Episode #336: Building Smarter Transfer Pathways for Today’s College Students

Speaker A: Welcome to the Higher Ed Geek Podcast where we explore the impact of edtech on the student experience with engaging, fun and relevant conversations that honor the wide range of work happening all across the higher ed ecosystem. I'm your host, Dustin Ramsdell. I've been working in and around higher ed for the past decade focused on student support and digital experience. Join me every week for discussion with some of the best minds in education. Technology will be bringing you their perspectives on how digital transformation is reshaping the way we recruit, engage and graduate learners. You'll hear first hand accounts of how institutional leaders are developing their strategy as well as get deeper on the stories of how these edtech tools are being built to foster better student outcomes. With that, let's get to today's episode.

Speaker B: Greetings everyone and welcome to this episode of the Hired Geek podcast.

Speaker A: Episode number 336.

Speaker C: Drew Lurker, College Source.

Speaker B: Uh, this topic of transfer student pathways just is something that I've always been really interested and curious about.

Speaker A: Certainly there is a great opportunity and potential to further the work to making

Speaker B: the transfer student process smoother and better

Speaker A: for students and the institutions.

Speaker B: We get into all the details of what makes this work important and just some kind of dispatches from Drew's uh, experience at Ivy Tech Community College and uh, the work that he's doing now at College Source so that hopefully will inspire others to uh, keep on the

Speaker A: path if you were already on it or to begin, uh, embarking on looking into how you can do some similar

Speaker B: things at your institution to maintain a great transfer student experience. So without further ado, we will get

Speaker A: right to it here. Episode number 336 with Drew Lurker.

Speaker B: Something that I care a lot about, very interested in that I don't feel like I get. The opportunity to discuss at length on the podcast is around transfer credits, those articulation agreements for things, how they work and just feeling like there's just a really great area of opportunity to make those work better for institutions for students. So that is what our conversation will be focusing on today. I'm very excited for it. Uh, Drew, if you want to introduce yourself, uh, briefly, uh, talk a bit about your background and then we will get into more of that topic and the work that your organization, College Source does.

Speaker C: Thanks for having me. My name is Drew Lurker. I've uh, been in higher education for almost 20 years now. So I've worked, um, all across different areas of higher education. Spent a long time at Ivy Tech Community College where I've worked in roles all the way from career services all the way to the registrar's office. That was a position that I had before coming over to College Source. I was actually the assistant vice president for student records and statewide, uh, registrar. So that was a lot of fun. Had a great time being the registrar for a very large institution of almost 190,000 students. Which always surprises people when you talk about a community college and then find out that it's actually one of the largest institutions of higher education in the country. So Indiana is unique in that they have one community college for the whole state. That's how it encompasses almost 200,000 students. So in the registrar's office for almost seven years before I made the transition over to College Source, where I get to work with colleges and universities all across the country.

Speaker B: Now Ivy Tech kind of comes up often as a big institution and kind of garners a lot of attention and stuff. But, yeah, and I think that maybe being the sort of, you know, the catalyst, uh, you know, working there in the registrar's office, big system and for the time that you did. Yeah, being interested in this work and, you know, making that transition to kind of focus more wholeheartedly on it with institutions all across the country. But before, uh, we get too far into talking about kind of the nuances and, uh, get into the weeds a little bit. If you want to explain a bit about the work that Color Source does, that I think will be certainly informing, uh, your perspective on this topic.

Speaker C: So Color Source. And one of the reasons why I came to work for them is because of their impact and breadth in the transfer space. It's been around since 1971. So, as I like to say, it was EdTech before EdTech was a thing. We've been working with institutions of higher education as our primary client since then. So we now work, you know, obviously not in microfiche like when we started, but we have an online database of over 173,000 course descriptions in our database, which is just such a vast repository of equivalencies. Uh, when I was at Ivy Tech, we actually had over 30 some thousand equivalencies in our database. Um, but now being able to work with colleges and institutions that are looking to improve that process is really the fun that I get to have. Um, whether it's improving their transfer process or even working on their degree attainment. Because that's another piece of software that Collegehurst provides, is our degree audit system that really helps track that student success and degree attainment.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a couple of things there I Mean, why I kind of have this fascination and interest in how students transfer credits from one institution to another. It's just been something that's fairly normalized. It's not uh, the sort of fringe thing that's only been happening recently. Uh, so that idea, it feels very endemic. Uh, it is something that enables obviously students to persist and graduate, you know, uh, efficiently. Uh, and then, you know, is I think a uh, sizable, sometimes like kind of recruiting funnel. You know, it's like they want to, you know, some institutions very much lean into it or you know, just want to keep the steady flow, you know, because it is that idea of if it's a formal kind of arrangement or just kind of acknowledging, like yeah, we just, we get a lot of students who you know, come from their community college and then start studying here for uh, to move on to get their bachelor's or something. But we've had discussions recently on the podcast of just acknowledging the idea of getting wonky on like your operational systems and procedures and you know, the tools you're using, all that, all this very behind the scenes stuff, like it really matters, you know, and I think we'll get into more of that detail. What's some context on transfer articulations is probably like what a lot of people see that sometimes it's like, you know, put out a press release or whatever, they want to try to garner attention on an institution that they're doing that. What's context and history around that of like how they classically have worked? Give us the history and give us the context, kind of the table stakes that are leading to the current moment.

Speaker C: Yeah. And you know, it's really interesting watching this change over the last decade because you know, like you mentioned historically, transfer is not new. Right. Our company was founded in the 70s to help with the transfer problem. So. But even over the last 10 years, like when I first started working in a registrar's office, uh, we were seeing a lot more, um, like you said, transfer articulation agreements coming, agreements in between individual institutions. But shortly after that, I think the rise of the Gen Ed cores and more state level agreements coming up really kind of highlight some of the focus that we've had on transfer in the, in this country. Like I was in Indiana working on the Indiana, uh, General Education Transfer Corps. We called it the STGC for short. And you know, the idea and the concept is that, you know, you could take a block of credit and be able to transfer that between any of the state schools. And those have really come to rise in the last, I would say 10 years. The idea that you would be able to pick and choose from a list and then have confidence that those would transfer to whichever school that you wanted to go to. And now I think we're seeing more attention being put on those type of agreements where it's maybe even going past the gen Ed and it's going into some of the professional upper level credits that students might be pursuing. So it's really like, how to put it, it's the ability for students to transfer from institution to institution has gotten better, but it's not quite where it should be yet. So there are many strategies and tactics that people will use. Transfer agreements, gen Ed cores, common course numbering systems are all an effort to help smooth that process of transition from one institution to another institution with minimal loss of credit. But one of the things that some of the initiatives don't necessary talk about is the importance of applicability to the degree. And I, uh, that is one advantage I think gen Ed cores have is because if you can guarantee that the courses will at least count for the general education core, it's at least moving the student forward in progress. Straight course to course equivalencies or common course numbers doesn't always guarantee that students making progress. So I think that is one interesting thing that's coming up now. More in conversation is ensuring that students are actually making progress towards their degree with transfer rather than just guaranteeing the transfer credit. And that's what a lot of the transfer agreements are trying to solve for, is assuring that there's progress, not just credit attainment.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's I think, uh, just thinking backwards, like I think there was an initial uh, kind of germ of the uh, interest in my brain was like I had that experience where it's like I technically got credit for a bunch of classes but it was just like cool. You now have like an abundance of elective credits that like don't really matter or apply to anything. Um, um. So like on principle it's like cool, great. But then in actuality it's like for me pursuing the attainment of my credential, there was nothing really noticeably gained. I get like it, I guess even that just like maybe the timeframe was the same but I had to maybe take like marginally less credits per semester or something. But it was like at the point where it's like it feels like it should have like mattered more or kind of connected more or whatever else. So I think yeah, like that being the bare minimum where I'd imagine historically in many, you know, decades past, it was just sort of a wild west. It was very subjective and very inefficient. But then, yeah, like certainly in, I would imagine in public systems within states, there's a lot more sort of ability to like, do what you're saying, have a lot of kind of consistency across the board. But I think, I would imagine as moving forward more to kind of the present moment, the volume, the complexity and wanting to keep an eye towards that operational efficiency is kind of what is on people's minds in this space. So talk a bit about that, I guess of like, are those the things that you're seeing that are changing? Start with that and then we'll kind of go into more around how technology is starting to kind of uh, support tackling those issues.

Speaker C: Picking up off some of your point too, of the state system or state conversations, state institutions creating these kind of environments, it's pushing the private institutions to also, while they're not maybe legally obligated to honor those requirements, we would actually see institutions in the private sector start honoring the same agreements because it presents a competitive advantage for those state institutions to accept it, uh, because of the enrollment. If I can be guaranteed that, um, when I move from institution to institution, it's more likely I'm going to go to one of those state schools. So we actually saw private institutions coming on board voluntarily to honor those agreements at that were obligations for the state institutions that private uh, institutions saw that they could actually benefit from participating in those even though they weren't legally obligated to do so. So I felt like that was an interesting natural flow of if the state can make movement in a, in a direction that others will come along once there's momentum.

Speaker B: Yeah, I do think it's powerful, you know, public systems being able to like move their collective weight and then kind of like cause this ripple effect that impacts things. But speak more to anything on that area and then I guess use that as sort of a jumping ah, off point to how the work of organizations like yours, you know, are having technology be able to help kind of positively address like, kind of the issues and things that folks are uh, grappling with right now.

Speaker C: As states do have the authority and power to create this momentum and transfer, the technology that can support them is waiting in the wings. Right. Like, and a lot of institutions have access to or currently use systems that will help them in their transfer, whether that be OCR to help with the kind of, the administrative lift. Because I think that's one big thing that's coming up right now is the ability to remove some data, like just manual data entry from the process, which usually slows things down to using systems that create standardized equivalencies for the transfer process. Because once one of the things that we worked on really hard when I was at Ivy Tech was creating that consistency in the transfer process. We went from when I started a process where we had 19 different registrars around the state, each had their own set of rules, like, literally on a spreadsheet, right? Like, everyone had their Excel file of how we transfer A to B when it wasn't part of one of those statewide agreements. And so implementing technology and implementing, we used tasks at, uh, Ivy Tech, we actually consolidate all those 19 spreadsheets into one system so we could create the consistency and that student experience, ensure that they were getting treated fairly no matter what campus that they went to and got the same credit for the same coursework, the same experience. Now, the fun part of that too, though, is also we were able to alleviate a lot of work from the faculty in doing that process. We were finding, like, when we decided to actually implement this and decided to move in this direction, we actually looked at, uh, basically a root cause analysis of what was slowing things down. And what we were finding is actually faculty were reviewing the same course multiple times, just in different locations. And so by simply just consolidating the data and consolidating the process, we were able to actually not only speed up the system for students, but we were actually able to save faculty time, which is honestly one of the most valuable resources that our institutions have, is the expertise and. And the time that faculty have to spend on these things. And so that. That was really one of, I think, probably the biggest successes, uh, that I had when early on in the registrar's office there, was to consolidate that process and really show that we could speed it up by simply just getting a common data source for our equivalencies. Technology that allows us to create those administrative efficiencies are really coming to the forefront right now with the conversation about AI and how we can use our resources better and specifically in the transfer process.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think we have a lot of conversations how the digital infrastructure of an institution enables that sort of effectiveness and efficiency. Part of the equation is obviously just like having a coherent set of tools in your tech stack that are going to play nice with each other. And those are sort of the steps that are, I will admit, you know, sizable steps, certainly maybe some big culture shifts and change management and stuff, but, like, making Those strides gets you to a point where you know, as you name dropped AI, I'll certainly uh, give you an opportunity to expand on there any sort of things that you're seeing now or kind of foresee uh, in the near future of like those are kind of the, yeah the prerequisites for you to fully harness the potential of AI in a process like this of you know, and I think it's probably super well suited to it because like if you do it right or you know, organize things in the right way, it is a highly quantitative kind of process that I think uh, AI loves. So uh, if you want to speak to just what you are understanding will be kind of on the horizon in the near future when it comes to transfer credit processes at institutions and how AI will kind of enable a greater

Speaker C: potential there with AI in the transfer process. What we're seeing a lot right now is the adoption of the OCR technology. When it comes to the transcript reading, we work with a lot of institutions and their vendors, um, to create basically a feed back and forth between our systems and the OCR so that they know what equivalencies the students actually going to get credit for. So that's what like I think the first uptick I think I'm seeing because I remember investigating OCR technology probably seven or eight years ago and the cost was so prohibitive, it was hundreds of thousands of dollars for an institution our size. And now OCR technology is you basically can't go to a conference without someone talking about their new OCR technology using an AI to scrape that data and that you're right, AI is great at doing some of those things but at the same time it just came back from the past conference and you it iterated over, over again, you know, crap in, crap out when it comes to AI. An adage that still holds true. And that's one of, one of the things that I think with transfer, uh, credit is going to be a little bit of a challenge because there's a lot of stuff out there for it to consume but it often doesn't have the context. And a lot of people especially I think, oh well, I'll um, be primarily dealing with last two or three years for transfer. But I can tell you, especially at a community college, we get transfer credit from 10, 15, 20 years ago. And good luck trying to find the course description from 20 years ago unless you have a system that gives you access to that right. It's not readily publicly available. So I think that is going to be interesting to see how it deals with that. Everything I've heard with transfer credit past OCR has been course to course equivalencies. And I think there's potential for it. But actually I think there's a lot, lot more potential for AI in other means. I think finding a course and what the equivalent course is just kind of the surface level. I think there's a lot more to be done with maintenance as a registrar, like we would get a course equated to another course but you also have to maintain that. And we would try to do currency reviews but that's, it was really hard. We had only a handful of people who were maintaining this and trying to keep students who are coming in the door happy. And uh, you know, the maintenance piece is often the hardest piece. You know, getting faculty to take time to re look at something and decide like okay, has that changed enough that we need to reevaluate it? And I think that's where some of the you know, this new technology will come in and actually be more helpful to understand how uh, a course may have changed over time. Right. And identifying that okay, maybe this one is now ready to actually needs to be re put through for review rather than just having a blank. Like the way we would handle it now is we just have a blanket policy that every X number of years the course needs to be re reviewed. I think there's opportunity there to get more intelligent about how some of that work gets done. Yes, course of course equivalency, yes. Data scraping, those are like the first level type things I think that it will be helpful for. But I also think we have to be aware of some of the context that the human brings into the situation. Understanding that a course is part of maybe a bigger set of data points that's not apparent ah when you first look at the raw data. And so I think we have to be careful ah how we approach it, um, so that we make sure that students aren't harmed by the decisions that we make quickly. And so it's, that's something I've been pondering of. You know, how do we appropriately use this new technology? Um, because there's also the idea of well, sometimes just straight word search is sufficient versus throwing something at an LLM and using this massive resource hog to do something that could be done with a very simple and very quick keyword search. So I'm uh, always careful because I really love stuff that AI can do. But I'm also like I could have done that with a simple query. I could have wrote that in SQL and got you the same thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it just made me think of like a, you know, silly kind of analogy. It'd be like watering your, you know, flowers in your lawn or something with like a fire hose versus just like a sprinkler, you know, gentle, whatever. It's just like uh, watering it.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's like way too powerful. You're probably gonna like break something or hurt somebody.

Speaker C: To your point, you might do more damage than good. And this is one of the things like I think about like right now the trend is moving towards speed. Everything needs to be faster. And I can say when I was at Ivy Tech we did take our process from taking multitudes of weeks down to a, uh, service level agreement with our campuses that we would be able to do an initial review of a student's transcript within five days. Right. And we were often under that sla, um, I think we averaged around like three, three and a half days for review. That's pretty quick. But everything is about moving faster and faster and faster. And sometimes I wonder if we move too quickly, if we don't unintentionally miss something. So I've been reading a lot about cognitive offloading with AI and the learning process. And I think about the people who worked in our office that did the day to day transcript evaluation and they eventually developed just an inherent kind of knowledge of the coursework that was coming through. And you know, I think we gotta be careful that we still develop that talent in the people to understand what is coming across our desk so that students don't get harmed in the process. Especially with transfer evaluation because it's the lag time between the indicator that we made a good or bad decision is so long. For example, you might be in taking a student in April who's enrolling in August. And if you missed the key components of the course, that will make them successful in the course that they're enrolling in. You won't know that until maybe September or October when the course drop deadline is approaching and they realize that they're not being successful in the course and they dropping the class because they were underwater from the start. And that's true of the human decision too. So it's not unique to an AI. But I think as we develop those skills in either the human or the computer, we got to be aware that we need to have a thoughtful process and an appropriate use of the tool so that we don't unintentionally do harm to our students. And that's part of the AI conversation. That I don't hear a lot of people talk. Talking about yet. And I say yet because I think it's coming. The student success piece of this. Yes, administrative efficiencies. But what have been the measured student successes out of these administrative efficiencies? And I think that that's a question that's yet to be answered because, uh, we can always measure time to complete a task, but it's a lot harder to. To measure the effect that it had on the student.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think that is a really important point and kind of, you know, already kind of answers, uh, what I was going to ask Ness about, like, why is it, you know, what makes it so important to get this work right? Uh, and I think just throughout our whole conversation, I think, you know, one on the sort of like time to completion in terms of, for students, uh, persisting and graduating and all those sort of things. And then. Yeah, that there's I think, very, very negative kind of side effects of, you know. Yeah, that kind of like overreliance and not scrutinizing. You know, if you're using some of these tools where you are just being like, wow, look at that, all the time we saved. And yeah, then there's going to be like a lagging indicator. And um, that is something that I think would like understandably and rightfully so very much frustrate a student. And you might be needing to work that much harder to kind of build back, uh, uh, the trust in things.

Speaker C: But yeah, especially at a time when higher education struggling with trust. That's. That's a piece. And working at a community college, we would see students who. The first failure was often the hardest failure to overcome. And that's a little bit of like a lot of the work that I'm excited to do is about how to help institutions identify some of these, these points and create efficiencies without circumventing systems that would safeguard that student.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it is tragic because it's like that student, you know, is earnestly just trying to pursue their academic goals. They chose you already. They like, they went through all these hoops and everything else, and then something like this happens. I think, yeah, that's why it ends up being so impactful and everything. So many things with AI, I think, obviously, are very ambiguous and it's moving very quickly and changing and all that. But I think we are now getting kind of accelerated kind of path alongside all of that of people being like, okay, how are we going to build like, AI literacy? Okay, how are we going to like keep humans in loop and okay, how are we going to be really conscious about cognitive offloading? And all those things were like with the advent of just social media and all these other kind of like pieces, uh, in years past it felt like digital literacy, uh, during that time was. It just didn't really keep up I guess as much as I felt like it could or should have. Um, and so yeah, I don't know, it is kind of just an interesting thing of like, you know that that pace or rate of change I think can be sort of this, you know, kind of catalyst that makes people, I think, you know, want to make sure people aren't left behind or you know that we're not overlooking things or going about things in a irresponsible way. So that it's uh, reassuring and refreshing I guess to see that the left

Speaker C: behind piece is an important part as you look at resourced and under resourced institutions. And that's a piece that the OCR is a good example of that. Right. Like as a community college I could argue that we were under resourced even though we were very large. But the OCR technology would have really helped us of old. But it was just cost prohibitive. That technology is getting cheaper and cheaper and I'm excited about that. Like I'm excited how that can actually expand access. But then I think yeah, we do, we have to be aware of all of our actions, whether it be data privacy or the haves and have nots biases that it might introduce. But I think there's a path forward where we can, we can use this tool. Well, if we, if we're thinking about how we're using it.

Speaker B: Well yeah, because I think there is like a future where there's so much about kind of what could be with so much around kind of student support and services and where this could be a very like, you know, 24 7, you know, self service thing for students where you know, as long as they have the right documentation things they're submitting it in and sort of the uh, agentic AI kind of is able to maybe give them a preliminary unofficial kind of like hey, here's kind of what we can gauge generally from, you know, we are going to put this forth to a staff member who should be back to you within you know, three to five business days or whatever and then kind of have that be maybe just a little bit more of like a transparent process and you know that maybe you could then even go back and forth of like, hey, so why wasn't course a, you know, accepted for credit or whatever else and then, you know, then a staff member comes back to you student and you can maybe have that more meaningful dialogue. Because I think that that's also the kind of the outcome that folks are very hopeful for is that we're not uh, you know, even how you mentioned like faculty too, like just any of these faculty or staff at institution are not bogged down by administrative processes. They could have more meaningful interactions with students and more opportunities for collaboration with their colleagues to kind of work through these things.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, and as you give um, faculty staff more access and more transparency into the process, then they can and like you said, I really like have uh, those meaningful conversations because when I was a registrar I was in charge of our degree auditing system which was part of our academic planning tool. And I would always say let the computer do what the computer is good at and create these plans and let our humans have the conversations that they went and earned master's degrees to go half right. Our advisors were really great people. They really cared about students. They wanted to have conversations. What I didn't want them doing is dragging and dropping courses into a student like into like a semester by semester plan. And I think that's where there's opportunity for computers to do what they're really good at and put sequence things, put things in order, you know, a uh, known trusted set of data to be able to produce a plan or a pathway for them to go into and then have those higher level conversations with advisors because they, that's what they wanted to do. They don't. It's frustrating when you have to sit there and go through a checklist with a student as an advisor when you really want to talk about the things that truly will lead to student success and talk about things about their support systems and who's going to be on their team or who's not going to be on their team as they try to reach their goal.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, well, as we wrap up, uh, we'll ask the question that we love asking all of our guests what advice you would give to other higher ed leaders navigating this moment.

Speaker C: A lot of things are coming down to data right now and measuring success and those return on investments. So I think one of the things that we did really well when it was at Ivy Tech was we created very clear goals and then we didn't try to create metrics for everything. And I see this a lot when I work with institutions. The bend is to measure everything you can measure and uh, improve everything and what you end up doing is just getting a lot of noise. So focus on the few goals you have, narrow them down to what's really core to your institution and focus on a few metrics that you think you can move. And when I see institutions do that, that's where I see true gains in student success. Primarily. Like that's my first and foremost. If students aren't successful, why are we doing this? But then also from that, that drives the efficiencies that truly have impact on the process. So it's the old adage of, you know, don't try to boil the ocean. And when you focus in on what you have control over, that can move you towards your goals. We all heard this and know it. It's just hard to practice at times, especially now that, you know, AI has given us report, uh, after report after report and flashy PowerPoint after flashy PowerPoint we get inundated with this and sometimes we just got to step back and really look at what is our goal and what's going to move me m to that and then start measuring and you know, taking action on that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's always some of those things like the uh, you know, old tried and true mantras, but they bear repeating and keeping in mind. Yeah, that kind of focus and discipline and uh, yeah, just very clear targeted goals. I think it's just the, yeah, the focus and discipline and yeah, metrics and goals you can measure against. And I don't even think, I mean it's just the idea of like on the kind of qualitative side with all of this really wanting to have mechanisms or uh, avenues for students to provide feedback of just generally how satisfied they are with these kind of processes, what they felt like worked well or didn't and that sort of thing that would then maybe be like, yeah, we know we want to do X, Y or Z and maybe it just helps to build a better coalition of people to work on it to know that like, wow, yeah, we've got a big room to grow here. Uh, in terms of students being satisfied with this process or whatever else.

Speaker C: Well, and I, I can give you an example of one that we, we set out for at Ivy Tech. So when we were at, when I was at Ivy Tech, it was in line with Lumina goals. Ivy Tech had a goal of having 50,000 credentials awarded per year at the institution, which was sounded mind boggling at the time because this is like 2015. I mean I think we were awarding around like 12 to 14,000 credentials per year, which for some institutions that sounds like a lot, but when you get to. At the time we were sitting around 175,000 students. Um, we're looking at it going, how do we get to 50,000 when we're here? And we actually ended up creating a process from that that moved us towards that goal where we actually identified like students who were making progress towards degrees or degrees that they had already actually earned, but we didn't know it at the time. We coined it Degree Discovery. It was actually a project I worked on with College Source. I went to them with this problem and they said, give me a minute, we think we can help you out. They gave me back some custom code and lo and behold, that's what we that College Source now have as degree discovery. When I left two years ago, we, I, uh, believe we awarded 35,000 credentials per academic year, which wasn't quite to our 50,000, but it was a lot further away than we were at 10 to or uh, 12 to 14,000 when we started looking at that goal. But we knew we had a goal. We didn't know how we were going to get there, but we identified areas that we thought we could address and then we started making progress towards those. And it also helped that the state had a performance funding metric that we could then show a return on investment as well. Uh, that when we increase those degree awards that we were going to be able to fund some of this work. Um, but yeah, it was, it was, it's kind of crazy to think that we got to 35,000 a year and they've only continued to grow that number since I've left too. So it's exciting to see how they approach that 50,000 number hopefully here soon.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say it's like not yet. You are marching, uh, towards it there. Uh, you know, College Source, you know, supporting institutions like Ivy Tech and appreciate you bringing in a lot of your kind of reflections and experiences from that institution. And um, yeah, that was kind of swirling in my mind. I'm glad you brought it up. Is that idea of a positive byproduct of really thoughtful work here. The idea that you could take someone from, you know, when you're like applying to jobs or whatever else, from the very like ambiguous, some college kind of descriptor of your education level to being like, I have an associate's degree, I have a bachelor's degree. Like it being specific versus, you know. Yeah, if it's like some college, it's like I took like a, uh, semester of courses. Or somebody could be like, I am 97% of the way to my degree. Like, but technically I am also some college. So I think that is, uh, yeah, like, very beneficial. Like, an institution can show, obviously, uh, some positive metrics in terms of, uh, credential attainment. And then the students benefit from just being able to, like, more accurately capture, uh, the work and the effort that they've made.

Speaker C: Uh, because I don't find a whole lot of people that find degree audits exciting until you start talking about how it could actually positively affect student outcomes. And when I could start sharing examples of, you know, we would have students who would get the credential because we take. They have certificate degrees, which sometimes could be just a couple of courses. And I would have students share, like, you know, this was their first positive academic experience. Uh, you know, some people see community colleges as. As like, well, I couldn't do anything else when really they're great places for students to start their educational career. Uh, and they would share, like, this is the first positive thing I've gotten from education where, you know, high school or college experiences because they got a degree and, you know, it might just been. They might have come to earn an accounting degree and they got a bookkeeping certificate, but it was a meaningful milestone. And having those processes that automatically identified that and that we were able to award those credentials as they were being earned was really powerful to students whose life was improved by the actions that the institution took. And I think if we can keep doing more and more of that, I think the. The trust factor that we're fighting right now, we'll be able to put behind us because we'll have the student at heart. Yeah.

Speaker B: Well, I think this is a beautiful place to end the episode. Motivating words, inspirational words for folks of like, because I do think the focus and the discipline gives you like, bounds and sort of a sandbox to play in of, like, where you can start to get a little bit creative when it comes to, uh, thinking about these problems that do maybe seem very daunting. I think you've given some great advice and reflections and insights and perspectives on this topic, and we'll have ways to connect with you and college source in the episode description. But just really appreciate all you shared and, uh, taking time out for the podcast here.

Speaker C: Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

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