(From left, Timothy Schmitz, Jennifer Hulehan, Erin Smith, Beth Pontari, Paul Bell. Photo by Amy Randall Photography)

Education in South Carolina has seen changes in recent years, as the Covid-19 pandemic caused an upheaval in the way students were taught. The Palmetto State’s higher education institutions have been praised for the way that they have evolved in response to shifts in culture and the ways that young people approach their careers. 

Integrated Media Publishing hosted a roundtable discussion with five leaders in the world of higher education on June 25, 2024. 

Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

The participants were:

Jennifer Hulehan, dean of arts and sciences at Tri-County Technical College

Beth Pontari, vice president for academic affairs and provost at Furman University

Timothy Schmitz, provost at Wofford College

Paul Bell, vice president for advancement and alumni relations at Erskine College

Erin Smith, director of adult degree re-engagement at OneSpartanburg

Integrated Media Publishing Editor David Dykes moderated the discussion.

Question: Let me start off by asking, the high school graduation rate in South Carolina was 87.1 percent in 2018, according to the Open Data Network. The 2021-‘22 rate was down to 83.8 percent, according to U.S. News and World Report. What should that tell us? Jennifer, do you want to start?

Jennifer Hulehan: Well, K-12 isn't my area of expertise, obviously. It's higher education. If I had to attribute it to something, I would say that the Covid-19 pandemic played a big role in what happened in the K-12 system during that time. So, the years 2020, 2021 were a little tough for everybody, just like they were for us in higher education. And just like across the country, we see declining enrollment in higher education. I would expect that they would see also some declines in their metrics for the K-12 system.

Timothy Schmitz: I think Covid does have a lot to do with it. We're going to be dealing with it for a long time. I think we tended to think at first in higher education that it just affected high school kids, but of course, it affected students all throughout their K-12 environment. … The work that's been going on in Spartanburg, I think, has demonstrated that moving those metrics at all is not just about education or teaching or teachers or school districts. It's about an entire social environment.

Erin Smith: I would definitely agree. Part of what we're doing with Re:Degree is about economic mobility and economic development. I think that impacts the higher education space, obviously, but it also impacts K through 12 because we're talking about an environmental issue. Being able to provide education to adult learners allows them to be an example and to model to their students within their families and show them that they can do it as well. That’s what's wonderful about what's going on in Spartanburg is, we're looking at people holistically and how that can develop and increase some of those metrics that have lagged in recent years.

Q. Paul, let me ask you this. What types of programs are you offering to your students that you see as beneficial to providing students with the skillset they need to secure a job, either right out of high school or out of college?

Paul Bell: Let me start by saying we don't have a name for the program. We're just incorporating these things into the warp and woof of Erskine and the teaching in the classroom and outside the classroom. There are things that we want students to be able to do when they graduate, no matter what their major is. One is, they need to be good critical thinkers. We often hear our president say, We aren't here to teach students what to think. We're here to teach them how to think. I had a student a couple of years ago tell me, when I came to Erskine, I had very, very strong opinions about a number of issues. He said, by being here with students from other backgrounds and different attitudes, I maybe haven't changed my views, but I know how to listen to those people, and I know how to sit down and have discussions now. We do that in classrooms. We want students to engage in good, open, honest dialogue. We want them to have great communication skills, both verbal and written. We want them to have an ethical and moral character.

I had some students who graduated a few years ago, and went to UCLA and started a graduate program. They wrote back and one of them said, just a few weeks into their program, I can tell a difference between the way I think and the way the students I'm with thinking. I said, what do you mean by that? He said, at Erskine, I had to take classes outside my major. I was forced to take classes in subjects I wasn't necessarily interested in, but now I can have dialogues with people who have different backgrounds. But he said, I was also taught business from a Christian ethical standpoint. He said, that makes a difference in the way I approach what I do. Interpersonal acumen. We want them to be able to communicate face-to-face, not just on their phones. Finally, we want them to have global preparedness, to realize that there's a larger world out there and they can have an impact on it. We're weaving those things into the culture of Erskine. There's no name for that program, but it's just part of what we do.

Q. Beth, we have another outstanding Furman intern working with us this summer. But you have many other programs to help students prepare for the workforce.

Beth Pontari: I think you make a really good point that the skills that are valued are those liberal arts skills. Companies will continue to tell you that that's what they prioritize because they want employees who can come and learn to learn, be flexible, be agile, because as we know, the jobs that exist today are going to be probably gone and we'll have new jobs. Just training people to do the exact things that you mentioned is still going to be critical. At Furman, I think we're intentional about two things around those skills. One is, students don't always know that they're getting them or how to articulate them. And so, in our Pathways program, which is years one and two, we have a required graduation requirement that's an advising course. Students meet once a week for the first four semesters with their academic adviser and 14 peers and a peer mentor in their first year. But we start them actually understanding what are career competencies. … Thinking about how do you get those skills, which skills do you need to work on?

And then helping them create the narrative around how they have the skills. You'd be surprised at how talented all of our students are, and they can't articulate it on an interview or on a job application. We really try to be much more intentional in the first two years of helping them realize what are those competencies, how do they get them, and how do they talk about them. But what's really important is for them to have actual real-world experiences. We really value internships, undergraduate research, and study away. You mentioned internships. In the state of South Carolina, we actually have over 500 internship sites. Just in the Greenville area this summer, we have Furman 182 students interning. That, we find, is so critical for them to be able to really practice what they're learning in the classroom. And importantly, to figure out, is it what they want to do, or maybe even more importantly, what they don't want to do? … The way that we manage this is we actually will pay students for unpaid internships because that's a real barrier for students.

Those are the game-changer internships where they're really engaging. A lot of students can't do that if it's unpaid. So, Furman has put money and resources behind making sure our students can do that. That differentiates them when they go to get a job, and they have that skill set, they've practiced those skills. … We really feel like we are serving, at least the Upstate community, with providing this good pipeline of work in the summer. Then a lot of our students get hired in these companies where they intern.

Q. Jennifer, what type of partnerships with companies are most beneficial? Can you describe those?

 

Hulehan: We have a number of partnerships with different businesses and industries in our Tri-County service area. We went to business and industry and said, what do you want to see out of employees entering the workforce? Much like both of my colleagues have said, the things that they're looking for are what we have traditionally called soft skills. Where hard skills might get you hired, soft skills are going to help you in career advancement and growth. They're going to be the things that lead to promotion. Lack of those skills will get you fired and into trouble. We're looking at that in this new way and talking with business and industry about what they want and what they need. The things that they say that they need are, we want people who can communicate effectively. We want people who can think critically. We want people who can connect intentionally. And so, we've taken those three things and we put them into what we call our workplace skills initiative. It doesn't just happen in pockets. We're integrating it throughout the curriculum, whether that's our technical program of curriculums where students do learn the hard skills, how to do mechatronics, how to do welding, or it's our university transfer students who might go on to Wofford or Furman or Clemson.

It's all being integrated across the board. The students often don't know they're getting those skills while they're taking these general education classes, but they are. And so, helping them to see that more intentionally, to articulate it, to be able to apply it to their college when they transfer or directly into the workforce. Of course, as a technical college, we also have some more direct links to business and industry in our area. … We have lots of opportunities for internships and externships, but we’ve also focused lately on apprenticeships. We have some very big apprenticeship programs going on right now. One of those is our Manufacturing Works Apprenticeship. It's a pre-apprenticeship program for youth in our community. It's actually starting with high school seniors in their second semester who don't have any plan to go to college. They don't know what they want to do with themselves. They're pretty sure they don't want to go to college yet. They want to go make some money. So how can we better prepare them for doing that? Because our goal is that everybody has family-sustaining wages in the jobs that they choose.

And we know they can't just get that straight out of high school without something else. Manufacturing Works is a partnership with First Quality and with Arthrex, both in Anderson County. They help support that program by providing some of the instruction on their own sites, by coming to the students and doing mock interviews that sometimes turn into real interviews because they're so impressed with the education that the students are getting. That's a quick seven-week program for those students, and it's been highly successful. We also have our BASF North American Development Apprenticeship program, which is a 12-month program. It works with incumbent workers who are already employed at BASF who need additional education in order to have that career advancement and growth that they're looking for and that we want people in our service area to have. They work at BASF the whole time, but then they're also taking coursework with Tri-County, and we're delivering it to them right where they need it so that they're not having to come to college separately. Another big apprenticeship that we currently have is with Prisma Health. And so that's the nurse apprenticeship program. We have, again, incumbent workers, people who are already employed at Prisma Health, but who are in some of the lower-level positions who want to see themselves move into nursing.

We need more nurses. And so Prisma Health recognizes that. So how do we move these people from maybe nursing assistant roles into nursing programs that will get them prepared to do that? And so those students already work there. And again, we deliver them educational experiences on-site in coordination with Prisma Health so that they're getting that education as they are continuing to work. … They need to make money while they're doing some of these things. And that's particularly important for the population that Erin has talked about, which is those adult learners who are coming back in. They can't stop paying their bills. They can't stop putting their kids into childcare. They have to have something that's going to sustain them while they're doing education. And so that's been our focus in terms of apprenticeships.

Q. When you say soft skills, you're talking about being able to show up on time, be properly dressed, those sorts of things.

Hulehan: All of those things count. But it's also the bigger things like Beth was mentioning, really, when we talk to companies, it's the learning how to learn, because what you're doing today in whatever role we hire you in is probably not … going to be what you do later. And so, you need to be able to think critically. You need to be able to learn new tasks. You need to learn how to use new technical equipment that might show up one day. And the jobs we're training for now are not going to be the jobs that exist in 10 years. As our companies evolve, they have more different types of jobs that people are coming into. You're not going to be successful at that if you don't know how to learn new things, if you can't think critically and problem-solve within your work environment.

Q. Even though interest in higher education is high, significant barriers still remain, preventing many adults from enrolling in a program or completing a degree. What's keeping them from enrolling and what's causing the currently enrolled students to consider dropping out?

 

Smith: Re: Degree’s purpose is to help those adult learners with those barriers. We have a college navigator who will help them navigate the process of coming back to college. Some of our students have been out for three years, some of our students have been out for 10 years, and a lot has changed. FAFSA has changed, application processes have changed, students are having to navigate getting their transcripts from one institution to provide it to another institution. That can be a very daunting process. Having that college navigator there to walk them through that, help them find links. I was talking to a colleague who went to a conference about adult learners and different things they're having to navigate. One of the activities they did at the conference was, they gave everybody a list of things to find on a college website, and they gave them about 90 seconds to do so. Needless to say, they weren't able to do that. That can be frustrating to an adult learner who has finally made the decision to go back. I had a student, my first student that I worked with when I got hired with OneSpartanburg.

She had tried to go back to an institution last April, but she got so frustrated with the process that she stopped. We were able to work with her in October and get her enrolled for the spring semester in January just by helping her through that process. We also helped with barrier removal. It's one thing to provide support, but if there's no finance behind that support, it's not really impactful. A lot of our students that we've worked with have remaining balances at the institutions where they left. Sometimes that can be a barrier to returning. We've been able to help students pay those balances. … We've helped our students with laptops. I've been very surprised at how many adult learners don't have their own personal device. They have maybe a work laptop, a tablet, or their phone, but you need a dedicated work laptop to do your school work.

We've been able to provide that as well. We help people with community resources. We have partnerships with the United Way, SCDEW, Upstate Workforce Board, where if we have a student who's in a situation where they need a job or they're wanting to transition into another career field, we can help them with that. I think that seeing that initiatives like ours grow around the country is going to help adult learners to be able to come back and to alleviate some of those barriers that they have. We work with Spartanburg Academic Movement's Hello Family, which is there to help individuals who have children, 0 to 5, find childcare options, help them with food insecurity, housing insecurity. Those are things that are issues for adult learners as well. If we can be that voice and that advocate for our adult learners and help them to navigate those barriers, then we've done our job. 

Schmitz: Higher education is really complicated. So trying to imagine how to navigate four-year higher education, community college, technical college. I don't think that a lot of higher education is often well-served by national journalism, where you'll see lots and lots of stories about college debt. The author of the article doesn't dig in to find out that most of that is graduate debt or the landscape is complicated or held by people who have attended for-profit institutions versus nonprofit institutions. I think there's a real weakness in the society in the way that we discuss higher education. Further, I don't think it's helped us in our industry, as it were, that we’ve become something of a political football. … Finally, I think the discussion around the benefits of a college education, which is part of this same cultural conversation – metric after metric continues to demonstrate that a college education is a benefit to the individual who receives it in terms of lifetime earnings, in terms of happiness overall. And yet there is still an undercurrent of a drumbeat against higher education that I think is more political than anything else. I think that is one of the things that is really shaping the environment we exist in right now.

Q. The skepticism about the cost and value of a four-year degree has grown, and that's been widely debated and widely discussed. Vocational programs have been rising. But the point of a four-year liberal arts education, in my case, it taught me more than just about communicating. It taught me a little bit about my heart and soul. Why isn't that message being more widely conveyed?

Pontari: At Furman, we want students to develop a sense of purpose and meaning because that leads to a more fulfilling life than what your salary is. But I think it gets back to what Tim said, that there's so much pressure on ROI. What's the return on investment? … I think it's a balance. I think for a long time, some institutions were not accountable for the value that people were investing in their college education. I think there's a balance there that we should be accountable to our graduates for ensuring they're successful and ensuring it was worth the cost. But I feel like the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it's really hard to talk about things like purpose and meaning. You have to show actual salary and moving up the ladder. As much as all of us agree with that, it's hard, based on how higher ed has talked about, to make that compelling, which is a shame. …

I think everyone cares about that and cares about the holistic development of students, not just whether they're prepared to do a job or whatever. It’s all about sound bites. It's all about marketing. Those are really hard stories to tell about how important that is. But I don't think institutions are shying away from that. I think they're just being asked to demonstrate value in a very black-and-white, numbers-oriented way, which is not all bad, but it's swung so far in one direction that the piece that you're talking about, I think, tends to get a little lost.

Schmitz: It's a challenge to do. Trying to figure out how to connect those skills with students, not even understanding that they're getting particular skills and trying to make those connections, is a real challenge.

Pontari: I think in culture, we're not really good at reflection, right? Because it’s all about giving students the opportunity to reflect on where they want to go, where they've been and what they're doing, and really figuring out what they care about. Our culture does not support that. We're all about scrolling and getting everything quickly. It's also this idea that I don't think we're doing it as a culture because to have that purpose, I mean, you have to step back and really take time to reflect, and that's just not something that seems to be as valued.

 Bell: There was a survey of parents done a few years ago, the top 10 reasons for choosing the college. The No. 1 thing, to the chagrin of most of us at the table, was to get a high-paying job. And those skills that we're talking about, those life experiences and those more intangible things were farther down on the list if they were on it at all. I think we probably deal with that on a daily basis where you have students and family saying, we're coming to you because of the value of the education you have. You've been there a long time. … We like the value of the education you offer, but what job am I going to get the day after graduation? That's not to put down the tech schools … but I think that's the world that we live in. On one hand, we're telling those stories. At Erskine, we call it the Erskine experience. And that's what our students talk about when they graduate. Our alumni talk about the relationships and how they grew as a person when they were in school.

I'm sure that happens at all of these institutions. But at this point in time in our culture, most of them, when they walk in the door, are thinking, what's my paycheck going to be and what job will I have when I get out? And that's not a bad thing to have, but it creates this tension in the way we market.

Schmitz: If the kids are going to change jobs a number of times, (it’s possible) the job hasn't been invented yet. If we are preparing you for your first job, that's not an education. That’s job training or job preparation. … We're talking to people about what an education is versus what learning is or versus what career preparation is. Those are different things. Education is about the next 30 years of your life. It's about preparing you for all the possible roles you're going to play. I think that's fundamentally different from sometimes what the parents are expecting. What I'd love to say to them sometimes is that you're selling yourselves and your child's education a little bit short if that's your expectation, because we are going to do that. But ultimately, we're preparing them for a lot more. It's a process.

Smith: At OneSpartanburg, we're trying to live in both of those worlds with the talent arm of OneSpartanburg. I fall under the Chief Talent Officer, and we have a Director of Talent Solutions. We're trying to figure out what those talent gaps are and how can we merge that side of it with the educational side. I think a perfect example is our partnership with Wofford and Converse to help with the teacher pipeline. We were able to broker an agreement between OneSpartanburg, Wofford College, Converse University, and School Districts 3 and 7 in Spartanburg County to help students who are graduating from Wofford with minors in education to go to Converse to get their master's in teaching for free. It will be paid for by Spartanburg County Districts 3 and 7. They will get their master's in one year and also do their student teaching in Districts 3 and 7. We will be providing them with a $500 stipend for three semesters. … When they graduate, they will graduate with a one-year teaching contract in either District 3 or District 7. If we can do more things like that where we're combining the educational component with the job market component, with the talent, with the talent gap component, that speaks volumes to what the benefit of education can be.

Because honestly, the students didn't believe us. Their parents didn't believe us. They thought it was a scam, but it's not. You're trying to create a teacher pipeline because just like nurses, we're hemorrhaging teachers as well. If we can build a pipeline with existing funds that the school districts already had for professional development to build that pipeline into those two school districts, and hopefully more, we can show that ROI right there. We have a partnership between two prestigious institutions. The students are getting top-notch education, and they're going to graduate with a job.

Q. Is the state doing enough to support higher ed and technical education, particularly in terms of teacher salaries?

Schmitz: My parents were public school teachers, so I'm always going to think we could do more on the salary front.

Q. The state has a billion-dollar surplus. Teacher pay in South Carolina trails a lot of other states.

Hulehan: I think that the state sees its investment in the students directly and that we've seen the benefits of that. They’ve put the money into Life Scholarship, into lottery tuition assistance, into SC Wins. And they've created a situation where our students who graduate with a two-year degree can graduate completely debt-free, which to go back to the previous question, answers that question about, Can I go to college? … What am I going to get out of it? And we can look at them very realistically and say, Here's the return on investment for that. We did an economic study six years ago that showed for every dollar that the legislature invests in Tri-County Technical College, the taxpayers get $2.10 back in terms of revenue and decreased use of public services. The students themselves get $5.50 more in lifetime earnings. And the general community, our society, gets $8.50 back in terms of added revenue into our communities and again, decreased public service costs. And so, we can give them that. But also, we do associative arts, we do associative science, we do gen-ed. And so, we try to sneak the other stuff in.

Here's our big marketing. You can come be debt-free, but also we're going to provide you with as much of a holistic educational experience as we can because we do want to provide you with the opportunity for careers and not just jobs. And then the other piece of that is we can say, we can cut your tuition in half if you want to go to a four-year school. We have direct transfer programs with 30 colleges in the state of South Carolina to say, If you think you can't direct go into Furman, if that doesn't seem realistic for you right now, you can sign up and go to your community college, you can go for basically free, and then you can transfer into the four-year university that you're looking to go into. And so, from my perspective, the state has invested in those ways because they see the direct return on investment, and that is having an impact on our direct communities, if not our direct salaries.

Pontari: We're still pretty low-ranked in the public school. I don't know what a ranking is across the nation, but the last time I looked, it was well in the 40s. So that's something that we should all be concerned about, however, we improve that with programs like what you're doing. … From where I sit, I'm really invested in raising South Carolina in terms of its profile around education, period. There's not as much a focus on the four-year degree, especially where we sit at the state level. That’s not a complaint, it’s an observation. Where that leads us, I'm not sure. But the way that people seem to be drawn to South Carolina and various businesses, we're going to have to deal with that because we are lacking very specific pipelines of types of workers in some areas. If it's about the economy, we're going to have to figure out how we all play a role in that to continue to move South Carolina forward.

Schmitz: I think it's hard to be a teacher. I don't think it's just about salary. I think being a teacher now is hard, and they find themselves in many cases also assailed culturally. What can they teach in the classroom? … I think they find themselves often feeling exposed to criticism or worse. I think there's a lot that we could do, I don't know if this is the state, but I think culturally to support the profession of teaching, particularly in the public schools, not just in South Carolina, but across the country.

Bell: I agree with everything that has been said. I know that for a long time, and it may still be true … that South Carolina had a reputation as having the best technical college system in the country. We want to maintain that, and I think that's one reason that so much emphasis is placed on technical college education and making that available to students. The state is pretty generous with tuition grant, Life Scholarships, Palmetto, which helps in-state students. It doesn't help students from other states to come here, but it does help offset those costs. But then the other part of your question was about compensation for teachers, and I don't know that we could ever pay a teacher enough to compensate them for what they do. One thing that Erskine is working with right now through some charter schools is called Teach Right USA. It's for people who have been out in the workplace and are not teachers, but have discovered that they want to go back and become teachers. It's a certification program for them, and it seems to be really taking off. We're hoping that we can help impact the state education system in that way by bringing people in who've been out for a while and found out that they have all these great job skills, but their passion is for teaching, and their heart is for students.

So, going back to school, we've talked about stopping what you're doing and going back to school is difficult. And so, this is a path way to help them get certified. And I think that can only bring, in the long run, stronger teachers to the classroom because they've been out, they've done that reflection, and they know at that point that that's what they want to do.

Q. I'm going to put each of you on the spot. Jennifer, we'll start with you. If you could go back and do one thing differently in your educational career, what would that be?

Hulehan: I can't think of one. We've talked a lot about students and how we're providing them with education, we're providing them with training, and how you can't prepare them just for the jobs that they're going to have. I had an interesting conversation with one of our under-resourced I-BEST students one time. … He said, How long have you worked here? At that time, I said, 15 years. It's 20 now. He said, Oh, gosh, I don't think I could ever work in a place for that long. The same place? I said, Well, it's the same place, but I haven't been doing the same job the entire time. That's what we want for you as well, that we're not preparing you for a job, we're preparing you for a career. In each decision that I've made in my educational career, it's been moving me to a different level, moving me to be able to give back in a different way, helping me to help students in another way. I did a traditional four-year college for my own experience and went to traditional graduate school at Winthrop University. I did not want be a teacher at all.

They don't make a lot of money. … Ultimately, my education opened my mind to the fact that there were other ways to get involved in education, and that's how I came to work in a two-year community college. I started as an instructor in the classroom. As I did that for several years, it was seeing, how can I give more? How can I do more? How can I take what I do in the classroom and expand it so it reaches further students. And so, from there, it's a program director's position. It's a department heads position. It's an associate dean. It's a dean. … I don't think I would change anything about that because I appreciate where I am now and the way that I can give my gifts and talents back to the institution and the students that we serve. At one point in my career, I thought, maybe then I'll move on to a four-year school or maybe I'll go to more graduate school.

And, what I found was that I loved the community college. I love our mission. I love the work that we do there, whether it's putting students directly into the workforce or sending them on their way to their next step at a four-year university. We do it all, and that's a really unique place to be. And it's a really important way to make a direct difference in students' lives. And so, the way I do that has changed. … It's allowed me the opportunity to create new programs like the I-BEST program that we offered or the Manufacturing Works pre-apprenticeship and to really expand my own view of what education is and to focus on what's the difference between job training and education. We do both at Tri-County, but how do we do both and do both well? And so now I'm at this 30,000-foot-view, looking down and how can we do different programs, different pathways, pipelines. I think that and the partnerships is incredibly important to the work that all of us do.

I'm in a position now where I can help create those pathways, create those partnerships to help us all be better together. I’ll go with (I wouldn’t change) one thing.

Q. OK Beth, one thing differently.

Pontari: I'm similar in that. I can't think of anything really because I have a similar pathway. I was a first-generation college student. If you had said you would be a provost at some point, I would have said, I don't know what a provost is. …  And when you get into academia, you get into it for the teaching and the research. My path here has really been about Furman and wanting to contribute to Furman and the students that come to Furman. … Teaching in the classroom, chair of the department, associate provost, provost. It's really because I care deeply about what we're doing at Furman, and I believe in it. I think I'm finally just starting to understand how this connects to so many bigger issues, like in South Carolina, for example, and like the pressures on higher ed. So, for me, I wake up every day very grateful for where I am. And the path, the way I got here, lots of opportunities, incredible mentors, a supportive environment. …

I don't have a lot of regrets or changes. At Furman, we talk about our pathways. Our students have a four-year pathway, but we try and share our pathway stories with them so they understand that it's not always straight. … I went to college thinking one thing and came out an entirely different human with different plans. I did a lot of that in those four years, which is why figuring out your purpose is so important. I had opportunities to do that in that four-year span where I thought I was going to be a clinical psychologist. … And I got to get my Ph.D. And as a first-generation college student, getting a Ph.D., what a privilege that was. ... My first job was at Furman. Again, what a privilege to serve an amazing institution. …

I just think in higher education or wherever you sit, you really have to be thinking about the bigger picture now. I think when I went to college, you just went to college, right? And it was assumed that was a good decision. Now there's so much more at stake. I think how we connect the dots with our communities, how we serve our communities, how we serve our students, it’s such an integrated ecosystem that I don't think I really understood. For me, it's more leaning into that and figuring out what role will Furman play to benefit the Upstate, Greenville, the state. I think there are things that we can do that we haven't even started yet in terms of partnerships. I'm excited about that, but I don't feel like I have a lot of things I wish I had done differently.

Bell: I may be the oddball at the table because my career, though long, has not been long at Erskine. When I graduated, I worked in the admissions office for four years … and I left and went to graduate school and missed Erskine very, very much. I've lived in Due West, the town where Erskine is, for many of those years, but never thought I would have the opportunity to go back to Erskine until about 5½ years ago, and I was offered the opportunity to go back into an advancement and alumni relations role. So, I have a long history with Erskine, but not a long history of working in higher education. As a student, if I look back on my student years, the one thing I would have done differently would be to take advantage of the semester abroad program. Now I see numerous students a semester going to study in other countries, and I'm a little envious.

But like my colleagues here at the table, I think that one of my roles is to open doors and create partnerships within the community where we reside, within the Abbeville County, Greenwood, Anderson County area. And so, we're working on partnerships with businesses, medical facilities, working with internships for students. One of the things I get to do because we are also the alumni office, is students will come and say, I'm interested in this particular field. Do you know someone who can mentor me or offer me a job? To make those connections with people has been very rewarding, and I want to see that grow. … Also, in the development side of what I do, it is often connecting donors with the students whose lives they've directly impacted. ... I have people sometimes say, Oh, you have the hardest job in the institution. And I said, No, I argue with the president about which of us has the best job because I'm the one who gets to deliver the news to a student sometimes who is sitting at the breakfast table telling her mom, we can't afford for me to go back to school.

And then I get to call and say, a person you don't know who lives three hours away has just given this amount of money and wants it used for a student who is struggling, and it's the exact amount of money she needs to come back. That's what makes me get up in the morning, to watch lives get impacted and then watch those students go out and impact other lives.

Schmitz: It's funny how much my own career trajectory was like that. I came to Wofford as a history professor straight out of college. … Then to become a department chair and then associate provost and ultimately provost. That's not something I expected at all when I started. I think a couple of things that I would have changed. I wish I went to a big state university. Not nearly as easy to study abroad, especially when I had to work a job to go to college, and I couldn't take a semester off from working and then study abroad. It wasn't nearly as easy as we make it at Wofford for kids to study abroad. .... I was going to be a lawyer, and I wish I had known that I was going to go to grad school a little bit earlier. I didn't make that decision until Christmas break, my senior year. …

I was a history major either way, but it would have been nice to have known that path earlier … The big thing I would have done differently is, I wish I could have relaxed a little bit more. … College actually wasn't a whole lot of fun for me because I felt like I worked a job and I thought that I approached it with a sense of desperation. I wish I could go back to my 18- to 21-year-old self and say, things will work out, and you can maybe just chill out a little bit. … I will say as a history professor at Wofford, there is a lesson that I learned when talking to other history majors about some of these topics, about things like career discernment. I wish I had figured out earlier that when they would come to me and say, Dr. Schmitz, what can I do with a history degree? … The answer I gave them for years was, what do you mean? You can do anything with a history degree. … You can research and write and communicate. All that's true, but that's not what they wanted. They wanted me to tell them specifically what they could do. It was the opposite of what they wanted. There's not a great way for a history professor to answer that question because there are so many things that one can do with that degree. Often they think it only means you can teach or you can do whatever. But I wish I had come up with something a little bit more specific or figured out that I should engage in a deeper conversation with them about what their specific interests were. I thought I was giving them a great answer. I mean, my gosh, the whole world is open to you. That's really not what they wanted. That was too little in terms of what they were after.

So, I wish I could go back and think about some of those conversations with advisees over the years and have been able to intuit a little more specifically what they wanted.

Pontari: I think that one of the things that we realized, and it became easier during Covid because we were Zooming all the time, is you have to get the history alumni in front of them because you can get a panel of eight to 10, and they do … literally different things. But they want to hear stories and real-life examples. It's the same thing, but it's a human there telling the story. … And one of the silver linings of Covid, now that alumni are so much more ready to engage on Zoom, and you get a great sampling of all the things. And then they can talk about how they use their skills. … Having those live alumni or connecting them like you are is so critical for them because they need to see something tangible.

Schmitz: And as faculty, we’re not equipped for that, right? … We're not career counselors. We don't know all the different pieces and things that people have done. So, working with the alumni is really important.

Q. Erin?

Smith: The only thing I would change is I should have finished my doctorate a long time ago. … But in terms of my educational trajectory, I owe everything to Winthrop University. That was the best decision I ever made. … I owe everything to Winthrop because I went there wanting to be a journalist. I was a mass comm minor and an English major because I didn't want a major in mass communications because I thought that that would pigeonhole me. I knew I could do anything with an English degree. It meant I could read, write, and speak well. But when I got there, I learned about the world of student affairs. Everybody here is on the academic side of the house. I'm student affairs through and through. I was a resident assistant. I wrote for the minority newspaper, I joined a sorority, I met my late husband.

Everything changed for me at Winthrop. I was a part of the Resident Student Association, and my mentor, John “J.T.” Timmons. … He got me interested in RSA. He took me to the careers and housing luncheons. He had me at these conferences because he saw something in me that I didn't even know existed. I didn't realize that what he was doing as our adviser was a job. … When I got out, being an English major, I graduated with no job. I found my way back to higher education because I asked myself, When were you the happiest? What were you the most excited doing? It was working with college students. I meandered back to higher education through the South Carolina Governor’s School because I was a residential life coordinator.

Then I ended up at Greenville Tech for 10 years. … I worked my way up to dean of early college, worked at Tri-County for almost three years.

It's just been an amazing path that's illuminated itself as I've gone along. None of this was planned. … Everything in my path has been created for me, and I've stepped into that role and been able to do it well. I just really feel blessed because it all started with Winthrop. I also give credit to Nova Southeastern University, which is my graduate school, for really teaching me what it means to be a student affairs practitioner. … I honestly feel blessed to be where I am and to know that my four-year liberal arts English degree got me here.

Q. I want to thank each of you for your time and your insight today. I appreciate it. Also, thanks again to Erskine, and Tri-County Tech for the sponsorship of the roundtable.