86: Brooke Elliott (Illinois) on Expanding Access

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. Our guest today, Brooke Elliot, is the 11th dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign a role she assumed in August of 2024 Brooke earned her PhD from the University of Washington in accounting, and has been at Illinois her entire career.

After 23 years in the College of Business, she has risen to become the first woman to lead the college. Prior to her deanship, she advanced through key roles at Gies, including being head of the department of accountancy from 2017 to 2020 Associate Dean for online programs, an explosive part of Gies business portfolio from 2020 to 2022 and finally, Executive Associate Dean of Academic Programs from 2022 to 2024 when she assumed the deanship. In today's episode, we not only get an update on the broader arc of institutional change that has occurred at Gies over the last 25 years, but we also get a detailed view of Brooks's goals for leading Gies forward, much of this involves several strategies she has for advancing access to undergraduate education, while also keeping her finger on the pulse of change affecting the accounting profession in an era of AI We hope you enjoy this episode with Brooke Elliot.

Welcome. Brooke Elliot, it's wonderful to have you here on Dean's Council. Thank you. Thank you.

David. Well, we really look forward to our conversation today. When I think back over the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, over the last 20 years, it has really gone through a lot of change. I mean, we kind of throw that out loosely at it at many business schools, but geese has really if we were to rank order, the change component, geese would be pretty close to the top.

Yes, you've been in the job a year and a half. How's it going? And moreover, how's it going within that change dynamic. How are you keeping the troops energized after such a sustained amount of infusion and engagement?

Brooke Elliott 2:49 Yeah, yeah. Positively, so yeah, 18 months in, you know, it's, it's, it's going really well. I get up every day, and I absolutely love what I do, not the hard challenges, because they're there inevitably are in this job. But you know, I'm really passionate about expanding access to education.

That's why I love being here at the University of Illinois, and I absolutely love traveling around the world and meeting our alums, and that's a big part of this job. So you know, I really am inspired by both our students and then, you know, our alums and donors that want to engage back and give philanthropically to help us continue to drive forward. You know, to your point, you know, if we look at geese over the last decade, like we have been wholly transformed, the IMBA program is now 10 years old.

And you know, if you roll back 10 years, in December of 2015, we had zero online students, and now we have over 7000 online graduate students, and more online graduate students than we do undergraduate residential and graduate residential combined, which means, you know, who we served has dramatically changed, and that changes you as an institution. You know that did take a tremendous amount of innovation, and I will say now innovation is just ingrained in who we are. It's part of our culture.

And I think what has happened over that decade is we've attracted faculty and staff who know we're a place that really thinks in a different way, innovates quickly, is not afraid to take risk, not afraid to make hard decisions, perhaps to shut down programs whenever we see an opportunity, really, to deliver on our mission and expand access to education in new ways. And so it's, you know, I'm not saying our teams don't get tired. They do and and sometimes they have to tell me to slow down a little bit, but, but, but overall, we're just, I think we're built for it now, which is a really awesome place to lead.

Ken Kring 4:54 Wondering in your early days. So what are the surprises? Have there been you. New headwinds, or proportionate headwinds that you, you know, had not anticipated.

And sort of, how are you dealing with, sort of, what you're finding in terms of the market forces and the requirement to continue change? Brooke Elliott 5:14 Yeah, well, I mean, you know, last year, in my first year as dean, there was a lot of change. You know, there's a different political environment. And, you know, I feel like starting, if we roll back a year to January 2025, I feel like every Friday at five, new news came out and and it really required us to, you know, think carefully about how we were doing business and how we're going to respond.

You know, I have a great marketing communications team. I have a great strategy leadership team. And so, you know, in that first year, we spent a lot of time together, you know, it felt like a lot of times a bit of crisis management. And I think it's hard anytime there's a changing environment.

I mean, there was a change management process going on because I was coming in as dean and still shaping my team, I felt like we were in crisis management mode, and at the same time, we were still driving forward and innovating. And so I do think like that was a little exhausting for me and and for the team, but I really feel like we're in a pretty good, you know, Cadence right now. You know, I will say there are still, really, you know, strong headwinds. We and other business schools, you know, have relied historically on international graduate students to really seek out the type of education that we offer.

We've relied on that tuition revenue. And, you know, there's a significant decline in international student enrollments, not just here at the University of Illinois, not just in the College of Business, but but really nationwide. And so, you know, we have to think very creatively, and I think really continue to innovate, to identify new sources of tuition revenue. I mean, in the end.

I mean, I run the school like a business, and tuition revenue, philanthropic dollars, state dollars and Federal dollars are the only four sources of funding, and we tend not to get federal dollars. And you know, less than 10% of our budget at u i, u c, comes from the state. And so it really does come down to tuition dollars and philanthropic dollars. I mean, whenever you have a significant hit in one of those pillars being international graduate student tuition revenue, you have to quickly identify new sources.

Dave Ikenberry 7:29 How did you respond to the international dip? And I suppose the other part of that is, not only was there a dip, but you probably didn't really know it until the middle of September. I mean, when there was just a lot of empty seats that, you know, you were hoping for the best, but maybe the How did, how did you respond? Were there specific strategies?

Brooke Elliott 7:54 Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things, you know, I really got behind our team, and we added some additional resources to focus on yield, because, you know, it was really late, you know, whenever all of a sudden, visa interviews weren't available, and then our historical yield rates we knew, you know, were not going to play out. So we started working on yield. We invested additional scholarship dollars in a way that we hadn't before, because we knew, you know, if we think about historically, we might have gotten full tuition dollars, even if we were going to get half tuition dollars, it's better than having an empty seat.

And so we really worked on not only international student yield, but upping scholarships for domestic students to try to ensure, you know, that we were able to generate really revenue for seats that we had in graduate courses at the same time. I mean, on the online side, we I mean, it's, it runs like a machine, and so we're good at really driving yield in those programs. And the nice thing about our online portfolio. So we have a portfolio of three fully online degrees and then 16 graduate certificates.

80% of those students are actually domestic students, and 20% International. So those programs actually serve as a natural diversification to the international graduate students that predominantly comprise our residential programs, and to our benefit, those programs on the online side have continued to grow, and we also had been having conversations about launching a series of new online degrees, and so we accelerated that process. And so we're going to launch our fourth online graduate degree in the coming 12 months, it will be an online Master's of Science in Business Analytics with an AI focus, Ken Kring 9:49 with a very recent and current activity in the Middle East.

Are you modeling again for either online or other sort of programmatic enrollments? Brooke Elliott 9:59 Yes, yeah. Positively. You know, when we look I mean our student our international students, we've seen the biggest dip in students from India and China.

Of course, we don't when I look at enrollments from Middle Eastern countries, we have some enrollments, but not large enrollments in our residential programs. You know, I expect those likely to go close to zero. We have been having conversations with a lot of different university partners, both in India and in the Middle East, and I do see that as a potential path forward developing, maybe perhaps not fully online, but some type of hybrid program where a lot of the learning happens asynchronously or from the studio like the one I'm in today.

And then perhaps, you know, in exec ed style, some focused in person delivery, I think you know, that is a model that we're very well suited to deliver given the investment that we've made in high quality online content and delivery, and it may be a way to capture and really, you know, serve students internationally in a hybrid program and allow us to still generate revenue. And those conversations are very, very early on. You know, some institutions, of course, as you both know, academic institutions, particularly private institutions, have campuses in other parts of the world.

The University of Illinois does not have a campus in another part of the world. But we're working closely with the Granger College of Engineering to see if we can identify areas where there's joint interest in geese and Granger education. And then from an operational perspective, it might make more sense for us to be able to have, you know, perhaps not a physical location but but a headquarters where we have people on the ground and engaging with those in local communities to really understand the needs.

From an educational perspective, Dave Ikenberry 12:02 let's switch gears a little bit. Brooke, something close to your heart, which is accounting education. For the last, I can't even remember how many years, but it's been going on a long time. You know, the accounting community just could not generate enough accounting graduates.

I mean, either it seems like the whatever you generated, you should have done 2x of that with AI today, there's, you know, there's fear and concern that maybe AI is going to change the way accounting services are provided, maybe even change the way accounting is taught, but that the the number of graduates needed is going to change, it's going to shrink. What's your view on all of that? And what do you see the the future of accounting education? To be Brooke Elliott 12:54 sure, sure you know, on, on, just to start, I'm still really bullish on accountancy education.

You know, we're the number one ranked accountancy program in the world, and so we also really good spot, right? I attract the best talent. You know, the last time something like this happened, I was actually head of accountancy, and, you know, it was when they're really the technology at that point was really focused on data or business analytics, and there was a lot in the popular press that data analytics was going to be the end of the accountancy profession as it existed. And I feel like it's that rhetoric again, of course, like that wasn't the end of the accountancy profession as it existed.

And we actually, at the University of Illinois were one of the first to embed business analytics into our accountancy curriculum. We launched a graduate concentration in business analytics, and we really just ensured that, you know, our graduates had the skills necessary to be successful, and so we really saw no dip in the demand for the talent that we provided. I expect the very same thing to happen now. You know, we are already we have already embedded AI throughout much of the undergraduate core curriculum.

Our accountancy faculty members are embedding AI tools and applications and really teaching our students, you know, how to use AI to, perhaps, you know, help them develop better client solutions to help them be more efficient. I believe that at least, at least for the University of Illinois, we're going to continue to see really strong demand for what we offer now, I do believe, for, you know, if you think about accountancy education very broadly, there is going to be less need for very basic accounting talent.

You know, whatever you think about, just pure bookkeeping, or just, you know, really basic transactions. I mean, much of that already is being done by AI. We have great relationships, of course, with all of the big four accounting firms, and so I see the way they're utilizing it, but in those same conversations, they continue to, you know. Remind me that they still struggle to retain talent.

And so, you know, I do think the type of talent that we produce has to be different. And the entry level, you know, the auditor, one or staff one role is going to look quite different. And I think the expectation in terms of what students will be able to do whenever they show up day one is different. But, you know, I'm confident that we're going to continue to produce that to produce that talent.

You know, we still see strong demand at the undergraduate level for for accountancy, undergraduate education, and you know, the big four still recruit hundreds of our students every year. Dave Ikenberry 15:40 What do you have some examples of how you've integrated that AI into your various accounting courses, or maybe elsewhere in the college? Brooke Elliott 15:50 Yeah, so, you know, as an example we have, and this, again, this happened in probably a little more than a decade ago.

You know, we brought what were prototypical statistics statistics courses in house, and we have a sequence, business to 10, business to 11, and it it really teaches basic like statistics, analytics. And then we teach every single student how to program. So they so right now, every student leaves and they can program in Python. We're revising those courses because, in all honesty, students don't need to know how to program in Python.

And so what we're doing in those courses is we're teaching them the basic still of programming, because I think there's some level of fundamental knowledge that all business students and all students need to know. And so we're right now defining like, what are those fundamental competencies and skills that we think every business student needs to know, and then how do we teach students to leverage AI right to enhance those skills? And so it's a human in the loop approach. And so we're now revising the business to 11 course so that it actually empowers students and teaches students to use AI to program and to develop the same solutions that would have required a programming language.

You know, previously, in one of our courses, one of the faculty members, she walked through a series of assessments that she does with our students, and in the first assessment, it's a problem, and they have to solve it using Excel, and they basically have a week to complete that assignment. The next iteration, they are empowered to use their programming skills, and they have 48 hours to develop a solution. And then the last iteration, they use AI, and they can actually complete the assessment in a class period.

And so we're trying to teach students the fundamental skills. We still think it's important that they actually know how to do it in Excel, because it they go through the basic, you know, analytics. But we also want to show them, once they understand it, how much more efficient they can be Ken Kring 17:58 interesting as leader, are there global implications or or nuances related to, particularly around accountancy that are, you know, either different or or also need to be enhanced or changed or adapted?

Brooke Elliott 18:19 Yeah, I mean, we think about global talent implications. I mean, all four of the big four accounting firms have been outsourcing talent internationally for a while. And, you know, I think to up to even 25% of the workforce of some of the big four accounting firms. You know, they outsource internationally, and so it's not domestically source talent.

It will be interesting to see, you know what happens in terms of the percentage of talent that large accountancy firms actually source internationally versus domestically. And you know, whether you know the talent domestically will have the skills you know, perhaps to displace some of that international talent that the firms have been utilizing. I mean, I think that's an that's an open question. I've been, I always have this conversation with, you know, with different accountancy leaders whenever they come through.

You know, one, I think, other big change that's happening broadly in the accountancy profession is, you know, at least at a state level, there's now a shift away from 150 hours towards 120 hours. The Certified Public, you know, the CPA exam looks quite different, and it's much broader. So you know that you could actually earn an undergraduate degree in something other than accountancy and successfully sit for the exam. So I also think, not just domestically, but globally, accountancy really is looking for a more, you know, I guess diverse set of talent, or the talent looks more heterogeneous.

And whenever I think about you. Our ability at the University of Illinois to produce that talent, I'm very confident, you know, that even if it's not, you know, it doesn't, they don't come through our prototypical accountancy major, that we still produce a tremendous amount of the talent. I mean, many of our students in Gies actually go on into the advisory side of one of the big four accountancy firms. We have a lot of our finance students, supply chain students, and they also hire many of our Grangeville College of Engineering students.

And so I think we think about talent development at a really broad level to meet the demands. Dave Ikenberry 20:35 Brooke, let's circle back to the beginning of our conversation. You've been in the in the job a year and a half, aside from keeping the train moving down the track, a train that's been moving pretty quickly. What are some of the new strategic innovations you've introduced, and how are those?

How is that going? I know it's still early, yeah, but how's that going? Brooke Elliott 20:57 Yeah, it's still early. Yeah, we're moving.

We're coming pretty fast here, though, yeah, you know one thing when, when I think about we've done an amazing job of expanding access to business education in the graduate space, and that really has been through the creation of a broad portfolio of online degrees and certificates in the undergraduate space. Though, you know, we've, we've, we've, we've been pretty stagnant. In all honesty, we historically have enrolled just under 600 freshmen. We enrolled about 200 on campus, transfer students at the beginning of their sophomore year, and then about 80 students off campus, transfer students at the beginning of their junior year.

And so and the entire time that I've been at geese, and I've, you know, I've been here for 23 years, like that's what our enrollment pattern has looked like. We have about 3200 undergraduate students. Whenever I see though the demand for what we offer, the it really has been, the growth has been exponential. If you go back prior to the geese gift, we had just right around 3300 applications to geese.

If you roll forward a few years. Then the University of Illinois adopted the Common App, and at that point, we grew by about another 1000. But post common app, it we our growth in applications at the undergraduate level has been times three. So this year, we are at over 12,000 freshman applications just for geese.

It's just for geese. Yeah, and we've so we we become the most selective college on this campus, like, more selective than Granger, but not by not by intent, like right believe in expanding access to education. And so a lot of our innovation now is starting to be focused in in the undergraduate space. And so I think about it in two ways.

One, I would just like to serve more undergraduate learners. I mean, we serve 75% in state students, but when I look at depth of quality in applications, we are literally not admitting 1000s of students who I know would be successful here, and that's, that's hard. I mean, a lot of, I mean, they're in state students. Their parents are alums.

They want to be third and fourth generation Illini, and we're not admitting that. And that's that's not a good story for a public flagship. So we're making big investments to be able to grow our undergraduate class. We actually grew it some this year, by about 100 students.

So we ended up enrolling 787 freshmen this fall, but over the next three years, I would like to grow that to enrolling 1000 freshmen each year. The again, you will see no difference in the quality of the student that we admit, but it does require us, you know, to make some big investments and think innovatively about how we deliver what really sets geese apart like right now, every single student participates in an experiential learning project. We have a junior level course where every single student works as part of a team on a live client project.

And so, you know, we're really trying to make investments now and think innovatively about, how do we scale what we offer so that there's no degradation in quality, but we can expand access. So that's one piece of it. The other piece, though, is, how do we expand access to business education, to those on this campus, you know, the University of Illinois, we crossed 60,000 students total, undergraduate and graduate this past year. There are 1000s of undergraduate students who are here and either wanted to be in geese, but are not, or perhaps they didn't want to pursue, you know, undergraduate business education as a major, but they would love to have access to business content, and we just haven't provided that opportunity.

So what we're working on now is building out a series. Series of undergraduate online certificates that would then stack into a hybrid business minor. And we're starting to have really early conversations around what might it look like to have a plus business major, like, Why does, why does engineering get to own that whole space? There's plus CS, there's plus ds.

I'm like, let's go with plus business. And so we're spending a lot of time strategically and thinking about, how could we actually accomplish that? And if we can, you know, we're going to exponentially increase the number of undergraduate learners that we serve, perhaps more than how we even expanded access in the graduate space, which which would transform who we are. Ken Kring 25:41 Again, interesting.

Yeah, it's interesting. So you've, you've, you've characterized some pretty good problems to have around growth, yeah, continuity, excellence. And, of course, the the, the reciprocal to that is, it's a financial challenge to address those kinds of initiatives. Sort of, how are you looking at the financial model?

What? What sort of remediation or improvements to thinking and talking about? Brooke Elliott 26:14 Sure, sure. So, you know, I think if we think of it from a financial model perspective, if we're able to serve more undergraduate learners that are already on this campus, right?

We generate some revenue from instructional units, and so it's not going to fully cover the cost, but over time, it will. So we're making big investments in developing online content, although some of the digital content that we have now we can actually leverage to develop and deliver, you know, fully online undergraduate certificates. And we do online education really, really well, and we already have the infrastructure built to deliver it. So to some extent, you know, it's just amortizing if it cost, you know that that we've already really born and spreading those over a larger portfolio than just our online graduate offerings and so.

So part of it's thinking about, you know, what investments have we made? What assets do we have? How can we deploy those in other spaces to continue to expand access and generate revenue? And I think we'll be able to do that quite well.

You know, in when I talk about enrolling more freshman undergraduate learners, I want to continue to serve. You know, the predominance of undergraduate students that we serve, I believe should be from the state of Illinois, but I would like to also serve more out of state students. And so we serve 75% in state students. I have zero interest in serving less in terms of numbers of in state students that we serve right now.

But you know, serving out of state students, it is a way to generate additional revenue, because there is an out of state differential. And the other really important thing from a strategic perspective is, you know, Illinois and the Gies College of Business, we continue to really have a regional reputation, but not a national reputation, which I think sometimes it's surprising to people, but But it's true. It's true in all of the research that we look at. And one way to really grow that national reputation is to bring in students from other states, particularly the coast.

We have a lot of alums in New York, New Jersey. We have a lot of alums in California, whether it's in the bay area or Southern California. And so we're already making investments in terms of prospective student events, admitted student events, so that we can yield more students from each of coast. And so that's another angle from really just a business model perspective.

And then the last piece is, I have to be really good at at philanthropy and and I am so that's good, but it's a really, it's honestly a really easy story to tell, right? I mean, we were a land grant institution. We want to expand access to education. There are qualified students in our home state, and we want to give them an opportunity.

And whenever I tell that story to alums and donors like it resonates. And you know, many of the individuals that I connect with, you know, Illinois education, it really transformed their lives, and many of them benefited from a scholarship, and it's the only reason they were here, and they want to provide that same opportunity to others. And so it's ensuring that, you know, we're being successful in engaging our alums and bringing in philanthropic dollars so that we can support that growth and really so that we can expand access.

Dave Ikenberry 29:29 Well, Brooke, this has been a fantastic interview that time has just flown by, and unfortunately, we're at the end of that time. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. We wish you the best. I mean, again, Illinois has done fantastic over the years, but the institution is clearly in great hands with you at the helm.

So congratulations and and I really look forward to what's going to unfold in the years ahead. Brooke Elliott 29:57 Well, I really appreciate it, and I very much enjoy. Our conversation today. So thanks for inviting me.

Ken Kring 30:03 Absolutely great being with you. Brooke Elliott 30:04 Thank you. All right. Thank you.

Have a great afternoon. Dave Ikenberry 30:15 Ken, what did you think of our time with Brooke just now? Ken Kring 30:19 Yeah, that was really, really an excellent discussion. You know, one, one sort of immediate takeaway was having spent 23 years at geese, right?

And being in the job for a year and a half as a very natural embodiment of the role of leader. And I think that it's sort of a testament also to the strength of knowledge and familiarity on some of the community aspects, to be able to speak with such naturalness and authority about, you know, strategy, plans, activities, really, really, very clear thinking and very impressive, Dave Ikenberry 31:01 right? Ken Kring 31:02 Well, as your takeaway, Dave Ikenberry 31:04 I had a couple of interesting takeaways.

One was when we were speaking about, you know, how do you keep, how do you keep that energy alive after, after so much innovation? I mean, it really is true that if you, you know, if you go back 20 years ago, Illinois was not at the frontier of change. I mean, there was a certain stability, a certain conservatism that epitomized that, that college that does not exist at all. And her response to that was, it's true, we had a few growing pains, but we we attracted a different kind of person to the institution, one that was more open to it.

And I what an insightful comment that you know, over time, as natural attrition occurs, there they were, they brought on any kind of person to to sustain that high energy that they have today. I thought the other interesting insight, and it kind of mirrors my own leadership approach, was just the raw entrepreneurialism that she seemed I mean, she runs the place as a business and and maybe that's natural for somebody with an accounting perspective to do, but that kind of depthness is going to serve her well, and is serving the institution well.

So I really liked hearing her reflect on on that as well. But what a great institution, and, and, and it's, fun to have another insight into the institution's evolution over time. Ken Kring 32:45 Yeah, great history and really impressive trajectory. Dave Ikenberry 32:49 Yeah, thank you for listening to this episode of Dean's Council.

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