Click to open the transcript
- Hello, good evening and welcome from Wellington New Zealand where I am. It's the middle of the afternoon and I'm very happy to be here with a wonderful group of people to talk about Forced Online, so thoughts and predictions about how COVID will impact the future of the liberal arts higher education in Amherst. My name is Hillary Moss. I teach in the departments of Black studies and history and soon to be education studies. And it is a great pleasure tonight to be joined by former trustee and chief strategy and engagement officer for 2U, class of '91, David Sutphen, General Counsel of Chegg Woodie Dixon, class of '95 and Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of added, ad, Chaka, you're going to have to help with that, Adtalem, Chaka Patterson, class of '90. And today we're going to talk a little bit about the relationships among educational technology, higher education and the liberal arts. This is certainly a question that is at the forefront of all of us who are experiencing a shift to remote learning. I'll just add a short anecdote about why this topic was especially meaningful to me. I teach classes on the purpose of education. And in February of last year my students had the opportunity to talk about the liberal arts and to imagine could the liberal arts exist absent of residential liberal, or residential setting? We talked about what the possibilities were prior to the pandemic of the role of technology in democratizing access to education and particularly in addressing concerns that Amherst, because of its small numbers, might be too expensive an endeavor to keep going forward. I laughed with my students and I said, ha ha ha, this is great but I never ever don't want to teach in the classroom. Little did I know less than a year later I would be teaching via Zoom in New Zealand but I'm really, really happy to have people who have experienced both residential education and know a lot about educational technology join us today to help reflect on what the shift to online learning has made us think about in terms of the liberal arts and also to think about how we might take the best of this experience and re-imagine Amherst going forward. So I have a couple of questions that I've decided to start the evening with, but then we'll have a chance to open and hopefully have a broader discussion and hear from our panelists tonight. That first thing that I wanted to do after welcoming all of you is just talk a little bit about what you remember when you were 17 and you chose Amherst of all places. So what did a liberal arts education mean to you when you were deciding to come to Amherst
- Come on, Chaka, you're the senior statesman here you.
- I could also call on, I'm not afraid to do it.
- So I had a bit of an advantage because my mother at the time was a history professor at Northwestern. And so I had no idea what a liberal arts education was or the difference between a college and a university. So she was kind enough to break all that out for me. And we ultimately decided together, really she decided that a liberal arts education would be right for me and she was absolutely spot on. So the way we thought about it then, the way I think about it now is, it would provide me with a really broad set of ways to think about the world, ways to approach the world and really learn how to learn and it turns out she was spot on and that has really been a lifelong skill.
- Yeah, I guess I'll jump in, what I would say is, and Woodie and I've talked a little bit about this. So I think there's probably a little bit of similarity in our respective experiences. My sister Mona, who's two years older than me was at Mount Holyoke and so my parents were basically like, you need to go someplace near where your sister is. Hopefully you're smart enough to get into these places. And for me I guess, at that stage in my life to be perfectly honest with you, I was more interested in soccer than I was in academics. And I was also interested in going someplace where I thought I could play as a freshman. I came to visit my sister for spring break and then ended up spending most of my time at Amherst. And I think I was someone who had a lot of potential but had never really been kind of challenged in the way that I think my parents knew I needed to be. And I think they felt that I would get lost in a bigger institution and that I needed to go someplace where there was a level of kind of intimacy and that I would have professors who would kind of care about me and be vested in my intellectual development. I'll tell a quick story and then I'll turn it over to Woodie. So my sophomore year, this is obviously back, this was late '80s where you had to still like send stuff home in the mail and I'll never forget, I sent home the first paper I got an A on to my mom and my dad and about a week later, she calls me and the first thing she says to me is, "Who wrote this?" And I was like, "I wrote it." And she's like, "There's no way that you wrote this paper." She was like, "I helped you with your college essays, "there's no way you wrote this paper." And I was like, "What do you think we're spending all this money for "me to go to this nice school." So I would say as to Chaka's point my parents helped me make the right decision. So, Woodie, over to you.
- Yeah, somewhat similar, I had an older sister at Wellesley and so it was very similar to David's story in that we were kind of geographically limited. And that's kind of how I got to the East coast but the better, till I got to Amherst is, neither of my parents went to college. They really had no idea what the next step after high school was. And interestingly enough, born and raised in Minnesota I was playing hockey at an inner city school and we played Blake, which is, as many of you know, is a very prestigious private school in Minneapolis, in Minnesota. And I ran into Steve Flom, who was a long time Amherst alum and Amherst served the college tremendously and Steve really mentored me and asked a lot of hard questions that my parents couldn't ask, like what do you want to do next? And what is your career path going to be? And what interests you? And I really didn't have any answers. I didn't really have any professional role models. And so we kind of figured out that what I wanted to do was learn and think deeply and be a strategic thinker. And because of that a place like Amherst was the perfect choice for me because it allowed me to do that without having to hone in to a specific engineering or pre-med path or some other path that I had to go down and I could take the first couple years, it turned out to be three years to really figure out what I wanted that next step to be. And to be able to do that in an environment where I was surrounded by like-minded people but also faculty that would kind of see to it that I was in class every day and that I was doing my work. And so it was really just a combination of having someone who happened to be an Amherst alum help me think more deeply about kind of what I wanted to do next and that it was the perfect fit for Amherst at that time.
- So I'm wondering if you can share with us a little bit about your professional trajectories as well. So how, after leaving Amherst, a liberal arts education might have set you on your path or not and what your professional paths were after leaving Amherst, going on to the things that you do today.
- Yeah, we can start in reverse order since I just went, interestingly I graduated with Amherst with a degree in history and I go home for a year off to work, my friend had started a carwash so I'm driving cars at the carwash, coaching soccer, the women's varsity team at my high school. And my parents literally came unglued with the concept that they had spent this money on Amherst. And here I was washing cars and coaching soccer. But they were pretty excited when I got some of my law school acceptance letters. And so I ended up that after that year off going to Harvard for law school and just through kind of having an open mind and really seeking opportunity, got to represent several R&B and hip hop artists shortly after law school, transitioned that into coming back to Amherst to get a sports management masters at the University of Massachusetts while coaching soccer with the Goodings at Amherst College. And then from there I went to the NFL, was the General Counsel of the Kansas City Chiefs for six years, the General Counsel of The Pack 12 for 10 years and now the last six months at Chegg. And an interesting thing is I kind of know part in that pathway that I know what the next step was going to be. So I ended up being the General Counsel of Kansas City Chiefs. I think I was the youngest GC in the league at that point. And I didn't take sports law in law school and kind of here I am General Counsel of an ed tech public company and did not have an expertise in the ed tech space or even securities or public company work. So for me, it's been a lot about having an open mind and an open pathway to next, what the next opportunity is going to be and then seizing on those opportunities.
- Yeah, I guess what I would say is I often describe my career path is kind of non-linear and I kind of go with my gut. So when I got out of Amherst, I also, I didn't have a job. I moved to DC, slept on my sister Mona's floor, so you see a reoccurring theme here. And then I ended up getting a job. I interviewed for the investment banking jobs while I was on campus and they just kind of laughed at me 'cause they knew I was a poly-sci major, they're like, you don't want to be an investment banker. I was like, yeah, you're probably right. So I ended up working at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, DC. And then I applied to Harvard Law School but I did not get in, unlike Chaka and Woodie. So I ended up going to Michigan for law school and continued to pursue my passion for civil rights. So I worked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and for Brian Stevenson. And then when I graduated from law school I clerked on the Third Circuit for a year. And then my best friend from law school was a year behind me at Michigan. Harold Ford Jr got elected to Congress at the ripe age of 26. So I went to be his Chief-of-staff for a couple of years, then moved to the Senate side. I was Senator Kennedy's General Counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee where I handled all of his civil rights work. But I also took on the intellectual property portfolio. And that was when Napster and Grokster and all the peer-to-peer file sharing stuff hit the scene. I then left the Hill to become the lobbyist for the major record labels at the RIAA which was suing 12 year olds for downloading music. And then I moved to Viacom, the media company. And then after Viacom I spent eight years running the Washington office of a global PR firm. And then I came to 2U four years ago and is what my job is kind of a corporate affairs role. And so what's interesting, at least for me is my job now requires me to think laterally and horizontally and strategically. And in many ways, even though there was no clear next step a little bit like Woodie, I never knew what the next step was, but I look back now 25, 30 years later and realize that kind of every step along the way now seems to make sense. And so much of the things that I now spend my time thinking about the irony of all irony is my nickname at work is now Shakespeare 'cause I do all the writing. And there's no doubt in my mind that that is a function of Amherst because Amherst taught me how to write. So, Chaka, over to you, man.
- Yeah, so I have bits and pieces of those stories. So, like Woodie and Dave, I took a year off. I graduated from Amherst in 1990 as a political science major. I actually went and worked at Leo Burnett Advertising with Mona then off to Harvard Law School. After law school, I clerked for two federal judges. And then I was an associate and then a partner at a law firm then I went to be a prosecutor in Illinois Attorney General's office. Then I went to a large public utility holding company a Fortune 100 company, Exelon Corporation. And there I was in the legal department for about nine months and then switched over to the finance side where I had absolutely no finance training whatsoever, but ended up being treasurer of the company for several years and then back to a private law practice, then back to government as a prosecutor and then to my current position as General Counsel of Adtalem. And I think, like Dave and Woodie, I never knew what was coming next, but I always had a great deal of confidence that I could do anything precisely because I left Amherst knowing that I know how to learn. And I was fortunate enough to write my senior honors thesis, I can say that now, it didn't seem so fortunate at the time but I was able to write my senior honors thesis with Austin Sarat and that sort of capstone experience really gave me the confidence to know that I know how the learn, I can learn anything if I really put my mind to it. And so as I've made my various moves throughout my career the lessons that Amherst, the academic lessons, that broad liberal arts training has really stuck with me and been incredibly beneficial as I've made my various career moves.
- So what strikes me about all of your trajectories is that in some ways the move towards educational technology didn't seem like it was something that was deliberate or sort of intentionally thought out. And so I don't know how you would approach students, particularly students of color now who come to you and they say, I want a career exactly like what you have, what do I do? Or what are the ways that I should think about it? And the only commonality I could hear was go to law school and be open-minded. But what is the kind of mentoring or advice that you would want to provide, I can cold call with the best of them. I'll go with Woodie to start.
- What I often say to people, especially now and I think this is relevant to the broader conversation we're going to have is we were kind of, I would say at the tail end of the era where you had like lifelong careers, right? Where a lot of people came out of school, if they went on to professional school of some sort then they often stayed in either the same company or the same industry for their entire careers. Whereas now they say that the average person is going to have 17 different jobs and six or seven different careers. And so I guess what I often say to people is you should think about your career a little bit like your education, which is like, just in the same way that a place like Amherst provides you with certain foundational skills to be a critical thinker and an effective writer and your career is that way as well. Like at the beginning of your career, it's really about like, who are you working for? What are the skills that you're developing? And do you have people who are investing in your growth and your development because chances are whatever those first couple of jobs are that you take are not going to define your trajectory. So what I always try to do is to tell people early in their career, like don't over index on how important those first jobs are in terms of either the company that you're working for or the industry that you're in and instead over index on finding someone who you can learn from and develop the kind of those foundational skills that will serve you well regardless of what you end up doing down the road.
- And I think to add to David's point, we were almost, I feel like towards the end of the traditional educational model in the sense that like you went through a prestigious undergrad, you try to go to a prestigious grad school and there was your career in front of you. And that was the pathway. I was just thinking about this today. I mean, I've hired I think eight people in the last two and a half months and I can remember where one of them went to undergrad off that list. And because to me, like right now it's just not relevant, to me it's relevant about what they've done and who they've become as kind of a technical and professional lawyer or stock administrator or a paralegal. And so I feel like when we were all like, at least in our age group in our late 20s and early 30s, like everyone was like, oh I went here and I did this and this is where I went next. Now it's just not as relevant as what your experience has been because the world is moving so quickly that it's really about, I mean, what you can learn in two years in real world experience kind of so much trumps kind of your path at this point that it's a little bit moving off of that traditional model as well.
- Yeah, I guess I would just add that I agree that acquiring a skill set, really investing in yourself early in your career to acquire that foundation of skills, that foundation of mentors and then remaining open to the various possibilities, Dave and Woodie said, given how the fast pace of the world there are probably students at Amherst now who are doing things that are not yet invented. And so it's critically important to have that skill set, have that set of mentors and then be flexible and confident enough to move into things that no one's ever done before.
- So I wanted to shift us a little bit to talk a little more about education technology. And one of the comments that struck me when we were having a pre-meeting was that the way that most of us now are experiencing online learning. So this rapid sort of shift to Zoom doesn't necessarily represent adequately what you see the best of educational technology or an online experience being. And I was really struck by that. And so I'm wondering if you can help us sort of better envision what kinds of educational technologies exist that sort of supplant the forced shift to Zoom that most of us are experiencing? What does our broader world look like?
- Yeah, I'm happy to start, we own two medical schools, a veterinary school and the largest nursing school in the US, I think most people would agree that their strong preference would be to have doctors and nurses be hands-on with patients and in a clinical setting, obviously that was just impossible as the COVID-19 pandemic increased. And so, one of the things that we shifted to was a technology that allowed us to replicate the clinical experience online. And it's really extraordinary. I mean, obviously there really is no substitute for hands-on patient interaction, but the technology was really incredible in terms of allowing students to replicate the lab component of their medical education and a lot of the clinical interaction. And so we are now looking at repulse pandemic, how we incorporate a lot of that into the curriculum because it really is a fantastic way to supplement what will likely continue to be some version of in-person training.
- Yeah and I think people have to understand, I think people have to understand that the world that we're in now, which I've seen through my kids, I've got a 12 year old and a nine year old firsthand is Zoom was in a sense and all of the kind of online learning that's happened in the last year, it was a lot, most of it was forced, so it wasn't planned, where I think on the flip side, people in the education technology space like Chegg have been planning for this for a long time. And so the idea that we would meet students where they are and give them 24 hour access is what a lot of ed tech has been thinking about for some time which was a shift for a lot of the population that got thrown into this. Made me, I just remember to my own amorous experience, I mean, if it was Sunday afternoon and you had a question for a professor and they had office hours on Tuesday, you might bounce it off a few classmates, but you had to go to the office hours and ask the question and you'd get the answer. And that's how we learned, like my students, my kids are, aren't waiting 10 minutes for the answer when they have a question, they want it right now. And so it's the ability for online education to supplement and really provide this additional layer of information flow that's so valuable to the way students think and learn today and the way that life is moving at such a fast clip. So it's one of the key ways clearly that online and tech and can help. And we've got so much more to talk about, but that's kind of the first thing off of my head now. And we'll go to David next.
- Yeah, I guess maybe I'll give a concrete example. So one of the programs that 2U powers and the way our business model works is we partner with top tier nonprofit universities to help them power their online graduate degrees, undergraduate degrees, bootcamps and short courses. So I guess I'll give the example of one of those programs is the Yale physician assistant degree. So a little bit like Chaka's business where it's a healthcare discipline and you think to yourself, well, how could you possibly do that online? I think the point that Woodie was making is really important which is COVID is warping for two reasons. One is like post COVID the hybrid between online and physical is what the reality will be. This is not a reality, right? This is like a moment in time where you can't blend the two. So I think it's important to think about the blended is what the future is, as opposed to a moment where we all are forced to be remote because online education and remote are not the same thing, right? I think that's an important nuance for people to understand. So what I think is really compelling about the Yale PA experience is, there's a physical campus PA program at Yale and there's a faculty member at Yale who wanted to launch an online program. So he had to go through the whole process of getting it accredited and fast forward now, the program's been around for three and a half years. They have 81 students that just did their white coat ceremony. They're from 27 different states around the country. They're from all different kinds of communities, right? Rural, urban, native American reservations. And so when you think about the learning experience, we help them produce tons of asynchronous content, so recorded lectures, other things and then they go to class once a week live. And then when COVID is over, they will come to campus for an on campus intensive immersion. Well, the person who runs the program at Yale would say the students who are now graduating from the online program are arguably, and you can measure this, having a more diverse richer learning experience because guess what they have to do 14 clinical rotations to get that degree and they all don't have to do it within a 50 mile radius of New Haven. They're spread out all around the country. So the nature of the kind of clients they're serving and patients bring that rich experience back into the classroom is just, and if you think about it people are able to stay in the communities where they live and give back to that community rather than uprooting their life and having to move to New Haven and maybe never coming back. So when I think about a place like Amherst, which is decided issues of inclusion and diversity and access and equity are really important, I think one of the things that we have to be thinking about as an institution is how can online and hybrid foster and further those values that we've decided are critically important to the institution going forward?
- So that actually is exactly the question that I was hoping to ask. I know one of the critiques about the kind of education that Amherst provides is that it is available because of its residential nature to a very small number of students. And that it doesn't really adequately represent the kind of model or the kind of education that most students who are in higher education can experience. And it is really because of that residential model, it is really difficult to scale. And yet, when I talked to the three of you about what was sort of most formative or most foundational about your experience of Amherst, these were all very sort of physical, tangible, almost in person connection. So the mentoring from Austin Sarah or the kinds of communities that you developed here. And so I'm wondering if you can help us better think about how technology can help us democratize access but at the same time, not lose those aspects of residential learning that are really tend to be so critical.
- Let me just, I'll start with kind of an overarching thought. And that was when I was at Amherst and seeing what Amherst has done since you really think that racial and cultural and economic and all of these kind of diversities that we see on campus are what make up the average student. And you kind of think, hey, Amherst is doing a pretty good job of being representative across the whole. Now that I've been out 20 plus years and I'm working in this space you start to understand that that's even as the versus Amherst has become it's not the modern student, right? Like your point, I mean, the modern students in their mid 20s, most of them work full-time jobs, I think like one out of three or so or four have a child, like that is kind of who the modern student is. But if you look at kind of Amherst student body, that's not the traditional Amherst student. And so it's finding a way to meet this more diverse student, if you look at diversity across the board and finding ways to meet them and possibly having them part of the process.
- Yeah, I'd just jump in and say, so like we just signed a partnership with Morehouse, Morehouse is going to offer an online undergraduate degree completion offering. And basically the president of Morehouse's view was that there's 3 million black men in the United States who have some college credits and have not completed. And I think his view is that the world needs Morehouse to be capable of doing more to educate those men than requiring that they physically be on campus for four years. And so when you think about to Woodie's point, in almost every other portion of the world, college is not the way we think about it in the United States. It's not the 18 to 22 year old residential experience. It's the working adult learner. And one of the things that I think COVID has woken a lot of higher education institutions up to, we see it with a lot of our partners is a realization that because of this new kind of, some people call it the 60 year curriculum or lifelong learning, people are not just going to go to an institution for four years, between the 18 years of 18 and 22, they want to have a connection with them through their entire life. And so the way I think about it to Woodie's point, if you're a working mother who is in your late 20s or early 30s or even your 40s and you want to come to Amherst, is that really realistic? It's not right now and I think one of the things that Amherst is going to have to ask itself down the road is we have the privilege and I mean, that privilege because of the amazing support of alumni and the endowment to have a luxury of being able to make some of these choices but there is not an entity in any facet of society that has been able to avoid the digital transformation imperative and disruption. Every elite brand across every, the New York Times, everything, Hollywood, every other facet of society that thought, oh, we don't have to think about that because like we're the New York Times, it's at your doorstep. So my view is the way Amherst needs to think about is this is going to happen, let's do it in a way that is consistent with who we are. And like the best kind of technology makes something that is already awesome even better and compliments the thing that defines the essence of what something is. And there's no easy answer to that but we all went to Amherst, we all know how to think critically and solve complicated problems. And I would argue that that's something that as an institution we have to figure out.
- Yeah, like when I think about the schools that we operate I think those points are spot on. There's an enormous shortage as we have learned of primary care physicians, primary care nurses, particularly doctors and nurses of color, there's tons of studies that part of the health crisis and particularly in the black community is because we received poor care from white doctors. And so when we think about our schools and what we're going to do post pandemic I think Dave is spot on that the technology disruption is at our doorstep and we're going to need to and we want to figure out the best way to educate even more doctors and nurses of color because that's the only way for us to really contribute to solving the healthcare crisis particularly in communities of color. And so finding the right sets and kinds of technology that will allow us to even do the basic sciences and some of the clinicals and I think Dave is right like with the PA programs, we are looking at those same kinds of benefits that allowing people to go to school right where they live, I mean, we educate people who tend to be from rural or urban communities, allowing them to stay in those rural and urban communities and provide healthcare in those communities is essential. And so then coming full circle, thinking about the value of an Amherst education and teaching people how to learn, teaching people how to critically think, how to express themselves in a compelling way, that is not only life-changing for the people who've had access to education but how do we export that that life changing type of pedagogy to as many people as we can.
- Hey Hillary can I add one thing just to this point? So oftentimes I think there's an assumption that the intimacy of the student faculty relationship that you have at a place like Amherst that comes with being in person cannot in any way shape or form be replicated and 100%, we all understand that, there is not, being on a camera is not like being in person, but I will say this, like a couple of years ago we acquired a small company called Critique It and it was just this eclectic founder who now still works for us. And he essentially had developed a software that enables you to annotate any piece of content with another piece of content. So think of it as this, if you were in an art history course at Amherst and you could drop into a painting, an image of a painting a video about the brush stroke in that section, you could in writing someone, if a professor was critiquing someone's writing style or a piece of literature, you could drop in audio or a text or anything. And so when you think about the, what makes an Amherst education so powerful I don't know about all of you but one of the things that I was always so struck by was the thoughtfulness and the personal nature of the feedback I got from professors in my classes and when I wrote and imagine the richness that you could add on top of that, if someone new, who was a music major and a math major that you could drop in someone performing that piece of music in a different way, as an example to show the student, well, this is how I want you to think about pushing yourself, that would make the learning experience richer and more powerful. Yeah, and it'd be great if they were physically there on campus but they don't necessarily have to be the whole time in order to get some of that intimacy and depth of interaction between faculty and students.
- So I wonder if, sorry William.
- I was going to say one quick thing for a lot of people who have been kind of behind a little bit on the move to online education and because COVID-19 really happened overnight and thrust everyone online, I think there's been this kind of growing concern and debate about either or and I think for David and Chaka and I like online and the ed tech has never been about either or. We have to get over the fact of this isn't an either or, this is a how can we make education better and how can we give access? How can we extend diversity? How can all the things that are beneficial about being online? How can those be incorporated into the educational process?
- Yeah, so another ahead--
- Sorry, go ahead.
- Yeah, another example--
- No, I was just going to--
- Sorry Hillary.
- Sorry David, go ahead.
- Let me give you this one more example, 'cause it's from my time on the board, we came back for an event, the trustees and we met with some of the chemistry professors and they were talking about both the challenge and the opportunity of the richness of the diversity of students at Amherst now, right? So you could have an intro to chem class and you could have students sitting next to each other. One of whom comes from a wealthy private or public school whose chem lab before our new science center, might've been as good if not better than the chem lab at Amherst. And then you might have a student who came from a school or as an international student, a coning scholar, who's never been in a chem lab. And so the professors would say there's no difference in the intellectual capacity or capability of these students. They just have had inequitable experiences coming to Amherst. Well, think about what the power of asynchronous coursework could be for those students who've never been in a chem lab before, right? Because if there were recorded lectures that introduced them to here's all the equipment, here's how to think about using it, here's, they could very quickly level themselves up. And guess what, the students who were even already kind of comfortable with that, I guarantee you would also benefit from that because they could use it as a refresher. So to me, that's a like a quintessential example of how, if you say you care about diversity, equity inclusion and you want to bring it to life when you're bringing students to campus who have very different learning experiences, that's a way that you can use technology and the hybrid approach to truly create a more equitable and engaging experience for everyone.
- Yeah, Hillary, I'll just jump in, I won't interrupt you, if you hop in just real quick. David, Chaka and I were talking about this when I went to Amherst and got on campus I literally did not realize people were doing like a prep year. And there was actually all these people walking around that had done an extra year of school. I didn't know that existed.
- Yeah I didn't either, I agree.
- How great would that have been to me to have online access to understand that concept during my whole summer leading into Amherst and then even, well after that Amherst maybe catching up on some of these things. I mean, yeah, the idea that people were still taking Latin, I was like, really? Like I mean, the inner city it's like, it's just not taught, like, I'm sorry, like we're just, we're not there. So I think all of these areas of access will just give people more even footing and a better understanding of what the entire process entails.
- So I think what's most useful to me about this conversation is that it helps to separate out the experience of how we are learning on COVID from what educational technology could be. I think there's a trauma that is associated right now with this generation of students who were as you described it forced online where they more than anything I think, want to be back on campus and be back with their friends and be back in that place where they felt so comfortable. And so I could see it, for sort of predicting forward. I could imagine a kind of Amherst that actually moves even closer to hold each other tight and celebrate that residential model. But it sounds to me like what you're suggesting is a way that COVID can actually help us let go of what we hold so dear and so I'm wondering if you can help us think through, if we get past the trauma of COVID, what are the sort of positive ways in which this time can help us re-imagine Amherst and sort of reinforce the values that all of you describe?
- Yeah, I'll start, I guess two things that I think about are one, one of the things that's obviously special about Amherst is the intimacy of the community and not just those who are on campus but the broader alumni base and the passion that people feel about the institution and the richness of experiences and diversity of alumni. Well, one of the benefits of online is you can tap into that in a much more thoughtful and exciting way. So like it's a way to unleash some of the power and the knowledge that sits within the network of Amherst alums that I think could be really interesting. And then the other thing I would say is, there is this broader debate going on in society about the value of the liberal arts, right? And obviously I think probably everyone who's listening to this is like an advocate for the liberal arts but you also have to kind of acknowledge the fact that there are certain realities about what the workplace demands. And so the other thing that I think is ask yourself, instead of a semester abroad is there a potential down the road where somebody spends a semester or a year, like working in Chicago or in New York or in DC and can continue to take some of their courses but take what they're learning and almost as an applied liberal arts, because I do think over time and again, we have the blessing of being a very well endowed school with a reputation that is obviously second to none but will people want to spend four years in Western Massachusetts and not be able to spend some time in the real work world and bringing of that learning back and forth. So I think there's some interesting opportunities there potentially.
- Yeah, I'll give a real world example of that. We had committed to taking a couple of interns from Amherst prior to COVID shutting everything down. And so we figured out a way, we sat down as a team and figured out a way to recreate or re-imagine the intern experience virtually. And so the two interns lived at home for the summer, we're headquartered in Chicago. I think one was in Philadelphia, one was in Boston. And I think if you ask them they had terrific summer experiences. And so it allowed them to essentially intern in the legal department of a Chicago based company while being at home. And so I think that's sort of one example of how we can think about, as Dave said tapping into the richness of the network as we go forward and using technology to do that.
- So I had that chat, oh sorry Woodie.
- I was just going to say, I think expanding the experience could be so important because the intellectual thinking and the strategy and the rhetoric and all of the unbelievable things that you learn at Amherst, how to process information, you really don't put into practice until sometime after being there. And now that I've been kind of out in a way and I've even taught sports law for some time, I love combining the deep thinking thought process with real life experiences, right? Like, so my sports law class that at Washburn Law School when I was in Kansas City at the Chiefs, like I always brought them to a Chiefs game or a sports event and even did it as part of their examination because I just thought thinking about it alone wasn't going to give me a true understanding of whether they fully grasp the material or not. So I really liked kind of expanding what and how people are learning. And today what point I made, I think when we went to Amherst, four years at Amherst with maybe a study abroad semester which is what you did. And I have a hard time imagining that my two kids, my daughter, especially at one place for four years. She's going to want to bounce and move and be in New York and then maybe be in Eugene, Oregon and get a feel of what she really likes doing but have a central location maybe to get back to. But I, they're just learning in such a different way. Just look at the sports experience of people that are younger these days. I played on the same high school and soccer team my entire youth, that's what we did. You made a club team and you did it. That's what, it was the arc. My son's now on five across teams at the same time. Like they're just, their brains and the way they think and the way they absorb and the way society is coming at them is so different. And I think Amherst, it would be helpful to react and meet people in the middle somewhere there.
- So I have a couple questions from the audience that I wanted to make sure we have time to get to. And the first one I think is really just an informational question. How do you understand the relationship of today's ed tech with that of MOOCs, so Massive Open Online Courses.
- I'm happy to take the first crack at that. So I think what's interesting is if you think about MOOCs and the irony is Coursera is supposed to literally go public tomorrow and they are one of the big MOOCs. I think that the theory of the MOOCs, 10, 12, 14 years ago is that they were going to disrupt higher education, right? They were going to democratize learning, make everything free, which would mean that people wouldn't want to go to these institutions anymore. Interestingly 2U took a very different approach, which is to say like the resistance that you sit in higher ed to transformation is not a fear of change, it's a fear of loss, right? Like the fear of losing the way we have done things that is so powerful. What's interesting is I think what everyone has come to realize is that like institutions of higher education are not going away, right? There's some of the most powerful brands in the world. Now that doesn't mean that all of them are going to survive but like Yale is not going away, Amherst is not going to go away anytime in the near future. It doesn't mean it won't change. And so I think what you're finding now is what people realize is that MOOCs play an important and useful role as almost an entry point for people who want to explore learning in part because they're free. But if you actually want to be offering people like a pathway to either get a certification or ultimately a degree that you have to create more structure and rigor around that. And if you think about it, there are very, very few entities operating in the higher education space now with the exception of the bootcamp. So tech skills skills-based bootcamps that are effectively competing with institutions of higher education as another pathway, right? Especially as now traditional institutions get into online. Because if you have the choice between going to X respected school online or some entity that doesn't have a 250 year reputation of educating people, chances are you're going to choose the institution of higher education. So I think that the more that higher education institutions embrace this, the harder it will be for entities that try and disrupt them to thrive.
- So the next question that I have again, I think has to do with this juxtaposition. So a person asked, if Amherst college students can attend Amherst from anywhere in the world, how might this change the concept or the experience of being a student?
- Yeah, so I don't, it seems to me that what it does is it allows people to decide what kind of experience, they want to have, is I think one of the things that we've been developing here is, I think Woodie said, it's not either or, you could have both. And so what it does is it gives, so for example, you could imagine if people could attend Amherst from anywhere in the world maybe they have an inverse experience. Maybe they do three years wherever they are and a year on campus and so it gives people more flexibility to craft the kind of higher education experience and learning that they want to have and I think that that is a good thing and makes for a richer content and richer students.
- Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this. It's not, I don't think an either or concept, it's how can that, whether it be a year or three semesters or how can that supplement your experience? And it may be that you're an incredibly smart person in country X that's got to be on your family firm, so much time and your parents have said, hey, if you want to go two years to Amherst, we can manage that because of your brother's this age, or your sister's that age but we need you back. Should we be denying that person an opportunity to learn and educate themselves? And I can tell you that someone like that could be an incredibly rich experience for the other students and then stay connected to Amherst via their online learning the time that they're not on campus. So I think that's what we're trying to get across is that Chegg and all these other platforms are supplemental to the process. And we want it to be an incredibly useful vehicle for students to not only supplement their education at that point in time, but also continue it for the rest of their lives.
- So another question that somebody in the audience is wondering is, should Amherst offer the option of having a degree that does not require residency? So Vinny comes to you and says, there's this proposal, what do I do? Should there be an option for students who say, you know what? I can't come to Amherst, but I want an Amherst degree, how so?
- I mean, I'll take the first cut at that, my initial--
- These aren't my questions although.
- No, my initial reaction to that is I don't think that going that far immediately is necessarily the right choice. But I do think that I would not be surprised if 15 to 20 years from now there's some dimension of that at Amherst. I just, I think there is a certain inevitability to if you're willing to acknowledge that that not every student necessarily needs to spend all of their time physically on campus to have the rich learning experience. And remember, I mean, this is, we are literally having these conversations with Morehouse right now, because obviously Morehouse is a 153 year history of educating black men. And a lot of the faculty are like, you can't do that if they're not here. Well, guess what if you're a 45 year old black man who like never got to graduate from college, you probably not as interested in spending time on the yard with 22 year olds. But the value of a Morehouse education could be profoundly life transforming for you. So I think it's, answering that question depends I think in part around how Amherst thinks about what an Amherst student is. Because if you continue to think about an Amherst student as the 18 to 24 year old, straight out of high school, maybe per young person who took a year or two off, if you start to think about an Amherst student as an adult learner who's brilliant and who could add academic, but whose life doesn't enable them to uproot themselves and move to Amherst for four years you might come to a different conclusion.
- Yeah, I agree with that. I think it will ultimately be kind of the answer to how does the Amherst truly want to treat diversity across the board. But if we want to accept it in its fullest form, there will be portions of the educational process at Amherst that are all online and accessible without being on campus. If the definition is more narrow and it's to David's point it's the path that we all took but we're from diverse backgrounds and that's diversity, then it will be completely residential.
- So I think we have time for one last question. And I think the question that I will throw out is the one that we had at the top of our billing which is asking you to speculate on our future. So imagine we are all at a time hopefully where we can safely be together again and there's no longer a need for being forced online. What are your predictions for how COVID is going to change the future of liberal arts education?
- Yeah, I'll start.
- I predict based on sort of, I guess capstone to what we've been discussing here is we are going to see a significant change and we are going to see the use of ed tech I think democratize access to the liberal arts. And I think it is incumbent upon Amherst as a leader to be in the forefront of of that change and that democratization.
- Yeah, I guess what I would say is picking up on Chaka's last point and then I'll make a second one, which is to say that again, if you look across other sectors, it's the most respected iconic brands that figured it out first, who ended up getting like the, retaining their supreme. And by that, I don't mean, I'm not talking about Amherst versus a Harvard, but I'm talking about among the elite liberal arts colleges, right? You don't want to be the follower. You want to be the leader. And I guess the other and a corollary to that point is I think the single biggest driver for change is going to be the students because I think what's going to end up happening is that students are going to start to demand it. And if we don't have it, they're going to go someplace else. And over time, what we're going to find out is that we're losing students to other institutions. And one of the reasons why we're losing them is they're going to say, well, I want some flexibility. I want to be able to take some of my courses online or I want some greater and that is going to be the forcing mechanism, because at the end of the day, like every other industry, as much as higher ed doesn't think this way, they are the customer. And if the customer says they ultimately want something then you figure out a way to deliver it to them. Otherwise you don't get the kind of customer that you want.
- Yeah, this is a great segue for me. I mean, Chegg went public in 2013 and we've had this moniker, we put students first, that's our number one priority. That's what we do across our entire company. It's what every decision gets made from. And so, I think Dave and Chaka will agree. I mean, Amherst has to decide whether it's going to put students first and I mean the broad spectrum of student and to David's last point students are going to ultimately drive the change. And so you can either embrace that change and get on board at the front end or be forced to do so to stay in competition with the people that have already basically passed you by and try to catch them from behind. So I think there's no question that there's going to be some level of change and some meeting in the middle, especially around kind of some of the skills and technical areas where students want to meet but also have a liberal arts education in addition to having more online access. So it'll be kind of a question that Amherst is going to have to answer and I mean it's our company moniker so I would love Amherst to meet the students kind of where they are and put them first.
- Well, unfortunately we are at time and I can tell just from the number of questions that have come in that I haven't had a chance to ask, that this is a conversation that could easily fill more than an hour. People have asked questions about athletics. They've asked questions about small class sizes, access to professors, the importance that students don't have access to quick and easy answers and have to struggle. And I think the lesson from this is that if we do these kinds of sessions, we need more than an hour because it's really hard to compress all this in fast paced time. So I want to thank all of you for being here. I want to thank the support that we've been given from the people behind the scenes. And I hope this will just be the first of many conversations about positive things that can come out of this shift to remote learning which for many of us has been sad and hard. So thank you very, very much and have a good evening.
- Thank you for being such a great moderator, yes.
- Yes, thank you.
