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- Listeners, historically, town and gown was a phrase to refer to the complex relationship between the university and the surrounding community.
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It also highlighted the interdependence between the two.
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But as the concept has evolved over time, do our higher education institutions still hold obligations to others beyond tuition paying students?
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I'm Dr. Cristi Ford, along with my guest, Dr. Matthew Rascoff, vice provost for digital education at Stanford.
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And we're diving into how that belief is being upheld and maybe even strengthened.
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- [Announcer] Welcome to "Teach & Learn," a podcast for curious educators brought to you D2L.
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- Each week, we'll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K to 20 space.
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Sharpen your pencils.
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Class is about to begin.
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So, good to have you here today, Matthew.
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- Thank you so much for having me, Cristi.
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What a pleasure.
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- Absolutely.
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I really am excited about the conversation today.
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We're gonna really spend some time discussing pathways quite a bit in this episode.
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And so before we delve in and learn a lot more about what you're doing and your institution is doing, can you just provide a little bit more context by what you mean when you use this term so all the listeners are on the same page?
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- Sure, we use pathways to describe the process that students experience, but institutions and educational providers don't always think about, and it's the way we move through our lives educationally.
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And so, you know, if you're a student and you're going from high school to college, that feels like an enormous canyon that you need to cross.
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And, you know, on one level, it's kind of the logic that we've defined for our system, but on another level, there's so much friction in it.
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And, you know, what we mean when we say pathways is kind of redesigning the system in a more learner-centered way to take their perspective into account.
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So, if you're in a kind of supply side, provider-centered mindset, yeah, like, that's their system, higher ed, this is our system, and any gaps in between, that's kind of your job to figure out.
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But the way we think about it is more how a learner might, which is to say, like, this is all my education.
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And it's just kind of an artifice to say K-12 is one system and higher ed is another.
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Why did we decide that?
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That's kind of a historical artifact.
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The way people experience education is as a pathway I think.
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It's as a journey.
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And I think we, as designers of learning experiences, would do well to take that perspective more fully into account.
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- I love this approach because oftentimes, as you know, sometimes we have this chasm that we talk about exists between K-12 and higher ed.
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But if we're taking the learner's perspective of a pathway, it really makes the onus upon us as institutional providers, institutions, K-12 providers, to really break down those barriers.
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- Exactly.
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- And I love the fact that you're using the word pathways, because we know that institutional sometimes mandates may think about one direct pathway, where, in essence, there are a lot of different ways that our students come to our campuses.
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And so you wrote a piece where you discuss these pathways and how this obligation extends, like, just beyond Stanford, but to all private universities.
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And the piece, if I remember correctly, was entitled,"Private universities have public obligations," and listeners, we'll link to this piece in our notes.
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But when you talk about this piece that you wrote, what's your argument in a nutshell and what compelled you to write it?
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- Thank you.
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I mean, part of the argument I think is particular to Stanford where I work and part of it is about the private higher education sector and I think part of it is about the broader higher education sector.
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And the idea is that we are, let me start with Stanford.
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You know, we were founded as an institution that was dedicated to educating the sons and daughters of California.
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Part of what makes this place distinctive is that it was co-ed at the beginning.
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We had free tuition at the beginning of Stanford.
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For the first few decades as an institution, it was free tuition.
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And the founding grant of the university that was put in place when we were established says that we have to take into account the public good and that we should be dedicated not just to the interest of our own community, to our own students and faculty, but to the broader public as well.
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I think that's a very powerful idea.
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Not every institution has that history, but we do.
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And I think, you know, as we look to the future, it's valuable to draw on the past.
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And so it's important to understand institutional DNA and the roots as we try to design for growth that is organic, that is not artificial, that will be biologically accepted, not biologically rejected by the organ, you know, by the body.
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And I think that's, drawing on history is one of my frameworks for thinking about innovation that is rooted, that does not feel that it's implanted, that does not feel like it's being imposed.
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So, yeah, that's kind of the Stanford perspective.
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The broader higher education perspective, I would say, is that our sector, whether you're in a private university or a public university, is subsidized by the public, you know, and if you are at a private institution, you're not paying taxes, you know, much of the funding comes from federal agencies, everybody chips in for that.
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Every taxpayer in our country chips in for that.
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And I think it's not enough to say that we contribute to the commons, to the public good, through the research enterprise.
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That's fine.
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That's kind of a common answer to that.
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It's absolutely true.
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I think that's necessary, but not sufficient.
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And I think on the educational side of what we do, we also have an obligation to contribute to the public.
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And the selectivity of institutions, we're not designed for that.
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Nobody really wanted that.
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And I think we need to find ways to redesign and to circumvent some of the bottlenecks that we've imposed in the admissions process to provide more educational public goods.
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- I really love this conversation because too often we talk about public versus private, and there is this sense that sometimes, this matter around elitism and not focusing on the common good.
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So, I appreciate your focus and feedback specific to Stanford, but then talking about the ecosystem as a whole, that we all collectively have this responsibility.
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And hearing about Stanford's DNA around educational access, I really was reminded of the co-ed piece.
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I just hadn't remembered that piece of this conversation.
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And so as we think about the concessions that Stanford made in its history, I think one of the things that I remember from the conversations in looking at some of the historical data is Jane Stanford's solution was to allow learners to take classes without even becoming Stanford students.
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- Exactly.
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- And so, you know, that was one way the institution could maintain its admission standards and support the mission.
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- Exactly.
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- And so I guess I wanna talk to you more a little about, more about online and, given your experiences, how do you see this modality helping to support these various college pathways that you've talked about?
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- So, when I started here in the fall of 2021, I launched a new team called Stanford Digital Education.
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And we are in the central administration reporting to the provost, and we do mission-driven digital learning at Stanford.
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And so we are the central office that coordinates the efforts across the schools, but we have a mandate to rethink the goal and to position learning opportunities for those who've been historically underserved by higher education.
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And the way we've thought about that is to build this program that's focused on low-income high schools across the country.
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We use this criterion of Title 1.
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It's sort of a federal criterion that defines a free and reduced lunch percentage of 40% or more.
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And we built a model that actually taps in to that provisional student category that you described and reimagines it as an opportunity for non-admitted students to take courses from Stanford for credit through a hybrid model that is offered through a partnership with their local schools, a nonprofit called the National Education Equity Lab, which helps us run this Title school network, and Stanford faculty.
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And the model is that we bring together teaching fellows who are trained Stanford undergrads, grad students, and alums, faculty, and then local teachers in the school, and we offer this hybrid course experience that has combinations of face-to-face and online and has combinations of synchronous and asynchronous learning that gives students a fantastic college course, the chance to learn rigorous material that is, on the book, same learning outcome, same rigor as what we offer on campus, and to do it for credit that has both moral currency, psychological currency, and financial currency for them.
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And it's kind of a boost for them for their academic aspirations, for their growth mindset, and also for their social capital because it turns out, you know, those teaching fellows from Stanford are some of the best ambassadors of the university that we can send out into the world.
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They become near peer connectors.
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They themselves report that it's the most meaningful thing they've done at Stanford in the past year.
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Most of them say that.
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And so it's kind of a projection of Stanford knowledge, not just to the world generally, but specifically to low-income high schools, where we know from the data that the most talented students never even show up on the admissions radar of selective colleges.
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The majority of the most talented low-income students in the US never apply to any selective college.
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And that's research that was done here at Stanford.
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It's sometimes called undermatching.
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That's kind of a jargon term, but it's basically a gap in that system, between the K-12 and higher education system, that question that you asked me at the beginning.
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You know, this is one of the critical gaps, that low-income students are undercounseled, underadvised, and they're not told that if you applied to Stanford, you'd get in and you'd get full financial aid, and so they opt out of that system.
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And our message is we want those students to not just be identified, but we wanna cultivate that talent.
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We wanna give them opportunities to learn with us, to demonstrate their potential and to grow their potential.
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And so that's kind of the model that we've designed to reach upstream into that earlier system, to the precursors in junior and senior year of high school, and give opportunities in communities that have never had a model of dual enrollment from any selective college, let alone Stanford.
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- Man, I have so many questions for you.
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When you talk about mission-driven innovation, you think about the selectivity of an R1 or the selectivity of a private or an Ivy and this public good.
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As people are listening and thinking about maybe their own institutions, how do you create change management in a way or how do you create opportunities to help others prioritize this public good in the midst of everything else the university is working on?
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I guess that's just a question I'm thinking about as I'm seeing how you've done it so successfully at Stanford.
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- Yeah, it's a great question.
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And I think the answer is probably different at different institutions.
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So, I would hesitate to tell somebody, you know, to just use our model.
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I think the goal is to find kind of synergies between the private interests of the institution and the public good and to redefine those as a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum game.
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So, you know, when I say that our teaching fellows report that co-teaching in our program is the most meaningful thing they've done, that's me hunting for those opportunities for our own matriculated students to benefit and to learn.
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Our faculty love the program too.
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I now have a backlog of faculty who wanna work with us.
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So, I think enlightened self-interest is the framework.
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You know, it's not absolute altruism.
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Institutions, organizations, don't act out of altruism.
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Enlightened self-interest means that sometimes what is in the public interest, it's also in our interest if we understand that interest properly.
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Your job as an innovator is to go hunting for the right sources of that interest and the right partners, both outside and inside, and to be the enabler and the broker who uncovers those opportunities for creating shared value.
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- You know, as I think about this last year and a half as we've come out of the pandemic and many institutions are trying to redefine the value proposition of higher education, I think this example and case study really hits the heart of this opportunity to really be able to meet students where they are.
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And I think the term you used was finding undermatched students who really should be in our institutional settings.
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And so I wanna ask a little bit more about your partnership with, I think you said it's the National Education Equity Lab.
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Can you talk about the importance of that partnership with Stanford, you know, and how that partnership came to be?
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- Absolutely.
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So, I think doing partnerships is also a key innovation strategy.
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Just getting better at it and curating them and letting good organizations in and keeping the bad ones out.
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Like, that's a really important role for those of us who sit kind of on the margins of the institution, and, you know, can open the gates, not completely, but thoughtfully, to the right allies who share our goals.
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So, the National Education Equity Lab is a startup nonprofit organization led by a terrific education reformer, former Obama administration education official, her name is Leslie Cornfeld.
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And they help us, they bring these students to us.
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So, they help run the network of schools and they're recruiting Stanford and other great universities and we help them bring universities onto this network to create a kind of many-to-many, two-sided marketplace, you could think about it.
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It's not a market in the conventional sense.
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It's not a for-profit model.
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But there's kind of universities that wanna offer courses and high schools that want to receive them and offer them to their students and they're the intermediary that's helping to set this up.
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And they've been a great ally for us.
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And I think we, you know, in great institutions need to find more allies.
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We need more friends.
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We need to work better.
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- Yes, we do.
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- You know, with one another and also with the nonprofit, community-based organization sector, the civil society sector.
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And we have an important role in attaching our own credibility to models like this and saying, you know, "This is valid.
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This is worthwhile." And, you know, since we have joined, many other institutions, I just heard Vanderbilt last week signed an MOU with them, you know, they look to us and they say,"If Stanford's doing it, we can too." And I think that's another important innovation, you know, phenomenon.
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You can sort of use the isomorphism and some of the herd dynamics of higher education for better.
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You know, and that's kind of a, we look to peer institutions.
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So, that's just a reality.
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That can hurt or it can help.
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And use that for good, use that factor as a possibility for scale and for building a movement and for influencing our peers.
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- I love all of this.
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And before we move on, I just would love to hear a little bit about the cohorts that you've had so far.
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What do you know about the students that have come through your program?
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Do they end up in your pipeline?
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Like, how much information do you know and how are you measuring the impact?
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- So, that's a great question.
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We do track the impact and there's a study with Robert Balfanz, who's a professor at Johns Hopkins, who's longitudinally tracking what happens to these students.
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Seven of them are now undergraduates here at Stanford.
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Just this week, I actually got to see two of them, a freshman and a junior here, two women, fantastic students.
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One of them is from rural New Mexico reservation, a community that's never sent a student to Stanford since our founding in the 1891, since the, you know, reservation was established.
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She's the first, not just in her family, but her entire community to ever come here.
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And yeah, that was incredible.
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And the other one is from urban LA, South Central LA, and, you know, it's just, I mean, that's part of it, is bringing the students to Stanford, but undermatching is not gonna be solved by Stanford.
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Like, the research shows it's about 35,000 students per year who are in that category of the top 10 percentiles of grades and test scores who never apply to any selective college.
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You know, we only have 1,700 seats in our freshman class, so we can't do that on our own.
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So, that's why we're thinking in this kind of consortium, collective way.
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And so, you know, we've sent students to Columbia and Princeton, like, all the other great universities, and all the state flagships as well.
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You and I have some North Carolina connections.
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I previously worked at the University of North Carolina System.
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So, you know, I understand, you know, that's actually where you can really address the undermatching challenge because that's where most of the seats are.
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They're in state flagships.
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So, if you can raise a student's sights to go to a state flagship that they might not otherwise thought they could get into that would have financial aid for them, that's a win for us.
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We call that the assist.
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You know, we set you up.
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We don't have to score all the baskets.
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You know, we got seven baskets.
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That's wonderful, students coming here.
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But that's not commensurate with a challenge of 35,000 per year.
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We all need to play the game of assist.
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We all need to pass the ball.
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And if you play this like a team sport, I think you could actually chip away at that challenge of undermatching.
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The whole Ed Equity Lab network I think will have 15,000 students enrolled this academic year.
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So, that's starting to get into the right order of magnitude to address this challenge.
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Meanwhile, it's not just about that top 10 percentiles from me.
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We bring whole cohorts of students from a school.
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We don't do individual lone geniuses.
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I don't believe in that.
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What we ask schools to do is to send a whole class and a teacher that take the course together.
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And I think there's important metacognitive lessons in the team dynamic within the school, in the learning community that you can build, the supportive, collaborative opportunities to help one another, to tutor one another, to coach one another.
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So, so we're not looking for just individuals.
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We're looking for cohorts.
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And I think there's an important democratic educational role in investing in kind of building capacity for the teacher and for the school.
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Not just plucking individual geniuses out and sending them to a boarding school or, you know, bringing them to Stanford for the summer.
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There are many talent search programs that do that.
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And I don't believe in that at all.
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Like, what we wanna do is embed it in the school that lifts up a whole class together.
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- So, I love this because what I hear you talking about is really being able to resource communities and really being able to provide opportunities not just for the best and the brightest, but to lift all sails at the same time.
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- But who knows what the best and brightest even means?
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They're sophomores in high school.
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- That's right.
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- You know?
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And talent sometimes just is not recognized by-- And it takes a while sometimes.
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- Exactly.
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Some of it needs to be cultivated and supported, and if you don't believe you have it, you might not be showing up for your teacher.
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So, you know, we need to stay humble.
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I think standardized testing is a form of arrogance.
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It says like, "Oh, we can find a genius in the cradle.
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If you just had the right test, we would know in the womb who's gonna be the next..." Forget that.
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Geniuses are made, they're not born.
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- That's right.
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- And our role is not about geniuses necessarily.
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It's about communities.
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It's about building more collective models that create opportunity for everyone.
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Even as we are participating in this elective meritocratic system, it needs a counterbalance, it needs a democratic counterbalance.
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And that's what we're trying to do.
00:20:40.589 --> 00:20:51.299
And I think they're often intentioned, but part of what the magic of digital learning offers is that we can take a more abundant approach to learning.
00:20:51.299 --> 00:20:54.089
Doesn't have to be scarce the way it was in the past.
00:20:54.089 --> 00:21:06.930
There's opportunities to share and to democratize education without harming the highly selective undergraduate admissions or graduate admission system that prevails here and at our peer institutions.
00:21:06.930 --> 00:21:17.910
And, you know, the place is still doing just fine and we can still enroll thousands of non-matriculated students and offer them credit and it hasn't harmed anything.
00:21:17.910 --> 00:21:21.900
Quite the contrary, it has only benefited Stanford and its own community.
00:21:21.900 --> 00:21:56.700
- You know, as I listened to you talk about college pathways and dual enrollment and really investing in communities and the innovation work, I'd love to understand, you talked about the research happening at Johns Hopkins, the longitudinal research, if there are other research studies, and as you're looking around this landscape and thinking about these innovations, are there other ways that if people are not prepared or ready as an institution to be a provider of dual credit or have all the institutional pieces together, are there other ways that you see people are leaning in and really starting to think about this public good and really starting to raise up communities?
00:21:56.700 --> 00:21:58.109
- Absolutely.
00:21:58.109 --> 00:22:06.150
So, I look to organizations like Texas OnRamps as a model for how a state flagship can invest in pathways.
00:22:06.150 --> 00:22:12.869
It's a profound innovation that I think many state systems and state flagships could replicate.
00:22:12.869 --> 00:22:25.769
And in fact, I've learned recently that the University of Illinois is replicating that model and a statewide strategy with support from the American Talent Initiative, Aspen Institute.
00:22:25.769 --> 00:22:31.079
They just put out a release led by Lisa Anderson, who I'm proud to say is an alum of our team.
00:22:31.079 --> 00:22:34.259
She's the digital learning leader at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
00:22:34.259 --> 00:22:45.450
She's driving kinda a statewide model for working with teachers to support college pathways through college level coursework that's embedded in schools.
00:22:45.450 --> 00:22:48.992
So, you know, we have not perfected this approach.
00:22:49.829 --> 00:22:51.119
It's far from a monopoly.
00:22:51.119 --> 00:23:03.359
What we're trying to do is build networks of mission-driven educational improvement and change, and, you know, we're just at the beginning.
00:23:03.359 --> 00:23:06.000
There's so many different ways that you could approach this.
00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:25.230
I've learned more recently about college advising and counseling and there's all sorts of interesting innovations that are happening in that space using digital to connect undergraduates to high schoolers to build more effective relationship-based counseling.
00:23:25.230 --> 00:23:40.710
There's a nonprofit that has a chapter at Stanford called Matriculate that is led by students who are assigned to four high schoolers who have to meet a set of criteria, GPA and recommendation criteria.
00:23:40.710 --> 00:23:47.549
And then they get this intensive one-to-four ratio of near peer college counseling.
00:23:47.549 --> 00:23:48.383
They don't have that.
00:23:48.383 --> 00:23:54.119
Most schools, you know, have like one-to-400 ratios, not one-to-four ratios, for a professional counselor.
00:23:54.119 --> 00:24:05.130
Every college or university could have a chapter of Matriculate with a little bit of support that enables your students to kind of represent you and to support low-income college pathways.
00:24:05.130 --> 00:24:07.950
Doesn't require coursework.
00:24:07.950 --> 00:24:11.700
This is on the administrative side, not the academic side of college admissions.
00:24:11.700 --> 00:24:18.240
But, you know, taking on the FAFSA is no joke, if you've never, you know, approached it, if your parents didn't go to college.
00:24:18.240 --> 00:24:21.380
And people need a lot of help.
00:24:18.240 --> 00:24:21.380
- Even before the changes.
00:24:21.380 --> 00:24:23.039
Even before all of the changes.
00:24:23.039 --> 00:24:23.873
- Exactly.
00:24:23.873 --> 00:24:25.470
And, you know, exactly.
00:24:25.470 --> 00:24:36.029
We should simplify it for everybody, but it's still a process and if you're the first in your family to go to college, you need help and schools aren't always set up for that.
00:24:36.029 --> 00:24:40.890
So, that's a role that I see institutions playing.
00:24:40.890 --> 00:24:58.200
Enable your students to participate in programs like that and support it and join, you know, Matriculate has like a membership model for institutions to join in and we did that recently in collaboration with our admissions office and our Haas Center for Public Service and that's been fantastic.
00:24:58.200 --> 00:25:03.299
So, yeah, there's so many different approaches that I think are exciting.
00:25:03.299 --> 00:25:08.910
But to me, the key is point the innovators at these challenges.
00:25:08.910 --> 00:25:10.829
Focus on these audiences.
00:25:10.829 --> 00:25:20.730
And if you don't think about them, you know, if you think your job is just serving working professionals, you've missed the biggest opportunity for serving the underserved learners.
00:25:20.730 --> 00:25:25.380
It's fine to serve working professionals, but, you know, only a third of adults have a degree.
00:25:25.380 --> 00:25:29.536
So, if you're focusing on people who already have a degree, what about the rest of our society?
00:25:29.536 --> 00:25:31.853
- Good point.
00:25:29.536 --> 00:25:36.329
- And that to me is, that is a missing piece of most strategies, most digital learning strategies.
00:25:36.329 --> 00:25:50.250
- What do you say to folks who are turning away from looking at high school students as a main opportunity for enrollment because the numbers, you know, the enrollment numbers are dwindling in terms of the numbers of students who are graduating from high school and moving into higher ed?
00:25:50.250 --> 00:25:55.200
Like, how do we get people to change the narrative of those kinds of conversations?
00:25:55.200 --> 00:26:08.069
- Yeah, I mean, I'm sure your listeners know like the demographic research from Nathan Grawe and, you know, the Clearinghouse numbers this year that show that first-year enrollments are down.
00:26:08.069 --> 00:26:11.032
Although, I understand there's typically an adjustment a few months later.
00:26:11.032 --> 00:26:20.160
So, before, you know, worrying too much about a headline of 5% decline, like, we should wait a couple of months and see what the adjusted numbers are.
00:26:20.160 --> 00:26:38.490
But yeah, at the UNC system, when I was there, we focused on some college, no degree as the main online audience, you know, and we were building online undergraduate programs that were intended to serve those who had stopped out and supporting their pathways back to college.
00:26:38.490 --> 00:26:46.019
And I think that's, for online strategies in public universities, that makes a lot of sense.
00:26:46.019 --> 00:26:50.819
The some college, no degree population I think now exceeds 40 million.
00:26:50.819 --> 00:26:52.799
- It's huge, it's huge.
00:26:50.819 --> 00:26:56.279
- When I was there, you know, 10 years ago, it was in the 30 millions.
00:26:56.279 --> 00:26:57.660
I don't remember the exact numbers.
00:26:57.660 --> 00:27:01.799
So, that to me is, it's a critical challenge.
00:27:01.799 --> 00:27:05.279
There are great organizations that are helping with that too.
00:27:05.279 --> 00:27:10.980
There's one called ReUp, which helps institutions kind of re-enroll those who've stopped out.
00:27:10.980 --> 00:27:12.809
And there were many innovators in that space.
00:27:12.809 --> 00:27:20.759
Like, UNC Charlotte built a program that was focused on the city of Charlotte and, you know, it was an information campaign.
00:27:20.759 --> 00:27:27.299
It was around de-stigmatizing returning to college and kind of resetting your sights, like a second chances model.
00:27:27.299 --> 00:27:28.319
And I love that.
00:27:28.319 --> 00:27:35.160
So, yeah, I think online undergraduate programs, you know, historically have been oriented towards adult learners.
00:27:35.160 --> 00:27:41.069
The first-time student population actually also continues to grow online.
00:27:41.069 --> 00:27:42.509
Like, they also want online courses.
00:27:42.509 --> 00:27:44.940
So, it's not instead of at this point.
00:27:44.940 --> 00:27:56.099
But I think most elective institutions have focused on master's degrees, but there's now a lot more movement in bachelor's degrees for adults.
00:27:56.099 --> 00:28:00.359
Cornell University recently approved an online bachelor's program.
00:28:00.359 --> 00:28:02.400
The faculty approved it a couple of weeks ago.
00:28:02.400 --> 00:28:05.730
- Which is fantastic to hear.
00:28:02.400 --> 00:28:05.730
- That is a monument.
00:28:05.730 --> 00:28:07.349
It's a huge achievement.
00:28:07.349 --> 00:28:19.710
At the University of Pennsylvania in the School of Arts and Sciences, so, like the core liberal arts part of the University of Pennsylvania, they have an online bachelor's program that I believe enrolls one out of seven Penn undergrads.
00:28:19.710 --> 00:28:24.210
That is an immense achievement in the context of a highly selective institution.
00:28:24.210 --> 00:28:31.230
In the arts and sciences heart of the university, they built an online bachelor's success story that is for adults.
00:28:31.230 --> 00:28:35.835
So, you know, we need more examples like that.
00:28:35.835 --> 00:28:38.519
- We do.
00:28:35.835 --> 00:28:40.710
- And I so admire institutions that have moved in that direction.
00:28:40.710 --> 00:28:46.019
And, you know, like it or not, those places kind of like set a certain standard for the entire system.
00:28:46.019 --> 00:28:49.259
They give permission to the rest of the sector to act.
00:28:49.259 --> 00:28:52.529
When they act that way, they give permission to the rest of us to act.
00:28:52.529 --> 00:28:54.450
That is exciting.
00:28:54.450 --> 00:29:16.440
- I love when you said something to the phrase of, you know, using the headwinds for good, really thinking about some of the selective institutions that have the opportunity to really change the narrative of where higher education is going and change the narrative and stigma that we have historically put on underrepresented populations, we've put on online education, digital learning, right?
00:29:16.440 --> 00:29:22.319
Like, we've just changed the narrative drastically around these topics, so.
00:29:22.319 --> 00:29:25.259
- That is part of the privilege of working at a place like this.
00:29:25.259 --> 00:29:26.880
- Yeah.
00:29:26.880 --> 00:29:34.470
- People look to us for leadership and what we do influences the strategies of other institutions.
00:29:34.470 --> 00:29:37.710
Use that power for good, you know, while you have it.
00:29:37.710 --> 00:29:47.549
In the short amount of time that you get to work at these institutions that last hundreds of years, use the platform to share what we have, you know?
00:29:49.361 --> 00:29:50.193
- I appreciate that.
00:29:50.193 --> 00:29:52.049
So, Matthew, what's next for you?
00:29:52.049 --> 00:29:55.049
What's next for the work that you are leading at Stanford?
00:29:55.049 --> 00:30:04.740
- So, we have a new president at Stanford who's put out a very exciting mandate in his inauguration speech that's focused on expanding access to learners worldwide.
00:30:04.740 --> 00:30:18.359
And the vision is that there's an order of magnitude more learners around the world who could benefit from a Stanford education compared to when he, President Jon Levin, was an undergraduate here in the early '90s.
00:30:18.359 --> 00:30:30.750
That's an exciting challenge for us to take on, you know, especially in the context of a deglobalization and a return to nationalism and protectionism, which he also addresses in his speech.
00:30:30.750 --> 00:30:35.519
And, you know, we are trying to figure out, like, how to do that and what that means.
00:30:35.519 --> 00:30:44.640
And there's a lot of exciting ideas I think that are emerging from this community with a mandate to kind of reimagine a global strategy.
00:30:44.640 --> 00:30:58.289
It's not predicated on global campuses necessarily, but uses all the digital and human capital tools at our disposal to provide more educational opportunity to those who could benefit from it around the world.
00:30:58.289 --> 00:31:05.609
I published a piece recently about an emerging open education strategy that we call living textbooks.
00:31:05.609 --> 00:31:09.720
And it's kind of a re-imagination of the textbook as an open source project.
00:31:09.720 --> 00:31:15.059
There's now three or four of them that have come organically from Stanford faculty.
00:31:15.059 --> 00:31:20.460
They're built generally on GitHub, which is a platform for open source collaboration.
00:31:20.460 --> 00:31:21.292
- Yes.
00:31:21.292 --> 00:31:47.309
- And many of them have a combination of content and code, you know, so there's a kind of quantitative component, that benefits from having kind of digital-first representation, but they also have print representations and many of the more progressive university presses are willing to do peer review and to produce a print version of these books that can live alongside an open source digital version of the book.
00:31:47.309 --> 00:31:50.160
So, it's not like a PDF/EPUB that you would download.
00:31:50.160 --> 00:32:06.509
It's an active kind of living, breathing open-source community that people can respond to and they can fix problems and they can translate it and repurpose it and globalize it because, you know, the content that we produce here could be valuable in other parts of the world.
00:32:06.509 --> 00:32:08.789
GitHub unusually is open in China.
00:32:08.789 --> 00:32:12.113
Many other community-generated platforms are blocked in China.
00:32:12.113 --> 00:32:21.873
But because it's the foundation of open-source collaboration, you know, even China, which is kinda closing its technological borders, remains open to that one.
00:32:23.325 --> 00:32:30.599
So, and many of the challenges around previous open educational concepts were around kind of technological sustainability.
00:32:30.599 --> 00:33:02.369
And the idea is that if we don't worry too much about the technological layer, just like use the existing technology collaboration platforms that are out there, but instead think about the content and application layer and the implementation, like, the supporting community colleges and using content that we create and building courses of their own based on it, like, that's actually higher value adding and it reduces some of the technological burden and the challenges that other open source projects or open education projects have faced in the past.
00:33:02.369 --> 00:33:03.900
So, I'm excited about that.
00:33:03.900 --> 00:33:05.942
I wrote a piece recently about it.
00:33:07.079 --> 00:33:11.579
And I love when you find organic faculty movement.
00:33:11.579 --> 00:33:13.799
Like, we didn't tell anybody to do this.
00:33:13.799 --> 00:33:15.240
I just did some pattern recognition.
00:33:15.240 --> 00:33:21.630
I was like, "Oh, this is happening in the psychology department," and then here at the Doerr School of Sustainability, there's another group of faculty who wanna do one of these.
00:33:21.630 --> 00:33:28.067
Like, put them together, document it, and then see if we can get more, build a service around it.
00:33:28.067 --> 00:33:29.152
- That's right.
00:33:29.152 --> 00:33:33.083
- So, I think that is another, you were asking about innovation strategy, that's another one.
00:33:33.083 --> 00:33:42.509
Just listen, listen to what the innovators are already doing and figure out how you can unblock the next ones who wanna do what more of what they're doing.
00:33:42.509 --> 00:33:45.210
- I just really always appreciate talking with you.
00:33:45.210 --> 00:33:46.440
I always leave inspired.
00:33:46.440 --> 00:33:56.339
I always leave with new information, new opportunities to think about the work that we both love and have just committed our lives to.
00:33:56.339 --> 00:33:59.309
I know, listeners, we've given a lot of information here.
00:33:59.309 --> 00:34:02.160
Matthew's given you a lot of opportunities to think about this work.
00:34:02.160 --> 00:34:07.200
We'll do our due diligence and make sure that we note all of this in the show notes.
00:34:07.200 --> 00:34:09.449
Matthew, thank you so much for the time.
00:34:09.449 --> 00:34:11.346
- Thank you.
00:34:09.449 --> 00:34:11.346
- Really great to see you.
00:34:11.346 --> 00:34:12.780
- Likewise.
00:34:11.346 --> 00:34:16.829
- Is there any lasting comment that you want the listeners to be able to take away before we close out this episode?
00:34:16.829 --> 00:34:21.929
- We have a newsletter that I would love people to sign up for and we'll link to that as well.
00:34:21.929 --> 00:34:27.059
We are open, and I think, you know, we love hearing from readers.
00:34:27.059 --> 00:34:31.469
I respond, I read, I respond, social media, email.
00:34:31.469 --> 00:34:38.099
You know, we want to be engaged in these questions and so I encourage your listeners to reach out.
00:34:38.099 --> 00:34:39.360
Thank you so much for having me.
00:34:39.360 --> 00:34:43.019
I'm really excited to be with you and to engage more in the future.
00:34:43.019 --> 00:34:46.289
- Absolutely. Well, I wanna thank our listeners as well.
00:34:46.289 --> 00:34:49.920
Thank you for being our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere.
00:34:49.920 --> 00:34:51.539
Remember to follow us on social media.
00:34:51.539 --> 00:34:58.230
You can find us on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook @D2L and subscribe to the D2L YouTube channel.
00:34:58.230 --> 00:35:05.039
You can also sign up for the Teaching and Learning Studio email list for the latest updates on new episodes, articles, masterclasses.
00:35:05.039 --> 00:35:12.480
And if you like what you've heard, remember to rate us, give us a review, share the episode, and remember to subscribe so you don't miss anything.
00:35:12.480 --> 00:35:13.313
Bye for now.
00:35:13.313 --> 00:35:18.329
You've been listening to "Teach & Learn," a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.
00:35:18.329 --> 00:35:23.400
- [Announcer] To learn more about our K through 20 and corporate solutions, visit D2L.com.
00:35:23.400 --> 00:35:32.099
Visit the Teaching and Learning Studio for more material for educators, by educators, including masterclasses, articles, and interviews.
00:35:32.099 --> 00:35:38.579
- [Cristi] And remember to hit that Subscribe button and please take a moment to rate, review, and share the podcast.
00:35:38.579 --> 00:35:39.599
Thanks for joining us.
00:35:39.599 --> 00:35:41.659
Until next time, school's out.
00:35:41.659 --> 00:35:43.661
(bright music)
00:00:00.660 --> 00:00:08.970
- Listeners, historically, town and gown was a phrase to refer to the complex relationship between the university and the surrounding community.
00:00:08.970 --> 00:00:12.150
It also highlighted the interdependence between the two.
00:00:12.150 --> 00:00:22.410
But as the concept has evolved over time, do our higher education institutions still hold obligations to others beyond tuition paying students?
00:00:22.410 --> 00:00:29.190
I'm Dr. Cristi Ford, along with my guest, Dr. Matthew Rascoff, vice provost for digital education at Stanford.
00:00:29.190 --> 00:00:34.350
And we're diving into how that belief is being upheld and maybe even strengthened.
00:00:34.350 --> 00:00:39.270
- [Announcer] Welcome to "Teach & Learn," a podcast for curious educators brought to you D2L.
00:00:39.270 --> 00:00:43.259
- Each week, we'll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K to 20 space.
00:00:43.259 --> 00:00:45.813
Sharpen your pencils.
00:00:43.259 --> 00:00:45.813
Class is about to begin.
00:00:47.039 --> 00:00:49.020
So, good to have you here today, Matthew.
00:00:49.020 --> 00:00:50.969
- Thank you so much for having me, Cristi.
00:00:50.969 --> 00:00:52.200
What a pleasure.
00:00:52.200 --> 00:00:53.159
- Absolutely.
00:00:53.159 --> 00:00:55.740
I really am excited about the conversation today.
00:00:55.740 --> 00:01:00.719
We're gonna really spend some time discussing pathways quite a bit in this episode.
00:01:00.719 --> 00:01:13.019
And so before we delve in and learn a lot more about what you're doing and your institution is doing, can you just provide a little bit more context by what you mean when you use this term so all the listeners are on the same page?
00:01:13.019 --> 00:01:29.549
- Sure, we use pathways to describe the process that students experience, but institutions and educational providers don't always think about, and it's the way we move through our lives educationally.
00:01:29.549 --> 00:01:39.180
And so, you know, if you're a student and you're going from high school to college, that feels like an enormous canyon that you need to cross.
00:01:39.180 --> 00:01:49.530
And, you know, on one level, it's kind of the logic that we've defined for our system, but on another level, there's so much friction in it.
00:01:49.530 --> 00:02:00.480
And, you know, what we mean when we say pathways is kind of redesigning the system in a more learner-centered way to take their perspective into account.
00:02:00.480 --> 00:02:12.870
So, if you're in a kind of supply side, provider-centered mindset, yeah, like, that's their system, higher ed, this is our system, and any gaps in between, that's kind of your job to figure out.
00:02:12.870 --> 00:02:20.159
But the way we think about it is more how a learner might, which is to say, like, this is all my education.
00:02:20.159 --> 00:02:25.469
And it's just kind of an artifice to say K-12 is one system and higher ed is another.
00:02:25.469 --> 00:02:26.909
Why did we decide that?
00:02:26.909 --> 00:02:29.250
That's kind of a historical artifact.
00:02:29.250 --> 00:02:34.250
The way people experience education is as a pathway I think.
00:02:34.409 --> 00:02:35.370
It's as a journey.
00:02:35.370 --> 00:02:43.772
And I think we, as designers of learning experiences, would do well to take that perspective more fully into account.
00:02:44.669 --> 00:02:53.430
- I love this approach because oftentimes, as you know, sometimes we have this chasm that we talk about exists between K-12 and higher ed.
00:02:53.430 --> 00:03:05.520
But if we're taking the learner's perspective of a pathway, it really makes the onus upon us as institutional providers, institutions, K-12 providers, to really break down those barriers.
00:03:05.520 --> 00:03:06.353
- Exactly.
00:03:05.520 --> 00:03:19.889
- And I love the fact that you're using the word pathways, because we know that institutional sometimes mandates may think about one direct pathway, where, in essence, there are a lot of different ways that our students come to our campuses.
00:03:19.889 --> 00:03:29.370
And so you wrote a piece where you discuss these pathways and how this obligation extends, like, just beyond Stanford, but to all private universities.
00:03:29.370 --> 00:03:37.650
And the piece, if I remember correctly, was entitled,"Private universities have public obligations," and listeners, we'll link to this piece in our notes.
00:03:37.650 --> 00:03:44.550
But when you talk about this piece that you wrote, what's your argument in a nutshell and what compelled you to write it?
00:03:44.550 --> 00:03:45.850
- Thank you.
00:03:45.850 --> 00:03:56.189
I mean, part of the argument I think is particular to Stanford where I work and part of it is about the private higher education sector and I think part of it is about the broader higher education sector.
00:03:56.189 --> 00:04:00.449
And the idea is that we are, let me start with Stanford.
00:04:00.449 --> 00:04:08.610
You know, we were founded as an institution that was dedicated to educating the sons and daughters of California.
00:04:08.610 --> 00:04:12.509
Part of what makes this place distinctive is that it was co-ed at the beginning.
00:04:12.509 --> 00:04:14.520
We had free tuition at the beginning of Stanford.
00:04:14.520 --> 00:04:17.879
For the first few decades as an institution, it was free tuition.
00:04:17.879 --> 00:04:33.720
And the founding grant of the university that was put in place when we were established says that we have to take into account the public good and that we should be dedicated not just to the interest of our own community, to our own students and faculty, but to the broader public as well.
00:04:33.720 --> 00:04:35.819
I think that's a very powerful idea.
00:04:35.819 --> 00:04:39.810
Not every institution has that history, but we do.
00:04:39.810 --> 00:04:44.850
And I think, you know, as we look to the future, it's valuable to draw on the past.
00:04:44.850 --> 00:05:06.269
And so it's important to understand institutional DNA and the roots as we try to design for growth that is organic, that is not artificial, that will be biologically accepted, not biologically rejected by the organ, you know, by the body.
00:05:06.269 --> 00:05:18.660
And I think that's, drawing on history is one of my frameworks for thinking about innovation that is rooted, that does not feel that it's implanted, that does not feel like it's being imposed.
00:05:18.660 --> 00:05:20.790
So, yeah, that's kind of the Stanford perspective.
00:05:20.790 --> 00:05:40.230
The broader higher education perspective, I would say, is that our sector, whether you're in a private university or a public university, is subsidized by the public, you know, and if you are at a private institution, you're not paying taxes, you know, much of the funding comes from federal agencies, everybody chips in for that.
00:05:40.230 --> 00:05:42.930
Every taxpayer in our country chips in for that.
00:05:42.930 --> 00:05:48.389
And I think it's not enough to say that we contribute to the commons, to the public good, through the research enterprise.
00:05:48.389 --> 00:05:49.290
That's fine.
00:05:49.290 --> 00:05:52.649
That's kind of a common answer to that.
00:05:52.649 --> 00:05:53.699
It's absolutely true.
00:05:53.699 --> 00:05:56.009
I think that's necessary, but not sufficient.
00:05:56.009 --> 00:06:02.160
And I think on the educational side of what we do, we also have an obligation to contribute to the public.
00:06:02.160 --> 00:06:07.740
And the selectivity of institutions, we're not designed for that.
00:06:07.740 --> 00:06:09.480
Nobody really wanted that.
00:06:09.480 --> 00:06:21.033
And I think we need to find ways to redesign and to circumvent some of the bottlenecks that we've imposed in the admissions process to provide more educational public goods.
00:06:22.199 --> 00:06:33.240
- I really love this conversation because too often we talk about public versus private, and there is this sense that sometimes, this matter around elitism and not focusing on the common good.
00:06:33.240 --> 00:06:42.360
So, I appreciate your focus and feedback specific to Stanford, but then talking about the ecosystem as a whole, that we all collectively have this responsibility.
00:06:42.360 --> 00:06:51.029
And hearing about Stanford's DNA around educational access, I really was reminded of the co-ed piece.
00:06:51.029 --> 00:06:54.449
I just hadn't remembered that piece of this conversation.
00:06:54.449 --> 00:07:10.230
And so as we think about the concessions that Stanford made in its history, I think one of the things that I remember from the conversations in looking at some of the historical data is Jane Stanford's solution was to allow learners to take classes without even becoming Stanford students.
00:07:10.230 --> 00:07:12.000
- Exactly.
00:07:10.230 --> 00:07:16.475
- And so, you know, that was one way the institution could maintain its admission standards and support the mission.
00:07:16.475 --> 00:07:17.310
- Exactly.
00:07:16.475 --> 00:07:30.209
- And so I guess I wanna talk to you more a little about, more about online and, given your experiences, how do you see this modality helping to support these various college pathways that you've talked about?
00:07:30.209 --> 00:07:37.649
- So, when I started here in the fall of 2021, I launched a new team called Stanford Digital Education.
00:07:37.649 --> 00:07:46.500
And we are in the central administration reporting to the provost, and we do mission-driven digital learning at Stanford.
00:07:46.500 --> 00:08:02.523
And so we are the central office that coordinates the efforts across the schools, but we have a mandate to rethink the goal and to position learning opportunities for those who've been historically underserved by higher education.
00:08:03.360 --> 00:08:09.269
And the way we've thought about that is to build this program that's focused on low-income high schools across the country.
00:08:09.269 --> 00:08:10.980
We use this criterion of Title 1.
00:08:10.980 --> 00:08:20.100
It's sort of a federal criterion that defines a free and reduced lunch percentage of 40% or more.
00:08:20.100 --> 00:08:47.850
And we built a model that actually taps in to that provisional student category that you described and reimagines it as an opportunity for non-admitted students to take courses from Stanford for credit through a hybrid model that is offered through a partnership with their local schools, a nonprofit called the National Education Equity Lab, which helps us run this Title school network, and Stanford faculty.
00:08:47.850 --> 00:09:28.679
And the model is that we bring together teaching fellows who are trained Stanford undergrads, grad students, and alums, faculty, and then local teachers in the school, and we offer this hybrid course experience that has combinations of face-to-face and online and has combinations of synchronous and asynchronous learning that gives students a fantastic college course, the chance to learn rigorous material that is, on the book, same learning outcome, same rigor as what we offer on campus, and to do it for credit that has both moral currency, psychological currency, and financial currency for them.
00:09:28.679 --> 00:09:44.639
And it's kind of a boost for them for their academic aspirations, for their growth mindset, and also for their social capital because it turns out, you know, those teaching fellows from Stanford are some of the best ambassadors of the university that we can send out into the world.
00:09:44.639 --> 00:09:47.190
They become near peer connectors.
00:09:47.190 --> 00:09:52.019
They themselves report that it's the most meaningful thing they've done at Stanford in the past year.
00:09:52.019 --> 00:09:53.820
Most of them say that.
00:09:53.820 --> 00:10:08.190
And so it's kind of a projection of Stanford knowledge, not just to the world generally, but specifically to low-income high schools, where we know from the data that the most talented students never even show up on the admissions radar of selective colleges.
00:10:08.190 --> 00:10:12.779
The majority of the most talented low-income students in the US never apply to any selective college.
00:10:12.779 --> 00:10:15.720
And that's research that was done here at Stanford.
00:10:15.720 --> 00:10:17.057
It's sometimes called undermatching.
00:10:17.057 --> 00:10:27.840
That's kind of a jargon term, but it's basically a gap in that system, between the K-12 and higher education system, that question that you asked me at the beginning.
00:10:27.840 --> 00:10:38.486
You know, this is one of the critical gaps, that low-income students are undercounseled, underadvised, and they're not told that if you applied to Stanford, you'd get in and you'd get full financial aid, and so they opt out of that system.
00:10:38.486 --> 00:10:45.629
And our message is we want those students to not just be identified, but we wanna cultivate that talent.
00:10:45.629 --> 00:10:51.029
We wanna give them opportunities to learn with us, to demonstrate their potential and to grow their potential.
00:10:51.029 --> 00:11:11.309
And so that's kind of the model that we've designed to reach upstream into that earlier system, to the precursors in junior and senior year of high school, and give opportunities in communities that have never had a model of dual enrollment from any selective college, let alone Stanford.
00:11:11.309 --> 00:11:13.110
- Man, I have so many questions for you.
00:11:13.110 --> 00:11:23.702
When you talk about mission-driven innovation, you think about the selectivity of an R1 or the selectivity of a private or an Ivy and this public good.
00:11:24.720 --> 00:11:38.789
As people are listening and thinking about maybe their own institutions, how do you create change management in a way or how do you create opportunities to help others prioritize this public good in the midst of everything else the university is working on?
00:11:38.789 --> 00:11:44.850
I guess that's just a question I'm thinking about as I'm seeing how you've done it so successfully at Stanford.
00:11:43.110 --> 00:11:44.850
- Yeah, it's a great question.
00:11:44.850 --> 00:11:47.789
And I think the answer is probably different at different institutions.
00:11:47.789 --> 00:11:52.200
So, I would hesitate to tell somebody, you know, to just use our model.
00:11:52.200 --> 00:12:04.710
I think the goal is to find kind of synergies between the private interests of the institution and the public good and to redefine those as a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum game.
00:12:04.710 --> 00:12:16.740
So, you know, when I say that our teaching fellows report that co-teaching in our program is the most meaningful thing they've done, that's me hunting for those opportunities for our own matriculated students to benefit and to learn.
00:12:16.740 --> 00:12:18.450
Our faculty love the program too.
00:12:18.450 --> 00:12:21.389
I now have a backlog of faculty who wanna work with us.
00:12:21.389 --> 00:12:25.919
So, I think enlightened self-interest is the framework.
00:12:25.919 --> 00:12:28.980
You know, it's not absolute altruism.
00:12:28.980 --> 00:12:33.149
Institutions, organizations, don't act out of altruism.
00:12:33.149 --> 00:12:40.860
Enlightened self-interest means that sometimes what is in the public interest, it's also in our interest if we understand that interest properly.
00:12:40.860 --> 00:12:54.169
Your job as an innovator is to go hunting for the right sources of that interest and the right partners, both outside and inside, and to be the enabler and the broker who uncovers those opportunities for creating shared value.
00:12:54.169 --> 00:13:11.878
- You know, as I think about this last year and a half as we've come out of the pandemic and many institutions are trying to redefine the value proposition of higher education, I think this example and case study really hits the heart of this opportunity to really be able to meet students where they are.
00:13:11.878 --> 00:13:16.529
And I think the term you used was finding undermatched students who really should be in our institutional settings.
00:13:16.529 --> 00:13:23.250
And so I wanna ask a little bit more about your partnership with, I think you said it's the National Education Equity Lab.
00:13:23.250 --> 00:13:29.519
Can you talk about the importance of that partnership with Stanford, you know, and how that partnership came to be?
00:13:29.519 --> 00:13:30.352
- Absolutely.
00:13:30.352 --> 00:13:34.529
So, I think doing partnerships is also a key innovation strategy.
00:13:34.529 --> 00:13:42.000
Just getting better at it and curating them and letting good organizations in and keeping the bad ones out.
00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:57.029
Like, that's a really important role for those of us who sit kind of on the margins of the institution, and, you know, can open the gates, not completely, but thoughtfully, to the right allies who share our goals.
00:13:57.029 --> 00:14:09.659
So, the National Education Equity Lab is a startup nonprofit organization led by a terrific education reformer, former Obama administration education official, her name is Leslie Cornfeld.
00:14:09.659 --> 00:14:12.779
And they help us, they bring these students to us.
00:14:12.779 --> 00:14:26.513
So, they help run the network of schools and they're recruiting Stanford and other great universities and we help them bring universities onto this network to create a kind of many-to-many, two-sided marketplace, you could think about it.
00:14:26.513 --> 00:14:28.980
It's not a market in the conventional sense.
00:14:28.980 --> 00:14:30.960
It's not a for-profit model.
00:14:30.960 --> 00:14:39.809
But there's kind of universities that wanna offer courses and high schools that want to receive them and offer them to their students and they're the intermediary that's helping to set this up.
00:14:39.809 --> 00:14:42.419
And they've been a great ally for us.
00:14:42.419 --> 00:14:47.789
And I think we, you know, in great institutions need to find more allies.
00:14:47.789 --> 00:14:49.019
We need more friends.
00:14:49.019 --> 00:14:50.429
We need to work better.
00:14:49.019 --> 00:14:50.429
- Yes, we do.
00:14:50.429 --> 00:14:58.590
- You know, with one another and also with the nonprofit, community-based organization sector, the civil society sector.
00:14:58.590 --> 00:15:05.669
And we have an important role in attaching our own credibility to models like this and saying, you know, "This is valid.
00:15:05.669 --> 00:15:22.139
This is worthwhile." And, you know, since we have joined, many other institutions, I just heard Vanderbilt last week signed an MOU with them, you know, they look to us and they say,"If Stanford's doing it, we can too." And I think that's another important innovation, you know, phenomenon.
00:15:22.139 --> 00:15:27.929
You can sort of use the isomorphism and some of the herd dynamics of higher education for better.
00:15:27.929 --> 00:15:31.409
You know, and that's kind of a, we look to peer institutions.
00:15:31.409 --> 00:15:33.179
So, that's just a reality.
00:15:33.179 --> 00:15:35.009
That can hurt or it can help.
00:15:35.009 --> 00:15:43.830
And use that for good, use that factor as a possibility for scale and for building a movement and for influencing our peers.
00:15:43.830 --> 00:15:44.669
- I love all of this.
00:15:44.669 --> 00:15:51.360
And before we move on, I just would love to hear a little bit about the cohorts that you've had so far.
00:15:51.360 --> 00:15:55.110
What do you know about the students that have come through your program?
00:15:55.110 --> 00:15:56.909
Do they end up in your pipeline?
00:15:56.909 --> 00:16:02.970
Like, how much information do you know and how are you measuring the impact?
00:16:02.970 --> 00:16:05.399
- So, that's a great question.
00:16:05.399 --> 00:16:14.879
We do track the impact and there's a study with Robert Balfanz, who's a professor at Johns Hopkins, who's longitudinally tracking what happens to these students.
00:16:14.879 --> 00:16:18.059
Seven of them are now undergraduates here at Stanford.
00:16:18.059 --> 00:16:27.240
Just this week, I actually got to see two of them, a freshman and a junior here, two women, fantastic students.
00:16:27.240 --> 00:16:39.210
One of them is from rural New Mexico reservation, a community that's never sent a student to Stanford since our founding in the 1891, since the, you know, reservation was established.
00:16:39.210 --> 00:16:43.830
She's the first, not just in her family, but her entire community to ever come here.
00:16:43.830 --> 00:16:45.539
And yeah, that was incredible.
00:16:45.539 --> 00:17:02.460
And the other one is from urban LA, South Central LA, and, you know, it's just, I mean, that's part of it, is bringing the students to Stanford, but undermatching is not gonna be solved by Stanford.
00:17:02.460 --> 00:17:12.102
Like, the research shows it's about 35,000 students per year who are in that category of the top 10 percentiles of grades and test scores who never apply to any selective college.
00:17:12.102 --> 00:17:15.960
You know, we only have 1,700 seats in our freshman class, so we can't do that on our own.
00:17:15.960 --> 00:17:19.890
So, that's why we're thinking in this kind of consortium, collective way.
00:17:19.890 --> 00:17:27.750
And so, you know, we've sent students to Columbia and Princeton, like, all the other great universities, and all the state flagships as well.
00:17:27.750 --> 00:17:30.599
You and I have some North Carolina connections.
00:17:30.599 --> 00:17:33.509
I previously worked at the University of North Carolina System.
00:17:33.509 --> 00:17:41.130
So, you know, I understand, you know, that's actually where you can really address the undermatching challenge because that's where most of the seats are.
00:17:41.130 --> 00:17:42.569
They're in state flagships.
00:17:42.569 --> 00:17:53.039
So, if you can raise a student's sights to go to a state flagship that they might not otherwise thought they could get into that would have financial aid for them, that's a win for us.
00:17:53.039 --> 00:17:54.359
We call that the assist.
00:17:54.359 --> 00:17:55.500
You know, we set you up.
00:17:55.500 --> 00:17:57.359
We don't have to score all the baskets.
00:17:57.359 --> 00:17:58.740
You know, we got seven baskets.
00:17:58.740 --> 00:18:00.630
That's wonderful, students coming here.
00:18:00.630 --> 00:18:05.759
But that's not commensurate with a challenge of 35,000 per year.
00:18:05.759 --> 00:18:08.430
We all need to play the game of assist.
00:18:08.430 --> 00:18:09.900
We all need to pass the ball.
00:18:09.900 --> 00:18:15.299
And if you play this like a team sport, I think you could actually chip away at that challenge of undermatching.
00:18:15.299 --> 00:18:22.230
The whole Ed Equity Lab network I think will have 15,000 students enrolled this academic year.
00:18:22.230 --> 00:18:28.049
So, that's starting to get into the right order of magnitude to address this challenge.
00:18:28.049 --> 00:18:31.079
Meanwhile, it's not just about that top 10 percentiles from me.
00:18:31.079 --> 00:18:33.150
We bring whole cohorts of students from a school.
00:18:33.150 --> 00:18:36.329
We don't do individual lone geniuses.
00:18:36.329 --> 00:18:37.680
I don't believe in that.
00:18:37.680 --> 00:18:44.220
What we ask schools to do is to send a whole class and a teacher that take the course together.
00:18:44.220 --> 00:19:00.472
And I think there's important metacognitive lessons in the team dynamic within the school, in the learning community that you can build, the supportive, collaborative opportunities to help one another, to tutor one another, to coach one another.
00:19:00.472 --> 00:19:03.329
So, so we're not looking for just individuals.
00:19:03.329 --> 00:19:04.589
We're looking for cohorts.
00:19:04.589 --> 00:19:14.549
And I think there's an important democratic educational role in investing in kind of building capacity for the teacher and for the school.
00:19:14.549 --> 00:19:21.480
Not just plucking individual geniuses out and sending them to a boarding school or, you know, bringing them to Stanford for the summer.
00:19:21.480 --> 00:19:23.666
There are many talent search programs that do that.
00:19:23.666 --> 00:19:25.470
And I don't believe in that at all.
00:19:25.470 --> 00:19:30.119
Like, what we wanna do is embed it in the school that lifts up a whole class together.
00:19:30.119 --> 00:19:43.268
- So, I love this because what I hear you talking about is really being able to resource communities and really being able to provide opportunities not just for the best and the brightest, but to lift all sails at the same time.
00:19:43.268 --> 00:19:44.910
- But who knows what the best and brightest even means?
00:19:44.910 --> 00:19:46.440
They're sophomores in high school.
00:19:46.440 --> 00:19:47.396
- That's right.
00:19:46.440 --> 00:19:47.396
- You know?
00:19:47.396 --> 00:19:51.910
And talent sometimes just is not recognized by-- And it takes a while sometimes.
00:19:51.910 --> 00:19:52.742
- Exactly.
00:19:52.742 --> 00:19:58.890
Some of it needs to be cultivated and supported, and if you don't believe you have it, you might not be showing up for your teacher.
00:19:58.890 --> 00:20:02.700
So, you know, we need to stay humble.
00:20:02.700 --> 00:20:06.269
I think standardized testing is a form of arrogance.
00:20:06.269 --> 00:20:09.779
It says like, "Oh, we can find a genius in the cradle.
00:20:09.779 --> 00:20:15.750
If you just had the right test, we would know in the womb who's gonna be the next..." Forget that.
00:20:15.750 --> 00:20:17.819
Geniuses are made, they're not born.
00:20:17.819 --> 00:20:19.230
- That's right.
00:20:19.230 --> 00:20:21.869
- And our role is not about geniuses necessarily.
00:20:21.869 --> 00:20:23.250
It's about communities.
00:20:23.250 --> 00:20:28.950
It's about building more collective models that create opportunity for everyone.
00:20:28.950 --> 00:20:38.250
Even as we are participating in this elective meritocratic system, it needs a counterbalance, it needs a democratic counterbalance.
00:20:38.250 --> 00:20:40.589
And that's what we're trying to do.
00:20:40.589 --> 00:20:51.299
And I think they're often intentioned, but part of what the magic of digital learning offers is that we can take a more abundant approach to learning.
00:20:51.299 --> 00:20:54.089
Doesn't have to be scarce the way it was in the past.
00:20:54.089 --> 00:21:06.930
There's opportunities to share and to democratize education without harming the highly selective undergraduate admissions or graduate admission system that prevails here and at our peer institutions.
00:21:06.930 --> 00:21:17.910
And, you know, the place is still doing just fine and we can still enroll thousands of non-matriculated students and offer them credit and it hasn't harmed anything.
00:21:17.910 --> 00:21:21.900
Quite the contrary, it has only benefited Stanford and its own community.
00:21:21.900 --> 00:21:56.700
- You know, as I listened to you talk about college pathways and dual enrollment and really investing in communities and the innovation work, I'd love to understand, you talked about the research happening at Johns Hopkins, the longitudinal research, if there are other research studies, and as you're looking around this landscape and thinking about these innovations, are there other ways that if people are not prepared or ready as an institution to be a provider of dual credit or have all the institutional pieces together, are there other ways that you see people are leaning in and really starting to think about this public good and really starting to raise up communities?
00:21:56.700 --> 00:21:58.109
- Absolutely.
00:21:58.109 --> 00:22:06.150
So, I look to organizations like Texas OnRamps as a model for how a state flagship can invest in pathways.
00:22:06.150 --> 00:22:12.869
It's a profound innovation that I think many state systems and state flagships could replicate.
00:22:12.869 --> 00:22:25.769
And in fact, I've learned recently that the University of Illinois is replicating that model and a statewide strategy with support from the American Talent Initiative, Aspen Institute.
00:22:25.769 --> 00:22:31.079
They just put out a release led by Lisa Anderson, who I'm proud to say is an alum of our team.
00:22:31.079 --> 00:22:34.259
She's the digital learning leader at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
00:22:34.259 --> 00:22:45.450
She's driving kinda a statewide model for working with teachers to support college pathways through college level coursework that's embedded in schools.
00:22:45.450 --> 00:22:48.992
So, you know, we have not perfected this approach.
00:22:49.829 --> 00:22:51.119
It's far from a monopoly.
00:22:51.119 --> 00:23:03.359
What we're trying to do is build networks of mission-driven educational improvement and change, and, you know, we're just at the beginning.
00:23:03.359 --> 00:23:06.000
There's so many different ways that you could approach this.
00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:25.230
I've learned more recently about college advising and counseling and there's all sorts of interesting innovations that are happening in that space using digital to connect undergraduates to high schoolers to build more effective relationship-based counseling.
00:23:25.230 --> 00:23:40.710
There's a nonprofit that has a chapter at Stanford called Matriculate that is led by students who are assigned to four high schoolers who have to meet a set of criteria, GPA and recommendation criteria.
00:23:40.710 --> 00:23:47.549
And then they get this intensive one-to-four ratio of near peer college counseling.
00:23:47.549 --> 00:23:48.383
They don't have that.
00:23:48.383 --> 00:23:54.119
Most schools, you know, have like one-to-400 ratios, not one-to-four ratios, for a professional counselor.
00:23:54.119 --> 00:24:05.130
Every college or university could have a chapter of Matriculate with a little bit of support that enables your students to kind of represent you and to support low-income college pathways.
00:24:05.130 --> 00:24:07.950
Doesn't require coursework.
00:24:07.950 --> 00:24:11.700
This is on the administrative side, not the academic side of college admissions.
00:24:11.700 --> 00:24:18.240
But, you know, taking on the FAFSA is no joke, if you've never, you know, approached it, if your parents didn't go to college.
00:24:18.240 --> 00:24:21.380
And people need a lot of help.
00:24:18.240 --> 00:24:21.380
- Even before the changes.
00:24:21.380 --> 00:24:23.039
Even before all of the changes.
00:24:23.039 --> 00:24:23.873
- Exactly.
00:24:23.873 --> 00:24:25.470
And, you know, exactly.
00:24:25.470 --> 00:24:36.029
We should simplify it for everybody, but it's still a process and if you're the first in your family to go to college, you need help and schools aren't always set up for that.
00:24:36.029 --> 00:24:40.890
So, that's a role that I see institutions playing.
00:24:40.890 --> 00:24:58.200
Enable your students to participate in programs like that and support it and join, you know, Matriculate has like a membership model for institutions to join in and we did that recently in collaboration with our admissions office and our Haas Center for Public Service and that's been fantastic.
00:24:58.200 --> 00:25:03.299
So, yeah, there's so many different approaches that I think are exciting.
00:25:03.299 --> 00:25:08.910
But to me, the key is point the innovators at these challenges.
00:25:08.910 --> 00:25:10.829
Focus on these audiences.
00:25:10.829 --> 00:25:20.730
And if you don't think about them, you know, if you think your job is just serving working professionals, you've missed the biggest opportunity for serving the underserved learners.
00:25:20.730 --> 00:25:25.380
It's fine to serve working professionals, but, you know, only a third of adults have a degree.
00:25:25.380 --> 00:25:29.536
So, if you're focusing on people who already have a degree, what about the rest of our society?
00:25:29.536 --> 00:25:31.853
- Good point.
00:25:29.536 --> 00:25:36.329
- And that to me is, that is a missing piece of most strategies, most digital learning strategies.
00:25:36.329 --> 00:25:50.250
- What do you say to folks who are turning away from looking at high school students as a main opportunity for enrollment because the numbers, you know, the enrollment numbers are dwindling in terms of the numbers of students who are graduating from high school and moving into higher ed?
00:25:50.250 --> 00:25:55.200
Like, how do we get people to change the narrative of those kinds of conversations?
00:25:55.200 --> 00:26:08.069
- Yeah, I mean, I'm sure your listeners know like the demographic research from Nathan Grawe and, you know, the Clearinghouse numbers this year that show that first-year enrollments are down.
00:26:08.069 --> 00:26:11.032
Although, I understand there's typically an adjustment a few months later.
00:26:11.032 --> 00:26:20.160
So, before, you know, worrying too much about a headline of 5% decline, like, we should wait a couple of months and see what the adjusted numbers are.
00:26:20.160 --> 00:26:38.490
But yeah, at the UNC system, when I was there, we focused on some college, no degree as the main online audience, you know, and we were building online undergraduate programs that were intended to serve those who had stopped out and supporting their pathways back to college.
00:26:38.490 --> 00:26:46.019
And I think that's, for online strategies in public universities, that makes a lot of sense.
00:26:46.019 --> 00:26:50.819
The some college, no degree population I think now exceeds 40 million.
00:26:50.819 --> 00:26:52.799
- It's huge, it's huge.
00:26:50.819 --> 00:26:56.279
- When I was there, you know, 10 years ago, it was in the 30 millions.
00:26:56.279 --> 00:26:57.660
I don't remember the exact numbers.
00:26:57.660 --> 00:27:01.799
So, that to me is, it's a critical challenge.
00:27:01.799 --> 00:27:05.279
There are great organizations that are helping with that too.
00:27:05.279 --> 00:27:10.980
There's one called ReUp, which helps institutions kind of re-enroll those who've stopped out.
00:27:10.980 --> 00:27:12.809
And there were many innovators in that space.
00:27:12.809 --> 00:27:20.759
Like, UNC Charlotte built a program that was focused on the city of Charlotte and, you know, it was an information campaign.
00:27:20.759 --> 00:27:27.299
It was around de-stigmatizing returning to college and kind of resetting your sights, like a second chances model.
00:27:27.299 --> 00:27:28.319
And I love that.
00:27:28.319 --> 00:27:35.160
So, yeah, I think online undergraduate programs, you know, historically have been oriented towards adult learners.
00:27:35.160 --> 00:27:41.069
The first-time student population actually also continues to grow online.
00:27:41.069 --> 00:27:42.509
Like, they also want online courses.
00:27:42.509 --> 00:27:44.940
So, it's not instead of at this point.
00:27:44.940 --> 00:27:56.099
But I think most elective institutions have focused on master's degrees, but there's now a lot more movement in bachelor's degrees for adults.
00:27:56.099 --> 00:28:00.359
Cornell University recently approved an online bachelor's program.
00:28:00.359 --> 00:28:02.400
The faculty approved it a couple of weeks ago.
00:28:02.400 --> 00:28:05.730
- Which is fantastic to hear.
00:28:02.400 --> 00:28:05.730
- That is a monument.
00:28:05.730 --> 00:28:07.349
It's a huge achievement.
00:28:07.349 --> 00:28:19.710
At the University of Pennsylvania in the School of Arts and Sciences, so, like the core liberal arts part of the University of Pennsylvania, they have an online bachelor's program that I believe enrolls one out of seven Penn undergrads.
00:28:19.710 --> 00:28:24.210
That is an immense achievement in the context of a highly selective institution.
00:28:24.210 --> 00:28:31.230
In the arts and sciences heart of the university, they built an online bachelor's success story that is for adults.
00:28:31.230 --> 00:28:35.835
So, you know, we need more examples like that.
00:28:35.835 --> 00:28:38.519
- We do.
00:28:35.835 --> 00:28:40.710
- And I so admire institutions that have moved in that direction.
00:28:40.710 --> 00:28:46.019
And, you know, like it or not, those places kind of like set a certain standard for the entire system.
00:28:46.019 --> 00:28:49.259
They give permission to the rest of the sector to act.
00:28:49.259 --> 00:28:52.529
When they act that way, they give permission to the rest of us to act.
00:28:52.529 --> 00:28:54.450
That is exciting.
00:28:54.450 --> 00:29:16.440
- I love when you said something to the phrase of, you know, using the headwinds for good, really thinking about some of the selective institutions that have the opportunity to really change the narrative of where higher education is going and change the narrative and stigma that we have historically put on underrepresented populations, we've put on online education, digital learning, right?
00:29:16.440 --> 00:29:22.319
Like, we've just changed the narrative drastically around these topics, so.
00:29:22.319 --> 00:29:25.259
- That is part of the privilege of working at a place like this.
00:29:25.259 --> 00:29:26.880
- Yeah.
00:29:26.880 --> 00:29:34.470
- People look to us for leadership and what we do influences the strategies of other institutions.
00:29:34.470 --> 00:29:37.710
Use that power for good, you know, while you have it.
00:29:37.710 --> 00:29:47.549
In the short amount of time that you get to work at these institutions that last hundreds of years, use the platform to share what we have, you know?
00:29:49.361 --> 00:29:50.193
- I appreciate that.
00:29:50.193 --> 00:29:52.049
So, Matthew, what's next for you?
00:29:52.049 --> 00:29:55.049
What's next for the work that you are leading at Stanford?
00:29:55.049 --> 00:30:04.740
- So, we have a new president at Stanford who's put out a very exciting mandate in his inauguration speech that's focused on expanding access to learners worldwide.
00:30:04.740 --> 00:30:18.359
And the vision is that there's an order of magnitude more learners around the world who could benefit from a Stanford education compared to when he, President Jon Levin, was an undergraduate here in the early '90s.
00:30:18.359 --> 00:30:30.750
That's an exciting challenge for us to take on, you know, especially in the context of a deglobalization and a return to nationalism and protectionism, which he also addresses in his speech.
00:30:30.750 --> 00:30:35.519
And, you know, we are trying to figure out, like, how to do that and what that means.
00:30:35.519 --> 00:30:44.640
And there's a lot of exciting ideas I think that are emerging from this community with a mandate to kind of reimagine a global strategy.
00:30:44.640 --> 00:30:58.289
It's not predicated on global campuses necessarily, but uses all the digital and human capital tools at our disposal to provide more educational opportunity to those who could benefit from it around the world.
00:30:58.289 --> 00:31:05.609
I published a piece recently about an emerging open education strategy that we call living textbooks.
00:31:05.609 --> 00:31:09.720
And it's kind of a re-imagination of the textbook as an open source project.
00:31:09.720 --> 00:31:15.059
There's now three or four of them that have come organically from Stanford faculty.
00:31:15.059 --> 00:31:20.460
They're built generally on GitHub, which is a platform for open source collaboration.
00:31:20.460 --> 00:31:21.292
- Yes.
00:31:21.292 --> 00:31:47.309
- And many of them have a combination of content and code, you know, so there's a kind of quantitative component, that benefits from having kind of digital-first representation, but they also have print representations and many of the more progressive university presses are willing to do peer review and to produce a print version of these books that can live alongside an open source digital version of the book.
00:31:47.309 --> 00:31:50.160
So, it's not like a PDF/EPUB that you would download.
00:31:50.160 --> 00:32:06.509
It's an active kind of living, breathing open-source community that people can respond to and they can fix problems and they can translate it and repurpose it and globalize it because, you know, the content that we produce here could be valuable in other parts of the world.
00:32:06.509 --> 00:32:08.789
GitHub unusually is open in China.
00:32:08.789 --> 00:32:12.113
Many other community-generated platforms are blocked in China.
00:32:12.113 --> 00:32:21.873
But because it's the foundation of open-source collaboration, you know, even China, which is kinda closing its technological borders, remains open to that one.
00:32:23.325 --> 00:32:30.599
So, and many of the challenges around previous open educational concepts were around kind of technological sustainability.
00:32:30.599 --> 00:33:02.369
And the idea is that if we don't worry too much about the technological layer, just like use the existing technology collaboration platforms that are out there, but instead think about the content and application layer and the implementation, like, the supporting community colleges and using content that we create and building courses of their own based on it, like, that's actually higher value adding and it reduces some of the technological burden and the challenges that other open source projects or open education projects have faced in the past.
00:33:02.369 --> 00:33:03.900
So, I'm excited about that.
00:33:03.900 --> 00:33:05.942
I wrote a piece recently about it.
00:33:07.079 --> 00:33:11.579
And I love when you find organic faculty movement.
00:33:11.579 --> 00:33:13.799
Like, we didn't tell anybody to do this.
00:33:13.799 --> 00:33:15.240
I just did some pattern recognition.
00:33:15.240 --> 00:33:21.630
I was like, "Oh, this is happening in the psychology department," and then here at the Doerr School of Sustainability, there's another group of faculty who wanna do one of these.
00:33:21.630 --> 00:33:28.067
Like, put them together, document it, and then see if we can get more, build a service around it.
00:33:28.067 --> 00:33:29.152
- That's right.
00:33:29.152 --> 00:33:33.083
- So, I think that is another, you were asking about innovation strategy, that's another one.
00:33:33.083 --> 00:33:42.509
Just listen, listen to what the innovators are already doing and figure out how you can unblock the next ones who wanna do what more of what they're doing.
00:33:42.509 --> 00:33:45.210
- I just really always appreciate talking with you.
00:33:45.210 --> 00:33:46.440
I always leave inspired.
00:33:46.440 --> 00:33:56.339
I always leave with new information, new opportunities to think about the work that we both love and have just committed our lives to.
00:33:56.339 --> 00:33:59.309
I know, listeners, we've given a lot of information here.
00:33:59.309 --> 00:34:02.160
Matthew's given you a lot of opportunities to think about this work.
00:34:02.160 --> 00:34:07.200
We'll do our due diligence and make sure that we note all of this in the show notes.
00:34:07.200 --> 00:34:09.449
Matthew, thank you so much for the time.
00:34:09.449 --> 00:34:11.346
- Thank you.
00:34:09.449 --> 00:34:11.346
- Really great to see you.
00:34:11.346 --> 00:34:12.780
- Likewise.
00:34:11.346 --> 00:34:16.829
- Is there any lasting comment that you want the listeners to be able to take away before we close out this episode?
00:34:16.829 --> 00:34:21.929
- We have a newsletter that I would love people to sign up for and we'll link to that as well.
00:34:21.929 --> 00:34:27.059
We are open, and I think, you know, we love hearing from readers.
00:34:27.059 --> 00:34:31.469
I respond, I read, I respond, social media, email.
00:34:31.469 --> 00:34:38.099
You know, we want to be engaged in these questions and so I encourage your listeners to reach out.
00:34:38.099 --> 00:34:39.360
Thank you so much for having me.
00:34:39.360 --> 00:34:43.019
I'm really excited to be with you and to engage more in the future.
00:34:43.019 --> 00:34:46.289
- Absolutely. Well, I wanna thank our listeners as well.
00:34:46.289 --> 00:34:49.920
Thank you for being our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere.
00:34:49.920 --> 00:34:51.539
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00:35:13.313 --> 00:35:18.329
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