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As content strategists and designers we do our best to create experiences that inform and empower our users.
David Dylan Thomas
Dayana KibildsUnfortunately, we sometimes fall short of perfect, human-centered, user-focused design practice.
Two of our most common failings occur when we bombard our users with excessive cognitive load and impose on them unnecessary emotional labor.
David Dylan Thomas and Dayana Kibilds are having an ongoing dialog about these important topics and let me eavesdrop on their conversation.
We talked about:
- how emotional labor and cognitive load can put up a brick wall between you and your users
- how Day’s personal story about her college admissions experience informs her current work
- the implications of higher ed institutions being slow to adopt content strategy practices
- the disconnect between the language on admissions webpages and student reading ability and how simply paying more attention to language could help
- the dynamics behind emotional labor and how we might assign value to it
- how power dynamics in a relationship can make it difficult to push back when someone is assigned extra emotional labor
- the inverse correlation between wealth and privilege in the assignment of emotional labor
- a new metric in college admissions that looks at improvement of metrics besides academic achievement – things like grit and perseverance and commitment
- the importance of defining goals and purpose and articulating new incentives when you introduce new metrics
- how surprisingly easy it is it to make things easier for your colleagues and customers
Day’s bio
Day is strategy director at Ologie, focusing primarily on enrollment marketing strategy for educational organizations. In her 12 years in the higher education sector, she’s led enrollment and digital innovation work at Penn State, Cornell, Western University (Canada), and supported university content strategy projects at Pickle Jar Communications. She speaks regularly about enrollment marketing, productivity, and stakeholder management at global conferences such as CASE, HighedWeb, Confab, PSE Web, Utterly Content, and ContentEd.
As a lifelong immigrant who has lived in 6 different countries, equity and diversity are really important to her. She sees content as a true equalizer, and part of her motivation to do this work is so students of all backgrounds have access to the educational institutions they deserve to be a part of.
Connect with Dayana online
Dave’s bio
David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias, creator and host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast, and a twenty-year practitioner of content strategy and UX, has consulted major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. As the founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas, LLC he offers workshops and presentations on inclusive design and the role of bias in making decisions. He has presented at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, Confab, An Event Apart, LavaCon, UX Copenhagen, Artifact, IA Conference, IxDA, Design and Content Conference, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, and the Wharton Web Conference on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and social justice.
Connect with Dave online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 122. As designers and content strategists, we do our best to make information accessible and usable for all of our customers. But even when we operate with the best of intentions, we can still make our users – and our colleagues – do extra work and confuse them with impenetrable walls of text. Day Kibilds and David Dylan Thomas have thought a lot about emotional labor and cognitive load and in this episode continue an ongoing conversation on these important topics.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 122 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with me, Dayana Kibilds and David Dylan Thomas. Usually I just jump right into it, but I want to talk real quickly about how this episode came together. The three of us were at Confab a couple months ago, and Dave and I had dinner with some friends the night before the main conference was starting and just as we were leaving, I asked him what he was thinking about and up to these days. He goes, “I’ve been thinking a lot about emotional labor,” and then we didn’t get a chance to follow up on that and I really wanted to.
Larry:
And then the very next morning Day did a talk at Confab about cognitive load and specifically around the impact of excess cognitive load on students from diverse backgrounds trying to get into universities, and just the consequences of overloading them with extra information. So anyhow, so I just wanted to say that, but welcome Day and welcome Dave. Day is a strategy director at a company called Ologie, which does… Day works in higher ed. And tell me a little bit more about your consulting practice there at Ologie.
Day:
Yeah. Hi, Larry. So happy to be here. So I am currently working at Ologie, a strategy director focused primarily on enrollment projects. Ologie is a purpose-driven agency company that works primarily with higher ed clients in North America. And one of the things that we really seek out, are institutions and nonprofits that want to make a difference and really give students opportunities, or people, opportunities to thrive. So I feel like I’m in exactly the right spot, and I’m really happy to talk about this topic, which for me is personally important. And also as a person that’s been working in higher education enrollment specifically for 12 years, just something that I’ve become increasingly frustrated about, because it seems to be the thing that no one is talking about. So I’m just excited that we can talk about it now.
Larry:
Well, hopefully this is the start of a bigger conversation.
Day:
Yeah, exactly.
Larry:
And Dave, I want to welcome Dave too. Everybody knows David Dylan Thomas. Dave is a well-known speaker in the content strategy and design world. He conducts a lot of workshops, is doing an independent practice now, but he’s probably best known for his book Design for Cognitive Bias. So welcome Dave, tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Dave:
Sure. Thanks, Larry. Good to be back. It’s funny you mentioned Confab. Larry and I, the first time I was actually on your podcast was in a hallway at Confab. We recorded right there. It’s a lot of fun, so good to be back and yeah. And since then I’ve gone solo. I now go around getting people excited about, and giving them better tools for, more inclusive design. So I do that through talks, workshops, and my book Design for Cognitive Bias.
Dave:
And it’s kind of difficult to be in that space and not talk about emotional labor and not talk about cognitive load and Day’s talk, just to give folks some insight here, it is a truly wonderful talk and there is an image from that talk I will never forget. She shows some text from a college website put through Hemingway, which for those of you who don’t know is basically a web app that shows just how clunky and obtuse your language is. And it will do that by highlighting the really hard to read stuff in red. And she showed this super red page of text and described it as a brick wall that your potential students, especially diverse ones cannot get over. And Day, I don’t know if you saw Twitter just then, but people blew up like, “Oh, my God, this example is perfect.” That was an iconic moment, so thank you for that. And I’ve been stealing it and telling it to people.
Day:
Love it.
Dave:
But yeah, but I feel like that’s a great image for us to start with, this very real way of thinking about how we aren’t just making it difficult for people with the emotional labor we ask of them, the cognitive load we ask them, we’re building walls by doing that.
Day:
Yeah. I almost dropped that line from my practice, but I’m so glad I didn’t. I was like, “This is so cheesy.”
Dave:
No, it was so good.
Larry:
I second that. It was great.
Day:
It was a bet, right? I didn’t know it was going to look like that when I ran it through Hemingway, but I just wanted to see what the reading level was. And one of the great things about Hemingway app, it’s free. You can put in any text in there, and as Dave said, it just highlights everything in red that is really hard to read. And then it gives you an overall score for the page that you’re analyzing or the text you’re analyzing. And I was like, “Oh, just for fun, let’s see what the reading score is on this page.” And it was just a page specifically written for Dream Act students that probably don’t have family members in their immediate household that are going to help them interpret this information.
Day:
So I put them in there just to see if I could prove a point with it, and out comes just this incredible image of red lines. And I looked at it and it just made me think of a brick wall and the reading level is postgraduate. Who can understand… And this is one page that is supposed to explain to you how you actually have access, written on a level you don’t have the literacy for. Are we helping or is it hurting?
Larry:
No, that’s a really cruel irony, I’ll point out, that you’re imposing postgraduate level language on yet-to-be . . .
Day:
A 17 year old. A 17 year old, yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. Well, and Day, that goes back to you. You told this great story in your talk about how this all first came to your attention because you were a really bright young student and you didn’t get into your preferred university because you missed a very basic, ostensibly simple requirement to get in. So it’s not just the wall of text. It’s also the whole interaction design and the whole flow of the experience. Can either of you talk a little bit more about that, about how the language is obviously an important part of it? And we don’t want to put up these brick walls, but there’s a whole bunch of other design considerations that go into this as well.
Day:
Yeah. So I can start and then Dave, please jump in. So the inspiration for my talk is actually a question they’ve asked me months before Confab. And we were having a conversation about different barriers. And I was thinking a lot about language and process back then, I had just come from a campus job where I was very frustrated about… I was trying to advocate for just doing something completely out of the box in admissions and just blowing it up completely, like a small group, like a test. And of course, faced resistance. And then Dave asked me, “So what would admissions look like if we really wanted students at our institution, students from according deserving groups specifically.
Day:
And I think Dave, you used an example about refugee camps. You said, “What would it look like if we really wanted these immigrants in our country? We would go there with snacks and pillows and blankets and paperwork, right? We would go there, we would go find them.”
And that really made me think, what would it actually look like if we wanted to admit the students that we say we want to admit. When we write in our strategic plan that we want to diversify our incoming class, it wouldn’t look like the way it is now. And so I started digging into that like, okay, why does this suck so much? Why is the admission process so complicated? And many of the things that I think are… One of the things at least I think is happening in higher education, as we know, higher education is always behind other industries, but the idea of proper content strategy, content design, I don’t think it’s reached many institutions and it’s scary and intimidating. It’s a new field or developing field. And there’s a lot of expertise in some big companies, but who’s going to do that at an institution.
Day:
So one of the things that I like to always do, especially when I’m at a conference is try to find the thing that anybody could affect, the thing that anybody could change. And for me that was language.
Day:
If we just look at language, the process is going to suck. It sucks. But if we just look at language, how hard is that to… It’s easy to fix, right? But how is that contributing to how horrible the process is? And that’s where this whole idea of cognitive load came up for me, because I kind of in this Confab talk and the way I wanted to design this was to mimic the process of a student trying to apply to the university. And as you kind of mentioned, Larry, I went through this and I missed the key requirement because in this process we’re expecting students to visit or click through at least 30 times different things. And then they ended up with somewhere between 15 to 20 pages of content that they have to somehow read, understand, and figure out how it all works together. And there’s a requirement here that may apply to you and a requirement over here that may not apply to you.
Day:
And it’s on them. The onus is on them to figure out what is important, what isn’t, in what order? And all of this is written at a level way beyond comfortable level of literacy. I mean, you need a dictionary, you need to take notes, you need a mind map to figure it out. So I went through this and I said, “Oh, my gosh, yes.” Even if we couldn’t change the process, so if we couldn’t go all the way to Dave’s question, what would it look like? If we just simplified the language, right? I think it would go a long, long way. If I didn’t have to pull out a dictionary and ask a PhD family member to help me figure it out, it would go a long way. So I think that’s what I wanted the message to be. We don’t have to be professional content strategists. We don’t have to redesign the whole process and blow it up. We could just change the language and that alone could open up a lot of doors.
Larry:
Great. Yeah. And I think you kind of set out a whole bunch of that. The whole swath of what you just talked about is like that. I think that’s a really good thoughtful, starting point for people to think about this, but the other side of this too, and that’s mostly about the customer-facing part of this. And I think the emotional labor stuff that Dave… And Dave, we haven’t talked about this. We just barely touched on it at dinner. But my thought about that is that a lot of the emotional labor, that’s more about internal stuff, dealing with your colleagues at work. And I’m sure it comes up in communication with end users and stuff, but can you talk a little bit about emotional labor, Dave. And also, maybe after, I’m really curious about the role of cognitive biases in both of these dynamics.
Dave:
Sure. And I’ll absolutely loop back to that origin conversation, which I’m so glad I was able to go there. Because I think one of the things I remember bringing up and I was asking you, “What does it look like if we really wanted them?” Was what would it look like if they were rich? Right? And that, right? So leveraging this back to emotional labor. So a definition I will caveat here. I am not an expert on emotional labor and I will also caveat it is ostensibly weird for me to be talking about this because emotional labor is very often associated with, and tasked on, women. But a definition that I would use more or less comes back to, I think one of the original studies that coined the term, which was of flight attendants, mostly female who would be harassed on the job and still have to put on a smile.
Dave:
Right? So that smile in the face of having to deal with stuff that no one should have to deal with is a form of labor, is saying, we’re going to define that as a form of labor and it is emotional labor. And it’s basically the extra work you have to do on top of your job to keep your job, right? So in the consulting world, this could often mean having a difficult client who you can’t just say, “Hey, we need to make this change or that change.” Because if you do that, they’re going to yell at you. So what you end up doing is spending a half an hour writing a three line email that somehow still makes them feel good about themselves, but gets across the point you need to get across. All the work you do to for the so I don’t hurt your feelings or so I make you still feel like your ego is important, that’s the emotional labor part of it.
Dave:
And one of the interesting conversations for the past 10 years has been above and beyond how do we minimize that behavior? Is in cases where that emotional labor does end up taking place, how do we charge for it? Right? How do we actually quantify it so we can actually say, “No, look, it is actually harder to work with you than with that other person because the emotional labor that you being toxic is making me do.” So and we can discuss sort of how that happens, but I think so put broadly, that is what emotional labor is saying. We are going to say all this extra work that goes into couching all of that, goes above and beyond just, “Hey, here’s the information I need to give you or here’s the task I need you to perform.”
Dave:
It’s all the extra work. It’s all the, “Well, just smile, honey. Can’t you smile while you do that?” That should… Well, it shouldn’t happen. But if it does happen, we should be able to charge for it, a lot. And where it comes back to what you were discussing before about what would you do if they were rich? If you think about, take any task flow you can think of and ask yourself, if I were getting a hundred thousand dollars guaranteed commission, if this person completes this task, would I make it easier to do? Because all… We can talk about admissions. We can talk about just about anything. But admissions is a great thing. Basically with admissions, I am saying, here is a thing you want, potential student, and here are a list of hoops you need to jump through. And the more hoops you jump through, the fewer hoops I need to jump through on my end to actually admit you.
Dave:
So even just putting your name on the thing. Great, I don’t have to put your name on it. Right? Or giving me this financial information and entering it. I don’t have to go get that information. You did it. Right? That’s one less thing for me to do. If you look at the luxury market, right? Someone’s buying a vista house, like an island, a super luxury and high end car. I am going to send someone to your house and have them fill out all the paperwork. All you need to do is sign. I am going to take on all of that extra work. And all you need to do is sign. Right? I’m going to get as close to that as possible. And the same is true for emotional labor.
Dave:
Whatever mood you’re in that day, I, as the person who wants your money, am going to make you feel as good as possible. That I’m going to do all the emotional labor I need to do to be like, “Hey,” if you’re coming in to look at some jewelry, “Hey, would you like some coffee? Would you like some tea?” Right? I’m giving you a bespoke suit. Hey, why don’t you sit here? How many lumps in your tea? Right? I’m going to do all this stuff for you. I’m going to treat you like an honored guest. Right? Do we do that for college students? Do we do that for people who are trying to immigrate into the country? Kind of no. We want them to do as much work as possible and certainly side conversations to be had there about some of that being purposeful, because we actually want to lower the number of people who are trying to do that. Going back to the core concepts, if you treated them the way you treat rich people, you would be seeing a very different division of emotional labor.
Day:
And sorry, Larry.
Larry:
I just wanted to say one thing real quickly is that you ended your talk with the story of your admission to that German university, where they helped you with that. Were you going to talk about that or…
Day:
Oh, there’s a bunch of ideas. Dave always does this to me. I mean, every time he says a sentence, I have like four ideas that formulate. So the first thing I wanted to say is actually that this, Dave, what you’re describing, really makes me think about the emotional labor of the applicant too. So in terms of, so if you’re applying to university, you don’t understand. What do you do? You send an email. And oftentimes the reply you get is so snarky and so murky and complicated, it doesn’t actually help. But the student has to put themselves in this position like, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t want to piss them off because I want to get in.” Right? So on top of the terrible cognitive load of the experience of trying to figure things out, you also have to treat the admissions people like royalty. Right?
Day:
And we’re not… I know when we talked about it was about being employed inside the university, but there’s also that, we’re putting that emotional labor or onus on the student too, to make us feel good about our process and suck up to us because I have the power. Right? I have the power to say no to you. And then as you were speaking about emotional labor too, of course it made me think about working at a university and what’s expected of the staff versus the faculty. And in the roles that I had, which of course, recruitment, undergraduate recruitment, and responsible for the entire incoming class. I have to work with faculty members and I enjoy it, but there’s always a few that you know you’re going to get insulted. And I have been. I’ve been called many things and you just have to… What your boss tells you is, “Well, it’s in your performance evaluation to manage relationships, right?”
Day:
And if a conflict arises, it is my responsibility to not even make a big deal about it because even if I make a big deal about it and it’s resolved, it’s going to be a black mark on my performance review because there shouldn’t have been a conflict in the first place. It’s like, “But I did not initiate.” Right? But I have to do all the work to make it go away, with no support. Because even just raising my hand for support is, “Oh, you did have that conflict that one time in your performance review.” So I’ve been there.
Day:
And then Larry, I do want to talk about what you asked me here, which is… So long story short. I didn’t get into the schools I applied to, which were Cornell and MIT. And the reason I didn’t get in is because I didn’t understand the websites and I didn’t send transcripts because I didn’t know I had to. I’m first generation university student, immigrant, Spanish first language. My parents couldn’t help me, et cetera.
Day:
So when I got my rejection letters from Cornell and MIT, I’m about to turn 18. I have no plan. So we started looking for universities in Germany for me to go to. My dad decided at that moment he was going to step in and help me. And we both kind of Googled a lot and applied to schools or sent a bunch of emails to schools in Germany. And the first school that replied and said, “Oh, sure. Yeah, just send me all your documents as an attachment to this email and I’ll take care of it.” That’s the school I went to, that’s where I got my business degree. So it’s essentially that same model of the… All I had to do was sign, right? I just attached a bunch of documents and it’s interesting because in Germany I am a European citizen, so I didn’t have to pay tuition. So there wasn’t that financial incentive, but I think they really maybe wanted international students or there was some sort of incentive for them to just do all that work for me.
Day:
So yeah, when I think about admissions and especially admissions for these groups where the cognitive load is just really challenging to overcome. I think about a model like that, the model of treat… As you said, Dave, it’s pretty crude, but what if they were rich? Can we treat them all like that?
Dave:
Pretty much.
Larry:
Yeah. Actually, I have a friend who’s a high school counselor at a super fancy school and she has a full time job of just getting kids into good universities. I’m sure they don’t forget their transcripts.
Day:
Yeah. So, and when I think about it in admissions, sticking with this example, when the nephew of the donor that the building got named after, when that person contacts the admission office, how backwards do we bend? Right? We do everything for these students. We do everything. We bend every rule. We do everything. We do everything we can do. Then it’s okay to bend the rules, then it’s okay for them not to think about figuring it out, or then we suck up to them. Right? But they’re not aligned in our strategic plans. Right? Like the . . .
Larry:
Yeah. And the opposite of that dynamic of the privilege is that seems to go back to the emotional labor part where that’s somehow the opposite of privilege or Dave, does that ring with how you . . .
Dave:
Well, the more money you have, the less emotional labor you’re expected to do. I’ll put it that way. Right? I mean, we’re not going to get away with this without talking about capitalism. We’re not going to get away with this without talking about the fact that it was 4th of July two days ago. And all sorts of it was… It was a very difficult holiday to celebrate for a lot of us. And frankly, I don’t know that I can go on any podcast two weeks out from Roe getting decimated without talking about that. All of which to say, we generally speaking, expect people who don’t have money, especially women, especially people of color to do emotional labor for free.
Dave:
And so, yeah, it is not a surprise that lots of people have to jump through hoops to get into admissions unless they gave the university a lot of money and all of a sudden. And when you were saying that, I think especially because we’re a couple days out from July 4th, that is kind of the opposite of what we were sold for America. Right? The whole idea of America is, hey, doesn’t it suck to have a king? Isn’t it weird that who your parents were gets to decide your future? Well, it’s like one of those sales pitches. Are you tired of your parents deciding your future? Your lineage deciding your future? Great new idea, democracy. And pitch America and all that. And it’s just sort of like, “No, we just replace royalty with money.”
Day:
Yeah.
Dave:
And the emotional labor follows from that, to get back to that. That’s where you’ll generally see more emotional labor. And I think the frustrating part is that it’s bad enough we expect the poor to work harder. And you’ll find generally speaking, that is the case. The more jobs you have, the poorer you probably are. What really sucks about it is we expect them to do it with a smile. That’s the emotional labor.
Day:
Gratefully, right?
Dave:
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Like, “you should be thankful that we’re even giving you the chance to apply to our prestigious university.” And the irony of it is, and Day, I’d love to hear your take on this. I was reading recently, I’m going to blank on the name of it, but a different metric. Say you have US News and World Report says, “these are the best universities.” Right? And they have their own metrics for that. There was another list that came out that bases it on, I think what they call economic mobility. And the universities that do well there are these sort of smaller universities out of Texas and California. And the metric is basically around this idea of how many people who basically are not rich are you admitting? And then how much richer are they when they graduate? Basically. Or what are their economic prospects after they graduate? What’s the delta there?
Dave:
And if you look at a Harvard or Princeton, it’s horrible. They do horrible on that metric. But some of these like UT Austin and some of these smaller ones, but that is sort of a completely different way of thinking about this notion of privilege, this notion of labor and cognitive load. And I will bet the admissions… I’m very curious actually, but I’ll bet the admissions process for those universities is different.
Day:
Very different. Yeah. So I’ve started looking at this metric. I’m currently working with a client that I absolutely adore because this is the metric they’re most proud of. And I’m looking at it and kind of trying to think about this is something I’ve been thinking about for a few years now. How do we measure potential? And if admission is supposed to be really a prediction of your success potential, what metrics can we use? Right now we’re using grades. We’re using past academic performance. There’s a really healthy correlation. That’s why we’re using it. But for students that haven’t had the opportunity to even try academic performance, right? Or they go to a school that doesn’t have the resources or they have to work part-time or they have to… Students that have to do more work as you’re saying, maybe that’s not the right metric.
Day:
So what could be a metric? And how do we measure potential? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do as admission officers? It is. We’re supposed to measure that. That’s how we decide, “Hey, yeah. Sure. Come into our school. And when you leave, you’ll be what you want. You’ll be better off, you, your community, your family, et cetera.” Right? I see the purpose of education to be exactly that. It’s to improve your own outcomes, your community, your life. It did, for me. It changed my life completely. So when I think about measuring potential, so some of the things I’ve been wanting to try, I don’t work at a university anymore, but can we measure if they work part-time? Can we see, do they have a single parent or do they live with both parents?
Day:
What are some of these other things that have nothing to do with grades that we could look at? Do they take care of a sibling? Do they, I don’t know, have to somehow support their family. Do they cook? What other work are they doing? And maybe it’s this idea of measuring how much work you’re doing and not just academically, but just in your life. And that should be just as important as if you got a really good SAT or if you have a 4.0 GPA because you are working.
Dave:
Yeah.
Day:
So in my dreams, I wanted to create this forum where they just kind of tell us this stuff, like do you live with just one parent? You have siblings? Do you sometimes take care of them? How many hours per week do you work on things that are not school? Just to see these kind of other measurements of grit and perseverance and commitment and all the stuff we say we’re measuring with grades that we’re not. Grades are now a completely gameable metric. Right?
Dave:
Yep.
Day:
So I really like this idea of work or just labor as maybe a correlation with potential. I don’t know.
Dave:
Yeah. And I feel like it gets right back to the value prop of college to begin with. Right? Because it’s like, if all I’m looking at is how many A’s you got, okay, that means you’re super smart. What do I need you for college? Right? It gets a little weird, right?
Day:
It gets a little weird.
Dave:
And I know nothing about college football, but I learned this one fact that has stuck with me. So there is a different ways of rating a team. And one of the things you rate is something called I believe, strength of schedule. And it’s basically a way of saying, “Hey, of all the teams you had to play, well, how tough were they? Did you have to play a bunch of easy teams and that’s why you’re number one? Or did you play a bunch of really hard teams and that’s why you’re in the middle?” So I feel like there is a version of strength of schedule for incoming students. It’s like, “Did you get all A’s because you have 50 tutors?” Anyone can have 50 tutors and get that. Or did you get all C’s while working two jobs? Okay, that tells me a different story.
Day:
I like that. Oh, I’m going to be thinking about that for a while.
Larry:
I love that too, because it gets at that classic illustration of equity over… Truly leveling the playing field. And that’s sort of like… Normally I’d wrap up about this time, but I want to keep this going a little bit longer if you both have time, because to what both of you were just saying, I think there’s need for new metrics and new ways of thinking about this in our work as how do we measure the success of our content? Either of you have just thoughts off the top of your head about that?
Day:
Go ahead, Dave.
Dave:
Oh, okay. Anytime we talk about new metrics, my first thought is, okay, if you need new metrics, you probably need new incentives. Right? And you probably need to do a better job of defining your goals. Right? So again, I keep coming back to this example of college admissions, because even with potential… I’m really going to just flip the table here. Oh, I apologize. But going back to that example of like, “Hey, if I’m so smart, why do I need you, college?” Right? If we decide that the goal of college is to make smart people smarter, then great, let’s find the smartest people in the world to make them even smarter. If we decide that the goal of college is to make as many people smart as possible, then you start to look more like a hospital. Right?
Dave:
If I’m a hospital, I don’t look for healthy people and make them healthier. Right? I look for people who are hurt and basically try to get them to baseline. And it’s interesting, even in the medical profession now there is actually a whole new movement around, not just are you not sick, but are you well? That is a whole shift that’s even happening in medicine. And it’s interesting to explore. And I don’t think they’re contradictory ideas, but it’s interesting to explore because I think it goes very hand in hand to say, “Hey, I want to make the admission process easier for all because I believe that all could benefit from this thing, this educational apparatus we’ve set up.” Which frankly, not to put a fine point about it, and again, I would love to hear your thoughts on this, Day.
Dave:
I think that’s where the survival strategy for college is period right now, because I think a lot of people are realizing even if they are smart and privileged, college basically becomes a networking club that they can do a few other ways if they want to. And if they’re not, it becomes with the exception of these economic mobility colleges, a waste of money. Because now I just have a bunch of debt. And I have to take a job I don’t like to try to pay off that debt, and all the stuff I learned isn’t actually helping me the way it was supposed to.
Day:
Yeah. I do agree that it starts at redefining the purpose of what they’re doing. What are universities for? And I personally do believe it is social ability. It’s helping communities, it’s saving the planet. And I think there’s room for making the smartest people smarter. We need researchers, scientists, policy make, we need that. But I think every school is trying to go for that or not every but most. And so what about the other side of that equation? What about making, your metaphor, the sick people healthy again? Or how about that? How about bringing communities up through education? So this all just makes me think. It’s one point I want to make is if any university is listening to this, they’re going to say, “We have a process to allow for students to apply.” Right? “We want to see, we give them an opportunity to write a personal statement where they can tell us, what did you call it? The…”
Dave:
The strength of schedule.
Day:
The strength of schedule, right. But writing a whole extra essay that the other students don’t have to write is more work. It’s both cognitive load and it’s also emotional labor because you have to try to figure out what makes you so special. And in many cases, these students are thinking, “Huh? Maybe I’m not. I don’t have anything to say here. I didn’t win chess club. I don’t play the cello.” Which are all the things they think they should be doing. Right? No one’s going to say I go to school the minimum amount of time possible because I got to pick up my little brother and then I got to work part time. Right? No one’s going to. No one’s thinking that’s what gets you into university. Right? So it’s not about giving them an opportunity to tell us, it’s about just making it completely simple and friction free. And I think you’re right, that the way for many institutions to survive is to realize that. And it’s actually a really amazing thing that they could do for the world so, yeah.
Larry:
I love that this has turned… My question about metrics, I realize it sounded almost shallow in the context of that, but it also kind of gets back to more qualitative ways of measuring things and a strategic approach to like, well, let’s think about wellness or let’s think about social mobility as the goals here, and what are the things we need to do in this organization to make those outcomes more likely? Does that make sense?
Day:
Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. I know we should… I try to be kind, I don’t want to impose too much emotional labor or cognitive load on my= podcast listeners too. So I do want to wrap this up at some point. I could talk to you both forever obviously, but hey, before we wrap, I want to give each of you, is there anything last? Anything that we haven’t talked about or that has occurred to you during the conversation? Just anything you want to mention before we wrap up?
Day:
I think I’ll just say something I tried to say at the beginning that, although these ideas all sound very big and complicated, it’s actually not that hard for people in the roles that we have to make a difference. So what is that base minimum thing that we can do? How can we make things easier for our audiences, our colleagues, et cetera, so that instead of putting the burden, whether it’s emotional or cognitive on someone else, we take on some of that? We can all do that. I’m not saying do that at the expense of your own health and wellbeing, but we do have that power and we do have that skillset in this content world, so.
Dave:
Yeah. And I will simply back that up and say that we live in overwhelming times and it makes feel like there’s nothing you can do, but there is. Even these little things. And now again, I’ll go right back to the red Hemingway slide, you almost threw out. I can’t believe that. That changed people. And there are people I know who work in government who also want to borrow that metaphor and use that stuff. That is this one choice you made to on a whim make this, just what would happen if… And then you put it in this thing. And I think it’s life changing.
Dave:
And you probably weren’t thinking, “I’m going to change lives today by putting this thing through Hemingway,” but it was a thing you could do and you did it and you tried it and you saw. So there are little things like that we… And you happen to know the impact it had because we’re here to tell you, but there are things we all do that are just things that align with our values that we have at least a little bit of control over and they have influence that we never know about.
Dave:
So I will add to your encouragement, to folks who are in this field, make that little change, even if it’s just one word you change to make it easier to understand, that may be the difference between someone applying or not.
Day:
Yeah, absolutely.
Larry:
I love this, but we do need wrap. One very last thing. If folks want to follow you online or just connect, what’s the best way for folks to connect with you?
Day:
So I’m both on LinkedIn and Twitter for these kind of conversations. Either one works really well for me. Just Google my name or put it in there and I’ll come up.
Larry:
I’ll put it in the show notes as well. And Dave?
Dave:
Yeah, if you just go to daviddylanthomas.com, all my socials and things are there.
Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate this conversation.
Dave:
Thank you.
Day:
Thanks, Larry.
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