Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at University of Michigan. I’m Greta Guest, state communications manager, for the Michigan News office.

Last January, president Santa J. Ono set the university on a path to imagine what aspirations the University of Michigan could achieve in the next 10 years. UM’s Vision 2034 is the outcome of the yearlong strategic visioning process that engaged more than 25,000 students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors, and local community members.

UM’s vision to be the defining public university of our time, boldly exemplified by our innovation and service to the common good, outlines four areas where the university will make dramatic and focused impact; life-changing education, human health and well-being, democracy, civic and global engagement, climate action, sustainability, and environmental justice.

Provost Laurie McCauley is here to talk with us about life changing education.

Greta Guest
Welcome to the Michigan Minds podcast, Laurie.

Laurie McCauley
Thanks, Greta, for giving me the opportunity to talk to you about some of the work that we’re doing.

Greta Guest
When it comes to education, including higher education and lifelong learning, how can the University of Michigan make it more accessible, more affordable?

Laurie McCauley
U of M views educational access as incredibly important to our mission because it’s really a key stepping stone towards active citizenship, societal contribution, and social advancement. So we know that making education accessible really speaks to refining the things that we do well, things that we’ve already invested in, like the Go Blue guarantee, which last year we raised to family incomes of $75,000 or less. In the state of Michigan, students pay no tuition. That allows us to be more inclusive to students from a variety of socioeconomic status backgrounds. We also know that we need to continually look for opportunities to create and transform educational models.

We want to focus on maintaining and expanding our already substantial admissions outreach efforts. Our admissions team spends a fair amount of time in Michigan and throughout the US at making known what Michigan has to offer, and that’s something that we’ll continue to invest in and dedicate time. We also know that we need to expand our infrastructure so that more students can be educated here. And one of the ways that we’re doing that is increasing our housing. We’re actively building more residential facilities to be able to house students, as well as providing greater diversity of educational offerings. For instance, a commitment to online approaches and non-degree classes and certification so that we can spread our ability to educate people both near and far.
We also need to continue to focus on access-oriented programs like our Wolverine Pathways program, which invests in individuals between 7th and 12th grade to get them prepared for a college education, for spending time on our campus. Another example is our Marygrove learning community in Northwest Detroit, which is a beautiful example of kind of melding a medical education resident approach where our students in the Marsal School of Education provide the educational opportunities to the students in the Marygrove campus. And so they learn to be better teachers by their experiential learning on that campus and the students in the greater Detroit area benefit from having the great teachers that we’re developing here being their guides and mentors.
And the third area is the University of Michigan Center for Innovation in Detroit, which is building not only on master’s programs, but also expanding workforce opportunities in the Detroit area. And hence, we’re partnering with the city of Detroit to bring new and interdisciplinary offerings to the city to help to further expand the footprint of our campus, but to develop and build the city of Detroit at the same time. And all of this is taking place at a time where we’re constantly looking at ways that we can make education more affordable to all.

Greta Guest
Why is access so important, not only to individuals, but to society as a whole?

Laurie McCauley
Higher education is really a mechanism for strengthening our society as well as strengthening ourselves as individuals. We want to empower people to realize their goals and potential. So for instance, on our campus, we have people from all 50 states, from dozens of countries, from all over Michigan, from all walks of life, religions, ethnicities. They all come here to learn and to grow together. On our campus, you can actually find a microcosm of the world, and as a result, students learn a lot about who they are, but also about what they hope to achieve as well as the skills to achieve it. We really want to make sure that people of extraordinary aptitude are discovered and nurtured. People who may not have normally sought to have a college education because they came from a family who didn’t have a history of being educated in college.
Access is also an equity issue because higher ed is one of the greatest engines of social mobility. Most societies have a class structure of some sort, and in many ways higher education has perpetuated that, but higher education, especially at a large public university, is also a way of disrupting that system, of allowing people to have social mobility through the skills and the experiences that they’ll learn on our campus. So they develop lifelong professional relationships that make tangible differences in their lives. And by us giving the broadest array of people the opportunity to do that, we can also help and build our society as a whole.

Greta Guest
Given the disparities in the education experience by many in our society, how can the university revolutionize how we approach education, both the teaching and the learning aspects?

Laurie McCauley
We have the great fortune of having an inaugural vice provost for undergraduate education, Angela Dillard, who started in January in her role and has already just jumped in to use this database that we have generated by our own faculty to guide the ways that we can assure our students are successful. One of the tenets of this in the data that they have found is that if students start and take a full course load, 15 credit hours, they’re more likely to graduate on time and so having a greater graduation outcome, for instance. And this is termed early momentum. And so building in processes so that students can have a very positive progressive early momentum really helps with their success on our campus.
And this has been shown throughout higher ed as well. We also know that high impact practices sets students up for success. We have a really robust education abroad program. Many of the schools and colleges on our campus have their particular different educational abroad programs, but we also have a vice provost for engaged learning, Valeria Bertacco, who oversees and helps to facilitate these study programs with our schools and colleges. It’s interesting because her team actually looked through the data that we have from our campus and was able to show that students who do, or engage in a study abroad experience, are more likely to graduate on time and have successful outcomes. We also know that just these experiences of studying abroad help to increase their intercultural understandings and strengthens their qualifications for future employment, and hence sets them up for success.
We have the second largest program in the Big Ten, but we’re looking to not only bolster this program, but to make sure that all our students have the opportunities regardless of their financial status.
We also are looking at diversifying the outcomes and the opportunities in that program so that there’s more countries and more experiences as well as just promoting more early awareness so students are aware of these programs and the benefits that they have for them. There’s a lot of other examples of experiential learning and ways that we can expand our offerings. One of the other jewels that we have on our campus is our Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, which I think is just unparalleled in higher ed and has been in existence now for I think about 30 years. Students can immerse themselves with faculty in their research and scholarly pursuits, and I think has just really been an eye-opening opportunity for so many students to develop their critical thinking skills, which serves them well.
LS&A has had theme semesters that allow, again, students to immerse themselves in a certain theme that they may be interested in. Last year it was Arts and Resistance. LS&A also has a Semester in Detroit program. I could go on and on, but the opportunities that our students have are really remarkable, and we’re just looking at continuing to invest in them and continuing to elevate the experiential learning that our students have.

Greta Guest
The university already does a lot to make higher education affordable. For example, $290 million in financial aid this year alone goes to undergraduate students. So what else do you envision for putting a Michigan education within reach of more students?

Laurie McCauley
This is something that we are constantly being attentive to, and I’ll just give one example because I talked about the student success initiative earlier, and something as simple as having students, or guiding them through their advisors to take 15 credit hours, they’re more likely to graduate on time, and hence the overall financial costs are less. And this is a real issue. In fact, just this past weekend, I was talking with a couple friends of mine who happened to have daughters who are at Michigan, and one of them initiated to me that her daughter wanted to take fewer than 15 credit hours, and she and her husband had gone through and mapped out all of the costs involved with this and said, “This is, at least in part, a financial decision.”
And so I think the more that we can come alongside students so that they can be successful and engage fully and in a timely manner through this early momentum is a cost savings as well. At the same time, we’re constantly attentive to minimizing tuition increases. We have been really diligent at keeping tuition increases below inflation and looking at all of the financial efficiencies that we can do as a university to try and keep our costs as restrained as possible.

Greta Guest
Maybe we could go into a little bit more about lifelong learning. Is this a new area for the university or have we been doing lifelong learning per se?

Laurie McCauley
I think we’ve always looked at lifelong learning, and much of that work has been in different locations throughout the university. Some of the professional schools actually have requirements for their profession for lifelong learning, oftentimes called continuing education. I think now that we’re in a period of really rapid change in our world, it becomes more and more important to think about. And in our partnerships with communities and with corporate entities, we realize that they are looking for ways to have their workforce updated and educated in things that, even though they may have gone to college 10 or 20 years ago, have changed significantly. We’ve definitely looked at ways that we can partner with corporate entities and with communities and governmental agencies to deploy our online offerings, for instance, to a broader community.

Earlier I mentioned the University of Michigan Center for Innovation in Detroit, and I think that’s a perfect example of something that we’re investing in now, which we really hope will be a role model for lifelong learning as well.

Greta Guest
Thinking of the campus community, how can we all help prepare for these changes and to fulfill the goals of Vision 2034?
Laurie McCauley
Well, I think first we need to keep in mind that Vision 34 was developed as, what I would say, is probably the most inclusive project in strategy that this campus has seen in contemporary history for sure. And I think that’s a really important point because it is what our community has come together to say we value and we want to invest in. So when you think about, “Well, what should people do?” I think they need to realize that their entire community has come together for this. I think familiarizing themselves with the final product and what it says, what it means, I think having conversations amongst themselves is going to be really critical. I think what you see in Vision 2034 is not only these core impact areas, but you see things that cross throughout the vision.
And one of those that comes very prominently is interdisciplinarity. And I think we need to really actively think about how we can up our game there. I think we’re actually quite good in that area because of the excellence that we have across the board across our campus, but I think we all realize that we can do even better, and I think that’s something that we need to really think about purposefully. I think the way the arts engage us and inspire us is something that we should really welcome and delight in thinking about, as far as the core impact areas. I think we need to think about our core values and how they interface with a strategic vision. Our core values are diversity, equity, inclusion, innovation, respect, integrity. And I think how those all fit through the actions in the vision is something that all of us in the community should be attentive to as well.
The other thing that we see prominently in the vision is being on the top of our game technology, research and discovery. And generative AI is an example of that and how we will embrace it. Also, understanding potential challenges that it may bring us as well. I think it’s just a really exciting time to embrace what our community has brought to us.

Greta Guest
There’s been a lot of interest in AI and how it’ll be used on campus and in shifting how we learn, what are some of the ways we are leveraging AI now and in the future?

Laurie McCauley
Well, we’ve been quite fortunate that Ravi Pendse and his team have been very forward looking in the context of generative AI. I mean, we have a long history on our campus of artificial intelligence from its very beginnings, but in the space of generative AI, having the opportunity to have all of the tools available to all on our campus is just transformational. So all faculty, staff and students being able to work with these tools is just incredible. And of course, because we have such accomplished scholars and leaders, they just really dove into this and have used the tools in really beautiful ways in teaching and research. For instance, faculty who have transformed their courses, allowing students to have personal tutors, for instance, because they fed all of the materials from their course into U of M Maizey so that it could be a personal tutor for their students.
And then the students could send queries to this chatbot 24/7. And then they actually then did research to show that the students benefited from that in their learning outcomes. That was just really amazing. There’s been faculty that have used this in robotics and in wearables. There’s been faculty who’ve looked at it to optimize medical approaches in developing antibodies, in understanding the nutrient requirements for bacteria that have been really challenging to be able to cultivate. There have been professors in the school of public health who’ve used AI to deploy cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain patients and been able to show the benefits of it. So we know that there is a huge ability for generative AI to help our students to provide tutorial opportunities for them.
We also know that it has a huge potential as a disruptor in education. Primarily, most say, as a positive disruptor, but we also know that there’s cautions around it that there are things that we need to adjust to differences in the way that faculty may engage these tools because they know students are deploying the tools in ways that were not possible 10 years ago. It presents a lot of really exciting opportunities, and it’s just, I think, phenomenal to see how our faculty have embraced these new approaches.

Greta Guest
Thanks so much for being with us today, Laurie. Appreciate your time.

Laurie McCauley
Greta, it was great talking to you. Thank you.

Greta Guest
Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds, produced by Michigan News, a division of the university’s Office of the Vice President for Communications.