More Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence

The pace of AI is accelerating, and it’s a bit exhausting. 

Last spring I wrote a blog post titled, I Am a Prompt Engineer. I was so proud to have completed an 18-module online course to build my prompting skills for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Just three months later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4 Omni with conversational prompting. Now I start many of my ChatGPT sessions with, “Please refine the following prompt to maximize your response to…” and my original single-sentence prompt comes back to me as a fully flushed-out three- to four-sentence beauty that is far beyond anything I could have crafted on my own. It writes my prompts for me! Just like that, I’m obsolete and my career as a prompt engineer has ended. Additionally, the conversational power of GPT-4o is pretty incredible. I’ve had multiple 10- to 20-minute conversations with it to gain insight or explore issues and situations in ways that expand my thought processes beyond what I could do if I were to continue talking to myself while thinking things through.

I don’t consider myself “Pro-AI.” Rather, I consider myself “productively paranoid.” AI is happening, and it’s happening so fast that it sometimes makes my head spin. I have fun creating images for presentations, but the pace of development coupled with the scale and variety of uses can be overwhelming. This complexity and pace are why I wanted Todd McLees to join us at the College’s Fall Opening. I think his message — embracing AI to advance human flourishing — is important in these early stages, as it encourages us to create more positive-use cases that will hopefully outnumber the inevitable negative ones. I’ve seen multiple articles about the Manhattan Project costing $23B in current dollars and its creators forming an advisory board to create guardrails minimizing the technology’s potential dangers. In contrast, companies are currently spending $230B (10 times that amount!) on AI, with no advisory board or guardrails whatsoever.

We may not be able to influence what the “Big Tech” companies are doing with AI — they are unleashing it into the wild, and its impact is inevitable, whether we want it or not. If we simply ignore AI or fail to develop good habits with it, we run the risk of succumbing to its downsides, much like how social media’s downsides have negatively influenced society. I suppose that can be an individual choice; however, if we collectively ignore AI, MVCC might struggle to remain relevant. Relevancy is what is driving the paranoia I feel, and I’m trying to use that feeling productively by personally engaging with AI.

Recently, the College Senate and Cabinet collaborated to create and launch an AI task force to develop recommendations for a Board Policy on AI at the request of the MVCC Board of Trustees. We’ll also have a small group participate in a 30-Day Challenge led by Todd McLees to develop useful AI habits through daily engagements over 30 days. These actions are all in an effort to stay connected to the blinding pace of inevitable change that now includes SUNY adding artificial intelligence as a requirement under the information literacy core competency of the general education degree requirements.

I appreciate the innovators and early adopters who are engaging with AI and working to guide and support their peers with what they’re learning. I also value the perspectives of the cautious and concerned among us. I share many of their sentiments and believe it is important to include these voices as we look to find our way through this wave of intense change. However, avoiding AI now would be like avoiding the internet in the 1990s. In my opinion, one of the things that makes MVCC special is the constructive sharing of perspectives on complex and disruptive issues. Rather than avoid the hard stuff, I believe MVCC does an amazing job of engaging in meaningful conversations to understand the forces of change and find ways to adapt and evolve our programs, services, and operations to remain relevant. AI may be our greatest challenge yet, but I’m confident we can figure it out together.

*Note: Not a single word of this post was generated by AI. I claim every word in this post as my own.

If you have any questions or comments on this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu 

Surf’s Up — Learning to Ride the Waves While Weathering the Storm

Mindfulness leader Jon Kabat-Zinn is quoted as saying, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” I believe this captures our reality at MVCC — we are learning to surf, and surf well.

As I enter my 17th year as President of MVCC, I am continually inspired by the resilience, hard work, and caring manner of MVCC faculty and staff, and our collective ability to adapt. I feel like I’m just starting my third presidency — they all just happen to have been at MVCC.

The first period, from 2007 to 2014, was dominated by enrollment growth fueled by the Great Recession, strengthening systems, and building capacity. The second period, from 2015 to 2022, centered around increasing student success with our Guided Pathways reforms and, of course, navigating challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it feels as though we are transitioning to a new era at the College — one likely filled with programs and services delivered at a speed and scale through partnerships we can hardly imagine today.

I find insight in Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s quote, “When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That is what this storm is all about.” Similarly, as an organization, we have undergone significant changes through numerous Guided Pathways initiatives to transform the student experience — all while enduring the COVID-19 pandemic, processing millions of dollars in stimulus funds to make up for lost revenue, and redesigning workflows and job responsibilities across departments to absorb a 9% reduction in our full-time staffing pattern by eliminating 35 full-time positions and laying off three existing staff members.

We’ve had to surf the waves as they came.

It’s not easy navigating our environment when the economy of Upstate New York has a 3.3% unemployment rate and a shrinking number of high school graduates. This is compounded with public and private four-year colleges lowering their admissions standards and accepting students they wouldn’t have considered five years ago — students who otherwise would have attended a community college. And the State of New York, which is supposed to provide roughly one-third of our operational revenue, gave us only $350,000 more this year than they did in 2008. Despite being part of a “historic” $163M investment for public higher education in the recent state budget, community colleges received the same level of funding as last year and were told to be grateful. Read more in my May 2 blog post, “Against the Odds.”

How do I know we’re learning to surf at MVCC? Well, at a time when the Gallup organization publishes research on employee engagement and says that workers are “burned out” and “disengaged,” last spring’s employee survey showed that 89% of full-time employees feel proud to be a part of MVCC, and 80% look forward to coming to work each day. This pride and enthusiasm show up in our collaborative efforts with school district partners to reimagine the high school-to-college transition, as well as our ongoing efforts to redesign core programs and services to meet individualized needs and restore the promise of education with our FastTrack Career Programs, specifically designed to serve adults who have fallen through the cracks of our educational system. I will share a more detailed white paper on this “reimagine, redesign, and restore” framework in a future blog post.

As we pursue the “re-work” strategies mentioned above, we know artificial intelligence (AI) is a game changer — much like the internet was 30 years ago. We recognize this moment and stand ready to meet it at MVCC. AI will be the primary focus of our organizational learning in the coming year with webinars, workshops, and crowdsourcing opportunities for faculty and staff to learn together and do what MVCC does best — scan our environment, analyze best and emerging practices, and adapt what works into our culture in ways that make us better and stronger.

As punctuated as the change of the last several years has been, I believe the coming year may be one of relative equilibrium — the calm before another storm if you will. It will be a time for us to navigate the intensity of the daily crunch, but also a time to take a collective breath to take stock of how far we’ve come and consider the next strategic arc for the College. It will also be a time for us to ask ourselves important questions that need to be asked in ways that will better position us with a sense of readiness for whatever comes next.

With all this in mind, as I think about MVCC and the future, I’m reminded of this quote of unknown source: “Fate whispered to the warrior, you cannot withstand the storm. The warrior whispers back, I am the storm.”

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Hope vs. Optimism

In these challenging times, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the differences between hope and optimism. In the face of adversity or trouble, many of us have an inherent need to look toward the future with a sense of optimism or hope. It’s also important not to overlook the underlying issues that created the adversity in the first place. Somehow, we need to find a middle way that acknowledges the adversity and shines a light on a path forward through whatever darkness we may be facing at the time.

Reviewing multiple online dictionaries and AI models, I found some common themes on the two concepts of hope and optimism. Optimism can be seen as a general attitude or outlook that things will be better — without providing much in the way of specifics. Hope, on the other hand, is more of a feeling or belief grounded in aspects of a specific goal or outcome.

While I consider myself a generally optimistic person, I can more precisely say I have warranted hope — based on multiple facts — that the difficult budget process we just endured at the college is a pivot point for us. I believe we are now on a course of programming for the future and no longer rightsizing from the past, and here’s why I feel hope is warranted:

Our recent organizational climate survey showed that 86% of respondents are proud to work at MVCC and 86% also look forward to coming to work every day — every day. When we contrast that with the Gallup research that shows record levels of employee disengagement at work, it’s evident that there’s something uniquely good that resides in MVCC’s culture. The proposed budget for next year leaves the college in its best fiscal shape (absent the years with COVID stimulus dollars) since 2018 and maintains capacity with the major changes in recent years to enhance and support the core student experience here.

Additionally, enrollment is up 7% this semester over spring of last year. What makes this increase different is that we have a sense of why: Enrollment used to be something that happened to us, but the hard work and increased collaboration throughout the college to manage enrollment more intentionally has created a new-found sense of agency for us compared to the past. From annual scheduling to scaling guided pathways reforms to new programs like Fast Track, we’re seeing intentional efforts drive enrollment increases that fuel our fiscal engine.

I don't want to leave the impression that, in my sense of warranted hope, I am overlooking the hard work and added burdens each of us will face as we pull together to design a brighter and more sustainable future. My hope is squarely centered on my admiration and belief in the people at MVCC. It is the people — each and every one of us — working together, finding solid footing on sometimes shaky ground, and the profound sense of resilience I have seen in our employees over the years and continue to see daily, that will ultimately see us through.

At the end of the day, we all want to feel a sense of safety for ourselves and our colleagues. That is understandable, but in this ever-uncertain environment, we are managing a multi-variate problem — we have most of them solved but will be forever managing the others as they arise. MVCC has been studying and preparing for disruption for a decade, and it is squarely upon us. Fortunately, we have built organizational muscle and the capacity to anticipate and respond to change and disruption in productive ways. In addition to the reasons offered above, what gives me hope is that we have spent the last year not just minimizing the impact of very difficult financial circumstances or a pervasive sense of abundance in always finding a way forward, but we’ve become ever-more resilient and have evolved our collective thinking, strategy, and operations to be more intentional about shaping our future together.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Small Bets – Innovating at the Edge

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many trends that were creating disruption even before 2020 and accelerated elements of our society that brought the future to the present overnight. With enrollment declines and dramatic decreases in state and local government budgets, funding models for public community colleges have become more fragile than ever. Since 2007, the convergence of technologies has fostered the development of new and disruptive educational platforms, and this has only been magnified by the pandemic. Augmented and virtual reality, as well as robotics and artificial intelligence, are developing at rapid rates with tremendous potential to disrupt learning even further. And the ever-widening gap between the “haves and have-nots” in this country has grown to the largest among any of the G7 nations, with the wealth gap between the richest families and the poorest in this country doubling between 1989 and 2016. This has been made even worse by the pandemic — burying our most vulnerable students behind layered and intersecting barriers to advancement.

It’s enough to make one curl up and just hope for survival. It’s overwhelming at times to consider how fast everything is moving amidst such complexity. However, if the idea of making small bets — innovating at the edges of an organization — is embraced, an organization can shrink the change, as Dan Heath suggests. MVCC has been nurturing our organizational culture to continually scan the environment to monitor these macro trends and take bold actions to make small bets that will keep the College well-positioned for the increasingly complex and ever accelerating future. With partners like Jobs For the Future (JFF), the Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida Counties, and many others, we’re able to identify promising practices and rally the resources to launch minimal viable products (MVPs) and begin iterating our prototypes.

Securing the Financial Future of the Institution

State and local funding combined with student tuition have long been the primary revenue base of community college funding. Grant funding is mostly temporary and is not sustainable, so something more is needed. The MVCC Foundation created a separate Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), Tea Leaf Ventures, to support three social enterprises. If a social enterprise is a commercial venture that supports social good, why not make the College the social good? Tea Leaf Aircraft Exchange, Tea Leaf Manufacturing, and Tea Leaf Touring and Consulting are all in their infancy but hold great promise for new and sustainable revenue for MVCC.

Embracing Disruptive Platforms

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are disrupting the way in which people access content and learn. Coursera enrolls 73 million and edX enrolls 32 million individuals around the world. We are prototyping how to create non-credit to credit-bearing pathways for students to complete this content and apply it to their credit programs. Our computer science faculty created a pathway from the Coursera platform for the Google IT certification curriculum. In addition, we’ve also used the edX platform to deliver a non-credit leadership certification to students in our YouthBuild program at our Educational Outreach Center. As content delivery is changing, so is the transcripting of learning. MVCC recently launched the digital credentialing platform Credly to allow students to post their micro-credential certifications on their personal social media accounts like LinkedIn.

Anticipating Accelerating Technology

Technology is accelerating an incredible rate. Robotics, augmented and virtual reality, and behavioral “nudging” are all technologies of promise to increase student engagement and success. Robots have been the thing of science-fiction but they are increasingly becoming more prevalent in society. While some robots are available at substantial costs, MVCC faculty are working with the Cyberhawks student club to program Misty the Robot, which was purchased with a $2,500 donation. Misty will be available on the Rome Campus in the near future to interact with students.

Our YouthBuild program is implementing immersive learning technology through SkillMill Training through Interplay. We also implemented Persistence Plus this past Fall to connect with students through texting powered by intentional messages of engagement supported by artificial intelligence that is having a positive impact on student retention.

Muting the Impact of the Wealth Gap

Although College-Community-Connection (C3) is an important component in our current holistic student supports, it’s actually a “small bet” early prototype of what may very well scale to be a fundamental component in our future operations if the current national trends of a widening wealth gap between the “haves and have nots” and the growing complexity and stress of daily life continue. Ensuring that our students’ basic needs are met and that they can rely on the College to help make sense of all the learning options that will help them secure a good job or career will become more important over the next decade. C3 has all the makings of what will be needed if these trends continue.

COVID-19 has compromised our students’ ability to build the relationships they need to secure a great job and pursue the career of their choice. Our Career Services department is working with a cohort of about 125 students on a special LinkedIn project that will allow us to test a few things and gradually scale up the ways in which we get our students on the platform to expand their professional networks and build social capital for themselves.

Guided Pathways as Prelude

Guided Pathways is a comprehensive framework to increase equity and student success. Given the magnitude and scale of changes called for in the framework, it’s hard to imagine Guided Pathways would be a small bet. But if the trends of a growing wealth gap, decreasing support of public education requiring new business models, accelerating technology reshaping the student experience, and increased stress and complexity in society, the Guided Pathways framework is a prelude to the types of changes that will be needed 10 and 20 years into the future.

All of these small bets are in motion. Some are more developed than others, but all of them combined signal that MVCC is focused on how the present connects to the future. Making small bets like these positions us to learn with emerging and promising approaches to serving our students better and keeping the College strong and well-positioned in what will likely continue to be a very uncertain future.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Organizational Healing

Seeing the faces of several hundred new graduates walk across the stage last week prompted a period of reflection for me. It was enlightening talking to graduates at the post-commencement reception back on campus. Multiple grads shared their mixed emotions about how excited they were for their next step while also feeling sad to be leaving MVCC. This made me think about how excited I am for all the changes soon to come with our Guided Pathways efforts while still processing the emotional toll of another extremely challenging budget process that included several difficult personnel decisions.

I found insight in a quote from Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Church, in his TED talk about “How to Remain Relevant.” He says, “There is no growth without change; there is no change without pain; no pain without loss; and no loss without grief.” In all my years of studying and experiencing change, I’ve never connected the two cycles. However, if you overlay accepted change models with the five stages of grieving, they’re almost identical. Warren goes on to say that many times it’s not that people are resisting change, it’s more likely that they are grieving. Recognizing this as a natural organizational reality surfaces the notion of organizational healing.

Change is often referred to as a constant in our lives, but it seems that regardless of how well-managed change may be, it likely will be experienced across the spectrum from minimal to traumatic depending on the impact. This is especially true when the change is dictated not by innovation, or in the name of student success, but rather is driven by external factors like money or lack thereof. Budgetary cuts are just that — cuts that serve as wounds to the organization. And, like surviving any trauma, there is a period of recovery with necessary self-care. Organizations are complex adaptive systems much in the same way the human body is, and as such they need time to heal. 

While we experienced enrollment growth during the Great Recession, change was comparatively easier because there was “more.” In the subsequent years of enrollment decline, the organizational growth has been harder because there was “less” and we challenged ourselves to do “better” — our new mantra of “more and better with less.” This has come from our adopted philosophy of “preserve the core and stimulate progress” that requires us to manage the paradox of personnel reductions while adding new positions to meet emerging demands. 

The annual rhythm of balancing a budget under increasingly complex constraints can wear on us as individuals and test our collective resilience. However, the organizational will to march on is what makes the difference and this requires a period of healing to absorb the impact of the change, pain, loss, and grief. This is how we gather our strength, lift each other up, and find the resolve to continue. During these times we must rely on our organizational rituals, continue celebrating and recognizing the bright spots that make us who we are to feed our souls and nurture our hearts. It is indeed different for all of us, but as many colleagues have said, “We’ll get through it, because we always do.” That enduring spirit of finding a way, of modeling the way, is what inspires confidence and encourages excellence, and allows us to embrace our community.

Change is hard. But recognizing grief as a natural part of the change process allows us to take the necessary deep breath and move toward healing that will allow us to endure and focus on the future that holds ever-more inspiring stories from students and colleagues going beyond expectations in ways we have yet to imagine — all of which make change, however difficult, worth it.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.  

The Future of Learning is Already Here: Wildly Accessible Content

I remember the anxiety I felt in 2012 when it seemed every other day for several months I would trip across a story about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how they were going to disrupt and fundamentally change higher education. When some of the most prestigious colleges and universities began offering their curriculum online for free, it was hard to miss the fact that things were changing. Fortunately, the headlines subsided and most higher education professionals took a cleansing breath and rationalized that MOOCs lacked a sustainable financial model and would soon go away — we didn’t have to worry about them. 

However, MOOCs amplified the fundamental structural flaws of modern postsecondary education — rising costs, questionable outcomes, lack of personalization, lack of flexibility, too much variability based on delivery by individual faculty members, and misalignment between programs and employability. Since 2012, MOOCs have indeed persisted to the point that in 2016 the three largest MOOCs in the United States earned a combined $100 million net profit and beat most every college to market with the concept of scaled employer-driven credentials. Check them out and peruse their offerings to see just how accessible and affordable they are, as well as the name brands providing the instruction — Udacity, Coursera, and edX.

Similar to MOOCs, the Khan Academy has infiltrated K-12 systems across the nation and is widely used (albeit discreetly in most cases) in higher education. With several large funders like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Khan Academy is providing supplemental learning through short, clear, and extremely useful videos on content across a range of disciplines. In 2018, more than 100 million people accessed content on Khan Academy’s website with nearly 5 million paid subscribers.

Another platform influencing modern learning is Google Classroom. In 2012, Google accounted for about 1% of all media devices used in public K-12 classrooms. With the launch of Google Classroom and Chromebooks, their market share grew to 58% by 2016. Colleges today are finding recent high school graduates arrive wondering why they must purchase large expensive textbooks when they’ve been reading short, relevant, easily accessible content online for the past four years in high school.

The explosion of online content and platforms like Khan Academy and Google Chromebooks have spawned the development of Open Educational Resources (OERs). The modern textbook is undergoing a complete transformation and is being replaced by online content — sometimes through OERs and resources like Collective Commons, and other times through licensing other online resources.

With online content so readily accessible and the power of platforms accelerating change, new models of delivery are appearing beyond MOOCs and OERs. For example, Udemy provides curriculum from independent educators offering standard undergraduate curriculum at reasonable prices. Straighterline.com offers the 50 most common undergraduate general education courses for a nominal fee. The curriculum is approved by the American Council of Education and offered through more than 130 college and university partners. In 2017, they enrolled 22,000 new students in addition to the 75,000 already enrolled and had students report successfully transferring their courses to more than 2,000 colleges and universities. While some may question their quality at this point, the arguments remind me of those I heard 25 years ago when the University of Phoenix, Walden, Nova, and others burst on the scene with online programs — and most of us spent the subsequent 10 years playing catch up once their quality improved.

The reality of wildly accessible content and people increasingly comfortable learning in varied ways is now facilitating the largest employers bypassing traditional higher education delivery systems (read colleges and universities) to simply offer their own curriculum to accelerate the development of a qualified workforce. Consider employer-driven content like AT&T and Walmart partnering with Coursera; Salesforce offering free curriculum to train associates across the country to take their product to scale; Google offering their IT Certifications; and the intense demand for computer programmers has prompted the rise of coding boot camps like the Flatiron School that is now approved for federal financial aid, Apple and their Everyone Can Code curriculum and Amazon coding camps.

MVCC is uniquely positioned to address these disruptive innovations because of the work we have done over the last several years. With the creation of a the Code Academy, the incorporation of the Google IT Training Certificate into our non-credit offerings and soon our credit offerings, and our current work in examining and redesigning prior learning assessments, we are ready to do the work necessary to stay relevant while maintaining the highest of academic standards. MVCC is the first community college in the SUNY System to adopt a Board of Trustees Policy on Microcredentials, and it is this kind of forward thinking — and our unique ability to take innovations and make them our own — that will help us thrive in these uncertain times. 

The future is already here. We must find small spaces to safely prototype and utilize some of these emerging delivery systems to eventually integrate into our regular, core offerings that in five to 10 years will need to dramatically change in ways we’re only now beginning to see.

Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu. 

Embracing Paradox: the Future of Community Colleges

Thomas Friedman’s latest book, Thank You for Being Late: The Optimist’s Guide to the Age of Acceleration, provides a thorough examination of all the forces driving and truly accelerating change, with an emphasis on the manner by which technology is disrupting every sector of our lives … and likewise, higher education itself is in the early stages of disruption. 

As community colleges, we pride ourselves on thinking about how our communities are changing and thinking about the future of work; however, we talk about the future of work as though it’s a detached, existential concept — someone else’s work and not our own. When we think about the future of work, we must make a special effort to also consider the future of OUR work and how it is fundamentally changing.

The general notion of college as we know it is not going away anytime soon. A smaller percentage of Americans will attend a traditional college setting as they clock in their 45 hours of seat time for each credit hour of sitting— er, I mean learning. We will, however, have fewer colleges, as smaller colleges are unable to weather the storm, and close their doors or merge with others. Most colleges will rather retain many of the familiar elements but will morph into adaptive enterprises with creative networks and unique partnerships to meet future student needs. Students are already learning differently. Many teenagers today are fearless. Why wouldn’t they be when they can search for YouTube videos on how to do, build, create, fix, and learn most anything? As I’ve heard my friend and Amarillo College President Russell Lowery-Hart say, “Let’s face it, things need to evolve — faculty have students fact-checking them on smartphones in real time during class!” Even many returning adults are learning in new ways, as they too can search YouTube videos to learn new things and are often more motivated to access content through podcasts and other means.  

To summarize Peter Smith’s focus in his recent book, Free-Range Learning in the Digital Age: The Emerging Revolution in College, Career, and Education, the new reality is that colleges and universities used to be an oasis of knowledge surrounded by a desert only a few could cross. With technology today, the desert has gone green. It’s not that disruption is coming for higher education, it’s already here in the form of wildly accessible content, private companies with transcripting platforms to document all that learning, and accelerating technology that will fundamentally change how people learn.

Although disruption to this point feels more like an uncomfortable itch than a broken limb, many colleges are already in the midst of managing a profound array of unprecedented paradox. With organizational cultures rooted in and shaped by more than 300 years of academic traditions, behaviors, and beliefs, community colleges must find ways to:

• productively honor the past while creating the future;  
• adapt to change by following the principle of preserve the core and stimulate progress that Jim Collins set forth in his book Good to Great;  
• balance access through enrollment (which drives 75 percent of MVCC’s operating budget through tuition and state aid) and student success and graduation (which requires processes that counter access at times); and
• respond to increasingly strained fiscal resources while adapting to change by managing simultaneous personnel layoffs and hiring for new positions in college budgets necessary to keep the institution evolving and vibrant.

And all of these paradoxical elements can be summarized in the new reality for community colleges — the need to do more AND better with less. MVCC is undergoing changes at a rapid pace, and the need for further and more innovative change is only going to accelerate our efforts with Guided Pathways. From new intake systems to redesigning developmental education, MVCC is anticipating the need, and every day is learning to do more and better with less. 

As I mentioned in my previous post, the wave of change is coming, and those colleges that recognize it sooner rather than later (#anticipate) will make it to shore safely. They may have a redesigned or reimagined surfboard or will have manufactured an even more efficient, relevant, and successful mechanism to ride the wave, but they will make it to shore nonetheless. Those colleges that fail to turn into the wave just enough to accelerate out of the tube will be overwhelmed and vanish — it’s just a matter of time.  

Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu. 

Guided Pathways: Prelude to Disruption

CNN photo

I recently saw a video on Twitter showing a surfer setting the world record for riding the largest wave (82 feet tall) and I retweeted the first thing that came to my mind: "I don't know why, but I can't help but think that this is a metaphor for public higher education leaders in the next 5-10 years...#anticipate."

Upon further reflection, I think the metaphor came to mind because higher education is quietly being disrupted. The ripples are small right now, but the tide is definitely going out, and those who fail to see it will be overcome by a tsunami of change in the coming years. Fortunately, MVCC is one of more than 250 of America’s 1,100 community colleges engaged in Guided Pathways reform in some way. MVCC is one of the 13 community colleges in the American Association of Community Colleges Guided Pathways 2.0 cohort and is fortunate to simultaneously participate in the New York State Success Center Guided Pathways cohort funded by Jobs For the Future (JFF). With funding from our Oneida County sponsor, we are able to send teams of faculty and staff to institutes to receive technical assistance and coaching that expose us to national best practices and a framework for fundamentally reimagining the student experience. We are also fortunate to have financial support from our County to be members of the Achieving the Dream (ATD) National Reform Network since 2014. The culture shift that we’ve experienced through this network served as a critical pre-cursor to our Guided Pathways work.

My early experience at the Guided Pathways institutes gave me the impression that this reform was about two things — organizing academic program curricula into clear career pathways for students; and rethinking student onboarding and support systems. Simple and clear, I thought. The deeper our teams got into Guided Pathways, it became abundantly clear that there was more to this reform, and it was anything but simple. To truly apply the Guided Pathways framework and reimagine the student experience, we are in the process of:

1.    Remapping our entire curriculum across all programs.

2.    Rethinking our student onboarding process from admissions to the first day of class.

3.    Overhauling our student advising system to consider more intentional and personalized models at scale.

4.    Frontloading career services to support students in making better choices at the beginning of their academic experience — as a two-year college, our students don’t have time to drift around and “find themselves.”

5.    Transforming our approaches to developmental education by embracing national research and evidence-based practices that have demonstrated more effective models to address student learning needs.

6.    Disaggregating our data to understand the impact of our systems on low-income and minority students to put equity front and center in our collective work.

7.    Infusing data into our regular decision-making processes.

8.    Providing inescapable wrap-around supports to address students’ non-cognitive needs associated with everyday living, like housing and food insecurities, transportation, and other priorities that can compromise student success.

9.    Evaluating all of our technologies that have grown in number and complexity in an effort to leverage everything we have toward increasing student success.

10.  Finding new ways of working together as we do all of this simultaneously, when in the past any one of these efforts alone would have taken two years or more.

Guided Pathways is not a fad or a project, but rather a comprehensive, evidence-based framework that requires a long-term, ongoing institutional commitment that will continue to evolve as we fundamentally re-examine our approaches to student success. As dramatic and disruptive as the pending changes from this work will be, I believe it is only a precursor to even more disruptive changes that lie ahead for postsecondary education — changes that will likely unbundle, accelerate, and once again re-imagine learning and student success at our colleges. Organizational success in the future will require us to challenge our assumptions, question much of what we believe to be true, and accelerate our own learning to embrace changes and models of learning that were impossible to even conceive of let alone consider in the past.

During my time at MVCC, I have seen the College community face various challenges, and in each instance the College has shown a unique ability to synthesize the best of these ideas and national research, and at its own pace, make these ideas our own. We embrace the need for change, and we find a way to make it fit our unique culture. This tempered and considered approach to incorporating best practices has proven to be a hallmark of MVCC’s resilience. We are guided by our values, and we make change our own. 

For my first five years at MVCC, I wrote a blog post most every week during the fall and spring semester. It was a way for me to make sense of the College and the community that were so new to me, as well as share my thoughts on what I was learning. For the past seven years, I have written far fewer blog posts, as we’ve gotten into the thick of a great deal of organizational change — and I rechanneled my writing energies into a book titled Competing on Culture: Driving Change in Community Colleges. I am immensely fortunate to have a supportive and visionary Board of Trustees and amazingly talented staff who provide me with the opportunity and mental bandwidth to deeply consider what’s happening in the world around us and clarify a path forward through some great unknowns. 

I think I have the beginnings of that path and am once again compelled to post weekly. For the next several weeks, I intend to describe how this wave of disruption is coming together, why organizational culture is the way through and out of the wave for community colleges, and how the culture at MVCC provides insight on the building blocks to create a culture of connection and anticipation that I’m betting will see us through to shore, poised to ride even bigger waves in the future.

Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu.