Transforming College Advising: A New Approach to Student Success:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 248 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guests Scott Carlson and Dr. Ned Scott Laff

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 248

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

David: 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.

Transcript: 248 – Scott Carlson and Dr. Ned Laff

[00:00:20] Guest Backgrounds

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guests today are Scott Carlson and Dr. Ned Laff, authors of the new book Hacking College: Why the Major Really Doesn’t Matter and What Really Does.

Many of you know Scott through his writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he’s covered a range of issues for the publication, including college management and finance, facilities, campus planning, energy, and multiple other topics.

Dr. Ned Scott Laff has been in higher ed for over 35 years, helping students design successful undergraduate experiences at institutions that include Governor State University, Augustana College, Columbia College, and Loyola University, Chicago.

[00:01:02] The Concept of Hacking College

Drumm McNaughton: With all the challenges that colleges are facing, graduation rates and creating job-ready graduates are an imperative, and Scott and Ned joined me today to talk about a new model for student advising. How college faculty and staff can help students hack their college experience through a proactive, personalized approach to success.

Ned Scott, welcome to the program.

Dr. Ned Laff: Thanks for having us, Drumm.

Scott Carlson: Nice to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, it’s my pleasure. I am looking forward to a great conversation. You guys just released a new book called Hacking College, and before we get into that, and I gotta say that is just an interesting, very interesting title. I definitely want to get into that.

[00:01:49] Scott and Ned’s Journey

Drumm McNaughton: But before we get into it, give us a little bit of your background; how did you get to this point? Scott, I know you’re a writer for the Chronicle, and Ned, you’ve been in multiple higher ed positions. Give us a little background so that we know you as a person.

Scott Carlson: Well, I’m you know, I’m a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve been there for 25 years, covering things like the finance of colleges, the connection between colleges and cities, the effect of college on low-income students, and how students end up making their way through college, covered sustainability for a number of years. I’m just interested in how college interacts with society, and where it’s headed is part of my beat. And along the way, when I was writing about college to career, I wrote a report on that and wrote a number of articles for a year on that really intensely looking at that. I met Ned Laff along the way, who was sending me email after email saying, there’s a better way, there’s a better way.

So, I’ll leave it to Ned to tell that story.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks, Scott. Ned,

Dr. Ned Laff: Yeah, I have been working in higher ed for 35-plus years. And I take a different perspective on how we can work with students to help them better succeed at college. So I bring experience in curriculum development, developing learning outcomes for courses and academic departments, running interdisciplinary programs where students could design their own majors. And, of course, my own scholarly work in English language studies.

And what I began to realize is We weren’t helping students understand the university or the people they’re working with, and so if we could change the conversations we had with them, they would begin to see themselves within a system that offered them so many possibilities to help them achieve the kind of success that they hoped to have.

Drumm McNaughton: That really tees up our conversation really well because having been down in the trenches for as long as you have, you’ve seen things very differently, and there’s a lot of talk out there right now, especially from the mainstream media that, college isn’t worth the money, there isn’t the value there, etc. And what I hear you saying is we need to do a better job in educating students, not so much from an education perspective, but what are the opportunities for them when they get to college and how do they navigate that system more effectively. And yes, the system needs to change a bit too.

Dr. Ned Laff: Absolutely. Absolutely.

What we we discovered is that once students begin to understand what a university is about and how it works, the way they can begin to navigate it opens up possibilities they could never have possibly seen.

[00:04:52] Understanding the Empty College Degree

Scott Carlson: This is essentially what Hacking College is about. That what we’re writing about is the empty college degree, like how students go into college and wind up creating these empty degrees that don’t lead anywhere. They lead into underemployment, they lead to that job as the bartender, working at the Gap, or they may lead in a direction that the student didn’t really want to go in, but they just didn’t understand what the academic program was and where the possibilities were from that academic program.

What we’re writing about in Hacking Colleges, how to make this process more intentional so that the student is able to decide where they want to go and craft the path to get there.

Drumm McNaughton: And that’s right in line with the recent study that came out from Holt Business School. 94% of recent graduates have regrets about their degree and 43% feel doomed to fail because they chose the wrong degree. What I’m hearing the two of you say is, the premise behind Hacking College can change that significantly.

Scott Carlson: Yeah. Because a big reason why this is occurring, the studies that you just cited, well, the big reason why that’s occurring is because there’s this overarching focus on the major as the guiding principle. And what we’re doing with Hacking College is trying to take it out of that discussion. Most students come into college and main question that they deal with is, “well, what are you going to major in?” And so the students feel pressured to pick a major that seems to relate to a job or sounds like a job, or seems to head into some sort of high paying pathway of one sort or another.

And we’re breaking that down and saying, that’s not the way that you need to do it that, in fact, the major is minority part of what you’re going to take throughout your college career.

[00:06:33] Changing the Conversation in Higher Education

Scott Carlson: How do you take the different pieces from the college experience and weave them together into something that makes sense, something that can tell a story to employers and something that helps you enter this world that you’re trying to enter, not necessarily the world that the major supposedly leads to, or what the college thinks you’re supposed to be driving toward.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, that’s interesting, but I’m going to do, here’s my naysayer going to come out. Students when they first come, 17, 18 years old, if we’re talking traditional students, if it’s non traditional or a little older and they’re going to have more world experience, at least we hope they will.

Coming into college, how do they know what they want to do?

Dr. Ned Laff: It isn’t a question of how do they know what they want to do, what these students come in with. They come in with interests, but these aren’t just trivial interests. They’re coming in with interests that match their own, personal dispositions and their life experiences. It could be a student who had lung issues and discovered that riding his bicycle helped him.

And this is what he wants to center his work around, but there is no major called, “I have lung issues and I want to ride my bike to get healthier and maybe this could lead to a career”. It could be somebody who has an experience taking a medieval literature course and all of a sudden discovers that what she loves is the beauty of the manuscript itself with all the artwork around the edges of it. And so she understands what bookmaking is about, but there’s no major called “here’s how to get a job in bookmaking”. It could be somebody who has a personal experience. Like I came in under the type fee visa, which would allow me to have residency status in the United States because of the country I came from, but my best friend didn’t come from that country. We’re exactly the same. What’s the problem here? How can I get involved with this? Or it could be a student who says, I want to be able to help people in my neighborhood get loans so they could build businesses and so they could buy houses. Those are these interests they have, but there’s no major titled that.

[00:09:05] Real-World Examples and Student Interests

Drumm McNaughton: That’s interesting because I graduated from the Naval Academy. I had a physics degree, I flew airplanes and spied on people in the Navy. I jokingly say that but that’s what I did. And when I got out of the Navy I didn’t get hired by the airlines because I’d had cancer while I was on active duty, and that was back in those days, that was a complete disqualifier. So I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I did some project management work and things like that, did some consulting work, but then I went to a career, I call him a career specialist, he was a consultant with a very large consulting firm out of Canada, and he had an assessment process that he put me through. And he told me two things out of that and it was in depth, written thing for our interview, et cetera. And he said, “the area you should be working in is organization change”. And then he said, “you need to go back and get a graduate degree”.

And of course, I’ve never been one to do anything halfway. So instead of going back for masters, I decided to go get a PhD. And in the meantime, I realized I loved teaching. Flying was great, but it was a teaching people how to fly that really made the difference, hence academia. So I know exactly what it is you’re talking about, but that is going to require a major change to the way we deliver education and especially how we work with new students coming in from an advising perspective. Almost a new model, so to speak.

Scott Carlson: Well, a new model in a sense, but the major change part we would argue against a little bit. What we’re arguing in Hacking College, and one of the reasons why it’s called Hacking College, is that we think that a lot of these things can be accomplished within the structures that are already there at the college or university.

The main thing is that the conversations need to change. It needs to go from, “well, what do you want to major in? That looks like a great major. Here you go. You’re on your way”. Right? To, tell us more. We have these terms, hidden intellectualism, vocational purpose. We talk about wicked problems. We talk about the hidden job market all within this book in terms of how we frame up this argument. So, what is that hidden intellectualism? What is that thing that’s driving you into college? What’s that vocational purpose? Where’s the area where you want to apply some of your talents, where you want to discover and work on these issues that fascinate you in the world. And then how do you go out into the world to discover the people who actually do those things, discover the skills that they have, and then how do you design that backwards into the degree? None of this is about changing the college degree into something where it’s all like interdisciplinary majors or design your own program or anything like that.

We’re saying you can do all of this within the traditional structures. You just need to change the conversations that the students have, that it’s not just about picking a major and well, you’re on your way from there. No, it’s about looking at the actual world, looking at where you’re going to apply these things, realizing that the world is full of wicked problems, realizing that everyone does multidisciplinary in the real world of work. And so how do you assemble the multidisciplinary skills you need in order to enter these spaces, these hidden spaces within the world of work?

[00:12:19] The Role of Advisors and Faculty

Drumm McNaughton: What I’m hearing you say is the changes need to happen starting with the conversations with the student. What do you want to do in life? And how does your academic career, how does a program impact that? How can you take advantage of it? Does that make sense?

Dr. Ned Laff: Yes. Take, I’m good at organizing, I should be in organizational development and change. What we’re talking about is, you need to get below the level of the word organizational development, because the first thing that happens with students is they get somebody who says, “Oh, that’s management, and that’s in the business school, but it could be in psychology. It could be in labor industrial relations, it could be in public administration”.

And then when you look at how a college degree is set up, it’s basically broken into three areas, general education, with some of the courses possibly counting towards your major, the courses in quote unquote a major, which is generally something like here are the three required courses and now pick one from column A, one from column B, and then pick five more courses and then electives. But if when you get the question of, I have no idea what you mean by organizational development and change, let’s find out the people who are out there doing this. Let’s set you up with interviews to talk with them now to see what they would advise, what they use and the type of learning encounters they want you to have. All of a sudden the students then begin to make design choices among the courses that are in general education, courses in the major, elective courses. And how they weave together with the, their interests.

So somebody could be in psychology, right? But they’re not in developmental psychology. They’re in organizational development and leadership. And so then they could be tying together courses from public administration, some courses from the management minor and other opportunities that exist on campus. And then they can create opportunities for themselves with people in areas that they would want to work with, and they’re bringing in the experiential. So the students design their experience.

Drumm McNaughton: So what I’m hearing you say is when a student comes to college, university, and they go through their, one week orientation, this is almost, I may be completely off base in this, but it seems like that would be a really good time instead of all the tours that, a student goes through, et cetera. To sit down with an advisor or maybe a group of advisors from different colleges within the university to start to explore what that student really wants to do. Some of them are going to know already, but I would say probably at least half, if not more just have an idea, but it needs to be explored. Does that make sense?

Scott Carlson: Yeah. And I would say crucially in that conversation and something that we’re arguing in Hacking College is that, the possibilities for what that thing is should remain more open than how they are currently treated on a lot of college campuses. Because a lot of students come into the college experience with a hidden intellectual ism with this motivating interest that they immediately discount because they’re like, well, that’s not real. That’s not a real job. I love comic books, but that’s not a real job.

I talked to these two students at St. John’s University. I was there in the fall and I go for this kiln firing that happens every two years at St. John’s, and I always talk to the students, whenever I’m on any campus, I always talk to the students about “Well, what are you doing here? What’s your major? Why are you hanging out?” I ran into these two young men who said, well, I’m a business major and the other kid was an international business major. Business major sounds like a job, right?

But I said, “let’s put aside your major for a second. What are you guys actually interested in? Let’s say I could get you a job doing what you’re actually interested in”. Well, the business major said, “well, you know what I’m really fascinated by. I love astronomy. I think astronomy is really cool”. But maybe he’s not a science head, right? There’s still a range of opportunities in the world of astronomy.

The other student said, “well, I just love skiing. I think skiing is amazing”. Well, skiing is a multibillion dollar business. Global business. So how do you go at this, those things? Where’s your space in the world of skiing? That’s what we’re talking about with the hidden intellectualism and the vocational

Dr. Ned Laff: And the point that Scott brings up is important because if you’re at St. John’s or if you’re at Penn State, the Aspen Ski Corporation is not coming to your career development center. And unless the career development people are thinking that everything is business, and everything has a business aspect, there are the people who are the astronomers, and then there are the people who make sure the astronomers can actually do their work, and those are two different kinds of worlds, but you’re still in the middle of astronomy. But we’re not talking to students about that kind of granularity and those kinds of things in the hidden job market. Once we do, the whole nature of a college experience changes because the students perceive it differently. The system itself doesn’t necessarily change at all.

Drumm McNaughton: Something that, when we were speaking yesterday, that really impacted me was “engagement drives learning”. People have to enjoy what it is they’re studying. Just take the person that you spoke to, Scott, about skiing. It’s like you said, skiing is a multi billion dollar industry across the globe and you may not be the best skier in the world or you may be, and if you are a great skier, that gives you the opportunity to go in and start organizing ski patrols, the business side of the aspect, cause you can relate to it much better. Astronomy, the same way, there’s a lot, even if you’re not a scientist, I studied astronomy as part of my physics degree and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But was I going to be a physicist, theoretically? No, not at all. But could I have been a project manager, run an observatory? Absolutely.

Dr. Ned Laff: Or write, do articles on astronomy. Write for Science Magazine. Be on Science Friday on NPR Radio. The ski industry goes to who makes the skis, who makes the bindings, who makes the boots, the clothes. All of it. Who sets up the ski vacations? Who sets up the pricing? It’s a massive industry with multiple parts to it and unless students learn how to drill down into the granularity, they don’t see what’s actually right in front of them.

Drumm McNaughton: So in changing the purpose of advisors, and even faculty members to some degree because faculty members have a world of experience that they can impart, it’s upon us to help students see the relationships with what they’re doing in college, what’s going on in the world and how do their interests fit with that. Is that a fair statement?

Scott Carlson: Yeah.

[00:20:06] Discovering the Hidden Job Market

Scott Carlson: It’s a big part of discovering, what we refer to in the book as, the hidden job market. Now, of course the hidden job market is already a term that’s out there that describes the, four fifths of jobs out there in the world that you find out because you knew somebody. It’s your social connection kind of job market, right? You found out about this opening at this employer because your sister has a friend who works there and they told you about it, and so you were able to wind your way to it.

We take that term hidden job market and we give it a twist in the book to say that hidden jobs are not just those jobs that you get through social connections. We retained the term because often these jobs acquired through social connections, right? But hidden jobs are actually these granular positions that are out there in the world, that help the students start to see, “Oh, now I can see how I can connect anthropology or sociology to a marketable, meaningful role out there in the world. I can see how I can apply these skills to this specific range of the world. And I can see how those skills might transfer across to other possible jobs in the world, because I start to see in a sense the underlying rules of how the skills that I have apply in these different settings”.

That’s the importance of the hidden job market to us.

Dr. Ned Laff: And the other thing is if you connect with people in the hidden job market, then you start building out networks and those conversations open up further spaces to look at. For instance, “I want to be in film studies”. What are you going to do with this? Here’s an interesting question. “Who sells Chicago to the film industry? Or who sells the state, right? And so there are people who work in Chicago, and what they do is they find spaces that this would be perfect for the film that you want to shoot. All of this is out there. I once sent a student to see a movie, and then I said, what I want you to do, is I want you to read all the credits at the end of the movie, which of course we never do, right? He comes back in and says, there are people who are called location managers. What’s that? Here we go. Let’s start your research.

Drumm McNaughton: Which is a great segue and thank you for that. Ned, When we take a look at the various structures and the individual groups, you know, college, et cetera, there’s some changes that need to be happening, we’re not talking about completely reinventing college or university, although there’s many listeners out there who would say, absolutely, it needs to be. You’ve got different groups within there.

So what do the students need to do? We’ve already talked about discovering that hidden talent within themselves, what’s the world that you want to enter, but take us through the process that a student needs to do. And then we’ll go through the changes for advising and the leaderships of the institutions, et cetera.

Dr. Ned Laff: One of the things that students need to do first is realize that every person on the university campus is a potential learning opportunity. Second, they need to realize their faculty are not their high school faculty. They are all field of study specialists. So while they might be sitting in your class teaching you, they’re also part of regional, national organizations. They’re doing their research. They’re connected with people and resources across the country, sometimes across the world. And the next thing they have to understand is the difference between college and high school. In high school, they jam learning into your head. Every two weeks they push a button and out comes an exam. In college, you have to “get” your education. And the change of that verb is important. And in “getting” your education, you’re not following a sheet of paper, you have to design it. And that design comes from how you gather information, how you connect it to this thing you’re interested in, and it could be, I want to be an engineer. Okay, but I don’t know what you mean by engineering, because the field is massive. Are you talking about bioengineering? Are you talking about computer engineering? Do you want to build a better way to see farther into space? There’s all of this out there, but then there’s all these people who are doing it.

And you need to start doing this research literally within your first semester, somebody needs to be posing these questions and just like getting an assignment in an English composition class, they’re giving you an assignment for you to do, and you need to come back with that information so you can begin to piece this out.

Drumm McNaughton: So what I’m hearing is two things. First that it’s up to the students to use initiative to seek out first to view people differently, view them as resources for broader information than just your courses, so they’ve got to use that information, and then second, there’s got to be a structure put in place that helps to, I’ll use the term, awaken students to what their potential could be, what their interests are, so that they can start charting their course with their advisors and their faculty. Does that make sense?

Dr. Ned Laff: Yes. And this starts with asking these great questions. Most of the time undergraduates do not see faculty as field of study specialists. They usually don’t get to that point. Take psychology, right? Psychology professors all have to pay penance teaching intro to psych. But the person who teaches adolescent development is not the person who’s teaching cognitive, and the person teaching cognitive is not the person who’s looking at organizational psych. All of those are field of study specialties and generally you don’t see this unless you look up at the senior seminars that are being offered. So most of the time, the typical advice the students get, “Oh, you’re interested in psychology. Why don’t you take an Introduction to Psych class?” What this model would say is, “Here are these six different seminars. Sit in the class for a day. And then come back and tell me what you hear”. And that’s where they see faculty really strutting their field of study expertise. Now they have something, now they begin to see that this university is this massive organization of learning opportunities that’s spread across everybody.

On one campus. I found out that the Dean of Students was a golfer and had a golf show on the NPR radio station. As soon as students found out about it, about 10 of them were in his office saying, Can you help me with this?

Drumm McNaughton: Mm hmm. So it’s changes to, you know, the way faculty do things. They need to be resources for students and engaged in the advising the advisors need to be able to guide students to realize their vocational goals. And students need to use initiative to help this, because no one at this point, unless they’ve already read your book, which is in pre publication right now, unless they understand this, there’s no structure there for them to do this type of thing. Except I would say maybe 5 percent of the colleges?

Scott Carlson: I mean, the kids who do this, the students who do this are the ones who get lucky or they bring a number of resources from their background that allow them to navigate this intuitively. They have enough cultural capital, they have enough wealth, they have enough college background in their family that they understand how to navigate this process and get the desired result.

Our book focuses on students who did not come from families with a long history of college. In fact, I think almost all of them are first generation students low to low middle income students. So they’re coming in with limitations. Part of the power of what we’re talking about here is, you’re talking about changing what faculty do or changing what advising does, changing how the students approach the situation. It’s really about hooking into meaning with all of these things, hooking into what’s the thing that drives you, right? If you make that connection with the faculty member, not just on like, “well, you’re a faculty member and I need to talk to you to pass this course and get what I need”. That’s a very sort of transactional kind of relationship. We’re talking about a little something a little bit deeper where the students are connecting with faculty members, with people out in the world of work, with staff members on campus who have these hidden talents, these hidden interests on these areas that they both care about. So it’s where a passion meets passion.

And when that happens, you’re more likely to form like this bonding between the two of you. And you’re more likely to hit deeper topics within this area of interest that you want to hit. And the student is more likely to get additional resources from that person. “Oh, you’re interested in astronomy? You should talk to my friend. I’m an astronomy professor, but you should talk to my friend who works at this planetarium over here. And then he’ll hook you up with three other people”. And all of a sudden you start to build this network where you’re able to land with something after college.

Dr. Ned Laff: The other thing to understand is the university itself, a college or a university, is a massive corporate structure. There is endowment. There is fundraising. There is investment. There is managing the investment. There’s supply chain management. There’s human resources. There’s governmental affairs. None of this are things that students are introduced to. They’re introduced to, here’s the classrooms, here’s the basic majors, the cafeteria, the residence halls, here’s how you can develop a social life, but no one ever sits down and says, “by the way, Here’s this person who works in government affairs. This person’s job is to lobby the state in order to get support for this college”. Okay. Well, what happens if you begin to develop a relationship there and you’re working on that, what kind of world do you begin to open up and it’s on your campus already?

Drumm McNaughton: All of this makes perfect sense and I think you really hit on something with your ideas and the book. One of the things that really impressed me when we spoke a couple of days ago was internship and the process of discovery.

[00:31:29] Internships and Experiential Learning

Drumm McNaughton: Internships, as the two of you talked about, they are a way to validate people’s ideas on what they want to do, and it’s equally as important to be able to say, “I hate this. I don’t want to go there”.

Dr. Ned Laff: Right.

Scott Carlson: Yeah, a big part of the discovery in this hidden job market that we talk about is about the validation. So we talk about students in the book who want to go into spoken word. We talk about students in the book who want to enter the world of museums. And people around them saying, well, spoken word isn’t really a job. So, think about becoming a lawyer or think about going into business. Well, actually spoken word has a substantial job market. There are a number of organizations in various cities that work with spoken word on various things on youth development, on education and so on. So how do you enter that world? How do you open it up? That’s a, that was a validation for the student that was in our book.

And it’s also important for the students to enter that world, then see what it’s really all about. Because a lot of students are making these choices about their academic program on sort of a fantasy or on what the media tells them that the world is about or what their parents are telling them what the world is about. And it, it might not line up exactly with what they’re thinking. So going out in the world and discovering this is important for various reasons. I can tell you about students I’ve met who have gotten all the way through their programs. I remember meeting one student from Towson university was working at enterprise rent a car. I knew that Enterprise hired college graduates and she was driving me from one Enterprise location to the other Enterprise location where my car was, that I was gonna rent. And, I said, “so what led you to Enterprise Rent a car?” And she said, “well, I went to Towson for education and I was in the education program, got out, got my job at a school, and I lasted three months and then I quit because I hated it so much”. And I noticed that she had a wedding ring on and I said, “well, what’s your husband do?” And she said, “well, my husband also went through the education program, also got into the schools and discovered that he didn’t like it either. And now he drives oil trucks”.

So, part of the lack of validation, is part of what’s driving the underemployment problem in the United States. That is the empty college degree. That’s the problem with the empty college degree that we write about in Hacking College.

Dr. Ned Laff: And we tend to look at internships more as experiential learning opportunities. So just as I got out, education is horrible. One of the students we profile in the book is, “I love French. I think everybody should study a foreign language”. And from there used what we call this research investigative inquiry to go from Columbia, South Carolina to an incredible summer internship at the French Consulate in New York City. And that opened up the whole entire world of, “oh my god, the things that you can do with a French degree if you put the pieces together appropriately”.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, and I’m going to just toss out one thing that I heard from you gentlemen yesterday when we spoke. Advising has to change because if it doesn’t, one, we’re failing our students, but second, in just a very few short years, AI can replace everything that current advising is doing right now.

Dr. Ned Laff: Yes. Exactly.

Drumm McNaughton: So I want to thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I certainly hope that folks listen to it with an eye to “how can we do this better to help our students have meaningful careers and more importantly, meaningful lives”.

Dr. Ned Laff: Exactly.

[00:35:17] Advice for University Leaders

Drumm McNaughton: So gentlemen, as we always do three takeaways for university presidents and boards, what do they need to do? Cause this will improve their graduation rate and their surveys, and from a really, selfish perspective, probably their donations from graduates.

Dr. Ned Laff: And their recruitment.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

Scott Carlson: Okay. I would say the first thing is being open to change. One of the reasons why we wrote Hacking College as Hacking College, is that it’s a bottom up, a sort of a field manual for guerrilla warfare and higher education, basically. We wrote it such that people who occupy these spaces, in the middle or at the bottom of the organization can read it and understand how students get lost and then guide the students from there and part of the reason we wrote it that way was because we didn’t think that the colleges would actually change anything so that the students would really have to hack the system in order to get through successfully.

So, first takeaway, what I would say is if you’re a leader of an organization, you should be actively working to serve the students and getting the barriers out of their way. I think the second thing is that, one thing that we talk about in Hacking College is that college is a kaleidoscope, that there’s all sorts of ways of going at these problems, as long as the problems are represented on campus. And what we’re seeing right now is a lot of colleges closing liberal arts programs, reducing things down, and they have to do it for financial reasons, but it’s making that kaleidoscope less varied. So, that really does affect the educational experience. Not only what the students can access through the college, but what the students are encountering with each other.

Those are my two, I’ll let Ned do the other three.

Dr. Ned Laff: What I actually would suggest of a president is put on jeans, a t shirt, and a sweatshirt. Walk onto your campus, because no student is going to know who you are. Go where they hang out to have coffee, and sit and just listen. And listen to all the issues that they’re going to be talking about and take them seriously. And realize that, you change the nature of the conversation. You change the way students then learn how to make the system work. This is very much about students become active agents in designing their undergraduate education. Our role Is to help them learn how to do that and help them how to learn to use the system to their best interests.

If you come back as a president and see this, what you can realize is you can still have your agenda for research. You could still have your agenda for tenure. You’re not changing anything structurally at all. But you can learn to help students perceive the whole nature of the college you’re at differently. And that opens up possibilities you would never imagine.

Drumm McNaughton: And guess what? There’s 41. 5 million students who have stopped out from college. I would be willing to bet that half of those would not have done it if they really were engaged with their learning, if they were excited about it, and we had the support systems in place to be able to help them when they hit

Dr. Ned Laff: Yeah. I would like to end on one thing. We’re not talking about following your passion. We’re talking about clarifying your hidden intellectualism. Passion is the emotive expression of doing that. And once those two are put together, students succeed.

Drumm McNaughton: That is a great takeaway. Gentlemen, what’s next for you?

Dr. Ned Laff: Well, we have to write a primer, on, a handbook for how, here’s the 10 steps on how to do it.

Drumm McNaughton: Okay. That’s good. Scott, what are you going to be writing about next at the Chronicle?

Scott Carlson: So I’m doing the edge column now. So a lot of the edge columns will touch on things that are in the book or expand some of the ideas. I’ll be working on this student primer with Ned. And we’re taking the show on the road, talking to a number of colleges and universities about how this actually works.

One thing we put in the last chapter, how you would operationalize this. To some extent, we didn’t put in a lot of details because we want the colleges to really sit down and think about it and apply it to their particular culture. But helping the colleges think about this a little bit is one of the things that we’re going to be doing over the next year.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, gentlemen, thank you so much.

[00:40:09] Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Drumm McNaughton: I think this is at least for me, one of the most meaningful podcasts that I have done because I have a lot of great guests and you guys are right there with all of them, but this gives us a way to help students, and that’s the whole reason we’re there, to help students become successful. College is a place of transition, transformation and if we’re not giving them the tools that they need to do that we’re failing them and frankly we’re failing ourselves. So thank you so much for being on the show.

Dr. Ned Laff: Thanks for having us.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today. And a special thank you to my guests, Scott Carlson and Dr. Ned Laff. Gentlemen, thank you. It was a very fascinating conversation and I look forward to when your next book is going to come out. It’s going to talk about how to implement all these great ideas.

Listeners, thanks again. Look forward to hearing from you, talking to me about what sessions you’d like to hear. Thank you for listening.