Episode 89: Risa Dickson on Connecting with Companies and Communities for Student Success
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What role can engaging companies in your community play in enabling student success? How can experiential learning help students not just learn skills but ways to apply new ways of thinking and working? How can students learn to work with people with different perspectives and backgrounds? What does this say about the future of higher ed? We discuss all this with Risa Dickson, President at University of La Verne.
The landscape of higher education is shifting beneath our feet. We are currently in what Risa Dickson, President of the University of La Verne, calls a "hard pivot." From declining birth rates and the "demographic cliff" to the rapid obsolescence of technical skills, the traditional models of academia are being challenged like never before.
But within this challenge lies a massive opportunity. By redefining student success not as an isolated academic metric, but as a vital component of community health, colleges can forge a new path forward.
Redefining Student Success as Community Health
For decades, the gold standard for student success was simple: persistence and graduation. While those metrics still matter, the definition is broadening. True student success now encompasses access, completion, and the ability to apply education within the community.
When students succeed, the community thrives. This creates a vested interest for local businesses, research organizations, and civic leaders to invest in the educational journey from day one. By bringing these stakeholders into the conversation, universities stop operating in a vacuum and start acting as the engine for regional prosperity.
The Skill Obsolescence Trap: Why We Must Teach Students How to Think
A startling reality of the modern workforce is that many technical skills taught today will be obsolete by the time a student enters the job market. We’ve seen this transition before—moving from drafting boards to CAD/CAM software—but the pace of change in the age of AI is unprecedented.
The solution isn’t to stop teaching skills, but to prioritize "ways of thinking." For example, data analytics is less about a specific software and more about a mindset of inquiry. To prepare students for the workforce of the future, we must focus on:
Making connections across disciplines.
Identifying trends and anticipating changes.
Developing "narrative fidelity"—the logic and progression required to tell a compelling, sensible story.
The Power of Interdisciplinary Experiential Learning
If you ask experts which factor most influences student success, the answer is almost always experiential learning. However, the next frontier is making this learning interdisciplinary.
Imagine a group composed of a philosophy major, an engineer, and a marketing student embedded within a city government or a tech company to solve a specific problem. The philosopher asks different questions than the engineer. This collision of perspectives is exactly what modern employers like Amazon are looking for. They don't just need people who can code; they need people who can write, think critically, and understand the human implications of technology.
Differentiation Over Demographics
The "demographic cliff" is a looming reality, with birth rates down and fewer students on campuses. But as the saying goes, "Demographics aren’t destiny; differentiation is."
Institutions cannot be all things to all people. The cost of education is too high to maintain every small program in isolation. Instead, colleges must understand their specific student profile—the students who progress quickly and do well in their specific environment—and lean into that niche. By partnering with other institutions through consortium models, colleges can share costs on utilities or software, moving from internal competition to collective support.
Conclusion: Creating the Future in Real Time
We are literally creating the future of higher education right now. By pivoting toward a model that values application over rote information and community integration over academic isolation, we can ensure that the next generation of learners is ready for jobs that don't even exist yet. The "Playbook" for the future is clear: connect with the community, prioritize experiential application, differentiate your mission, and collaborate for the greater good.
Episode 89 Transcript
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Risa Dickson: If the success of our students helps our communities, then it becomes a vested interest of our communities to also invest in student success from access through completion. And so if we can bring our business communities, our research communities, whatever those communities are into the conversation and help them understand what they have at stake in this, it broadens it so that it's not just the universities trying to do this in a vacuum.
Elliot Felix: 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. Welcome Risa. I'm so excited for our conversation about how we students can learn to think so they're prepared for the workforce of the future.
Risa Dickson: I started my first assistant professor job in 1991 at Cal State San Bernardino. I spent 24 years there. As I moved into the dean's office and then I became the assistant to the president, at every level, I realized I really had a greater ability to help more students. Now I'm at the University of La Verne serving as the president. I believe really we're in a very hard pivot. Our students think differently than when you and I were in school. Technology has changed how they learn.
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Elliot Felix: Given that the demographic change, the technology change, the workforce of the future—how do you define student success? What is this way of thinking that you think positions students to be successful into the future?
Risa Dickson: I think student success is about access to college, getting them through college or university, and then ensuring that they understand how to apply their education in the community. So I think student success is actually the health and success of our communities. We all need educated people in our communities to be thinking through what the community looks like and making policies.
Elliot Felix: I love that broadening and that, let's not look at the success of students in a vacuum. Let's look at the success of students and society together, because you can't have one without the other.
Risa Dickson: If we can bring our business communities and our research communities into the conversation and help them understand what they have at stake, it broadens it so that it’s not just the universities trying to do this in a vacuum.
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Elliot Felix: If student success is community success, what are some examples of how you tie those together?
Risa Dickson: One of my ideas is to take interdisciplinary groups of students, embed them in a company or in an organization, and help them work through a project or a problem. You're gonna get very different questions from a philosophy major than you will from an engineer than you will from a marketing major.
Elliot Felix: I love the idea of interdisciplinary experiential learning. In my first book, everyone always asks me which of the tips is the most important, and I always say experiential learning.
Risa Dickson: I think experiential learning is so powerfully important because our students need to understand how to apply what they're learning. We teach the students the information without the application. I would love to see us start changing the way we teach, where we take a history class and we apply a historical context to modern day.
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Risa Dickson: A skill does not help you think things forward. It teaches you how to do something, but when your industry changes or a job needs to be created, it doesn't work anymore. I watched that pivot in the early to mid-eighties where there were people who moved with it and other people who found themselves unemployed because they didn't know how to move from a machine shop to programming spatial relations into a computer.
Elliot Felix: Is that moving from grades to portfolios and seat time to competencies? What are we gonna have to change in order to pivot and to create these new sorts of learning experiences?
Risa Dickson: I think this is gonna be so community-dependent. We're gonna have to start really giving context to our institutions in terms of what people's interests are and what kind of work they have the aptitude to do. We need to continue to have that fluidity and flexibility across their lifespans because the health of our communities is gonna depend on it.
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Elliot Felix: Demographics aren't destiny. Differentiation is. If you're knit tightly in with the community groups and companies, that gives you a way to both be helpful and to differentiate.
Risa Dickson: One, it helps us become more nimble and flexible and efficient because we can't be all things to all people. If we understand who our students are and what it is that we are educating them to do, we can become more efficient. It also allows us to target those students and become more productive at recruiting them.
Elliot Felix: You’re acknowledging that higher ed is a two-sided market. We’re trying to attract and develop students, but we’re also trying to serve communities and employers.
Risa Dickson: I would love to see a model where institutions are no longer competing with each other. It allows us to start setting up these loose consortiums so that higher education is supporting itself rather than competing internally with itself. If we can pull together as higher ed and come up with our own narrative and define who we are, not in opposition to each other, but as pieces of each other, it’ll help us as an industry.