How the U. of MT is Engaging and Supporting Stop-Outs

0:00:12.0 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Our guest today is Brian Reed from the University of Montana who shares what he’s learned from helping stopped out students at his institution to re-engage and choose the best path forward. Give him a listen and enjoy.

0:00:35.8 Ed Venit: Hello and welcome to another episode of Office Hours with EAB. My name is Ed Venit and today we have a compelling conversation lined up that speaks directly to one of institution’s biggest emerging challenges. And that’s how do we re engage our stopped-out students? What’s a stop out if you don’t know? A stopped-out student is someone who’s left college, has the potential to return or be connected in some way with a credential. It’s a way to turn something that might be, say, a failure point into a success for the student and also change their trajectory, of course, in the job market. Joining me today is Brian Reed. He’s the Associate Vice President for Student Success at the University of Montana. And he and his team there are leading a really important, impressive initiative to re engage their stop outs, connect with them and get them connected to either a credential or to some career advising that would help improve their prospects as they have left the campus. We’re going to talk a lot about this, talk a little bit about the initiative, and also talk a little bit about EAB’s role in providing some of the data that is needed to make this kind of initiative work.

0:01:43.4 Ed Venit: I’d like to turn things over to Dr. Reed for a minute right here. Why don’t you introduce yourself, tell us all about yourself and how you came to this work.

0:01:51.4 Brian Reed: Yeah, hey, great. Thanks for having me, Ed. Again, I’m Brian Reed, I’m the Associate Vice President for Student success here at the University of Montana. We’re an R1 research institution here in western Montana. We’re proudly an open access flagship. We serve mainly almost 70% residents from Montana, which also includes students from all 13 federally recognized indigenous tribes as well. And so part of our mission of building in our DNA is equity and access. And so one of the things that I’ve given considerable thought to over the years is how do we re-engage our learners who had to leave for whatever reason, whether that be personal or life circumstances or finances. And so it’s a group near and dear to me. As a first-generation college student, I know how challenging it can be to navigate higher ed in general. And so it’s a group that I give a lot of thought to. And it’s a group that I think higher ed needs to pay more attention to, given, as you mentioned, some demographic shifts. They’re not making a whole lot more 18-year-olds these days. And also we are being held to account for our postgraduate outcomes.

0:03:06.5 Brian Reed: And so this is a group that I think deserves our attention. And so, for us, there’s 110,000 of these folks in the state of Montana who have some credential, no college in debt. And I think the number now is 41 million nationally. And unfortunately, only about 3% of those return to their degree. And so that’s where I think our program’s a little unique. And I’d be happy to talk a little bit more about that.

0:03:32.1 Ed Venit: Yeah, that’s one thing that I think a lot of folks don’t really get a sense of. It’s just the scope of how big the stop out or what say the National Student Clearinghouse policy, some college, no credential population. It’s something like one in six, one in five Americans have a little bit of college, but not a degree to show for it. And of course, they may also have debt and cost. They tend to make just a little bit more than high school grads. These aren’t success stories for either the student or the school. And, it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is. We would all like to make it better for everybody involved. Before we go a little bit farther down that road, most of our readers, sorry listeners, are likely not residents of Montana. Could you tell us a little bit about the workforce that we’re talking about here that these students are in and how it is both maybe a little bit the same and a little bit different from, say, some of the other areas of the country that folks might be hailing from?

0:04:27.9 Brian Reed: Yeah, absolutely. And so as folks may or may not know, Montana is a very large state geographically. And a little tidbit I like to share to illustrate the size is that it is closer to the, our southeast corner is closer to the state of Texas than it is to the northwest corner of the state of Montana. And so that is how big we are geographically. And we only have probably a couple of what we would consider metropolitan centers and that’s actually a stretch. And so we are really, a wildly rural state with not a lot of hubs of industry in the state. It’s a lot of entrepreneurs in the state. And we find a lot of our graduates are entrepreneurs. Also in terms of businesses and industries outside of entrepreneurship that we send our students to, we have a lot of students who work in federal government, particularly in the US Forest Service. We have one of the best forestry programs in the nation, wildlife biology programs. And the College of Business is renowned in the state of Montana as well. And so we are largely a small business state. And so that makes our challenge a bit more in terms of plugging our graduates into the economy.

0:05:48.6 Brian Reed: But one of the best thing is we have some of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation as well. Actually we’re under the national average. And so our students do find jobs. It’s just not at your typically major industries. I mean we do put students with Google and KPMG and others. But a lot of our students who stay in state go to serve their communities through public service and/or smaller firms.

0:06:13.4 Ed Venit: I also know a little bit from looking at your data that for the folks who don’t stay inside the state of Montana, you also have alums all throughout Seattle, Portland, Denver, Boise, Salt Lake, big, big important group within the western United States, mixing them with all the other college grads that are out there. Pretty significant thing. Been to your campus, it’s gorgeous. If anybody has a chance to go visit, I totally encourage you to do so and go get to see a little bit of what Brian was just talking about. Let’s turn back to our story here. You frame this work as a moral imperative. Share a little bit more about that. You and I both care deeply about this. It feels like a thing that we should be doing better in higher ed. Calling the moral imperative though, it takes maybe even a step further because now we’re getting beyond say this is just a commercial imperative. We’re looking to grow our enrollment or get some tuition revenue from these students. No, this is more in the we’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do, category. Tell me a little bit about that.

0:07:11.3 Brian Reed: Yeah, absolutely. Not only does this make like you said, intuitive enrollment and revenue sense as a what I would consider an untapped resource for those. Again for me, as you mentioned earlier about whose fault is it? And I’ll be really candid, I think it’s the institution’s fault in a lot of circumstances that higher ed throughout its history has not been designed or set up well to serve a diversity of learners. Learners who parent, learners who work, learners who are first in their family to pursue higher education. And so I consider it our institution and our industry and sector’s responsibility to make sure that the students we invite to our campuses through our program policies and services can be successful. Now do I believe that we will eliminate all attrition at the institution? No, not at all. But I think our attrition says a lot more about us than it does about our students. And so with that, I believe I would call this a promise unfulfilled on our part as an institution. And so for me, there’s a term that our president, Seth Bodnar has coined here as our guiding mission at the institution called inclusive prosperity.

0:08:34.7 Brian Reed: And at the University of Montana, we believe inclusive prosperity is that we believe every student that we recruit here needs to be given the support, the resources and the education to help them achieve their personal, intellectual and career outcomes. And so we take that mission very seriously. And we don’t care where you come from, who your parents are. We’re proudly again an open access institution. And we feel like that is our promise that we make to the residents of Montana and the students who attend the University of Montana. And again, I think simply put, it’s the right thing to do.

0:09:13.9 Ed Venit: Yeah, I’ve looked at, gotten to know this plan that you put together. It’s a multi phase, multi year plan and it is a pretty comprehensive stop out re-engagement plan. We’ve seen a few of these throughout the years and this is one that really stands out as being particularly impressive. And so we’ve got to know you a little bit on that one. We’ve done a couple of different sessions with you at different moments. You spoke at our conference, Connected, our Student Success Conference, this past fall. I got to share a lot of these ideas. We’d love to, if you could share a little bit with the audience what your approach to this is, with the core of it being that you’re trying to connect students to either reverse associates or bring them back for a bachelor’s.

0:09:53.6 Brian Reed: And so for a while we had, like most institutions, we had what we called a return to learn program, which is where we had provided some degree of outreach to our stopouts to say, hey, we’d love for you to come back to the institution. And it’s part of our regular re recruitment cycle as well here at the institution. But what we heard a lot of was from our stopouts was like, that’s great, I’d love to come back, but I’ve got these life circumstances. Again, caretaking, parenting, working. Also the finances were a hurdle. And so there were all these reasons why students could not just simply return back to the degree path. And so there’s a lot of programs like that nationally. I think what sets this one particularly apart, and it’s largely inspired by the Colorado program, the statewide program there, they had to award degrees, associate degrees to their stopouts, was that we were going to offer a degree for the students who had otherwise earned the requisite credits, the type of credits to qualify for the associate of arts degree. And, by the way, let’s talk about what a pathway to returning to the BA might look like for you and not only to that major that you might have been on when you were here, but we’re going to map your degree because we have access to our data.

0:11:19.0 Brian Reed: And I’ll talk a little bit about the edified work that we’ve done with the Navigate team or the EAB team. But also, we’re also working with grads who might not be ready to return to that path on their career trajectory. Meaning, hey, I’m not ready to come back. Those life circumstances are still in place. But I’d love to know how to leverage this credential a bit more in my work. And so state of Montana, there is about a $4,000 wage premium between high school and the associate’s degree earners. There’s also some reduction in unemployment. And so there’s enough of a benefit here for us to work with our stop outs who get this credential to help them leverage that and work a little more. And as you’ve said, and you made me aware of, which I wasn’t before you had said it, but I think you move from a GS2 to a GS4 in the federal government by simply having that credential and knowing that we’re a heavily federally based workforce here, particularly with forestry. That’s a game changer for a lot of those folks. And so that was really the inspiration and the framework for the program was let’s take an idea that was flailing in terms of the return to learn, give it some legs with the credential and then throw a bunch of resources at these folks to really help them leverage that credential in whatever way they wanted to do.

0:12:53.5 Ed Venit: Yeah, I think there’s an also common, you have to overwhelm them with kindness here too. Something has already not gone well one time. What you’re offering them almost sounds unbelievable. Why are you giving me a free college degree? Well, you earned it, but feels a little bit, I might be disbelieving if someone showed up and said something like that to me. And then there’s the sort of thing like, well, hey, how come you’re paying so much attention to me? You have to really continue to love them until the point where they’ll be able to take on something there. The comment about the government work, it works in the federal government. A lot of state governments work that way. Really any kind of all the way down to, say, education systems where you have folks who are, they don’t have bachelor’s degrees, but they’re working in schools. They can also get pay bumps of a couple of thousand dollars. Adding on associate’s, works in the health care industry as well. There’s lots of places hidden out there where just simply adding that credential adds earnings power for someone.

0:13:54.2 Ed Venit: Which is pretty amazing. We realized pretty early on you mentioned this, that the data you’re going to need to do this was going to be a challenge.

0:14:03.9 Brian Reed: Yes.

0:14:05.1 Ed Venit: And one of the things I got to get to know a little bit better watching you all do this was all the different spots around campus where we were going to build a perfect CRM data asset for something like this. What elements would you need to add in? Because this has been a vexing problem for folks who have taken on stopouts in the past. Just know from a number of different false starts I’ve run into across the course of the years. Talk a little bit about that realization and then a little bit about how we all get to work together on edify to bring the data together.

0:14:34.5 Brian Reed: Yeah. And so the challenges with a project like this, and if you talk to the folks at Colorado, they’ll say the same. They were really collaborative when we were standing this up as an institution, is that the data for these learners exists in several different places and not in one place. And so current contact information may live in one place. Labor market data that you would want to share with these learners lives in another place. Their degree works or their degree audit data is going to live in another database. And then just their general enrollment profile data is probably going to live in a banner like system like we have. And so the challenge is, how the heck do you put all that together in a place where a team of folks like we had been able to get together, can see all of this in one spot, be able to outreach to these folks, be able to talk to these folks about what a return to the BA path might look like with specific course maps. And then also things like, and this is the thing, little things like does this person have a financial hold that they had at the point of departure that we need to address before we reach out and say, hey, so the thing you don’t want to do is, hey, we’ve sent you to collections, by the way, when you left the institution.

0:15:57.1 Brian Reed: And by the way, here’s an associate’s degree. That’s the data you want to make sure you have at your fingertips that you’re making the right choices and the right outreach with folks. And that’s where the Edify product at EAB was just I cannot say enough about the, not only the utility of that, but also the ease of use and how your teams at EAB helped us design that dashboard with the end users in mind. And Vergelio and others who worked on that project, Pope Ashworth here at the University of Montana, it was just an easy, straightforward process. And the thing I always love about working with EAB is that you design products for people who are on the ground working directly with students.

0:16:45.2 Ed Venit: Yeah. I like to talk about these things often in the sense of our products aren’t the story. The problem that we’re trying to solve here is the story. But in this case, the product and the problem are, though they’re one in the same. This fragmentation issue is a big problem if you’re trying to something like this or frankly any number of other things. I’ll give you another data element that I know you all consider here, which is as a student enrolled somewhere else, well, that’s going to be your clearinghouse data. You don’t want to try to re recruit a student who’s happily enrolled at some other place.

0:17:16.1 Brian Reed: Or graduated from somewhere else. Yeah, exactly.

0:17:18.0 Ed Venit: Sure. Here’s an associate degree. Thanks, I’m good, kind of thing. And I’m also just putting myself in the shoes of maybe a lot of the other AVP or dean level folks out there that are running student success teams. And I know one of the big light bulb moments for you all was when you realized, our alumni office considers anybody an alum if they’ve just been here for one semester and they track the addresses for these people, so they’ve got the current up to date contact info over there in a completely different part of the university that maybe you wouldn’t have thought, that’s a possible source for that info. And yet there’s people over there that are, that’s their job. Being able to bring that together and there’s value on their end as well, of course, because they like to see what students were doing while they were here. It goes both ways. But that light bulb of, we do actually have the info, just elsewhere. We just need to unify it together.

0:18:14.8 Brian Reed: And you mentioned, you’ve hit on something that I think was really critical to the success of this program. This was a cross functional team of the Registrar Alumni Association. Our two-year college. We have an embedded two-year college. Faculty were on this, our career success team was on this. We also had a representative from the Department of Labor who was on our team. And this is, I think this is a testament to the work that we were able to do. I got an email when we had wrapped the initial phases of the project up and we were able, and I’d canceled the meeting because I felt like we’d made some really good progress. I got an email from the Department of Labor rep who said, I’ve never been so bummed to have a meeting canceled in my life that this project has been such a success and so much fun, and focused on helping people. And I thought that was a great testament to the work that we had done here when she had sent that email.

0:19:13.1 Ed Venit: I love it. Let me underscore that last point and connect it back to the moral imperative because hey, if you’re feeling a little bit down or a little bit beat up in higher ed right now and you want to do some good in the world, look at this. Because this is also directly running at and we’re improving our outcomes just by trying to do exactly what we’re trying to do with our students, which is complete them and launch them into better lives. It’s a feel good story all around and one that can also help strengthen the institution position going forward. Let’s talk a little bit about what you’ve learned going forward through this. Because anybody who’s tried the stop out initiative runs into any number of different kinds of unexpected challenges along the way. What advice would you offer peers now that you’re a couple clicks down the road and they might just be getting started?

0:19:58.5 Brian Reed: Yeah. I used this phrase at the Connected Conference and I really believe this is that run until you get tackled. Nobody tackled me here at the institution. I met with the president and I presented this idea and he said, I love it. It’s the right thing to do. I was like, all right. I met with our CFO because there’s some associated graduation costs that we have. And I said, would you be willing to forego the cost for graduation? And he said, absolutely, it’s the right thing to do. I met with our commissioner’s office. They loved the idea, they championed the idea. And they were like, it’s the right thing to do. And so nobody along the way told me no. And so it’s a great lesson. And if you’ve got a good idea, run until you’re tackled. And even when you’re tackled, those are all design challenges and design around those, and figure those out with the… And so that’s the first lesson. The second lesson is there’s a lot of magic in bringing in a cross functional team together, like I mentioned, with all the different ideas and people who want to support an effort like this.

0:21:00.4 Brian Reed: And so getting your Department of Labor in there, people you would not normally work with on a daily basis. And I think a lot of magic can happen from that. Also I think the other thing is, the big reveal here is that throughout the process, we discovered we had a total of 11 stopouts who had qualified for the degree. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but you know what? We celebrated that number in our committee. Hey, we found these folks, they’re going to get an associate’s degree and we’re going to give them a bunch of support either returning to the institution or in their work or their job searches. And we were really stoked about that. But the additional, and this is what I consider really the chef’s kiss of the whole program is that in addition to discovering the 11 folks who had qualified for the credential, we discovered almost 200 people who were really close, like a course short. And so I then went to our provost and said, hey, we’ve discovered we’ve got this big group of folks who are really close to this credential. Would you be willing to support discussions with a college and a faculty member to set up an asynchronous course?

0:22:14.2 Brian Reed: Let’s figure out if there’s a critical general education course that a lot of these folks share or different pods that these folks share and set up asynchronous courses for these folks to be able to complete. And the resounding answer from the provost was, absolutely, it’s the right thing to do. And so that is plan 2.0. After we do the initial launch in February with the award of the credentials, we will then move into, what does completion look like for these nearly 200 stopouts?

0:22:44.2 Ed Venit: That’s amazing. And a great lesson on the perceived boogeyman of the university bureaucracy that really isn’t, if you start appealing to the right things. I’m reminded of a story from a few years ago where someone was trying to do a re enrollment campaign like this. They’re like, the parking office will never go for it because they want to collect on the parking tickets. And that’s why we’re getting stuck. They have the holds on the students. They won’t let them register. And so the CFO heard this was like, hold on, called the parking office was like, it’s not going to be a problem.

0:23:15.8 Brian Reed: Yeah.

0:23:16.3 Ed Venit: We’d rather get the tuition revenue than the parking tickets.

0:23:19.2 Brian Reed: Yes.

0:23:19.5 Ed Venit: But it’s, people’s minds always work like that. And it’s more of an overall mindset. Having the backing of leadership is really critically important here too, because it makes a lot of those problems go away real quick in those moments, for sure. Let’s talk a little bit about what you might be hearing from the students. Are you hearing great stories? Have you heard feedback? What are they saying when you connect with them?

0:23:41.5 Brian Reed: We actually launch in February as part of our spring degree work cycle. But in our focus groups that we had with students about what would you want to hear in terms of the type of messaging? What are your initial or initial thoughts about a program like this? This was wildly. I remember meeting with student government about this because they’re one of our ready-made partners for focus groups. And they were like, this is brilliant. This is the right thing to do. And so we’re getting a lot of positive feedback from current students. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback from partners throughout the state. The businesses that we talk to, we stay in really close communication with our business partners in Missoula. And so the honest answer is that’s TBD. But we’re getting, in terms of our current students who we’ve asked to comment on this, the response has been resoundingly positive.

0:24:44.0 Ed Venit: I’ve heard in the past folks who are scared of launching in on something like this because they’re afraid of how it might make them look. We’re shining a light on our failures. We’re shining a light on our numbers maybe we don’t like about ourselves or situations that we didn’t like.

0:24:57.8 Brian Reed: Yeah.

0:24:58.2 Ed Venit: I think hearing you say that gives me a lot of confidence, hopefully with people listening to this, that no, you’re not going to get that response, it’s going to be the exact opposite. It’s going to be, hey, this institution cares about, make sure it finishes the race with the student and acknowledges it’s not going to be perfect. And that actually gives me a lot more confidence in the leadership and direction of the institution, at least it would for me right there. And again, coming back to you’re trying to make yourself look better, you’re trying to demonstrate your value. What an incredible story to share with the community, especially plenty of folks in that community who would fall into that category of yeah, I came, I took a couple of classes, it didn’t really work out for me. But man, I sure do appreciate that you’re not, not going to let that happen for the next me, who’s coming along in the future or we’re going to build something out here. Love to talk a little bit about the metrics of success, you’re launching in February for coming back in a year’s time.

0:25:54.4 Ed Venit: What are we looking at? Hoping that you’ve accomplished or seen improve. And I always have a little hesitancy asking for these things because short term metrics are also really, really important. Got to get some quick wins. The obvious thing, we want to graduate students to get them degrees. What other things might you look at to say, hey, this is going really well on a day-to-day basis. And then flipping that, what are the big like five-year success things? There may not be metrics associated with that, but if this is a wild success and we’re talking in 2030, what are we talking about at that point and saying, hey, this is such a wild success.

0:26:32.9 Brian Reed: Yeah. Obviously we hope that one of the metrics will be how many, what number of the eventual recipients of the credential return to the institution. That will be one that we will definitely want to look at. And then how do they fare once they return back to the institution? Again, this is one of those things where I didn’t want this program and I don’t want this program to be where you get a nice letter, maybe a phone call, here’s your credential, good luck in life. We want to be connected to these students and so we have already created a cohort tag within our banner system and our other systems to be able to track these students both if and when they return the institution. But then also we’re going to track their, let’s say the student says, not right now for me on the BA, but I want to look at these career opportunities, we’re going to look at things like, because we have some really robust career outcomes data down to the individual student level, we’re going to be able to track things like income that did they change positions? Did they increase their wages in a job change? Did they earn other credentials along the way?

0:27:50.5 Brian Reed: And so we’re going to be able to track a number of things both in terms of if and when the student returns from an academic and postgraduate outcomes perspective, but then also in the labor market as well.

0:28:03.8 Ed Venit: I love all this. When I started thinking a little bit about some of the things that you were doing along with the work that I was doing that was trying to look at post graduation outcomes, realize that you’ve got the thing, you built the thing here that is going to be absolutely necessary for being successful in the future if you are interested in postgraduate success. We spent a lot of years interested in first year retention appropriately. Then we started getting interested in actually graduating the students appropriately. What’s next? Well, we got to make sure we launch them off into real life. And how do we know that we did well? We have really lousy data on that, when you really think about it. And a data system like this, the efforts that you’re doing helps bridge that gap and is a light towards where we might be going in the future. Everybody needs something like this if you want to understand what happens to your students, two, three, five years, whatever after they leave, even simply the level of knowing where they even exist at that time and what they might be up to.

0:29:02.0 Ed Venit: You can see the value here bringing this together for maybe a third student success metric. Call it earnings, call it employment, whatever it might be, but whatever happens after graduation, that says we did a really good job on succeed here because that’s really how we’re going to improve in that regard. And all we’re looking at here is simply rebalancing the historical overweight focus on the entry into college, the orientation to college, and give a little bit of that effort or add a little bit of effort to the offloading out of college.

0:29:34.6 Brian Reed: Absolutely.

0:29:36.1 Ed Venit: Brian, I just want to thank you so much for being with us today, both to share your story and actually to also have a story to share. Because I’ve been looking at different stop out things throughout the years. This is by far one of the best and most elaborate ones that I’ve seen. You’re having success, even getting set up and being an example for others who want to go in this direction. I also have the multi prong approach of hey, we’re going to get you a reverse Associate’s, we’re going to get you some career coaching. If you want to come back to that Bachelor’s, we can too.

0:30:04.6 Ed Venit: Acknowledges the diversity of students that are out there and really helps work with the elements that you have right in front of you. Any final guidance that you might have for folks on the line who might want to be just like you and move a little bit along in this work or pick it up, where would they go? What would you advise them to do?

0:30:22.9 Brian Reed: Yeah, give me a call, send me an email. I’d love to chat about our experience. Our team would love to talk to you so that this is something you got that you’re interested in. And again, it doesn’t… Colorado did this as a system and that’s great. We did this as an individual institution. And it doesn’t have to be a statewide initiative or even a system wide initiative. And that’s a way to say I have an open invitation for folks who want to come and chat with me about how to make this work. And I’ll think through problems with you and really help you out, so don’t hesitate.

0:31:00.0 Ed Venit: Thank you. That’s a generous invitation. And for folks out there looking for a new challenge or something interesting to take on and you’re inspired by this conversation, do reach out to Brian. He’s a great guy. Their team is great and they’ll walk you all through this. And really, in the end, the beneficiaries of course are our students. Brian, once again, thanks for being with us today on Office Hours, really appreciate it. And then until next time, we’ll see you later.

0:31:24.6 Brian Reed: Thank you, Ed, it was a pleasure. And thank you and the EAB team.