Flipping The Script On Higher Ed

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Now the second-fastest growing private university in the nation, Maryville University heralds itself as one of the few universities committed to the continual innovation and evolution of the digital learning experience.

At the helm of Maryville’s innovation is their president, Dr. Mark Lombardi. Nationally, he is recognized as a thought leader in higher education and is frequently called upon to discuss Maryville University’s significant advances in educational access, technology, and partnerships, as well as developing an individualized path for students.

We had the opportunity to sit down with Mark and talk about how he measures success at Maryville, how he approaches curriculum and experimentation in the classroom,and his vision for higher education’s new “Golden Age.”


Doug:
Mark, thank you for joining me today.

Mark:
My pleasure.

Doug:
So, Maryville University, using your own words, rigorous, technology driven, mentor inspired education. So, I got to ask, do you eat at your own dining hall?

Mark:
Sometimes I do, sometimes. But I’m usually running around at those times of the day, but yeah, I do. I do.

Doug:
Well, I mean, certainly the numbers speak for themselves for Maryville, right? The second fastest growing private institution in 2020. I mean, what are you doing? What are you doing differently?

Mark:
Well, let me give you , kind of a little context. Several years ago, I had, he’s now retired, but I had a guy who oversaw our whole IT division as well as other things. And universities are constantly incrementally trying to improve this or that. And he came to me and he said for four and a half million bucks, we can build one of the top 10%, most connected campuses in America. And I said, let’s do it. And we invested in that. And that was the platform that allowed us, not just to provide much better service to students, not just to provide higher quality education in many ways, but also expand in the online platform, expand in other arenas.

Mark:
And let’s face it, today for students, curb appeal is not how something looks, it’s how fast their phone works when they get somewhere. And that really drove a huge part of our growth, not the only thing, but it turned out to be a very good investment. And we’ve maintained and augmented that network. And of course, during the pandemic, it became invaluable for us. We were able to pivot fairly seamlessly. We had a few bumps, into an online environment in 2020, now two years ago.

Mark:
And then obviously, as we brought them back, we had all of that connectivity to help with hybrid education. So bottom line is we’ve been able to invest in the key areas that matter most to today’s student. And that’s really driven the enrollment.

Doug:
What year was that when you really made the big investment?

Mark:
It was really about 2014.

Doug:
2014.

Mark:
Yeah. And then right after that, we moved significantly into the online education space.

Doug:
Got it. I mean, some of that challenge around that is the institutional friction, right? You got a faculty that likes things a certain way. How’d you fight through that friction? Or, are you still fighting?

Mark:
No. Well, not really at all. I mean, there was some friction, but here’s what happened. We have a nationally ranked nursing program, outstanding nursing, high quality education. The nursing board pass rates are in the 90% and greater. So we said, let’s go online with nursing. If we are able to do it and do it effectively, nobody else is going to say, well, if you can do online nursing, you can’t do online philosophy. That just doesn’t make any sense.

Mark:
Because nursing has an external evaluative factor to the quality of the education. And our nursing faculty embraced it. They were wonderful. And so we went into nursing first, we were highly successful. And that really eliminated 90%, a 100% of the friction. And now of course, during the pandemic, faculty come up to me and say, thank God we went into online education. We were able to do that.

Mark:
So, people think of universities in all the stasis and all the opposition and all the rest, and that exists in a lot of places. What we’ve been able to do at Maryville is essentially gather together groups of faculty and staff who are already in an innovative space, like one-to-one with iPads, or what have you, or online, and knit those people together. And they become the Pied Pipers of what we’re doing. And that’s exactly what’s happened with the growth in online. It’s happened in a number of other initiatives we’ve taken.

Doug:
What about, I mean, I would imagine, we often say you have to be digital first to what we do to talk to the Gen Z and the younger. I don’t know what’s younger. I think Gen A, I think they’re naming it Gen A?

Mark:
They’re going to run out of letters.

Doug:
That’s true. We start over, we get to go again. So we got another hundred years, I guess. On the recruitment side and getting people looking, I would imagine you’ve gone very digital there as well?

Mark:
Yes, very much so, using various kinds of admission oriented apps, like ZeeMee, for example. And ones like that, that are very effective at developing community before students even get to you. So as they’re going through the application process, you’ve got 10 students here and five there, and two there spread out. They don’t know each other, that they’re applying, but you use the social media to knit them together before they even get here.

Mark:
And so we’ve got for our freshman class, first year class for next fall, we’ve already got a whole bunch of them that have decided they want a room with somebody based on the [crosstalk]. Yeah. And so you use the tools and you operate in the space that they’re in. You don’t make assumptions. Certainly not the way I was recruited back in the dark ages. If you did it that way, we’d have no students.

Doug:
So now let’s get … So they matriculate, off you go, year one. Tell me a little bit, where does technology live in the classroom? What’s online? What’s not? How’s that all weaved together?

Mark:
I want to first state, there is no endpoint to this. It’s an ongoing evolution. So it’s not as if boy we’ve cracked the code and we’re set up perfectly because we’re evaluating it every number of weeks and months. But what we’ve done is we’ve taken a campus and created a connectivity that is campus-wide indoor, out. It doesn’t matter where you are in that campus, you can connect and be engaged in a class, asynchronously, synchronously, et cetera. So what that does is it makes the entire campus essentially a learning classroom or a learning space. That’s the first thing. I tell presidents all the time, you have to be a learning space all over campus. You can’t have dead zones. You can’t have all those things.

Mark:
Then what we’ve done is we’ve had a very, very effective, and this is a testimony to our faculty, professional development program. It’s two weeks, it’s a week in May after graduation and a week in August before we start. And we invested, we added two weeks to every faculty member’s salary. So instead of saying, “Hey, come to this and we’ll give you a bad sandwich and a and 25 bucks.” We gave them two weeks full salary, and at about 93 nights.

Doug:
Just for technology training?

Mark:
Well, it’s for a whole series of faculty development. But the focal point is technology training, whether it’s using AR and VR in the classroom, or our other ways that we can utilize. For example, our iPad initiative, we feed out to our students 200 free learning apps that they get downloaded, and how to use those apps. So it’s all kinds of strategies. And as a result, I think the latest number we have, 93% 94% of our faculty are trained in just about all of these technologies.

Doug:
Including VR? Including AR?

Mark:
Well, I wouldn’t say they all use it at a high rate, but their knowledge and awareness of it and their ability to incorporate it is there. Now, as I said before, it’s a constant process of evaluation. Because you can never say, “Oh, we invested in this and we’re done and we’re fine.” So it’s a constant process. And we have students involved in it, students involved in telling us how they want to receive information.

Doug:
Are you seeing, we get asked a lot about effectiveness, right? How’s the technology? We use a lot of VR in simulation training and we get asked a lot about, where’s the proven effectiveness? Fortunately, there’s a lot of studies in the trade space for its effectiveness. Do you get asked for that? Have you guys run your own control group studies? What does that all look like?

Mark:
We do, but we start from this premise. The only measure of success of a university is student outcomes, graduation rate, getting a job in their chosen field and career, and progression. That’s the most important measure. Not grades, not any of that, what I call kind of nonsense, old-school stuff. But as we’re going through, we’re evaluating learning outcomes.

Mark:
For example, we piloted something in math this year, which I’m very excited about. Using AI, we took two different levels of math classes. The numbers escape me, but think of it as 101 and 201 or something. [Crosstalk]. And we put the students in those, and we combine the classes and have them progressing week to week, and then AI evaluating their progression. So instead of students, everybody has to take 101, and everybody has to take 201 next. And what we’ve been finding in that data, this is one example of many, is students are accelerating their learning and moving through. So they’re going to get credit for two courses by just going through one.

Mark:
The other though is the students that struggle at various times, we’re helping them understand exactly why and how they can progress. So, so far the data on that is fantastic. So, yeah, we’re evaluating learning progress as we go. And surveying and using AI particularly to do that. But then we’re also just laser focused on outcomes. So a 98% career placement rate. And then what happens in their careers is they move forward? That to me is really the only measure.

Doug:
I’m excited to get into the careers and the connective tissue to employers, et cetera. I want to stay on the technology just a bit longer. You hit on a couple things there. I think they’re insightful. One is you can get a little more personalized. I mean, sometimes what’s not accepted or appreciated is the computer knows exactly where someone’s understanding is. That’s tougher for a faculty member, particularly when they have a large class. Are you using that at all like to enhance that time, that faculty time?

Mark:
We’re using technology now, and again, I think we’re almost there, not completely, to build learning profiles of students before they get here. Because everyone learns differently. Everyone’s brain operates differently. Everyone can process information in different ways. We are building learning profiles of students and then letting that inform the pedagogy, not the other way around. Warehouse learning, one size fits all, that has proven to be in my opinion, a disaster. And not only that, it’s exclusionary. And it really hinders access and opportunity, which is something we’re passionate about.

Mark:
So we’re really pivoting and we’re moving from pedagogy centered on the faculty member to pedagogy centered on the learning style. Technology allows you to do that when it’s applied properly. And that’s what we’re doing and we’re excited about it. It’s just, we’re seeing some really great results. And the real push now is to just make this university-wide.

Doug:
I didn’t understand that last point. What do you mean university-wide? Because this still exists just in certain programs?

Mark:
I’d say it this way. We’re trying to create it so that particularly in the prescriptive programs, so in nursing, you can’t skip around. You’re required to go through these. So it’s not impossible. It’s just a little more difficult to make sure that people that are accelerating through don’t get frustrated. So certain, what I call the professional programs that have a prescriptive curriculum, you have to tinker and redesign and use it a little differently. But that’s certainly an issue that can be overcome. It’s not an absolute impediment.

Doug:
Got it. So, recognizing competency based paths. But at the same time, there are some, you have to check the box [crosstalk 00:00:11:58].

Mark:
Exactly. Exactly.

Doug:
Let’s stay on that, on the certificate programs or the professional programs. And I saw on some of your collateral, you’re advertising more certificate programs. And I’ve seen universities doing this more, running the classic operation. And then on the side, more certificate programs floating to the top. Tell me a little bit about what’s happening?

Mark:
Well, on the outside, it looks like we’re offering more certificates. But what really is happening inside is we are in a process of modularizing our entire curriculum. So think of it this way, think of a university, or programs not as a collection of courses. It’s really a collection of modular content that can be stackable and movable. So it would be something like this, I’ll take political science, my old discipline. I’m in political science and I’m a political its major. And I take these courses and that means if I pass them, I can graduate in politic science. Well, really it’s not the courses.

Mark:
That should not be the unit of content management. The unit of content management is skill based. I call them modules. You could call them components of knowledge and skill development. That if you put those together, regardless of what you want to call the major, you’ve got that. And you can take that and market yourself in that. That’s what we’re in the process of doing that’s so exciting. Because when you modularize content, you allow for students, learners at all levels, whether you’re 18 or 35 or 55, to go in and go, I want that. And I want that. And I want that. And I’m going to put that together, because my employer says, this is … And that’s where we’re headed.

Mark:

And it’s exciting because it empowers the learner to pick and choose. Now again, there’s always going to be a prescriptive program that someone has to in order to become a nurse or a physical therapist, doctor. You have to do this. That’s understood. That’s the profession. And I don’t want to lay on a gurney in a hospital and somebody not having gone through and gotten a good nursing degree and education. Neither would you. But everything else, the modularization is the wave of the future.

Doug:
What about, I mean, let’s go even higher level. And the challenge now, you’re certainly fighting this trend is, we’re not seeing quite the enrollments. There’s been plenty of people questioning the value of the degree now. I mean popping people in for four or five years away from a workforce and coming back and thinking, now this person is suddenly prepared for the workforce. How are you wrestling with that?

Mark:
Well, the business model of higher ed is mid-20th century and it’s broken. We’ve gored the ox, right? I mean, we charge people ridiculous amounts. I think the figure is, since 1980, the cost of … CPIs gone up 62% and education is like 168% or something. The business model’s wrong. So, as we revolutionize these elements we’ve been talking about a higher ed, the necessary, or the natural element of that is going to be this.

Mark:
We’re moving towards having higher ed be more like a subscription model. A model where like your cell phone bill or your Netflix subscription, the things that you would never think of doing without. You can pay on a monthly rate and you can access the content, right?

Doug:
Lifelong learning.

Mark:
Online, on ground, however you want to do it, hybrid. You can access that. Now, we’re not there yet.

Doug:
Yeah. How close? I mean, that sounds amazing. That’s what universities should look like.

Mark:
I’ll make a prediction for you. I think by 2025 we’ll be there. That’s where we’re going. And I think the reason is because that’s where most of us are living our lives in society today. I don’t know about you, I got a cell phone in my pocket. I don’t even know how many subscriptions I’ve got, but I know I don’t want to give any of them up, right? I sure as heck didn’t want to give up Netflix or cell phone or whatever.

Mark:
Higher education should be affordable. And that opens it up to access an opportunity for millions who’ve been closed out of it, millions of people. And that’s really the ultimate goal. But the way you open it up and lower the cost is you change this whole notion of delivery. The whole idea that it has to be four years, and you have to take these courses in sequence. That’s what creates basically a scarcity model in higher ed and also an expense issue.

Doug:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I imagine as you start envisioning that in 2025, the employers come in sooner, right? And they start participating sooner. And I know you guys have some innovative programs with local employers. So let’s talk about those programs then, perhaps talk more generally about how you see your role with employment?

Mark:
Well, we started Maryville Works two years ago, locally in St. Louis in the area. We’ve already got seven companies as part of it, with over 2,800 customers. Now that’s two years right out of the box. When I say customers, so how this works is we don’t try to go in and sell to each individual employee, “Hey, it’d be great if you got a degree, great.” We go to the employer and we say, what skill sets does this group of employees need most? If we have the expertise, our learning designers with faculty and others, design, not degree-seeking, nothing like, we design basically skill training programs.

Doug:
Skill training that run in parallel to their employment, earn and learn.

Mark:
Exactly. And it’s not the thing where it’s, hey, you got to come here on a Saturday morning and a Thursday night and all that old stuff. Online, right? Or with a hybrid component. And here’s the exciting part. The employers are designing it with us. We’re not telling them what they need. They’re telling us what they need. And when they do that, often they say, “Hey, some of our people want to help deliver this content.” Fine. That’s no problem. We train them up to do that.

Mark:
What we’re finding in these programs is groups of employees who need to skill up, now the employer doesn’t have to fire them and go find others. Doesn’t have to spend a tremendous amount of time doing something they don’t want to do, which is education. They’ve got a partner that can work with them. It’s not degree seeking. It’s not credit bearing. There’s no grade. So let’s say 50 people in the IT department at a company need to skill up. The final project developed by the employer is these employees working on that project.

Doug:
Right. But the individual also wants some recognition for that, right? They want to be able to travel with that. Like, “Hey, look, this certificate I have.” So how do you reconcile that?

Mark:
We’ve been taking that and for lack of a better term, badging it, and creating certificates. Now, sometimes employers want a white label, meaning they want to say something like the Edward Jones Certificate, that’s fine with us. Sometimes they don’t. And then we, for lack of a better term, we put a package around it. And then we say to the employee, look, you want to come to Maryville and get a cybersecurity degree. We’ll count that as life experience credit for sure, and towards that degree. If you want to go to another institution, we’ll basically validate that as a university for, if you wanted to go to a school down the street. So it’s sort of flipping the script.

Doug:
Yeah. The employers start becoming a little more primary. I mean, I guess if you don’t evolve, they become a threat, right?

Mark:
Well the employer becomes the customer. Here’s how it works. And by the way, this goes back to our conversation before. They buy subscriptions. So for example, we have a company in town, large company that foresees themselves having to train up about 500 employees in a couple of areas over the next five years. They purchased 500 subscriptions. Now they don’t have 500 people right now. They might have 50, but they see that they’re going to be doing this on a consistent basis. And that’s where that subscription model comes in.

Mark:
So think of this, employers would give an employee say up to $7,000 towards tuition remission, pick the school, pick what you want to study, whatever. Sometimes it was a good investment, sometimes not. Now employers are purchasing 500 subscriptions over a five-year period at between $500 and $1000 a subscription. A much better cost effective investment for the employer, a much more targeted in the skill, the development to help them. And also very beneficial to the employee. So it’s better, it’s smarter, it’s more effective. And certainly more cost effective.

Doug:
Do you see a day, I mean, go out 10 years. We’re seeing some trends we sell heavily in the skilled trade service companies, et cetera. They’ve basically made the argument to high school graduates like, “Hey, start earning today. And you can learn as you go. You’re going to earn and learn. Don’t go away.” I mean, in 10 years, do we see the enrollment numbers look different because it’s subscription? What do the numbers [crosstalk]?

Mark:
Well, 57% of everyone studying at a college today is over the age of 25. So really we’re already there. The idea that 18 to 22 year old make up, they make up the bulk of the college population because that’s who you see in the stands cheering at football games and whatnot. But the reality is that the majority of people in higher ed are working adults. And here’s the interesting part. I’m so sick and tired of reading about the demographics of high school, it’s declining. We’re about to enter a golden age of education. There are 46 million Americans right now, working Americans with college credit, but no degree. They either have to get education for a degree or they’ve got to skill up or do both. Yeah.

Mark:
The reality is the market for education is exploding and expanding. If we take the blinders off and think that it’s all about recruiting 17 and 18 year olds and realize, there’s a whole population out there that is going to have to develop and learn new skills and educational elements to continue to move through their career or the other careers that they’re going to be choosing.

Doug:
Right. Yeah. That makes sense. One thing I’ve seen and I’ve seen it with some of my friends who are parents now of kids just about to enter college, and hopefully they won’t watch this because I’m going to mildly insult them. It feels a little bit like sometimes they’re chasing a status. Like, “Oh my daughter, Sally’s going to XYZ University.” And it feels more like, “Hey, we just bought a BMW.” It doesn’t quite feel like we’re doing this because it’s absolutely the best education for our daughter.

Mark:
I’m not going to blame the parents or blame the students, I’m going to blame higher ed. We’ve spent the last 120, 150 years creating what essentially is an elitist model. And we know that because all the schools that are ranked highest in whatever rankings you look at are the ones that let the least amount of students in. Now think about that. In order to be the best, you’ve got to deny more students to come in. It is the epitome of an exclusion model. And then it creates all this status around it.

Mark:
If you’re telling me that the best place to go, the best restaurant, the best university, the best, is the place that you can’t get into? I don’t know about you, but as a working class guy from the East Coast, I find it insulting. And also I find it ridiculous because think of all the talent that is closed out because of that. And the elements of race and gender and all those other elements that exist and underneath the surface.

Mark:
The future of higher ed is an access opportunity model. It’s the reverse of that. It’s everyone that you can think of has talents and abilities. They may be aware of them. They may not be aware of them. Our job is to help them find out what they are and empower them. Some of them are going to get a degree. Some of them are going to get a certificate. Some of them are going to engage in lifelong skill development. There are multiple platforms or pathways for them to go. And the idea that there’s only one pathway is crazy.

Doug:
Right. Right. I mean, with the success you’re having, and if you were a football coach, you know you’d be recruited to run one of the bigger programs. And you’ve been there since 2007, right? Do you say, I’ve got a vision, we’re going to take Maryville to the next level? I mean, what do you personally, what are your goals?

Mark:
Well, I’m old enough and I’ve made enough mistakes in my life to know that when you find the right place, you never take it for granted. And I love Maryville University. But I was blessed. I came to a university that was a good, solid, quality university. But it didn’t yet see what it could be. And then we had a bunch of people there who had various pieces of this vision in their minds or in what they were doing, faculty and staff. And then we brought some other people together.

Mark:
But the most important thing is Maryville University is a place where the silos had never gotten that big. And so as a result, I didn’t have this huge, hundred million dollar donor who refused to, or this or that. And I had a board of trustees who were largely in the business world where their businesses were revolutionizing at the same time. And they might not have understood all the educational elements we’ve been talking about, but they understood the need to adapt to the digital revolution of this century.

Mark:
So, it became this wonderfully element. I think of it like a mosaic, right? All these different pieces, we were able to put them together in a way. And now the sky’s the limit. So, this is my last job.

Doug:
Yeah. Okay. I mean, and to disrupt something like that, like an institution, literal institution that’s been so anchored, it’s hard to do. So you need that support.

Doug:
You wrote a book, Pivot: A Vision for the New University. I mean, you use the word pivot, which is really interesting. Pivot is the term they often use with technology companies, right? “Ah, this model’s not exactly working, let’s pivot.” I mean, obviously that was deliberate. Tell me about that. Tell me about the book generally, but also about the title.

Mark:
Well, it was a collaboration with Joanne Soliday, who’s a great educator, who is a very successful, helping build Elon University for example, among others. We’ve been coming to this conclusion for a while in working together, was there’s a revolution in education, the business model, the education, all the things we’ve been talking about, it’s got to happen. If it doesn’t happen, higher ed will collapse as an industry. But nobody wants that to happen. Nobody wants to turn over education to the, forgive me, to the Googles and Amazons of the world. As they say their tender mercies, if you will.

Mark:
So we said, look, higher education can remake itself and be even more vibrant and more important than ever, but it’s got to pivot. And so when we started talking about doing the book, I said, look, because Joanne had consulted with us or whatever. And she always said, “It always feels like when I’m at Maryville, I’m at a startup tech company and everything.” And so we started thinking about titles and we said, this about a pivot.

Mark:
And we want to give universities, particularly leaders, a pathway or pathways to make that pivot. And that’s why we, in there, we talk about, I call the false narrative around consensus. The idea that if you’re going to do something in higher ed first, you got to get everybody to agree. This is America, nobody, everybody didn’t agree about anything.

Doug:
You can’t even buy a pizza with six people.

Mark:
Exactly. And consensus is always been the way higher education thwarts change. So chasing consensus makes no sense. And we went through the principles of how do you get institutions to see things differently, pivot and then make those changes? And there were some excellent examples with the case studies that were in there that Joanne oversaw.

Mark:
So it was a fun ride. It was a great project. I will be honest with you though, there were a lot of things that I wanted to say in there that Joanne wouldn’t let me. She’s a much more diplomatic.

Doug:
There’s a hint of consensus attention. You want to make sure you’re not too far … At Interplay, our worldview is anchored around better careers, better lives. And that’s why we show up every day. And education, we skip education in that statement. What are we doing wrong? And where do you guys fit in that vision of better careers, better lives?

Mark:
Well, I can say this because I was a faculty member for a good 15, 16 years before I went into administration. Or as they say, I went to the dark side of the force. Let’s just say for sake of argument, self-evident, right? Education is an inherent good. There are very few people that would argue it isn’t. But what happens with educators over time, decades really, is their focus becomes insular on their discipline, their program, their college, their own stuff. And it’s a slow drip, drip, drip kind of thing.

Mark:
They start to think about the delivery of education in terms of what they know and what they’re delivering to students with the idea that if I deliver to you what I know, somehow down the road, your life’s going to be better. That may very well be true. There may be some truth to that, but that’s not the primary purpose of education. The primary purpose of education is to empower people in their careers and in their lives. Empowering people means skills and abilities.

Mark:
And so if I start with, I believe in liberal arts education, I do. But I don’t believe that’s where you start. I think you start with skills and abilities and they weave in the liberal arts dimensions of that rather than the other way around. What Maryville’s done very effectively is to put the right balance on those two elements, I think. As opposed to all of one or all of the other.

Doug:
Certainly a unique perspective and really appreciate you joining us today. This has really been fascinating. Thanks Mark.

Mark:
Well, my pleasure. Thank you.

Doug:
Appreciate it.