Accreditation NECHE Style—From Prescriptive to Nuanced:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 233 with Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Lawrence "Larry" Schall

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 233

[00:00:30] Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

[00:00:31] Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is Larry Schall, President of the New England Commission on Higher Education. Larry has a long and distinguished career, both in and outside higher education. He started as a civil rights attorney in Philadelphia, then joined Swarthmore College, where he served as their Vice President for Administration for 15 years, and then President of Oglethorpe University in 2005 for 15 years, where he led it to unprecedented success, raising its profile and doubling its enrollment and net tuition revenue. He joined NECHE at the height of the pandemic and since joining it has led NECHE’s expansion, both within and without the United States.

[00:01:14] Drumm McNaughton: Larry joins me today to talk about innovation in accreditation and how NECHE works with its commission and its institutions to lead the pack with this.

[00:01:24] Drumm McNaughton: Larry, welcome to the program.

[00:01:27] Larry Schall: It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:28] Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure to have you on, I’m so looking forward to it. You’re with the New England Commission for Higher Education and you guys have such a great reputation for innovation. Before we get into that though, please do me a favor, give the listeners a little bit of a background on you so we can all get to know who you are.

[00:01:49] Larry Schall: I’d be happy to. I began my professional career as a civil rights attorney in Philadelphia, back in the late seventies, after getting out of law school and did that for a decade or so. And soon after I found myself at my alma mater, it’s at Swarthmore college outside Philadelphia. As a, vice president for administration, a little bit of an odd move, but people there knew me and I was ready to do something different. So I spent 15 years there serving under a terrific president, Al Bloom, and then left Swarthmore, and we moved to Atlanta where I was president of a, another small liberal arts college, one with a little less resources than Swarthmore, Oglethorpe University, and did a 15 year turnaround of that place and left it in good shape with a number of new facilities and a lot of new faculty.

[00:02:41] Larry Schall: And so when I made the decision to leave after 15 years, wasn’t ready to stop working, so I was trying to figure out what to do next and got invited up by the search committee for the New England Commission to have a conversation with them about leading an accreditation agency. And I shared with them and I said at the time that. “Not sure it was a great fit because I wasn’t a huge fan of accreditation from 30 years on the other side”, but it turned out to be a good fit. And that was four and a half years ago.

[00:03:11] Drumm McNaughton: I’m guessing, with your background at Oglethorpe, you probably know one of my good friends, Larry Large.

[00:03:17] Larry Schall: I was with Larry maybe three weeks ago. The, 18th president of Oberthorpe was being sworn in. I was the 16th, Larry was the 15th, and we were both invited back, joined the new president on stage and passed the mace down the line, and, it was my privilege to hand it to her. So yeah, I was with Larry just a few weeks back.

[00:03:37] Drumm McNaughton: He and I have known each other for a couple of years now. He’s a good man.

[00:03:41] Larry Schall: Absolutely.

[00:03:42] Drumm McNaughton: Thank you for that background. NECHE’s been around for quite a long time, hasn’t it?

[00:03:48] Larry Schall: 1885 under different sort of structure and name, but we were the first accrediting agency in the world back then. It was a new idea.

[00:03:57] Drumm McNaughton: Wow. So obviously you weren’t with them back then. You’re not quite that old.

[00:04:03] Larry Schall: Now we started the idea, what, back then it was like people were, “what’s the difference between a secondary education and a higher education? And how would you know the difference and what the quality looked like in each of them?” And the agency that got started, and it was started by I think the presidents of MIT and Harvard and some others, to work at what did a quality higher education look like?

[00:04:26] Larry Schall: Way back in those days, it was certainly more prescriptive than it is now. It had to, how many books they had in the library and how many faculty and what degrees did the faculty have and what was taught and actually that whole sort of focus on inputs lasted a long time.

[00:04:42] Larry Schall: I remember back when I was at Swarthmore being accredited by Middle States, they still back then asked how many books you had in the library and I remember going over to the library at Swarthmore, it’s a beautiful building on campus, and I can’t remember how many books we had, hundreds of thousands. And one of the questions was like, ” so what percent of those books have circulated in the last 10 years”? It was back in this, so this is back in 1990 something. I don’t know. It was like 3%. It was so few of those books ever left the library. Which, it’s probably smaller percentage than that today.

[00:05:19] Drumm McNaughton: Probably. Reminds me a little bit of strategic planning. One of the things we talk about is the spot syndrome, the Strategic Plan On the Top Shelf dot gathering dust.

[00:05:30] Larry Schall: There’s still there’s still a little bit of that, I would say.

[00:05:33] Drumm McNaughton: More than a little, unfortunately.

[00:05:35] Larry Schall: I would say so.

[00:05:36] Drumm McNaughton: We’ve seen over the last, oh gosh, I would say probably the last 10 years, some significant changes in accreditation. Measuring outputs, as you mentioned, versus inputs. One of the big ones was back under Trump one, the regional versus the institutional accreditor designation. How has that impacted NECHE?

[00:06:02] Larry Schall: Yeah, so when that got changed, which was I think 2020, and I started in June of 2020, it was actually a big issue that we brought in front of the Commission. We were the New England Commission. One of the things we were very proud of was that, when you thought about the regions, New England, it actually is a region as opposed to HLC, which has 17. which is California. And, know, folks used to say, ” we could get in the car and travel to every one of our institutions in just a couple of hours and New England had a really strong brand. They were open to the conversation. I think one of the things I said to them is just in terms of a business model, if the model is that institutions from New England can choose to go somewhere, but we say no institution from outside New England could come to us, it’s a pretty goofy business model. It’s like we can lose them, we can’t gain them. So we thought about that and decided how we would be selective about it. Wasn’t unless we were just going to take anybody that came. And so we put a policy in place, a practice in place that institutions that were in good standing with another departmentally recognized accreditor could come over to us in a fairly expedited process.

[00:07:17] Larry Schall: And the first one, first calls we got actually were from a quartet of schools in New York, that had been accredited by the New York State Board of Regents, which was a, I think they accredited maybe a dozen schools. It was a sort of an oddity in the business and they, New York had made the decision to get out of that business, and so they gave these schools, I don’t know, two years or whatever, to find a new home. And the four of them, these were all very selective, high end Ph. D. programs. The American Museum of Natural History, Rockefeller University, Sloan Kettering Memorial, and Cold Spring Harbor all decided to come over together. So I did a couple week trip to New York and visited the four of them and they were the first to come over. And then we’d begun to see some liberal arts colleges in upstate New York come over and schools scattered around the country.

[00:08:09] Larry Schall: So it’s been an interesting transition for us, I think when we’ve handled well, we say “no” far more than we say “”yes. And the other things I think we chatted about before is that, at least since, I think it goes back maybe 25 years, we began to accredit institutions outside the United States, stand alone institutions across the ocean. And when I came, we had 11 of them, and had been members for quite a while. We added a 12th fairly recently in there, and we have 16 new ones who are in the process of becoming accredited. Regions that we’ve never been in before in Africa and East Asia and the Middle East.

[00:08:47] Larry Schall: So it’s interesting now that, I think we’ll soon have more than 10 percent of our institutions outside New England, and we expect that number to grow. At the same time that the number of New England institutions actually shrinking because we’re seeing mergers and closures and consolidations.

[00:09:05] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, I understand what you’re talking about with the New York. I worked with an institution, the Elmesey Graduate School of Molecular Medicine, who’s a very highly focused PhD. research program on Long Island. Had we known each other, I would have recommended them coming to, coming to NECHE, but they ended up going out to WASC and they were very pleased with the process that they went through.

[00:09:30] Larry Schall: Yeah, so I was just in New York and visited with the folks on the four of them that, they’re unique in a way. It was fun to put teams together to go to those places because we were able to draw from PhD programs at Harvard and Yale and MIT. Where most of the, a lot of those doctors at those schools, that’s where they got their PhDs from.

[00:09:51] Larry Schall: Yeah, it’s added to the richness and diversity of NECHE to add those institutions as well as institutions outside the states.

[00:09:58] Drumm McNaughton: One of the things that when we spoke, a few days ago, really impressed me was for each of these new schools, you personally go out and do a visit with their leadership and their leadership team to just get a sense of the school before you say, “Yes, you can apply for eligibility”. That’s impressive.

[00:10:17] Larry Schall: It’s, I think important both to them and to us, and so I’ll spend two or three days like a team visit, but it’s not a team visit and it’s not official in the sense, but it is the sort of gateway for us to see together is, like, is this a good fit?

[00:10:32] Larry Schall: And by the time I do that visit, we’ve already been on the phone and Zoom and so we’re pretty clear that it’s going to work. So that, that happens. And then we send a team out. They do a report, we send a team out and then they appear in front of the commission.

[00:10:45] Larry Schall: It’s interesting, one of the things different about our commission, I think, than any of the others is we have presidents appear before us, just in the normal course of business not, when I was at Oglethorpe and we had some financial issues, I was called before SACS to defend ourselves. Once we got healthy we just sent reports in. I didn’t have a chance to appear in front of them, but every comprehensive evaluation President comes, spends an hour in front of the Commission. When these new institutions appear and they are up for candidacy and then initial accreditation the president appears before us and it’s historical, but it’s a really nice way for those institutions to understand how our work is and for us to, hear directly from a president. So that’s every one of our meetings and we have four business meetings a year. We’ll have anywhere between a half a dozen and a dozen presidents spending an hour in front of us.

[00:11:44] Drumm McNaughton: You’ve got a family of innovation there at NECHE, and this is all part of continuing that culture that you have. You had mentioned the other day, “NECHE on the road”, your team being able to drive out to all your your different institutions, you don’t bring on a lot of outside, I wouldn’t say outside institutions, you make sure that institutions are a good cultural fit for who you are, and I think this is all part of that process of, “Welcome to the family. We’re going to perpetuate our values as part of this”. Is that a fair statement?

[00:12:24] Larry Schall: Absolutely. Yeah, so ” NECHE on the road” started, this was my wife’s idea, it was, I started work, July, 2020 middle of COVID. I was coming into the office every day cause that’s what I always did my whole life. I was the only person. There was no traffic in Boston, so it was easy to come in. And then, by the time the fall hit, I was going nuts, because I just was coming in the office. I wasn’t seeing anybody, and she said, why don’t we just pack up the car and go visit some schools?” We planned, at that point, we were going to do Western Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. We were going to see 20 schools. We couldn’t, Vermont wouldn’t let you in you literally couldn’t cross the border. So we did Western Mass, scooted around New Hampshire. And I think we ended up doing like a 10 day road trip and I think we did 20 or 25 schools. It was crazy. The hotels that were open, the rooms were stripped, the restaurants were closed. So we literally, we had a cooler and we’d go to a grocery store and just pack the cooler up. And then we’d come back at night, exhausted, eat dinner out of the cooler. My wife’s a photographer, she did all the pictures. And then I would write a draft of the text and she’d edit it. And then she’d put it all together. So we’re now up to 70 some of these blog pieces, mostly current institutions, but also new ones. We just did four in Vermont week before last, which was a nice time to go to Vermont. The colors were out.

[00:13:54] Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely.

[00:13:55] Larry Schall: Yeah, but it is, it’s both something that I enjoy, but it’s also a way for people to come to know NECHE where it’s not at a, I’m not doing business. It’s not a team. I’m not evaluating. I’m just trying to learn about the institution and tell their story.

[00:14:09] Drumm McNaughton: That’s part of that NECHE family that you talk about.

[00:14:13] Drumm McNaughton: You’re known for innovation. How do you manifest that? How do you keep that culture of innovation going?

[00:14:21] Larry Schall: Yeah, that’s a great question. We have standards. We have nine standards. There are very few numbers in those standards, although I would say underneath those nine standards, there are almost 200. We don’t call them substandards, we call them numbered paragraphs, but, they’re fairly prescriptive, but they allow for, I think, a lot of flexibility.

[00:14:38] Larry Schall: And then we have something called the Policy and Innovation, where school can come to us and say, “We have an idea that actually is in contradiction n to one of your standards. So we’re telling you right now, there’s a standard it doesn’t meet, but we think it would benefit students and worth an experiment, worth trying. And so we have schools come to us under that. But then I think, because schools see us, really, as a partner in this quality enhancement, quality improvement process, when I’m out on one of my visits, the president will say, we’re thinking about… What would you guys think about it?” And then we’ll have a conversation, we’ll sometimes share drafts. So schools are very transparent with us. If we think this is something that will benefit students, we try to find a way to do it to say, “yes”. We’ve just approved three institutions to do these degrees, 90 to 96 credit baccalaureate degrees, which is a, it’s a big step for us, not an easy one. And we’re doing that as an experiment. Partly because they know us well, we know them , they feel very open exploring things with us, to the extent, you sometimes read about some school in some other region where they announced their closing on Tuesday. It’s like this abrupt closure that catches everybody by surprise, including the accreditor. And it’s not anything that’s happened up here. I, I’ll have a president pick up the phone and say, ” we haven’t decided to close, but the board, we’re talking about it and we’re not sure what our runway is, and we just want you to know, and, we’ll keep you in the loop”. Schools, I think we’re trusted. It just may be the best way to say it.

[00:16:11] Drumm McNaughton: And that does not surprise me knowing you as I do and knowing the way NECHE operates. You have to have that level of trust between yourselves and your schools for them to come. Conversely, if you don’t have that trust, that’s an issue. I was with one school who got put on show-cause because they didn’t inform their accreditor that they were actually… and they didn’t know it, they were graduating students without their GE requirements. When they got told that they were doing that by the Department of the Navy, they said, “okay, great, let’s fix it”. The president of the university said, we’ll just keep this in house we won’t tell the accreditor, and when the Navy found the second one, they went to the accreditor. And instead of what could have been just a simple probation, they got put on show-cause for not being trustworthy.

[00:17:09] Larry Schall: No, I think that’s, it really is when the system works at its best, there’s communication back and forth.

[00:17:16] Drumm McNaughton: It also too, you have to work with your commission, your board to get these innovative changes through. You just mentioned three year baccalaureate degrees. How did you work through this with the board? Because you’ve got some pretty high powered presidents on your commission.

[00:17:37] Larry Schall: It took about three years to get it through.

[00:17:41] Drumm McNaughton: Really higher ed moves that fast? I’m surprised.

[00:17:44] Larry Schall: Yeah, when we first brought it up and the majority of the commission were like, “no, we’re not going there, it’s going to open a floodgates”. And so I said, we have these four business meetings a year, and then we have three days of spread out into two meetings of what we just call retreat where we don’t do business, or we try not to do business, but really talk about the role of accreditation in enhancing higher education and changes that are happening in the landscape.

[00:18:13] Larry Schall: So we bring outside speakers in, we give them reading material. So we, this one went, it’s probably not quite three years, but it was close and the first couple times where we took votes, it got voted down and we tried to hear what were the concerns? And then based on understanding what the concerns were, we brought a draft proposal, sort of a protocol to the commission. If a school met these four conditions, we would allow it to go through. And then we, that got debated back and forth. And then finally that protocol got passed and then that’s how, and then these three institutions came to us under that protocol and met the conditions. Yeah. So that’s how it works. We also, we went through this with, one of our requirements was basically that all the curriculum needed to be in English. Students with a baccalaureate degree needed to graduate with a collegiate level of proficiency in English. And we had some institutions that were looking to start programs in Latin America, not for students who would ever come to the States, but, an MBA in Spanish in Chile or in Columbia. And they came to us with us under the innovation policy, explaining What the goal was, and we let that gave approval to that on through the policy and innovation. We’ve had those, French program in Morocco. We’ve approved and then most recently was this was an interesting one. We had a school come to us.

[00:19:48] Larry Schall: It said, there are pockets of Spanish speaking people in the states that speak English, but English is clearly their second language. And if they’re going to get a Masters in something and remain in their community that we’d like to offer that in Spanish within the U. S. borders. And we’ve now approved that. So that was an interesting one. We find our, the innovation comes from, we don’t go out and tell an institution you should do this. We, these ideas come to us and then we.

[00:20:20] Larry Schall: Discuss them, bat them around, go back and forth with an institution, and staff then tries to get it in a place that when it comes in front of the commission, because it’s the commission that’s in the end making the decision, that we feel like it’s got a fairly good chance of getting approved. We, staff has a pretty good sense of how the commission thinks.

[00:20:39] Larry Schall: We’re not always perfect on this one, but we get a pretty good sense.

[00:20:43] Drumm McNaughton: It’s, it requires, and correct me if I’m wrong, my sense is it requires a tremendous amount of trust between your schools and your staff and the commission, so that when you bring something to the commission, they may not. Like the three year degree, they may not say yes on the first time around, but it’s one of those, let’s explore, let’s see what we can make of this, especially with your focus being on what’s best for the student.

[00:21:17] Drumm McNaughton: And bottom line, that’s what it’s always got to be.

[00:21:20] Larry Schall: We have a chair and vice chair of the commission that I spend a lot of time with, if they tell me probably not, I wouldn’t bring it. I don’t bring it. Not ready yet.

[00:21:31] Drumm McNaughton: What are some of the hot buttons that you’re seeing out there, in higher ed right now? Besides diversity, we all know diversity is probably the biggest hot button.

[00:21:41] Larry Schall: One of the things, so in New England, the demographics are not favorable and they haven’t been favorable for a couple of decades. We’ve seen closures and mergers, go back decades. It’s not a new phenomenon, although it’s, the pace is increasing. A lot of our small, New England’s got a lot of small, under resourced, sometimes religious institutions have been around a long time, serving a fairly small number of students, unique missions. And when you used to serve a thousand students and you now have 700, or you used to serve 500 and you now have 300, it’s really difficult to survive on your own. So we’re, we’ve seen a bunch of Vermont independent schools close. We’ve seen others merge. We’ve seen, this is not something I expected, but we’re seeing consolidations and mergers on the public side. So the 12 Connecticut community colleges are now a single college with 12 campuses.

[00:22:47] Larry Schall: The Vermont, it was five Vermont state colleges are now Vermont State University. Maine has the first consolidated accredited system in the country, first and maybe the only one ever. So those are, I think, six. Still independent institutions, but they’re under one consolidated accreditation. They’re accredited as a system, which is really an interesting and unique, at this point, model.

[00:23:17] Larry Schall: Which has worked pretty well.

[00:23:19] Drumm McNaughton: Did you have to rewrite the rules for that one?

[00:23:21] Larry Schall: It probably came, it’s right before my time, it probably came under the policy on innovation, but it, we, when we send a team out, they visit the system, but then we’ve got members of the team are out to each campus and, It was a really, it was complicated with us. It was even more complicated with the department of education.

[00:23:36] Larry Schall: Cause trying to figure out like how the financial aid flows, does it flow through the system? Does it flow to the institutions, how the IPEDS reports, are they by institution or are they system wide? And they’re still trying to sort some of that out, but it’s worked. And I think it’s made it more efficient for them. So that sort of closures consolidations is certainly a trend. And the growth of larger institutions, I think, is a trend, not just in New England, but, when I came here five, four and a half years ago, Southern New Hampshire might have had, A little over 100, 000 students online, they’re now almost a quarter of a million. The flagships, the state public flagships, by and large doing well, the smaller regional ones, not so well. So the diversity of higher education, which I think is historically been one of the strengths of our, of the whole enterprise, is at risk in some ways as the bigger fish eat the smaller ones.

[00:24:31] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, we see that in corporate America as well with all the Mergers going on. I personally, I don’t see any end to it in the next 10 years, especially with the number of traditional age students decreasing because of the enrollment

[00:24:46] Larry Schall: I think that’s true. We have, I think we have only one for profit. In, portfolio, domestically, we got a couple abroad. So that’s, New England is still the home of the sort of independent college, not the private, not the for profit one.

[00:25:00] Drumm McNaughton: That may change.

[00:25:01] Larry Schall: May change. Yeah. I don’t know. The rules, with the change of administration that, the Democrat rulemaking tends to be harsher on for profits and the Republicans tend to try to wipe that away. Make it easier for them To exist,

[00:25:16] Drumm McNaughton: It’s just, if you don’t like it, just wait four years, it’ll change. So where do you see accreditation going in the next 25 years? of

[00:25:25] Drumm McNaughton: political affiliation.

[00:25:27] Larry Schall: So I, over time it is, it has gone from, and this is a simplification, but there’s some truth to it from looking at inputs and then to looking at processes, do schools have appropriate processes in place around governance and academic program review to then looking at outcomes.

[00:25:45] Larry Schall: And then, and I think that trend is only going to increase given the cost of higher education, given the levels of debt and the challenge there is how do Every school has a different mission. Every program within a school has different expected outcomes. So how do you create a system that measures outcomes?

[00:26:07] Larry Schall: And, the tendency is to look at earnings, one year out, five years out, 10 years out. Right now that the data is still fairly new. So I don’t even think they have 10 years out data now, for an art school or religious seminary. Or, is that the right measure? And so generally governments don’t do well with things, the things that are nuanced and higher education is nuanced. And so that there’s a push to make it less nuanced as the, the STEM fields right now are exploding and the liberal arts, at least in certain places are.

[00:26:43] Larry Schall: Being trimmed, probably not a great thing for the country. And, but that’s that where college used to be seen as a public good training, the next generation of leaders and citizens, it’s now turned much more into a private good. And you’re paying X, what should your return be?

[00:27:03] Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. So yeah, it’s higher. It is certainly changing. I see that with my clients quite a bit. The focus has become much more on the short term and gainful employment or whatever kind of measure you use, in. With me remembering the old Clark Care experiment back in California, the public good, it’s sad to see, but these are the times we’re in,

[00:27:30] Larry Schall: It’s a hard one. It’s hard to turn around, but this is where the diversity of institution, so there are still, we have still have a whole lot of extraordinary institution that are. Great liberal arts colleges. And then we have institutions that are really just about training people for the workforce.

[00:27:47] Larry Schall: And, again, that, that is the strength of the system.

[00:27:51] Drumm McNaughton: and it’s too bad that we can’t do both at the same time, but, oh, Larry, this has been very enjoyable. I thank you for spending time with me today, as we always do, three takeaways for universities and presidents, university presidents and boards, I guess I should say.

[00:28:07] Larry Schall: So one thing I’d say is that, as we, I said, before I said, we see all the presidents appear before us. And one thing that’s really clear when you are able to see, 50 presidents over the course of a year is. That leadership matters and particularly the alignment between the board, particularly a board chair and a president, really matters.

[00:28:31] Larry Schall: I think one of the most disturbing trends that we see is that is this just rapid turnover of leadership. And, if you’ve got the average tenure of a president’s now less than five years, and if you’re. If you’re a president for less than five years, you’re not really able to do much at an institution.

[00:28:50] Larry Schall: And I think that instability of leadership, alignment between the board and the president would certainly be one. Second, I’d say is that, despite the fact that we, we see a fair amount of innovation,

[00:29:02] Larry Schall: new models of education really, are few and far between. And I think in 25 years, you’re going to see a whole bunch of things. You don’t recognize this higher education. And so I think the institutions that. Get out in front of that are more likely to be successful. We see, I think, more bold innovation outside the United States and our international schools than we do here.

[00:29:27] Larry Schall: We see a couple examples, but, and then I’d say the third thing is that the, I think the strength of both accreditation and the strength of higher education has been its independence from the government. Particularly with regard to what gets taught, how it gets taught, how things are governed, and I think that’s at risk. That particularly at risk in certain states, but. And I think when politics lays its hand on higher education in a heavy way, it’s a danger to the system.

[00:29:58] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.

[00:29:59] Larry Schall: And I’d say the same when it tries to control what accreditors do in a direct way. It’s also, it’s a danger to the system. So I worry about that.

[00:30:09] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Thank you. Those are three great takeaways. What’s next for you? What’s next for NECHE? I know you guys are undergoing your, revision of standards. What else?

[00:30:19] Larry Schall: Headed to the Ivory Coast in January for a new institution, a great institution. American style institution in French speaking Ivory Coast, and then to Turkey in the spring, a new institution, not new to us, and a really distinguished institution in Istanbul. So that international piece grows. And then the Standards Review is, we do it every ten years, and so this is an opportunity for us to understand Not necessarily how higher education is going to change in the next decade, but that it will.

[00:30:51] Larry Schall: And how do we create the flexibility in our standards that still, have a, a bar that says, this is what quality looks like, but don’t say it’s got to come in this form or that form. It can look, it can vary differently. And I think in a decade from now, it’s going to look differently. And so it’s a challenge for us to working with our members to do what we think is going to be a pretty significant.

[00:31:19] Larry Schall: Revision of our standards to anticipate that kind of change. I

[00:31:23] Drumm McNaughton: I look forward to seeing them and, digging in and getting to understand them a little bit better. I work with many institutions, some of which are NECHE and, it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it.

[00:31:34] Larry Schall: appreciate it. And I appreciate the chance to chat.

[00:31:38] Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. Larry, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

[00:31:42] Larry Schall: Be well.

[00:31:43] Drumm McNaughton: You too. Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to Larry Schall, President of the New England Commission on Higher Education. Larry, thank you for a wonderful conversation. I look forward to the next time you can join me on Changing Higher Ed.

[00:31:59] Drumm McNaughton: Next week, we welcome Dr. Tia Brown McNair, Consultant at Sova and former vice president of AAC& U about truth, racial healing and transformation. She’s developed a wonderful assessment that can help institutions grow in this area. And I look forward to a great conversation with her. Thanks for listening, everybody.

[00:32:21] Drumm McNaughton: See you next week.