Blog Recap:
When it comes to enhancing student experiences in higher education, collaboration between IT and Student Affairs can truly make magic happen. In the latest episode of Higher Ed Demand Gen, Shiro chats with Paul Schantz, the director of web and technology services at California State University Northridge (CSUN). Paul’s 18-year adventure in higher ed is nothing short of fascinating, especially as he shares insights from transitioning from the corporate sector to shaping student experiences at CSUN.
Starting in marketing, Paul moved on to implementing a consistent brand across CSUN’s Division of Student Affairs. He talks about how blending IT with student affairs and enrollment has brought boatloads of benefits to the campus, including tackling the not-so-easy task of rolling out enterprise content management systems.
Paul breaks down the structure of the enrollment services team and their role as the bridge between central IT and university relations, making sure accessibility concerns are front and center during purchases and the RFP (Request For Proposal) process. His team is specifically focusing on a digital asset management system — an investment that will support integration and marketing.
An interesting point Paul raises is the importance of writing website content that’s easy to digest. It’s not just about throwing in big words to sound complex; it’s about making info straightforward and accessible for everyone. Using analytics to make data-driven decisions on what’s on the university’s homepage helps them streamline the navigation and content, ensuring students can find what they need without a hassle.
Paul’s dissertation research on one card systems — think of them as a student’s all-access pass, similar to customer loyalty cards — showcases their potential to enhance student engagement. Tracking various activities and services through these cards can lead to insights on what helps students stay and succeed.
Paul ends on a note discussing the need for more focus on student retention and experiences. It’s clear that thoughtful integration of technology and student services isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s essential for supporting students’ journeys through higher education. So, here’s to more campuses bridging divides and elevating the student experience!
Read the transcription
Shiro:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Higher Ed Demand Gen Podcast hosted by Concept 3 d. If you like our content, please follow or subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple, or Google. My name is Shiro Torrey, and I will be your host today. And for today’s episode, I’m really thrilled to learn more about how IT and student affairs can join forces to create a better student engagement experience. Plus, we’ll over also cover something new, which is, Paul’s take on the future of higher ed one cards. So with that, I’m really excited to have Paul Chance join us today. Paul is the director of web and technology services at California State University Northridge, which we’ll be referring to as CSUN in short on today’s recording.
Shiro:
Welcome to the show, Paul.
Paul Schantz:
Hi, Shiro. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Shiro:
And I do ask all my guests this as an icebreaker. Paul, please tell me what you love about higher ed.
Paul Schantz:
I think in higher ed, it’s really all about the people and how helpful everybody is. In fact, that was probably one of the biggest adjustments that I personally had when coming from the corporate sector about 18 years ago.
Shiro:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I I think in our intro call, speaking about invest in in being invested in higher ed, you had just reached to the day your 18th year, with CSUN, so that was fabulous. So now you’re at 18 plus. Right?
Paul Schantz:
That’s correct. That’s correct. I can vote now, or my my, career at CSUN can vote now.
Shiro:
That’s funny. Awesome. Well, you mentioned a little bit about your background just now, you know, coming from the corporate side. Can you tell us a little bit more about, your past careers and your current role now?
Paul Schantz:
Well, prior to joining, CSUN, I worked in a couple of Fortune 50 corporations, primarily doing front end web application development and web design work. The job that I had immediately prior to CSUN, I was working for a banking institution on all of their new customer acquisition web properties. So if there was any, incoming requests that were coming from, say, Yahoo Finance Placements or from Google organic search or, Google paid search, television, radio, any kind of advertising. They were coming through the web pages that I managed, which had forms on them, and we had everything very highly instrumented. So we knew every campaign where people were coming from. And, when somebody clicked on the submit button for the form, it would go into our lead gen system and get distributed out to one of the thousands of offices across the country. So when I came to CSUN, I was very in in 2006, I was very interested in, the student outreach and recruitment, activities, and this was long before the the the enrollment cliff that everybody’s talking about now. Mhmm.
Paul Schantz:
So folks in the corporate world have been thinking about, this sort of thing for a long time. So it’s it’s an interesting topic to me, and I think that there’s a very clear tie in to, building, good web experiences, for, our students.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. And, yeah, I think one one thing I learned from you is that you actually do have a pretty strong background in marketing for someone with what seems to be more of, like, an IT role title, and that really stood out to me because that doesn’t really happen in a lot of the calls I have with someone with a web director or web web services title. So that was super interesting and made me more excited to talk to you as well. Mhmm.
Paul Schantz:
Well, yeah, I mean, the mission statement that we have for my department, it’s pretty simple, and that’s to deliver user friendly, student centric online student services. So that really runs the gamut. And and it not only does it benefit things like, you know, the the student experience, it it also helps with, the outreach and recruitment component that I already mentioned. But it has, benefits across the board. It includes things like EDA accessibility and so on, making the experiences as, useful for every student as possible.
Shiro:
Gotcha. And where does your role fit into in terms of, like, a department? Are you tied with enrollment? I think you mentioned student affairs. Like, where do you sit in under the umbrella of things?
Paul Schantz:
Well, back in 2006 when I was hired, I was hired as a web development manager. And at that time, CSUN did not have a management system, like an enterprise one that Mhmm. There was no templating system or, in use by the campus. And, therefore, every department across campus kind of had their own variation of web pages. Some of them looked very professional. Some of them looked like a student had developed them. There was very little consistency, and and that’s what I was hired to do, was to implement some form of consistency, and branding and marketing, across the entire division of student affairs. So one of the very first projects that we had was to develop a template like that and to staff up my team with the designers and developers who could help to make that happen.
Paul Schantz:
And since then, of course, the campus does have an enterprise content management system. And kind of an interesting, side, note, a a tangent is one of the earliest tasks that I had was to survey the, enterprise content management system, marketplace to see if there was anything that could fit, that we could implement, not just in for student affairs, but for the entire
Shiro:
Mhmm.
Paul Schantz:
Cal State Northridge campus. And the reality was is that it was still too early for our average users to, understand what that was all about and to apply themselves, you know, much less, you know, thinking about, the consistency across all websites across the entire campus. So that, that that, never really went anywhere here on this campus, but, the core of the analysis of the work that I had done on that did end up going to our chancellor’s office, via my boss at the time. He shared that, the the technical scoping document that I had written, and that did end up going into a, a master enabling agreement that the chancellor’s office put out. And I know that several campuses within the Cal State system did end up using it. So it wasn’t for nothing that I did that for. So that that’s good.
Shiro:
Got it. Yeah. I can imagine. Like, I I think, 2006, I don’t think, you know, these popular CMSs that are out there today, like, they were just getting developed or they didn’t exist yet. So that’s pretty fascinating. You made that recommendation before the the tech was even caught up to market. It’s interesting.
Paul Schantz:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, even in the corporate sector, there was a hodgepodge of solutions, and most, large organizations, they customize them for their own needs anyhow. So I don’t think there’s such a thing as a vanilla implementation.
Shiro:
Gotcha. So yeah. So yeah. So you sit now under student affairs. Right? And so you effectively have 1 foot in IT, and then you have 1 foot in student affairs, which I believe at CSUN also includes enrollment. Is that right?
Paul Schantz:
That’s correct.
Shiro:
So you got one foot in the door in IT student affairs enrollment. How do how does student affairs and enrollment benefit from having you on their team?
Paul Schantz:
Well, it’s interesting because in until about a year and a half, 2 years ago, the enrollment function academic affairs division.
Shiro:
Oh, really? Okay.
Paul Schantz:
So there was a transition a couple years ago, and there were a number of folks, on that enrollment services team, and that included admissions and records as well. Mhmm. And they had some technology staff. They still do. They do not report to me, but I and my department are very closely aligned with our the vice president for student affairs office. So we have been as long as I have been here. And so my team plays mostly an advisory role, and oftentimes, we play a role as an intermediary between, central IT. We have a central IT division as well.
Paul Schantz:
I’m in what you would call a distributed IT unit. And what we do is we provide input, mostly in the initial purchasing and, like, the RFP process where we’re analyzing, you know, what kinds of APIs, the solution has, as well as considerations around accessibility. Because, in our division, we have, 3 departments that deal with accessibility concerns and can talk about those a little bit later. But, I also and my team also has connections with, our university relations and advancement team, which is where the professional communicators and PR folks for the university, reside. And they have helped us in terms of, some of the branding concerns as well as and I know I’m kind of veering off into a tangent. So please steer me down. No worries.
Shiro:
I’m listening.
Paul Schantz:
Too far afield. But, in our division, we’ve also had a student marketing and communications team as well. And so they’re producing a lot of the, marketing materials, for any of the work that enrollment services is doing. Mhmm. And they take the lead from university relations and advancement in terms of, like, the look and feel and, you know, some of the kinds of graphics that we will use, although they do their own photography and that sort of thing.
Shiro:
So
Paul Schantz:
and that’s led into some interesting conversations around adoption of a digital asset management system, which we are literally in the RFP process right now, and I’ve been very heavily involved in that, with the, my colleague in university relations and advancement taking the lead on that. But because of my experience, you know, it was, I think, helpful for them to get a understanding of the kinds of features and functions that they might wanna have for integrations and marketing, you have experience in IT, and,
Shiro:
in marketing, you have experience in IT, and, you know, you’ve worked with many solutions in your career, You’re able to advise on, you know, best practices, accessibility concerns that you can take on from central IT, and you can kind of face them up front with your, with under under the student affairs division. And this enrollment being a part of student affairs is is interesting because often I see enrollment admissions as a separate department, may maybe adjacent to student affairs, but also its own separate entity. And so the fact that it lives under student fairies now is is very interesting. And it sounds like university advancement is actually leading a lot of the charge in the branding of CSUN. Is that right? A digital asset branding?
Paul Schantz:
Our university relations and advancement, they’re public facing for, like, the community. So, like, when there’s press releases and and outward facing stuff. And they handle a lot of things. Like, we have some there’s always some filming going on. There’s a a large production, I think, for some Apple, TV show, like, this whole week, on campus because of how close we are, to Hollywood and Burbank and the studios and such. So Right. They also manage that aspect of, you know, the community relations. Yeah.
Paul Schantz:
But our student marketing and communications team is awesome. They do all kinds of, collateral for, you know, the web and digital print, everything, and we work very closely with them. So we’re my team is primarily, as you had alluded to, provides a a consultative role. Because I as I had mentioned, you know, in in my past life in corporate world, we had instrumented everything. So we knew exactly where people were clicking on. We were doing AB and multivariate testing on the different kinds of, campaigns that we were running. And, when you really turn open the spigot, you can really see a difference just in the color of the text of the headline or, you know, the photo of the people that you have. It really does make a difference in in the conversion rates.
Paul Schantz:
And so it’s it’s kind of fun. And we’ve been, we we’ve been doing, click tracking and, like, heat maps of all of our
Shiro:
Right.
Paul Schantz:
Web properties for, gosh, since I started here for a long time.
Shiro:
Are there a certain related to that, are there certain trends you’re seeing, in web that, you know, have been helpful to create a better experience, whether that’s the delivery of information, making things more navigable for students and visitors on your website. Like, are you seeing any changes? I’d I’d assume one of them would be, you know, mobile first experience now, but maybe there’s something deeper there that you’ve you’ve been noticing or realizing?
Paul Schantz:
Yeah. It’s it’s interesting. You would think that, when talking to a technologist, you know, you would talk about the instrumentation. You talk about the mobile first, like you say. But realistically speaking, the biggest thing is in the writing on the website and making sure that you’re conveying the correct message that your website visitors are looking for. So that’s what drives conversion rates, and it also drives, convenience too for the user, you know, because they’re they’re gonna come to your website. They’re looking for something. And all too frequently, I think that higher education institutions, they write at the 16th 17th grade level.
Paul Schantz:
And, you know, our freshmen, they’re just coming out of high school. And on our campus in particular and also most of the Cal State, schools, the we should be writing at about the 8th or 9th grade level. Mhmm. So the investment in rewriting the content is actually, I think, the most valuable thing that you could do with your website. I mean, that’s going to help everybody. And and quite honestly, many folks, especially if they are new, like, maybe they’re a new leader in their departments. Right. They oftentimes want to put absolutely everything in their website.
Paul Schantz:
And it it it kind of reminds me of my experience during the web one point o boom. Even the smallest businesses, they wanted to recreate Amazon. It’s like, that’s probably not a very realistic approach. Yeah. You know, you’re when you’re selling, I don’t know, like, fishing lures. I don’t know. Just pull that out of the air, but, we we we see that a lot in higher education as well. Simplification.
Shiro:
Got it. Yeah. That’s that’s really interesting you say that because this is a big assumption is if I’m if I’m talking to someone in in IT and web, usually, like I feel like we get down to a lot of the nitty gritty really quickly, right, like SEO optimization, page speed, which which does make a big impact, but we kinda think of all these tactical, more technical details. And we’ve, I think, with all the new technology coming out, we, like, tend to really hover around that. But I think messaging, like you mentioned, is is such a key component of marketing and it has been for 100 of years, and we can’t lose sight of that. Right?
Paul Schantz:
Yeah. And in fact, I’ll I’ll I’ll give a more human answer to that. When I first started as the web development manager here, one of the first things we did was to start instrumenting all of our stuff to measure things like page load times and, APDEX scores, you know, like how fast is the page loading. And, I was very proud of myself for having implemented that and taking that to my vice president for student affairs. I would share, look how fast this is loading. And it’s like, but after a certain point, I mean, the eyes glaze over, and it’s like, well, he doesn’t really care about that. But on the other hand, when I share a heat map or show, like, a a click map of where people are clicking on a web page, that tells a story almost immediately with a picture. And you can see exactly what people are clicking on and what they’re not clicking on.
Paul Schantz:
And, that was, that’s extremely helpful, especially for a, a property that’s as valuable as, like, a university’s home page. And oftentimes, there is jockeying for position. Well, there’s always jockeying for position, on a on any organization’s home page. So and, if if an organization is truly interested in being having a data making data informed decisions, then in my opinion, they would have somebody who handles the analytics and is able to tell the story about what information should be in what spaces on any given web page.
Shiro:
Gotcha. Yeah. That’s super helpful. Have there been any shifts or changes you’ve made in recent years, as an example, that has really helped? Maybe it started just as an AB test, but, you know, have really helped improve any part of the website.
Paul Schantz:
Yeah. I mean, I think that, there’s been some changes particularly around some of the things that are included in the header Mhmm. Of the web pages, also establishing limits, for example, on, like, mega menus. I mean, they’re very, very common. But the reality is is that most of the individual operational departments don’t need to have all of that if they’re organizing their information appropriately. So we we have limits to the number of navigation elements that go in, say, like, a top navigation. What kinds of things should go in a left hand navigation and that sort of thing.
Shiro:
Gotcha. So kinda going back to the simplification that you talked about. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. I remember, like, this was, I think, on Myspace, but I remember people were really, like, messing around with how to make their web page look prettier. And, like, there was, like, a you could have, like, stars falling from your your, your mouse key or your mouse arrow, and, like, that was popular. Like, definitely unnecessary now, but, it kinda just reminds reminds me of, like, that’s just an extra thing.
Shiro:
You don’t need to do that, and you can simplify now. That’s great. Awesome. Well, you know, I love all the specific examples you’ve provided me. I I kinda wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about something you’re currently researching for your dissertation on, and so that’s 1 cards. Right? So let’s let’s talk about 1 cards and what’s with you and 1 cards.
Paul Schantz:
Oh, well, thank you. I you’ll have to stop me because I’ll like anybody who’s talking about their their, doctoral dissertation, we have a tendency to to ramble. But, I’ve I’ve got my elevator speech speech that I’ve gotten narrowed down to, like, one sentence. And so this is, the idea. The basic idea is that if a university has a mature implementation of a one card system, they are more likely to have students who persist and graduate. Okay? So that’s the thrust of, my thesis. And what got me interested now now I can I’ll I’ll I’ll kind of expand on it. The the thing that got me very interested in in CampusOne cards is their similarity, to customer loyalty cards that companies like Target and Supermarkets use.
Paul Schantz:
So every time that you use one of those cards as a consumer, that records a transaction that the company then uses for determining what kinds of products that they’re going to stock on their shelves. And there’s, downstream, I guess, they would be upstream, impacts on the, the supply chain and so on, but they’re also developing a profile about you as a consumer. Not you specifically as an individual, but generally as, like, a consumer segment. And the CampusOne cards are a very mature technology. They’ve been around for over 40 years in the form of an ID card. In the old days, it would be an ID card that had your picture, your student ID number, and maybe a a barcode so you could check things out at the library. But they’ve vastly expanded now to encompass all kinds of things, like Mhmm. Meal plans, a declining balance.
Paul Schantz:
So you can use it like a debit card, on campus and with approved vendors off campus. You can use it as a key for your dorm room. You can use it to get through the turnstiles in the recreation center to attend sporting events and so on. So in many ways, there are analogies to the click tracking like Google Analytics on a web page, only you have, either a plastic card, which the way that I’ve defined it for folks who maybe are unfamiliar with what a one card is, is imagine taking your your driver’s license, a credit card, and, like, a hotel room key and taping those 3 cards together. Only now you can have it as an application on your phone. So the card swipe is kind of the coin of the realm. Right? So in many ways, what this does is within the, circumscribed boundaries of a university, you have the entire user experience of a student, all the different kinds of transactions that they have as they go around campus.
Shiro:
Mhmm.
Paul Schantz:
So what events they, swipe into and so on. Mhmm. So the connection up to this this seems to be, like, the perfect intersection the it’s everything to do with a student that is not in the classroom, and that is a very, very wide range of services and activities.
Shiro:
Mhmm.
Paul Schantz:
So it can be sporting events. It could be the recreation center. It can be housing, you know, getting into your dorm room, the gates, clubs and organizations. There’s just 100 and 100 and 100 of different kinds of opportunities, to interact. And all it is is just a swipe of the card. Just, you know, that the student has been somewhere at a certain time to attend a a particular event, or there’s there’s a transaction there. There’s a record of it. Right.
Paul Schantz:
And the my interest here from a theoretical perspective is that in student affairs, we’re very interested in student engagement. And, one of the pillars of student affairs theory, was Alexander Aston, and he has a theory of student involvement, which later changed involvement engagement are are often used kind of interchangeably. Mhmm. And the the basic theory is quite simple. It’s that the more that students have meaningful engagement with programming that the university is putting on, the more likely that they are to persist and engage. So the question that every operation has on a campus is which engagements and at what level is going to generate the greatest amount of engagement, which leads to those, you know, greater retention numbers and greater, graduation rates higher graduation rates. So, the the the kind of the conceit of my, my research questions, which I won’t go into here, it’s that if a university is invested in such a system and they frequently if they’ve been around for 20 or 30 years, there are dozens and dozens of systems that connect to a one card system Mhmm. That chances are good you’re doing reporting on what’s happening with that system.
Paul Schantz:
Well, what are students swiping into? And, also, if it’s accepted in more places, chances are good that student affairs professionals are using that data as well to make data informed decisions. And if they’re doing that, then they’re probably using the data to make continuous improvement in their programming and the events and so on. And therefore, that leads to higher persistence and graduation rates. So it’s kind of a big you know, it’s it’s sort of a big topic, and it’s a quantitative study, so I’ve had to do an awful lot of narrowing narrowing my focus or else I would just never get done. But, I’ll be using the IPEDS data set, for doing my regression testing and so on and determining if, you know, are there differences, you know, in the types of universities Mhmm. And the types of, card systems that are in use and so on. So
Shiro:
Gotcha. That’s yeah.
Paul Schantz:
That’s a big nutshell.
Shiro:
Yeah. I I have a lot of comments and questions. I attended university just over a decade ago now, and I went I’d intended a a large state university, University of Colorado, in Boulder, and we had a one card system. Like you said, it wasn’t on our mobile phones yet, but it got me into my dorm. It helped pay for meals. It got me discounts adjacent to campus. It was basically, like, your driver’s license student credit card, etcetera, like you mentioned. I think it got me into some lab rooms too.
Shiro:
I can’t quite remember. But, yeah, like, very familiar with the concept. What I was curious. What percentage of schools today don’t have a one card system? Because I went to a school that did, so it’s kinda hard for me to understand which schools don’t.
Paul Schantz:
It’s it’s interesting because I I and and CSUN is a member of, the National Association of Campus Card Users or NACU, and they have about 500 universities that are are members. Obviously, there’s a lot more universities than that that have, one card systems. I’m actually not a 100% sure, but my guess would be that at least 50% of the campuses in the United States have some form of a a one card system.
Shiro:
So based on your theory and your, like, one one liner, right, is that the 50% that don’t have a one card system are I don’t know if risk is the right word, but have less data to work with, more less inputs to work with to help figure out data around student engagement with campus, and therefore, maybe missing out on opportunities to help increase retention because they don’t have that data? Is that is that another way I could look at this?
Paul Schantz:
Well, potentially. Uh-huh. I I don’t know that I would necessarily agree, a 100% with that statement because oftentimes, it’s not that we need to have more data.
Shiro:
Mhmm.
Paul Schantz:
Like I mentioned before, many campuses have had a one card system for decades.
Shiro:
Right.
Paul Schantz:
And they are sitting on mountains of data. And they’re, it’s not that it’s not for want of data that campuses are not using the information. So I think that it’s important for a campus to have a culture of using data and knowing where to go and the appropriateness and having the awareness of the, associated laws around privacy, and security before they can really meaningfully do any kind of high level, you know, analysis of of this data. The vast majority of folks, I I I’m sure, in in the student affairs profession, they are using information, that’s derived from card swipes at a department level. So for example, a large event is happening and students swipe into that event, and the organization that’s putting on the event, they want to know what the attendance was. They might do some analysis of the demographics. You’re like, you know, x percentage of attendees were freshmen versus sophomores and that sort of thing. And in that way, I think that’s kind of the that is the way to open the door for creating this this, culture of data is, and and here’s I’ll I’ll I’ll kind of digress briefly here.
Paul Schantz:
Student affairs professionals are often viewed as not being particularly technical. But in my experience, when you have when you ask them, well, what kinds of operational, questions would you like to have answered? They have a ton of them, and they have a pretty darn good idea of, like, where that data would live and what it would look like. They don’t necessarily know, okay. Well, how do I go about getting access to a database? Yeah. It’s like they oftentimes don’t know who to ask or the terminology that they would need to use in order to get it. And then once, you know and sometimes when they do get it, they’re just given this huge data dump. You know, it’s basically just a big, you know, in ETL process, you know, an extract, transform, and load. So it’s like they’re given a gigantic, like, Excel spreadsheet or something, and they’re kinda like, okay.
Paul Schantz:
I don’t know what to do with this. And so kind of helping to pave that road a little bit to make it a little bit easier and, kind of start with small projects like pilots. Hey. Like, what’s what’s one thing that you have this burning desire to know about your operation and how it, how it benefits the student experience? And that’s kind of the approach that I’m starting to take and trying to develop some kind of a, a framework for thinking about that.
Shiro:
Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, this is I mean, I like how you tie this back to student retention. I don’t have the numbers out in front of me, but I believe the dropout rate of a student from any 4 year institution is, like, 67. Or, sorry, the retention rate is 67%. 10% of those students actually transfer to another school. So, effectively, the retention rate is more like 77 or 78%. But that’s you know, when you look at that the other way, there’s, you know, 20 or plus percent of of dropout from from an institution, and that’s a big opportunity for this school to learn more about and and ultimately providing a better experience or engagement or better education for the students.
Shiro:
So I think this is super fascinating stuff.
Paul Schantz:
Well and for sure, there are differences in the retention rates for different student demographics as well, and our campus has been doing an awful lot of work in disaggregation of that data. And when you talk about, certain types of of of student population, say, like your black students or Asian American students, they’re oftentimes quite small. And the, what and I I I I kind of hesitate to bring the whole sales component back in, but, I mean, in in my prior in my prior life, it it it was just a truism. It’s like it’s less expensive to retain the customers that you already have. So, a lot of the sexiness around recruitment and and getting new people, you know, getting new blood in onto your campus, that’s something that a lot of people will crow about. But, you know, once the students actually arrive on your campus, are you providing them with meaningful experiences that make them want to stay? And, when you’re talking about some of those underserved minority populations, you know, the numbers are actually quite manageable. I mean, you’re talking oftentimes 100 or sometimes even dozens. It’s like, okay.
Paul Schantz:
Well, what are we doing to make sure that our campus is a welcoming place for them, you know, so that they do want to stay. And that investment is actually quite a bit less, but it requires, I think, a more high touch experience. And and that kinda ties back to the communication aspect. And it’s like, say what you need to say. Don’t say it with a wall of text. Keep it short. You know? Make sure you’re having a meaningful conversation with them.
Shiro:
That’s this is super interesting stuff. Yeah. And and I know we’re almost out of time here. But, yeah, I know student retention is is a big, big topic for higher ed student affairs. And, you know, they say that oftentimes, you know, for a lot of the tools out there that indicate, like, if a student is is not going to class, it’s already too late. Like, that indication is is not good. So how can we get ahead of that? And I I think, you know, this is one of the a really cool way where a lot of schools already have this data. They just don’t know how to digest it that they can utilize, hopefully.
Paul Schantz:
Every director, of every department that I have ever met has always had at least 1 or 2 hypotheses about how the work that they do and the programming and events that they conduct, benefit the student. And there are also other hypotheses that they would like to test that they just don’t have the bandwidth or the understanding about, like, okay. Well, what data would I need in order to make this happen, and then how would I interpret that? And and that, I think, is going to be the next big thing within, the field of student affairs.
Shiro:
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m I’m excited. I’m excited to see more research come out on this topic and so I can keep talking about student retention because I don’t think it gets talked about enough in higher ed. Paul, thanks so much for for joining the podcast today. I think we need to do another episode on accessibility because there’s a whole another 18 years of of things you’ve done at CSUN that we didn’t get to talk about here today. But it’s been amazing having you on, so thank you so much.
Paul Schantz:
I’d love to do another session with you. Thanks for inviting me again, Shiro. It’s a pleasure being here.
Shiro:
Thanks so much, and thanks for our listeners for tuning in. Please catch us on the next episode.
