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Students and parents are questioning the value of a degree. Simultaneously, companies are questioning if graduated students joining the workforce are truly career ready. Higher education is feeling this pressure. Host Jason Altmire sits down with Eric Kuennen, Executive Director of Work Readiness Solutions with Kaplan University Partners to discuss this challenge that institutions face.
Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire (00:05):
Hello, and welcome back to Career Education Report. I am Jason Altmire, and we talk about, on this podcast, higher education of course and some politics and some business and things that are of interest to our schools. And we have a very interesting guest today. And Eric Kuennen, who you're going to hear from, is the executive director of Work Readiness Solutions for University Partners for Kaplan. And Eric's going to tell you a little bit about that and some other initiatives that they're involved in, but the reason I wanted to have Eric on the program today was because he had a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago that just got tremendous traction and generated a lot of discussion regarding college campuses and their career services centers. And we're going to get into that, but first I wanted to just welcome you, Eric, Eric Kuennen. Why don't you say hello and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Eric Kuennen (01:01):
Great. Hi, Jason. Thanks for letting me join you today. So I'm Eric Kuennen. I'm the executive director of Work Readiness Solutions, specifically with Kaplan University Partners, which is a small group that sits within Kaplan that really focuses on partnering with leadership across colleges and universities in North America, so been in this industry, I would say, on more of the supply side of education for almost 25 years and started actually working for a small private liberal arts university in Iowa, and ever since then, just kind of watched my path grow and work with a variety of institutions. So it's great to be here today and look forward to chatting with you.
Jason Altmire (01:39):
Thank you for being with us. And this LinkedIn post that I talked about was very interesting. You described in the COVID environment, a lot of meetings are virtual and you did have the opportunity to go in person to some campuses and you had some observations regarding where they locate their career services centers, the type of things that they're offering. So tell us a little bit about what spurred that in your mind and why you think that's an important discussion.
Eric Kuennen (02:05):
Yeah. So I think going back to what I just shared, when I started my career, I went to a small private liberal arts school and really didn't think about career services until second semester of my senior year, where I first was looking for the building and found this little building in the corner of campus and went over and met a career service advisor and started thinking about my job and then realized real quick, oh wow, there's a whole process that it needs to happen in a search. And so it just made me think back to looking at where we are now, I mean, we have parents and students looking at career services, pre-matriculation into a college or a university, which is something that you wouldn't have even seen probably a few years ago. So I think a lot of it for me was really driven on seeing that career services is coming front and center with every college and university I speak with it.
Eric Kuennen (02:57):
It's always been that thing you've thought about late in your journey and it was somewhere to help you with your resume or your LinkedIn profile or for some interview skills and now you're just seeing it, it's the shiny building in the front of campus that you first see when you visit a school and there's all different types of techniques and things being put in place. The employer relations are just continuing to just evolve and grow at every institution. So it just kind of made me realize where we were 25 years ago and where we are now.
Jason Altmire (03:29):
It's been a constant consideration and complaint honestly among employers about the idea that students who are coming out of universities are not as well-trained for the jobs that are available today. And I remember when I was in Congress, we used to have this debate about the higher education system and K through 12, for that matter, just operating on inertia, doing things the way we've always done it and not really thinking about the future. And we were training people for jobs that were available ten years ago, rather than jobs that were going to be available 10 years from now. Is that what you find with regard to career services? And I think as an opportunity for students to go through the system and learn and grow and be prepared, you want to be prepared for the job that's going to be there when you graduate, not a job that used to be there.
Eric Kuennen (04:20):
I spent part of my career in corporate training, and I can tell you still, there's a big disconnect between higher education and corporate when it comes to the, what I would call, product that is being delivered to a lot of these companies. They still have questions and concerns that they have the right talent or the right skills, or now you hear it for several years all about soft skills, but there's always that complaint. And then you mix that in with the fact that you have parents and students who are starting to question the value of a degree. That all puts a lot of pressure on higher education to start understanding that they have to do things to make sure these students are career-ready and that they are employable. So I'm just seeing a big movement in industry starting to get involved more in higher education alignment to make sure that the students they are producing can fit into the jobs.
Jason Altmire (05:14):
And the Wall Street Journal did a series last year, over the course of the entire year, talking about how students were going to school, taking out loans, running up a lot of debt and earning degrees that were especially in private nonprofit schools, some very prestigious schools that they were not able to position the student in a way that they were able to pay back those loans. So do you think that that type of series and that type of discussion is overdue in the higher education ecosystem?
Eric Kuennen (05:47):
Yes. I mean, I work with presidents and provosts regularly and looking at those types of programs. What I will tell you is that they are being very proactive in making sure those students, when they graduate, are employable. So I'll give you an example. I've seen... I'm working with institutions right now where let's take an English major or someone may be in a humanities role where there is concern about they graduate with this degree and what is out there for them as far as a job. I'm starting to see more and more institutions look at it and say, okay, what type of credential could go with that degree to make them more employable? As an example, I graduate with an English degree, but I also leave with some type of certificate or credential in cybersecurity. And we know that that will be a huge increase in job potential because oral, written communication skills are some of the top skills being looked for in an employee when it comes to cyber. They're not looking for just that full-fledged cyber degree. So I do think it's a conversation that needs to continue and they need to look at how do you intentionally add specific credentials that align you to employability opportunities with degree programs.
Jason Altmire (07:03):
We talk a lot. We of course represent the career education post-secondary schools. And we do talk a lot about this idea of stackable credentials, exactly the program that you're talking about. And I know that you, as a group, have talked about your new program called Credegree. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that because I think that's the same type of theory.
Eric Kuennen (07:24):
So a few years ago, Brandon Busteed, who had been previously with Gallup, joined Kaplan as the head of learn-work innovation and is now our chief partnership officer. And he was really one that kind of brought it to the table, because he realized Kaplan works with 10,000 plus companies globally, where they have employees that take advantage of our industry-recognized credential prep training courses. These are things like your college for financial planning, your CFA, real estate, accounting, digital marketing, project management, those types of programs throughout the world. And what we realized is that there was this conversation starting to happen in higher education around credentials and degrees. And I truly do believe what you were talking about stackable. The world of non-degree and degree, that wall is coming down. And I think the only reason it hasn't moved faster is just higher education politics, a lot of the things when it comes to curriculum that you would imagine that slow up the process.
Eric Kuennen (08:23):
But his thought was why are we not working with leadership across universities to look at their programs, to look at their local employer networks and start to understand, what I was talking about, can you leave a school with an associate's degree, as an example, and have your SIE designation and make yourself more employable? And so that's something that we've started. So we coin the word Credegree, but really what we're doing is we are partnering with universities to be very intentional. This isn't enterprise play, where you select a platform and you just make it available to your students. We are working with them to map credentials to degree programs. So when the students leave, let's say, the finance programs, they can also leave with certain wealth management designations, or when they leave, like I said, that English major, they can have that cyber designation.
Eric Kuennen (09:14):
So Kaplan has around 70 undergrad, graduate credentials. And I should point out when we say credentials because it's such a loosely used word, we truly believe in what I would call industry-recognized credentials. I think there was a report maybe nine months ago that came out that talked about the million plus credentials that are out there. We think the world of badging is great. And there's a lot of different types of credentials that are available, different types of license and certificates. We've decided to focus on the ones where either an organization that has value to a corporation, or a corporation has said, this means a job. When they leave from this, this is something that we have an opening for.
Jason Altmire (09:57):
Do you think there's a role for career schools? We represent the career education colleges and universities were generally the proprietary sector of higher education. Is this something that you think would be of the interest of those type of schools?
Eric Kuennen (10:12):
Definitely. I think, I mean, obviously many of your colleges have been doing this for years. I, in a previous life, worked for a large education company and oversaw our team that worked with career colleges across the United States and have had a lot of experience. And I've come to understand the space and the students that you support. I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I mean, I keep track and watch all the innovation. There's more innovation that comes out of these schools than many. As an example, a friend of mine runs an organization called ADTC, American diesel truck training company out of Ohio. And when I see what they're doing, as far as alignment with industry and then looking at the types of programs they're rolling out, I see it with places like UTI out in Arizona doing a lot of things around innovation with curriculum. So I definitely think there's opportunity for it.
Jason Altmire (11:08):
You talked about partnerships with other schools and universities, and one that I was really interested in and thinking about talking to you and some subjects that would be of importance, the partnership that you have with Wake Forest, which was announced towards the end of last year, and it's called Career Core and involves some other schools too. What was the Genesis of the discussion that led to that initiative? Why Wake Forest? And what is that program all about?
Eric Kuennen (11:37):
When we initially partnered with Wake Forest University, Nathan Hatch was the president. They had probably one of the most well-known heads of innovation and career services, an Andy Chan, who heralded “Career Services” Must Die TED Talk. And when you look at the team that Nathan had, it made it clear, that's the kind of organization Kaplan wants to work with. We want to work with those people who are looking at this, not just from a one potential opportunity. So we work with Wake Forest in many different areas. We work with them in our college for financial planning via their professional studies program. We launched a fintech hub in Charlotte with them, similar to how we support institutions like Purdue Global and Lynn University and places like Liverpool and Essex. We are in the online program management space, the manage services provider space. So we do provide those types of services for Wake.
Eric Kuennen (12:32):
In talking with Wake, what ended up happening is our head of learn-work innovation has known Andy Chan for years. When he came over, he met with Andy to kind of better understand what was the landscape at Wake Forest as far as making sure students were employable when they graduated, thinking like this is one of the leading institutions in the country when it comes to career services. And he spent time with Andy and learned about all the amazing things. And I mean, they do more than most institutions, but what Brandon left with was, wow, here's still so many things that Andy wishes he could do and for one reason or another, wouldn't do them, whether it's the expertise of the institution or whether it was financial or whether it was at scale.
Jason Altmire (13:18):
This is all a great discussion about what you're doing with regard to career services and the different programs. But how do you measure success on all of these things? How do you know that this is working?
Eric Kuennen (13:29):
We're not in business if we're not about accountability. I mean, Kaplan, if you think back about our Test Prep business, we are successful when students are successful, when they pass that test, when they get that job. I can give you an example in the bootcamp space. So we operate the number one rated consumer data science bootcamp out there under the brand Metis. The way we judge outcomes there is based on employability. Are they getting jobs? And we do all the right things to make sure they are successful and they get those jobs. I just shared as an example yesterday with an organization that we're looking to potentially partner with, and we had 148 graduates from our bootcamp just in their backyard. And that's a great way to show someone's success is not only do we provide the career services for the time being to get them everything they need, but ultimately we got them the job.
Eric Kuennen (14:19):
So I think that's a big area is did they pass? Did they graduate? Did they get the job they were looking for? Or are they getting that... When we work in the corporate space, if I'm an employee and I'm looking to get upward mobility, did I come and get a credential, and did I get that? So we look at a lot of those types of things. I can tell you in Career Core, we have an advisory council that's made up of our nine founding partners. And the top two things that they were focused on, one of them was outcomes data. And what we're really focused on is what I would call high quality employment data, not 95% of our people are graduated, but maybe they're a barista or something. Not to say that's negative, but we're really focused on when they go through the program and there's a set expectation, do we get them what they were looking for?
Jason Altmire (15:09):
I would just ask one last question to kind of tie all this together, because over the last few years, we've seen significant shifts in higher education, lots of institutions have closed or consolidated or merged with other institutions. And of course that even includes Purdue University's acquisition of part of Kaplan. And this has happened across all sectors as public and nonprofit colleges have shown an increased interest in serving non-traditional students. So I guess I would ask what do you think is driving these changes and how do you think the market will react and you expect it to continue into the future?
Eric Kuennen (15:47):
Yes. I guess the quick answer is yes, I do expect it will continue to get competitive and move forward. You look at the institutions that are having the most success right now, there's a consistent thing across all of them. One, there's always an innovative leader running the institution, supporting themselves with a very open-minded strong team. I mean, whether you look at a Michael Crow at an ASU or you look at a Paul LeBlanc at a SNHU, there's consistencies there. There's innovation there. There's this openness to partnership. I think that's something. Every institution needs to be more open to it. I can't tell you how many times I meet with an institution and there's still this buy-or-build mentality that goes on, even when they know they could have a better outcome by partnering. I think we all know cost of acquisition and marketing to students continues to rise and that's going to continue to put pressure on a lot of institutions.
Eric Kuennen (16:38):
There are ones that will be kind of safe from this world, but I think there are a lot of institutions that understand that the way you're going to move out of this and expand is going to be that innovative growth, that open-mindness, that strong leadership and also access. I mean, I can't tell you how many institutions now, even when you're talking about something that's like an online asynchronous model, you still need to provide that level of what I would call coaching and guidance as they're going through these programs and not just leave the student to their own opportunity, that there's someone there helping them along, especially with so many different types of students, all the different types of modalities that are out there now.
Jason Altmire (17:20):
Eric Kuennen, executive director, Work Readiness Solutions for Kaplan University Partners, thank you for being with us today.
Eric Kuennen (17:28):
Thanks a lot, Jason. It was good chat.
Jason Altmire (17:30):
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter, @CECUed. That's @C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.