#CIORadio | Ian Wilhelm (The Chronicle of Higher Education) on Managing Change in a Volatile Environment (live @ Educause 2022)

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, guest host Sharon Schwarzmiller was joined by Ian Wilhelm to discuss the looming challenges in store for higher education and how to stay innovative successfully in a volatile environment. This episode was recorded live at Modern Campus's Educause 2022 booth in Denver.

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(00:04) Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. We’re continuing our CIO Radio series, where we speak with technology leaders about the trends and challenges reshaping our increasingly digital space. On today’s episode, we speak with Ian Wilhelm, Assistant Managing Director, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Speaking live at EDUCAUSE, Ian and podcast guest-host Sharon Schwarzmiller discuss the looming challenges in store for higher education and how to stay innovative successfully in a volatile environment. 

(00:39) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Hello everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the Illumination Podcast. This is our CIO radio series. I'm here with Ian Wilhelm. Who’s Assistant Managing Editor of The Chronicle Intelligence for the The Chronicle of Higher Education. So welcome Ian. Thank you for joining us. 

(00:55) Ian Wilhelm: Thanks for being here.

(00:56) Sharon Schwarzmiller: So we are recording here live at EDUCAUSE, which you may hear a little bit of background noise. There's a buzz. There's definitely a buzz. So how has the conference been for you so far?

(01:07) Ian Wilhelm:  It's been good. I mean, it's good to get back and seeing people in person. It's good to have those conversations in which we can touch base from some of these big topics and in higher ed that are facing the CIOs. For us, we certainly had a lot of virtual meetings, I'm sure like you have and the rest of the world has had. But it's nice to see us getting back to something closer to normal. I'm not going to knock on wood to make a noise, but I will say that it's you, we'll see how things go, but it's been good to kind of get back in touch base with folks. 

(01:38) Sharon Schwarzmiller: That's good. Now, were you able to attend any of the sessions this morning at all?

(01:38) Ian Wilhelm: I attended zero sessions practically because I basically had meetings. Though I did have some Chronicle colleagues who were presenting today.

(01:44) Sharon Schwarzmiller: All right. So tell me, actually, this is really interesting. So can you explain a little bit to me about the work you do with Chronicle Intelligence?

(01:50) Ian Wilhelm: Yeah, no, I appreciate that clarification. Chronicle Intelligence is a unit within the Chronicle of Higher Education that was created a number of years ago to look differently at how we cover the space of higher education. And what I mean by that is like, you know, the Chronicles been around for over 50 years where a news organization we're journalistically focused. 

(02:08) But we wanted to have a team that is not driven necessarily by the Daily News or trying to cover the daily news or the weekly news or what have you, but look more deeply at the trends and the challenges that are facing higher education and really do a better job of talking about how can we help them in their jobs, how can we help them in their careers? And do that in different forms as well. So we heard from our audience that, hey, this would be something helpful for them to be a little bit solutions oriented, for lack of a better phrase. And so that's part of what I work on. It's sort of an extension of what I did out of the newsroom. So I am still an editor within the newsroom. And, but in many ways I still focus on some different things, longer term trends, arguably, and producing different types of reports actually producing virtual forums and other types of in-person events as well.

(02:52) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Excellent. So are there any themes that are emerging for you more consistently now?

(02:56) Ian Wilhelm: Yeah, I mean, I think certainly now we're in this space where the pandemic was to borrow a cliche was an accelerant to many challenges. Certainly here we talk about a lot about the digital transformations that people have talked about for years. And now it's sort of was somewhat accelerated by the pandemic. I think the challenge is, I'm hearing a lot about, okay there's a bit of snapping back to normal colleges want to go back, understandably I don't want to speak with too broad a brush for that. It affects everyone. But there was an emphasis here on going back to what they know, I think in many ways. And so how do you kind of, as a leader, how do you kind of keep on moving forward, your institution? Because the pandemic was one challenge. And hopefully were, were past the major disruptions that caused, but there are other challenges looming pretty, you know, close on the horizon.

And like the democratic cliff, certainly the enrollment challenges we're already seeing. And so big other challenges, and so how you kind of get back to trying to be innovative on your campus. How do you kind of transform, how do you kind to set strategy in a time when things are so volatile? On top of that, when you have your students who are really facing a mental health crisis, you've got your faculty who feel really burnt out. I heard from a CIO yesterday of Boden College Michael Cato, who used a bar to phrase from his present. He said, everyone feels extra crispy. And you know, and I think we all kind of feel that in a way. And it's not going away. We're hoping that it was going to go away, but things are still volatile. Look at the economy, we don't know where that's headed, and that's certainly going to affect things from high in higher education. So I think for me, as I think a lot of the leaders are thinking about, Hey, how do we keep on moving ahead while acknowledging we face some real deep challenges when it comes to change management?

(04:29) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Yeah. And I think we feel it, whether we're in higher ed or we're in higher ed tech, we feel all of that. I think it may be hard to even ask this question and pull out the pandemic, but since you've been doing work with the Chronicle since 2010, I believe, what are some of the most dramatic shifts that you've seen? If you can extract out the pandemic, it's hard to do that.

(04:54) Ian Wilhelm: I also appreciate the question in a couple different ways. One, I appreciate trying not to focus too much on the pandemic because I think we need to get past the pandemic talk and focusing in on it only. And then two, I appreciate the question because it gave me an opportunity to kind of reflect both on how long I've been an observer of higher ed. And it's been you know, a decade here. And to kind of take a step back and say, what would I call out? And it's hard to get away from the loss of public trust. And what is the perceived public value in higher ed? It's a big complicated story. It has many facets to it. It has certainly has a political facet to it. We have a governor who decides that higher education is a target and it's one that he can get elected on it practically.

We have a congressman who's running an Ohio says academics are the enemy. Some of these are resurgent of previous ideas. But just to focus on the political attacks, I think undermines or would underplay the other part of it, which is really this concern from students and families that is the value of higher education still there. Certainly, there's a big question about affordability. Certainly there's a big question about the student loans and obviously the Biden administration has made a big statement about that in terms of trying to alleviate that challenge. And it's being challenged in court. But I think the undermining concern is do people think of higher ed as being worth it anymore? The empirical data says, yes it is. It's worth having an associate's degree. It's worth having a bachelor's degree. When you look at earnings solely, and I mean this not to be crass in the sense of only looking at earnings, but that's one of the empirical ways you can do it.

But on the other hand, why is the perception out there that continues to drop in American public that the higher education is not worth it—may not be worth the effort. And so I think that's a huge difference perhaps than 10 years ago. I think some of those, certainly some of those concerns about costs were there and certainly there were concerns. Some of these political attacks were still there as well. But in the space that we're now in, seems to be much more ratcheted up and how you fight that. And we hear from college presidents, that's a very hard thing to push back on. It's a very hard thing to try and change that conversation, especially when the data is on your side, but you hear again and again, Hey, I'm not sure higher education is for me. And there are alternative paths that have been created. And that's a whole other thing that sort of developed alongside this too, we could talk about. But to me that was the big change. And I don't think it's necessarily a surprising one in the sense of that most people are seeing this and talking about it. I think solutions for that are hard to find though.

(07:24) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Yes. And I think, I feel like I read a new op-ed every three weeks that gives ideas on how to solve that. But obviously I think it depends on the institution and what you're going through and really the student base, which is really an interesting question I want to lead to. So there are a couple of podcast interviews I've had the pleasure of doing today. A couple CIOs said they attended this morning's session where EDUCAUSE puts on some of it or releases some of its research around trends. 

(07:56) Ian Wilhelm: Oh, it's trends report. I did read that and I certainly, it's a valuable piece of information for the Chronicle as well. 

(08:07) Sharon Schwarzmiller: So I'm interested in, maybe you had a chance to read it. Did anything stick out to you from that?

(8:07) Ian Wilhelm: Yeah, certainly it did. And I've actually been borrowing this phrase when I first saw it come out. Susan Grajek, who works at EDUCAUSE is someone I've worked with before and certainly respect her thinking on this. She had a really nicely framed idea in it that it dovetails a little bit with loss of public trust and, and the perceived value. But moving from student success to student’s success, that's an apostrophe as their folks who are listening on the podcast. But that idea, that personalized approach and certainly that dovetails very much with what lots of companies and the tech world are thinking about and have been thinking about. I think higher ed is very far away from a personalized, customized approach to solving or to serving students. I still think it has a long way to go in that area. 

(08:50) And so as a cynical journalist, I'm a little skeptical. But I mentioned that to someone else who had both worked in higher education and now works at a tech company. But they said, isn't it amazing that higher education is focused in talking about that way that we really would like to get to a point where we're not putting students in say, separate categories. Oh, this person's an adult student that's a non-traditional category. Let's talk about non-traditional needs for this student. Oh, this is a traditional age student. They're coming from this type of background. They go into this category instead of saying, no, this is an individual student who has individual needs and we need to be able to solve for that. And we certainly, our technology needs to be able to solve for that as well. Right. Because as everyone knows, they're used to getting one click and getting something quickly from Amazon or wherever. So to me that was really significant. And I guess, and I want to give a credit to Susan again for that nice framing of that. Because we're seeing that. 

(09:4!) And just to pin it back to my previous idea of the loss of public value, I think that's part of how you help solve for that on an individual basis. Again, I think that's a larger issue and a different issue in some sense. But the idea of making to a student, Hey, we do have a place for you and it's individualized to you and we're going to articulate the path that you want to see through your education to a career in a very clear way and not put those hurdles in your way. We're going to try and clear out as many hurdles as possible. 

(10:08) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Yes. Which I heard loud and clear from that report as well, which is reduce the friction and some of this personalization can help to add to that. And you're right, the perceived value to the individual will, in theory should eventually increase value amongst the masses. All right, well good. So all of this is intertwined, but we've all seen the following enrollment numbers across the post-secondary space over the past few years and we didn't necessarily see the recovery that we may have hoped for with these fall 2022 numbers. Why do you think that is? 

(10:41) Ian Wilhelm: Yeah, it's a really tough question to answer. I do think, obviously it touches back to what we just talked about when it comes to the loss of public, of perceived loss of public value and in higher education. I do think we heard the other week, and I should again, give some sourcing as a journalist to a former colleague Jeff Selingo who writes a lot about this. But he pointed out in a piece for the Chronicle that institutions now not only need do they need to sort of sell themselves to the student. They need to sell higher education to the student. And again, maybe let's talk about those alternative providers. And there there's alternative paths. There are now out there. You do see an increase in the number of employers who say, we're going to waive what was previously, previously a requirement for a job that is a bachelor's degree or maybe an associate's degree.

We're going to waive that. I don't want to oversell that because still the majority of employers are still going to be asking for the bachelor's or asking for some sort of type of degree or credential. But I think that's significant in the sense that higher education does not necessarily seem the only path. Of course, it never was the only path or other paths, but now it seems like those paths have really multiplied. And so that's another place. And certainly again, the job market has been hot. People have been looking for jobs and they've been able to find those jobs. So the thing I am looking forward to the year ahead, we may be facing a recession in this country and typically it's a little bit counterintuitive, but during a recession, enrollment goes up.

(12:08) As people sort of say, okay, I'm going to hold off on my career path. I'm going to look for other ways to scale up because I'm not finding the jobs I want. People had predicted that frankly when the pandemic first hit, and it didn't happen. Community colleges, where that usually has that bump they did not see that they saw a drop. They're recovering slightly from that, or at least it’s not as bad as it was. But that's, that's one question that I will certainly be watching the Chronicle to see has any affect. But again, the larger term trend though is certainly fewer traditional aged students as we faced what has been called the demographic cliff that is there. I mean, there's fewer number of high school graduates in This country because the birth rate decreased.

(12:46) Sharon Schwarzmiller: That's right. All right. Interesting. And I think, again, and I keep laughing because you're almost easily making it flow to the next question. So you just talked about some of the directions that we're headed. What other key trends are you and your team, the Chronical Intelligence, are kind of watching?

(13:08) Ian Wilhelm: You mentioned, well we talked a little bit earlier about the student mental health challenges and it's pretty acute and it's not going away. If you look at some of the data that's come out from the CDC about concerns about high school students partially this was driven by the pandemic and somewhat isolation they may have felt. But those numbers about of folks saying the experience anxiety or depression you know, that's going to probably increase. And so you see colleges and you see this reflected in some surveys of college presence where they say, this is our top concern. And how do you kind of make sure you're looking at the spectrum of what those students need. They're the very acute needs of someone who say is considering suicide. That's a very, very big challenging, very different moment than say the student who's saying, I'm anxious about my grades.

But all that spectrum, you have to be able to solve for that. And they don't necessarily have the capacity for it. And so there are obviously, you know, we're at a tech conference. There are some tech companies that are doing more about that. Doing some better integration with some areas to make sure that they know they can provide, say virtual telehealth as one aspect of that. But we certainly see this affecting the faculty as well as faculty. Were really on the front lines during the pandemic providing some sort of support for the students. And we hear that again and again, that faculty say, Hey, we're not necessarily trained for this. Certainly there have been some trainings on campuses but they themselves feel like, hey, we're feeling stressed out and we're trying to help our stressed students. 

(14:30) Sharon Schwarzmiller: That's what I was going to say. I know the faculty themselves have felt some of that burden and some of that anxiety themselves because of what they're trying to do to help that student body.

(14:39) Ian Wilhelm: Yeah. And then just getting them—what is the role they should play? Many of them want to play a role in helping that student, at least, if not direct help pointing them in the right direction. You know, we've heard small ideas like just putting on your syllabus, here's how you get in contact with the mental health resources that are available on the campus. Or if you need help contact a peer. Cause many students would prefer to talk to a peer than say a faculty member or a person on staff. So, you know, there are lots of small things that can maybe add up to a bigger thing where we can take on what is, you know, people have described as a crisis. And I think that's fair.

(15:11) Sharon Schwarzmiller: That's fair. So that's is that's one of the things that's on kind of on your mind? 

(15:15) Ian Wilhelm: That's one of the big issues on our mind. I think certainly some of the things we talked about, how the student success continue to be and that's adjacent to that perhaps. Certainly the things that we hear at the conference as well about the, I'm not in love with this term of digital transformation, but everyone uses it. Right. But how do we talk about that? How do we talk about other vague terms like innovation? But I think a really important conversation to have and how you kind of continue to have those conversations. Because again, the pandemic, and this is again well-known, has proven that higher education can change and can change very quickly. That's when it had a very acute emergency to deal with. Can it change when the emergency is still very real but perhaps feels less urgent because it's not such one that we're writing, you know, hearing about every day perhaps. And so I think that's part of the challenge and how they set that strategy to do that. It's something that we'll be keeping an eye on as well. 

(16:10) Sharon Schwarzmiller: It's interesting to watch institutions manage the change back and forth because I don't think they've had to do change management the way they have over the past two and a half years to quite the degree. They've had to be very quick, but they, but they handled it.

(16:29) Ian Wilhelm: They did. Yeah. And then I don't, and it's easy. And again, I put on my cynical journalist hat and that's kind of the terrific cliche as well. But I do want to say, Hey, let's also take a pause and say, wow, what, what an amazing job for the most part that they did. There were lots of things I think they fell down on. But on the other hand, I think for the most part, I don't think anyone could have predicted the pivot to online, the way they provided support. How do they found out, hey, there were some real big technology gaps that their students face. They didn't have the laptops or the wifi. Let's put a wifi in the parking lot. Let's put some wifi in a bus and drive it around. I mean, some amazing kind of innovative ideas.

And I think that type of innovative thinking is going be required going forward to solve some of those bigger long-term structural challenges as well. And I also want to mention, another area that came up with the conference, is the hiring challenges. And that's a huge one in it. And we did a survey and it showed that it was the biggest area. And I think that's not surprising in part because it workers have a lot of options. It's not just a higher ed job, obviously, it's a job for every corporation in the world, every government. And so they have options and if they higher education's not willing to offer a hybrid workplace it workers are happy to go someplace else that does. And that's just one example. But that's an area I'll be curious too. If the job market starts to slow down and people have some employee employees have some left choices, workers have fewer choices does that lead to higher ed that hiring crunch actually improving for higher ed? And I'm not quite sure that because the economy seems so admitted. It's so hard and complicate complicated to predict. But that's one area we'll be looking at

(17:56) Sharon Schwarzmiller: And I heard the same thing about just the hiring challenges for IT folks. And that's across the board because we talk about it too. But you can definitely see where in the higher ed space given especially like in the community colleges where, let's say across the board really, wherever you're just in a little bit of a different situation with how much you can pay. But there are also other parts of the package of being in higher ed that are outstanding, right. That you can offer. And just seeing how that shift will impact the potential employees out there will be interesting to watch.

(18:39) Ian Wilhelm: Well, that's the traditional offer higher education has had is, hey, we're not going to pay as much, but we offer what is a community. We offer you to come to a campus where you’re going to be surrounded by a lot of eager students and interesting people potentially. You're going to come because of the mission. Ultimately some of that is also offering some good benefits.

(18:59) But what we're hearing from some folks and managers in higher ed is that that's not competitive anymore. That higher ed has lost its luster a bit. And that mission driven type of sell for the college may not be there. Which again ties back to the original point. Has there was something also been lost in terms of just the perception of higher ed? Again, I think it's easy to lump all of that together. I think there are some things, hey, if you know higher ed can offer a hybrid workplace and better salaries, some of these problems would be solved. 

(19:26) I don't want to say that the mission-driven interest in higher ed has gone away anywhere. I think there are lots of people who would want to work in the industry, want to work in the field because of its mission and because of its ability to serve students and certainly create knowledge and research for the world.

(19:44) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Yeah. I mean that's why I'm here.

(19:46) Ian Wilhelm: Exactly. That's why most people are here. 

(19:49) Sharon Schwarzmiller: I mean, we love it. And that's a good spot to turn, right? So after every Illumination podcast, we ask the same question of the people that we have the pleasure of interviewing like yourself. And that question is, if someone is going to go to dinner in your hometown, where would you tell them to go?

(20:12) Ian Wilhelm: My hometown is Washington DC. I would tell them to go over to Adams Morgan, which is my old area not too far from where I used to live and where I grew up. And there's some amazing Ethiopian restaurants. They've been there for a long time. DC has become much more of a foodie town than when I was a kid. And so, there are probably lots of great restaurants like Rose's Luxury that have won some awards. But if you're going be in town, I say go try some Ethiopian food because it really is…there's some great places over in Adams Morgan in the adjacent neighborhoods that I think that sort of shows a little bit of a different flavor than you might get at some of those other restaurants. Go over there. Check it out. You get to eat with your fingers. My kids love it too. 

(21:01) Sharon Schwarzmiller: That's great. Ian, this has been wonderful. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Appreciate joining us here and thank you all for listening to CIO Radio through the Illumination podcast series. Bye now.

(21:13) Voiceover: This podcast is made possible by a partnership between Modern Campus and The EvoLLLution. The Modern Campus engagement platform, powered solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement and development, conversational text messaging, career pathways, and campus maps and virtual tours. The result innovative institutions can create learner to earner life cycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency. To learn more and to find out how to modernize your campus, visit moderncampus.com. That's moderncampus.com.