The Rant Podcast
A bi-weekly podcast focused on pulling back the curtain on the American higher education system and breaking down the people, the policies and the politics. The podcast host, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, is a known innovator and leader in higher education. The podcast will not pull any punches as it delves into tough questions about the culture, politics and policies of our higher education system.
The Rant Podcast
Exploring AI and Cloud in Higher Education with Laura Ipsen, CEO of Ellucian
What if the future of higher education is already here, driven by cutting-edge technology and strategic innovation? In this episode, we sit down with Laura Ipsen, CEO of Ellucian, live from the bustling ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. Laura provides a front-row seat to the pivotal conversations reshaping higher education. From the integration of AI to enhance learning outcomes and streamline administrative tasks to the importance of digital transformation, community interaction, and workforce development, we cover it all. Laura also sheds light on how Ellucian's agile approach supports institutions worldwide and their role in addressing challenges like student mental health and the enrollment cliff.
Discover how cloud technology is revolutionizing educational institutions, boosting productivity, and aiding in the reskilling of non-traditional workers. Laura discusses Ellucian's strategic partnership with AWS and the use of AI for data privacy and cybersecurity. We also reflect on the excitement of Ellucian Live 2024, featuring notable speakers like Bill Nye and William Shatner, and drawing over 5,500 attendees. Laura's insights into evaluating and integrating new ed-tech solutions through open APIs and partnerships are not to be missed. Plus, we'll give you a sneak peek into our upcoming event in Orlando, promising even more engaging discussions and fresh ideas. Join us for an episode packed with innovation, strategy, and a vision for the future of higher education.
Hi, this is Eloy Ortiz-Oakley, and welcome back to the Rant, the podcast where we pull back the curtain and break down the people, the policies and the politics of our higher education system.
Speaker 1:In this episode, I am back at the ASU GSV Summit in San Diego, sitting down with another great leader, laura Ibsen, ceo of Ellucian. Ellucian provides enterprise resource planning products and cloud-based services to colleges and universities throughout the globe, and I get to sit down with Laura to talk about what's going on in Ellucian, how they're thinking about integrating technology, specifically artificial intelligence, into their suite of solutions, and what interests her about the ASU GSV Summit. We'll also talk about their event, ellucian Live, and how it's attracting more and more people from across the globe. I also want to take a moment to thank Ellucian. They are a sponsor of the Rant podcast and without their support, we wouldn't be able to bring you great interviews like those that I'm recording at the ASU GSV Summit. With that, please join me in welcoming Laura Ibsen to the Rant and I hope you enjoy the interview. Laura, welcome to the Rant podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you. It's awesome to be here and I never thought I'd be sitting here with you doing a podcast, but it is exciting and congratulations on all the success.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks, and thanks to Lucien for helping sponsor the RENT Podcast. Absolutely, we really appreciate it. It gives us the opportunity to come to events like ASU GSV, sit down with great leaders like yourself and talk about what's going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ditto, back to you. Thank you for being part of this community and making sure that you shine a light on many important things that we have in higher education.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a lot going on here in San Diego this week, and let me start with that. So, since you've been here at ASU GSV this year, what's exciting you? What do you find interesting since you've been here?
Speaker 2:I've had a lot of meetings. What I find exciting is the buzz, the community, the sidebar conversations just in the opening event that we had with Debra Quaso just like connecting with old friends. I saw Chancellor Greenstein the Patsy system?
Speaker 1:Yes, so did. I. He should come on the podcast, Danny should. Paula Blank, of course here.
Speaker 2:So just like running into the people that are just talking about different things in the community, I saw your successors, dr. Christian and she was just amazing. So it's exciting to see the momentum getting carried forward in the California Community College system. And then this morning I hosted with AWS and Google, a breakfast of women leaders across education which was exciting, and we talked about digital transformation.
Speaker 2:We talked about the crisis of student mental health workforce, how we're building these pipelines into the workforce as digital is transforming everything. So lots on the horizon and we got two more days.
Speaker 1:Two more days.
Speaker 2:Yes, I don't know if I can survive two more days, but yes, so it's been a lot of fun, very busy, but we came up because of Ellucian Live too, which we'll get to. That's right, that's right?
Speaker 1:Well, that's always a big event and we'll talk about Ellucian Live. So, laura, for our listeners who've been living under a rock, who don't know Ellucian, tell us a little bit about Ellucian. What's your mission and what's your vision for the organization over the next five, 10 years.
Speaker 2:Sure. Well, we as a company, we've been focused on higher education and the technology to serve institutions from the administrative side and all of student for over 50 years and our mission really hasn't changed. It's to power higher education so institutions can empower student success. At Lucian, we really put students at the center.
Speaker 2:We focus our innovation to making sure that you bring the best class in, that they're getting all the support and services and education they graduate into opportunities for the future. So more and more we're doing that, just piling the innovation in there. We serve 22 million students around the world. We serve in 50 countries so it's an exciting time and close to 3,000 institutions 80% of the community colleges are using the Ellucian ERP and student information system. So it's an exciting time, and now we're transforming to this thing called cloud.
Speaker 1:So do you consider yourself a technology company?
Speaker 2:We're an ed tech company 100% and we've got great investors Blackstone and Vista. What's really fantastic now is that we're doubling down on all of the innovation to move artificial intelligence in to really see and predict and use the data to make sure students are successful to take some of the administrative burden and things like reporting off the backs of institutions, successful to take some of the administrative burden and things like reporting off the backs of institutions.
Speaker 2:And so it's a really exciting time to be an ed tech company driving a significant amount of the transformation. We're about 50% of the market in the US.
Speaker 1:Wow. So here at ASU GSV, you know this is the sea of ed tech companies. It is All shapes and sizes, all backgrounds, from all parts of the world. You know Lucian's no small startup. Lucian's been around for a long time, as you said. So how do you think about integrating the technologies that you see popping up? I mean, this time last year we were just talking about ChatGPT and here we are. Everything is AI-driven, everything is about large language models. So how are you leading this very mature organization in this kind of environment thinking about implementing technology?
Speaker 2:We are mature. We're a billion dollar company in the billion dollar club when it comes to revenue, so we're the market leader exclusively the largest ed tech event, exclusively focused on higher education. So first we feel a deep responsibility to deliver to the institutions that have been with us for decades and decades. While we power up significant infrastructure, the administrative tools and all of the CRM, it's also important to be very agile. We built our platform, our SaaS platform, where we're working with.
Speaker 2:California Community Colleges on and many others to be open, interoperable, extensible, secure, and the reason that's so important is that this ecosystem that we see in the ed tech community, we want it to thrive, we want innovation to happen and by integrating with all of these new startups and younger companies, it's very important, it's very healthy for higher education, startups and younger companies. It's very important, it's very healthy for higher education. So our goal is to make sure that we're open, that we integrate, that we provide that as opportunities across the entire landscape.
Speaker 2:So that's what makes it fun and not just higher education, but now we can connect back into K through 12. And when? We talked for many years. It was about how do you see the data for all students.
Speaker 2:Now the game changer moment is around AI. So everything that we're doing now helping students stay on track, understand not only what are they learning in terms of a degree, but how do they amplify their opportunity with different courses and curriculum and tying that into the skill sets and then attaching that directly to more of the workforce opportunities. So, as you look at the funding going into higher education, that you can have outcomes that are good for learners, good for the institution and the communities that are going to work in.
Speaker 1:So I spend a lot of time talking about those workforce outcomes. I mean you can't find a state in the country, a governor or mayor who's not talking about the workforce outcomes, the economic mobility, the lift for learners, the return on investment. So how do you add value to that equation when an institutional leader is thinking about using your ERP?
Speaker 2:Well, number one. All of the information about students flow through the European Student Information System, so the most powerful thing we can do is to help institutions unlock the value of their data to make sure it's all connected. So, right, most powerful thing we can do is to help institutions unlock the value of their data to make sure it's all connected.
Speaker 2:So, right now it lives in many different silos. It's not about going to the cloud, but when you move to the cloud and software as a service, you connect all that data. It's one massive lake of data. Then you can actually add on new capabilities so that the bursar has insights that the same the student has a registrar, your Provost, your faculty so it's really unlocking the value of data.
Speaker 2:That's the most powerful transformation that we see happening now democratizing that data, connecting it, serving up new experiences for students and also making sure that we take care of the most the the students that are underrepresented, that we make sure that the students that are underrepresented, that we make sure that the students that are from diverse backgrounds have just as great of a learning opportunity and the financial support, the support that students need across the whole experience for when they go in, that there's a value of a degree. And that's the biggest challenge right now. Right, every student and many parents. I have two in college what is the value of a degree? And now it's really about with the products we build. We just announced the Lucien Journey.
Speaker 2:This is a student journey that we can then show that the curriculum and degrees and the planning, what skill sets do students have, and then tie that directly to the workforce opportunities. So a student that may graduate with a degree in anthropology can say hey, that degree. I have skill sets that map into many more jobs. So this is where we just have to get better between the intersection of higher education and the needs of the workforce, and AI will be a powerful tool to do that.
Speaker 1:Well, given how far we've come in AI in just one year, I'm looking forward to see what changes come about In just one year. I'm looking forward to see what changes come about. So we talk a lot about going into the cloud or moving to the cloud, moving these services in the cloud. And for our listeners who are not in the IT department, to you, how do you explain to a higher ed leader why is this a good thing? How does this make their operation more efficient?
Speaker 2:Well, it is about efficiency and productivity that when the institutions we serve move to cloud, we do a full ROI and total cost of ownership. So you see what the value is. We show where the workflows will be more productive. We automate all the reporting. So if you have access to the data. The report should be like send me a report on this, versus having teams of people with Excel, spreadsheets and everything else. So how do we get more of that work?
Speaker 1:done faster. People love their Excel spreadsheets.
Speaker 2:I know they do, and it's not that we don't love Microsoft but you can have those too. But how do we make everything more productive? The other one is how do you make it more secure Because this is an area you focused on from fraud detection?
Speaker 2:all of those types of things you can do much better when you're in the cloud. So delivering up cloud is about the productivity of an institution, especially as now we see better capabilities to deliver on the class that you want to bring in. And enrollment, because right now the enrollment cliff is right now and in the future, institutions need to be more focused on how do they market to and attract the traditional learners.
Speaker 2:But more importantly when we think about reskilling non-traditional workers, and this is what was so compelling in Sonia's conversation with Michael Crow. Compelling in Sonia's conversation with Michael Crow, dr Christian, that she said we have 1.6 million high school students in. California, but there's 10 million that can be part of the community college system to retrain, to make sure that we help them find those jobs of the future, and I just think that's so exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, lots of different opportunities, particularly as it comes to making sure that we improve the pipeline to a workforce outcome, because, as you mentioned, that's what learners are looking for. That's what attracts them to a program of study. Very few have the luxury of just learning for learning's sake. They want to learn because they've been told that there is an economic value on the other end of that, that there's a better life on the other end of that. So now you talked about data privacy. I can't tell you how many institutional leaders I've come across that have had challenges, you know, most recently with financial aid fraud. They've had challenges with having ransomware attack their servers and all sorts of challenges with managing their data. You know a lot of actors out there creating false profiles trying to get access to financial aid. How does Ellucian help institutional leaders guard against those threats?
Speaker 2:Well, we have a very robust technology group. We have a chief information security officer that not only works with us, but is attached to many institutions as an advisor when a ransomware may happen, embedded in all of our solutions, and both on-premise but more and more service in cloud. We have an amazing partner in AWS, and so a lot of that security, those capabilities around breach and cybersecurity, is in partnership with AWS, with our software. So that's where we're enabling new AI to detect things early, before someone infiltrates into our system.
Speaker 2:And then there's many other companies that we know very well. They're looking at capabilities that will detect fraud. And some of that we're building into our new student portfolio of innovations is fraud detection that someone can't come in, register and apply and we know it'll be a false student. I don't know if that's even a false student, but a fake student.
Speaker 1:A fake student, that's right. A bad actor. Let's talk about your big event. Yes, you just coming off Ellucian Live 2024. 2024. And it is a big event I've had the pleasure of attending.
Speaker 2:We get you back there again.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's always fun. So tell us about Ellucian Live. What were some of the things that were exciting this year? What are chief information officers, chief student services officers telling you that they need right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, a lot of them, I think, have seen that.
Speaker 2:The messaging that we've had about putting students first, putting them at the center making sure that we're delivering all the value to students, tying it to the workforce opportunities, making sure that we're delivering all the value to students, tying it to the workforce opportunities. That really resonated with everyone from the broad community of the user community, which this is. We had over 5,500 attendees this year and so the power of everything we're doing to innovate with AI, new tools that serve students, both on the administrative side and with the students themselves, in areas like automated reporting enabled by AI, our communicator capabilities that can have constant connection with students, knowing what they need All of that was just what surfaced really well. Beyond that, we had Bill Nye, the science guy. We had William Shatner, who was amazing.
Speaker 1:I missed Kirk.
Speaker 2:You missed him and he was just fantastic. He talked a lot about education his views on what should happen and what students are demanding.
Speaker 2:So that was tremendously exciting. But the most important thing is the community is getting together. Many of our customers now we have 2,000 that are actually consuming something in SaaS. So the wave is happening to move to the most modern platform so that institutional leaders and faculty and staff can really build this future, this very dynamic hybrid way of learning where you're going to learn anytime, anywhere. It's going to be degree, non-degree credentials, micro-credentials, all of that's coming together. We just are there to be the enabler, to be the platform of experiences of innovation and to better serve the institutions around the world of experiences of innovation and to better serve the institutions around the world. We have 250 million students, traditional learners, around the world Wow, we serve 10% today.
Speaker 2:So you know for us it's also an opportunity to bring a global community together because many institutions that are looking at enrollment cliff. Us institutions have a great opportunity to bring learners in from other parts of the world, to be more diverse increasingly diverse from the perspective, so we found that really powerful as well. We had 33 countries attending eLive this year.
Speaker 1:Wow, that sounded like a fun event. Here at ASU GSV, there are lots of technology companies trying to build solutions that answer some of the questions that you've raised and some of the questions that you're getting from your users. As the predominant platform in the US, I'm sure there's a lot of ed tech companies coming to you, you know. Can we build this? Can we add this service to you? How do you evaluate this huge universe of solutions that are being created?
Speaker 2:Well, that's where being an open and not a proprietary platform is really important. So, as we build that out, we have strategic partners, whether it's AWS or TouchNet. That does the payment systems that we focus on every day. We have delivery partners, but when it comes to these new capabilities, we listen to the institutions we serve. What do you need? We want them to be openly integrating into our platform, so we have open APIs where they can connect.
Speaker 2:So, it's not about putting walls up or you're great, but we're not sure about this, and many of them will compete, but that's a good thing because it makes us stronger. So it's building that open ecosystem, helping them integrate into what an institution needs and making sure that we keep the pulse on what is next. What do you need for your students, what do you need for faculty, for the administration and serving up the data in new ways.
Speaker 2:So one of the most powerful things is making sure that we have, with the Lucy and experience, the cards and the dashboard based on persona as a chance, or you can see all of the student information, the economic profiles across the state, how you're connecting to the workforce. That's the big dream that.
Speaker 2:I know you talk quite a bit about is that you show the value of education through the success of students. Our vision really is to unlock learning for all, and in many places around the world and states we haven't done that yet. Many of our underrepresented students are disadvantaged from getting into education, not to mention you know FAFSA didn't help. We're super focused on the FAFSA issues, like out front on that and it's it really hurts.
Speaker 1:And you give the Department of Education a little help. Yeah, we offered. We offered to give them help and we would still help.
Speaker 2:And I think we're making progress there. But that's where, as an industry leader, we feel that we have a responsibility to show up on the toughest issues with customers, whether it's cybersecurity, the issues with the challenges of FAFSA, that we've had to be there for many of the institutions that serve so well the HBCUs. We had one of our owners, robert Smith who runs the Student Freedom Initiative on stage.
Speaker 2:He was phenomenal. It resonated across with every institution. It showed the power of the best investors investing in our success, which leads to the support and success of institutions.
Speaker 1:So just a really really exciting time there. Well, it sounds like I need to be doing podcast interviews at Ellucian Life.
Speaker 2:Well, actually.
Speaker 1:I was going to raise that at the end.
Speaker 2:This is just so wonderful, we've got a few that do it, but I would love for you to host you. We're passionate about what we do and serving and we truly believe that education, that technology, is a great equalizer for education, and education is a great equalizer for all, so we want to facilitate that.
Speaker 2:So every learner, no matter what age, has the opportunity to improve their lives, and the technology is the enabler to do that. But great leaders, how you led in California and many others, that's where we intersect with the mission that we all have.
Speaker 1:So let me ask you a couple of last questions as we begin to wrap up. So, first of all, for those interested in Ellucian Live, can you tell us a little bit about what you see coming in 2025, where you'll be? And then the last question I'd have for you is is if there's anything that you'd like our listeners to know about Ellucian that you haven't talked about. What would that be? I know that you have a lot of great competitors out there trying to do good work as well, but what sets Ellucian apart?
Speaker 2:Well, we are true partners. We just won an opportunity with Indian River State College in Florida, and the quote from President Moore was very powerful to me. President Moore said that you can find vendors anywhere, but you can't find partners everywhere. Right, and that's the partnership that we've committed to. It's not just about showing up with some software and here you go. It's really about making sure that they have the value, and so we're really proud of being a trusted partner to the institutions we serve. We are very focused on giving back, so all of our employees have 40 hours to give back. Most of them do that right in their schools and with higher education.
Speaker 2:And then I'm really proud because over the last couple of since COVID, we announced our PATH scholarship. So, that's very powerful for us in terms of how we support students in need. It oftentimes goes to the MSIs, the community colleges, because we see that students can you know $250 or $500, they can make it through.
Speaker 2:So we've given $1.6 million in those scholarships and we made another commitment this year. So you know we want to be known as the most innovative platform. We serve students globally. We meet institutions where they are so that they can modernize. We are super innovative, bringing on artificial intelligence. Focus on student success and well-being, understanding where the pain points are for higher education and being a trusted partner for the future, for today and the future.
Speaker 1:And that's really coming through across all of the institutions we serve globally. So Ellucian Live next year.
Speaker 2:How do people find out about the event? They go to our website, elluciancom. Look at our social media channels because certainly you'll be thrilled with what you see just the community coming together, the vibrancy. I would say the community is our superpower in higher education, because this is a place where maybe institutions compete a little bit and you have a lot of you know like, hey, you're really proud of your state and what you do, but this is where the communities come together because we're mission-based, we're servant leaders of what we do and that's very powerful.
Speaker 2:So it's all over social media. Come to our website, Learn more about Ellucian and we'd love to see everyone early April 6th through 9th in Orlando. And we want to have the podcast there too.
Speaker 1:So let's get the rant there. Well, that sounds like a great plan. Well, Laura, I know how busy you are at events like this. I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to sit down and talk with me. It's great to have you. It's always great to see you and appreciate the work that you're leading at Lucian.
Speaker 2:Wonderful Well, thanks for your leadership and making sure that you illuminate lots of ideas in your podcast, and look forward to having you in Orlando. All right, I'll look forward to that Sounds good.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks for being here.
