Podcast: Jean Eddy on Starting Early with Career Education

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. If you’re a parent, an educator, or someone who’s worked alongside youth, you’ve likely experienced the confusion that comes for learners and their families around college. They’re trying to figure out where to go, what to major in, and how to pay for it.

That’s why American Student Assistance, the nonprofit also known as ASA, provides advice and support starting in middle school. Jean Eddy is CEO of ASA. She’s been a leader in higher education in America for more than 20 years with senior roles at Northeastern, Brandis, and Rhode Island School of Design.

All very vibrant institutions. At ASA, she’s expanded the scope to career exploration for 13 to 18 year olds, college and career planning services, as well as advocacy and research on the evolving education and career landscape. Joining us on today’s episode is also Annabel Salini.

For more than 20 years, Annabel Salini has been a leader in education, policy, and technology. She’s joining us for today’s episode and is the Chief Strategy Officer at ASA and knows as well as anyone what’s new and interesting in higher ed. Let’s listen in as Tom talks with Jean and Annabel. Jean and Annabel, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast.

Thank you Tom, it’s great to be here. Yes indeed. Great to be here Tom. Thank you for this. It’s really great to reconnect with both of you.

I was digging around in your profile and was surprised that you got a master’s in computer science back in the 80s. Where did you do that? Why did you do that? Well, I think what’s really important to bring forward in this conversation is that I was

a non-traditional student, so I didn’t find my way to computers and systems and then decide to use that. I was working. I was up against a problem that I couldn’t solve with talking to the computer folks, knew what I wanted to say, and had a language barrier.

I figured the best way to approach them would be to learn more about what they did. I actually went and learned about systems and computers so that I could work through how are we going to do a systems implementation where I was working. It was almost backwards. Where did you do that degree?

I did it at Johnson-Wilson University in Providence. There probably weren’t a lot of women in the program at the time. Is that right? That is, yes. That is fair to say.

That is fair to say. It was really, I think, far more a man’s field than it was a woman’s field. Unfortunately, Gina, I don’t think we’ve made as much progress as we need to in computer science. It is still, unfortunately, a male-dominated field.

Probably around 1990 had lots of different interesting job opportunities with a degree in computer science. Why higher education? Because I was already in higher education and I had absolutely fallen in love with it. I had decided that I was really trying to work through all of the things I wanted to

do and loved about higher education. I was really not focused on computer science as a field, so to speak, but rather a means to an end as far as what I can do with it in the space I was in. What did you love about higher education? What was the draw?

I loved kids. I loved kids of all ages. I would also say, and I have talked about this quite a bit, particularly most recently reading Julia Freeland Fisher’s book about who you know. I met a faculty member when I was actually doing my non-traditional college work who

ended up reaching out to me and asking me to go and work for him. I was introduced to higher education through this faculty member. Because he had gotten to know me quite well, one of those mentoring associations, so to speak, he knew that I had this blend of I like systems. I also like kids and I also like service.

It was really a nice meld of all of those things at the same time. I think that that has really served me well to this day. I just really like kids and want to see them do the best they can possibly do within their lifetime. Annabelle, you took a different path and took a Masters in English Lit.

What drew you to English Lit? I found that literature and, Tom, full disclosure, I went to university in the UK. A slightly different system actually requires you to start making some of these choices about what your major is going to be pretty early. You need to know around 15 or 16 what your focus is going to be.

I was an avid reader. I loved stories. I loved exploring the world through the perspective of authors’ voices. I think I started off life as a medievalist and over the course of my studies, chose to focus on American literature, which is, I think, ultimately, I discovered the US through

the work of the transcendentalists and people like Sarah Ondu. It’s a very unusual kind of way in. As I was graduating, knew that I didn’t want to pursue academia but loved being in that environment. I spoke to a career counsellor.

I was at the University of Cambridge. She gave me a pass to the London International Book Fair and said, you should work in publishing. I went and got myself an internship. We turned into a full-time job with a legal publisher and stayed in that field for 18 years.

Right. We first met when you were at Pearson. We did. We did. Maybe 10 years ago.

I think that’s right. I was working with a lot of university leaders as they were thinking about embracing online learning. Jean and Annabelle, you are a little bit of the ying and yang of ASA now with the degrees in computer science.

That’s probably why you’re good strategy partners. Is that fair? Yeah. I would say that’s more than fair. Jean, tell us a little bit about ASA.

It has an interesting origin story. Yeah. ASA started off 60-some-years ago as a federal guarantor. Primarily what that meant was we made sure that young people who were getting student loans to go to college had the best means to repay those loans.

In other words, they could take advantage of the best methods to be able to do that. I think we took it really seriously. We were always connecting with students one-on-one and trying to make sure that they had the best outcomes. I think what we found over time, however, was that despite our best efforts, we were

still not having the kind of impact we wanted to have with young people as far as being able to cut down on the amount of defaults that people had, certainly the amount of money that kids decided to borrow. We were more and more talking with young folks as we were trying to have them figure out what were the best ways to repay their loans.

We were hearing things like, gee, I wish I hadn’t borrowed so much money or I wish I knew more about what my career choices were before I started this process, et cetera. I think that when we decided to really take a hard look at how we could have better impact a couple of years ago, we realized that in order to do this effectively and have the most impact, we really needed to start to help young people as they were thinking about

career choice, about paths that they might take as far as the things they would study, the things that they love to do and what that might mean for them as far as things they could do for the rest of their lives, and be able to help them figure out what this journey could be so that by the time they finished high school, they would have a better direction or a plan and ideally make different choices than what they might have made without

that information. Yeah, that’s such a key insight, Gene, that I think 20 or 30 years ago we could just send kids off to college and they could find themselves and stumble into a job. That was through the American dream, was that escalator, push kids to college and they’ll get a better job than you had and the world’s become a lot more complicated and I think

your insight that guidance is important, more important than ever and needs to start earlier than it has is really, really key. I’ve said this a number of times, people remind me that I say it maybe too many times, but college is a wonderful experience and it represents so many things to so many young people and I don’t want to minimize that.

You learn how to think, you learn how to make lifelong friends, often times you meet your life partner and you also do an awful lot of discovery during that process, but if college has become more and more expensive, it’s a really expensive way to do discovery and I think that a lot of parents and I think the American public are looking at R.R. why as far as what college is and I think because of that they are equating it with what you,

you know, what the career is or what the job is that you end up with after a college education. I think that that’s unfortunate because I think a college education presents so many more things, but I certainly understand that the price tag is very, very high. It is and we’re talking at a point where America has in some respects fallen out of love with higher education or at least the majority of people are confused and concerned

that a recent Gallup poll indicated that Americans are angry about the cost and as you said, confused about the value of college or particular pathways. Do you have a sense of why that’s happening? I think a lot of it has to do with the whole idea of the immediacy of employment after college. And I think that an awful lot of young people can’t make that direct leap into a position

after they leave college and it oftentimes has to do with the fact that they haven’t had the prep time ahead of time to be able to figure out what are those paths that I might be able to take. And for many college graduates, there are many, but again, if they haven’t had that kind of internal conversation, if they haven’t had the guidance along the way to say, gee,

maybe you should try this or maybe you should think about that or do you realize the number of things you could do with an interest in justice one field? I think those conversations are happening too late and an awful lot of college graduates are in career prep offices after the fact because they didn’t have those conversations maybe five years before that.

Annabelle, you’ve been thinking about the changing nature of work, what some people call future of work, what the World Economic Forum calls its fourth industrial revolution. How do you think about change, the changing nature of work? Are the drivers that you see that have most significant implications for education? Yeah, I think, well, the first thing I would say, Tom, is I think that a lot of that conversation

has been focused on the intersection of, as Dean says, college to work and to some extent high school directly into work and CBE careers. I think and certainly we’re fortunate to be here in New England in the Boston area where there are a number of really thoughtful people at our universities doing research and working in this area.

What I have seen is a dearth of work in this phase of what are the implications for middle and high school. So when I think about the world of work in 2030, full disclosure, I’m the parent of two middle schoolers, so this is also personal for me. What skills and what jobs will exist that they will graduate into?

And I think that’s a space that requires more exploration and it’s a space that ASA is thinking about. I am pleased to see that the conversation is focused on starting to focus more on skills rather than jobs because I think we know that jobs that those kids will be moving into don’t exist today.

And I think that’s really difficult for mentors and families and educators to talk about with kids, jobs that they don’t even know exist. I think one of the things that we’ve talked about in some of our work is how do we help parents and educators get more savvy and aware of this changing world of work if this is not something that they’re immediately connected to?

We know that particularly middle schoolers are developmentally going to be interested in hearing from parents and educators about what those opportunities are. So we think more research, more focus on skills and transferable skills. We know that generation is likely to have upward of 10 jobs as the course of their career. So how do we build young people that are resilient and are coming into the workforce

with a set of skills that allows them that sort of flexibility and creativity? I think another major shift that we see coming with this generation emerging now and I think it will actually continue for the foreseeable future is kids looking to build their own career. They don’t necessarily want to work for large corporations.

They don’t necessarily want to work in an office. They want to be able to piece together and patch together meaningful work, work of their choosing, working for organizations that align to their values. And I think some of these shifts are going to have a profound effect on the future of work.

Yeah, I appreciate all of those insights. In guidance, we can get, I love to focus on helping kids get jobs and I appreciate your focus on skills. In many cases, young people will be making jobs through entrepreneurship or flourishing in a freelance economy where their career really is more a sequence of projects than

it is a sequence of jobs in the traditional sense. You talked about resilience and I talked about projects and project management. What other key skills, when you talked about transferable skills, what other skills would you headline as becoming more important in the innovation economy? I think, well some of these are going to sound a little trite, but they’re also not necessarily

things that we are preparing them for right now. Certainly teamwork, the ability to work together on projects to figure out team dynamics, be able to be in productively. When I think about our education system, I get very excited when we’ve certainly seen it in some of our grantee schools, the project-based learning is really, I think, a quick in-kiss

with some of those skills that’s which is exciting to see. We want to see more of that. Communication skills, I think being able to not only communicate with each other, but be able to talk to an audience, be persuasive, particularly if they’re going to be self-employed or be able to have them self-insult into organizations and sell their ideas across organizations.

I think these are really important skills. I’m a huge proponent of some great work that’s happening in my kids’ school districts with sort of organizations like Model U Learning Debate. These are incredibly important skills that I see happening perhaps more in informal learning settings, frankly, than in school settings.

Annabelle, as a parent of middle school kids, what advice do you have for other parents of that age? What kinds of activities do you think are particularly productive for middle school students? We talk a lot internally at ASA as sort of middle school being a really great moment, and I think Jean alluded to this.

To help kids understand their interests, their attitudes and their skills, we think that they can start that work early to know themselves, to understand what it is that kind of lights them up, that gets them excited. That’s helpful academically in terms of sort of connecting themselves to the work that they’re doing, but I think helping them with that self-execration and being mindful about

that, like when are they in a situation that they’re really enjoying themselves, having a moment of flow or feeling really connected to the work, and giving them more access to that. You know, she’s got a kid that likes working with their hands, giving them more of that. Are they a kid that likes being outside? Are they very kinetic?

I think being very mindful of that and helping kids make those connections is important. Unfortunately, at ASA, I think in part because of our mission, but also because we are squarely kid-centered, we love having young people in our space and in our office. I also think taking your kids to work, exposing them to what it’s like to be in an office or in a building with other professionals and colleagues and modeling that is also

understanding that that’s not always possible for everybody, but whether a parent or a mentor or a friend is able to provide that kind of exposure, I think is really important. We’re also supporting a number of organizations that have implemented this and are working with schools to actually take kids and do work, which is terrific, but recognizing that not every district or every individual is able to do that, I think that sort of exposure

is really important as well. Right. Work experience, I’ve written several times recently, work experience may actually be more to making good career choices and being employable than formal education, and that often starts with informal job shadows, visiting workplaces. I appreciate that and I think it’s great advice. Gene, in 2018, you expanded the mission at ASA to really start

in middle school. Maybe you could, we’ve touched on it a couple of times, but that was a really significant change for ASA. Maybe you could talk about why that change and what services you offer for middle school students and teachers. Sure. I think that, as I’ve said on a few occasions, when we decided to enhance our mission, we didn’t do it lightly. We really went into a period of a lot of research and a lot of

conversation with a lot of organizations about what made sense in this space. What was clear to us after all this research is that middle school kids really have the capacity to still wonder, to still want to experiment and engage, and they are not as focused about their friends attitudes when they haven’t had the amount of time to really get something set in stone, so to speak. It’s just a great time to be able to offer some new things and allow a

chance for a student to go exploring. The more research we did, we found that in every single case, that was underscored. We started to really work with middle school students, and this was a new area for us, no doubt. We have worked with high school students and college students for a number of years, but not middle schoolers. We spent a lot of time looking at the things that we

could do. I know, Tom, that you’re familiar with the videos that we have on our website, which really allows students as early as middle school to go out and explore, to see the kinds of things that kids their age are thinking about, wondering about, and experimenting with. Having them understand that, there are many ways to get out of an issue, but also that there are all kinds of kids across the country who are thinking the same things that

they are thinking right now. We have been going directly to kids to do that, and we have had an enormous response in that regard. Currently, we started working with school systems to support exploration classes, so that kids starting in seventh and eighth grade could go and try things that they may not otherwise want to try.

In our first project, we have the year’s first data on that, and what was very interesting to me was, to a kid, they all liked it. They liked the idea of being able to go out and do things and try things that they hadn’t done before. 48%, I believe, of the kids who participated said that they would like to go on to the next thing. Most of these classes were STEM classes. We also had a significant number

of students, almost 30%, say they never wanted to take another STEM course again, which as far as I’m concerned, is success, because it’s simply saying that they are trying something, they might have enjoyed that experience, but it’s certainly not something they might want to do again. We have broadened that program now to be able to have middle schools in particular be able

to offer different ways of exploring. Some people are doing maker labs, some people are doing the exploration classes like I spoke about, but the schools themselves are really the architects of what those programs might be like. Concurrently, we are supporting, in the state of Massachusetts, we are supporting apprenticeship programs through a pathway program with a commonwealth that allows students in high schools

to be able to take college credits, but also do apprenticeships that will allow them to have a certain number of hours up against a certification. Then in addition to that, we are also working with school systems, and I know that you know these folks very well, but we are supporting eight districts in California in the world of work notion as far as how we can work with school systems to have this be, I would say,

a state of being as far as exploring and being able to see how that exploration could turn into a career or a pathway to a career as they move through the system. We have had a multiple prying approach, and concurrently we are also making sure that everything we do is really backed by research. We are studying our own programs to be able to have a platform where we can go forward

to policymakers and influencers across the country to be able to join with us in what we think is pretty important work. Gene, let’s give a shout out to our friends from Cajon Valley. Ed Hidalgo, David Miyashiro, build what we think is the best K-8 career education system in America.

I know they really appreciate your support. We appreciate the ways in which they are integrating career education into the core curriculum and allowing kids to explore different career pathways and all the while reflect on their own strengths, interests, and values and how those match up with the opportunities in different career clusters.

We appreciate that you are helping that work scale to new districts. It will be fun to be together with Ed Hidalgo at LearnLaunch very shortly. Yes, indeed. Indeed. Annabelle, you have helped ASA expand its work in advocacy and policy.

What’s your organization doing there? We’re very fortunate to have a phenomenal advocacy and policy team led by Julie Lamas, who really, when we think about our work, so we’re doing this work, as Gene says, in schools. We’re also doing work direct to kids, which Gene can talk about in a second.

We think the third pillar of our work that’s really important is this advocacy and policy work when we think about scale. Understanding that as we identify that practice of what’s working, measuring the impact of this work and how we hope it will allow kids to graduate with a better sense of themselves and where they go next will lead to better post-secondary outcomes.

And a motivated and credentialed workforce, which will continue to support the growth of the nation. I think this is a really important advocacy pillar because we also recognize that if we’re asking school districts and organizations across the country to change something, they will need the resource and political support to change.

We think that having at the center of the job to be done for our elementary and secondary schools, this notion of career exploration and career development, that it exists not just within CTE, but actually for every kid on whatever pathway that we’re on, recognizing that that will need support and need support both at the federal and state level. Gene has alluded to the fact that we are funding some of that work in Massachusetts, but we

think it’s important that policymakers, politicians, get behind this as a movement and support it and that will be the thing that drives scale and systemic change. Gene, we’re all going to be together at Learn Launch in a few days. Why support that organization? What are you excited about there?

I think it’s really an opportunity to come together with some of the most influential policymakers in this space, policymakers, philanthropists, tech, the education community to be able to talk about this particular aspect of how we can work with young people to impact their education is really just a wonderful opportunity for us to get their insights, their input, have conversations to see how we can elevate this issue and bring

it to the next level. We are incredibly excited about working with them this year and I believe that they are seen as a major commuter in this country and to be able to join that is really, I think, a testament to what ASA has been able to do, but also to see what Learn Launch represents. I think the Learn Launch Conference is really the best regional convening on innovations

and learning. I think Learn Launch is probably the best regional ecosystem facilitator around innovations and learning. I think we both appreciate the work that they’re doing. Jean, as you look down the road a year or two, what’s on the roadmap for ASA?

Where would you like to make additional impact? I think one of the biggest excitements I have coming into work every day is how we can interact directly with young people. I talked before about our videos and allowing young people to be able to see themselves in those experiences.

Later this year, hopefully by early spring this year, we will be launching a product that will let young people be able to take the next step in that exploration. We’re really excited about that here and I think it is going to be an opportunity to offer a form of informal education to young people that will help supplement their journey through the typical education process.

I think that that and certainly increased partnerships, I think our partnership with Learn Launch is certainly going to move us in new directions. We are working with Mentor to establish a stronger connection with them. We have many, many things in the works. I think all in the hope that we can have the kind of impact with young people that we think

we can have in the near term. Yeah, that’s really exciting. Annabel, anything you want to add on the roadmap going forward? Just piggyback what Jean was saying about partners. I think one of the things that we recognize and you use the word ecosystem, which is the

word probably overused here, is that we recognize that things is work that we can do. It requires a village and we are thrilled to be partnering with content partners, with implementation partners. We are looking to expand that work and are keen to do that. Another reason why we’re excited to be at Learn Launch and actually a number of conferences

over the course of 2020 to shine a light on some of the superb work that our partners are doing, you reference world of work. We want to bring those stories to a wider audience so others can be as excited and as inspired as we are by their work. But also, every day I have the wonderful privilege of talking to people doing really interesting

work in space. Being able to find new partners as well is something that is an absolute top priority for us in 2020. Annabelle, where can people go to learn more and find the resources we’ve been talking about?

ASA.org is a great place to start. It’s great. ASA.org, a terrific place both for young people and teachers, nonprofit organizations, thinking about providing guidance resources for young people. Gene and Annabelle, we really appreciate the work that you guys are doing at ASA.

Thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you for having us. Thank you. A big thanks to Gene and Annabelle for joining us on today’s podcast. Check out ASA.org for great career guidance and resources.

And before you go, be sure to rate and review the show. It helps us get better and helps more of your friends find us. That’s it for today, listeners. Thanks for tuning in. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.