Dr. Zakiya Ellis, Principal Consultant at  EducationCounsel: Why Higher Ed Needs Firefighters and Architects in the Age of AI

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, an ongoing conversation with leaders and innovators offering insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

Today, I’m happy to welcome Dr. Zakiya Smith Ellis to the podcast, who is going to help us sort through some of the many pressures facing higher education in this moment and how it should respond to best serve students going forward.

Few people are better positioned to do this than Dr. Ellis, who has worked at the intersection of higher education policy and practice at many levels — from the White House, having served on the Domestic Policy Council, to state government, including having served as Secretary of Higher Education in New Jersey, as well as having been at the Lumina Foundation. She brings all of that experience to her roles as Board Chair at the Institute for College Access and Success and as Principal Consultant at EducationCounsel.

Thank you very much for joining us today, Dr. Ellis.

Zakiya Ellis

Well, thank you, Van, for having me. This is a pleasure.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Let me switch to Zakiya if you don’t mind.

Zakiya Ellis

Yes, please call me Zakiya.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Wonderful. Let’s start with AI, the topic of the hour, because I know you have been doing a lot of thinking about its impact on the higher education sector. What are you seeing as the most important challenges of AI to this sector?

Zakiya Ellis

Yes, AI is all over. Some of the biggest tech companies had their earnings reports yesterday, and it was interesting. What we saw was a lot of their spending has been on AI, and that’s all over the place. And so I think there’s been a lot of consternation about what does it mean for higher education, for teaching and learning, right? So how students show up, are they using AI to do their work?

But what I think is the more pressing challenge really is what is it doing to the future of work? And so I’m excited to be talking to you today because I think it’s exposing some of the challenges that have frankly been there for a while with higher ed in terms of how closely we think higher ed is linked to our students’ career success, whether the ultimate goal is just getting your credential or is the ultimate goal preparing you for success in work and in life. And if the ultimate goal is preparing you for success in work and in life, and the credential is a way to help you do that, then what does it mean when these entry-level jobs that have been the basis of white collar work — you know, you go out of college, you get this entry-level job, you do some grunt work, and then you get onto the real meaningful work that you do — if that entry-level piece is kind of really abruptly taken apart by AI, how do we think about what higher ed should be doing in having a more integrated curriculum with experiential learning that allows you to get some knowledge base before you actually graduate?

There are a lot of places that are doing that and doing it really well. Especially in some of the health related fields, that’s the norm is you have some experience before you leave, but I think that is becoming a challenge for all of higher ed writ large to grapple with.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Some people describe this challenge as having to start your career at the middle because at the middle is when you have context, you have wisdom, you have knowledge that is more valuable than the tasks themselves that can be easily outsourced into AI. So you talk about students coming out with experience coupled with their academic program. Why is it so hard for colleges or higher education to adjust to providing this work experience?

Zakiya Ellis

You know, I’ve been grappling with this for the past few months. My academic background is in education. I was trained to be a K-12 social studies teacher, a secondary social studies teacher. And it’s interesting because in teacher training, that’s kind of part of the game. You don’t get to become a teacher typically in the traditional model without having  the experience of having a practicum and really going into the classroom while you’re still in school and getting the experience of teaching. You have a mentor teacher and there’s somebody there to help you, but you learn better. You’re able to see like, this is what it means to teach seventh graders, as I was doing in social studies. This is what happens when you think you have a lesson plan, but then one of them cracks a stupid joke in the middle of your lesson plan. And how do you pivot from that, and that’s a critical part of teaching.

And then there’s the content. You know, you think anybody can do it — yeah, seventh grade social studies, that’s no problem — but I was a college student and came up against something that I was like, “I have actually not experienced this before.” It was the concept of a lock in a body of water, when you’re on a boat and you’re trying to get from one elevation to another. As a suburban kid from Atlanta, I never heard of a lock before. It was just not something I was familiar with. And it came up in the text. I realized, wow, that requires me to go back and have some deeper understanding of the content.

So all of that made me better as a future teacher for having the experience in the classroom, and then I could go back into the actual classroom experience of teaching. And then I could go to my classroom experience with my professors and say, this is what happened in class, this is what I experienced.

It’s kind of a flywheel effect where those things make you better. This is the way we teach nurses. This is the way we teach doctors. This is actually when you go to law school and you do your summers at a law firm and then you come back. There are professions that we think of as very highly regarded that really use this model of what I would call apprenticeship, actually.

It’s hard though, because it’s actually not easy to do this well because some parts of academia, I think, see the idea that you are looking for guidance or expertise outside of the discipline as anathema to what they’re doing. I hadn’t realized how prevalent that is until some of these conversations about how do you restore trust in higher education. As I sit in there, the folks that are most resistant to this, I think, are some of the most brilliant scholars, who might say, wow, I would love to have that brilliance in history help us with our current dynamics. I mean, my goodness, isn’t it relevant to think about the history of the United States given the challenges that we face politically now? And are there not ways that you could help students deepen their understanding of things?

I just think it’s not always the tradition of what we think of as the best types of higher education, but when you really peel back and think about how do people learn well, how do adults learn well — not just adults but children too — it’s learning by doing. It’s not something we are unfamiliar with, but it is not a widespread way of doing traditional higher ed and I think that has to change pretty quickly if we want to be successful in the long term.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, I definitely resonate with your example about teacher preparation, right? And if people remember that in creating doctors, they go through their formal medical training and then they do several years of residency. What I didn’t realize until more recently is that those residency wages are actually subsidized by the government in order to make sure that you are fully trained. I wonder if we put your Secretary of Higher Education hat back on…are there incentives that need to be rethought, especially as we shrink the number of entry-level jobs because these alternative technologies exist to get them done?

Zakiya Ellis
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head — the incentive structure is what we’ve got to fix. To your point about medicine, the system wouldn’t work without some kind of government subsidy to make it possible. So if we think that this is still valuable, if we think that it’s still helpful to have some core of underlying education — which I actually think is very much valuable, I don’t want anyone to hear what I’m saying as suggesting that traditional disciplines or philosophy or any of these things are not valuable — I think they’re even more valuable when they’re contextualized.

So I’m hopeful that we can think of ways through policy to incentivize employers to participate in a system like this. Otherwise, what reason do they have in the near term to do this? In the long term, eventually all of the people who have the kind of experience will retire and pass away and you will kind of have a lack of folks that have that judgment, that have had those experiences, and then it’ll be a problem. But we don’t want to wait twenty years to say, oh my goodness, we’re looking around and there’s no one to replace the mid-level managers or what have you.

So I really do hope that we can think of ways to incentivize that employer participation in a system like this because that is what would really need to happen in order for something like this to be a widespread change. If you think about AI and really our public education system — one, AI is benefiting from our collective knowledge and wisdom, and two, I’m going to focus on public, although private colleges exist and are a part of our ecosystem — but our public education system is not just benefiting individuals, it benefits all of us collectively. It benefits all of us collectively to have doctors that are well trained. I think it benefits all of us collectively to have teachers that are well trained. I think it benefits all of us collectively to have journalists and people that participate in society that have some good underpinning of knowledge that’s helping them. And so when we think about it that way, we can think more about what it would look like to have a public system help subsidize some of these roles.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Before we leave the topic of AI, I wonder, as you’ve been thinking about AI, do you have any guidance or suggestions for the higher education leaders that may be listening in?

Zakiya Ellis

Ooh, you know, I’ve been reading more and more on AI — probably reading things that are written by AI about AI — but one of the most useful ways to think about this for leaders is, I think, to make sure that they are experiencing it. One of the realizations that I’ve had is that the more you exist at the top of a leadership pyramid or something in an organization, the less you may need to do some of the work that AI is well poised to do and is helping people do. Your staff may be using AI, but you may have reached a point where you’re so reliant on staff to do all the things that you’re not actually interacting with the technology.

So as much as possible, actually try to see how it works, whether it’s in your personal life or in your professional life, so that you’re not talking about this theoretically, so that you’re not thinking about what is the change that my students are facing in a theoretical sense, but that you have some understanding personally for what it could mean and what it could look like.

I’ve been increasingly impressed with what AI can do, especially given where it started a couple of years ago. And obviously we’re talking about the mass-produced generative AI, not the AI that has existed for many decades now, but the mass-produced generative AI that has been available to consumers as of late. Even when I say, I’m going to give you some context — I’m going to say, I would like you to make parallels between this and this, give it some guidance — that guidance is coming from someone, you know, that I have some underlying baseline expertise to say, I don’t actually feel like doing this outline for whatever, whatever. Can you do an outline that makes these three points? And I’m going to talk to you as I’m driving and then when I get to wherever I’m going, I look and I say, man, this is like ninety-five percent of the way there. Anyway, having that experience as a leader, I think, will help you consider what does it mean for your students.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I had a really interesting conversation last night with the dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the MBA program and she said, sort of the initial wave was all the consternation about, is it taking the jobs? What’s happening in the labor market? What skill sets should we have? And then now the student body has really just begun playing and now they’re getting to the creative part. Oh, I can do this, I can do this, and thinking about business concepts. And you’re right, we ourselves have to play with the tools to demystify and then also demystify for the students themselves.

So in addition to the pressures of AI and changing technologies, Zakiya, what are the other policy pressures on higher education leaders right now at the state and the federal levels?

Zakiya Ellis

There are so many, right? I think just today, the Department of Education released a new round of regulations about student financing. If AI hadn’t been happening, I probably would have been talking more about this and writing more about student affordability and how people pay for college, because that’s what I spent most of my career working on, post-secondary finance and it’s still very important. Obviously when you talk about Americans today, they’re really focused on affordability issues and how they’re going to get through with any number of affordability challenges, and higher education is looped in with that.

So I would say the fact that we are experiencing —  and I don’t know if people realize this — but it’s the largest change to the structure of our federal student aid programs since their inception. Again, if all the other things weren’t happening in the world, this would be front page news almost every day and we will see massive impacts. We will see massive restructurings. We will probably see a reemergence of a private student loan market that hasn’t really existed in earnest in at least ten years, maybe longer, just because after the Great Recession and the restructuring of our finance industry, private student lending became less profitable. And now that pendulum may swing back.

We will see folks not be able to have students borrow in unlimited amounts, and that is true for parents borrowing on behalf of their students and that is true for graduate students who have had their borrowing skyrocket. Not all of these things are bad things. I think it’s good in general for people to have less debt. But the intersections of what that means then for access to all of these different types of programs that have been bolstered by a really robust student loan program is yet to be seen. So that’s one pressure, the financial pressure, that I don’t know everybody realizes yet.

Then there’s increasing politicization of higher education. What can be taught? What can you say? What programs can you have? Some of these are driven by concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion and how they are carried out on campuses. But that piece, which had been so fundamental to almost every college’s mission — talking about expanding opportunity in some way, the importance of diversity to their community, the importance of inclusion — I think many places are having to rethink how they do those things. And even if you think it’s appropriate to rethink the how, that is a disruption because a lot of people don’t have great guidance on what that looks like and how to stay true to their mission and their values in doing that.

So there’s just a lot of other swirling pieces from the financing to the politicization that I know are pressures on college and university leaders right now.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

None of those buckets are small, so thank you for updating us on what’s going on. Having been a policymaker and sitting in those chairs yourself, you talk about a need for both firefighters and architects when it comes to policy work. I wonder if you could just explain that analogy, especially for listeners who haven’t been in seats where they’re driving policy.

Zakiya Ellis

Yeah. So this actually came from me trying to make sense of everything that you just mentioned — all of these changes that are happening. There are changes that need to happen, and then there are pressures that seem like they’re coming down from wherever in higher education. I have used the analogy of a house on fire, and that higher ed, your house is on fire. So it may feel like, oh my goodness, we’ve got to get a firefighter to put out the fire, and you do, because if you want the house to exist, you need to put the fire out. But you also need to remember that the house wasn’t perfect before the fire. It needed renovations before the fire.

So even if you’re able to get firefighters and put the fire out, you also need to have architects to think about what the new house should look like, because the new house doesn’t need to look exactly like what the old house looked like, because the old house wasn’t serving us as well.

To push that analogy further, we weren’t serving all of our students well. We weren’t reaching all of the students that need to be reached. The systems and structures often hadn’t been updated for where we are technologically or where we are with workforce needs. So all of those things were pieces of architecture that still needed to be worked out, even as we think about — yes, the best way to renovate your house is generally not to set it on fire. So let’s put out the fire and then let’s think about what needs to come next too.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, in the vein of being an architect, you’ve developed a student bill of rights and a set of student-centered principles. As we think about reforming higher education — which is where we met, it was the Lumina Foundation, and the Ditchley Foundation had a roundtable on the topic of reforming higher education — for the  workforce leaders and employers in the audience of this podcast, what will shift if we actually center the learner in how we design the system that is to come or should be coming?

Zakiya Ellis

Yes, yes, I appreciate you bringing that up. It was a great conversation. I think more of these need to happen where we’re talking with folks across different sectors and maybe even not just from the U.S. experience of higher education, because there’s a lot to learn from other people across the world and how they’ve changed their post-secondary structures to better meet the needs of students.

What would shift if we actually focused on the learner? First, I think the way that people enter post-secondary education…it’s a good thing that we have a variety and a diversity of institutional types in the U.S. but almost all of those require people to take some proactive step to get to post-secondary. So even if you’re a community college that is basically open access, usually people have to do something. They have to know that they want to go, they have to fill out an application, they have to prepare in some type of way, and then all the way to the most highly selective institutions that have this inordinate amount of stuff that is required, and then things that are somewhere in the middle.

It’s changed over time rapidly. I think your state public regional college that is not entirely open access but may let in the majority of students, still requires a whole application process and people really stress out about it.  I think if we really wanted to have learners first and we really thought it was useful and necessary for people to have some type of post-secondary experience — not everyone obviously is interested in having that super selective, super competitive experience and not everybody needs that — but if we think that for most people some type of post-secondary experience is helpful, whether it’s trades or anything, then making that a seamless process is important.

I have a five-year-old, and when she goes to school, there is a process, but it is not lengthy. It’s like, I know where my local school is, I go in, I sign her up, even if I wanted to go in the day school started. They wouldn’t like me to do that, but they’re not going to say she can’t come. They would have a process because we believe that it’s beneficial to have a system of public education. I think that seems so foreign to folks because of the U.S. system and all of these intricacies, but it would start there.

It would really center that experiential learning that we talked about, the integration with workforce, as the norm and not having that be like a special thing that you do or an internship that you have to find on your own. It would be integrated into every program. Your faculty would have as part of your program of study, here are some ways that our coursework integrates with things outside of the classroom and those experiences would just be a normal part of how you do your college experience. So those are just a couple of things.

It would be much more affordable, to the point of free. I feel like free has been politicized, but the idea that you don’t have to pay something for a public system that provides a public good — I don’t think is actually that controversial. At the very least, it should be something that is highly transparent in what that price will be and not confusing, as it is now for many students to kind of go through that. So those are some ways, and some of those ideas are in that student bill of rights.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I was wondering, are there some exemplars from other countries that perhaps demonstrate the art of the possible?

Zakiya Ellis

I love that — the art of the possible. Yes. When I think about the repayment system or the financing system, Australia for a long time has been the exemplar in how people think about that. They also did a really great job of thinking about learning outcomes. Now, I remember when I worked at Lumina, we had a relationship with the Australian government where we were learning from them in an active way and we talked to the Minister of Education — and you know, we don’t have a Ministry of Education here and there are good reasons for that — but when I said, how did you get all of these colleges to agree to a standard set of outcome measures in learning, they started with, well, we had a big meeting with everyone.

And it’s like, no, this is one of the challenges of having a country as large as we are and as diverse as we are. And when you realize just the scope and scale — okay, they have forty public colleges more or less, and that’s like the number of colleges that may be in a smaller state in the United States of America, not the 4,000 colleges and universities that we have.

So there are some challenges in size and scale whenever we try to look at innovations, but it does mean that it’s possible.

Sweden was another example of their work-integrated learning models and how they work with employers. Germany has a long history of apprenticeships and work-based learning. So there are certainly places that we can learn from. Again, some of these countries have different structures, much more active labor unions that are kind of actively participating in connecting work and learning. But it does mean that there’s a possibility, and I am, if anything, a believer in American exceptionalism and that we can find a way that works for us, learning from the best of what has happened in other places.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

So Zakiya, you have a Substack called A Girl Is No One. What can people find there and what’s the conversation you’re hoping to spark there?

Zakiya Ellis

Yeah, so thanks for sharing that. If anyone is familiar with the series Game of Thrones, this is an epic line from Game of Thrones where a key character says, you know, a girl is no one. And so the idea is to decenter myself. Like, I have high self-esteem, I think I know things, but it’s not necessarily about me, it’s about the ideas and what we’re trying to promote in terms of a conversation.

And that conversation is one that is looking toward the future and thinking about what is the future we hope to have, what do we know about what could be possible, and how can we invite people in to share their thoughts about where we should be going from here? So they can find thoughts on AI, the future of work and higher education. They can find thoughts on some of these equity conversations and even accreditation and how it could be changed or reformed — a little bit of all of those pieces that touch higher ed in some way.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, let’s wrap up today by giving you the opportunity to share with us what makes you optimistic about the future of learning.

Zakiya Ellis

Well, what makes me optimistic — that’s a great question. I am an optimist at heart. I mentioned I have a toddler and a five-year-old. So one is seventeen months, the other is five years old and when I see how they interact with the world and the curiosity that they have about things, I am optimistic about the future of human flourishing. A lot of times we talk about AI and whether humans are going to design the future. I am optimistic that the creativity and curiosity of the human spirit can see us through anything if we believe in that and nurture that and so that is what makes me optimistic about the future.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I really like that — optimistic about human flourishing. Thank you very much, Zakiya, for joining us today.

Zakiya Ellis

Thank you, Van, for having me.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.