Why Don’t More Colleges Run Co-Op Programs?

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

1:44 - An Unusual History of a Co-op Model

3:28 - Kettering Presidents’ Path to University Leadership

6:17 - Why Colleges Should Think of Employers as Their Customers

11:23 - Why Colleges Can’t Learn Everything They Need On Campuses

17:17 - How Kettering University’s Co-op Model Differs Than Others

20:44 - Why Isn’t Kettering More Popular?

24:44 - What Is Keeping More Universities From Doing Co-op Programs?

29:30 - Sponsor Break

31:05 - How More Colleges Can Move to a Co-op Model

35:36 - Companies Don’t Have Enough Internships to Meet Demand

39:08 - Could There Be ‘31 Flavors’ of Experiential Learning?

41:50 - Will We See a Return of the Corporate University?

45:52 - Lightning Round With Robert McMahan

Links

“Colleges Teach Learning, but They’re Not Learning How to Survive,” by Robert McMahan in Fortune.

“Former Governor Dishes on Connecting Work and College,” past Future U episode.

Transcript:

Michael Horn

Jeff, you and I have been talking a lot this season about the importance of real-world learning as an antidote to the rise of AI in the workplace, to make sure to prepare students for that future of work. And when we do that, we talk about the normal list of things: apprenticeships, internships, externships, projects.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And co-ops, of course, Michael. We talk a lot about co-ops.

And, of course, we featured Northeastern University, which is, of course, famed, for co-ops a few times on Future U, on the Future U podcast over the years.

But today, we're gonna take a closer look at a lesser-known school that's built on a co-op model for a 100% of its students in the hopes that we can learn a little bit more about the scalability behind this practice as we consider how to make sure all undergraduates leave college with real-world experiences that help them launch into their careers.

That's ahead on this episode of Future U.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

Michael Horn

I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff Selingo

And I'm Jeff Selingo.

So, Michael, as we mentioned up top, we're looking forward to talking about a different school that doesn't get all the headlines about its co-op program, but has been doing the co-op model for more than a hundred years, and that's Kettering University in Flint, Michigan.

Now Kettering has an interesting backstory as we're gonna hear in this conversation. It was founded in 1919 as the school of automotive trades. Just four years later it was renamed the Flint Institute of Technology. And then General Motors acquired it in 1926 and renamed it General Motors Institute of Technology. It was essentially the corporate university for GM.

And then it got spun off in 1982 and renamed Kettering University later on in 1998. And it was at that point that it really outgrew its automotive roots.

Michael Horn

So that's the backdrop, and Kettering is unique in many respects as a result relative to other accredited colleges and universities. But it has remained a very focused school in many respects.

And so to help us understand its version of the co-op model better, but frankly, the co-op model's broader scalability and how other schools perhaps could copy it as they seek to figure out how to incorporate more real-world experiences for their students, I'm thrilled that its president, Dr. Bob McMahon is joining us.

And Bob became the seventh president of Kettering University in August 2011. Before Kettering, he was the founding dean of and a professor of engineering in the Western Carolina University College of Engineering and Technology. He was a professor of physics and astronomy at UNC Chapel Hill during which time he held a number of other fascinating roles as we'll hear.

But let's get into the conversation. Bob, so good to see you. Welcome to Future U.

Bob McMahan

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Michael Horn

Yeah. So, you know, I wanna start actually with a version of a question that we used to ask our guests regularly on the show, but we sort of moved away from. But Jeff and I are both fascinated with the different backgrounds and pathways of university presidents.

How did they come to the position that they're in?

You've, of course, held some prominent leadership roles at universities. You have extensive academic training in physics, astronomy. But you've also held roles at In-Q-Tel, the CIA's private venture capital organization. You've been an entrepreneur. You've advised a former North Carolina governor.

How do you describe your path to becoming a university president, and how has that path shaped your perspective as a college leader over the last many years at Kettering?

Bob McMahan

Oh, that's a great question, and there's a lot to unpack there, and I'll try to do it concisely.

You know I've never known — well, I can't say that. Probably one or two people I could name — that have aspired earlier in their careers to be a college president. I mean, it's typically kind of an amalgamation of things over one's career, and that's certainly the case for me.

I would start by saying higher ed has always been and the university has always been my first love. I have always loved, and in fact teaching is, I don't think there's anything quite as gratifying as watching that light bulb go off in a student. I still get the same thrill with that. I still teach, and I still get the same thrill, at that moment that I did when I first started teaching. So my love has always been in the university and in teaching and in that interaction with students.

But over the course of my career, which has kind of run parallel in a lot of these things, I've seen how the university interacts with various aspects of the economy and our society from a public policy standpoint, from a business standpoint. And so in all of those different, you know, parts of the background, I guess Steve Jobs once said, 'You can only connect the dots in reverse.' And I guess in that way, my career is kinda that way. I kind of picked up pieces of each.

Perspective is very important, how the university responds, how it behaves. But not only that, the role in which it can play and the power that it has to shape both the lives of individuals, but also the society, more broadly. And so bringing all that to the university, especially to the presidency, was a real honor, and I think it's a great role in that regard.

Michael Horn

Well, so one of the things that I wanna ask you about is, I used to say all the time that higher education should stop thinking of students as customers and instead think of employers as the ultimate end customer.

And in that model, students are something like either the product or maybe they're the client. The distinction being customer's always right, but you actually have to tell the client when they're gonna have to change their perspective or something like that.

And so I've heard that you have a similar view around this in certain ways around who the end customer is of higher education. So I'd love to hear you reflect on that and what higher education institutions, therefore, in your view, ought to be optimizing around today, if that's changed over time for schools, and how Kettering fits that mold today or if there's room for adjustment.

Bob McMahan

Oh, that's a great question.

Yeah. I do. I've said that many times. If you know, from a strictly kind of operations business perspective, if you will. And universities don't like to think of themselves as … In fact, they reject that characterization. But indeed, they are. They're economic participants, and we play a very real role in establishing the trajectory of our students and the economic viability of those students in their careers.

And in that way, the customer of an organization, of a company, is the thing or the person or the organization that establishes the value of the product that you are producing. So in that sense, the student really is very much the product of the university and the customers are the graduate schools or the organizations down line from that who hire or who accept our students and establish the value of what we are doing and the value of their experience here.

But it's not simply just a client relationship. It's more of a mentored relationship. So I would argue that the relationship at the university is more akin to the relationship that you have with your physician. You can't go into the physician's office and say, ‘That big bottle of that, I want one of those.’ And the physician says, ‘Well, we've got a special. We can get two for one today.’ It's not a customer relationship. It's a, ‘We are together. We are working together to achieve a good outcome for you.’

And this in that it's a mentored and guided relationship with like you said like we said earlier, the companies, the employers of the students, or the graduate schools are the ones that establish the values. That very much is the case.[a]

The second part of your question, there's a lot to unpack in that question. Because when we talk about the university in this country, we tend to talk about it as a single entity or a single type of institution. And I think part of our difficulty articulating what we do in the higher ed community is that we don't provide a clear map of the higher education landscape as it exists today.

When people talk about the university, they speak of it as a single model. But I would posit that we actually have several. And when I've written them out by notes, I come up with seven different kinds of universities that are operating simultaneously in our society. And each one solves, each one really reflects a response, a rational response to change or to a situation, and each one solves real problems. But the difficult part is each one of those models points us in a different direction. And as the economy has changed, the reality in which the higher education model has been developed has changed dramatically.

Employers are operating in a different economy than higher ed was designed to serve. Our students are living inside of a different reality. And the country faces a different set of challenges. So we are increasingly faced with an educational structure that's kind of discordant with the world around it.

And that's where institutions like Kettering, Kettering being, I think, a very powerful example of one of those models, which I like to think of as kind of the 'experiential integration’ model, is a very powerful model and really, takes us, points us in the direction that we need to go in the modern economy.

Jeff Selingo

So, Bob, you bring up an interesting point there. Right? This idea of the single type of institution, and this is something that Michael and I talk often about. And it's interesting that it came up through another co-op school, being Northeastern. Its president, Joseph Aoun, told us recently that higher education is diverse, but not particularly differentiated.

And, you know, I've argued that we are entering an era where institutions will have to be more differentiated just to survive. Right? Everybody can't be comprehensive.

And I'm kind of interested because it kind of fits in with that Kettering actually fits in with that narrative in that, you know, you're really specialized around eight STEM majors with a variety of minors and concert concentrations, of course, that can be added in. But here's an institution with a very clear and limited focus. You know, it's very clear the students that you're set up to serve.

And so just kinda curious, just quickly, how has that evolved over time? But I'm more interested in, is that the right number now given that AI might you know, is gonna probably change the workforce? Do you think there's going to be shifts in the number of majors and the number and the types of them in the years ahead?

So where have you come with that, and do you think that's where your future is going to be over the next 10 or 15 years, or do you think it's gonna probably change again?

Bob McMahan

Well, there's two pieces to the answer to that question.

One is I you know, with that varied background, I very much subscribe to the model that an organization should do the things in which it can be excellent and provide excellent value and provide excellent outcomes.

So the number of majors that we offer and the degree programs that we do are really designed to be those around which we can provide an excellent outcome for the students. And that feathers into the second half of the answer, which is, we are truly this institution is truly unique in The United States in terms of how it goes about what it does, its educational model. Because it was formed, over a hundred years ago, and we've been doing the same type of ... had the same structure since. But it was formed by a group of individuals that I would argue started from a position of humility, in a way, in the sense that they started with the premise that half of what you need to learn to become a fully educated, fully capable professional, you could not actually learn in the university.

And so, the way I articulated, I don't think they probably would have done that, but is that what they were seeking was not knowledge, which is typically the deliverable of universities as we know it, but mastery. Mastery is different. Mastery is where you can apply knowledge in meaningful ways in context and under real circumstances.

One of the founders of the institution famously said something to the effect of ‘If we taught if we taught musicians the way we teach engineers, we'd make them take twelve years of music theory before we ever let them touch a piano.’ — which is ridiculous on its face. But in fact, that's what we do in much of higher education, much of how we educate students.

And they started with a different premise, that you had to organize the university in a fundamentally different way. You had to create a different calendar. You had to create different modes of delivery. But you had to also start with the premise that the experience that students gained in the application of their discipline was as important to their evolution as a student and ultimately as a professional as what they could learn in the classroom, and that that virtuous circle needed to be created between those two. It needed to be reinforced. It needed to be maintained, and it needed to be integral to the curriculum.

So it's not just a, ‘Here's a traditional university with a traditional semester calendar with a traditional major structures, and we're going to offer a co-op or we're going to offer an internship opportunity.’ That's not this model. This model says that what you learn. And quite frankly, professionally, when we each think back on our careers individually, and if I say to you, 'What were some of the seminal points in your career where you had that experience or that or that interaction that really changed the direction of your life, it changed how you approach what you do, etc?' Very few of us would say, ‘My introductory calculus class is where I had that.’ Right? It's usually something professional, something that happened in the context of an organization and how they interacted.

The founders of this institution decided that was so critical that the whole organizational model would be built around it. And as such, I really do believe that this is really the best way in which to educate students in this modern economy, in this modern era.

And it is ultimately a scalable model. It is ultimately a model that can be adopted, but it requires change. It requires institutions to say, 'We perhaps need to organize and think about what we do differently than we do today.'

Jeff Selingo

Okay. So, Bob, Tell us a little bit more then about the co-op model there because we probably are burying the lead here for our listeners who wanna know more about that.

So how is it similar or different from the other schools that we know are famous for their co-ops, Northeastern, you know, RPI, Drexel, University of Cincinnati, and so forth.

Bob McMahan

Yeah. That's right. And in fact, there was a lot of commonality in the founding of this institution to some of those.

The difference is very dramatic insofar as, one, our co-op experiences are mandatory for all of our students. 100%. It's a degree requirement.

But two, we organize very differently around it. So when a student enters the university, the freshman class actually comes in. We divide them into two cohorts, which because we're all scientists and engineers, they're the A and the B cohort. Nothing more romantic than that. So into two cohorts. And these cohorts throughout their time at the university rotate through the university in opposition to one another. So when one group is in in class, the other is in a professional placement in industry, in a federal research lab, in organizations across the country and across the globe in their field of study, in a professional role, a paid and integral role in an organization appropriate to their educational outcomes that reinforces the degree program that they are seeking. They start this in their first year. In their first year they go through two of those rotations. In their second year, they go through two of those rotations, and so on throughout their entire education.

We partner with these companies, and we partner with about 600 companies worldwide, to provide opportunities for these students, not as observers, but as mentored and integral parts of their teams. So take a chemical engineer. Over the course of their entire education, they are in this rotation. And as they are advancing in their education, they are advancing in their career. And they graduate with an outstanding degree from one of the top engineering schools, science schools and business schools in the country at the undergraduate level, and they also graduate with two and a half years of professional experience in organizations appropriate to their discipline.

Where that's important is they not only get to learn ideas, but they also see them in context. They see them under pressure. They understand how organizations work. They understand how teams work. They understand how ideas get moved through a process. And in so doing, they bring a lot back to the university. That informs not just what they do in their placement, but it also informs how they engage their education once they get back.

So the student body here behaves very differently in a lot of ways than a traditional student body as a result.

Jeff Selingo

Okay, Bob. So this is you know, Michael and I love this stuff. Right? Because we've been talking about how the job should be more central to the university. You talked about how this can be a scalable solution.

We know that parents and students want a job and want the ROI. Co-op schools are hot as a result. It seems like you should be the biggest university in the world. Right? And so I guess I'm kinda curious about what is ... We often hear this, well, like, co-ops can't work everywhere. Co-ops schools can't be huge. Like, why not? Like, why shouldn't you be getting hundreds of thousands? You should be the most applied to school in the country right now, and you should be having more students in Ohio State given what you do. So why don't you?

Bob McMahan

Well, I think there's a historical reason in part.

For a significant portion of our time as an institution. We were a corporate university Up and through the early 1980s before we went private, nonprofit, we were known as General Motors Institute. We were part of the General Motors organization. Where, when we were founded in 1919, we were a private institution that operated for about 10 years. And in the late twenties, the company realized they were acquiring so much of their key talent. So many of their CEOs, so many of their chief engineers, so many of their key talent from this one university, from this one school, they acquired the university and brought it in-house. And they operated it as an accredited degree-granting program, but a corporate university through the early '80s.

And during that period, the university did none of the things that a traditional university does to market and to build awareness of its offerings and what it is doing. So, we're a 100-plus years old, but in some ways, some of the aspects of the operations of the universities are much younger. And so a lot of lack of public awareness, I believe, has its roots at least in that period.

As to the scalability of the model and how it operates, it is scalable and it is applicable to a broad range of disciplines, but it requires, again, a different orientation to how you go about delivering the education.

For one thing, you have to develop a set of — I mean, industry, business, the private sector has a role here, too. Right? It's not just the university because the private sector has to say, 'In order to ensure the supply chain, if you will, of the product — this highly valuable, highly productive employee of this organization — in order to secure that product, we need to invest in relationships with universities in ways that we have not previously.'

Most universities don't ask them to do this. They don't have the language for it. But we do. And when we ask, our students are highly sought out by those companies and those organizations because they know what they are receiving both as a student, but also once the student graduates, should the student continue with them.

So there's an investment on both sides and a framing that has to be developed with those partners. That's where we have a lot of advantage, I think, as an early entrant. But I firmly believe that this is a model that could be adopted much more broadly than it currently is. But it requires that we think about what we do differently and how we deliver what we do differently.[b]

Michael Horn

Yeah. So I want to talk about that adoption because Jeff and I for at least a few years on this podcast now have been saying experiential learning, more important. Co-op seems to be a big part of that. We hear a lot of universities interested in it.

A few are shifting. Champlain College, I think, in Vermont — like a couple. But it seems for the most part, they're not moving it.

And so, you know, what is holding it back? Is it sort of this reticence about giving employers a prominent seat at the table, the amount of reconstruction it would have to do on the curriculum? What's holding other colleges and universities back from making co-op a prominent part of their model even if it's not fully required?

Bob McMahan

In some cases it's, you know, universities have historically had a relationship with private industry and with business that, you know, ranges from benign neglect to outright hostility. They don't view them as partners. They view them as consumers of what they are doing. And that's an incorrect viewpoint, I believe.

And this comes from my experience on the corporate side as well as my experience on the university side.

The real magic of the model is in its integration into the education. A student who goes to a school with a traditional co-op program is certainly is certainly experiencing more than they would if they did not have that access. But most co-op programs are not designed, even the longer-term ones, around some form of integration with the educational model. The university keeps doing what it's doing the way that it's doing it, and it provides this add-on experience for the students. That's actually the zeroth order implementation.

The real virtue of the model comes in saying, 'Okay, as a university, because of that experience, we need to change what we are doing and how we educate, and we have to integrate what the student is telling us back into the curriculum.'

So at Kettering, you will see in a classroom, you will have an interaction with a faculty member that says something like, you know, they're studying the mass transfer equation in engineering. And the professor will say, 'You know, Jane, I know that you're you're working at the cryogenic wind tunnel at NASA. This would be relevant to your work there. How do you apply this on a daily basis?' And Jane says, 'Well, this is not what we do because this whole part of this equation doesn't really contribute significantly. So we use this approximation, and this is what we do, and this is how we do it.'

That understanding gets folded back into the lecture material in kind of a dynamic way. [c]

Furthermore, our students because they are professionals and they are engaging their education ultimately in a different way, they tell us. They come back and they evaluate us every 12 weeks. We hear from them. Right? When they come back to the campus, they say, 'I need more of this.'

Michael Horn

And that's driving curriculum as opposed to the professor imagining what they need. Yeah.

Bob McMahan

Exactly. They say, you know 'This part, we're not using an industry. This part, we are. We need to have more modules. We need to increase the focus on this.'

And so it starts to inform what you do in a very dynamic way. And so we favor, in a lot of our curriculum development, we favor programs like bachelor's of science in engineering because they allow us the flexibility, the curricular flexibility to implement change, destroy, move, modify as we go to reflect kind of the dynamism of the underlying economy.

Michael Horn

Yeah. So you can stay in sync with it. Bob, this is a fantastic tour of your model, but also frankly the potential of it across the economy and the university.

Thank you so much for joining us on Future U.

And for those listening, we'll be right back.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. Ascendium envisions a world where low-income learners succeed in postsecondary education and workforce training as paths to upward mobility. Ascendium's grantees are removing systemic barriers and helping to build evidence about what works so learners can achieve their career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Michael Horn

Welcome back to Future U.

Jeff, let's get right into it. We just heard about a very coherent integrated model of co-ops that gets results. And one of the keys to its success is probably that clear focus, or put differently it's limited offerings. And I think that's its strength, right, as it's set itself up.

Against that backdrop, I do wanna clarify a thing. One thing I said on my end is I was asking a question around sort of who's the customer of higher ed and the student in this other role.

I do think this sort of student as client / product framing, if you will, it's a useful construct for certain institutions and students, probably not all. And I know you've done work with Michael Crow at ASU categorizing different kinds of institutions, which we've talked about, of course, before in this show.

But I think that's where I wanna go with you, Jeff, is exploring this particular kind of institution. We heard Bob say that he thinks the co-op is a scalable model — that other universities can adopt it, particularly if faculty drop their animus toward industry, if you will.

We heard him say that it's scalable even as Kettering itself is relatively small, about 1,600 students.

So I'd love to imagine with you how one might scale this model. I think it's not hard to imagine perhaps how a new university might build around a co-op model, but if you were a more comprehensive university, I know you've said it's the end of comprehensive U for many. But, you know, you're sitting there existing with lots of different majors. You've got humanities majors, STEM majors, social science, right, the range of things.

Could you move to a co-op model? And if so, how would you do it?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. So first of all, I think you can. I don't think it's as easy as many people think it is, and I think that's why so many universities don't do it, at least require it or require it across the curriculum.

I think it's less about the animus that faculty have against industry. It's more that they just think their discipline is the most important thing, and they don't necessarily wanna open up room in the curriculum for jobs, essentially. So I think that's part of the problem is that we have to create some room in the curriculum.

And then the second thing is we do have to find all of these employers. You know, even Northeastern tells us often that it's hard to set up all these employer partnerships, which often has to be a centralized office. So that's a whole infrastructure that you have to build.

This is where I do think if we had intermediaries the way that Ryan Craig talks about them in the apprenticeship world, could we have intermediaries in the co-op world that help set up these entities or these partnerships with employers. Because you don't have the partnerships with employers, then it's hard for students to find those co-ops. It's very bespoke to them much like it is with internships, and then I'm not quite sure it's really part of the curriculum.

And then you have to figure out, 'Okay, what do we do mainly for those majors that don't lead necessarily to very specific jobs?' You know, you just mentioned the humanities, which I think is a really good one. So what are the industries that you're gonna have students participate in?

And then how do you develop kind of what I would call student learning outcomes? Northeastern does a really interesting thing on this, Michael, is that before you go into a co-op, you need to talk about what you want to learn out of it, how you're gonna prepare for it. It's really kind of going into almost a new job. And then when you come out of the co-op, you write about, and you talk about your kind of learning outcomes, which I don't think happens enough in higher education in general, letting students drive those conversations.

So that's how I would set this up.

But there's a decent amount of infrastructure there. That's problem one. So I think that's why having an external partner, having an intermediary do that, I think, is critically important.

And then second, I do think we have to rethink the curriculum in a way because otherwise, we're just gonna basically add a year on top of probably what is already the four year degree. Right? [d]

What do you think?

Michael Horn

Well, and I think you've seen that. Right? Certain co-op models, that's why they're five years, I think. Right? it's a little bit of — even at Northeastern, right — there's a little bit of a wrestling match. As you said, faculty say, 'Hey. They have to take x.' Right? 'That has to be part of the major requirement. There's no way, you know, in sociology, you can graduate without having taken this particular course or this particular thing in this distribution,' whatever it might be. And so often majors, you know, we tend to see that they stack up in courses. Very rarely do you say, 'Oh, you could just do 18 credits or something for a major.' That would feel like a minor, right, in the schools. And so that's part of clearly what's going on.

I think the other piece of that is what you just said, this infrastructure. And from my perspective, I've always wondered, like, could a Northeastern that does it at such scale — I think it's 6,000+ employers — could they spin that out, right, as its own entity and sort of have it as an intermediary. Or is it just, you know, all for us? Right? They're becoming global in nature, and so they would never do that, and you need someone else to come in and make that play. But that strikes me as, like, a second barrier.

Maybe I'll hold there. I wanna hear your thoughts before I get to the third thing.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. I mean, I'm laughing because I actually know somebody who approached not only Northeastern, but a couple of other universities about doing exactly that — spinning it off as a business. And the reaction was, 'Uh, yeah, we think it's proprietary. We don't really wanna do it.' And by the way, we then don't wanna have our students compete with other students, essentially. So how do you make sure that, like, the Ketterings of the world are number one in that?

The other issue or the other question, I guess, I have with infrastructure is we know, I don't have the data off hand from Strada, but we know from Strada, for example, that there are all these students who want internships. There's only a small proportion of them who actually get them. Some of that is because they can't find them. Some of it is because they can't afford them. They have to work in other jobs and things like that.

But I'm wondering if suddenly, say, 500 more colleges, let's just put a number on it, said, 'Okay. We're now gonna require co-ops for all of our students.' Is there enough capacity? We know that, you know, entry-level jobs are disappearing. We know internships or internships are disappearing on their own. Do employers — let's take it from the other side because I think here we're saying, well, colleges need to do this — do you think employers have the capacity to ingest all these students?

Michael Horn

No. I don't. I think there's a huge supply/demand imbalance. I think you're exactly right.

And Ryan Craig, our friend, often says, 'Don't call them employers.' Yes. They employ people, but they're companies. Right? And frankly, if we're being honest, and they could accomplish their goals with fewer people, they would because their identity is not employers, which is how we talk about them in this higher ed sector.

Which, you know, I get why we do it and where it's not useful is your point. Right? Like, this demand for people in co-ops or internships or whatever is not infinitely elastic. There's a limit to it, and there is a zero-sum nature to it. I think that's clearly part of it.

You look at a place like Champlain College that I mentioned in Vermont that has moved to a co-op model. I think what's gonna maybe work about that is that they're doing it in very specific areas, I think, around cybersecurity and gaming where the supply/demand relative to other schools works in their favor, and so they can carve out their niche. [e]

And I think this gets to the other piece that you were talking about is, 'what's the niche if you're going into, say, humanities?' Like, you're an English major. There's not an obvious one to one connection with industry that comes out of that.

I do think, that said, right, if you think of English ... We were talking in the episode we did at Adobe, right, about how we have to rethink a lot of these liberal arts or humanities majors in an age of AI anyway, that we all believe that actually the skills of an English major — how you communicate, how you use rhetoric, how you pull apart arguments, and so forth, and being able to read across lots of different kinds of texts and contexts —  actually has real value. But teaching it just as, 'Hey, let's read Shakespeare now. Let's read Chaucer and etc,' probably has some limits. Like, you actually have to put that skill into real projects and marketing or coms or, you know, places like that, I could imagine, Jeff.

So I think the possibility exists, but it brings into question is co-op gonna be the right structure to do that? Because I think a lot of companies would say, 'We'll take one or two, but 25, I don't know if we can do that.'

Jeff Selingo

Right. And I guess, Michael, does this need to be a one-size-fits-all? I think it helps the Ketterings of the world. It helps the Northeasterns of the world, the Drexels of the world to say we're a co-op school. Everybody does one. It's an easy marketing message.

But does that necessarily need to be the message? Could the message be, 'We're gonna give everybody a experiential learning, hands-on experience at least once before they graduate.' I would actually argue maybe for two or three of them before I graduate. Right? So we're gonna do job shadowing. We're gonna do research. We're gonna do campus jobs that are much more, you know, just better. You're actually gonna learn something. There are gonna be co-ops. There are gonna be internships.

So it's kind of, you know, you're walking into, you know, Baskin Robbins, and it's 31 flavors. Right? 31 flavors at a Baskin Robbins?

Michael Horn

Yeah that's what they used to say anyway. Yeah.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Well, somebody will...

Michael Horn

We may have dated ourselves. Someone will correct it.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Dated ourselves. I don't even know the last time I went to Baskin Robbins. But, anyway, 31 flavors of ice cream. There's 31 flavors of experiential learning.

Obviously, we're not gonna get to 31 flavors, but that to me is an idea of how we potentially could scale this. So you're guaranteeing everybody something, but not everybody has a co-op.

Michael Horn

Yeah. And I think that's the right way to ultimately think about it is less like the co-op model as it's been understood… This deeply integrated, and I think at Northeastern the proprietary way that they do it, and alternate students between these experiences of class and experience, and so forth. And a much more expansive view of what the experience aspect is.

And so, you know, look, there's organizations like Riipen, right, that will bring in real-world experience as a project into the course, but professors could do that certainly as well. I think this is where AI could ... As you know, I've been a pretty big skeptic of virtual reality in a lot of higher ed because the cost of creating these VR experiences is so high.

AI could make it, you know, much easier to do sort of entry-level simulations. Let's put it this way. Just so that by the time I show up in the government or organization or whatever job it is that you have some sense that I know how to operate within that environment.

And then I think what you said is maybe actually the most important thing, and this is gonna go way out of my lane. But as I understand it, work study needs to be really revamped. So a lot of those jobs, right, could be much more meaningful experiences.

And, you know, if we see that continuum, then actually there's a range of partners. We had Jane Swift, right, from Education at Work last season on the podcast. There are a bunch of these intermediaries doing pieces of these things that you could imagine stitching together maybe a more coherent experience.

Jeff Selingo

Michael, I wanna take this in a slightly different direction around Kettering, given its history and something that we've talked about often. This idea of the corporate university.

And, you know, we were out in Boise, Idaho. We saw what Micron needs in Upstate New York where it's building. You know, we know they have partnerships with different colleges, including the College of Western Idaho where we went. You know, they have that mechantronics program, which obviously they're helping, but, you know, trying to get students into those programs. You know, I've been talking to a number of other corporate leaders who are worried about their kind of retirement cliff and losing skilled labor.

Often, this is in, obviously, the skilled trades more than anything else, but you mentioned cybersecurity, for example.

Could we imagine almost the return of the corporate university here where, you know, I would imagine Ford and GM have huge needs right now as especially as they transition their companies into ... You know, they're more mobility companies now. Right? Autonomous vehicles and technology and things like that. They're gonna have huge needs for the workforce.

The AI companies are gonna have huge needs for the workforce. All these things.

Could you imagine the corporate ... You know — especially given universities aren't pumping out what often industry needs — the return of more of these corporate universities?

Michael Horn

I think definitively, yes. Right?

Because everyone's talking about skills-based hiring. My skepticism about it is sort of the universality of skills that I think context matters and culture matters quite a big deal. And so if I'm a company, I think from a strategic perspective, vertically integrating, integrating backward into core training actually becomes more important, not less, so that I can shore up my supply chain, if you will, of future workers.

And so I think corporate university becomes hugely important. I look at even what Apple University does, right, internally at Apple, which is really about helping, as I understand it, the management team understand how Apple solves problems, really preserving that culture. This isn't sort of like a nice-to-have investment. They view it as incredibly strategic. I think more companies, you know, it would be of strategic value to them to go in that direction.

And I think, by the way, Jeff, you know, hot take, I think that could be hugely disruptive to business education in a lot of universities, particularly hollowing out, say, exec ed and stuff like that pays a lot of these things.[f]

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And It reminds me. At one of my dinners a couple of years ago where, you know, at the end of the dinner, a provost said — you know, these are all higher ed folks around the table — he said — and most of them were near his institution — he said, 'You're not my competitors. It's the employers that are my competitors.'

He was talking a little bit about jobs, you know, taking students away, but he was also talking about, he's more worried about them taking on kind of the training, especially in a day and age when students are going to college to get a job. They're much more focused on the careerism of college. They don't care about the other stuff. Yes. They care about football and Greek life and residential life, but they don't care about all the other courses, so why not?

Michael Horn

So is the future gonna be the professionalization of sports and, like, the Caterpillar basketball team alongside Caterpillar U, back to sort of ...

Jeff Selingo

That would be kinda funny. I guess the bowls, these ridiculous bowls. Right? The Pop Tarts bowl.

Michael Horn

Yeah, it's vertically integrated. Right?

Jeff Selingo

I guess that would all make sense then.

Michael Horn

I do think the retirement cliff is a key part of this and the rapidly-changing nature of how you do these jobs. That's part of the reason, right, this moment supports, I think, that vertical integration as a company.

If, frankly, the skills weren't changing that much and we didn't see this velocity of change, I don't know that it would make as much sense in that sort of a world. So I think there's a good argument for it at the moment.

So, anyway, Jeff, I think that's a good place to leave it. We've run down a bunch of these different strands of how this might play itself out, and we'll stay tuned.

But before we let you all go, we're gonna welcome back Kettering University's president. And, Bob, we have three lightning round questions for you as we wrap up this episode of Future U.

Jeff Selingo

First question. What was your favorite college class, and why?

Bob McMahan

Oh, my favorite. Well, as an undergraduate, I actually got two degrees. I got a degree in physics and a degree in art history.

Jeff Selingo

That's an interesting combination.

Bob McMahan

No. I loved it. I actually did.

And my favorite college class was an introductory art history class that I had with the professor who ultimately became my adviser at the university. She got up in the class, and she looked over it, and she pounded her two fists on the table, and she says, 'My sole purpose of this course is to convince you that Titian was God.’

Michael Horn

Love it.

Bob McMahan

Her name was Rona Goff. God bless her. Rest her soul. Rest in peace. She is a wonderful human being, and she really influenced me in so many ways that she didn't know.

Jeff Selingo

What's the one buzzword that is used in higher ed that you never wanna hear again?

Bob McMahan

Oh, there are so many.

Michael Horn

Pick one of them. Just one, pick one.

Bob McMahan

Oh gosh. Now this is a hard one. Buzzword. With many of them. I'm struggling to come up with it.

Michael Horn

We can ask you a second one and come back. Let's come back.

Jeff Selingo

Let's ask you the next question. Yeah.

And so what's the biggest difference between students now and when you were in college?

Bob McMahan

The expectation of students, what they expect of their college experience is profoundly different, and how they relate to college is very different. They are much less prone to accept things on face value. Or what I used to say as a professor, 'Temporarily suspend disbelief,' which is an important part of the educational process. But there's some benefits to that as well. I think it makes us better.

Jeff Selingo

Good. Any other buzzwords you could think of?

Bob McMahan

Oh gosh. Give me, seed me one or two, and I'll tell you if I hate them.

Jeff Selingo

Well, what do you think about everybody talking about experiential learning? Do you think we need to come up with a different term for it.

Bob McMahan

Yeah. I mean, that's a good somewhat self-serving definition.

Jeff Selingo

Right.

Bob McMahan

But the word co-op, experiential learning, encompasses... Again, it's like the university in itself, it encompasses just an incredible range of diverse phenomena, and yet it's treated as if it's a single monolithic experience. And it's a box that you can check where, in fact, there's a huge variation in outcomes.

Jeff Selingo

Right. The experiential learning you're doing is very different than what somebody else could be doing.

Michael Horn

Bob, thank you so much. And for all of you, our listeners, appreciate you joining us. We'll see you next time on Future U.