Aligning Higher Education Strategy and Programs with Workforce Needs by Measuring Value Through Outcomes and Earnings:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 282 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Harrison Keller

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  282 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Harrison Keller

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Introduction and Guest Welcome

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Dr. Harrison Keller, president of the University of North Texas, and former Commissioner of Higher Education in Texas. Dr. Keller brings an uncommon dual perspective to the question surrounding higher ed, having shaped statewide policy at the high levels, and now applying those insights as a university president.

As a commissioner, he developed Texas’s “Building a Talent Strong Texas” strategic plan. He redesigned the state’s community college finance system, launched a statewide career advising initiative and modernized education and workforce data infrastructure.

Today he’s president of one of Texas’s largest public universities with more than 46,000 students. Dr. Keller is translating that statewide vision into institutional strategy, demonstrating how the ideas that drive public policy can become tangible campus level change. And he joins me today to talk about how UNT is doing things differently and making a difference in their students’ lives, both now and into the future.

Harrison. Welcome to the program.

Harrison Keller: Happy to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s good to have you here as well. I’m looking forward to a really great conversation to talk about higher education Texas style. Now, you’ve been on multiple sides of accreditation on Texas education. You’ve been on the commission, you’re now the president of University of North Texas.

[00:01:49] Dr. Keller’s Background and Career Path

Drumm McNaughton: If you would give our listeners a little background on you and how you’ve come to this place.

Harrison Keller: My path is a little non-traditional for a university president. So I’m just entering my sophomore year as president here at University of North Texas. I got up to North Texas last August, and before that I had served almost five years as commissioner of higher education for the state of Texas. Before that had been, for about 20 years, back and forth between UT Austin and the state capital. So I was a faculty member at UT Austin and a administrator, a vice provost, and I was deputy to the president for a while. But at the capital I had the opportunity to work on almost every aspect of state, public, and higher education budget and policy, which was like another graduate level education for me. My training is all fairly conventional and all in academic philosophy, both undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. But I got interested in philosophy because I was interested in ethics and public policy. And so for me that was great training for this career path to leadership in higher education.

Drumm McNaughton: Fascinating background. I’m curious, what was your dissertation on?

[00:03:06] Philosophical Insights and Respect in Leadership

Harrison Keller: So my dissertation was on respect for persons. And that’s actually come in handy a whole lot because what I was interested in are, what kind of respect is going to facilitate teaching and leadership and good democratic deliberation. And a lot of times when people talk about respect, they talk about distance. They talk about, “well, we’re going to have to respect each other’s differences and not interfere with each other”. But if we’re actually going to be able to deliberate, if we’re going to be able to teach people, if we’re going to be able to lead, we have to be more engaged than that. And we have to be open to the possibility that other people could say something that would change the way that we think about things.

So that work on my dissertation has actually been enormously useful throughout my career, as we try to create what I call deliberative spaces where people can have conversations and dialogue and really try to change each other’s minds and work through tough questions.

Drumm McNaughton: It reminds me of something one of my mentors told me years ago. There’s a reason that God gave us two ears and one mouth. They should be used proportionally.

Harrison Keller: This is good, stoic philosophy. Yes. I found myself reading a lot of stoic philosophy these days. There’s another one from Marcus Aurelius in that, “things are not waiting to be judged by you”. So you always have the, you always have the option of having no opinion.

Drumm McNaughton: I understand that it’s like, “this is not my movie. I’m not the author of it, so, maybe somebody else can have some input here”.

Harrison Keller: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:04:40] The Importance of Dialogue in Higher Education

Harrison Keller: Well, what sometimes seems like an even more radical motion is maybe we could have our differences be the starting point of a conversation. Maybe we could actually have a dialogue and see if we can come to some better ideas through that exchange of our different viewpoints.

Drumm McNaughton: What a concept, a dialogue instead of a discussion.

Harrison Keller: Rad, radical

Drumm McNaughton: It is very, in today’s day and age, it’s very radical.

Harrison Keller: It sometimes seems that way.

[00:05:09] Equipping Students with Essential Skills

Harrison Keller: And in all seriousness, I think one of the things that’s incumbent to us in higher education right now is we have to do a better job of equipping students with these skills, and being able to engage in dialogue, to be able to hear opinions they may disagree with, even that they find offensive, and actually have a discussion.

And I’m worried about what I see happening where folks will say, “well, if you’re saying something that offends me, now I don’t feel safe, and I want to be protected from what you’re saying”. As opposed to being willing to engage in a real dialogue, in a real discussion. So this is something we need to lean in on in higher education. We need to practice these skills. We need to equip our students so they can be adults who can engage in these kinds of conversations and good citizens.

Drumm McNaughton: And to me that takes it right to what is the purpose of higher education is, it’s not only to prepare people from the job market, but it’s also to allow a transformation. Kids coming in from high school and then graduating, ready to enter to the workforce. And there’s a lot of personal skills that need to be learned, one of which you just highlighted, is the ability to have conversations with ideas, with people that truly offend you and your own perspective, but to be able to have a quote, adult conversation with those types of perspectives.

Harrison Keller: Yes. That’s really important, not just so that folks can be adults and live in community and not only so, you can be a good citizen. These are actually important skills that employers need too. I was talking with one of our major employers here in the DFW region, just in the last week or so, and I was asking about, “well, what are the kinds of things you think we need to focus on more in higher education or be sure that we’re equipping students with?

**And one of the things that he said that really stuck with me is he said, “you know, I’ve noticed that some of our new hires, they don’t push back. So, if they’re in a team meeting and the team leader says, ‘well, I think we should, we’re going to tackle this issue this way, or, that this something’s gone wrong, we’re going to, we’re going to approach it this way”.

What the CEO was telling me is he said, “the guy who we just hired coming out of college may have a better idea. He may be somebody who has gotten exposed to technologies we’re not familiar with, or ideas that we’re not familiar with, and so he may have the best idea of anybody in the room, but we need him to be willing to speak up and put that idea on the table”. And he is concerned that new hires aren’t necessarily equipped with those skills. They may have great technical skills, but are they ready to have those discussions?

And for me, that was a really powerful observation that we need to take seriously. Like for training adults, for training future citizens for the Republic, but also for equipping our students to be able to help their employers navigate rapid change and highly dynamic work environments, we need to equip our students with skills so that they can engage in dialogue so they can engage productively in collaborative problem solving.

Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re 100% spot on with that, as was that employer. The challenge. Is that the responsibility of the university or is that the responsibility of their environment growing up? Personally, I think it’s both. But how do we do that?

[00:08:52] The Role of Liberal Education

Drumm McNaughton: That’s the purpose of a “liberal education”, which most people are saying, “oh my gosh, it’s got to be all, science related, math, all of those heavy technical skills”. That’s the purpose of what the GE courses are supposed to teach, is that inquiry, that critical thinking and in the classroom have the ability, or the professor gives the permission, the ability, for people to speak up because he or she has made this a safe space where ideas can be shared without, people telling you you’re stupid.

Harrison Keller: Yes. This is a really important point. Lot of students, what they experience in high school is more about reflecting content back to an instructor, and it’s less about engaging critically with arguments and ideas.

[00:09:48] Critical Thinking and Engaging with Ideas

Harrison Keller: And so when they get to college, then they’re being asked to do things in a different way so that you might read, here’s two different competing accounts of the causes of the Civil War that they need to bring into dialogue and take apart the strengths and weaknesses of the different arguments.

This was one of the things I loved about my undergraduate education, and I got a fantastic undergraduate education when I was a student in philosophy at Notre Dame. You spent a lot of time having to learn how to engage with philosophy that sometimes you even find offensive and that assignments would be things like, “okay, for this next class you’re going to have to identify what’s the strongest counter argument against the position that this philosopher’s taking”. And then you come back for the next class or the next paper. Now you have to make the strongest response to that argument and be able to empathize with the position that you were offended by. So that kind of work is really hard to do and it’s a set of skills that you have to practice.

I’ve been really impressed by universities who are asking students to practice those kinds of skills in different contexts. So in residence life or around low stakes issues in the dorm or in the cafeteria or something like that, as well as in their curriculum, as in their humanities courses, where students practice these kind of skills again and again, so that that’s going to be in their toolbox, whatever they end up doing.

[00:11:26] UNT’s Commitment to Civil Discourse

Harrison Keller: And that’s certainly something here at University of North Texas, as we’re working on our own core curriculum, we’re committed to making sure we’re infusing attention to civil discourse in our core curriculum.

Drumm McNaughton: And that is so critical, especially when you take into account what’s going on in Texas in higher education. One of the things that you and I chatted about a couple days ago was state level attainment goals.

[00:11:54] State-Level Attainment Goals and Credentials of Value

Drumm McNaughton: A lot of it has to do with credentials of value, but it also needs to bring into play higher ed’s need for the good of society, and being able to have respectful conversations without trying to talk past each other, is what we’re seeing right now in many respects.

Harrison Keller: And it’s really it’s a both/and kind of proposition. So on one hand, what I’ve found is people across the political spectrum can generally agree that higher education needs to add value in the sense of opening doors to economic mobility.

[00:12:32] Employer Expectations and Workforce Needs

Harrison Keller: You need to be better off for your higher education where you’re able to advance in your career to be able to have economic opportunities. Now, that’s not the only value of a college degree, and one of the striking things when you talk to employers is they’ll want technical skills, yes, but they also want, what some folks will call, durable skills or soft skills. They want people who can communicate, they want people who can work effectively in teams. They want people who can think critically and adapt to new technologies.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And that’s the AAC&U liberal education. At least for the ones that I remember, because it’s been a while since I’ve had Ashley Finley on the program. I need to get her back on. The number one was working in teams. Critical thinking is always there. The ability to look at data, draw conclusions, et cetera.

I think pretty much everybody is on the same page when it comes to the “what”. It’s the “how” that is, and as you know from having been in, legislature and all those type of things, there’s two pieces to any kind of discussion when you’re making a change. There’s where do we need to go and how do we need to get there? And it’s the “how” that I think is the most divisive of all.

Harrison Keller: I think sometimes the “how” can be divisive. I guess I might push back a little bit on that we’re clear on the “what”, because in higher education we’re used to being able to stipulate the value proposition from higher education. And there’s something that’s important and true about that. What counts as doing math ought to be determined by people who are mathematicians. But when I talk to employers, one of the striking things that I hear is they’ll say their workforce needs are changing faster than they expected, and some of them are even so candidates to say faster than we understand.

And so this is a time where I think actually, like we can’t confidently stipulate the value proposition from higher education. We need to be more closely engaged with the employers to help figure out the “what”, to help figure out what are the skills, what’s the essential knowledge, what are the experiences that are going to equip students to be able to add value, to be able to land good jobs, to be able to advance in their career.

So I actually pitched an idea to the Texas legislature this last session along these lines where I said “we need better intelligence about how our workforce needs are changing, that we can feed into our programs”. But look, University of North Texas, we are the largest university in the Dallas Fort Worth region. We have more than 44,000 students, it’s an incredibly vibrant institution. You could triple the size of UNT and it wouldn’t be enough for our region. We have to take fundamental responsibility for our talent problems, but it can’t just be us. It’s got to be us in partnership with other institutions.

[00:15:39] Texas Talent Accelerator Initiative

Harrison Keller: Anyway, the idea that I pitched to them is to say, “let’s stand up, sort of intelligence fusion center with employers, with chambers of commerce, the economic development corporations, the technical and community colleges, and like-minded universities, basically to do two things.

So first, let’s bring that data that we’re seeing about job postings and unemployment, stuff like that, into dialogue with the employers to see if we could get more actionable intelligence. Let’s get a little more specificity. When you say you want critical thinking to solve, what kinds of problems, what does that look like? What are the kinds of scenarios? Or communicate “how”, with what kinds of tools would be important”?

And then the second thing that this alliance proposed to do, that’s even more radical is, “what if we actually coordinated across institutions to get more scale out of the system. So instead of just jockeying and competing with each other for the same students, for the same programs, maybe we could coordinate more to try to work the demand side of the problem, and produce more educated graduates for the region?”

So anyway, the legislature got behind this idea and we just launched what we call the Texas Talent Accelerator at the beginning of this last month, and we had more than 120 employers and institutions that were there for the kickoff. And I think that’s how we’re going to have to navigate these issues is we have to let go of the idea in higher education that we get to stipulate the value proposition. We’ve got to work more closely with employers, and we’ve got to be willing to bridge those traditional barriers across disciplines and across institutions.

Drumm McNaughton: I applaud the initiative. I think it’s really, really good and I think it’s very needed.

[00:17:26] Holistic Approach to Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: It’s taking a holistic approach to value proposition, what graduates need to know and not necessarily how they get that. I think that’s still in the purview of the professors, administrators, whatever, but there needs to be some outside guidance for what does a graduate need in today’s society.

One of the smartest universities that I’ve ever seen do this type of thing was Cal State San Marcos. They had advisory boards for each of the colleges as well as for the entire university. And yes, you’d pay to be on it, whatnot, but it was made up of business leaders who would be advising the colleges. “This is what we need to see from your graduates.” And they integrated this with faculty skill sets, et cetera, and it was an incredibly great program. To me, it’s one of the top Cal States in the San Diego area, if not in the state of California.

Harrison Keller: There are some great examples that are out there. I’m a big fan of the Olin College of Engineering, where students have the opportunity to work on multiple projects for industry while they’re still in their program. So the students are getting the opportunity to translate what they’re learning in the classroom, what they’re earning through their degree program into a real-world problem and add value for those corporate partners.

So that’s another example of how higher education can leverage these partnerships for the benefit of the students.

[00:19:02] Faculty and Industry Collaboration

Harrison Keller: We also need to do it for the faculty. So folks will complain about the faculty sometimes, and I have to say that in most disciplines, the faculty have very limited data about what kinds of things their graduates are doing and what happens to them in their career paths or what graduates are being asked to do. So there are some disciplines where you’ve got very good feedback mechanisms in, say, accounting or some of the engineering disciplines or in the performing arts. We have one of the best schools of music in the world, here at the University of North Texas, none of our graduates going off to a studio in LA and say, “well, I never expected I was going to have to play like that”. They have a good sense of what excellence is going to look like in that professional context. For philosophy, for English, or history, psychology and biology, any number of disciplines it’s pretty limited information.

So, we need to do a couple of things:

One is able to equip the faculty where they’ve got better information about what’s happening to graduates and what they’re going to be asked to do.

Another thing is to get behind some of those faculty innovators and, for example we’re looking at sponsoring faculty externships where faculty can be embedded in some of these corporations and learn firsthand about what kinds of problems are they wrestling with, how are they working, how are they communicating?

And, bring some of those insights then back into discussions about course design and curriculum here at University of North Texas.

Drumm McNaughton: Those are great ideas. I hope that the listeners here will start incorporating some of these into their own institutions. Another example from Cal State San Marcos. Everyone going through and getting a BBA or a BBS, Bachelor of Business Science, they have a program, it’s a mandatory three credit hour course called Senior Experience, and they work in teams, they contract out to the various businesses to do projects, so they’re working as teams, they’re working on real world projects for the businesses, and I think the beauty of it, not only are they getting great experience outside, but it’s mandatory.

Nobody can slack off, so you have to work in a team, and you’ve got faculty advisors that go with you, so the faculty are getting exposed to these types of things as well. So, it’s a win-win for students, faculty, and for the businesses that are supporting these programs and these students.

Harrison Keller: That is a great and inspiring model.

[00:21:46] Integrating Work Experiences into Degree Programs

Harrison Keller: We’ve known for a long time, one of the best ways for us to add value, to enhance the value of our degree programs, is integrating those work experiences into the program. So you have an integrated internship are their real-world problems that students are working with, can add tremendous value, especially for a place like UNT, about 40% of our undergraduates are first generation college students, and they’re blazing a trail for their families. They may have a little more limited exposure to different kinds of professional contexts.

And so the other benefit from this, besides the translation of particular disciplinary skills, is it also gives the student the opportunity to develop some social capital and get connected with employers. And what we found at UNT is, when the employers are exposed to our graduates, more often than not, they hire them. They love our UNT graduates because they have had the opportunity to work with them, and what they found is these are smart, resilient, gritty students that are not entitled and when they’ve had the opportunity to actually have them, work with them in their companies, large and small, the majority of them end up getting job offers.

Drumm McNaughton: And that’s important for the graduate, but it’s also important for the employer and the institution. So with that, I want to double back to those learning outcomes that are so important. You’ve got a concept called credentials of value. Which, in the economy is the person better off, but it’s looking at lots of criteria, some of which are the technical skills, some of which are learned through internships and whatnot. But there’s also the personal interactions as well.

Harrison Keller: So the work that we’re doing at UNT around this carries over from some work in my previous job. So when I was commissioner of higher ed here in Texas, we updated the state’s goals for educational attainment. And one of the markers we put down, we became the first state to say we’re going to condition our attainment goals on the value of those credentials in our economy. So we don’t want to count any credentials where students aren’t better off, at least in the sense of having a wage premium from those credentials. So that was a big deal for the state of Texas, and we have incredibly rich educational workforce data that even at the state level we could leverage to take a look at these issues.

[00:24:19] Evaluating Economic Return on Credentials

Harrison Keller: So when I came over to North Texas, we’re leveraging that data where we can look into privilege reports from the state and we can see earnings for our graduates, we can see typical debt burdens for our graduates, and we can essentially see that like at the program level. And that lets us ask some good, hard questions about economic return on our credentials. So basically, the idea is this, what do the typical earnings look like for a Texan who only has a high school diploma, versus what do the earnings look like for one of your graduates that has whatever the credential is in question?

And then what you’d want to do is you net out what are those typical costs after financial aid, you net out, opportunity costs, we even account for the typical debt payments that a student who has debt would have. And basically, ask how quickly do you break even on that investment?

Well, we looked at this for all our undergraduate and all our graduate programs at UNT. For our undergraduate programs, we have more than 110, undergraduate programs at UNT, what we found is the median time to break even on that investment for a bachelor’s degree is about five years. So, all in, on all those out-of-pocket costs and even accounting for opportunity costs about five years. That’s pretty impressive. That’s really good. But we have a small number of programs, say between eight and 10 programs where it’s more than 10 years. This gives us a sense of where to focus. Right? So, we’re looking at that, what we call, time to value for all of our degree programs.

It’s not the only metric. We also look at what are the cost to the institution of offering these programs? Now, especially with our work through the Talent Accelerator, we’re asking questions about what does the demand look like in the economy, in our region, in the state, beyond, for certain kinds of credentials. And then we can decide, “well, what do we want to do to respond to enhance that time to value? Are there programs that we should stop offering? Are there programs that we need to enhance maybe they need that internship or you need to embed an industry recognized credential or combine this program with another program. But I have to say the way that we’re doing that is in partnership with our faculty. So the idea is not that you’re just doing this from the administration side.

The idea is you want to do this in partnership with faculty, to make sure that your curriculum is coherent and that you’ve got a clear line of sight to value for the students. And can be value in a lot of different dimensions, but the baseline needs to be an economic value. If you don’t have that you’re not going to be able to realize a lot of the other richer conceptions of value from the credentials that we want to see.

Drumm McNaughton: Isn’t that why they call it the bottom line?

Harrison Keller: Indeed, hopefully, yes.

[00:27:19] Shared Governance and Faculty Partnership

Drumm McNaughton: I want to explore shared governance a little bit because it’s been in the news what Texas has done doing away with faculty senates.

Harrison Keller: Oh.

Drumm McNaughton: But when you and I chatted a couple days ago, what you’re doing at UNT seems to be a model for other institutions. There’s a good transparency; there’s a lot of communications. You’ve got consulting. If you use a RACI model, you’ve got the responsible, accountable consultation. You’ve done a lot of consultation with faculty, and you’re building really a learning ecosystem. So, tell us a little bit about that, please.

[00:27:58] Innovative Learning Ecosystem at UNT

Harrison Keller: So it’s easiest to see if we just focus on what we’re doing in the context of trying to improve student success at UNT. So the marker we put down is we’re not going to define success just in terms of reporting degrees. From our first engagement with students through their time here, into their jobs, into their careers, we’ve got to take responsibility for that broader student journey, that broader conception of success. Alright, so how do we do that?

Well, we’ve learned a lot in higher education, over these last 10 or 15 years, about different strategies and we’re partnering with different organizations and institutions, that are working on the frontiers of these issues. On data analytics, on advising, on career development. A lot of other institutions have been doing that as well and taking inspiration, say from the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State, and we’re working with Braven, we’re working with DataKind on analytics and other partners. If you just do that work though, those are institutional levers and it’s independent of what you’re teaching, how you’re teaching. And in many cases, it’s actually independent of the faculty.

So the other thing that we’ve been doing at UNT is we’ve taken a hard look at like, “what is that learning ecosystem like at UNT? And with the faculty we’ve designed new kind of infrastructure, and that’s got three nodes to it.

So, one is an interdisciplinary institute on learning sciences. We had people from different disciplines who were working on issues related to the science of learning. So, we’ve pulled those together in an interdisciplinary institute so we can draw on those insights and also so we can have a better sense of what’s more or less effective.

The second thing that we’re doing we call the teaching hub. Basically the idea is, can we provide next generation support for effective teaching? So one of the catalytic projects for that group is around teaching with AI. How do we incorporate AI into teaching and learning? How do we support faculty?

But then the third thing that’s a little more radical that I alluded to earlier, we call the Curriculum Connector. And the idea is we want the curriculum, not just to be distributed across the institution, where it’s not just within the disciplines and within the department, but can we be intentional about making sure that our curriculum is coherent and also that we’ve got a clear line of sight to the kinds of skills that students are going to need so that they can add value for employers or as entrepreneurs so they can really realize the value of their UNT degrees.

[00:30:46] Supporting Faculty Innovators

Harrison Keller: All of this has been designed in partnership with the faculty, that’s got faculty, co-directors and steering committees, and the thing that people don’t often want to say out loud is that most institutions have not created structures to get behind their faculty innovators. And that’s before we get to criticizing the faculty about whether they’re willing to change or not, we need to take a hard look at ourselves and the institutions. Are we really investing in and getting behind our faculty and the kind of training support we provide? Are we asking hard questions about the incentives for faculty?

If faculty buy into all this work and they lean into this innovation, and then time for promotion and tenure comes around and we say, “oh, I’m sorry, you’ve only published two articles, not four articles in this kind of journal, and that’s really all that we care about for promoting you”. Well then, we’ve just pulled the rug out from under them.

So we’ve got to make sure the support structures are there, that you’re aligning the incentives, that you get behind the faculty innovators, so their creative energy can help advance the institution to the benefit of the students in this broader vision of student success. That’s our vision at UNT. That’s what we’re building here.

And what I’ve found is my faculty senate has been terrific partners in this. The faculty innovators, the faculty leaders, have been great partners in this because getting back to, you asked me about my dissertation at the beginning of the conversation, we operate in a spirit of mutual respect. We’re going to disagree sometimes, but we’re going to take each other seriously. We’re going to have open, transparent communications, and we’re going to recognize that we need to put our best ideas together to be able, to get the best outcome for our institution.

Drumm McNaughton: So critical. Our business runs on two premises. One, people support what they help create. Second, people want input into decisions before they’re made, decisions that are going to affect them. You’re doing both of those things. I’ve turned down clients who say, “I want to implement X, Y, Z” and “it’s my way or the highway”. And it’s just Nope, sorry. This is not going to work for us. It’s got to be a joint thing because we’re all in this together.

Harrison Keller: If we’re going to do more than have boutique projects, if we’re actually going to make a difference, and if we’re going to be able to make change at scale, that’s the way we have to do it, is that we’ve got to work across these traditional barriers between faculty and administration or across academic departments. And as I was saying earlier, the barriers across institutions, the barriers between institutions and employers. We’ve got to bridge all those barriers, put our best ideas on the table, so we can move faster, and so we can have impact at scale.

Drumm McNaughton: So true.

[00:33:49] Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards 

Drumm McNaughton: Harrison, this has been a fabulous conversation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, and I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. As we always do, two final questions. What are the three takeaways that you think are most important for our higher ed presidents and boards to do to make sure that their graduates are ready for joining the workforce?

Or anything else that you think is important?

Harrison Keller: Well, to make sure graduates are ready for joining the workforce. Number one with a bullet is engage closely with employers and not just in the traditional advisory boards, but given how dynamic things are right now, we have to have much closer collaboration with employers.

Second thing that we have to do that you talked about earlier, is we don’t treat the experiential learning as a bolt-on, where we’re doing our traditional courses and then it’s nice if students do an internship. One of the most important, most valuable things that we can do for students is to give them the opportunity to develop those skills, in the context of their program.

And then I would argue the third thing is that we need to look also beyond just those workforce, skills and think about like how we’re taking responsibility for educating students as citizens, as adults, as critical thinkers, who can engage in respectful dialogue even with people they disagree with strongly, so we can live in community, we can move forward together.

Drumm McNaughton: Such valuable insights. Thank you.

[00:35:29] Closing Remarks and Future Plans

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you?

Harrison Keller: Next for me is, next for me today actually is going to be a meeting with the Faculty Senate Executive Committee. So I’m going to be right back into these conversations today. But we have a ton of work that we’re doing right now at UNT on our, strategic plan and about to roll out November 5th, a bold new vision for University of North Texas. So, stay tuned to UNT. I’m really excited about where we’re going as an institution, what’s coming.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I’m excited for UNT that they have you as a president. You’re a breath of fresh air in many respects, and I wish you and UNT all the best in the future.

Harrison Keller: Thank you. I really appreciated the conversation. Appreciate your saying that.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I hope our paths cross in the near future.

Harrison Keller: Look forward to it. Thank you.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Harrison Keller Harrison, it was a pleasure having you on the show. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk about these great ideas. To my audience, thanks again for tuning in, see you next week.