President Koppell Speaks at U.S. News & World Report Leadership Event

On December 12, 2023, U.S. News & World Report hosted an exclusive breakfast forum in New York City on leadership in higher education. Speakers, including President Koppell, examined the latest trends and insights about leadership and the changing landscape of education. Discussion explored the opportunities and challenges facing leaders at colleges and universities across the country right now.

Below is a video and transcript of President Koppell’s conversation with Brian Kelly, Editor at Large of U.S. News & World Report.

Additional speakers included James Kvaal, under secretary of the U.S. Department of Education; John B. King Jr., chancellor, The State University of New York, and 10th U.S. secretary of Education; Mildred Garcia, chancellor, California State University; and Ari Berman, president, Yeshiva University. For more about the event, click here.

Brian Kelly:

Jonathan Koppell, President of Montclair State University.

We are not going to get the longest word, but we are going to get the last word. And I will often take that as the better alternative.

We have a lot of things that we want to touch on here. I’m Brian Kelly. I’m not Eric Gertler, as it says on your program. I used to be Eric Gertler but not anymore. But I’m pleased to be here with Jonathan. I grew up in Clifton, New Jersey. First university I ever saw was Montclair State, it was big and it’s always stuck in my heart, so I’m delighted to be able to be here with Jonathan.

Among other things, Montclair State has recently been named one of our highest ranked schools for social mobility. There’s a lot of other things we can talk about. Jonathan’s biography is terrific. He was at Arizona State University which is very innovative, and is doing innovative things at Montclair State.

But let’s get into the quick lightning round here. What did we hear today? Jonathan, what are we taking away from a lot of information?

Jonathan Koppell:

I think we can use this as an opportunity to try and synthesize, in addition to talking about some of the stuff we want to talk about. And I should say just so I have credibility, I went to PS 81 and 141 in the Bronx. So I fit in with the panel today.

So the main thing I take away is that the story of higher education that’s reported in The New York Times, which makes it seem like the world is Harvard and the Ivy League, is just completely wrong. I’m not talking about the hearings and the general craziness of the last week. I’m just saying that the idea that the Ivy League is representative of higher education in America, both the good and the challenges, is just wrong.

The way that Chancellors King and Garcia talked about their mission and what they’re doing, I can tell you – and it reflects on those poll numbers – Chancellors King and Garcia are thinking about a lot of things, but the size of the endowment that they have to manage and whether or not the movement of the S&P 500 is affected, that’s not one of them.

And so I think what we need to take from this session is to reorient the conversation around higher education away from the dynamics of a few small institutions. And by the way, I’m not even just talking about the degree to which those institutions are creating pathways for students who are marginalized from higher education, even some of the logistical things. So you heard President Berman talking about the challenge of growth. Those institutions aren’t talking about the challenge of growth because their business model is to stay the same and to exclude people and not to grow. So an institution like Montclair State University, or we were talking about Arizona State University or the SUNY system or the CSU system, we’re trying to grow to create more learning opportunities for more students. That’s our mission. An institution that’s not trying to grow doesn’t have to grapple with some of the same things.

So if we want to have a conversation about the future of higher education and the challenges, we need to stop the fixation with a small number of elite institutions.

Brian Kelly:

Should we just get rid of the Ivy League?

Jonathan Koppell:

No, not at all. They serve a purpose. I’m a graduate, like they serve a purpose. They offer a pathway for a small number of people to a remarkable education.

But fundamentally – and I think this part of the conversation about affirmative action was lost – fundamentally, a marginal change in the composition of the student body of a tiny number of institutions that serves a tiny percentage of students is not going to alter the landscape of leadership in the country.

So if the survey data says people look at the leaders of businesses and government and they say we want to see more diversity, what the Ivy League does to change the percent composition of their enrollment is not going to affect that. It’s just not going to affect that.

There was a study that I’m sure many of the people here know. Raj Chetty, who’s a well known economist, wrote an article talking about how because the leadership of institutions is so dominated by people from the Ivy League, and I think it was four other private institutions, the leadership of those institutions won’t become more diverse unless the Ivy League institutions are more diverse and so on.

I almost laughed out loud when I read this, because it didn’t even occur to them that maybe the problem is that the leadership of those institutions is dominated by the graduates of 12 colleges. Like that’s the problem. It turns out there are a lot of really smart, really talented people who didn’t go to those schools.

And so maybe we need to figure out how to diversify the pipeline so that we’re not leaving, you know, acres and acres of human potential left uncultivated.

Brian Kelly:

I think folks here probably are aware of the U.S. News rankings. We do rank 1500 schools. We’ve always said it’s not just about the Ivy League, but obviously, there’s a tremendous focus on the Ivy League, and then we’ve had some really good conversations about data here. And we have expanded our capacity to look more deeply at institutions and want to do more of it.

What would you – at Montclair State – what would you like to be ranked on? What data would you like to surface that would allow you to showcase more of what you’re doing and show consumers and students what it is that they could get from Montclair.

Jonathan Koppell:

Well, I really appreciate what U.S. News was trying to do in revising the way you were doing the rankings because I think what you shifted the focus to – and this is what we at Montclair State University would be particularly interested in having people look at is – what’s the delta for the student who attends the university? Right? So if the main value add of a university is that I filter out 97% of the people that I add, the question of what the gain is for the student who attended that university is fairly hard to answer.

Because I could tell you that that student, the marginal effect on that student’s life of going to institution ranked number one versus institution ranked number two, the marginal effect is close to zero. But the marginal effect on a student’s life of going to Montclair State University is enormous.

So it turns out that if I wanted to predict whether a student graduates from college, the most useful thing to know is not their high school GPA, it’s actually their family income. And the demographics of the student population gives you a predicted graduation rate.

Montclair State University’s predicted graduation rate is 20 percentage points lower than our actual graduation rate. And so that’s what puts us number seven for social mobility in the U.S. News ranking on that score.

I want people to know what difference it’s going to make in their life to go to our institution. I want to be clear, that’s not exclusive to Montclair State University. We take great pride in that. But that’s, I think, the question that people should be asking when they’re looking at colleges: how is this experience going to alter my trajectory? Right? That should be the substantive judgment of the value of a college education.

And yes, it matters whether you have letters after your name, and what the income implications are of that, and we can get into all that. But I don’t think that question is asked enough.

I was talking to another university leader who said quite honestly, their institution, it’s a selective private institution – not Ivy League – but they said a kid who goes to my school is going to be fine whether they go to my school or not. They’re going to be fine.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true for a student who attends Montclair State University. Not every student, but many students. And it’s certainly not true for every student who attends a CUNY or SUNY institution or a Cal State institution.

We take a great deal of pride in that and we’ve built our institution to ensure, to the extent possible, that we’re capable of having that effect on a student’s life.

Brian Kelly:

I mean, that doesn’t happen by itself as we know. The schools that don’t do well on our list, we look at and say they’re taking kids in and they’re not fulfilling the mission. What are some specific things that you’re doing to get these kids to that level?

Jonathan Koppell:

Well, and Chancellor Garcia alluded to it, so I don’t want to repeat the previous things. So part of it is providing the mentorship and the wraparound services, being cognizant of the needs of a student.

Chancellor King mentioned the idea of giving hands-on learning opportunities to prepare people for the workforce. We’re trying to get more intentional about preparing a student, not only for success in college but beyond. A few years ago, somebody made a really good point to me. They said, you know, you talk all the time about first generation college students, but those are first generation professionals. So they don’t know anything about schmoozing at a cocktail party or preparing for an interview or dressing the right way for a professional interaction. So to the extent you can build that into the process, I think it’s more useful to the student.

A second thing, just to put specificity. There’s been a lot of discussion about data and I will mention that in any gathering of higher ed leaders, one of the main topics which – actually, it’s interesting to me, the phrase hasn’t even been said until I’m about to say it – the main topic is artificial intelligence. And what does that mean for the future of higher education? What does that mean for the future of work? And one of the opportunities is to deploy artificial intelligence to better understand our students.

So data, in and of itself, doesn’t do anything. The question is, how do you use that data? So, our hope is to build a 360 degree picture of a student. Yes, how they’re doing in classes. But are they getting their meals regularly? Are they exercising? How much time are they spending on their homework?

The way we’re tracked these days, we can have a remarkably thorough picture of a human being while they’re in college. And what if we then deploy artificial intelligence to predict when a student might be on a pathway to bad outcomes and intervene sooner? That’s what universities need to be doing.

And I will say, universities that have a population like ours or SUNY or Cal State, we’re thinking that way. We’re thinking how do we increase the outcomes, because that’s how we ultimately deal with the dissatisfaction people feel towards higher education – by increasing the success rate as Under Secretary Kvaal talked about.

Brian Kelly:

It’s interesting, I majored in schmoozing at cocktail parties in college. So, a different experience. It was valuable. 

Jonathan Koppell:

Look where it got you.

Brian Kelly:

Yeah, you know, not everyone goes that path.

But one of the things that I know you’ve talked about, and Montclair State has done, is engaging in the community, specifically hands-on in the community. And then simultaneously, related to that, is the broader sense of public service, and sort of imbuing that in the curriculum. Talk a little bit about that – does that have an effect particularly maybe on disadvantaged students? Is that an appeal?

Jonathan Koppell:

That’s fundamental to who we are. And I think it’s important on a lot of levels. Let’s get back to the beginning of the dissatisfaction people feel with higher education. I think some of these are people who sort of diffuse frustration that takes the form of answers about endowment.

So here’s how I would translate that endowment answer, which is that universities seem to care only about themselves, right? And as long as the university is doing well, the university is satisfied, and they have beautiful campuses sometimes surrounded by communities that are not so beautiful.

So at Montclair, we don’t view that as an acceptable attitude. The success of the institution is defined in part by the success of the communities that we’re serving. And so we are deeply engaged in Newark. Since I’ve arrived, we’ve become super involved in Paterson, which as a Clifton guy, you know, is a nearby community. I’m a big Paterson booster, a really interesting, underappreciated city in New Jersey. Key to our country’s history. In fact, the birthplace of the American industrial revolution, but tough, economically stressed, high levels of crime, unemployment, lack of opportunity.

How do we as a university, sit next to Paterson, New Jersey and say, well, it’s not my problem? And that, to me, that’s unacceptable. And so we’re engaged there in multiple interesting ways. We’re part of the resurrection of Hinchliffe Stadium, one of the only standing Negro League facilities. We’ve taken responsibility for creating a museum at the stadium and we’re going to create a curriculum with the Paterson school district.

We’re turning East Side High School – which people might know from the Morgan Freeman movie about Joe Clark – we’re making that a community school to create a full service center. In each of these things, we create learning opportunities for students.

So this is the key to answering your question. The students now are applying the lessons that they’re learning in the classroom to advance the communities, many of which they come from, they’re from Paterson and that has a lot of value.

First of all, it underscores their civic responsibility. But it also gives them the opportunity to apply the knowledge that they’re acquiring in the classroom. And it gives them a sense of efficacy.

If there’s one thing that I strongly agree with about the characterization of Gen Z, they want to do stuff now. They’re impatient to take action now. And the idea that you’re going to tell them well, study this for five or 10 years and then someday you’ll get to apply it, is unacceptable. They’re just not interested.

I talk to students – they’re starting businesses. I’m not talking about side hustles, like consulting firms with clients across the country. They’re doing it now. And so if we’re going to reach students and show them that what we’re doing matters, we have to create those opportunities.

And so by meeting our responsibility to create pipelines for teachers, to address social inequity, to deal with hunger and homelessness, we are also serving our students by giving them what they demand from an education in the 21st century.

Brian Kelly:

How are your students doing?

Jonathan Koppell:

I think my students are in a lot of the same places that the previous speakers talked about. I think that they’re reacting to the world around them and they are distressed. I think everything that was said before – COVID consequences. I think one of the things that wasn’t alluded to directly, but we’re seeing and is related to the reaction to Israel – Gaza, one of the consequences of students being cloistered for a year and a half, two years, is they didn’t develop the conflict resolution skills that are so critical.

And so – see this sounds funny – but we’re actually seeing more irresolvable fights between roommates and you know, the roommate doesn’t behave the way they want. They’re like, I want a new roommate and it’s like, no, work it out and they’re like, no, I demand to be moved and it’s like, well, there’s nowhere to move you too.

But those skills, of how do you deal with disagreement? Yes, it deals with international affairs but it deals with interpersonal relations as well. The one pushback and I guess it didn’t get captured in the poll or maybe I just am lucky to be with students who don’t conform to that. But it’s true in my ASU experience as well as Montclair. I actually think that there is a higher level of optimism among younger students than among – than in my brain – but also than among my peers, and that the students are not deterred by the world.

I do think that they’re like, all right, get out of the way because you’re not making things better and we’ll deal with it. But they’re not throwing up their hands and saying, oh, we’re doomed, and what’s the point? They’re saying I need to get at it and I need to get skills.

The thing that I’m most impressed with by students at Montclair is they’re like sponges. They are so appreciative of the resources that are available to them. I think more so than at institutions that frankly have more resources if I can be so bold.

I don’t have everything to offer that the Ivy League institutions do, but my students are so eager to use everything that’s available to them to make themselves better and to prepare to be change agents. I’m inspired by it. I would be much more depressed if I didn’t get to hang around with Montclair students. That’s the truth.

Brian Kelly:

That’s because they’re from Jersey. They figure it out.

Jonathan Koppell:

That’s part of it.

Brian Kelly:

People from Jersey get that. People who aren’t from Jersey don’t even know what I’m talking about. So, don’t worry.

Dig a little deeper on this whole speech issue, how are you dealing with that? Is there a speech code? How are you trying to draw the line?

Jonathan Koppell:

Every institution is different and by the way I could go on at some length on – I’ll call it the clumsiness – of some of the institutions, and the leaders and how they’ve handled this. There are many more institutions that are handling it quite well, by the way. We don’t talk about them because that’s not a very good story and they didn’t get invited to testify. Gee, I wonder why.

So Montclair is interesting. President Berman and I had a really interesting discussion about this. Turns out Montclair State University probably has one of the largest, if not the largest, populations of Palestinian students of any school in the country. Probably maybe a little different than the Clifton you grew up in. Clifton and Paterson has the second largest Palestinian community in the United States after Chicago. A lot of those students come to Montclair.

So we have a very large Palestinian student population that’s been very active and expressing themselves. And we have a Jewish population that’s very concerned about what’s going on in the world. I think that the key, and I’ll tie it to the theme of the session, is the way I’ve thought about my role in this as a leader is to not talk about foreign policy. Montclair State University doesn’t have a foreign policy, it turns out.  But I’m the leader of a community, and my job is to maintain that community as a place where everybody feels safe, heard, and respected.

And so in the messaging that I’ve done, it’s been trying to underscore what the values of our community are and what expectations we have for each other in terms of how we interact. And it’s more about that than a discussion of the overall situation.

I have a lot I could say about that and I’ve watched people commenting as, again, the previous speakers made reference to, hard to comprehend things that are being said. And it’s frustrating for me as somebody who cares about public affairs to not jump in and say, but that’s just a fundamental misreading of history. But that’s not the goal from my current position. And maybe there’ll be a time when we get to that. But my current position is to try and establish an expectation of what discourse should look like.

And by the way, that should make it obvious that calling for the extermination of one set of students is not an acceptable form of discourse. But I think the key is, and actually this gets to the “what are we for”? The key is establishing the values of the community and what we want to be as a university community. And I think that’s been missing, right? There’s been no affirmative statement. It’s all negative. Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. But not, what do we aspire to be? 

And I think part of being a leader is laying out that aspiration. And that has not been forthcoming for many people.

Brian Kelly:

As a scholar and a professor, you have studied institutional behavior, right? And now you’re in an institution and trying to figure out how it behaves. One of the arguments is that university presidents actually have a surprisingly little amount of power, that I’ve heard. Has that been your experience? And how do you move the needle when you’ve got these, as everyone has talked about today, these incredibly complex issues, vast constituencies.

Jonathan Koppell:

Look, it depends on what your expectations are. I mean, these are not dictatorships, right? So you can’t just by fiat change things. But I actually think if you can lay out a vision as to what you’re trying to accomplish, you can do things.

Probably the biggest, I think, shortcoming of higher education in response to those poll results, is that many people see leadership as being a cheerleader or a booster in response.

So, what most university presidents I think tend to do, by the way, not our speakers, but what most university presidents say – “No, these people who are critical of higher education, they got it wrong. We’re fabulous. We’re terrific. Everything’s great.” Or they’ll say, “yeah, yeah, yeah, but not my institution.”

And so I actually think what we ought to be doing is owning it and saying yeah, there’s a reason why people are frustrated with higher education. The majority of people who went to college in this country don’t have a degree. I mean, just think about that for a second. The majority of expenditures under the Pell program, people are familiar with that. The majority of expenditures on the Pell program did not result in a degree. It’s like, does anybody want to defend that? I don’t know. I mean, so the question is how are we going to change, to address that?

And more often, the emphasis is on “how does the student adapt to the university”. Enough with that! How do we adapt to make ourselves better able to accommodate students? And so when you lay it out that way, then I think people are willing to change. I’m not saying that it’s easy. I don’t snap my fingers – several members of my team are here and they’re like, oh yeah, it’s totally easy! But we’ve actually been able to do some interesting things.

One of the things that we’ve been able to do is integrate Bloomfield College. Bloomfield College is the only Predominantly Black Institution in New Jersey. We don’t have any HBCUs in New Jersey. It was on the verge of collapsing. Basically because the business model was unsustainable. And that seemed simply wrong, inconsistent with our mission to let the only institution dedicated to serving African Americans in New Jersey to fail.

So we said, well, could we design a structure where it became part of Montclair? But retain its distinctive mission, right? That has a differentiated pathway, within a large public university. And you would say, well, how on earth would a public university do that? And the answer is because we had a purpose.

I’m looking at my board chair. So I’m happy to say that the board of trustees said, yeah, we should do that. That’s the right thing to do. And that’s going to require some adaptation. But it’s for a reason, it’s not change for change’s sake. And so I think universities are willing to change.

You’re familiar with ASU. ASU is known nationally for sort of saying, let’s blow it up a little bit and see how we can do things differently. I think people are OK with that if there’s a substantive goal in mind.

Brian Kelly:

Last question, given everything I’ve heard today, why did you take this job?

Jonathan Koppell:

My joke is that I’m an average of my parents. My mother was a college professor, administrator. And my father, who’s sitting over there, was a lifelong public servant. 20 plus years in the state legislature and New York State Attorney General. And so I became a political science professor because I just merged politics and academia.

But the longer answer is because I think universities are capable of being incredibly powerful instruments of social transformation. And quite frankly, they are underutilized to that end. And I saw that. I’m a super geek. I took a class in college on higher education leadership. So presidents like to say, I never thought I’d be a university president. Like no, I had this in mind a long time ago because yes, it’s frustrating to deal with some of this stuff. But there’s an opportunity, think about what we’re empowered to do. First of all, to create pathways for individuals to change their lives.

But I actually think, and I’ll throw this out there as a closing thought. I actually think part of the reason that we’ve lost track of the value of higher education is because we’ve – nerd alert –  is because we only talk about it as a private good. So that as if we’re churning out educations, people get a college degree and it’s economically valuable to them. And thus the ROI on higher education is “how much did your salary go up because you got a Bachelor’s degree from Acme University?”

Higher education, and education generally, we shouldn’t forget, should be thought of as a public good. Society is better because more people are educated. Even people who don’t have a college degree benefit from the prosperity of having a highly educated society.

The explosion of the American economy in the 1950s was driven in part by the GI Bill which broadened access to college education and created a dramatically educated workforce. Indeed, in New Jersey, one of the problems we have is we don’t have enough educated workers to fill the jobs that are available.

At the same time, we have a remarkably high unemployment rate, just wrap your brain around that for a second. And so we need to embrace the idea that higher education when properly oriented and performing at a high level is one of the greatest drivers we’ve ever invented as a species to drive social prosperity.

And so I think the assignment to say, ok, make that work in the 21st century with a different level of public investment and a different set of expectations and a different set of complexity –  that’s a pretty good assignment. I’ll take it.

Brian Kelly:

Ok. Good job, Jonathan.

Jonathan Koppell:

Thank you.