TWICV - Special Edition with Laura De Veau October 25, 2024

Gary (00:01.728)
Welcome back to yet another special episode of This Week in College Viability. Hi, I'm Gary Stocker. This week we have a visiting professor from the Lynch School of Education and Development at Boston College and a principal at Fortify Associates. I have to welcome Laura DeVoe to the podcast. Laura, thanks for joining us.

Laura De Veau (00:20.886)
Thank you, Gary. It's wonderful to be here with you. I really appreciate it.

Gary (00:24.382)
And know what, this is not the first time you and I have done this together. So we are repeat conquerors of the podcast domain. And for the listeners, the follow-up on this has some logic behind it. A couple of weeks, couple of months ago, Laura posted on social media a lead that I hadn't seen before, and that was that Vanderbilt University had moved into New York City. Now there more details behind it than that. And so, Laura, let's start off with why is Vandy...

Laura De Veau (00:26.972)
No.

Gary (00:50.622)
moving into New York City and what else might be going on with other colleges like that.

Laura De Veau (00:54.816)
Yeah, I think it's really interesting. wrote it in my sub stack. I have a sub stack called What's Up in the Academy. I'll get you make sure you have the link so you can put it up in the the show notes. But I think that when I look at this and I see what Vanderbilt did, it immediately got me thinking about what Northeastern has been doing for quite some time, which is they've identified locations. They did this out in Oakland, California, taking, you know,

property out there and developing that. And I think what it does is it provides institutions with a clear opportunity to recruit in a different way. And so when I saw Vanderbilt go into New York City, into what's basically existing, a very small theological seminary in New York, which you know is not going to be bringing in a lot of students.

I would have to imagine just keeping the heat on at the place is incredibly expensive and overwhelming. the first thing I did is I did a Google Maps of where this campus was in comparison to where NYU is. And when you look at institutions and where institutions compete against, Vanderbilt and NYU have some common

opportunities there and a student who might be applying to NYU is very likely applying to Vanderbilt or institutions like it. Vanderbilt is not in New York City. Vanderbilt is as far from New York, well, I'm not gonna say as far from New York City as possible, but it is definitely not New York City. But you would have to also take a look at how many alums does Vanderbilt have in the New York metropolitan area and how many companies might recruit.

Gary (02:33.6)
you

Laura De Veau (02:49.674)
Vanderbilt students or maybe they've heard from their career services folks like, we've been trying to get into some of these businesses, but we just don't have a footprint close enough and our students just can't get there. So when I heard about this, I said, okay, so this is a very strategic decision as far as Vanderbilt is concerned. It allows them to provide their students with access to New York City, potentially give them some opportunity for actually having classes there.

have internships or co-ops, something of that nature. And it changes the game and it allows them to expand into some environments that they're not currently in. I then tweaked up that side of my brain that's constantly thinking about mergers and closures and saying, okay, I'm the theological seminary. Why shouldn't I go to a place that has deep pockets and is not they themselves in a viability problem?

right? And say, Hey, you know what? Let's think entrepreneurially here. What do you think of having a great Midtown Manhattan kind of location? Isn't that great? Don't we all want to be in Sex and the City and walk around and this is awesome, right? And so, you know, I think that that's where you've got this. And I say kudos to the folks at the Theological Seminary to say, you know what? I'd rather, you know, sell ourselves to or

Gary (03:49.503)
Yeah.

Gary (04:02.418)
you

Laura De Veau (04:16.49)
land lease ourselves to a place like Vanderbilt and know that our institution is going to have a footprint remaining here in Manhattan and not be a, you know, a high cost co-op or condominium. So that's what was going through my head.

Gary (04:38.048)
So, know, I want to digress for a second. I was at the Chicago Marathon a couple of weeks ago, our daughter ran in that. And right in the middle of prime time, prime real estate in downtown Chicago was Columbia College. And you and I follow Columbia College and it's not in a good situation. I wonder how many other colleges not in that Chicago metro region are thinking Vandy-like.

Laura De Veau (04:43.458)
That's great.

Laura De Veau (04:48.567)
Yup.

Laura De Veau (04:52.961)
Nope.

Gary (04:59.592)
And looking at a place like Columbia College is going to be very challenging to maintain a viable presence for a long time. I how many other colleges are pondering that same kind of scenario.

Laura De Veau (05:01.783)
Yep.

Yeah.

If I was Syracuse University, I'd look at Columbia College. You know why? Because we lose students to Northwestern all the time. Students want to go to Chicago. Students want to be out of that space. If I was Mizzou, I would look at it. It may not be that far, because this is my Northeast vision of the world.

Gary (05:11.188)
Yeah, there you go.

Gary (05:35.404)
Ha ha!

Laura De Veau (05:37.108)
It's got that step up urban opportunity for my Mizzou students who may want to go back there. There are places that that absolutely makes sense. Years ago, decades ago, Emerson College opened a satellite campus in Los Angeles. And people were like, well, that's because they are an entertainment school and students go out there and they get jobs in LA and all that stuff. Now, if you go out...

I'm gonna date myself, I'm 57 years old. When they first did this, I was still just out of college myself and it was this dumpy little spot in LA. Now you go out there and you're like, wow, this place is nice. And students see this and they go, okay, this is viable. Like schools have been doing this in some version for decades. But now what we're able to say is it's not just a satellite, it is a.

Gary (06:14.88)
you

Laura De Veau (06:33.588)
specific part of what we have to offer. And if you take it to another level like Northeastern's doing, which is you can start your education in Oakland, California or London, England or Toronto, Canada, and then come into Boston and continue your education. Okay, that's a whole other way of thinking about this. So, and, and

To be frank, sometimes it also eases some of the issues that the campus is feeling. I don't know if this is what's happening at Northeastern, but they only have so much housing. They only have so much space on college campus. So if they're able to say, all right, first year students, you're gonna live somewhere else and then you're gonna come to Northeastern either second semester, your first year or your sophomore year, that allows for them to kind of ease in a little bit on the housing crunch.

Gary (07:24.448)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (07:27.778)
So there's a lot of strategy that goes into this.

Gary (07:31.424)
So, you know, the first two examples we've talked about are the biggies, the big colleges that have the resources to do this. And really, I believe the most significant action in terms of mergers, and I don't use acquisitions because that's not gonna happen much in higher education, there will be, you've heard me say this and others heard me say this as well, there will be more consolidation in the form of both closures and in the form of mergers. And you now need to kind of address this conversation to those colleges.

Laura De Veau (07:34.871)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (07:45.024)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (07:59.606)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (07:59.84)
who've already heard this stuff before, but maybe the folks working at those colleges or students and their families, faculty and staff, what are the top two, maybe three reasons a private middle of the road, non-selective college needs to consider a merger today?

Laura De Veau (08:15.554)
Yeah. Well, when you, you you were kind enough to provide me with these questions in advance. So it gave me some time to kind of mull it over and all that. And, you know, this is something that, you know, someone will complain about because I'm not running for president. So I'm not, you know, getting the questions in advance is fine. That's fine. That's fine. And then edit it out to make me look more cogent. But anyway, there is this when you gave me this question.

Gary (08:31.912)
I cheated Laura, cheated, I'm okay with that.

Laura De Veau (08:42.338)
One of the things I go back to is the question I always get asked about the closure at Mount Ida College where I was vice president for student affairs. So was there when the college closed in 2018. And I always get the question, why did it close? And so I say there's like a three-legged stool of closure. If you've got too much deferred maintenance, we had $40 million in deferred maintenance.

No one's going to give you $40 million in one year to fix roofs and your infrastructure and your IT stuff, okay? Second thing is discount rate. The year after we closed, we had been discounting at 62%. So anything over 50 % is a gigantic warning sign. And then the third reason is leadership. And that's personalities and all of that.

and the leadership of the president, the CFO, trustees. If a school, to your question, if a school has two of those three legs, because by the way, they're never gonna admit they've got a leadership problem, right? If they got two of those three legs, they need to start thinking about a merger.

Gary (09:52.499)
Right.

Gary (10:00.731)
Interesting.

Gary (10:04.736)
And one of things I have written about and talked about for long time is when we get to this merger stage, and feel free to say, Gary, you're nuts. You wouldn't be the first one and almost certainly not going to be the last. I've always espoused that mom and pop mergers, mom and pop mergers, onesies and twosies, threesies is not going to be enough. I've always espoused that those mergers should at least grow to 10-ish or more colleges. What do you think? To get the scale needed for on the academic side?

Laura De Veau (10:30.727)
You broke up a little bit there, Gary. Can you just repeat the question again?

Gary (10:34.528)
Let me ask that again. So I've always said that colleges, when they look at mergers, it shouldn't be the onesies and twosies and threesies. It should be something along the lines of ten or more, or least building toward ten or more colleges to get the academic and non-academic scale needed to be able to compete. Am I right or wrong?

Laura De Veau (10:45.228)
Mm-hmm.

Laura De Veau (10:50.476)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (10:54.4)
Yeah, yeah. No, I think we need to think more entrepreneurially. I agree with you. I think two schools is not going to happen anymore. I think two small institutions that are, they themselves, difficult to compete. know institutions with 3,000 students or less are more likely to close than others. They're not sustainable in terms of enrollment.

So you want to get yourself to a point where you've got at least in my mind, 10,000 students. And in order to get there, you need to have at least three schools, probably closer to five and plus. And I think we have to get entrepreneurial here. We have to think about, you know, what kind, what do we do well? Okay. And we have to stop thinking about the institutions trying to become something that

Gary (11:25.312)
10,000.

Laura De Veau (11:46.976)
they'll never, that even with the merger, they may not be able to be there quite immediately. So let me give an example. Like, you know, when you're looking at college campuses for your child, there will be some non-negotiables, okay? A student may say, I want a co-op or I want to do study abroad or I want, you know, on-campus housing guaranteed for four years, or I want...

Big time athletics, okay? The merger of five schools that are division three or NAIA schools is not gonna get you big time athletics. The merger of five schools that don't currently have a tradition of co-op is not the time to say, and we're gonna add a co-op. Don't, don't add things, okay?

Gary (12:38.368)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (12:39.906)
But if you had five schools and out of those five schools, two currently had strong co-op and internship programs, two had some kind of public facing programs that are well known in terms of, recently here in Massachusetts, two schools have merged, Bay Path University and then Lesley University, okay?

and no, Cambridge College, Cambridge College. So Cambridge College and Bay Path, Leslie wishes they were in on that. But Cambridge College has been known for decades as being a place that people who are teachers, K-12 educators are getting their various recertifications through Cambridge College. They run summer programs so that teachers can get recertified and they get their...

Gary (13:13.856)
you

Gary (13:30.047)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (13:34.208)
all their recertification items and all of that. Then Bay Path is well known for their online learning and they have a very large online learning. So these two made sense, even though they're nowhere near each other, they're both in Massachusetts, but they're a good hour and a half away from each other. And it allows for you to kind of build something out. And I think that that mergers one to watch. But if we're actually looking at something I wanna see, okay, for giggles.

I want to see us take a lot of these smaller Catholic private universities that are scattered all over the country. And maybe they're all of the same type of tradition, Catholic tradition. Maybe they're all Franciscan or they're all, you know, a group that all like the same nuns founded them, you know, whatever. Okay. And that is going to be something where they could say, all right, we're all a similar mission.

Gary (14:16.384)
All

Gary (14:22.496)
Right.

Laura De Veau (14:29.686)
We all align with this one part of the Catholic Church. We all have, you know, a tradition of this. What can we do to say we are now a national university? We have four campuses and we're scaling out on some of this other stuff that frankly is not actually bringing us students that are retaining. And that's where I'm gonna actually say, do you need athletics? Do you need some of these other?

Gary (14:41.14)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (14:59.234)
add-ons that people say, but my kid's going to do athletic. I'm like, you know, we got to be more intentional about things that, know, Champlain College did years ago. They decided up in Vermont, we're going to get rid of our athletic program and we're going to really lean into wellness and intramural sports. And they've got hiking and skiing and all kinds of stuff. And students really make that part of their lifestyle.

losing intercollegiate athletics didn't do anything to hurt them. It actually enhanced the experience. So I think that, you know, to your question, I would like to see groups of schools that have similar missions, that have complementary academic programs, not all the same, but complementary programs, and be able to say, are a national university system.

Gary (15:30.229)
Yeah.

Gary (15:33.576)
Andrew.

Laura De Veau (15:56.165)
And this is what we do.

Gary (15:59.486)
And yet you and I are engaged in a serious and realistic, I think, conversation about mergers. And yet we read and we hear regularly, I'm speaking generically, that the people that should be having this conversation, the college leaders, the college trustees in these exact kind of small non-selective colleges we're talking about, tend to say what? Well, no, we're okay, we'll survive. it's silly, but can we speculate on what it would take

Laura, to get them to recognize before it's too late, because that's what's happening now, they're recognizing it's too late, to act yesterday on this stuff, not next week.

Laura De Veau (16:33.418)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that this is where the leadership comes in, right? This is where someone has to come in and say, all right, what are we trying to do here? Are we trying to educate people or are we trying to be like everybody else? And, you know, I think that there have been some examples of some presidents who've said, and they've looked at the books and they said, OK, maybe we do need to get rid of athletics. Maybe we do need to give rid of, you know, a particular academic program.

even if it's well enrolled. Okay. So like I'm going to use, you know, where I'm currently located in the Boston metropolitan area, you know, there are fantastic business programs all over the place around here, whether it be at the large universities like Boston university, Boston college, Harvard, et cetera, or you go over to Babson college, which is the number one business school for decades in America.

in the world, excuse me, I'm gonna have some of my friends and colleagues from Babson's like, that's a world thing, Laura, it's a world thing. But literally it's right down the street or Bentley University or Bryant University. Like you've got all three of those B schools all there. And then if you're a kid who's like, maybe I'm not at that academic level, maybe I need to be at a state school, I could go to Framingham State or Bridgewater State and get a good business degree. So now you're a small private.

like my previous institution that closed and you're like, I'm going to have a business department. Why? Why? Why? Just so you can like keep people on the football team? That's to me, it doesn't make sense. So I think what has to happen to your question about why don't people kind of make these decisions? They are also not making other decisions. They need to start making decisions about how, what is our mission? We need to get back to the mission.

Gary (18:14.09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Gary (18:25.312)
All right.

Laura De Veau (18:31.436)
What is the mission of the institution? What are the majors and programs and offerings that we have to provide to be mission-driven, to reach and attain that doctrine that drives us as an institution? And then does it matter that we have a Starbucks or not? Does it matter that we have a climbing wall? Does it matter that we have one of these things? Because if it doesn't, why are we trying to aspire to that? We don't need to get into that arms race.

What we need to do is focus on what we got to do. And so I think there's another piece of this is that when the president wants to say, we're going to scale back, that's a leadership thing. You need to have a strong leader to say, in order for us to keep this institution viable, we're going to scale back. This is what it means for us. This is why we're doing it. And hopefully be able to move us in a good direction.

When it comes to that idea of merger, think the other thing that's there that we haven't talked about is how clumsy, cumbersome and overwhelming it is to get it done through each state. Each state is different. The states don't like it. They don't like to play along. They don't know what to do with higher education when it comes to these things. Okay. And then the accreditors, the accreditors, they, they, you know,

As higher education is the only industry that accredits itself.

If hospitals accredited themselves, if the airline industry accredited itself, if the car manufacturers accredited, I would literally stay in my room in a padded space and never leave because why would I get on a plane? Why would I get in a car? Why would I go to a hospital? I wouldn't trust it. So the accreditors don't help either. yeah. So I have no answer to your question other than to rant.

Gary (20:09.631)
you

Laura De Veau (20:35.124)
Okay. And I think that that's really overwhelming when it comes to being a president and a board of trustees to say, all right, why, why should we do this? Cause there's no, there is not a mechanism that helps the institution come up with something in a way that is, you know, other than hiring a consultant, which is important, but the consultants are not an intermediary with the state. The state does not have that kind of connection. They're also not an intermediary with the, with the accreditors.

Gary (20:39.85)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (21:05.076)
And so if there was an intermediary, like if the Department of Education or something like that said, look, we know this is our reality. We're going to put together an intermediary and this is how it's going to work. And we're going to be here to help you with this, almost like a souped up federal consultant. That might help. But right now you're on your own.

Gary (21:29.16)
Yeah, yeah. I just a couple hours ago was talking to a college president just about that. He's engaged in some merger activity and he was lamenting the fact that the crediting agencies would make it not impossible, but as close to impossible as it can be without being that. But when we have these mergers, there's always a whiff of what's in it for me. And I often share what I believe when a college makes any change. They can change the font size on the business card.

Laura De Veau (21:42.38)
Yeah.

Gary (21:55.312)
And inevitably, I'm trying to be Laura DeVoe here and kind come up with a funny. inevitably, faculty will have a protest. And shortly after the faculty have a protest, the students will have a protest. What's in it for faculty initially, maybe students also, what's in it for faculty if a college were to engage in a merger of some sort?

Laura De Veau (22:02.37)
Okay.

Laura De Veau (22:11.382)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's interesting because I think back to my own experience, my lived experience with Mount Ida prior to our closing. If people go back and look at the history of everything that happened over the course of our last semester around, we had announced that we were pursuing a merger with LaSalle College, which is located literally four miles from where Mount Ida was.

that had to become public because when you do a merger it has to become public and so there was a public piece of that and we had this we did I almost and this is me being absolutely biased but also you have to remember I was traumatized through this whole thing so I have to look back at it through a specific lens. I think we did a pretty effective job in explaining to the students and the faculty and the staff that in order for us to be sustainable we have to think differently and a merger made sense.

And it was interesting to watch the two campuses. The campus response at LaSalle was very negative. The campus response at Mount Ida was actually quite positive. There was anxiety, but you have to be clear with folks when you're making these announcements to say, this is what it's going to look like for each group. Okay. This is how it's going to impact the faculty. This kind of affects the staff and this is the students.

Gary (23:20.372)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (23:37.794)
And when it came to the faculty, you have to be honest about which programs are gonna remain, which programs are gonna be taught out, which programs are gonna be combined because maybe there are two similar programs. And what will that mean in your total FTE? Are we going to, you should be sitting here going as part of the conversation. We have this many faculty who are in range for retirement.

we will have a buyout, we will do all those kinds of things, but you need to be intentional with the faculty. With the staff, that was a bigger heightened area for anxiety, at least on our campus, because you don't need two soccer coaches, you don't need two vice presidents for student affairs, you don't need two registrars, you needed one, okay? And I was saying to my team, it is highly likely I will not survive this merger.

Gary (24:10.207)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (24:35.618)
because of the politics of it. And my counterpart at the other institution was longer in the game than I was and LaSalle in the merger, because it's never a merger of equals. They would have been the ones with more money on the table. They get to make some decisions that we don't get to make. And so that was anxiety producing. But even there, the staff was like, it makes sense because it makes sense.

Gary (24:38.633)
Yeah.

Gary (24:48.084)
All right.

Laura De Veau (25:04.374)
The students ultimately just wanted to know, were they going to have a space within that community where they were seen as equal partners, not as, we saved your ass, okay, if it wasn't for us, right? And they definitely were in this mindset of, I just don't wanna be seen as the poor redheaded stepchild cousin that nobody wanted.

Gary (25:18.218)
You

Laura De Veau (25:32.546)
in all of this, but can I still have my major? And that sort of thing. So there's all these pieces. We did have some scrutiny about finances at that point. And then especially when the merger didn't go through, there was a heightened sense of anxiety. And then obviously we had what we had, which was our closure and the purchase of the property by the University of Massachusetts. So, yeah.

Gary (25:58.88)
And let me follow up with a tougher question on that. And you mentioned kind of indirectly that had LaSalle and the item merged, there would have been layoffs. Right? There would have been layoffs. Yeah. And so that's an inevitability. And we read in the newspapers, well, not newspapers, but on our TV, on our screens these days, when there's any kind of merger, when there's any kind of industry consolidation in any industry, let alone higher education, yes, I lose jobs, you lose jobs, others lose jobs.

Laura De Veau (26:08.626)
yeah.

Laura De Veau (26:15.562)
Yeah, there's no local newspapers anymore.

Laura De Veau (26:21.142)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Laura De Veau (26:27.008)
Mm-hmm.

Gary (26:27.092)
that's going to, it's a reality that's gonna happen in higher education. Here's the tough part of the question. Are those layoffs a good thing, Laura? Are they a bad thing?

Laura De Veau (26:39.122)
You can do layoffs in a humane way. And so there's my non-answer. There is going to be a good, you have to not just say, and no one's going to lose their job. That's a lie. That's shenanigans. That's baloney. It's not going to happen that way. You have to know what the cost of doing business is. So in the case of a merger, let's say you have two, because I was in student affairs, so I'm going to have a student affairs answer. OK?

Gary (26:52.97)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (27:08.47)
Disability services and the counseling center, two separate offices, always were overtaxed for students on both of the campuses. So if it actually went through, I was gonna be pounding the door down saying, these people all should be keeping their jobs because we need them, because everybody needs these services. We need these services, okay? Do you need all of this? No. So it's like the cost of doing business.

is not just about, how many people do you have? It's how many students are you serving and what's best practice? And if you have to scale back, you have to scale back. This is where the traditions and how institutions just literally, just they get their fee embedded in the cement and say, but this is the way we've always done it. We need to keep these people around. This is what we have to do. And that is just

bad business. It's bad business on institutions and we should be looking at that when institutions are like, well, we're in a tough spot. We already know that salaries and all of that is the human resource costs are the things that are the highest. Okay. And so you're like, why is this position still around? Well, it's just the way we've always done it. And I'm like, that's not an answer.

Gary (28:06.954)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (28:30.942)
I worked at a university at one point, Gary, where there was a woman who had been working at the university for 25 years and she had worked in a copy room. And the copy room was at that point, everyone had a copier in their office. Everyone had a laser printer in their office. They didn't need to go to the copy room anymore. But the institution in this desire to keep her and a couple of her colleagues still employed.

Gary (28:47.104)
Yeah.

Gary (28:53.429)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (29:00.342)
they changed the rules that you couldn't have a copy machine in your office. So they came around and took all the copy machines away. And we had to then use the copy room. I'm like, this is bananas. This is absolutely bananas. so that's an extreme example of total tunnel vision decision making. But I've seen versions of that.

Gary (29:04.352)
you

Laura De Veau (29:30.036)
of all sorts of sizes at the five institutions I've worked at. And like, are we going to keep doing it this way? yeah, well, we've moved Clarice around to five different offices because no one wants the ID card operation, but we're going to keep doing this. like, but you can outsource this. You don't have to produce the ID cards on your campus. You can actually use your people that your company, the company you're working with and they'll make them.

Yeah, no, but we have to keep Clarice around. Okay, I'm not saying can Clarice, I'm saying find something else for Clarice to do, but why are you doing this yourself? Like we have to stop that.

Gary (30:05.47)
Yeah. Yeah. And we've talked the business aspect of mergers. We've talked the faculty a little bit. And let's wrap this up with the final question, That's the student piece. So let's look ahead to the closures are given. I'm not about to guess at a number, but there will be significant closures. just to the merge, the consolidation, I don't even like mergers, consolidations. Let's talk about the consolidation piece and its impact on students.

Laura De Veau (30:17.483)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (30:29.154)
The consolidations, right.

Gary (30:32.926)
Will this impact their access to academic advisors, to career services, to other students, support resources? You mentioned a minute ago, maybe not. What do you think about if a student is listening to this, what should they look forward to if their college merges?

Laura De Veau (30:32.982)
Mm-hmm.

Laura De Veau (30:38.485)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (30:45.046)
Hmm.

Laura De Veau (30:48.482)
I have always made the recommendation when I have been talking to institutions that are merging or closing and they're doing intentional teach outs with other campuses. So in many of the cases when I've talked to people, it's we've closed and we've arranged teach outs at these two institutions and the students are going out or whatever the case may be. I've always said that there should be a maintaining of a couple of people that should be able to be reached

and provide service to those students. One is someone who has a skill in the registrar's area, because some people make decisions later in the game, like, I've now decided to go X, Y, Z. Can I have some help getting my records there, et cetera? So someone who has that ability to manage student records and that sort of thing. The second person is someone in the student affairs area, someone who could speak to

you know, look, I'm gonna cut through some of the issues with, you don't have to have them employed on the campus, maybe that they're, that's being acquired. Some places that might work, some places it doesn't. But now in the world of remote work, someone could be, you know, located anywhere and say, yep, I know Bobby, I remember that, I can look up his student record, I can tell you little bit about him. And Bobby could call the student,

service person from their closed college and be able to say, hey, Laura, I'm having a really tough time. I'm trying to navigate this and I'm not getting an answer. Like, okay, well, let me help you. And I know that sounds like hand holding, but I think one of the things that I've experienced through the closure of Mount Ida, we had that. We didn't mean to have that, but we had that.

So either people called me directly, I wasn't getting paid for it. The students got to me who needed help and I was able to navigate wherever they were. The registrar was employed on a contract basis by UMass and they were able to help the students with the records. She was basically on contract for about 18 months. And as time went farther and farther from the closure, the less and less

Laura De Veau (33:07.906)
things she had to do, but she was there to help navigate it and she was really good at it. And I think that when you look at the completion rate of the students who were part of our closed institution, we had the highest completion rate. mean, sadly, we had the highest completion rate post our closure than we had years when we were open. And it's because we had people around to help. And I made sure...

Gary (33:26.228)
Hmm. Hmm.

Laura De Veau (33:34.454)
during the closure that I was connecting with all the deans of students and the vice presidents for student affairs at places where a significant number of students were going. Like if one or two kids was going somewhere, I didn't necessarily get involved. But in those cases, I had at least a handful of students who reached out to me and said, hey, you know, I'm doing really well at XYZ place, but I do have a question. Okay, tell me what your question is. Can you help me navigate this? Sure.

And I think that if we can be more humane when it comes to these closures and say, hey, you know what? We're going to put you on contract for a year. Maybe it's not a full-time job, but we'll have you on contract to help with these specific scenarios. I actually think that's going to end up in a better situation for the students than.

even trying to put on some kind of big fall welcome just for the students that came from the closed college, that doesn't resonate with them. My dissertation was about this. And when I talked to the students, they're like, these big events made us feel like everyone's looking at us, like we're like these weirdos that just kind of dropped onto the campus. This wasn't fun. We didn't want that. We just wanted someone to help us. And that's what they wanted.

Gary (34:33.726)
Right.

Gary (34:38.41)
Good point.

Gary (34:54.74)
Yeah.

Interesting. Well, I'm going to have to describe you, Laura, as I've been pondering this, as a fountain, a fountain of information and guidance. Go ahead and put that on your business card if you like. A fountain of information and guidance. It's always fascinating to get your perspective and even help me think through the big picture items that are in this industry. as you and I have talked off camera and off the recording before, we're in

Laura De Veau (35:06.978)
There you go.

Gary (35:21.952)
We're in the middle of a change. We're in the middle of a massive change. And we and I will chat again a few years down the road and we'll look back and say, my gosh, I had no idea that what we talking about then would really, in some form or fashion, become a reality. So Laura, I'm grateful for your time, for your expertise, for your guidance. We should probably talk about doing this again someday. All right. Take care. All right. We'll talk soon. Take care.

Laura De Veau (35:23.51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Laura De Veau (35:30.024)
Yeah.

Laura De Veau (35:39.862)
We should. It's always a pleasure, Gary. I really mean it.