Note: This interview in the Innovation Spotlight Series originally aired on March 13, 2023 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Drew Magliozzi:
Yeah, I'd go so far as to say technology is never the solution because there is no "the solution." In fact, one of our partners, Dawn Medley -- she used to be at Wayne State, now she's at Stony Brook -- she always says, "There's no such thing as a silver bullet, only silver buckshot," which I like and it's entirely true. I think of us as, actually, we don't drive the outcomes, but we help students make use of all the resources available to them to get the outcomes. Sometimes these are resources that are heretofore underutilized, like supplemental education, for instance, getting more people to that. Is it going to move the needle a ton?
Getting back to the question, what are the conditions? Look, we serve institutions in the whole spectrum, from pretty under-resourced institutions to the folks like Georgia State who have the utmost in tech enablement, and you can attack the challenge no matter what someone's maturity level is, but the playbook is a little bit different.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together, a podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is a podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders that will help you improve student success. I'm your host, Bridget Burns. Each week, I partner with a journalist to have a conversation with a sitting college president, chancellor, system leader, or someone in the broader ecosystem who's really an inspiring leader. The goal is to have a conversation to distill their perspective and their insights gathered from their leadership journey. Our hope is that this is inspiring and gives you something to look forward to each week.
Hi, welcome to another episode of Innovation Spotlight. I'm your host, Bridget Burns, with the University Innovation Alliance.
Ian Wilhelm:
I'm your co-host, Ian Wilhelm, from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Bridget Burns:
Innovation Spotlight is a show that is designed to elevate cutting-edge insights and ideas and innovators in the field, who can share with us what they're learning from the front lines and be able to give us some inspiration, some perspective. Ideally, some tips and tricks, to make it so that it's a little bit easier to do complicated stuff like innovation. This is all designed to surface those good ideas in the hopes that they help you in your work. So, that's why we call it Innovation Spotlight.
Ian Wilhelm:
Later, we're going to hear from Drew Magliozzi, the CEO of Mainstay. But, since I've got Bridget here, I do want to ask her a couple questions so we can glean some insights in real time from the field, as innovation happens across the campuses in the United States. Bridget, you're working with institutions, you're speaking at institutions as you travel around the country, what is something you can share about innovation right now? What's happening right now? Particularly what's going on in the way of innovation at this exact moment that you'd like to elevate for our audience?
Bridget Burns:
Well, it's no surprise when I mention that people can't hire folks at the moment. You're seeing that many of the offices that are responsible for doing the project management work of onboarding new technology or doing new interventions, they are completely understaffed. Our work, we have a fiscal sponsor institution, we're experiencing it, but everyone is everywhere, and I can't fully diagnose it, as it's entirely that we're ineffective at our transition back to how we do hybrid versus remote versus in-person. I think that a lot of the folks whose jobs could be remote would like them to be, and not all institutions are adopting that same perspective. You're dealing with less people, so it's a little bit bumpier to implement right now.
The other piece that's, again, obvious, that I see from the outside, is how people are spending their time. We're still, in some places, operating in a COVID meeting schedule -- the cadence and the timing and the types of conversations that people shifted their calendars to include during COVID. While some institutions, many, have moved away and actually done a re-visioning of how they need to spend their time, that's actually not very common across the board. When I talk about this, I see a lot of heads nodding, where people are saying, "Yes, we're still having this one meeting that we came up with in the past few years because we were all remote. But now we're in person. It doesn't make sense." I would just say what gets in the way, for innovation, is how you spend your time. It's your calendar, it's your inbox, it's your phone. At the end of the day, I could tell you it's all kinds of other things. We're going to have a conversation about chatbots, about ChatGPT.
I want to tell you that the impediments to innovation are super high-tech. But it's really what are you spending your time on? What kinds of conversations are you having on a regular basis? How are you supporting those conversations to be iterative so that you can actually engage in that higher-order thinking where you're generative? That, plus the structural project management support issue where people are having a hard time getting vendors paid, they're having a hard time getting contracts through, it feels sometimes like the machine has slowed down. So I would say, in general, we're running into the very common rub. It doesn't matter what kind of large organization or company we're talking about. These are very common impediments to innovation. It's down to the people, energy, resources, and whether or not it's difficult to do something new and it's difficult to do just your normal job. In many places right now, it's difficult to get through the day, difficult to get through the existing workload.
I think, lastly, there's a perception that innovation is everyone's job, and so it's no one's job. I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to have a vice president for innovation or a center for innovation. Just recognize that people are paid to do their job. They're not paid to change their job. Not in their minds. Bosses think that, but not in their minds. People get through the day, "I got 40 hours. I also have a family, or I have other things that I want to do with my life." The innovation sometimes can only happen on the margins, or it only happens with borrowed time, or free time, or free labor. Frankly, when you have folks who are still on the heels of burnout, you just are dealing with a slowing down of the machine. Now, again, this is not universal, but I would just say these are things that I see fairly consistently. I think that they are solvable, but the first step is to recognize that these are actually innovation challenges, and they are common. Therefore, common solutions can work, and everyone doesn't have to struggle to try and invent the wheel.
Ian Wilhelm:
I remember one specific idea on this idea of too many meetings you suggested, which I tried to implement at The Chronicle -- and to be honest with you, it failed -- was the idea of going on a meeting diet. You suggested the idea that we added so many meetings during the pandemic to actually take all meetings off the schedule for two weeks and then come back and say, "Okay, what did we miss? What conversations were missed in that two-week time?" It's a tough thing to do for an organization, but I just thought that was one applicable thing you had suggested a while back. About trying to find the time and how you're spending your time and just be recognizing, "Hey, too many meetings now also leads to not enough thinking about new ideas." So what is something, in terms of applied ideas, what's something you are seeing or noticing in the field that's really making a difference potentially in supporting innovation right now? You've mentioned some a few minutes ago. What are some other sort of specific things you want to suggest and keep suggesting for the field to take notice of?
Bridget Burns:
So, I think last time I talked about making sure you have a process or a protocol to support new ideas. One of the things I always talk about is using yes, and as a framework in your meetings because you want them to be generative, you want new ideas or babies, they're not there to be judged, and you need to create a space where people are going to pitch and catch ideas. They're trying to riff together, they're trying to make an idea better, and that often requires a level of social safety for imperfection. So yes, and very common from improv, talk about it all the time.
One other thing before I go back to it, just what you said, is I'm always trying to give people a phrase they can use when they get into the typical meeting where talking about a new thing isn't going to work because there is a story that we are telling ourselves about what is possible and who we are. If you don't know what the story is, that's the number one problem. You got to at least acknowledge it. My favorite oldie but goodie is, "We tried that already" or, "We can't do that here because dot, dot, dot." Usually that's filled in with we're too unionized, the faculty won't like it, you choose any trope. You just have to know what the story is, right? There is an underlying narrative, and if you don't see it and if you don't talk about it, it actually has control over you.
The response I really like to whatever the story is, but whenever you're trying to talk about a new concept is say, "I know we can't do X," and you have to say so, whatever the idea is. So maybe it's, "I know we can't go to common core numbering. I know that we can't centralize advising. I know we can't" whatever; it's, "I know we can't do it, but if we could, what's one thing we would try?" You should call out the thing that we can't do, but if we could, and you have to give people permission to enter an alternate reality, that is one where, "Okay, we've owned that it's not possible. So I'm now going to not think I have to focus on defending my job and protecting the status quo." Because often, when people are trying to protect the status quo, what they're doing is, like people who say they change in innovation are liars because you only like the change in innovation that is your idea or that you agree with, right?
The idea that all change good is, like, that sounds weird. So you have to actually create social safety, because people are completely, understandably worried about keeping their jobs, keeping their roles, keeping their office, anything that's about change. You got to create the safety for people to invite them into the alternate reality so that you can benefit from their generative thinking. So that's what I would just say. "I know we can't do X, but if we could, what's one thing we could do?" Then if that doesn't work, the other option is what's the worst idea? Try and come up with the worst idea. As the leader of the meeting, you have to come up with a terrible idea to create social safety first and make vulnerability okay. So it's like we could force people, we could, well, we would just physically walk away, whatever the crazy idea is, come up with that idea. That's also a generative thing that I picked up from IDEO. I pick up inspiration from all kinds of places. So the idea of a meeting diet is not unique.
I would suggest that if nothing else, you color code your meetings for nutritional value. For me, the prompt that I have heard and used many times is, "What things are energy giving versus energy sucking?" Because energy is the thing that we want. To innovate, you need energy. Look at your calendar and just switch things. Actually, those are energizing conversations and these ones are an energy sucker. That doesn't mean you have to get rid of all of them, but you would probably come up with a different strategy to support yourself, to make sure that you're able to give great energy for the ones that are going to be, the ones that pull energy from you. You would also, perhaps after an energizing meeting, you would set aside some time for brainstorming, for writing, for doing stuff, surf the wave and coast off of the spaces that are energy giving.
So those are just a few things that I'm seeing right now. I just came from Nashville and Tampa and I was, spoke with, I think there were probably a hundred institutions. These are just things that, again, I'm always testing and seeing what is resonating regardless of the type of institution folks are in.
Today's episode is sponsored by the University Innovation Lab, which is a digital ecosystem designed to help higher ed professionals, just like you and I, accelerate innovation with a wide array of tools, trainings, resources, and community, all in one location. If you also want to drive change and advance student success on your campus, but feel like there aren't enough hours in the day -- and frankly you don't always know where to start -- the University Innovation Lab can help. It was created with tools and templates and professional development uniquely generated by the UIA. The lab helps student success; administrators and innovators advance student-centered change and improvement more effectively with more clarity, collaboration, and impact. To join our wait list, go to theuia.org and click the resources page.
Ian Wilhelm:
Well, I appreciate your points about yes, and I would say, and something at The Chronicle we always talk about, is the best way to kill a story and a story meeting is to say, "Oh, we've done that before," because it does not lead the conversation anywhere and simply shuts down the conversation. So I really appreciate that, that thinking about the "yes, and." I know someone who thinks probably a lot about yes, and is our guest today. So Bridget, thank you for your insights. I do want to get over to Drew now. I'm going to introduce Drew Magliozzi, who's the CEO of Mainstay.
Drew Magliozzi:
Hey, everyone.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome.
Drew Magliozzi:
Thanks for having me.
Bridget Burns:
We're excited to have you. So for folks who don't know what Mainstay is, I will tell you my version, which is it's a company that does a variety of things in terms of equipping campuses and their ability to talk to, but mostly listen to students, and those are called chatbots, but that's not what Mainstay's just, like, I think you're in general, you're kind of an outside ally for institutions that, again, want to listen more to your students. Tell me how wrong I am.
Drew Magliozzi:
Great, Bridget, you're hired. Yes, we listen and I think also respond with empathy even at two in the morning when no one's around to answer a question. We can automate a lot of that, and in fact infuse it with a ton of emotion science and cognitive science to help people take the next step in their journey. Then, maybe the only piece that I love mentioning, but maybe this is only for a subset of the population, is we're the only platform consistently proven to move the needle on enrollment, retention, and academic success. We've done ten randomized controlled trials in the life of the company, and for some reason like to expose ourselves to all this scrutiny. So it's a little bit like being on this podcast.
Bridget Burns:
Yeah, you're in the hot seat even though you're in a very dark room, which, like, you are actually, we're going to interrogate. Okay, so Mainstay is a company, many people might have known them as AdmitHub back in the day. I have given Drew a hard time about changing their name. You are known as the company, the chatbot company that Georgia State works with, and they are kind of exhibit A of an institution that has made investments in technology to improve the experience of students, and they have the data to show that it's worked for them.
I want to understand that's one campus, but not everyone's Georgia State, right? Just like anywhere. I want to understand following on our earlier conversation about what institutions think about and what they think about themselves and whether that makes them more innovative or not. You've worked with a lot of universities. Is there any advice, have you looked at some that have been easy to implement ed technology from the outside and those where it's been very difficult, because I know those exist. What kind of advice could you provide? Could you coach institutions on here are the things that really matter if you want to make sure that onboarding a new technology is easier?
Drew Magliozzi:
That's a great question. There are a few that come to mind. One is, don't buy technology, especially AI technology like ours. I always say you should hire it. I extend the metaphor pretty far, which is, hey, not only are you incorporating this in your team, you're showing all the vulnerability around what's working/what's not at an institution and being really clear about what the goals are and the challenges. But also, you're taking a growth mindset with technology and training it constantly, starting small and incorporating it to get little wins and get better every day. Not just get the people better at using the tool, but with AI in particular, the tool itself actually can improve with the right usage. So if you put your best people on it and commit to the care and feeding of a technology like that, it can pay huge dividends. I think you hit the nail in the head with so many people feel that they have so much other stuff to do that they don't have time for just one more thing. But in this case, I would say not just Mainstay, but AI technology in general. This is one special thing that could have breakthrough outcomes for decades to come.
Bridget Burns:
That's super helpful.
Ian Wilhelm:
In terms of how those campuses are innovation ready, how do they kind of get ready for implementing that technology? You were talking about approaching it there, but I kind of wonder, what do they kind of have to do to make sure that they kind of set the plate and to accept that technology? I just want to hear a little bit more about that. Because I think the technology will be the solution, but really it's going to be some of the institutional challenges, institutional silos, things like that that they have to clear out before they can even use the technology in a way that actually helps students specifically.
Drew Magliozzi:
Yeah, I'd go so far as to say technology is never the solution because there is no "the solution." In fact, one of our partners, Dawn Medley -- she used to be at Wayne State, now she's at Stony Brook -- she always says, "There's no such thing as a silver bullet, only silver buckshot," which I like and it's entirely true. I think of us as, actually, we don't drive the outcomes, but we help students make use of all the resources available to them to get the outcomes. Sometimes these are resources that are heretofore underutilized, like supplemental education, for instance, getting more people to that. Is it going to move the needle a ton?
Getting back to the question, what are the conditions? Look, we serve institutions in the whole spectrum, from pretty under-resourced institutions to the folks like Georgia State who have the utmost in tech enablement, and you can attack the challenge no matter what someone's maturity level is, but the playbook is a little bit different. But really, I would say from a technological standpoint, you want to just have your arms around data so that you can at least share it and access it, but from really a readiness standpoint from people, just a willingness to try, to, yes, and as you said, Bridget. This is a crazy one, but this mindset from, actually Tim at Georgia State does this better than anyone, is celebrate failure in a weird way.
That's a bit of that growth mindset, which is, "Hey, when we understand that we are the problem, that is something to celebrate because it means we can be the solution." That's going to happen with any new technology, or really any new innovation you're going to implement, you're going to mess it up. It's those moments when it differentiates what your success is going to be, and if you can rebound from those issues, you're going to be way more successful in the long run. A growth mindset with technology is going to get you a lot farther than a fixed mindset and hopefully treating technology partners as true partners, not just vendors.
Ian Wilhelm:
Yeah.
Bridget Burns:
We're just having you talk about whatever we find interesting today, and I think this whole process of finding the right vendor, this is one that's really important. So people are always asking me, who should I? I'm looking for X type of vendor, blah, blah, blah. That vetting issue, and that's one of the things in the UIA that we do is, because it's like a vetting and vouching process in our network, we don't let vendors come in and pitch our campuses. Instead, we wait until one of our campuses has good data using a technology product and they feel like they want to vouch for the vendor, then they can talk about their experience, and then at that point, that's where that conversation goes.
So that buffer has been really helpful for my campuses, but it doesn't exist out there. People have long talked about a Yelp for EdTech, and there have been attempts by foundations, and there have been attempts by a variety of folks. Even ASUGSV, I feel like, kind of almost operates like a Yelp for EdTech at times, but it's super difficult to find the right partner and to figure out who's going to be a good fit for you. Are there things that you've observed in terms of questions that you've been asked, that have helped a campus suss out whether or not you actually are on the same page or you would be a good partner?
Drew Magliozzi:
You bring up the Yelp for EdTech. I think it's an interesting idea, that's like searching for the what -- "I want Chinese food tonight, I'm going to search on Yelp." But honestly, I think it's more the why and the how in EdTech that makes for the best partnership. Maybe we need the Tinder or Bumble for EdTech instead, which is really matchmaking, right? It's not about what I'm delivering you. It's about are we achieving the goals together and are we working together effectively? There are a lot of different ways to skin the cat. There are a thousand student success strategies and ways to move the needle on retention or graduation rates. Is this the company I want to work with? Are they the right people for us to get the job done? How are we going to go about doing it? The one what, I think is actually last in the list, or it happens to be a chatbot or an engagement platform, but really, no technology -- even the best technology in the world -- is ever going to be successful if you're not doing the why and the how properly, which is focusing on the goal and doing the work, day in and day out, together.
Ian Wilhelm:
I hope the investors are listening out there for this idea of a Tinder for EdTech. I want to be on the ground floor of this.
Bridget Burns:
Oh man, I swear they've tried. Lots of folks have tried, and in fact --
Ian Wilhelm:
We've tried, too. Yeah, sorry about --
Bridget Burns:
People have tried just an email list. Honestly, it ends up being, I feel like I'm carrying a backpack of experiences and stories from others around when I travel from campus to campus. I'm trying to remember who else had that same problem, and I remember what the name of the company was, so I would love something scalable. It's just, at the end of the day, people trust who they trust, and they need somebody to vouch for something, and that's hard to scale.
Drew Magliozzi:
BridgetGPT, I can see it.
Bridget Burns:
Well, that's a perfect pivot. Let's talk ChatGPT, because while you are not ChatGPT, you are being asked about this, because the closest thing in the market in higher ed is chatbots, and people don't understand the difference between the two. They are right now very worried about students cheating using ChatGPT. Did I mention that the other day I used ChatGPT to generate a cease and desist letter, and it was awesome? So I highly recommend if you need something like that, you don't need to write an essay. So Drew, what's ChatGPT, can you give us just the skinny from your perspective as someone who understands [inaudible 00:21:40] to chatbots and ChatGPT?
Drew Magliozzi:
Yeah, for sure. For example, chatbots, I mean, are as diverse as apps in your phone. You wouldn't go to Yelp and expect to get an Uber. So there are a million different flavors. ChatGPT is a pretty breakthrough innovation. The GPT is short for generative pre-training transformer, which is actually derived from a pretty cool paper that came out in 2017 from some researchers at Google called Attention Is All You Need, which was really a breakthrough that is now bearing fruit with ChatGPT. Folks might be familiar with DALL-E, which is an image generator, another one for video called Stable Diffusion, another one for voice recognition called Whisper. Basically, these GPT is what's known as a large language model, or LLM for short, and this one is the fourth generation.
It's comes from a company called Open AI and it's really good for answering questions, generating letters, really writing any copy or code, creative writing, and really a ton more. In fact, the technology is even as diverse as being able to understand really any sequence of letters, so genomics or protein folding. These are all derivations of these large language models, which is amazing. The funny -- and actually if you want to put in the show notes or something, like this link to an article by Steve Wolfram last week. He really breaks it down what exactly is happening, but really, fundamentally, it's just remembering what it's been fed and predicting what the next word in a sequence is going to be. So it has this giant corpus of text, practically like the whole gosh darn Internet, fed into this meat grinder, and out comes really amazing prose. Simply just by remembering and predicting, it can not only write you a letter, Bridget, it can pass a medical licensing exam.
It can summarize thousand-page documents. This one's unbelievable. It actually scored a 147 on an IQ test, which puts it in the 99.9 percentile of intelligence. On the other side of the equation, sometimes it hallucinates or downright lies and doesn't know what year it is and blatantly fabricates facts, like, with utter confidence. So even the founder of Open AI, which developed this, said that, "This technology is limited but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness." But he says it's a mistake to rely on it for anything important right now. I think what it's doing is sparking people's imagination of what is going to be coming down the line in the next ten years. That is going to be a game changer for society. I think if we aren't using the same technology to accelerate and improve education, we're missing one, a moral imperative and a massive opportunity for civilization to keep up with the pace of change. Fair enough, people.
Ian Wilhelm:
We're hearing so much concern about it, I wonder if you felt like you had a similar arc with the chatbots that you had to explain it, and is there sort of a new technology comes out, this is very typical, and then especially with AI, and then you have over time, you see more and more people using it, embracing it. You feel like we're on a similar path with this ChatGPT and then other things. Is there an arc that you've experienced as you approached some folks with your chatbots, at first that there was some hesitancy, and then things kind of grew to acceptance over time, or maybe we're still in that period? I don't know.
Drew Magliozzi:
Yeah, I think there's still some hesitancy, and rightly so, there should be. Bridget, you said on the other podcast -- well, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that.
Ian Wilhelm:
Was it part of the webinar?
Drew Magliozzi:
It's a webinar. I think there needs to be a Hippocratic Oath when it comes to AI in education, honestly, because it's moving so fast, and the potential to break stuff -- and really, I'm one for creative disruption and destruction, but some of the walls in higher ed are load bearing, and this could have a huge negative consequences. So for us, the way we've always combated the sort of skepticism is by holding ourselves to as much scientific rigor as possible. Are we moving the needle on the things we say we're doing, and are we closing equity gaps? If we are, like, we're on the right track, but you have to be relentless about it.
I think this one's different though, and I will say it's unlike any other technology that's hit the mass market before. Like any technology, the tech is never good or bad. It can be used for good or can be used for bad. So, the real key is who's deploying it and how, not the what, but the why and the how again. I think there is incredible opportunity, but in ways that most people aren't thinking about right now with respect to this technology. I think with this one, most folks are looking at it as, like, the AI Aristotle, if that makes any sense. Like the all-knowing oracle where I can go to this thing and it will give me all the world's knowledge. It knows everything.
But the funny thing is, with education, rarely is it the most knowledgeable person who makes the best teacher. If you think of the best teacher you ever had, if you were struggling with a math problem and you went to this amazing math teacher, would they just tell you the answer? No. They would ask you a sequence of questions to break down the problem so that you, with your own thinking, can come up with the conclusion yourself. So actually I think the greater potential for this technology is not the answers it gives, but the ways that it can help craft questions and follow-ups to students that encourages growth mindset, that has infused with the best cognitive science. Actually that's how we are planning to use it. We've got these great partners, David Yeager, Marc Brackett at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Dave Yeager at UT Austin, and a whole host of other collaborators that are helping us train this so that we can elevate the conversation between students and teachers. That, I think, has far greater potential than as this -- a chat replacement for Google or a chat replacement for Wikipedia.
Bridget Burns:
Because I feel like people got a little bit of education about ChatGPT, they got a taste of what chatbots are about. I do want to ask if you can clarify the high level, so, risks of AI and chatbots on campuses. You kind of touched on that a little bit, but I would combine that with how specifically Mainstay, what kinds of guardrails. You said that yes, holding yourself to that higher level of rigor, but people should ask these questions of EdTech companies to ensure they have taken the same Hippocratic Oath. And those questions are?
Drew Magliozzi:
Look, I don't know what the questions are for everyone, but because honestly every university is different, so they should ask their own questions. But I think, fundamentally, they should ask, "Hey, does it work? Do you have references that say it delivers what you claim it delivers, and tell us how we're going to do it because I don't even want to know just that it works? I want to know how we are going to do it. How you did it with Georgia State is not how we're going to do it at Potomac State. We're a different school and we've got different student body and let's tell you our problems and have you fall in love with them just like we have so that we can solve them together." I think it's probably more rather than the Tinder, do we love each other, but do we love the same problems? If that's the case, that's probably a good indicator of a partnership. What was the first part of that question, Bridget? I think it was a two part.
Bridget Burns:
Well, about the risks of AI and chatbots, but I would just add, if you're talking to Fancy EDU instead of Podunk, one of the questions I would also arm you with is, "What were the conditions that were necessary on the university side of the house to ensure that this was a great partnership?" Hearing that from the actual companies to know, "Okay, well, they actually give us a project manager. They actually had us report it." The person who signed the contract was the vice president or whatever. Those little conditions, those matter a lot.
Drew Magliozzi:
Yeah, I mean the highest levels of leadership need to be bought in and stay informed. They don't need to do anything, but at least on a quarterly basis, checking in, understanding, is this aligned to my goals? I don't know if you've seen this, Bridget, but one of the things I've noticed in higher ed is, not all levels of the organization actually know what the goals of the institution are. Someone at the lowest level probably doesn't actually fully recognize, "Hey, what are our enrollment goals? Do we have something?" It's the best universities that are able to share those goals at all levels and have everyone marching toward them. To some degree, actually, vendors can be a great help, because they can be their justification for creating that level of transparency up and down the organization to say, "Hey, you might be 26 years old and a new hire in this office, but you've got to know that we're running in this direction, and this is how we're measuring, and this is what I'm on the hook for as your leader."
So, I think that's one handy way to make sure that just everyone's aligned to the same goals. You asked about the risk, though. I think there's some obvious risks around obviously any technology and making sure that it's safe, answering your questions, et cetera. But there's a hidden risk with this particular one, which is, the biggest risk is that you put it in a corner of your website and just think that you're done because it'll work just fine on the corner of your website. But if you are not constantly advancing it and weaving it, and this goes for many technologies, weaving into the fabric of how you operate, you're going to miss massive opportunities. So if you're thinking it only as, "Hey, this is going to make me a little bit more efficient answering student questions," you're going to miss the massive opportunity to move the needle on student outcomes, and do that consistently.
The ones that we've had the most success with, they celebrate the win. "Hey Tim, you helped us drop summer melt by 21%. Let's do it for year-to-year retention." "Okay, great, we increased year-to-year retention three percentage points, that's awesome. Can we move the needle for large lecture classes with high DFW rates?" Like, "Okay, great, we moved the needle for that large lecture course. Can we do it for the STEM courses too? Can we do it at the community college level?" The question is, who is always willing to take the next step with you? It's really, those are my favorite partners, because they're the fuel for innovation, not us. I don't come up with the ideas, Tim does, or Don, or Michael Berman, or whoever else we put -- Aashir -- and they call us and say, "I imagine if a technology could do this for me, that would be amazing." Those are the best partners.
Bridget Burns:
Well, awesome. Well, thank you Drew for Mainstay, for sharing with us your insights from ChatGPT, connecting with institutions trying to actually implement an outside technology. The question that I think is probably the most important, though, for our listeners is: Drew, who's your dad?
Drew Magliozzi:
Oh geez, Bridget, you said you weren't gonna -- My dad and uncle were the co-hosts of radio show called Car Talk for 37 years or so.
Bridget Burns:
I have gotten to meet his dad. I've gotten to meet Ray from Car Talk, and I still think the coolest thing would be getting him to do my outgoing voicemail message, because that voice is super iconic. Whenever I tell people this, they're like, and Drew is always bashful about it, but I'm like, man, you should lean into that because that was my generation. I grew up listening to Car Talk. Anyway, that's your fun fact for the day, is that your chatbot might be somehow in some way connected to the show Car Talk.
Drew Magliozzi:
We squandered another 35 minutes today.
Bridget Burns:
Well, thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciated your time. Ian, as always, excellent to have you as my co-host. For those of you at home, we're looking for suggestions for who are innovators in the field advancing important work that you'd like us to interview, to learn about the experience of innovation, advice for innovation, and what kinds of things that folks should be considering and doing. So we are happy to hear from you in our DMs on Twitter. Otherwise, we hope you have a wonderful week ahead.
Bios of Guest and Co-Hosts
Guest: Drew Magliozzi, CEO, Mainstay
Andrew Magliozzi is a social entrepreneur, educator, and web developer, aspiring to help people learn and live better lives with the help of technology and human instruction. In 2014, he and Kirk Daulerio partnered with a shared vision to make college access more equitable through technology. This passion led them to start AdmitHub, a student engagement platform that uses behaviorally intelligent chatbots to connect students with the support they need to reach college. AdmitHub soon evolved to support millions of students with empathetic, conversational guidance throughout their entire higher educational journey. As Mainstay, they still empower people to take the next step toward achieving their goals in both academia and business. For many people, entering the workforce and navigating a career comes with a new set of challenges to overcome. Mainstay partners with schools and businesses to give students and employees the support they need to succeed every step of the way, helping to start and measure meaningful conversations that drive action at scale via rigorous research methods and their Behavioral Intelligence approach. Prior to starting AdmitHub, Drew founded Signet Education (an educational consulting company specializing in tutoring, test preparation, and admissions consultation) and the FinalsClub Foundation (a collaborative online learning environment enabling the free dissemination of high-quality academic content). Drew earned an AB in History and Literature from Harvard in 2005, and served as a board member for Cambridge School Volunteers from 2011-2013.
Co-Host: Bridget Burns, CEO, University Innovation Alliance
Dr. Bridget Burns is the founder and CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA). For the past decade, she has advised university presidents, system chancellors, and state and federal policy leaders on strategies to expand access to higher education, address costs, and promote completion for students of all backgrounds. The UIA was developed during Bridget’s tenure as an American Council on Education (A.C.E.) Fellowship at Arizona State University. She held multiple roles within the Oregon University System, including serving as Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor, where she won the national award for innovation in higher education government relations. She was a National Associate for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and has served on several statewide governing boards including ones governing higher education institutions, financial aid policy, and policy areas impacting children and families.
Co-Host: Ian Wilhelm, Assistant Managing Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Ian Wilhelm is a journalist with more than 20 years of experience, covering higher education, nonprofits, and philanthropy. He currently serves as Assistant Managing Editor for Chronicle Intelligence (CI), a division of The Chronicle of Higher Education. CI produces content to inform colleges and universities about national issues and develop ways to solve pressing problems on campuses. Previously at The Chronicle, he was a senior editor, helping manage a team of reporters focused on enterprise and feature stories for its weekly newspaper and daily website. He also served as the international editor and senior writer for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the newspaper for the nonprofit world. As a freelance writer, Ian's articles have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Religion News Service, USA Today, The Washington Post, Newsday, and other publications. He has worked abroad, living in Germany and reporting stories from Africa, China, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.
About Innovation Spotlight
Innovation Spotlight is an event series that happens live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. We feature short interviews with experts on specific interventions and innovations that serve student success, with a particular emphasis on the critical skills necessary to help an institution eliminate disparity. By elevating these cutting-edge insights, ideas, and innovators in the field, who share what they're learning from the front lines, we aim to help viewers identify the first three steps to take, what they need to know to take action tomorrow, and what experts have learned from implementation that they wished they’d known beforehand. We hope that, by surfacing these perspectives and inspirations, along with some tips and tricks to make the complicated business of innovation a little easier, we can help you in your work.
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