Lisa Vollendorf: 

We need to help break through the elitism that we suffer from in higher education in the country. And we need to let people know, everyone can dream the dream of college. We have the ability to award credit on an outcomes based approach, which is how we’re able to give credit for prior learning. So over the last three years, to give an example, our students on average graduated having come in with 47 credits of transfer credit and 13 credits awarded for prior learning. We work, and have for 50 years with the IBEW local three electricians in Manhattan, and they do their, they become journey people after two years and get their card. And along the way, they get their degree with us. And in some, most cases it’s an associate’s degree, liberal arts associates. And in some cases, they will have brought in credits and they’ll get a bachelor’s with us. But what is amazing is we are diversifying the workforce. We’re diversifying the educated workforce, and we’re doing it in partnership with companies, with unions, with the State Department of Labor, and really with anybody who wants to think with us creatively about how we can help companies and state agencies and unions recruit, upskill, and retain their employees. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

That’s Lisa Vollendorf, sixth president of Empire State University of New York, where she is leveraging the scale of that system to transform what began as a statewide distance education provider, relying upon postal services and telephones into what is now a major online education provider serving learners of all ages, widely published, recognized, decorated, and supported. Dr. Vollendorf is indeed a tireless advocate for public higher education, deeply committed to access equity and inclusion. We talked about SUNY Empire’s unique origin story, how it shifted to online delivery starting back in 2007, why it gives more transfer and prior learning credit to incoming students than any other institution. And which industry incentives continue to produce headwinds as it scales its student-centric delivery model. I hope you enjoy our conversation.  

 

Welcome to TRANSFORMED, a higher digital podcast focused on the new why’s, the new what’s and the new how’s in higher ed. In each episode, you’ll experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence. Culture, strategy and tactics, planning and execution, people, process and technology. It’s all on the menu because that’s what’s required to truly transform.  

Hello, welcome and thanks for joining us for this special presidential series episode of TRANSFORMED. My name is Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I’m joined by Dr. Lisa Vollendorf, president of Empire State University. Lisa, welcome to TRANSFORMED. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Thanks, Joe. I’m so happy to be here. What do you wanna talk about? 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Well, I would love to talk about your thoughts on overcoming imperfect incentives to serve learners of all ages. But first, tell me a little bit about your personal story and, and how you got involved with higher education. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Thank you for the opportunity to be here and to share just a little bit about my own journey. I was raised in a mountain town that many people are familiar with, Breckenridge, Colorado. And my parents were in what we call today, the service industry. My mother was a daycare home operator, so I grew up in a daycare home with many little ones around me every single day, and three younger brothers. And my father did construction for many years, and I was 12 years old when I met a woman who lived in the town adjacent to ours who told me that she was a secretary. And it was a good job because she had benefits, which I had never heard of before. So from that age on, I was very set on getting a job with benefits and that being a secretary perhaps would be a great thing to do. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

So I went to college, I went to Colorado State University, and I was able to go because of, um, my eligibility for Pell Grant and work study. And because of my family’s help along the way as they could, um, you know, per imperfectly perhaps along the way, but they were able to help some. And I was very fortunate to attend Colorado State where I met a professor who believed in me and believed in my future and encouraged me to get this very strange thing I’d never heard of called a doctorate. So I did go to the University of Pennsylvania. I earned my doctorate in romance languages. I became a Spanish professor. The rest you can read about in my bio. But what perhaps is less obvious is that during my entire career, and really year over year as I worked in, uh, primarily comprehensive universities across the country, I became increasingly devoted to a very simple and very neglected aspect of public higher education, which is access, access, affordability, and quality. And I came to Empire State University on July 1st, 2022 from California because I saw in this opportunity the opportunity to drive access, to provide people who do not have access to public higher education, the opportunity to dream the dream of college. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Awesome. Wow. I love hearing these backgrounds, and that’s a great one. And so fitting with what is needed. So, um, we certainly need more of that. So let’s set the stage with a little bit of history. You know, because Empire State University has a really cool origin story of its own. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Empire State has an incredible origin story. It was founded in 1971 by the chancellor of SUNY at the time, and some of his key leadership. And these were people who were instrumental in getting SUNY rolling, in really thinking very deeply about what kind of a system needed to be in place so that the entirety of the population of New York, outside of the population served by CUNY, the City University of New York, could have access to two year and four year college and university experiences at an affordable rate. So famously people say that you, there is a SUNY within 30 miles of every person who lives in the state of New York. So the system is large, but they still knew to their great credit in the early seventies that the sy the system being large, did not mean the system was built for every single person. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

So they created Empire State College at the time as the distance education arm as the completion arm of SUNY. And in the early days, the way that we at SUNY Empire delivered on that, um, promise on that mission was to have many, many offices around the state to hire people across the whole state and distance education. Um, which only the, the older among us, uh, listeners will remember at that time, the technology for distance education was US Postal Service and telephone. So if you fast forward over the years already, by 2007, SUNY Empire had made a deep investment into newer technology involving computers and the internet and online teaching and learning. We were 50% online by 2007. We were about 85% online in 2018. So coming up into the pandemic, and when we emerged from the pandemic, about 97, 98% online. So we still have some in-person classes. We still have some locations that primarily are in service now to our faculty and staff who live across the state. But we are increasingly are a remote work, uh, remote online teaching and learning institution. And we also are in service to students of all ages, which is something that we pride ourselves on. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Amazing. And so when did, so when did you realize, when did Empire State University realize that it was uniquely positioned to serve learners of all ages? It seems that at least part of this grew out of the original mission. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Absolutely. So one thing that is fascinating to me about SUNY Empire is that from the beginning, our purpose was to reach people who otherwise did not feel welcome, did not feel included, or did not feel they could go to a physical campus, whether it was a community college or a four year university. And we have remained true to that core mission from the very beginning. We serve a diverse student population that that approximately maps onto the race and ethnicity demographics of the state of New York. We serve students proportional approximately to where people live in the state of New York. Our students hail from every county in the state of New York. And these are things that have been steady for the institution over time, even as modality has changed and some of the foundational aspects of SUNY Empire that have enabled the institution to, to constantly evolve and constantly innovate while hewing very closely to the original mission and to our core values of access and diversity and innovation and flexibility. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Really this, all of this is made possible by that origin story that that enabled us to build a foundation that included awarding credit for prior learning, which as you well know, across the country, institutions are struggling to find a way or, and scrambling in some cases to find a way to embed prior learning assessment and credit credit for prior learning into their own policies and practices. So we have that as a point of pride. We also have, as a real point of pride, our ability to meet students where they are, to hear students’, uh, stories and not just look at all of their transfer credits, which we are very happy to take. We have full transferability up to 93 credits. I think that is, uh, if not unique, it is very uncommon. So we take pride in pushing students to tell us or prospective students to bring all of their credits to us, put them on the table, tell us their story, so we can also encourage them to seek credit for prior learning where it’s appropriate. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

And then we also had, from the very beginning, individualized programs. So students had the ability to come in, say who they were, tell us what classes they had taken, what their experiences had been, we would package them for those credits and help them devise an individualized study program. So that was in the seventies and the eighties. And again, as you fast forward and come into the 21st century and 2023, we have majors, we have structured majors like everybody else, and we have the ability to also individualize programs of study. And we have the ability to award credit on an outcomes based, um, approach, which is how we’re able to give credit for prior learning. So over the last three years, to give an example, our students on average graduated having come in with 47 credits of transfer credit and 13 credits awarded for prior learning. We have a lot to be proud of. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Amazing, amazing. So, um, if we, if we go back a little bit though, if we talk about, let’s talk about what serving learners of all ages truly means. I know that you’ve got a wide range of ages active. Um, and, and so maybe talk a little bit about how those programs and, and, and interactions work. Um, if we can, 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

This is something we think about a lot here at Empire State University. So we had, at our most recent commencement, uh, we do commencements across the state. And our first one in the spring was in Rochester at the very beautiful Kodak Theater. And it just so happened that our youngest graduate of the class of 23 and our oldest graduate of a class of 23, both walked across the same stage in the same ceremony. So we had a 19 year old graduate and a 79 year old graduate. And that in and of itself, right there, tells you what it means to be a truly access driven, access focused, student focused institution. And I find it wonderful and inspiring and, and sometimes amusing that every single student I speak with at commencement says, my journey began so long ago. And so I’ve started asking people, when Joe, when did your journey begin? 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

I took my first class here three years ago, it seems like so long. And then the next person will say, Maria will say, took my first class in 2012 and I had my children. And then I came back and I finished during the pandemic. And this is my last class, and I’m, it’s been so long, and the 79 year old woman said to me, I took my first class in college in 1972. That is a long journey. And that is an inspiring journey. And it also tells you we have to have the ability to serve four generations of learners. So a 16, 17, 18 year old student has different, um, digital, um, intelligence, has different requirements, has different needs, different needs for connecting to other people potentially in the community compared to, um, somebody, you know, if I were a student here, I probably would not be looking for community among my fellow students because I work and I’m busy and I would be upskilling or getting a second master’s or whatever it may be. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

We have all of these students in our community, and we constantly are looking at our analytics and our learning management system to improve our master course shell. So we improve our service to our students through our course delivery system, and we also are always interacting with our faculty and our staff and listening to our students to really see where and more support and more training and more services are needed. So we have built out extraordinary, we have the foundations for extraordinary student support services. Um, and for us, interestingly, we, unlike any other place almost in the whole country, we are right now purposefully really thinking about what investments to make, what training investments to make around how we work with traditional age college students differently because this population is coming to us and they didn’t use to, but they’re seeking online as all the national data tell us. So those are some examples of differentiated student support services, um, training our faculty and staff and all of us around, you know, building awareness about our student population and really making investments constantly, uh, and differently based on what students are showing us or telling us their needs are to help them not just come here, but stay here and achieve the, the degree they want. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

So you actually, you got me thinking about this when you said that you, you meet these students where they are, and, and to me, the way you described it, it, it, the footprint of that must be quite different than the typical institution you, and you could only pull that off if you had figured out how to do that reasonably efficiently. Right? Because it, you can’t just have a whole lot of extra handholding that’s not efficient when you scale and you need to answer to budgets. Right? So maybe you can speak a little bit about how, how you’ve made that work, because that just feels like a, a wonderful way for students to get placed into something that’s gonna work for them. But boy, oh boy, it does sound like a unique capability that, that most institutions haven’t had to figure out. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

I love that question and it reminds me that my entire career, I of course worked on residential campuses or, you know, campuses that were urban serving where most students didn’t live on campus, but nonetheless, we had residential, um, features and we also had residential life and student life and all of those things. So empire in its origins and over the years really hung its hat on faculty mentors and as you say, one-on-one and, and really helping students figure out their own path on an individual basis. And we do that and we’re proud of that. And we also have ways where we’ve been able to find some scalability, principally because we’ve added, only in the last several years, we’ve added what everywhere else in the country we call majors, we have structured programs. So just like everywhere else, students here want to study business, uh, number one major in America, psychology, criminal justice, we have addiction studies, which is bursting at the seams, which is wonderful for workforce development. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

So we have some other programs that have come on and are really in high demand. Our education program is really booming, which is great because we have a teacher shortage. So all of these different student populations have different, they do have different needs, and we have the ability because we have, um, we didn’t used to, but we have schools and departments. We are aligned with some traditional, uh, structural, um, ways of ways of doing business that have allowed us to gain some scalability, right? And of course, we leverage technology and, and that without, without learning management system, without data informed and evidence-based, uh, decision making around where to make investments, we would, we would not know it would be, um, you know, it would be kind of a spaghetti soup. And that’s not where we are because like everyone else, we have a lot of data available to us, and we’re very thoughtful in using that to choose where to make an investment or to disinvest to bring the, the investment over to, um, academic services or student support coaches or whatever it may be. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

So it’s very similar to what inst all institutions are used to doing in the 21st century. It’s just that I would say where we’re making our investments is different in many cases from where you would if you were on a traditional campus. And so a couple of examples, right, are we have extraordinary financial aid office, and you can imagine how complicated it is to work in financial aid at an institution where mo on average students have already burned through a third of their financial aid when they arrive here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So we have to be very creative, very direct, and we also have to help students not just get the aid they need, but be purposeful about how much they have left so they can str structure their own program. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Fascinating. So, but it sounds like an interesting and very thoughtful combination of this sort of special services that you have evolved over time, but also the leverage from some of the more traditional things that are going well, that you’ve made good choices about. And you’re, you’re, you are getting some lift from that, from that, uh, that success fascinating. And you alluded to this, but I want to double click on it briefly. And that is your ability to support learners of all ages and do so in a way that is delivered increasingly, if almost entirely now online, has made you attractive to a different part of the market, which is students that want to get a degree faster than the traditional residential experience or, or at least the traditional timeframe. Talk about that as well, please. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

So I would say there are two aspects of younger students trending toward fully online undergraduate programs. One is potentially the expediency that you just alluded to, the efficiency of, I can, I can stay at home, I can do this work, and I can set my sights on my next degree. So for students who know, you know, psychology for example, they, they’re going to get an undergrad in psychology and they know they will be required to have a graduate degree. These students are bring this generation is bringing a real intentionality to that, that planning for themselves. Now, of course, most people at age 17, 18 do not know what they want to be or what they will be when they grow up, as it were. Um, but so what’s beautiful, I think about this, this, uh, pandemic generation tilting toward, or leaning into more appropriately said, leaning into fully online is they’re also having the opportunity to not drive themselves into debt, which is, uh, what we’re reading in the research about this, that they’re raised by the generation that is saddled by debt for a whole complexity of reasons. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

And so this generation is, is bringing a purposefulness toward their education, their consumption of their education as undergraduates, which is far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen from prior generations, probably ever. So I think there’s that, and I also think that people are looking toward, um, the opportunity to attend college when they would not have been able to do so. You know, the fact remains, we leave the majority of Americans behind in our higher education system, if only 37% of Americans have a college degree, an a bachelor’s degree, that, uh, you know, we’re leaving that other 43%, um, on the table. It’s not 43%. The math was very poor there. <laugh> we’re leaving the other, the, the balance of the population. I’ll say it that way, 63%, sorry, on the table. Well, that is not acceptable. We’re getting AD or an F in higher education. And I think online is opening access to people who never would’ve even thought they could attend college. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

I love the way you frame that because it’s important to grasp the, there’s a little bit of a subtlety here, right? It just so happens that the big, big unmet need is this vast yes. Number of learners that have been left behind and across all the generations which you are serving, uh, clearly as evidenced by your, your, your story about this year’s graduation ceremonies. That’s the big, big problem to solve. But along the way, and because you have scale, you can do a nice job serving this other, other market segment, which happens to be leaning in really hard because of their circumstance, which has actually tuned them into a variety of factors. And it is a subset, but it’s a very interesting, very hungry, very motivated and capable subset that it’s, it, it, it is fantastic to see them being served as well. Right? And so look at the balance, the part of the challenge of education is delivering across a range of what’s, how different people learn and, and what their current capabilities are and all kinds of factors. But your ability to address that is fascinating to me. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

And, you know, these things are challenging. I mean, we are not a, a perfectly well-oiled machine. I have never seen or heard of an educational institution that gets it all right? We do not. And that’s fine. I mean, we look at the learning that we can get from our mistakes or from our suboptimal delivery of whatever service it may be as an opportunity to improve. And we really, I think more than, certainly more than I had experienced in my career previously, we really are attentive to what we’re hearing from and what we can learn from, uh, our students and our faculty and staff and what we’re seeing because our student population has changed over time. We never used to advertise at SUNY Empire in any way except to people who are working and usually working parents. So if you ever saw an ad as I did when I first, uh, moved to New York a year and a half ago, we had bus ads and they had parents at the kitchen table studying with their kids. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Hmm. And that is a big and very important part of our population. And there are many people who don’t relate to that because they, they fall outside because they’re retired, they have grandkids because they’re 16, 17. So we’ve really moved into a different, um, way of talking about the institution and helping people understand that SUNY Empire is here for them regardless of where they come from or what they look like or what, you know, how many times they feel they failed out or stopped out. So I agree with you that it’s this, this popul this. We need to help break through the elitism that we suffer from in, in higher education in the country. And we need to let people know, everyone can dream the dream of college. And it’s not that college is for everyone, but we should have equity in our dreaming and equity in our access our, 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Well, for the first time. You’ve helped me think about how it is higher ed catching up with the American dream, right? The American dream, if you’ve got sweat equity and you’re willing to operate in the free enterprise system, you can have success. And what you’re talking about is helping everyone, um, you know, the American dream round around higher ed working for everyone. And, uh, it feels like we’re closer to that than ever, and it’s exciting. So let’s, um, let’s do our topic justice here a little bit deep into the podcast conversation, but how are incentives stacked against you and how have you tried to overcome those imperfect incentives? 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

This is something I think about a lot. They have. We have, I’m gonna back up and say American higher education is built around an incentive structure that fundamentally number one is about tuition revenues. So this is for private and public, right? We need the tuition revenues to be able to make our budget. That’s fine. We did not used to, but we do now have some outcomes based approaches to this work, which were, is long overdue. So we have for the last decade, two decades really been focused in on retention and graduation rates, not just on, as people say vulgarly buts in seats, right? We’re not just focused on enrollment, we’re focused on get students and help them stay, be successful and help them complete in a timely fashion. So IEDs, which is the, the national level, uh, collector of our data, when we report to ipeds, we report on first time full-time students. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

So what we used to call freshmen, well, SUNY Empire, it will not surprise anyone, has very few first time full-time students. We have more now than we’ve ever had, but the numbers are still very low and percentage wise, out of our 16, 17,000 students, they’re very low. So this, when you, if you were to Google our institution, you would see graduation rates that do not seem good in any way, shape or form. And I don’t disagree. And I would say that is not how we measure our student success. We do not pressure students to, um, up their average unit load, which if you work at a residential four year, that’s part of the work you do to finish help your students finish in four for really good reasons. So those, that data collection is very important, but it also is a disincentive for institutions that serve re returning learners, adult learners, students who are going to come in and then, um, stop out because they’re having a plan stop out and they’re going to come back. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

And all of that makes your data look worse. And what we pride ourselves on is that if we admit a student and the student doesn’t come to us in a semester, we don’t require that the student defer admission. That student is considered a student with us for three years. And that is normalized in our culture. And I mean, everyone at Empire, much to my surprise when I arrived, understood that the student data include students who were admitted and may not have come yet. And some of those students do come and they come a year later, a year and a half later after admission. So that’s a unique, uh, way of doing business. That makes a lot of sense. Why would you have someone who went to the trouble to apply and then they can’t come for whatever reason? Why would you tell ’em you’re out? 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

You have to apply later and you would, if you are a small liberal arts school or if you’re trying to fill your dorms and you need to know your numbers. Absolutely. But we need more flexibility and financial aid similarly is utterly, um, embedded in honestly, something is becoming almost a mythos of the, this elusive first time full-time, four year university student. Yes, those students will still exist, but those numbers are shrinking year over year across the country. And what we don’t have in place in our country anywhere is any incentive for degree sharing, for helping a student start at one institution and transitioning them to another institution. So if you start at a four year residential and your parents get sick and you have to move home, that four year residential will continue to try to get you back, and in some cases will pay an outside company. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Many of us have done this across the country in the last few years to help get a student who dropped out to come back or stopped out to come back. Why don’t we build a system where you can co-brand your degree, where you can be proud to say the student started at Empire, did, you know, three years has a year to go, but now really wants in-person learning at their, at, at, you know, the SUNY down the street from them. So we could be doing that work and that institution could be doing it with us. But the incentives are all about completion, retention, um, tuition revenues, and not about what is best serving the student, the individual, the group, the demographic of students. I’m very passionate about this because I feel we, if we had different incentives, we could, we could break through some of these old ways of being and, and drive access and completion for more people. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Fascinating. So, so those are incentives. They’re, they’re deeply embedded. You’re overcoming many of them to pursue, continue to pursue this mission and deliver, you have some help from some of the scale and some of them the traditional programs that you’ve been able to leverage to help fund your unique approach. Um, you know, now if I zoom out beyond incentives, you know, how do you, this market of, you know, learners of all ages, it’s been around forever, but we’ve ignored it forever, right? So how do you, how do you, how do you shape yourself around a market that’s been ignored, um, and and, and find rhythm in that? 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Well, that’s the billion dollar question. I think I agree that, that, that is the question to ask. So when we think about how we are driving enrollment and enrollment opportunities at SUNY Empire and also our, how we shape our marketing investment, we fundamentally are focused on enrollment driven partnerships and places where we can help people who are getting their associates already help them have a seamless entry point, a seamless transfer into a four year degree. So one example that we’re very proud of and that we’re really trying to push on to, to grow this program is in the state of New York, if you get an associate’s degree in, in nursing, you have an RN and you can go directly into the workplace like you can across the country. And especially because nurses are in short supply, all the things we know from the last few years. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

So people are making decent, if not good salaries with their rn. And the state of New York has a req a law that went into place in 2017 requiring RNs to get their bachelor’s, their BSN within 10 years. So BSN in 10. So we’re pushing up on now that first cohort who may still only have an rn. And what we’re trying to do is, right when Stu right, when students are graduating from their community college rn, we are working with our community college partners, we’re putting geofencing marketing dollars around those pinning ceremonies, as they say, for nursing Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. So those students know there’s an online affordable opportunity for them to continue because we also know when people stop college, whether it’s stopping your associates or, or not going directly from associate to bachelor’s, it’s harder to pick back up. So in some senses, creating a mechanism, whether it’s through our partnerships or it’s through our marketing to help students know about this opportunity, regardless of where they are in the state, can help them continue to drive their own educational attainment, not hit a paper ceiling, which is why a lot of students have come to us over the decades, you know, for all the talk of college education might not be worth the investment. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

The fact remains that employers in this country, uh, the super majority of hires we make, when we, when we have a choice, all employers or most employers are choosing people who have a college degree. So the paper ceiling is real, and we’re trying to help people know, um, through these partnerships, through workforce partnerships, we have union partnerships. We give credit for prior learning to, uh, various union apprenticeships that the apprentices are doing for a two year cycle. For example, we work, uh, and have for 50 years with the IBEW local three electricians in Manhattan. And they do their, they become journey people after two years and get their card. And along the way they get their degree with us. And in some, most cases it’s an associate’s degree, liberal arts associates, and in some cases they will have brought in credits and they’ll get a bachelor’s with us. But what is amazing is we are diversifying the workforce, we’re diversifying the educated workforce, and we’re doing it in partnership with companies, with unions, uh, with the State Department of Labor, and really with anybody who wants to think with us creatively about how we can help, um, companies and state agencies and unions, how that we can help them recruit, upskill, and retain their employees. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Love those examples. Uh, just so fitting with a combination of market trends, but also the unique circumstances and the things to navigate in the state of New York as an example there, the working with unions. Fantastic. Okay. Other challenges? So beyond incentives, um, what other challenges do you see ahead? 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Well, we have a lot of challenges in public higher education. Uh, we’re the, the disinvestment, um, that we all have really suffered from over the past decades. It has taken, is taken a toll and continues to, I’m privileged to have come into the state of New York and into a SUNY institution at a time when there was a historic investment made in SUNY and in the promise of a public higher education for all New Yorkers. So I’m very grateful for the legislative support, and I’m very much aware that across our entire sector, people are suffering from what we, uh, fondly call a HF hangover, which is hf were the bailout funds that came to higher education, specifically during covid and covid relief funds. And most institutions have, have burned through those appropriately. So they were given for an emergency situation and they helped many institutions stay afloat or, or do good work and do good work over the past few years. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

As we look ahead at SUNY Empire, our challenges really are around identifying the opportunities that have, will have the greatest impact and alignment with our values and figuring out how we can staff up to meet the enrollment growth that we’re experiencing while ensuring that we grow with integrity and we’re able to serve all of our students well, even as we become a larger institution. And one thing we haven’t talked about, but is obligatory in 2023 in any educational podcast is the rise of generative AI chat, GPT. So the challenge too, to keep up with technology, to position the institution, not to be reactive, but proactive and to be a leading force around online education, quality online education around how we use, uh, technology for greater efficiency, uh, but not, uh, we do certainly don’t wanna be leveraging technology to do any harm to, uh, to ourselves or our students or the quality of, of what we offer. And we have the same staffing challenges that people, uh, across the nation, across all sectors are facing. And we continue to really be thinking together about how to bring our best strategic minds to bear on how we can support our students, our faculty and staff today, and how we grow and structure and, and, and streamline processes and ways of being to project ourselves toward a bigger, more impactful, um, deeply access driven institution five years out. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

Makes sense. Um, a, a a nice combination of typical, um, forward-looking forward-thinking strategic objectives amidst, you know, the usual challenges along with, you know, the, you brought up ai, I didn’t, I that’s a first perhaps, but I love it <laugh>. Um, and, uh, and, and thinking about how it applies, right? How, how is this thing, the, the goat is definitely out of the barn and I think the, the best minds in higher ed are, are figuring out, okay, this is a, a thing like other technologies that we need to figure out how to incorporate, how to harness, how to understand, sure. How to govern. Um, but, um, great, great stuff. So let’s bring this, this podcast to a close. What, um, on this topic of overcoming imperfect incentives to serve learners of all ages, what are three takeaways you’d offer our listeners? 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Well, first and foremost, in case uh, you haven’t noticed my exuberant enthusiasm, I am really proud to work at Empire State University because we’re an institution that truly has since the beginning and continues and will continue to meet students where they are. We’re an online institution with built-in flexibility in our academic programs, and with a deep commitment to holistic student support services and to, to innovating as, as we go along and to evolving with the times. I am proud that we welcome transfer students and that we embrace full transferability, we take credits, we take, we, we devise credits for prior learning. We want everybody in America to know there is a place for them in public higher education. And I’m proud to say Empire State University could be that place for everybody today. And I would love for more universities across the country to build capacity to do this work so we can together drive that 37% of bachelors, uh, attaining people in the country higher and higher. 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

So would I. Great summary. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today. 

 

Lisa Vollendorf: 

Thank you so much for the opportunity 

 

Joe Gottlieb: 

And thanks to our guest for joining us as well. I hope you have a great day and we’ll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of Transformed.