
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Most universities, Shawn Banzhaf says, would be happy if 5% of their students were military-connected. At Arizona State University he puts the figure at about 13%, roughly 22,000 military-connected students. In his experience, serving them well takes more than processing GI Bill benefits: it takes understanding a different culture, making expectations explicit and building community from the first day.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Shawn Banzhaf, Executive Director of the Pat Tillman Veterans Center at Arizona State University. The conversation covers military culture training for faculty and staff, trauma-informed care, the hidden curriculum and the difference between being military friendly and military supportive.
Banzhaf served 21 years in the Army National Guard, including a deployment to Iraq, before leading the Tillman Center. He walks through the programs ASU uses with its military-connected students, from a wilderness program whose participants, he says, stay through to the end of their degree about 90% of the time to a one-hour training that has reached thousands of faculty and staff.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, provosts, boards, enrollment leaders and student affairs teams that serve veterans, service members and military families.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/veteran-student-success/
#StudentVeterans #StudentSuccess #HigherEducation #ChangingHigherEdPodcast
At UC Santa Barbara, Kavitta Ghai recalls, students waited two days, on average, to get a question answered. For a student whose scholarship was just pulled or whose tuition is due tomorrow, that is too long, and at community colleges, she notes, most classrooms have no teaching assistant at all. She argues AI can now offer the round-the-clock support students have never had, if it is built and governed the right way.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Kavitta Ghai, CEO and Co-Founder of Nectir. The conversation covers why faculty-led adoption works, how to guardrail AI at the course level, and how to measure whether AI improves student outcomes.
Ghai co-founded her company as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara and has worked with colleges and universities from Stanford's Graduate School of Business to the California Community Colleges. She explains why AI should draw on a course's own materials rather than the open internet, why student conversations with AI should stay private, and why an outright ban leaves students behind.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, provosts, boards, CIOs and faculty leaders deciding how AI should support students and who should control it.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/ai-for-student-success/
#AIinHigherEducation #StudentSuccess #HigherEducation #ChangingHigherEdPodcast
Most AI risk at a university does not start with a hacker. It starts with a student, a faculty member, or a researcher copying something out of the learning management system and pasting it into a personal AI account, where every safeguard written into the institution's enterprise licenses no longer applies.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dean Scontras, Vice President of SLED (State, Local Government, and Education) at Island. The conversation covers the three AI issues facing presidents: academic integrity, compliance around sensitive data, and responsible AI use aligned with institutional guidelines and mission.
Scontras has spent his career bringing new security and identity technology into state government and higher education, with prior public sector leadership roles at Duo, Auth0, and Wiz. He explains why the visibility an institution needs is about safety rather than policing, why AI has become a board-level decision with more stakeholders than the CISO alone, and why a policy without the tools to enforce it cannot be enforced.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, CIOs, and research leaders deciding how much AI to allow, where to allow it, and how to enforce the line they draw.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/ai-governance-in-higher-education/
#AIinHigherEducation #HigherEducation #ChangingHigherEdPodcast
Texas A&M holds a green light rating for its speech policies and still fell from 47th to 192nd in this year's College Free Speech Rankings. Harvard climbed from 245th to 71st without changing a single policy, a sign that how leadership responds to speech controversies matters more than what is written in the handbook.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Sean Stevens, Chief Research Advisor at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The conversation covers the seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings and why institutions with strong written policies can still see their free speech climate collapse.
Stevens, a social psychologist specializing in political psychology and survey methodology, directs the rankings, which this year surveyed students at 261 institutions across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. He explains how the rankings score student self-censorship, comfort expressing ideas, political tolerance, and trust in administration, and how deplatforming attempts and punishments of faculty and students can weigh on a school's score for up to five years.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating how their institution will respond to the next campus speech controversy or external pressure to censor.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/college-free-speech-rankings-leadership/
#FreeSpeech #AcademicFreedom #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast
Student loan default and repayment rates have continued to be calculated through years of dormant collections, and some institutions could soon face single-year default rates high enough to threaten their Title IV eligibility. That risk is arriving alongside final OB3 rules, sweeping accreditation proposals from the AIM negotiated rulemaking, and midterm elections that will reshape every committee governing higher education.
In this Washington Update episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Tom Netting, President of TEN Government Strategies. The conversation covers the federal regulatory and political changes that put institutional Title IV eligibility at risk and how the 2026 midterms could change them.
Netting has advocated before Congress, federal agencies, and state governments for more than 35 years on behalf of private institutions of higher education. He walks through the final OB3 rules on earnings accountability and graduate and professional loan limits, the AIM Neg Reg proposals on transfer of credit and accreditor independence, the diffusion of the Department of Education across other agencies, and the committee-by-committee stakes of the midterm elections.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating their institution's exposure to default rate penalties, accreditation changes, and the next round of negotiated rulemaking.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/washington-update-title-iv-risk-midterms-neg-reg/
#HigherEducationPolicy #NegReg #ChangingHigherEdPodcast
Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. W. Brooke Elliott, Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it cost on the staffing, funding, and governance side to make it hold.
Elliott is starting her third year as dean in her twenty-fourth year at Gies, where the land-grant mission is expressed through a purpose statement committing the college to expanding access to business education. Her operational focus is on what accessibility means after enrollment: whether the live client projects, consulting engagements, and immersions inside a degree are reachable by a large share of learners rather than a selected few.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and deans evaluating whether to scale experiential learning beyond pilot programs and selective cohorts.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript:
Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/scale-experiential-learning-to-every-student/
#ExperientialLearning #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast
Workforce readiness is usually framed as a funding and program-design problem. In some states and at some institutions, the funding and the employer willingness already exist, and what is missing is a structure on the institution's side that can take the offer and act on it.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Brad Griffith, president of Buckeye Innovation, a central Ohio technology firm building custom software for nonprofits, local governments, and growing organizations. The conversation covers where the public-private partnership between employers and institutions breaks down, and what leaders can change on their own side of it.
Griffith serves on a curriculum advisory committee at Central Ohio Technical College, hires apprentices through Columbus State Community College's IT Flexible Apprenticeship program, and ran six state-reimbursed interns this past summer. He guest lectures in a justice tech program at Ohio State and has helped commercialize university-developed technology, including a job-matching tool that came out of the OSU Wexner Medical Center.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, deans, and career services leaders evaluating whether their institution can absorb employer, donor, and state investment in experiential learning at the speed those partners operate.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/employer-engagement-in-higher-education/
#WorkforceReadiness #HigherEducation #PublicPrivatePartnership #ChangingHigherEdPodcast
Private colleges under enrollment pressure get told to diversify revenue. The venture that follows usually either fails to earn or drags the institution away from the academic identity families were paying for.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Brooke Barnett, President of Rollins College. The conversation covers how a tuition-dependent private structures a diversified budget model without compromising the curriculum that gives its degree value.
Barnett walks through the Innovation Triangle, a three-part portfolio Rollins spent more than a decade and $200 million building. The parts run on deliberately different economics: a boutique inn whose net proceeds fund student scholarships, an art museum relocating into the Winter Park community that charges no admission and is designed to draw no institutional funds, and the Rick Goings Institute, a cross-sector executive education venture built around AI readiness informed by the liberal arts.
She separates declining willingness to pay among full-pay families from rising ability-to-pay pressure driven by demographic shift, and explains why the instruments that address them are not interchangeable. She also details how Rollins applies its own pedagogical method to institutional AI decisions, refusing technophilia and technophobia as the same kind of failure.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating whether to launch non-tuition revenue ventures and how to structure them so they reinforce rather than dilute institutional identity.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/tuition-dependent-college-non-tuition-revenue-academic-mission/
#HigherEducation #HigherEdLeadership #ChangingHigherEdPodcast
Institutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers doing the damage are recent design decisions, not fixed features of higher education, and several of them cost almost nothing to remove.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Evan Kropp, executive director of distance education at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. The conversation covers what has to change structurally when adult learners stop being an enrollment contingency and become a population the institution designs for.
Kropp oversees UF CJC Online and its Master of Arts in Mass Communication, a 36-credit online degree enrolling roughly 650 students. His operational focus areas include course design standardization, cost transparency, transfer and prior learning credit, and the translation of academic learning outcomes into professional language students can use.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating whether to build degree completion and adult learner pathways at their institutions.
Topics CoveredRead the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/redesign-an-institution-for-adult-learners/
#HigherEducation #AdultLearners #DegreeCompletion
Most institutions in a crisis don't believe they're in one. The word calls up a scandal with a camera crew outside, and nothing on this week's agenda looks like that, so the answer is often no.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Evan Nierman, founder and CEO of Red Banyan, a strategic communications firm built around high-stakes rapid response. The conversation covers why a crisis is any circumstance with the potential to negatively impact reputation and/or revenue, and what that definition changes for colleges and universities.
Nierman explains why the old instinct to stay quiet and avoid giving oxygen to a fire now cedes the battleground to whoever is willing to characterize your institution, how most colleges can pinpoint their likeliest crises well before one arrives, and why the day-to-day spokesperson should usually be a trained communications professional rather than the president.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and communications leaders deciding whether to respond publicly, and when.
Topics CoveredRead the full episode summary and transcript: https://changinghighered.com/higher-ed-crisis-communications/
#CrisisCommunications #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast
From the publisher's feed

31,916 Listeners

38,694 Listeners

25,750 Listeners

371 Listeners

9,640 Listeners

10,132 Listeners

56,387 Listeners

141 Listeners

60 Listeners

57,597 Listeners

15,957 Listeners

502 Listeners

3,572 Listeners

91 Listeners

54 Listeners