Brian Rosenberg
You know, I think there is some evidence that the best way to create change is to start with a small, much, much, much smaller group. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the President, you know, maybe you get together a group, every college has a group of people who are smart, imagine that you’re really interested in change. Find those people on your campus and give them a problem to work. It may be a financial problem that may be a curricular problem. It may be the need to come up with with a new distinctive program. And metaphorically lock them in a room and say, work this problem. Come up with a really interesting idea. And then give them the opportunity to test it.

Keith Edwards
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW, I’m your host Keith Edwards. Today I’m joined by Brian Rosenberg was president emeritus of Macalester College and visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also serves as Senior Advisor to the African Leadership University. He’s a regular provocative thinker writing in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Inside Higher Ed, and he has a new book titled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, Resistance to Change in Higher Education. I’m so excited to Brian for being here, and I’m really excited about this conversation. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us work in 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 our archives. It’s studentaffairsnow.com. Today’s episode is sponsored by Symplicity, a true partner Symplicity, supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he him his I’m a speaker, consultant and coach. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I am not broadcasting from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota today. Today I am in Long Beach, California, and I am at the ancestral homelands of the nations. I’m so excited to Brian for being here. Let’s get to our conversation.

Brian Rosenberg
Well, first of all, Keith, thank you for having me. It’s great to see you again. And somehow you haven’t gotten any older. Even though I even though I continue to age, you just you just look the same.

Keith Edwards
You spent 17 years that aging except for the beard. So I thought I try the beard today. And you went without it. So yeah.

Brian Rosenberg
So So I left Macalester in the spring of 2028. My last semester was the first COVID semester. So I concluded my presidency by having to send everybody home in March of 2020. So it was a very strange end. And then I came to the Harvard Graduate School of Education as something called President in residents. And I’ve stuck around I found that I enjoyed the teaching a lot. I hadn’t really spent much time in a classroom for a long time. And once I started to do it, I I kind of got hooked on it again. And so I’ve been teaching part time since then. And also, as you mentioned, working with essentially a startup University in Africa, the African Leadership University, which was founded by a Macalester alum, Fred Slonaker. And that work has been absolutely fascinating. And it formed a lot of my thinking in the book, and I also am on the board of the Teagle Foundation. So I’m, I’m living the life I want to live. I’m doing the things that I enjoy doing. And I’m as busy as I want to be. So I have I have no complaints.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful with teaching and all of that you also also wrote this book, whatever it is, I’m against it. And as I have sort of shown it to different people, or recommended to different people or engaged with people, the response I get is with the title is, oh, my goodness, I love it. And they just lead in that is so great. And I think people are connecting with that title, with empathy, with frustration, with really relating to that, and I think people who are making change have heard that or felt maybe not heard it, because I don’t think people say it, but they communicate it in other ways. They feel that and also they’ve expressed that themselves. And so the title certainly is provocative. But you’re not a Twitter or an ex person, and you’re not someone who throws out pithy lines to get attention. You’re very thoughtful. So tell folks about where this whatever it is I’m against it really came from and how it understanding that can help us understand how you’re thinking about change in higher education. Right?

Brian Rosenberg
Well, for those who don’t know, the actual title itself is taken from a song that Groucho Marx sings in the Marx Brothers movie Horsefeathers. He plays a character called Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff. And he’s dressed up in a cap and gown. And he sings this song, and it always stuck in my head. And when I wrote the proposal for the book, that’s the title, I gave it thinking it was kind of a joke, that the press would never actually stick with that title. And I have to give a lot of credit to the people at Harvard education press, when when it came time to deciding on a final title, they went with it. And so I’m grateful they did, because a lot of people find the title provocative. What led me to write the book was the ability really, for the first time in decades, to step back from my career in higher education. I started as a faculty member, I was a faculty member for 15 years, I was a dean for five years, I was a college president for 17. And as you know, because you you’ve been in the trenches, on college campuses, when you engaged in that work, you don’t have that much time to step back and be reflective. Everyday, you’re just doing the work. And so whether it was being a teacher or being an administrator, I was just doing the work. And there’s just not that much time to step back and think about what that work means, what you like about it, and ways in which it can improve. And so now I have, I have the gift of being able to step back. And two things in particular, I think, spurred me to think in in terms of this book, one is the teaching, I teach higher education. Now I teach mostly young professionals in higher education. And if I’m going to teach about this world, I felt as if I needed to take careful and honest look at it, I owed my students that most of these young students are people who want to make change in the world. And they love higher education, but they also want to improve higher education. And so teaching was one of the things that spurred me to reflect on this world that I’ve lived in. And the other is having the opportunity to work outside of the US and work in a system where the constraints are very different. The opportunities are very different, the needs are very different. And it made me realize that the way we do things in the US is not the only way to do things. Right. And there might in fact, way be some better, more efficient, more equitable ways to do things. So I think it was the combination of the teaching, and working with with a university in Africa. That pushed me into a series of reflections that ultimately led to the book. Yeah.

Brian Rosenberg
When in this Groucho Marx is playing this professor who’s just pontificating, whatever it is, I’m against it. Even if you change your mind, even if you I’m against it, I’m against it. I’m against it. And I love that because I think folks who I talked to are thinking very presently about in this moment, and this moment of innovation and change and things shifting and enrollment cliffs and COVID and online and AI and change that so many people are really digging in against that. But this is actually decades old satire about higher education, or sort of bringing all that together.

Brian Rosenberg
Yeah, it’s what’s what’s remarkable is that almost a century ago, higher education was being parodied for its resistance to change. And here we are, almost a century later. And as you say, the world has changed in almost indescribable ways. And yet, the truth is that a student who walked into a classroom when horse feathers was filmed in the 1930s. If that student was suddenly transported to the year 2023 And walked into a classroom, it wouldn’t seem all that unfamiliar.

Keith Edwards
Maybe around them completely different world

Brian Rosenberg
totally different, but you’d still probably walk into a room with a professor up in front of the room, and you might listen to a lecture. The technology would be different but Fundamental model of walking into a place and having a an expert in the front of the room, delivering knowledge to you is still the dominant model in American and European universities. And it was the dominant model in 1930. And it was a dominant model in 1830. And in many ways, it was the dominant model when medieval universities were established a millennium ago. So despite all of those changes, despite the fact that, you know, I probably have more information on my phone, and the Harvard Library had 50 years ago, right, the university model has not, has not dramatically changed, arguably, I think change less than any other major industry that exists in in certainly in the United States. And that’s one of the things that led me to think about the topic of this book. How could that be the case? Right, you know, I have it every every university, every college that I know of, has in its mission statement, some version of the word transformation. Certainly Macalester does. Transformation, transformative, we want to change our students lives, we want to change the way they think. And we want to change the world. And faculty members in their disciplines are always trying to push the boundaries and change. Paradigms change theories change the way things are looked at. So how could all of these people who are so focused on change, come together and create an industry that is so change averse? So? That’s the question I started with. And, you know, the immediate conclusion I came to was that it’s, it’s not sufficient to just blame it on individuals. You know, faculty love to point to administrators, administrators love to point the faculty, everybody outside, higher education loves the point to all of us. Yeah. But I genuinely don’t believe that higher education, education attracts people who don’t want to do a good job. So the early conclusion I came to, is that when a phenomenon is this widespread, it’s probably something that’s embedded in culture, and embedded in structures. And so I tried to look at the cultural and structural elements that have led higher education to be such a change resistant industry. And

Keith Edwards
it sounds like the African Leadership University helps you step out of some of that culture and out of those structures and see lack of structures or different structures, different ways of thinking, it just kind of called the question on some things that maybe you had assumed it just has to be this way, this is the way it is. And then you saw Oh, it doesn’t I guess now, did it? Did it sort of open up a whole Pandora’s box of possibilities?

Brian Rosenberg
And, and honestly, you know, I, I used to think, and I’m sure I am not alone. In thinking about this, I used to think if I had the opportunity to start a college university from scratch. To what extent would it resemble the existing colleges and universities? And to what extent would it be different. And essentially, that’s what ALU is, it was founded in 2015, and rolled its first students in 2016. So it’s less than a decade old. And there were no pre established rules. And there were a lot of pre established constraints. So as underserved as American students are by higher ed, things are dramatically worse in Africa. 9% of the students in Africa who graduated from high school go on to a college or university. And mostly that has to do with lack of lack of opportunity, there is an insufficient supply, and they’re too expensive. Most of the students who want to go to a college or university can afford to pay little to nothing. And even if you reach the middle class, maybe $2,000 a year. Africa is short about a million PhDs if you wanted to replicate an American model. And of course, the challenges with technology, electricity are overwhelming. So you have this enormous set of challenges. But the opportunity is, as I said, there are no rules. So you can look at the problem and say, Alright, what solution can we create to this problem? without anybody telling us you can’t do that? And so there are certain very obvious things you need to throw out the window. You cannot have a model that relies on lots and lots and lots of PhDs meeting with students in small classes. There aren’t enough It’s too expensive. You cannot build a model that relies on a giant expensive campus, you just you don’t have the money to do that. You cannot rely on a model that costs $70,000 a year, or $50,000 a year, or $30,000 a year. So when you throw out all of the requirements, and you bring in all the constraints, you come up with something that looks very different. And while it’s still very much a work in progress, it for me at least called into question and a lot of the things that for, essentially my entire career, I just took for granted as Givens, like well, you have a university, of course, you have to have lots of different departments. But do you really? Do you really need if you’re a small college to have 35 different majors, the academic calendar, the students really need to take four years, and they need to have three months in the summer and maybe a month in the winter, where they’re not going to school and faculty aren’t teaching? Do they really need to be in one place for three or four years? Or is there some way to combine being in a place with also accessing knowledge that is widely available on the internet? And so it caused me to question things that I had for essentially my entire academic career, which, if you count being a college student, goes back into the 1970s. It caused me to question things that I had never questioned before. And that’s, that’s good, right? We should, even if we don’t have the answers, we should ask the questions. Yeah.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, it’s a gift. I love the no rules, but lots of constraints. And now what do you do with that environment, a lot of challenges, a lot of problems to solve, but not very many limitations. In the book, you talk about some changes, that, what changes should be made, and also how to make changes, I want to kind of split the content and the process. So let’s give you a magic wand. If you could change US higher education in three or so ways, what would be some of those changes that you would wave?

Brian Rosenberg
How magic is my wand?

Keith Edwards
It’s very magical. It’s very

Brian Rosenberg
magical. So I don’t have to be I don’t have to be particularly realistic about what’s feasible.

Brian Rosenberg
No, let’s, let’s brainstorm. Let’s get out there. Let’s, let’s take some of those things that we take for granted and challenge them. Yeah. All right.

Brian Rosenberg
So so the first thing I would do is reconceived the center of the university, we hear again, and again and again. And I said this again, and again, again, myself, the faculty of the heart of the university, the faculty of the heart of the college, the faculty are critical, essential part of a college university. But the reality is, the students should be the heart of the College. The purpose of higher education is to educate students. And so I would try to reorient colleges and universities to put the student first. And so the question that I would ask is not what’s best for the faculty, what’s best for the staff, what’s best for the administration, what’s best for the student. And I would argue that a lot of the practices that are almost universal in American higher education are not best for the student. So I would cite the calendar as one. You know, think about the cost of higher education. And think about the fact that one of the simplest ways to reduce that cost is to reduce the time to degree. And, you know, the calendar that we’ll use it ALU, for instance, has the equivalent of three semesters a year with a three week gap in between each one. So students get to get their 120 credit bachelor’s degree in three years. And it saves a year of tuition, and to say, as a year of opportunity cost. And so if I could make wave a magic wand, I would say why does it have to be four years? And once we know why, because there’s a research component. And if we tried to shorten the time to degree, we get all kinds of pushback from all kinds of people. But the reality is, it’s done that way. In many parts of the world. It’s doable, and it would reduce costs. I would do away with the extraordinary fragmentation that exists on American college and university campuses. So even at a small college 2000 student college like Macalester as you know, we have well over 30 academic departments and And we had probably as many if not more administrative departments. And that adds the cost and it doesn’t help students. So I would dramatically reorganize the way these institutions are run to try to create more, fewer silos, more synergy and more ease for

Keith Edwards
students, and more interdisciplinarity.

Brian Rosenberg
Absolutely. So, you know, there’s this ongoing tension between, you know, the extent to which college is preparation for the workforce employment. And college is meant to educate you in some other way to be a particular kind of human being. Those two things don’t have to be incompatible with one another. But I think we really have to ask the question is the academic structure that we have right now, preparing students for the right way to move into the world they need to inhabit? And I’m not just talking about making money? Is it preparing them to deal with problems like climate change, or racial inequality, or urbanization, a whole range of problems. And why not build an education around what students need to know need to learn in order to address these problems, if you’re going to go into the world and try to deal with climate change, you probably need to know something about science, something about economics, something about sociology, something about a whole range of fields. And we’ve dipped our toe into the water in higher education when it comes to interdisciplinarity. You know, at Macalester, we created a range of what we call concentrations, which were interdisciplinary and really interesting. Areas like global and community health, food, agriculture and society, human rights and humanitarian ism. But they’re add ons. They’re not the center of a student’s education, the center of a student’s education is still a major. So they still have to major in English, or history, or biology, or sociology, or mathematics. And I would like to see us open up the possibilities a little bit more at NAU, and I’m sorry, I keep referring to Aliu. But it’s an interesting touch point. For me, students don’t choose a major, they choose a mission. So when a student starts, when a student starts their education, they look, there’s a list of 14 Grand Challenges and Opportunities for the African continent. That include things like urbanization, the 15, fastest growing cities in the world are all in Africa. Agriculture, women’s empowerment, and gender equity, the arts, you know, all these things that are both challenges for African opportunities. And what you are asked to do is to design a mission that addresses one of those challenges or opportunities, because that’s what you’re, that’s the world, that’s the life you’re going to have to live. And so build an academic program that prepares you for that. And so there aren’t 35 different majors, students, students major in either entrepreneurial leadership, there’s also a major in in software design, because there’s such a need in Africa, and it’s such a job opportunity. But they build the education around their passion and around the problems and opportunities that they’re going to be confronted with when they leave. It’s not the only way to do it. But the the interesting thing for the interesting question for me is, why do all American colleges and universities do it the same way? Majors aren’t necessarily the worst way to organize an education. But they’re not the only way. Yeah, and yet at 1000s of American Colleges and Universities, we all do it the same. Yeah. And so why isn’t someone trying to do it in a different way? multiple different ways to see if those work so I would, I wouldn’t not start with majors, I would start with organizing the curriculum in different ways. I

Keith Edwards
just love that I it’s, it’s a great example of I would have never have thought about that. That would never be a possibility on the menu. And now that I hear it, I’m just so energized by just even discerning what is the mission I want to pursue is incredibly powerful just by itself. You got to learn something to just explore and figure out mostly about yourself about where you want to explore and then once you’ve chosen that, getting into it sounds a lot like you know what’s your what Is your life purpose but a little less pressure? Maybe your mission?

Brian Rosenberg
And and obviously, when you’re 18 or 19 years old, you don’t always know what your life’s mission is. But in some ways, that doesn’t matter, right? Because what’s your wish? Something

Keith Edwards
changes later?

Brian Rosenberg
What you’re learning to do? is pursuing mission? What do I need to know? What skills do I need to have? What knowledge? What personal characteristics do I need to have in order to pursue a mission? And your mission might change, but the things you learn in pursuing that will stay with you for the rest of your life?

Brian Rosenberg
It also starts with a question rather than an answer. Right? It’s sort of like, what’s the problem? What do we want to figure out? What are we curious about? Rather than I want to be a chemist, who knows that exactly.

Brian Rosenberg
And the reality is, most students who major in chemistry, are not going to be chemists. And so we’re still, most college majors are still designed, as if faculty members are educating students to be college professors. And they’re not. They’re educating students to be different things. So we really have to ask is the curriculum aligned with what we are trying to prepare students to do and to be, and I would argue that there right now is a misalignment. And because we haven’t, within higher education, been willing to confront that ourselves, we have all kinds of people from outside higher education, who are criticizing us and pressuring us to change often in ways that are not very wise and not very productive. And when you don’t change yourself, inevitably, what’s going to happen is people from outside are going to try to pressure you to change.

Keith Edwards
I’ve just been in conversations with a lot of student affairs leaders. And how I’ve been framing it is that a world of higher education is is really complex. I’ve been using VUCA, this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous with all of the things coming at us. And we’ve touched on a few of them, enrollment CLIs, pressure from legislature, tuition, student basic needs all of these things. And because of that complexity, the opportunity for change is something the status quo has never been as endangered as it is now, because of all of these challenges, right? And seeing people really energized to do something different to better serve students to better take care of staff so they can better serve students. And so hearing people so energized, innovate and create. And as you note, change is hard. So let’s move from the content of change to the process of change. What would be your advice to campus leaders who don’t have that magic one you just got but who wants to be innovative and creative and help these institutions better serve students and society in a sustainable way? What sort of process thoughts would you offer? Yeah,

Brian Rosenberg
and first of all, you know, I think it’s important to approach these questions from a position of humility. And so I am the first to admit, and I acknowledged it in the book, that I don’t think I was particularly successful as a college president and pushing for a lot of the changes that I’m talking about. And there are a number of reasons for that, you know, when you’re the in some ways, the more secure the institution, the harder it is to change. Because change is hard. And people need extrinsic incentives. And if people feel secure, they’re less likely to do the hard work of change. And you know, as you know, Macalester is fortunate enough to be a certainly not an institution that’s immune to pressure. But that is that is relative to most colleges and universities and secure one. But I don’t so the advice I’m giving is not based upon a long record of success, but it’s, it is based upon trying to do a lot of thinking, Yeah, you

Brian Rosenberg
really bring both humility and a little bit of critical self reflection, you know, looking back, this is what I did, and I wish I would have thought about it this way. And, and that’s why I’m able to think,

Brian Rosenberg
here’s where it gets, I think, controversial for some people. I think the system of shared governance that exists within higher education was designed to enable very slow, very incremental change. It was designed to prevent dramatic change. And for for some of the history of Higher education that was okay. You know, I think it’s led to the long term sustainability of a lot of a lot of these institutions, a lot of the oldest institutions in the world are colleges and universities because they haven’t changed like this with the latest whim or fashion or idea. So if you want a system that prevents dramatic change, shared governance is great. Because you have to pass everything through the the sifter of community reaction, thinking about a typical college strategic plan. And how many people want to be in are engaged in that process. Faculty, staff, students, alumni, parents, trustees, people in the community. And by the time you get through with that sifting process, you’ve probably sifted out all of the the more radical and transformational ideas in the quest to come up with something that is the least objectionable to the largest number of people, which is not a recipe for transformational change. So you know, I say in the book, and I really do believe that broad consensus like that is the enemy of innovation. I don’t know how many great ideas have you ever emerged from a committee, but I don’t think the numbers are very high. And again, this is where I get a lot of pushback from, from people in higher education, who are so deeply committed to the idea of shared governance, and I get it, there’s something profoundly attractive about the idea that everybody participates. One of the things by the way that many people don’t understand about shared governance, as it’s traditionally conceived, that it’s that and you know, this, you’ve been on a college campus,

Keith Edwards
you’re sure I repeated what you’re about to say many times. So go ahead. It’s

Brian Rosenberg
not really it’s not really shared. Right. If you go back to the original, a up statement on shared governance, which was written in 1966, I believe, and identifies three, three parties, the Board of Trustees, the President and the faculty doesn’t say anything about students, in fact that specifically says in that document, that students are not in a position to make governance decisions about the institution says zero about staff. It says zero about any other administrative function doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of non tenure track faculty. And so when people talk about shared governance means lots of different things to lots of different people. But the reality is on most college campuses, it’s not really shared. The power differential between faculty and staff is enormous. The power differential between tenured and tenure track faculty and NTT faculty is enormous. And so, you know, to talk about it as truly shared, is, I think, something of a distortion about the way decisions actually are made on most college campuses. And for 17 years at Macalester one of the most frequent concerns I heard from staff where was our voice isn’t really listened to. And they had a point, they had a point. If you look at the Faculty Handbook, it has all kinds of rules about the things that the faculty gets to decide. If you look at the staff handbook, it’s essentially an employment handbook. So we shouldn’t kid ourselves about how shared governance is actually working on college campuses. There are some groups with power, there are some groups without my argument would be that if you really want to change things, and this would be my advice to two college leaders who feel like they really do. Don’t start with a committee of the whole. You know, I think there is some evidence that the best way to create change is to start with a small, much, much, much smaller group. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the President, you know, maybe you get together a group, every college has a group of people who are smart, imagine that you’re really interested in change. Find those people on your campus and give them a problem to work. It may be a financial problem that may be a curricular problem. It may be the need to come up with with a new distinctive program. And metaphorically lock them in a room and say, work this problem. Come up with a really interesting idea. And then give them the opportunity to test it. Small, small scale, experiment with it. Maybe you create it as a as not a required program, but an optional program. Go and give them a little bit of funding and and see what works and see what doesn’t work. And only after an idea has been created and tested, do you begin to widen the circle. I mean, sooner or later on every college campus, you do have to widen that circle, because we just don’t, it’s we’re not living in a world where five or six people can make a decision for an entire campus and have it stick. But five or six people can come up with some great ideas and test them. And so, you know, one position that almost no college has that probably colleges should have is something like a vice president for innovation or director for innovation, whose job is not to just do business as usual. But to think about the new thing, the different thing, the next thing. So sometimes this is this is known, I talked about this in the book as being an Ambidextrous Organization. You know, on one hand, the larger hand, you’re doing business, as usual, people are doing their jobs. But this other hand in which you’re trying new stuff, and that one is smaller and quieter. And it allows new things to gestate. And maybe one or two of those things will actually grow and stick to that by the time you come to the larger community. You don’t just have an idea you actually have evidence, right? Look, students who participated in this program graduated at a higher rate. Or students who participated in this program had a much higher satisfaction level, or this program attracted a much more diverse group of students that our other programs did. They’re all kinds of, or this really resonated in the market. And a lot of students who came in so they came in because we did this, right. It’s one thing going with an idea to another haven’t gone with evidence. Yeah. And so I’ve

Keith Edwards
designed thinking or human centered design where we problem we understand it, we try something we pilot we test it, we learn, we change it we we realize that sounded good when we metaphorically got locked in the room. But in reality, this part was a disaster. And now we’ve not only do we have evidence, but we’ve also learned fixed cleaned up modified. Now, we want a lot of people’s input on this as we go forward. And that’s the way you know,

Brian Rosenberg
that’s the way in any area, the best startups tend to work, you know, you don’t start big. You start small and you test and you revise and you course correct. And, you know, one of the one of the challenges of higher education is that there’s resistance to looking at other industries for guideposts and best practices. And particularly if anything comes from what would be called the corporate world. And so, you know, there’s a lot of really interesting design thinking that goes on, in worlds outside higher education, but higher education has not been very quick to adopt some of the lessons of design thinking if you just use the word corporate, for a lot of people, it immediately just negates the possibility that the idea can be good. So there is evidence out there there are people who thought carefully about how to enact change in change resistant organizations. You know, the the other the other possibility, and this is one that I liked much less is, you know, the old Clayton Christensen theory which is is going to be disrupted from without, you know, decades ago, Clayton Christensen was arguing that it’s almost impossible to disrupt a legacy organization from within. And so what you tend to see is that they get disrupted from without, so IBM gets disrupted by Apple from without, and it kind of doesn’t see it coming. And then all of a sudden that comes. And it is true that that’s happened in a lot of industries. And he predicted it would happen in higher ed at one point, he predicted that within 10 years, half the colleges in the US would close. And it was one of those famously wrong predictions. I think what he underestimated was the stickiness of higher education as a part of our culture. Going into college is not like buying a car or a computer and, and the social rite of passage of going to college, even if it costs a lot, and even if even if it’s challenging Israel really important to people and to their families. And so it’s not quite as disruptive as some other industries. But we’re beginning to see some The evidence that maybe Christiansen was not so much wrong as premature. And that, in fact, there are forces from outside that that could disrupt the traditional higher education industry, some of the large online providers like Southern New Hampshire, or Western Governors have gotten enormous. And there are more students studying online right now than there have been before. And, you know, we’re seeing mostly outside the US a lot of private money going into funding educational institutions, it’s certainly happening in Africa, be private equity, money is flooding into Africa, because they see an opportunity to make money by providing what is mostly a very, very, very, very poor education, to people who really need an education. So my fear is that if higher education doesn’t take the right steps to fix and improve itself, people with what I would consider in many cases, the wrong motives will come in from outside and disrupted for us, we’re already seeing that happen politically. When I look at what’s happening in in a lot of states, where legislators are essentially stepping in and saying, you can’t teach this, you must teach that you’re not doing sufficient post tenure review. So we’re going to force it upon you or we’re going to get rid of tenure. That’s the last thing we want. Right? You know that that is a cure that is worse than the problem. And I also think the last thing, we want a for profit actors coming into a sector that is supposed to be essentially for the social good. You know, just look at what’s happening right now in health care. I also just finished a 10 year term on a nonprofit health care board. And that is another essential industry that is in really challenging shape and is being I would say cannibalized by for profit actors, who are who are essentially taking all of the people who can afford to pay for health care and health insurance, and then leaving the nonprofit sector to care for all the people who can’t, which is not a financially viable model, right, not sustainable. And they went after healthcare first, because it’s a much bigger industry, it’s a much bigger part of GDP than higher education is. But higher education is still a multibillion dollar industry. And so, I feel like sooner or later, if higher education doesn’t start to do a better job that they’re going to, they’re going to start to move into into our world. And we shouldn’t be deceived by the fact that the first generation of for profits were really generally pretty bad. People learn and it wouldn’t be surprising if the next generation of for profits, learned some of the lessons and from the first generation and started doing some things that really did affect the nonprofit, higher education industry in more profound ways. So my preference is that it happens from within. Yeah. But if it doesn’t happen from within, I do worry about it happening from without,

Keith Edwards
right, you know, challenging the reality of shared governance, some design thinking, some innovation, some trying some things and then getting inclusive, and then you’re sort of ending with this. You’re reminding me of a great quote from Shawshank Redemption and get busy living or get busy dying, like if we don’t disrupt if we don’t innovate, if we don’t change if we don’t figure this out. It’s going to happen from the outside with folks who maybe have other motivations or less context less understanding of what’s going

Brian Rosenberg
on. And I don’t you know, what, what is so striking to me is that the, if you put aside everything else that I’ve said about curriculum, pedagogy calendar, put it all aside. The simple fact remains that for 95% of the colleges and universities in the United States, the current financial trajectory is not sustainable long term. The average discount rate right now at private colleges in the United States is 56%. When you and I started at Macalester, it was probably in the low 40s. So not very much time, that this cat rate is increased rapidly and during the last few years, it’s been going up to Up to three percentage points a year. Which means that right now, private, higher education in America is essentially on sale for more than half off. And you can’t keep marking down your service at a higher and higher level, sooner or later, you get to a 100% mark down, and you’re giving it away for free. And so that cost curve has to be bent, it can’t keep going like this. Because what colleges are doing to attract students is just marking it down. And you combine that with, with what you referred to earlier, the the demographics, you know, we know, we don’t have to be a demographer to know that, starting in the middle of this decade, is a cliff. And the number of high school graduates is going to decline by about 15%. And it’s going to hit hardest in the Northeast and the Midwest, the areas of the country where the student populations are the least diverse. And so you take the unsustainable financial model and the problematic demographics. And you have the definition of something that needs to change. And so even if you think the educational model is perfect, the simple fact is that it is too expensive and not scalable and not sustainable. It’s great for the students, the small percentage of students who get into a highly selective, great. And as we both know, a disproportionate number of those students are wealthy and white. And a disproportionate number of students who don’t get in are not wealthy and non white. Right. And so you get into McAllister, or you get into Harvard, or you get into Kobe, you’re you’re in good shape. Not to say that those places couldn’t be improved, right. But I could see you sitting in one of those institutions as a student or a faculty member and saying what’s wrong? Yeah, this is great. I love my professors, I love my classes, I love my residence halls, I love the the club sports, I love the I never loved the food in the dining hall, or the parking food. Right, even though they have, you know, six different dining stations and all kinds of options. But I could see how from that vantage point, things would look pretty good.

Keith Edwards
But it’s different. When you look at 4000 institutions, there are 4000 institutions

Brian Rosenberg
and you know, 3920 of them are not in that position. And a good percentage of them are in a very dire situation. And so, you know, that is, if you accept nothing else that I say you have to accept the reality of the fact that the financial model cannot go on exactly as it is right now. Change

Keith Edwards
is needed. Well, we are just about out of time. And this podcast is called Student Affairs NOW. So thanks for being a part of it. We always like to end with what are you thinking troubling, or pondering now and if you want to share where folks can connect with you feel free to do so. So what’s what’s sort of on your mind these days?

Brian Rosenberg
I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that, that what’s top of mind for me right now is figuring out how colleges and if colleges, and when colleges should respond to things like what’s going on in Israel and Palestine. You know, one of the things that I’ve wrestled with my whole career as a as a, as an educational leader is, what role do we play? And what role should we play in speaking to social and political issues. And this is as vast a moment as I’ve seen in my career. Imagine being the new clothing, gay, that brand new president of Harvard and stepping into what she stepped into. And so I think about that I worry about students, I worry about their, their, their mental and emotional health, I worry about their physical safety. There’s some awful things that are being done to students at Harvard, that are unconscionable in terms of trying to shame them. And it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s tough and to figure out what to do as a leader, one of these institutions, it’s, in many ways, the ultimate lose lose situation. But you don’t feel like you can do nothing. So that I’m thinking about that a lot. And I’m actually going to be teaching a class on ethical questions in higher education. And it’s one of the things that I want to talk about what role do college leaders have, if any, in dealing with these issues? So that’s what’s on my mind right now. I’m easy to reach. My Harvard email address is brian_rosenberg@gsc.harvard.edu. And I am not a social media guy, but I am on LinkedIn. And so you can find you can find me on LinkedIn.

Keith Edwards
Yes, yes. As you As folks know, Brian is not at his best at 140 pithy characters at a time. So the thoughtfulness and the threads and the connections is great there. So thank you, Brian, this has been terrific. I really appreciate the book, your work, your leadership, your innovative thinking, and your courage and sharing some of that including not just what the sector should do, but some of the things you wish you would have done differently. And now that you know, you’re looking back on so really appreciate it.

Brian Rosenberg
My pleasure. And great to reconnect, Keith and thanks for having me. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
thank you. And thanks also to our sponsor of today’s episode Symplicity. Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals. A true partner to the institution Symplicity supports all aspects of student life, including but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and well being student success and accessibility services. To learn more, visit symplicity.com or connect with them on social media. Huge shout out to our producer Nat Ambrosey who does all of the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. And thanks to our community for all your support and connecting to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter. I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks to our fabulous guest today, Brian Rosenberg, and to everyone who’s watching and listening. Make it a great week. Thank you all.

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