Episode 62: Sukhwant Jhaj on How Design Creates Hope and Inspires Change
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How can design inspire change? What are the tools and techiques of design that college and university leaders can use to increase student success? How can this help instiutions shift from an access mindset to a success mindset? We dive into these questions with Sukhwant Jhaj, VP of Academic Innovation and Dean, University, at Arizona State University
Higher education is currently at a critical crossroads. While access to college has increased over the decades, the results remain uneven. We are seeing massive equity gaps where students from the top income quartile graduate at significantly higher rates than those from the bottom. If the promise of democracy is to serve all citizens equitably, our current educational system is falling short of that goal.
Sukhwant Jhaj, the Vice Provost for Academic Innovation and Dean of University College at Arizona State University, believes the solution lies in design. As an architect by training, Jhaj views the university not as a static institution, but as a malleable system that can be redesigned to better serve today’s and tomorrow's students.
Beyond Graduation: Redefining Student Success
For a long time, the student success movement was focused solely on access. Then, the conversation shifted to retention and graduation rates. While these metrics are important, Jhaj argues that we need a more holistic definition. Student success isn't just about getting a degree; it’s about what happens after.
Are students thriving in their careers? Are they prepared for a world where AI and automation are rapidly changing the nature of work? True success involves post-graduation outcomes, including wealth generation and long-term health. To achieve this, institutions must stop looking for "college-ready students" and instead focus on becoming "student-ready colleges."
The Power of Design Thinking in Higher Ed
Why design? Unlike purely analytical disciplines, design is centered on synthesis and empathy. It allows leaders to reframe "wicked problems"—problems that change as you try to solve them. By applying design practices, institutions can:
Frame the Right Problems: Instead of just repeating past actions, design helps leaders visualize a future state and find novel ways to segment complex challenges.
Co-Design with Students: Engaging students and employees in the problem-solving process ensures that solutions are actually suited to their needs.
Bridge the Gap Between Work and Learning: Design allows us to integrate real-world work experiences directly into the curriculum, making education more relevant and pragmatic.
Integrating Work and Learning
A majority of college students work while they are in school, yet we often treat work and learning as two separate lives. Jhaj suggests a fundamental shift: giving students "credit for learning through work."
By co-designing internships, practicums, and real-world projects, colleges can help students transform their "jobs" into meaningful learning experiences. This not only builds a student's portfolio but also prepares them for a lifetime of retraining and adaptation in an evolving workforce.
Hope as a Design Strategy
At its core, design is an act of hope. To design something is to believe that the future can be better than the present. In the face of institutional inertia and systemic challenges, this hopeful mindset is essential for change management. When you involve a community in visualizing a better future, you create the excitement and buy-in necessary to move from vision to implementation.
Episode 62 Transcript
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Sukhwant Jhaj: I take from design practice this notion of hope being a central theme of design. So when you're designing, you're imagining a future state. You believe in it. You are committed to it. Designing as an act of faith when you can make things better, maybe just a little bit better for tomorrow.
Elliot Felix: That was Sukhwant Jhaj, the Dean of University College and the AVP for academic innovation at ASU where we've had the pleasure of working together on a number of space and strategy projects and in his former role at PSU student success as well. And he, in my mind, is really the national leader on the role of design and student success, redesigning processes, applying design thinking to career development. We had a great conversation about all that and more, but I think you're really going to enjoy. Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework, and their careers. Welcome, I'm so excited to talk to you today about the role that design can play in student success. And I think a great place to start would be to hear from you about how you got started. So tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in design and student success.
Sukhwant Jhaj: Excellent. Elliot, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me to this podcast. I am a designer by training. I'm a faculty member in the design school at Arizona State University. In addition to that, I serve as vice provost for academic innovation and Dean of University College, but more importantly, I'm a designer who thinks about what is next in higher education and how one might be able to use design practices to design an educational experience, to design a next generation of education system that will serve today's and tomorrow's students much better. Because there's significant room for improvement in how we have been delivering learning. I believe design can play a fundamental role in transformation of higher education. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Elliot Felix: Me too. I can't wait to unpack that. We can just pull on those threads right there. What do you think are the opportunities for improvement or what do you see as the challenges?
Sukhwant Jhaj: Before we dive into the opportunities, let's just see where we are at this moment. If you look at the America's education system, let's see what kind of result it delivers and what we see when we look at the data is significant equity gaps in terms of who the system is serving.
Elliot Felix: Not only who it's serving, but how well it's serving them.
Sukhwant Jhaj: That's right. Both of those things. For example, if you look at income quartiles, students who come from the top income quartile are graduating at a significantly higher rate. 66 percent by the latest measure from the Bell Institute. Students from the bottom income quartile, the number is 16 percent of them achieving bachelor's degrees by age 24. This discrepancy and the output of the system is unacceptable. And when we look at what happens once you get this degree, what is the impact on lives of people? Yes, we see salary premiums. But when it comes to wealth generation, significant gaps exist and who is gaining the advantage as a result of these experiences. So again, looking at institutional performance, looking at systemic performance, I would say there is significant space for changing the outcome for our students. And if we are to in some ways accomplish the promise of democracy, then we must serve all citizens equitably. And that's just simply not the case at this stage. So as we get into this thinking about what's next and how we might transform it as designers, we have a unique role to play in this in defining the problem better and thinking about novel ways in which we can engage the employees and the students themselves and problem posing and idea generation and coming up with solutions that are better suited for today's students.
Elliot Felix: I love that. The promise of democracy means serving all students and serving them well, having better outcomes, not just in terms of graduation, but in terms of life and career. And you know, not just having the wage premium, but the wealth premium, the new measure you're referencing, where it's not just a measure of what you get out of it, but what you had to put in in order to get that outcome. If we're talking about graduation rate, and we're talking about wealth, and I've also seen other studies about health as another benefit, college grads have significant health benefits as well. Is that how to define student success? Is it graduation? Is it wealth, career, health? How do you define student success?
Sukhwant Jhaj: If you just look at the trajectory within the student success movement, for a long time, it was access. Who's going to college? A lot of energy was spent on it. And from there, we sort of shifted to who's not graduating? But it was still very much a focus on the students. Then there is a flip happening slowly to institutions taking responsibility for the success of all the students. How do you transform your institution? Not who's not successful in your institution. That's a very significant shift in perspective and taking responsibility. Right.
Elliot Felix: Be a student-ready college, not bemoaning the lack of college-ready students.
Sukhwant Jhaj: That's right. That's a very significant mental shift that is taking place. And then institutions transforming themselves and serving students, but still the focus largely is in terms of retention and graduation rates. I think the emerging conversation is around post-graduation success. So I would say all of these dimensions matter, but I would most certainly add what happens to students once they leave their institutions. Are they thriving? How well and poorly are they doing? I believe we have as educational institutions a role to play in that space. And I would say for two reasons. One, responsibility to our students. Secondly, our learning systems might change for the way in which work is changing. Right. So if you look at, there's this sort of arc on how work itself is getting transformed with the introduction of new technologies, our students today will be our learners tomorrow because it truly is going to be a lifelong system. Right. So you graduate, your work transforms itself, AI, automation, analytics, rapid prototyping, rapid manufacturing, intelligent management. That's all of that sort of the emerging technologies in that space. The way in which the institutions have to engage with their students is different as learners, or they're not earning credentials, but you're helping them stay competitive for whatever is coming their way in the future. And that's a very distinct and different kind of relationship that we must maintain. It goes past just your next graduate degree and so on and so forth. Because if you look at the evidence that is emerging, a majority of American workers would need to be retrained. A majority of training is less than one year. And most of our credentials that we offer are a year in length or more. So, in this emerging space, the kind of learning that needs to take place and the learning systems that must evolve are somewhat different. But again, this is just looking ahead and seeing what might come our way.
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Elliot Felix: So, step one is be accessible. Step two is take responsibility for supporting your students and enabling their success and then step 3 is transforming yourself to fulfill that responsibility and looking kind of over the horizon beyond graduation to career success and doing it through the lens of not a one-time credential, but preparation for lifelong competitiveness. I think that's really interesting. I mean, you've mentioned employers now and work a couple times in this conversation. Fundamentally, is that the role that a college or university should play? Are we the connectors between students and the workforce?
Sukhwant Jhaj: I think that certainly is one of the roles that we must take on. And for a variety of reasons, let's look at the student experience. Let's bring it down to that. If you look at the data, a majority of students work while they're in college and that work has an impact on their learning experience. So just thinking about how you design learning experiences where work experiences are integrated into it, I think is a very real and very pragmatic thing that educational institutions have to focus on. We were both trained as architects and in our experience, that was a core part of the learning experience—problems coming from the employers or from the community, site-specific work feedback, the creation of a portfolio where there's real evidence of your work. These are practices that have a place in other disciplines as well because they allow students to transform that work experience, which they're having as students as merely something that they're doing to pay for college, to a learning experience. That shift. Work is distinct from learning. Increasingly I see, and there's a number of projects that we are working on where these things are getting integrated, I see that as an important part of the kind of thinking that we need more of.
Elliot Felix: What's interesting is it's not just that today's students are tomorrow's workforce. What you're saying is today's students are also today's workforce because most students are working. And that work can be part of the learning experience. My book has 127 tips on making the most of college and finding that ROI. I constantly get asked if there's one tip to give students, what would it be? And I always say work on real-world projects in your classes. Because then you can not only find purpose and meaning in your work because you're seeing how your classes connect to a career to a community and you're learning skills, but you're also meeting people. The social media strategy in your marketing class doesn't have to be for a fictitious company. It could be for a nonprofit in the community. Then you're interviewing people, you're meeting real people, you're building a portfolio. Maybe they need an intern this summer.
Sukhwant Jhaj: It's a great learning experience, right? It allows you to connect two different distinct parts of your life. A skill that you better start practicing if you want to live a thriving life. But then if you look at the system itself, if you look at our systemic graduation rates, we know that a large number of students, a little bit less than half, do not graduate in six years from the institutions where they start. The overall number might be a little bit more, including transfer students, of not graduating might be a little bit less, but we have a significant population of Americans who have started their college education but did not finish it. What do we see? We see that a large percentage of students, somewhere between 40 to 50 percent, do not graduate from the college they started. Nationally, that number is about 34 million returning adult students. A vast number of them want to go back to college. So here are adults who have significant work experience already. This question of how do you integrate work and learning would remain. So they're coming back to college and they're bringing these experiences from their lives through which they have learned. And how do we help integrate?
Elliot Felix: Yeah. I mean, real-world projects, learning as you're working, working as you're learning. But also just credit for your work, I think, is another quite tangible, practical way to bring these two worlds together and to value it.
Sukhwant Jhaj: Slight difference there in our opinion. I would say not credit for your work, but credit for your learning through work. Right, so you have to still demonstrate that you've actually learned something. Just working by itself is not enough. There are mechanisms we can find like portfolio reviews and tests and other kinds of things where people can demonstrate that they have learned. That's a very uniquely ASU position, I would say.
Elliot Felix: I appreciate you putting a finer point on it. So credit for your learning while working.
Sukhwant Jhaj: Yeah. Or like co-designing these experiences. You have internships, you have practicums, other ways. Our teachers program here at ASU have designed this really integrated program where students are actually working in schools and these things are integrated. They're receiving credit. So there are ways of doing it and ways of doing it rather well.
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Elliot Felix: And we have challenges in terms of equity. Not just access, but success and not just success in college, but beyond it. Why design? What can design do that other disciplines or approaches to student success can't?
Sukhwant Jhaj: Yeah, you know, it's a great question. So let me try to answer that. You can think together on this number of things. Core to at least my studio experience was learning how to frame a good problem. Simply going through actions that you have engaged in in the years past is not going to give you a result that is any different than what you have been accomplishing before systemically. And we have made very little progress in some of these spaces. So I think this reframing and revisualizing and finding novel ways to segment this bigger problem of how do you improve access and how do you improve success of students and how do you design the services and experiences—all of those things—the kinds of core design practices can play, in my mind, a fundamental role in how we think about the problem and how we design the process of getting to an answer to those problems from the design discipline perspective. That's the second thing. This notion of co-designing—designing with the people whose lives they're going to have an impact on, be it employees or students, engaging them in problem posing, in idea generation and prioritization in terms of social design. Those are emerging practices. Not that that happens in all places, but I think we have incredible capacity in that area. This process of facilitation, right? So you've reframed the problem, come up with some solution, but then you have to take a community on a journey from point A to point B to transform that particular practice, unit, organization, whatever scale the problem is. I think design can play an incredible role in this way, making the design process of coming up with that solution also their change management process. So, you take people who are involved, whose lives are going to be affected, bring them into designing of a solution, and then the design process is laid out that you're taking them from point A, where they are, to point B. And here, in particular, I would say the act of drawing—about drawing out conceptually, metaphorically from the community, but really visualizing, seeing things, the practices like illustrating a design solution, things like gallery walks, things like classic brainstorming techniques where we can see what others in a community are thinking, what is the family of ideas that is out there, how one might cluster them. All of these are very visual practices that are core to design. And I think they can be deployed in very novel ways to get past disagreement, to select a wide area of alternatives, not just one solution, to democratize some of these processes. I think all of this has a particular role. Then I would go back to my training as an architect, but I think in general it's true for design as well. We're constantly looking at the idea and this notion of material imagination. How do you imagine an idea through the materials through which it will be constructed and made? That kind of practical aspect of getting things done, right? So it's not just the idea, you brought the community together, but you're also thinking about how you'll implement. It's said that a building is designed multiple times. It's designed on a piece of paper, designed in the specifications of the document, and the construction document is designed again through scaffolding, and then it is built. The same is true for these processes. And I think there's much for us to learn and put into play as we do that. And this sort of professional project management at the end, right? Actually getting the work done.
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Elliot Felix: I love all the things you mentioned about framing the problem, reframing the problem, co-designing techniques to visualize solutions. I love the idea that the design process is the change management process because there's really no shortage of good ideas, right? It's like coming up with those ideas in such a way that they actually happen and that a change actually occurs. The value of doing that in the right way, with the right people, can't be underestimated because at the end of the day, vision alone can't change the world. Implementation does.
Sukhwant Jhaj: Doing this intentionally, so that's the piece. It's not accidental. The transformation process doesn't begin after you have a design solution. Then you go, "Oh, now we must bring the community along." No, no, no. That's not how it works if you want to be successful. A few people sitting in a small room coming with an idea then say, "Oh, how do we now win support?" That's really not how we ought to be working.
Elliot Felix: I think a couple of people in the back room with wood paneling and cigars... I think that's how you get buy-in, right? You want the fewest number of people providing input. That way the ideas are totally untested and not accepted and quite risky. I think this is a great recipe. I feel like higher education is a wicked problem in that it's a problem that changes as you work on it. And there's no amount of information that you can gather that gives you a perfect solution. And so I think that the mindset, the skillset, the toolset of design helps you understand people and where other disciplines are so focused on the analysis. I think design's strong suit is synthesis—putting things together, making connections, and finding a way for 1 plus 1 to equal 11. You are designing a learn-work program where students are learning skills, building a network, getting a project in their portfolio, making an impact in their community, whereas if you were thinking about it purely analytically, those things might all just happen separately.
Sukhwant Jhaj: Absolutely. I'll add one more thing. These problems have made very little progress on, and it's very difficult for those of us who have committed their lives to working on issues of student success and also have seen setbacks and challenges as we do the work. But I take from design practice this notion of hope being a central theme of design. So when you're designing, you're imagining a future state. You believe in it. You are committed to it. I think designing as an act of faith in some way, designing as an act of hope, to me, addition of that to this mix of student success is essential. It's very easy to give up. The work is difficult work to change, let's say, an advising system, or change the student support system, or imagine it as a holistic system and not something siloed. But this sort of integration of hope, of thinking of the act of designing as a hopeful act. At least I carry that in my heart as I get engaged working on challenges and problems because then you get to contribute and imagine this world as something that is malleable, that you can change through your actions. When you can make things better, maybe just a little bit better for tomorrow.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. I think that's part of the change management point you're making because that's part of how people get excited and committed and envision and implement and follow through. And I also think from a practical standpoint, one of the things I've certainly learned is like, most of these projects or initiatives or programs or spaces need funding. I think people—while hope isn't a strategy per se is the soundbite—I do think people back vision. They support vision and hope and imagination a lot more readily than they support needs. And I think if transformation is the goal, you have to set the bar high and you have to inspire people to get over it. And I think design can play that role.
Sukhwant Jhaj: It can help you visualize a better future today. I think that's quite inspiring. Now, conceptually, I agree with the idea that hope is not a strategy and that's not what I'm saying. I think the point I'm trying to make is, when you begin to believe that the world is malleable, that the university is a malleable thing, that the processes and experiences are malleable things that can be changed and designed, when you act and you propose these things, that action, that act of designing is an act of hope. And when you do that, you're absolutely right. You create a very different kind of excitement towards the work. People have been engaged. They've been going on this journey and you brought them along.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. You mentioned framing and reframing. And I feel like the design mindset can do wonderful things just by reframing something. I'm remembering a great How I Built This episode talking with the founder of Tom's Shoes. Before he started that business, he started many others and one thing he learned is whatever he was proposing, he would always tell someone that he had a business. He wouldn't say, I have this idea about advertising on the side of buildings. He would go to someone and say, I have this business advertising on the side of buildings, and then people would support a business in a way that they wouldn't support an idea. So, I think just like the reframe, the intention and the language and the hope can make such a huge difference.
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Elliot Felix: I'd love to make this concrete and talk about a few examples of projects or programs at ASU or beyond that really have you excited for demonstrating the role that design can play in student success. I think you mentioned something about a work-learning integration program. Maybe that's one of them.
Sukhwant Jhaj: A number of things that we are doing. Part of my job is to rethink and redesign University College. And we have three goals. One is to design personalized learning experiences to address equity gaps. Two, design an integrated work and learning system. And lastly, to redesign student services using design thinking, analytics, automation, intelligent agents. And we have been at it almost for four years now. So that's the project and there are a number of projects that we are working on where we have very systematically done this work, including some with you. We have been systematically working on rethinking the academic support systems—tutoring, supplemental instruction—and that has been a fairly systematic approach where we're not only thinking about space and students' experience of space, but as a physical thing where we've got a chance to work with you where you created these conceptual designs. Those things were built in the end. That space exists today. Through this integration of physical and digital, how would these two things come together? We are serving about an equal number at this stage of online and in-person students. So how would you serve them? How would this dual modality service look like? How would a university with multiple locations offer services to students in multiple centers where you can walk in? How would you use AI in this mix? How would you redesign the job and system? So we have been working very systematically involving students and frontline staff and doing a series of experimentation and visualizations and micro-projects over almost a four-year period. I'm really proud of that work in building the academic support architecture because that's key. If you want to expand access, you need to figure out how to support students once they arrive and their success in some of these key courses is critical. So there design is playing a role from imagining spaces to design of services, design of student experience, work experience, and employee experience. That's one body of work. We are also working with 12 national partners. We said, what happens if you reimagine our student employment as a learning experience? What would it look like? What would be the learning goals? And how would we rethink these roles? It started with a department and grew to hundreds and now thousands of students across our national partners. We have received almost 2 million in grants to rethink student employment nationally and we just had a design institute on campus where design thinking techniques are being used. It is driven by discovery and the idea of making things visible and building coalitions. We have launched this thing called Work Plus Collective where all these resources will live as open licenses. Core to all of this is the use of design practices in discovery, in framing of problems, in understanding student perspective through interviews. It's about getting people to a more creative, more hopeful place where you can get past institutional inertia.
Elliot Felix: You and I both have design backgrounds, but I think our hope is that even people who don't have that background can deploy the mindset, skillset, and toolset of design thinking to define and solve these problems. How do you bring people along who don't have that formal training?
Sukhwant Jhaj: In that particular case, it was play—there is this playfulness that is introduced. As a leader, you can help your team develop these skills. They're very easy to learn. There are all kinds of tricks of the trade to help those who have a hesitation in terms of visualizing or drawing. I'll give you one more example. At Portland State, we worked on the redesign of the advising system. The key act there was to do communal design and illustration. The community was working on multiple illustrations of an idea over a couple of months. People were agreeing and disagreeing, but they're providing feedback on a visual. You don't always have to draw, but things can be presented and feedback sought. It was a communal process. We can build these capacities in our team and use things like illustrations to come to agreement on ideas where there's a lot of contention.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I love that. I often think about three core tenets of design: understanding people, thinking holistically to make connections, and then prototyping and testing. But I feel like making it tangible is also key so you can have community input. I think there are five pillars because making it tangible and co-design are key elements. It's a skill like any other. A leader's job is to build the capacity of the team and equip them with these tools. Great conversation. I really appreciate your input and I'm looking forward to how the book shapes up.
Sukhwant Jhaj: I certainly hope so. It's been fun to work with you, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Subscribe to my Connected College Newsletter at ElliotFelix.com for insights and excerpts from my upcoming book, tools you can download, and special offers. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.