Hello and welcome to Higher Thinking on higher ed. I am Charlyn Carrington of Content Strong Communications, the fractional communications and marketing leader of choice for post secondary and nonprofits. Today I am excited to continue diving into the trends, the challenges encountered by leaders in higher education. And I'm honored to welcome Dr. Nick Ladani to the hot seat today. Nick is the president of San Francisco Bay University, a Forbes contributor, and a seasoned higher education leader with more than 30 years of experience across public and private institutions. He's authored over 80 publications and is known for advancing meaningful change in higher education. Big thank you again, Nick, for bringing your expertise to this conversation today. How you doing? 02:05 Nick Ladany I'm doing well. Thank you, Charlyn, for having me on the show. I appreciate it. 02:09 Sharlyn, Content Strong Oh, my goodness. I am so excited to dive into this conversation with you. You have such a robust kind of background. I usually like to start these conversations just to, you know, with a bit of a context check. Right. I mean, you've described. I think in an earlier conversation that we had, you've described higher ed as having failed large segments of the student population. How has that belief kind of shaped your leadership style and your leadership vision at your university. And what are you kind of doing differently as president? 02:40 Nick Ladany Well, I appreciate the question. I think as someone who's seen it both from the inside and outside, I feel like I'm in a position to talk about what is working and what is not working in higher education. And by and large, as you were just mentioning, I do think higher ed has failed large segments of the population, if not the entire population, with their promise. 03:00 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 03:01 Nick Ladany So when I think about going into college, what does that mean? What are the important things? I think higher ed has lost its way. And what I mean by that, in the 40s and 50s and probably the 60s, what you saw is this more robust acceptance and inclusion in higher ed. And then it became much more exclusionary. And that we did this through a variety of means, whether it was through standardized tests that have no validity or in terms of outcomes, the true outcomes of what college should be about, or admissions criteria that doesn't fit the student population or a narrowing of the student population that is most critical for the college. Basically, colleges had this real race toward get the wealthiest students as quickly as possible. 03:49 Nick Ladany And there were a lot of proxies that were used, I think, to determine who are the wealthiest students who can afford a public or private higher education. And universities did that in a very clever way. And over time and at points, okay, there is a need to have funds at the university, but as those upper wealthier populations started to decline, the burden was put on the student, whether it was through loans or some other means, in order for them to come up with those expenses, rather than cut expenses to meet the student needs. So it's a combination of a variety of things. But the exclusionary, by and large, intentional, unintentional, conscious, unconscious, exclusionary approaches of universities toward admissions on top of the fact that we've not decreased expenses to help all students succeed in college and get in and succeed in college. 04:45 Nick Ladany I think those are some of the factors that make a huge difference. 04:49 Sharlyn, Content Strong Well, you know, I mean, my big question is always how. How is that knowledge kind of shaping your. Your strategy overall and the way you're leading your institution? But I know we're going to talk about it in, you know, I'd love to ask you what your goals are pretty candidly. You know, you've described your work as, you know, a bold attempt to disrupt and democratize higher education. And I think you'll talk about this in a little bit. You know, from slashing tuition costs to embedding kind of AI. What's the long term goal behind that overall disruption in your work? And how will you know when you've achieved it? 05:24 Nick Ladany That's a great question. I think some of it is by the numbers, but some of it really is. Are we seeing students learn in these new tech integrated approaches? Right, right now we've got a very labor intensive approach to higher education, which is partly why we the expenses have increased. Faculty don't teach very frequently. I mean faculty will argue, for example, that they teach a lot when they really don't. Ask any high school teacher, for example, how often they teach and compare the two. Teaching is teaching and we need to cut the cost and how much. It's the intensity of labor around faculty, also the intensity and labor around staff and not focusing staff on true student needs rather than ancillary needs. Whether it's college athletics or I always say the rock climbing wall. 06:18 Nick Ladany How many rock climbing walls does a university need in order to be successful? Well, the answer is zero. And most people don't realize that a rock climbing wall to build, maintain and staff costs more than a therapist. And where do students need their help right now? They need it in mental health, not in rock climbing walls. There's plenty of ways to get physical fitness without a rock climbing wall. And so I think higher ed has ran toward, or there's been a race toward the superficial. Look at this lovely rock climbing wall. Look at this athletic field. Costs hundreds of thousands of dollars just to water athletic fields in a year. How do we refocus what higher ed should be doing? 07:00 Nick Ladany So the long term vision really is to say cut the cost, get back to the basics of helping students learn, whether it's through appropriate faculty teaching approaches, effective teaching approaches. Very little secret in higher education is faculty have never been trained in how to teach. And most people have been to college will hear that and either know that or say, well that explains it, why so many faculty they've had at any university. There's no university where there aren't poor teachers and there aren't a large percentage of poor teachers. The problem is colleges haven't been able to move them on. We can talk more about that another time. 07:35 Nick Ladany But basically get the teacher focused on what truly is important and focus all the wraparound services directly to students, whether it's academic support, wellness, mental health, all those types of ancillary, if you will, or adjunctive support services directly to the students. So my vision is rethinking how we offer college. What are the majors? What are the types of teaching approaches we do, how many credits should a college degree really be and how quickly should they be? And the real mark of a college is how quickly they graduate. And most colleges are, on average colleges are graduating and somewhere in the 50% or less range. And for students of color in particular, it's much lower than that. Those are failure. If you're in a class and got 50%, you would be failing, right? Professors would legitimately fail you in a class. 08:31 Nick Ladany Why aren't colleges operating under the same rubric? And the one other thing I'll add, and I wrote an article about this in Forbes, is the new metric for colleges is the six year graduation rate. So think about that. A four year institution's metric is the sixth year graduation rate. And that 50% I gave you was the six year graduation rate. Well, kudos to the marketers that came up with the idea that let's promote a six year graduation rate as the norm versus saying what do colleges need to really do to graduate their students in four or three years? That should be the expectation. So a lot of the things I've seen inside higher ed are things that a lot of my colleagues noticed. But we had very little ways to empower ourselves to make those changes. 09:23 Nick Ladany And so as a president of a university that really does believe in change and access to higher education, we are doing those things. Well. 09:33 Sharlyn, Content Strong What do you think that barrier is for students in terms of the six year graduation rate versus the three or four year old? 09:41 Nick Ladany Well, sometimes if they can't get the classes they need, which is due to faculty not having not wanting to teach in the summer or universities not ensuring that courses are offered in the summer. Some of it is the way the courses are structured themselves, some of it is 120 credits. There's nothing magical about 120 credit degree. Historically, as I understand it, the reason we have 120 credits has to do more with faculty needing courses to teach than a legitimate outcome expectation of what students need to learn. And so to me what's really critical is we go back and ask ourselves why aren't we doing a 90 credit degree? Oxford does it, Cambridge does it, perhaps we should do it. And so we actually are exploring and universities are beginning to explore the 90 credit undergraduate degree. 10:39 Nick Ladany And really that is where I think universities need to focus. Because there's nothing that says magically you get 120 credits and you're more competent. It's mostly electives. And frankly the other side to that you ask why is colleges don't need 60 majors. There is no rationale to have that many majors. Minors, maybe, but you don't need 60 majors. That's that race to the top or the race to the superficial. Like, if we can have more majors, then we're a better institution. And that's not necessarily the case. You can, you can integrate, and I'm a big fan of philosophy and other of the liberal arts types of degrees or humanities degrees, but this can be integrated in other degrees as much as business can be integrated in the humanities degrees. And sometimes we bifurcate the two types of degrees, professional degrees versus humanities degrees. 11:34 Nick Ladany They all should be leading to something that is giving students an opportunity to graduate and get a job. Bottom line, if you're not getting jobs at the end of your time in college, the college is failing you. 11:47 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. 11:47 Nick Ladany And the college sets you up. 11:50 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. Yeah. And you. And we think about that a lot. Right. Because, I mean, especially now, I feel like we're all having that conversation across the board about really demonstrating the value of higher ed. And that's, I mean, student. A student comes typically to university, of course, we know, for the critical thinking skills, et cetera, but they want to get a job and they want to be able to say, we've gotten that interdisciplinary foundation. We can take these skills and we're going to get a job by the time that we graduate. Right. Yeah. 12:17 Nick Ladany I mean, I think we can walk into. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Right, Right. I mean, we can get you a good degree and get you a job. There's no reason colleges don't do that other than willful desire. That's the only thing. It's just finding the way to make it work. And there's just too much resistance in the system, unfortunately, to do that. 12:37 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. Right. I mean, I think you've spoken candidly just now about how many presidents are playing it safe, let's say, in the face of everything, in the face of, let's say, political pressure, in the face of, you know, changes to DEI in the face of a multitude of different things. What do you think courageous leadership looks like right now in this moment? 13:03 Nick Ladany That's a good question. And it's not easy for universities, university leaders to be courageous because our jobs are on the line. Frankly, at most places, if you're courageous, you could lose the job because of your state representatives or because of who's on your board of regents. If you're at a university that's a private university, your board of trustees may not like what you're doing if you're courageous, there's a safe zone that presidents learn very quickly to stay within. 13:31 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 13:32 Nick Ladany I'm fortunate. My board really does provide me the breadth of work that allows me, or breadth of scope that allows us and me to do things that are more out there. And I mean, I guess you could call it courageous, but it's really going back to the basics of what matters to students. 13:48 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 13:49 Nick Ladany Learning opportunities, providing them a holistic and comprehensive and if you will, a neoliberal arts education that gets them a job. These are not out crazy, outlandish kinds of things to do. The problem is colleges have lost their way. So if I say we shouldn't have, you know, athletics cost 10% of our tuition, every student, on average. There's an article recently, I forgot which school in Virginia, but it showed that about student tuition, about 10% was going towards college athletics. Well, does that make sense? Well, if you say college athletics, you know, about a dozen schools nationally are actually making money on college athletics. Okay, those dozen schools I could get. But there's hundreds of schools, thousands that are offering college athletics. 14:37 Nick Ladany But if you say at a university, hey, we need to rethink college athletics or we need, you know, football costs more than we bring in, you likely have a board member who's going to say, no, we must have football because I played football. 14:50 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 14:50 Nick Ladany Well, that's just silly. You know, these, some members of boards, they're very good business people by and large, but they, some members don't have that business acumen so they insert their own preferred biases into the system. 15:05 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 15:06 Nick Ladany And in a similar way, this, the anti DEI movement in my opinion is anti intellectual movement. 15:11 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 15:12 Nick Ladany Basically DEI is saying don't be racist, sexist, homophobic. And what happened was with the DEI movement is it started to get more around the edges versus just hitting it head on. 15:25 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 15:26 Nick Ladany You know, we know when I was in school there were racist, sexist and homophobic faculty. There still are. So the point is stop them from doing it. And that really is the essence of a lot of what DEI is about. And the problem is it was conflated with very kind of edge level types issues. 15:47 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yes. 15:48 Nick Ladany And instead of hitting it head on and be very direct, I think everyone can agree. I think there's a bipartisan, whether believe they agree or not. I think bipartisan, don't be racist, just don't be racist. That's a fair statement. That's dei, but it's really the center of dei. It's not the other stuff. That I think in the attempt to work around the edges to help people change slowly, that's what happened versus just hitting it head on and saying we expect you to be. To treat students fairly, to provide them equal opportunity, to not be biased in your approach to whether it's interacting with students, grading students, hiring faculty, accepting and admitting students, all of that stuff. That's the essence of dei. 16:33 Nick Ladany And so we've lost our way there in large part because now it's the rhetoric of DEI and what it means, which is not really what it means and what it traditionally has meant. In fact, I've talked about this. Diversity originally was the soft term for let's not be racist. And then we said, okay, diversity sounds too scary. Or actually we started with multiculturalism, basically saying let's honor the different cultures, whether it's race, gender, sexual orientation, social class and so forth. Well, that was too scary, the word multiculturalism. So then went to diversity, which softened it. Then went to equity, then went to inclusion. Now it's belonging. And now it all backfires. Just go back to what it was really about, which is we want, now we're going back pluralism, which is really. 17:20 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 17:22 Nick Ladany New phrase. But basically the idea is accept option where they feel disenfranchised, disempowered and shamed for who they are, have the hard dialogues. That doesn't mean you can't talk across political lines. And that's the other thing universities are losing their way about, is have those dialogues. And the problem is universities to some extent are too big to succeed because they're trying to appease too many people. You want to have a dialogue. That's what universities, that's the essence of what good, effective universities do. Have the dialogues, even if you disagree with them, have them and talk about them and work it through and respect one another in that process. That is the essence of higher education. Or at least that's what we should get back to eventually. I think we will. 18:09 Sharlyn, Content Strong That's what we should get back to. Yeah, let's hope. I mean, let's hope we can cross our fingers and hope that we do. I want to shift gears just slightly because I know we, I think we talked about, in an earlier conversation about some of the changes you're making regarding your curriculum and regarding AI and just this idea of future ready learning. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. I mean, I think you're moving towards kind of full or AI integration both in curriculum and in your degree Offerings. How are you kind of approaching this rollout? How do you think it will reshape the student experience over the next few years? 18:49 Nick Ladany Well, what we know is ask anybody who has grandchildren or children, their kids and grandkids are better at them than tech with tech. So kids are going growing up now and they're using AI, they're using chat, GPT, gpd. And the universities are reacting like, oh, stop using that because it's affecting us. There was a recent article, again not remembering which university this is, or maybe it's best I don't mention which university, but people can look it up. Basically, professor, which used ChatGPT to create lectures and it was noticed by some students and in the same syllabus for the class, the students weren't allowed to use it. So it's hypocritical. This is the hypocrisy that happens in higher education. And to me, what we need to do is embrace AI. 19:46 Nick Ladany The faculty roles have been changing over many years, going from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. The new faculty model. I'm not saying you get rid of faculty, but faculty will be current faculty roles will be replaced with new faculty roles. And the sooner universities get there, the better. Which means AI can support and do a lot of the types of lecturing and interactive experiences that students need to learn. But faculty can play the role of community building, additional exploration of the topic, bringing industry experts to talk about what's happening in the industry. And I keep saying, and we keep talking about this idea that you're not going to, you're, you are not going to be replaced by AI. You are going to be replaced by the person who understands AI. 20:37 Nick Ladany And so that is what we are trying to do is say to our students, you need to understand this. You need to be AI fluent and you can learn using AI. We have an AI tutor the students use and seem to really enjoy because they can reach out at 2 in the morning when they're more apt to be studying and say, hey, I have a question versus writing to a faculty member and they may never get back to them. 21:03 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right? 21:03 Nick Ladany And maybe a week or two until the exam happens. And by the way, it's not perfect. We're still learning, we're still trying to make sure that we're doing it the right way, but we feel we're doing it the right way. And the big about what if hallucinate gives the wrong answer? There's ways to give the wrong answer. AI is just a product of what often we put into it. And I've known faculty who are just completely incompetent shouldn't be in front of the classroom, but they are there and they're saying things that aren't helping students. And so what we're saying is we can have at least a little bit more control over that. And at the same time, the best faculty are the ones we want in front of the students. The best. 21:53 Nick Ladany The top third of faculty that who are AI is mimicking, but that's also those faculty members or who we're bringing in front of the students, whether it's async, I'm sorry, whether it's synchronously or in person. 22:04 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 22:05 Nick Ladany Who can help facilitate the kind of learning that's needed. And those are the expectations that higher ed should be focused on, not all this other nonsense. 22:14 Sharlyn, Content Strong I think it's really interesting the discussion we're having and not we collective we are having around AI, the use of AI in education and the what it means for us in this, in this sector, how we design programs, how we design thinking to really understand that AI is not going away. Right. We have this opportunity to integrate it into the learning and make it part of their learning, knowing that they're going to use it. I use it, we're all using it every single day. It supplements our work. Right, but what does that mean? How are we still continuing to ensure that we're supporting, you know, critical thinking skills? Right. I think that's the big thing of it. And exactly what you said is this, you know, I hear this all the time. It's gonna replace you. 23:02 Sharlyn, Content Strong AI is not going to replace any of us. You still need someone to guide the AI and to lead the strategy piece to make sure that it's working. Right. 23:10 Nick Ladany And jobs are changing, you know, and if not the top job for men in the US driving truck driving, taxi driving, million men may not have a job in a few years for self driving vehicles. So what do we do with those folks? I mean this is the problem for in my view is sociologically we're not ready to address that problem. Now interestingly, AI might open access to education retraining for a lot of those folks. But we need to be forward thinking and we're not forward thinking. They're just going to start losing their jobs and then understandably they're going to be upset and then you're going to see perhaps some things that shouldn't be happening unfortunately will cause more problems in our communities. But if we get ahead of it and say, hey, you've got these skills. 24:05 Nick Ladany How do you generalize those skills into other types of occupations where you could get paid? That's important. It's not just men driving. I'm just giving you that one example. It's going to happen across all industries. So how do we retrain? How do we refocus folks to get jobs that integrate AI in an intentional way and not wait until it's too late? 24:28 Sharlyn, Content Strong How do we think about the future of work in general related to AI? Because the jobs that we have today will not exist in the same way, will look completely different. And that I think that's such a huge question. 24:41 Nick Ladany Exactly. And should university and do you need to spend $50,000 for tuition or 300, $400,000 for tuition that is going away? Whether universities want to deal with that or not, that I think is going away. So how do we bring down tuition to a level that most students can pay for, whether they work or not work or the parents want to pay for? That's going to be the big challenge. Because if we can get the tuition down, and I think we will with AI, I think we can get the full tuition, undergrad or grad, down to a few thousand dollars. Once that happens, then you open up education. It's a matter of, you know, give the students the opportunity to learn. 25:25 Nick Ladany Doesn't mean you lower rigor, it means you keep the rigor high, but you just, you give students the support to meet those high standards. And that's really what education. That is the democratization of education in the long term. 25:37 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. So I want touch on that exact point because I think in our earlier conversation you talked about doing exactly that. I mean, you're aiming to deliver a high quality degree for just a few thousand dollars. How are you measuring the impact of that both for students and ideally for the wider educational system ecosystem? 25:58 Nick Ladany Well, I think with students we have built in AI helpful, built in models where we're able to assess the student learning in lifetime. That's what AI can help us understand and do. We can see if a student talk about individualized learning. We can see if a student is getting the concept in part by how they're responding to the AI lecturer or AI facilitator, the avatar, if you will. So that is a way to assess learning in a true fashion versus a largely subjective role that a lot of faculty use to assess students. Or the multiple choice question that's never been really validated as a standard for learning outcomes, true learning outcomes. It's good for learning content. Rote memorization, by and large, multiple choice questions do that. Okay, but that's really not learning. 26:54 Nick Ladany Learning comes from the interaction with other students, the interaction with the faculty. Learning the content is part of that process, but then applying the content. College is focused a lot on content learning. What we're trying to do and we believe we'll be able to do is focus on practical application of that content learning. 27:15 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 27:15 Nick Ladany So both getting the content and then the practice, that is what employers want. That's what we are doing and that we believe. I believe in the future of higher education. 27:25 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. You mentioned, you know, kind of a big transformation that you're having at your university and this idea that you're, you know, you guys did slash tuition costs and you've got, you've kind of hit that. What if I think about that as something that you've recently done and I think about some of the goals you're probably having over the, you know, the next six to 12 months. What would you say those big goals are, those big lofty vision things that you're really looking at to kind of transform your next few months. 27:53 Nick Ladany But I think the big things are providing offering AI interactive degrees to really get to that point where we're offering them at a low cost, but also high quality, high rigor programs. And we think it can be done. We know it can be done. We've seen some of the early prototypes of what we're developing. It's outstanding. What can happen. And if we can do that effectively and demonstrate that this is a true, if you will, more effective approach to teaching and learning, then that opens up education to the masses. It allows us to educate all kinds of groups. Folks that have traditionally been left out of higher education, folks that have been in higher education. You ask even the wealthiest students what's working and what's not working, they'll tell you in higher education, they will be attracted to this. 28:51 Nick Ladany But also groups that traditionally have not had access to higher education or limited access. We should be able to provide very low cost education to folks in prisons, for example. We know the number one way to decrease recidivism is education. We'll give them that opportunity. Refugee camps, for example. We could do this worldwide. There is a real, true, broad, bold vision that we're creating where we think higher education and education, even the K12 space which we're looking at, can be changed largely with AI, but also with an approach to education that fits the needs of students. 29:35 Sharlyn, Content Strong Excuse me, your excuse. So what so what would you say if you were to think about what you've done over the past, let's say year, and then think about once again what you're looking towards. What are some of the big wins you've had recently and what are some of the bigger challenges you're facing? 29:51 Nick Ladany Well, I want to say this with, you know, with limited data because we didn't have a large class. We have a cohort of class we're calling our startup scholars. These are students, largely low income, students of primary, almost all low income and or students of color. 30:08 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 30:09 Nick Ladany We saw a 81% retention from fall to spring, which if you look at the national average for that population in particular, it's around 30%. So we're doing something right. We don't have all of it worked out yet. 30:27 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 30:28 Nick Ladany But the goal is to get them to graduate. The whole idea is get all our students to graduate. So our new core curriculum, which is partly what they're taking, is industry validated. So it's the skills industry wants. We've asked folks industry, what are these skills and are these the ones? We have a core curriculum that's about 3:30 credits like most universities. But instead of the menu choice, pick one from psychology, pick biology, our core curriculum. Those 10 courses are fully interdisciplinary. So there's a rationale to learning math. It's not just take math 101, it's here is math used. How to design your life is one of our courses. It brings in communications, it brings in computer science, it brings in math. Fully interdisciplinary courses, which I would argue almost no university does effectively. 31:25 Nick Ladany Most are a cobbling together of faculty views on what should be in those courses versus truly what if faculty, the best faculty had their way. You would see what we're doing as the gold standard and we think that is going to be the gold standard moving forward. So that's a success early on. But again, I want to be care it's early low numbers. We think it's going to continue to evolve and get better. We also only offer right now a limited number of majors, business, computer science, engineering, and we're adding psychology and we'll add something in the health sciences. But we don't think we're going to, I don't think we're going to go beyond maybe a half a dozen majors. You don't need a half a dozen because if you make those majors interdisciplinary that students can, then they'll get the job. 32:18 Nick Ladany They get two years out of college or one year out of college might be different. For them in 10 years. So they need multiple skills to be able to shift into other occupations. Whereas most colleges, the general ed is again, a menu choice. That doesn't really give you the kind of value it teaches you content about psychology, but it's really not. You're not a psychologist, but you can get that information and how to use psychology in your discipline of choice or in your job, that is part of what they should be learning in college because everyone needs that. And so, and I'm just picking psychology, but you also need math, you need biology, you need humanities, you need everything wrapped in. So it's just doing it more intentionally and assessing students ability to do that. 33:05 Nick Ladany So we have a whole assessment system where we have behavioral indicators that are providing us data on if students are achieving those. Are they able to become one of our core values as tenacious leaders? Can they be leaders? You were talking about courageous leaders. It's really similar to courageous leadership. Can students provide that or learn that as they go through college? And we think they can. Can they be global citizens? 33:29 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 33:29 Nick Ladany That makes sense. If you can't be a global citizen, you can't work in most industries in the next 10 years. You better learn how to do that. So again, get away from the rhetoric, the national rhetoric. Focus on what are the skills that students really need. And that's what we're trying to do. 33:45 Sharlyn, Content Strong I think that's a. That's a great answer. And I mean, my final question, the second part of that question loops in with my final question, which is of course the magic wand question. Right. If you could instantly remove one obstacle, one big challenge that's in your way right now, and you could tell me what it is. And it doesn't need to be one. It could be multiple. The big challenges that are kind of on your brain right now, whether the regulatory, whether they're cultural, whether they're philosophical, whatever they are, what would you fix? 34:14 Nick Ladany Oh, those are. There's a. I'll answer it this way. Let's see if this fits. It's not going to fit fully what I think, but I will try to be succinct. I would say, broadly the myths and delusions that higher education have promoted. Getting rid of them, basically this idea that only certain people can go to college, the idea that some people shouldn't get a college education. I think everyone should have a college education if they want, they don't want, that's fine too. But let's not foreclose on their decision making by some person saying, well, you don't need a college education. You can do X, Y and Z. Well, if you do X, Y, and Z, if you open your own business, you got to know business. You better have some education or you're not going to succeed. 35:05 Nick Ladany And that's the kind of a myth that's out there. The myth that college, the way it's currently done is the best way and that everyone's trying to mimic it. That's not the case. Accreditors have not been innovators to change. If I could. If we could change the process of accreditation. There is no. If you step back and look at accreditation, you will see that some accrediting bodies or some accrediting groups, and this is subgroups, depending on who you get as the accreditors, will provide some room for innovation. 35:52 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 35:52 Nick Ladany But true innovation is not going to happen the way we currently have accreditation in Canada and in the U.S. You know, I know Canada's got their own accreditation issues as well. It's if everyone could get their head around what is most important for the student. 36:10 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 36:10 Nick Ladany I think if you start there without a personal agenda, then you can be successful. So get the smart people in the room without the personal agendas, without the faculty members saying, I must teach my course for us to be successful, or the accreditor saying, you must do it this way within this rubric in order to be successful. Because you go outside that rubric. But there's no evidence to say inside the rubric is better than outside. There's a belief, and maybe to some extent that's true, but you got to move outside that for the administrators to have the courageous conversations and say what really needs to be said. You know, we're not doing it the right way to truly get business people with financial acumen to look at colleges and say you need to restart. 37:05 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 37:06 Nick Ladany Get the honest conversations happening without the personal agendas. I guess that would be the one big thing I wish we could do, and I don't know that it's there, frankly. I think many people are trying on their own personal job or their own, you know, what they believe is the only way to educate. We have 4,000 universities in the U.S. There's more than one way to do this. And if we could get out of our own way, that would be the one thing I would wish we could find a way to do. And fortunately in San Francisco Bay University, that's what we've been able to do. I've hired VPs. I think I mentioned this to you before, but they're all appropriately disgruntled with how higher education is operated. And what we do is to say to one another, why are we doing this? 38:00 Nick Ladany Does it make sense? Does it fit the student focus? And then we act accordingly and we have debates and we're going to be wrong sometimes, but we're not afraid to ask the questions. And I've never seen that at a university. The honest conversations that need to happen in order to help students, at the end of the day, that's the piece that I'd love to see happen a lot more. 38:22 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 38:22 Nick Ladany And so we're trying it. We're hoping we're going to lead the way. That's our idea, is to lead the way nationally and internationally in higher education and help people find a different path forward and help model to other universities what can be done. 38:38 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. Right. 38:39 Nick Ladany And the last thing I'll say is they're predicting 250 to 300 universities going under next year. I think that's probably about right. And the reason is, and there's plenty of ways out of that, but you need an aggressive, you need a board that's going to be willing to look at that and in ways that can be looked at. You need administrators to do that and you need faculty to do that. And right now those things are not happening. So I've seen and what I've witnessed that's tragic to me is universities are going under because their own selfish and self diluted way, what they believe higher education is, they'd rather lose their job and let the university go under than innovate and change. 39:22 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 39:23 Nick Ladany And that's tragic because at the end of the day it hurts students, both current and alums. And what we're trying to say is, no, look at what we're doing. We can do it, you can do it too. And this is how you do it. 39:33 Sharlyn, Content Strong I'm going to check in with you in like six months to see if we're seeing that across the board. I want to see the, watch the metric and watch what happens with your institution and see how the changes you've made are going to make a difference versus other people. Because I think you're probably on the right track. 39:51 Nick Ladany Well, give us a year, six months, but give us a year and then definitely we'll come back and we'll talk about it. I'm happy to. 39:58 Sharlyn, Content Strong Is there anything else standing in your way that you could think of? Any other big challenges? I mean, we talked broadly about the sector, but thinking specifically your school. 40:09 Nick Ladany No, I think for us, because we're financially in a good position and we're using our funds directly to impact student learning. 40:17 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 40:18 Nick Ladany I think we're going to be there's very little that's getting in our way. You know, it's going to the investments we're making is in student learning, is in student outcomes. Getting them jobs and changing the higher ed sector is going to be a, an outcome that occurs because we're going to demonstrate what we're doing with students and students will feel they can get what they need without having to spend, like I said, 100 to $500,000 on a university experience. That doesn't need to happen. There are many ways to do it where I think students will be successful without. And so yeah, I think that's the, that's for us the big thing. 40:59 Sharlyn, Content Strong Is there anything else on your mind that you were like, Charlyn, I meant to mention this and I didn't get a chance to. Anything else you want to say before we close? 41:07 Nick Ladany Oh, one last one thing I will tell you is that we're doing that I think is innovative is no cost for textbooks. 41:15 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 41:15 Nick Ladany Our students pay for textbooks. You don't need pay for textbooks. Textbooks are extraordinarily expensive in higher education and there are no reason for that expense. There's a lot of open education resources and people and universities should become, should have come together long ago to do this. So we are, we have implemented a no cost for textbooks for their education San Francisco Bay universities and frankly every university could do that if they had the wherewithal. So that's another kind of innovation that we think is important and will change how higher ed is looking at things. 41:54 Sharlyn, Content Strong And I think what you said there is specific this idea of the innovation idea, specifically thinking about the student experience and not the institution as a whole. And that's a difference, right? Like that's the different perspective. I think some institutions, very much so are institution minded whereby others like yours. It sounds like very student minded and it completely shapes your strategy, it seems like. 42:17 Nick Ladany Yeah. 42:18 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. So thank you. Big thank you Nick, for sharing your time and your experience, your perspective and everything with us today. It's been such a thoughtful and generous conversation to our listeners or watchers. I hope this episode sparked ideas, affirmed your own experiences and helped you see a challenge in a new light. If you are a communications or marketing leader or any leader in higher education and you have want to contribute to this conversation, I would love to hear from you. Because these conversations aren't just talk. They're the start of a shared roadmap for the future of our field. So let's get to work. Thank you so much again, Nick. 42:50 Nick Ladany Thank you, Charlene. It's great to be here. Appreciate it.