Interview With the Host with Dr. Mark Millliron

Transcript

I love the history here. You know, you go back 50 years ago, this Navy captain that sees a problem Let’s just start off there. I mean, can you explain and, and share with the audience that rich history? Love the history. Dr. David Shigose, Navy captain, PhD, who’d been teaching with UC San Diego, but was watching service members coming back trying to use their GI Bill and kind of getting savaged by traditional education because the model wasn’t flexible for parents.

It wasn’t flexible for working students or for people who are gonna be deployed in 30 days, and it was no fault of those institutions. They just weren’t designed for that population. And he said, “Hey, we wanna develop a high-quality university completely focused on non-traditional working and military students.”

And they gave him the blessing to go to it. Again, flash-forward 55 years, we’re serving 50,000 students a year. We’re serving another 80,000 in workforce development, contract training, but half of our students are parents. All of our students are working. Um, you know, half of our undergraduates are active duty veteran or spouse dependent, so we are still serving that non-traditional working and military student population.

Best part, come to our commencement, you’re gonna see somebody as young as 18, somebody as old as 80, all walking across the stage celebrating. Kids cheering for their parents as opposed to the parents cheering for their kids. It’s incredible. I mean, the stats are ridiculous. It’s amazing. But, you know, we talk about a lot in the episode, you know, it’s like the word anders, ’cause every student that’s coming here is like, “And I’m in the military,” or, “And I have a family,” “And I have this.”

And so love you just, um, you know, talk about that a little bit more in detail. So one of the things we wanna make sure we’re doing is we’re showing students that we see them. You know, we actually believe to serve students well, you have to see them, and part of seeing them is being able to tell the story of the kind of student we serve.

And so as we started doing it, what we found out is there’s a whole group of, of students in higher education that, whose primary identity is being a student. Mm-hmm. And then there’s other stuff they’re doing, but that’s what it’s about. Our students aren’t that. Our students, their primary identity, um, is divided, so they’re a student and a parent, student and an employee, a student and a service member, and those ands are just as important as the academics.

So for us, how do we design for the ander? For somebody who has that kind of, that kind of mixed model, and how do you do it at really high quality so it’s not just about doing it on the side? Like, this is our main job, is focusing on the ander population. And what’s great is we tell that story about anders and talk about it.

People wanna come up and tell us their ander story. Yeah. “Yeah, I was raising kids while I went and got my master’s.” “I was, you know, deployed in Iraq while I did this and got my bachelor’s.” And like, one by one, we’re trying to start this larger conversation because when you say the word college student, um, to anybody around the country, and especially if you’re talking about the media, the m- first thing they think of is that 19-year-old on the quad with a backpack.

Mm-hmm. Super important population. I’m raising some of that population. I get it. Um, and they’re really important, but our student population is actually the fastest-growing in the United States. 70% of h- of college students will tell you they fit one of the non-traditional characteristics. So for us, it’s how do we design just for that population and do it well?

So, you know, you have this huge demographic going to school here. How do you service all of them? Now, you have a 25-year-old that’s super tech-savvy, and then you have someone else that, you know, might be, you know, barely using email, and it’s amazing how personalized you have made that. Our job is to meet that student where they are and take them where they need to go, and realize how diverse that’s gonna be.

Because we have some students who are total rock stars, and, and what we have to do is get out of their way. Yeah. And other students who, uh, need academic support, financial support. They might need psychosocial support, and we have to have the right support at the right time for the right student. The good news is we’re built for this.

This is our student population. This is what we care about, and so we’ve built the systems, the processes, and we have the people that care about these folks. In most of higher education, the mental model is so much about that traditional student. They have a hard time getting their arms around a 36-year-old woman with three kids who’s wrestling with sick children as they’re trying to get assignments in.

That’s not our faculty and staff. We do Andrews training for every one of our faculty and staff members. We do Psych Armor training so they understand military culture, so that they know that’s who we care about. So all of our learning designers, all of our advisors, all of our faculty understand that’s who we’re serving, and that allows us to make sure we focus on the technologies, the techniques, the policies, the practices that help them learn well, finish strong, and launch like rock stars into the next adventure.

What a mission. It’s fun. Crushing it. It’s awesome.