Michael Avaltroni (Fairleigh Dickinson University) on Education Without Endpoints

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Michael Avaltroni to discuss the shift from time-bound degrees to lifelong learning ecosystems and the integration of flexible, career-aligned pathways that meet learners where they are.

Transcript

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Shauna Cox (00:00):

And Michael, welcome back to the Illumination Podcast.

Michael Avaltroni (00:06):

Pleasure to be here. Great to be back.

Shauna Cox (00:08):

I am so excited to kick off our conversation. You are my first podcast of 2026, so no pressure, but we are here today to talk about how lifelong learning pathways are really defining what I'm going to call a modern university. So just kicking off our conversation, how do you envision the modern university kind of evolving from a more time-bound degree provider to a lifelong learning ecosystem that's going to support individuals across the entirety of their career?

Michael Avaltroni (00:37):

So it's a great question. It's something we think about with great regularity as part of really our strategy going forward. We're hoping to build the university of the future, which is no longer about coming and getting a credential for four years and moving on with that sort of trajectory for life. I think we all know the rate of change and the rate at which things are continuing to evolve, in some cases, in ways we don't even fully know yet. I think require us to think about lifelong learning at the core of what we do. So for us, it's really thinking about, I think, completely revisiting and re-imagining what the university can be in terms of the people, in terms of the processes, in terms of the partnerships, in terms of the place. So we've really started to identify those four. The people is obviously, how do you continue to engage more folks who are non-traditional learners, though I'm not sure that traditional learners is even defined anymore because I think everybody at some point is in a learning journey and a reinvention journey and a re-imagination journey.

(01:36):

They may not even know it yet. But I think as we think about that, how do you engage more folks for what we're trying to articulate is really intergenerational living and learning. And that brings us to a lot of the connections that we hope to be able to make as we also reimagine the campus of the future. So part of the project that we're embarking upon is taking advantage of the uniqueness that we have, which is two New Jersey campuses on very desirable parcels of real estate in very, very desirable places in New Jersey to really reimagine a campus where we develop it to contain new potential entities for living and learning, things like university-based retirement living, aspects around early career housing, aspects around other types of communities and other types of resources where our campus becomes almost a curator for this sort of intergenerational living and learning, and that people can embark upon that learning journey with us at any stage of their life or career.

(02:37):

So a lot of it is really kind of thinking about everything. It's thinking about who comes and when they come and how they come. How do we make learning more flexible? How do we go to truly meet learners where they are? In some cases, it's not just in time, it's in place and it's in life. And we've talked about a lot of the ways that we can create these flexible learn while you earn pathways, where you don't need to drop everything and go back to school, that you can do it as part of a journey. And we've been working with corporate partners to be able to deliver onsite education while people are engaged in employment and do it for the purposes of upskilling, retraining. And in some cases, really developing talent, which is great, not just for the learner, but also terrific for the corporation or the partner who allows the investment to be made in people that they can retain and build.

(03:28):

So all of this really becomes, for us, the journey to the future. We hope that if we get it right, we have a mindset that education is more of a subscription-based model than a four-year journey or a two-year journey or whatever the length of time is, that it becomes something that you start when you're 18 or in some cases even before with pre-college programs that we hope make it more easy for students to transition into that first journey to college. But then we become your learning partner throughout your life that we can provide some continuing education, advanced degrees, certificates, other types of enhancements, and do it in a way where we're strategic about giving people what they need just in time.

Shauna Cox (04:12):

And I love the way that you're describing it because you're really physically, strategically, everything is really this ecosystem. And I kind of envision its own campus where everybody is in the various stakeholders, and you're really putting the learner at the center. So I think that is so, so critical. And within this ecosystem, I kind of want to dive into the programming side of it. So what shifts in academic strategy are most critical for building a more seamless pathway that kind of integrates the micro-credentials, the certificates, and those degrees, because they're not going away, into a more coherent kind of learner-to-earner experience.

Michael Avaltroni (04:53):

So that's a great question. And again, that's another thing that we really pay a whole lot of attention to. One of the things over the past few years, we've really taken an academic journey as an institution to make a deliberate and concerted effort to try and hone our programming around a focused area that we feel we do well and we feel has a very bright future. And that's really in health adjacent and professionally focused programs. So the last couple of years has been a journey around some program consolidation and some reassessment of some programs that were typically under-enrolled and that were not really part of necessarily where we thought our focus needed to be. I think higher education's had this problem of trying to be everything to everyone, right? Institutions have aspired to get bigger and to offer more. And what I think we've lost sight of is when you do that, in many cases, you can't do it at scale and you can't do it in a way where there's really a robustness of being able to deliver everything.

(05:47):

I always use the analogy if it's the diner versus the fine dining restaurant. A diner has hundreds of things on the menu, but maybe you're not going to get anything that you really say, "Oh, that blew me away." Whereas a fine dining restaurant has six things and every one of them is outstanding. And I think for particularly private institutions like ours where we don't have a land grant obligation to be delivering comprehensive education to our communities for everything that they want and need, we have the ability to really begin differentiating. And so in doing that, we started to look at, as I sort of described these health, health adjacent to professionally focused programs, the health programs are obvious. They're the ones that are the clinical training programs that we know are in desperate need right now. And there are shortages across the health systems that are becoming a crisis point.

(06:32):

The health adjacent programs is a lot of programs that we offer here that aren't direct patient care, but are linked to overall health and wellbeing. And I use analogies even just like we have a hospitality school and hospitality of healthcare is a science unto itself and an art unto itself that's critically important for a patient journey or to create effectiveness in delivery of care. We have things like cybersecurity, which also has a healthcare component with patient records and portability. We have programs in business and in leadership and in entrepreneurship, all of which have these components. So in doing that and consolidating our set, then we were able to begin to look at this learner to earner journey and to say, okay, then let's look at within the health sciences, how do you take students from across the continuum of starting points and look at ways to create this sort of career laddering and career journey for them?

(07:29):

In some cases, it's partnering with high schools and two year schools to say, we will get you an early on credential that gives you early earning potential. So you can become a patient care technician, a nursing assistant, a pharmacy technician, something that's usually a lower barrier to entry, but has substantial earning potential. So a student that just simply says, "I can't afford to go back to school and drop everything," has an earning point to start and foundationally build from, and then begin building these ladders of career where you say, "Well, if you're starting in an area of patient care and you really are passionate about patients, here's an array of options at the associate's level, at the bachelor's level, at the master's level, at the doctoral level that are all attainable, but ultimately attainable in manageable bites." Rather than often what is very daunting, particularly to people who are trying to navigate life and education to say, "There's no way I can go and become a doctor of nursing practice because it's eight years and a million dollars and I can't figure out how to do it.

(08:29):

" Whereas if you say, "Well, okay, let's chop it up into you can become an LPN, again, begin working at a higher level, higher earning potential, stay at the site and then go for your BSN, stay at the site and move to nurse leader, a nurse practitioner, and all the way up to their nurse manager and then to the C-suite." Those are manageable bites that can be done without the person having to drop everything, but more importantly, aligning it with their interests, aligning with their expertise and aligning it with really holistic growth that happens both in the professional space and in the academic space.

Shauna Cox (09:07):

And I think the key thing that you're really highlighting here and illustrating is if you are the diner institution, how can you go into that deep of a level to help a student paint out their pathway for their whole career that they're currently sitting in? Because that is such a level of detail that you explained. And I'm like, how can you offer that if you are offering a hundred other programs? So I think what's really important here is figuring out what your niche is, what your programs are as an institution, and kind of accept the fact that you can't deliver everything to everyone all at once. But I want to take it one step further in terms of the programming. And for you guys, it's the health space and what you highlighted there was the health space. So really, how can an institution keep pace with that in a world that is constantly rapidly evolving and everybody needs new skills and everything like that?

(10:07):

So how can institutions more effectively align, say, curriculum innovation with rapidly changing market labor needs while at the same time not compromising any academic rigor or a shared governance that they have around it?

Michael Avaltroni (10:23):

Yeah, it's the tough battle because I've always said in higher education, we move at a pace that is completely in misalignment with the world right now. We work in a matter of years and generations and academic calendars and cycles, and the world is moving in a matter of minutes and seconds, that you can get instant decisions on things. I always use the analogy that I can go and get something shipped to my door from Amazon or from Home Depot, or I can go and apply for a loan or whatever, and I'm improved instantly. And if I say my desire with cash in hand and the desire to do it is to start an academic program, someone will tell me, come back in August. And knowing that that's the time lost is ultimately then going to be money lost and career loss, that's not something we can do anymore.

(11:13):

I think the answer to how we do this is we have to and really robustly build partnerships with the end users, quote unquote, in the sense of the person who's going to be the future employer and the ones who really identify that for us, the bedside need, the patient need and to be able to speak back to that. So for us, I think a good example is what we've been able to do with our corporate partnership programs where the corporate partnership programs are delivery of education onsite in a sort of low residency model. So there are some online components, but there are substantial in- person components because the cohort is built from people working in a partner site, meaning they all share a partnership of that they're all Merck employees or they're all Novartis employees or they're all Fiserv employees. So there's this camaraderie built in and there's this collegiality and there's this really cohort nature built in, but it's done so that it's flexible, it's met on the site of where the people are employed, so there's convenience.

(12:12):

But the more important part of this is we've built it in partnership with the corporation to be able to flavor the curriculum to really take a lens of view of what the needs would be. That doesn't mean, oh, we don't require these courses anymore. It means if we're requiring a finance course for an MBA, it would be really nice if we're using case studies from your day-to-day work. It would be really nice if we're drawing on examples from what you're doing. So we're building curriculum and partnership.

(12:40):

We're also, in some cases, deploying some of the folks who are experts in this field to co-teach with us in the programming. So if you're, again, the CFO of Merck, you probably have a very good articulated value of how to articulate finance in healthcare more so than potentially somebody who might have an academic background but not have the experience. So bringing those two together is really a powerful tool and the students are ultimately the beneficiaries of that. But I think the more we can build these robust partnerships that really align the ability for us to do what we do well, which is really build a curriculum and build a structure and build a learning journey with folks who have the on ground needs of what a learner and a future employee would have as their value and what they would bring to an organization, the more we do that together, the more we're able to keep pace.

(13:34):

And if we don't do that, frankly, we're going to be left behind because we're going to be teaching people things that the real world is going to say, "This isn't what I need." We're going to be teaching a version of AI that a student is going to learn and they're going to leave and enter into a corporation. They're going to say, "We need to train you on what we're doing because it's completely out of alignment. You have this sort of academic view. We need you to actually be boots on the ground doing something." So I think this is the only path forward if we want to stay relevant.

Shauna Cox (14:01):

Absolutely. The student comes to the job and it's like, well, the skills you have now, we needed three months ago and now there's something else there. So it's really important to be working in lockstep because I've found over the years, oftentimes it was institutions working with corporations and it was, "Well, here's our package. What do you think? " And they're like, "Well, no, we want this change, that change." And it's like, "Well, it's too late, so here you go. " And

Michael Avaltroni (14:30):

That's one of the challenges of really the pace at which each of us move. And that's one of the things we've also thought about in a couple of our newer degrees, a Master of Healthcare Administration, for example, is really made up of a series of essentially micro-credentials that are built in a way where they come together to make the 30 credits you need for the master's, but they can be sort of swapped in and out as relevance becomes greater in one area or lesser in another, or there's a new version of this thing. So it's built almost as a backbone that is laid in with individual components that if we need to change them, we can change them in order to make the degree stay relevant.

Shauna Cox (15:09):

It's really this hub where you can personalize what you need to when you need to. It's adaptable, it's agile, which really, talking about the modern university here, I think that is the future of the institution. And with that, we obviously can't talk about a modern university without technology. So what role should technology be playing when it comes to a personalized, navigable and a continuous learning journey that is going to keep a learner engaged throughout that lifelong learning journey?

Michael Avaltroni (15:42):

Yeah. One of the things we've really focused on, and we think it's an opportunity for us to really define, in some cases, really define our university, but certainly to define the role of our university in educating, for example, the workforce of the future in healthcare is creating this sort of really very, very seamless and very, very critically important dovetailing or alignment between technology and the human. Really looking at creating a program around what we've identified as this concept of humanics, really the role of human literacy alongside technological and data literacy, because we don't see anybody being able to navigate the future without having some real manageable expertise in all three. I think one of the things we're trying to really read the future for is not simply just looking to lean into technology as the only or as the sort of center point. I think a few years ago we were there, right?

(16:42):

We were giving instructions to every kid needs to go to coding camp to be ready for high school and all kids need to learn to code and it should be the language we're teaching instead of a foreign language. And now you look back five years later and AI is doing all of our coding for us and we're saying, "Well, that's no longer really a skill we need." So if we go after this sort of shiny object thinking of the newest technology and we're only paying attention to the newest evolution of what's today's sort of leading edge, I think we're going to lose a lot of people along, again, this time continuum of the technology's moving faster than we could ever educate you and make you savvy on it. So for us, we're really thinking about this sort of human centered use of things like AI and machine learning and in the role of healthcare, we think it's more critical than ever that we train differently to really allow people to utilize technology to practice at the top of their license, but to have the skills necessary in things like empathy, critical thinking, creativity, decision making and judgment, overall cultural sensitivity and cultural awareness as being really the keys to this humanics concept that allows someone to be able to practice with effectiveness and efficiency using technology and data, but to practice with compassion and that human understanding at the core of what we know will never go away.

(18:07):

And I always use the analogy that we see now more than ever that as technology and the access to technology, communication gets greater, people are feeling more and more isolated, more and more alone. Mental health crisis has increased. All of these are related because we're communal beings and we're never going to get to a point, no matter how technologically advanced we get, where you will have a difficult diagnosis given by a robot or given by AI or anything else. It may help you to identify in an MRI something your eye could never see, which is great use of technology, but delivering difficult news to a family member, to a patient, having a meaningful conversation, that's a skill that we need to make uniquely human and teach people how to do that well.

Shauna Cox (18:56):

Well, I feel like, like you mentioned of the last five years, we really put our foot on the gas to dive into technology because the pandemic, we were isolated. Okay, so how can we leverage technology, leverage technology and really optimize it? But it's like, hold on, we're all humans. I feel like this is kind of the year of taking a step back and being like, where are the human components coming in? Let's be real again. Let's not over ... We want to optimize where we can optimize, but bring those human elements back to kind of ground everybody again and let's just take a moment and reflect on everything that we've been doing.

Michael Avaltroni (19:37):

I couldn't agree more. And I think for us, I think we've been caught up every one of us in this wave of technology, which is magnificent. Every morning I try and use ChatGPT for something because it's not that it's doing work for me. It's enhancing my ability to do work and to create volume that I could never create myself. But I realized that at the end of the day, that's not going to be a replacement for me. It's going to be an enhancement for me if I do this right. And I think we need to change the mindset of that fear that we've had over the past years that everybody's talking about AI is going to replace all the jobs and start looking at how does AI enhance the work that humans really need to be at the center of in order for us to be effective.

(20:18):

I always use the analogy that I feel like I used to coach kids soccer and when kids are young, you've got 22 kids all running after the ball. The kids who end up being good players are the ones who know where to wait for the ball so that when it comes to them, they're alone. And I think for us, we're trying to think about, we've done way too much of everybody runs after the next thing. So this is the technology du jour. Everybody goes and adopts it and says, "This is the answer." And then a year later it's replaced and everybody runs there. It's the winners are going to be the ones who see where it's going and can kind of play to that space.

Shauna Cox (20:53):

Absolutely. I love the ... Your analogies are my favorite thing because they really put out those clear pictures and I'm just picturing kids running to the

Michael Avaltroni (21:01):

Softball. Yeah. I always was the case. I always used to say, "Just stand there and wait because eventually the ball's going to come to you and you'll be all alone." Yeah.

Shauna Cox (21:08):

Exactly. And so we're talking about the human components and I really want to look at the societal impact that institutions can really have here. So how can universities kind of strengthen that societal impact they have by redefining themselves as these hubs for the ongoing talent development, a workforce mobility and kind of the economic resilience that quite honestly everyone is looking for today?

Michael Avaltroni (21:34):

Yeah. I think one of the things that we've been trapped in in higher education is a point in time, which was not all that long ago, where we were the only place you could come to get access to information, to knowledge, and to really career advancement and to personal development and all the rest. And now my phone has more power in it than a million libraries of a million college campuses. So the days of I need to come to get the sage on the stage and get access to the microfilm and all the archives and all the rest, those days are gone. And so if we are holding our value to that, ultimately we have no value because the value is easily replaceable and it's easily kind of in many cases found with greater ease and greater access and greater overall convenience than we could ever possibly accommodate.

(22:22):

I think for us, we've started to really think about what is college, what is a university? And in some cases, I think our greatest value has always been helping people to develop their lives. And in the case of a first time college student, to come in as an adolescent preformed and to come out more formed about themselves and the world around them and their opportunities, the whole aspect of you've got to come and you've got to pick a career and four years later you'll go, that day's probably gone as well. I don't think it's realistically going to be you major in something and that's what you do for 50 years except under very rare circumstances. But the ability to come in and learn about yourself, learn about how you learn, learn about the things that are critical, that are core skills, that are really those fundamental things that you would use across your journey no matter where you go, that's a great value that I think we need to start articulating is sort of this baseline from adolescence into adulthood.

(23:24):

And that's the first time student. For all other aspects of what we do, I think it's very similar. I think it's not necessarily taking adolescents and bringing them into full-fledged adulthood as sort of mature individuals who are self-aware, but I think every part of a learning journey brings some of that to the learner. I think that every person, whether they're going back to school at 40 after having raised a family, whether they're going back because they're mid-career and they're dissatisfied, whether they're going back because they feel like they're being sort of put down a path of obsolescence, most of, I think, the value that you get from education isn't the three credit courses that you log along the way. It's that journey of learning about yourself, discovering about what you love and what you're passionate about, discovering the journey of what education opens eyes and opens doors to that I think becomes the value that you can get at 18, 28, 48, or frankly, as we're looking in a program that we have, which is our Fluorum Institute for Lifelong Learning, which is seniors and retirees who are staying relevant and staying engaged by coming and taking classes and taking part in events.

(24:37):

And what we're seeing is that's a completely different journey that they're on. That's a journey to stay connected, to stay relevant, to stay sharp of mind, to try and stay off things like dementia and other types of diseases of the mind. So every stage of the journey of life really has an opportunity to use learning as an enhancement, not just to better your career, but to better yourself, to go more deeper into your sort of introspective journey and to do some things overall for your physical, your mental and your overall health. And I think those are the things we need to sell that have always been a part of education, but now more than ever are of great value and I think will be in great demand.

Shauna Cox (25:21):

Amazing. Well, Michael, those are all the questions I have for you. But before I go into my bonus question, is there anything else that you'd like to add about creating this lifelong learning ecosystem and kind of redefining what that modern university is?

Michael Avaltroni (25:37):

I think the only thing I would say, this was great conversation because I think we touched on so many things. I think for us, we believe that if we get this right, that the university of the future brings greater value than it's ever brought. I think that the whole mindset of will higher education become obsolete and all of the rest of that, the answer is if it stays in doing what it does and doesn't budge, the answer is very quickly. But I think the opportunity to really see education as a pathway to, again, mobility to career, but also fulfillment and in some cases really connect that to overall that aspect of health and whole person wellbeing, I think is something that we're really aspiring to do to make the connection between an educated person and a healthy person of mind, body, and spirit. There is a lot of evidence to demonstrate that's real.

(26:27):

And we believe now more than ever, that's critically important as people are on this sort of health span journey to looking at not just living longer, but living higher quality, more fulfill, more engaged life.

Shauna Cox (26:39):

Absolutely. Well, again, thank you for the conversation around higher ed. And before I let you go, I'm going to shift the conversation a little bit to ask my very selfish bonus question. But in higher ed, there's a lot of academics. I'm going to put the stereotypes that we love reading. So what is a book that either you've read recently or that you just read years ago that really sticks with you that you would recommend for anyone to read?

Michael Avaltroni (27:11):

So there's a couple that come to mind. My most recent and probably I would say most, I think important read in terms of perspective on a lot of things around what we just talked about today is The AI Driven Leader by Jeff Woods. It was a great, really insightful read around how to deploy all of this wave of technology in a way that enhances your ability to lead. It talks about things like how to use AI as a thought partner rather than as, again, a replacement for how to use it for some really, I think, some unique situations that leaders face every day. They talk about simulating a board meeting using AI and uploading the bios of all your board members and having to ask you questions and things that are just things you wouldn't think about a simple ChatGPT prompt. So it's been a great eye-opener for me.

(28:00):

So I certainly love that book. The other one that always comes to mind that's a Tried and True Classic is Creating Magic by Lee Cockrell, which is really kind of goes back to my foundations of a lot of the things I see in great value from what Disney does around creating a user experience that I think we in higher education can learn a lot from and how we can create that sort of magic on a campus the same way they do in the Magic Kingdom and elsewhere. So those are two that certainly come to mind that I always, one, I go back to quite often and sort of reference and think about. And the other that was a great new read for me that really talked a lot about, I think what we need to be thinking about as leaders, as technology continues to evolve and grow, and how do we use it as a leveraging tool and not as something that's just simply sort of a lazy replacement.

Shauna Cox (28:48):

Amazing. I am very excited as I ask all these questions to have a ginormous stack to be

Michael Avaltroni (28:55):

Read-better download Audible or some sort of a reader to drive around and listen. Yes.

Shauna Cox (28:59):

Exactly. Amazing. Well, again, Michael, thank you so much for the conversation. It was really great chatting with you.

Michael Avaltroni (29:05):

It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.