Mark Milliron (National University) on A Design-Thinking Approach to Student Success

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Mark Milliron to discuss customizing student services to match real-life needs beyond academic, and creating value-rich education. 

Transcript

Shauna Cox (00:03):Mark, welcome to the Illumination Podcast.

Mark Milliron (00:05):Glad to be here, Shauna.

Shauna Cox (00:07):Yes. And so we are here to talk about the reframing of student support, especially as higher ed and just the world in general are constantly changing. So to kick off our conversation, how should higher ed institutions reimagine that role of student support in shaping the future of learning access and institutional success?

Mark Milliron (00:29):Yeah, it's a great question and I kind of want to begin with a premise for anybody who's trying to lead in a higher education institution is job one is to serve your students, you have to see your students. What I mean by that is our missions tend to be very different, right? If you're running a community college, if you're running a state university, if you're running a private nonprofit like National University, we have different student populations that have different kinds of needs for different kinds of support. So it's really important that you see your students, and here's part of the problem, and when you say the word higher education writ large, I'll talk to big audiences and I'll say picture a higher ed student. And invariably the picture in their head is an 18-year-old with a backpack on the quad, not working, going full-time.

Mark Milliron (01:18):Student population is maybe 20% of higher education and made even worse by the idea when you say, let's just talk about higher ed, everybody thinks about Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and that's less than 1% of higher ed. So part of our challenge are these preconceptions about what a student is, what kind of institution you are. Once you get really clear about your institution, your mission, your vision, your direction, and then you really see your students means taking the time to understand them, you're going to start designing differently. I'm a big fan of design thinking.

(01:52):You have to begin with empathy. And part of that empathy is understanding who those students are. So lemme just give you a concrete example. National University founded in 1971 by a Navy captain PhD, heartbroken watching service members trying to access traditional education with their GI bill. And what he found was that as traditional education, nothing wrong with it, but it was not designed for service members, working students, non-traditional students. They said there's got to be a different way of doing it. Went with a group of officers, helped go to WASC and said, let's design a grad school totally focused on this student population. So fast forward 50 years, national University is now one of the largest nonprofit private universities serving 50,000 students a year. About a third doctorate, third master's, third bachelor's. But 100% of our students are non-traditional working in military students. Two, we serve average age of our student undergrad is 33, master's, 37, doctoral 42, we're 70% diverse. We're 65% women, the population, lots of parents. So we've actually named our students Anders, because our students are their parents and students. They're deployed and students, they're employed and students, they're taking care of elderly, aging parents and students. It's very different than an 18-year-old who's living on campus. Does that make sense?

Shauna Cox (03:15):Absolutely. And I think that's so key to note because it is true, especially with a shrinking traditional age student and an increasing amount of adult learners out there with some college, no degree and all that. I think it's really important to narrow down who you're talking about, understand your students, and just adapt to your way of thinking because it's outside of that traditional structure that when you say higher ed, that's exactly what people think

Mark Milliron (03:44):A hundred percent. By the way, that means our faculty and staff are hired, understanding who we serve. We actually have an orientation program for new employees that's basically an Anders training that helps them understand who Anders are and so that we can be more strategic with our student support. And what we see pretty clearly is the majority of our students, they're on purpose, they're very focused, they're advancing in their careers or changing careers or whatever it's going to be. And they're focused. They want to come here. And the biggest challenges they have tend not to be academic. They tend to be life and logistics and psychosocial. And those exist obviously in traditional education populations as well. I mean, I love our traditional institutions. I love, I really do. I think they do phenomenal work. I love community colleges. They're a natural transfer partner to us, and we do a lot of collaboration with them.

(04:38):But for our student population, we call it whole human support. It is the wraparound of the right support for the right student at the right way. And there's no one size fits all. It is figuring out what mix, what set of ingredients for this recipe for this student make the most sense. So it might be this student needs financial support, this student needs logistical support, this student needs some kind of peer mentorship, whatever it might be, or this student actually needs support getting access to housing or childcare or whatever it's going to be. Our job is to help figure out the kind of support necessary for that student. And by the way, Shauna, this, some of our students are just complete rock stars, and the biggest thing we can do is get out of their way. It is really just make sure there's no bureaucracy for them because they just want to learn.

(05:22):Well finish strong and launch effectively. So not an easy answer to your question because I do think I go back to the idea, if you want to serve your students, you have to see your students. And that means taking a breath and thinking about if we're going to design for them, we have to have a sense of empathy and understanding about who they are. So for us, it's one of the reasons why we care deeply about studying student engagement strategies, looking at MPS, really getting a sense of what our students are feeling and living through.

Shauna Cox (05:52):Absolutely. And I want to dovetail into the next question because you talked about all these recipes and how one size is not fit all. So how should colleges rethink that relationship between student engagement, their academic pathways, and then quite honestly what students are most focused on, which is their career outcomes?

Mark Milliron (06:11):No, it's a great question. And we actually have a strategic plan that's built on a theory of change. Actually. We think students come to us not for degrees, they come to us because they want to change their lives and they think a degree is one of the ways they can change their lives. And one of the things our job is to do is to figure out how we use the best of next generation education, all the cutting edge tools and technologies, techniques, wrap that at whole human support. And then we aim that at what we call value rich education. And this gets to your question, our conception of value rich education is that it's our job to look at the program of students in and make sure we have, we're designing credential rich, connection rich, and experience rich experiences for our students. Because we're all about world-class student experiences.

(06:58):We want our students just gushing about the experience they have with us that actually helped transform them. So step one is in today's day and age, the best thing we can do is curate the family of credentials that make the most sense for that student. So that might be badges, industry certifications, and a degree, it might be an associate's and then a bachelor's degree. It might be getting a SHR M certification before they get their master's in hr. It might mean getting a construction C allows them to be a foreman before they begin a construction management degree, behavioral health cert before they get to behavioral health management. So in every degree program, whether it's doctorate, master's or bachelor's, there are families of credentials that we ask our program leaders to curate those together and figure out what's the set. Because one of the things we find, by the way, is that the credentials that come before the degree, a lot of people are worried, oh, they're going to get that and leave makes them twice as likely to finish.

(07:54):It's amazing how it creates academic momentum. But then the second thing is connection rich, being really intentional about students connecting to other students, students connecting to faculty, and then students connecting to professionals in their field. We do things called peer navigator networks where we actually have students who serve as peer navigators for students who are coming after them. And there's something really powerful about that. We're really big on the faculty student clubs and connections and co-curricular activities. And then also just trying to get them connected to our alumni and other professionals in the space because rarely a commencement do I hear any student wax poetic about the LMS. What they talk about is another student that they met or a faculty member or a professional, right? That's kind of where they go. And then the last one is experience rates, which is how can we bring in clinicals, apprenticeships, internships, project-based learning, just have experiential things that happen with that student that they are going to remember forever.

(08:51):And by the way, often those experiences come from co-curriculars. They don't come from, so for example, we've set up something called the Parent Scholar Society, and the idea is that they're a part of, with us as part of our Anders, we have so many student parents and we want them to help us get better at serving parent scholars. So they become kind of, for us, a kind of expert. They become subject matter experts or SMEs for us on parents scholars. And that's beautiful because they can be a part of helping make us better at every stage, which is kind of great. So to just go back to your question, it is thinking about the value proposition you're offering these students. Completion is the low bar. Of course we want our students to complete, but our job is to get ridiculously good transformative experiences for these folks. So they'll go tell other folks all about it.

Shauna Cox (09:40):Absolutely. And I want to keep on this theme of the Anders, the non-traditional student. And because I think your institution is so fitting to answer this question, but what role does lifelong learning play in redefining student support?

Mark Milliron (09:59):That's a great question. We actually do a monthly university leadership council, which pulls our 50 top leaders from across the university together. And by the way, these are leaders in it, student support, academics, like every division of the university. And the goal is we come together around our strategic plan and progress and strategy and really just make sure we're all on the same page. But one of the things we also do is we have something at the end of the meeting called the dessert. And the dessert is a group reading or a group, like a curricular resource, whether it's a TED talk or it's something. But we've been reading a series of books. So we've read, for example, the Power of Moments. We've read Unreasonable Hospitality, which is kind of amazing. But there's this book that we had everybody read called The Perennials. And what we end up processing it all together, we do these deep processes and say, what does this mean for our university?

(10:52):The perennials book is phenomenal. Sociologists out of UPenn who really talks about this idea that because of lifespan and healthspan and technology that we now, we don't really, we have this intersecting set of generations all coming together. So universities like ours national should not be focused on whether it's alpha millennials or whatever, we should be focused on perennials, which is people from all these generations interacting with each other and people living for a long time and having to learn at different ages and stages and wanting to be a part of it. And we really see, and Shauna, this is a big deal. We see ourselves as part of the ecosystem of education providers that are out there. Our number one matriculation partner is San Diego State because students will go there and get their bachelor's when they're young, and then they'll go work and then they'll come back to us later and get their MBA or to get their doctorate.

(11:42):So we work, and then almost 80% of our undergrad students come from community colleges, so they transfer in. So for us, we're part of the ecosystem of providers that are out there. And what we know is that given the different ages and stages that people are going to learn, we want to show up at the right time and play our part really well, but not pretend to be what we're not. If there's an 18-year-old who wants a campus space experience, they're all excited about climbing walls and residence halls for the love of God, don't come to national. That is a horrible idea. But later in life, when you're working and you're trying to raise kids and you really want to get that master's or doctoral degree, that's us. That's when we show up and we try to support. Does that make sense?

Shauna Cox (12:24):Yeah, absolutely. And I think it just reminds me that some people in higher ed, they'll talk about the competition and like, oh, you're stealing your competition and everything, but when you really get down to the grassroots of it, if you understand your audience, it's not a competition. If anything, it's the healthy competition of it. And I think it's just, yeah, knowing,

Mark Milliron (12:44):I'll take it one further. I mean, yes, there might be a declining 18 to 22-year-old cohort coming out that always ups and flows, but argue their participation rates are going up higher and higher. I would argue if you look at the 40 million, some college and no credential crowd, not to mention the perennial learning dynamics that are happening. We have a ton of people who actually need our support. And I always joke with the 40 million some college and no credential, I'm like, we'll, take 1%. You can have all the rest. Don't worry. There's enough for all of us. Truthfully, our competition are not other institutions. Our competition, our number one competition is not attendance. It's people not coming. So for us, we always say that our competition is poverty. We're trying to open that opportunity pathway for these students. And so that puts you on a very different footing, which means we want to collaborate with everybody here. We obviously we're based in San Diego, we're really big in LA strong across California, but we're in all 50 states and we have so many other institutional partners with who work with us, and we're all stealing ideas from each other and figuring out how we can serve our students better. I really do think it's a time of abundance more than people think in the world of education.

Shauna Cox (13:58):Absolutely. And I'm seeing that over my five, six years in higher ed here. I've been seeing more and more push for that level of collaboration, which is so nice to see because everybody needs a little healthy competition. But at the end of the day, you do need to share your ideas, show what your playbooks are so people can learn and build so it fits them and their students. And you did mention a point about ecosystems. So I want to go back to that point. How can institutions build more resilient, adaptable, student support ecosystems that drive not only the retention on the student side, but also institutional growth?

Mark Milliron (14:33):Wow, that's such a great question. And it really does get to the idea that you want to make sure you understand your ecosystems in which you work, your regional ecosystems in particular, I'm a big fan of the idea, Russell Lowry Hart, who's the president of Austin Community College, just a great human being. He used to always say that caring about your students and wanting to provide the right kind of support does not mean that you all have to be social workers. But what it does mean is you better know social workers so that you can point your students to them, right, that they need it. And those social workers are at work in your community. If they're hungry, there are food banks if they need housing, there are people who provide housing. If there's transportation issues, there are partners in your community. Part of it is braiding together that ecosystem to provide the right, I'll give you a good example.

(15:26):We just launched something last Friday. Our first nest. And our nest is our mascot's, a peregrine falcon. So the idea of a nest is at some times in your development, you need some support right there at the right time. Our students are Anders, and what they often need is a place they might not want come to class, but they want to come to learning because for them, home is often not a quiet place. It's not a safe place. Sometimes they don't have high-speed internet. They need just in time support, but often they need childcare. So we've partnered with the YMCA, which is right across our parking lot at our Ney Mesa site. And what the Nest is, is kind of a, we work for learning. Instead of coming into work, you come in, you literally can do drop in childcare at the YMCA for an hour and a half, two hours, come over and then open up your laptop and do your online learning, and you're there with coffee and friends and other people that you see.

(16:18):It's a killer environment. And then we have our Sanford Harmony Clubhouse, which is our kind of healthy relationship program for kids that is in school districts all across the country, programming there. We have our veterans center, we have an innovation center where you can see next generation education, VR and programming, drones and all that stuff, ISS all happening there. And then just in time tutoring support for the folks who were going to be there. And our students just went crazy over it. And again, and one of our students was like, I just spent, first time they saw the nest, she's like, I just spent two hours sitting in the coffee shop doing my work before I came to my hybrid class. I would've come here. Now that I know it's here, this is where I'm going to come. So we become their home away from home, like a sociologist would call it a third place. But that's an example of an ecosystem play because that works because our partner at the YMCA happens to be the number one childcare care provider in San Diego. So we're now working with them. We're going to open up our second nest in Escondido, and we're hoping to open up these nests in partnership with community colleges around the country in different places, part of our kind of work. But that's the idea that you don't have to do it all yourself. Find the partners you can do it with.

Shauna Cox (17:33):Absolutely. I love that. I love the idea because that's very welcoming for the student. Higher ed alone can be very daunting. And then you throw in all these obstacles and then it's going to push them away even more. But if you're opening your doors and having the support that they need right then and there, I love that idea. It's just so holistic and everything like that. Now, this next question, maybe it's what influenced you guys to open the nest? I'm not sure, but how can data-driven insights about student behavior, their needs and their outcomes transform the way that institutions are designing and delivering their support services?

Mark Milliron (18:11):That's a good question. So we are big believers in a very simple three-part formula, which is get grounded, get real get going. So getting grounded is getting clear about your mission, your vision, your ways of work, who your students are, how you're serving, all that grounding work has got to get done, and then you got to get real. And part of getting real is really unpacking quantitative qualitative data and getting a clear understanding of how well you're doing. We're big purveyors of, we use, we've done a massive data restructure here at National so that we can turn the lights on pretty bright and we want to see loss and momentum. Where are we losing students and where are we getting momentum with students? And let's reduce loss points. Let's increase momentum strategies and get everybody involved in this process and make it a leaderful process of sharing that data.

(18:58):We want a culture of wonder, not a culture of blame. We don't want data to be used to blame people. We want to actually unpack it and move forward. Angela Baldisari our leader in that work, and she's absolutely amazing. And she's so good at working in an open collaborative way with all the leaders. And we've really created this data rich and all the way up to our trustees. Our trustees have our five core indicators with a fully disaggregated dashboard that goes all the way down where they can look at what's happening with our credential count, our per grad rate, our persistence, our engagement scores, our NPS, and then disaggregate it by different student types and understand where we're strong and where we're weak. But we started all these larger conversations. I will tell you, if you haven't done the Get grounded work before you do the get real work, all hell can break loose.

(19:44):So you've got to get very clear about who you are, why you care about it, and how you're going to go together. And then the get real, you've built enough trust where you can dive into that data. And then the next thing is just making, make sure you don't get into analysis paralysis because you can get spun up pretty quickly. And the worst thing in higher ed is just the idea, we'll do it next semester, we'll do it next term, we'll do it next year. You got to get moving because every single data point is every single one of those ones and zeros in the data schemes is a student with a story, with a history that you want to try to impact. So you got to get going. That's the third step. So it's get grounded, get real, get going. So get going means test, try, tune, get stuff out there and instrument it and test it and see how it's going to work and how you're going to move forward.

(20:30):But you got to be tough minded and you got to be okay when the data says your idea didn't work. I mean, Shauna, this is one of the things I've seen in my 30 plus years in this work is people fall in love with their ideas and they're far too heartbroken when they don't work and they're not okay just letting go. It's like, it's okay. You tried that, it didn't work. Let's get onto the next thing and we've got to be okay letting some things go. That might not be, because sometimes we've glorified the past what our experience was, what was so important, and it does not work with this group of students that are coming in or because it was our idea. We're trying to prove it's going to work and falling into confirmation bias. We've got to be tough-minded and work with a group of people who are going to be willing to pull that together, but don't get me going on data. We love our data, and by the way, qualitative is to us just as important as the quantitative. We want to make sure that we are really getting that sentiment analysis from students as well.

Shauna Cox (21:30):Absolutely. Data is the conversation that I keep seeing emerging that people want to have. So we might have to have a data conversation a little bit later on, but I want, and also, and just another side note in terms of, I love the idea of if you do something, you have to be okay with it. One of the terms that I've heard was if you're going to fail, fail fast, that way you can move on to the next thing. So now I want to look ahead and ask what bold moves do you believe higher ed institutions need to take in the next, say five years or so? We don't know what's going to go on to truly meet those needs of the modern learner.

Mark Milliron (22:09):So I think there are a number of big things that have to happen, and I think there are policy practice and probably partnership things that have to happen. On the policy side, I think we've got to get clear about the family of learners that we're trying to support. I think our policy and funding environment in the world of higher education is still very focused on the 20th century learner, on the traditional age student. And that's fine. I'm a big supporter of Pell, big supporter of the traditional student loan strategies and all that. But it is so hyperfocused, even the regulations around it are focused on the 18 to 24-year-old student. I mean asking a 36-year-old what their expected family contribution is going to be for their parents. It's like, it just makes no sense. So it is kind of humiliating for some of these folks coming in.

(22:58):So I think we've got to think differently. So for example, we're big promoters of military tuition assistance, but also employer tuition assistance. So the section 1 27 and the 52 50 plans that have specific tax benefits for employers who providing employee tuition assistance. We think employee tuition assistance is a beautiful model for the working learner because it links those employers and higher ed. And I think that policy transformation will actually create more apprenticeships, more internships, more connection around curriculum. So that's the policy stuff. The practice stuff is like we just have to be willing to get in and try to use some of these tools. I think AI has the opportunity to probably bring more learning to more students than ever before, and ironically has the opportunity to create more human connections than ever before because we could help us understand when people need to connect with people, which is a really big deal.

(23:50):And then the partnership side, which is I think the idea of go to education, then go to work is gone. I think now we're in these almost call a learning swirl where you're going in and going out of education at different ages and stages. We've got to figure out how we create these partnerships between employers and education, nonprofits and education, regional education ecosystems and education, because you're not going to build your economic development committee or your chamber without education as part of the strategy. So those partners have got to be a big deal, which by the way means we as educators have got to become multilingual. And by that it means we have to understand how to speak business, how to speak civic, how to speak nonprofit. We've got to be able to go into those environments and understand how we translate our stuff into their world, create those kinds of connections.

(24:39):So I think change will happen on all three of those fronts, and I think we have to be able to willing to do all three and just understand it's going to be, we're constantly on a journey from novel to normal. We have all this novel stuff coming our way, whether it's policy, practice or our partners, and we've got to move it into the normal phase and use the data to help us understand what's working to help our students learn more effectively. I think it's, again, a pretty exciting time in the world of education hard because people have some pretty brutal misconceptions about, and they have this kind of almost reductionist mindset about what higher education is. They all want to go however they feel about Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, that's, they think what higher ed is. No, the vast majority of students are on a very different kind of journey and leveraging a pretty, I think, beautifully diverse education ecosystem out here in the country.

Shauna Cox (25:35):Absolutely. Well Mark, those are all the questions that I do have for you. Thank you so much for the conversation. But before I let you go, I need to ask you an important question. On the Higher Ed podcast, you are based in San Diego, California. Someone's coming to town. Where do they need to go to eat?

Mark Milliron (25:52):There's so many good places, by the way, there's probably 20 food trucks I would send you to that are absolutely amazing. But there is an experience that's really very San Diego, very cool. Jake's in Del Mar. So there's this place called Jake's. It's in Del Mar, it's on the beach. You literally eat dinner watching the surfers come in. You're right on the ocean. It's pretty amazing. A fantastic seafood, really good service, kind of great stuff all the way around. The dessert is phenomenal there, by the way. They have something called the hula pie, which is macadamia nut ice cream with chocolate and all this. But I would tell you, that's fantastic. But if you really want to take Jake's to the next level, you don't order dessert there. You finish your dinner and you walk right up the hill to a place called Anne's Hat Makers. Anne's hat Makers is probably with the best gelato on the planet. It is an unbelievable gelato place that you will thank me for recommending. And it's again, just a short walk right up the hill from Jakes. So that's the ultimate kind of one two punch is you get dinner on the beach and then you walk up to Dan's and get your gelato, and then you take a big long sleep. You don't have to get,

Shauna Cox (27:00):You can walk off a little bit of dinner when you go up the hill, but after

Mark Milliron (27:03):That you need a big nap. You justify the gelato with your steps,

Shauna Cox (27:07):Right? You always need to justify dessert. Dessert is the best thing out there. So Amazing. Well, mark, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you so much for the recommendation. It was great having you on here.

Mark Milliron (27:17):Oh, glad to join Shauna, and I'll be glad to come back again. Whenever you want.