Work Forces Rewind: Scott Carlson and Ned Laff on Hacking College

Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, authors of "Hacking College," discuss how to craft a higher education experience that intentionally links student learning to future work and career success. They emphasize the necessity of a proactive and personalized approach to higher education, tapping into students' passions and hidden intellectualism. Carlson and Laff champion a field of study approach, empowering students to actively design their undergraduate degrees, unearth hidden job markets, and leverage faculty expertise. They underscore the significance of cultural and social capital, urging institutions to adapt and support this student-centric model. The conversation illuminates the ways that higher education administrators and faculty, and students themselves, can personalize the learning experience to ensure higher ed graduates are well-equipped to navigate diverse career opportunities.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Happy summer all. We're back with one more rewind episode featuring Scott Carlson and Ned Laff. And in this conversation, we dive deep into their new book Hacking College. Amongst many topics, we discuss a framework to approach college and the college experience with a personalized focus on future careers and long-term goals. We hope you enjoy this conversation and look forward to kicking off our next season in our next episode.

So Julian, I've noticed a real shift in our conversations lately, both with clients and on the podcast, we seem to be delving deeper into the complexities of the school-to-work transition, especially for young adults and for working adults.

Julian Alssid: It's true. Kaitlin, and it really highlights the increasing complexity of that transition. The job market is constantly evolving, and it can be tough for students to figure out where they fit in, especially with so many opportunities hidden from public view.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a tall order for educators and institutions too. For example, faculty are being asked to wear many hats and skills like career advising can sometimes feel separate from their day to day roles and require new sets of tools and related training.

Julian Alssid: Right? It's not just about helping students find a job, but about guiding them through a process of self discovery, exploration and network building and helping them understand their own interests and strengths and how those connect to real world opportunities.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And that's where I think our guests today, Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, have some really valuable insights. They've literally written the book on this. It's called "Hacking College", and we're talking to them on the book's release date.

Julian Alssid: Yes, and congratulations, guys. The book offers a framework for faculty and staff to help students take a more proactive and personalized approach to their college experience with a real focus on future careers and life goals.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Though we'll ask Scott and Ned, to give their own background, Scott's a Senior Writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he's been writing about the trends shaping higher education for over 25 years. As his LinkedIn profile states, he writes about where education is headed, how it serves or doesn't serve students and the public, and how the sector can stay relevant and resilient.

Julian Alssid: And Ned has over 35 years of experience in higher ed, helping students design successful undergraduate experiences. He's held leadership roles at numerous colleges and universities focused on academic advising, curriculum development and student engagement.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Scott and Ned, welcome to Work Forces. Congratulations on the publication of this book, and we're excited to dive in with you today to learn more about Hacking College.

Ned Laff: Thank you so much.

Scott Carlson: Thanks for having us on.

Julian Alssid: So to get the conversation started, love to hear a bit more about your respective backgrounds and how you came together to write this book.

Scott Carlson: Well, as Kaitlin had said, I was at The Chronicle for about 25 years. I've you know, in the years leading up to the pandemic, I was writing a lot about inequality and the path from college to work. I wrote a couple of Chronicle reports about the future of work and how students wind up getting jobs. And in writing some of this, these reports, and writing some of these stories, the follow up stories in The Chronicle, I had been getting a lot of notes from one Ned Laff who had been contacting me and had been working in this area for some time. And this is, in fact, how we got to know each other and got to meet each other, because Ned was just writing me over and over again about, oh, there's a better way. There's a better way to do this. I'll let him take the story from there.

Ned Laff: Yeah, I have the work that I had been doing in higher ed. It's hard to call it something like advising. It's, it's in this middle, middle ground. I got into this when I was a grad student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where I was working in a program called Individual Plans of Study, where students could design their own academic major, provided it couldn't be done in any of the colleges at the University of Illinois Urbana. And what we began to find out working is that students would be coming in and we would help them figure out how they could do essentially, the heart of an individual plan of study, but underneath the rubric of a major. And that started to raise questions in my mind about what is the nature of a college curriculum from the eyes of a student. What is the relationship of a college curriculum to the world of work? If there is this giant thing called the hidden job market, which is not advertised in career services, you don't see it on, you don't see it on. Indeed. You don't see it anywhere. And what does this mean in terms of student engagement, and how students can tap what they're genuinely interested in, what we call hidden intellectualism, and how they actually better engage learning and and the university they're at. And I would send Scott these. I'm like, probably about 100 emails a week, just nagging them. I got something here. I got something here. Just give me five minutes, though.

Kaitlin LeMoine: You share about this in this, in the book, a little bit. We'd love to hear about how the book title came to be. And can you share a bit about the major challenges you hope to tackle when writing this book?

Scott Carlson: Well, I think when I was writing some of that stuff for the Chronicle about the path from college to work, I was sort of following along the kind of narrative that everyone else sort of follows. And it's, you know, it's sort of about skills. What do you do with liberal arts education? How do you get students to land internships and all of that. And you know, really, one of the points that we that we make in hacking college is that a lot of that just sort of comes about by luck. For a lot of students, they just sort of happen to run into the right person who shows them how to play the game, or they come from a lot of social and cultural capital that sort of paves the way to where they want to go. And part of what we're trying to do with hacking college is to describe, kind of, the principles of how people wind up creating valuable undergraduate degrees. We're kind of looking at the whole issue of what is the empty college degree. You know, the empty college degree being sort of this degree that is a quote, unquote useful major, and then a bunch of other stuff in the degree that doesn't really knit together. And a lot of students graduate with that kind of degree. You know, we think this is like a huge part of what drives the national conversation about underemployment and of the value of college right now, and that emptiness being sort of the main problem there. And so with Hacking College, we're trying to tackle this, this question like, how do you actually get to something that's valuable? The term hacking comes from the notion that colleges sort of set up a bunch of rules around, you know, how do you get through? How do you, what do you major in? How do you, how do you fill up the rest of the undergraduate degree? And we're using the metaphor of hacking we're talking about like, how do you, how do you use these different structures that you find in college and then knit them together in a conscious way? How do you, how do you create opportunities and create a program that plays off the strengths that you already bring to college? This is a big part of the hacking metaphor there, coming out of the work of Bruce Schneier, who talks about how hacking is across society. People hack the tax code. People hack regulations, government regulations. People hack their lives in all sorts of ways. And of course, the wealthy hack college in hiring expensive college consultants, in, you know, in lining up opportunities for their children in all sorts of ways. How can we do this for students who don't bring these kinds of resources to the undergraduate experience?

Julian Alssid: So Ned, you so in the book, I think you used the term earlier, you described approaching this undergraduate experience as a field of study.

Ned Laff: Yes.

Julian Alssid: What does that mean? What exactly do you mean? And how does approaching college with that lens impact their learner experience?

Ned Laff: The interesting thing about using field of study is, I asked students once, can you tell me the difference between your college faculty and your high school faculty, and they couldn't and it was a wonderful experience, because what it meant was basically 90% of what faculty have to offer, what a university has to offer, is invisible. So when you look at faculty, faculty are field of study specialists. They aren't just, I'm a professor of English or I'm a professor of biology, they are I'm a professor of environmental biology, and I'm looking at the migration patterns of whales. And that is looking at it is defining a problem which we call in the book wicked problems, which demand a multi disciplinary approach. And how you approach those wicked problems depends on how you define it. So it's not unusual to hear students come out and say, I just graduated with my degree. I'm at Northwestern University. I actually heard this the other day at the gym. I'm at Northwestern University. I'm graduating, and I have no idea what I'm doing with my degree. I don't know how it adds up, because no one had ever asked them a question like this. I'm going to go into accounting. I have no idea what. Talking about, can you explain that to me? And as soon as you ask for that explanation, whole bunches of things open up. And among those things that open up are all this possibility in what Scott and I call the hidden job market. So the other part of field of study is that it brings an outward looking perspective into how students think inwardly about the college. When they begin to do this, what they realize is there's three basic components to an undergraduate education. When you look at most colleges, right, Gen Ed, the major, and what are you going to do with the rest of the hours, which is almost a third or more of your hours? Sometimes it could add up to 50 hours, because some courses in the gen ed count for the major. Well, when you look at a degree audit, it's except for the basic required courses. It's blank spaces to be filled in. How you fill that in is either going to lead to a profound field, the study for you, where you're using the that thing that you're interested in, your hidden, what we call hidden intellectualism, to guide the way you start looking at the learning opportunities on campus and filling these pieces in so they integrate and they fit together. So Gen Ed links with elective courses, which link with how you select what you want to take from this thing called the major department, and how you begin to identify faculty by their fields of specialty. So for instance, take psychology. There's developmental psychologists, there's social psychologists, there are psychologists that focus on Labor and Industrial Relations. There are cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, all of those, if, depending on how you're going to look at the problem you want to study, all of those represent a different way of organizing the learning opportunities on campus. How you organize those learning opportunities that starts building out a field of study. But the other thing that's important in doing this is finding out who is doing that thing you want to do, because all of a sudden you walk out into the world, right? And this world, by the way, could be faculty doing their research and they're discovering things that, wow, if I was to do it all over again, I would be doing this for my course selection instead of that, because this is what I'm encountering right now, and students can bring that information back into how they begin to design what their curriculum or their course of study is, and that's the difference. It's an active design process, not from an advisor or a faculty member talking about degree requirements, but from a student designing the pieces of their curriculum.

Julian Alssid: Just going back for a minute. I mean, this makes all the great sense and and I think anyone you know, so many of us can hearken back to that faculty or administrator that kind of helped us help the lights go off. But I guess I do wonder, and I don't know, maybe I'll love this one to you, Scott, this requires a bit of a mind shift for a lot of faculty. I mean, I don't think you know, they signed on to be the Career Counselor, the social networking expert, along with the, you know, the content expert and expert instructor. So A, what's your view about that? And B, how are we going to get from here to where you guys think we need to go?

Scott Carlson: I mean, I think what you're asking is sort of what I'm picking up from what you're asking is, you know, an implement, an implementation sort of factor here, like, how does this actually happen on a college campus, right? And so kind of part, you know, what we envision, you know, we wrote Hacking College in this very conversational style that allows anyone to read it and anyone to sort of adopt the practices there. Because, you know, on one hand, people you know, they sort of asked us, do you want after this, this book came out of a story that I wrote for The Chronicle called the crusade against terrible advising, right? And after the article came out, you know, Johns Hopkins Press and others had asked, Do you want to turn this into a book? Do you want to write a book about advising? And we really didn't want to write a book about advising. We wanted to write about these structures that cause students to fall off the path. And in writing the book, we wanted to write it in this accessible style, because we sort of felt that everyone on a campus should be able to read this and then work with the students that they, in particular, have in their orbit. That's how you're going to sort of increase, increase the touches that that students have with people on campus, right? We can't just sort of lay this all on advisors, or lay this all on faculty advisors, and in part of the part of implementing this, part of what we're getting at is that what the colleges can do is they can, they can sort of adopt this as a mind frame at the colleges where everyone is sort of speaking this field of study, language and instructing students how to how to go about this, how to talk to people, how to find these contacts that are going to help instruct them in how to design their undergraduate degree. Now, these can be faculty members, but we're hopeful that when the students do encounter the faculty members, when they are working with them. They're working with the faculty members that share this kind of passion, or this hidden intellectualism, or this area of interest, this place where they're going to have a head start on the conversation, because they're already into what the faculty are talking about. And those faculty members, members then will be motivated to work with those students, because those students are in the area that they're interested in. I mean, a big part of the social capital that we talk about in hacking college comes through cultural capital. You know, the conversation about social capital is everywhere in higher ed right now. It's about who you know, right? But a big point that we're making in hacking college is that what drives the social capital is the cultural capital. It's the stuff that you're bringing as a person to the other person in making this link across interests, hidden intellectualism, obsessions, that kind of thing. So this is, I think, a big key to sort of making these relationships work.

Ned Laff: And another part of it is this is very much the student is agent. So there's a student in doing this, they're creating networks. So it's not like I'm I am dependent on a faculty member. There could be three or four faculty members. There could be somebody in student affairs that they talk to, they go out on what we call this research, investigative inquiry, and start talking to people in the areas that they're interested in, and they're bringing information back there. Then they can sit, perhaps with somebody in an advising office and say, Here, I've got all this information. Now, how do I put the how do these pieces start to come together so that I can graduate under the requirements of a major, right? But design the pieces so it gets me to where I want to go. So it's very much a process of students building out their social capital, building out their cultural capital, learning how to network with people on campus and off campus, right? These are all the skills that everyone says people need, right? But they're doing this to design their undergraduate field of study. So in the process of doing their undergraduate education, all these mystical skills of oral communication and teamwork and stuff, they're all coming together, because what's driving it is the students' hidden intellectualism and their vocational purpose.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, I mean, I really appreciated in the in the book, when you know you had a line, it's not where you go to college, but how you do college that matters. That really stuck out to me. And I think, you know, as as we're thinking about the the social and cultural capital, and you know, one point in the book, you raise this concept of the hidden jobs, and you take it in a slightly different direction than I think we sometimes hear it talked about like it's not just about what's posted on LinkedIn as a job opportunity or not, but really that other definition around like pulling back the curtain of the world of work and helping learners really get an understanding of what are all the different job opportunities and career paths available in what might be. I mean, you, I love the scenario of working in a museum, right, like, but would love to, would love just to hear you talk a little bit more about that and what that, you know, what going down that path, through those hidden jobs, can really unearth for learners.

Ned Laff: You know, this is where students, all of a sudden, everything changes for them. I sent this one to Scott recently because I didn't know this existed. There is a national Egg Board. I mean, isn't that cool? It's it's a national organization, and what they deal with is eggs, the eggs you eat. So that means, when you think about it, they have to have a director, they have to have communications, they have to have organizational structure. There's all these things out here. You will never see the National Egg Board listed in a career services office. But that doesn't mean a student can't access it. So what happens is, everything is fair game. And part of the issue that we need to start thinking about is, we right it. Universities tend to define here's where the jobs are. Instead of listening to students and helping them realize, Oh, you want to do something like spoken word, and you want to help students. You want to help kids, in general, use that in order to build out their self esteem, get on their feet and start moving forward. Well, what major is that called, right? But when you start looking at it, you know, we have Google, type in Google, and all of a sudden, up comes all this information. And will people talk to you? Sometimes you have to tell students that they have to put a time limit on it, because once you get people talking to you about what they love to do, they'll go on and on and on, and that opens up possibilities, plus they didn't help the student network to other people doing similar types of things. So now what happens is the model is sort of like a good dissertation advisor who asks you that question and then says, here's how you go find the answer. Now, go come back and tell me what you're coming back with. And so that's how the process works. So it's faculty, it could be staff, it could be anything you hear on the radio, anything you see on TV, anything you read in a newspaper, a billboard that you see you're in yoga class and hear a conversation. All of that is fair game in this process, and it changes the whole nature of the job market and for students, when all of a sudden they say, oh my god, I just ran into somebody who's doing what I love, right? We tend, we tend to say, follow your passion. That's the line out there, right? But really it's following that hidden intellectualism and vocational purpose. The passion is just the emotive expression of, Oh, my God, this is real.

Scott Carlson: One thing I would say is that you know this process that allows students to go out and discover these worlds that are important to them, you know, the Egg Board, or whatever. You know these the world of skiing, the world of anime. You know, it's not just good for the student in discovering something that's out there. I think it's also good. We also think that it's good for the institution. Yes, have you ever heard of the concept of the desire path? You see desire paths when you walk through a city and there's a, sort of a grassy place along a sidewalk, and then you see this sort of like dirt path that goes through the sidewalk to Earth, through the grass to another sidewalk on the other side. It's the people sort of making, this is the shortcut. This is how I want to get there. It's the way that people hack the urban urban infrastructure, in a sense, right? But it also shows others where they can cut across the grass to get to a place faster, right? And eventually, over time, in a lot of instances, the cities will just pave that part because that's where this that's where the people are going. Let's create it. Let's create an actual path there, right? And that's kind of what we're saying. Can happen with the colleges too. The students go out and they discover these worlds, and they're like, oh, I can use this to go to open up the world of eggs through the Egg Board, or I can go into anime, or I can go into museums, or what, what have you. And then the institution starts to discover, oh, these students are leading the way. They are blazing the path. It gives us an opportunity for other students to follow them. And then we can, we can institutionalize that path. We can create a way for students to get there easier,

Ned Laff: And it also challenges, it also challenges our traditional way of thinking about things. I have an academic minute that I wrote it was the answer to the Dead Poets Society. Of course, you can study Shakespeare and go to medical school, more than likely you're going to end up being a much more empathetic doctor. But what students begin to discover when they start looking at the 5000 different ways you can actually get into medical school, it allows them to balance out their life. So I've had students who never had that semester of chemistry, physics, math and biology in the same semester because they discovered, wait, this is what's required to get into medical school. But there's other stuff. There is this whole thing of. How does culture affect health care? How do social social factors affect health care? Why is understanding language important? Because language involves not just speaking to somebody. It involves a culture of eating, a culture of behaving, a culture of everything all of there's so many different paths to get into medical school. Why do so many students only hear about one? Right? Because I remember reading an article that was in The Chronicle that people who are trying to defend history were saying, Wow, we have a couple of history majors who are interested in medical school, but they never ask this question. They never lay this out. How does understanding how to do historical research help you take a better patient history, and asking that question changes everything for a student, and allows them to plan things in a way that best fits all the all the gymnastics that are in their life.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I appreciated the use of the term translation chasm in your book, and I think you know whether that's talking about from a more liberal arts major to a more technical job, or, as you're saying, right? What does it look like to think about maybe something, maybe a graduate school opportunity where it's like, Wait, does this relate? And how and what really are those tangible skills, those cross functional skills, just interdisciplinary skills that kind of follow you wherever you go. I think you know is, is invaluable from a learner perspective, especially, you know, as we recognize that people tend to have more than one job, more than one career at this point, right? So like taking that skill and being able to apply it over and over again, and think about, wait a minute, how do these skills translate to this next opportunity, or to this maybe peripheral or tangential opera that might seem peripheral, peripheral, but actually maybe isn't.

Scott Carlson: Yeah, and I think, I think that's an interesting point about the translation chasm there, because I think a lot of the students go in thinking like, well, major equals job, right? And so what do you do with history? What do you do with dance? What do you do with you know, art, right? Like, become an artist, become a dancer. You know, like, there's all sorts of ways to think about it under this framing. There's different ways to think about what your pathway can be. But you make a good point. One of the things that we write about in hacking College is the notion that you only gather those skills, and you only really sort of understand their meaning and their applicability if you know why you're sitting in the courses, if you know why you're there, if you know what it's leading to, or how you're sort of applying it, right it's skills. I think the conversation about skills in higher education right now is just so much about like, well, we're going to open these kids' heads, and then we're going to dump the skills in, and they're going to be great, and then somebody will hire them for those skills. Eventually we're going to go to skills based hiring, quote, unquote, right? And, you know, we just think that the whole scene is a lot more complicated than that, and requires a lot more human engagement, yeah, than all of that. It's just not this turnkey, like, let's give people skills and then go from there, right? You know.

Ned Laff: Skills are always contextually based

Kaitlin LeMoine: And the coaching that underlies what you're talking about.

Ned Laff: Yes, and interestingly, I'm taking something from my background. It's a metaphorical step to take the skills that you've learned in one contextual setting, and then begin to apply them in another to see how they apply into other contextual studies. You're seeing these analogic connections. And this is, this is the other power of the field of study approach.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, well, it's and it's interesting. We, like Kaitlin, and we talked quite a lot about, you know, that? I mean, it's really about ensuring that each of us has this kind of, you know, good understanding of what we bring to the table, both intellectually interest tech and in the end, the good jobs now, the more we can see from what's emerging here with tech and AI and such as is like, you know, it's like, kind of these jobs require the higher order thinking a good liberal arts program teaches, and the ability to apply yourself. So in a way, what you're talking about is a very organic way of just using this infrastructure that we have to move more in that direction.

Ned Laff: Right and building off Gerry Graff's work on "Clueless in Academe", this idea of hidden intellectualism is important when I work with students or when I'm talking to a group of students, I always ask them this question, have you ever gone to a movie with your friend? Yes, and they all say yes. And then I ask them, but did you see the same movie? And then there's a certain line right. There's a certain area where they could say yes, they saw the same movie. But then when they start to get into that interpretive mood that that's not the same movie that everyone's seen. Well, this is the same thing that happens when a student is in a class, when they have clarified their hidden intellectualism, they know they're looking at the contextual nature of the skills and then shaping that through the lens of their hidden intellectualism into the field of study, the problem that they're going after.

Scott Carlson: Julian, I, you know, I would just say too that, like this is one of the things that it's one of the points of Hacking College, but it's also one of the things that we worry about a little bit. You know, Hacking College is, on one hand, really critical of a lot of the structures within, you know, the average four year institution or university, and what they're doing wrong with advising, and what's happening with, you know, the tracks that they're setting up, and how they're shoving students into boxes and all of that. But you know what you're talking about in terms of what we're talking about here, in terms of, how do students actually acquire skills? How do people actually learn to grow into the roles that they eventually occupy. You know, that's really, it's really individualistic and really hard work. You know, it's hard work on the part of the institution, too. And we do worry that, you know, that the national conversation that seeks to simplify this process, that is about like setting up pathways or putting up tracks, or, like, saying it's all about skills based hiring, or it's all about, like, you know, setting up these, these very, you know, rote pathways. You know, we just worry that that's not really going to get us where we want to go as a nation, in terms of a working nation, you know, there has to be this balance between offering people opportunities that are clear and may have clear pathways to them, but also, you know, giving people the opportunity to be entrepreneurial and to express the skills that are already within them and the desires that they have and the worlds that they want to enter.

Julian Alssid: Okay, so just riffing off of that. Scott, one of the questions we like, always like to ask on each of our episodes is, you know, what can our what steps can our audience take to become forces, in this case, in hacking college? And you know, our audience is more the people who are trying to run these institutions and teach students and interested to hear your take on that, you guys.

Scott Carlson: I, I'll start, and then I'll let Ned take it from there. But like one of the one of the things that Ned and I have thought about writing for The Chronicle as a follow up to hacking College, is as a story that says it's right in front of you. The answers are right in front of you, because there are so many times when we've gone to colleges and the institutions just are not even doing the basic work of getting off of campus, talking to the various constituents that are off campus, really engaging the students on what they really, really want there, that there are sort of unfilled internship positions out there, that you know, that the college is lined up, but no one's bothered to like connect the students to it. I think some of the work that has to be done right now is really low hanging fruit, and it is really just about getting people out of the out of the confined space of the campus, and getting them off campus and to discover what's out there, and to start to build these partnerships that are really fun. I think the other piece of it too is to try to engage the student around what we're talking about in the book, in terms of playing off of their playing off of what drives them. I mean, we're in a position right now where, you know, we've been talking about this for a couple of weeks, where we just have no idea where the world is going. This is where we end hacking college that you know, Zach Stein, he's this educational futurist that we quote in the last chapter says, you know, we just, even the elders, have no idea where the country is going, where education is going, what form it will take. So maybe we need a little less control around that, and we need to start to embrace this hacking concept that allows us to open it up a little bit more and maybe experiment a little bit more. That's what's coming. I think for higher education.

Ned Laff: There's something very deliberate also in what we did with Hacking College, we focused on, Hi, here's a school that anyone can get into. Here's a community college that anyone can get into. These are not Ivy League colleges. They're not the high end flagship institutions, and all of a sudden they become hidden dream schools, because what students begin to see is that these, all these schools, have a wealth of learning opportunities on their campuses if they can see it well, the flip side is for college administrators to be able to see exactly the same thing when students begin to see when they begin to look at faculty as field of study specialists, the whole nature of the college changes. Everything changes. Well, if we can get faculty and administrators and staff to see the same thing, then what you begin to realize is, gosh, go wander into some of the offices or some of the labs on a community college, and all of a sudden you're going to see some of the craziest stuff going on, right? So there's this wealth out there. So here's all this wealth, and here's this thing of what our college is going to do to try to attract students or to show students that there's value and it's right in front of you. Change this is interesting, right? Change the conversations, right? So the last time I looked, and trust me, I look at this all the time, there is no budget line in change the kinds of conversations right. Change the conversations the students see themselves differently. They see the campus differently. They see all the opportunities around their campus differently. All of a sudden it's a wealth of opportunities. The other thing that's interesting is this, people will always ask me, why will these people that we send students out to talk to? We make them make these phone calls, this research, investigative interview? Why would people talk to them, and I tell them straight up, because they're all frustrated parents whose kids never listen to them, and they've got so much to share, and they really want to share it. And so the hack is, I'm not going through an HR gate. I'm going around the gate. I've taken a desired path. I'm connecting, I'm matching my interest with somebody else's interest, which then brings passion to passion, and all sorts of stuff begins to blow up. It's great.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I feel like we could have, we could have a full day's worth of conversation about this book, and I, and I hate to take us to the last question of our conversation today, but, but I will so you know, we've really enjoyed this conversation and really appreciate so many of you know so many of the topics that you raised and in this book. As we close out today, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow the work that you're doing? And Scott, you know, you mentioned the follow up piece you might be writing, and how can our listeners kind of remain in the loop?

Scott Carlson: I mean, I think, first of all, you know, just for me, I'll continue to write for The Chronicle. I have a column called The Edge, where we'll be hitting these topics on a regular basis, and we'll be out there on social media. I mean, social media is kind of a disaster these days, but I am on LinkedIn, so I'll be posting on that. And, you know, we'll just continue to have this. We're just going to continue to push this. I think, given the way that people are talking about college right now. We want to change that conversation. And we want to change the conversation around, what does it mean to be connected to the workforce? Yeah, that's been part of it.

Ned Laff: So I'm on LinkedIn. Contact us. You know, we will gladly sit down, set up a time. We could do a Zoom talk. There's whole bunches of different ways to do this, and this is important for people in universities to understand you can take what already exists that you're already using, reshape the insides of it, and all of a sudden a master in college class becomes a class in mastering how to hack the college right same amount of time you already have it scheduled. You're not increasing any revenue. But the important thing is the effects on the students will be different. And so it's easy to do. It's like anyone who would like to continue the conversations just, just contact well.

Julian Alssid: And I'm sure people will definitely want to continue the conversation. We're so excited to have been at the front end of this dialogue you're starting, I hope others will read the book I'm about 52% of the way through, judging by my bookmark here to the left. But thank you both so so much for joining us today. Good luck with this, and you know, we too look forward to being part of this conversation.

Scott Carlson: Thank you both.

Ned Laff: Thanks so much.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces dot info or on Apple, Amazon and Spotify, please subscribe, like and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.