Most students who leave college don't fail out. They get worn down, routed through ten offices, chasing five signatures, navigating a financial aid maze a parent once called "harder than getting a bank loan." Brian Reed's uncomfortable claim: that friction isn't an accident. It's designed.
Reed is Associate Vice President for Student Success at the University of Montana and a first-generation kid from an east Kentucky coal-mining town who arrived at college terrified he'd flunk out, told only to "don't quit." 20 years later he argues that grit was never supposed to be the plan. Institutions should be built so students don't need it. In this conversation with Emily, he makes the case for treating students like the consumers they are, disaggregating data until the failures are undeniable, and redesigning higher ed around the students it was never meant to serve.
Highlights:
- How Montana saved half a million dollars by redesigning one work-study form
- Why Brian tells his team to "stop being gatherers" and become hunters
- The "four flavors of Deb" framework for getting staff to change how they work
- Why he calls the career fair (and the campus tour) dead
- How he makes career readiness "inescapable" across gen-ed courses
- The "design for the margins" method he borrows from human-centered design
- What he'd tear down first with $10 million (and why he insists he doesn't need it)
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