September 8, 2026 · Episode 328
Workforce Readiness: Why Higher Ed Struggles to Use Employer Support
40 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Paid internships, donor funding, and willing employers already exist. What keeps institutions from turning that support into workforce readiness?
A twelve-person software firm in central Ohio ran six paid interns this past summer, put every one of them on real client work, and then filed with the state for reimbursement of a substantial share of those wages. One of those interns arrived from the University of Richmond with his placement funded by his own institution, roughly five hundred miles away. Others have come through Ohio State with donor money attached.
That employer engagement in higher education still required the company to identify, assemble, and navigate several separate funding and placement channels.
That is the part of the workforce-readiness conversation that tends to get skipped. The usual assumption is that closing the gap between graduation and employment takes new money, new programs, and new staff. In some states and at some institutions, a share of the money is already appropriated and the employer willingness is already there. What is often missing is a structure on the institution’s side that can take the offer, get it to the right academic unit, and move on it before the employer fills the seat some other way.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Brad Griffith, president of Buckeye Innovation, a central Ohio technology firm that builds custom software for nonprofits, local governments, and growing organizations. Griffith serves on a curriculum advisory committee at Central Ohio Technical College and hires through internship, apprenticeship, and certificate-funding pathways at both two-year and four-year institutions. The conversation covers what he calls the public-private partnership, and where it breaks down.
Quick Overview
- State reimbursement programs and donor-funded placements can substantially reduce the employer cost of a paid internship where those programs exist.
- Internal curriculum approval sequencing can be a greater constraint on curricular change than accreditor review.
- Course descriptions written broadly enough to allow technology substitution let faculty stay current without reopening formal approval.
- The full problem-to-launch work cycle, including post-launch support, is where Griffith sees employers having to backfill.
- Participation costs and processes that large employers absorb easily can discourage smaller local employers from engaging at all.
- Griffith wants graduates who can exercise judgment about AI, not simply demonstrate familiarity with the tools.
The Money Is Already Appropriated. The Intake Structure Is Not Built
Buckeye Innovation participates in Ohio’s College Technology Internship Program, previously named the Diversity and Inclusion Technology Internship Program. The mechanics are not complicated. The company applies and submits job descriptions. The state collects student applications and sends back a list of possible matches. The company interviews, hires, and pays the student, at a floor of fifteen dollars an hour and frequently well above it. After the wages are paid, the company files for reimbursement.
In Griffith’s own research, at least half a dozen states run comparable programs funding roughly 50 to 75 percent of intern wages, generally for students enrolled at an institution in that state. He described the Ohio program as a meaningful source of revenue for his company in some years, on top of the productive work the students delivered and the full-time offers several of them received.
The distinction he draws is about what students actually do once they arrive. He is not describing an internship built around grunt work. His interns and apprentices sit on project teams alongside designers, developers, and content strategists. Apprenticeships through Columbus State Community College’s IT Flexible Apprenticeship program run six or twelve months rather than three, often serve working adults changing careers who have full-time jobs and children or a parent at home to care for, and in some cases the firm has committed to paying for a certificate and providing a stipend while the apprentice studies.
Two other funding channels sit next to the state program. Ohio State runs internship programs where donors fund the placement. And the University of Richmond funded a student’s internship at an Ohio company outright.
For institutions in states with these mechanisms, the question worth asking is not what experiential learning would cost to build. It is whether a state program exists, which regional employers are eligible, and who inside the institution owns those relationships. Donor-funded and institution-funded placements at outside employers belong in the same inventory. In some cases, the constraint may be administrative intake capacity rather than the absence of funding.
The Bottleneck Is Faculty Governance, Not the Accreditor
Most employers who try to influence curriculum assume accreditation is what slows it down, and Griffith started there. He noted that accredited engineering programs require review and approval for good reason, and that an institution cannot afford to move too quickly on curriculum that has to be vetted properly.
McNaughton, drawing on his own service on a university curriculum committee, offered a different read. In his experience, the accreditor enters the picture only when an institution changes something on the order of 25 percent of credit hours, which routes upward as a substantive change. Below that kind of threshold, the delay is internal. At a large university, a single course change can require sequential approval from three or four separate curriculum committees.
The distinction changes what a president can honestly tell an employer. If the constraint is external, the institution’s hands really are tied. If it is internal governance sequencing, the institution owns both the problem and the fix, and pointing at the accreditor wears the relationship down over time.
One workaround is already in use. When advising on curriculum, Griffith’s committee deliberately avoids naming specific technologies in approved course descriptions. Write a tool into the catalog and the syllabus is frozen to a product that may not lead the market in eighteen months. His example: specifying Claude Code in an approved curriculum when Gemini CLI, Codex, or something not yet released could end up the industry leader. Keep the descriptions broad and faculty can swap the tool without reopening the approval queue.
Formal curriculum advisory committees also give many two-year and technical colleges a structured way to bring employer input into that process. Central Ohio Technical College, co-located with Ohio State University Newark, is charged with maintaining a community advisory committee that convenes at least twice a year. Members review courses and syllabi, name the skills they are seeing in the workforce and the ones that are lacking, and open recruiting channels for students who might want to work at member companies. Griffith acknowledged the committee sometimes gets into the weeds on specific technologies, and argued that colleges may need exactly that level of detail. Over years of service, he has watched the college integrate what the committee advises.
He sees fewer comparable opportunities at the four-year level, and said as much directly: he encounters more of this engagement at the high school and two-year level than with four-year institutions. His involvement with four-year programs runs through guest lectures, project team mentorship, and software work rather than the room where curriculum gets decided. That gap does not reflect disinterest. He argued the opposite, that his teams depend on people with a broad liberal arts education, because anyone who spends an entire career inside Buckeye Innovation will not develop the diversity of thought that makes the team effective. He is a two-time Ohio State graduate, in electrical and computer engineering and then an MBA, with a stake in the university continuing to churn out graduates who can staff his business. He said plainly that he would like a seat at the table.
Institutions Teach the First Half of the Work
Griffith describes the competency he needs as start to finish. Someone who can hear a challenge from a nonprofit or a local government, conceptualize what is possible, build it, test it against the requirements, talk with real humans about how it works, launch it, and support it after launch.
Universities often teach the theory well. They teach why things work and how they work. What he sees less consistently is instruction that carries a student through building it, launching it, and keeping it running once real people depend on it. That back half is what employers end up backfilling through internships and apprenticeships, and it is what a capstone, a project team, or a hackathon can reach when practitioners come in to mentor, judge, and coach.
An Ohio State justice tech program, a collaboration between engineering and the Moritz College of Law, shows the difference. Faculty currently give student project teams free rein on technology choice. Griffith raised the practical implication with them: four project teams on four different technology stacks produces something no organization can realistically support long term. Teaching students to reason about that constraint, without boxing in the creative work, takes someone who has carried software past launch.
His related ask is a portfolio. He wants to see publicly visible work, not a transcript reference to coursework. Design and architecture programs already make portfolios a familiar part of professional preparation. Extending that practice would give students in other disciplines a hiring signal they have already earned.
Career Fair Pricing Can Screen Out Small Employers
Some universities charge employers to participate in career fairs. Fee structures that large national employers can easily absorb may discourage smaller local businesses from participating, and may exclude smaller firms capable of providing students with substantial mentorship and applied experience. Griffith’s concern is that pricing set at that level fills the room with big defense contractors and large employers while the small businesses stay home.
The same test applies beyond career fairs. Pricing, application processes, and lead times all deserve a look for whether they unintentionally favor only large employers, particularly at regional institutions whose graduates disproportionately stay and work locally.
Commercialization Requires a Different Capability Than Discovery
Researchers at the OSU Wexner Medical Center developed a way to match individuals with developmental disabilities to jobs, scoring an individual’s skills and abilities against the demands of a role to find work the person could do that would also further their development. The research was sound and the matching algorithm was good. The delivery mechanism was paper surveys mailed to families, paper surveys mailed to employers, and manual matching against spreadsheets and PowerPoint.
Buckeye Innovation built the product out. That tool, VocFit, is now one of the firm’s largest clients, has been demonstrated in Italy with training delivered in Italian, and has drawn partnerships with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Colorado State University. Griffith’s summary of the principle is the part that travels: what develops technology in a university is generally not the same thing that helps that technology grow outside the university. Hosting it, supporting it, and building a sustainable business model around it are separate capabilities, which is why he treats commercialization as a partnership question.
Why AI Strengthens the Case for Broad Education
Large language models generally generate responses by predicting likely patterns in language. As Griffith put it, they are good at collecting a great deal of information and handing back the average of it. What they are less likely to produce on their own is something genuinely off the wall, or an unusual combination of ideas pulled from separate domains.
That has a hiring consequence he has seen directly. Several of his most creative thinkers took non-traditional routes into the field. One came from restaurants. One came from test prep. One took her first non-grant-funded job at his company after working in nonprofits. What they contribute is the kind of varied experience and perspective that can produce less predictable, more original connections. It is also why he wants institutions to protect the broad education, the student organizations, and the athletics, all of which he sees as enriching creativity.
The line he draws on student use is sharp. One path leads students to subcontract their critical thinking, to delegate it to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and let the model do the thinking. The other, which he sees among his strongest team members, uses these systems as thought partners and as a way to amplify creativity rather than replace it. He wants graduates who can tell him where they would use AI, where they would not, where it performs, and where it fails. Treating these tools only as a plagiarism risk can leave students underprepared to make the kinds of judgments Griffith now expects from his employees, a concern that runs parallel to how some business schools have begun sequencing AI instruction.
The Operational Fix Is a Menu, a Roundtable, and Faculty in the Room
The proposal that came out of the conversation is unglamorous, and it has four parts.
Give employers specific ways to participate. Griffith’s suggestion was a published menu of opportunities: guest lectures, project team mentorship, capstone sponsorship, hackathon judging, advisory committee service, apprenticeship hosting, certificate funding, and acting as a live client students can interview. A menu turns a vague willingness to help into something an executive can say yes to in one conversation.
Go where employers already are rather than waiting for them to show up on campus. Chambers of commerce, entrepreneur networks, service clubs, and volunteer executive programs such as SCORE convene that population on a standing basis.
Ask before designing. McNaughton pushed past the menu to an employer roundtable: get local businesses in a room for an afternoon and ask what they are seeing, what they need, and how they would like to participate. His reasoning was simple. If you ask people what they need, they will tell you. The answers may require the institution to change its model, which is precisely the reason to ask first rather than arrive with a finished program.
Include faculty from the start. They generally hold the say over curriculum, and a plan built without them will stall in committee review no matter how enthusiastic the employers are.
McNaughton added a staffing model he has seen work alongside this. One university assigned tenured faculty to the foundational courses and brought in adjuncts from industry, practitioners rather than professional academics, to teach the upper-level courses where currency matters most.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
The following reflect Brad Griffith’s stated recommendations for institutional leaders.
- Invite businesses in and build structures where outside perspectives are represented.Griffith holds his own company to this standard, putting designers, developers, and content strategists in the room even when a problem looks like it belongs to one discipline. What he wants to hear from higher ed leaders is the same instinct: “I have the academic viewpoint. What other viewpoints are not represented here at the table?” A board of trustees can only do so much, which is why he points to advisory boards and standing invitations to employers.
- Make sure students graduate with real project work they can show.Not a coursework example, but a project on a portfolio site that a hiring employer can actually look at. Some programs, particularly in design and architecture, already do this well. He wants to see far more of it.
- Embrace AI, and teach its limits alongside its capabilities.Agentic AI is here, it is reshaping his industry, and the alternative to engaging with it is graduating students who were taught that it is only a tool for plagiarism. He wants graduates who can give him a critique of where AI belongs and where it does not, and who partner with it as a thought partner rather than hand over their reasoning to it.
About Our Guest
Brad Griffith is equal parts digital strategist and empathetic problem solver—proudly 100% geek, with the business and nonprofit experience to explain tech without the jargon. Brad brings grounded insights on tech equity, human-centered design, and aligning digital strategy with real-world goals. Think apps, websites, and platforms that streamline processes, level the playing field for small organizations, and help mission-driven teams do more with less. As founder and President of Buckeye Innovation, Brad leads a fully remote team of engineers, strategists, and designers who build custom digital tools to help businesses grow, nonprofits expand access, and communities thrive. His insights come from developing tech that’s not just functional, but deeply purposeful. If your listeners care about using tech to drive meaningful impact and sustainable growth, Brad’s the guest you’ve been looking for.
Connect with Brad Griffith on LinkedIn→
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Connect with Drumm McNaughton on LinkedIn →
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 328 – with guest Brian Griffith
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.
[00:00:31] Meet Brad Griffith
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.
My guest today is Brad Griffith, president of Buckeye Innovation. Brad leads a fully remote team of engineers, strategists, and designers who build custom digital tools to help businesses grow, nonprofits expand access, and communities thrive. His insights come from developing tech that’s not just functional but deeply purposeful.
So why is this important for higher ed? Brad uses interns and apprentices in the work that he does, and he sits on curriculum advisory committees for Ohio State and another community college in his local area. He’s got direct experience and insights into what businesses need from higher ed grads and vice versa, and he joins me today to share how higher ed leaders and businesses can partner together to ensure their graduates are workforce-ready and help turn around the perception of the value of higher education.
Brad, welcome to the program.
Brad Griffith: Thanks for having me, Drumm. I appreciate it.
Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I’m looking forward to a great conversation today. You are doing some amazing stuff there in Ohio with your company, Buckeye Innovation, and some of the things you’re doing is really out of the ordinary for internships.
[00:01:51] Brad’s Origin Story
Drumm McNaughton: I really wanna explore that, but before we get there, please tell my audience, tell our audience today a little bit about yourself.
Brad Griffith: Sure. Uh, yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you having me on the show. I grew up in Dublin, Ohio, so I grew up right here near where I live now and where I’ve started my business. Started into technology pretty early. My dad was a veterinarian, ran his veterinary practice for fifty years. So I learned what it was like in a very entrepreneurial family and a small business and the limited resources we had.
Had a great educational upbringing, really great support system. Dublin schools are well-respected, and they taught me a lot of great lessons, and I learned a lot about technology there. Ended up going to Ohio State University and studied electrical and computer engineering there and saw more opportunities, started to see more into nonprofits and local government, which is where my company operates today.
And got my engineering degree, ended up going back and got my MBA from Ohio State as well, so I had a fair amount of time in higher ed. And then started my company. I had a couple of jobs, three jobs out of college, and then started Buckeye Innovation. It’s now been about seventeen years. Just over seventeen years ago, I started my company.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow. That’s, that’s amazing.
Brad Griffith: Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s an amazing story.
Drumm McNaughton: Uh, and I know Dublin from Muirfield Village, the golf course.
Brad Griffith: Very good. You’re a big golfer. Great.
Drumm McNaughton: I am a golfer and doing more of it lately, which is really nice.
Brad Griffith: That, that’s good. Yeah, Muirfield’s a beautiful course.
Drumm McNaughton: Have you played it?
Brad Griffith: I have not. I, no, they don’t, they probably wouldn’t allow me to play. I’m not good enough for that sort of thing.
Drumm McNaughton: I don’t think I’m good enough.
Brad Griffith: I’ve been there a couple times. It’s the serenity of being on the golf course I think is what I enjoy the most.
But yeah. No, I’m more of a tennis guy. I played tennis through high school.
Drumm McNaughton: I hear you. One of, one of my good friends, former president at Ohio State, Brit Kirwan, mid 80’s—
Brad Griffith: Absolutely.
Drumm McNaughton: —still plays four to five sets or four to five games of singles every week.
Brad Griffith: Oh, yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: Just amazing.
Brad Griffith: That’s incredible, right? I aspire to do that. That’s why I’m, I’m trying to keep my body healthy, my knee. I’ve been going to physical therapy lately so that I can play tennis into my 80s.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, I certainly hope it works.
[00:03:59] Why Workforce Readiness
Drumm McNaughton: Today we’re gonna talk about the role of universities and businesses in ensuring graduates are workforce ready. I mean, that’s a very timely topic, especially given that the public perception of higher education is dropping. There isn’t as much faith in higher education as there used to be 15 years ago.
[00:04:20] Buckeye Innovation Model
Drumm McNaughton: Tell me a little bit about Buckeye Innovation and how you’re breaking the mold on what’s needed for graduates.
Brad Griffith: Yeah, absolutely. So we try to provide opportunity. Buckeye Innovation exists as a– It’s a technology firm. We design and develop software. We build marketing websites and e-commerce websites all targeted around innovative growing organizations, typically those who are closing equity gaps, trying to find some opportunity gap, information resource gap in the community, and they’re closing that gap for people.
And we build technology that helps them be more effective. One of the major gaps, you know, we see, uh, and you’ve talked about on episodes of your podcast, some more focus on workforce development, a shift towards workforce, and there are lots of competitors to, to higher ed universities and colleges these days.
But a-as I see my job, I think there are things that private companies can do in workforce development that universities can’t, and vice versa. And so I see my role as an employer, as providing opportunities for people who may not have otherwise had them or may have had a different experience just doing an internship where they have grunt work.
We try and provide really meaningful workforce opportunities, and that could be for two-year or four-year college students. We also do some programs where people are trying to get back into the workforce, or they’re trying to shift their careers. So we’ve worked with some coding boot camp graduates or certificate program graduates.
Uh, but I see as we’re building this creative software for nonprofits and local governments, trying to make sure that our workforce, the team that we have working on those projects, is diverse, brings unique perspectives, brings very cross-fun-functional perspectives. We hire designers, developers, content strategists.
And so I, I see we have a, an important role to play, and there are a bunch of different opportunities that we could talk about, ways that we’re doing that through internships, apprenticeships, some co-curricular programs where we’ll actually work up with project teams or I’ll do guest lectures in class.
But I wanna make sure that we’re contributing to that opportunity.
Drumm McNaughton: And that’s exactly where we’re gonna be going with this. What you’re describing to me is what some people call a public-private partnership. It’s how the private sector and the higher education institutions can work together to make sure students get what they need and they’re workforce ready when they graduate.
[00:06:41] Student Shifts and AI Skills
Drumm McNaughton: What are some of the challenges that these various groups are facing? I mean, students, we talked a little bit about it. The, the demographics for students are changing. What are you seeing?
Brad Griffith: Yeah, for sure. So you still have some students who go the traditional route, the going straight from high school to college, do their four-year degree, and then go out into the workforce or maybe continue grad school. I’m seeing more students who don’t necessarily know after that four-year degree what they want to do.
As I have two daughters, my daughters are twelve and sixteen, and my sixteen-year-old has her first summer job this year, and she’s looking at what is she gonna do for college, starting to look at colleges, even doing some– uh, we’ve got a great program in Ohio that allows high school students to get credits paid for, so she can take classes at Columbus State Community College or Ohio State University.
She did some at Columbus State last year. She’ll be doing more next year as well as that. So I’m seeing that there are even high school opportunities in higher ed where we can bring in apprentices. We’ve hired a number of apprentices through Columbus State Community College.
We’ve also had interns. We have six interns this summer, and a couple of them are from Ohio State University. We’ve got some from around the country as well. I s- yeah, I see different needs. So they all want to learn real skills. Um, we could talk a little bit about AI as well. There’s, uh… You, you’ve done episodes about that as well, about the impact of AI or how AI is being leveraged in universities and some of the risks.
We need a workforce who knows how to use AI tools but also knows when not to use them. And so that, yeah. Yeah, we’re looking forward to playing a bigger role in that.
Drumm McNaughton: So , we’re seeing more adults, and these are folks that can’t necessarily take four years off for an education. So the pedagogy needs to change, and the expectations need to change. The cost is significantly more. And then, you know, life gets in the way, especially, you know, it does for your traditional age students.
But from a percentage-wise, we’re seeing those numbers of the non-traditionally adults really going up.
Brad Griffith: Absolutely. Right. A lot of our apprenticeships through Columbus State Community College, they have an IT flexible apprenticeship program, their ITFA program, and it’s generally working adults who are going back to school. There are some traditional students in there, but there’s a higher percentage that are working adults.
They’re trying to change careers into a technology field. There are different needs. They are more likely to have children. They may even have an older adult, a parent in the home that they’re caring for. They have full-time jobs. And so there, there are a lot of different ways that we need to approach that in how we offer opportunities.
Some part-time opportunities. There are seasonal opportunities. Maybe it’s just a mentorship program. I’ve participated in those where I mentor or other team members will mentor students. A lot of different needs.
[00:09:34] Curriculum Can’t Keep Up
Drumm McNaughton: Universities are facing a lot of the challenges as well. You know, graduating students without the skills, and that’s what we’ve been talking about right now is making sure those graduates have the skills. But the other big thing is the curriculum can’t really keep up with technology and the businesses, and you see that firsthand.
Brad Griffith: Absolutely. Yeah, and then I think there’s a good reason that when you need an accredited engineering program, that needs to be reviewed, the curriculum has to be reviewed, has to be approved. You can’t afford to move too quickly on that because it needs to follow a pretty good structure to make sure that they have vetted it.
But technology is moving way faster than that accreditation process can. And so I’ve seen some interesting things. Ohio State University has a white-labeled version of a, a certificate program to teach user experience design or software development in a maybe a twelve-week program. They don’t run it.
Someone else runs it, but puts Ohio State University branding on it. That has been interesting. I still think, and I’ve thought this for a long time, that project teams doing projects, whether it’s a capstone project in a class or Ohio State University has a Buckeye Bullet team. There’s a whole set of different hackathons, programs where they do a hackathon or a project they get together over a weekend.
Those are incredibly valuit– valuable, and they teach real-world skills. But they need professionals, like from Buckeye Innovation, other software development firms around. They need professionals to help with mentorship and judging and helping to coach on those skills that the curriculum just can’t possibly keep up with.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. And I’m probably gonna get myself in trouble with at least a few faculty members when I say this, is the research that faculty do is incredibly important. It really is. But at the same time, it’s not necessarily in line with what businesses need, or is it keeping up with the pace that businesses are moving. And when you’ve got that particular issue, then you throw in the curriculum approval process that most institutions have, going through faculty governance, you’re just making the timeline even further behind, aren’t you?
Brad Griffith: I think so. And it is tough.
[00:11:51] Advisory Committees Explained
Brad Griffith: I’ve been on a curriculum advisory committee for Central Ohio Technical College for quite a few years.
Drumm McNaughton: A minute. You’re j- you’re intro- you’re introducing something new, a curriculum advisory committee. What is that?
Brad Griffith: Sure. So Central Ohio Technical College, they’re co-located with Ohio State University Newark. So it’s in Newark, Ohio. It’s maybe about a thirty-minute drive from downtown Columbus. They are charged with having a community advisory committee who will advise them on what skills are necessary in the workforce, what might they change in their curriculum to ad-adapt the curriculum to workforce needs.
And so we get together ge-generally at least twice a year, and we talk with them, about their curriculum, review what courses there are, the syllabi for the courses. We talk about what skills we’re seeing are needed, what skills are lacking. There’s some opportunities for engagement in recruiting, finding students from Central Ohio Technical College who may want to work with us.
And I think that’s it. Then you said public-private partnership. That term I think is very important. Universities are designed to do something. Businesses are designed to do something different, and universities need businesses and vice versa. We need people who have that liberal arts education, a broad education across a lot of different disciplines.
If people come and they just work at Buckeye Innovation their whole life, they are not gonna learn some important skills that contribute to the diversity of thought that makes my team effective. We need people who have a great liberal arts four-year education. We need people who have been in the workforce taking a different path.
We need people with certificates or two-year degrees. So I think that public-private partnership where I as a business owner can talk about what skills I need, what gap I’m seeing, and how that matches up with the curriculum, it helps them to speed up their process. And their process, my understanding, I’m not working in higher ed, my understanding is that for a two-year college like that, they can move a little bit faster than a four-year can because they don’t have the same accreditation process.
They have an approval process. It’s still hard to keep up, but they can move a little bit faster, and I’ve seen a lot of movement over the years in integrating what we advise them on.
Drumm McNaughton: What I typically have seen, and I worked on a curriculum committee at my own university, you can move quickly, but it’s not so much the accreditation process as it is the faculty governance process that slows things down. Many times, a big university, you’ll have three, maybe even four curriculum committees that you need to get approval for before changing a course.
The accreditation only comes to if you’re changing 25% of the credit hours, then yeah, it’s gotta go up through the accreditor as a substantive change or a sub change. But it’s usually the, the faculty governance that slows things down. What you’ve just proposed, and let me see if I can spell this back to you correctly.
Colleges and universities have their own things that they do, and yes, they may be behind on doing things, but they’re still doing a relatively good job. Businesses have their own needs, and what you’re doing at Buckeye Innovation and what many other institute- or many other companies are doing by intern programs, apprenticeships, et cetera, is you’re doing that bridge work that’s needed between the graduate and the business.
Does that make sense?
Brad Griffith: I, yeah, I would agree with you. Absolutely. And we need to step up. As businesses, we need to step up, and if I have a complaint or a concern that I’m not seeing the skills I need to be there. That, that bridge, I need to be that bridge to say, “I will offer an opportunity. I wanna work with the faculty and staff.”
You know, we have internship programs through Ohio State University where they actually have donors who fund the internship, or we have an, an intern from the University of Richmond this summer, where the university funds his internship, and he comes and works with us. We provide the opportunity, the mentorship, the coaching, but they provide the funding for it.
Or the State of Ohio has a program that we work with college students from around Ohio. There’s high school internship programs also. We need to be working this public-private partnership and, as you said, you know, I need to be that bridge. I need to step up as a business owner and say, “If I want to see certain skills, I need to be willing to provide workforce training, and I need to bridge that gap from the curriculum and what they’re learning in school to the specific skills they need to be a great entrepreneur, to be a contributing developer, a designer, a content strategist in a company.”
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. Well, I’ve seen this work very well. In fact, 15 years ago, believe it or not, that long ago, Cal State San Marcos had each of the colleges or schools that were part of the university had an advisory board from business, and they would come. You’d pay to be on it, and you’d be there to advise the dean or university issues, the president, on what was going on.
It’s different from the board of directors. It was an advisory board, but it’s very similar to what you’re talking about. I suspect yours– I, I’ve not been following Cal State San Marcos on this, but I suspect what you’re talking about, this curriculum advisory committee, gets down even more into the details, weeds that are necessary because, you know, colleges, they can’t do it all.
There’s just no way. That’s not what they’re built for.
Brad Griffith: Right. Right. Yeah, I do think we get into the weeds sometimes of looking at the syllabi, talking about specific technologies they might want to teach. And I appreciate opportunities like this to learn, but understanding what are some of the actual bottlenecks, and maybe it’s not the accreditation process.
I know when we’re talking about the curriculum, we try to not have them swap out courses. We try to keep the course descriptions broad enough that if they need to change out technologies that, you know, if you wouldn’t wanna specify in the approved curriculum, this teaches Claude Code, because what if Gemini CLI or Codex or some other product ends up being the industry leader?
You don’t wanna get yourself too stuck. So sometimes we do get into the weeds there but they may need that because that’s that bridge from the theoretical and the research, the liberal arts education to what do I need to actually build and launch? I’ve worked a lot with the curriculum committee lately on start to finish.
I need someone to be able to conceptualize, here’s a challenge, here’s a, a nonprofit challenge. Here’s something that’s holding their business back. Maybe it’s technology related or business process related. I need a, a software developer who can hear that challenge, can conceptualize what’s possible. What have I seen?
How could I put together a product that helps to solve that problem? Actually build it, test it, check it with the requirements, talk with real humans about how it works, and launch it. And that’s something that, that universities do not tend to teach start to finish. They teach the theory, they teach why things work and how they work, but they don’t teach actually do it and build it and launch it and support it after launch.
And those are things that I think the businesses need to step up and say, “Here’s the real world example.” Whether that’s a project team, an internship, mentoring. I’ve been doing some guest lectures in marketing, and there’s a, a great justice tech program at Ohio State University that’s a, a collaborative program between engineering and the College of Law.
Going to do guest lectures, helping to mentor, those are really important things I think for us to be doing.
Drumm McNaughton: It’s interesting that you say that because the graduates, when we’ve talked, there’s a lot of things, you know, not seeing the critical thinking, waiting for someone. Yet there are institutions that are doing this type of thing. For example, David Marchick, who was the dean of the Kogod College of Business for American University, now is taking over as the interim president.
They infused AI into all their courses back a year and a half, two years ago. And one of the marketing courses, there is no textbooks. The professor gives them AI prompts. They have to build a marketing plan, and then they have to build the programs to be able to test it, validate it, et cetera.
So it’s fully using AI to do this. I mean it’s an incredible course design.
Brad Griffith: Yeah, that’s really interesting.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. So they have bridged that gap between the theory and the actual application. So that’s certainly one thing. But the challenge is, I think you mentioned a few of them when we spoke last week.
You’re not seeing the critical thinking coming out of the graduates. You’re not seeing the self-starters and the experience to put together, you know, programs rather than think about them theoretical. Do I have those right?
Brad Griffith: Y-y-you do. I also– I hesitate sometimes to blame. I think you’re right. Yes, I am seeing those things. But as we look at transitions from baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, we’re seeing this transition. You know, I hear some of my colleagues, who run businesses say: “What is with these entitled students coming out of school thinking that they need to make all this money, and they’ll switch from one job to another just a year later for a big bump in pay?”
And so who are the managers? Who are the people who are enabling that, who are making that happen? Who’s making that offer? And it’s the Gen X and the baby boomers. They’re the ones who have enabled that. So I wouldn’t tend to blame there, but I do think that with AI in particular, we need to be thinking about what does that enable? It could enable people to just turn off their critical thinking. I am going to subcontract out my critical thinking. I’m gonna delegate that, and Claude or Gemini or OpenAI, one of these models, ChatGPT, they’re gonna do my thinking for me.
Or what I’ve seen among my best folks on my team is that they use these as thought partners. They use it to co-create, and maybe that’s what the class was doing, the marketing class was doing. If you use it as something that can amplify your creativity, large language models, what they do by nature is they give you the most likely response. They’re great at going and collecting a whole bunch of information and saying, “The average of all this information, here it is.”
If you want something that’s brand new, that’s unique, that’s creative, that, that gives you something that’s not a likely response, that’s a little bit off the wall, or it’s a combination, a unique combination of multiple things, AI is not gonna give you that. And so my best creative thinkers, sometimes these are people who take a non-traditional route and you know, I had someone who worked in restaurants. I had someone who worked in test prep previously. I’ve had some nonprofit employees who, one who her first non-grant funded job was here at our company. Getting people with different backgrounds, they bring some really creative mindsets to problems. And so that’s what I, I want to see from universities, that liberal arts education, the opportunity to be involved in student organizations and athletics.
Those things that they can provide are really great for enriching creativity. It’s gonna be interesting to see how they truly integrate AI, and do they teach people to use it as a thought partner, as a tool to explain to me how this theory works, not as a write this paper for me or give me the answer to this or… yeah. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:23:27] Partnership Playbook
Drumm McNaughton: So what should colleges be doing and universities be doing going forward? Obviously, like what you’re doing is internships, advisory boards, but give us a few more ideas of what colleges can do to help turn around this perception and prepare graduates to better enter the workforce.
Brad Griffith: Uh, great, great question. So w-well, I think that business owners and business executives, anyone in the workforce should be offering up their time and their talent. They need to be offering to get involved. Universities, I would love to see doing more inviting businesses, going to where businesses are, going to the Entrepreneurs’ Organization.
EO is a great organization of entrepreneurs around the world, many chapters all around the United States and other countries. Go out to those groups or chambers of commerce or other places.
Drumm McNaughton: Rotary Clubs.
Brad Griffith: Form partnerships, rotary clubs, Kiwanis. Like, there are a lot of great places. We see things like with SCORE that is funded by the Small Business Administration, largely retired executives or people who then volunteer their time. I would love to see universities reach out, ask people like that, ask people who are active in business to come and be involved. So we covered, you know, internships, like, apprenticeships are great, similar to an internship, they may pay a little bit more, they may be more involved or a little bit longer term. Sometimes our apprenticeships are six months or twelve months instead of a three-month internship So apprenticeships I think can be great.
We’ve done some programs where we actually fund some education. We will hire an apprentice with a commitment to pay for a certificate and then they go and they get their certificate with some stipend while they’re studying. An invitation from a college or university to have us involved, I think would be great. There are departments inviting us as guest speakers, guest lecturers, inviting us to mentor project teams. The, this justice tech program at Ohio State with the Moritz College of Law, I go in and I speak to them about building software and some of the practicalities.
So what is it really like building software and launching it? Had a great conversation with their team yesterday, with faculty both from computer science and from the law school, talking about how right now they give the students free rein. Whatever technologies you wanna use, use those and build something, and we hope that we can keep this going long term.
I said, “We may want to– the practical way of approaching this though is we need to tell them that there probably are some constraints.” If we have– They’re gonna have four project teams this coming semester. If you have four project teams who all use different technologies, the reality of trying to support four totally different technology stacks it’s very challenging.
And so we need to be thinking, while not constraining them too much, we need to talk about what is it actually like when you’re gonna build something that needs to be supported long term. So inviting, to, to your question, inviting businesses in to talk about the real world implications of some of the decisions that students make, I think that’s incredibly important.
Being the customer, they can interview us. You know, lot of ways to invite us in. Career fairs. Some universities charge for career fairs. I think if businesses are providing a lot of value trying to make sure it’s accessible to small businesses, that’s a great way to get the big defense contractors and the big businesses there, but exclude the small businesses.
I think inviting them to career fairs is a good idea.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. The other thing that we talked about was outside funding, getting those for internships and other things like that. In Ohio, you’ve got the Ohio Department of Development, which does that type of thing. But Ohio’s not the only state that does this.
Brad Griffith: No, not at all. Yeah, in my research, there are at least a half dozen different states that offer these programs and fund fifty to maybe seventy-five percent of wages for an intern. So if a business will provide that opportunity to generally it’s someone who has studied in that state, they’re a, a student of a higher education institution in the state.
The way our program works, we apply for the program, we give them job descriptions. It’s called their College Technology Internship Program. Used to be the Diversity and Inclusion Technology Internship Program. Still brings us diverse candidates, which is incredibly important to me, so it broadens our diversity.
But they can’t use those terms for political reasons, unfortunately, right now. So we apply, we give them job descriptions. They then have students apply, and then they match us up. They give us a list of students who may be a match, and we conduct interviews. They then reimburse. After we have hired these students, we pay them at least fifteen dollars an hour.
Many of them, it’s significantly more than that. We even get some graduate students, folks who have finished their four-year degree. And so, after the fact, after we have paid them, we file for reimbursement. It’s been actually a significant source of revenue for us some years, providing this employment opportunity for workforce development, enriching their educational experience.
And it brings in money for us as well as really productive folks who, many of whom, we’ve made offers to continue on or join us as a full-time employee.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:28:24] Tech Transfer and Closing Thoughts
Drumm McNaughton: The other piece with this is tech transfer. Potentially angel investors working with you, working with the institution. Tell me a little bit about that, please.
Brad Griffith: Sure. Absolutely. We’ve got some great institutions in central Ohio. Rev1 Ventures is a great organization that is a startup studio. They work with startups to help commercialize technology. Many of the technologies that come out of Ohio State University or Battelle Memorial Institute. Battelle’s a great defense contractor here in town that does a lot of great research work.
Technologies are coming out of those institutions, and they are not set up to commercialize the technology. So we have a, an office of technology commercialization at Ohio State. There are a number of different ways to approach it. There’s a center for entrepreneurship, a number of different programs.
We have worked– we, we’ve had, I would say, at least a half dozen different projects at Ohio State, some coming, uh… One of, one of my favorites came out of the medical center, the OSU Wexner Medical Center. They had technology that helped match individuals with developmental disabilities to jobs based on , the individual’s skills and abilities and the job’s demands to match them up to a job they could do that also helps them to further their development.
It’s a really great technology that bridges those equity gaps that we like to be bridging. They had spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. So they would send out a, a paper survey, collect back the paper survey from families about skills and abilities. They would send out paper surveys about jobs and get employers to fill out what are the job demands, and then match those up manually.
The research was great. It was sound research. They came up with a great matching algorithm. But the process of implementing that and then commercializing it as a, a software as a service type of model, it’s just not what a university is set up to do. And so I think that’s another great opportunity for a public-private partnership.
I’m building some of my own products right now for our nonprofit local government clients that we can sell to a bunch of clients. This is what we do is we build software, we figure out how can this be sustainable, how can there be a business model around it. And so that’s what we did for VocFit, and we– That’s one of our largest clients over the last several years, trying to help them commercialize this technology.
And it’s in a very social enterprise kind of way. They have grant funding largely. I don’t believe they charge for any of their services. I got a video from from my client. They’re demoing this software in Italy, and there was someone who was doing training in Italian of this VocFit software that came out of Ohio State University.
Now there’s a partnership with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Colorado State University. The way to get that technology out of a university is usually not more of what was done to, to develop it in the university, and so I think there’s a big role that we can play. We did a, we built a business plan competition software package that helps Ohio State University run basically a business plan competition to commercialize some of their technology. All sorts of opportunities there.
What develops technology in these universities is generally not the same thing that’s going to help that technology grow outside the university. And so that public-private partnership, yeah, I think getting companies to help with the commercialization, it’s a great idea. We’ve had opportunities to build business plan competition software that the– It was at Ohio State University. It’s now at the Ohio Department of Higher Education. They run these business plan competitions to help get technology commercialized and spin it out of the university. So great opportunities, but businesses need to be invited in to help with those sort of things.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. So going forward, what do businesses and colleges need to do? I would say, based on what we’ve talked about, colleges need to be more proactive to get businesses involved with things like advisory committees, curriculum development, that type of thing. What do you think?
Brad Griffith: Absolutely. I would love that. I would love that, that proactivity. If we could hear from colleges and universities about how they’d like us to be involved. What gaps do they see that we can help fill? It’s not just about donating, it’s about what can we do with our time? How can more of my team members get involved in the university as mentors?
So I do wanna see that proactivity. It– You know, for instance if the university can set up a menu of opportunities, what are all of the different ways that someone could be involved? I think that’s a great way to take that to a business and say, “Which of these might you be willing to contribute?”
I think that, that’s a great opportunity.
Drumm McNaughton: I would say go beyond that and do a, a roundtable, you know, maybe an afternoon roundtable with businesses. What are you seeing? What do you need? And ask them how they would like to participate in this. It may require the colleges and universities to change their model on how things…
Make sure you involve faculty in this conversation because they’ve got the say over curriculum generally. But I would take it that step further rather than the university putting out the list. You know, I’ve always found if you ask people, you know, what they need, they’re gonna tell you.
Brad Griffith: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. And getting businesses to say, “This is what we need, and what I’d like to see from the university to help us fill that need,” I think that is important. I don’t see as many opportunities for that with higher education institutions with four-year degrees as I do the high school level or two-year colleges.
I see that from Central Ohio Technical College and Columbus State Community College. We have a lot of mentorship opportunities there. There isn’t quite the same engagement. Faculty, I think the tenure system and as you were mentioning, the faculty curriculum review process doesn’t seem like there’s many opportunities where we’re being invited in to offer our input.
Drumm McNaughton: But you should be.
Brad Griffith: I think that would be very helpful.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely.
Brad Griffith: And I’m a two-time alumnus of Ohio State University, so I have an interest in the university doing well, continuing to churn out great graduates that supply talent for my business. I’d like to have a seat at the table there to help out.
And I am a small business owner. We have twelve employees. But I think my voice could be helpful, and the voices of some of my team members could be very helpful in teaching the university what it is that we need in a, a partnership where they can provide something valuable, and so can we.
Drumm McNaughton: Brad, this has been a great conversation. I’ve o- obviously, I don’t get this engaged , with all my guests as I have with you, so thank you. As we always do, three takeaways for presidents and boards. What do they need to do to make their graduates workforce ready and using businesses as a means for that?
Brad Griffith: Yeah, great, great question. I feel like I’ve got some takeaways for myself. I’ve learned some things. I appreciate the engagement in this because I don’t wanna just share, uh… You know, I have some experiences that can be valuable, but hearing your experience has been really great too.
What, what can universities do? So I need to see leaders inviting people in. We’ve talked a lot about that. So in-invite businesses in in every opportunity. In my company, I think about cross-functional collaboration. I need designers, developers, and content strategists at the table to talk about things.
Even though it feels like this is a developer task, getting a perspective from someone else is very helpful. And I would like to see that kind of mentality from higher ed leaders who say, “I have the academic viewpoint. What other viewpoints are not represented here at the table?” And a, a board of trustees can only do so much.
Getting that sort of an advisory board, that’s a really important thing. So consider advisory boards, consider inviting businesses in. Doing project work is incredibly important. Please try, as you’re leading, making sure that your students come out with examples of their work, more than just a coursework example, a project that they did, something that’s on a portfolio site that’s actually visible publicly for me to see.
That would be another thing. So a true examples of work, coming out with a portfolio. Some programs I think do an amazing job at that, particularly design programs or, you know, architecture programs may have a lot of that, but I wanna see more portfolios. And I would say the third thing that I would point out, AI is here. AI is having a big impact on my industry. I want to see it embraced. I want to see students understanding the capabilities of the technology. You could say this about any technology, that as students are going through school, there’s some new technology that either they can say, “Well, I don’t know.
This might be a fad. We’re just gonna learn the way that it’s always been done, just the fundamentals.” Or you can say, “Let’s learn the fundamentals, but let’s experiment with the latest technology,” so that when you come out in the workforce, you’re gonna need to know how to use that technology and know what the limitations are instead of just saying, “I should totally avoid it.
It’s only a tool for plagiarism.” It is not. Agentic AI is here. We should be embracing it. I hear universities talking about that. I wanna see that keep going so that someone can come out of school and give me a, a critique of where do they wanna use AI, where do they not wanna use AI? Where is it good?
Where is it not as good? How do I partner with AI as a thought partner, not use it to do all of my work for me? So th-there’s a role the university’s play in that.
Drumm McNaughton: Those are great takeaways. I’m gonna add one more to that. When you’re assigning faculty, one university that I knew, which will remain unnamed, they had their tenured faculty teaching the basic courses, the fundamentals. They’d bring in adjuncts from industry, not adjuncts that were professional academics, but adjuncts from industry teaching the higher level courses so that you’d be getting the latest and greatest that’s in industry. This is also one model that you can use as well.
Brad Griffith: That’s a great idea. I love that. I hope to do more teaching. I talked to a colleague last week who said, “I really wanna get more into teaching,” and I sent him a couple of links of where he might be able to teach locally. So I think that, that’s a great model.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s great. So what’s next for you, and what’s next for Buckeye Innovation?
Brad Griffith: Right. So our mission is to make sure that technology is universally accessible to all businesses and organizations. They should all have the best web and mobile technology regardless of resources, geography, nonprofit, for-profit. So we’re trying to do a lot for nonprofit and local government where we see very under-resourced organizations.
Higher ed could fall into this as well. And I see opportunities for us to a-apply our skills to have a really positive impact on the community. Something that we’re trying to do more of is get more into products. Something where I can build a product, a donor management system. We’ve got a volunteer management system.
We have other tools that nonprofits can use, a board portal tool. So I wanna build more software that can be reused, give our clients the value of custom software where it really replicates a business process, makes it more efficient, and I wanna do that in a packaged way that we can repeat it over and over again.
So that, that is big for us, and I wanna keep embracing all these different employment models ’cause I, I think it’s important that we serve the workforce needs of today, the different pathways, not just four-year universities or two-year colleges, but boot camps, workforce development kind of programs, wanna keep, uh, pursuing that with our hires as well.
Drumm McNaughton: Great. Well, Brad, thanks so much for being on the program. This has been a wonderful conversation, and I wish you guys all the best going forward.
Brad Griffith: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I’d love to have another conversation in the future. I really appreciate you having me.
Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure.
Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guest, Brad Griffith. Brad, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time our paths cross.
To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.
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