New College Rankings Focus on Student Success

0:00:12.5 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we discuss a new college ranking system that rewards universities that do the best job of improving access and postgraduate outcomes for students from their community. We’re talking about the Student Access and Earnings classification system expected to be rolled out soon by the American Council on Education in conjunction with the Carnegie Foundation. Our experts say this new classification system could be a game changer and incentivize more universities to redefine institutional excellence around student success. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:01:00.0 Ed Venit: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Office Hours with EAB. My name is Ed Venit. I’m our lead student success researcher here and I’m joined by my colleague and good friend, Ellyn Artis. Ellyn, would you mind telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

0:01:09.0 Ellyn Artis: Sure. Thanks, Ed. So my name is Ellyn Artis and I lead our Moon Shot for social and economic mobility effort at EAB. It is about 25 schools that have said we’ve got to figure out how to really improve student success, student success, social mobility and economic mobility for all of our students. So delighted to be here to talk with you today.

0:01:32.4 EV: And we’re going to have a conversation today about the Carnegie New Student Access and Earnings Classification. You may have heard about this for the last few years, referred to as the Socio and Economic Mobility ranking. They’ve changed to a little bit more of a plain language one. So Student Access and Earnings Classification, which, Ellyn, of course, is very relevant to the work that you’re doing and could be a potentially big change in how schools are assessed relative to each other going forward on both the issues of access and earnings, which are pretty important to a lot of the schools that we work with, as well as the overall education system and of course, the future of higher education.

0:02:13.6 EA: Well, let’s start just by jumping into sort of, what does that mean in layman’s term? Student Access and Earnings Classification. It’s a lot of words. It could mean something complicated. But, Ed, just tell us what it means in plain English.

0:02:27.6 EV: Sure. When we usually talk about the Carnegie rankings, we’re usually talking about the research rankings. What’s the purpose of these? Well, it’s to help sort of sort schools and you’ve heard like, say, R01s based on their research intensity. And this is often how schools get access to different safe funding sources, or it’s a way to sort of attract different talent. These new rankings are meant to be able to do the same thing, but instead of highlighting your research activity, we’re highlighting mobility and the way we specifically are going to be doing this with these rankings is by grouping together like institutions. And you know, this peer set can be defined in a lot of ways. It can be defined by your geography, be defined by your access, can be defined by your student population. A lot of that’s in the details here. But schools are going to be grouped together into like groups and then you know, one of the things that will be alike will be well, what student population are you trying to draw from? And then how well does your student body reflect that population? That’s the access part. So essentially does your student body resemble, based off a variety of metrics, the students that we would expect you to be serving? And if not, what can you be doing more there to increase the access thereof of the students that we’d like to see you see, that’s the access side of things.

0:03:42.5 EV: Earnings is just the income of the students after they graduate. And I think they’re just specifically looking at income for students who receive federal aid. And that’s going to be any students. So that will include both non graduates and graduates that don’t have employment after they graduate. And I want to say it’s a few months after graduation that would be looking at those numbers. So still a few details here that are being hammered out. But that’s the basic broad strokes of how this thing is going to work. It’s going to compare like institutions based on how good are you at encouraging access to your school? And then how do you do it places students into high paying jobs after they graduate.

0:04:21.4 EA: Got it. So thanks for that clear explanation. Ed, we’ve always been focused on, you know, we’ve been looking at enrollment, we’ve been looking at completion and graduation rates. But tell us how this really, these new classifications really represent a shift in sort of how we measure the success of an institution. How is this different?

0:04:41.7 EV: Sure. So let’s just look at, from a student success side of things. We might have been looking at a school that is graduating 90% of its first-time full-time students within six years and said, hey, that’s a really good thing, but we aren’t really looking at say what do you have to work with? Right. 90% of students coming in. If you’re dealing with students who are say, particularly affluent, really strong, academically motivated, you know, 90% is going to be an easier number to attain than if you’re not working with a population or a population that needs say a whole lot more support in any of those regards. In that case, 90% is truly commendable. So we’re trying to be able to draw out the schools that are getting that, you know, how are you outperforming essentially, you know, in these regards in order to sort of support students and get them better outcomes than they could have gotten otherwise. Then once we identify the high flyers here, the schools that are doing the best other schools can look to them for inspiration, say, oh yeah, we could be doing. They have this great practice that we should adopt that they have this great policy.

0:05:42.8 EV: We should do that too. Look at what they’re doing here with, say, the way they’re distributing aid money. We should consider that as well. So it’s a way to sort of highlight who the top performing institutions are, you know, who are the truly progressive in this regard are truly effective and letting others begin to emulate and create a bit of a competition here so that, you know, it’s something that you and your team can strive for, moving up and something you can celebrate. And in fact, you show off really good in the ranking system.

0:06:08.3 EA: And I just. As you were talking Ed, it made me think about it also really creates space for our sort of community colleges, our technical colleges, some of our regional colleges and universities to really get into this rankings game in a new way. These are sort of the folks who’ve always been sort of engines of social mobility for a lot of our states and for a lot of the country. And so they too now get to really think about how they sort of are moving this metric forward.

0:06:37.7 EV: Yeah, absolutely. You know, when you think about rankings in higher education, you might be thinking about the US news rankings, which are going to have their own formulas and tend to highlight particularly well-funded and let’s go ahead and call them elite institutions, where you think about the research rankings, which are going to have a lot of overlap with that group. But what about the thousands of other schools that are out there that are doing really great work for students? But it is difficult to stand out from the pack unless we have something like this, a scoreboard for you to look at and say, yeah, this is what we’re doing here and this is how we stand out. And this is why you should pay attention to what we’re doing. And we have a lot to teach the rest of the world.

0:07:16.5 EA: Got it. Well, so tell me a little bit about. You mentioned US news and World Report as rankings. There are other rankings that folks are paying attention to. How do we get institutional leaders in particular to really think about this change in a new way and to think about why this ranking in particular is something that they want to run after? That’s one question. And then the other part of it is, once they decide that it’s really important, how can they really, you know, beef up those rankings, if you will, to ultimately both, like, help students succeed, but also think about sort of how they show up higher and higher in this index.

0:07:56.3 EV: Yeah. I think the most important thing for a leader to do here is zoom out and understand, you know, what’s the good intent here. We’re trying to share ideas between schools that are doing well. If you’re not doing well, you want to know that. If you are doing well, you want to show off. So there’s a really good intent behind here. So I think that’s the first thing a leader needs to convey. The second is, hey, if we do really well here, if we work hard and we strive for this, students are the winners. You know, this is what we’re supposed to be doing here. So it’s a way to reorient the mission around a single goal or around a very visible goal and say, we’re going to do this. You’ve seen this a lot with the research rankings. You’ve seen provosts go to faculty and say, we’re going to become an R01 within the X number of years. And here’s the plan for doing that. How incredible it would be if you could go to your faculty or to your entire campus and say, we’re going to move up the access and earnings classification, and we’re doing exactly like this.

0:08:49.4 EV: We have a plan, and everybody’s going to be on board with this, and we’re moving forward. And again, the big winners here are the students. You can clearly see out of this. I think in a lot of our work, we hear from schools to say, oh, I want to be the next Arizona State. I want to be the next Georgia State. I want to be the next school that’s standing out in student success. Well, here’s the opportunity to actually go do it, because you have a way to get essentially badged for doing that. You know, you get the recognition, you get the trophy, and others can point to you in that regard and say, right, there they are. We want to be just like them. So it’s a way to really boost morale and be a leader in that regard by giving everybody a common goal that we can all feel really good about. Where there’s pushback here is often in the details of the system, and the thing that gets the most pushback is the earnings part, because that feels like a pretty, you know, pretty Metric, metric, if you will. It doesn’t really include all of the great robust benefits you get out of a college experience.

0:09:49.5 EV: And so it’s not a perfect metric. But there is no such thing as a perfect metric. The earnings data is an accessible piece of information that’s relevant to our students. We would all like to have earnings in that regard. And so, you know, it’s better than nothing would be. The way I described the pushback here is, is there a perverse incentive to push students in the highest paying majors. So think business, computer science, something like that, and away from other majors that might not have such a tangible high paying job directly after graduation. And the good news here is that ACE who’s administering these rankings is telling us straight off the bat, no, actually the most important thing to do is to get a student into a job of any sort. Their specific major matters a lot less than are they gainfully employed and moving forward with earnings. You know, to put it another way, zero is the worst possible earnings to have in this regard. Any earnings on top of that add year number. And they’ve done enough of the math behind this to feel pretty confident in that assessment. So a school strategy should not be, hey, we’re going to funnel students into these high perform or sorry, high paying, sorry, let me say this one more time.

0:11:01.6 EV: We’re not going to funnel students in these programs that lead to high paying jobs. We’re not going to try to build new programs that do this. That’s not the way to win this ranking system. The way to win this ranking system is through career advising. We want to get more students into internships. We want to start these processes earlier. Let’s do better resume coaching. Let’s get connected with our local employers. Because the most important thing to do here is guarantee employment or to just say support employment and facilitate that so that you get those earnings on that.

0:11:32.7 EA: Yeah. And you both mentioned internships and you mentioned career coaching. I’m starting to see through Moon Shot and other initiatives. Also, just how do you bring experiential learning into the classroom itself? So how do you make sure, particularly for our students who might not, who might either be in a college location that doesn’t have, you know, I was just at a college yesterday where they said we have agriculture jobs, but we don’t have a lot of jobs in the biotech space. Right. So how do you bring those experiences into the curriculum as a leadership team to make sure that that’s happening? That’s one way. How do we make sure we’re focused on co-curricular experiences from the very beginning across the spectrum. Because as you said, Ed, it’s about getting them the job they want right at the end of this. It’s not about sort of pushing them into spaces they don’t want to be in order to run at the end of this. And I love what you said about sort of students really are the biggest winners at the end of the day. And that’s what we always want to see.

0:12:31.3 EV: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about the Moon Shot and maybe about some of the things that the schools that you work with who are coming together to specifically around this outcome to improve access and to improve mobility. Some of the things that they’re thinking about maybe already ahead of this new classification system because they want to do it of their own regards. And for all we know, they might end up being the ones that are the shining stars that everybody’s looking at. So give us a little preview here. What, what might other schools be looking to? If they’re looking to your schools and say, hey, we should replicate that?

0:13:04.0 EA: Or just like you said, the biggest metric at the end of this is employment right now, how to measure it? You actually made it sound pretty simple. But getting the data, that’s something we’re still struggling with, campus to campus, we have it at the state, we have it at the national level. But trying to figure out how institutions have it at their fingertips, a struggle for some of us. So that’s one thing we’re working on, just sort of trying to understand where our students land in a more robust way. So that’s one thing. Those leading indicators are the same as they’ve always been. Retention, graduation rates, completion, credit accumulation before that, to really make sure that students are sort of getting across that finish line. And so we’ve seen in the Moon Shot, that pretty focused, intentional policy, best practice and things even like hold reform, micro grants, paying attention to classrooms, your maps, all of that can move graduation and retention rates pretty far in just a couple of years. So we’ve seen retention go up by 20% for a particular population. We’ve seen for even some of our black students, graduation gaps being narrowed almost entirely.

0:14:10.8 EA: And we’re starting to also see, just like for different populations of students, really thinking about those increases in graduation rates, retention, and then this. And now we’re looking at social and economic mobility. And the way that we’re really doing that is by thinking about some of those best practices that I was talking about co-curricular experience is big. We sort of know that, but we haven’t really embedded that into the, into the student experience. So how do we make sure that you know, to go see your career coach at this point? How do we make sure it’s being embedded in the classroom at that point? So really trying to be intentional about that and is one thing we’re doing, same thing I would say with paid internships. How do we try to figure that out? How do we take the work study jobs that so many of our students already have and really build sort of detailed professional development and sort of stackable skills into those so that those become sort of things on the back end that sort of help them, you know, be able to tell their story and lead to these jobs at the end of the day.

0:15:12.8 EA: So that’s a huge way I think of thinking particularly about how first generation or some of our low-income students can really start to think about social mobility. They don’t have the networks, a lot of them. And so we’ve got to think about how we build that while they’re still in our colleges and universities. And then last but not least, and I’ll turn it back over to you because I know you’ve been thinking about this a lot Ed is also even thinking about dual enrollment from the very beginning. How do we take the students who are already on our college campuses, are being taught by our college faculty and instructors from the very beginning, think about the community supports we need to build around them as they matriculate so that they come in faster and then graduate faster and are able to move to those jobs that shift our communities. So so much I could talk about here, but that’s some of the things that I’m starting to see emerge amongst our Moon Shot schools.

0:16:00.3 EV: Yeah, just to react to a few of those things. First of all, I love all that, you know, you and I have these great conversations about this sort of stuff all the time. And I think something we all both agree on and I think we have a lot of pushback, hard time finding a lot of pushback. About the idea that internships are the gold standard for getting students ready for careers. We would love every student to have a paid internship. And that’s not always going to be possible. What I’ve been really encouraged about in our recent work and for instance with the forge job simulations that EAB has, by the way, it’s free and available to everybody. If you want to go check those out, it’s at forage.com but going back to this the idea that you could get these sort of co-curricular experiences in a light but effective version even without the full paid internship. So something like a job simulation with a few hours’ time can give you a sense of what it’s like to work in a place while also raising your hand and saying I’m interested in you employer. Whoever put together this job simulation, please recruit me.

0:17:04.3 EV: Employers are telling us the earlier you can get a student to do that, that hand raised moment, and they would ideally like it to be in the first two years, the earlier they can get you into the cycle for securing a full internship, the real deal. So it increases your odds dramatically. Just essentially raise your hand and say I’m interested in a career of any sort. Here I am, please start recruiting me and doing that as early in the first or second year. You mentioned dual enrollment. This is in that same theme of getting started earlier. We have all kinds of data that’s just your typical 18-year-old does not know how to make these decisions, does not feel comfortable making decisions and needs all the guidance they can get. And the good news here is that a lot of this stuff is kind of some simple nudging type activities. Like let’s just get you started on these things earlier. We know what to do, we just need to do it earlier. And one of the things that we could do is these sort of like light experiences, if you will, that are internship, like don’t take the place of an internship but can give you kind of an early nudge or an early flavor of that, what that might be and eventually lead you into what the gold standard actually is.

0:18:08.8 EV: You know, that full on internship that hey, maybe that’s who your employer will be afterwards.

0:18:13.8 EA: Absolutely. And I love your push on earlier because as I, you know, been out even last week talking about portfolios and co-ops and some of those externship opportunities, students are saying we need those faster so that we can talk about those. Right. In my senior year I can’t, you know, I don’t want to do that my second term of my senior year. I need to do it in my junior year so that I can tell those stories. And so I think there’s opportunity there.

0:18:36.0 EV: Ellyn, we should probably talk about some of the challenges schools are going to be facing with regards to this. I’m going to bring up a big one in a moment but you know, I would love to hear from you. You’re on the ground with a lot of these schools. You see the day-to-day sort of barriers that can be cultural, they can be internal politics, they could be financial, they could be the inertia of history, whatever it might be. You know, we’ve always done it this way.

0:19:00.7 EV: It could be any number of different things. So I’d love to hear a little bit about some of those barriers. I’d like to talk a little bit about our career data after that. But other barriers besides that. What sort of things are you facing? And they’re maybe easily overcomeable. They seem daunting, but they actually aren’t. Or maybe they really are daunting. And they are the things that should be kind of the top of the list if I’m a president or a provost or a VP that’s trying to push forward and look good at these on this new classification system.

0:19:30.5 EA: Absolutely, Ed, great question, because we’ve thrown out a lot of good ideas, but there are challenges. And the first one I would name is just that change is hard, right? And change is hard in highly complex institutions that have sort of different divisions and academic affairs and student affairs and different colleges. And it can be an 800-person institution or a 40,000-person institution. Change can still be hard. And so I think some of the work is just thinking about how do we get agreement at the leadership level or bottom up, depending on sort of the culture and context of your campus, to say this is important for our students and to really then think through how do we embed this into some of the curriculum work we’re already doing or into some of the student affairs co-curricular experience work we’re already doing. How do we seamlessly make it a part of our institution? That’s one thing I also would like. We can’t have a real conversation today without talking about budgets. Date budgets are cut, institutional budgets, enrollment is back for some, but it’s sort of still down post pandemic. And so less is less, right? I learned that from you, Ed is still the story of many of our institutions.

0:20:43.5 EA: And so thinking about where we prioritize, I think is it’s just a challenge in sort of how do we do this is one. The other thing I just want to name is that it is complicated, I think, to get all factions of the university on board with this. I think there are still a lot of folks who don’t believe quite yet that students come to institutions for a job, right? They want them to do the exploration, they want them to have this experience, and so do I. But I also want them to have a job and a career at the end of it. And so there’s just some real talk that has to happen about sort of what’s the true value of a particular higher Ed institution at any given time and how do we serve and meet students today for where they are and for what they want out of our experience. So a few things, a lot of them on just sort of the change management side and then some real fiscal pushes as well. Oh, jumped in. But then I do want to come back to that career data you were talking about.

0:21:49.9 EV: Well, I wanted to react to a couple of the things that you said right there, first. I’m going to forget my train of thought as usual, something like this. So coming back to what you were saying about the budgets. So one of the interesting things about this new classification system is what if you end up looking really good? Well, this might be the way that, say, funders, philanthropic organizations, state governments, whoever, go about choosing who gets the money in terms of, oh, we’re going to launch a new initiative, give it to those folks over there. They have a proven track record of success. They’ll take the money, figure the thing out, and then teach everybody else. It’s kind of what funders often like to do with their founding cohorts for, say, a new initiative. Well, this is gonna be a way you can stand out. So it’s actually possibly, you know, a way to bring a little bit more revenue, especially in times where, like you said, you know, the belts are a little tight right now in a lot of cases. So I definitely want to call that out as a potential upside of this.

0:22:56.6 EV: The other thing that’s interesting about this is getting over the, say, the faculty pushback, for instance, that you mentioned. What’s college really for, what we should be growing as intellectual individuals. Hey, nothing about this threatens that, right? Like, especially when, if we let ourselves off the hook of we’re not trying to funnel students into different kinds of majors as a result of this, unless the academic department is off the hook a little bit. And actually, maybe, you know, your miles may vary depending on the academic department, but if you go to the faculty and say we’re actually taking the pressure off of you, you don’t have to worry as much about career outcomes. English professor, let’s say, because we’re going to be doing this new initiative in our advising office and we’re refocusing on, you know, early career advising with an internship and, yeah, it’s going to be your English students, but you don’t have to worry about, say, you know, placing that student in some job somewhere that’s our job. You just got to work with us on this. So done right, Done right in the right environment, it can take some of the pressure off folks that might otherwise be feeling the pressure of, I’m an English professor, I’m not a career coach.

0:24:01.3 EV: How am I supposed to help? Well, continue to be an English professor and do a really good job there. Let’s get the student graduated. We’ll help get them into a job. It’s a little bit of like, kind of lets people off the hook a little bit if they’re viewed in that way. Unless people be good at what they’re good at would probably be the way, I would say might be the approach here.

0:24:19.6 EA: Absolutely. Just one last challenge, actually, I want to mention, is also just the political environment of higher ed right now. And so just very quickly to say higher Ed is politicized right now, and so we can’t ignore that. But I don’t think there’s anyone who’s not behind sort of getting graduates of institutions, jobs, and careers that serve their community and their states and sort of the country. So that’s a good thing for all of us as well.

0:24:48.7 EV: So everybody wants good things to happen to graduates.

0:24:52.1 EA: Absolutely.

0:24:52.7 EV: Literally everybody wants good things to happen to graduates out there. And that is the one thing. And I’ll come right back to it, we said at the beginning, but we’ll say it again. It’s the one thing that pretty much everybody agrees on is we want good things to have happen to graduates. The quibbles about, say, a system like this are, is this the right way to measure that or not? But the general sentiment we want good things to happen for our graduates is pretty universal. So if we can all agree on that, maybe that’s a jumping off point for us moving in, forward in a politicized environment, because, hey, that person who might not have been so supportive of something else that you’re trying, well, they’re going to like this. You know, they’re going to be after that because they want that thing, too.

0:25:28.6 EV: Want to talk a little bit about the scoreboard, and that’s the career data. We’ve gotten a lot deeper in this. And Ellyn, this has been really surprising for my journey about kind of understanding how much colleges actually know about career outcomes. And I’ve been a little bit surprised at how little it is, actually. And I’m wondering if you’re having the same experiences with the schools that you work with. What I’m seeing is that it’s very Difficult to get any kind of outcome data. You might be trying to survey students, you know, scrape LinkedIn or you know, send out postgraduate surveys. Maybe you’re trying to survey your seniors where they graduate.

0:26:05.4 EV: Just to attain even 50% coverage on a graduating class is a pretty herculean effort. And that’s just simply knowing students have been placed somewhere much less maybe what they’re earning. So it’s really hard to see this scoreboard. And while we might be able to get, you know, kind of a broad brushstroke, oh yeah, our graduates average this much in earnings, it doesn’t really provide us with the granular data we need to actually inflect that number. So we’ve talked a little bit about this early career advising thing. That’s just something that everybody can agree on. We know this is going to work, it’s a good idea. What else is out there? What other tweaks can we make to help guide students to a better postgraduate outcome? Defined here as, you know, career placement and earnings. Have known if we couldn’t back solve from, well, here’s the outcome.

0:26:51.8 EV: What experience did they have when they were still a student? We’ve been doing this for years with things like retention and graduation rate. Back solving through predictive models into hey, what are the experiences students have that lead to graduation versus the ones that don’t? Why can’t we do that with career? It’s because we don’t have the career outcome data with a level of granularity where we can say this is what happened to Ellyn, this is what happened to Ed and what were their experiences while they were here. And then we see this again and again. It turns out if you do this, better things happen to you after graduation. It’s very difficult to understand that right now if you’re a school and for academic institutions that have people who want to answer questions, it can be very frustrating to not have the outcomes data. So this is a potentially point of emphasis that I’m just going to highlight to a lot of folks. We’re often relying on the career directors to collect these data. I might suggest this is now a cabinet level priority because of the stakes not just for this classification system, but just overall and maybe is no longer sufficient just to say, you know, we’re doing the best we can with the career office.

0:27:51.1 EV: We funneled it up to the president and then we have, you know, president has a factory that they can share but actually needs to be more of a cabinet level. You know, this is a metric we’re looking at all the time we take it to the board, whatever it might be. And much like we elevated student success metrics about a decade ago, it may not be time to elevate the career metrics as well. And for that we actually have to collect. So we don’t know where to find the data quite yet or how to make that easy. But that to me is a top priority for higher ed is getting that data source together in a reliable way so we can do science on it and figure out how to make ourselves better in this world so that we can look better and say this ranking system or any other one going forward and actually also provide better outcomes for students. Wouldn’t that be nice in the end?

0:28:33.6 EA: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you want to be that institution that says six months after graduation we guarantee this or we’re going to show all of our graduates have done this after this. And there are a couple of institutions that have really part of their enrollment strategy is to do that, but we got to have that data in order to do that. Yeah.

0:28:53.1 EV: I often think about myself in these conversations. Yeah, Ellyn, I was that senior in college that showed up in the career center in April. It was like, here I am, help me. That’s how you end up in grad school. But we don’t want to do that. What I would love to have had happen, and this, you know, wasn’t really the case back in the ’90s when I was in college, but I would love to have had someone come up to me at some point years earlier and said, hey, you know, red alert. You haven’t done the basic starting points of a career journey right now, like build a resume or like, you know, open a LinkedIn account, which you wouldn’t have had back then, but you know what I mean, you know, the basics get started, come on in here, go to this career event. And we, you know, we flagged you because we were able to build an alert system, for instance, around career development. Wouldn’t that have been wonderful for someone like me to not have that experience? Because say I was getting started as a sophomore year. I know all that information is out there, but it requires students to be self-starters and we know how that’s going to go in a lot of cases.

0:29:52.2 EV: We’re going to have to proactively reach out to students a little bit more here. Once we start getting this and we couple it with our other student success systems like Navigate 360 or Starfish, we can start really doing some career intervention work with students. That really is impossible quite now in a lot of ways.

0:30:09.1 EA: I love that. Ed, you seem to have done okay for yourself and you seem to, you know, if we collect your data, you’re doing great still at this point in life. But my question is, how do we help? What advice do you have, sort of for institutional leaders who want to make the most of the system? They have a bunch of little EDS on their campuses. A bunch of little Ellyn’s right. How do we really help leaders think about what they have to do to sort of redefine institutional excellence around student success, to really make it around student access and earnings?

0:30:40.7 EV: Yeah. So I’ll refer you to a blog that we put out a couple of weeks ago on. This is under my byline. So go and search for Ed Venit. If you’re looking for this, this blog post on the Student Access and Earnings Classification, I want to say it came out in late March, maybe it was early April, but right about there to be able to go check that out. There’s some good guidance in there. Just to recap some of the things that we’ve said in this conversation that would be useful. One, you know, bring this idea to your campus and say, hey, here’s a goal we can run towards. And it’s a goal we probably all want because it’s going to be good for students. Two is get comfortable with that notion of it’s going to just be about earnings. And that’s a, you know, a proxy for a lot of other good stuff happening to students. But we’re not trying to max earnings per student. We’re trying to max the number of students that have earnings. That’s what we’re trying to go for. So we want to get career placement and earlier career placement. And that’s again, a goal that I think a lot of us can agree on.

0:31:34.8 EV: So kind of building that consensus that gets you through some of the political hurdlers early on. And then, yeah, doing the research on what actually produces a good career outcome here. And what more could we be doing early on? Some of that early focus on just do some of the basic stuff, you know, the basic resume building, the basic outreach is so critical. And let’s say you don’t have a lot of career advising capacity in your first-year advice novice. Well, good news. Now you have AI and a lot of this career fl. We’re hearing this from more and more advising offices. I’m hearing at least you are as well. But I’m hearing from more and more advising offices where frontline advisors are using publicly available AIs to say research an entire set of career possibilities for a student who has respect Y and Z. You know, or if the student has done a bunch of stuff, ChatGPT, make that into a resume for this student. And it can be one that they just continuously update when they have new experiences. How amazing would be to have a resume when you’re 18 years old that you can feel like, oh, yeah, I’m actually building towards a career here and I can go shop this around in different moments.

0:32:37.7 EV: Who, you know, maybe that internship application. So that kind of stuff early on doesn’t have to be hard. We actually have all the tools we need and we maybe don’t need a ton of specialized training even to do some of these basic things. It just needs to happen. You start having these things happen, good things will start happening for our students down the road.

0:32:56.8 EA: I love it. Thanks, Ed.

0:33:00.2 EV: That seems like a pretty good note to wrap this up on. We’ve been talking a lot about the new Carnegie Student Access and, sorry I’m going to say this correctly, this new Carnegie Student Access and Earnings Classification, which will be coming out at some point this spring. And it will be a thing that we hope a lot of schools will take seriously and want to aspire to look really good at and a way to sort of stand out from the pack and really get yourself the credit for a lot of the good work that you’ve been doing maybe over the last few years. So I want to thank you for your time today. Ellyn, thanks for coming along. It’s always nice to have a chat with you and appreciate you spending a little time this afternoon with me.

0:33:39.0 EA: Thanks so much, Ed. I’m looking forward to seeing what institutions do, as you said, to make it a win for all students.

0:33:46.2 EV: If you’d like to follow up, anybody on this podcast, encourage you to learn more about the Moon Shot. You go on EAB’s website and look for that. And like I said, go check out the blog that we wrote on this for a little bit more guidance on this. And yeah, I mean, as these things emerge, keep the stories coming in us because we’re going to be learning as we go on this. So please do communicate with us and we’ll be able to maybe help you and just really everybody do really well with this new ranking system. Hopefully it does a lot of good for students. Thanks a lot for joining us today. We’re going to sign off right now. Good luck, everyone.