A peer-to-peer discussion with the Executive Chairman of The Education Board, Inc. and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Harvard.

🎙️ Jason Wingard, executive chairman of The Education Board and distinguished visiting professor at Harvard University, provides a candid perspective on the anticipated level of employee career readiness by employers and the gaps in soft skills these organizations are seeing among the recent graduates they’ve hired.

“Part of what is needed for these young people is to have that kind of professional experience on the ground,” says Wingard. In more recent years, “the time crunch to be ready for work was accelerated, and the expectation that students had more real world experience for some of the soft stuff that comes up in interactions during the business day, they just didn't have.”

Whereas previous generations had more lead time to learn and be mentored on the job before putting their skills fully into practice, the reality of today’s workplace is that product development cycles are shorter—which Wingard posits increases the need for soft skills such as communication, problem solving, the ability to be led and to lead, as well as navigating conflict in the workplace from day one. 

Sharing examples from leading companies and his experience, Wingard outlines how universities can better collaborate with and draw from industry, so students can simultaneously learn how to apply theory in the workplace, and practice and apply knowledge themselves in real time. He suggests higher education institutions and leaders supplement curriculum with specialized skill development that aligns with what businesses need, shaping the educational experience to integrate more practical and professional skills in the classroom. 

You won’t want to miss this distinguished academic leader, business executive and author, get to the heart of one the most top of mind topics on university and business school leaders’ minds on this new episode of Deans Counsel.  #highereducation #leadership #podcast #DeansCounsel

Photos courtesy of Kroll and Temple University.

Read more about Dr. Jason Wingard

Transcript:

Welcome to Deans Counsel, a podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists, Ken Kring, Jim Ellis and Dave Ikenberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face in one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy.

Music.

Dave Ikenberry 0:13

Welcome to Dean's Counsel, a podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists, Ken Kring, Jim Ellis and Dave Ikenberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face in one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy. Our guest today is Jason Wingard. Jason has had a remarkable career prior to spending time as president of Temple University, Jason held key roles at Columbia, Wharton and Stanford. In addition, he also was the chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs. During his tenure, Jason has gained a remarkable insight into shifting expectations of employers, and he has a keen understanding of what corporations are expecting out of college graduates. Today, in this episode of Dean Counsel, Jason reflects on why this shift in expectations has occurred, why society in general feels college degrees have declined in value, and he offers advice on what we as Deans should consider going forward. Traditionally, universities have been inclined to focus on the hard skills that graduates need as they enter the workforce, but Jason points out that corporate product development cycles preclude the ability of new employers to help our graduates pick up these soft skills on the job skills that are needed to succeed in life. While universities have been reluctant to embrace this new, expanded challenge, we'll hear from Jason some tools and techniques to consider in helping shape what's needed in tomorrow's workforce.

Ken Kring 1:59

Dean's Counsel is really gratified here today to have Jason Wingard talk with us. Jason's remarkable background, and you all can sort of see it in the advanced material that has involved both a stellar academic pedigree and experience, but also sort of across very many different areas, including having been an early founder and ultimately the president of the foundation for E pals, platform designed to provide meaningful teaching and learning, using technology To promote those learning principles. But then more recently, as a vice dean at the Wharton School, where he was vice dean of executive education, he was a managing director and chief learning officer at Goldman Sachs, the dean at the professional school at Columbia University, and more recently, the president of Temple University. In addition to all those academic achievements, he's really a public intellectual on on learning and most recent book, the college devaluation crisis in 2022 goes into some real insights about market disruption and the diminishing ROI of education. So Jason, we're not here today to take down education. We're here to build it up, and your insights around some of the additional new learnings is really going to be helpful to us and our audience. Looking forward to our conversation

Jason Wingard 3:43

Well, Kent, thank you very much for the introduction. Jim, Dave, thank you. It's a pleasure to be part of the Dean's Counsel, and I look forward to this discussion. And as you said, there are a host of solutions that go along with each of the problems that all of us have identified over the last couple of years. So I look forward to discussing those.

Ken Kring 4:03

So I think you know, maybe the first and opening question might be, what distilled your interest to really think about both the current state of education and and ultimately the future of education.

Jason Wingard 4:17

Yeah, so my background, as you partially just summarized, has focused on education from a variety of viewpoints throughout so I started off in Silicon Valley being the manager of education for a company called Silicon Graphics, and so we sold high end computer hardware To country governments, Ministers of Education universities all over the world. That was my first entree into how can technology be used to help advance education. I went on to get graduate degrees at Emory and Harvard and University of Pennsylvania focusing on education, professional development, technology. And as you said, I've. I started a startup company focused in the education, the E learning space. I worked at the highest level of learning by running Goldman Sachs University and Pine Street at Goldman Sachs, and then have worked as a dean Business School, professional school college president. So I have been researching from a scholarly standpoint, and in practice, in leadership roles around education, K to 12 higher ed executive for the better part of 25 years, and I've written several books, and the last one to answer your question more directly, the college devaluation crisis was an answer to what so many people have been asking me the question about as as a business leader trying to provide training and as an academic leader trying to prepare learners for the workforce, is college still working? Is graduate school still working? And so lots of people have opinions about that. Lots of people can say from the university side, for example, it certainly is doing a societal good. We know what works. We know how to train we know how to conduct research and prepare the workforce. And plenty of people on the workforce side have been saying more recently, we're not getting what we need anymore. We are not getting the skills that are required. It used to be that we had a base we could recruit from colleges and universities and graduate schools and get the talent we wanted, and then we could further train them on our own specialized for our product and services. But that's not working anymore. The gap is too large, right? And so the book that I wrote between right before the college devaluation was called the great skills gap, and it was all about this gap that has emerged between all the top employers saying, we can't get the talent from the colleges and universities that we used to so what do we do? Do we hire from the gig economy? Do we train them ourselves and try to hire them earlier, right out of high school? Maybe? Do we go internationally and try to hire people from other universities or other markets around the world? And nobody has figured out the answer. And so all we keep hearing about is this gap between skills and the need for market demand and competitiveness. And now the question starts to merge around, well, can AI close the gap? But nobody knows the answer can. And so the answer to your question about how did I get into it was because people were coming to me on the business side and saying, We don't have the skilled workforce that we need, and people were coming to me on the higher education side saying, why don't you all do something differently to prepare your students to close that gap? And both aren't budging, and the gap is not only not getting smaller, but it's getting bigger.

Jim Ellis 7:41

I mean, that's really a great opening statement, if you take what we do in higher ed, and I always would break it down two ways. Number one was the time you spend in the classroom. Number two is the time you spent outside the classroom. So if a kid was taken getting 16 credit hours in a semester, he's going to school 16 hours a week, and he's got 152 hours a week that are free. And my premise always was that the universities don't take advantage of that 152 hours for internships, Co Op programs, etc, etc. What have you seen that might work where public Well, the universe academia can work well with industry during the four years that that the student is at the university before they launch them in, because that's really where they need to get the they need to get some kind of understanding of what they're about to launch into, and and two things, and they'll throw one more than you can respond. And that is, not only is it the knowledge and the skills, but it's also the EQ that goes with working. You know, these, this generation is, is late to work. They're a little sloppy in their dress. They're um, they they want to work from home, as opposed to work in an office, they, they, they sit at their desk and eat, as opposed to, you know, doing the work. How do you help them kind of get professionalized before they step into that first job? Because we all kind of remember those first jobs. You know, we were nervous as hell. And I think the first thing we were nervous about is, where do we find the restroom? But then after that, then after that, it was, you know, yes, sir, no, sir. But these, these kids, are a little bit different than that. So it's really a two fold question. Number one is, you know, working universities work with industry better to prepare them before the first step. And then secondly, that the EQ side of it.

Jason Wingard 9:39

Great question, Jim. And I think I'll start off by giving a little bit of context about what you're asking. It used to be that there was more time. You know, product development, business development cycles took longer to unfold. So what that means is you could go to college for four years, and you could learn lessons, and you could learn theory and. Principles, and then you could start a new job and go through their new hire training, and then be apprenticed by mentors and sponsors in the organization. And then there was plenty of time for you to grow up and learn how to dress and learn how to show up at a meeting and learn how to engage in the work cycle and produce and get evaluated, etc. And what has happened in recent decades, but more recently in the last five years, is those product cycles are much faster, right? So you have to be ready to produce at a faster clip than you used to. You don't have years to get ready to slowly go up the trajectory of development. You have to be able to do stuff right away and to be able to execute, because the goal post changes quarter by quarter. Okay, so that's that's a contextual piece. So the question, the answer to your question, then what is it that universities can do? Universities can understand that the work environment has changed in that way, and that preparing students the way we used to, to be able to be ready on job day one, it used to be they used to have to be ready on job day one to be mentored and to be coached and to observe, and now they are expected to be ready to work on day one. So what does that mean for university? Well, that means you have to integrate that kind of development into your curriculum somehow. So if that is that you are going to take courses as a student in college or in graduate school, and then you're going to take your extra time and do internships or be exposed to the workplace in some way, because there's a partnership, a relationship Co Op between the university and and employers, then that's good. The problem with that is that many people are saying, again, back to the college devaluation crisis. My book, I'm spending a lot of money to go to college, and I don't really want to spend more money or sacrifice the opportunity to make money by doing some kind of a non paid internship or a free professional experience, so that I can learn to supplement my education in the classroom, right? So that the valuation goes down when I spend a lot of time in the classroom, and then I'm trying to supplement that classroom curriculum by spending time somehow, even if it's coordinated by the university in the employer's offices, right? And that usually means free, or that usually means low paid, or maybe that means a little bit of college credit, but for whatever, whatever it means, it means that's more time I'm spending trying to get prepared for the workplace, and it costs me more. Now the the real answer to the question, and I'll get to your second part, which is, how do you get that EQ universities need to revise their curriculum? And this is the part that's important. Because when I say that, a lot of people say, Are you saying that college isn't worth it and it should be shut down? And I'm saying it's both. And we still need theory, we still need research, but we need to produce it and to share with our students in an applied way. So there, there has to be a way we are the smartest people on the planet, we could argue, in the higher education context. So we should be able to develop curriculum and and to lay out what the theory says about leadership and management in chaotic times, but we should also be able to introduce that content in cooperation with employers who are going through those struggles in real time, so that the student learners can see directly how the theory is being applied, and can Get experience directly as part of their classroom experience, so that they are prepared to get exposed in a way that allows their EQ to be at its highest level when they finish the curriculum. You're not going to be a naive person that's only been reading about theory and that's only had an opportunity to learn about this in the classroom. You learned it simultaneously. Now you would say, can you do both of those things at the same time in the amount of time that's allotted in a semester? And the answer is yes. There are plenty of models where we have been shown to be able to do that effectively, where people grow up to your words, Jim, and get much more mature from a professional standpoint, they also understand theory about what what is has been researched to work and not work, and then they've also had the opportunity to practice and apply that in real time. If you can do all of that, then the university's value proposition is, is at its highest level, nobody else can do that better on the planet than universities and faculty members who have both theoretical and research expertise but also applied knowledge, right? And if you have both of those, and then you have access for the students to be able to be learning and reading while at the same time practicing and experiencing what happens when you try different approaches, then when they show up on day one, they are much more prepared. It sounds like an easy answer, so that question may. Be Well, why don't more people do it? Well, there's a lot of reasons why, but that's the answer to the question.

Ken Kring 15:06

So by implication, we're also talking about the the earlier demand for students to have applied learning that can be deployed in the marketplace. So this is not just employer driven demand, it's also student demand, right? I mean, your experience span adult learners to you know, 18 year old. Talk with us some about the gift in skill building for the 18 to 22 year old, as opposed to adult, adult learners and additional programs.

Jason Wingard 15:52

Well, the question goes a little bit back to Jim's earlier question. You know, 18 to 22 year olds don't have professional experience. They don't have practical experience coordinating with people, leading people being led by people providing feedback, solving problems in contentious situations. You know, they don't have any real world experience if they've only been in high school or college and haven't worked in a professional setting, right? And so part of what is needed for these young people is to have that kind of professional experience on the ground, because of what I said earlier, there is a product development cycle that is happening much quicker, and so their need to jump onto the hamster wheel and contribute is much faster than it used to be. So you used to go to IBM after graduating from college, and you had several years to get training and to be mentored and to go through a development training cycle before you ever saw the front lines. But if you go and work at Amazon right now, you're going to see the front lines in the first quarter of your employment, and there's going to be an expectation that you have the skills, the EQ, the negotiation, the hard skills and the soft skills, to be able to contribute right away. And our students don't have that. You know, one of the things when I was at Goldman Sachs, we used to hire, you know, 1000s, so, you know, one to 2000 analysts and Associates, entry level employees every year. And for many, many years, decades of Goldman Sachs existence, you'd be able to hire people directly from the top business schools, mostly and universities around the world, and then you put them through a really dramatic and robust training program that could last 469, months, even a whole year, and then you would be assigned a sponsor, and you'd be able to try activities in the workplace a little at a time, and constantly get feedback on those. And that happened for a long time, but then and in more recent years, the worth of time to do that, the time crunch to be ready for work, was accelerated, and the expectation that the students had more real world experience for some of the soft stuff that comes up in interactions during the business day, they just didn't have. And so what we did at Goldman was we went back to these universities where we were mostly hiring from, and we asked them if there was a way for them the universities to provide them with the kind of training that would make them more ready on day one. And the university said, That's not our responsibility. That's your responsibility. And so we tried that, we tried that at Goldman Sachs to get them more ready, but then we found it's not good for our business because it costs too much to get them ready and spend the time and the money to train them to have that EQ, to have that real world experience. Because what could happen? Ken, they could say, thank you for that training. Goldman. Sachs, I'm gonna go leave and go take a job somewhere else. So then we, as the employer, said, Well, that's not our value proposition. And the university said, That's not our responsibility. And so then you get back to the learner, and your question was, what about the young learner? What about the old learner? The learners just want employment. The learners want to be valued for their contributions, and they want to get paid, right? And so whoever can prepare me is what I want. So if I can go to Columbia University or to Stanford University or to Ohio State and get prepared to get a job that's going to give me gainful employment, then I want that. But if I go to one of those schools and I come out and the employers are saying, you don't have what we need yet, then that's a problem for me spending money on that university. If I go work for an employer, and I expect that one of their benefits is going to be to train me to be prepared to do work. And they say, well, we're not going to invest that much in you because we're not sure you're going to be around and whether you're worth it. Then what happens? Then that's where this gig economy starts to rise, where you say, Well, I'm gonna go there and I Jason, I'm gonna go out and try to find competency based skills somewhere out in the marketplace and try to train myself, but now I'm spending even more money and more time trying to get myself ready, and is it going to be valued, so there's a lot of passing of the buck of who's responsible for the skilled workforce to be ready. Is it the universities? Is it the employer? Is it the learner themselves? And then back to your question, Ken, there, there is a difference with it slight between those young learners and the old learners. They both need to learn the same set of competencies. The younger ones tend to have less real world, person to person experience, but that can be achieved at an earlier age. I'll give you another example. When I was dean of the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University, part of my purview, in addition to overseeing 17 master's degrees, I also oversaw the Columbia high school program, and so for the first couple of years when I was dean the programs where we placed the most students in employment situations at the master's levels was in applied analytics, technology management and enterprise risk management. You know, those degree programs at the time I was there were the hottest content wise, and that's where the Googles and the Amazons and others were hiring most of the students. Well, by the time I got to the end of my tenure, Google, I'll give you Google as an example. They weren't hiring from those three master's degree programs and they weren't hiring from the 14 other master's degree programs. For the most part, they were hiring directly from the high school program, right? And when I tell that story, people are alarmed. They say, Well, why would an organization that big hire from a high school program and not from master's degree program. And the reason was because they had done research. And so many other Fortune 500 companies know this. But when you're talking about computer science and data analytics and those kinds of hard skills, the best time to learn those the best time to be educated around those concepts, is 18 to 22 so it was better for those companies to take those students and to put them through their own boot camp and to promise them we'll we'll pay for you to go to college later. We will do a lot, but we want to engage you in a contract now to learn where you need to learn and be supportive to us. Now, we'll teach you how to be a grown up. We'll teach you how to act in a room of other business leaders, but we want your skill set around this particular knowledge set right now, and it's not advantageous for us to wait for you to go to college and come back. So that's a that's a an alternate way to answer your question, can I know what you were asking when you said 18 to 20? What's different about how they are learning? Well, so much about what is needed in the workforce right now, skills wise, is around analytics and logistics and data science and AI, and the best time to learn that in our scientific developmental brain is in those early years. And so that's just another way of saying, when you are in your college age years, 18 to 22 that's your best time to learn the hard skills, but it's also the best time to learn the soft skills. And so for your listeners, the simple way to answer all these questions is you need to be able to learn now the hard and the soft, the theoretical and the applied during college years. And if you're not learning all of that, then you're sacrificing part of the equation. And nobody is answering how you can do that all at the same time?

Jim Ellis 23:03

I know I kind of look at it as a blockade, but one of the the issues, and it's probably the 800 pound gorilla in room, is the way the academics are rewarded for their work. So you've got, you know, you you're not rewarding you're rewarding them for their research, yes, and they literally are being promoted on the basis of the research. I mean that the teaching component is a very contrary to what many people think. The teaching component is just not a huge piece of their reward to move up the ladder of academics. And so therefore the true scholar will say, that's not my job. And And yet, here we are with faculties that are the preponderance of our faculty, the greatest percentage of the scholars that are doing the research, that that are judged so that we can help ourselves as a university, build our reputation, right? So how do you get around the fact that the way that they're they're independent contractors, almost. They are rewarded within their industry by the work they've done from a research and publishing standpoint. And you can augment them a little bit with professors of practice, clinical professors, however you want to call them, you know. How do you how do you do that? How do you put that balance in as an administrator in a in a four year institution? I'm talking undergrads here, more than, more than grad sure, because it's, you know, 18 to 22 is, as you say, that's really there where they they get molded a little bit and learn this stuff. And how do you get through that piece? Well, I'm glad

Jason Wingard 24:41

you didn't start with that question. That's probably question. That's probably the hardest question you can ask.

Jim Ellis 24:46

I know so

Jason Wingard 24:47

you're you're exactly right, and the way you framed it is the easiest way to understand it right. And I'll summarize it again. Employers want the college graduate. Stay with college as you did, but employers want the college graduates to be more ready on day one after graduation for the workplace that requires them to have hard skills and soft skills that are integrated and and workplace ready. Universities have said we will do the hard skills. It's not our responsibility to do those office work soft skills in this, in the way that you're asking for. That's not our job. So people who have tried to solve the problem have tried to mediate that by saying, Well, isn't there a way for kids to go to college and have some kind of Co Op, internships, apprenticeship model, where they can can get that experience, and that's been hard to do. So then you look again, you throw all the pieces up in the air and say, Well, what is wrong with this system that we can't really close this gap and fix it? And you're right. The incentives around faculty, what they need to get tenure and what they need to move up to get to full professor, are around research. You know, there's a research, teaching and service component, but it's research is the biggest percentage of that, and it's teaching their research, which is the next part and services, really, on the academic committees that reinforce, you know, the research and teaching that is in that side of the house, right? So, so that is the reward system. That's the model that worked for a long time, and I've written a lot about this, and I am certainly not here to say that we should blow up the tenure system, but that is something that we should look at, because we say, well, if what is required now, Jim, let me, let me take a step back and say there are listeners out there who will say it is not the university's responsibility to provide a ready to go skilled workforce for employers, right? So we're operating on an assumption here, right, that we are trying to answer the question and provide solutions for how colleges can prepare their graduates to be more ready for workplace, right? But there are a lot of people out there who are probably beaten at the at the phone right now, saying, That's not our job. Our job is to broaden perspectives, to provide more critical thinking, analytical expertise, around theories, around research, around best practices, so that they can broaden their minds and think about what might be around a variety of different topics. Okay, so I just want to stop and underline that not everybody agrees that that's the role of the university. But if you're asking me the question, What can universities do to make their college students more ready for the workplace, then you do start to look at, well, if that was what a university wants to do, then they have to look at their faculty structure and reward system and say, well, then maybe we need to increase our teaching percentage of the equation for tenure and promotion to be more applied, to be more making sure that students are ready to go to work not just having their critical, analytical minds expanded, right but, but there's a presumption there that that's what we want universities to do. Now the professional schools have been doing a better job at that by nature of the content that they teach. You have more business school faculty and engineering faculty and schools of Professional Studies faculty who actually have done the research, but because of the nature of their work, they've also largely done a lot of consulting and board work in the field, so they have more experience directly with employers than faculty, say, from Arts and Sciences. When you're talking about philosophy, when you're talking about religion, you're talking about English, those faculty don't tend to have the same exposure to employers in the workplace, so they're not as as readily available to draw the connection between the content that they're teaching and how that can make a student more ready for working at Goldman. So I don't want to not answer your question. I think the way if you if a university says that they want to be more valuable to students who are looking to get jobs in the workplace, and they want the curriculum to better prepare students for that, then they would seek to have those students not only learn the content that is theoretical, but to integrate that in an applied way by having relationships with employers from day one of freshman year, right? And in order to make sure that that was successful, you'd need your faculty evaluation system to to make good use of that by rewarding faculty for facilitating that process in some way, right? And that hasn't happened by and large yet. So what you're seeing then is a small number of faculty, tenured, tenured faculty, who are responsible for the power and development the curriculum of a college and university. And you have a value this. Connect. Universities need revenue, so they need to offer classes, and they need to offer more of them to get students ready. So what do you do? You do what you said, Jim, you hire adjunct faculty or lecturers to come in and to be able to talk about the real world, and hopefully some of them have more research experience, so you still maintain that balance of research and theory with applied and that's why the schools of Professional Studies like Iran at Columbia are really thriving so much. Because you have master's degrees and you have under undergraduate programs and degrees that are focused on teaching topics that universe. I mean that employers want to hire from. You know, we would actually almost commission the work we were doing at Columbia, we would do surveys of the top employers in the world, and we would ask them, what kinds of skills do you need to be able to hire students directly from Columbia? And they would tell us, and we would go through an annual cycle of revising our curriculum to match those themes and those trends from what employers wanted, and we would hire faculty who had direct experience working in the field at peer companies, and at the same time, had done research. And because of that combination, we had an onslaught of applications and people wanting to come to get a degree where they had theory, where they had applied knowledge, where they were being taught by the world's best. In terms of having that balance right. But it's controversial because traditional would say that's not the way a university should operate. A university should operate by having teachers who are tenured and who are getting evaluated the way you said, Jim, based on their research primarily, and that that applied connection to the workforce is not our responsibility. That's not our mission. And so we have to answer that question about is that mission of the college and the university to make students job ready on day one, or is it their mission to just give them theoretical insights that they can take and build platforms later?

Ken Kring 31:59

So take that from just a different angle. And this is going to have to be our final, our final question. But teaching hard skills, whether it's theoretical or applied, is a more natural sort of faculty extension. Talk with that. Some about teaching the soft skills to Jim's point earlier, the different sort of social and behavioral skills that makes the 18 year old or the 22 year old ready day one. Are there interesting innovations there with faculty? Are there interesting initiatives with some of the major employers. Yeah,

Jason Wingard 32:42

you know, I'm visiting at Harvard now while I'm on sabbatical, and I spent some time with a few faculty members a couple weeks ago, and we were asking this very question. They were asking me this very question, how can we professors at Harvard University who are in humanities be able to prepare our students better with some of these soft skills, because we haven't worked in any of the companies or industries or sectors that they are seeking to work in. And part of the answer became, it was their responsibility the faculty to you know, in their words, they got buddies. They each got a pool of 10 business leaders across different industries and sectors, and talked about their research and what they teach and how it might apply to some of the soft skill capabilities that are needed in the workplace. And so they took it upon themselves as faculty members to better understand how their content and curriculum could be more applicable to the field, specifically in the in the form of soft, soft, soft skills. Because this, these are not, you know, again, these are English and history professors. These are not engineering. So the hard skills don't really apply, but the soft skills do apply, and they learn how to do it. And now they are, they are practicing that. So this is back to Jim's point. This is a group of faculty who want their students to be better prepared, and so they are taking it upon themselves to figure out solutions for how to do that. They will not be evaluated based on this extra work. This will not give them any more credit towards their ultimate agenda in their industry. But it's something that's important to them, and they feel if they can prove that it works, it'll be a contribution to take this to scale, to maybe change the model in the future. If they can prove that it works, because they feel that so many of their colleagues are scared of it, they're scared of the change. They're scared of altering how they are prepared to teach college students. They're scared of how they're going to be evaluated, because they, you know, they they like the model. They understand that. They know it. But if you can show me that another model works, then that's good. Now to more specifically to your question, some of those costs, soft skills include negotiations, include coordinating Complex. Assignments include rerouting strategic plans, when, when, when chaos reigns and you know something unexpected happens, communicating in writing form, communicating in speaking form, communicating in virtual environmental context, which is new for many people. So all of these are areas where you know these soft working with people in complex environments. It's very relevant to what is being taught in Arts and Sciences. They just have to know and understand what those business case studies look like, so that they can share those in their environmental context. So so the last example I'll give is one of these professors from Harvard is a history professor, and he's talking about moments in history and reading contexts and different theories that have worked, dates, etc. And he started reading some case studies from a couple of tech companies in Silicon Valley, and he's incorporating those case studies into his own content. He's merging stories and lessons about American history and world history, and how that applies, from a soft skill standpoint, to this particular case for these Silicon Valley companies, and it's working really well. The thing that I'll add, I know we're out of time that many of the faculty today are also worried about. Though, Ken is being canceled because the way in which you can facilitate dialog in classrooms is by asking your students to take what's happening in the business world, in the political world, in the educational landscape, in their own personal lives, bringing all of those lessons and questions and points of view to bear in the classroom. Right? So the higher education system is a safe place for this course that is on opposite ends of the spectrum and ask questions that you may not be able to ask exercise or practice anywhere else. But what's happening is some faculty are starting to get scared of going beyond their curricular expertise and their research to incorporate it with the things that are happening in the business landscape today, because they don't want to be captured on video, for example, and put on Tiktok or Instagram and canceled for talking about something that is not relevant in some people's minds in their classroom. So the example I'll give is one of these professors, another one with a philosophy professor, and he was motivated because so many of his students were talking about the Super Bowl halftime show with Kendrick Lamar two weeks ago, and they wanted to talk about how the country how the world, has responded to that halftime show, and they wanted to put it in the context of his philosophy literature that they were learning in the classroom, and they were really excited. The students were to do some projects around that. And he said, No, we're not going to do that. You know, I'm afraid that I will get in trouble somehow for that, or you may get in trouble somehow for that in this cancel cultural society that we, you know, we find ourselves in sometimes. And so I think that's a barrier that we also have to overcome. I'll summarize by saying there are so many soft skills that can be learned in colleges and universities and and used as a benefit to prepare students to be able to be more ready on day one. Back to Jim's point, with the EQ, with the negotiation and the learning and the coordination and the communication skills, but we are starting to pull back in the university system to make sure that we're focused more on the direct content, so that we don't go out of bounds and introduce content that may be offensive to some.

Ken Kring 38:35

Jason Wingard, thank you for the fascinating and very relevant conversation here today, we really enjoyed it and have learned a lot.

Jason Wingard 38:43

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I'm glad you all are are leading this Dean's Counsel and the insights I've been learning from myself. So thank you all for providing this platform.

Jim Ellis 38:55

Thank you very much. This is great.

Ken Kring 39:05

You Well, Jim, that was quite a discussion. What were your thoughts?

Jim Ellis 39:09

Well, he he's so realistic in his thought process, and he's so practical, and it's, it's really something that just has to be applied in the academic in the academic arena that the thoughts he has, and I'm glad that he continues to push in this direction, talking about the devaluation of the college degree, etc, etc, because it's a conversation needs to continue. And even when we talked about, you know, the professors being afraid in the classroom, of the of the getting into the rhetoric and the dialog that really should be done, that's just has to be, it's got to be brought back. And it just has not been. It's not there, sadly, and they're worried that they're some kids going to pull out an iPhone and put them on Tiktok for saying something, and that just shouldn't happen. So I thought it was an extremely enlightening. Discussion, and very, very much worth the time of of our listeners to listen to this. I thought it was terrific. Yeah,

Ken Kring 40:07

the kind of energy, insights and sort of balance perspective he brings this is really quite remarkable. Um, yeah, he's not afraid to, um, convey to you what you know, what he you know, what he sees and what his

Jim Ellis 40:22

assessments are, yes, yeah, I totally agree. I think he's he really has got a very, very great perspective on so many things. And, I mean, I could have gone on for another hour talking to him about these things. So very, very valuable session. Great. Enjoyed it. Thank

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