Live From USC: Why It’s Time to Take Big Swings

Chapters

0:00 Episode Trailer

2:08 Goals for USC in the Next 10 Years

6:03 How Important Is Experiential Learning?

9:16 Providing Immersive Education to Every Student

11:11 How Can Colleges Afford Experiential Programs?

13:53 Are Colleges Doing Enough to Cut Costs?

15:44 Comprehensiveness Versus Specialization

18:06 Making Tough Trade-Offs

20:24 Balancing Risk and Ambition

23:19 The Importance of Board Culture

25:52 Sponsor Break

26:30 Introducing USC Panel

27:32 Adding Internships to an Engineering Degree

30:46 A College Student’s Case For Hands-On Learning

33:22 How Students Can Show What They Know in AI Era

38:16 Building a Flywheel

41:10 Potential Downsides of University Partnerships

42:30 Scaling Experiential Learning

45:25 Where Do Students Learn Soft Skills?

47:43 What Skills Are Employers Looking For Now?

50:31 Making Sure Internships Aren’t Just Free Labor

53:02 Wrap-Up

Relevant Links:

“Why Don’t More Colleges Run Co-Op Programs,” on Future U.

“Northeastern University: A New Model for Higher Education?,” Harvard Business School case study.

“State of the School 2026: Built for What Comes Next,” from USC.

“Students Design and Build a Rocket to Carry Payloads to Space,” from USC.

“Future of Work and Learning Report,” by Adobe.[1]

[1]we need to confirm this is live and if so add the link. If not, just cut from the show notes here

Transcript

Beong-Soo Kim

I would rather take big swings and miss than not swing at all.

Jeff Selingo

That's Beong-Soo Kim, the new president of the University of Southern California.

Michael Horn

We took Future U. live to USC in front of an audience at Ginsburg Hall.

Jeff Selingo

23 schools, a health system, big time athletics, almost a billion dollars a year in research. Plenty of people say a university like that can't really be governed.

Beong-Soo Kim

I actually reject that view. And if the observation has any kind of traction anywhere, it would be at a place as complex as USC. But our experience has been different.

Michael Horn

Then a panel took that big swing into the classroom. USC's engineering school now requires every student to build something.

Gaurav Sukhatme

The idea that you would not practice it as part of your education is almost a foreign idea to engineering.

Jeff Selingo

A senior from the rocket propulsion lab told us where he really learned the job.

Ian McDaniel

The best way to learn how to make a part that's machinable is to learn how to machine parts. And the second best way is to get yelled at by someone who knows how to machine parts.

Michael Horn

And when AI can write the paper, what should a student show an employer?

Shauna Chung

As a former English professor, essays are something that AI is very eager to construct and consume. The top thing that employers are seeking right now is proof of capability.

Jeff Selingo

Plus what happens when a lab's idea leaves campus?

David Barnhart

We actually came up with some crazy idea for a biological robot device that was meant to go grab things in space. Turns out, the company thought it was cool. They picked it up.

The company just got $30 million. We haven't got anything yet, so we're still waiting.

Jeff Selingo

Future U., live from the University of Southern California.

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Jeff Selingo

Thank you, and welcome to USC for Future U. Live today.

First up today, we have president Beong-Soo Kim, who's the president of USC, the fairly new president of USC. In fact, you're gonna be inaugurated this fall as the thirteenth president, hopefully, lucky 13 for you.

It's, you know, one of those rare opportunities, I think, when presidents start their term and when they're inaugurated to really look beyond the problems of the moment, right, and think what does this university look like in the next 10 or 15 years? Where is this really headed?

And so when you imagine USC, you know, ten years from now, what do you really want it to be known for?

Beong-Soo Kim

Jeff, first of all, welcome to you and Michael. So delighted to have you at USC.

I love the question because I actually think that the next 10 years are gonna be the most exciting decade in higher education history.

The reason I say that is because there's so much change occurring — technological, social — and universities are going to play an incredibly important role in shaping that future and responding to it.

And what I would say about USC is that we have all of these incredible academic strengths, programs, schools. We have a health system. We have an incredible research enterprise that spends almost $1 billion on research every year.

And I think the opportunities and what I really want people to understand about USC in ten years is our ability to innovate and meet the moment in education. That's the first thing.

So what I mean by that is with AI and other disruptions, we now have a chance to ask profound questions about what are we trying to teach? How are we wanting to teach it? Who are we trying to teach?

And we believe that the schools that we provide, the interdisciplinary approaches, the relationships we have with industry, and the experience that we provide on campus that includes everything from football games to other kinds of performances in the arts provide an incredibly unique and distinctive experience. And we want to be known as the educational leader.

And one of the things that we've just kicked off is actually reinvigoration of our general ed program.

We have a very innovative program that includes great writing courses and freshman seminars, but we haven't innovated it for a decade or longer. And I think there's an incredible opportunity now to develop a new general education program that really is thoughtful about what are the skills that students are going to need in the future, not just to get jobs, but also to lead really fulfilling and satisfying and impactful lives.

So in the education space, I think we wanna be a leader.

And in the research space, there are so many exciting opportunities that we are seeing to understand and develop cures for diseases that have afflicted humans for centuries, and I'm particularly excited about research and clinical trials that we have at USC to develop a cure for Alzheimer's.

We're also doing work to cure and regrow heart tissue after heart attack, cure cancer, blindness.

So I'm particularly excited about what we're going to be able to accomplish over the next ten years in that.

Jeff Selingo

And I think the opportunities are probably incredible. We're gonna be talking later about trade offs and how as a leader you make choices.

Michael.

Michael Horn

Well, one of the parts that you're... We talk a lot about on Future U., but I think you think a lot about as well, is experiential learning in that equation.

And as, you know, like many phrases in higher ed, it's easy to imagine the phrase experiential learning becoming one of these buzz phrases that means everything and nothing all at once.

When you think about the importance of experiential learning in the education part of the equation at USC, what do you mean by it? What do you have in mind?

Beong-Soo Kim

Well, we do use the term broadly. Actually, we use the term immersive experiences.

Michael Horn

Immersive experiences.

Beong-Soo Kim

But it's really, really important for us to be intentional about providing those opportunities to students.

In fact, more than half of our majors actually require experiential or immersive experiences as part of the graduation requirements, and almost all of them provide options for those immersive experiences.

And they can take so many different forms, say, a place like USC from traditional internship opportunities to spending a Maymester is what we call it in another city to learn about real estate and building design.

We have a program that is led by the Marshall School of Business that sends students at the beginning of their year to the Philippines and other countries in Southeast Asia to gain real world experience working in a variety of industries from construction to technology firms and everything in between.

So we want to continue to develop those experiences and opportunities and not just have a one-size-fits-all solution. [1]

I think that the opportunity is for us not simply to continue developing all of these opportunities for students, but to be more intentional about integrating those opportunities into the curriculum, into the classroom, I think there's more opportunity there.

Certainly in some of the examples I gave, that's happening organically. They're getting credit for those experiences and classes and industry experiences.

But I think that there's more that we could do to create an ecosystem and an experience where someone comes to USC, they are majoring in cinematic arts, they get a job in industry, maybe we've helped facilitate that connection. Maybe they then changed their mind and they decide they wanna be a physics major or an English major instead based on that work experience.

And so then how do we provide more experiences based on their new direction that are going to help them figure out, ‘How am I going to apply this once I graduate?’

And so we wanna start early, we wanna be intentional, and we want to, as much as possible, integrate those experiences into advising and into the academic experience.

Michael Horn

Yeah. It becomes almost a career prototyping in addition to the learning that's coming out of it as you … enriching your academic experience.

In your view, does this become a goal that every single student at USC has some of, you know, some sort of immersive educational experience?

And if so, what does that look like, say, for the English major compared to the engineering student?

Beong-Soo Kim

That is a goal. That is a goal for every student to have that opportunity and maybe even go further than that and have it really kind of part of the required curriculum.

So what does that look like for English majors? Or engineering students or anyone else. I think it really varies.

I think one of the things that we're really proud of at USC is that we're trying not to just slot people into this is your major, this is the career progression. We have so many students who double major English and computer science or dancing and architecture. There's no limit to what I've seen in terms of double majors, minors, and we want to... We encourage that.

In fact, sometimes I wonder if we should mandate everyone to do a minor or a double major because that experience of being able to attack issues and see problems from multiple perspectives, I think it's actually critical and core to critical thinking.

So for the English major, going back to your question, maybe the perfect work experience is to work at an investment bank and for the engineering student to, you know, to spend time at a ballet company. Right?

So we don't wanna be prescriptive based on the majors. Instead, we want people to take advantage of what's so special about USC, which is the fact that we have so many different schools in so many areas of excellence and across the entire enterprise.

Michael Horn

I'm curious as you cultivate that with intentionality, do you see any tension here as in, you know, high touch hands on education can be expensive?

A recent Harvard Business School case study at Northeastern, as you know, which is well known for its co-op at Northeastern, found that they have over a 150 staff members, supporting those c- op experiences.

USC is already one of the more expensive universities in the country.

So I'm curious, how do you give students those experiential, those immersive educational opportunities without simply adding more programs, people, cost, and things of that nature?

Beong-Soo Kim

Well, we have a new provost, in fact, who comes from Northeastern. David Madigan. And so I certainly expect that David and I will be working on this challenge together.

I think that Northeastern deserves a lot of credit for their program. And although I'm sure it was expensive to build out, that means it's also difficult to replicate and compete against something like that.

But there are a lot of different ways I think that we can skin this cat.

There are, as I've mentioned, a lot of other opportunities beyond just the traditional co-op model that Northeastern has developed that we think are really beneficial for students.

And one of the areas of advantage that we frankly have over a lot of other universities is the strength of the history, the scale of our Trojan family alumni network.

We, for us, that family, it really is important. It's not just lip service. Our goal is to make the USC experience not a transactional experience where people come, pay tuition, get a degree, but an experience that they're going to remember for the rest of their lives in a positive way. A place where they're not just learning information and doing coursework, but having these private industry internship opportunities and then combining that with relationships that are gonna last a lifetime.

As a result — and this is something that people have commented on about the strength of the Trojan spirit and the Trojan family since the 1920s and 1930s — as a result, we have an insanely committed alumni base of people who want to hire Trojans and help Trojans in any way that they can.

And I think one of the opportunities for the university is how do we tap into that well of support even more effectively.[2]

Jeff Selingo

Beong-Soo, I wanna stay on cost for a second because I've been spending a lot of time, as you know, with families, over the last year.

And when they talk about affordability in higher ed, which is a big issue for a lot of families, they think about the cost of education. When universities think about affordability, they think often about financial aid. Right? We see all of these programs around trying to put more money toward financial aid.

But do... At some point, do universities like USC need to really attack the cost side of this, the expenditures, the amount of money they're spending on education?

Beong-Soo Kim

I think they do. I've certainly made that a priority this last year.

As you mentioned, Michael, our tuition is high and that's not what people actually pay on average because of financial aid, but the sticker price is something that people pay attention to. And so we made a decision last year that we were going to increase tuition, but by the lowest percentage that we've increased it in, I think, 40 years or so, putting aside one of the COVID years.

And that was an important marker for us and an important signal that the sticker price matters. And for a lot of families, whether they're middle class families or in that range, they may not be able to get all of the financial aid that they need to afford a USC education comfortably. And we wanted to signal that we understand, we hear you, and we're trying to do something about it.

And going forward, our goal is to try to continue to bend the cost curve, and try to keep tuition at least somewhere in line with inflation.

Jeff Selingo

Okay. So... But cost also has to do with complexity. Right? This is an incredibly complex organization. Right? 23 schools, major health system, big time athletics, billion dollars, as you mentioned, in research, undergraduate, graduate education, the whole comprehensive university model.

And when I think of higher ed and the twenty five plus years I've covered it, growth has always been synonymous with success in higher ed. You just wanted to keep getting bigger.

But is that... As you think about the next 10, 15, 20 years, is that still the model in higher ed is just keep growing?

Beong-Soo Kim

Well, it might be the model for some universities, but that wouldn't be my ambition.

Jeff Selingo

Because can you be excellent at everything? I guess is really the question.

Beong-Soo Kim

And I think that's exactly the issue. I don't think that if you're just growing for the sake of growing, you're at least from my vantage point and for what I want to lead at USC, I don't think that your eye is in the right place, which is on excellence.

I think that excellence sometimes comes with growth but they're different things.

And I think that part of what it means to foster excellence and really recommit to excellence at a university means not just deciding what you want to invest in, but what you don't want to invest in, what you don't wanna be the best at.

So I think that both of those decisions have to be made and the second decision is a lot harder to talk about. [3]

But I completely agree, Jeff, with what you were suggesting which is that the goal is to be excellent.

We're in a competition for talent, for the best students, for the best faculty, for the best grants, for the best research, and we've been very fortunate in how we've fared in that competition over the last several decades. But if we are not paying attention, if we are not competing to win that talent, then we're gonna be going in the other direction which is to say losing talent, losing students, and that's not a good place to be.

But going back to your original question, it's not about growth. It's about keeping your eye on excellence and getting the best talent.

Michael Horn

It's a useful distinction and we're not gonna ask you to say where you're gonna make the trade-offs right now, but I guess I'd more be curious about the process of making those trade-offs because as you know, there are so many constituencies, faculty, alumni, boards, students, each with an expectation that their views, their programs will come first.

How do you think about managing those expectations and opinions as you're leaning into excellence and trying to win, which frankly Jeff and I have talked a lot about this season.

A lot of presidents don't sort of have that mindset of where can we be excellent? Where can we win on the playing field, if you will?

Beong-Soo Kim

I think that there are a fair number of observers who would say the modern university, especially a complex research university like USC with a health system, you have academics, you have athletics, you have research, they're ungovernable.

I actually reject that view.

And if the observation has any kind of traction anywhere, it would be at a place as complex as as USC.

But our experience has been different. Even though we have more complexity than almost any other university with the number of our schools, the size of our student population, the very, let's call it, interesting external regulatory environment that we live in nowadays, being in California, but also being subject to everything happening in DC, it doesn't get much more complex.

And yet, I think that what we have shown over the last year and hopefully longer than that is if you put in the effort and if you make the genuine commitment to engage the faculty, to engage the students, to engage the staff, and share information and share the strategy, the the way in which our community has come together united around this goal of achieving excellence, of elevating the university, of extending our impact, and making some difficult decisions along the way, it's been incredibly heartening and has given me enormous confidence about what we want to pull off over the next ten years.

Jeff Selingo

So being here today was kind of an amazing experience for me today.

We were at Annenberg earlier. I remember being here in the 1990s as a young reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education when Steve Sample was the president. You know, USC didn't have this huge national and international reputation like it does now, you know, and that really started to change in the1990s.

But with that shift, of course, in the last decade also came headlines that weren't always as good, you know.

So part of USC becoming USC was taking a risk, taking a lot of risk over the last 25 years.

Now you're a lawyer by training, so I have... I live with a lawyer at home, so I know, like, you're trained to identify risks often.

How do you balance protecting an institution against what might go wrong with being ambitious for what might go right? Right?

Like that's a needle you all often have to thread.

Beong-Soo Kim

Yeah. So I would actually separate a couple issues. So...

Jeff Selingo

See, the lawyer. Right?

Beong-Soo Kim

So the first issue, the fundamental issue in everything we do has to be integrity. If we're not waking up every single leader, every single member of the community committed to doing the right thing, then we're gonna have problems. And sometimes we're gonna have those problems anyway, but then it's about how are we responding. How quickly are we addressing this situation? How candid are we being? And everything...

And this does draw perhaps on my legal training where you're taught as a young lawyer, it can...

You can build up a reputation over the course of a lifetime and you can lose it in just one minute by not being straight with the facts. So you have to always start with integrity.

Now, with respect to ambition, I would rather take big swings and miss than not swing at all. This is the moment for universities like USC to take advantage of the disruption, take advantage of some of the chaos that we're seeing, focus on our mission, focus our strategy on how we can win this competition for talent and really be the best. And where we also could decide that we don't wanna be the best, this is the time to really take some big swings.

And I think being in Los Angeles with the Olympics coming up, we have our 150th anniversary, if we're not taking really really big swings in the research area, in educational innovation, in the health system, I'm not doing my job.[4]

Michael Horn

Well, I mean, it's exciting. Right? Because I think a lot of times people retrench in times of difficulty and it's actually the time to innovate because we need innovation in those moments when there's crisis.

Part of innovating is also having the board at your back. You knew USC's board obviously from a very different seat before becoming president.

We hear from a lot of presidents that boards can either accelerate change or they can make their jobs substantially harder.

How do you think about what a board should own? What should the president own? Where do presidents and boards sort of get that relationship or set of responsibilities wrong and get out of sync with each other?

Beong-Soo Kim

Yeah. So I will not recite kind of the standard just sayings about, you know, university leaders need to manage and boards need to kind of have oversight.

You know, kinda everyone understands that basic framework.

And of course, exactly where the swim lanes are divided is a little bit complicated at times, especially when it gets to really difficult issues.

Beong-Soo Kim

From my experience, what people perhaps don't pay enough attention to is the board culture. Do you have a board culture where people don't simply understand their roles and their responsibilities, but where we can have conversations and disagree about certain topics and that's okay.[5]

Beong-Soo Kim

I am so incredibly grateful for the board that we have. They went through some governance changes five, six years ago in terms of the size of the board, how they were going to evaluate themselves, how they were gonna show up, not just in terms of philanthropy, but also just in terms of their expertise.

And I think that we now have a board that has an incredibly healthy and robust culture.

And the board meetings are honestly a pleasure because I go into those board meetings not thinking, ‘Oh, how can I impress the board with everything I've accomplished over the last several months.’ But genuinely wanting to get their feedback and perspective during a time when we need that industry, government, research experience that they bring in order for us to be our best?

Jeff Selingo

Beong-Soo Kim, president of the University of Southern California, thank you for being with us on Future U. today, and we'll be right back after this break.

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Jeff Selingo

Well, welcome back to the Future U. podcast live at the University of Southern California.

So we are coming off a great conversation with Beong-Soo Kim, the president of the University of Southern California. Now we're really thrilled to welcome a great panel here to continue the conversation.

We have Ian McDaniel, who's a senior astronautical engineering major, and a former SpaceX intern. So welcome.

We have Gaurav Sukhatme, who is the interim dean of the USC School of Engineering.

We have Shauna Chung, who's the senior manager for higher education at Adobe, also an academic career before that, a former English faculty member in the CUNY system in New York at the College of Technology.

And we have David Barnhart, who is a research professor, in astronautical engineering and director and cofounder of the USC Space Engineering Research Center.

So welcome to Future U.

So, Gaurav, let me start with you because we were talking with the president around experiential learning. Right? And there's so much talk about this. Like, when I talk to parents, it's the thing they want, for their kids, and we've done several shows on it. But it's really hard to define that term. Right?

Everybody wants to talk about internships, but that's really hard to scale.

There's a lot more college students looking for internships than there are actual internships out there.

Your school of engineering is now requiring every undergraduate and graduate student to complete a practicum. Right? So some experience in what they actually... where they actually build or create something.

So why did you decide that needed to be part of the curriculum while also giving students that flexibility to define it?

Gaurav Sukhatme

Yeah. That's a great question. One of the things about engineering is that, you know, engineering has always been about conceiving through an idea, building something, testing it out, getting some data, refining, making it better. And kind of the design, build, test, evaluate cycle is so essential to engineering, that the idea that you would not practice it as part of your education is almost a foreign idea to engineering.

And so in a way, when we evaluated our curriculum, one of the things we were surprised by is that we weren't explicitly requiring it. We just sort of implicitly believed that all our students were doing it anyway. And a little bit of digging suggests that about 50% of our students were adding to the curricular content of our coursework.[6]

Jeff Selingo

On their own.

Gaurav Sukhatme

Yeah. On their own.

And so while there are some scaling challenges of the type you allude to, we feel we are off to a very good start with that kind of base.

It's an extraordinarily strong base of students, one of whom is sitting here to my right and he's gonna talk about it.

And we think that that brings engineering to life. It prepares students for a career in engineering. It's substantially additive to their education.

Now comes the second part of the question you asked, is which, you know, to what extent do you wanna be prescriptive about this completely? And to what extent do you want students to be involved in the design of these experiences.

We are cognizant of the fact that even within engineering, there's substantial variation across disciplines.

So, you know, the kind of experience that might make sense in biomedical devices may not necessarily be the same experience that somebody who's, say, working in computer science may want.

And so some aspect of the variation across engineering is why we're reaching out and working with students to design these experiences. The other is that we're... We think that it gives students an opportunity to become... Take some ownership for their education, which is a healthy piece of becoming educated in itself.

Now it's a requirement, so it would be faculty supervised. It needs to be substantive, and ultimately, there has to be an agreement, that it fulfills certain criteria, that it aligns with the engineering education in a meaningful way. But we think we can trade these off.

And so, yeah, it's a bold step, but, you know, as president Kim said, I'd much rather take a big swing.

Jeff Selingo

And so so, Ian, I've been really excited to talk with you. I've always been fascinated by space. I'm a Gen Xer. I grew up where they used to wheel the TV into the elementary school classroom. We used to watch space launches, the space shuttle at that time, you know, live.

And, you know, you were telling me, you walked in here as a freshman into the Rocket Lab and almost immediately, you know, went from learning how something might be designed to actually cutting carbon, you know, composites, for something that would go into space.

And often, when I talk to first year students in college, they often complain that they don't get to touch anything. Anything. Right? That it's all theory in the classroom.

You know, what did that hands-on experience mean to you as a freshman?

And we have a lot of higher ed leaders who listen to us who think, well, you know, undergraduates early in their career, they're not ready for that. Right? They have to have that theory in the classroom before they practice.

What would you say to them right now?

Ian McDaniel

Yeah. So, I'd say that I came to this school very excited to learn but also very excited to build.

As the dean put so well just moments ago, engineering is about the process of creation, and so getting to do that early on I think is super important if you are to learn what kind of engineer you want to be and make the choices about what kind of path you wanna take in your education.

And so I think you can absolutely, hit the ground running on day one like I did and just immediately start learning by doing.

Obviously, your classwork is important, but I think having a little bit of a baseline, knowing what the parts of a rocket are, knowing the basics of how to do structural analysis makes a lot of that work more engaging, more exciting, and also just makes it easier to learn, once you already have a little bit of a baseline. You know what a nozzle is and you have some idea of how flow through it might go. You'll take that class, you'll take fluid dynamics, and suddenly the things will make a lot more sense. [7]

And so having that baseline from the Rocket Lab where we'll teach you what you need to know to be a good member of our team, is extremely important, I think, at least it was for me, in my classwork as well where suddenly I'm much more competent at the engineering things that I'm learning in my class.

Jeff Selingo

Because you had that experience.

Ian McDaniel

Because I had that experience. Yes. Exactly.

Michael Horn

Yeah. It's interesting. Right? They both feed each other in some way. It creates more need to know that then creates the experience, helps you, and it balances each other out and sort of builds off each other.

Shauna, I wanna turn to you on this because I often talk a lot about the need for education to move beyond seat time towards students being able to show what they know and actually demonstrate it through creation and building.

It seems even more important in an AI world at the moment where producing a polished presentation or a piece of code may be different from building something for a rocket, tells us less, I think, in many ways than it once did.

And so I'm curious, like, with your employer hat on for a company hiring people. I imagine this has got to be a very live conversation right now. What should students be able to show employers now as evidence that they actually know how to think, create, solve problems as opposed to just here's my portfolio of artifacts or my grades on a transcript. Please trust me. I didn't... I created this not AI.

Like, do you think about, how do students really show you what they can do?

Shauna Chung

Yeah. So I have some really exciting employer insights that I'd love to share maybe a little bit later in this session. And so if you don't mind me swapping my employer hat for my teacher hat Okay. I'd love to respond to this question from kind of that angle, just building off of this learning by doing that's so inspiring, these immersive experiences that we're hearing modeled.

When I think about how we're asking students to really think and to create and to problem solve, I'm just reminded of in the age of AI how much our assessment has had to change. Because I think more traditional methods of assessment have defaulted to more text-based modalities.

And I say this with a lot of love as a former English professor, you know, essays are something that AI is very eager to construct and consume.

And so I think this really begs the question, how do we rethink our criteria for assessing evidence of learning?

And I think one of the shifts that I've been seeing from a lot of educators around the world is just not just it's really moving or expanding students expressive capacity. So it's asking students to make their thinking visible in multiple ways. And so instead of maybe a 200-word discussion forum post, there is more of this metacognitive checkpoint that they're adding to the learning journey where students are really asked to slow down, to ask themselves why and how am I thinking, and how do I demonstrate that knowledge in different ways.

So I've seen people pivot more toward podcasts, for example, where they're having their students discuss things in a round table setting, kind of like what we're doing right now to think through course concepts or foundational course concepts. So they're asking students to produce video responses where students are speaking directly to camera maybe a little bit more extemporaneously than they might be doing in written form, but it's really getting them to use their own voice and to think through those concepts in that way. [8]

And I think once students really have that metacognitive awareness of why and how they're learning, and they then situate that in a real world learning context, real world problems, I think that's really where they start thriving, especially when they have all these expressive modes at their disposal to really communicate those ideas.

Because I think a lot of times expression is really flattened to this let's make things look pretty, this aesthetic layer. But I think it can be this very strategic and amazing way to communicate ideas to a broader public.

And if you can just indulge me in a really quick anecdote, I used to teach a lot of first-year writing classes. And similar to what I was hearing the president say earlier, you know, these gen ed courses, they haven't been examined for a long time. And so I had a lot of students come from multiple disciplines saying, ‘Alright. This is a hoop I need to jump through. This is just a run of the mill Gen Ed course.’ But we ended up doing some really, really cool things where I was asking them to examine problems through the lens of technology.

And I had a group of students who got super passionate about one of their research projects. They were looking at the impact of our university's expansion on local businesses, and they chose a video modality to convey this idea. And I saw them record themselves live from the scene, do street interviews where they were asking peers about their perspectives, and they put this all together into a video essay. And they were so proud of their work that after the semester ended, they published this to social media.

A local activist group found that video because they made it public, and they actually took that video to a city council meeting that summer, and they screened it in its entirety in order to continue that conversation that was already happening in our local government.

And those constituents are reaching out to me saying, ‘What did you assign? What kind of project was this? How can we keep working with you and your students?’

And my students are reaching out to me saying, can you believe that what started as like this required essay in your class ended up becoming something like this?

And so I think this experience is a really good illustration of the kind of evidence that not just educators but employers are looking for. It's not that students are just capable of solving problems, but they're actively involved in the problem solving, that they're attending to those problems. They have the artifacts to really demonstrate and prove that out, and they're also able to tell this beautiful narrative and story around their impact.

Michael Horn

Yeah. So, David, I mean, that's showing the applied really in education.

But, of course, applied isn't just about the educational side. It also comes in the research end of this as well.

And when students and faculty work with industry on real world problems, what kind of flywheel effect does that create between research, the learning, innovation outside the industry walls?

How does this all come together at a place like USC?

David Barnhart

Yeah. That's a good point. That there's a couple of things where, as I think, Dr. Kim talked about.

We're going through some rather interesting changes relative to both geopolitical, political funding kinds of things. So one of the things that's really useful or unique that at least I'm able to execute at an external research center that makes a connection with industry.

So whether it's through the SBIR process or directly to an industry member or to a government grant that we put that we actually win. The idea that we then generate some research that comes in, we generate products that we've actually developed, we build the prototype, whatever it is. There's a couple of ways then that students can get value proposition and then it goes back into it.

There are two ways that we've been lucky enough to execute. One was we actually came up with some crazy idea for a biological robot device that it was meant to go grab things in space. Turns out, company thought it was cool. They picked it up. It was great for the patent process here that, you know, USC loves that.

They then came back to us and say, ‘;Hey, this is really cool. Can you help us make it work?’

So that's pretty cool. So students were able to continue not just the creation, but also now the implementation of that particular instantiation, which is great. The company just got $30 million. We haven't got anything yet, so we're still waiting. [9]

The second one, which which is actually really interesting, which we're just instantiating, is again a professional research project that we have with nine other universities for the US Space Force.

So under that, you can come up with a bunch of different tasks that they wanna have, which is great. One of those, we developed an AI-based, rather unique V&V kind of a system. So as a result of that, now that was sort of closed and it was restricted to certain levels of students. Certain certain projects that you have that you do things. The university obviously wants students to publish. Some of those things they don't allow you to publish and so therefore you can't have students working all the time.

But from that, we were then able to put that into a NASA proposal and that was cool enough because we actually did win that. And now I'm actually taking all that information and all the stuff we had. We're gonna create an AI in space course that's gonna go for the next three years, specifically to support what NASA wants to do because they wanna see, ‘Hey, man. You need to be teaching students what AI is gonna be in space as we go forward.’

Michael Horn

I'm curious just as a follow-up on that, and you may have answered it with the anecdotes that you chose there, the biological robot and the like. I'm curious about the downsides of being too tightly linked to industry.

Like, how do you think about basic research versus applied research, the importance of foundational that might not have an immediate payoff nd keeping that balance?

David Barnhart

Yeah. I've... Yeah. That's tough. That's tough. So the... You're absolutely right. So... And typically in either a company, a company likes to have proprietary information. They wanna maintain it themselves.

University, views proprietary information correctly, I might add, as, you know, the third rail. Right? Because it means you have to go ask for permission to publish about something that a university worked on or a student worked on. We'd like to avoid that. Right? We're supposed to be opening things up.

The balance then becomes, well, if we get appropriate permission, students can work on those things, which is good, if they're not going to a direct degree.

And then we get permission from the company to then take that and use it into a fundamental research sort of area. But almost every... Unfortunately, every contract that comes in these days, there's a balance that has to be looked at. Is it fundamental or do you have a restriction and we have to work with that?

Jeff Selingo

So, Gaurav, I wanna go back to something we were talking to the president about, and this is about scaling experiential learning.

It's often when I go to college campuses, you know, some people give me a tour and we'll go down to the corner, downstairs, way off to the side, and they'll talk about this innovative experience they're doing, and it'll be like 10 students.

And there are all these students who don't get it. Right?

And so as you think about scaling this to thousands of students, how do you prevent, you know, lowering the quality of the experience so that employers, you know, stay at the table and they want your graduates?

Like, it's easy to say, well, here are the 10 best students and we're gonna give them to these employers, but what happens when you start to do it for hundreds and thousands of students?

Gaurav Sukhatme

Yeah. It's a great question.

I think we are fortunate in that a substantial number of our students already self select into very substantive such experiences already.

And that was as, you know, as I said before, what energized us to say, well, if the number of students doing this already is so substantial, approaching about 50% of the undergrad body, we may be able to scale. Right? If you're starting off from a different footprint, I think the scaling is a lot more difficult.

So I think that's an asset, and it's sort of one of those things you discover in your midst. And then when it becomes apparent, you realize that the students have already done a lot of the work that voted with their feet. Right?

Now what we are trying to do is to lean into a couple of other advantages that USC has. One is to leverage our position in Los Angeles.

You know, this startup ecosystem, for example, staying with the space theme, and Los Angeles is second to none worldwide. I think from where we are sitting today within a 100-mile radius, I'm gonna go on a limb and say there are at least a 100 space startups. I'm pretty sure there are a 100 space startups because they're on a spreadsheet in my office. And so there are substantially more, actually.

So on November 17, later this year, we will be convening them here in this auditorium for a day full of panels for a new space economy forum. And the lunch and the post panel discussions are all with students. The faculty will interact with the industry panelists on fundamental research and cutting edge and new technologies. Doctoral students and undergraduate students will present posters on their work, so we hope there's a meeting of the minds and there's an opportunity for students to either go intern or for projects from industry to arrive on campus, either of applied nature or for basic science nature.

So we're very keen on fostering these, and we're being very intentional about creating more opportunities for our students.

Jeff Selingo

And I love that way of, like, leveraging location, which is obviously a huge advantage, to you, but you're also able to leverage it.

So, Ian, I wanna go back to this idea of soft skills. Right? Because employers often talk about students missing these soft skills, things like, you know, working with other people, solving problems, making decisions, you know, helping make decisions in ambiguity.

You know, obviously, when you interned, I would assume those things mattered. Where did you learn those on campus? Or was it, you know, the Rocket Lab that really helped exercise those soft skills? Or do you feel like there's other parts of your experience where you've been able to exercise those soft skills to demonstrate that on the employer side?

Ian McDaniel

Yeah. I'd say, honestly, my soft skills came mostly from the Rocket Lab. It is an incredible place to learn how to communicate. Rockets are incredibly coupled systems, which means that communication is absolutely paramount to their success.

This is true both in industry and in the Rocket Lab, which means that if you're not talking with people figuring out how to communicate your ideas, then, like, the Rocket Lab would not work.

And so it be... It provides a super, like, safe space to make those mistakes and learn how to do that communication, which you then can pretty much take seamlessly into industry, at least in my experience.

We do a really good job of completely, like, replicating the design review process that industry uses. And so by the time you get to industry, you feel quite comfortable, honestly, with how to communicate, to communicate your ideas and get everyone on board with them.

Honestly, for me, it was quite seamless just going to industry from the Rocket Lab specifically because of the way that we choose to emulate those soft skills.

As well as that, there's some skills that are, like, less obvious in engineering that it's hard to teach in a classroom, but it's pretty easy to teach in a Rocket Lab. One of those is manufacturing and integration intuition. How do parts fit together? How do you make them? How do you make a part that is actually able to be laid up, like with carbon composites? How do you make a part that's machinable?

The best way to learn how to make a part that's machinable is to learn how to machine parts. And the second best way is to get yelled at by someone who knows how to machine parts.

Jeff Selingo

Getting, yeah. Well, yelling is... But failing, I think failing is a good skill, to learn, earlier in life.

Shauna, you put on your, your professor hat before. I want you to put back your employer hat for a moment because, you know, we constantly hear and especially in this day and age with AI around creative thinking, analytical thinking, technical literacy. Right? They all sound good, but often, you know, when I talk to parents about this, when I talk to college leaders about it, it's pretty abstract. Right?

So, you know, they... You know, and many employers say they really don't know how to measure or assess those things.

So when employer is trying to figure out whether a new graduate has these abilities, these soft skills we're talking about, this analytical thinking, these things we keep saying are gonna become more important in an AI world, what evidence are you really looking for?

Shauna Chung

So I kind of have an exclusive for the Future U. podcast in this live audience here.

So Adobe is about to release a research report called “The Future of Work and Learning” at the end of this month. I'll spoil a couple of things. It's been kept under lock and key, but I've been empowered to share a couple of statistics around all of this.

And so we gathered insights from over 200 employers or hiring managers, over eight interviews with hiring managers and employers, and then some third-party desk research.

And the top thing that employers are seeking right now is proof of capability.

And what I mean by that is three things. The first thing is that students or candidates are doing exactly what Ian is doing, exactly what we've been hearing described here is that they have knowledge and they're able to apply that to a specific problem.

Secondly though, and I think this is the harder part, they understand the role that they played in that application and also the decisions that they made in order to make that happen and they're able to articulate that in very clear terms.

And then third, if an AI technology or a tool was used in that decision making process, that they as a human were able to retain their sense of judgment and they're able to articulate that to the employer, how they did that.

And so this proof of capability is showing up as one of the top hiring concerns or challenges or the factors that made a finalist stand out. [10]

And so I know that numbers and statistics aren't super sexy for the podcast medium, but if you can indulge me with just two quick numbers. We found that 92% of employers are expecting that decision making and sound judgment are going to matter much, much more in the next three years.

And yet they're finding that in their career pool of early career professionals, 79% of candidates are typically evidencing or demonstrating that readiness, and they find that this is a gap that's only widening.

And so I think that this is an amazing opportunity for higher ed to think about how to incorporate more decision making and sound judgment skills into the curriculum, and I think what we've been hearing at USC is a beautiful model of what that could look like.

Michael Horn

David, I wanna come back, on something you were talking about. We were talking about some of these opportunities to work with industry, but also some of the tensions.

I'm just curious. Is there something... Like, how do you separate what is a genuinely educational partnership with industry from simply giving students a company project to work on and and sort of, maybe not quite free labor, but a little bit of free labor for the company? And and what does the university really have to add to make that experience learning rather than just work?

You know, sort of what we were hearing from Ian, all the skills that he got that can then be demonstrated that way.

Or you could feel free to also say I'm making a meaningless distinction that does not in fact exist, but I'm curious how you think about it.

David Barnhart

Yeah. That's a... That's interesting. It's a tough one. So, at least, in the research center we have at the moment and the research we do, we don't necessarily distinguish what is a teachable element. Okay. You're gonna... 15%, you're gonna be taught here.

The other is, now you have to deliver something. Right? Because there...

There's a lot of coupling that goes between that. And there's an ideation that occurs. There's a build a little bit, test a little bit that Gaurav talked about. There's, ‘Hey, is this what you're looking for, mister or missus industry?’ And then you sort of go back again. Right?

So there's training and teaching that's occurring in the actual process that's going.

Now the interesting thing is from a sort of what is what is the education piece there? The best thing that we can do if it's possible as a faculty member, or individual attached to the academia is to say, remember ASTE 520. Right?

So you attempt to try to, if possible, bring it back. Back into... Yeah. At least there was a reference there.

Now in many cases, the academics is a great building block, but it's only a starting point. Right? And then you have to take the next step to go beyond that in order to teach it.

The other thing that almost always happens, is very positive, is that the industry, the challenge itself requires higher levels of tool sets. Whether those tool sets are, you know, real pieces of equipment or mechanical pieces, they're also simulation tools. And there's a lot of that stuff that's out in the industry, and that also introduces us as the sort of the research of the faculty into, ‘Hey, this is available.’ Students then get to utilize that.

And so that's another way that we, again, sort of cycle from the industry back into research.

Jeff Selingo

Well, this has been terrific. We could continue this conversation, for probably a long time, but we're gonna leave it there.

Michael, any closing reactions?

Michael Horn

I'll just give you the quick three that I have.

One, the importance of leveraging the family and thinking about the university community as a family to create all these experiential learning opportunities.

I think what I heard coming out of that is the importance of, you know, students actually really driving this also. This isn't sort of an engineered check the box exercise. Student agency is critical in here.

And then lastly, I'm gonna take away that excellence and integrity, Jeff, are the north stars, and those are different from growth. And that is probably a distinction for higher ed historically, but it's an important way to orient toward the future, I think.

What about you?

Jeff Selingo

I wanna go back to Beong-Soo’s point about the board and board culture.

I think the governance system right now in higher ed is not built for this moment. And I think that the care and feeding of the board, the faculty, and really focused on that, you know, on those relationships, are critically, important.

I also thought integrity was important. Think he made a... Beong-Soo made a point right after he said integrity. He said sometimes we're gonna get things wrong. Integrity doesn't mean always being right, but it means knowing when you're wrong and admitting it, and I thought that was great.

And then from this panel, this idea of learning is social. Shauna, you were talking about the podcast idea. I know Michael and I were always talking back and forth about... As we're putting shows together.

We were, as I mentioned earlier, we were over at Annenberg before this, we were in their big newsroom, and people were just talking to each other. And, you know, I'm... My I have... My oldest is right now a junior in high school, and we're taking a lot of tours of college campuses. And one thing I'm always looking for is how many students are, you know, heads in their phone, AirPods in by themselves. How often are they interacting with faculty members? How often are they interacting with each other?

Because ultimately, where we are today is one of the last analog experiences that a lot of students are gonna have where it is very social and learning is social.

You know, we've heard so many times on this podcast that the best learning happens when there's friction, and that happens when we're in groups. And I think that's a really important piece not to miss here on a residential campus.

So thank you so much, for our audience here at the University of Southern California.

Thank you again, to USC for having us, for Adobe, for their support of this podcast, and for all of you joining us here live today.

Thank you.

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