Student Success & Equity with Dr. Rob Johnstone

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

Learn why labor market data needs to inform changes to the student experience.

In this episode, I interview Dr. Rob Johnstone, Founder & President of the National Center for Inquiry & Improvement (NCII).

(Scroll down to access the transcript.)

We cover the following key topics:

5:13: Back to basics: Guided Pathways & labor market data.

14:27: Key labor market data finding: across geographies, consistent inequities or "imbalance" with respect to gender and race.

21:53: Moving from talk to action.

28:56: Role of leadership and processes.

40:25: Addressing the push back against student completion and labor market data.
 
49:54: Social science & humanities majors.

56:12: Summary through a sports metaphor.

Slides Rob referenced. Example: California.

Rob's doggie who we can hear in the background toward the end of the episode. 

Select Dr. Rob Johnstone episode quotes:

"Walk me through the experience of a new student at your college this last fall. So let's say fall 2023. How was their application to onboarding to first day experience different than a student that started your college in fall 2018 or fall 2013? Because if the answer to that question isn't significantly different, why would we expect their outcomes to be any different?"

"All this talk and all this theorizing we do has to translate into fundamental changes in the student experience. Too often our change processes are circling around what we do rather than what we're having the students experience. You have to break the structures that have existed that are best designed to serve the status quo."

"We've solved problems for small numbers of students. We've nudged problems for large numbers of students."


"If this post-graduation data is so important and you're not happy with what you're seeing, well, maybe we should make this more clear to students so they're making informed choices. What does that look like? How do we operationalize that? What would the process look like?"


"If you're going to say, "How do we make classrooms more career connected?" no one's sitting in a python class or welding class wondering what they're going to do when this is over. They all know already. If you're sitting in English one, psych one, non-majors biology, algebra one or statistics, those are the courses where we need to be more career connected. But what does that look like?"

"I've looked at markets in red states, blue states, urban, rural, markets that are suburban, everywhere from Los Angeles to Atlanta to Missoula, Montana to New York City to Mobile, Alabama. The equity by race or the imbalance by race--it's highly consistent that the gaps exist in all of these markets, whether your politics are progressive or conservative, whether the state is blue or red. And so if you're in Los Angeles or you're in Atlanta or you're in Charlotte, North Carolina, you see these really large gaps. Of course, the base rate of the population that is Black or Latinx is going to vary from like 5% in Missoula to 60% in Los Angeles. So you're not going to have the exact same size gaps. But you do see these gaps are amazingly persistent in the high wage jobs and the low wage jobs."

About Dr. Rob Johnstone
Dr. Rob Johnstone is a national leader in the higher education reform movement and is the Founder & President of the National Center for Inquiry & Improvement (NCII). He created NCII in 2013 to help 2-year and 4-year colleges create structures, processes and cultures that increase and make equitable student completion, learning and labor market outcomes. His unique & engaging approach to inquiry & improvement fuses the world of foundations, initiatives, and system-level policy changes with the ground-level work of college practitioners & senior college leaders. He has worked on the ground with over 450 colleges around the country in 43 states and brings an energy and passion for authentic change to optimize the student experience to improve outcomes. 
 
About Dr. Al Solano
Al is Founder & Coach at the Continuous Learning Institute. A big believer in kindness, he helps institutions of higher education to plan and implement homegrown practices to improve student success and equity by coaching them through a process based on what he calls the "Three Cs": Clarity, Coherence, Consensus. In addition, his bite-sized, practitioner-based articles on student success strategies, institutional planning & implementation, and educational leadership are implemented at institutions across the country. He has worked directly with over 50 colleges and universities and has trained well over 5,000 educators. He has coached colleges for over a decade, worked at two community colleges, and began his education career in K12. He earned a doctorate in education from UCLA, and is a proud community college student who transferred to Cornell University.

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