Effective University Mergers & Lessons in Stability from PASSHE:

Changing Higher Ed Podcast 231 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Daniel Greenstein

Transcript: Podcast 231 – Dan Greenstein and Drumm McNaughton

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

[00:00:31] Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is Dr. Daniel Greenstein, former chancellor of Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Dan became PASSHE’s chancellor on September 4th, 2018. And in that role, he served as chief executive officer of the state system, which operates Pennsylvania’s 14 public universities, serves nearly a hundred thousand degree seeking students, and thousands more enrolled in certificate and other career development programs.

[00:00:59] Drumm McNaughton: Prior to PASSHE, Dan previously led the post secondary success strategy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he worked on initiatives designed to raise educational attainment levels and to promote economic mobility, especially among low income and minority students. He also served as vice provost for academic planning and programs for the University of California system.

[00:01:24] Drumm McNaughton: Dan just wrapped up a very successful tenure at PASSHE, and he joins us today to talk about what they’ve done there, how they did it, and the lessons learned for institutions who may be considering a merger or consolidation.

[00:01:39] Drumm McNaughton: Dan, welcome back to the program.

[00:01:42] Dan Greenstein: It’s great to be with you after 131 other interviews.

[00:01:45] Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. Yeah, you were my hundredth and, gosh, a lot of water’s gone underneath that bridge.

[00:01:50] Dan Greenstein: yeah. All good.

[00:01:52] Drumm McNaughton: And just a little background. I’m excited to have you on the show. You’re stepping down from the chancellor position at PASSHE. You have done incredible work there. In fact, what you’ve done at PASSHE, I would venture to say is you have done a case study on higher ed consolidations and you’ve basically saved higher ed in rural Pennsylvania. The first one’s great, but the second one is so much more important.

[00:02:20] Dan Greenstein: Yeah, no, I don’t know if it’s saved yet, but we certainly made a big step forward. So I appreciate the kind thoughts and, I think there’s some more work to do, but, folks are on it and, I’m excited to, I’ll watch from afar and be very interested to see how it goes. I’m sure it’ll go well.

[00:02:34] Drumm McNaughton: I’m sure it will. Give our listeners a little bit of your background.

[00:02:40] Dan Greenstein: Yeah I’ve been in and around higher education for my entire career. I started life professionally as a trained historian. I was a historian at Glasgow University, Scotland. And, I was one of those guys who got a tenured role and freaked out and said, what, that’s it? And, of course, gave up a lifetime security of employment to go into a series of one year contracts. Who wouldn’t? And, really became fascinated by internet services, this was in the nineties, and through internet services, digital libraries, and then through digital libraries, then into really intensively shared services at the national and then ultimately the statewide level. And there was always an undercurrent of real, concern for advancing the workforce development and social equity kind of mission that public higher education, in particular, has in this country. And of course, those two things collided in the 2008-9 when the bottom dropped out of the market, during the Great Recession and there was such an extensive cut in public funding for higher education and so many people, many of them not looking like me, most of them black and brown people who were found themselves without a place in higher education. And there’s two kind of agenda, that kind of change agency, change management and higher ed innovation thrust and that equity thrust just came crashing together. So I was given an opportunity to pursue that at Gates at the Gates Foundation, where I led their post secondary strategy, which was all about improving performance of universities and colleges for low income students of color.

[00:04:07] Dan Greenstein: And then left Gates to try my hand at university leadership, having convinced myself that it’s one thing to know what to do, it’s another thing to actually do it. And that that whole change leadership change management journey was underdeveloped and I think to a certain extent understudied, and PASSHE came up as an opportunity and I jumped at the chance.

[00:04:26] Drumm McNaughton: I didn’t realize you’d spent so much time at Gates. They have done some incredible work. In fact, my first, accreditation gig was with a school in San Diego that had gotten a grant from Gates to divide a 3000 student comprehensive high school into six small schools. Now you’ve done just the opposite at PASSHE. You’ve taken six smaller schools and made it into two larger schools.

[00:04:54] Dan Greenstein: Let me contextualize. So I came to PASSHE because the system was in trouble. The usual array of challenges facing higher education, decline in public funding, demographic challenges, real drop off in the size of the high school leaving population, usual kind of technology disruption that you see. And so for a long period of time, you know, a decade anyway, the universities had been in response to cuts in public funding, they’ve been raising tuition and of course that was driving students away or hard to get anyway, because there’s fewer of them. And they’d gotten to the point where the I would say five or six of our schools were at or near insolvency financially, which I will define as meaning that they had exhausted their reserves, but they were continuing to operate with negative annual margins.

[00:05:41] Dan Greenstein: And of course, in the Pennsylvania state system, it’s a single corporate entity, it’s structured that way, which means that as a university is unable to pay its bills, all the others have to pay them for it. And so the weaker schools, the five or six that were at or near insolvency, were dragging very heavily on the others. And of course, no one at that stage is desperately strong. And Pennsylvania state system is 14 universities, most of them in rural Pennsylvania. It is an engine of social mobility and workforce development in the state of Pennsylvania. Serves low and middle income students predominantly, has a high proportion of underrepresented students. So it’s, the student body that I care about. They’re regional universities, they’re not selective, they’re less selective, I think our most selective is 83%, most are in the nineties. Really important schools. It’s these kinds of schools that sort of are responsible for educating the most of people in this country who go into some form of four year education.

[00:06:29] Dan Greenstein: And they were in a, obviously we were in a very difficult circumstance. So the board envisaged what they call the system redesign, a fundamental redesign of the system. And the objective in the redesign was really to produce more, not fewer graduates, right? Because. In this state, the numbers currently, I think 61 percent of all jobs need somebody in them with some higher education of which only 51 percent of adults have. So there’s this massive talent gap and we’re shrinking. So that’s crazy. You got to grow. So the objective is to grow our credentialing productivity, in order to do that, you got to stabilize yourself financially because you’re in pretty bad shape.

[00:07:03] Dan Greenstein: So there was this broader agenda, integration was a very small fragment of that overall work. You can talk as much as you’d like about it, but it was set within that context, right? And just before we get into integration, just to be clear about what’s happened, I think some of the highlights that, we’ve stopped the slide in our enrollments taking a long time, we’ve stopped the slide in our finances, we’ve seen improvement in our student outcomes, retention rates, graduation rates, et cetera, we’ve frozen tuition for seven years in a row, and I have never taken a tuition increase to the board for approval., And we’ve significantly improved our relationships with the state, which has increased our annual, appropriations by about 30 percent in the last few years, and given a significant one time injection of funding. All those things are good, and all those things were the deliberate, sort of, goal of this redesign.

[00:07:52] Dan Greenstein: Integration was one small step along the way, so I just want to contextualize it because I know it attracts a lot of attention, and I get why. But, it was part of a much, much broader transformational agenda.

[00:08:05] Drumm McNaughton: It sounds to me like, yes, there was the merger piece, the integration, or as some folks would call it consolidation, but it seems like a lot of what you were doing is highly advanced change management. Is that a fair statement?

[00:08:21] Dan Greenstein: Yeah. And that was basically, that’s what the job required, but it was also what personally fascinated me about. It is what I wanted to do in my next gig when I left Gates, because, there’s this theory that, there are many trajectories that universities and colleges can take, probably not an infinite number, but, an identifiable number of trajectories universities and colleges can take to sustain themselves, to become resilient, and to continue to do good work with their students. Any number of them can be documented on paper. And, you and I will both be able to identify high impact practices that help improve blah, blah. It doesn’t matter unless you can actually get it done. And that was really the question that I left Gates with was, ” What is its change capability”? Is it really realistic to assume that, and where are the gaps, and then how do you strengthen or shore up the weaknesses that you find in that change capability? And so that intellectual curiosity was driving me almost as much as my mission orientation, which is, “Oh my God, this is a really important school.” you can’t imagine, A viable Pennsylvania economy that doesn’t have affordable pathways into it for everybody, so all these things were motivating me as I came and sort of landed here.

[00:09:39] Drumm McNaughton: Will you made the decision to integrate the campuses. And with that decision there’s gotta be red lines. When anybody’s going out and doing any kind of acquisition or buy side sell side, whatever, there’s certain principles that you have to go by. You just don’t want to say hey I’m walking into the grocery store and I came here for sliced meat. But oh great, there’s potato chips over here and I’ve got limited budget so I’m going to buy the potato chips and you’re going to walk out with something less healthy. So, what were those red lines that you looked at that said these are the key things for the areas that we serve?

[00:10:20] Dan Greenstein: So I guess the guiding, we had design principles for the integrations. I’m writing this blog or I’ve written this blog, it’s, di greenstein. com, he says, shamelessly, and, a couple of the earlier blogs are really, address the origins of the transformation of the system redesign strategy. And in it, there’s a couple of blogs where I talk about how an organization’s culture and its political context will shape the contours of what’s possible in its transformation.

[00:10:51] Dan Greenstein: And the design principles, I think, were really developed in a way that reflected those formative influences on the overall redesign strategy.

[00:11:02] Dan Greenstein: A couple of aspects that the system did not have, the board did not have the authority to change the corporate structure. We had to go seek and get legislative approval for the board to enable it to do a university integrations. It never got and it does not have the authority to close.

[00:11:17] Dan Greenstein: So it doesn’t, we could have a university which is continuing to fail and there’s nothing, the board is on the hook to pay its bills. And if the system goes bankrupt, then the full faith and credit of the state has to come in. So it would require legislative action to close an institution. So you basically had to manage within the existing footprint. You had to maintain the existing footprint. Our schools are 130 odd years, the youngest is 130 something years old. So they have very powerful local brands, right? They’re not widely known necessarily beyond their immediate region, but they’re well known within their region, and those brands are important for all sorts of reasons. And so you really had to do as best you could to maintain that. It was a, strength. You want to maintain brand identity. It was important that any integrated institution sort of leverage the underlying brands of the campuses that can combine it.

[00:12:04] Dan Greenstein: That meant they continue with their athletic programs, they continue with their mascot, they continue with their names in some maybe new form. Financial viability became a critical design. One of the motivating factors behind integration, we started down the path of, okay, universities have to sustain themselves financially, it is now required for universities to operate with balanced budgets. Go figure that wasn’t in place before.

[00:12:26] Dan Greenstein: And you knew that as universities began to respond to that directive, you could just see what’s going to happen, that the smaller rural schools were going to cut their programs so deeply that there was going to undermine their ability to enroll students, and frankly, to serve their communities. These places are creatures of place. They are service to their regions. They provide the regions with the next generation of healthcare worker and teacher and business leader and whatnot. And so it’s not just the students that need choice in program, it’s the communities.

[00:12:51] Dan Greenstein: They’re looking to these universities to recruit their next generation is hard to get people to move to rural Pennsylvania. So that breadth of programming was important to the region as well as to the student. You can only afford as many programs so you can enroll students, and so the only way to maintain broad academic programs in these smaller, struggling rural schools was through integration. So financial viability, but more importantly, financial viability that enabled the combined entity to maintain a full breadth of academic. So those are the kinds of design principles.

[00:13:20] Dan Greenstein: And then there were some which were just, softer, but they were real. Political, right? At the end of the day, these decisions are political, you had to weigh up. In one, one of the other blogs, I talk about, change management is a campaign, like a political campaign. And it’s a very specific, like in a campaign for an elected position you need 50% of the votes plus one. Right? There’s another calculus for this kind of change management, but it’s still political. You need to build, you need a followership that’s big enough to get you over the finish line. And that followership was more and less possible with certain combinations of schools. So it wasn’t as simple as, I envy those who are involved in purely market driven acquisitions where I’m shopping for a school and I know here’s the reasons I’m looking to acquire something, I need to have the following attributes, now let’s go look. It wasn’t as simple as that. You needed configurations that looked like they could viably sustain breadth of academic programming, maintain instructional activity on each of the constituent campuses, and maintain local brand. And it was politically possible.

[00:14:25] Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. And so some of those ideas and thoughts you had, you talked a little bit ago about the rural community needing a wide range of academic programs. It was about workforce development, not only this generation, but future generations, so that the workers, the graduates can serve the rural economies, and then there was a financial.

[00:14:47] Drumm McNaughton: Correct me if I’m wrong, but PASSHE, or I think you just said this, PASSHE did not have the ability to close campuses unless you got the change from the legislature.

[00:14:58] Dan Greenstein: No, we didn’t close camp. The legislative change that we got enabled the board to consolidate, but not to close.

[00:15:05] Drumm McNaughton: Wrong terminology, but that’s what I was talking about. So you got that from the legislature. That in itself was a major portion of, at least at the beginning, to do what you needed to do.

[00:15:19] Dan Greenstein: Yeah. That was relatively, it took a long time. It took about a year, the combined vote of House and Senate, there was, I think there were 253 members of the state House and state Senate. And I think we got 250 yeses, and the governor’s signature, obviously. There was issues, it was complicated, but it was not like the actual doing the work planning and doing the work was a heck of a lot harder than getting the authority.

[00:15:42] Drumm McNaughton: That was one year out of your six. Was it one year planning one year doing it? Or was that just your first year?

[00:15:48] Dan Greenstein: Oh, gosh, the legislation took 2019-20. We got the legislation passed, was passed in June, 2020, Active planning ran from June, July, 2020 through call it June, 2021. The board voted to approve the integration plan in July, 2021. And the integration plan was that implementation began immediately, and the idea was to enroll the first cohort of students in the integrated university in fall, 2022.

[00:16:18] Dan Greenstein: So there was about 18 months. A little less 14, 15 months from the time the board said, okay, implement the plan to the time, the first cohort of students arrived at the integrated university, and then I think so that now we’re at fall 2024, so this is our third cohort of new students enrolling in an integrated university this fall.

[00:16:39] Drumm McNaughton: To get to that point though, you had to do a lot of work with stakeholder groups. Am I right?

[00:16:44] Dan Greenstein: Yeah, it was a, that was a lift.

[00:16:48] Drumm McNaughton: What were the kinds of groups that you worked with and was the message the same? Was the message varied? How did that work?

[00:16:55] Dan Greenstein: So I think of the process as having three phases. Actually, the integration process was defined in legislation, so there was a, the first phase was financial review. And it was basically a paper exercise, and that was almost entirely done out of my office, and it was just analytical exercise. If you put A, B, and C together, is it better off or worse off than if you don’t? That took a few months, and we interacted closely with the leadership at the universities that were being looked at as potential integration points and obviously a wider range of stakeholders, but that was a fairly closely held and not because we were bad or not being transparent. It was what’s it look like on paper? And then, there were board meetings and constituency meetings and whatnot, but it was not as involved.

[00:17:36] Dan Greenstein: Process, which ran from October 2020 to July 2021, was the implementation planning. That was incredibly involved. So we had the six universities have been identified, their leadership teams were engaged in the process. The system office managed or coordinated the planning process. There was something like 29 working groups at each of the universities or each of the sites. They had subgroups. I think at one point we estimated there was a thousand people actively involved in planning. There was layers of interactivity, each working group, working groups would be working on student supports or the academic array or governance and leadership, whatever. Each of the local working groups had its own consultation paths. There were consultation paths at the regional level, and then there was consultation paths at the statewide level. All of this was articulated. All the working groups had charters and charges, and, it was a very sophisticated detailed planning process.

[00:18:38] Dan Greenstein: I would say that the hardest thing about it, we had some exceptional support in the program management, the project management, quite frankly, from the third party that we engaged. And I would say that one of the most challenging parts about it was that it was a hydroheaded monster, and communication, discipline, and consistency was very important, and it took us a few months to get that right. Once we got it right, we were pretty good at it, but it took probably our first two or three months, we were learning how to work in that expansive, but coordinated way and communicate.

[00:19:09] Dan Greenstein: It was important you had to be very disciplined in the communication because what’s the order in which groups get communicated with, what’s the nature of communication, you needed consistency. But we optimized around consistency. It was absolutely critical that anyone group that all groups who were in, whether they’re local, regional or statewide are hearing the same thing, the same set of talking points, and that timing and the delivery and when information was distributed, et cetera, was all very highly coordinated.

[00:19:36] Drumm McNaughton: That is so critical with a project this massive. And frankly, I can’t think of another project consolidation like this that has happened on this scale before. Has there been one?

[00:19:48] Dan Greenstein: Well. I think they happen on this scale. I think the unique attributes of this, when you talk to people who’ve done this before, it is very rare that it is done in public. This was a very public process. We’re a public university and system. And there was a lot of engagement by the legislature, the legislation which enabled integration to happen required the Chancellor to testify quarterly in front of joint meetings of the education and appropriation committees in both the House and the Senate. So I was testifying, every few months, several times every few months. And there was a lot of visibility. Higher education being what it is, people are for or against something, have ways of making their presence and ideas known to the public through the legislators, through the legislative process.

[00:20:30] Drumm McNaughton: Really? Really? I never would have guessed.

[00:20:34] Dan Greenstein: Yeah, so there was a, lot of activity on that front, but it was done in public. So when you talk to people who’ve done this kind of thing before, it’s more often the case that the plan is done and then people are told this is what we’re doing, and that’s when it becomes public. So I don’t know anyone who’s tried this publicly, maybe Vermont was there because it was also public and it got caught up in the political to and fro. But yeah, it’s pretty rare you see something this open.

[00:21:00] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. And then, on top of working with the stakeholders and coming up with your plan, there’s huge regulatory interest in this between your main accreditor, you’ve got the Department who’s going to be weighing in on this, and you’ve got programmatic accreditors. And then the one that, that I understand was one of the most challenging was working with the NCAA.

[00:21:22] Dan Greenstein: Tips and tricks. First of all, I thought Middle States was an incredible partner. They’re a regional creditor obviously, and it’s the universities that are accredited, not the system, Heather Perfetti to her great credit, we were in touch very early on in the process. I remember, I distinctly remember a phone call. This was when there’s only a few voices in the mix and at PASSHE side, anyway, just early, early stage. And we get on the phone with Heather and her team, and we’re all frankly Oh crap, what are we doing? What are we about to do? And they were fantastic. They said, Oh, here’s the X number of ways that you can do that. And they’re not going to tell you what to do, the accreditors, but they’ll tell you, here’s how process is and then, you choose, you tell us which one, which, and then we’ll, so they were fantastic. And I got to, I have to, I walked away from that phone call thinking, okay, this is going to be hard, but it’s not here’s some people who’ve seen this movie. And then I got to tell you that, they were also good because somewhat after that we’re a little further along but not much Middle States agreed to convene a meeting which happened maybe a couple of times with the Department of Ed, with financial aid, the federal financial aid with the State Department of Education, because those are the principal actors. And they basically had a conversation of, “okay, this is what we do, and this is when we do it”. And so that they all understood the interdependencies and the timelines and really the regional accreditor, I would, Heather would mind me saying this, I saw them as the ship blocking the Suez Canal, because basically everybody waited on them on the regional creditor to make its decision and then including NTAA and all of the other programmatic accreditors, including financial aid, et cetera. Everybody waited on Middle States. Once middle States made that decision, then everything else fell into line,

[00:23:08] Drumm McNaughton: I’ve never heard of an accreditor getting a group of folks like this together to really get everybody going. That is super credit to Heather for doing something like that.

[00:23:20] Dan Greenstein: Hundred percent, she was fantastic. They were really good and they were clear and the staff was helping us understand the process and, to the point that it’s, you can imagine, cause you’ve worked in the area, it’s a lot of work, it requires a substantive change and teach out plans, all that stuff, that’s a lot of work, and they would go out of their way. We were, I think we were a good partner because we would ask, but they were there to help explain so that there was less “Do over”, Right? Cause that’s the thing you’re. If you’re engaging a thousand people in planning and I would say 150 intensively, and they all have day jobs, that’s your most precious resource is their time. So you really want to do everything you can to make sure that everything they’re doing is, it doesn’t have to be redone. So anyway, they were fantastic.

[00:24:07] Dan Greenstein: NCAA was also fantastic in a different way. There, the issue was and I get it, from their point of view, it’s okay, you take three institutions that were once independent of two, mostly, but not entirely, and they all have independent athletic programs, athletic directors and budgets and all the rest of it. They’re going to compete genuinely. Right? If you’re a consolidated institution and you’ve got three programs, what’s going to stop you from stacking one, so it wins all conference every year. No, seriously. That’s near, it’s an issue. I’m putting it crassly, but that’s what they were trying to govern for. And so they worked with us to help us identify a model which would basically preserve the integrity and independence of each of the athletic programs. Which I was grateful. And when we work with them, because it was interesting, they knew, in div two especially, I did some analytics at one point, and I just use some basic financial health indicators. And and I looked across their div two publics public schools, which are in div two, and they were like 60 percent of them are on their way to having really big financial difficulties.

[00:25:09] Dan Greenstein: So solving this problem for us, and I think they knew this, was in their interest cause they’re going to have to solve it again. And I think we actually have a viable solution. We’re still working through some of the, there’s some interesting cost issues and stuff like that. We’re still working from some of the operational issues, I guess I put it that way.

[00:25:25] Dan Greenstein: But I think from a governance perspective, I think we’ve more than satisfied NCAA, but I think, and it’s so important, especially in rural schools, as athletics are super important, I think we’ve actually identified, practically speaking, a path forward for other schools that find themselves in this circumstance and want or need to preserve their athletics program.

[00:25:45] Drumm McNaughton: And I think that this is going to happen with more frequency going forward.

[00:25:49] Dan Greenstein: A hundred percent.

[00:25:50] Drumm McNaughton: So that’s the regulatory bodies. And again, kudos to Heather, the whole Middle State staff for doing this. How did you come to making the decisions on the org chart? Because, selecting university leadership, blending the universities, three universities into one with branch campuses, how did you go about that?

[00:26:11] Dan Greenstein: My personal role was limited to, because the chancellor recommends to the board, the presidents, right? So my role was limited. You had six presidents, you’re going to end up with two. So that was my role. And then from that point, you really delegate those other organizational leadership decisions to the presidents who are basically doing the same thing that I was doing. But they’re doing it on a much bigger scale and they’re doing it function by function. And it was particularly complicated because, and I don’t think there is a way around this, I think it’s just part of the fabric. In some ways you want to say, “if you’re going to do this again, wouldn’t it be nice just to stop all activities, spend a whole year planning and building and then bring the students back”, but you can’t do that.

[00:26:56] Dan Greenstein: There was a year plus where we’ve gotten very early to the point where there was one president responsible for three universities, even when those universities were independent, we’re still accredited. So there’s a point in time which lasted for more than a year where the president basically had three leadership teams, one at each university of the about to be integrated and a kind of meta or proto new university leadership team. Right? And then over time, all of that shifted into a single leadership team for all three. That was a process that was assisted in many ways. We did a system wide early retirement incentive, which I think helped, it was across the system, but it helps those universities in a specific way.

[00:27:38] Dan Greenstein: We were very careful to try to manage talent. There are good people we did not want to lose. And, where that was happened, we tried to ensure that there were places for them. Obviously we weren’t a hundred percent successful. And I think we tried to be as, I think the presidents tried to be as humane as they could be.

[00:27:57] Dan Greenstein: I can certainly speak to the transitions that I had to coordinate, and I am proud of the fact that all of, the presidents, the six that were there, all of them landed well. And I see their professional development as part of one of my most important responsibilities, and I’m glad to say that opportunity presented itself in each of those cases. Yeah, good people, and it was, hard work. It was necessary, but with a good result.

[00:28:22] Drumm McNaughton: How did you make the decision for which programs would stay with which campuses or would they change?

[00:28:28] Dan Greenstein: So I did not. So the planning process, so when we moved into implementation, so if financial planning was very closely held, implement integration planning, was that rambling, lots of committees, whatever, that structure. When the board voted to implement, pretty much everything got delegated down to the president. Now the route map was available in the implementation plans, which are available on the web, and so the program arrays had been already identified. What was left was to blend the curriculum. We’re now going to have one English curriculum and not three. That was super hard. That was entirely done at the campus level and hats off to our faculty, and our academic administration, but our faculty, they work their butts off and God bless them, and they did a great job. Once you’ve determined the program, right, what majors minors degrees, and that was done part of the planning process, very inclusive planning activities, you’ve still then got to blend the curriculum, you’ve got to blend the departments, they have different P& T processes and faculty evaluation, but all the practical and process stuff has to get blended together, and then you have to go and redefine all of your course sections. You have to rebuild your curriculum from the bottom. So I think, the provost at Commonwealth University, she approved like 4, 000 courses.

[00:29:42] Drumm McNaughton: Oh my gosh.

[00:29:44] Dan Greenstein: It’s, and the faculty had to write them. It was unbelievable. And yeah, hard work and most of it took place during term. It was a exhausting work The first year was really hard. The first year of the where the cohort of students are there and they’re blending the curriculum, it was really hard on people, on systems, on process to stretch everybody to the limit I think the second year things got a little bit better. The third year is, finally the basic foundational stuff is in place. But yeah, the first year, two, were not super fun.

[00:30:20] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. No, I can well imagine what it’s like. I’ve had to do it with two different universities. And when you’re looking at six, that’s crazy. Let’s we’re starting to run out of time. I, we could go on for at least another hour easily. Going through this whole process, I suspect it enabled you and your team to think about new ways of doing things, from the communities, from the students, faculty. Let’s talk a little bit about that and the benefits that you’ve been able to help realize.

[00:30:54] Dan Greenstein: I guess some of the lessons learned: at the integrated universities, we could try things that had benefit across the system. For example, when you’re blending three curriculum across several campuses, you want students on any campus to have access to the same majors, minors and degree programs, and we had to build the technology environment to enable that to happen. We actually scaled that environment now across all of our schools. So we’re now in a position where we can do that program sharing at massive scale at statewide scale.

[00:31:22] Drumm McNaughton: Nice.

[00:31:23] Dan Greenstein: That’s super important when you think about, there’s probably only enough demand, I think about it in terms of demand, in our system to sustain three or four, I don’t know, name your favorite; chemistry departments or physics or Celtic poetry or philosophy or whatever. Now we actually have the opportunity to enable students anywhere to have access to that major if they want it.

[00:31:44] Dan Greenstein: That’s huge. It’s important for the smaller schools, obviously, because they get program breadth without having to worry about how many students they enroll. It’s important for the bigger schools. Our West Chester University, 17, 000 students, why shouldn’t students have access to the nationally renowned weather degree at Millersville? So I think, I think we learned a lot about, student success initiatives.

[00:32:05] Dan Greenstein: So one of the things you find when you’re operating within a university, and you’re trying to improve student outcomes, and you invest in, I don’t know, name your favorite, thing, holistic advising or a new approach to health and wellness counseling, et cetera. And you go deeply into the departments that’s responsible for those activities and you change the way they do business and everyone gets excited and you can do really good work and you can definitely move the needle.

[00:32:28] Dan Greenstein: Inevitably. That department will go as far as it can, and then it’ll hit up against constraints, which are basically defined by the other departments it interacts with, which are not reorganizing themselves, and they don’t want to, thank you very much.

[00:32:43] Dan Greenstein: When you do a university integration, and you’re planning the university, so the planning protocol for integration was, “What needs to be there and working on day one, let’s call that a priority”, and let’s do that at each of the university functions, broken down into, I don’t know, 29, 30, whatever, and that’s the plan was basically, okay, what needs to happen in that area? When you’re doing that holistically across all the functions of university, you can now think differently about student success.

[00:33:11] Dan Greenstein: You can now think differently about diversity, equity, and inclusion. You can now think differently about high impact practices in the classroom. Because now, you can look across all of your functions and say, okay, because we’re throwing all the cards up in the air. And we saw some really powerful benefits and student success in particular with more holistic approaches, quite frankly. We saw very powerful impacts in our abilities with institutional research because, institutional research is now every conversation because everybody’s in every conversation. And so how do we support our units more effectively? We saw profoundly important improvements in enrollment forecasting, and part of it was because all the cards are thrown up in the air and you have this much more holistic ability to optimize around student outcomes and, institutional financial health.

[00:34:00] Drumm McNaughton: I’m sorry, I’m going to, I’m going to interrupt you for just a minute because I’m chuckling. You say, focusing around the student, reminds me of the, we’re in a political season right now and Clinton’s comment, “it’s the economy stupid”. In higher ed, it’s the student, and if you don’t look at it holistically on what is going to make them successful, you’re not doing it the right way.

[00:34:23] Dan Greenstein: Right. Then there’s so many, things that get in the way of our doing that. But I think the other advantage was that you’re bringing people from across the places together. And how do you do this and how do you do that? And there’s this natural dialogue, which is required, where in a way they’re gonna almost naturally pick the best of breed and build on that. So I think that is helpful as well.

[00:34:45] Dan Greenstein: The downside, to be perfectly honest, is that this is a rocky process. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s slow and it’s painful and it results in some negative outcomes early on, particularly with respective enrollments. But our student outcomes have actually only gotten better since the beginning, which is interesting.

[00:35:01] Drumm McNaughton: That is neat. We’re coming up to the end of our time. I want to ask you to look back over the last six years. What’s surprised you?

[00:35:10] Dan Greenstein: So the thing that surprised me, I’ve been asked this a few times, I always give the same answer and it’s not because I’m lazy, I think it’s true. The thing that surprised me was, if you’re going to undertake this transformational work, you have to have some basic foundational capability. Your governance has to be in order. You have to have clear and well functioning accountability, both individual and institutional. You have to have data resources and people who know how to mine it for insights. All of that stuff took, and we, our starting point, I thought in all those areas was pretty high. All that stuff took for ever to build, and I was just I was surprised by that. It’s it’s a hundred percent worth the time. Absent that foundational work the best you can do is these boutique little initiatives. Which is super Which you know doesn’t deliver the same impact. But yeah that time investing and getting foundational capabilities, spent. It will consume every hour you spend on it and every dollar

[00:36:05] Drumm McNaughton: It’s like building a house. You have to start with the foundation. If the foundation is rotten, you’ve got to go back and fix the foundation until you can fix anything else. That’s, that, that’s House Hunters 101.

[00:36:21] Drumm McNaughton: Dan, thank you. First, let me just say congratulations on a job well done there at PASSHE. I doubt the system would have been in the same kind of shape, the good shape that you’re leaving it in, and you should be very proud of the work that you’ve done. And I know you’re a humble person as it is, you’ve done a fabulous job. Thank you.

[00:36:43] Dan Greenstein: I appreciate that. I will say one of my other lessons is that, saving the world at saving universities, or even running universities is a team sport and, I had a phenomenal team and a big one. Not in terms of direct reports, but people all over the system and the level of dedication and commitment and passion that they have shown, continue to show to the work. It made a lot of things possible. And frankly, I had a great legislature. Super, supportive, even where they disagreed.

[00:37:08] Drumm McNaughton: And it’s so important to have that team there, but the team is only as good as its leader. So thank you for all that you’ve done.

[00:37:17] Dan Greenstein: Thank you. Appreciate it.

[00:37:20] Drumm McNaughton: As we always do, you had the same last two questions the last time we talked. Three takeaways for presidents, boards, who are thinking about doing the craziness that you had to go through. I say that very lovingly.

[00:37:35] Dan Greenstein: I think there’s some tools out there now that are available. There’s some guidance that’s available now. You’re not alone, I guess i’ll put it that way. You don’t need to feel like you’re alone Enough folks have been through this that you can at least get some pointers, so I think that would be one.

[00:37:50] Dan Greenstein: And then the other one is more at the sort of personal. I was actually having a conversation with the president the other day and you can do this if you need to you can. A lot of it is just having the confidence and the chutzpah, but the confidence that, it’s a doable task, and with the right support you will get it over the finish line.

[00:38:09] Dan Greenstein: I would not do this to save money. It’s the wrong reason. Do the right thing for your students and for the communities that they serve and for the state if you’re a public and the money will follow in my view. But if you do this to save money you’ll probably end up saving money, but you might break a bunch of things along the way.

[00:38:25] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, and breaking them usually doesn’t do anybody good. So what’s next for you, Dan?

[00:38:31] Dan Greenstein: I was invited by Baker Tilley to come and help them build their higher ed practice, which i’m super excited about and I start there on November 1st and see what I can, I, as I say to folks, I woke up one day realizing that the runway ahead of me is a lot shorter than the one behind me and this industry, which I love and I’m passionate about is in a whole world of hurt. There’s a lot of good work left to be done here at PASSHE. But at the same time, I feel like I want to, and I need to help. And, that’s where my passion is, so I think that that platform will provide an opportunity to help at greater scale.

[00:39:06] Drumm McNaughton: Very good. I wish you all the best. I know we’ll stay in touch. Our paths will cross again in the future.

[00:39:12] Dan Greenstein: Fantastic. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

[00:39:14] Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. Take care.

[00:39:17] Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening and a special thank you to today’s guest, Dr. Daniel Greenstein, former Chancellor of Pennsylvania State System on Higher Education. Dan, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show and I wish you all the best going forward.

[00:39:33] Drumm McNaughton: Join us next time when we welcome Jim Johnson, former president of the University of Alaska System, to the show. Jim will be talking about his most recent book, “Public University Systems, Leveraging Scale in Higher Education”, which offers a fresh new look on how public university systems can address challenges like access, affordability, and workforce development.

[00:39:59] Drumm McNaughton: Thanks again for listening. See you next time.