NATIONAL LOUIS UNIVERSITY
Chicago, Illinois
NLU launched the innovative Harrison Professional Pathways Program in Fall 2015 to address the disproportionate number of students from historically marginalized backgrounds who do not enroll in or complete college. It also serves as a scalable model for higher education, both locally and nationally. In its first year, the Pathways Program enrolled 85 freshmen and had 75% students return for sophomore year, exceeding local and national benchmark retention rates by offering an accessible price, holistic wraparound support services, and broad admissions criteria.
The NLU Pathways Program supports students who have been traditionally underserved in higher education. Pathways students are predominantly below college readiness levels, and the majority are first-generation, low-income, and Hispanic and African-American. Year 1 recruitment efforts targeted Chicago Public Schools’ graduating seniors to enroll at NLU’s Chicago campus, while Year 2 recruitment expanded to a broader range of both Chicago-area and suburban high schools surrounding NLU’s Wheeling campus, where the programme was added that same year. The Pathways Program is well on its way to achieving its goal of serving nearly 5,000 undergraduate students by 2020, and to establishing a new undergraduate college. This approach to undergraduate education is designed to demonstrate that all students are capable of success if colleges become more “student-ready”.
‘We weren’t going to last if we kept doing what we were doing. That led us to—in a pioneering way—break a lot of ground’.
‘Other institutions in our tier are focused on rankings. We made a choice that we will focus on how well we serve our students.’
— President Nivine Megahed
NIVINE MEGAHED
President of National Louis University
Nivine Megahead, born in Egypt, grew up in New York State. She earned her BA in Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and an MA and PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Rochester. She began her academic career at the Georgia School of Professional Psychology and was a campus dean at the American School of Professional Psychology in Hawaii. She also worked as a psychologist in private practice and as an educational and programmatic consultant for universities around the world. She has been president of multiple institutions, including the University of Sarasota and Kendall College in Chicago. In 2010, Megahed became the eleventh president of National Louis University.
Her current strategic priorities include providing affordable, accessible, quality education that promotes student success; focusing on veterans’ education; expanding new frontiers in digital education; and growing the university’s leadership in community-based applied research that focuses on schools as a central base for community transformation.
How has your personal journey informed your motivations to do this work?
I am trained as a clinical psychologist, but in every role I always thought about how to do it better and make the system work better. The big theme that drove me was that I always wanted to make a difference, to leave some kind of impact that is positive.
When I went to Hawaii, it was a campus that was in deep, deep trouble. It had never been fully accredited, and students were upset because they felt they had been promised things that weren’t delivered. The faculty was disenfranchised. It was a big old mess. I didn’t know any better, I just went in and said, ‘Well, let’s fix it. Let’s get accredited and let’s get people working together’.
That was it. That was my trajectory. Once I did that, I realized how much I loved impacting a system in that way and seeing all the lives you could improve if you really thought about what you needed to do at a higher level to make those changes. I loved the idea of building a great team that worked together, moving together towards something they all wanted. Eventually, I was tired of being in the for-profit space, because in the end there was always a stakeholder I didn’t want to deal with, which was either a stockholder who wanted return on their investment or an owner who wanted more but didn’t want to reinvest into the school, the students, or the programmes. I finally decided I wanted to work somewhere that’s mission-driven. When the National Louis opportunity emerged, I was delighted.
What does innovation mean to you in the context of your work as an institutional leader?
Many feel that innovation is synonymous with technology, but I don’t. I think of innovation as putting things together in a new way that helps either change the way you do things or the way the work is done. It’s bringing together new concepts that help advance your goal. It’s about challenging the norms and the status quo to create something. Our institution is a very innovative place, but only because we take nothing for granted.
I read a book in college, the classic, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is about innovation because it’s about suddenly realizing, ‘Oh, the world doesn’t sit like this; it sits like this’. Then all of a sudden everything changes because you recognize the world is round, it’s not flat. We’re on the periphery, we’re not in the center. That’s innovation. It’s looking at it so differently that it forces you to do everything else differently.
How did you experience the severity of external pressures on your institution?
We were facing the same kind of economic headwinds that most of our sector had been facing for the last several years. That led us to do all kinds of courageous things. When I came on, we were one of the first to do a programme review and evaluation, and we shut down programmes because enrollment and revenue had dropped, and we were still tuition-dependent. We reviewed all our programmes, we involved the entire community, and we shut down 15 programmes. We dramatically reduced the number of faculty and staff. We probably cut our size by a third. I remember my president peers (in Chicago, there are so many presidents—there are so many universities) kept saying, ‘We’re watching, you’re not going to last’. And I kept saying, ‘Well, we weren’t going to last if we kept doing what we were doing’.
I believe necessity is the mother of invention, but that led us to—in a pioneering way—break a lot of ground. We started rebuilding and driving towards a much more disciplined, deliberate, metrically-driven culture—a culture that made decisions based on evidence as opposed to instinct. There was a lot of trial and error trying to figure out the best way to position ourselves. I recognized that our strongest route was sticking to our core commitments, our “mission commitments”. If we stayed true to those, it was the right thing. Our mission commitments were about serving students, helping them impact their communities. It was about access for students. I mean, this institution was built on a mission of access for everybody.
How do you do that in the highest quality way? You pull it apart and see what nuggets of truth you should address. If we’re really going to achieve our mission commitments, then we should be concerned about the cost, we should be concerned about whether the students finish, and we should be concerned if our teachers are prepared when they enter the classroom.
And that’s when clarity hit, like, ‘Stop! You don’t need to fight this; you need to solve it’. So we started. One morning four or five years ago I said, ‘I want to create an affordable education for people’. I saw the sociodemographics changing, and I said, ‘People have to access it’. I mean, 87% of our kids in Chicago Public Schools—400,000 of them—are low-income. Across the state, 50% of our kids are low-income. How do you provide access if people can’t afford to go there? I started on this idea and pulled together a couple people and hired someone from the outside. I said, ‘I want to create an affordable degree, but I also want it to be better quality than what we have. I want it to be able to scale, I want it to improve completion rates against the national average, and I want employment rates that are outstanding’.
We tapped into an unmet need because it’s a completely diverse population we serve. We tapped into it with everything we learned at the institution, so we tapped into it with incredible analytics all the way through. What’s predicting student success? How do we get at grit? How do we improve the mindset? How do we see their engagement in the classroom? We have measures for everything, and we’re tracking it all, and we’re learning so much as we go. As the sample gets larger, we see which things are robust and which are not. It’s set up in a context where there’s rapid iterations, so in Year 1 we saw we needed to give them a week to ramp up. When Year 2 students came in the second freshman year, we told them we’re starting a week earlier. We called it Ramp Week.
Every month I take a group of students to lunch, and I sit and talk with them. I’ll say, ‘Tell me about who you are or what you want to do, what’s important to you’. I find it baffling that every university isn’t jumping in trying to serve this population, because 90% of them leave you awed. Every one of them I talked to—what just blows my mind—wants to go back, to make their communities better.
How many students coming from these blighted neighborhoods, who have no opportunity, how many of them do we have to educate, graduate, and help get employed for them to want to be back in their communities, to change their social and economic opportunities? How many of them need to go back into their communities to change the communities? That’s what we’re going to do here: We are going to show how to really impact communities. It’s through education, but it’s by supporting people all the way to their employment. It’s not, ‘Okay, you graduated, you’re done’. We have to be accountable to their connection to employment.
You can’t be good at everything. On occasion one must choose to be bad at some things. Does this idea have merit for you as a leader? How has it played out in your organization?
I constantly say to people that we can only work on two or three things at a time, and those should be what we drive the hardest. Don’t worry about everything else. It’s not about choosing to be bad; it’s about focusing on what you want to build. It’s hard to keep people focused on the thing they want to be great. We decided we wanted to be great at this undergrad initiative, and I’ve ensured focus by creating a dedicated team of resources.
How would you describe the leadership structure you created?
In the first few years, every decision was coming to me while we were in crisis. Everything kept bubbling up, little or big, and people were afraid to make decisions. At a certain point, when we got out of the worst of it, I said, ‘All right, we’re not about to be extinct, so I want you all to lead. It’s not just me making all these decisions’. We made leadership team adjustments, and we finally got the right team in place. There were a couple messages that went out. One was that I wanted the leaders to lead their units and empower their people to lead, but I also wanted a lot of collaboration across units. So, I got the right people to put that together.
I expected everyone to be a decision-maker. They should never punt on a decision. The most stagnating thing for an organization is when people won’t decide. In higher education people like to fall back and do not want to decide. You have to counteract that. I said in all decisions, ‘You make the best decision you can, but I want your decision-making to be guided by this: Are you making the decision that is in the best interest of our students?’. We changed the culture. There’s nothing we cannot fix if it’s the wrong decision, but we cannot fix indecision. Success is built on a pile of failure.
I had to build the team, and it took a little while to get right. There were a few fits and starts where it wasn’t a right match and we had to make a change. I have a developmental approach to an executive team. I see them as effective in certain phases, then they probably need to either move on to greater things or move on to something different, because as you hit a different ramp, you’re no longer playing to their strengths.
How did you frame your vision for this work? What was the story you told about why this was important?
My first few years here, the feedback was that folks didn’t feel they had a vision. We were in crisis, so it’s harder to come up with a vision when you’re making sure you don’t capsize. It’s one of those things that I grew into, as opposed to Ta da here’s the vision!
At the end of the day, when I think about what drives us, it’s because we believe every child deserves a great teacher, and we believe that every individual deserves an opportunity for economic prosperity and social mobility. But how do we manifest those beliefs?
We try to own the entire lifecycle of education because we believe that’s the greatest lever for economic and social opportunity, and it starts with making sure every kid has a great teacher in K-12. We started out as a teacher prep organization; we were the first school for teachers in this state. We have to stay on top of developing great teachers for the kids of Illinois and this nation, and we have to always provide access and opportunity for individuals to impact their communities.
I realized that most of the time we talked about impact as, ‘Well, our students do well and graduate’. That’s a good outcome, but that’s not the impact. As an institution we’ve always been pioneering and dedicated to innovation, but we’ve also always been in the service of supporting students and impacting our communities. I started recognizing that it’s bigger than just graduating our students. It’s about how we change these communities. How is education a lever that does that? How is education the thing that helps people achieve the sort of economic prosperity that drives broader change for everybody?
National Louis University Visual Case Study
Executive Leadership
President Megahed provided directive and strategic leadership during restructuring, then pivoted to a more distributed model during rebuilding. Leaders were empowered to make unit-level decisions and collaborate across silos. The result was a culture that supported bold decisions and prioritized students’ best interests.
Spark
National Louis University was facing economic pressure and a declining enrollment. In response to this pressure they conducted a robust programme review involving the entire community. This resulted in the difficult decision to cut fifteen programmes, reducing the size of the institution by almost a third.
Sense-Making
The university was then faced with the challenge to rebuild and redesign. President Megahed grounded this effort in a deep commitment to the university’s mission. She initiated a monthly listening session with students to learn more about their lives and what was important to them.
New Vision
Anchored in its existing mission to provide broad access, serve its students, and help them impact their communities, NLU achieved its new vision by centering the student experience and making evidence-based decisions.
Team/Mandate
Teams were encouraged to be bold in their decisions, and to ground their decisions in evidence and data. Work was prioritized to a few key projects at a time to create focus. Underlying all of their efforts was the belief that “if you put in the effort, you will succeed.” University leaders and faculty held this belief for themselves and their work to reinvent the university, just as they held it for their students and their potential to succeed.
Iteration
As university employees witnessed the review process and redesign efforts, more took risks to innovate and improve, leading to a culture of continuous improvement and success.
National Louis University Professional Pathways Program
PERSONALIZED INSTRUCTION
Adaptive online curriculum replaces textbooks, engaging students at their various levels. Face-to-face classes feature small class sizes so that professors truly get to know students and provide individualized support.
FLEXIBILITY
Pathways courses meet twice weekly so students can complete most of the work on their own schedules.
DATA
Professors and coaches meet weekly to review student data and plan interventions. Administrators review data twice per quarter to inform ongoing enhancements to the programme.
PATHWAYS
Pathways takes the guesswork out of course selection, providing clear and efficient tracks toward graduation.
COACHING & MENTORING
Success Coaches provide personal, academic, and career support and guidance, helping students stay on track to graduate.
Who They Serve
The NLU Pathways Program serves students who have traditionally been under-served in higher education; predominantly first-generation college-goers, low-income, and Hispanic and African-American students.
Providing Access
At $10K a year, Pathways is the most affordable bachelor’s degree programme in Illinois. A minimum GPA of 2.0 is the only admissions criteria.
Enabling Success
Real-time student data enable high-touch student support and intervention and highly personalized instruction and pathways to graduation.