Reimagining Higher Education: AI, Innovation and the Future of the Campus

Sathish:

“Welcome to the BinaryWorks podcast, where we talk about technology trends and AI in higher education. Today’s topic is reimagining higher education with AI, innovation, and the future of the campus. I’m excited to welcome Dr. Nick Ladany, President of San Francisco Bay University and a higher education leader with decades of experience as a university president, dean, and academic innovator.”

Nick:

Thank you, Sathish. It’s great to be here.

Sathish:

“You have described San Francisco Bay University as a startup, a challenger brand. What makes it one?”

Nick:

We are in a unique position to up-end higher education. When we talk about a challenger brand, think of Airbnb. I like to say we are going from the Yugo version of higher education to the Waymo version. We are purposely changing how higher education is delivered, and doing it in a way that is affordable and accessible. Up to this point, higher education has largely failed many students, particularly those without easy access or resources. We think of ourselves as a 40-year-old startup. We have been around 40 years, but it was only a couple of years ago, when I arrived, that we built a new leadership team. We brought in people with a healthy disgruntlement with higher education who are firmly committed to how life-changing it can be.

We asked: if we want to restart higher education, what should it look like? We capped our classes at 20, because relationships with faculty, staff, and administrators are key to meaningful student success. We decided to train faculty how to teach. The dirty little secret in higher education is that faculty have never been trained to teach. There is no other workforce where you hire people who lack the skill for the job, except maybe politicians, as someone pointed out. The best faculty develop relationships with students and know how to help them learn, not just content, but what it means to be interpersonally connected and a good citizen. We built that in.

We offer wraparound services for all students, including academic support and unlimited mental health services, because the foundation of educational success is personal, interpersonal, and social success. And we are affordable. Tuition is about $10,000 a year, and in a few months we will launch our MBA program, which will cost $10,000 for the entire degree.

Sathish:

“How do you make it that affordable, and for everyone?”

Nick:

Universities used to be affordable. When I was in school in the early 1980s, tuition at the University of Maryland was around $536 a semester. Over the last 40 years, tuition has outpaced inflation and nearly every other product, including healthcare. It has become a race to the superficial: rock climbing walls, lazy rivers, lakes, and athletics programs that look professional, even though only about a dozen schools nationally make money on athletics.

If you streamline education, it can be done. Our faculty teach year-round, nine classes a year, not just a few courses over three or six months. We pay them well, starting around $125,000 a year, and the best faculty want to teach year-round anyway. We went all in on teaching and supporting students. To be fair, we do have resources, including an unrestricted endowment, but we need to be net positive like everyone else. Most universities have not been willing to look honestly at their finances. You cannot tell me that with a billion-dollar endowment you cannot offer mostly free tuition. What else are you doing? That is the question we asked ourselves, and we redesigned the university from that view.

Sathish:

“How has higher education changed since you started?”

Nick:

Costs have increased enormously, partly because state and federal subsidies have disappeared, making public institutions look more like private ones. Online education has changed things too. Students do not need face-to-face classes for all four years, and the data shows they are fine with a number of courses online.

We have also embraced the 90-credit undergraduate degree as the new standard. A century ago, we created 120-credit, four-year degrees largely to give faculty something to teach. It was not really about the liberal arts. There is no magical reason for 120 credits over 90. Oxford and Cambridge offer shorter degrees, and if they can do it, we can too. Part of the challenge is that faculty have gained more control over curriculum than they used to, and it now often serves faculty rather than students. Our view is that faculty are great content experts but not curriculum designers. We need to help them teach and design curriculum. At many institutions, faculty push back, claim ownership of the curriculum, and resist being evaluated like anyone else in an organization. That has led to stagnation.

It is not only faculty’s fault. Administrators share the blame. Campuses added administration, and administrators often spend their time appeasing different groups without a clear mandate to get things done effectively. Then we exploit students’ payments and their belief in higher education by raising tuition because we can, not because we should. We give families high hopes, and when students arrive, we expect them to accept low expectations. That combination never works.

Sathish:

“What excites you most about the innovation happening now?”

Nick:

AI is arriving at an important time. It lets us lower costs and be more effective. We developed our MBA Pro Plus, which is largely online, with a human component where faculty are best and an AI component where students learn from AI avatars of faculty. Take negotiation skills. Anyone can teach the classic Harvard negotiation framework. An avatar professor can look like us, interact with students, and provide personalized, neurodivergent-friendly education.

After learning the content, students have an experience with an avatar boss and must negotiate a salary increase. They demonstrate the skills they just learned for 20 or 30 minutes and immediately get feedback on how proficient they were. Very few people are perfect right away, so students can try again and learn skills the way all of us do. None of us end up in jobs perfectly matched to our major, except perhaps accountants. Our students engage in experiences that prove they have those skills when they graduate.

We do this in a closed system using the pedagogy we developed. It is not ChatGPT praising students for everything. Our AI tutors actually frustrate students a little. We want them to engage in intelligent failure: try something, make a mistake, and learn from it, as we all do. Then they meet with a human professor who does what professors do best: build community, mentor, develop meaningful relationships, and offer career guidance. The best professors did not just teach us content. They made a transformational difference.

Sathish:

“Tell us about Innovate Bay. That is not a typical university program.”

Nick:

Innovate Bay is our incubator, created to give people who traditionally have not had access to incubators a chance to grow their businesses. It has become quite a phenomenon in the Bay Area. Rohan Brown, our managing director, has done an amazing job connecting us with the community and bringing on small companies, and we provide some seed funding to help them succeed. Our students have access to it too.

Our signature scholarship is the Startup Scholars Program for undergraduates. It provides free tuition, free room and board, a monthly stipend, and a $10,000 stipend for a passion project or startup the student creates with our guidance. These students usually have some entrepreneurial skills, and we develop them further through the curriculum and the incubator.

Sathish:

“How do students qualify for the Startup Scholars Program?”

Nick:

These are traditional undergraduates, and the application includes an essay on what their company could look like. We do not expect 17- and 18-year-olds to have a full business plan. They are not on Shark Tank. They are early in their thinking, but they have outstanding ideas, and that written piece is part of how they are selected.

Sathish:

“AI is reshaping teaching, learning, and engagement. Will it significantly improve retention and enrollment?”

Nick:

Our graduation rates hover around 80 to 85 percent, depending on the student population. The national four-year average is about 50 percent, and most universities report six-year graduation rates of around 60 percent. To me, that is unacceptable. Then call yourself a six-year college, not a four-year institution. With our 90-credit undergraduate degree, our goal is a three-year graduation rate of 80 percent or more.

AI can be a huge help. It can offer tutoring, or faculty avatars available 24/7. We call it the best version of the best faculty you have had. Human faculty play an important role, but AI can supplement them. Most faculty cannot be available around the clock. If a student gets home late from work, starts an assignment, and gets stuck, they might have to wait a week for an appointment, if the professor responds at all. That is a waste of time and poor learning design. But you do not want AI just giving answers; that is a fancy Google search. We want students to learn concepts and apply them, and our early course designs show AI can do that remarkably well. Yet most universities are trying to avoid AI, treating it as cheating. It reminds me of the calculator and the computer. This one is arguably different, but we still need to learn how to use it effectively so students can get jobs.

Sathish:

“Will traditional degrees still be effective in ten years, or will they have to change significantly?”

Nick:

Degrees will have to change. I do not think we need universities with 60 majors anymore. We will have about half a dozen, perhaps a dozen at most, that are purposely interdisciplinary. Answering any important question requires multiple fields. If you look through only one, you miss a big piece. With AI, we can gain enough expertise to integrate knowledge in ways AI may not, to solve human problems. Take cyberpsychology, an emerging field that integrates psychology, communications, computer science, and marketing to study how people interact with social media. A psychologist looking only at behavior would miss much of it. So I think we will have integrated, broad majors that may lean toward the arts or business, and everyone will need more process-based skills, not just content knowledge.

Sathish:

“How should students prepare for the future workforce, including AI fluency?”

Nick:

The way universities are structured today, they are woefully underpreparing students for the future. I would love to see universities embrace change, but many factions within them block innovation. There are pockets of innovation, but not true innovation across higher education. Universities need to rethink how they prepare students, and they will be pushed to. We believe we can be a model, and our students are giving us early signs that it works. Universities had better change. About one is closing every week, and they should have seen it coming years ago.

Sathish:

“More students want online education. Will online dominate, or will traditional campuses remain?”

Nick:

Online will have its place. We are developing neighborhood campuses: small footprints, perhaps 4,000 square feet, with a seminar room for about 20 and coworking-style lounges where students learn through an online approach. Online alone does not work; look at graduation rates at online universities. I tell students and families to check four-year graduation rates, not six- or eight-year. If it is below about 70 percent, something is wrong. Students need pathways into and through higher education that help them graduate.

For traditional undergraduates, there is something important about personal connection with adults and professors, and that can happen in a much smaller space. That is the neighborhood campus concept, though it may only be needed for a year or two. By the third year, most students just want to finish. Our goal is to get them a degree and then into graduate school or a job. Anything less does students a disservice. Some wealthy families can let their children meander through an educational experience, but I do not think it helps them become well-functioning adults. A neighborhood campus might be in a public library or a community partnership. We are starting in San Jose, then Oakland and across the Bay Area, then south to Los Angeles and San Diego, and then eastward. Leased spaces do not cost much. We do not need a 50- or 100-acre campus everywhere. Many universities do not understand how to scale. Simply putting what you do online is not effective either. If teaching on campus is good, bad, and ugly, you get the same good, bad, and ugly teaching online. You have to redesign both the online space and the campus space, and that is what we are doing.

Sathish:

“It reminds me of retail. Even with online shopping everywhere, people still prefer to go to the store. I hope the physical campus remains.”

Nick:

I think some version should remain. I agree there is value in it, just not at $30,000, $40,000, or $100,000 a year.

Sathish:

“Enrollment is a major challenge, and universities are closing. What should they do to bridge the enrollment gap?”

Nick:

Most universities are still targeting 17- and 18-year-olds. There are 40 to 50 million people in the US with some college but no degree. Why not focus on them, and on other populations you can attract and help succeed? If everyone is fishing in the same pond, that is the problem. There is not really a shortage of students. There is a demographic cliff, but if you only fish in that one pond, eventually you will not be very successful. And many students, not just nationally but worldwide, need an education. Why do we keep focusing on what worked 20, 30, or 40 years ago? That is a large part of why universities are failing. They are not being creative or innovative. They insist on sticking to what they do no matter what. It is a Blockbuster Video model of product development, and we need other examples.

Sathish:

“What kind of partnerships should industry and universities build to create a future-ready workforce?”

Nick:

In our case, our new general education curriculum, which is purposely interdisciplinary, was built and validated with industry people who told us, yes, this is what we need, or no, it is not. It is not based solely on that. Much of it is critical and durable skills, the liberal arts skills as we have defined them. But industry partnerships are critical for students to see how work works, get jobs, and learn how to behave at work.

The pandemic affected a lot of students. It has a long tail of trauma, big T and little T. We have also seen that it developmentally delayed students’ emotional growth, and social media adds to that delay in social development. Put it all together and you get real challenges for students and our future workforce. I hear colleagues say the new generation does not work as hard as the old one. I do not think there is much truth to that. But they are not skilled in ways that matter, so they have to be taught the mature skills students typically had 20 or 30 years ago.

Sathish:

“What will the campus of the future look like? Will there be more robots?”

Nick:

I think it will look like us. We are at the leading edge. It is neighborhood campuses, different online approaches, and meeting the needs of different student groups simultaneously. The best universities will not focus only on the 17-year-old undergraduate. If that is all you do, you are missing the boat. You are trying to homogenize the student experience when students need personalized education at every developmental level. Some 17- or 18-year-olds arrive with the maturity of a 30-year-old. Others, perhaps affected by family trauma, may be developmentally closer to 14. You educate them differently, and you have to meet all those needs.

The future university will also offer lifelong learning to students who come back, including seniors. What will people do if AI replaces many entry-level jobs? Older people were often told to retire and sit on a beach, and I am getting closer to that group myself. That sounds great for a few weeks, but at some point you need meaning. The best way to find it might be work you never considered. If you were an accountant your whole life, maybe you want to teach, study plants, study how we achieve peace, or go into politics. There is a lot of work to be done in our world, and we have pigeonholed people in their careers and lives in ways that will not be as useful in the coming decades.

Sathish:

“What leadership lesson would you share with leaders of similar-sized universities?”

Nick:

The biggest lesson is to be bold. Do not be driven by fear of change. In higher education there are all kinds of pressures not to do things, instead of just doing them. Do not let people dissuade you. Stay consistent with your true mission. We want to reach populations traditionally left out of higher education as well as students who have had access, and we serve both. That means thinking about higher education differently. Do that, and you will right the ship if you are heading down the wrong path, avoid the cliff, and get ahead of challenges before they arrive.

Sathish:

“Workforces are often reluctant about AI because of job-loss fears. What’s your take?”

Nick:

I think there will be job loss. Current research suggests losses in entry-level positions, but job growth in areas that need AI-related expertise. If job loss is significant, it may lead to universal basic income, which would not necessarily be a bad thing. More importantly, it will help us develop fields we have neglected, like peace studies or creating environments with less physical and verbal violence. We will be able to tackle those challenges more readily because more people will focus on them. We need mental health support, and AI is not going to replace therapists anytime soon, though it may replace aspects of what they do.

If we do this well, I think we will also come together as communities, and neighborhoods will become the center of social life as they used to be. I hope we can walk into a neighborhood and find not a chain pharmacy that searches you on the way in and out, but a local pharmacist who knows the community and has that personal relationship. That is what is missing in our culture. Build those neighborhoods and communities, and you create a very different experience, not just for adults but for children learning how to treat one another better. We are not there yet, but I think that is where we are headed, and AI will actually help us get there.

Sathish:

“To close, what is your vision for the future of higher education?”

Nick:

I want other universities to look at San Francisco Bay University as a model, then expand on it and get better than us. We challenge them: look at what we are doing and do it, and if you can do it better, do it better, because there is so much need. Let’s stop focusing on select students and excluding others. Let’s focus on all students and ask what we need to do to make education central to everyone’s life, helping them grow into the kind of adults we frankly need more of.

Sathish:

“Thanks, Nick. I hope to reconnect in six months, when AI will have changed even more.”

Nick:

Thanks, Sathish. Have a great day.