The State of Student Support Services

Kevin Tyler

Hello and welcome back to Higher Voltage, a volt podcast covering the latest trends in higher education, marketing and administration. And with everything that’s going on in the industry, there is a lot to cover. I’m your host, Kevin Tyler, an industry veteran, and I’ve worked on both sides of the fence at institutions like UCLA and various higher education agencies. And each episode, I talked to industry experts to get their take on what’s working, what’s not, and what has to change. Higher voltage is produced by volt, the go to news source for higher education marketers and enrollment professionals. You can visit volt at Edu and subscribe to Higher Voltage on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss an episode.

Electric Kite ad read

Kevin Tyler

Welcome back to Higher Voltage. I hope everyone is having a great summer. I’m excited for today’s conversation about college support and basic needs and mental health. Joining me today is Lindsay Daugherty from RAND. Lindsay is a senior policy researcher at RAND who specializes in research on education and workforce development. She focuses on partnerships with policy makers and practitioners to help build better pathways to good jobs. Lindsay’s research examines career and technical education pathways at the high school and post-secondary levels, credit for prior learning and competency based education, wraparound supports for individuals pursuing education and training, and transitions from education and sector based training into employment. Lindsay, I’m so glad to have you on Higher Voltage to talk about some really recent and important research. Please share anything else I did not cover in your intro that you’d like our listeners to know?

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah, thanks for having me today, Kevin. I’ve been at RAND for quite a long time. Worked out in the school district for a couple of years. And, really got inspired there because we were doing research on students who were in the top ten percent of their high school class, students with 4.0, who are not going on and going to college. I think it was only fifty or sixty percent of students in that urban low income school district that went on to college. And so it just really got me interested in thinking about why don’t students go to college, who are already kind of academically successful and ready to go, and what other things might be holding them back? And so that really got me interested in trying to help out with community colleges and, and figure out, you know, what types of services are needed. So I love talking to you about that.

Kevin Tyler

I love it. You raised so many important issues that higher education as a whole industry is facing every single day. You know, why are very qualified and prepared students not going to college? Why can’t those students also succeed or be retained in college? Today’s conversation is going to focus on some research that RAND did that you participated in, that collected data about long term trends and housing insecurity, food insecurity and mental health needs. And I think that this is such an important conversation for us to have, because, obviously, this is for our listeners who’ve been with us for a while. This is obviously a marketing podcast. It’s a podcast about higher education marketing. But one of the things that I think strongly and feel strongly about is that as higher education marketers, we have to understand the lived experiences of our audiences and what they carry with them in order to communicate to them in ways that demonstrate that we don’t only see them, but we also understand or are fluent in their needs. And one of the things I often say on this show is that, like over the past few decades, we have seen higher education institutions become more responsible for a wider breadth of responsibility, like food insecurity, like housing insecurity. And this report kind of echoes that opinion and that colleges are now stepping up to the plate. A lot of colleges are stepping up to the plate to address some of these kind of external needs and desires, urgent needs that incoming students and current students have. And so, this study from RAND about college support and basic needs is about topics that have been and will continue to be so important for marketing leaders to know about and to have some sort of fluency in, especially in light of recent legislation across the country, the higher education landscape. If we are not understanding the needs of the students, we cannot market effectively to them about the supports and offers of an institution. So I’m really excited to chat with you about this research and want to start off the conversation with just some of the top line findings that you surfaced in the research for this report?

Lindsay Daugherty

Yes. So there are a couple of different reports that we wrote. So I think the one that’s probably the most important to emphasize. We talked to community colleges that were identified as leaders across five different states and asked them, what are you doing to address your student basic needs? And so, I think that report really pulled out a set of core things that colleges were doing. They were providing a wide range of services, so they were addressing food and housing and had kind of the full range of wraparound supports to provide students to. They have, you know, case management. So individuals who were explicitly trained and devoted time to working with students who are facing these needs and tracking and making sure that they were following through with the connections that had been made to different public resource programs. There were things that we identified that were common across these leading colleges, which were really, it was a college wide effort. It was not just this one individual who was working in an office, but everyone across the college knew about this service and this office and knew that this was the place to send students if they needed non-academic support and support with these other kind of financial needs beyond financial aid. And so really heavy referral systems from, you know, both faculty and frontline staff, opportunities for them to point students in the right direction. And we would often also hear from these leading colleges that peer referrals were hugely important. You know, so there was kind of the set of, you know, really promising practices that we consistently saw some of these leading colleges doing. And I think the thing that was really cool to learn in that report, you know, I’d been concerned because a lot of colleges were able to scale up the basic need support that they were able to provide during the pandemic. And I was concerned that the loss of that federal funding that was supporting a lot of those basic needs services would have meant a real pullback in what these colleges were able to do after the pandemic. But, you know, what was really nice to hear is that they had found ways to sustain these resources through foundations and through institutional funding. And a lot of states now have dedicated funding streams that help to cover the costs of these benefits, navigators or whatever, you know, case managers that are out in colleges. And so it’s been nice to see that, you know, what was really brought to attention during the pandemic in a major way and was starting to become increasingly visible before the pandemic is now being sustained in terms of these, you know, housing, food and mental health supports that students are receiving, colleges.

Kevin Tyler

It’s an interesting kind of needle to thread when talking about these needs that incoming and current students have that are non-academic. I’m curious how, from a research perspective, how can colleges frame these findings to build some level of awareness without oversimplifying or sensationalising these issues, and also without making it seem like there is an equivalency between achievement and lived experience, if that makes sense.

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah. So I think it depends on who you’re trying to market to or who you’re trying to communicate to. I do think that there is a major issue right now with the general public misunderstanding who your typical college student is. There’s so much media and press that focuses on Ivy League colleges and the issues that they’re facing in terms of political uprisings. And also, you know, some of the pullback of funds and things like that with the current administration and and before that, affirmative action. But, you know, more than forty percent of students go to community colleges and even more go to broad access colleges. And there’s a real lack of attention to the types of students that are attending these colleges who are older, often have families or working a job while they attend college and, you know, barely making ends meet and are just really trying to find a better pathway to a job. And so, I think there’s a general marketing and communication issue about who students are. But, you know, within colleges, I think, you know, there is a pretty strong awareness now of who the population is. And there has been a pretty strong effort over the last five to ten years to destigmatize basic needs and to really communicate to students that this is for everyone. We want to support you and meet you where we are. Colleges will use the term we’re a student ready college, you know, and it’s less about being a college ready student and shifting the onus off of the student to somehow meet a bar that the college sets, and that it’s really the college’s job to meet a student wherever they are. And so I think colleges have been doing a pretty good job of communicating out and building awareness. I think among their students and to some degree their faculty and staff. I’ll say one more cool thing about a really advanced effort to do this, to build awareness. I think it is important, as I was mentioning earlier, that you have these referrals and that you have this real culture of care within a college and that it’s not just one person cares and is sitting in an office and the student has to, hopefully, find their way there. It really is about feeling like you’re welcome, that you have people who really do care about you in the college. And so what Amarillo College has done and what other colleges have done after Amarillo is a real poverty emerge. And I can’t remember the exact term, you know, for this poverty lab or something like that, but really coming in and making all of the staff engage in a one day training where they experience to live the life of their students and get to build a stronger understanding of what their students are facing on a daily basis. So they come into the classroom or into their job every day with a little bit more compassion and a little bit more perspective about what that student might be facing, and that it’s not about sticking to X, Y, and Z policies. It’s about, again, meeting that student where they are and doing everything that you can to support them and help them move forward. So I think that, you know, colleges are, at least community colleges that I work with, are doing a pretty good job of communicating this out to their students and staff.

Kevin Tyler

Yeah, it’s always been known and kind of a refrain in higher education that community colleges are kind of really well positioned to serve communities that have greater needs than a traditional four year PWI land grant. But we do see institutions of that size really kind of step up to the plate when it comes to addressing some of the needs that people have on those campuses. 

It’s interesting to me that some of the information that was presented in the report show that there were fewer people that get involved in support programs at a community college level, but that there are more at the four year traditional university that get involved. And I’m curious if you have any sort of insight or perspective on why that might be.

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah. So that report that you’re referring to focuses on particularly helping students with access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is also commonly known as food stamps. And I think this is also true of mental health that, you know, universities just have much more money to spend on supplemental resources for students of all kinds. So our findings in California were that, when it came to really providing dedicated one-on-one support and working with students through the SNAP process, helping them with their applications, following up with them, that there were universities that had as many as six people trained exclusively on this case management and support around public benefits with students. And when you talk to community colleges, they’re lucky they have one basic needs person who’s helping to oversee their pantry and five other things. And maybe they can take a class on SNAP and try to help a few students with that as well. So I think, yeah, there’s definitely a capacity difference. And that’s what drives a lot of those differences. There’s also differences in eligibility for SNAP across different settings. And so that drives some of the participation differences as well. But I think really the capacity is the difference between the two years and four years that we found.

Kevin Tyler

When you and your team do work in research like this, is there a point at which you think about how we turn raw numbers or stats into narratives or storytelling, and if so, like, can you share what that that translation looks like so that our listeners can understand what kinds of storytelling might be the most valuable to their audiences.

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah. So, unfortunately, in some studies, we’re not able to do that. And so, you know, I think in the SNAP one that we were just referring to, that was something that came up with our advisory group is, where are we going to get student voice into this? So people do care about student voice. So we have an advisory group of people up at the state level, and they do want to hear the student voice and acknowledge the importance of that. But in that particular study, we weren’t able to in our other study of Single Stop, which is a technology intervention that helps connect students to SNAP and other public benefits and to community resources and facilitate case management by a community college staff. We did a lot, almost one hundred interviews with students, and we surveyed thousands of students to learn about their experiences, their level of basic need. And, you know, those interviews were really impactful. I think we tried to incorporate them to some degree, and a lot of the main interpretations that we made of the findings in our analysis were really dependent on what we heard from students. And, you know, I think what we heard from them had a lot of need. So they described really tough circumstances. And so, I think getting students on camera and having them talk about the circumstances that they’re in, can be a really powerful and important tool to communicating what students are going through. I know for me, sitting on those calls, I was getting emotional and wanting to follow up immediately after and figure out how I could help and connect that student to resources. And so, I think for colleges raising money for foundations that help to support basic needs, you know, having that student voice there can be really important. I think we also learned a lot of surprising things. You know, we don’t see a high take up of a lot of these resources. And we want to understand why students aren’t using them. And it was just interesting to hear them talk through how hard things were and then have them say, well, the reason I didn’t use the services, you know, we would ask them directly, well, why didn’t you follow up with the case manager that was trying to offer you services and they would say other students need it more than I do. So there was some sort of triaging that they were doing in their mind about their level of, you know, deserving or need that they had for those resources relative to other students. And so that’s one barrier. Stigma, you know, is another barrier. Students don’t want to be on public benefits. Some students, or they don’t want to go to the food pantry. And so, you know, yes. And then some students just weren’t aware. Some students we talked to, who we know that a case manager followed up with them four or five times, and they couldn’t recall that this had happened. And so some of it, I think, is just a flood of information coming at students and them trying to just keep track of the latest thing that they’re being told about a class and not remembering about a resource that they were offered, you know, a couple of weeks ago. And so I think there were a wide range of things that were contributing to low take up of this particular intervention. And students, these are, there are a number of different studies across settings that show that these are barriers to student use of basic need supports.

Kevin Tyler

That makes total sense. I’m so glad that you mentioned Single Stop. And there’s another program that is referenced in the materials called Find Help. And I just want to pull this thread with you just for a second more. And that when studying programs like Single Stop and Find Help, did you observe any other patterns in how information was or wasn’t effectively reaching students? I know that, you know, there’s, you know, communications channels like texts that you mentioned between students and caseworkers. What can those patterns that you’ve identified, teach us about how to design better outreach, do you think?

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah, it was, some of it is circumstantial. I think we did this, conducted the study of Single Stop during the pandemic. And, so there were some really interesting things going on during that time. One students, I was just talking about students being flooded with information, you know, particularly during that time, they’re switching to online learning and being flooded with electronic information all of a sudden from every one of their classes, much more so, and they’re not on campus. And a core part of what Single Stop sees as its service model is having an on campus hub that’s in a highly trafficked area. And so students aren’t on campus. They’ve now lost that opportunity to kind of connect with students. And, you know, a student might not want to jump on the phone with someone that they’ve never met before, and they can’t sit face-to-face to talk about a really sensitive issue like food or housing. They want to, you know, have that person face to face and be sitting down with them in an office where they know there’s privacy. And so I think some of it was, that is that, you know, we were also, interestingly, in those interviews with students hearing about them receiving one thousand dollars in pandemic relief funding to help them during these semesters. So this was spring 2021 and fall 2021. And during that time, states were allocating resources and were receiving resources to specifically go out to students who were facing financial, unmet financial need. And so there were, it was just a different set of circumstances. And those thousand dollars were immediately accessible in the case of many Colorado students and dropped into their account without them having to fill out paperwork or anything like that. And so, I think that’s another key learning from a lot of the work that we’ve done lately, and something that I think a lot about in terms of SNAP as and whether or not it can be a resource for college students that’s really going to be broadly used, is that I think colleges are focusing a lot more on the food pantries now and on emergency aid, which is, you know, you fill out a form, forms and my car broke down or I’m hungry or whatever, and I need utilities paid. And your college decides whether or not to sign off and approve it, and usually does. Really, it’s more just to have some record of the need. That’s not that they’re kind of going around and necessarily deciding what is and is not worthy. And so, and these are offered to all students and they’re open to all students. So they’re easy to understand and they’re easy to apply for. Whereas something like SNAP, food stamps is very difficult to apply for. Complex, intentionally complex because they are trying to keep students out of the program, and they’re trying to ensure that only the people that most need it get it. And the way that they do that is by putting five barriers in the way of getting it. And at the end, you may get twenty five dollars a month. So students may be making a calculation in their minds of it’s not worth the work, you know, to maybe potentially get something down the line. And so, I think that part of it is thinking about the administrative burden. Some of it is about getting the word to students and making sure that students are aware. And I think that, you know, another challenge for our study is that we were working in schools that were newly implementing these programs. And what I think I’ve seen over time is that, you know, to become that Amarillo College, which is really seen as one of the leaders in this space, it takes five or ten years of building up trust and your reputation within the college and among staff. It’s not something that happens in the first month or two. You know, it’s repeated getting your name out, getting your name out. And then finally, again that student word of mouth starts to happen, and everything. So, you know, having that broader net of awareness, in addition to having it be something that students can easily access, and they just need to put in a student ID or something. That’s how most schools do their food pantries. As you just walk up, you put in your student ID just for tracking purposes. But it doesn’t matter. Every student is eligible. They make staff eligible so that staff can go up and walk in models to students. This is for everyone, you know. And so I think that understanding of, like, this is not stigmatized. It’s not… It’s something for everyone. It’s easy to access.

Kevin Tyler

That makes really good sense. I think about, like, we often think of higher education marketing as only the externally sent, right, that only the recruitment messaging and viewbooks and websites whatever, which is very, very important. But just as important is the retention marketing, right. Like how I’m communicated with that will keep me here. And that I understand that the supports are there. And one of the things about this, you know, component or category of need is that there is very little room to break any trust, right? Like you have to whatever you’re promising you have to follow through with. And that is the only way that you can build that trust that you just referenced, that Amarillo has done such a great job at. And so, when we think about the stories that we are telling, the messages that we are sending out to our already on campus community, that is going to be just as important of a story to tell about these services, what they exist for, for whom they exist and how it operates. And in that, and that’s how you get that trust to build.

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah, definitely. Especially because I think it’s tough to market some of this stuff externally to prospective students, because it’s the message that most community colleges particularly try to lead with for students is that we are going to bring you to economic prosperity. We are bringing you to a future career. And so to bring up in the meantime, we’re going to help you get on public benefits and we’re going to help you get food. That food sends you to a food pantry, that runs counter to this image that you want to provide to students in terms of this is going to, you know, move you upward. And so I think it’s a really delicate balance to market basic needs services. And I think it’s mostly about making sure that you get students in the door. And a lot of what researchers talk about, and foundations and other reformers of post-secondary ed success interventions talk about not putting the onus on the student to go find the support. Even within the college. It shouldn’t be about marketing things to students. The student should just, it should be a part of the process so that the student’s getting support. You know that there’s something. For example, one community college that we talked to, talked about doing pulse surveys. So every week or two, it’s not on the student to go to their teacher or their friend and say, where do I go get food or go navigate and find down. There’s something that’s being asked of them every two weeks that’s quickly assessing, do you need help with any of these things? And they can kind of hit the buzzer and it’s someone’s going to be on top of them following up with that. And so moving away from the traditional thinking of marketing in terms of like, let’s put up a bunch of flyers and go put out, put a table in a highly trafficked area. And yes, colleges still do those things. But I think really building this sense of broader trust among the staff so that they know it’s the go to place to be. And then also thinking about some of these, you know, how can we do systematic check ins with the students who might be at greatest risk and target the services to those students, because we know there are going to be a set of students at the top, you know, who are fine financially and are not going to need these services. And so, really, that’s what a lot of these leading colleges are thinking of right now is, you know, what is the best way to develop intake processes that can help get students in without having it be just your broad marketing and they find the right door.

Kevin Tyler

And I think that’s an interesting and important distinction in that marketing is also about experience and not just about the message, right? And if the experience is one, if we were saying that, we kind of support the whole student, right? You get some of that messaging out in the world, but we don’t know how to handle this delicately or intentionally, then there is a disconnect in the messaging or the promise and what is being delivered in the experience. And I very much appreciate you mentioning the fact that this is, you know, addressing needs like this goes beyond flyering and emails or tabling. It also means what the process looks like to get the need met in a way that feels most comfortable to the student. That is a marketing tactic, and it is a thoughtful and strategic way of approaching something that can be very delicate and sensitive. 

I could not have this conversation without kind of talking about, you know, the elephant in the room, so to speak. And that is some of the budget cuts from the federal level to both, basic need support and, likely, to higher education. And as you know, that onus gets moved to states, these states will have to decide whether or not to fund this or that. And I’m wondering if you have any sort of idea, based on the research that you’ve conducted for these reports that we’re talking about, about what might happen next in higher education and in basic need support because of the decisions being made at the federal level.

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah. You know, it’ll be interesting to see. I think states have expressed, as I mentioned earlier, you know, I think one of the things that was so great to hear from at least the leading colleges is that their states were still being really supportive of this. Again, I will echo your point that colleges and states are facing big budget crises, and they are very worried about the funding that they have and how they’re going to allocate it to all the things that they need to allocate it to. So I think it’s a real concern, but as of now, so far, states have mostly been moving in the direction of passing things that award funding to colleges for basic needs to fill in and backfill the pandemic support that really was used to help scale a lot of those supports at colleges. So I think speaking up until, you know, a month ago or so, you know, things are still headed in a positive direction for basic needs. And it’s something that is true both of your Californias and your Washington state’s. But also Kentucky is a big leader in this, and North Carolina does a lot of work on basic needs. And, so I don’t… And I’m talking with my Ohio colleagues and they’re doing stuff on basic needs. And so it really is happening across states of all different political affiliations or, you know, across different types of populations. And so I think that there is this broad recognition that we need to support. We can’t just be putting students in school and having them drop out. The dropout rates have been very high for a persistently long time, particularly at the community college level. I don’t think that this recognition of the importance of supporting the whole student is going to go away, but I do, you know, wonder how they’re going to be able to continue to fund all the support services that they provided. And there are trade-offs between things. 

I will say that I was at a conference a month and a half ago where they were talking about workforce development programs and funding them, and there it was very critical. Everyone was talking about the need of support, going beyond just paying tuition and fees and the costs of workforce development and training, whether that was at community colleges or whether that was from some goodwill or some other type of training provider. And so there are really innovative programs, like a program in the state of New Jersey that provides living support, a living stipend to students, in addition to helping to cover the costs of their short term training program. You know, and so, I think that there’s a recognition that you cannot take people who are low income. It’s not just the cost of tuition and fees. They are having to give up hours on the job to participate. And unless you help to fill in some of that income and bridge that gap, they’re not going to be able to do it. So, yeah. So I think that, again, everything I hear is an ongoing recognition that we need to invest in this. But we’ll see when the rubber hits the road. And colleges have to make those trade-offs. What ends up happening.

Kevin Tyler

Yeah. I’m curious, throughout the course of your research, was there any, like, idea that came to your mind that was just, like, glaringly missing the higher education landscape when it comes to the topics we were talking about today? Was there just like, why is everyone missing this thing? Or why is everyone talking about it in this way, when it should be this? Or was there anything that, like, the industry is just kind of like either getting wrong or just not positioned well to address at this point?

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah. I mean, again, like dealing with things like trying to get students access to SNAP, that feels like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, you know, and really just trying to patch all of these things. Okay, we’re going to go to a food pantry here and we’re going to find a person, connect them to housing here. And I do wonder if there’s an easier or less administratively burdensome way to meet some of these needs. As we were just talking about the $600 living stipend and something that’s attached to your financial aid. And so it’s just more a part of your regular financial aid that you receive, as opposed to them having to fill in all of these needs. But again, I’m sure that still wouldn’t meet the need that’s out there, and there would still be a demand for some of these additional support services. So, you know, but I do wonder about that. It’s a little different with, you know, college campuses, some of them aren’t set up with cafeterias or things like that. But that is, we have decided as a society that we are going to pay for lunch and breakfast for students who are learning, because we acknowledge that at the K-12 level, you can’t learn without breakfast and lunch. And so, I don’t know if there’s some, you know, program that could be developed like that, but I just wonder if there’s a more systematic way to be addressing this. You know, of course, this is not the time in terms of the current administration to be talking about expanding food support, but, you know, it seems like there’s an easier way to get food to students than…

Kevin Tyler

Yeah. And I think you speak to, you know, the core of the reason why I think that this conversation is important right now is that I’m hopeful that colleges and universities of all stripes, community colleges, traditional four-year, all of them are preparing themselves for what it might look like to have these conversations with more people, because the economy is what it is. We have, you know, roughly three million people about to lose some benefits that they really, really need. And if they want to go after an education, colleges need to be, higher education needs to be positioned in such a way that they can not only speak to it, but also serve it. And so, this might feel completely separate from, you know, the core of what this podcast, the show is all about. But I do not think that it is, because the more information that we can have, again, about the lived experiences that students are bringing to our campuses, the better we can serve them. And so I really appreciate the way that you and your team at RAND kind of unpack the need and some of the examples that are happening across the country at institutions large and small. 

I’m wondering in that frame or in that context. My final question is one that I ask to every single person who passes through these higher voltage doors is, what do you think the future of higher education looks like from where you sit? Maybe in five or ten years?

Lindsay Daugherty

I don’t know. I tend to be an incrementalist and think that things don’t change much. What I have seen over the last ten years is that a lot of the same reform issues are being talked about that I was hearing about in twenty fifteen. In some ways we move very little and we move slowly. 

Kevin Tyler

Say what? That’s crazy.

Lindsay Daugherty

Oh yeah. Well, institutions are built, you know, just like the United States was to move slowly and have fifty different committees making every decision. And so, you know, a lot of post-secondary institutions are not positioned to move quickly and be innovative in the way that they could be. But I was at a meeting two weeks ago with all of the state higher education leaders, the people who work at the state agencies overseeing colleges. And so, I heard a lot of dynamic discussions and sessions there. And I would say that there were a sprinkling of ones that were focused on basic needs and those types of things and helping to support the whole student. But really, I think the main focus of states and colleges right now is aligning with workforce and making the case that they are valuable in helping to build our workforce. And so, that was the focus of the vast majority of things, whether that’s pulling in work based learning opportunities, where students are going to get to learn on the job, or whether that’s making sure that you’re building stackable credential pathways that are aligned with good jobs at the end. And so, I do think that there will be a shift toward, an ongoing shift that was already started, you know, a couple of years ago, that’s moving toward more focus on strengthening our workforce pipelines and less focus on our general education pipelines, potentially. But I think that that might be a good thing, because the pendulum had swung a little far, I think, in US education toward such an emphasis on general education as the primary valuable pathway. And when someone would say the word career and technical education or vocational education, it was seen as lesser than. And the pathway you go to if you don’t make the main pathway, which is college, and college is a four year degree, you know. And what I see in community colleges is that they are everything. They are the transfer pathway to that four year degree. They are providing welding training. They are training nurses. They are doing all the different… And all these pathways, many of them lead to good jobs. And so I think, you know, moving toward a place where transfer to a liberal arts degree or transfer to a STEM degree are important pathways that are there. And students are also aware of pathways in more applied fields, like healthcare or advanced manufacturing, that may have shorter term credentials built in. Because part of it, I think, is not just the support that the student gets, it’s structure of the program. And some people cannot take four years off of work, you know, and need to work more incrementally toward whatever their career and life goals are. And so, you know, I think that that shift might be actually a positive one.

Kevin Tyler

You know, I’m glad that you mentioned that, because one of the things I was struck by as I was preparing for our conversation was a quote on your bio page for RAND. And I’d love to share that with folks here, because I think it’s an important perspective. And what it says here is that, “For some reason, we decided in the United States that everyone has to get a four year college degree, and if you don’t, then your education and training is not really worth it. These stackable credential programs can really open up access to college and professional training for a much wider pool of people, and, hopefully, give them pathways to economic opportunity.” I think that’s absolutely correct, and I think that there is a very critical role for higher education to play in those offers of stackable credentials. I do not think that what this quote says is that, you know, don’t go to college. It just means to me, go to a different version of college. And so where are those initiatives and those innovations that you are talking about? You know, the alignment to workforce at the conference you were just at, there is a conversation about diversifying the educational experience in America that I feel like is starting to be had, but it kind of it’s been floating around for quite some time, and we’re now being forced to really consider it and entertain it. And I think that that, I am aligned in my thinking with yours, what the future of education looks like.

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah. Yeah. And I’m hopeful for it. So we’ll see. You know, I mean, we’re having a little bit of a rocky time right now in terms of some funding and… But, you know, they’re expanding workforce Pell. And that will be interesting to see how, you know, the expansion of support to shorter term programs help to support these stackable credentials. And, you know, I mean, of course, there are concerns on the other side that we could lead students to programs that are not valuable. But I think there are a lot of funders and states, who are really investing right now and figuring out what are the credentials, short term credentials of value that we want to allow our workforce Pell funds to go to. So I think that we are going to see definitely an expansion in that area, because whenever you see federal funding going somewhere, you’re going to see more bodies going in that direction and more colleges focused on developing those programs. But yeah, I’m hopeful because I don’t think you’re diverting a student who always would have been a chemist, and they’re going to go towards some short term credential that doesn’t pay off. I think that the majority of students who end up enrolling in these short term programs never would have attended college at all, or would have tried to. And then after they see that, oh, I’m in math and English again, I came here to get a job. Like, what’s going on? I walked in the wrong door. You know, they would have dropped out. And so, yeah, these alternative pathways and these options for funding those alternative pathways through college, like you said, it’s all college. Redefining college so that it’s all of these pathways, you know, and then telling kids again, you can all go to college, but college just could be six months and it could be two years, and it could be four years. And so, you know, pick what career you want or what job you want. And then we’re going to show you the education and training pathway that’s going to get you there.

Kevin Tyler

Yeah, yeah. Or five years like in my case. 

I want to share one more thought that comes to mind, as you were talking about the different kinds of offers that college could end up being involved with. And one of the brains that I admire in the higher education marketing space is Tony Proudfoot from Western Michigan University. In a conversation that I was a part of a couple of years ago, he was talking about how marketers should have more ownership of the higher education product, because we are on the front lines of communicating with audiences, and we know what they want and we know what they need. And if we are able to design a product that more aligns with the diversity of needs, educational needs, then we are able to serve them a lot better. And I think that work like this, this report about college, basic need and mental health support, all the other things that we have talked about. I think marketers need to be at the table when coming up with these new programs, offers, stackable credentials. The entire educational experience needs to have a marketing brain at the table so that we know how to, because we know how to talk about it from both, you know, both directions to our audiences and from the deliverer. So that just came to mind. And I think that’s an important point that comes to mind every now and then when I think about what the future of higher education might look like.

Lindsay Daugherty

Speaker 3 Yeah, I completely agree that that marketers both and also the voices of students, you know, I think college has gotten smarter about bringing students into the room as well when they’re designing a new admissions system or they’re designing marketing materials that actually get some students involved. And there aren’t ninety five acronyms that no one understands. And it actually is speaking in a message that’s going to be, you know, important to that student. And recognizing that those aren’t a bunch of seventeen year olds at high schools that your student could be, you know, a thirty five year old working adult with a child. And so making sure you capture that diversity of students who are actually attending college these days, rather than having this image of what you think a college student is.

Kevin Tyler

Amen, Lindsay Daugherty. Thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation. I loved it. I liked to nerd out on things like research and higher education. So this is the perfect intersection. So, for our listeners, we will have a link to the reports from RAND, as well as some other supporting materials, in case you desire to dive in a little bit deeper. But in the meantime, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining me on Higher Voltage, and I cannot wait to have an update conversation on the back end of this kind of turmoil that we’re sensing in the space to see how things might have changed.

Lindsay Daugherty

Yeah, that sounds great. Again, I’m optimistic we can get through this. It was really great to talk with you, Kevin. Thanks for having me. And, hope to talk again soon.

Kevin Tyler

Thank you.

Lindsay Daugherty

All right. Bye-bye.

Kevin Tyler

All right. Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Higher Voltage. You can stay up to date on the latest higher ed marketing trends and news by following Volt on LinkedIn and Bluesky. You can find me, Kevin Tyler, on Bluesky as well. We’ll be back soon with another episode. And don’t forget to catch trusted voices hosted by my friends Teresa Valerio Parrot and Erin Hennessey, also on the Volt network.