Episode 68: Joe Sallustio on How Technology is Transforming the Student Journey
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How do you define student success? What role can technology play in student success? What data do you need to understand the student jounrney and make better decisions? What can colleges and universities learn from other industries? We discuss these questions and more with Joe Sallustio, VP of Industry Engagement at Ellucian and Host of the EdUp Experience podcast.
In the current landscape of higher education, operating without "crisp, precise, and ready data" is a recipe for struggle. As financial models are challenged and student expectations shift toward the immediacy of the "Netflix experience," institutions must rethink how technology undergirds every step of the student journey. In a recent episode of the Connected College Podcast, host Elliot Felix sat down with Joe Sallustio, Vice President of Industry Engagement at Ellucian and co-founder of the EdUp Experience, to discuss the intersection of digital modernization and student outcomes.
The takeaway is clear: technology and student success have become one. You can no longer have a successful institution without a robust digital backbone that simplifies complexity and accelerates progress.
Defining Student Success: Outcomes Plus the Qualifier
"Student success" is a term often thrown around in strategic plans until it becomes "everything and nothing." To make the term meaningful, it requires a qualifier. Is it academic success? Is it graduation? Is it securing a job within six months of completion?
A pivotal way to view success is through the lens of the student’s own definition. For many, especially Gen Z, success is tied to a growth mindset—the feeling of gaining skills, being challenged, and making tangible progress. When students feel they are growing, their satisfaction with facilities, coursework, and technology rises accordingly.
Data and Analytics: The Backbone of Institutional Strategy
For many leaders, the "rotary phone" of technology—outdated PDFs and static printouts—is still the norm in boardrooms. However, the environment of technology makes the most significant difference when data and analytics are used to tell a story both internally and externally.
Precise data allows an institution to understand exactly where it sits financially and operationally. Without this real-time insight, improving the student experience is guesswork. Data shouldn't just be a report; it should be the narrative that proves the value of higher education to a skeptical public.
The "Skip Intro" Economy: Why Speed Matters in Higher Ed
We live in an age of immediacy. Whether it’s skipping a Netflix intro or refreshing an Uber app until the wait time drops, today's students—and adult learners in particular—expect efficiency. In higher education, this translates to "speed of service."
Technology should be used to "skip the intro" on administrative hurdles. This includes:
Instantaneous transfer credit evaluations.
Instant maps and push notifications for campus events.
AI-enabled nutrition and dining hall suggestions.
By using AI and machine learning to handle these logistical steps, institutions can create a seamless journey that respects the student's time and keeps them focused on learning.
From Brokers to Direct Connections: The Future of Partnerships
The business model of higher education is evolving. Traditionally, third-party brokers have filled the gaps in innovation or resources, connecting institutions to the workforce. However, as technology advances, many institutions are moving toward a "direct-to-consumer" model.
By automating functions like credit mapping and skill-stacking through platforms like Ellucian’s Journey, colleges can create visual skills ontologies that link curriculum directly to job outcomes. This shift allows universities to internalize key functions, reclaim revenue, and build stronger, direct relationships with industry partners.
The Human Element: Why Technology Enhances (But Won't Replace) Faculty
Despite the rise of AI-trained admissions models and automated workflows, the core of education remains human. Technology is a tool to simplify a complex business, but it cannot replace the relationship between a student and a faculty member.
The goal of digital modernization is to remove the "friction" of being a student so that the "fire" of learning can happen more easily. By automating the mundane, leaders and educators can spend more time doing what they do best: mentoring and guiding students toward their goals.
Episode 68 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: For any institution that's operating without crisp, precise, and ready data, it's hard. Especially when the financial models challenge for many schools. How do you improve that if you don't know really where you are this is where the environment of technology can make a difference in the realm of student success, however you define it. Data and analytics. How do I use the numbers around me to tell a story, right? And this story about the value of higher education that we need to tell externally, but also internally, right?
Elliot Felix: That was the great Joe CIO from Ellucian and the ed up experience family of podcasts. We had a great conversation defining student success, the role that technology plays in it, how that role is changing, and we go on lots of interesting tangents about what higher ed can learn from other industries, whether it's Netflix or the NBA. Let's dive in. 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.
Elliot Felix: Joe Scio, welcome back to the podcast. I'm amazed with all the things you're doing. You found time for this conversation between your role at Ellucian, your role spearheading the ED up family of podcasts. So thanks for taking time outta your busy schedule and tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today.
Joe Sallustio: Thanks for having me, Elliot. You make me sound like I'm super organized and I am not. So let's just be clear.
Elliot Felix: And you're anti Calendly too.
Joe Sallustio: I'm anti Calendly.
Elliot Felix: You're anti calendar link, which I don't know, you're just you're like, that's like the rotary phone of calendar management. It's like the old school.
Joe Sallustio: As far as higher education goes, I've worked in higher ed institutions for approximately 23 years across both for-profit and non-profit institutions, ranging from as little as a thousand students up to about 10, 12,000 students. And most recently, I am a year into my new role at Ellucian as vice president of industry engagement. I. Trying to bring my expertise across, really overseeing every function in and around higher education during my career to Ellucian, who creates technology, products and digital modernization strategies for institutions to better serve students. So a higher ed adjacent ed tech area, if you will. But I'm having a ball and able to spend my time talking to people like you.
Elliot Felix: That's awesome. I hear that you've interviewed, 17,000 university presidents.
Joe Sallustio: Is that, what about where you little less, but of course I, I forgot. I didn't forget, but I just didn't remember to say it. My co-founder, Elvin Prees and I started the Edip Experience Podcast about five years ago. We've interviewed over a thousand people in and around higher education, business and industry, and that a thousand episodes or so includes about 350 ish, plus or minus nice college and university presidents, of which I get a lot of information all the time. All week long. 'cause I interview people every week, Monday through Friday. Same bat time, same bat channel. So I'm talking about three, three or four college presidents a week. And it's amazing. It's been crazy.
Elliot Felix: I like the rebranding of, it's not that you forgot, it's that you didn't remember, but that was good.
Joe Sallustio: That's it's not that I'm losing, I'm winning more slowly. Yeah, that's right. That's good. Yeah. I use that when I don't call on someone in a meeting and I say, does anybody else have anything to say? And I go, oh, I just didn't remember to call on so and I didn't forget.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Absolutely. I love it. Well that's such a great, that's such a great story and such great conversations you're a part of and you're leading and you're facilitating. I would, I'd love to hear like from all those conversations and from your experience, how do you define student success?
Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I love this question because I don't think there is a real definition for it. I think that we, higher ed, proper, we've accepted the fact that student success is everything and nothing. In fact, if you wanna sound really smart about higher education and you're in a room and you wanna impress everybody. You just say, yeah. We're gonna pull the through lines from our strategic plan and ensure it maps to student success and people will go, nice. Oh wow, that's really insightful. And meanwhile, the person has absolutely no idea what they're talking about when they say student success. I was talking to a college president and I asked them this very same question and their answer was, however the student defines it. And I thought that's a really good place to start. It really is. But we do have to define it as an institution because it becomes part of our mission and part of our value system. So how I personally define it is that it's a set of outcomes that the student is working toward that you need a qualifier on in order to make it student success. For example an outcome might be academic success or successful course completion. It might be graduation. It could be outcomes that lead to a job within a timeframe. So there's a, there's the term graduation completion, but the qualifier is so important . Yeah. And otherwise, how do you know you're successful?
Elliot Felix: It's success Relative to what?
Joe Sallustio: To what? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's the measure that we leave out, right? Like we, we wanna improve student success in the admissions process. What are you talking about? I have this happen all the time when I'm on the podcast, I actually have an episode where I just get in the box and say, student success means nothing. It means nothing because you have to define it. Yeah.
Elliot Felix: Do you think it's a good thing that it remains undefined because it forces people to define it for themselves? Or do you think it's a bad thing? That there's no accepted definition?
Joe Sallustio: I think it's more on the good side that there's no accepted definition for it, but the caveat is that you better define it if you're gonna say it. It does us a disservice when we throw it around you loosely, to cover every activity if it's like somebody who doesn't know anything about higher education, the first sentence they learn is we want enhance student success. Like that sentence itself, if you walk, like I said, you walk in and you just say that somebody will go, oh, they work in higher education or education.
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Joe Sallustio: For any institution that's operating without crisp, precise, and ready data, it's hard. Especially when the financial models challenge for many schools. Yeah. How do you improve that if you don't know really where you are or really how you sit? Yeah, if you're looking at like dead PDFs you're in trouble. It's out of date by the time you bring it to the meeting.
Elliot Felix: So yeah, exactly. You're right.
Joe Sallustio: And quick story, an unnamed institution of which I know has meetings where we're talking 2023 and 2024. None of the technology is working. So you have all the high level administrators in a room and six dittos, and I use the term ditto because it's such an old term, right? Like you got dittos in grade school. Yeah. Six printouts by department retention, enrollment. So on and so on. Financial aid, and everybody reads their, obviously you got a packet of papers in front of you and I said, okay, so this is where the environment of technology can make a difference in the realm of student success, however you define it. Data and analytics. How do I use the numbers around me to tell a story, right? And this story about the value of higher education that we need to tell externally, but also internally, right? We have to have everybody believe. But then secondarily to that, you look at artificial intelligence and machine learning, product innovation and you start to go, okay, and you said it earlier, student success is part of it is speed. I think there's a big speed part of student success, not in how fast I can navigate my degree necessarily, but how I service my student to help them be successful.
Joe Sallustio: And I look at models and I talk about this all the time, like Netflix, Elliot, I know this is you. When you sit down and you watch a Netflix and you bring up the show in the bottom right corner, there's a little button and it says skip intro. And I know you press it. I know you do. I press it right when I call Uber and it says that the Uber's gonna take 18 minutes. I go back out and I refresh and I go back out and I refresh until I get it to an acceptable amount, like six minutes is even pushing it. So there's this immediacy vibe. Yeah. That we want in our personal lives and in our professional lives dealing with students. We somehow accept less than that. So how can speed undergirded by technology create better outcomes, transfer credit evaluations that are instantaneous. An instant map of a college or university that pops up on my headphones and starts telling me exactly where I'm supposed to walk and when and how many steps it takes to get there. Or a on the menu push notification about Yeah. An event that's happening later. A speaker that's happening later. Yeah. A tutoring, I'm a division one athlete, and I, in the morning it says, here's the menu for the university today. I don't think you can get enough nutrients. You might want to go to this hall instead of this dining hall because they got chicken and you need more chicken. So you start to think about how AI can enhance that journey. And it's gonna be about technology and student success, however you define it, becoming one, because you can't have one without the other these days.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I like that. The, the idea that analytics, data and analytics are the backbone. Then once you have that, you can leverage AI to make things faster, more efficient, more personal, even more like location based.
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Joe Sallustio: So at the risk of being self-promoting, but Ellucian obviously is a global ed tech company. I get in this knowledge of products and what's coming out. So we have this product called Journey. And the reason I bring this up is because it is the culmination of what artificial intelligence can do when it maps to the skills economy.
Elliot Felix: Also a great band.
Joe Sallustio: What's that? Also a great band. What's that? Journey? Journey? Yeah. There's lots of use cases for the word journey, but what it does is it, so an institution, think about it this way. They could take their curriculum non-credit or for a credit and back. It put it into journey. And journey creates a visual skills ontology of basically a skilled pathway video game style. How the student can, what skills the student will gain as they progress toward the degree. Now, if I want a different skill, it could hypothetically map to a different degree path or, and then it brings in job outcomes and says, with this pathway, with this degree, it maps to these jobs that have these skills. And that's just one example. When I look forward I look at this product and it goes crazy and there's other ones out there, right? It is other types of products that do things. Transfer credit is another way. I always come back to that 'cause I think that's such a huge barrier to improving the business model of higher ed is the slowness that exists. And dependencies in transfer credit evals. Yeah. Until we solve that, parts of the business just can't move faster. So how can AI help with that? Those are the things that I think we have to think about.
Elliot Felix: Back to our student success definition and the idea that you're making progress. You're taking steps along a path or a journey, and that journey maybe changes as you're learning things and as a student realizes they want a different skill or a different, explore, a different career path. I think that's really, that sounds really cool. Yeah. And how do I do it without losing credit?
Joe Sallustio: Yeah. I will tell you in my time in higher ed, how many students I came across that had more credits than needed to graduate. Yeah. And we're processed and they're just taking classes because some advisor somewhere missed them.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. That's a disservice there's that GAO, the Government Accountability Office report, the average credit loss is 43%. Yeah. Mean, how much did we say college costs? Too much. And sometimes we're part of the problem, like hiring itself, simplification, my friend. How do we use technology to simplify a very complex business?
Elliot Felix: So if journey is one way of, tech enabling student success and analytics and simplification. What are some other great examples of how institutions are adapting to these changes and harnessing technology to, to make it happen?
Joe Sallustio: So you have a, as I said, you have a very long and wide spectrum of adoption when it comes to technology and modernizing technology. You brought up the rotary phone, which was interesting because many institutions still have the rotary phone of technology for their institution, right? That's the way. Way it works. And they and you have to like, retrain yourself how to turn the buttons. And if you have somebody come in who's newer, if you take a rotary phone and you put it in front of a 15-year-old they're looking at this, they don't even know what to do with it. Oh, look at these pretty, this pretty thing that I can turn, don't even know how to use it.
Joe Sallustio: When you look at use cases for technology and how it can enhance, one of them has to be. Simplifying the other half of transfer credit, which is prior learning assessment policies. Yep. How do we simplify those and how do we get it to the point where our faculty are willing to accept credential based skill stacking for credit? And if I can have a program or some piece of technology that says, these courses in Coursera. And this course in Udacity, if I put them together, it's three credits. If I had a program to do that, you think about how it would change the partnerships. A lot of schools are partnered with third party brokers and, guild education and so on. There's these third party brokers that do a lot of the brokering between institution and educational pathway. I see that business model becoming. Less desirable as technology takes out the middleman and starts mapping schools to skills to a degree. You don't need that broker necessarily anymore. So you start to think about how technology will change the business model around higher ed. That's the more fascinating conversation.
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Joe Sallustio: What I think related to those partnerships is if you look at higher ed's, dependency has been on a lack of innovation or sometimes resources. And so you have a company that comes in the middle and says, you can't do this. We can, and we're gonna connect you with the workforce. And so they, they become the wall or the broker eventually higher ed will go direct. They'll go direct for us. Arizona state's a good example of that. They're doing that in multiple. So they'll scale up. I think we'll see universities have really defined business functions. There are some big universities that have WGU could be an example. They have people all across the country and their sole job is to connect with businesses and drive business partnerships. You'll have to go through a third party when you're doing that yourself, right? And then you re of course, a hundred percent of the revenue.
Joe Sallustio: So I think it's, for us in higher ed too, it's about figuring out what the business model of the future is. What's it contained? What do I need? What can I get rid of? What can I stand up myself? Where do I need a partner? I think marketing is one area where a partner is like so critical. Institutions try to internalize everything and run marketing. It's too sophisticated now with the way I. AI is driving things in the Google algorithms, and the sophistication on how to run marketing it's like a big job now. And the knowledge, the industry knowledge of what other people are doing. Yeah. PE people partner for different reasons. One, that being one of them, because you don't know what you don't know, and you want a partner that understands the landscape or it's a capability you don't have or you don't have the capacity. But it's interesting that there, there is this cycle where you partner for things and then eventually you grow the, that capacity or you grow that capability in-house and then you take it on. So you don't need someone to broker credits or you don't need someone to course share or whatever it may be. I think that's part of evolution, but I also think technology will solve some of those challenges eventually because you'll solve it with automation and instead of people, which is how we, businesses have just typically solve problems, right? To usually you hire a bunch of people in and take over those functions, but now what if you can automate some of those functions, yeah.
Elliot Felix: And I think what, what seems to happen the cycle seems to be that technology facilitates going direct, as you say. So you cut out the middle person, the travel agent of credit transfer or whatever it might be. And then part of that partner goes away, but then it gets reborn just as there's a resurgence in some kinds of travel agencies around, specific kinds of journeys or going to specific places or things that are more complicated and, the institutions evolve and so do their partners.
Joe Sallustio: Business always reinvents itself. Yeah. I had a you'll find this interesting. I had a college president very recently that said they were experimenting. With removing all upfront admissions conversations and moving 100% to an AI trained admissions model to where you would have to subscribe to the university to have human interaction like so the uplift is talking to a human, but otherwise you get Johnny, the AI program, right? Whatever it might be. I thought, man, talking to you human, human is like a membership cost. Now if you call like an airline, you can't get a human being half the time. But what does that look like in higher ed? And is that applicable in a business that is all human? Mostly what we do learning is gotta have a human component. So not to say that this college president was wrong, 'cause it's fascinating to see how they were thinking about this.
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Joe Sallustio: Definitely don't accept getting your Amazon packages more than three days. 'cause then you're just gonna cancel the order. Yeah. So higher ed will get to that point too. You know where speed becomes the big time differentiator.
Elliot Felix: Really interesting convo, and I want to give you the final word of advice for folks, as they're thinking about the role that tech can play in student success and how to adapt to, to change. What's one piece of advice you'd give to leaders who are trying to make that happen?
Joe Sallustio: Talk to the students. I think talking to students and saying what do you need? Is it a lost art in this technology that we live in? I don't believe that technology will completely replace or not even completely replace it. We'll never replace the relationship that a student has with a faculty member in the learning process. It will enhance it, it will compliment it, it will not be a supplement for it. And I think when we can. Say we truly believe that the faculty and student relationship can be maintained, it makes us so much more open to looking at the possibilities of technology. If we think that it's gonna replace us as educators, it becomes harder to adopt. So I think that it's a mindset. You talked about mindset, and the other thing I would say is make sure you get resources that help you define student success. In fact, I would recommend your new upcoming book that you have.
Elliot Felix: Oh, thank you.
Joe Sallustio: For for research and student success, the connected college leadership strategies for student success. That's what I would do. That's where you have great partners, is you pull on people who are experts in what you do and what they do, and find out how to do it.
Elliot Felix: That's great advice. Joe and I learned something from all of, or many things, from all of our conversations and I, and talking to students I think is critical. And I remember in another conversation you said that a different way, which was, stay close to students because your job as a leader is gonna keep pulling you away. You're gonna get pulled into meetings and reviewing dashboards and reports, but you can't lose sight of the students if you want them to be successful. And yeah, I just, I really appreciate you echoing that today and all your insights on where we are and where we're headed.
Joe Sallustio: Thank you. It's been an honor to be here, my friend. Thanks for the invite and you can know economy Me Anytime.
Elliot Felix: And where can folks find you?
Joe Sallustio: They can find me on LinkedIn. You're everywhere but you can find me at LinkedIn. Okay. They can find me the yet up experience.com is an easy way to that's it.
Elliot Felix: Excellent. Thanks Joe. 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. You can also find more information about talks I've given, articles I've written, and upcoming events there, and please support the podcast by rating and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.