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Reframe: Episode 86

How to Keep College Relevant in a 21st Century Society

Reframe Episode 86

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Change is sweeping across higher education. Many economic and technological factors are forcing universities to stay relevant in highly competitive 21st century job markets, and increasingly diverse student populations are driving many social and cultural changes as well. But finding new ways to thrive in this environment is a challenge that deeply interests Jason Lane.

An internationally recognized scholar who focuses on the leadership and governance of higher education, Jason Lane is also the new Dean of Miami University’s College of Education, Health and Society (EHS). On this episode, Dean Lane talks about the future of higher education, and about what he hopes to accomplish as dean of a college dedicated to transforming society for the better.

Additional music: Broke For Free, “Add And”

Read the transcript

James Loy:

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast by the hosts and guests may or may not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Miami University.

James Loy:

This is Reframe, the podcast from the College of Education, Health and Society on the campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

James Loy:

Higher education, like many institutions today is facing a great deal of change. Some of this change is being brought on by economic and technological factors like those that are forcing many universities to find new ways to stay relevant in highly competitive 21st century job markets. Other changes are being driven by social and cultural factors, such as meeting the needs of increasingly diverse student populations. In either case the future evolution or even re-invention of colleges and universities will depend greatly on the decisions that its leaders make now. So on this episode, we speak with Jason Lane. He's an expert on leadership and governance within higher education, especially as it intersects with politics, policy and globalization. Jason Lane is also the new Dean of Miami University's College of Education, Health and Society, also known as EHS for short. He's also a very strong advocate for the importance of universities in general.

Jason Lane:

I have long argued that higher education is one of the greatest social institutions ever created by humankind. And I think that what we do, the ability to create knowledge and to pass it on to the next generation is special.

James Loy:

However, he also admits that as an institution, higher education is facing a number of challenges, especially when centuries of tradition and established practices can sometimes clash with the fast-paced demands of modern society.

Jason Lane:

We have to be responsive to culture, how do we ensure that we are teaching folks to both think, but also be relevant at the same time? And it's an ongoing, I think, struggle of what do we keep? What do we hold on to? What is important? And what is it that has to adapt and change because the world does change?

James Loy:

We'll speak more with Dean Lane about the future of higher education, where it may be going and how it might get there, as well as what he hopes to accomplish as the new Dean of a college that is deeply committed to transforming society for the better. That's all coming up on this episode of Reframe.

James Loy:

Dean Lane, thank you so much for being here today. We're excited to have you on the podcast.

Jason Lane:

Thanks for having me.

James Loy:

So as the new Dean of the College of Education, Health and Society, or EHS, as we call it for short here at Miami, can you talk just a bit about your background? What is your area of expertise and what got you interested in this field?

Jason Lane:

Sure. I think throughout my professional life, I've always been impassioned by and an advocate for higher education in general. It really dates back to my college days. I was a student leader, student president, really got excited about the amazing ways in which a college can transform the lives of individuals, provide them opportunity and access, but also the ways that a university connects with its community and the important role it plays as an economic engine about providing quality of life, about raising important conversations around diversity, access and inclusion.

Jason Lane:

And so I think for me, just understanding the broad ways that higher education integrates with society and helps others has been something that has kept me going. And so that's how I got into it. If I had to summarize my research, I'd say there's three general trends. One is leadership and how do we actually run these universities and colleges? Another one is around what we call system-ness and that's how do we think about large scale change and multi-campus collaborations, or even multi-college collaborations within the university so that we can better facilitate the work of the university in a more collaborative sense and the internationalization of it. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the ways in which higher education intersects with the global world and the building of campuses overseas and sort of the development of these multinational colleges and universities and what does that all mean.

James Loy:

That sounds like a tremendously large area.

Jason Lane:

In some ways it is. The area is higher ed. I love higher education and have spent my time really trying to understand the enterprise and how it works. And so it gets bucketed into those areas. But at the end of the day, it's all about how do we make higher education better for society.

James Loy:

How about your college experience as an undergraduate? What did you major in, in college and were you always excited about maybe becoming a Dean one day? Was that always in the plan or did it just kind of evolve along the way?

Jason Lane:

That's a great question. I started out as a accounting major. My father was an accountant and I thought that was the thing to do. And then of course I took my first accounting class and realized it was not what I wanted to do and ended up switching to political science. And so my background really is from a political science and work theory perspective. That's sort of the lenses that I bring to study higher education. I always knew I wanted to work in higher ed. It wasn't always clear to me exactly what I wanted to do in higher education. I knew I wanted to lead in some capacity. I knew I wanted to study it in some capacity. And so the evolution of how I got here has been a bit non-traditional and wasn't the traditional department chair and then Dean. I had some side steps into research centers and systems, but I always knew that I wanted to help improve higher ed from positions where I thought that I would have an opportunity to contribute.

James Loy:

With such an emphasis on leadership and governance in higher education, how have you seen it evolve throughout your time? Maybe how it was when you first entered the institution versus what you've seen it become today.

Jason Lane:

Great question. It's changed in so many ways. I would say some of the biggest changes, we hear about them, at least with inside the sector, demographic changes are changing. There are fewer students graduating from high school. We need to be concerned about it. And that yields a couple of different opportunities. One is that we know within that demographic, we have an increase in students from diverse backgrounds coming into higher education, a number of states by the mid 2030s. It's likely we'll be at a minority majority in a number of states of the students coming out of high school. And so really think about ways that we shift how we do what we do to be more inclusive, to be more equitable, to bring more folks from diverse backgrounds into college and support them through to be successful is going to be really important.

Jason Lane:

I think the other is thinking about more, what we might call post-traditional students, right? Those who aren't the traditional college aids, but adult learners, those who might need retooling in the workforce, maybe they had a career in business or manufacturing, but now they want to come back and help the world in a different way. Maybe they want to be a social worker or they want to be a teacher. They want to be a nutritionist, right? Or just career shift and think about sport as a way to move forward in the world. So I think in higher ed, we've got to be thinking differently about who we're serving, but I think also how we serve them, the backbone of higher ed, right? What we are, what is uniquely ours in some ways is knowledge. We create knowledge, we transmit knowledge. That's what we've done for a thousand years. Knowledge is probably one of the most important things in the world today as we think about a knowledge economy or innovation economy.

Jason Lane:

And yet we have trapped our knowledge in certain ways around credits and programs and majors. And we need to begin thinking differently about how we create an ecosystem of learning that's lifelong, that allows people to have access to this knowledge in different ways, whether that's a micro-credentials or certificate programs or professional development. And to me, it's all about expanding learning, giving opportunities to people that allow them to be better versions of themselves to gain knowledge, to think differently about the world around them. And so I think sometimes we've got to break out of those more historic ways that we have thought about packaging ourselves and producing knowledge and bring opportunities to people that may not have thought of higher education. But I think we've got to rethink the whole learning ecosystem and how we deliver it.

James Loy:

That's a good way to put it. I've never heard it expressed that way, that learning can be trapped in credits and curriculum. I think one of the main metaphors we do often hear is the ivory tower, right? This metaphor that you used to describe academia or college or universities as somehow above or separate from society in some way. Does that speak to the need to untrap learning or to get beyond the ivory tower, the need to integrate it more into society, to be essential to the fabric of rather than this oasis or apart from society, as it has been sometimes viewed in the past?

Jason Lane:

No, absolutely we need to. In fact, Abraham Flexner about 100 years ago said, "The university is not apart from or separate from, it is a part of society and culture. It's both acted upon by culture and we act upon culture," right? We can't separate ourselves in any sort of way. We teach things that then go out into the world, right? People use that and it influences how they do what they do beyond the ivory walls, if you want to use that term. And then we have to be responsive to culture, right? And that's been a debate in higher education for hundreds of years. Is that what is the role of curriculum in society? How do we ensure that we are teaching folks to both think, but also be relevant at the same time? And it's an ongoing, I think, struggle of what do we keep, what do we hold on to? What is important in our curriculum? And what does it has to adapt and change because the world does change? And students who come to us to learn, need to be able to operate in that changing society at the same time.

Jason Lane:

And so I think, higher ed needs to get out of an ivory tower, if that's where it's at. But I think a lot of places have, and I know EHS has. EHS is in the communities. They're out there building partnerships. We're from Cincinnati to Dayton, but we've also got great opportunities around the world for students to go out and learn in different sort of ways. And when we do those things, we learn, right? We learn from our partners in the field, we learn about what's happening in schools or what's happening in hospitals or what's happening in stadiums. And that should, and I hope come back and inform the way that we work, what we teach and what we do in the classroom.

James Loy:

One of the quotes that I've always found amusing, and I'm not sure who said it, but it was something akin to, if you pick someone up from the past, like 100 years ago in the past, just plucked them out of their time stream and put them into today in a 21st century society, one of the few structures that they would recognize today would be the university/college structure.

Jason Lane:

To actually be picking them up from 1000 years ago.

James Loy:

1000 years! Okay.

Jason Lane:

It would look the same. The University of Bologna was created around 1055 in Italy. They had students, they had faculty members, right? They came and they were taught by those faculty. And they may have worn similar regalia as we do today at commencement. We are an organization of history and tradition. A strength of it is our tradition, is our history. In fact, I have long argued that higher education is one of the greatest social institutions ever created by humankind. It has transcended nations. It has transcended politics. To your point, it looks not dissimilar to what it did 1000 years ago. And there's value in that, right? That it has been able to sort of be somewhat apart, but not fully apart from all of these struggles in society. And I think that what we do, the ability to create knowledge and to pass it on to the next generation is special. And sometimes we forget that the work that we do really is remarkable and it transforms lives and communities in just amazing ways.

James Loy:

Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the things I've always loved so much about higher education. College campuses, to me, always felt like these places of just infinite possibilities of like magic and wonder and exploring ideas and expanding your mind. I've always loved it and I still believe that's absolutely true. But you also talked about some of the challenges and ways in which colleges need to sort of evolve and transform. You touched upon partnerships being one thing, getting out in the community more, having that inform what professors teach and how they research. But what are some examples of what that might actually look like? Like in a less abstract way, how would that actually realistically inform this new way of existing in a relevant and productive way going forward?

Jason Lane:

And I'm sure it's a new way per se, but I think it is making sure that we are focusing on meaningful two-way, what I might call democratic partnerships, right? Relationships that are mutually beneficial, where the community and the university come to the table collectively, that we're working together to co-learn from each other. I think a lot of times in higher ed where we've seen partnerships, it's been more one-way. The university comes in and says, this is how we're going to do it. A lot of communities, I think have felt burnt by that over the years. And we all bring knowledge to the table. We all bring our experiences to the table. And I think the universities of the future that are going to be most well situated to serve society are those that understand there's an equality around the table of the community members and of the university. And that we come to this to co-learn and develop collectively and feed that into what we do here at the institution.

James Loy:

Can you take us behind the scenes from what you see from your perspective? Like you're seeing the university from a much higher level than most. We also hear a lot about the common challenges, the rising diversity of students, higher tuition rates, people questioning the value of college education. But what are some of the other issues that you see from the inside that people would be surprised to learn, or maybe some issues that aren't talked about as much that should be talked about more?

Jason Lane:

Right. So I think one of the major shifts that has occurred is what we might call an increasing swirling of students. I think when folks think of higher education, they think of somebody coming out of high school, going to an institution, taking four years and completing their degree. And that does still happen, right? We know it all happens, but there is an increasing number of students that are swirling among institutions. They're picking up credits at multiple places. They are moving between it. And not just from a two year to four year, is what we think about transfer. There are a lot of students who move two year to two year, four year to four year. In fact, reverse transfer, four year to two year. And higher ed has not been well set up for those students. But that's how students are increasingly experiencing higher education is moving between institutions.

Jason Lane:

And that's one of the real challenges, I think a lot of folks are trying to grapple with right now is how do we effectively provide a coherent educational experience for students while also ensuring that they aren't having to repeat things they've already learned, right? How do we give them credit for the work that they have done? And to that point too, I think another aspect of it is a lot of folks pick up learning along the way. And so there's been a push to think about things that are prior learning assessments or competency-based education, where we can award credits to students based on what they have done, as long it has meat rigor and there's a sense of what the learning outcomes are.

Jason Lane:

But again, it's getting out of that mold of just that standard way that we have organized ourselves around a four-year curriculum and see other ways other students could come into that curriculum from somewhere else and step in, right? And we'll give them credit for what they've done. Is there a way to think about the work experience they've had, right? Whether or not they're in the military or they've had other experiences that are meaningful and solid and contribute to what higher education is about.

Jason Lane:

Another one, and it ties back to the demographic piece you're talking about, but we are seeing a decline in students coming into higher education right now. We recently dropped below 18 million students. And it wasn't that long ago there were about 20 million. So I think a lot of leaders in higher education were used to a period where there was growth in enrollments. And we are in a time now where we're going to be seeing a decline likely in interest in higher education, at least among some of those populations that we've traditionally served. And so it's a time when higher ed needs to be more strategic in how they use resources. How do we think more effectively about who we are and what we offer and how we offer it?

Jason Lane:

And that gets to another part that we need to do a better job of telling our story of why we matter. Higher education, if you look at a lot of the polling data out there, its reputation which has long been strong, has been on decline as something that is a valuable part of society, as many democratic institutions have. But for a long time, I think people trusted higher education, that it was doing a good thing and there was value in it. And people are beginning to raise questions about that value of higher education. And people begin to think about the return on investment and is it worth that amount of money?

Jason Lane:

Undoubtedly, it is worth that money, right? We know that if you come into higher education, you on average will make a million dollars more in your lifetime than somebody with only a high school degree. We know that for every year of college, on average, an individual's life will be extended by a year. We know that it reduces recidivism in our criminal justice system. The ancillary benefits of higher education are significant both to the individual and to society as a whole. Places that have well-educated workforces are more likely to attract corporations. And that affects the tax base and increases what's available in terms of public funding for those around us.

Jason Lane:

So there's all sorts of reasons why higher education is valuable, but we've not done a great job of telling our story to the broader society. And I think that's one of the things that we have to also work on. We need to be able to better articulate why higher ed matters, but we also have to think about the challenges that our young folks are coming out with, right? How do we confront this issue of debt load? How do we raise additional dollars so that we can provide scholarships to those who may not otherwise have access to higher education? It takes money to run a university, but we also have to make sure that we balance that against the access so folks can come here and earn their degrees.

James Loy:

Absolutely. Funding is something I wanted to ask you about. I mean, there's a lot of universities that seem to be just interested in perpetual growth. More students equals more tuition, which equals more dollars. But is there a tension between maybe finding the right amount of students versus this idea that they should all endlessly grow? And are there other, maybe nontraditional out-of-the-box ways that universities should look towards to kind of rethink funding in some fundamental way or find other ways to do it?

Jason Lane:

Yeah. That's a great, great point. And it goes back a little bit what I was saying earlier about the trends, right? I think a lot of institutions were in this period of perpetual growth because there was perpetual growth and demand for higher ed among those traditional populations. As that has now shifted and moved into decline, we've entered a period of hyper competition and some institutions will farewell. Other institutions will not. But I think across the board, what it has highlighted for a lot of places and a lot of leaders is the need to think about the diversification of funding streams. And I think higher ed has an opportunity to do this in a number of ways.

Jason Lane:

When I look across Miami, where I see EHS really being able, I think to expand what it's doing while still focusing on the high quality undergraduate experience, a lot of institutions talk about student success. This place believes it and does it, right? Our faculty are deeply committed to the teaching and mentoring of our undergraduate students. Our staff are here for the students. This is a place that loves and cares about students and it has since 1809, right? It just, it's in our ethos to do that.

Jason Lane:

I think there's also opportunity to think about ways that we could grow some graduate programs in areas where we have strength to think about different modalities to serve students in those spaces because a lot of students who come back into graduate education, are looking to the residential experience. Many of them are adult learners who are already working, right? And so they want to have flexibility to be able to take a course from home or from a place that's more local to them, let's say in Hamilton. They want the convenience more so because it's going to be harder for them to be able to come to the traditional university campus and take courses. So we need to think different about some of those programs that we can offer and how we offer them to the people who we want to serve.

Jason Lane:

Another piece is professional development lifelong learning. At our core, we're about learning. It's what we do. And there are a lot of professions out there that either by requirement or by design, folks need to continue to update their skills, their knowledge basis. And whether you're an educator or you're a social worker or if you're a nutritionist, all of our fields continue to evolve. And if we can provide opportunities for those folks to come either, let's say for an executive workshop in the summer in beautiful Oxford, Ohio here on the Miami University campus or in an online environment that they can plug into for a three-hour webinar in the morning. And again, once they get in, I think, and begin taking classes with us, whatever format looks like, they'll realize what an amazing place this is.

James Loy:

So you're the new Dean of the College of Education, Health and Society here at Miami University. You're brand new. This is a very exciting time. We're excited to have you here. And I know you've talked about an emphasis on community partnerships and student success, but as the Dean of this college, it's an exciting time. What would you like to do? What's your vision for the college? What are some things you hope to accomplish to hit the ground running? [crosstalk 00:21:22] you want to have in going forward?

Jason Lane:

What I would say as I think about EHS in particular, where it might go, where we have real opportunity is the ways in which we can collectively work to transform society for the better. How do we make it more equitable? How do we make it more just? How do we make it more inclusive? How do we help those who often aren't helped by society? And I think that's something that's really special about where EHS is and how it's configured. We have educators. We have social workers. We have mental health practitioners. We have nutritionists. We have kinesiologists. We have folks in sport, right? We're engaged in the community. We're engaged in healthcare. We're engaged in education.

Jason Lane:

All of that comes together as a way to create a society. And if we can improve each of those individually, that's great. If we can work collectively to find the intersections where we find the overlap and the engagement in ways that our students see the power of the intersections of mental health and education, of sport and community, of nutrition and health, I think that we can really be a go-to place nationally for folks who want to be at the center of trying to improve the societies that they're in, to transform them in positive ways.

Jason Lane:

The greatest problems facing humankind cannot be solved by any one perspective, any one discipline. And when you think about issues of health disparities, or you think about educational disparities, you think about climate change, or you think about mass migration around the world, all of it is going to have to be addressed by people coming together and taking different aspects of those issues, working on them collectively to improve the world. And I think EHS is a microcosm of that because of the specialties that we have here, we can collectively begin to work on those things.

James Loy:

So you've outlined many of the challenges facing higher education today, why it needs to change, how it should change, but how do we get there? What are some of the biggest barriers to actually enacting that change and how can we transcend those barriers to actually move forward?

Jason Lane:

So large scale change is hard. There's been research out there that has shown change efforts from 1995 to 2015, only a third were successful, right? Despite all the great books that have been written by business scholars and leaders. And you can go to Barnes & Noble and read all about change. Our ability to create change has not increased. What I've seen though in areas where we've seen large scale change really has been through what you might call collective impact. And that's where people are coming together to collectively think about and address problems.

Jason Lane:

One of the things that is too common in society as a whole and higher education as what you might call isolated impact, right? I have my initiatives to do X and it's going to affect X number of students or community members or the homeless. And they are working separate from this group over here. And they're working separate from this group over here, and so forth and so on. And so what ends up happening then is you have a lot of isolated impacts, but none of them are really moving the dial. And what we need to do is begin to think collectively about what is it we're trying to achieve.

Jason Lane:

And so let's take student success, for example, right? If we want to improve completion, get more students to graduate, it's not my job or your job or the advisor's job over there, right? It's our job collectively to make it happen. We know from research, it takes advisors, helping students navigate courses in an effective way. It takes mentorship from faculty outside of the classroom to engage students. It takes a wonderful learning experience in the classroom. It's tied to high impact practices and study abroad and writing centers and all those sorts of things, right? There's an ecosystem there, but we have to find a way to collectively think about what we're doing.

Jason Lane:

And so when you look at a lot of large scale change efforts, and there've been efforts to transform the ways in which we home the homeless to, how do we reduce unnecessary morbidity in healthcare to, how do we improve K-12 education, right? It's about coming up with a collective vision of what we're trying to do. It is about developing the metrics of success. More importantly, it is about measuring those metrics and holding ourselves accountable that are we actually making progress in the ways that we need to? It is about repetitive communication, right? You just can't say we're going to do something and then expect everybody to know what we're trying to do. You have to talk about it all the time. You have to build it into your processes and you have to build it into your procedures. And so it becomes part of what you do as an organization.

Jason Lane:

And then you've got to have a backbone that's responsible for advancing it, right? Not necessarily leading it, but making sure that we are holding ourselves accountable, that we are meeting regularly, that we're trying to create change, because what ends up happening a lot of times is folks might come together around a table and get excited, right? This is great. And then we all go our separate ways and no one takes responsibility for moving it forward. And then we'll come back together a year later and we'll scratch our heads because we all were doing our own thing and nothing happened on the bigger picture.

Jason Lane:

And so I think for any university moving forward, having a way to create a big picture vision of what it's trying to achieve, holding itself accountable, using processes of continuous improvement that allow us to try things out, see if they work, did it move in the right direction? That idea that we're constantly learning from everything that we do, at the end of the day, we are a learning organization. That's how we were created. That's what we do. It's what we teach. And we need to turn that on ourselves and begin to understand from an organizational perspective, how do we learn? How do we improve what we do? How do we not get tied to things that we've always done, just because we've always done them, right?

Jason Lane:

I'm not saying change is good for the sake of change, but we also have to be careful that history isn't good for the sake of history. And we've got to find that right balance of what do we keep that is true to who we are, but also how do we continue to move forward and improve so that we are continuing to reinvent ourselves and be relevant to society and providing that high quality education that students want being part of our communities in positive ways.

James Loy:

Jason Lane is the new Dean of the College of Education, Health and Society at Miami University, where he specializes in leadership and governance within higher education. And this is the Reframe Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. We have many more episodes for free right now available wherever podcasts are found.