Strategies to Improve Student Retention Rates and Lower Acquisition Costs:

Changing Higher Education podcast 227 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guests Carey Dukes

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 227 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Carey Dukes

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Carey Dukes, an educational and business leader with over 30 years of experience in business management and higher education. Currently Assistant Professor of Management at North Greenville University, Carey’s career spans from having served as CEO in multiple companies to driving innovation and efficiency in large scale transportation operations.

Drawing from his experiences as a first-generation college student, Carey has become a thought leader in addressing student retention. One of higher education’s most critical challenges. And he joins us today to talk about a model that improves student readiness and retention and will give us some actionable strategies that can reduce dropout rates.

Carey, welcome to the show.

Carey Dukes: Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure. I am looking forward to our conversation. We’re going to have a great one on how to improve institutions’ retention rates, especially in those first years, which is always the biggest challenge. But before we get into that, please tell listeners about yourself and why you’re an expert in this.

Carey Dukes: First of all, I was an unready student when I started college 30 years ago. But eventually, I figured it out. I graduated like most of us, right? We just trudged through those first four years, especially that first year. But after I completed my undergrad, I actually got into logistics and supply chain, and so I spent 25 years in that industry, mainly focused around implementations.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, wait, wait a minute. You’re not a pure academician. That’s heresy to talk about these things.

Carey Dukes: Oh no, no, no, no. I’m sorry. I’m not up here. I get it. Yeah. I am coming late in life back to academia. Yeah. I always knew I wanted to get my doctorate and eventually teach, but I spent 25 years in the industry implementing change solutions for customers as well as internal and external customers. So I come from that lens of looking at things and seeing things that were really broken and trying to fix them. Then, I will use my knowledge and experience over time to try to make an improvement. So, when I decided to come back to school, one of the reasons I did was I wanted to be able to make changes, if there were opportunities for that, and I also wanted to teach the next generation. Here’s what is expected of you in the workforce.

So that transition, when I came back to school, it was really focused on from college to the workforce. What I found when I got back was I started to notice some of the same things that were happening in the eighties. I don’t know my age, but that’s why I was going to college. Are still happening with freshmen.

So I started to actually started working with students and trying to help them and actually had some success in helping them trying to mitigate the problems they were having with the transition. And my dissertation research was really tied around that change management idea and whether or not if we can improve readiness, the hope is that we can actually improve success with the transition.

So, I created a model around that, and we’ve done probably 5,000- 6,000 assessments to that end. I use that knowledge to try to help freshmen transition from high school to college, and that’s what I’ve been working on while teaching classes. So, they come in almost on a daily basis.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. That’s a fascinating background. I can’t say it’s unlike my own because I came out of industry as well, flying airplanes, spying on people for a living, et cetera. And when you do those kinds of things, you see things from a different perspective, you don’t, you’re not locked into. Gosh, I was having a conversation with, with you a couple of days ago and it wasn’t so much of thinking outside the box, sometimes you’ve got to break the box.

Carey Dukes: I would agree.

Drumm McNaughton: And so right now the big challenge we’ve got, the “big challenge”, one of the big challenges we have is we’ve got 59 percent of college students that don’t graduate within four years, 30 to 35 percent of those transfer after their freshman year.

That’s a huge, huge number, which we’ve come to expect in higher ed, except for one thing. If you had that in industry, your CEO would get fired in a heartbeat.

Carey Dukes: Yeah. If you couldn’t retain customers any better that, and my, and even the logistics supply chain, any industry. Think about the customer acquisition costs to recruit that person, knowing that 35 percent of them are going to walk out the door after the first year. In industry, you’re right, that would not be a retention rate you would be proud of let me just say that.

Drumm McNaughton: No. And, if you start looking at it through a Six Sigma perspective, that is way out of line.

Carey Dukes: And that’s what caught my attention, right? The 59 and the 30, those two numbers together, obviously the 59 represents that students are paying more than the four years that they’re expecting when they do their budgeting and the 35 means that the customer acquisition costs for a university, you’re not actually able to recoup that over four years. You better get it over one year because you know a certain percentage of them are going to be gone. And that’s an economic strain, especially to the private institutions that I, I work at a private institution, and I work with private institutions. That’s a real impact to them and there’s a lot of strain and worry in that regard, because customer acquisition costs and retention matter there.

Drumm McNaughton: We’re going to come back to that because I think it’s critical, especially from a financial perspective. You had made a comment just a little while ago, about instead of trying to work on when they get there is you start the preparation for this. When we talked about it, and you made the statement that the transition from high school to college is the real big challenge that they have. Tell us a little more about that, because I think most folks aren’t prepared for college.

Carey Dukes: Well, it’s so fun because I started researching and thinking about where the induction point is, right? Where’s the point at which we need to get the students on the pathway to readiness or preparing them for the change? And so my initial thought was, “Well, most universities have a first year experience program. Let me go there.” So as part of that, I taught some of the first-year experience classes. That’s not where it is because it’s a timing issue. The students are coming in and you’re taking them on a week-by-week journey through that first semester, but a lot of the skills, for instance, time management, time blocking, as I call it in the book, My tools is if you’re not organized and you don’t know what you need to know, as a senior graduating high school, if you wait till week eight of your first semester to learn how to manage your time, it’s too late. The horse has left the barn. Right?

And so I said, “well, where is it?” So I think it’s between that admissions offer and that high school graduation and or August 1st, for instance. Let’s work with those components of readiness because there are things about academia that are just different than high school. They’re not the same animal. And I can tell you from my own personal experience I thought it was great when I realized when I graduated high school that I only had to be in class three hours a day for my 15 hours. I said, great, I’ll go get two additional jobs, which is what I did. So, I had three jobs during my freshman year of high school, plus I went to school.

Obviously, I do not realize that college is a full-time job in and of itself because most of the studying takes place outside of college. I can tell you I have students today who think the same way that I did many years ago. They look at it as, “I only have to know when I’m in class, what I need to work on.”

I polled 50 students this fall and I asked the question the first day of class, “Okay. You know, your 15-hour schedule, you spent all summer getting ready to come here. How many hours a week are you allotting or slotting, for studying for these 15 course credit hours?”

One out of 59 had scheduled eight hours a week. That is all. And that’s what I’m talking about early. And that’s the first week and that’s your time to get ahead.

Drumm McNaughton: So that makes sense. Time management, we all know, is a critical skill. But there’s more to it than just that. So, what you’re talking about with this first year experience is that it’s not really going into the academic pursuits. You touched into that a little bit with the time management and the time blocking, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?

Carey Dukes: Yeah, they spend a lot of time, and the theoretical framework for that course for most universities is really built around building the community between the student and the university, with the idea that if they feel more connected, then they’ll perform better.

I don’t disagree with that, and I think there’s a value to that, but the reality is that at the end of the first semester, an individual is going to get a grade, right? He’s going to get a grade in five classes, and were you ready to attack those classes in a way that you could be successful? When I look back over time at the success and/or performance of a lot of first-year programs, I see that they seem to have plateaued in regard to retention. If it were true that the first year was improving retention, you would see it in the numbers where I don’t really see it, especially at some of the private institutions and even smaller public institutions.

Drumm McNaughton: I understand exactly what you’re talking about with that. My own undergraduate experience, I went from high school where you never had to crack a book, et cetera, et cetera, to college. But my college was a little different, the Naval Academy. Not only did we have all our military duties, but we were required to play sports every afternoon, and we generally took 18 semester hours, which was five or six courses, trying to do time management and learning how to take notes. All of those things is required for someone as a first year and you never learn in high school. That’s overwhelming.

Carey Dukes: Oh, it is. And you are in an environment where you were already structured, so a part of it was forced upon you. Think about a student that is a first-generation student or an athlete who has made it through college or high school, really to your point, not cracking a book now being exposed to that with no overarching structure for what their days and what weeks look like.

And that’s where I see, especially the athletes, they spend so much time preparing for sports and for their classes, but they don’t think about the time they need to be learning how to study, learning how to take notes. I see both extremes. I see some people who don’t take notes at all, and then I see others like, one I had last year had 19 pages of notes on the first chapter. That’s not notes, you’ve written another chapter, right? So you’re both of those are not conducive to being successful because you get inundated and then you don’t know what to focus on. So I spent a lot of time with the students and when I’m coaching them on how to do that, how to do a better job at that.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. And it’s not only first gen and athletes, but it’s also community college transfers as well.

Carey Dukes: Oh yeah. Exactly. There, there’s some of the same, whether you come from high school or whether you come from community college, that first year has about the same attrition rate in a lot of institutions, because it’s the same problem.

Because, again, depending on the community college, you’re going to a four-year institution with different types of professors, right? I spent a lot of time talking to my students about that because all professors are not created equal. They have different areas of focus, different things that are important to them. And it’s up to the students to learn what type of professor am I working with, or I’m being taught by, because it’s not enough to just be frustrated because you can’t get through to them. It is what it is. They’re either a research professor or, there’s three different types that I cover, and I go over with them to make sure they understand. That’s not right or wrong, that’s just the way it is. And depending on what environment you’re in, it’s up to the student to react and respond accordingly. It’s not going to be handed to them.

Drumm McNaughton: Nor it shouldn’t be but at the same time what comes to mind is these skills that they need to have going into the first semester, first term they’re there, these are skills that carry on into the business world, i. e being able to manage your time, to be able to think critically, all of these things. And that in itself is frequently discounted or just ignored in those orientation courses.

Carey Dukes: Yeah. We teach project management. I teach project management as one of my courses. So, I bring what I call the project management scope checklist into these freshman programs and say, “look, you treat every class like a project and you outline all the scopes, the limitations, the limits and exclusions, all of that for every course.”

Well, what can a student do with that? They can apply that to their first job when they walk out of college, right? That way of thinking where you build a solution around all of the things you’re going to do in a particular project and up to and including limits and exclusions, right? So, you don’t get yourself in a situation where you’re allowed scope creep to interfere.

So, these are not just collegiate exercises, they’re actually exercises they can use ongoing.

Drumm McNaughton: So let’s talk a little bit about this process and how you make this work with a, how do we, what do we call it? A readiness course? It’s not really freshman orientation.

Carey Dukes: No, it’s before that. Yeah, I’m working with students prior to them coming to the university, like the summer before. So sometimes either after they’ve been accepted, or they graduate during the summer. from high school, getting them to take the course.

 I’m going to do this every year with inductions of new content, but it’s really this year was a book. Next year is going to be a book video/combination because I’ve found that students are responding better to the video responses than they are just to the books themselves.

Carey Dukes: And then during the semester, I work with them, give them the books, and then I sit down with them and do one on one here at the university North Greenville, where I teach. And, and it’s funny because a lot of them ignored me the first week, and as I talk about in the book, academic Armageddon is between weeks four and five guys, you can believe it or not, it’s coming.

And well, guess what? We’re there. And my office is, I’m having to cut time out because I’m seeing them on a regular basis, coming in, talking about some of the things we talked about a month ago. So it’s interesting.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, academic Armageddon, tell us what you mean by that. We all have experienced it, but…

Carey Dukes: Yeah, I think about it in a way that’s different than the way most people did, right? When I started college, and I’ve asked this question of you, I’ve asked it of many people. Think about when you started college, four weeks after you start, what happened? Roughly those four to five weeks in that time frame, you’re going to have five college tests. And they’re going to be the first test you’ve ever taken in college. And they’re going to be structured in a way that you probably aren’t prepared for, and it’s going to look like a nuclear bomb went off in your grade book. And every semester, I see students, they come in and they say, “Well, I made a 32 on this one and a 46 on this class. So I’m just going to ignore those classes and focus on the ones that I have a chance to pass.”

And that’s why I mean, I want to get the students before the semester starts because by the time they hit the academic Armageddon week, A lot of scholarships are lost, right? Because they are not able to hold those grades.

Drumm McNaughton: And guess what? When they lose two out of those five classes, scholarships go out the window, but also, too, that adds to the cost that they have to pay, the length of time to graduate, the cost they have to pay. It seems to me like that one thing would do away with a lot of the student debt we have.

Carey Dukes: It would have to make an impact, but that’s where 59 are going longer than four years. This is where, because they’re losing it the first semester. To get out in eight semesters, I tell my students, look, it’s real simple math, 120 semester hours. You need 15 hours every semester for eight semesters. If you only pass three classes your first year, you’re either going to summer school, which means you’re paying for the classes, or you’re going to take 18 hours down the road, which they’re not going to do, or you’re going to do what’s happening, which is taking an extra semester to a year to get a four-year degree. And that is real cost. You’ve lost your scholarship, and you’ve increased your actual cost to be a student, to be able to get your degree. That’s probably of all the things I’m trying to address, that’s probably one of the bigger ones because I don’t want it to be any more expensive than it has to be.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, absolutely. So you’ve got in your book and your research that you’ve done and what you’re doing there at North Greenville, you’ve got a model of readiness. There are six variables. Let’s go through those.

Carey Dukes: Sure. Yeah. The first one is really the lead into all the others. And it’s “context”. It’s where are you coming from? And it doesn’t matter what your life story is up to this point. What matters is where are you and that you recognize where you are. For instance, did you have a strong family unit helping you? Are you the first person to come to college in your family? Whatever that case is, it’s important that you know because a lot of that leads into yourself belief on whether or not you think you can actually achieve this goal. Right? Because people make excuses for their backgrounds, or they rebel against mama or daddy wanting them to go somewhere. So, we spend time trying to understand what that context looks like for each student that we talk about.

The next one is “do you value this degree”? Do you want a degree? Do you think a four-year degree matters in the long run? And if it does, is it important to complete it as quickly as possible? And believe it or not, there are students who don’t. They come because they’re told to come. They’re come because they’re expected to come. Those are some of the students that struggle early on.

“Informational assessment”. Do you know everything you need to know to get through that first year? And this one, students really struggle with when they’re answering these framed questions. And some of them think they do, but then when they start to see the questions the way we frame them, they realize that they don’t.

And then the last two, the major two variables, components that are kind of tied together is, “Do you believe you can achieve this goal?”, and “Are you ready overall to achieve it?”

And if you have those two pieces, then what effort, and this is what stretches a lot of them is the final one, which is, okay, what have you done about? Have you changed your sleep schedule? Have you started to tie your time in with the day? And they look at me like I have two heads, right? Because, but if you’re trying to be ready for change, you need to be making the effort. to be ready for the change.

So those are the component variables that we measure, and then we provide feedback not to be pass/fail, good/bad. It’s to give them the knowledge that, okay, if you’re struggling with this variable, here’s where you can go to learn more about that. If you’re struggling with this one, here’s where you can go more. And it works both ways. There’s overconfidence as well because some students come from backgrounds, and they think they know everything. Well, be careful with that because college has a tendency to slap you right in the face sometimes when you think you know everything already coming in. So we’re trying to yeah I see students every day, and it’s about now when they start realizing in week four. They’re like “”oh my goodness”.

I had one come to me this week, and that was the case. He was all fired up the first three weeks, but that is not the case anymore, but he’ll be okay, cause we’re going to work through it.

Drumm McNaughton: What’s interesting is, and this is one of the things that I personally am not in great favor of with the dual enrollment is, you need four years, really, from an emotional maturity perspective, to be ready to go out. You’re sending these kids and many of them, if they’re commuter students, they’re staying at home, within a range or doing things online, that’s one thing, but those students who are going away to class, they’re probably on their own for their first time. If you don’t have that kind of structure to where you get up in the morning at seven o’clock, you don’t stay out partying or whatever until three and then oh my gosh I’ve got three minutes to make it to class and you’re hung over or whatever. You’ve got to have that structure put in place to help you.

Carey Dukes: Or you have to have fought that fight yourself to realize what is required of you. That’s actually how I look at it is I don’t see any of that as a failure. Because they need to be responsible themselves for their own ability to show up on time and be prepared. And you need those four years.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And with that, this is part of the reason, I’ll bet, that the most successful students that work with you, you do this between their high school graduation and showing up. So they know and can embrace some of these skills that you’re teaching them as they go forward.

Carey Dukes: Yeah, well, because it’s so focused on getting ahead. And it’s hard to get ahead when you start after the semester has already begun. Right? Because the getting ahead reduces the anxiety level of the students beyond belief because they’re not pressured. I’m getting them in now in week three, week four, week five, and they’re all tied up in knots because they realize how far behind, they are. Where when I work with them as high school seniors or during that summer, they’re a lot calmer because you’re always working from ahead.

And again, this ties to work, because I believe in this same thing when it comes to work. You don’t wait on a problem to slap you in the face. You try to get ahead of it by doing all the things you can to prepare. So it’s, these skills are transferable. They’re not just for college students. They’re also things I want to teach folks when they get out in the workforce. So yeah, you’re right.

Drumm McNaughton: yeah. So this orientation versus an introduction to college life. One is a building community of belonging versus the academic skills that are necessary. And when we spoke the other day, I thought you really described it very succinctly. You’ve got the academic, you’ve got the psychological, and you’ve got the critical thinking.

Carey Dukes: Yeah, I break it into three, those three parts. Yeah, there’s an academic component to college life that is just different from high school. If you think about the life changes you have over your lifetime. I don’t know there’s a bigger change from high school work you do to college work you do. It’s not the same animal.

And then you’ve got the practical. “Well, how do I achieve that academic success? What are some tools that can help me with that?” And then the psychological, those six variable components we talk about, that how your individual makeup and why that matters, and how do you improve those over time?

And then finally, the critical thinking, which is really, I call it continuous improvement. I always want my students to be thinking about how they can continually improve their performance in the classroom and ultimately themselves as individuals. What are some exercises they can go through? How do they do evaluations of their success? How do they measure where they were versus where they’re going? And by measuring those components and then really thinking about how I continuously improve this, you end up with a graduate that has all of those functions as a part of what they do on a normal basis. Which again, helps them in college, but also helps them outside of college when they get ready into the workforce.

Drumm McNaughton: So we’ve broken down the various components. Give me what a optimum program would look like starting with the student, the prospective student, high school to college or whatever graduates. What’s the program?

Carey Dukes: Well, I would, if you have a college student get accepted to a university, what I would like to do is when they are accepted and they know I’m going to that university to begin the process then of looking at this assessment of readiness. Start there, right? Go through the course, start the course, take the evaluation first, which is what we do, and then go through the content of the course, whether they’ve graduated high school or if they got the acceptance letter in March.

Start as early as you can to be prepared when the time comes. That way, if you do that, once you get your core, you get your course information a couple of weeks before classes start, you know to start then. You’re already ready, willing, and able and ready to begin your coursework before the first day of class begins.

So I actually would like to tie it to sometime between graduation and say July 1st, but if possible, do it at the time you get your acceptance letter if that’s where, you know, you’re going to go,

Drumm McNaughton: And so going through and doing the assessment piece, and getting a hold of your course syllabi, you know what courses you’re going to take, et cetera. But there’s another piece in there about how do they study? How do they plan their time? All of those things. Those are critical. So where does that fit into the whole model?

Carey Dukes: Once you have the model and you know where you are, then you start walking through the academic, the preparation, and the critical thinking content of that activity. So you do that on a module basis. You do it, week, one week, second week, and it breaks down. It really, it tries to tie all 16 weeks over the course of the semester you’re going to go through, but it’s condensed down. Because I don’t want this to be another textbook that you have to read, I want it to be more active and involved and engaged.

So that’s how I structured the first one. This new one, for 2025, it’s going to have the book, but it’s also going to have video content as well, where they can look and get answers to questions that they may not have had, but also ask questions that they have themselves, where they can reach out and say, “Hey, what about this scenario? What about that scenario?” And so we’ll respond back and provide guidance either where they’re in video form or in discussion form to make sure that when they walk into campus, they’re ready.

Drumm McNaughton: So let’s just pull a, XYZ university wants to build one of these programs on their own, they would start off with assessing where the student is, possibly using your material or not. Then you’d have to build a course around the processes that they are going to do from an academic perspective, from psychological and critical thinking perspectives. They should be taking that prior to getting to their first class.

Once they figure out what they are going to be taking for classes, then they would want to start digging into the syllabus and potentially even started studying the process. Understanding what it is the faculty member is going to want them to study, et cetera. So that when they walk into class the first day, they’re already familiar with the syllabus and they can start planning out their time to be able to overcome academic Armageddon in the best way possible.

Carey Dukes: Yeah. I advocate as part of that process, that once the syllabus is available and you have the books, then it’s on you as the student to start doing your readings, start doing your prep, because we have a particular way we do the reading and the note taking, and have as much of that done before the first class session as you can.

 That way, when you get there, you have the potential to really be two weeks ahead if you do that. Because typically you don’t do a lot of work that first week and they don’t start lecturing to the second. Well, that gives you two weeks that, guess what, no one else is working on anything. But if you are, then you’re that much farther ahead, your anxiety level drops, and your preparation time for academic Armageddon is two weeks longer than what everybody else’s time is.

And it’s been working with the students I’ve been coaching up this last year or so. They definitely see the benefit of it.

Drumm McNaughton: So what kind of results have you seen from this?

Carey Dukes: I have yet to have one tell me they did not benefit from it. I’ll give you an example of a particular student.

I got him about three weeks in, I was actually teaching him. He was a football player and he was absolutely bombing three out of the five classes. He’s kind of the same student that I was talking about. And we started going through this process of how this works and how he needs to start preparing. He not only recovered before the end of the semester, he didn’t get A’s in everything, but he made the statement to me that he wished you would have had me the first semester he was here instead of the second.

Because even though he went through the first semester and he bombed the second semester, he had not improved at all. But once he started going through this process of how do you take notes, how do you study for tests, how do you use project plans to do that? And then how do you start thinking about problems in ways that you can actually improve them instead of just letting things happen to you, how do you improve processes as you go? He had never considered that. Not only did he turn it around, but he actually came back without his football scholarship this fall because he gets to see me every week and we talk about these same problems because he said it’s a different way of thinking about college that he had never thought about before.

He’s one of them. I got a couple of other students that, they had never considered that there were things they didn’t know. They thought they knew what college was until they started going through the book and going through the sessions, especially with the informational assessment, and then all of a sudden, they realized how much they didn’t know.

And I’ll give you one more comment. In the book I write about different professors, how they think, like as a professor, we can write about them, how that, how we think some are very engaged with the one on one back and forth. Some of them, the closest you can get to them as an RA, right, because they’re research guys, that’s kind of their focus. And so I don’t want the student to feel put off from those professors. It’s just a different interpersonal relationship with some versus the other. And that was eye-opening for a couple of others.

Here’s the thing, and as it’s what I tell everybody. The book is what it is, but if you can get one piece of information from all of these pieces that I give you, as far as tips, tricks, whatever you want to call them, that makes your first semester better, then I win. That’s all I want.

I just want the students to improve. Number one, the students win, and number two, the universities win because there’s so many that are leaving. What if 10 percent of them stay because that now all of a sudden, they’re not only engaged with the community through first year but they didn’t lose their academic scholarship the first semester they were here, they were actually able to keep it. So those are some of the things that I’m striving for and I’m not you’re not going to solve all the problems because there are students who do come, they just don’t want to be here for whatever reason. But the ones that really truly do and they just don’t know what to do, that’s the purpose of it is to give them the ammunition they need to be successful. And we’re using feedback to improve it. Like last year’s book will improve this coming year’s book that comes out on November 1st. So as we go forward, we’ll continue to do this. Really. I see this as an every year project because I love this because I’m seeing active responses from the students and that’s what I really want to try to help.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Well, Carey, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for being on the show. You’ve given listeners a tool, a method to where they can improve their retention and more importantly to help students by doing it. So thank you very much for that.

We’re going to wrap up with our typical three questions. Three takeaways for university presidents and boards?

Carey Dukes: What is your retention and what has it been over the last few years? Is it getting better or is it getting worse? What’s it worth to the university to improve their retention rate? What does it mean monetarily, but also academic standing? If you’re able to keep more of your students, how does that make you viewed within the society, and especially in the community that you serve?

And then how well is the program you’re currently running doing in relation to trying to improve that retention? And if not, I would love to work with some other folks on trying to help solve this problem and get some different perspectives on it. So that’s the takeaways that I’d have. It just doesn’t feel like a lot of folks have measured that.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. What’s next for you?

Carey Dukes: We just launched our supply chain program here, our concentration on supply chain. So I’m focused on getting that up and running. The new book comes out on November 1st, so we’ll have that up, and we’re finishing up the last two videos for that book as well. So both of those pieces come together on November 1st and just continuing to teach students and the ones that I currently have and then the new ones that I’m picking up as we go and trying to make them as comfortable as possible with this transition. The next week or so it’s obvious I’ve got four tests in the next five days, so I’ll be hearing a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth between now and then. I’m sure. So

Drumm McNaughton: No doubt. Well, thank you for what you’re doing. And thank you so much for being on the program. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to hearing more about what you’re doing there.

Carey Dukes: I appreciate it, Drumm. Thanks a lot.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening. And a special thank you to today’s special guest, Carey Dukes. Carey, thanks for being on the show. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to chat.

Join me next time when I welcome Sunny Ramaswamy and Selena Grace from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities to the show. Sunny and Grace will be joining me to talk about the latest things going on in accreditation, including their pilot initiative on a three-year bachelor’s program, which they started last year. Join us for this one. It’ll give you some great insights on what’s going on in accreditation, both now and the future.

Thanks again for listening. See you next time.