Rethinking Higher Education's role in Career Exploration: Meet Dr. Terri Givens

Dr. Terri E Givens is a Political Scientist and CEO of the Center for Higher Education Leadership (CHEL). She is the former Provost of Menlo College, and was also Vice Provost for International Activities and Undergraduate Curriculum at UT Austin.

A sought-after expert and speaker, she has lectured and served on panels at international and national conferences on topics as diverse as immigration politics, the radical right, minorities, the globalization of public policy and how to manage life in academia. A popular writer, blogger and social media enthusiast, Givens can be found online at https://www.terrigivens.com, her column at Inside Higher Ed and on Twitter @TerriGivens. 

Dr. Givens has authored and edited books on immigration policy, European politics and security, and race and representation in western Europe. Her newest book, Radical Empathy:Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, will be published in early 2021 and is available to pre-order here. Team Xperienceships met Dr. Givens recently to talk about the future of higher education, career exploration and how leadership needs to adapt in HigherEd to remain prepared for the current fast-moving global context. You can watch a short interview clip here or continue reading for her full interview.

Xperienceships: Dr. Givens, as we're going to talk about career exploration during this interview we'd like to ask you what your first paid job was.

Terri: My first paid job was working in my father's office. He worked in the military for 20 years, but then afterwards, he started his own company. And so when I was in middle school, high school, I would go in and on the weekends and clean up his office and get paid a little bit. So that was my first paid job, but my first real job was not until I got to college. I worked my way through college when I was at Stanford, so I worked in the library and as a research assistant and so on.

X: You're a political scientist by training. How does that influence your perspective of what's going on in education and what's needed specifically at this moment?

T: The fact that I'm a political scientist has had an impact on my entire academic career, because especially when I've been in leadership positions, I think I have a better understanding because political science is really about power and relationships. 

I think it's helped me along the way because I have a better sense of how different people in different positions have an impact on policies and push teachers and so on. Currently, I can see that part of our problem is that we don't have any overarching guidance or guiding principles about what to do, in terms of innovation. And this is true everywhere. It's not like this is just the US or even Europe. 

What we really need for education right now is some time to take a step back and rework the entire system, but we don't have time to reshape the entire system. So what we're going to have to do is figure out what pieces of the system we can take on. Because I'm focused on higher education, the issue of the future of work is huge right now. Parents, students, policymakers are all considering how is that college education translating into a future career? 

There's probably going to be more push policy wise, but also there are current pushes from policymakers to get colleges and universities to focus more on how you're developing skills, and getting students into the kind of position where they get training and therefore are capable of doing these different jobs.

X: During COVID, we’ve heard a lot about adaptability and flexibility. I wonder if you could talk about a couple of projects that The Center for Higher Education Leadership (CHEL) and what you consider to be your most urgent work.

T: For leadership, there's two components. The first is faculty development. The reason I started CHEL is because I know from my own personal experience that faculty go to graduate school, they become subject matter specialists, but they don't have any kind of training; actually not even in teaching sometimes. I'm focusing specifically on how do you become a department chair, how do you become a Dean? When I became a Vice-Provost at University of Texas at Austin, it was like drinking from a firehose. I didn't know a whole lot about accreditation, or strategic planning or a lot of the things that are really critical. So our goal is to reach out to faculty and administrators and give them an easy way to get that training online. We've been online from the beginning when we started a year and a half ago.

We have an Introduction to Higher Education Administration course, a strategic planning course and something on accreditation, program review. All of these different components help somebody understand the nuts and bolts of leadership in higher education.

The second component is basically trying to save small private liberal arts colleges, because they are the most in danger right now of failure. This was happening even before COVID. Now COVID has accelerated things. What we're trying to do is step in with a group of anywhere from five to 10 institutions and say, “look, this is how you can come together and collaborate based on what we're seeing in higher ed and what we're going to be seeing over the next couple of years.” 

We cannot have the same number of institutions in two years that we have today. And so my goal is to save as many of those institutions as possible because they're distinctive, they are supporting communities, they attract certain types of students. And frankly, I think it's important for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion because a lot of students who may not thrive at large public institutions actually get really good support at these small private liberal arts colleges.

They're really a good alternative for students who need that small residential campus. But that doesn't mean we can't have online courses and a central place for career planning and exploration, internships, etc. Having some online courses and providing a way for these institutions to maintain their mascots and even some sports, but with a much more cost effective approach that would actually save students money as well, because tuition is out of control.

X: What's the opportunity that you see in this new parameter for career exploration to be different and to become more democratized by the technology that we have access to?

T: One of the things we did really well at Menlo College when I was there was internships. Every student was required to do some kind of internship, because we were a Business College. And I really appreciated that because when you require all students to do it, that means you have to provide the means for all students to do it. When I was at Stanford, I was a first generation college goer and I was working my entire time. The idea of doing an internship, which especially back in the 80s would have been unpaid, was just not feasible for me. I mean, I actually did end up doing a year of unpaid volunteer work where I got some experience, but for too many students, there isn't that opportunity. 

I'm seeing these partnerships develop between corporations and universities, and it just blows my mind that we don't do more of that, especially here in Silicon Valley. Stanford does a pretty good job of this, but even Stanford I don't think really has figured out the best way to get students connected to industry that allows them to know what it is like to be in a job. A lot of our students, even at Menlo College, would have to go into more training after they got their degree just to know how to be good employees. 

I really like the term “democratization” because for too long, you know, this idea of being able to do internships and so on was more for students who came from wealthy backgrounds. And they're the ones who had the networks. What's really critical going forward is that institutions take on that responsibility to build those networks and plug their students in rather than expecting their students to be able to create those networks.

A college administrator today needs to be reaching out to industry and saying, “We want you on our campus and we want to help you get good employees, and we're going to do what it takes to make sure our students are prepared to work for you.” You're not a ‘vocational school’ because we don't know what the future skills are going to be. We just have to prepare our students to be critical thinkers to be able to write, to have quantitative skills. They have to be able to think in a complex way, because the future of work is all about complexity.

We want to be students to be thoughtful. 

X: You provide support as well to institutions and to edtech companies who are developing and adopting new technologies who are trying to innovate. How are you helping higher education leaders prepare themselves for the future of higher education and then prepare their students for the future of work?

Well, if you kind of look at more broadly what's happening online, there are providers that are working closely with institutions to develop pedagogy and doing instructional design and so on. I've been really digging in and trying to understand the world of educational technology. I go to a lot of conferences like ASU +GSV, all these different organizations that focus on educational technology. Higher Ed just isn't there. Where are those innovators in the organization? If they're not at the leadership level, then where's the innovation happening? Some of it's coming from faculty. I have a good friend at University of Michigan who's really done amazing things with games in his political science courses. And then there are people who actually are instructional designers and are also faculty who are doing amazing work with online courses. 

A lot of times it is connecting to technology in different ways. Some of it has to do with utilizing tools in the classroom, but other times, it's having amazing computing infrastructure - for the engineers, as we did at UT Austin for example, having technology in the labs, 3D printers, etc. Arizona State University, which just got $12 million from the Koch foundation to work on innovation, have created their own group of researchers and people who are focusing on innovation.

I think what we need to do is encourage all of those levels. We need that kind of innovation coming from the faculty too, but we need to provide support for that. And that means that we should be guiding funding to these innovative approaches. 

X: What are the biggest challenges you see when higher education leaders need to adopt and implement innovation, but they don’t? 

T: The biggest part is the willingness to take the time to understand the innovations because it's too easy to maintain the status quo. A lot of it is taking the time to step back and look at best practices and find out what's working and why. It requires strategic planning and incorporating different components. One of the biggest hurdles I ran into as an administrator was the fact that everything has been done kind of piecemeal over time. So we have this piece of software over here that we bought, because we needed to do X. And then we bought this piece of software over here that we needed to do why now we need to do X and Y. And, this group over here likes their software and this group over there likes their software and we can't get them in the same room to talk. You need the leadership to pull these things together, dealing with different constituencies, even when we’re distributed or we're siloed. 

I mean, we are firefighting right now. It's an emergency situation, and we've got people getting sick and so on and so forth. And that's the first priority, but I do think there's huge potential for institutions.

I think there's a sense of being in competition in the US, especially, we're always competing. And that's fine. But you know, we're at a stage now where we need to stop competing and start collaborating. That's going to be my new catchphrase, stop competing, start collaborating, because we don't have the resources. We can't be spread too thin. Then the potential is huge.

X: What is the brightest future that you can envisage for higher education? If we're lifelong learners, reading this article invested in this change, what can we do?

T: I would say that the most important thing we can do is provide access to higher education. And that means different things for different people. But let me take Stanford, my alma mater as an example. Let’s say that Stanford University increases the number of students who attend by adding an online component, but as an alum they also come to me and say, “Oh, you're starting a new company. Here's some courses that you could take too.” I am a lifelong learner. That's why I love doing what I'm doing now. I'd been a professor and a provost. Now I'm an entrepreneur. 

Every time I do one of these interviews, I'm learning something new. I've been spending a lot of time learning what's going on in the edtech ecosystem, both for K through 12 and higher ed, and what I would love to see is more about learning from each other. That college presidents really take the time to compare notes and understand best practices and have more freedom to experiment ?