State of Facilities Conversations: Episode 4

Pete Zuraw: Greetings once again to all who are listening in to our series of conversations on the State of Facilities in higher education. My name is Pete Zuraw, and this is the latest in our exploration of issues related to this year’s report, our 11th.

We encourage anyone who hasn’t seen the report to grab a copy available on the Gordian website. This series is intended to go beyond what’s in the report and talk about where the observations in the report lead us and how it connects to the future direction of colleges and universities, and particularly the leaders. Like every interaction here Gordian, we hope to support you today in your work building better communities by transforming data insights into smarter decisions.

Today, Deborah Wallace joins us from her office. It is her office right at California State University, Dominguez Hills, as VP for Administration and Finance. She has a great vantage point to see and understand what’s happening on her campus and with peers elsewhere in the state and beyond. This isn’t the first time Deb has joined me on one of these conversations, and she’s back because, I think not because we made the ask. But importantly, because she has such interesting insights about what’s happening in higher ed. I am just so glad to have the opportunity to sit with you again, Deb. So thank you for being here.

Deb Wallace: Thank you so much, Pete. And to those who may listen to this, so glad that you have an opportunity to engage in these spaces, even if it’s just from a listening standpoint. But I’m excited to be here. Excited to share some of the things that are latest happenings within our ranks of space and enrollment. The impacts all of those good things, but you know, I can certainly confirm what Pete is talking to. 

Peter’s talking about today with respect to space growth is essentially flat across our database and for a third year, as schools confront the reality that there needs to be sufficient revenue in order to build, particularly in forward looking environment where a fewer students are going to be available for each school’s pool, and you know, we are 23 campuses. So there is a lot of choice. I think a lot of the students have a lot of choice out there, but things don’t always work the same in California.

What would you say?

Pete: I mean, you’re confirming what we’re saying, right? You’re confirming that things are running flat, that schools are finally having to look at this and do the math, right. We’ve been talking about this for years. That there was just more space being built for a lot of schools than they could afford to operate. That’s not always been the case with you, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting to talk to you about it. The rules are a little bit different there in California than they can be in some other places. A couple of states, like California, but what’s happening there with you?

Are you guys continuing to grow? Are you kind of looking to the future and checking out that population trend? Tell me a little bit about what you’re thinking about and where you think you’re headed.

Deb: Yeah, we did have, and I think some of this is still the remnants of this post COVID-era that we’ve been all involved in, so we are seeing particularly as we move into the new fall semester of ‘24, we are seeing somewhat of a rebound on the enrollment side of the house, particularly with first time freshmen. That is one of our core businesses right now and far as far as educating those students. One of the things that we continue to struggle with though is the retention piece of it, right, it’s those students that come in and left after two years for whatever reason. And again, this could be a part of that kind of post COVID era, if you will. A lot of those students started out and within two years COVID that hit them, so they had to go home.

They had to work or whatever the case may be, so we’re watching that very closely and I’m watching it from a budgetary standpoint, but we were still, you know, fared much better than some of the other like northern campuses in California. But we’re keeping our eye on it because it has impacted our budget quite significantly. 
I mean every couple of $1,000,000 for a campus, a medium sized campus like this can make a huge impact on what we can do within the classroom.

Pete: You’re in the LA basin. I’m in Boston right now and I’m thinking about some of the absurd prices I’ve seen. I say absurd, having worked in a lot of these nice places, the extraordinary prices that are being charged to go to school, particularly at some of the privates and I guess I’m wondering, is affordability an issue for your students as well, after a couple years, or is that less of an issue and it’s more just day-to-day, you know, living like you were describing just kind of trying to make ends meet?

Deb: Well, I think honestly, inflation has impacted every industry and you know higher education is no exception to that one. We just saw astronomical prices along the construction side of the house. So we are one of those campuses that had no building for like 30 plus years and all of a sudden now, and I’ve been here for four years, over the past couple of years I’ve probably had a portfolio of over half a million dollars in the portfolio. We’ve built one housing facility a couple of years ago and the price almost went up by 50%. So it’s just amazing how inflation does impact the cost of that and what we’re seeing. But as far as affordability, I honestly believe that the California State University system is the most affordable in the country.

Honestly, especially for those students [who] live in California, especially at our campus, probably 60% of our students live within 25 miles of our campus. 

And so they get it. They understand that, especially if they transfer from one of our partner community colleges, it’s very affordable. Now tuition it has gone up a little bit because you we can’t avoid that, right, with the increases in salaries and personnel that it takes to operate universities now. But I still think it is a bargain, for what students get out of it and the work that they’ll be able to do when they graduate. I mean, if you talk to a student and I think it’s perspective, if you talk to a student, they’ll have a different idea about that. But we still believe it is a good bargain. For what you get up for, return on investment.

Pete: Yeah, that makes sense. And you were touching in your comments on this issue of inflation, right? And it does touch not just the lives of the students as they exist within and without, but certainly your cost of running the business. I mean, the cost of money has been particularly complicating the last couple of years, right? 
Inflation has just changed everything, and that’s after years of, even through the recession, right? Reasonably predictable inflationary pressures, the access to debt has usually been pretty good for institutions over the last I don’t know, 20 years really.

But I can imagine a lot of conversations you’re having with colleagues who were looking for money to do their work, right? Everything got expensive. Paper is more expensive, paper clips are expensive. Printers are expensive, you know hammers and screws and nails are expensive, right? So what information? What kind of things are you asking for from colleagues to help you make the best decisions about allocating resources, and are you doing anything there to work together with them, to collaborate with them, so that they feel like they’re part of the process and not just waiting for, you know, the almighty financial person to, you know, sort of sprinkle some cash in their direction? What are you doing to work with them right now to help them understand the situation?

Deb: Well, you know Pete, you’ve known me for a while. I’m just this power-hungry queen who just wants to have it her way or the highway! No, I wish that were true, but you can’t survive in this business that way. You know, and I had a long talk with my president this morning because I want to shift gears, if you will. No longer can we afford to have this [model] where each one of our divisions, and we have six on our campus, so mine is a division of administration and finance, of course, there’s academic affairs, student affairs, those entities, information technology, but we can no longer afford to say everybody take a proportionate cut.

Based on the reductions that we have to take, it’s just not feasible. We will have to rethink the way that universities operate in the way that we serve students, so it’s more of a, I told my President this morning, I want to try a much more different approach, which is let’s be the captains of our own ship, right? If we’re going to serve 10,500 FTEs, let’s do that in a way that is the best of the best, right? It’s about bringing that quality.

So what does that mean? We have to rethink the way that we do information technology, administration and finance provide those services. I’m really trying to collaborate with my information technology partners; just this this past fiscal year, we launched 2 major initiatives on our campus. One was Questica budget, the other one was Concur, of course, which made a huge difference in the way that we move paper around workflow. All of those good things, we just can’t afford to hire too many people to do that work anymore. And so we need some of this technology to kind of help with that as attrition happens, retirements, things like that, the ability to refill those positions are not as fluid as they used to be a few years back. So we’re having to rethink the way that we do business in order to better serve students. And so my job, I believe as a strategic partner and collaborator on my campus, is to bring all of that together, along with the President and say, OK, if we’re going to have 50 fewer classes, what does that mean for the rest of us? Can I close down a building on the weekends? Can I do this? And really become strategic partners about how to save some of those dollars because that’s where we are and California is no secret. 

Right now, California does have a huge deficit, and so every industry is having to rethink the way we can do that. But I think it’s OK. Honestly, it is a good way to hit the reset button right? Because you can do things for so long and higher education is just going to have to retool, rethink, in order to educate the student of the future. 
And it’s not going to be by, you know, 50 people trying to do one thing. You might need two people to do that one thing in order to ensure that you know your budget, your personnel is your highest cost. So of course that expense line will have the largest impact.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. Are you finding a receptivity outside the President’s office for these ideas? Are people on board with this idea that the rules are different? And they’re gonna have to not live with less, but think more creatively about what it is that they’re doing?

Deb: Well, you know me. I try to just keep it raw and real and you know change is this difficult. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think what industry you’re in and higher education, I think is slower to shift because, you know, I think we get used to doing things a certain way. But I think the messaging is important, and I told the President, I’m really going to be very self-reflective as to how we message that. It’s not that we necessarily want to come in and say, well, we need to just rip the band aid off and reduce all of these costs. It’s getting to that quality programming and maybe becoming smaller. Maybe that’s what it means, but you know, having the power behind it and empowering people to make those suggestions about how we move forward with some of this stuff, it’s not easy. It’s almost like turning a cruise ship and you know they’re making them bigger and better. Now I just came off of [a cruise ship] so I know I’ve this thing was just massive and so it’s like staring a cruise ship with a, you know, with a steering wheel that’s only eight inches round. You can’t do it.

You just have to rethink and retool in an effort to bring the campus in a space where this is what we have to do in order to, you know, honestly there, survivability becomes a word right in these spaces.

Pete: But it’s work. We’re watching the school a week close this year so far, so it’s pretty dramatic. Let’s stay with that [cruise shipe metaphor] for a second. You talked about changing the direction on the cruise ship. It’s one thing to be the captain or the captain’s first mate and say change the cruise ship, but you have to work with the whole team to decide how long it’s gonna take to turn that cruise ship. How do you know what, who’s going to be involved in changing it, how long it’s going to take? 
So how are you anticipating having to collaborate with your colleagues to say, you’ve mentioned, can we close this building? Can we shut down these classes? There are a bunch of people involved in that process besides just one.

What did you call yourself? A power hungry queen. One power hungry queen saying let’s make it so. I mean, are you thinking are other people primed to work with you on those things? Are you gonna have to bring them into the fold to get them to work more closely with you? And where are you in that in that dialogue right now?

Deb: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think everybody has to be engaged. We’re engaging students. At the beginning of last fiscal year, I presented to the entire team.

I said look, first of all, we have to be able to diagnose what is what is broken, right. That’s the first thing, and I just kind of laid out a plan for how do we move on a continuum of by this date. So honestly, by October of 2024, here we should be completed with all of the reductions. And so it’s the journey in between, right? It’s engaging. We’ve done a series of lunch and learns on the campus. First of all, it was educating the campus, it deciphering between, OK, Deb, you keep saying head count, but what does that mean for full time equivalent students? So I think the educational piece and the change management piece are critical to that success and we’re pulling people in the students and I’m asking them questions. How do you think? How will this happen if we decide to take away this program? What does this mean for you? What if we did this? What if we allow these centers and institutes now to be in one central location where you’re actually can do some cocurricular stuff. Just because you’re the Latinx Center doesn’t mean that you can’t have collaboration with the Women’s Resource Center, that type of thing. So it’s having everybody rethink the way that we do business. So there’s change management, there’s communication, there’s education, there’s reduction. There’s all of those things on this parallel track of trying to get the campus, you know, to a space where I’m not sweating bullets about it. Do we have enough adequate reserve because I have to think about those things on the back end of that of the spectrum.

Pete: Cash flow, right?

Deb: So it is, it is. It’s like steering this cruise ship with a with an eight inch wheel.

I’m telling you it is. I think being in this network with the California State University system is phenomenal. I reached out to two colleagues just last week and said, hey, I heard that you were able to, you know, combine two of your colleges. Tell me, what was that process? What did it look like? So we’re in this amazing network of people that have done this. We don’t have to go back and reinvent the wheel and we talk about, well, my culture is this way. So we’re in these deep, not only philosophical, cultural conversations, but we’re having conversation around, well Deb, if your faculty don’t, then you might have a problem with X. So I just appreciate that network and the ability to just pick up the phone and say, look, I’m struggling with this. What are your thoughts? How did you do it? And I just wrote it down. Probably I went through 1/2 of a writing pad because I wanted to get as much information as I could in order to make sure that the IT doesn’t create this panic on the campus. That’s one of the things I talked to my president about this morning. He says, “What are you proud of this, this past fiscal year?” And I said the fact that we were in crisis, but the campus wasn’t in panic. There’s a difference there, and I think that’s important, right?

Just because you’re in crises doesn’t mean that everybody’s running around like their hair is on fire. We’re managing that crisis in a way where folks know that we have to do something, but they can still be somewhat seamless in their day-to-day work.

And I think that’s really important.

Pete: That’s so great. I love that sort of not panic, even in crisis. I know you’re on minding me of a project that I have the privilege to be Privy to. That’s a collaboration going on right now between APPA, NACUBO and SCUP looking at rethinking this notion of collaboration. It was a white paper released back in 2022. That group is still working, hoping to do some more stuff soon to make it actionable, but it’s talking about this very thing you’re talking about. Bringing people together, getting them to work together, the communication issue is so important. And you were also touching on something that that group’s been talking about, which is the notion that the changes are happening at an individual level. They’re happening at kind of a departmental level. They’re happening at institutional level, right?

And you’ve got to be receptive to that and you’ve got to be aware of it as you communicate because you can tell your peers up in the C-Suite, just go make it happen, but as an institution you have to make sure that everybody’s taking that message to the department individual level because it will breakdown at that point, particularly at colleges and universities where the individual is so very important.

Deb: Yes, absolutely. You nailed it. I think you know moving forward, we have some Herculean tasks to get through and part of that is that communications plan, right? 
And I think I have an amazing president who says don’t worry about it, Deb, let me carry some of that water for you. The heavy water bearing as I’m putting out communications like every few weeks and saying last time I gave you an update on this, I’ll be giving you an update on this so we don’t have to. Folks can see that even at that level that there is a concern about, you know, where we are as far as a budget and you know the campus and everything. So I think that’s been very helpful as well.

I know some presidents may not get involved at that level, but I think it helps.

Again, it goes back to that, keeping the campus calm even in crises, all of those. So I have an amazing network even here on the campus, I have a wonderful wonderful boss and I have amazing colleagues that are that are willing to say, OK, Deb, where do we need to go next in order to get this done? So I think I’m in a very lucky space.

I’m not, you know, hungry hungry power queen. Just joking here, but I also have, you know, great folks that I work with on a day-to-day basis.

Pete: We better be careful not to let that reputation get out there, that you really are a power-hungry queen! No, and thank you for saying those things. I think because that collaboration effort, that exercise, that the association working on is about that same thing too, right, for organizations that don’t have access to the network of peers that you have within the accounts payable system or that schools with like the UC system would have if you are standalone institution or maybe you’re a small system. Nebraska has three or four schools in a system as opposed to what you have, it’s helpful to be able to make sure that there are tools and mechanisms that are standard vocabulary standards. You can reach out to colleagues. I think that’s great.

We were talking about people. I want to go in a different direction if we can, which is the staffing issue, right? It’s been huge across everywhere. It was a big part of the report talking about staffing strategies. I can’t imagine that situation is any different there in the LA area, right? A hard time finding skilled talent, let alone talent that’s willing to work for whatever wages you’re paying. Maybe I’m wrong, but are you coming up with any unique techniques for how to? I mean, one of them obviously is if you shrink the size of the school, you have to search for fewer people, but that’s not a strategy. That’s just a reality. When you do have to find people, are there things you’re coming up with to find people, whether it’s [a] manager or a plumber, like other particular techniques you’re using to track people down?

Deb: You know, again, I talk about this higher education and the culture and all of that. It has always been a culture that everybody needs to be here from 8 to 5, right. 
And so there is a generation of folks, and again in this post COVID era that has driven a lot of this, they like the fact that they can maintain some work life balance with telecommuting. And so we have really, honestly, you know, gone back into a thought process about how can we make this work and still provide that high touch because our campus is one that needs that high touch for the demographic of students that we serve. And we wear that as a badge of honor.

I mean, we appreciate that we try to keep the classroom small, all of those things, in order to ensure that those students are successful moving through. But I think we really had to have a lot of conversation and a lot of change management, especially at the management level about can we allow people to work from home a couple of days and what will that do? What does it do to that high touch, high feel environment? Can we have it such that, you know, we’re trading off and it doesn’t matter if you come in for every office in this space? There is somebody there to at least greet you. So that is one strategy that we’ve used. We will allow that if it is the right position. Right now there’s some positions if a custodian comes and says, hey, Deb, I need to be off, you know, and then we have to say sorry, that doesn’t work for that. But for the most part, I think a lot of these positions, again rethinking the work itself and really saying, yep, you could probably do a lot of that from home. But on Mondays and Wednesdays, when a lot of the students are here and they need that support, I’m going to need you in the office. And that that seems to be effective. We’ve probably actually retained quite a few people based on that and believe it or not, I think a lot of people are saying it’s not even about the pay right now. That is a great benefit that is offered in order to put the whole package together and say yep, with the with the wonderful benefits package that we have, you have the ability to work from home for a couple of days, so you don’t have to get on these crazy California freeways. The 405, everybody knows it as you can go four or five mph anyway, but it’s that ability to rethink how we provide support to our what we call on our campus as one of our pillars are thriving educators, right, everybody on this campus is a thriving educator. I don’t care if you are a custodian, if a student needs support, we ask, what can I do for you? It’s about the customer and our students are our customer. We want to make sure we’re serving them so they can get through successfully and that’s what it’s all about.

Pete: I love that. I think that, you know, if you can find the kind of people that want to work in an educational community, they embrace that, that sort of thriving educator mantle. They wanna be a part of the community and that’s great. And you’re right.

We talked a little bit in the report about retention being one of the important issues, if you can find a way to keep people that’s way more effective than trying to go out and hunt to find new people to bring into the community right now. So that’s really a great comment. I also loved the point you were making about the essentiality of creating the work environment that’s tailored to the student community you have, right? You have a lot of First Gen students. You have a lot of commuter students. 
You have a lot of students that have complicated lives literally learning how to learn in the way that you want to teach them, and that’s very different than some other schools around the country where they may have different life experiences that create different opportunities for how you can flex your staff. So I think that’s a really important note to you have to tailor it to the purpose which is teaching those students what they need to know, right?

Deb: Yeah, and let’s be honest, high touch, I feel is quite expensive, right? It’s because we may need more counselors. We may need more mental health specialists, because a lot of our students, because they are First Gen, they’re coming from environments where you know, nobody in their family understands that space, right. So sometimes they feel alone. It creates those mental health issues, but again we wear that with a badge of honor because then we can truly say that we understand what students success is or we can take students who again are First Gen and go out and they and they become doctors, lawyers, you know, we’ve got senators, we are the only campus in the United States that has five sitting mayors that are graduates of this university that that are running major cities you’ve got Karen Bass, you’ve got Rex Richardson, who’s running Long Beach, so these are major cities. So we’re very proud of that, but we use that again as a badge of honor to say it, it doesn’t matter where you come from. It matters where you end up, and so at the end of the day, that’s the reason why I’m here. Because I was that student, I was that student 30-40 years ago. But you know, I know what it’s like. If anybody had told me, you know, 30 years ago that I’d be a vice president at a major university in a system that is the largest public higher education system in the country, I’d be laughing you all the way down the street. But that’s how you transform lives that transform America. That’s what we stand on here at Dominguez Hills.

Pete: Which is an amazing sense of purpose and it’s one of those rallying things to get employees to rally around, that purpose means you want to have an amazing campus. You said earlier you’ve been investing a bunch in that campus of late.

Are you still flush with cash? Still gonna keep investing? Are you anticipating that you’re gonna keep a population that’s stable enough that you can keep doing that? 
Or are you thinking more carefully about what the future holds right now? Your situation is unique to your world.

Deb: Great question and you know, I think we will continue to transform the campus because I think there is a shift right now happening on the campus because as you mentioned, we were a commuter campus. But we are seeing that more students are wanting to stay on the campus so they can be immersed in the programs. And so that would be a huge shift. I think about the UC-Irvines of the world, the very large campuses right now that started out maybe as commuter, but now it’s upside down, right, they have, they have a huge footprint for housing and that’s what we’re trying to do and we’re trying to really think about what that will do for these students translating into the workforce. So what I’d like to see is really all the land that we have, because we have the good fortune of having a lot of land on our campus. We’ve got 70 acres of untapped land and are working with maybe some public private partnerships to really create some of that work. We’ve got a lot of aerospace around us that is always looking for top talent, those types of industries that will be with us in perpetuity. And so we need to be able to create not only a space for them to immerse themselves in the extracurricular as well, but when they graduate and they find jobs in their areas. Remember the data proves that they live within 25 miles, so they’re not going to move too far from Grandma. That lives maybe in the Torrance area, right? So what we’re doing is we want to create those spaces for them. Yep, you can work right here at Northrop Grumman, those types of industries. And so that’s that to me is the vision that I’d like to see for the community that we do some of this P3 stuff and we create this retail/housing that is very pervasive right now around the United States, where you work and you play and you live, you sleep, you do all of that within your own ecosystem that is packed with individuals that have the same, you know, vision and values that you have.

Pete: So let me let me challenge you a little bit on the on the process.

Our database is replete with institutions who had at some point thought that they were gonna grow. They thought that there was an industry they picked, name your industry, and they built for it and then it wasn’t realized. And looking back, they were not clear on the discipline they were going to use to make sure that they were building in areas where there was something there. And so they find themselves with all this extra space that they don’t know what to do with, classrooms that are empty or residence halls and spaces that aren’t maintained the because the student population isn’t right. And I guess I’m wondering what discipline you’re putting in place to make sure that you’re picking the right directions to move in, so you’re building just what you need and not ending up with excess, or if you have a process you have that you’re working on.

Deb: We do have a process and it’s going to depend heavily on the partnerships that we can develop outside of the campus ecosystem, right? What I just talked about, it’s going to be really sitting down with folks and saying, hey, look over the next 25 years, we have a plan to do ABC right and build out this. And so that’s where we want to position ourselves, and we are in the South Bay. So we do have a little bit of luxury where you know industry partners want to come in, they want to grow in this area. It’s very lucrative. We’re close to a huge port in Long Beach and so you know, 

logistics and all of that are just very prevalent right now. And you know, COVID taught us a little bit about logistics, right? You gotta be able to get that stuff into the port and you have to be able to get it shipped and trucking and all of that good stuff. So we had a rude awakening on that. So I think that is 1 industry. I think that is going to be quite important as we move forward as a country, right? We’re working with industry partners like that to develop that. What does it look like?

How do you manage logistics in a way that if you can’t get some of that stuff in, what do you do? So we need we need skilled critical thinkers, if nothing else, that come and bring those ideas to the forefront and work with industry. But that’s what we’re doing. We’re having a lot of industry conversation. We work very closely with the chambers and surrounding areas as a matter of fact, each one of us on our senior leadership team, really works with some of those affinity groups outside of our regular duties, like I serve on the Economic Development Committee as a Commissioner for the City of Carson. And so I get to hear all of the things that are happening with their strategic plan, what industry they’re bringing in, all of those good things. So that is almost a requirement of our President, and I appreciate that because it really does immerse us into those partnerships with those folks.

And I can always bring back, hey, did you all know that Carson was getting ready to get an IKEA store? Or did you hear that they were gonna be bringing in a major furniture supplier or whatever the case may be. The other piece of that is our deans are going out and having those conversations with because they’re the ones that set the curriculum for the campus. So the deans are going out doing partnerships. I’m sure I’m not, you know, sharing anything that other campuses have not heard about. But I think that’s very important is those folks are actually out there in the industry getting the information.

Pete: Well, I would say what I love about what you’re saying is it’s multilayered.

It’s multi pronged, right? And it’s deep and it’s connected into the community, right.

You can never guarantee right? Industries go away. In 2001, you could have said we’re gonna be the biggest supporter of Blockbuster in the world and that wouldn’t have gone well, right. And people in Seattle might be nervous about Boeing right now because of their reputation, right? If there’s a strong relationship there, so nothing’s perfect, but what I love is the way in which there’s so much discipline to what you’re doing. It’s not just a bunch of people in an ivory tower sitting around thinking that this is where we’re gonna go because we want to do a department around such and such. You’re using information that you’re gathering and data you’re gathering, which is really, really powerful and you related to that.

You also mentioned technology earlier on, your IT folks and working with them.

I guess I’m wondering about that technology, and even AI, are you seeing that instead of tools to move the institution forward? Is it complementary to work or are people anxious about it? This is a threat because it might replace people? Where is the psyche of the institution?

Deb: Yeah, I have to be honest. You know, I talk to a lot of people on campus all the time and I think it’s almost like the chicken noodle soup. Right, there’s a bunch of stuff around, I have talked to some people that I never even would have thought would have even in engaged in AI in a million years and they’re going, oh, yeah, I use it all the time to help me with create my students, you know, students portfolios for the year, if they’re in a master’s program or whatever the case may be. I’m sitting there just overwhelmed and I think it’s, you know, students are always on the forefront of what AI can do. So I don’t think it’s ever a challenge there, but I think it’s a mixed bag and I, you know, thinking about our campus too specifically, during COVID and everything, we did have a we did have a challenge with it, just trying to close the digital divide. So AI now has come and added that layer of how do we even close that digital divide? We had students we found out during COVID, and we talked about that demographic just a little bit, that didn’t even have Wi-Fi available at home, so talking about AI and things like that, we’re having to really just fix that ground floor layer and then we can begin to move into some of these things. We’ve had to do that rapidly, right, because the world is moving at such a fast pace and it’s evolving and AI is is part of that. I mean, when we received federal dollars, like most campuses did to kind of help us through the COVID, we had to spend money just to put in some infrastructure, so our students could come and use the parking lots basically as classrooms to learn and be successful. So we’re having to rethink to close that digital divide first and then really put on that AI layer and things like that.

So we’re getting there, I think and we’ve had to do that rapidly. I would probably say this campus grew by leaps and bounds to close that digital divide within two years. 
I mean it was just amazing how we had to rapidly pivot in order to make sure that the students have what they needed to be successful and we did it. We created outdoor tents and all kind of stuff that very creative things to get students to do that. But as far as AI is concerned, we are embracing it as a campus where we’re providing that support for faculty, which we’re working with faculty and trying to have them rethink the way that they work in the classroom and all of that good stuff. There’s some folks saying, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t want to touch it and but there are some people who are embracing it and running away with it and creating these marvelous spaces. I I’m not a social media person but I just happened to be on my LinkedIn account and one of our deans was doing this. He was doing this kind of webinar but he was using some kind of pen, as a matter of fact, I need to talk to him and he was having a conversation with people all around the world and he was using this pen and it was writing in this – I didn’t even understand all the technology behind it, but I was sitting there going, ohh my gracious. I’m just mesmerized at whatever he’s doing here and he was using AI. He was using the digital pen and all of this good stuff and he was doing a lesson and I said, wait a minute. So catching up can be quite amazing if you allow it to.

Pete: And you had to look at yourself and see things differently, right? 

If COVID hadn’t arrived, if we hadn’t had to go virtual, you might have continued to operate in a fashion that had that gap still there and you were not paying as much attention to it as you’d like. And because it forced its way in, you had to respond.

And you did, and I think what’s interesting is we can choose to look outside and take feedback from outside world, right? I mean, open AI didn’t release Chat GPT until less than two years ago. It hit the public realm and now there are so many different AI tools. Everybody’s dropping AI into their advertisement, whether they have AI or not, like you almost have to grapple with it. And yet, you’re right, you’re still in a situation where some people they’re still catching up. So that’s a really interesting thought about how we have to be so smart about bringing people along at the pace that they can accept and yet make sure we keep driving it forward because you can’t fall behind.

Deb: When you hear our students say, I don’t even have a computer at home that I can work off of, because remember they are First Gen. And so to close that gap for them and provide, we just said every student gets a computer period and you get, you know you get the tools that you need on that computer, whatever we need to do in order to get them up to speed. So they can use their canvas without stressing about, you know, trying to do all of this off of a cell phone that you know screen isn’t big and I can’t see and so it creates a lot of stress and all of that for them, but I’m proud of the work that we did after that post pandemic, if you will, trying to reduce some of those stress levels.

Pete: We’ve been talking for 1/2 an hour. I think that’s a great way to finish talking about the ways in which you guys are facing different situations that are not better or worse, they’re just radically different than the people down the road and up the state and across the country. Each situation provides its own challenges, and while you may have a steady supply of students in a state that’s still relatively populated with students going to school, you’ve got very different kinds of challenges you have to cope with. And so the financial stresses are no less, they are just focused in different areas, which I think is an amazing kind of thing for people listening to, to appreciate and think about. It’s fantastic. This has been, as always, a fascinating conversation with Deb, and I’m so grateful for you, for the time and the willingness to let us share it with others. You know, it’s tricky in these conversations, we don’t have any idea which pieces are gonna be of the most use, but in this case I’m confident.

I think all of them are going to have some value to people listening and watching.

So thank you for that. I really appreciate it.

Deb: Thank you. Thank you for having me. And again, I always appreciate getting out there and creating a network, right, because I think this will this will have some impact, even creating that network around the idea that, yep, I’d love to touch base with Dominguez Hills because there’s only three in our in our in, in our respective district. But you know, we had that same kind of problem, so I’d love to just bounce an idea off of you. And that’s how we create this higher education network of experts around, you know, it’s subject matter and all of that and just really making a difference out there for our students because at the end of the day, we all have a set of challenges that we have to work through, individual challenges as individual campuses. But at the end of the day, our mission is still the same. We are here to make just amazing citizens that change the world. That’s what we’re here for.

Pete: In our on our last conversation, Mark Helms from Florida was talking about the fact that plagiarism is welcome in this context. We’re here to share for everybody good and to those of you listening, you just heard it Deb’s got an open-door policy. You just pick up the phone call or reach out. She will definitely pick up to collaborate.

Deb: Absolutely.

Pete: I the this is officially the final conversation in the series that we were gonna be running. Although for those of you listening, we are thinking about adding some more so, so stay tuned, we may be adding some or sending you some notes to remind you about a 5th or 6th that’s going to come along. We are so grateful to anyone who’s listened to the whole series, we wish everyone well as everyone heads into another academic fall and hope that the conversations have helped each person participating focused on transforming data insights into smarter decisions that are going to aid you in building the best possible communities, unique for your community. Thank you for being with us. Please stay safe and always be kind to others.

Deb: Thank you.

Pete: Goodbye.