82: Chandra Subramaniam (CSUN) on Being a Student-centric Dean

Dave Ikenberry 0:13 Welcome to Dean's Council, 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 davinberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face and one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy, when done well, higher education has this remarkable, even amazing potential to transform social progress, not only for the students who attend, but their extended families as well.

When we hear students lifting themselves up by their bootstraps, higher ed is often an important aspect, deeply integrated into that journey. Today, we meet with Chandra Subramanian, Dean of the David nazarin College of Business and Economics at Cal State University Northridge, after spending time on the faculty at University of Texas Arlington, Chandra has been dean of Cal State Northridge for about eight years. In that time, he has come to thoroughly know and understand the unique demographic nature of his student body, and has focused his energy as Dean on designing and building programs to drive their success.

70% of his student body are first generation students. A similar proportion work out of necessity, either full or part time, and more than half of his student body is supported by Pell Grants. In short, the vast majority of these students do not come from privileged backgrounds, and this, of course, poses challenges for achieving student success metrics. In this episode, we hear how Chandra has reshaped student services to focus on how to strengthen key gaps that students from this demographic need assistance with, for example, building social skills to prepare these students for professional work environments is a big challenge for his college along the way.

Of course, we learn of tools and tips from Chandra that may be useful in driving success in any modern business school. We hope you enjoy this episode. Our guest today is Chandra Subramaniam. He's dean of the David Nazarene College of Business and Economics at Cal State Northridge.

Welcome Chandra. Thank you very much, Dave. Appreciate being here. What a pleasure to have you here and joining us today.

Could you share a little bit about what your focus has been over the last few years at Northridge and and what some of your success points have been in recent years. Jim Ellis 2:45 And I think maybe to add to that, just talk a little bit about your student body. Chandra Subramaniam 2:50 Thank you very much. I think that, I think, is the big focus that I've had for several years now, given the student body that we have, in terms of who do you want to be?

And I think partly, I think when I first came to CSUN, it was primarily the focus was on graduation rates. And so we sort of changed our mission statement to more career success, you know, because of the type of student body we had. So our student body is primarily first generation. In fact, more than 70% of our students are first generation.

Most of them work at least 20 hours a week, which is about 70% of the students and some many of the students also work full time, but the work that they're doing is not necessarily in a professional environment. So these are students that are working to make ends meet, especially since more than about close to 56 57% of my student body are Pell Grant recipients, which means most of the family income is sitting around $46,000 so you can tell that the need for funding mechanism becomes critical for them for to support their family.

And we also have a very high diversity. In fact, we always come out in the top 10 number of schools that have a high diverse population, student population. So part of it is, all of this is important to recognize the type of resources we need to provide and the type of experiences that we thought, that we thought that was important for the students. The one thing I do have to say about our student body is, by the way, given that they have not been given a silver spoon, there's no sense of entitlement.

And given that they need the field to succeed, they're hard working students, so that makes it sort of easy for us to move forward with what we need to do, and some of the successes come because of that. They're willing to put in the work that needs to get done. So I think that is our major focus in terms of who our student population is, we have, and the question is, what do we need to make sure that they success? World.

So much of what we have thought about at the college has been, how do we make sure we take this set of students and make them successful? And the one thing we could say is, well, they are not going to come in with very little social skills and so on. We need to provide the social skills and the professional development. But beyond that, we need to find another pathway if they're going to be competitive, in order for them to sort of experience and learn and do things that can take what they're learning in the classroom and applying it.

And that was very, very important. So much of what we do is making sure that all students, or at least most students, are applying the skills that they learn in the classroom in a real world situation, right? And our case has been trying to scale that up as much as possible. Jim Ellis 5:56 So give us a couple of examples of those.

I think the examples they're really very germane to this conversation. I think it's great. So tell us some of those. Chandra Subramaniam 6:05 So the thing that we want to do is all students have to do something.

So in essence, if I'll do some examples of my our accounting students. So the accounting students, by the way, we have decided at one point in time that we need to work with the community. And I know most school business schools, all do the wider program, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program, except not in the scale that we do. We currently, by the way, the students, as of this tax season in 2025 within the college alone, they completed more than 10,600 tax returns for taxpayers, bringing back to the community about $16 million we also support based on a state grant, four other CSUs and several community colleges to support them on their wider program, and we support them, which results in another 6000 taxpayers being supported.

So in essence, you can see the size and magnitude of the program the so that's one program the same accounting department also runs what we call a Low Income Tax Clinic. I believe, as I've been informed that we are the only business school in the country that has such a program. What the program does, by the way, is if a taxpayer, and they have to be low income for this program, comes in because they have received a letter from the IRS or a call from the IRS that there are some issues related to their tax returns, and therefore there's some amount of money to be paid this the taxpayer can come to the students under this program on Low Income Tax Clinic, and the students then support the taxpayer by negotiating with the IRS to sort of figure out in terms of exactly what The hurdle is going to be and frequently, that negotiation alone is sufficient to reduce significantly, whatever the penalty that they are supposed to pay.

If the bigger part of this is if the students cannot settle the issue that the IRS has, they can actually, together with faculty who are who are member of the California Bar, can actually argue the case in tax court. That is the unique feature of this program, where we have got a large number of students actually representing clients in a real world case in tax court. Dave Ikenberry 8:42 And what a remarkable experience that has to be for those students to have it at that age in their development, absolutely.

Chandra Subramaniam 8:49 And so this is a program that's been approved by the IRS for now, for many years. And so we do about 202 50 cases of the Low Income Tax Clinic a year. Dave Ikenberry 9:01 Could you share with us, Chandra, some of the other unique things that you must be doing to shape these I'm going to use the word non traditional. That sounds pejorative, and I really apologize for that upfront.

But what are some of the tools and techniques that you're deploying to when you bring when you're onboarding these students to get them to succeed, things that you might not see at just down the street at UCLA or what have you. Chandra Subramaniam 9:30 So let me give you sort of two parts of this puzzle that we've been working on. As I said, for me, the professional experience is important, but the because, as I said earlier, that most of our students coming are coming from, in some sense, the lower economic background, exactly, and the type of skills that they have learned in their home doesn't translate to a professional environment, even if you're working.

So the question was, how do we build that up so we have a career center which. I think most business schools have, but you know, there's absolutely no way for us to put enough human resources into a career center, so put in a lot of technology in it, right in terms of whether we do the V mark for the students who do the resume writing, whether we do what we call standout so that they can learn how to interview, mock interviews. We make sure that we they can connect back and forth with center.

But more importantly, what we have also done, by the way, is to provide the students a program to build their social skills, which we call passport. And so that's a program that we've been growing rapidly. So now, out of 1000 freshman students that come in, we have about, I think, 400 of the students actually taking a passport program, which is, it's a four year program that the students take if they are freshmen, and it's a two year accelerated program if they are transfer students.

What that does is goes through all the skills that we believe the students need. But it's not a one and done. It's a continuous program that they do. They meet every other week, they have mentors that develop and work with them and so on.

And the idea with a passport program is to continue to build up social skills. But beyond the social skills issue, given that we are trying to compete in a very competitive market of Los Angeles, Jim knows how. He knows how well this big area it is, and what we've also tried to do is say, okay, you can build a social skills, but we're not going to get to where people grow up with the skills already, right? So the question becomes, how do I shift this movement in terms of saying, I'm going to give you a social skill, develop as much as you can, but then I'm also going to increase your hard skills.

So what we decided to do is many years, several years ago, I think all of us were hearing in the papers and so on with IBM and Amazon and several firms saying that you really don't need a four year degree, you just need to take the certification and then you can get some work, right? And very quickly, we found out, as many of you did, more than half the states in the country said you don't need a four year degree to get a state job. You just need to get certifications. So that is actually worrisome for me, because when you talk to the same leadership in these companies about what is the career success of someone taking certification, it isn't very long.

So certification provides them skills in order for them to do a specific job with a short term and then they need more certification in order to move forward. So what we decided to say is a four year degree is going to give them the careers that they need, but they need skills in order to enter and develop the skills. So we started working with our partners that we have worked with. So we started off with my, what we call systems and operations management students with SAP.

I think several schools use SAP, so we started with an SAP certification, and that started to grow in terms of where we had marketing students then were sort of strong. We can require it, but we strongly encourage them to take these certifications, or micro credentials, from real world third party industry certifications, which is either HubSpot and HootSuite. We had accounting students taking certification from the IRS and Microsoft. We so we went department by department, and instead of being top down of me telling them what certification they should have, we decided to let each department decide what certification that they thought their students would really need to get the step up.

So we started with about students receiving about 80 certifications or micro credentials about four years ago, and this past year that we just completed, students received more than 4500 micro credentials. So it's grown rapidly, and so several students are going to come in with a degree that they have on their resume, with a series of certifications and micro credentials that they will own, right, and that, I think, has given us some real good visibility, because in 2024 ACSB awarded us the 2024 innovations that inspire Award, which we're very happy to receive in that case.

And I think this year, as many of you may have noticed when they came out with their first report on business education, on page 51 is lazarillon College talking about workforce, right, developing the workforce so in essence, I think it's given us and our students. Benefit of making sure that when we said career success, that we meant it by going forward with developing both the social skills and professional skill and the hard skills that they need to be successful. Jim Ellis 15:13 A couple of a couple of other areas that you worked on.

Want you to expand on some of those, one of which is internships. Now every every business school gets internships for their students, and so that's an important one, particularly because, as you say, you've got first gen students that really don't really have business experience coming from home, so they're having to figure out, how does the business work? So internships is one, and then secondly is kind of entrepreneurship, which is a completely different direction, because now you got to teach these kids how to go out and start a company, run a company.

So talk to me about the two of those areas, because those are they're very different the way you're handling them than maybe another university would handle them. Chandra Subramaniam 15:59 So one of the things that we thought was important, as you know, James, you're absolutely right, by the way. It's a great question to deal with this internship issue, because I think most schools talk about internships, and they sort of say it's important students have to go get in. And frequently, I think most students can get internship because they have their family have connections, or the university has connections in a school like us, which is a major public university that have not done much in terms of networking, because we were not dependent on our alumni.

For a long time, we were state supported. So in essence, this was not a major criteria. And so in that case, by the way, we because, again, based on a student body where there's that, it's not like they have built built in relationship with employers out there, through their networks, they have to go find their internship. But even with that difficulty, one of the things we required was at least in two majors in marketing and management, we have a required internship for students, so students cannot graduate without getting an internship.

And the precisely and even the accounting students, by the way, even though that's not required, more than 70% of the students take an internship because that's how they get their job. But what's most important about internship is, remember, I said earlier that all of these students, most of these students, are working, but they're working in a non professional environment. So the internship was supposed to provide them that professional environment to work with at least for a semester or two in order to get the skills that they need to get ready for employment.

Covid sort of put some damper on what we do with internships. Pre covid, we were running more than 900 students on internships a year. We are now backed after covid period by back to about 700 students on internships, but that's growing back again after we went down to zero during covid. So I think the most important part of that internship was move away from the type of job you're currently doing at the ihops or the Starbucks, but to get the professional experience.

The The other thing that came across was, how do you think, like an entrepreneur, you're a business major or any any major at the University, we wanted students to actually think through how to be resilient, how to change, how to pivot as circumstances change and as ideas don't wash out, and so on. So in essence, by the way, one of the commitments I made with the provost at that point in time. Now it's about eight years ago, they were looking so we entrepreneurship to CSUN is relatively new.

It may it's about a decade old. So we are still learning the ropes. We are very engaged internally with entrepreneurship, not externally, yet, that part of it is growing, but the entrepreneurship component was important, because for me as a business school, we need to grow that together with the rest of the university. So the thought was whether we're going to keep it at the college or move it centrally.

And so my resolution to that was, we will manage the entrepreneurship for the university through the college, so every entrepreneurship program that we run is for the university. So typically, we get a whole slew of students from across the campus. About 30 to 40% of the students in entrepreneurial programs that we run and competitions that we run engineering students in computer science, but 30% come from business, but another 30% come across the campus. So the idea is to get them all to join together as much as possible in order to develop skills that they need to be successful, in terms of thinking out new ideas.

And so over the last few years, we have been somewhat successful. We. Not at the same level in terms of some other schools are. We've been doing this for many for a couple of several decades, but I think we are starting to grow that program out so much so now that we have had several very strong successes, so we are now trying to move that entrepreneurship skills out to more of the community we live in a community, just so that we are all on the same page.

The CSUN is actually a very large public institution, and the only public institution in an area of 2 million people in the valley of Los Angeles. So we have a big market that we haven't actually worked with and connected with and so now the question is, how do we connect them, bring them in, especially because in the community that we live in the in the valley, we have a very large number of small proprietors. In fact, I was given this number some time ago by the Los Angeles Economic Development Center, we have 20% of all businesses in the valley are one or two person proprietors, compared to 14% in the state and 11% across the country.

So you can see that when you have a very, very large immigrant population, the easiest path to go to work is to start your own business, which is why entrepreneurship became very, very important as a way to build the skill set of the students that we have who come from families that are running these small businesses. So all of what we do is sort of connected to the community in which we live. And how do we help support and build the sort of economic background of the students that we have.

So one of the things that I talk about a lot is every student that we graduate and gets a job increases their family income by doubling or tripling it. That's the impact that they have. Wow, which is why we typically get very highly ranked on the social mobility index. Dave Ikenberry 22:07 Chandra, let's build on that again.

You 70% of your students are first generation. The vast majority of your students appear to be doing 20 hours a week of external work, sometimes more than that, that's probably not voluntary per se. It's it's kind of mandated. What that so that suggests you have your students have exposure to issues such as food insecurity or perhaps financial security issues.

We know that one of the top reasons students drop out of their learning journey is due to finances. Is there anything special, or is there a particular focus that your school has to keep students on track? Chandra Subramaniam 22:54 Great question, Dave, it's one of our big I mean, as you know, I mean, part of it is as a large public university for a long time, probably till about 1995 totally dependent on the state, right, we have not actually spent much time or develop the the area of advancement within the university.

So for us, that's been new. So as weak as I've come in about eight years ago, the big issue for me is we are not giving very many scholarships for students. We talk a lot about the fact that we have a lot of students working to support them and the family, but we as a university of a college have not done much in order to support them. So in essence, that became a big push in terms of us trying to find ways and trying to connect with donors to provide the support that we need for the students.

And we have been somewhat successful. We have, in some sense, I think I would say we are probably, over the last eight years, probably quadruple the amount of scholarships that we give out right for students. But having said that. So we give out, probably in the neighborhood about four to $500,000 scholarship that I think in most schools, you will say, well, that's not much, right?

Because the school our size, with over 7000 students, I should be giving a lot more in terms of support to the students. But it's been, as I said, it's a slow build, as we've been building it up as much as we can in order to support the students. And scholarship is the best way to support the students. We are also changing the way we do support for students scholarships.

It used to be we would support them based on one and done, which every year, we even shifted it with our donor body to sort of say, No, we need recurring scholarships, which means if a student receives a scholarship, they shouldn't worry about applying for it again next year, as long as they maintain the GPA right, so that they don't have to worry about it going back to work. And so the other thing that we have. Done, by the way, in scholarship, using this scholarship as a venue to keep the students which, which is Dave You pointed out on retention issue was to say that we found out, by the way, we tried this as an experiment several years ago, that if you gave a scholarship to a student, which is a recurring scholarship, most of our students at that time, were taking about anywhere from nine to 12 units, right?

Because they were working those hours, we said this, don't give a scholarship, but that means we would like to get you to do on the semester that you're getting a scholarship 15 units, right? So which meant we increase the number of units that students will take by giving them a scholarship to really reduce the amount of time that they're working would that surprisingly, did, by the way, and we later found out on looking up other national research that the more time the students spent in the classroom, the retention increased, even though we allowed them to drop the fifth class if they wanted to or was struggling, only 2% of the students actually dropped their first class and their GPA actually increased from the previous year, right, right?

So it sort of came with a bundle of benefits, right? By increasing their time that they're spending in the classroom, and they're taking you more classes interesting. So that's what we've been trying to get at in terms of experiment to see what we can do in order to help the students be successful. So much.

So this year, by the way, we just increased our number of units a student sticks at the college, not necessarily at the university, at the college, from 12.9 units on average, to 13.9 units, which benefits our graduation rates and retention, all kinds of things, right? Yep, in essence, part of these are, in some sense, what we do in one area benefits us in other areas.

And we are trying to see how we can help do all of those things that are connected in some sense. Jim Ellis 27:08 The other thing that you've done quite a bit of is to get the students involved in competitions. Talk a little bit about that. Chandra Subramaniam 27:16 This is, you know, it's an interesting question to look at in terms of competitions necessary.

So one of the things that Kate mentioned is we have been a large public university where resources has been difficult to get right. And so one of the things you hear a lot from my faculty when we came in was the fact that, well, we can't afford to send students out for competitions, because it costs funds, right? So we didn't. What we did was we did a lot of internal competitions within the college or within the university in order to make sure that we are not spending funds.

But the problem with that is the students never learn what is outside, what other people are doing, what experiences they can get when they go out there to compete in a regional competition or a national competition. So we made this ask with my donors to raise the funds that we needed in order to support the students actually going for competition. So one of the rules that we have at the college now is the dean's office will support students going for competitions right as much as we can, whether it's regional or national, depending on how far they go, because it's important for the students to believe in themselves.

The one thing I've learned in my you know, I've worked now for about 25 years in a public institution, right previously at UT, Arlington, now at CSUN, is more students in this in a public institution, especially coming from the background that they are in, don't believe in themselves. They feel like the imposters at a university. We need to provide them the confidence that they're going to be out there and they can succeed and actually grow in their career. Right for them to be able to go out and experience a competition and feel energized and feel that they can win is huge.

So that, I think, is where the competition plays upon, because then they come back and talk to other students, and it's a cycle, right? It's a belief in themselves, that they are don't know how to be imposters, that they can't compete with anybody, and therefore they don't have to pretend. So I think that's where, I think the competition piece of it comes in to build confidence on the students. Right?

We have done the same thing when we have sent them out abroad, again, not as much as many universities do, but minimally, we've tried to send students out. To to Asia, especially China, or to Europe, in order to build out confidence in themselves in terms of what they can achieve, right and to see what the other side of the world looks like. You would be surprised by the way that it's you know, we live on the coast of LA. 40% of all goods and services come through our two ports, la port and Long Beach port.

And yet, majority of my students do not have a passport. They have never traveled anywhere, right? Giving them that experience is critical. And so when we do this experience, when I talk about this film, it's not the students paying the whole amount.

I do want some skin in the game, but the college then supports a student 75% of the cost for their travel internationally, right? So you can see that I go, you know, trying to convince my donors why I need their funds as much as they can the benefits you're going to get. But we need to do things if you really believe in the school you graduated from, right, probably decades ago. But it's important for me to do that in order to bring in the type of resources that we need to support the students.

So I, in some sense, I call myself a very student centric team, right? I'm trying to figure out exactly where the pieces are that I can connect for to support the students as much as I can. Dave Ikenberry 31:32 Chandra, when you look out over the horizon a few years or even further, what are some of the threats and or some of the opportunities that that you see, particularly for your demographic and your college? Chandra Subramaniam 31:52 Davis said that's a beautiful question, by the way.

In fact, this is something that I think about a lot. So the way I tend to look at these things, by the way, is to say, if a student is coming today, this year, fall 2025 they'll probably graduate in 2035 years from now. And when you look at that, by the way, and you say, Wow, the world of business is changing so rapidly, I'm not sure what we're going to be able to have. What are the jobs that we're going to have in 2030 especially when the Institute for the Future tells us that 60% of the jobs in 2030 has not been created yet.

Right, right? What do we teach now that will get them trained or bring them the experience they need for those jobs in 2030 so all we can do is we can't train them for those jobs, but to make sure that they can they know how to learn, right? And so we do a lot of those kinds of activities, and partly we do that a lot with of with partnerships. So the one big area that we are currently working on is on what's going to happen with AI.

And all of us are working on the same thing, in some sense, right? What? How is AI going to change what we do? So in some sense, by the way, we have created, we have had a long term partnership with IBM, and so they provide, they come into the university, to the college, on a frequent basis, on a yearly basis, and they do workshops like at the college.

They also do what we call a big, huge event called workforce of the future that talks about what's coming up. We now, currently have a partnership going on where the students are will be required to take what is called IBM's AI foundation for ai ai literacy certification, right? And they so, they provide that for us, for all the students, to take. But beyond that, by the way, many of our faculty, as I think you may or may not know, the CSU was one of the first university system that went ahead and purchased a license for chat GPT Pro from open AI with a number of other firms, and so all students, faculty and staff, have access to chat GPT Pro for the next and so they put a license period for about 18 months, which will expire next June, and then we'll see where we go.

But the idea is, we wanted our students and faculty to play work with it, do as much as we can. So that's one of the things that we are trying to get at in terms of faculty to get comfortable to use AI and to be able to teach students in terms of how to use AI most effectively, because I think there is a small proportion of faculty that will that continues to believe that they wanted anything to do with AI, right? And our concern is, if AI is going to be the what is going to be happening, changing the market.

Place. Our students need to know about it right and understand how to work with it and use it most effectively. So I think that's where my sort of long term look at is in terms of how do I deal with the things that are coming out that we are not aware of, or things that we see coming, and how do we at least work and partner with that as much as we can in terms of that, so we also partner with Coursera in terms of bringing this the professional education that we need for the students, as much as we can, right?

I do know that many schools also partner with Coursera, but the way we partner with Coursera is a little different compared to most, I think most schools purchase a license and say, students, faculty, if you want to use it. Here it is. In our case, we identify specific certifications and micro credentials that in Casera, and we make sure that the faculty is sort of strongly encouraging students through all kinds of bonus points and some structure in order for them to use in the classroom, which is the reason why we get as much in terms of the number of certification that students get.

So in essence, that's where we are trying to get at is in terms of building skills that students need, both in terms of what the technology skills that they're doing. One quick last tidbit I want to leave with is as many schools may have done, we also changed our business program so that we used to have something called an intro to business program before students can get into our our junior and senior year. It has now been changed into a data literacy course, so every business student cannot move up beyond the first 300 level course unless they have done this data literacy course, so that every other no other department needs to reteach data literacy again, right?

Whether it's Excel, it's Power BI, those things are already done in that first. They can do beyond that, right? And so we've been trying to change as they met. You mentioned these things are changing.

The question, how do we change with the times? Jim Ellis 37:13 Really, really appreciate. This has been a great conversation, Chandra, and we so appreciate your candid, candidness and telling us how you how you deal as a student centric Dean, with with the population that you have and the appropriate programs you put together, and thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. We do appreciate it.

Chandra Subramaniam 37:33 Thank you. Appreciate the time that you're spending with me. Jim Ellis 37:36 Thanks. Stay in a couple of weeks.

Great listening to forward to it. Thank you. Thank you. Dave Ikenberry 37:50 So Dave, what did you think of that?

I really enjoyed that conversation. You know, he's got a demographic that I surely appreciate. You know, one of my great ethos in life is, is that higher education can really be such a positive force for social change and upward mobility, and his demographic is right in the sweet spot of all of that. And so I really, I really identify with that, and I I really appreciated hearing his focus and and just his whole thought process about how to address and advance that demographic.

Jim Ellis 38:33 I agree with you totally. I think what he does, you know, the college does a superb job with the tax returns. I mean, you think about 16,000 tax returns and working with with people that don't understand tax codes and don't understand any of that, to get them through that, and have the students with that kind of experience, and then to be able to spend time if they have to to go legal, I think that there's so much wonderful opportunity for these young people, he's and his his thought of being student centric is just right on the money.

Yeah. And to be student centric with this demographic population, these kids only, only have got up to go. They're just going up. It's great.

Yeah. Kudos to him for sure. Yep, yep. Good thing.

Dave Ikenberry 39:19 Thank you for listening to this episode of Dean's Council. This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search. Dean's Council was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital arts for a catalog of previous shows. Please visit our website, at Dean's council.

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