Closing the Education-to-Employment Gap: The Rise of the Career Center as Campus Infrastructure

Today's special episode is sponsored by Ripen, the number one project based learning platform for institutions, learners, and employers. Hey everybody, this is Darren Francis with Harbinger Lane and Signals in Higher Ed. With me today, Patrick Madsen, University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Patrick, thanks for coming. Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, yeah. Well, so we're talking about experiential learning. We've been doing this for like the last three months. We've got another, you know, ten plus episodes lined up to do on this topic. It's great to talk to you, really understand what's going on at Charlotte in terms of experiential learning. I think before we get into that, you've got one of those titles that's hard to put on the badge at the conference, I imagine. Very long title that just keeps going, right? Higher education. That's right, yeah. But you are the Associate Dean for Advising and Experiential Learning and the Executive Director of the Career Center at UNC Charlotte. So let's start there. Unpack that a little are these rules? I tried to start the bar low when I first started, but I I guess I guess I didn't do a good job. Yeah. So that that's it's a big position, and, you know, I like that because for me, I like to try to solve problems on this campus and or any university I'm at. So, essentially, my position comes down to two parts, really. One is helping students maximize their time at this university, and then the other part is making sure that they have skills and experience before they graduate. And, you know, when you when you do those two things correctly, I think, students will have a great experience, and they'll find that that career success post graduation. So all the, you know, units and whatnot that report into this position, they're a part of that giant puzzle. I wish I could say I do it alone, but you know what? They all do it, and I just make they just make me look good. So maybe talk a little bit about how you got into it. Did you get in from the career center first? Did you enter in from the academic side? So my professional journey started about twenty six, twenty seven years ago. And how I got into the career center career counseling gig was actually first through my graduate assistantship and during my counseling program and then an internship. So we always tell students that internships matter and it mattered for me. And I can remember way back then, I got the opportunity to do career counseling, which was a part of the counseling center, not the career center back then. And I remember finding joy doing that. And the joy for me was seeing students put the pieces together, figure out why they're studying, what they're gonna do, and and then seeing it actually make it happen. And so it was really cool to see that. And I think that sparked that energy and joy for me to continue on twenty six, twenty seven years later. Even in my counseling program, I remember this quote from my career counseling course. It was from Carl Rogers, a theorist. And he said, a career is an expression of who you think you are. And when you think about that that fact that we're all here to, you know, spend our time doing work, it needs to be a good job. It needs to be purposeful work and not just a job where you do things. And so all that kind of put it together, and that's what keeps me going these days. I'm curious, though. I mean, over almost three decades, you've seen some evolution in this space, I know you've worked at a few different institutions. What do you think has been the biggest shift that you've seen in that time? Yeah. Yeah. Almost thirty years, and I know I look like I'm still a college student. But I think, you know, I think back, you know, over that span of time and literally my first university versus the one I'm at now. So my first university, I got that full time job at from that internship. The career center was located across the street from the university in an old house. And I can remember during my first year of employment there, students would be like, where are you? I can't find you. It's across the street. Oh, I don't want to go over there. And then flash forward to my current university where our physical career center is in the middle of campus where students are walking by seeing it all the time. And and I think that kinda says the the big, difference between back then and now is that what has changed is the career center as a as a concept for universities has gone from that thing over there where you do resumes and and you have on campus, job interviews to an integrated central return on investment aspect for colleges and universities. I mean, heck, past twenty years, every constituent from employers to families to students to to many others are saying the reason I go to college is to better myself job wise, but also get knowledge. Those go to in hand in hand. It's not one or the other. And so I see that that huge shift. And then you couple that with the shift in the population. So today, gosh, you know, nationwide, some of the stats say that forty percent or more of our students are working while they're in college. At UNC Charlotte, it's upwards about eighty seven percent of our students are working while they go to college. And I think when we start digging into this experiential learning thing, that's a big factor there. Twenty five percent nationwide have kids while they're in college. And when you start to think about this idea of nontraditional student or traditional student, seventy three percent of students these days are nontraditional, which means they're coming in with all kinds of life stories versus that traditional eighteen year old, you know, with zero credit hours, you know, and the the stars in their eyes for college. So it's big, and and I think that's why return on investment is becoming this this big conversation for higher education. Yeah, I mean certainly the non traditional learner has become the majority. It's a really interesting pivot that institutions have had to make over the last number of years, and many are still in that transition. In the next ten years, there's going to be a whole massive change. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about that. I mean, like, where are things today on campus around experiential learning? What are you trying to achieve today? Like what is and then we'll talk about the future too, but like what's happening today? Maybe even pivot back and say, Well, here's where we were and here's where we are today, but just give us a sense of the level of experiential learning that you're doing today on campus. Yeah, I think that's a huge question, and there's always this debate of what is experiential learning versus internships, and really what it comes down to is making sure that our students have real world hands on experience with their discipline of choice. And so I'm very proud of our university that campus leadership has deemed we're going to make sure that every student will have opportunity to get an internship and get that experience and skills before they leave us. I think that's fantastic. Now I'm going to say my personal goal is one hundred percent of students will have skills and experience before they leave us in some form or another Because when you think about the research that's out there, NACE, the National Association of Colleges Employers, says that eighty percent of employers look for their talent from their internship pool. And so if we want to get our students good jobs, as defined by Georgetown's Center for Work Research, if you will, I'm butchering their name, we want to make sure that we have these opportunities for our students to do that. And what's even bigger around that is that when you couple that with that idea of eighty seven of our students work part time and full time, I think back to my days, a couple jobs I I worked while I was in college to pay for college, Kmart, if you remember that, and Frame Shop. I couldn't quit those jobs to do an internship, and back then, of them were unpaid in my my area of psychology, I wouldn't be able to afford that. And today's students, it's even more of the case. And so we have to find different avenues, different ways for them to get experience, whether it's in the classroom, micro internships, gigs is what we call them, and many other different forms rather Darren, what you and I grew up with, which is that traditional full time experience where you're working for an employer. We still have those in co ops, but it's got to be a broader set of opportunities for our students. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess at a school as large as yours, and with the diverse student population, setting aside the old traditional route of internships, you kind of pointed into several paths for these experiences. What excites you? Where do you feel like the more scalable and meaningful options are, if you have to try and get that sweet spot. You know, what excites me is the challenge. You know, I think it's a challenge of not just finding more internships, if you will. It's more about how do we create structures that outlast me so that students continue to have these these opportunities, whether it's a great economy or a bad economy? How do we create processes and structures to make it as easy as possible for employers to be a part of the university, ecosystem and to make it easy for faculty to embed these into their curriculum? I and and the team that we're a part of here, we're trying to make everything fast, smooth, and simple so that people can just plug and play so that these students can get these experiences. And so I think when you think about what is being successful, our gig internship program is basically project based learning. And it's amazing to see when we opened that up a couple semesters ago, how many students were like, yes, I can do that. That's what I can participate in because I can't quit that other job that I have. And you start seeing it on their resume, and you know that it's starting to work and and make that movement. And then, you know, when we think about, getting this stuff into the classroom and making it required, and, Darren, I don't know if you know, there's there was research out there that says, career services is still an optional thing. And the research showed that only nine percent of colleges and universities require career education in their system. I mean, that's interesting. Now, that is going to be starting to shift as we start to make it easy and smooth for these different constituents to connect together. And so when you think about what's working, it's got to be discipline specific. One size does not fit all. What we do for a psychology department is going be different than what we might do with our engineering department. And I think that's the key to think about it. Now really quick, there's another research part with NACE's internships, and it talked about how many internships are out there. And a lot of times you might hear from administrators or those that are avid, just, Go find more internships for our students. And that's easy to be said, but guess what? Nationwide during this research, about eight million college students were looking for internships. And at that time of the research, there was only three point five million internships out there and only two point five of those three point five million were actually quality internships. So we know the students want it and we want to make it also easy for our employers to develop internships to fill that gap. So it's not easy just to go find them. We have to find different ways to build these structures. So you're building out the structures, you're creating more opportunity that fits into the flow of how a student can show up and participate. There's curricular versus co curricular angle I want to get into, and then there's also just, regardless of that, just tracking participation rates and understanding what that looks like. Because you want to get to one hundred percent, but you've got to have a bar in terms of where you're at. Number is, yeah. Yeah, right, right. So take either of those first, whichever makes more sense, but I'm real curious about how you think about curricular versus co curricular, how you think about the math of tracking it over time to make sure that students are getting the experiences, but they're also getting them at the right time and in a way that they can take advantage of them fully. Yeah. I think that those are great questions. So let's start with the cocurricular versus curricular. I call it the arc of development. Right? What we know is that when we're trying to embed something into the curriculum, it takes time. It takes a lot of politics. It takes a lot of discussion. We have to figure it in fit it in. Whatever fits in, something has to come out. We have to make sure it's it's got, the ability to track outcomes and assessment and SLOs and all the fancy words that that we have in higher education. And so when you think about that, that takes time. Now we can't just say it's too much time. It's too hard. Let's not do it. We have to do it. But in the meantime, cocurricularly, we can move fast. And so I'll give you an example from UNC Charlotte. Many other universities are in this boat as well. It's not just us. Cocurricularly, our career center, reports into university college. We're a part of academic affairs. And so that allows us as university college to have the ability to create courses, which means we can create internship type courses to actually be able to build these internship programs, whether it's the gig internship or a virtual internship program or a new, group internship program and so on and so forth. And so as we're helping our faculty build these integrated required into the curriculum internship opportunities or project based learning, we can quickly, you know, up get up to speed on everything else to help our students continue to get it. That and that makes it so that by the time they get things situated in the curriculum, we didn't miss out on all these students their opportunity to get something while we're waiting for that process to happen. So the arc of development takes time. Doing both of them at the same time is very important. When you think about how do you track this, oh, it's it's a lot, and I'll tell you what we do here. So at our university, this we're in our third cycle now. We track every junior and every senior and, of course, graduate students in partnership with our graduate school on who got something and who didn't. And the the things that we track for our experiential learning aside from do you work part time or full time while you're in college, that's not experiential learning. That's just a a bucket there, although we could have a debate on on that. We, of course, track internship co op. We track study abroad experiences. We track research experiences, and then we also track, anything that's embedded into the curriculum. So you think about your nursing, your education, and your social work. That's one and done. We don't have to worry about them. It's required in there. And so we track all of those, and that's, you know, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand records per year that we're going one by one trying to figure out if they have something. Now we have twenty five plus data sources that we pull from, and then we, of course, using Excel right now, get it all put together so that we have our starting point. And all this information is on our website so people can see what it is that we do. We have a very cool OneIT, team on this campus who's gonna automate that to make my life a little bit easier moving forward. But I think that gives us, Darren, what you're saying, what's your starting point so that you can actually know where you're going? And what's the really cool thing about the, at least, the past couple years of us doing this is now we can actually have the the real picture as best as it can be of which programs which academic programs need our support more so than others. And so when you think about engineering and nursing, they're fine, whereas other programs might need a little bit more tender loving care, little bit more integration, a little bit more of our bandwidth or the types of employers that they might be looking for. And so it makes our job strategy wise so much easier to move our resources around because, frankly speaking, today's world, you know, resources are ebbing and flowing as higher education changes, and we have to be much more strategic than what we were twenty seven years ago of just go get more internships. When a program is someone's coming to you to do more in their program. What does that look like? I mean, who is it that's making the request? What's the downward pressure in their world that happened that said, Oh man, I got to go talk to Patrick. So, our career center, we have a whole team who helps with, what I call the eco the career ecosystem. You know? So what we're trying to do is move the needle away from a just a career service to a career ecosystem where everybody on campus is having this career mindset. So we have a a number of academies, a number of consulting services that we do where it could be the department head comes to us and says, we wanna work through your processes. Sometimes it's a small group of faculty, who start it, so ground up, and sometimes it's the dean that says, hey. This is what we wanna have happen. So the consulting process is soup to nuts. We wanna know you know, let's look at what does your curriculum look like, what are the skills that you're teaching these students that match NACE's, you know, career competencies, and how do you translate it so students understand that they actually are getting, you know, skills and cool experiences from classroom projects and those those homework, you know, the homework that those mean old faculty make them do? How do we make sure that students realize that? I think we we assume students can make those those connections, and most career centers spend a lot of time doing that for the students. So we look at that, and then we ask them what are some of the experiences that that students get to be a part of, whether it's a, you know, simulations in in classes or real life projects that from a real life employer, not from a book. And then what do you do for require internship or not require internship and why? And then from there, we provide them, you know, recommendations and how we can support and how we can plug and play. And and I gotta tell you, when when the want is there, the motivation is there from department, we can make it happen. It's it's not a problem of can we do it. It's here you go. Let's make this thing happen. And so I think we're getting a huge response. And when you talk about the pressures, I call them the forces of nature. And so the forces of nature are sometimes politics get in there, sometimes the economy, sometimes budget, sometimes, you know, the the unknown, and those are always happening. And I'm gonna tell you that probably for the past twenty years, most of the research out there and the and the chatter has been around higher education needs to pivot, and university industry partnerships are very, very important to make sure that students are getting the return on investment, not soaking up debt and things of that nature. So it's been coming for a long time, and it's here now. So I would be curious about like a success story that you find relatively unique. Maybe it even surprised you, what I'm thinking about is that clearly, they are the early movers, you know. Business schools have been doing this for a long time. You mentioned nursing and teaching, and several other good examples, but when somebody new, based on some of the downward pressure that you talked about, comes to you and makes something happen, are there some success stories that come to mind that are pretty unique, whether they be the use case themselves or even the results that you saw that surprised you? Surprise might be the big word, but I'll tell you, when you think about, like, is there a particular program that has, you know, some sort of success? Let me tell you some of the success around the processes, which I think is more encompassing of of helping the entire university. So two things come to mind in in the tenure that I've had at UNC Charlotte. One is, when I first arrived and I was doing my research and understanding, you know, of what the current situation is, there were a lot of academic programs that that did not have an internship class as part of their, even if optional. Right? And so a lot of students, a lot of them in your liberal arts and humanities types of courses, if an employer said, hey. The only way I can bring you on is if you get academic credit, that student was out, which means they didn't get that opportunity. And so the easiest thing that we were able to fix because, again, we're in university colleges, we created the courses, and we closed all the gaps across campus. So every single student has the opportunity to to get credit for that internship. Everything's taken care of. I think that was a big win, and I think it's a very silent big win. Right? And then the second thing is we noticed that some programs were managing their internships by pencil and paper or an Excel spreadsheet. And so if that person left, ****, that is all gone. We noticed that our university didn't have all the information of where our students currently are interning. And and the way I describe it is, what if there was a hurricane in Florida and we had ten students down there that we didn't know about? We would not be able as a university to check-in on them to make sure they're okay because we wouldn't know. The only way you would know is if the chancellor asked the provost, provost asked the dean, the dean asked the chair, and the chair hopes that the faculty member kept information of where their interns are. And so the win for us was we created a technology to streamline all the paperwork for them. So it just bounces approval from one person to the next. We have all that information for historical records and to keep these employers happy to come back and get more of our student interns. And so those are two very simple quiet wins that I think have changed the game. I think there's a there's a there's a it feels unique. You tell me if this is unique, but it feels unique when you say that all of this innovation that your team is responsible for sits in academic affairs, as opposed to sitting outside from back across the street, back in your other scenario you mentioned. And I wonder what that affords you. Is it that you're kind of given more license to innovate because you're closer to the heart of the mission in a certain way? Does it afford you a greater ability to engage with peer to peer your colleagues on the academic side? Help me understand sort of what you see are some of the key benefits, because I feel like this is happening more in different types of institutions, and I'm just curious how how you see it. Yeah. I think what you're speaking to is where does a career center fall organizationally at a university or college. Yeah. And the shift over my time in this in this profession has moved from student affairs to academic affairs. Now we still have a lot of them in student affairs, but I I wanna say the majority of them are moving towards and or already in academic affairs. There's a small sliver of them that report into advancement, which, I have my own opinions on, but those are the three kind of categories that you see. I've been in student affairs, and I've been in academic affairs. This university, it's always been academic affairs. And I can tell you that, you you match that with the general change over the past twenty twenty plus years that I've been doing this and the multiple institution I've been at. Every institution has their own personality, their own approach to this. But I would say, in general, what I have heard from career centers and my experience as well is that being in academic affairs gives you the opportunity and the ability to integrate better into the curriculum because you're all kind of under that same umbrella. And then a lot of times, you get that the oomph of the of the, campus leadership academic affairs to also help you kinda get into those corners that you might be a little bit harder to get into from student affairs. Now the thing that I've been really impressed about this university, which was one of the many reasons that I decided to come here, about ten years ago now, is that student affairs and academic affairs at this institution have been joined at the hip and top down. And that's not as common as you might think out there. And I think that's important because what we wanna provide our students is an academic experience, the ability for them to get skills and experience, but also we want them to engage on campus. As all the research says, when they're in clubs and organizations, frats and sororities, leadership programs, they actually do better retaining, lowering their student debt and finding great opportunity post post college. Like, we we know that. And so that join at the hip sort of thing at this university, I think, is paying off. Yeah, feels like it. When you talked about your ability to kind of move faster on the co curricular side, I wonder if being in academic affairs also gives you that ability to identify some of the work that's being done co curricularly and start to build it into the curriculum over time. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's been awesome to be and I get to be at the table of student affairs leadership. They're great people here. And by listening to their conversations, if I'm moving into an academic department to talk about x, y, and z, I can bring in the leadership pro program along with me or the wellness coaches or the whatever it might be to to give them more of a holistic look of how we can make sure your student is thriving in your academic program in this institution, which drives up retention, which makes everything feel better because, you know, budgets and retention go hand in hand and career success and time to graduation, all these, you know, things that we hear about higher education. We wanna make sure that students start and they finish and they feel joy and energy in doing that with a college or a university. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with John Rinde at a regional comprehensive university in Pennsylvania, Slippery Rock University. Their model, the career services area, is it actually sits under enrollment, and enrollment is actually student success. It's actually everything from enrollment to graduation. So the net effect in John's world has been that it's pushed him further, I guess upstream, towards those incoming students, to helping students identify and feel more secure in their major, which has an impact on their retention and so on. Because really, at a regional comprehensive, you also got a lot more challenges around retention. But they were able to, in his time, go from like eighty one percent retention to like eighty six percent retention, and they really attribute a lot of that to helping students get further, to further identify with, and feel solid in their major choice, giving them early experiences that sort of reinforce that, and moving forward. And I'm curious, at an institution like yours, do you does that resonate for you, or do you feel like the metrics kind of have to be different based on sort of the student profile that you have? That's it. I think that's a good question, and and it absolutely does resonate. I think every college and university needs to look at the life cycle of a student and understand how they ebb and flow throughout the entire thing, not just the class to class, you know, course to course, if you will, but the entire experience. And it matters because students, these days are very, very much wanting return on investment. They're wanting to know what what's in it for me and why. Why are you making me do this? Why are you making me do these hundred and twenty credit hours when I actually wanna do those? And so I think universities have to really think through that. And so the life cycle of a student, and you talk about experiential learning and and giving them hands on experience, during those early term, you know, semesters, if you will, much like it sounds like my colleagues up there are doing, it's about providing them simulations and opportunities to solve micro problems. And maybe it'll be with real world employers, maybe not. But at least if you have hands on, can discover, yes, I do like math, or, oh, heck, no, I don't like math, instead of going four semesters into math finding out that I don't really like math. And then moving forward into those middle semesters, if you will, your sophomore, junior, if you will, that's where you get those more hefty projects. And they will should be with real life employers, whether it's in the classroom or micro internships or real internships. And then you get those more advanced level. And can you imagine? I bet you every single employer who might be listening to this podcast right now would say yes to this is that if they had a university or a curriculum that had all of that scaffolded required in their curriculum, they would go after those candidates because now you have much more value and proof that students not just listened in class, but they actually had to apply it, which means they probably started building those that critical thinking, that hands on experience, and figuring out how to solve and pivot or solve problems and pivot on a dime. Because I think the the future of work is gonna be less about can you do Java and these concrete skills and more about the humanness on can you think and can you pivot and can you be agile for things that we don't even know what's happening in the next next twenty years? And that's what students need to practice, I think, in college. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the institutional investment, and I don't necessarily just mean money, but when a new program wants to launch and or I should say wants to be more strategic and build more experiences into the curriculum, or even more support around the curriculum, what does that look like in terms of specifically on your team, like what are the roles on your team that engage? What are the roles from those programs? Who needs to come together? Who needs to do that shared work to problem solve in in in that way? Yeah. So if new programs are being built up or existing programs wanna retool, first, they'll reach out to either myself or or one of my main colleagues who manages the ecosystem sorts of things. And and, actually, this morning, I was in a a leadership meeting, and there was a couple programs that were saying, hey. We're starting in the fall, and one of the bullets was and we're paying attention to career education, career success, and experiential learning. And I was like, yes. There it is. It's right there. But aside from that, it depends on what they're trying to do. So if it's career education embedded into the curriculum, they're going to go with our career education team, the coaches, if you will, and they're going to help them put in things like how do you do a LinkedIn profile, or do you figure out motivation versus your skills and your purpose, and things of that nature. And then if the program is looking at how do we make sure to do that scaffolding sort of experiential learning, that's where they're gonna meet with our employer engagement team to say, well, what is it you're trying to achieve? What's the bandwidth that you have, and what are the different channels you're hoping for so that we can make sure to create sustainable structures so that when we do bring these employers and these projects to your department, somebody picks up the baton, if you will, and make sure that they're taken care of and they're embedded and take and and managed appropriately. And and I can tell you that, you know, I've been at another university where that didn't happen very well, and you get all these great employers that are like, yes. I wanna be able to give you a project or an internship, and can you introduce me to that faculty member? It didn't go so well, that employer didn't come back. We want to make sure that all those ties and the structures make sense. That's how we operate with campus. We'll go as fast as they want, or if they're kinda still thinking it through, that's okay too. And we'll we'll we'll be with them every step of the way. That's a great way in which to scale this work. I think when we spoke last, you hit on this one percent stat, this idea of one percent of an institutional budget is going towards career education. Yeah, so there's an article a few years ago and it was talking about resource allocation, right, and how are how is the shifting times. And and one of the stats was around, in general nationwide, only about one percent of a total institution's budget is career education. When you look at the stats of why people look at college, you know, the number one is career. Now that doesn't mean that universities are bad. They're not putting enough money. I think it's that and career centers in higher education today are faced with new challenges that we haven't been faced with before. You know, population decline, population changing, all those forces of nature that we can talk about, you know, another time. And and I think what we're finding is in this pivoting moment, we're learning at, here are the current resources that are allotted. How do we maximize them and use them more efficiently versus what we did years ago? So years ago, it was one student at a time. I'm gonna meet with every single one of them. We can't sustain that with ten career coaches, but what we can do is embed it into the into the whole entire system, which means you could still handle thirty two thousand students with the same number of staff members as long as the systems and these and the and the programs are set up effectively. And that's that movement from service to ecosystem that that we're doing here, and I think a lot of other career centers are doing across the nation. When you do go to the level of scaling around that, I just see a lot of data, and and you mentioned the spreadsheet. Are there technology partners that are emerging specifically to take this on? Or do you feel like this is a gap in the market? I work with a lot of startup companies. I don't have one in mind. I'm just wondering, like like like, is this There's a huge array, and especially with, you know, this this thing of AI that I keep hearing about. Right? I I think it's new. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. They're popping up all over the place. And then so you have those who have been around for a while that, continue to get in the market, and then there's brand new ones that, you know, have all kinds of cool ideas. And I think that, you know, a lot of the career centers, my colleagues across the nation probably getting bombarded, which is great. We see great innovation out there. Here's the problem. There's still no more money. And so when a vendor approaches me like, Patrick, I got this great idea to solve your problem. I'm like, fantastic. I'm willing to listen to you. I'm willing to give you my experience with higher education. Then the bottom line is how much? And they're like, thousand dollars a year. And I'm like, yeah. Okay. My budget is x. I like, that's gonna be a big conversation that I gotta get the provost involved, the chancellor involved, and it your product better work. And it and it can't be this thing where it's like, oh, it's fantastic. I will give you marketing material to help students. That's fantastic. But if it doesn't do what you're saying it's gonna do, then I just wasted a hundred grand on you, and I also look bad. And so there's a lot of vendors, but there's a lot of really good ones out there. And and I my advice and, again, my colleagues across the nation are are probably in the same boat as me is if I'm gonna bring on a vendor, then I'm gonna make sure it it it fits into the overall strategy that we're trying to build at this university and and in the career center. And I'll tell you what, vendors wanna get in, offer a pilot for free for two semesters so that we can see if this thing even does anything before we you start charging us money. Mean, if they really wanna do that, that's how you're gonna get in. Yeah. I'm even thinking before that. Like I'm thinking that as you've described this ecosystem, you've created something tailor made in order to scale and solve particular problems. And A, it makes me think that you've scaled fairly well, and so what you created works, right? It almost feels a little more to me like a different kind of startup. One that hasn't really built their products yet, needs to come alongside you and go, What can we build to actually support the workflows that you've established, and then go prove that out in the market other places? Right? Yeah, like a consulting room that comes in and says, Tell me your pain points, and let me engineer something, and then we'll see where it Yeah, just because, and I guess what I'm, what I'm, what I'm always looking for and I find it more in your world than I see it in other parts of the, of higher ed, is that you're faced with a you're faced with a scaling challenge that it is, it's not happening in other parts of the market. Like so, so someone who's just responsible for the teaching and learning infrastructure and the learning management system, and yes, there are new technologies that come about all the time, but the truth is, is that they've got their core learning management system, and that's what's scaling the whole thing. And it's allowing them to have all of these different things that allow that learning management system, they can look across data sets galore, pull from it, right? You have employer partnerships that you're tracking, you have co curricular components you're tracking, curricular components that you're tracking, you know, student participation levels, and a whole host of other things that I don't I don't know, maybe they are already tracked within your system in some other way. And you're right, there's no money for there's not new money for this stuff, but if there was justification for a new system to emerge, it may be in the space that you're in, and I just I'm just curious if you if that resonates with you or if that feels like it's already being accomplished and isn't isn't a necessary layer. When you pull that thread of thought, there are a couple of vendors that are out there that do the soup to nuts for the career center sort of stuff, and they've been around for a number of years. They do a good job, but I think as we start to move to this new thing of higher education, I think it's going to demand a patchwork of different things because every institution has its own personality and its own DNA of what they're trying to accomplish, us included. And so when have a vendor who says, I can do it all for you, I have a big red flag because usually it's here's the product out of the box. I'm not gonna let you customize it. And if you do, it's gonna cost you, you know, bunches of money. I prefer to be more nimble. And so we have a a fantastic innovative IT team here who really got us going with a lot of this stuff. And so we were able to create our own dashboards. We were able to create and automate our own first destination survey that costs tens of thousands of dollars if a vendor is going to do it for you. That saves my university money, and it ups the ROI. And it may not be as perfect as what a vendor can do, but it's good enough for what our constituents need. And then I can use those resources that I do have for those things that are that are not out there. And that's where that experiential learning, you know, report and data collection. And I think, again, my IT team is gonna automate that and and really try out new new things. And and that way, I'm also not reliant on one vendor who might raise their prices over the years, and then suddenly I'm stuck. You know? And so it's a big game, but I but I think vendors are are filling the space nicely, and I think they're trying. And I think there's a it's an interesting opportunity to see where we go in the next ten years. But I think even in the experiential learning space, there's some really cool things that have come out there that help students with simulations and embedding and and and structuring things so that it makes it easier for the faculty member. Those are a lot of things that a lot of universities are using, including us, to figure out how do we expand knowing that we may not have more human bodies to do this work, and I think that's where we use the stuff that's out there. You alluded to learning management systems. Canvas always comes to mind. That's what's on our campus. You look at it and it's class based and they create all cool things. When you look at that from a career center's perspective, you're like, how can I use that same technology to solve these problems that they may not have thought of for a course, and that's what we're doing? That's where we start to use instructional designers to automate a lot of our teachings so that we can use our humanness with students when they can actually read about how to build a resume and practice it, and then come talk to me, the human, for a great dialogue. There's real innovation happening that you're able to capture and scale, And it feels like a lot of these conversations I'm having with people within institutions are doing, to your point, it may have to be a patchwork thing because everybody's doing it a little differently. Really quick, you know, the other thing too is it relies on really good campus leadership. Like, I have a great chancellor and provost and other and and and VC of student affairs who believe in this stuff. So, like, if you don't have that as an institution or they just say, yes, jobs are great, then you can't get stuff done. You gotta have a great IT team who's innovative and and wanting to do something instead of the traditional IT stuff, and I got that. And then the players on this campus, I mean, it's just one of those, like, we're gonna find the challenge. We're gonna meet the challenge. We're gonna overcome that challenge, and we continue to do that, as best we can. If you don't have those parts as an institution, then, yeah, you're right. It's gonna be a weird patchwork that probably won't work, and it's just gonna cause more issues later on. What's happening differently because of the way that you're combined versus in other situations where these things have been separate? Yeah, and to be clear, the way our structure is here is the career center, I can boss them around. Our exploring advising group, I can boss them around, And then the other part of my job is to facilitate the rest of the advising experience moving in the same direction, even though I can't boss them around fully. Right? And I think that's a good in between because a lot of times institutions play around with this idea. Should we be decentralized or should we be fully centralized? One can have an argument for each one. I kind of like what we have set up here where we have this guiding force, a few of us at the top moving things in one direction, making sure there's a good baseline, a good common experience if you hop from that major to that major over there, but also the realization that a business school does advising a little bit different than our arts and architecture or our engineering college or the health care college. So all of them need to have that flexibility to adjust because their curriculums demand different things. And then same thing with experiential learning. It's my job to make sure that ecosystem for experiential learning is happening. It's going to look a little bit different in business than it does in engineering. Then we're filling the gaps along the way. And so I think to answer your direct question, it works better than what it used to in the past because everything is a silo a lot of times in higher education. And when you're doing academic advising in silos, even from which, you know, this academic adviser doesn't talk to that academic adviser and every every college does things differently, and they don't talk to the career coaches or work in tandem and then all the others, then the student gets a a a shifty type of experience. And we would waste money and time because we're not working hand in hand. And so I think going back to the idea of part of the Career Center's job is to train up all academic advisors, all faculty who want it on how to have career conversations with students, it makes it more seamless for our students to understand who's there to help them maximize their time on college. I told you I had a big job, man. Right? Mean, it's big job. And I can't say that I do it myself because we got some wonderful people in academic advisors all the way through. I mean, they are really cool people at this institution. You and your team become, you have this interesting view, right? Because what we didn't talk about yet, really, has been also so you've got students, faculty, administration, but you've also got employers, and when employers come into the mix, that's a whole another component of translation that you've got to do, and meeting expectations of the employer, and the faculty, and the student. But how you kind of navigate roles when so many different constituents are involved like that? Yeah. I like to joke around that I'm multilingual. I speak employer. I speak student. I speak family. I speak faculty. Right? And and what that means is, you know, a traditional career center, we're at the nexus of all of those constituents, right, and even politicians and anybody else. Right? And what that means is that what I have believed, my personal opinion over the twenty plus years doing this is that people want the same thing, but they're just not communicating that want very effectively. And because they're using different words, different terms, different motivations. And if you you being the the career center, individual, take a step back and really listen and help them learn from each other, then we can actually solve the problems. You know, employers, they just want good talent that will solve their problems and dare I say, make them money. Right? They just want good talent. Universities, they wanna be able to, you know, educate students to be awesome citizens in their community and find those good jobs and find purposeful work because we know that's gonna be awesome for them. Our politicians, you know, in general, they they want people to stay in their state. They want people to make money in their state because that's tax revenue and and a thriving community. But also, if we got good talent, then your state politicians are like companies were going to come and invest in our state. Everybody's got the same motivation, and our job as a career center is to make sure everybody's at the table and finding those connections as easy and smoothly as possible. Let's talk a little bit about what feels like outcomes that come from the structure that you have, and from the organizational side that you lead? Before we spoke, you mentioned a little bit about how UNC Charlotte is seeing student debt going down, graduation rates going up, retention improving. Are you able to track the more intentional work that you do to build this co curricular and curricular structure? You know, it's never going to be a direct thing because there are so many variables involved in a giant university or even a a small college. But I think what we can track is, in terms of success, our students using our services and coming back. I mean, that's an important metrics metric. Are they using our services and then acting on what we've provided them? So it's one thing to come to a resume workshop. It's another thing to actually do your resume in a quality way that gets you to that next step. And so a good career center has to manage and and and measure those types of things to make sure a student is successfully moving through the experience. But I think when you look at a university, and this one in particular, you know, we if we set the students up from the very beginning for success, so I think about our enrollment team in admissions, they're not, they're not overselling. They're explaining this is what this university is about. This is our powerful, you know, voice that we have. And if you wanna be a part of this, this is what we're gonna do for you. And then we make it happen, you know, downstream in that life cycle of a student. And then, of course, this university and any other university too does track that retention. And lot of times, we can dig into a little bit more of, like, what is retaining students and to kinda create that that big old picture that that you're looking for. But also time to graduation is important. I mean, you know, personally speaking, I think you can agree, we want our students to get the heck out of here within three to four years with zero to little debt. I mean, that that's the ultimate goal of all this, you know, sort of thing. And we can look at that. And, you know, I somebody was telling me the other day that our average student debt for undergrads has been going down, and that's a great thing to see. Now who specifically caused that? All of us together, because we're creating the right ecosystem for the here and now for what, you know, the pressures that students might have or any one of us. You've done some consulting in this space. You've seen things from other institutions that you've worked at, and you certainly have peers around the country and around the globe in this work. Where do you see the opportunity for UNC Charlotte to go? And are there examples that really intrigue you elsewhere that you draw from or that inspire you? Where I think we need to go and where we are going as a university is we are doubling down on that experiential learning. And I think it's wonderful to hear it from our campus leadership. It's wonderful to see it literally embedded in our strategic plan for the next five to ten years. It's great to see conversations happening all over the place. I mean, it's so cool, you know, between now and ten so years ago when I first started to hear people talk purposeful work using those terms, using competencies and skills in common language versus, you know, back in the day. And so all of that is really, makes me thrive, makes me, you know, feel like we are making an impact for for our students. But I think, you know, moving forward, the holy grail, if you will, is to make sure everything's integrated. It's gotta be. And that means integrated into the curriculum, integrated at the right spots. It doesn't have to be every single course, but the right spots where students are seeing it. And I wanna say, I think, my belief, career education needs to be required. Now how do we get to that requirement of many different ways to do it, many different ways, and making sure that those students get that internship, that's required as part of their curriculum, discipline based, before they get the heck out of here. Oh my gosh. If we have that, I'm hopeful to get that done before I retire, this university will rock and roll and will really continue to show, if not more, you know, success for our community and our state. I mean, that's kind of where I was going to ask you to go is just like your own vision for if all the things that you know are working well continue to scale, continue to prove out the value, and your plan is acted on in five years, what does that look like, you know, for you? What does that look like? Do you think, at large, we're at this crisis moment in higher education, everybody's questioning the quality and the rationale of having a degree? And a lot of it's linked back to the career conversation. So five years from now, yeah, based on what you know today, where do you make your bet in terms of the best possible outcome? Sure. Alright. Five years from now, here's what I am working for or towards and want. I want this institution to have the majority percentage of academic programs require internship in some form of experiential learning in some form or another. I think we can make it happen. In fact, I know we can make it happen. Second thing I wanna see is that when we think about project based learning or these gigs and these micro internships, if you will, the ones that our students who work full time really are are excited about, I would like every college in our university to have a point person who has a process and a system so I can get all these projects to the right disciplines to embed them in the courses, and that system works. I know it can happen, and we're gonna make it happen. And if we have that process and that system, that structure put into place, all of my community nonprofits, my employers, for profit employers, government agencies, all of them, they have these great projects, these micro internships, the need for talent and the want to, you know, develop talent, it makes it easy for them to plunk and play and everybody, makes it happen. This can happen within five years. It can happen if the motivation's there. And it doesn't need to you know, you might say, well, how much money do you need? I don't need a million dollars. I just need the motivation. I need people to say, yes. We're gonna actually do it. Not, yes. That sounds great. Right? And so I think I think we're gonna get there. I think we will. I believe it. I love it. I love it. Well, Patrick, you you've been a great guest. You've given me a ton to think about, and I really appreciate you taking the time today for for us. Well, thank you very much.