Angie Kamath (New York University) on Higher Ed’s Strategy to Thrive Amid Disruption

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Angie Kamath to discuss digital transformation in higher education and the opportunities ahead to meet various demographics. 

Transcript

 Shauna Cox (00:02):Angie, welcome to the Illumination podcast. I'm so glad to be chatting with you again.

Angie Kamath (00:06):Thank you so much, Sean. It's really wonderful to see you and happy New Year to yourself and the listeners. It's great to be here again.

Shauna Cox (00:13):Yes, happy New Year. So new year, same old challenges, but we're going to try to navigate through them and we are here to talk about those declining enrollments, digital transformation, and that competition that seems to be still there in higher ed, but hopefully we can carve a new path forward and get through some of those hurdles in 2025. So I'm going to kick off our conversation and ask, what do you see as the most significant opportunity for universities to evolve and embrace a lifelong learning model that's going to support students throughout their ever changing careers?

Angie Kamath (00:50):Great, and big question, and thankfully I'm an optimist. So while we've all been reading the demographic cliffs and the kind declining enrollments, I think that there's a lot of opportunity. It's going to require us, and I'm sure it's going to come out in this conversation, it's going to require those of us in higher ed to kind of think differently and be much more flexible. But for every kind of problem there's an opportunity. And so the three areas that I think are significant opportunities, there're really kind of three different demographics. So I think a lot, maybe it's motivated by the fact that I've got a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old at home, but the young adult career exploration market, skilling market, the kind of helping young people really think about that college, that high school to college and college to career transition, it is a huge opportunity.

(01:40):I'd go so far as to say, Shauna, that it's an obligation, whether it's a public or private university, we all operate in communities. We all operate with local talent, with young people, with local school districts. And so the first significant opportunity that I would highlight is whether we're talking about dual enrollment, where we're teaching college level classes in high schools that could then be transferred to credit, whether we're looking at summer or year long programs around career exploration and pre-college work to help young people really think about their options in the US post Supreme Court affirmative action decisions, the idea of preparing, engaging, recruiting, exciting young people of color is really important. So from an equity perspective, that's the first opportunity that I think is significant and maybe not always obvious or often I think the young person demographic is figured out to be just that pipeline to full-time degree enrollment.

(02:45):And I think that there's a significant space there. The second area that I would highlight, so if we go to the other end of the spectrum, and I'll land in the middle or I'll end in the middle, is, and we haven't figured this out to be candid, but many of my colleagues in higher ed have figured out how to really engage the demographic bubble that we're looking at in terms of the graying population and those folks who are at or near retirement who sort of I think we know from the scientific research need to be engaged to kind of continue that social engagement from a brain health and emotional health, a social health, a community health perspective, a public health perspective, engagement of an older population group is a really important demographic. And what we see at NYU is certainly around the, I'd say personal development we have still yet to figure out what that professional development might look like.

(03:36):I know that there are some entities that across the country and in North America who've been successful at thinking about the second career around entrepreneurship. I will say we do have one very successful program in terms of executive coaching and taking a career in any sector and then transitioning to use all of that experience to be an executive coach. And we've seen good opportunities for people there. The third and final area that I would say, and maybe this is the biggest opportunity based on the numbers, Shada, it's a new body of research that we're doing that I'm really excited about looking at what we call the paper ceiling. And so the numbers are huge. We've got 60 million people in the US who are in jobs that are really kind of middle skill jobs. They kind of require high school and some college, but not necessarily a degree.

(04:34):And about half of the folks in this area, most of the work, so 60 million people, about 80% are in professional services office jobs. About half of them, half of the people in this area don't have more than a high school diploma. And so the significant opportunity and why there's a paper ceiling is as we look and we're doing some really cool research with Burning Glass Institute, as we look at the population that's very sizable in these kind of professional jobs where they're middle skill, we see stall out jobs, we see jobs that you ought to be able conceptually to go from an admin assistant to an office manager to maybe someone who works in hr, but it just doesn't happen. And we're looking at this from a data perspective in that there's lots of jobs that are the destination jobs, the office manager, the HR kind of leader or recruiter, someone who, if you're working through an organization, you absolutely are qualified to do that.

(05:29):But we also see a huge number of openings in the destination jobs. And so you can do the math. A lot of people stalling out lot of jobs that are kind of a really kind of good destination. So what's the problem? It's training. What can fill that gap? It's training, it's continuing education, it's courses, it's not degrees. And so the research that we're doing is really doing an analysis on what are those jobs where people seem to stall out, they are stuck in them for a long of time despite, and there's just not career progression. What are those destination jobs that are unfilled? And then what are those destination and stall out pathways where truly training is the answer, short-term training, kind of non-degree training. And so you can imagine there's a lot of stall out occupations, there's a lot of destination trainings, but when you ask that question, what are those stall and destination jobs, that training could make a difference to bridge that gap therein, I think lies a really significant opportunity.

(06:25):So we're pretty excited and bullish about that. Some examples are going from an operational analyst to doing some kind of more data analytics type of training to be able to be a data analyst. So going from a junior data analyst to a more senior data analyst, going from an operations analyst, someone who's working more on kind of back office operations to more of a front office kind of data role. That's an obvious one. I mentioned admin assistant to office manager to HR is another pathway. There are several pathways. We estimate that through the research that will be done later this spring, we'll probably lean into about 20 occupations, so it's not a hundred, it's not three. But really thinking about what are those areas where training can make a difference? And I am really excited about this. It's not going to be secret vaulted research. We want to scream from the rooftops what we find, because at the end of the day, this is about economic mobility. It's about healthy communities and families and individuals. And we think if we can get more employers and educators and individuals understanding these problems and asking for change, whether that's in training that they have access to, whether that's in their own decisions on where to go for upskilling, we could really start to change the game.

Shauna Cox (07:44):And I love that you're viewing it as opportunities because oftentimes stuff like this and the work involved and the understanding of everything to get to where we need to go is quite complex. And there can be some hurdles in order to get there. And I do want to keep an optimistic view, but without, in this situation, there are of course going to be some challenges. So I think we have to talk about those. So what do you see as the biggest obstacles to embracing a lifelong learning model? And I know you've touched on some of those points, and then how can institutions start to overcome them? Of course, it's not something that's going to happen overnight, but what are some of those starting steps?

Angie Kamath (08:27):So the biggest obstacle, and it's clear, I mean I mentioned, I've been at it with our team for probably about a year and a half to try to figure out the market around retirees. And I haven't hit on it yet. I've hit on a couple of pockets of success, but I think there's a huge opportunity here to serve a few hundred if not thousands of people a year. And I haven't figured that out. I figured out how to serve dozens. And so the big obstacle is time. You need time to experiment. These are new business models. There's not an entrepreneur in, whether it's New York City or Silicon Valley or Toronto or wherever, that would say, oh sure, I'd give a startup six months to kind of become profitable. It takes years. And so the biggest obstacle is I think in this context that there's declining enrollment.

(09:08):We need new ideas. The incubation period is not working, is kind of working against us. And that's one of the biggest obstacles I feel really lucky. And I think Karen probably lies some adaptation that folks can use. I feel lucky at a school of professional studies where I have master's degrees, I have undergraduate programs and I have continuing ed, I can look at my business model, I can look at my revenues, I can kind of cross-subsidize things. I can take a little bit of investment capital if this program over performs and put it into a little r and d. So I have that flexibility. I recognize that not every organization or higher ed institution or training provider is structured that way, which means you kind of have to partner. So I can partner internally to get some of this done and work with my executive coaching master's degree to find a certificate and a shorter form version of that.

(10:00):I do think the notion of partnering to overcome this kind of business model development and prototyping challenge is one strategy to think about it. I was in a really interesting conversation. I'd say the second strategy to deal with the idea of an incubation period that's fair and reasonable to hit on some new business models. I'll tell you a very interesting conversation with a funder of ed tech startups and workforce development startups. And we were talking about AI and he was sharing that certainly AI is enabling some business models to be stood up really quickly in terms of prototyping. And that prototyping can be now achievement quick in ways that it couldn't quite be before. I mean before prototyping, particularly around training spaces, if you had to look at a training platform, if you had to look at curriculum development, that would take a while. You'd have to hire a consultant, you'd have to build a platform, you'd have to kind of get into a third party arrangement.

(11:03):I consider myself a step above Luddite, and I use the CHATT BT perplexity as one of my favorite engines to ask these questions. There's several pulling together. Gamma is another platform that I use for presentations and research. There are a lot of opportunities to kind of test out things using ai. So I'd really encourage folks to think about the role of partnering the role of ai, specifically in thinking about curriculum development and thinking about prototyping and thinking about kind of de-risking new business models. I think that's important. And I think that there's a lot of information out there, which means there's a lot of accessibility through AI to really find, experiment new programs, new curricula, new marketing strategies, new ways to do the market research to understand if there's a population or a project or an idea that has legs.

Shauna Cox (12:01):Absolutely. And mentioning ai, I think that touches on the point of digital transformation that we're in. So how can institutions leverage a digital transformation to deliver that more personalized, accessible and flexible education experience that will appeal to both traditional learners and non-traditional learners?

Angie Kamath (12:25):Really great question. And so a couple of things that I was thinking about sharing in this part of the conversation, Shauna, what we have seen is I use the word doses or dosing education. And so we've had for the longest time, like many other certificate programs that might take six or 12 or 15 or 18 months to complete made up of four or five courses. And it turns out that we don't have a great completion rate. And I think for a while I was beating myself up on that. And really part of a digital transformation is just the world that we live in is that we kind of want what we want when we want it. And so taking a dose of education, a class in data visualization or AI and communications or marketing technology and going away and applying it to your job and then coming back in six months or a year to kind of take the next dose, I think that understanding, so the notion of leveraging digital transformation, I think we have to first understand that that is real.

(13:28):And that's not a failure. That's not an unattractive educational offering. That's just how people are preferring, at least in our context to consume education. And so I think recognizing that and then the leverage is we are also seeing, and there's no right or wrong for every learner, they have a really different style. And so I don't think it's all in person. I don't think it's all remote. I think you really have to figure out how to appeal. And I don't love hybrid. I don't know any educator who really loves a hybrid kind of classroom. I think that there are folks who want self-paced. I think there are folks that want facilitated. I think there are folks that want to flip the classroom. I think there are folks that want an in-person classroom, and there are folks that are excited to just be with other people regardless of the format and what that looks like.

(14:21):And so that is important and that takes some investment to make that decision to be good at more than one thing. But when I think about being more personalized and accessible and flexible, I think we have to recognize that it's a both. And I think we figure out when a deep cohort, immersive experience in person is the right option. And I think we probably want to use and leverage technology to test out new topics and curricula in easy to access formats that are really flexible for people. And then it's interesting, I had a colleague once who would always tell me, paper and pencil is technology. We think of technology as fancy automation, types of workflow kind of platforms, but technology is really about understanding how to meet people where they were. It's a cliche to say meet people where they are, but we for the longest time would have evening classes like, oh, people are really busy and they want to work.

(15:28):They want to take and consume classes at nighttime. And it turns out when we actually use the technology of surveys and asked folks what they wanted, they are totally tired. At the end of the day, they do not want to take it to our class in the evening. They can't do it. And again, for the longest time, night school was like a thing. Taking classes at the end of the day after work was a thing. I don't know if it's post covid. People don't like to do that. And so we are seeing folks that are super happy to do something three to 4:00 PM make it predictable, make it for five weeks, make it in a dose that matters. Give me my readings and things to do in my own time, show up for a facilitated session and I'm good to go. And it could be in the middle of the workday.

(16:08):And so I think the notion of digital transformation, I probably expanded the definition a bit to think about all of the ways and tools that we can really think about accessibility. And we are seeing things that we just thought to be true about who wants to take courses when they want to take it, the cost, the modality. And I question everything because I just think we've seen tastes and preferences change. The other piece around digital transformation that's real is, and again here I am a middle-aged woman. I don't know what an early career person in their early twenties, maybe three years out of college, I really don't know what they need and prefer. They are just a different workforce. And so such a big part of this is just checking ourselves and making sure, again, here I am, I'm thinking of a pretty hip, middle-aged woman.

(17:04):But let's face it, I'm a middle-aged woman. I haven't a clue what a 24-year-old wants in terms of their educational experience. I really don't. And so we really have to make sure that we're not pushing things that resemble what I would've taken in the early stages of my career 30 years ago. We have to make sure that we're not creating programs that make sense on paper that aren't really kind of user experience tested. I find that, quite frankly, Shauna to be such a barrier, interestingly, on program design. And I think it's again, addressable. And so if we go back to there's a demographic cliff here, there's a lot of people that are not coming out of the traditional systems that thinking different is just so critical on every level.

Shauna Cox (18:15):But you were talking about programming there and I think that's a really key component to all of this, especially in today's rapidly evolving market, these changing preferences of learners and industry leaders. So how can universities innovate their program offerings to remain competitive and relevant in this rapidly changing market so that their students aren't, I almost want to say, going out of style or their education isn't stale by the time they get to the end of it?

Angie Kamath (18:46):So great question. And so audience matters a lot and modality matters. And so if we believe, and I believe labor market stats, that skills are generally obsolete in a five to seven year timeframe, we have to start targeting people a lot earlier. I think that we are programmed to sort of say, oh, mid-career you have to change your career. And you're almost, by definition in middle management, you're probably in your thirties and forties. Uhuh. I think we start getting to people a whole lot earlier because we know that most skills need to be refreshed. And again, whether it's that maybe is taking a more negative stance towards it in terms of refreshing skills, they're just new technology. I mean, chatt PT today is 10 times better than it was a year ago. And so that's I think the piece to be mindful of. So I think going younger and younger, and again, I would say for, I love the idea of really focusing on early career folks.

(19:49):So folks who are in the five to seven years out of college, I think they're a really important group. If you do a good job with them, they're going to come back. And we see that a lot. We see a ton of repeat customers of, oh, that job help me. It enabled me to take on this project. I got a promotion from that. I ended up getting a new job. Let me come back for X. Or I'm seeing the skill show up in a lot of job postings. I don't have it. Let me take a course. So it's straight up just business strategy, get folks when they're pretty captive. And I think you could have a lifelong learner and customer. So that would be my biggest piece that I think universities can do. And then what we mentioned before, which is we have to be really mindful of when people want this training. And it's not all night school, it really isn't. And thinking about that kind of dose of the program feels really important.

Shauna Cox (20:40):And I want to expand on that a bit and ask how can institutions then align their strategic goals with those evolving student and employer demands that you kind of mentioned there, particularly when delivering those measurable career outcomes that students are looking for.

Angie Kamath (20:56):So I've spent 24 years in workforce development, and so much of my time has been spent on here's the skills to get someone a job. And that's a really hard road. And I do think that there is an alignment now that to keep your job, you need skilling to advance in your job you need. And so I do feel like certainly there's a whole apparatus for folks who are transitioning from high school to college to career that's not going anywhere. There's an entry level workforce certainly. But I think it's really important to understand that training has a really important role for just keeping and advancing in careers, the notion of workforce development and using a training to be the catapult into a brand new job that can happen, but there's got to be a whole lot more supports to make that recruitment the referral. It's just hard to apply to jobs these days and get a hit.

(21:58):I mean, you literally to the bots are taking over, you really have to apply to a hundred jobs probably to get a few bites. And so those are some of the alignments where I think that there's a presumption that take the training and get a job. I would say take a training and keep your job, take a training and get an advancement in your job. And so making sure that we truth in advertising, that we're really clear with people. And again, certainly there are some credentials, whether it's like a project management institute, PMI credential or a CompTIA type of credential or very specific credentials where truly actually if you get that credential, it's so in depth and intensive. It will lead to a new job even for someone without the work experience. But I'm of the mindset in terms of my own career and what I've seen that's fewer and far between.

Shauna Cox (22:50):Absolutely. And then I think expanding on this further and leaning towards the employer side of it, what partnerships or collaborations, and this can vary across where you are in the states, what type of institution you're at, what are some of those collaborations with industry or employers that you see as essential in order to build that robust lifelong learning ecosystem?

Angie Kamath (23:18):Really good point. So I don't know that anyone has figured out perfectly well how to work with the kind of small and medium business community, but that is one aspect of that's where the majority of Americans of people are employed and small and medium businesses. And so partnerships with chambers of commerce, with local entities that are really working with employers. So sometimes you might want to have a consortium model where you're working with employees from five different food service organizations, or you're working with multiple government agencies or you're working with multiple manufacturers. I do think the role, I haven't always loved intermediaries. I think sometimes they take away the kind of real work that has to be done by kind of education. But there are some really good intermediaries. And maybe what I would say is we've learned a lot about working with employer intermediaries.

(24:11):Let's be more discerning about who we work with, who has real impact, who has the ability to create consortia of employers who want training. Those are the types of partnerships we should go after. And I think that I also just kind of wonder and worry about just infrastructure in the States and in North America. So the trades, HVAC construction, kind of thinking about all of the trades. There's a huge retirement, and those jobs are awesome. They're great. They are six figures. They require technical training. And I don't know who is filling those roles. We don't have an apparatus. And so oddly, interestingly, New York University, I just had a meeting this morning actually with an online platform that I'm really impressed with that really looks at democratizing training and credentials in the trades in more vocationally focused non-office job areas. And I actually think that we have an obligation to kind of get into that area because the demographics are just not on our side. And again, I think as higher ed, we have a real obligation to think about what we can do to change that.

Shauna Cox (25:26):Absolutely.

Angie Kamath (25:26):So a little bit out of the box partnerships maybe would be the answer to that question, Shauna.

Shauna Cox (25:31):Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. But before I let you go, I know you've done this once before, but I hear you have a new recommendation. So if anyone is in New York, where do they need to go to eat?

Angie Kamath (25:45):So one of my students from Myanmar recently introduced me to the Burmese Tea Leaf salad. I don't know if you've ever had it, but there is a wonderful restaurant with a couple of different branches in New York City called Rangoon, and it is spicy healthy food that has a bit of a kick that is very adjacent to, I'd say Thai food, but really distinctive. So I would go for Rangoon and I would, and again, I think it's a strong and growing demographic in New York City that I love to patronize just because they're a strong but mighty community and worth trying their food.

Shauna Cox (26:30):Amazing. I love it. It's a nice different recommendation from New York, so it's nice to hear it. I love it. Yes. Thank you so much, Angie, for joining me. It was great chatting with

Angie Kamath (26:39):You. You too. Thanks so much. Take care, Shauna. Thanks, Chloe.