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
Designing a University for Working Learners
What if the future of higher education doesn't lie in reinventing the wheel, but in reimagining who the wheel serves? Join me for an insightful conversation with Dr. Lisa Vollendorf, president of Empire State University, where we tackle this compelling question head-on. As a trailblazer in the SUNY system, Dr. Vollendorf shares how Empire State is setting new standards for online education, creating a flexible and inclusive learning environment for students aged 15 to 80. We shed light on the university's transformative journey from its 1971 inception to its current role as a leader in online education, especially post-pandemic, while emphasizing the shift in perception from non-traditional to the new traditional learners.
Navigating the complex world of higher education leadership, we confront the challenges of balancing innovation with tradition and fostering inclusivity by valuing students' prior experiences. At Empire State University, inclusivity isn't just a buzzword; it's a practice, offering credit transfers and valuing diverse backgrounds. Through our discussion, we explore the delicate act of refining brand identity and embracing artificial intelligence, essential for modernizing operations and meeting the demands of today's learners. This episode promises to provoke thought on how universities can truly reflect and adapt to the evolving educational landscape, ensuring every learner's needs are met with precision and care.
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. In this episode, I talk with Dr Lisa Volendorf, president of Empire State University. Empire State is one of the State University of New York's campuses and it was specifically designed to lead in innovating teaching and learning. I talk with President Volendorf about the mission of Empire State and how the university is innovating to better serve the working learners in the state of New York. I also get her thoughts about how her and her team are thinking about leveraging AI to better serve their learners. So with that introduction, lisa, welcome to the Rant podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me on Eloy. It's such a privilege.
Speaker 2:Well, it's great to have you. President Volendorf, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule. I know there's always lots going on. So Empire State is part of the SUNY system and it was founded in 1971. It was founded on a model of innovation and flexibility in learning.
Speaker 3:Tell us about your mission and how it's evolved, particularly since the pandemic and, since you took on your tenure there at Empire State, had the vision that, even though all of SUNY got built there are 64 SUNY campuses today, and SUNY was built explicitly to serve the people of New York so that they didn't have to travel far to access public higher education. It's a wonderful vision. There are very few states that have such a complete vision. California is another, as we know, and what I love about Empire is that it was believed at the time that it wasn't enough, and we know today that's true.
Speaker 3:it wasn't enough to have a whole system of four-year institutions complemented by an extensive system of two-year institutions, because really what was needed was an additional innovative campus, which is what Empire State was founded to be. We were founded to serve the entire state and to do that through what in the day was called distance learning, so traditionally, our students were non-traditional students.
Speaker 3:So that's where we are today post-pandemic world in 2024. Empire, already in 1995, had started to experiment with, and begin to be in the online space. We were 50% online in 2007, 85% online going into the pandemic, and we came out on the other side, 98% online. So we are SUNY's leading online university. We are fundamentally an institution that was created to meet learners where they are, and where they are today is online. So we're serving four generations of learners, age 15 to 80. And I couldn't be prouder to work at a university that that truly is diverse in its inclusion and really embraces high-quality access to affordable education in ways that are more flexible than anyone even could have imagined 50 years ago.
Speaker 2:Well, it's wonderful that somebody imagined before the pandemic that they needed Empire State University, because what we've learned since the pandemic is this is absolutely critical for state systems like SUNY. I know this was the case in California. We didn't realize that we were going to have a pandemic when we were building Calbright College fully online, but fortunately for us and for the system, we did so. You mentioned a key phrase that your university was imagined to serve non-traditional learners, but if you look at the data now, the majority of learners are the kind of learners that you just described, so they're really now the traditional learner and have been for quite some time. How do you reconcile that when you're talking with your colleagues and this notion of Empire State just serving non-traditional learning comes up.
Speaker 3:Well, you will never hear me outside of this conversation saying non-traditional learners, so I have to have a caveat there.
Speaker 3:I find it very interesting that the rest of the nation is struggling in the higher education sphere to find ways to serve learners of all ages, which is how I speak about our students. We currently are serving more Gen Z students than we ever would have imagined possible. So for us, non-traditional students are actually the traditional students at other institutions. So we are seeing an increase in teenagers and post-high school students coming directly to us, as we're seeing across the country, as you're seeing at Calbright in California and, as I know, we're seeing online institutions nationwide. So we are embracing younger learners, who are, for us, non-traditional, at the same time that we're continuing to think about how to serve four generations of learners. At any given time, everybody has different expectations and needs. So the space that we've really leaned into post-pandemic is in the sphere of holistic student supports for diverse students, regardless, really, of where they live or where they come from, but specifically tailored to what they're telling us their needs are.
Speaker 2:You mentioned the growth in online enrollments, particularly post-pandemic, that your university has experienced, and, given the huge growth in online learning across the country and enormous amount of innovation that has taken place recently with regard to the use of technology to support students, how is Empire State innovating today to keep up with those changes? You mentioned the fourth generation of learners. They're all, as you said, in different places, in different spaces and they learn differently. How are you thinking about innovation to better serve those learners going forward?
Speaker 3:One thing I love about Empire that is different from anywhere else I've had the privilege of working in my career is that innovation and flexibility, and therefore iteration, are built into our DNA.
Speaker 3:So I have such great regard for my colleagues at Empire, for people who came before us, because we come to Empire, those of us who are relatively new and are embraced by an ethos that really values every student and values the opportunity to learn from our students about what is needed, how we build out universal design for learning in our master course shell, the ways in which we experiment with interaction that is both synchronous and asynchronous.
Speaker 3:90% of our courses are asynchronous, in spite of the fact that students tell us over and over again they would like more synchronous opportunities for interaction and for coursework. The reality is these are busy people. They're caretakers, they work. Our students have obligations, again, regardless of what their age is and regardless of how many credits they had when they came to us. They all have complex lives. So, as we move increasingly into the asynchronous space because that's what students tell us more responsive to our students and helping us learn how to take some of those low-level tasks off of our faculty and staff's plates so we can focus on more meaningful interaction with our students.
Speaker 2:That's great to hear and I know that's a conversation happening across the country. Now you there in New York. You serve a wide demographic of learners. They all have different challenges depending on where they're at in the state, where they're at the country operate. Are there any things that are unique to your situation there in New York with your learners, or do you find more commonality than uniqueness?
Speaker 3:Thank you for that question. I think a lot about what it meant to have the opportunity to work for 16 years in the California State University system. I worked at big, urban-serving public universities At Long Beach State. I was at San Jose State. I moved to Sonoma, which was a suburban, ex-urban, smaller institution with a different student demographic really.
Speaker 3:But the overarching experience that I had in California was wrapped around a very clear value system that I carry with me to this day, which really hinges on Access to quality.
Speaker 3:Higher education should be a right for all and it remains a privilege because of all the barriers that we place on people from all backgrounds, and we really need to be continuing to find ways to break down those barriers and serve more people. So I would say that in New York and California we carry that ethos with us and that being an empire now at Empire State University, where we serve 16,000 students and we're growing. We grew 12% last year and we have the goal of continuing to grow to 20,000 by 2028. Grow to 20,000 by 2028, we're growing in service to a population that continues to be left behind by almost all sectors. Within public higher education and within the privates as well, we serve students who have many, many credits from many different institutions over many years, or students who come to us with credits that they took as dual or concurrent enrollment in high school or just after high school, they enrolled in community college.
Speaker 3:Unlike most institutions, we value our students' experience. We value it to the extent that we give and have for decades credit for prior learning, so credit for life experience. For decades credit for prior learning, so credit for life experience, as well as up to 93 credits of transfer from other institutions. So that is an ethos of inclusivity the likes of which I had never seen before I came to Empire State University and I really think it's a model for us to look closely at and consider, because we actually embrace what everybody knows is the gold standard, which is full transferability.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely right, and you mentioned something that I want to focus on just for a minute. This whole issue of credit for prior learning is a big topic across the country Community colleges and four-year public universities. Ace weighs in on this issue. So many of our learners are working learners, whether they come from the military into higher education or come from working environments where we know that they are learning. We know that they're gaining skills, and we in higher education have really had a tough time. I'd say we've failed most learners when it comes to transferring that experience to skills. How has Empire really honed in on that and built a model that really seems to be working for learners when it comes to credit for prior learning?
Speaker 3:Well, credit for prior learning, as your preface there to your question indicates, is a very complex beast.
Speaker 3:It requires that an institution stop what it's doing, because most institutions have built out curricula that are very tightly constructed, well-constructed indeed, but do not allow for or account for students as whole persons coming to us with prior life experience and, frankly, do not take into account or want to take into account the credits that they have rightfully earned and worked hard to earn at other institutions.
Speaker 3:So I think that if I had one thing to say about how to build a university from scratch, if we were all able to hit a button and do a reset, the reset would require that we assume that our students will have a diversity of experiences, a diversity of credits already booked, let's say, from other institutions, and that our starting point should be to ask how do we serve each of those students with integrity at our institution? And that is not the ethos that we bring to the table, especially for your institutions. We bring to the table an ethos that is very much under pressure financially, absolutely Also very much under pressure around. Our curricula are set and they are fixed and we need people to come through our curricula to be sure that they are going to achieve the learning outcomes that we have designated ourselves. So we have an individuality of spirit. I would say in higher education at each of our institutions that in the aggregate, does a disservice to and frankly, as you say, fails, a broader student population.
Speaker 2:I hope many of our listeners who work at the more traditional public and private for universities just listen to that answer, because this is absolutely what we need to do different in higher education. In my view, this is why there's frustration with higher education as we know it today this failure to meet learners where they're at. So appreciate the work that you're doing there. Now let me ask you a question about how you balance the more traditional viewpoints with some of the more innovative viewpoints that you just talked about. You've been in higher education for some time. You've been in various roles Now as president of Empire State University. How do you think about balancing tradition and innovation and how they're in conflict sometimes?
Speaker 3:The conflict and the tension that we feel in higher ed around tradition and innovation, I think is also at the core of the problem that you were referring to in the last question and answer, fundamentally, the belief system that we brought to the table when we built out American public higher education and private for that matter the belief system that we brought to the table when we built out American higher education is one steeped in tradition, and it is steeped in a tradition that is elitist and narrow and served a very, very small swath of the exclusively male population in this country.
Speaker 3:And to the extent that we cling to tradition for tradition's sake, we are clinging to an elitist and sexist and racist and truly just exclusionary view of what higher education actually should be or could be today.
Speaker 3:So I feel very strongly that, as I am at an institution, leading an institution that is very much focused on flexibility, innovation and learning from our learners, that we are well-positioned to empire, to question everything that we do, and I say that and I also want to say that we have, like everyone else, a lot of tension around what tradition should let go, what we should reshape and what we should create anew in service to the students we serve today.
Speaker 3:This is very hard work, and we are thoughtful and highly educated humans those of us who work in higher ed. So it takes time, and I feel the empire definitely has the belief that that we can and must do better year over year, and that that does require that we make changes according to, again, what our students are telling us they need, as opposed to what we think we need as faculty staffs and leadership at the institution. And, like everyone else, we are in a complex human organization and you'll ask me that question and I guarantee you that all of our other 1,399 employees will have a slightly different answer. And that's the beauty of the educational promise, isn't it?
Speaker 2:No, that's right, and I think the more questions are raised, the kind of questions that you're raising, the more that we reflect on who we are as educators, as institutions, and remember to put the center at the center the learner I think the more responsive we will be going forward. So I appreciate that viewpoint. Now, that's clearly a challenge of how we continue to reshape, reimagine the way we think about public higher education, but there's also lots of other challenges that confront higher education leaders today. This is a very treacherous time for higher education leaders. This is a very challenging time, particularly post-pandemic and all the challenges that low and moderate income learners face. What are some of the greatest challenges that you're facing as a leader and what advice would you have for up-and-coming leaders who want to become a president of a regional public four-year university right now?
Speaker 3:Well, I'll start with the end Eloy and say that the past six months, on top of the prior four years, have presented leadership challenges the likes of which nobody anticipated. People who are doing their best, with their teams, in consultation with faculty and staff and students across the nation, to really put their best foot forward. So I want to acknowledge that the work that has been done and the challenges that have been faced and will continue to be faced, I think, into the fall at residential campuses are crushing and challenging. And if there's anybody who's thinking about becoming a president power to you. I will give you my cell phone number so you can call a lifeline, as it were, if you phone a friend, if you need that, because it is tough work out there.
Speaker 3:And I want to acknowledge that first, because, when I shift to my answer for my job at this incredible institution, at this incredible time, empire State University's biggest challenge is how to grow with integrity, and we really spend most of our time, I would say, in our cabinet meetings and at the leadership level trying to help each other, be responsive and be proactive with regard to what is needed to ensure that we're supporting our faculty and staff to the extent feasible and possible today and into the future so we can continue to grow and serve our students well.
Speaker 3:So this is a relatively uncommon challenge, I would say, in today's environment, and I will reiterate that it is a very important challenge for us to rise to because when Empire State University and other institutions out there like us grow, we are growing in service to the student population you're referencing. We are growing in service to people who feel that higher education has failed them, because we have. We are growing in service to people in the military, whom you referenced, and veterans who are looking for a flexible way for them to use their GI Bill and to continue in their journey once they leave the military. We are growing in service to students who, time after time, their credits were not taken from other institutions and they could not piece together a degree even though they have, in some cases, dozens of credits that they bring forward.
Speaker 3:So I feel a sense of urgency and really a sense of deep commitment to growing the institution well, in service to those students who deserve their chance to dream and complete their dream of achieving their college degree.
Speaker 2:So we talked a lot about the challenges and you very succinctly put forth some of the challenges that you face and other leaders face. And I think in part of your answer you mention and you talk about the opportunity within that challenge the opportunity to really shine a light on what learners need today and to reimagine the institution to better serve those learners. But many public and private institutions across the country are struggling with enrollment decline. They're struggling with the challenge of an erosion in confidence in the value that those institutions deliver to their learners. How have you and your team been thinking about positioning Empire State and clearly your enrollment is growing, so you're doing something right. How are you and your team positioning Empire State to deal with some of those pressures and to actually leverage the demand from working learners to access a great post-secondary experience?
Speaker 3:I have so many simultaneous thoughts about this question. I'm going to say one that I never would have said, even 10 years ago. I came up through urban comprehensive institutions that were very large, pushing on between 30 and 40,000 students in any given time, and we didn't give a lot of thought, I would say, at those institutions to brand identity. I do think that the regional public comprehensives in particular, but also, I will say, many of the privates, and, as a side note, I will note that since I moved to New York State on July 1 of 2022, since I moved to New York State on July 1 of 2022, 15 schools have closed in the state One size. So I would say, number one, brand identity and brand clarity is critically important. You must have a brand identity that is clear for students to even know who you are and what you stand for, and this is very hard when you say comprehensive and brand identity, like those two things together make it very difficult to arrive at clarity about the brand. But to me, saying that you need brand clarity is actually a way to speak to you. Really. We really need, at our institutions, to know what we're good at and we need to have the courage to leave behind the things that either are not mission-centric and or we haven't been able to drive up to the level of quality that we know our other programs are at. So that's one piece of my answer.
Speaker 3:We landed on SUNY's leading online university for our branding when we knew, a year after the pandemic, that students were not wanting to come to Empire anymore in person. We kept throwing up in person all over the state, throwing up opportunities, confusing our students, spending a lot of time, then calling people to say, hey, your class meets tomorrow in Buffalo, and they said what do you mean? I thought you were online. So I give that as an example of our own learning and as we have refined our brand identity, we also have been refining how it is that we then approach the creation of a very strong and holistic student support network so that our students know that they can come to us and if they have basic needs, if they need to access a food pantry, they can do that through us. We have mental health services 24-7. We have a virtual food pantry. That also is a portal that enables us to connect students to social services wherever they are, whether they're in the state or out of the state. So we have been bringing some creativity to the thinking around student success. That is exciting to me, it's very energizing and it's helping us continually refine in service to what the students tell us they need.
Speaker 3:Those are a couple of my answers. They may not be satisfying to many folks out there, because I think it is really hard to come to consensus on any given campus, including ours. I will say we're 98% online and we do have people in our community who still are hoping and hold hope. Hold that hope out for a day when students will return in person and that ship seems to have sailed. Our students are telling us over and over again it has sailed Again. None of us is here to pass judgment on our colleagues or other institutions. We're all here, I think, to help each other be better. That should be the ethos that we bring to our jobs in higher education, because if we're better, then more people can have access to the degree that they deserve to have access to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with that. So let me ask you one final question as we begin to wrap up, and in particular, since your university is charged with innovating. It's charged with re-imagining how you meet learners where they're at, and this year has been the talk. All year has been about AI and how artificial intelligence is going to change the environment for the learner, for the institution, for how we operate, and so I'm sure you've heard many of those conversations. You can't go to a education conference without somebody talking about how AI is just going to change everything. How are you and your team making sense of artificial intelligence and what are the ways in which you're thinking about leveraging AI to better support your learners?
Speaker 3:is a little bit of the stages of grief, as it were. I think that many people were hoping that it was not what it was all cracked up to be and that maybe it would go away, and there was some denial. I think we are very much as a community and higher ed now in the phase of acceptance and an empire. We have had various groups working over the past I would say almost year and a half now looking at what policies we might need to change, how we need to approach our universal design for learning. Master course shell, which we continuously update based on the evidence and data that we pull from our Brightspace, is our learning management system. We work to update our courses every year in ways that are very much informed by the data that we pull from Brightspace and from what students are telling us and faculty as well. Aspect of how we intend to move forward, our fall is going to be very much informed by AI AI boot camp, lunch and learns We've already had. We have several already on the books. We're trying to bring the whole institution along and not exclusively only train up faculty so that they can be well-informed in their teaching and learning, but we really want teaching, learning and operations holistically to be lifted with these tools so that we can, as a university, be well-informed, moving forward.
Speaker 3:This is, I will say that, the advent of generative AI. Again, none of us could have imagined a couple of years ago that we would be where we are today, but it is challenging the foundations of how we all were trained in teaching and I think it's also challenging the foundations of what our learners expect of themselves and of their university. So I think it's an exciting time. It is a little bit scary, certainly, but I know already that the ways in which we have embedded AI in our operations have helped us really advance and help hundreds of students, if not thousands, by now.
Speaker 3:With the FAFSA fiasco, we came out on the other side. We are coming out on the other side of the disastrous FAFSA rollout stronger than we were going in last year, because we leaned into AI as a way to support our staff, to be able to help our students and our prospective students know what the options were, and come through AI. So we have already found some really exciting ways to be in service to students that we couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago. So I just love that about education. I love that we have open hearts for learning in service to our students, and at Empire we are working hard to be sure that none of our own people are left behind, so that we all have the skills and at least the baseline understanding of what's possible as we move forward around generative AI.
Speaker 2:Well, on that very positive note, President Volendorf, I really appreciate you being on the RAND podcast. I think all of us, particularly in the state of New York and throughout the country, are fortunate to have you, your staff and your faculty working to improve post-secondary education for the learners that we all care about, and that is the majority of learners throughout this country. So thank you for the work you're doing and, again, thanks for being on the RENT podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you, eloy, for the opportunity, and I just want to briefly say that I owe you a personal thanks because when I first started in California in 2005, you were, of course, in Long Beach leading the charge with the Long Beach Promise and Long Beach State and the school district and the community college that you were leading provided a model for the nation. That really was a model for how, if we collaborate and focus on the students and focus on the fact that every student deserves the right to dream their way to a college education, you led the way for me to think about my own future in higher education and my own future in higher education leadership. So that's a personal thank you to you. Many years later, you probably don't even know that that was the case, but for me it was an instrumental, it was an important part of my life and of my career. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for that, and obviously it's because of people like you that the Long Beach College Promise is what it is and continues today. So again, thank you, and thank you for mentioning that I know your former boss, king Alexander, is also a key architect in that, as well as Chris Steinhauser from Ambit Unified. As a matter of fact, I may have them both on this podcast one of these days to reminisce about those days.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening to my conversation with Dr Lisa Volendorf, president of Empire State University. If you enjoyed this episode, hit the subscribe button, Continue to follow us on this YouTube channel or on your favorite podcast platform, and we will be back to you shortly with another great interview. Thanks for joining us, everybody. Thank you.
