This interview originally aired on March 31, 2025 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on YouTube, 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 watch the video of the presentation. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to another episode of the Innovating Together Podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance. I am super excited to unveil today's timely conversation, which is around a model of how institutions can think about their relationship with students and their work-study, and how they work on campus, and how we show up as employers.
So, first I wanted to share with you that this episode is sponsored by Mainstay, which is the student engagement and retention platform that actually works because they have shown it with peer-reviewed third-party research, something that is very rare. And so if you bought a chatbot, it's probably from a company that is using Mainstay's research. We would encourage you to take a look at mainstay.com to find out more information about the kinds of ways that they have helped institutions improve outcomes.
It's also sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has been a long-time supportive partner to the UIA, and we are always grateful for their support.
So, today's episode is actually a really fantastic talk that came from the UIA National Summit, which we're so excited to be unveiling, finally, the content that was created and curated, not just for our audience that day, but for we think the broader higher ed community. And so, in this talk, you're going to be able to hear how ASU took a bold step forward to reimagine the relationship between students and the institution, especially when it came to employment. Now, a little bit of background here, which you're going to hear a little bit more in the talk. This is from Brandee Popaden-Smith, and it's about Work Plus, which is the concept. So, just to rewind time back in 2017, the UIA engaged in a project supported by Strada Education Network. And it was basically answering a very fundamental question, which is, "What if we reimagined the college to career space around the needs of students?"
Because we as a group could see that career services were insufficient, that career services was not being given the opportunity to be successful. It was too small of an office. It was being expected to do too much. And we also found later in this project that the vast majority of the things that people think career services is responsible for, they don't actually have any oversight into. And so, what we end up with is students who are not getting the experience that they need, the support they're looking for. And in the end, when we talk about mobility outcomes as being something we're trying to improve, this is going to be one of those pivotal things to improve. So, figuring out how, instead of just using the old model of bolt-on career services and give them very little support to be successful, what we did is seven universities decided to break it down to the studs, understand exactly what we're doing currently with career readiness, that whole space, college to career, what are we doing that we should stop doing, that we should start doing?
Did a ton of empathy research and understanding what students struggled with, and then worked with IDEO and a variety of other partners to actually prototype solutions that would solve those problems. Now, there's a lot I could tell you about that project and the outcomes. And there are countless solutions that have been stood up from that project or that initiative that are still alive today that are actually delivering incredible value, whether it's Career Champions at Oregon State, whether it's a series of interventions at UC Riverside or University of Central Florida. Anyway, so just know it worked. Each campus had to come up with their own prototype. And one of the other things that happened is we had to build a way of essentially diagnosing the employer-institution relationship. We wanted to understand what is a robust partnership and what is a mediocre one, and how do we as institutions show up better as partners to the employers so that they will treat our students the way we wish?
Spoiler: this is where we're going. So, we learned a lot in that process. But what happened right there is a spark of genius where the folks at ASU kind of stopped, and they thought, "Wait, we're actually the biggest employer of our students. What if we took that seriously? What if we did the things that we're telling employers to do if they were going to take care of our students in the way we wanted? Shouldn't we do the same?" And so that's where Work Plus comes together is it is the brainchild of [inaudible 00:04:40] Hodge at ASU and Brandee Popaden-Smith is going to share in this short talk from the UIA Summit about Work Plus and how it works. So, they're taking a bold step going beyond the traditional career services model, rethinking student employment fully. And given that you and I can only imagine how many students ASU has, this is really profound because the prototype happened there. It has actually now been scaled to many other campuses inside the UIA and beyond.
So, it was sparked in 2018. But instead of just advising students on career paths, ASU really focused on creating the kinds of opportunities that we often wish they existed for them, but doing it within our institution. So, Brandee's going to share some lessons from the years of trial and error and big ideas and how they embraced uncertainty, how they adapted as they went and built a national movement to rethink student employment. And so, this talk is a call to action: if we want to help students land meaningful careers, we need to start by shaping their work experiences while they're still in school. So, I'm super excited to introduce this short talk for you from the UIA National Summit, which is just one of the many profound experiences that people had where there were a lot of epiphanies and ahas, and people were interested in scaling the idea. So, I hope that that is something that it does for you. Please join me in welcoming this, becoming the employers we wished our students had.
Brandee Popaden-Smith:
All right. So, I want to share with you a little bit of some history and a story to what we were able to do with one of the grants awarded to Arizona State University through the UIA. And I actually have a very strong, clear memory of when I was asked to join the team that was leading the effort around the Bridging the Gap from Education to Employment grant that ASU was awarded. I remember hearing the vision for it, the purpose behind it, and the expected journey that it would take to get to where we wanted to go. And it really deeply resonated with me at the time. I remember hearing about the idea that we wanted to ensure to have access for really high-quality career development opportunities for all of our students. Sign me up! The chance to partner with institutions from all across the country, and actually come up with some really innovative ideas? Count me in!
And also, this idea that we could take traditional career services models – and at the time I was working in career services – and completely turn them upside down. I literally couldn't have been more pumped. When do we start? And then I remember the very first time I sat down in our very first session, and I sat at a table where there were Legos and pipe cleaners and probably 172 pads of sticky notes and possibly more Sharpies than I had ever used collectively in my life. And I quickly questioned what in the world did I sign myself up for? Fast-forward six years later here at ASU, and we actually have several thriving initiatives that the roots go directly back to our work with that BGE grant and the things that we learned as a part of the process. When we first started out, we wanted to ensure that we really understood the needs of our students.
So, we spent countless hours engaging and listening as a part of an empathy interview process with our students, and some of our alumni, too. We talked to students that were first-year students all the way to graduate students. We talked to students who were their first in their family to go to college. And we also talked to students who every single individual in their family already had a degree, and college was not just a given, it was an expectation. But it was interesting that when as we were talking to them, we weren't necessarily expecting a particular theme to come to light in these conversations. And that was that our students weren't waiting to work. We were trying to listen for these ideas as to how could we improve career services? How could we improve the career development support that we offered for our students? And our students were saying, "We're not waiting until graduation to work. We're working now."
Many of them had actually been working for many years already. Some of them were doing it because they wanted to, but the vast majority were doing it because they had to. And the unfortunate part that we heard as a part of this really unexpected theme was that our students weren't necessarily seeing this work actually aligning with their major or necessarily preparing them for what they thought they wanted to do after graduation. At the time, we knew the value of work-based learning experiences like internships and other types of opportunities. There was no shortage of data, and certainly even more so now that points to the value of these experiences, from the employer's perspective, what do they want to see on a resume, what do they want to hear in an interview. And from alumni who look back on it and say, "I know that that experience better helped prepare me," but the students we were talking to as a part of the BGE grant, they didn't necessarily express to us that they felt like they had easy access to these kinds of opportunities.
And so, our team started to ask ourselves a really important set of questions, the first being: Were we in fact the type of ideal employer that our students deserved and needed? And was it time for us to start taking our own advice? We spent a lot of time talking to employers about how to create ideal internship opportunities or other ideal experiences. Was it time we started taking our own advice and actually modeling and offering those types of experiences ourselves? Fall 2022 – or fall 2020 – great time to launch something brand new and try out a new set of ideas, as I'm sure we're all feeling and remembering.
At the time it was called the Working Learners Program, now known as Work Plus, was launched, and what we were trying to do was explore a series of questions on our campus for our students that were working. We had students working in part-time jobs all across the university in varying colleges and varying units. And we wanted to explore a couple things of how might we redesign these experiences for our students working on campus? How might we better support the supervisors that were coaching and guiding and leading these students? And a critical question around this idea of how might our entire university actually benefit if we were to consider student employment as a part of our student success strategy?
Four years in, now – what are we? 2020, yeah – four years into the work now, I like to jokingly say and lovingly say we're on version like 9.2 of what Work Plus looks like. The path to get here, it hasn't been linear, it hasn't been clean, sometimes hasn't even been logical, often messy, often divergent. And the number of times our team has asked ourselves, "Why in the world didn't we think about this two years ago? Why didn't we think about this last iteration?" But really thinking about how we wanted to ensure that the 12,000 plus students that were working for ASU on an annual basis, that they had an opportunity to engage in an intentionally designed, high-quality work experience, that they weren't necessarily having to go outside of the institution to find that real-world work opportunity. So here at ASU, we like to say we're passionate about understanding the problems that we're tackling.
We want to ensure that we deeply understand these problems and all the nuances that go along with them. We like to say that we're solutions agnostic. And what I mean by that is that we're not necessarily tied to one set of solutions. We ensure that we're constantly improving and constantly iterating upon what it is that we're doing based upon what we're learning from our students and our supervisors as a part of that process. We know that as a part of that, too, it's also really important that we're consistently partnering and consistently learning from others outside of Arizona State University. And that drive to partner and learn from others led us to start engaging and connecting with other institutions across the country. We wanted to learn and understand what did student employment look like on their campuses. And we very, very quickly learned we were not the only ones who saw student employment as a ripe opportunity for transformation.
Last year, in 2023, the Work Plus Collective was launched with the idea that we could have a positive impact on working learners nationally. And we would do so by bringing together institutions with shared values. These were institutions who believed that not only could we, but we should be the type of employers that we wanted for our students. I invite you to scan the QR code on the screen that'll take you to the website to learn more about what the Work Plus Collective is all about, and invite you to join over the 25 institutions who are in the middle right now of redesigning what student work looks like on their campus.
And I want to leave you with one last thought here. Unintended consequences shouldn't scare us. It certainly didn't for us. We started at one place at point A thinking we'd get to point B, and then C, we went to like X and then L and then Y as part of the process. And that was actually very exciting for us. We can't wait for innovation to be perfect before we act. The 1.5 million students that Bridget reminded us of yesterday, they're counting on us, and counting on us to act now. Thank you so much.
Bios of Guest and Host
With over two decades of experience in higher education, Brandee Popaden-Smith is a higher education leader specializing in career development and exploration, experiential learning, and work-integrated learning. She is committed to advancing equity and opportunity for underserved populations, including first-generation students, students of color, and those from high-need backgrounds. As Senior Director, University College at Arizona State University, Director Popaden-Smith oversees the Work + Learn unit in addition to college-wide grants and projects. By leveraging emerging technologies and forging innovative partnerships with universities, EdTech, and industry leaders, she has driven transformative change across the higher education landscape. With a BA in interpersonal communication from University of Central Florida and a Master’s in higher and post-secondary education, Director Popaden-Smith is dedicated to reshaping higher education to meet the needs of today’s learners, scaling impact through a steadfast focus on access, inclusion, and opportunity.
Host: Bridget Burns, Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance
As a trusted advisor to university presidents and policymakers, Dr. Bridget Burns is on a mission to transform the way institutions think about and act on behalf of low-income, first-generation, and students of color. She is the founding CEO of the University Innovation Alliance, a multi-campus laboratory for student success innovation that helps university leaders dramatically accelerate the implementation of scalable solutions to increase the number of college graduates.
About Innovating Together
Innovating Together is an event series that happens live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. Every week, we join forces with Inside Higher Ed and talk with a higher education luminary about student success innovations or a sitting college president or chancellor about how they're specifically navigating the challenges of leadership. We hope these episodes will leave you with a sense of optimism and a bit of inspiration.
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