March 11, 2026 · Episode 302
Students Are Acting Like Consumers. Higher Ed Needs to Catch Up
38 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Students want clearer outcomes, relevant skills, and pathways that fit real life. Here’s what colleges need to change to keep pace.
Jeff Dinski spent six years at NBC and ESPN learning that if you do not give your audience what they want, they change the channel. Higher education has never had to worry about that. Until now.
The case for treating students as consumers, aligning program portfolios with workforce destinations, and rethinking how faculty are qualified to teach draws on perspectives from Dr. Drumm McNaughton, a higher education consultant who works with institutional presidents and boards on strategy, governance, and transformation, and Jeff Dinski, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer at Ellucian, the largest edtech company in the world serving approximately half of all U.S. colleges and universities. Dinski brings more than 20 years of experience across sports media, consumer internet, and edtech, including roles as an operating executive at Parchment and as a partner at Tyton Partners advising education companies on growth strategy and market positioning.
The central argument is straightforward. Institutions that align their program portfolios with workforce destinations, treat students as consumers whose needs must be actively met, and build faculty structures that integrate practitioner expertise will find a defensible path through the disruption ahead. Institutions that do not will continue losing students to alternatives designed around what learners actually need.
The Confidence Crisis Is Structural, Not Cyclical
Public trust in the college degree has eroded in ways that have no recent precedent, and the causes are not temporary. Both political parties have contributed to the damage. One has publicly attacked elite institutions, degrading their credibility among a substantial portion of the public. The other spent four years messaging that degrees were not delivering sufficient value, using student loan forgiveness arguments that carried an implicit indictment of the credential itself. The cumulative effect is a level of skepticism that marketing cannot reverse because marketing did not cause it.
When the Department of Education designated specific institutions as bad actors and moved to discharge their graduates’ loans on that basis, the reputational damage was not contained to those institutions. The general public does not parse distinctions between for-profit and nonprofit institutions, between regional and national accreditors, or between institutions that were named and those that were not. The message that reached most Americans was simpler: some degrees are not worth what students paid for them. That message landed broadly.
Institutional leaders who are waiting for the confidence problem to resolve on its own are misreading the situation. This requires demonstrable changes in what institutions deliver and how they account for outcomes, not improved messaging about existing programs.
Students Are Evaluating Programs Against a Single Question
The industrial-era model of higher education operated on a straightforward premise: a credential from an accredited institution carried presumed value that the market would recognize. That presumption is no longer reliable. Students, and the families and employers who influence their decisions, are evaluating programs against a direct question: will this credential produce specific, recognizable competencies that lead to employment in a field I want to work in?
This shift is not confined to vocational programs or non-traditional learners. It is visible across the full spectrum of institutional types and student populations. Traditional 18-to-22-year-old students are asking it. So are adult learners returning after workforce experience. The institutions responding effectively are those that have stopped treating the credential as self-evidently valuable and have started building the evidence base that answers the question directly.
The practical implication is that program portfolio design can no longer be driven primarily by faculty interest or historical enrollment patterns. It has to start with an honest assessment of where graduates are going, what competencies employers in those fields require, and whether current curriculum actually produces those competencies. Institutions that have not done that work are carrying programs that are losing the value proposition argument every enrollment cycle.
Workforce Pell Grants Will Separate Prepared Institutions From Reactive Ones
The pending arrival of Workforce Pell Grants represents the first time the federal government will fund non-degree learning at meaningful scale. This is not a marginal policy adjustment. It is a structural change in how federal investment flows through the system, and it will create immediate competitive advantage for institutions that have already built the infrastructure to deliver short-cycle, skills-focused credentials.
Smaller private institutions under the most acute financial pressure will lean heavily into non-degree programs funded through Workforce Pell. The institutions that benefit will not be those that build programs in response to the funding. They will be those that already have employer relationships, program frameworks, and delivery capacity in place before the funding arrives. Workforce Pell rewards preparation, not reaction.
The model that works is specific. Institutions identify the actual employers their graduates go to work for. They build relationships with hiring managers in those organizations, not with industry associations or advisory boards that meet twice a year, but with the people making day-to-day decisions about who gets hired and what skills they need. They use that input to design credentials, degree or non-degree, that produce graduates whose competencies have been validated by the employers who will hire them. The institutions already operating this way at scale are primarily community colleges, which have built workforce-responsive program development into their institutional DNA in ways that four-year institutions have been slow to replicate.
Community Colleges Offer a Model the Sector Has Undervalued
The institutions facing the greatest structural risk are smaller private colleges that lack both clear value differentiation and the scale to absorb fixed institutional costs. Large state universities with stable public funding, elite institutions with demand that exceeds supply, and well-positioned community colleges are relatively insulated. The sector that warrants closest study is not the one under the most pressure. It is the one that has quietly built the most defensible institutional model.
Community colleges have spent decades identifying local and regional workforce needs and designing accessible, cost-effective credentials around those needs. That model is precisely what the broader higher education sector is now trying to build under pressure. The perception that community colleges represent a lesser form of higher education has obscured what they have actually accomplished. Institutions looking for a structural template for workforce-aligned program delivery would benefit from a more honest assessment of what community colleges have built and why it is working.
Faculty Innovation Does Not Require Unanimous Buy-In
One of the most persistent failures in institutional change management is treating faculty as a single constituency that must be collectively persuaded before anything can move. Faculty are not a monolith. At most institutions, a meaningful cohort of faculty are among the most forward-looking professionals in the building. They do not need to be convinced that workforce-aligned teaching has value. They need the administrative support, course release time, and institutional visibility to demonstrate that value to colleagues who would not move independently.
The sequence matters. Institutions that try to build consensus before acting lose early adopters to frustration while failing to move traditionalists. Institutions that identify the innovators, fund their work, and create the conditions for visible success generate the evidence-based persuasion that administrative mandates cannot produce. Faculty who care about student outcomes respond to proof that a new model is actually producing those outcomes. The leverage point is demonstrated impact, not institutional directive.
The faculty qualification structure also requires rethinking. The traditional pathway, running from bachelor’s through research-oriented doctoral programs, produces scholars who are well prepared for academic production but not always equipped to teach applied workforce skills. A practice-oriented doctorate, such as the Doctor of Business Administration, offers a differentiated qualification model grounded in application rather than research production. As institutions build workforce-aligned program portfolios, who is qualified to teach in those programs is a core strategic design question, not a peripheral credentialing matter.
The most effective structural solution pairs tenured faculty teaching foundational coursework with industry practitioners teaching advanced applied content at the cutting edge of their fields. Business schools have operated this model for decades, drawing on executives from major corporations to teach alongside tenure-track faculty. The broader curriculum has been slow to adopt what business schools demonstrated was workable. The Workforce Pell funding environment provides both the incentive and the financial structure to change that.
Mergers Are Forcing Strategic Rethinking That Voluntary Adaptation Did Not
The record pace of institutional mergers and closures is not evidence that the market is correcting toward equilibrium. It is evidence that institutions that deferred hard strategic choices are now confronting conditions in which deferral is no longer possible. Mergers compel institutions to examine which programs, structures, and commitments are genuinely essential and which are inherited from an environment that no longer exists.
The institutions that navigate this disruption most successfully will be those that act before they are forced to. The strategic logic is not complicated: identify where your students are going after graduation, build genuine relationships with the employers in those fields, design programs around what those employers actually need, and deliver those programs in the formats, modalities, and schedules that your students can use. Institutions that do those things well may find the structural changes required are less dramatic than anticipated. Institutions that refuse to do them will find the market makes the choice for them.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
- Experiment with non-degree courses now. Workforce Pell Grants will fund new program types at federal scale for the first time. Institutions with existing non-degree infrastructure and established employer relationships will capture that opportunity immediately. Those waiting for the policy to arrive before building the capacity will be starting from scratch in a competitive market.
- Find workforce partners you can trust. Aligning curriculum with employer needs cannot be accomplished through labor market analyses alone. It requires relationships with actual hiring managers who will tell you specifically what they need from the graduates you send them. Build those relationships before you build the programs. That input is what separates genuine workforce alignment from a marketing claim.
- Create the conditions for faculty innovation. Early adopters exist at most institutions. They do not need to be convinced. They need administrative support, protected time, and institutional visibility. When their work produces demonstrable student outcomes, that evidence does the cultural work that top-down mandates cannot. Work with the faculty who are ready to move, and let results bring the others along.
This analysis provides institutional leaders with a clear lens for evaluating whether their program portfolios, faculty structures, and student engagement models are built for the conditions that actually exist. It argues that without deliberate academic realignment and organizational redesign, institutions remain exposed to strategic risk they can no longer afford to defer.
Quick Overview
- The confidence crisis is structural and has bipartisan roots that communications strategy cannot resolve
- Students are evaluating programs against a direct value question; presumed credential value is no longer sufficient
- Workforce Pell Grants will fund non-degree learning at federal scale for the first time
- Institutional readiness now determines who benefits from the Workforce Pell opportunity
- Smaller private institutions face the greatest risk from enrollment decline and lack of scale
- Community colleges offer a proven workforce-aligned model the sector has undervalued
- Faculty innovation does not require unanimous buy-in; demonstrated results drive cultural change
- Practice-oriented faculty qualifications and hybrid practitioner models are structural solutions, not workarounds
- Institutional mergers are forcing strategic rethinking that voluntary adaptation had not produced
- Two strategic tenets: align programs with workforce destinations; treat students as consumers
About Our Podcast Guest
As Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, Jeff Dinski is responsible for driving Ellucian’s growth strategy with a focus on market expansion, strategy and insights, corporate development, competitive intelligence, and analyst relations. He brings deep knowledge and expertise in market analysis and strategy to this newly created role. With more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and operator in the education technology and media sectors, Jeff has delivered extraordinary results for both large conglomerates and startups. Most recently, Jeff was a partner at Tyton Partners, where he advised a broad range of education companies on growth and market positioning strategies, as well as private equity fund sponsors on acquisitions, due diligence, and portfolio company performance.
Connect with Jeff Dinski 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.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 302 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Jeff Dinski
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] Welcome and Intro
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.
My guest today is Jeff Dinski, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer for Ellucian. Jeff’s responsible for driving Ellucian’s growth strategy, and he’s done this in multiple ways. He’s got great experience. Most recently, he was a partner, at Tyton Partners, one of TCLs strategic partners, where he advised in a broad range of education companies on growth market positioning strategies, as well as private equity fund sponsoring for acquisitions.
Jeff’s got more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and operator in higher education, technology, and media sectors, and he joins me today to share some of those insights with us, as well as to look at higher ed in a very different ways, one that I think would be very beneficial given his background,
Jeff Dinski: Thanks for having me, drew. I’m excited to be here.
Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to a really good conversation. You’ve got an incredible background doing all sorts of different things. I would almost call it a serial entrepreneur, but you’ve actually worked in corporations with one of my company’s partners, Tyton Partners.
Jeff Dinski: Yes. There’s a bit of variety in my background and certainly some entrepreneurial stuff in there.
[00:01:47] Jeffs Role at Ellucian
Jeff Dinski: But right now I’m the Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, at Ellucian. Which is the largest, ed tech company in the world. We’re the market leader, in student, student systems. We have about half of the US, colleges using our system. And as corporate strategy officer, what that means there is, I’m respons for sort of our long-term planning and driving and aligning our strategies throughout the organization and then also driving a lot of our growth initiatives around sort of market research, mergers and acquisitions, helping define new product entries, new market entries internationally.
[00:02:22] Tyton and Parchment Background
Jeff Dinski: And then as you mentioned, going back further, I’d spent a little bit of time most recently, as a partner at a strategy consulting firm called Tyton Partners. It’s totally focused on the education sector. And then prior to that, I was a operating executive at a smaller education technology company called Parchment.
Drumm McNaughton: But you also were a journalist as well.
Jeff Dinski: That’s right.
[00:02:41] Life in Sports Media
Jeff Dinski: I spent, it’s awesome that you brought that up, I spent the first, six or so years of my career as a TV writer and producer, first at NBC for four years, and then two years at ESPN. So I did lots of sports and Olympic stuff, got to travel around the world, meet a lot of famous people, famous athletes. I really enjoyed that time in my life.
[00:02:59] Favorite Interviews
Drumm McNaughton: What was your favorite interview when you were a journalist? I.
Jeff Dinski: That is interesting because we interviewed everyone from, Charles Barkley to Barry Bonds. In terms of best interviews, I think one of the cool things we did is we interviewed, like, Michael Phelps before he was famous, before the Olympics, and did a lot of work there. And then personal favorite of mine, but to your point about background in journalism, not a great interview, but we got to interview one time, and this will be a little obscure for most people. Buzz Bissinger, who wrote most famously Friday Night Lights, which is the book I grew up idolizing as a journalist, so that was really cool for me as well.
Drumm McNaughton: That is neat. So you’ve seen the whole gamut when it comes to education, sports media,
Jeff Dinski: Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: What stands out for you the most?
[00:03:53] From Media to Education
Jeff Dinski: So I think one of the things that’s interesting is I spent the early part of my career in the media industry doing kind of TV and then some consumer internet stuff. And then I think, transition to education over the last almost 15 years and was really good transition for me because I actually wanted to be a teacher a bit when I was younger and so it was a really good sort of transition and something that I’ve obviously chose to stay in.
[00:04:16] Students as Customers
Jeff Dinski: And I think to bridge the two, I think one of the things that’s really interesting where, even in this day, I think media and consumer internet are really good at, is really just servicing the customer. I think if you think about my days in tv, when I was at ESPN, I helped start a morning show there. It was called Cold Pizza. It eventually evolved, for good or bad, into ESPN’s First Take. And it was a daily show, so we were really focused and attentive to the ratings. Your goal is to really produce something that people wanted to watch. That’s what the business model is, and I think as you move forward and move into digital models and internet, that’s continued. And I think what’s interesting to me as we dive in and talk about education is, I’m not sure higher ed in particular or the education sector in general always thought about their customers, their students, or more modernly learners as consumers or someone they need it to service. And I think that’s changing in a really good way whether it’s higher ed institutions or even high schools and colleges are thinking a bit more about like, how do we provide what our students really want or what our students really need and how do we meet the needs of those learners? And I think that’s one commonality that I think has always been true in media, but I think is starting to be true in higher ed.
Drumm McNaughton: I think that’s a really good assessment of where higher ed is in many respects.
[00:05:47] Higher Ed Confidence Crisis
Drumm McNaughton: You’ve got a loss of public confidence. The costs are very high. You’ve got the politicians stepping in and people have forgotten, in many respects, it’s, like Bill Clinton said, “it’s the economy stupid.” It’s all about the student and making that student successful.
Jeff Dinski: Yes,, I think that’s right. People talk about the challenges within higher ed now, and I think those vary from, the sort of financial challenges of enrollment cliffs, just general population, demographic changes, and that creates financial strain on the institutions.
[00:06:26] Politics and Degree Value
Jeff Dinski: But I think like one of the things we talked about in our interview that’s interesting from the political side is I don’t think higher ed’s been done any favors bluntly by either political administration over the last several years. I think obviously Trump is very publicly in the Trump and administration again, for good or bad, has very publicly gone after, many of the Ivy League schools and other institutions and in very specific actions. And I think that has, in my view, degraded some credibility among some of President Trump’s supporters around higher ed. But to be candid, I also don’t think the Biden administration helped higher ed in this regard because they spent the last, I don’t know, four years of the presidency, talking a lot about refunding student loans, forgiving student loans with a very explicit statement that, “Hey, your degrees aren’t getting value.” And so I think. If you add those two together, and they’re very different presidents, very different politics. I’m not equating the two in any way, but I think you have a situation where the general American populace in a way that I don’t think has been true at any other point in my lifetime, is starting to trust in higher ed or believe in the value of a higher education degree, less than they have in the past, and I don’t think that’s happened in our lifetimes before.
Drumm McNaughton: And that’s a very interesting perspective. I hadn’t thought of it from that, from the refund yet, but there were a lot of folks out there that, people were termed bad actors, institutions that the Department of Education said, “no, this degree was not worth it”. To me, it’s a little bit of a leap, but I can see how folks would make it, to interpret that to say the degrees don’t have the cache, they don’t have the value that they used to.
Jeff Dinski: Yes, totally. Like there, there were bad actors out there and people were getting marketed to in, in different ways, but I don’t think a lot of people will parse it that finally, like a lot of people were listening to messaging. Don’t think about, don’t know what for-profit education is, even candidly, and some of the things that happened there.
And so I do think it, it has had an effect.
[00:08:42] Skills Based Shift
Jeff Dinski: Now, as we talk about it, I think there’s the very possibility though that we can come back from that in material ways, and I think, the shift is going to be to go to more kind of skills-based learning, non-degree, and that kind of thing.
And to be clear, I think what I’m saying is, I don’t think that anyone, candidly, on either side of the political asile or the American populace at large, doubts the value of education. Like I think that’s still a core tenet to society and I think even some areas where you get aligned with politically.
What I think has become maybe less valuable than even when I was thinking about going to college is the perception that a college degree will automatically put me on the right track, and I don’t think that’s the case as much anymore.
Drumm McNaughton: You may be very right on that.
[00:09:35] Unique Pathways and Costs
Drumm McNaughton: I think people, and this is to be a generational thing, put the money aside, everybody that I talk to feels like higher ed is too expensive, and those are the folks that come down on the side of, there isn’t the value that there used to be, even though you can easily show that someone with a four year college degree will earn three times more than the average person who doesn’t have that.
But I think the thing is that these pathways are becoming more and more individual more unique. One size doesn’t fit all. It’s not like going to the shoe store and saying, “Yes, I want this pair of Hush Puppies”. I’m sorry I’m dating myself with Hush Puppies.
Jeff Dinski: But there are many Hush Puppies, so I know which I know what you mean. Yes, for sure.
Drumm McNaughton: They were very comfortable and then became Clarks, you know what, I’m sorry, I need to shut up. We’re we should be
Jeff Dinski: No. We can talk about shoes, all shoes, all day if you want. You can change the topic of the podcast.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. That might be a little easier to do.
But the pathways have become far more unique. It’s not like going to a custom shoe store and saying, put me a pair of shoes together. Although you certainly do have some of those with your very, expensive, some liberal arts schools,
Jeff Dinski: Yes,, sure.
Drumm McNaughton: In general, higher ed is making the shift to where it is, like what you say, more skills-based learning, more focused on workforce skills.
[00:11:14] Which Degrees Still Matter
Jeff Dinski: Yes, I think the point earlier, I don’t think anyone, there are certain degrees that people don’t question the value of it all. We still need engineers. We still, AI aside, like we still need lawyers. We still need doctors. Those are like super obvious ones. We still need computer programmers who are going to be accelerated by AI.
Those degrees still have, I think, a certain set of cache both in their field and in some cases out of their field. I think a lot of people understand the value of an engineering degree because they know the person’s quantitative. They know they think logically. They know they have some resilience because it’s hard. I think it’s some of the other stuff that look like. I love to read, like I happen to have been a, and it’s going to sound like I’m just advocating for myself here, I happen to have been a mechanical engineering major, but I had enough credits to be an English major and really loved that. And I don’t think if I had decided to do one versus the other, I would be any less prepared for my existing job. As long as I had, like the math classes mattered. So as long as I took the same set of classes, if I came out with a BA in English as opposed to BSE in mechanical engineering, which I have I’m not different as a person. And so to be clear, I think those degrees are super valuable. To go back to where we started on what the consumer wants, I think there’s a trend away from that in terms of what students, both traditional students who are coming out of high school and non-traditional students, who are 25 plus or going part-time, which is a bigger part of the population now, are looking for. I think they’re looking for more specific skills training and I think in order to meet the needs in the market, higher ed’s going to have to continue to shift that way.
Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re right and in many respects it is.
[00:13:07] Workforce Learning in Practice
Drumm McNaughton: Students coming, I had a conversation with someone today who was telling me when they came out of their degree program, they had learned the skills that they needed to. When they got into the workforce it was very different than what they had expected from their degree. I think there needs to be more of a merging of the two, and I’ve got a lot of examples of institutions who are doing this type of thing, where freshmen, sophomore, juniors, seniors even are getting definite workforce skills by actually working jobs as they’re doing. And it’s not an internship or an externship where folks are saying, “Yes, go get me this cup of coffee. You can learn from me by osmosis”. No, they’re actually getting in and doing the work that they would be doing at a corporation.
Jeff Dinski: One of the things we try to do is help schools go in that direction.
[00:14:06] Workforce Pell Explained
Jeff Dinski: So I think a couple things are going to happen over the next year that I think will materially shift the market. And I think anyone who listens to this podcast, maybe not anyone, but in all likelihood, knows that kind workforce Pell Grants are coming. And so I think that’s going to be the first time we’ve seen the federal government, in a meaningful way, essentially, fund, non-degree courses. And everyone’s waiting for it, so it’s not like this is a unique thought by me, but I think the detail’s important here. I think that’s going to have a profound shift in the market. And I think you’re going to see, we talked about some of the financial challenges, like I see it in, in our job a lot. Like one of the great benefits of working at Ellucian is we work with a really broad set of the market. We have a lot of community colleges, a lot of R1’s, large state schools, small privates, they all use our platform and so I think you can see the breadth of good things that are happening in higher ed and a lot of the challenges.
[00:15:08] Non Degree Programs for Survival
Jeff Dinski: And it’s very clear that for some segment of the market, I think traditionally, people would think about small privates, mid-sized state schools, maybe depending on funding, that they are really in some real financial hard times. You see it in the number of mergers across schools over the last couple years, that number has ticked up pretty consistently over the last several years.
And so I think what you’re going to see, we didn’t talk about it beforehand, but when we were talking about the TV stuff, it ties back to the comment I made there. I think what you’re going to see is particularly small private institutions lean pretty heavily into non-degree programs funded by Workforce Pell because I think they’re going to need, and we’ll see that, as a way to drive revenue and support their ops or operations to be candid. Because it’s going to be funded, and so then to go one step further I think if we agree that’s going to happen, to go to our very first comment, I think those non-degree credentials, whether it’s in statistics or AI prompting or data analytics or engineering or numerous other things are actually going to meet the needs of the market.
I think the schools are going to specifically structure them based on, just like community colleges have done historically, based on what the needs in either their local area or their target demographic are. I think you’re going to see that gain traction in a very real way, and I think that’s going to be really good for higher ed because it will get them in the habit of being responsive. As I said, when we started thinking about their learners as consumers and trying to meet those needs.
[00:16:47] Faculty and Market Relevance
Drumm McNaughton: One interesting piece with that is faculty. The faculty are the quote experts in their fields. But there’s always the, call it a calling out, faculty are not in touch with the marketplace, what’s going on? Things along like this. I see more of a perspective of faculty working, I wouldn’t say closely, but working with business folks to find out what in fact is going on in business and how they need to update courses, curriculums, things like that. Do you foresee this?
Jeff Dinski: Yes, I think so. I think one thing you have to always be careful about. And it’s true with all sort of groups of people. But I think we tend to paint faculty with a broad brush. Like it’s one, homogenous group of people and it’s not. I think you see many of the people I know, I have friends who are professors, they’re among the most progressive, active, like, new, cutting edge futurist thinkers I know, but then you do also have a big population of that came up as academics. Went to college, got a master’s, went through a PhD program. Really believes in the value of those traditional education. So I think, and to go back to our point, I think you’ll see a little bit of a, it may not be a bifurcation in a sense, it’ll split 50/50, but I think you’ll see a little bit of a split of progressive professors cutting edge, more innovative professors willing to embrace this.
And I think a great example of this, we’re really proud to have a big chunk of the community colleges using Ellucian Student, and I think historically that’s been the role of community colleges. To identify specific workforce needs historically in their local geographies and that we’ve got the virtual, that’s changed a little bit, but meeting the needs of the learners they had locally.
I do think, because short courses are a little bit easier to put together, they’re going to be a little bit easier to get accredited and approved. I think at some places, I do think you’ll see innovative professors saying, “Hey. I really want to do this. Like I want to teach something for my own good, for my students good, that’s going to directly lead to skills that are going to get them jobs”. And I think you’re going to see those sort of innovative first wave professors really go after that. And as you said, lean into thinking about what the workforce needs. You’re already seeing that at places like southern New Hampshire, Arizona State, like Western Governors. People know these places, but that’s how they’re thinking already. I think with the advent of Workforce PELL where you get funding, you’ll see that thinking percolate out. And then I think what you’ll see happen second wave is some of the more kind of conservative professors or maybe less innovative, depending on how you want to look at it, will see some of that success and I think like anything else, even if you’re not the first wave or the an early adopter, to use a marketing term, like if you see your colleagues having success, empowering students, right, because that’s what a lot of faculty care about. They want to be known as a leader in their field. That’s a lot of reason you become an academic and for a lot of other faculty, they want to teach students. They want to change kids’ lives or change learners’ lives. And I think when you see that impact happening, which I believe it will. I don’t think it’s going to be perfect. It’s probably going to be messy at times. But I think in general, the idea of moving to more, shorter, skills-based learning is really impactful. I think you’ll see some of the faculty that we would never have thought do this follow along eventually.
[00:20:33] New Faculty Skillsets
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and I think it’s going to require a different skill set to do that other than the traditional way. Faculty come up through the ranks, get their PhD, et cetera?
Jeff Dinski: What do you think will be different about the skillset?
Drumm McNaughton: I think it’s got to be more in-touch instead of research based, I think it’s going to be more application type things. When you stop and think about how a faculty member gets qualified, they go up… bachelor’s degree, master’s, PhD, they come in and maybe they’re taught how to teach, maybe they’re not, but it’s a complete academic role. But if you go for a DBA or a doctor of business administration instead of a PhD research-based type of thing, you’re more in touch with the practical. Then you’ve got to configure the courses differently and get the input from the outside versus research based. So I think it’s going to be a different pathway for faculty qualifications to do this.
But is it wrong? I wouldn’t say that it is, it’s just going to be different. And faculty who have come up through the traditional ranks, it’s going to, I think, going to be a bigger change for them than it would be somebody else.
Jeff Dinski: Yes, I think that’s totally right. And look, I think going back, like I think higher ed can learn from some of the things it’s done in the past, right, that I think will apply to these things. Great example, obviously if you take places like, most obvious one is business schools. Business schools for years have been using practitioners to teach. Certainly, some of the people who teach at business schools are academics and PhD and operations management or strategy, whatever the case may be. But a lot of those people, like I went to business school, a lot of them were they had worked at Walmart or Danaher or GM, or take your pick. And I think there’s already a model within a lot of these higher ed schools, I think lesser extent medical schools will do this some too. People were teaching in things like internships and then fellowships, obviously they’re practicing doctors right there, there’s a model here.
I think you’ll start to see, to your point about different types of professors, as we get some of these workforce training programs, I think you’ll see schools adopt that model more broadly out of like business schools. And I think that could be pretty good for all of us as well.
Drumm McNaughton: There’s one model that I’ve seen that I thought was just brilliant. It was a master’s program and they had their core faculty, their tenured faculty, teaching the base courses, the requirements, and then they would have adjuncts come in and the, it was the institution was located in Silicon Valley, they would have adjuncts who were doing the latest and greatest out in the valley come in and teaching the higher level courses to where they’re getting both the baseline knowledge that they need as well as what’s going on. To me, that, that seems like a really good model.
Jeff Dinski: Yes,. Yes,. No, that totally is.
[00:23:43] Financial Viability and Mergers
Drumm McNaughton: So we’ve also got a lot of things, and you alluded to this just a little bit ago, moving schools to being financially viable. We’re seeing a lot of institutions going out of business, finances are driving mergers. Digging back to your experience with Tyton, what are you seeing?
Jeff Dinski: Yes,, I think you said it . I’m not sure it’s that much more complicated than the idea that, we have, depending on how you look at it, a flat or maybe eventually declining enrollment base in the us. And then you have, for all the reasons we’ve talked about, the desire to more professional training. I think you also have people making different choices. I think you’re hearing more about apprenticeship programs. So as a result, traditional higher ed, even if you broaden out the population beyond 18- to 22-year-olds, I think you just have less people being able to pay for it. And so I think the reality is that doesn’t affect big state schools who have funding, who have scale. It doesn’t affect, rightly or wrongly, for really prestigious schools that are always going to have demand. If you look at sort of the US News and World Reports kind of acceptance rate and yield rates, it doesn’t affect the really prominent community colleges standardly, who have a really good product. because they have a product that educates really well for a relatively low cost compared to a lot of the other things in the market. And so who it affects, to be honest, is the smaller, private schools who maybe aren’t differentiated. And I think they have two problems. One is, not clear differentiation around value. i.e. There’s maybe not that much perceived difference between one or the other. And that’s why I mentioned the community colleges, because people think of community college sometimes as not being very great education. A, that’s just not true. But even given that, they have a clear, defined, differentiated teaching model in terms of where they are.
And so what ends up happening with these smaller private schools is they have two things, not a differentiated value. Then they have problem two, which is lack of scale. Because there is overhead at institutions, whether it’s a president’s salary or the football field or the student center, that is easier for you to pay for if you have 15,000 students than 1500 students.
And so I think what’s going to happen is, the demand impacts those schools the most and as a result, those schools are looking to merge and combine. And we’ve seen record numbers in that in 2025. I think that’s going to continue and I think, to go back to our broader point about higher ed being disrupted with Workforce PELL, and I didn’t use that word before, but I think that is what it is, and non-degree learning, I think in some ways that merging accelerates some of that disruption because by definition, when two schools merge, one or both of them is going to have to change or give up on some things that they see as sacro saint. And I think while that will be painful for schools, it’ll be hard for some alumni who really had great experiences there. It does get us thinking about new models. And if you’ve been forced to merge or forced to look at a different economic model, that also opens up your eyes. And I’ve seen this with presidents we talked to on, like, how can I do things differently? And I think the reality is a lot of, whether it’s presidents or faculty or provost, a lot of those people wouldn’t be asking if we need to do something different, if they weren’t forced to. And I think some of the combination of the economic challenges and then some of the consumer demand issues shifting, I think are going to force that.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, I think so.
[00:27:47] Strategy for Institutions
Drumm McNaughton: From where you sit, and, lots of experience in various areas of higher education, but also commercial, what should institution strategies be going forward? As a general rule, I know it gets very nuanced size, demographics of learners, et cetera, but what should they be
Jeff Dinski: If we’re being honest, I’m happy to opine in on this, we’re in a great spot where we have, 3000 customers on Ellucian and we’re super proud of it. I talk to those customers all the time, so I have one perspective.
There are certainly people who know a lot more about institutional operations and how you run an institution than I do, I wouldn’t claim to do that. But I do think it goes back to, if I were advising a school on thinking about strategy. I do think, and I’m beating a dead horse here, but I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s a bad point to repeat, I would go back to really two tenets.
One, can I look at creating new programs or revising my existing programs, to make them more relevant to the workforce that I’m pushing my students into? And that’s going to be very, for some places, I mentioned community college, it could be the local workforce. For other schools, it could be just a specific industry vertical that you play in. Whether that’s, fine arts and dance or computer science. So it’s thinking about, “Hey, where are my students going after school. And then how do we give them the schools that those employers want?” You hit it on it. And I think that’s where we’ve talked a lot about kind of Workforce PELL as almost isolate it from a degree. I don’t actually think that’s how it’ll play out in practice.
I think what you’ll see is students who are already enrolled in college taking incremental kind of programs on top of it to get those workforce skills. Like a great example like, AI prompting now, we could maybe make an argument that given how things have played out over the last three years, 19-year-olds don’t need help in AI prompting. But there’ll be other things that’ll come along and there’ll always be modern technology.
So I think you’re going to see people layer use those Workforce Pell grants to layer really specific skills about presentations, another great one. That’s something when we bring students in from out of college and hire them, like, almost inevitably they need help with presenting and all sorts of those things. It’s a real learned skill. So I could see schools doing some of that. So I think it would be one, think about where your students are going or where they want to go from an employer standpoint and tailor programs, even if they’re non-degree programs, around the skills that are going to make them competitive there. So I think that would be tenant one. That’s going to look different for every school, to your point, or at least most schools. Tenant two would be what I said, which is ultimately, and this is the hardest thing for me when I came from consumer media to higher ed, is ultimately you should be thinking about your students as consumers. And so we talked about one half of it, the “what your workforce needs” are implies what the content is. And then I think step two is to think about who your students are and think about where you can meet them where they are. This is no longer about like I come and talk and you have to come and listen because an 18-year-old will just as easy learn to change their oil on YouTube or play guitar on another online source as they will go to, medieval history class. And so I think you have to think about not only the content but meeting your students or your learners where they are in terms of format, modality, time of day, all of those things, and really reprogram your thinking to be like, “Hey, what is this base? If I think of them as my consumers, my customers, (even if you want to use it a different way) what do they need and how can I best service them? And I think if you do those things, you have a potential to really find a niche and excel as we go through what I think is going to be a pretty significant disruption to higher ed. And the irony of that is you do those two things and service them well, you may not need to change your model that much. It just may be tweaking some of the content and the modality and you may be able to continue with some of the same things you’ve always done. I think if you refuse to do anything, you know you probably won’t long term.
Drumm McNaughton: Very sage advice. Thank you.
Jeff Dinski: Sure.
Drumm McNaughton: Jeff, thank you. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this. I always enjoy talking abstract theory, things like that, but this was beyond abstract theory. This was some real tangible things that somebody who is originally from outside of higher ed, you see it from a different perspective. So thank you for sharing this.
Jeff Dinski: Of course, and it’s great being on, I love doing stuff like this and I know you have endless other people you could probably get to be on. So I’m very honored that you, allowed me to come on and talk today.
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. I appreciate that.
[00:33:04] Three Takeaways for Higher Ed Presidents and Boards
Drumm McNaughton: As we always do, two final questions, three takeaways for presidents and boards. What do they need to be thinking about in this age of disruption? I.
Jeff Dinski: Three takeaways. One experiment with non-degree courses. I think we talked about it.
Two. Find workforce partners that you trust. Because I said earlier about matching classes with workforce needs, that’s a little bit hand wavy, if we had more time, like that’s a high-level answer and it’s not a fair answer because you can’t just conjure that. So the way you do that is you find actual people who are hiring, and you talk to them. So find work first point partners you can trust.
And then I think three, think about how you encourage your faculty to embrace new models. Because I think what is historically going to be true of, US colleges and universities, and I think it will continue to be true for a while despite all this potential disruption worth on, and it is if you can’t get the faculty on board with doing stuff it’s hard to move the needle. And I think there are enough people that, as we talked about, early adopters or innovative thinkers that will, and so I figured out a way to make sure I’m working with the faculty rather than trying to work outside them, I guess would be the way I describe it.
Drumm McNaughton: Sage advice. Thank you, sir.
Jeff Dinski: Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you? What’s next for Lucian?
Jeff Dinski: Exciting time for us in a couple ways. We just completed the acquisition of Anthology, one of our competitors. So I think our mission. Explicitly Ellucian we seen is to power higher education so institutions can empower student success.
We really think of colleges and universities as our customers, but think about how we can help them drive what they really care about, which is the of student success, Whether that’s retention, graduation, or finding jobs like we talked about. And I think that is how colleges and universities think about it. And so I think for us it’s really exciting. We bring on almost 300 new customers that we’re able to help in that mission with our tools that, that we do believe are the best in the market. I think two for Ellucian, we’ll continue to see the rollout Ellucian Student, which is our cutting edge SaaS solution that we think is the best solution in the market. And you’ll see in April we’ll announce a bunch of big stuff there. It’s going to be capabilities and module based. So we’re really excited about that. And then I think we talked a lot about workforce and I talked just now about meeting students where they are or identifying the needs of your customers. I think that’s what we try to do as a business too. And so the third thing I’m really excited about in 2026 for us is we rolled out last year our sort of non-degree and continuing ed, corp management solution called Journey that’s designed to help start and run programs, exactly what we talked about. Non-degree, continuing ed, workforce power oriented.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s, that sounds great. I look forward to seeing all this new project and new toys coming out for our institutions.
Jeff Dinski: I’m excited about it as well.
Drumm McNaughton: Jeff, thank you so much for being on the program. I wish you and Lucy and all the best going forward.
Jeff Dinski: Okay. Thanks Drumm. Really appreciate it.
Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Jeff Dinski. Jeff, thanks. I enjoyed having you on the show. Great conversation, especially talking about all of the ideas that are coming from outside higher ed, so thank you.
For my listeners, thanks again for joining me. Look forward to seeing you next week.
