on Patreon, where we have lots of content there for free. There are paid levels, but there is also lots available there. For our free member and community, I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again to our fabulous guests today and to everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week.

Thank you.

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