Enrollments are declining: is it necessarily a bad thing?

Author

Phil Hill
November 22, 2022

Today Magic EdTech released a new episode in their Tech in EdTech podcast, where host Dipesh Jain interviewed me regarding enrollment analysis, with a unique angle asking if the decline in US postsecondary enrollment is necessarily a bad thing. We also discussed the difference in the focus on credentials between India and the US. You can listen at the podcast home page or on your favoriate podcast player. I have also embedded the episode below, followed by a transcript.

Transcript

00:00.00

Dipesh Jain

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Tech In EdTech. A show where we discuss education, technology, and everything in between. On today’s show, we have with us Phil Hill. I’m very excited about this episode because I’ve been following Phil for like for at least a year or more than a year and what I like is his view and you know, ah the way he analyzes data and goes behind the scenes to make sense of data and provide insights, that is amazing. So I’ve known Phil, he’s a publisher on PhilOnEdTech. If you’re in education, in ed tech, you probably heard of that blog. feel so excited to have you on the show.

00:41.36

Phil Hill

Well, thank you very much. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

00:46.00

Dipesh Jain

Thanks! So Phil I know you, a lot of us know you as a publisher on PhilOnEdTech and I have some really great, great experience of reading your content. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? How you got into education? How you came? How did you think about your blog? Just give us a little bit of background about yourself.

01:11.48

Phil Hill

Sure? Well, I guess ah, if I look back on the theme of what I do. It’s sort of that I don’t fit anywhere so I got into consulting because of a failed hostile takeover of a software company back during the .com era and discovered the truth that failed hostile takeovers tend to lead you to not have a job. So I fell into consulting essentially to pay the bills. But as I got into it I just realized hey this fits my style. I like to look at complex situations and sort of dive deep and say here are the real drivers. This is what’s happening so I just started overtime saying well I should just do consulting. I picked up a market analysis role partially because some of the things I was telling consulting clients, I kept saying the same thing over and over. So I wanted to write more about it on the blog and initially, it was “e-Literate” but now it is “PhilonEdTech” and part of that was so that I can you know go beyond the basics and keep saying the same thing. So people treat me sort of as a combination of consulting um market analysis and the market analysis focuses on where technology impacts teaching and learning like I don’t do pure back office work and some people treat me like the media occasionally I break the news on a story if I feel it needs to be there. So I sort of fit in between spaces.

02:36.89

Phil Hill

And just fell into it over the past twenty years by sort of reading where the market is and where the big questions are. And it sounds like ah from some of the posts that you’ve mentioned and you know what you’ve been looking at part of that is my interest in analyzing data. Taking public data sources and trying to make sense of it and help explain it and visualize the key aspects for other people. So that’s how I’ve fallen into the role that I’m doing right now.

03:04.54

Dipesh Jain

You know, your ability to look at data and make sense. I mean I was looking at one of your posts, Phil like about the Gates, the research done and I think this was actually a week back and you mentioned that you went into footnotes and sources like the amount of analysis you do to simplify some of that complex information is amazing. I must mention that so you know because a lot of times we see data, we see numbers and are like okay know what if the numbers are there probably this is what it is, but how you go behind the scenes, look at the data points correlate with the story and then bring about the analysis is amazing. I must say that.

03:44.30

Phil Hill

Well, I appreciate that. It’s probably something I need to talk to my therapist about because I can’t help myself like if I look at data, I’m immediately trying to say well, what’s the context? Well, what does this mean? Let’s follow the footnotes, make sure I understand how the data was set up. It’s so, it’s almost something I can’t help but do. So it’s good to hear that it’s appreciated or understood. So thank you.

04:11.15

Dipesh Jain

No absolutely and um, so looking at your background you were in consulting, you went into market analysis um I think what? What I understand when I look at most of your posts is you are trying to, what you call it “unlock the information” a lot in some of those you know those terms and language for general audience because I make a lot of sense of some of these information looking at your blog and the theme for today, the thing that I want to talk about is something that you’ve been talking about in your blogs, multiple essays is the declining college enrollment. I think we hear this everywhere. The college enrollments are dropping, college enrollments are going down, I keep hearing that and there is this you know there’s almost a sense of sometimes frustration, sometimes uneasiness, anxiety with all this data. So why don’t you give a little bit of background about college enrollment? What are the trends that you’ve seen in the past few years and where are we today right?

05:20.98

Phil Hill

Sure and the reason that I’ve written about this more and more is it becomes a driver for a lot of strategy. So, if we’re talking about EdTech so much of that is based in the US. What’s happening with enrollments, It’s ah because it’s changing what schools have to do for them to survive and thrive to change strategy. It impacts the business of technology companies so it’s just an issue that you can’t avoid. So where we are is that at least for the past twelve years, overall enrollment in US higher education for degree-granting institutions has been going down and it’s been going. So this is something that happened well before the pandemic. So one way to look at this is once the pandemic hit, we definitely had a drop in enrollment but that was really accelerating a pre-existing trend is what we’re seeing and where the impact of these enrollment drops varies by sector. So the one initially um, if you go back to 2011, 12, 13 the sector that was dropping the most was the for-profit sector, and one way to look at that is the fact that a lot of these schools, the University Of Phoenix which used to have by far the largest school in the United States is,

06:46.83

Phil Hill

It’s gone down from hundreds of thousands of students to below one hundred thousand students and a lot of that was a shift where traditional schools were starting to realize we need to serve non-traditional students. We need to serve underrepresented students, working adults, we need to provide online education, and yeah, a decade or more ago, too many traditional schools, nonprofit schools, just weren’t paying attention to where the for-profits were. So early on, this big shift in enrollment change really reflected that change in mentality about who’s going to serve these students. More recently, and something that’s concerning to a lot of people is, you’ve seen a lot a greater drop in the enrollment from community colleges than you have from other areas of education and that’s also concerning because they really have become the primary area that serves underrepresented students and so it gets to the whole idea of social mobility. We need to have a rich and robust 2-year system to serve these students. So, all in all, there has been an ongoing change, and a big part of it is trying to look at well who’s dropping the fastest and what does that represent and not all of it is bad, some of it’s representing natural changes in the market but that’s a lot of what we’ve seen. But just to give a sense is you know, total enrollment and the degree-granting institutions in the past ten years, it’s gone from 20.7 million students overall, down all the way down to under 18 million students overall just within the United States. So we’re talking about a fairly significant change and keep in mind, that a lot of this is happening before you even factor in what’s been called the demographic cliff where the number of students coming out of high schools is expected to go down significantly. So there’s a lot of reasons why this is an important topic and one is it’s not showing signs of reversing and it’s about to get even more complicated.

09:08.55

Dipesh Jain

No, I think you’ve unpacked a lot over there. Um, so let me give you some context like, I, you know I studied, I did not study in the US education system, I studied an Indian education system, almost a decade back. When I moved to the US, ah, the first time I got to know or I got to know about the intensity of this was when I read Scott Galloway. I’m sure we’ve all heard him. Yeah, and when I read, and he basically questioned um, and again I’m you know I’m just that was the first time and I saw, so because back in India right um degrees sacrosanct um, you know it at least it was, I mean you know it was extremely sacrosanct and okay, you need to there like there’s no option. What if there is no degree? You know there is, there has to be. You have to get educated um and you know there was a lot of funding for students to get educated. So when I moved to the US when I saw those questions and um, you know when I saw those trends, it really I got deeper into it like, and then that is when I understood the intensity of this. So what you say here, there are multiple things. Let me let me highlight some of the key points that you mentioned. One, that drop has been happening over the last decade or so, it just got accelerated by the pandemic. Second, is the overall numbers has gone down but it all has, it all has coincides with trends in okay, do employers need degrees anymore? What about credentials, micro-credentials?

10:37.71

Dipesh Jain

So when you see all of this, what is your analysis on this? Like you know, I know this is a broad question but if you have to break it down like okay, declining enrollment, what of it is ah is not good declining like you mentioned community colleges, I absolutely agree with you. They serve a lot of underrepresented sectors. That enrollment decline is I don’t feel that that’s good overall. But, what of it is also good decline like you know, people have probably found some other sources which give them more value for the money. What are your thoughts on that?

11:09.65

Phil Hill

Sure. Well if you look at the degree and you’re right. The US is not like India in some other areas of the world where the degree is you know as sacrosanct as you as you’re describing. But here in the US, it still has a very strong signaling purpose where so much of the workforce and how people get into their careers. The easiest way to answer whether they qualify for better or worse is saying, I have a degree from this school. So there is this strong persistence of the degree. Even if you look at it technically and say, well I might be able to learn as much or more with a different approach. So we’ve been talking about that in the EdTech community for a long time about non-degree certificates, alternative programs, and different types of credentials that might land me a job. The problem is that that’s always overhyped in terms of how it affects reality. Reality is just much slower than what people talk about. So I think there’s a lot behind this movement and the expansion of educational opportunities beyond the degree and I think it’s a good thing overall. But for a longest time, it was changes on the periphery, It wasn’t changing the mainstream of education. Part of what we’re seeing right now is at the same time you have to deal with the pandemic. You also have people really questioning the value of education and if the amount of debt they take on or the cost of education, are they getting enough value.

12:53.50

Phil Hill

Well, as the slow and steady increase of credentials comes along, I think you’re starting to get more and more learners who are saying, hey! I do have other choices. I can, I can learn from the workforce, from the company I get a job with and I can do training with them. I can go to a boot camp, I can take just a certificate course or certificate program, and so it’s almost like those aren’t new. They’ve been around for a while but now it’s starting to become much more acceptable and a lot more learners are saying hey, I do have options and alternative pathways. So if you look at that one from a long-term perspective, I think that’s actually a good change. We have more options for people to get value out of education and it’s forcing the system if you will to not be complacent and try to figure out what new workers, what their needs are, how to better connect them to jobs, etc. It makes the job difficult for a lot of schools to react to it. But it’s a change that is as you’re alluding to, I think this is different than the drop in community colleges which has some very negative implications. The rise of the non-degree option is a good thing, I think it’s driving change and I think it gives more options oftentimes, lower cost, quicker value options for learners and I think that’s going to be beneficial in the long term.

14:23.73

Dipesh Jain

Yeah, no and you know there are, there is another point that you mentioned earlier which is the rise of non-traditional learners, right? I mean I think initially there was a demographic that you catered to as you know these are high school students, they want to graduate, sorry they want to come to colleges.

14:37.49

Phil Hill

Yes.

14:42.55

Dipesh Jain

But with the rise of nontraditional students are, were the colleges prepared for that? You know when there is a working mother whose, who has a kid to take care of, and then the evenings she takes classes. You know, were colleges prepared for that, and now have they found options right? So that’s one cut on it. The second thing, which you know I want to talk a little bit about is just the skills needed to succeed in the knowledge economy. I mean you know we always question that after we graduate, do we have the skills needed to succeed in jobs and what we’ve seen is that question become more and more pronounced. I work with a lot of college graduates, right? Who hire, I hire them you know I work with them and they bring a lot on the table but a lot of what I see is some of those skills that are needed to succeed are probably something that we have not factored in in the curriculum or in the teaching and now there are these alternate alternate models which probably have gotten there. So, I see I see a multifaceted view of that.

15:48.92

Phil Hill

Yeah, I do too and part of that is a direct reflection on, we need to change the curriculum that is not meeting the needs of what people have right now. Sometimes it’s soft skills, sometimes it’s direct. I know how to do this job step by step and the science behind it or whatever the case may be but there’s also a do you know how to function in the workplace and the soft skills necessary? So, some of it quite honestly is an indictment of the current educational system and where we need to improve. But, there’s another dimension which is saying, “let’s not assume that all skill development is initially picked up before the time you’re twenty-four”. It’s moving toward the whole concept of lifelong learning. So, how do you get people into a career but keep giving them chances for advancement? So there’s that dimension that It’s extending in time over somebody’s entire career and that one’s not so much an indictment of the system. That one’s more looking towards we have a greater opportunity to improve education over time and do things that we didn’t used to do.

16:57.93

Dipesh Jain

Right and um, you know I think you you’ve highlighted it really well. Um, now now with this declining enrollment which are the institutes, do you think that have gained from this like students are not, let’s say that enrollments are declining in colleges which are the other other institutes or organizations or you know systems that have gained from this decline and they’ve been able to fill in some of that gap.

17:24.32

Phil Hill

Well, the two that are most prominent are Western Governors University um, and Southern New Hampshire University. Both of them are private, nonprofit universities that were started a long time ago, and Western Governors, it was created twenty, twenty-five years ago, and the central design is competency-based education saying we don’t think that seat time you know, 3 hours a week in class, 6 hours of homework or 15-week sessions, we don’t think these time-based definitions are the best way to measure learning and in particular, when you get nontraditional students. If the students know how to work quicker because they already have experience or they just have the the natural aptitude to do well, let them move faster. So sort of personalize the learning and measure their competencies. Do they know this? Have they mastered this skill or competency and if so, let them move on and it took a long time to get it established, and built over time. But now it’s a juggernaut, it just keeps growing every year. It’s fully online competency-based and they’ve been gaining ah and they’re the largest school in the US right now.

18:40.53

Phil Hill

Southern New Hampshire is another example and that’s a little bit different. They started out with a campus, a private campus in New Hampshire it makes sense, and they added an online arm and they just treated it very strategically. They essentially looked at what, how do we serve it almost like a Harvard Business School case study. If the students, the learners are who we’re trying to serve, then how do we need to redesign the organization and how do we need to design a school based on what they need? And so they essentially said let’s forget tradition, It’s a new unit. Let’s organize it and set up the model to serve these students, and so their online unit is also growing very very fast. So those are two schools that have definitely benefited and in both cases note that the commonality is not just online education. The commonality is first, look at the students you’re trying to serve and then design your organization around providing what they need and they’re they’re by far the ones that have benefited the most. You still have your name-brand schools, your elite universities, the Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and you have your flagship universities University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the ones that have a big name. They are not suffering from the enrollment declines and so there still is a lot of power in the name of a school and these elite universities if you will. So you’re right, It is distributed differently and there are groups of schools that are doing very well during this changeover, and ideally, it’s not just a matter of they’re picking up other people’s students. Ideally, we’re learning from them as well and you’re getting a bigger group of schools who can adjust accordingly.

20:38.20

Dipesh Jain

Yeah and not only are they picking up, I mean sure they’re probably picking up from others but they are also getting new students in. I’ve I’ve heard ah ah Paul LeBlanc I think the president of SNHU on multiple forums and he keeps talking about who is, who is a student you know, the view of our traditional student has to change. Our students are not what they used to be back in the days, right? So I think they’re getting different audience to be the student. Um, so yeah, no I think I think that is going to be fundamental to changing this around and now we’ve spoken enough about the issues at hand. What do you suggest like what can EdTech do or what can this institute do in terms of technology or infrastructure? Um, you know to be able to maybe ah change some of this like what can a, how can EdTech help and technology help in this particular scenario?

21:34.80

Phil Hill

Well, I guess a guiding principle overall and this is not a technology one but I think it frames the answer to your question is, you need to avoid the temptation, schools need to avoid the temptation to think that this is just a messaging issue like you see too many ah issue, too many articles online where college degrees are a great value, we just need to tell people better, that they are. It’s almost like convincing learners that they’re wrong and they do need to value the degree. So you need to the biggest thing is avoid that and instead, do what you just mentioned that Paul LeBlanc has done at Southern New Hampshire. Look deeply at student needs and then come up with the infrastructure to meet those needs. Technology markets, I think a lot of what you could view them as is the ability to do that outside of a school with the scale of the Western Governors or Southern New Hampshire, where they can develop a lot of their own technology and solutions. So one thing to do, one thing technology needs to do is get out of the way. When you provide, learning management systems is one of the core platforms to do online or hybrid learning and a lot of classroom learning. Well, what is so important, you don’t want a system that’s hard to understand and that requires training and you don’t want students to say well, I’m in this one class and they put the assignments in this location, I’m in another class and they organize it completely differently. Why am I having to learn where everything is? So one of the biggest things that technology can do is figure out its job and just do it and get out of the way, don’t be a barrier. So some of this is going to be non-sexy stuff. It’s going to be how do you make sure students are very organized, they know where to get assignments, they can submit things and it’s smooth and just very easy. Another area that I think is growing in importance and I think it’s a good change and it’s a difference between Summative Assessments and Formative Assessments. So, summative is where you’re actually getting graded. It’s going in your record, how you did on this test or assignment and we’ve always had those and those are very important. But, formative is more like well, you want to do an assessment so that you can get feedback and the learner can understand here’s where I’m doing well, here’s where I need to work harder. So one of the movements, if you will, is trying to figure out where technology can give much quicker and easier access feedback to learners so that they know how well they’re doing, but before it’s impacting their final grade. It’s sort of a low-stakes learning tool as opposed to a tool for let’s capture your performance and put it on your record.

24:30.86

Phil Hill

So that’s another area, make it easier for students to understand how they’re doing and what they can do better and I guess you know there are many areas, another one is just overall data analysis. Over time we need to understand what’s working and what’s not working, like we’re assuming this particular curriculum is what this set of students do. Well, how are they performing? Are there areas in the curriculum where we keep dropping students, in this class, on this test? Now, sometimes there might be a legitimate reason to say well, students if you don’t get this concept, you can’t move on. But a lot of times you might find hey, we can improve how we’re teaching this subject so that a greater number of students are able to pass the assessment that’s in there. So learning analytics, using data as a way to create a feedback loop and allow us to do more constant improvement in the system. So there are many areas where technology infrastructure can help out but those are three of the biggest ones that I would see right now. I guess I’ll add one more since we’ve talked about enrollment and non-degree work, having technology that shows sort of like a map. Here’s where you are in your program, here’s the course you should take next or might take next, that’s of interest and it will help you gain a new skill, and here’s a record of what you’ve done so that you as a learner can use it to get a job or to get a raise within whatever company that you’re currently in. So I would add that one is another big part of the technology infrastructure given the broad context of what we’re talking about.

26:20.35

Dipesh Jain

I love it. So the four that you mentioned are so important, right? The first one was, just make it simple and easy like get out of the way, you’re so right. One of the things I’ve learned you know, the first company that I worked with, a software company.

26:38.26

Dipesh Jain

and they said, the the founder there said one thing that got struck with me. He said, software’s job is to make it easy for people, I shouldn’t be learning software, the software should be me um and software should be made for me. I am not, I’m not supposed to be changing my behavior completely for a software.

26:46.40

Phil Hill

Yes.

26:57.77

Dipesh Jain

and I think that that has stuck with me because that’s so important and a lot of times, I see that I have to change my processes completely to be ah able to accommodate to the software. So, so that’s so important the second piece on assessment is also so crucial. In fact, I did a recording with ah, Paul Grudnitski I don’t know if you’ve heard but he’s is big proper into the assessment space and he talks exactly about that. Formative Assessment and using assessment to engage learners, rather than using that as a way to say okay, you know what rather than using that as a way to stress a student.

27:32.10

Phil Hill

Yes.

27:34.19

Dipesh Jain

How can we make assessments engaging? Ah, how can we improve the role of Formative Assessments? The learning and analytics piece is, can be a topic in itself, I think I think the systems that we have just do not talk to each other um, and the interoperability of how data flows from one tool to another is going to be so crucial in that entire space. Um, and I think um I think the fourth one, that you spoke about I believe relates to stackability like how can you stack your skills that you make a repertoire or a collection and then use that to advance your career. So thank you for that I think those are four amazing things that he spoke about.

28:11.70

Phil Hill

Yeah, no, I appreciate, I appreciate the feedback.

28:11.25

Dipesh Jain

Yup and you know, um, what do you see? How do you see this shaping up like we are here right now, where we are? We started by saying okay, the trends are declining ah, some colleges are gaining over the others because of the way they structure. How do you see the next four or five years? As far as what are colleges, few you think colleges will do? What is the, what will the technology do? How do you see this moving ahead?

28:40.76

Phil Hill

Well, one thing I think will become apparent and it’s it’s already becoming apparent. It gets that thing that this is not just a messaging issue, I think that more and more schools will view this as that we’re in an existential crisis. But when I say crisis, it’s a great opportunity to truly change how you serve students, not just sit back and say how do we recruit more or how do we get the message out but hey let’s improve what we actually do. So I think you’re going to get a much greater number of schools who are focusing on curriculum redesign over the next four or five years, certainly looking at online and hybrid education and figuring out how to fit it within student lifestyle. So I think those trends are going to continue but I think there’s also going to be a lot of pain points as well. There will be schools either going out of business or merging with others, there will be cases where schools are resisting change. I think it’s going to cause pain for them and their students. So I think we’re going to have turmoil if you will, over the next four to five years but coming out of it I think there will be a much stronger consensus on, that we need to focus on learner-centered design. What kind of credentials do they need for their job? How do we give them more engaging opportunities?

30:08.31

Phil Hill

So I think that we’re in the middle of sort of a transition and I think it’ll be, the world will look a lot more positive 5 years from now than it does today. Because today, we’re so deep into the change and you know going back to one of the themes that we’re talking in this conversation, It’s not just going to be degrees. I think there’s going to be a growing number of sub-degree credentials that are accepted by companies who are employing students. So it’s, you’re going to have, you’re just going to look at we have five or six options to get into this type of career and I can choose the one that best fits my, suits my needs. The one caution I would say in all of this in every case, be patient because no matter how long the changes take in education is always longer than people hope or expect it to be. We talked about learning analytics, we could go back fifteen years ago and go to conferences where people were talking about learning analytics and we’re about to have a revolution. Well, it’s still an important trend and we’re still learning more but as you said too many systems don’t talk to each other, don’t share data adequately and it’s been a disappointment. So part of coming out of these changes successfully is being patient and understanding something that you might think would take two years is really going to take six to eight years.

31:34.35

Dipesh Jain

Yeah, and and you know one of the things that you touched upon which we haven’t spoken the role of corporate and companies. I think that one of the direct beneficiaries of the system improving is companies because they get a set of talent that is ready to skill upskill. So what role do you think that corporates or companies can play in this change if they have any role to play?

31:59.49

Phil Hill

Well, they do have a role and I think you’ve already seen a lot of changes that we’re seeing today, is where there’s more of a partnership. So it might be a large company, who is working ah Amazon, with AWS, with their cloud hosting. They have helped develop a curriculum around data center and cloud hosting and a lot of the field that is in growth in the technology and they’re partnering with a lot of community colleges to provide that curriculum and to say and we’re hiring people who have these skills. So you’re already seeing those types of partnerships, I think you’re going to see more over time. not just the big tech companies but increasingly from smaller companies who are saying hey, we’re going to work with a set of schools, develop a curriculum that we know we can hire from but they’re delivering as a school. So I think you’re going to see a lot of that. There is also a level of education that’s going to be happening outside of colleges and universities. So you are seeing some companies saying we’re just going to train our own people but I think the more impactful change is sort of that partnership where corporations are going to work more with schools on co-designing a curriculum. Leave it up to the school to do the teaching and set the standards but help define ahead of time this is what’s needed in this field and this is what’s going to help people get a job or get a raise within a particular field. So I do think they have a growing and important role.

33:36.47

Dipesh Jain

Yeah, and that again reminds me of an article that I read where they said that companies have a DNA or a skill that they are the best suited to. For example, Apple teaching design or Amazon teaching you know, supply chain, or AWS teaching cloud.

33:51.64

Phil Hill

Yes.

33:54.84

Dipesh Jain

So I think those are the skills that those are the ah that partnership will play a more and more important role ah in helping students get trained and skilled. So no, this has been great. Ah, there are a couple of last questions as we wrap up this um, one is ah Phil, what are your sources? What are some of the sources of Information or knowledge that you consume that you could recommend to our audience if they have to learn about education, ed tech, workforce? What are some of the resources that that you can recommend?

34:22.70

Phil Hill

Well, one person I follow who writes Robert Kelchen, who’s a professor in Tennessee I forget which school it is. But he writes, sort of on the policy and the business of education from an academic perspective. He’s certainly somebody that I follow and look at. Clay Shirky is another one from NYU who when he does write or speak is somebody that I respect highly in his strategic view of what’s changing. So those are two of the sources. I mean I read a lot. I probably spend the initial, yeah, the initial 2 hours of every day really reading many many sources, and one thing that I have to force myself to do is keep looking for new sources, and you know so there are just different places you need to learn. So some of it’s just getting out there reading, following links, and then learning about oh, this is a group that does more and getting into that area. So it’s a wide range of reading but those are two of the examples of some really good strategic thinkers that I follow.

35:31.91

Dipesh Jain

Great and and for the audience, we are going to link the references in the show notes. So thank you for that. Phil, one last question, what is something and this is something that I ask people. What is something that about you that’s not on your profile?

35:49.56

Phil Hill

Ah, what’s that’s not on my profile? Well, I would say that I do I mean I have played in a band. I’ve always been interested in music and that’s actually I see a lot of similarities to my role when I play bass in a band with what I do right now and that part of it is like playing Bass. You’re not the front person, you’re not the one doing the melody but trying to figure out how do you fit in and help different people fit together to produce something. So I never talk about it necessarily but my playing bass in a band I think ah fits a lot with what I do as a consultant in market analysis trying to see how to hold pieces together and keep them driving in the same direction.

36:34.67

Dipesh Jain

This is brilliant! Perfect and thank you so much, Phil. This has been an amazing episode. Where can people find you? Where can they connect with you?

36:43.13

Phil Hill

Well, the easiest way is the PhilOnEdTech blog so philhillaa.wpengine.com and I have a contact form there and it links out to some of the other areas but that’s the best entree and I have a sign-up right on that site if you want to get newsletters. So basically have things emailed to you in your inbox as opposed to having to check the website. But doing that entree is the best way I’d recommend and staying in contact with me.

37:09.40

Dipesh Jain

Yeah, and I cannot recommend that enough I’ve been getting those newsletters and I must say that those are some of the most valuable inputs that I received, analysis that I receive. So Phil, Thank you so much.

37:19.50

Phil Hill

Well, thank you very much.

37:22

Dipesh Jain

Yeah, thank you so much for joining us and have a good day. Thank you!

37:25.80

Phil Hill

Okay, thank you bye.