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We interview sustainability leaders across industries to learn what they are working on and how they are steering their companies toward a climate-friendly world.
Alex - 00:00:12:
Welcome to Open Source Sustainability. I'm Alex Lassiter, CEO of GreenPlaces. On this show, I talk with sustainability leaders to learn how companies are adapting their business models to be in line with sustainability goals. We believe sustainability has to be open source to be successful. And these leaders have offered us a glimpse inside their strategies in hopes that we can all move forward together. We're fascinated by some of the unique challenges these sustainability leaders face and are excited to dive deeper. In this episode, I'm talking with Will Crawford, Director of ESG at Follett, North America's leading campus retail partner, and Brad Ives, the Executive Director for the Center for Environment at Catawba College. And we're talking about sustainability and reducing carbon impacts on college campuses. A college or university's carbon footprint can be impacted by several factors, size, energy consumption, transportation, waste management, infrastructure, and the list goes on. And mitigating emissions is going to look a lot different at each school. So let's explore the different solutions that colleges and universities from across the US are implementing to go green. Welcome to Open Source Sustainability Podcast. Very excited to have two very smart gentlemen with me today. Brad Ives, who is the Head of Sustainability for Catawba College. We'll learn more about that, but one of the first, and I think the first, college in the Southeast to achieve carbon neutrality, as well as Will Crawford, the head of ESG for Follett, a business-serving higher education institutions and apparel bookstores and all kinds of things for the sustainability world, a big part of the Scope 3 emissions. For many universities, over a thousand, across the US and beyond. So Brad and Will, thank you all for joining us.
Brad - 00:01:49:
It's a pleasure, Alex.
Will - 00:01:51:
Yeah, thank you for having us.
Alex - 00:01:53:
Absolutely. So I guess to get us started, it'd be helpful to learn a little bit more about your backgrounds and what you're up to today. So maybe we'll kick off with Brad, tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us what you've been working on at Catawba College and we'll kind of start there for some background.
Brad - 00:02:10:
Great. Well, you know, as a fairly old guy, I've got an extensive background, but I've ended up in sustainability on a path that may not be your typical. I was a New York lawyer, worked in finance in Charlotte and London, started getting into renewable energy in the early aughts, later developed big landfill gas project with Exxon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, before leading a company in the biomass space and then took a tour in government. I was the Assistant Secretary for Natural Resources for North Carolina before I finally made it into Higher Ed. In 2015, I became the Chief Sustainability Officer and Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was there for a little bit over four years and then I left there, which we can talk about later on, Alex, but left there and actually had the pleasure of working with Alex during COVID on some work for the government before I worked in the solar space and then doing some ESG consulting before coming back into higher ed here at Catawba. And the Catawba story is really an interesting one. The college has been dedicated to the environment really for three decades. We started out in the 1990s putting in geothermal HVAC here on campus that really started reducing the energy costs and greening the campus. Later did a series of energy efficiency projects. We've replaced almost all the windows and added a lot of LED lighting. That led up to the more recent years when we were fortunate enough to get an anonymous set of gifts that totaled $242 million with the goal of Catawba becoming the leading small college for the environment in the Southeast. I got hired after the first portion of that money came in and immediately identified the opportunity because of the geothermal work, the energy efficiency work, and some other things that have been done on campus that we could become carbon neutral. Like many colleges, and it's something I'm sure we'll talk about today, we had made a pledge to second nature to be carbon neutral by 2030. We achieved that seven years early, which was great. And we are the first college in the Southeast to have achieved that second nature standing. So that's the quick story on me and the college.
Alex - 00:04:38:
Absolutely. Well, thank you, Brad. Will, we'd love to hear a little bit of your background and how you've been doing. Who Follett is and why is sustainability a focus for a business like Follett. So we'd love to hear a little bit about your background and kind of what you all are up to today.
Will - 00:04:54:
Yeah, thank you. So my background in education is from Arizona State University. I have a background in business sustainability. And I've been with Follett for about two decades now. So starting in the early aughts in college bookstores and working my way through, honestly, from a stock room up to here the head of now environmental, social and governance at Follett. It took quite a bit of time as I was on the college campus to understand the dynamics of what the environment looks like for higher education institutions. Maybe a couple of years to really invest myself into that. But it became a very purpose-driven, mission %-driven role for me to support college campuses and then directly support students. I spent 18 years of my two decade career with Follett on a college campus, primarily on the West Coast mostly. But I spent quite a bit of time as a training store manager for our team. Spent a lot of time on the leadership committees, helped open a number of stores, both on the West Coast and the Midwest and around the country. And what I found to be kind of a unifying message between the campuses that I worked with and worked for was really a mission on how to impact the environment and how to be a more sustainable institution, which led me to many sustainability committees on campuses. The funny thing about that was that at times they were very small committees. It was one or two people or a few people in the basement of a biology department or somewhere in a room in the library. We're meeting, we're looking at master plans, we're talking about what are we going to do for the future? How are we going to inspire this generation to consider the environment and natural capital as a part of something that was precious and important to them? So then fast forward a number of years, and I then moved into our corporate office as a senior trainer for the organization, training again directly our leaders to support the campuses. That gave me the ability to provide some support or advocacy for what was happening in what we call the field or our campuses. And that was specific to sustainability as being material to our institutional partners. From that, those conversations, Follett and our leadership began to make an investment in ESG. So proudly, the company's 150-year-old history. I'm the first person to hold an ESG role for Follett and the first person to lead the newly created department. It's important for Follett to make things that are material for our partners material to us as well. And so we really wanted to lean in on how do we help support the campuses and their missions and their goals. And then more broadly, we really wanted to look at, you know, how do we impact the future? How do we make our business sustainable? The number of businesses that are over 100 years old are very small. So we want to look far into the future and understand our business related to higher education. How do we make a sustainable environment and ecosystem? And that's, I think, what brings us here today, which is why, you know, us three are here on this podcast.
Alex - 00:08:23:
Absolutely, and thank you. So what I find really interesting about this is both of you all had, what I would say is a little bit of a non-traditional path to get to where you are today. You've got Brad on one side coming in through, I think the more traditional, what we think of with sustainability and energy, green energy, renewables, landfill gas capture. You've worked your way all the way around there. You obviously have that legal base of understanding what are the implications of this stuff and how does it work. And then Will on the other end coming up through the grassroots side of things and they're saying that it's really the business of education services and working your way up to where we are today now and obviously two positions that are heavily influential in the way that we think about decarbonizing university. But where I wanted to start was to first understand, Brad, when we think about the footprint of a college or university, what is under that umbrella? When you're thinking about the overall impact and how to kind of manage this, there's a lot that goes into how a university thinks about its impact in the environment. So talk to us a little bit about, like what is the balance of control here?
Brad - 00:09:29:
Sure, and I think to start out Alex, it's worth talking about just, you know, what is under higher ed? I mean, because you've got the University of North Carolina, which is a, I would say a medium-sized, R1-classified research university that's got a hospital, medical school, extensive research, lots of dorms, lots of kids. You know, then you've got the places like in Ohio State or Penn State or Central Florida. I think Central Florida may now be pushing 50,000 students at one site plus research. So you've got things like that that are in higher ed. And then you've got the Catawba Colleges of the world where we have 1200 students. We're a classic small liberal arts college. So let me start by looking at a Catawba where, you know, our carbon footprint, our scope 1 emissions and most of your listeners probably will know what that means, but for those who don't, it's what you actually emit under your control on your campus. So here at Catawba, we've got some legacy natural gas water heating and boilers that provide heat for dormitories and other buildings. We've got some stoves in our kitchen. We've got Bunsen burners in laboratories. And then the other element of scope one emissions are basically our internal combustion vehicles and lawn maintenance equipment and things like that. Then you have your scope 2s, which is going to be supplied power from outside our providers Duke Energy. And scope 3 is something we can talk a lot more about here. But just deciding what is in scope 3 is tricky for a college. Even the size of Catawba, if you look at Second Nature's definition, they've trimmed that down pretty small. And they're looking at scope 3s consisting of commuting for your students and then travel that's paid for by the college or university. When we worked on our carbon neutrality, we went slightly larger than that. And we're looking at carbon emissions associated with our waste. Like you said, landfill gas, we were talking about when you send organic waste to the landfill, it's going to decay, it's going to produce methane. Methane is very potent greenhouse gas. I'm going to target that. Looking upstream at food service is something that we're getting our hands on and we'll probably report on in the future. We can talk about Will's business of where do the textbooks come from? What's the upstream carbon footprint of that? What about those t-shirts that say college on the front of them? But then you go to something like the University of North Carolina and it has a coal and natural gas-fired cogeneration plant that's producing steam for campus. A lot of larger colleges, especially R1-sized colleges, are going to have some sort of power generation or steam generation or combined effort on campus. And you've got to be able to know what that is. But it also gives you a lot more opportunity to lower your emissions because you can see that you change out from steam to hot water, which is less intensive. It's something Stanford did. They spent, I think, a half a billion dollars converting their campus from steam to hot water. Yeah, I mean, here at Catawba, we've got some... We found out we had dryers in our dormitories that were natural gas-powered and we're going to phase those out pretty quickly. That's a little bit easier than what Stanford went through. So lots of challenges, lots of opportunities. Although there are similarities in banding of college, every college is unique and it's going to have its own challenges.
Alex - 00:13:12:
And Will, as you think about this coming from the perspective of Follett, which, you know, as Brad mentioned is providing lots of things for the university or what we think about a university or a college ranging from textbooks to apparel and other things, start by thinking about why is this on your radar? Like, why is this something that Follett is even, a company like Follett is even engaging in, much less creating it and an entire division and having someone like you run it, why is this on the, why is this on the agenda?
Will- 00:13:41:
Well, I think Brad talked about this is that there's a uniqueness in college campuses. Every campus across, there's banding, but each campus is a bit of a unique environment. And we need to be very flexible in how we service each one of our campus partners and have a strategy for every campus that we engage with. The environment and what we do socially is also pretty material to Follett. We've had sustainability kind of baked into our business for a number of years, but it hasn't been as dedicated as it is today. We're still in our infancy in how we are measuring and tracking and reporting, but as a partner to the institution, and Brad talked about scope three and what we measure, if Follett can provide a piece of the puzzle to institutions that are looking to holistically measure their scoped emissions or to be on a task force or have a conversation of what do we inventory, what don't we inventory? There is opportunity for a firm like a Follett or another service provider to come in and give that piece of the puzzle. Just like a food service entity on campus, there's food going to a landfill. There's also textbooks that go to a landfill. There's t-shirts like Brad talked about that go to landfill. The textile industry can be very damaging to the environment, and so we want to make sure that our products, our services meet the demands of today's folks that attend college, but also again, a strong partner to the campus that can give that extra piece of data to make that report that much stronger, that much more transparency, and our goals are to be able to do that. That's what we intend to do over the next several years.
Alex - 00:15:32:
One thing that I'm hearing here, and this is going to get into this kind of first question, is You know, Brad, you have a lot of things. This is a lot. These aren't just, it's not just one thing. It's like you said, it's different for every university. It's different for every campus, different for every college. You're finding things as you go through it and trying to understand where we are. But hearing, you know, Will, as y 'all think about this from a Follett perspective. It seems like... Is one of the reasons this is so challenging because you have to engage so many people? I'm just imagining if you said, hey, if a college wants to reduce its emissions, It is not a one person operation. You have to engage your partners and faculty members and administrators and students and stakeholders and vendors in this. What is it like to begin this process, Brad, as you think about really getting off the ground and engaging everybody in it? How much do you have to work with other people in doing this type of stuff?
Brad - 00:16:32:
Oh, it's it's I mean, you really yelled at Alex. It's multifaceted lots and lots of people, you know, again, contrasting the large public of the University of North Carolina versus a Catawba College. One of our big challenges that Catawba going forward is going to be about commuting. Our faculty, our staff, and some of our students all commute. Well, Salisbury, North Carolina, we actually do have some public transportation. We've got four different bus lines, but this is one of the things of the closest stop we have isn't quite that convenient to school. So how do we partner with a local transit agency to handle that? At Chapel Hill, the university was such a huge part of the town that we were over 60% of the public transit budget. So we could come in and dictate the terms. We could really push where the route goes for all the buses. I mean, we had the problem there of our hospital complex at rush hour. We would average one bus every 47 seconds coming into that area and discharging or picking up passengers. At Salisbury and Catawba, we've got, I think the bus is coming by here, like maybe once an hour, and it's still a couple of blocks away. So we're not going to be able to reduce our commuting emissions very easy. We've got to work again, thinking of, if you want people to walk or bike, where are your sidewalks? Where are your bike lanes? Do you have bike paths? Do you have greenways? So that's just one example of how you have to engage others. The other challenges are thinking of stuff like your recycling and your waste hauling. In Chapel Hill, again, we were so large. We could recycle pretty much everything that could be recycled. We could have a vendor who would pick that up and take that to a materials recovery facility and sort it and get it out into the markets. Here, because we're a smaller college, we've got to participate in the systems that are available. And we currently don't have glass recycling. The entire county, Rowan County, where we are, there is no one that will recycle glass. So that's not something we can do yet. We're looking at options. Composting, another one that, for Salisbury, we're a pretty big source of organic material, but in the grand scheme of life, it's not that big a source. We don't do that much in the cafeteria in the summertime. So we can't get a hauler. That is close enough to us that it's worth it to them financially to come pick up our compost. Or we just lost our composting service and we're trying to figure out how to deal with that. So it is this interesting mix. And that's with that getting into suppliers. And if I want to change my fleet here to biodiesel where I've got diesel trucks, I don't have a single gas station that carries biodiesel in the county. Do I set that up myself? Well, I don't have the facilities that at UNC we ran our own gas stations for our service vehicles so we could just put biodiesel in there. It creates a lot of unique challenges, but it is really, really multifaceted. And a lot of what we're talking about is still kind of waste and emissions. We haven't even gotten into the rest of the UN sustainable development goals, which stretch really widely across the whole gamut of fire at.
Alex - 00:20:08:
So today we've got something like, I don't know, it's well over a thousand universities have signed the American Presidential Climate Pledge, but I think it's only 10 to 15 that have actually reached that carbon neutrality goal. So this is a goal to say, we're raising our hand, we're going to do this, we're going to get on a path, but a very small amount has actually gotten there. What do you think are the hardest parts of aligning stakeholders on a campus to do this? What are the things that are the hardest pieces about getting this rock moving beyond the initial commitment?
Brad - 00:20:46:
Money. Just plain and simple because nobody in higher ed is at zero emissions. Yeah. I think Catawba probably has one of the lowest carbon footprints among colleges. When you look at the set of colleges that have achieved what used to be called American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, ACUPCC, was the acronym, is now second nature, which is easier to say and remember. But, you know, in trying to do that, you look at it and you see it's folks with really small emissions. There are a couple of larger universities like Vanderbilt has gone away from that pledge and is doing it with Climate Vault. And that's a whole other discussion of what Climate Vault does and whether that's the best way to get to carbon neutrality. But there are very few large schools that are doing it and it's because of cost. I did a calculation a year or two ago and looking at Wake Forest University, which is one of the smallest Division 1 universities, that they can achieve carbon neutrality through offsets at a cost of about $350,000 to $400,000 a year. At Catawba, we ended up, we're still dickering with SIMAP and their criteria. We think they were overly restrictive in how we account for our scope 2 emissions. We think it should cost us about $45,000 a year to be carbon neutral and ended up costing us $67,000 last year. So that's a, you know, when you think about that math versus what does carbon neutrality do for a Catawba in getting our name out there and showing prospective students, prospective faculty, prospective staff that were committed to the environment, we get that money back in spades. You know, if you get two kids that come here over a four-year period just because you're carbon neutral, you have more than earned that money back in tuition. So you know, you can think of it very pragmatically that way. You also can just do it because it's right and that's why Catawba is doing it. But I think that a lot of colleges are having to do the math. And one of the dirty secrets is if you go to Second Nature's website and look at the carbon neutral colleges, there are only 10 of them listed. And that's because a couple have dropped out that were carbon neutral, they've ceased their program and done that quietly. So it's a really small number. And I'm astounded because I think lots and lots of smaller liberal arts colleges can do this for, you know, let's say $75,000 to $150,000 a year and then use that as a way to really look at their operations and start cutting costs by cutting emissions and cutting energy expenses.
Alex - 00:23:39:
Yeah, I was going to say as we kind of pivot into, there's the offsetting side of this of being carbon neutral and making that commitment. And the other piece of this is making these reductions. Will, you mentioned earlier, y'all know a little bit about textbooks. Tell us about what you're seeing. What is the, I haven't been in college for a while. When I was there, it was every year you got to go buy your books. It's almost comes out every year, you got to buy a new one. The whole thing when I was in school was they cannot possibly be making more versions of these things. We just had a version six months ago and why are we buying another one? Where are we today? What is the path to digitalization? What does adoption look like? How are y'all, from your vantage point, what are you seeing in the evolution of the way we think about textbooks and course materials?
Will - 00:24:28:
Yeah, that's an excellent, excellent question and an excitable discussion point. Textbooks, course materials have been my life for two decades. I try to immerse myself in what is the textbook economy look like and to your point, Alex, it's very funny that our providers, our publishers, our friends do need to turn products regularly. If you have inventory in the market that becomes aged, it lowers the value of that product and so to continue to make a profit, you need to then version textbooks, which is called Editions, editions of books. Now, what's interesting about additions is sometimes, many times, you do need to make addition updates. There is new information out there in the world. There is new understandings, new learnings. You want to put the best, freshest things in the hands of the students who are going to lead future generations. I was at a Textbook Affordability Conference sometime 2012, and the big publisher groups were there. We called them The Big Three. There's about five in this oligopoly, but they sat on a panel and they very openly said, look, we've kind of made this model that's broken. We don't know how to fix it. And it's because they created some of those problems of reversing textbooks and making it less affordable and less achievable for the students. So when we looked at what is the cost of course materials, what are the programs and innovations that we can offer as a large firm with 150 years of retail experience and in course materials experience, we thought about how do we provide access for course materials? We have a program called Follett Access. Follett Access very quickly is first day access for the course materials, required course materials for a student. So every student on the first day of class or before is provided with their course materials. Now one might say, well, how are you doing that? Well, we have very strong relationships with the campus and the publishers. We use that relationship to affect change. A great story, a great story that I love comes out of Xavier University. You know, Brad was talking about the ROI basically on sustainability goals and you know, you have a couple of students enroll and that helps provide financial support for the campus. Well, Xavier took a problem and there's many studies about this. 30% of students don't go to school with a book.
Alex - 00:27:00:
Hmm.
Will- 00:27:02:
70% of those students in the Xavier study might've had some of them. Well, I think if you think back to your college career, your journey, your academic journey, you think of how prepared would you be if you didn't have that course material? And yes, I believe course materials are foundational to the educational journey and the academic journey. And so while Xavier was trying to solve for this problem, they reached out to Follett, their partner of more than 30 years and said, Follett, how can you help us solve this problem? Well, that is where our access program came in. We reduced costs. We then worked with the campus to put their program in acceptance letters. That's right, so the campus leaned very far into this program, realizing that they had a problem, understanding in the future, if their students drop, fail, or withdraw, they're not going to graduate. It's not great for retention numbers. It's not great for success rates. It's not great for graduation. And it doesn't attract new entrants into the market, new students, new college students into that institution. By putting simple messaging in their acceptance letters that says, hey, your course materials are going to be paid for, they're a part of your program. You either go to the bookstore, pick them up, or they're digitally provided to you. Recently, the students out of those programs have said things like, this reduced the stress on me, my family, my parents from purchasing course materials, walking into the bookstore and moving from high school to college and not understanding or knowing how to navigate that system. And it made the transition from high school to college an easier or more seamless transition. And that's a wonderful story, how a campus partner leaned into a problem and said, how can my partner fix that problem? How can we customize the program to meet the needs of the institution and then driving success rates? From there, you asked a question about digital, the digital impact. The digital impact is so exciting. I, and it's, to me, it's what I think of the next conversation, the next wave that we need to talk about. Traditionally, you might've had print textbooks. Most folks have print textbooks. But as the internet became better and as technology grew, in the industry, this is a funny data point, but we used to always say five to seven years, everybody will be digital. That was 20 years ago. Guess what? That's not fair. If you've been on the post-campus, it was every five to seven years, everybody was going to go digital. We're at kind of the tipping point here. But I think that Pearson, which is a large publisher, they produced an annual report in 2021, talking about what digitization can do for emissions. From digitizing their products, they went from, they reduced emissions by 90% of emissions related to their products. That's some like 77,000 megatons of emissions. That's like 9,200 or something. So just broadly, you can take that quick data point and say when you digitized. You're going to see a reduction in carbon emissions, but it's more holistic than that. It's how do we service the student and how do we provide educational products and services that are where they want it, where they need it, but also has a great social impact.
Alex - 00:30:20:
Just digitizing a textbook, obviously you get the reduction in emissions. I would assume you get the reduction in costs to be able to deliver, which could open up more opportunities to get students with need the materials that they require without paying as much as we would every year that I had to for books. Brad, if y'all seen anything like that from your vantage point, is that how colleges navigate this? When a college thinks about, and I know this could be for any college or university you worked at, but... Is that how colleges think about it as well? Do they look at this and say, well, if we went digital, we're going to save costs, save emissions, increase access. But at, you know, but I like my paper. Like, how does it, how does it, what's what is that like? Like, I'm just curious, how does that conversation go?
Brad - 00:31:16:
Yeah, I haven't, my responsibilities at Catawba don't include the bookstore, where at UNC they did. And, you know, when you're looking at a, a UNC, we did a renovation of our store and took the textbook space, which it's a three story, sort of a two and a half story building, and it used to take up an entire floor was textbooks. And we did the renovation. We showed textbooks into half of the basement. So by having a lot more digital, you have this knock on effect that, you know, Will's company and their providers are going to have smaller warehouses. They're going to use less, the truck emissions to haul those things to campus. The, you know, paper going to landfills and turn it into methane is the decay, all that goes down. I, you know, the big challenge with college is affordability that higher ed and healthcare are two costs that have been outpacing inflation for, you know, really for the last three decades. And there are a lot of causes for that. And I do think, and here's where I'm going to speak a little bit against the interest of, of how Catawba operates. You know, I think that the way going forward is that you need to include the textbooks or, and I, and I, you don't even want to call it textbooks. It's learning materials. Uh, you need to include that cost in your tuition. You're really nickel and diming your students by expecting them to spend $250 to $350 a semester. Additionally, after they've paid you, you know, $40 to $70,000 for their tuition, why not include it? And then you also, uh, with your lower income students, you can make that into financial aid more easily. You don't have to have a separate line for that. Donors love to give for scholarships. If you're really lucky, you've got some donors who get it. We may be climbed out of poverty themselves who are going to come in and give you specific money for textbooks, but more likely they're going to put their money into higher profile things and, you know, create the Alex Lassiter scholarship for kids trying to get ahead. And then, you know, the school's going to have to go out and find other money to pay for the laptop, the textbooks, the other costs that don't have that name appeal and warm fuzziness to your donor. So I think there are lots of things about you're reducing operational costs for the colleges and universities, you're making it cheaper for the students. And then like Will was talking about, the importance of having the first day materials in the hands of students is so key. That's the key to success that a student that does not go in and get that syllabus and be able to go back to their dorm that night and start studying is behind the second time that class meets. And so it's really hard to get up that curve and a lot of first generation college students in Catawba, this is one of the big things we do. We are, you know, in the high 30% of first generation college students here. They don't have that parent who's like, Oh, you know, make sure you buy your books. Or, uh, maybe you could opt for the digital version. There's a lot of just pure lack of knowledge of how college works and having a system that makes it easy, that says, you know, click here to get your course materials upon first day of arrival. And it all just streams into your account and you have it. That's huge, rather than going to the store, finding out that the professor moved to edition seven. Edition seven wasn't stocked enough. So they've got some edition sixes that the bookstore maybe got, and then he or she's teaching out of a different edition. You got glitches like that. So there's so, so many things that are great about digital copies. And I think it's a time where we're seeing some really important change in higher ed that's going to allow for more success because ultimately, there's another point that Will made that's really huge is retention. And at your Harvard, your Chapel Hills, your UVAs, retention's not that big of a deal. At your average college, and I'm not even getting the community colleges, your average college, you've got a lot more fall off and you want to figure out how to retain those kids. And a lot of it is about access to the materials to be able to keep them engaged. And otherwise, you're squandering a lot of wealth and saddling people with debts for incomplete educations that aren't going to serve them in the way that they could. So lots of good change coming and it's helping on sustainability, but I think it's also helping on these other goals of lifting people out of poverty and providing a quality education to them.
Alex - 00:36:10:
Yeah, I think a lot about the kind of the historical sustainability definition of people and planet. And it is interesting as you think about this, I'm thinking about this from a finance perspective. Tuition and obviously alumni support, you know, over the history of a student, the lifetime value of a grad, of a student who successfully completes college, does well, earns great grades, gets a great job, continues to support through decades, hopefully of their life. That breakage is extremely costly to a university. And if a leading indicator of that is, and I experienced this, I did not come to UNC with need and financial aid. I was fortunate enough to not have to be in that situation. But I do remember getting there and someone saying, well, did you buy your books? So I had a budget for buying books. I said room and board and books. And I said, well, how much could books possibly be? And then it realized, oh my gosh, that's a lot of money. But it's interesting as you think about this, and we kind of I guess think about the future of higher ed, which I'm sure is an impossible question. You've got one new axis, which is all of the sustainability concerns, the rising cost of materials, of energy. You've got the general public opinion. You've got donors. You've got all of that stuff. But then you also have digitization, and digitization could potentially be a solver for access and textbooks. But, and Brad, I'm curious on this as well, but as you think about where this goes in terms of access back into the community, a university or a college can now serve somebody remotely better. I know virtual classes at UNC were just starting when I was leaving, and has, I think, probably turned into a larger revenue center for a university. How do you think about the 10 to 15 years from now, future of high rad, what are some of the things that y 'all are anticipating as you look at this through a sustainability lens?
Brad - 00:38:14:
Wow, I mean, a lot of it is, you know, this traditional model of you go somewhere for four years, you sit in a classroom and you get taught by a professor out of written books, you know, that model is changing really quickly. There are a lot of flipped classrooms where you're going to get a lot of content online outside the classroom in an asynchronous way that you can go watch a Khan Academy type video and then come into class to talk about, you know, what you heard in the lecture that the professor has already pushed out to you. That's sort of the simple stuff that's going on. The more complex stuff is, you know, how can you replicate the college experience? Like Western Governors University is one that's, you know, come out of nowhere to be a huge player. Arizona State, Bulls Alma Mater has been a leader in online education. Liberty University is, you know, massive, massive player in that space. I worry, it's just like, you know, work from home versus being in the office that you do lose a lot of what's in the experience because part of the college is a maturation process. You know, human beings, we mature very slowly. We're, you know, we're really, our brains aren't fully formed until we're in our mid to late 20s.
Alex - 00:39:31:
Mine's still not fully formed, I don't think.
Brad – 00:39:33:
Yeah.
Alex – 00:39:34:
Or maybe it's degraded, I don't know.
Brad - 00:39:37:
I'm with you there. And yeah, so a lot of the experiences, the socialization and coming out of COVID, we're seeing this with the loss of, with kids coming to college, you missed having high school in person and it's really something back. So there is this element where we need people to be in classrooms and to have those types of discussions and just to walk around campus and catch a coffee or lunch with somebody who picks up an idea from a class and talks about it. Start teaching themselves and they learn. So we have to continue to have that. The opposite extreme is, I think, lifelong learning is going to be the key, because we don't know what the jobs of the future are going to be. So how do you position people to learn continuously? And colleges like Catawba are looking at this space. Do we offer certificate programs? Really, some of the Ivy Leagues, like a Harvard Business School was a pioneer in this of bring people in, and you don't have to give them a full MBA. You bring them in for two weeks in the summer, and they get a credential. Well, that's now gone mainstream. So there's going to be a lot of learning where you get a certificate. I've been through three different programs like this myself. And I did an investment. I became a chartered alternative investment analyst, self-study, and an exam. I became a GRI certified sustainability professional. I became a global association of risk professionals, sustainability climate risk certificate holder. These programs were awesome, and a lot of it was asynchronous learning or study on your own. And I think that's going to be more and more a part of higher ed. So you're not necessarily just going to come in and get a fsel-year bachelor's type degree. You're going to need to be Microsoft certified. You're going to need to come back after your mid-career and get a certificate. And AI risk management is probably going to be a real popular certificate as soon as somebody figures out what the heck that looks like. And I think that'll lead to a real evolution of higher ed. But there's still this part of me that says, we've got to have college campuses. We have to have people coming to them. And we have to have them building that lifelong network and the social skills that are key.
Alex - 00:41:55:
Yep. Will, how do you think about the future of higher ed?
Will - 00:42:00:
Yeah, I am. So I'm nodding a lot as Brad is talking. You know, this is a very exciting part of the conversation. And there is an organization called National Association of College Stores, NACS. And early twos, they had a magazine, they had a magazine, we still have it called College Store. And it talked about what is the future of the college store, the campus store environment. We're always looking at, okay, what does this look like in the future? And to Brad's point, it's hard to project very full range of the future. He's absolutely correct in that certificates and these micro-education credentials are becoming important. The environment of a digital world and being in that digital environment. You do at times miss the camaraderie of what a college campus is all about. So we need to solve for that. Follett's very concerned with the academic journey, all the way from your acceptance letter to being an alumni and then sort of celebrating each one of those milestones along the academic journey. What does it look like in a digital world? How do you engage with your classmates in a thoughtful manner? And I am a 100 % online student. I have been pretty much my entire collegiate career, except for when I was in junior college and I had to hop on the bus and go to the class in the evening after I was working in the bookstore. But my environment has been very online, even at Harvard. So I'm in their Master's program for sustainability now and all of our classes, except for a, there's going to be a three week on campus part of this, but all of that experience is online. What the institutions need to be able to do is take that in-person experience, transfer it to the online experience and give the students the ability to build those lifelong networks and create a pathway to do so. And so that's what I think of the future. If we go very far into digital and online learning, I mean, for example, ASU, you talk about this, Brad, but 144,000 students were admitted for Follett.
Alex – 00:44:06:
Wow.
Will – 00:44:07:
A 144,000 students. That the scale of that is massive. That's bigger than some cities. And I think that you've got to approach the digital environment from the same way that we approach on campus, create opportunities to engage in thoughtful conversation, create opportunities for our student population to have a voice and tell the institution what has worked for them and what hasn't. So when I think of the future of higher education, it needs to be an institution that is preparing their graduates to participate in the future economy, but also those graduates consider the environment as a limited and precious resource. I want to walk away from campus, if I have a Business degree, a Sociology degree, an English degree, what have you, that I understand that the future is not promised. And we specifically, these graduates and folks, have a responsibility and obligation to treat the environmental resources as limited and precious. So that's kind of what I think about is what the future is going to look like, is approaching how do we create camaraderie in digital spaces and online learning.
Alex - 00:45:17:
It sounds like a lot of what we're going to be dealing with in higher ed is very reflective of obviously what we deal like in regular society. How do we handle all of these new and maybe scary things with AI and risk mitigation and machine learning and all of that type of stuff? How do we think about digitization and location mobility and access? The challenges of a society that has been ever more different from a socioeconomical status perspective and income and the cost of education increasing. So there's a lot going on here. A lot to, I would say, be worried about or anxious about as we try to think about things. But I'd like to end on from a perspective, if we have it, of what are some things that give you some optimism here? And I'll start, I think, something that I have loved from this conversation, from both of y 'all being here, is we've got a willing institution represented by Brad. And there's clearly a desire. You got thousands of colleges and universities raising their hands and say, we care about this stuff. But admitting this is a really big challenge and we can't do it alone. On the other side, you've got vendor, that's been around for 50 plus years, who's committed in a huge way to not just solving their profit issues or their way to figure out recurring revenue, but finding ways to be able to create access for students, to be able to increase success rates in colleges, to be able to address these challenges that Brad in the institution side of things is unearthing. And I think it's, I'm really optimistic just about the fact that you've got two folks represented here that I'm guessing are pretty representative of a lot of us that are around the table right now saying, how do we do this stuff when we're both motivated to get to the answer? And it's probably going to take, a collection of stakeholders to get to this anyway, but it is highly motivating for me to hear how in sync, a large services provider and a very forward thinking institution can be on an issue that frankly outside of this space can sometimes be more divisive. So it's great to see on the business side of things that there's a lot of alignment. So that gives me a lot of optimism. But Brad, what gives you optimism about the future here?
Brad - 00:47:41:
One of the things we haven't talked about Alex is the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on higher ed. It's going to be massive. And I can give you an example of something that happened here at Catawba. I mean, we’re a 150 plus year old institution ourselves. The campus here is over a hundred years old and we've got infrastructure problems. So our HVAC and our library went out late summer, right before we're coming back into school. We've had to bring in temporary units for that. But instead of going like, okay, we're going to replace like for like and put the same thing back in here we had, we were able to get a very forward thinking engineering firm in here. And they said, oh, you guys can actually, geothermal's evolved since the system you had. You can put it in a better system. It's going to make your energy use intensity and your building and take it down to incredibly low levels. And prior to the Inflation Reduction Act, it would have cost you significantly more than going like for like. But with the act, it's going to be the same price is putting the same stuff back in that's not as efficient. So a long-winded way of saying because of the Inflation Reduction Act, we're going to go with an enhanced geothermal system for our library, for our chapel, which is right next door and for another building. And this is going to lower our emissions going forward at the same cost that we would have had. Another example is we went out to buy our first electric vehicles. And one of those was a Ford Transit Van. Our price to Ford Transit Gasoline Van, Ford Transit Electric Van, they were the same price. But under the Inflation Reduction Act, we get $7,500 back by buying the electric. And it's costing less than that to put in an outlet for the thing. So we're going to save money by buying an electric vehicle and then having that on campus and we'll save money long term. So I think there are, you know, just to pick one small area that higher ed has got this great opportunity to renew its infrastructure and then to use that as a tool to teach in the classroom about finance, about the environment and emissions, all kinds of different things about decision-making, about how you excite your student body about it and do that in a way that because of this great act is going to be cost neutral to you or might even be better off making the greener choice. So that today is something that excites me to no end.
Alex - 00:50:23:
That's amazing, being able to take something that was previously a call center. To be able to go back and say, actually, I'm going to save the university money in a time that we need it, is that it could not be a more positive thing to be able to say. I think I read it was in The Economist, maybe two issues ago, $2 trillion worth of incentives coming online to help institutions, buildings, businesses decarbonize. Savvy universities, savvy leaders, savvy vendors will be able to figure this out in ways that will benefit the universities and the colleges that can. And for those that can't figure it out, they're going to miss out on that type of stuff. And obviously that's great news, that's amazing. Will, what gets you excited? What gets you optimistic about the future here?
Will - 00:51:11:
This podcast. No, I was listening to Brad and talking and hearing about how you take that cost and turn it into a revenue generation, how you use sustainability ideas to create excitement. I think that's exciting. I'm probably going to be a little bit more sort of cheesy on this side. What excites me about the future is watching enrollment grow into programs for global futures, for sustainability departments, for these kind of things right now as we're talking, it is back to school season. We are admitting millions and millions of students across this country and globally. And I think about the first time I picked up my sustainable cities, my sustainable worlds textbook, the first time I opened Silent Spring from Rachel Carson and began to read that story or looked at drawdown or some of the other texts that became very seminal in my education of sustainability, the interconnectedness of the world. And what is optimistic or excites me is really thinking about these students very intentionally considering their future, considering our future and how they are going to solve some of the complex problems, the wicked problems that we're discussing today. They're going to have the solves for them. They're learning that today. Right now, there was a student sitting in a classroom that is hearing about sustainability, that is dreaming about being on this podcast. And I think at Follett, we're all excited to really inspire, enable and just celebrate the academic journey for our students and our partners.
Alex - 00:52:50:
Well, that's amazing. And I agree, actually, we would love to employ any of those students if they're out there listening. But you're right, I think every time I engage with students, I'm just, I am always shocked about how much smarter they are than I am today, and I was back then as well, but just how much opportunity there is here. I mean, when I was in school, going into an environmental studies major, not a lot of career opportunities, maybe on the law side of things, there's certainly some, NGOs and things to that extent, but it just seems like such a great place to do this. And on the global stage. It doesn't seem, and I'd be interested in y'all's opinions on this. But, can we reach our climate goals as a society without engaging higher education? Is it possible to get there without higher education heavily participating?
Brad - 00:53:47:
No.
Will - 00:53:47:
No, I don't know, Brad. You want to say no, I'll say no.
Brad- 00:53:54:
Uh, no. Not a chance.
Alex - 00:53:55:
All right. Well, at least we've unearthed the big thing is we got to get started, get people move in. You got a thousand universities and higher education institutions that raise their hand, at least that said, I'm interested. You've obviously got millions of students thinking about it. You've got vendors, partners. We're all circling around this issue. Alumni, alumnus. And I think people want to participate. So I think we certainly wish you all the best in this as you start to help to encourage more. I hope this podcast helps to, at least for the folks that do have a high amount of interest but can't really figure out exactly the best way to get started, should be very inspired by the work that you all have kind of kicked off. But as you know, and we do as well, this is a long road. It's going to be a multi -decade challenge, but that's what makes it fun and that's what makes it interesting. So thank you all for your time today and more than that, thank you for the work that both of you all have kind of dedicated your careers towards in solving this extremely important problem. So thank you.
Brad - 00:54:55:
Well, Alex, thanks for all the work you do at GreenPlaces.
Alex - 00:54:58:
Thank you.
Brad- 00:54:59:
It's going to take everybody doing everything.
Alex - 00:55:01:
That's right. That's right. Time to roll our sleeves up.
Will - 00:55:04:
Yeah, agreed. And thank you, Alex. I echo what Brad said. Thank you for providing the forum to have this discussion. I think these are important conversations that we have to keep the momentum and keep them going and continue to bubble up things. So thank you for providing the forum. And Brad, thank you for your time. Very engaging. I really appreciate your insights.
Alex - 00:55:25:
Thank you to Will and Brad for joining us and thank you for listening. If you like this show, be sure to leave a review and follow this podcast wherever you like to listen so you don't miss an episode. This podcast is powered by GreenPlaces. If you are looking to reduce your company's environmental impact and reach your sustainability goals, visit greenplaces.com to learn more. I'm Alex Lassiter and I'll talk with you next time on Open Source Sustainability.