Michael Oltrogge (Nebraska Indian Community College) on Supporting Students from Crisis to Opportunity

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Michael Oltrogge discusses the pandemic's impact on student engagement and retention, and the shift required to best serve learners today. 

Transcript

Voiceover:Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. On today’s episode, we speak with Michael Oltrogge, who is president of Nebraska Indian Community College. Michael and podcast host Shauna Cox discuss the pandemic's impact on student engagement and retention, and the shift required to best serve learners today. 

Shauna Cox (00:02):Mike, thank you so much for joining me on the Illumination Podcast. I'm so glad you could join me.

Michael Oltrogge (00:07):Oh, well, thank you very much for having me.

Shauna Cox (00:09):Yeah, absolutely. So we're here to talk about the lasting effects of the pandemic, especially the toll it's taken on student engagement and retention. And I want to kick off our conversation by asking you, how have you personally observed student engagement and enrollment patterns evolve or transform in recent years?

Michael Oltrogge (00:30):Sure, yeah. At NICC, our student engage engagement has changed since the COVID Pandemic. Our students before covid, were all coming to campus. We're a computer only school, so we don't have dorms or anything like that. So all of our coursework was on campus. And at the beginning of covid and after Covid, the majority of our students prefer and succeed more in remote meetings. So there virtual meetings at NICC before covid, we were incredibly small. We had about 250 students scattered across northeast Nebraska, like my Macy campus and Auntie Campus are about 120 miles apart. So about 25 years ago, 24 years ago, we started instituting a VTC system at our locations because my instructors certainly enjoyed teaching the same class three different times. However, that wasn't cost effective at all. So our students were used to attending at a campus with a big screen TV with a camera, well cameras later on, we had that we'd be able to have the instructors use to be able to find the students who were hiding off camera, that kind of thing. So covid hit, we found out right away that our students didn't enjoy traditional online learning, where it's all asynchronous. You read a book, then you post questions and you respond to other discussion posts. So our students do a lot better with remote meetings, and our enrollments have been up since NICC gave the ability to offer this education coursework during the pandemic. And right now our students are still heavily concentrated in northeast Nebraska, but we've got students scattered across the us.

Shauna Cox (02:21):That's amazing. So in the aftermath of the pandemic, different challenges resulted of that, and I kind of want to dive into them a little bit more. So what are some of the specific challenges, especially for a tribal college that they face in attracting and retaining their students?

Michael Oltrogge (02:38):Yeah. Some of the specific challenges TCUs continue to face in attracting and retaining students is that almost all of our students are low income and first generation students. Through the pandemic, many of us were able to offer reduced, heavily reduced or free coursework as well as additional means of support in the form of internet access laptops and counseling services. With the Covid funds ending, many of the schools may not be able to continue those programs due to the cost because before the pandemic, like many community colleges, the largest reasons we were losing students was due to transportation, childcare and work complex remote coursework coupled with the needed supports, have assisted in keeping more students, even though our overall attention rates haven't seen a large increases, but we're still dealing with the same low income student who generally wouldn't even attempt anywhere else. Some of the other issues that we have faced, specifically tribal college-wise, are the sharing of some cultural knowledges and things.

(03:51):Because on both of my reservations, and I can't speak for all tribes by any means, I can speak for what I've seen on the Omaha reservation and what I've seen on the EE reservation. So even on those two reservations, there are still some pockets of knowledge where there's arguments between the elders about what should be shared and what shouldn't be shared. I'm a non-native guy, so I'm all for sharing whatever. However, I remember one elder that was actually one of my assistants, grandma's, that her game was, well, damn it, we better just start sharing all this information to everybody and whoever wants to learn it, because otherwise it dies with us.

Shauna Cox (04:29):Absolutely. And I want to dive into the best practices. A lot of the stuff that's stemmed out of the pandemic might relate to finance and things like that. And so you only have so much control here, but what are some best practices to overcome some of the obstacles that you've laid out here?

Michael Oltrogge (04:46):Yeah, NICC, we are still heavily invested in the $1 a tuition credit, and that has no fees except for graduation fee when you're getting ready to graduate with your certificate or associate degree or a bachelor's degree. We also offer free text or course materials with every course for our degree seeking students who earn at least halftime. We give them a laptop. We have some shorter range grant funds to help assist with some counseling supports, at least through this summer, because we've noticed that the counseling piece, it's a healthy chunk as well as some emergency aid programs to help with students going through the, well, just for those students who need help with access in the internet for those students. Within the boundaries of the Omaha reservation and the Santi reservation, we were able to set up basically EBS programs or an EBS system that the college kind of owns, but we're in partnered with the K through 12 schools.

(05:48):So then that way, all the K through 16 schools who were attending one of the reservation schools, so NICC or any of the K through 12 schools, have an opportunity to gain access to the internet that way. That was actually some of my first calls in March of 2020. I just started calling the superintendents. Everybody did the first shock things like, oh my goodness, what are we going to do? And then I'm like, what are all these K through 12 schools going to do? Because I'm teaching their parents and I know what their parents, their incomes and things are like. So we're able to partner right away, and then that program will last forever. So what we've done at NICC to the best of our ability is we've just tried to plan in a same manner plan for things that we can make sustainable over the long term, like the EBS system.

(06:38):And then we also try to budget everything based on student need. We believe that most of our low-income students leave higher education because of the economic aspect, and we are still rationalizing, giving Pell funding scholarships, higher education dollars directly to the students, certainly helps free up time on their end to stay in school because that way they can take care of babies, take care of elders. They don't have to worry so much about, well, that was the reason I started paying for textbooks about a decade ago, because moms don't have to come in and worry about where am I going to come up with 400 bucks for books or feeding the family for the next month.

(07:19):So that's what we've been trying to do right now. I believe we have it set up at least for the current year. Some of it'll be to the discretion of my board, but some of it is also to the discretion of the students. If we can keep having, well, just fairly high enrollments, we are going to be able to get to a point where we're going to break even with our BIE money or be in support funds, so that way we'd be able to forfeit tuition to get paid in two years from the Bureau of Indian Ed.

(07:53):And then one additional aspect is the NICC had instituted two online instruction courses for, so if any student or strike that, any instructor who wants to teach more than one online course, it has to go through at least online, what is, it's like online instruction one, something like that. So then that way all of our teachers basically learn about the best practices of teaching, learning and engagement in online environments. And I believe that's helped as well. Some of the cultural aspects. I know some of our elders and things still don't like computers very much, but it's actually opened up space physically on campus. So if elders want to come in and meet, they have spaces to meet. Now, a lot of our students still don't show up to campus, but they'll show up to the remote that remote meetings, because we tried to go, well, we're still sitting about 20% on campus, 80% online. But we tried to offer that, what, three years ago, two years ago, and everything merges together where we tried to offer 80% of our coursework online, but as soon as our students figured out that they had a remote in option to the courses, the campus went from having students around for two weeks to poof, everybody's gone again.

Shauna Cox (09:14):Yeah, absolutely. And I wanted to talk about that with the evolving needs of the students, and clearly you guys are putting students at the center to meet those needs, which is so critical. But as the demand for online or hybrid learning models continues to grow, how can institutions effectively maintain a strong connection with their learners? Especially as you mentioned, there's poof no one on campus anymore. So how can they maintain that strong connection while adapting to meeting those evolving needs and preferences of these students in this new kind of landscape?

Michael Oltrogge (09:51):Well, like I mentioned, our students seem to enjoy rhythm, remote coursework. The traditional online coursework, like I mentioned earlier, it doesn't work for our students, so they kind of need a face-to-face aspect, even in a virtual relationship. We believe this type of education is kind of the wave of the future, even for those learners who don't work best in those environments. However, it's been recently, again, we've been trying to talk about how to get more students on campus, even just doing little celebration things, trying to go back to before Covid where we do like Christmas potlucks. Well, in this day and age, you can't call it Christmas potlucks. We have a holiday potluck, Thanksgiving potlucks, things like that just to help create some kind of a sense of community. One of the things that we've also been able to do fairly regularly with any in-person meeting is we always offer food, but that is still a holdout from prior to covid.

(10:52):Food is a great motivator, especially for our folks. So as long as we're going to have a meeting, there has to be food, and then generally people will show up. And so we hope to be able to do more of the just in-person activity types of things. And I know it's going to be a little more difficult for the students who, well, for example, who are in Arizona, but even for things like graduation, we've been trying to get it arranged, so we can't necessarily afford to bring everybody back, especially if they have large families and things to graduation, being able to provide some kind of support and some kind of assistance to help that student come to Nebraska to actually participate in one of our graduations, because even under graduation, we provide a lot of cultural activities. For example, drums, feathering, things like that. We always try to do, at least in the past decade, we've always tried to do things like almost in a arena. So everybody will enter in the circle and we walk into the drum and we will have our mc set up and our dancers leading us in. And so I'm hoping we can get more and more folks to participate in that because we, over the past three years, we've had larger student graduates or larger numbers of graduates than we've had in a long, long time.

Shauna Cox (12:24):What kind of trends do you anticipate in the coming years when it comes to not only student engagement, but also that retention element?

Michael Oltrogge (12:40):And I've thought about some of it, and I don't know if I have great answers, especially towards engagement and trends for retention, but some of the trends I do see coming are more virtual options. I also see our students will become more accustomed to 24 hour customer service, as well as being able to take court work at different times and location that fits their needs. We're having, we're developing our first bachelor's of science program, and so we're trying to figure out how to mix and match lab components in, for example, it's easy with our students on campus or close to campus, but it becomes, it's very much more difficult for a student in Arizona where are we going to get them an access to a lab or do we set up a short course for two weeks, so then they just take their lab during that time or what?

(13:32):So we're still playing with those ideas, but we do feel that customer service will drive student engagement and the student services offered will lead to attention in that same breath. I lost it. Oh, well, in that same breath, the counseling services, I'm still a firm believer that generally everybody, at least in the states, are going to have some kind of PTSD from Covid because I mean, everybody was affected. Everybody had some elder in their lives who passed away or even younger than an elder pass away. In some cases. Those elders were isolated for a number of years because we were trying to save them, and they passed away anyway. And so I think a lot of that will stem through. And then our students, they already face some historical trauma just from their lives and their culture, their cultural history. So I think all of those things compounded are going to be a definite need, and that's why we're trying to figure out how to mix the counseling services.

(14:55):And I also anticipate that some degree programs will be phased in and out a little bit faster. Specifically in regards to the AI situation, I'm not a doomsayer, but I'm still not 100% on board with AI yet. I mean, I googled my wife and it told me that she is some kind of an independent consultant for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when she's been human resource directors for at least four different companies. And it didn't mention it, but I think that'll speed up quite a bit. I also see some signs that traditional degree programs will start requiring less credit hours in the future, and the distinct possibility of some sort of short course credentialing system that will become more of a direct competitor with traditional higher ed. Most of our students, well, let me take a step back. Many of our students who are the 18-year-old age at NICC, we don't have a great number of those except for our dual credit kids, but most of those kids grew up with iPads and tablets and all of that stuff. So they're kind of used to the now, now type of thing. And traditional higher ed a now, now it's more of a marathon than a sprint.

(16:16):So I don't know if we can work something like that out in the future, but I do see some of that. We've been doing a little bit of that at NICC, but it's still not the short courses. So our certificates will lead to an associate or associate will lead to a bachelor's program, but that's just because of the nature of our students. We want to give people a stop out point. So if rocks in the road come up in life, you haven't at least an option to fall on. Then I did the same thing with my education. I started at NICC and I got a couple associate degrees, and then I got my bachelor's and master's and then the PhD, just because if I decide I'm not going to do this or if life changes the avenues on me, at least I have a credential of some sort.

Shauna Cox (17:05):Absolutely. Well, I think those pathways are so critical for students and learners and the traditional 18 to 24-year-old, it's slowly becoming the minority demographic in higher ed. So I think it's really important to provide a lot of different avenues for people for different things that can happen and the rocks on the road can happen to an 18 to 24-year-old and things like that. So I think that's really key to have, and it's great that you guys are doing that and providing that four year. That's everything that we have for you. So just to kind of wrap up here, now, you're obviously based in Nebraska, so you have a wide choice of options here, but we're going to need a restaurant recommendation from you. So if anyone is heading to Nebraska, where do they need to go?

Michael Oltrogge (17:55):Well, one of the things I would recommend is actually called a rza. It's a fast foodish type of chain, but they offer real bread. They make their bread every day, and then they make, actually, it runs a sandwich, so well, it's kind of like a beef cabbage mix inside of a bun. So yeah, up until really recently, they were only in Nebraska and they just opened one in Yankton, South Dakota. So,

Shauna Cox (18:30):Well, if someone's also in South Dakota, they can pop by that. Amazing. It sounds delicious. Mike, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Michael Oltrogge (18:38):Wonderful. Thank you very much for your time, Jonna, Shana, sorry, and have a great day.