Note: This interview in the Weekly Wisdom series originally aired on July 22, 2024 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.
Eric Waldo:
“Every happy family is the same, every unhappy family is unique in its unhappiness.” And I'm not saying that it was an unhappy place, but I think federal agencies, bureaucracy, maybe they're unique in their own unhappiness, but they're also pretty similar. So actually, I didn't realize that at the time, but having had an experience at Education as the Deputy Chief of Staff, then at the White House in a cross-functional role, I was like, "I thought I have to learn a lot more." It was new relationships and new subject matter, but there was a lot of similarity in terms of navigating matrix organizations, hierarchy, egos. It actually brought me in some ways comfort of like, okay, everyone's dysfunctional in the same way, whether it's the medical profession or the education profession. And I was like, "Okay, got it." Dysfunctional adults, I know how to work with this.
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. And 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.
This show is sponsored by Mainstay, which is a student engagement retention platform that we've seen actually proven to work to improve student retention and outcomes at places like Georgia State and at other institutions. You're going to want to take a look at mainstay.com because you're going to find peer-reviewed research, which is one of the rarest things to have an EdTech company actually engage in that kind of scrutiny and subject themselves to outside eyes and then publish those results. And they do it all the time, and they've already proven that they can reduce summer melt by 21% at Georgia State. And another independent study, they also helped them retain 1,200 students they would've otherwise lost. So, check them out at mainstay.com. And the Innovating Together Podcast is also sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who has always been a generous friend of ours.
So, Weekly Wisdom is a show that is uplifting, and I'm always bringing someone on who is a leader in the field that I think that you would benefit from learning from. Someone who is not just a leader, but generous with their wisdom. And I can't think of a better description for who we are going to talk to today, which is my friend, and soon to be yours, Eric Waldo, who is the president of the DC College Access Program. Formerly, he was the executive director of Reach Higher. He also worked directly in the White House. He's like one of the biggest deals that any of us know ,and he worked directly with First Lady Michelle Obama for quite some time. So, Eric, thank you so much for making the time to be here with us.
Eric Waldo:
Thank you, Bridget. It's really fun to be here with you.
Bridget Burns:
I'm just so excited for folks to get to know you and to learn more about the incredible work that you've been leading. And I feel like I just want to start with the career arc that you've had, because I actually don't know the answer to this. I have no idea how you ended up getting to the White House, which I feel like it makes sense where you end up from there because you were so effective at building community. I think that's community builder and invigorating energy source to a variety of topics. How'd you end up there? Tell me the Eric Waldo story.
Eric Waldo:
Well, it's really funny you should ask because I joke that I'm not the person who actually – I wasn't someone who was trying to get to the White House my entire life. You meet so many people in Washington who, they're the White House intern. They were their class president from eighth grade onward. That wasn't my journey. I was someone who really in college, if you had met me, I was a comparative literature major. I was actually pre-med. I took the MCAT. I thought I was going to go to medical school. I'm one of three sons, and my dad's a doctor, and I was the last hope because none of them became a physician. So, I did all the classes, but my senior year I actually decided after I did the MCAT, I'm like, "You know what? I'm at least going to take a year off before medical school."
And suddenly, I didn't submit the things to the dean, and that freed me up. And I took a history of American education class with a professor named Carl Kasell. He used to run the education department at UChicago, then he was at Brown University when I met him, and I loved that class. And I was reading about the founding of the common school movement, education, all these great learnings of how we've been fighting about the value of education since our founding. And the TA in that class was a friend of mine, and I told her how I didn't know what I was going to do when I graduated. And she told me about a program called Summer Bridge, which is now called Breakthrough. And I became a team teacher of rising seventh and eighth grade students in Providence, Rhode Island, and that was my first taste into education. And after a little bit of a foray way down the path, I actually was briefly an actor. I had a headshot. I worked in the Berkshires, did a few plays here and there. I'll show you my headshot with a lot of curly hair.
Bridget Burns:
You are blowing my mind right now. This has been great.
Eric Waldo:
This is real. So, I had a headshot. I was acting in the Berkshire Theater Festival at a children's theater. I did a musical in Boston while I had a temp job, and then 9/11 happened. And I'm sitting there, I've got eight-by-ten glossy photos of myself that I'm using to go to auditions, and I honestly made a list of all the people I admired. I was having this existential crisis, and I called a friend of mine who, actually, he was in med school. I was like, "Should I go back to med school? What should I do?" And I made a list of the people I admired, and I realized that they all had something in common, which was education. The people I admired the most who changed my life were educators. And I made a plan that night, which was I was going to get a master's in ed and go to law school and work in education policy.
And I joked that I'm one of the few people in America who did the thing I said I wanted to do in my law school application essay. So, I went to the ed school at Harvard, and during that time I actually ended up volunteering in my first presidential campaign. It was an assignment that I did while I was at the Kennedy School to work. I was at the ed school, but I took a Kennedy School class, and I volunteered on the John Kerry campaign in 2003. Started knocking on doors in New Hampshire on weekends with Tufts students. Then I got to UChicago law school, and that's where I met Barack Obama. He was still teaching at UChicago at my first quarter there.
Bridget Burns:
Man.
Eric Waldo:
Yeah, exactly. And I ended up after law school clerking. And then when I saw that Barack Obama announced, I basically reached out to all my friends in Chicago, and I got hired to be an unpaid legal intern on the Obama campaign. So, the joke that I tell people is it's August, September 2007, and Barack Obama just had a terrible summer. He lost to Hillary Clinton in all the debates. People were saying he was too professorial. And I go to interview to be the legal intern to work for the staff council, a lady named Kendall Berman, and she was just her. She was the one person, and she had outside staff, but no one else was helping her. And I took this unpaid job, and when I did so, everyone thought I was crazy. I had turned down a six-figure job in New York City at Latham & Watkins, a big law firm. I'd turned down a clerkship bonus to take this unpaid legal internship to live in my friend's extra bedroom in Chicago.
And I took this bet on Barack Obama because I believed in him, and that basically was my first step on the Obama roller coaster and rocket ship. And so, I get on there, and then I work on the campaign. I get hired on staff, then on election night in Grant Park, I find out that I'm going to get a job on transition. I moved there a few days later and started vetting cabinet officials. And that's when I met Arne Duncan, and all my friends were fighting to go to the White House, to Treasury, to HHS were a lot of fun things were going to happen. And I was like, "Well, actually, I taught. I care about education. This is what I want to do." And I got on Arne's confirmation team, and I told him about my story, and he's invited me to come over and work for him.
And so, I basically then spent the next five years working for Arne. I became the deputy chief of staff there. And honestly, I sort of learned. It was like my Ph.D. in education. I've learned so much about the intersection between federal government and local government in terms of education. And one of my jobs as deputy chief of staff was liaising with other agencies and with the White House. And so, when Mrs. Obama's team called us after the reelect in 2012, they said, "Hey, we got this idea. We want Mrs. Obama to take another initiative. We want to work on education. Will you help us?" And so, I actually worked with her for about a year, still at Ed, where we were workshopping ideas around what she could take on for a new initiative. And that became Reach Higher, and then she invited me to go work for her. That became the final three years of the White House and another seven years of my life working for her.
Bridget Burns:
I love it. First off, it's just such a great story. I love especially for young people to hear, because this idea that you have to have a direct path is untrue, but also I love how you course corrected. And you actually ended up having a very direct path, but just the weaving altogether is just really beautiful in retrospect. It sucks that it always feels like chaos at the time and it always feels so ambling, but looking back it's just like this is a very clear story. It makes so much sense based on who you are that you would do exactly this. Well, that's refreshing. And Arne Duncan, I mean, talk about one of the people who – it's rare to meet someone who's a big-deal legend who actually is even better than you expect, and he is. Every time I interact with him, I'm like, "Man, you are just such a strong leader." And he's also a caretaker. I just ran into him in an event recently, and what he's doing in Chicago, he's such a heart-centered leader.
Eric Waldo:
Yeah. I mean, Arne, really important person in my life. Was a mentor, has become a friend. But yeah, the way he leads is extraordinary. He's a leader of character and strength and no ego, which is how he led. Our very first day in the office, and, again, I got to be at Arne's confirmation hearing, but our first day at Ed, he put up one slide at an all-staff meeting in the LBG auditorium at Department of Ed and it said, "Just call me Arne." And that's real. I think in DC there's a lot of trappings of fancy buildings, lots of history, lots of titles. And he didn't want to be Mr. Secretary. He wanted to be Arne. And that's something that Arne rarely pushes back on people around those sorts of things, but someone called him mister, he'd like, "Arne. Arne." He wanted to be Arne.
And I think that very small code actually had a lot of power both for our team, for DC, and the type of team we wanted to build, the ethos we were trying to create and what it was about. It's not about us. It's not about our egos. It's about getting things done for students. And Arne both lived that, but also the other word I think about with Arne, in addition to being egoless and student-centered, is courage. And that was a word that we actually used a lot. I mean, we talked about it. Now, in my nonprofit CEO mindset, I think about courage as an explicit value that we would have on our website. And that's one of the things we believe in, but Arne and our communications director, Peter Cunningham, who I think was kind of Arne Duncan's David Axelrod, his storyteller, they talked a lot about courage.
And I do a little bit of impression of Peter, but Peter, a guy from the Bronx, his dad was also a big politico, and we would talk about something. And the worst insult that Peter and Arne could give is he'd, like, "Not a lot of courage, Johnny. Not a lot of courage." Talking about someone else, some other leader somewhere, that they weren't showing courage. And so, we talked about courage all the time, and that manifested in real life. It wasn't just this fancy idea. And one just very specific example of courage that I was thinking about with Arne is he loved and embraced having difficult conversations with people who disagree with him. And a very specific example, I traveled the country with Arne many, many times over my years working for him. And we did an event in Seattle, I think it was probably like 2010, 2011. And Arne has a security detail. We have an advanced team that goes to sites ahead of time, so we always know what's going on. We're in constant communication.
Ray Magliozzi:
Hi, I’m Ray Magliozzi, co-host of NPR's Car Talk. If you're working to solve the biggest challenges in higher education, you've come to the right podcast. And if you're looking for a student retention platform proven to get results, check out mainstay.com. I may be biased because the CEO of Mainstay just happens to be my son. So, instead of taking my word for it, you can trust the research they've done with Georgia State, Brown, and Yale as proof that Mainstay improves enrollment, retention, and wellbeing. Visit mainstay.com/research to learn more.
Eric Waldo:
And we knew that there were going to be protesters at this event, at the school, protesting Arne. And the first thing Arne said was, "I want to meet with those protesters. I want to sit down with them. Let's invite them in. I want to have a conversation." And I just want to say how rare that is in Washington, DC. When people hear that there might be a protest, or they may get booed, or something may be scary, most people are like, "Gosh, I'm going to run away from that." And that was another one of the things we talked about a lot, was we talked about running to the fire. If something's scary, you don't want to hide your head. You don't want to say, “No comment.” You want to run to the fire. You want to say, "Hey, I'm the first here, and I'm going to show courage. I'm going to tell you what I think about it. I'm going to be authentic."
And so, at that event, we met offsite with those protestors, and I'll never forget it, because Arne actually asked our security detail to leave the room. And so, he's there, and these people are probably – let's say five to ten. And a guy was standing up just yelling at Arne, like full volume in a classroom, like, "You're a privatizing privatizer and you're going to take away Title I." And basically demonizing Arne, and Arne was just calm as could be. He's like, "That's not true. I don't know where you're getting that information. We're not doing anything to do that." And again, we think now today in the parlance of 2024 about misinformation or disinformation, there are a lot of funny things happening early in the Obama administration around education, Common Core that brought together I think strange parts of the left and the right together. And a lot of, frankly, conspiracy theories about what was happening.
And Arne was willing to talk to those folks, to listen, to be authentic, and then to invite them in. We had that conversation. He heard them out, he tried to address their concerns, and then he said, "Hey, let's come into this event. Judge me on what I do." And that was something I saw Arne do constantly. We had protesters at Ed, more than I'd like to share, and we'd invite them in. We'd sit down with them, and they were always shocked to meet him and to see him there in person, engaging with them as real people and not as caricatures.
Bridget Burns:
That's so refreshing. Well, I was going to ask you for a leadership wisdom that you've gleaned from others that you use on a regular basis, but I feel like you jumped straight to the best story ever. So, I'm just curious about you're a president of your own organization. I'd love to give you a chance to talk about it, if you'd like, but everything that you've experienced has informed how you show up for your team. And I'm wondering if, beyond Arne's example, are there other people or experiences that you think you catch yourself when you're in that leadership moment, that's kind of a hard moment where you're referencing someone else or some experience? What has been the thing or the person who shaped your leadership style the most?
Eric Waldo:
I do think it's probably Arne, just because I spent so much time in such close proximity, but actually I think I've been very lucky in my career to be exposed to some really extraordinary leaders. And I've actually been thinking about this a lot in my own leadership journey, and I think Arne obviously had that courage conversation is the biggest thing I take from him, with courage and also lack of ego. He was someone who, he would bring young people to the table. It didn't matter what your title was, your position. He didn't care at all about positional authority. It's like, “Well, Eric has a good idea, he should be in this conversation. It doesn't matter what his title is. Sarah should be in this conversation, Brian, Hillary, Dan.” And again, to me it was counterfactual to a lot of DC. A lot of DC is like, "What's your title? Where do you sit? Who sits next to whom?"
And Arne – and again, he actually just recently lost his mom, Sue Duncan, who ran the Sue Duncan Center in Chicago for generations. And she was a transformative leader, and I think that was his role model growing up. And what she did in the South Side of Chicago, she ran an afterschool program for kids who basically had been failed by the Chicago public education system. These are kids who couldn't read, who were kept being promoted through their grade level, and she'd take them after school. She'd give them apples, cheese, lunch, a safe place. And that program was also near peer-based. It was students teaching students, so the fifth graders taught the second graders, and the ninth graders taught the fifth graders. And Arne literally grew up at that center his whole life and saw the power of that.
And so, I think I've heard him tell these stories, and so, I think that affected me, too, where he realized that anyone can teach anyone. Wisdom is not just a one-way current of from down to below. It's also up, down, sideways, left, right. And so, in my own leadership, I've recognized that, and I saw this also on the Obama campaign, frankly, in 2007 and 2008. Great ideas. If you can have distributed leadership, don't have to come from the top. It comes from anyone. And when you empower those leaders, when you give them a seat at the table, when you let them lead, that is really powerful. They feel ownership, great ideas surface, and it isn't just this – I've maybe heard other leaders talk about the HiPPO problem: the “highest paid person in the organization” is suddenly the only one who makes decisions or where ideas come from, from this mountaintop.
And Arne very much was, “No, we're going to ask Justin, we're going to ask Sandra. We're going to ask all these people, and it doesn't matter where they sit. Let's give them the seat at the table, give them a voice.” And I think that's because he saw the power of it in his mom's program and then he himself was a young gun. I tease Arne now. He's got some gray hairs, but he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools at 37. I think he saw the power of empowering young people, passing the baton, keeping a really fresh mindset.
Let me just add one other thing on leadership models. Working for Mrs. Obama so closely, obviously it was a powerful experience as well. And she has many, many superpowers. I think she's one of the greatest storytellers maybe of all time, but I think the secret to that storytelling was actually authenticity. I think that when people ask me what's the most important thing I've learned about storytelling or leadership, I think her superpower is authenticity, because when she was giving a speech or thinking about what she wanted to tell to a group of young people, a group of school counselors, a group of educators, her process was really detailed and thoughtful to say, “What is a unique story that I have that these people might uniquely need or want to hear that could change their lives?” And so, she was willing to be vulnerable. She was willing to be authentic. She was willing to tell really hard and difficult stories about her own journey so that people could see themselves in her and grow.
And I saw that most closely when we talked to young people directly where, again, the first thing that happens is they think she's like Beyonce. It's like, oh, my gosh, this beautiful, really striking person has come into the room, and so they assume that it's impossible to be her. And then very quickly Mrs. Obama would spend time to sit on a table around the group and share her story and talk about her own journey from the South Side of Chicago. Parents didn't go to college, first gen, having to take a bus two different ways to get to her magnet school, being doubted by her school counselor who famously told her she wasn't Princeton material. So many people have the story of not feeling that they belong, what we call imposter syndrome. And I think when those students, there'd be this moment in the sitting down where they'd go from thinking “This is like someone I can't even believe, a celebrity,” to, “Wait a second, her story isn't that different from mine.”
And suddenly those students would tell their stories of, "Hey, I have to take care of my brothers and sisters. I have to do this extra job. I do X and Y." And they thought that those stories didn't matter, but then when they hear Michelle Obama talk about them, they suddenly realize those stories might mean that I'm stronger, that I have grit, that I have tenacity, that I have persistence. And you saw that unlock what they saw as their own growth mindset and potential. So, I think her willingness to be authentic, her willingness to be vulnerable, her willingness to really meet people where they are is something I think about all the time.
The last thing I'll say – I could go on for a while, but I do think a lot about kindness also in leadership. And I had the fortune, I left Mrs. Obama's team and the Reach Higher team, to jump back into the Biden administration for about a year and a half. And I worked for Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General and –
Bridget Burns:
That's such a curve ball. I love that you did that in the midst of everything.
Eric Waldo:
Yeah, he was taking a break from higher ed. I was like, "It's a pandemic." I had met Dr. Murthy years before, but then during transition we got connected through a mutual friend, and I was just kind of giving lessons learned from working at Ed, working at the White House. The Surgeon General's Office is actually a lot like the East Wing. It's a big bully pulpit, but not necessarily a lot of grand authority, other traditional statutory authority. And we were thinking about how to use his bully pulpit, so he invited me to run his public engagement team, and that was such an honor. And Vivek is someone who thinks a lot about mental health and the mental health crisis across America. He put out a lot of great leadership and work and writings on that, but one of the things, a value that he talked a lot about and that I think I thought about, but hadn't really articulated explicitly, was kindness.
And we are in such a difficult time maybe overall in our country, in America. The world feels tough on a good day that it's on fire, and we know everyone else has their own private struggles. I'm a dad, I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old at home. I'm maybe not sleeping or I'm worried about my mom who's got Parkinson's. I'm worried about my dad who I lost last year. We're all complicated, multidimensional people. It's not just about, "Hey, what's that KPI I had at work, and did you or did you not achieve it?" We have to see people in their wholeness, and so we spent a lot of time in our mental health work thinking about this. And I think kindness was what I distilled from that around wanting to create an environment that really tries to see people in their full selves and create a safe environment for people to work. And that kindness is a value that we explicitly state can help us not just get the work done, but get the work done in a way that how we do the work is really important.
And I think sometimes, at other points in my career, I've worked with leaders who cared less about the how, and I think a lot about the how. And Vivek was someone who I think helped me really crystallize my thinking that how is just as important as the what.
Bridget Burns:
That's so great. So, I was also going to ask you about the most surprising thing about your career. And I have to guess, is it that you just took a curve ball break and shifted from education to healthcare? I bet you learned a lot and thought – It just sounds really refreshing. I mean, I often think about that, because I'm just very curious about other places and spaces and what it's like to operate in them, because I lived in higher ed and worked in higher ed my whole career. And that had to be a steep learning curve, but so fun for that.
Eric Waldo:
It was a total blast. I will say I'm a fan of the opening lines of Anna Karenina, which says, "Every happy family is the same. Every unhappy family is unique in its unhappiness." And I'm not saying that it was an unhappy place, but I think federal agencies, bureaucracy, maybe they're unique in their own unhappiness, but they're also pretty similar. So actually, I didn't realize it at the time, but having had an experience at Education as the Deputy Chief of Staff, then at the White House in a cross-functional role, I was like, "I thought I'd have to learn a lot more." It was new relationships and new subject matter, but there was a lot of similarity in terms of navigating matrix organizations, hierarchy, egos. It actually brought me in some ways comfort of like, okay, everyone's dysfunctional in the same way, whether it's the medical profession or the education profession. And I was like, "Okay, got it." Dysfunctional adults, I know how to work with this.
Bridget Burns:
So, you’ve built and done, created all kinds of things. You've worked with the most incredible leaders that people reference who've never met them. People learn leadership from these people as just an idea, but the fact that you actually knew them personally just is fantastic. But you've left your own indelible impression on the world. You've created things. I mean, Reach Higher, I know that you ran it for the First Lady, but it had Eric Waldo in the DNA of it through and through, or has. And I'm just curious about, for you, if you look back at this stage of your career, if there's one thing that you've done, what are you most proudest of?
Eric Waldo:
Wow, it's tough. So, one thing I will say, and maybe it's the through arc of what we're talking about here on the journey, and again, when I think about I was talking about courage for Arne, authenticity in Mrs. Obama, kindness for Murthy. When I think about maybe what are the Eric Waldo secrets of success, and therefore what's that through line, I think it's following passion over prestige. And this will sound funny from someone who's worked at the White House or done some maybe what look like fancy things, but at different iterative moments in my career, I made choices that were about following my passion versus what I think a lot of other people thought would've been much more prestigious at the moment. And later, in hindsight, they look better, but that's only because I kept following my passion. And that meant that at these key inflection points, and I'll mention it specifically.
So again, talking about leaving a federal clerkship and choosing to work on the Barack Obama campaign versus taking a big job at a fancy law firm. When I told a career clerk in Cleveland where I was working that that's what I was going to do on my last week, she'd taken me out to lunch, she's a seasoned career federal law clerk, worked for a judge in Cleveland. I told her I was going to go work on the Obama campaign and she literally put her hand on my shoulder, and she said, "Okay, well, listen, let me know how that works out and call me if you need anything," but she thought I was insane. The physical and emotional signs of her story were like, "You've made a terrible decision."
I called a cousin of mine who was a lawyer, my cousin, Carlos. About 12, 15 years older than me, someone I've looked up to my whole life. He's a lawyer in Florida and Puerto Rico, and I called him and I said, "Carlos, here's what I'm thinking. I'm going to go work for the Obama campaign. This is why I want to do it. This is what I'm giving up." And I said, "You know, Carlos," I was like, "No matter what, I'll be on the right side of history." Because at the time, it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win and people presumed she was going to get the nomination and win. And when I told Carlos this, “I'll be on the right of history,” he said, "Eric, history is written by the victors." And he did not mean that as a compliment. He meant like, "Hey, if you lose, no one's going to care what you did." So again, I mostly have people telling me not to do this, and I followed my passion, and that led me to a place where, again, finally when Barack Obama wins Iowa, wins the nomination, suddenly it's this “what a great bet you made.” But I was sort of betting on my own passion.
Similarly, I get to the transition during the transition team and I'm vetting capital officials, I'm working with folks and, again, people were like, "You should fight to get the White House. You got there so early in the campaign. What are you doing? That's the more prestigious thing. Go to the White House, go to the Department of Defense, go somewhere else." And I knew I wanted to work for Arne. I wanted to work in Education and that was my passion, as opposed to saying, "No, you got to get this job at the White House." And again, some people were like, "Okay, you're working at Ed, but I thought you joined the campaign pretty early. You couldn't get a White House job again?" There was this like, again, working for Arne, following my passion. Those five years at Ed were transformative to my life. The people I met, the relationships I built, the subject matter expertise that I was able to get made it so that when I then five years later join Mrs. Obama at the White House, then I'm Eric Waldo. I'm a guy who knows who to call, knows where to go, knows how to navigate an agency, knows the subject matter areas. I'm suddenly more of an operator. And so now suddenly it looks like I've made all these decisions at the turning points, but again, I will just point it out. So, I go to work for Michelle Obama, but that was not an assumed thing. Again, life's funny at these crossroads. Right before I got the offer to work for Mrs. Obama, I had an offer to go work at Google. And this is early 2014 and I've been, again, a guy who mostly worked in nonprofit and government. I hadn't made a lot of money in my life, and I had this job offer at Google and I debated it for a week. And I was like, "I feel like I want to work for Michelle Obama."
That's a pretty unique thing to do in my life. And everyone was like, "Eric, yeah, it sounds like you want to do that. You're a service guy, go for it." But I had this one guy who came into my office. I was on an interagency council with him at the State Department. He was a business guy, and he literally again stopped in his tracks, like, "Wait a second, you're going to say no to Google?" He's like, "Are you crazy?" He was a business guy. He's like, "They're going to offer you more money. You've already served. It's time to go take care of yourself." He was trying to help me see this other point of view, but I was like, "No, I want to do this passion, same deal." If I had not worked for Mrs. Obama, the experiences I had, the work that you and I got to do together on the College Opportunity Summit, the College Opportunity agenda, President Obama creating things like signing day, having those moments, that was, again, betting on my own passion, myself. And I just think it looks great in hindsight.
It's the point you and I talked, the line may look straight, or you can create a straight line, but at the time there were these ups and downs of “am I making the right decision?” I had a lot of fear about leaving Reach Higher to work for the surgeon general. Will this undo all of my work? Do I have to start at the beginning of the line? And every time when I've done this, it's given me more and it's proved to be true. I followed my heart, and that's led to me being able to have a position where now I'm the president and CEO of DC's largest scholarship foundation. We were started by the owner of the Washington Post, Don Graham, 25 years ago –
Bridget Burns:
Don, such a good guy.
Eric Waldo:
Great guy. We've given away tens of millions of dollars to students over decades. Today we give away over seven and a half million dollars a year to over 1,300 students. We partner with 13 universities. We create a cohort scholarship program akin to Posse, but it's having incredible results for DC students who are first-gen, low-income. And again, proving that if you bet on young people, if you give them the resources, academic, social, emotional, and financial, they can compete, they can succeed, they can graduate from college, and they can enter the workforce and live the lives that they want to live. So, I'm at a place now where, again, I try to remember to be grateful and be like, "Eric, this is actually you are living the dream."
If you know me well or people who know me, living the dream is one of my little catchphrases. It works for good days and bad days, but I sometimes have to pinch myself and say, "I get to talk to people like you and talk about education." And Arne Duncan is someone who I can call, and I got to see Mrs. Obama at a college signing day here in DC in late April where I brought my old world and my new world together. I brought Michelle Obama as a surprise speaker to a DC College Access Program college signing day at Capital One Arena. We announced a moonshot goal for the city where we want to have an 80% six-year college graduation rate by the year 2050. I think I'm taking all these lessons from different moments in my life and making them possible for now my own home community, which is DC.
And so, it's just so fulfilling, and I feel so grateful and lucky, but none of that could have happened without a lot of luck. But also, a lot of believing in myself and, again, getting to work with people like Arne and Michelle Obama and Vivek Murthy and countless other leaders along the way who were willing to give me water and sunshine to let me succeed and fail.
Bridget Burns:
Well, I think clearly everyone at home who didn't know you before this understands what I meant by the infectious joy that you bring to your work, and just vibrancy. And the passion that you have for the work, it's really inspiring. I did want to ask you two curve ball questions because you said one is you've mentioned twice now that you were involved in vetting. And I am so curious about in that experience because you hadn't done it originally before. I'm wondering if there were questions that you used while vetting that you discovered were actually more insightful about whether someone was a good fit or not. Was there any question that, for you, you found was more illuminating or was, for you – could kind of give you the substance that you were looking for?
Eric Waldo:
It's a great question and, by the way, vetting is, again, a classic DC term. But just to be clear of what vetting is, vetting at a cabinet level on a transition, you were truly interviewing and also doing deep research on a candidate to make sure for, again, someone who might be the Secretary of Education, the head of the CIA, the Secretary of Defense. You were basically part of a team of vetters, who are traditionally lawyers and maybe a few researchers, and you are all divvying up their life and saying, "Hey, Mike, you're going to read books from this time to this time. Nikki, you're going to cover publications here. Eric, you're going to do social media and other things. Brian, you're going to interview this candidate. Here's the 80 questions that the transition team has created."
And again, it's all with the mindset which is we want to make sure we understand risk, which is both not just is this person qualified, but are there any things that might embarrass the president, the party, or put them in some way of risk of not being able to be confirmed by for these Senate-confirmed positions. So, what I would tell you is that those questions were largely pre-gamed in terms of here's the list of questions that the folks have created to make sure we're all aligned. What I would tell you is that I think what was most interesting from the vetting process is that you saw, and maybe I'm speaking a little bit out of school, but things that may have been red flags were different based on how senior the role was.
So, if someone was super senior and, again, really had this board of president, maybe something that would've been a red flag for a more junior person didn't count as much. So, we asked a lot of the tax questions, which, again, this is more like Clinton-era history of like did you claim withholding tax for your housekeeper, for your nanny, for whomever? Maybe at a certain era that was a red flag, you're gone. I found the more senior the person was, the more likely they were to get more grace versus more junior staff. So again, maybe not surprising. When the 16-year-old with the driver's license does the rolling stop, the cop's going to pull them over. Maybe someone gets to say, "Okay, sir, I see. I'm going to give you a warning this time," but I think, to me, it was a reminder that you never know what's going to be the thing that could be problematic. And I think in DC, candidates often overthink that there are these simple metrics of “Was I on this society? Did I give this donation?” It's really actually a multi-variable equation, and there are so many people in the room helping to assess that risk. You may be a prolifically published author and academic. You may be the biggest subject matter expert, that still could be problematic.
Last thing I'll say on this, that I think is what I learned is that there's a big difference between subject matter expertise and management expertise, which maybe is a no-brainer, obviously, but I felt early on in the administration we were skewing early on for subject matter expertise, not realizing that if you're the assistant secretary of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, for example, at Ed, it's great that you may have the knowledge and have written the books, but actually part of your job, a big part is going to be managing a team of 100, 200, 300 people. And that piece is something that I saw hurt different candidates along the way, where even if they got in, they thought the job was just about the content, and it became also about managing a large bureaucracy, which is not an intuitive switch. So, you're the Nobel Prize X for Y, but have you actually managed a team larger than five grad students?
Bridget Burns:
Yeah, that's a good one. That's super interesting. There were so many things. The Don Graham part that you brought up, too, earlier, he's such a good guy. And I was going to tell you that he's the one person who, when I met him, he was just very super excited because it was around Dream US and about the work we were doing with DREAMers just in terms of how we supported him.
Eric Waldo:
Extraordinary work at the Dream US, helping DREAMers with college education.
Bridget Burns:
His mom's Catherine Graham, and the parties of the Graham family are legends. And knowing my background and how I'm from out in the woods of Montana, and I'm just randomly at an event in DC and he's like, "Yeah, come on over. We're having a party night." And so, I get to invite Tim Rennick, which is still probably the coolest thing I ever did for Tim Rennick, is I brought him to a Don Graham party. And it was both our first time. We walk in, and there are members of Congress, there are CEOs, there was someone from the consulate. It was the biggest deals, and they're all just walking around. And Don invited us to just sit there, and he just held court and gave a chance for Tim to talk about student success at the time as someone who was running for president. It was the wildest experience, and since that time, I've never been invited to any other parties by anyone. And they would never live up to it, but yeah. And he's just always been so kind. Anyway, Don, lovely.
Eric Waldo:
He's a legend in DC and elsewhere. I think he's been an incredible public servant. He started the DC-CAP organization in 1999, recognizing at the time that there were no school counselors in DC high schools. And he wanted to transform college completion in DC, so he put with his, as the chair of the board, he helped raise money and start a team and a staff that then allowed and made sure that we had a counselor in every high school, then had a small last-dollar scholarship for students to go anywhere. We've transitioned in our 25-year history. Now we're a much larger scholarship and more of a completion organization, but his work, his leadership at DC-CAP, at Dream US, helping make sure Dreamers can complete has been extraordinary. They have a great new CEO in Gaby Pacheco. They're doing phenomenal work. And Don and Arne have a lot of leadership qualities in common, which I really appreciate of really being just entirely mission focused, all about students.
I would also say our new board chair, or new-ish compared to Don, he's been there for a little less than a decade, Ted Leonis is my current board chair, a really phenomenal leader in the DC community. Again, when you meet people in the space, Ted's another person like Mrs. Obama, he's a first-gen college graduate. His parents worked in the service industry. He was born in Brooklyn, moves to Lowell, Massachusetts, starts at a community college or University of Massachusetts, Lowell and meets a guy. He's mowing his lawn and, as Ted tells it, he bought a book in the library about mowing lawns, starts knocking on doors to find out if someone will help let them mow their lawn. A guy hires and takes a chance on Ted. Ted impresses them and he says, "Hey, what's your plan? What you doing in the fall?" And he says, "You know what? I think you might be Georgetown material."
That guy happens to be, I think, on the board of directors at Georgetown, encourages Ted to apply. Ted transfers to Georgetown, life transformed, goes from this first-gen kid who thought he couldn't make it to being the guy who's running circles around people at Georgetown with just his suitcase and his bag showing up on a bus to New York Avenue. And then Ted, of course, becomes a founder of AOL and helps transform the early internet, now owns many sports teams, has his hands in lot of places, trying to make things better for people, and especially for here in DC. And I'm so grateful for him and so many other philanthropists on my board and elsewhere who are still betting on education.
And Bridget, we haven't talked about this, and I think it's important for this Weekly Wisdom and the people who might be watching. We're living at a time right now where so many people are questioning the value of higher ed. The pendulum swings every five to ten years, and I think I can't go through a weekend where I maybe don't read something where someone says, “Is college worth it? Here's the survey of people who think college isn't worth it, or they've given up.” And I just want to say, A, thank you to everyone who's watching you and supporting you, Mainstay, Carnegie, everybody, because they still understand and believe the numbers, and that's the truth. And I have a slide where I say, “Is college worth it? It still is.” It's transformative, and here in DC, we're lucky to have great colleges like Georgetown.
Tony Carnevale from the Georgetown Center for Education Workforce recently, who announced he's retiring, he's got this famous study showing the value of college. Now it's up to $1.2 million more versus a high school diploma across the country. He did a state-by-state analysis. Well, guess where college is worth the most? Washington, DC. $1.9 million is the differential of a college diploma versus a high school diploma in DC. More than all 50 states, because we're a knowledge economy. So, this is true in almost every state in our country, maybe with Alaska where it's pretty narrow, the work you do with the Innovation Alliance, the work that everyone who's watching this program does, Doug and everyone at Inside Higher Ed, you're helping shine a spotlight on the fact that college higher ed still is worth it. I think about disruption coming in, AI and other things. We know being a lifelong learner is going to be critical, so I just want to thank you, thank anyone who's watching or listening or consuming this podcast or this live stream that the work you're doing on helping make sure we're at the front lines, creating ladders of opportunity for young people is so, so important. Don Graham started that in his whole life. Ted Leonis has done it. Arne Duncan has done it. Michelle Obama has done it. Everyone I respect and know and care about thinks that this is the work of their lives, and I appreciate you dedicating so much of your life to this work.
Bridget Burns:
Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm just so excited that you're doing that work and that you're staying committed to spreading this news, but it's also like, as you were talking about, that I just think about getting our finger on exactly what this issue is. And I think there's a connection between the fact that we have incredible data, we have incredible compelling story to tell. Goes back to what you said about storytelling. We have an incredible story to tell about the impact of college in people's lives and the earning outcomes, but our cognitive dissonance and our unwillingness to admit that people come to college to get a job makes it so that it's a hard story for people to trust, I think, or for them to listen to us about if we aren't going to be willing to just sit with both those things being true. We can't expect you to know the million dollars more in your lifetime if I won't admit that the reason that more than 90% of students come to college is to get a job. And I think that that is going to be something that we're going to have to wrestle with, and we actually have to integrate the nervous system because it's definitely connected. I want to just wrap with the best advice that you've received and a book that has been most powerful about leadership that you would most frequently recommend others.
Eric Waldo:
Yeah, on best advice I've received, maybe I'll cheat and give more than one, but one of them, I was at this career inflection moment, and there was a job I'd been up for. I didn't get it. I thought I deserved it. I was feeling pretty down about it, and I met with someone who was sort of a peer, and we were having coffee, and she was telling me, "Always play the long game." And how I interpreted “always play the long game” is maybe something may happen. Not every day is going to go your way, but always, again, show up with your values, your integrity, keep doing the work, and eventually you're going to get there. Maybe you didn't get there today, you lost today's game, but you're playing the long game. And again, that following your passion, doing what you want, you're going to get there. And I think so many people think about the short game. They're like, "Well, I didn't get what I wanted. I'm giving up. I'm leaving. I didn't get the job. I didn't get the promotion. That meeting didn't go how I wanted. I'm giving up, or I'm throwing that relationship out." I think playing that long game is really critical.
And I'd add to that, and it's something that my dad – who I mentioned, he passed away last year. He ran a lab at Case Western Reserve for decades and was an electrophysiologist, a cardiologist. And one of the rules, we called it Waldo Rules in his lab, and one of them was get found out. And he had this story about when he was more in a training level of his career, he was doing innovative work, and these surgeons basically are like, "Hey, get found out." They meant you're doing this work and nobody knows about it. Make sure people know what you're doing. And I think I often find people in their careers, if you're like me, maybe you have a moment where you don't really want to self-promote, or it feels gross to ask for something or say how good you are. Even maybe you feel uncomfortable even being on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever saying something about you. And I think that you don't want to over-index on ego, but you also want to make sure it's not a mystery, that sort of virtue in obscurity is not useful. I think you want to make sure people know about you, that you're trying to have a healthy appetite of getting out there and making sure people know what you're passionate about, what you want to do, what you want to be.
Because if you share that, if you want to be a college president, you want to be a dean, you want to be a school counselor, you want to be a superintendent, if you let people know what your dreams are, that will help them know how to help you. And so, that's where the “get found out” thing is about you taking agency to make sure you're not just assuming by the grace of the Almighty that you'll be pulled out of obscurity into the dream job that you want.
Bridget Burns:
That's great advice. He was a great man, great advice. Just everything I've learned about your father, what a legend. So, you're a great testament to him. The leadership book?
Eric Waldo:
Leadership book. So, look, two things I'd say on the book side and Tim Renick is getting multiple shout-outs on this podcast. There is a book by Andrew Gumbel called Won't Lose This Dream, and it is actually about the work at Georgia State University and tells the story of how Tim and other leaders helped create and transform that institution into what it is today – on completion, on technology, on data. But you realize sometimes you hear stories in obscurity, and you think it's just this one person by themselves taking on the world. You realize it took multiple leaders multiple years, and it was hard. It was someone playing the long game on what are all these chess pieces that I have to move to get where I need to get? So Won't Lose This Dream is a book I recommend.
And I will just say overall and for folks who maybe are also thinking about podcasts, I'm just a huge fan of Adam Grant who's a behavioral psychologist at Penn Wharton. He has a podcast called Work Life, and it's been going on for years now, and he's talking to leaders, CEOs across multiple sectors around what they do to, again, as he says, make work not suck. How to give feedback, how to think about challenge yourself, how to surround yourself with great folks. And I listen to that almost like my own. It's like my own mini-MBA therapy, where if I'm going somewhere on a Thursday, what's Adam Grant talking to? What CEO lesson is he learning? It's a little bit like what you're doing here, Bridget, by talking to leaders and getting their essences. And again, as a Ph.D. in that work area, he'll also say on Instagram, on Twitter, he'll post something like, "Hey, here's a control trial we did. It's not just my idea because I'm telling you, Eric, ideas, and they're anecdotal," which is a form of data. But he's actually saying, "Hey, they tested it, and they've learned it ,and this is a little bit better to think about that." It's helpful.
Bridget Burns:
I love it. Those are excellent recommendations. It's been really such a pleasure having you on a show. I feel like people are going to now have a sense of just how wonderful you are, and I feel like you've really given a lot of really good nuggets of leadership and wisdom. And you've spread the impact of the incredible leaders that you've had an opportunity to work closely with, so thank you so much for being our guest today. And for those of you at home, we will see you next time.
<h3><b>Bios of Guest and Co-Hosts</b></h3>
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<div class="bio-text"><strong>Guest: <a href="https://www.pahara.org/fellow/eric-waldo#:~:text=BIOGRAPHY,the%20U.S.%20Surgeon%20General%2C%20Dr.">Eric Waldo</a>, President and CEO, DC College Access Program</strong><br />
Since January 2023, Eric Waldo has served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the District of Columbia College Access Program (DC-CAP), Washington, DC’s largest scholarship foundation. Prior to joining DC-CAP, Dr. Waldo served in the Biden administration as Chief Engagement Officer for U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, spearheading public health campaigns around youth and clinician mental health, health misinformation, and workplace well-being. In 2019, Dr. Waldo joined Common App as Chief Access and Equity Officer while also continuing to lead Higher Reach, Michelle Obama’s college access and success initiative, to which he’d been named Executive Director during the Obama administration. An attorney for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in Chicago and a member of the Transition Team after the 2008 election, Dr. Waldo served five years as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. From 2006 through 2007, Dr. Waldo clerked for Judge Ann Aldrich in the northern district of Ohio, also serving on the board for the Military Child Education Coalition and the National Postsecondary Institute. Before graduate school, he was a working actor in the Boston area, following a post-college job with AmeriCorps as a middle-school English and improv acting teacher. He earned his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago, his master’s in education from Harvard, and his B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University.
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<p><b>Co-Host:</b><b> </b><a href="https://theuia.org/team/bridget-burns" target="_blank"><b>Bridget Burns</b></a><b>, Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance</b><br />
Dr. Bridget Burns is the founding Executive Director 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 (ACE) 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.</p>
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