The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 448: Sheree Utash—It's Only the Best School in America

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Mike chats with Dr. Sheree Utash, Ed.D., president of WSU Tech and a national leader in workforce education. They talk about how she reinvented a community college into a national model for workforce development, her role in taking Mike's S.W.E.A.T. Pledge and shaping it into the mikeroweWORKS curriculum, and why she believes skilled trades are key to America's future. It's a perfect pre-Labor Day discussion.

Hello, friends, it's Mike. It's the way I heard it. And it's only the best school in America. That is the title of the episode. My guest is the one and only Sherry U-Tash. Chuck, am I overstating things? Is it too hyperbolic to suggest the WSU Tech in the heart of America is the best school in America? In Wichita, Kansas, no, it's certainly one of the best schools in America, and it's a very, very good school for aviation technology. I know that. Well, maybe the best there for sure, but I don't know of any trade school that's done a better job of reinvigorating the skilled trades from the ground up. They're so passionate about the trades. And Sherry Utash, who's been running the school for years now, is such a great educator. And am I biased? You bet I'm biased. The MicroWorks Work ethic curriculum was designed, adapted, and ultimately embraced at WSU Tech.

that was the first of 70-some schools to take it. And hopefully there'll be 700 more somewhere down the road. And if that happens, then Sherry Utash needs to be thanked profusely and over and over again. Absolutely. Yeah, she had a lot to do with it. Curriculum was actually started at WSU Tech. Jade from our office here, me, a lot of other people. Jennifer Rowe helped to develop the curriculum right there at WSU Tech.

Yeah. Look, it's a hard thing to. do, guys, to look into somebody's soul and weigh and measure their commitment to work ethic. But getting a curriculum that does that into a school is a super interesting and I think important thing to do and a fine topic since this will be our official Labor Day show. Because honestly, when you talk about that part of our workforce, the skilled part, you have to talk about our educational system and you have to talk about trade schools and you have to talk about the willingness to make a more persuasive case for these jobs. And that's exactly what

Sherry is so good at doing. And as long as I'm thanking people, I got to thank our friends at Stand Together. None of this happens without them. Stand Together has been supporting MicroWorks for nearly a decade. They've been supporting my show, people you should know, currently airing on YouTube. It's hundreds of incredible organizations. that come together with bottom-up solutions. And really, that's what a great trade school is. It's a bottom-up solution to a massive problem. I think we can learn a lot from Miss Utesh.

Funny name, but a wonderful gal. She really is. I mean, she's got a great laugh as well. She does. God, I wish I made her laugh more in this conversation, but you'll hear some of it. You're going to like her. It's only the best school in America run by quite possibly

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So I'm happy to be here. worked out great. I'm going to be in San Diego the rest of the week for a workforce development conference. I love it. Which is a national conference put on by American Association of Community Colleges. And there'll be 1,000, 1,200 people there. I'm talking about workforce. Will you be addressing the crowd? I'm on two, well, I'm on three panels this week.

So I will be a panelist in three different conversations, workshops. How often do you do that these days? Like, how much time do you spend as an emissary? of sorts on work ethic? Quite a bit. Quite a bit. You know, I'm always happy to go talk to people about it and tell people what we're doing

and add to that conversation because it is a huge national need. We need it across the country. We've got to continue to move the needle. You know, and a lot of times I feel like, you know, I'm saying the same thing over and over, probably like you do. Yeah.

And I feel like, you know, like the needle should be here, we've maybe gone to here. So do you think, I mean, with regard to the countries, relationship with work ethic. Are we trending now in a positive direction? I think we're a lot better than we were 10 to 15 years ago. I think it is much more of a household conversation.

I think that we've destigmatized a lot of what people thought of vocational education, that kind of thing. So I do think that state by state, college by college, organizations like yours that are dedicated to this particular movement, this subject and the passion that we have about it. I think it is changing. But, you know, we still have a long way to go. We still have a long way to go for people to really, how do I want to say this? In my mind, it's like honoring and, you know, being a proponent for the dignity of work. You know, there's integrity and dignity in all work. And we all have to have, you know, the ability to be able to

to have careers and have jobs. And, you know, the whole idea of essential jobs, to me, it's almost like we have all these new collar jobs that have been around forever. I'm not a big proponent of white collar, blue collar. I don't like that. The color of collars. I think it's new collars. It's like everybody's part of the movement to create a workforce, to create an economy,

and to create a prosperous America. I talked about this in the intro. You and I are in such violent agreement. on so many things. And in hindsight, you've been such a, well, you've been such a blessing the microworks because it's great that you agree with our principles, but you actually adapted the sweat pledge and you got behind the idea that it could be a curriculum of sorts. Not just behind the idea. Like, you actually grabbed it and put it into your school. So I don't want this interview to be a to be totally self-serving. I want people who are listening to really understand

from your perspective and you are an expert, forgive me, but you've been around it for a long time. And I, I want people to understand the relationship between enhanced work ethic and mastering a skill that's in demand and all the work you're doing at WSU Tech. But I also just want to thank you for you have to put yourself in my place. It's on the wall right there, the sweat pledge. I wrote that thing 12, 13 years ago after half a bottle of wine, just to scratch an itch that I had. And I've said this to you before, but it's very difficult to articulate how odd it is to visit your school and meet hundreds of kids who have taken that thing to heart and who are living by it. So I don't really know if I have a question so much as an observation, which is, A, thanks,

and B, isn't it odd how like-minded people can find each other? Exactly. You know, I found your sweat pledge well before I knew anything about anything of what you were doing. But when I first started at WSU Tech, which was about 16 years ago, you know, as vice president of academics, and as a good newcomer coming into a new college, I went to industry and I listened to everybody, tell me, oh, your college puts out technically proficient people, but they don't know how to work. And I just was like scratching my head. Well, what does that mean? What does it mean? But I heard it from every single industry. IT, health care, aviation, manufacturing. Everybody talked about it.

So I was searching for something, not knowing what I was even looking for when I found the Sweat Pledge. And so I started integrating the tenants of that Sweat Pledge into the curriculum at that time, but all we were doing at that point in time was saying, here is this sweat pledge, and part of what you do in your orientation is you sign this that you're going to, you're going to take these in and these become values within who you are as a person as you go into the workforce. That's how this all started. And then one day I was in a meeting and out of the blue, somebody from stand together said, ask me something about the sweat pledge. Did I know it? Did I know anything about it? And I said, oh yeah, we use it. They're like, what? That's how those whole thing started. And it's just

kind of morphed into this, you know, beautiful, wonderful thing that not only do we have this curriculum built, but now we're taking this all, we're giving an opportunity for colleges and high schools all across the nation to be able to integrate this curriculum into what they do. And, you know, it's another tool for the tool belt, whether you're in health care, whether you're in, you know, whether you're in automotive services, whether you're in manufacturing aviation, whatever it might be, the idea of knowing how to not only get the job, but keep the job, which is really what it's all about, is keeping the job. That's the beauty of this thing.

That's the beauty of it. But never in my wildest dreams, probably 12, 11, 12 years ago when I found that on the Internet and thought, okay, we're just going to start, you know, using that. in our coursework. I just, I mean, just so the listeners and viewers understand how, how weird this is, shortly after I wrote that thing, I was in the woods in Northern California, giving a speech, oddly, to a really interesting assemblage of men from all over the world. And I talked about some of the tenants in it, and I talked about why I wrote it.

And one of the guys in the audience was Charles Koch. Charles Koch invites me out to lunch that day to talk more about this idea. And I had written it, again, mainly as a good-natured challenge, because I was starting to feel like you can't talk about work ethic without being immediately accused of some sort of alignment with rapacious capitalism. And you're simply implying that a certain segment of the population is fundamentally or inherently lazy. And of course, that's not at all what I meant. But in an effort to articulate the various virtues of working hard, Charles Koch said,

look, I can help you with that. And he wrote the foundation a super generous check. And then I became interested in his philanthropic efforts, which turned into stand together. Right? So now we're in this mutual admiration society, and he's saying, do more with the sweat pledge. See where it resonates. and you had already found it, and you were already doing this thing at the collegiate level.

So my question now is, what kind of resistance did you find, or did you at all? Both in the students who you were asking to comport with it and in industry, who I know you guys work super closely with. Do do do do do do do do do dumb Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time.

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And here's what I would find from people. I'd find from students, a lot of them would say, hey, I already know all this. And my response was, if I can learn something every time I teach this, you can probably learn something by taking this class one time. Maybe there's just a nugget. And if not, if you are that good, then, hey, I want you to be a mentor to all these others that might need this. And so that was the resistance on the student level. From an industry level, I mean, they welcome it because here's what was being said. Again, technically proficient students, they don't know how to work.

That's been a story or a common thread for a long time. You know, I think about, you know, spirit aerosystems that, you know, were giving out alarm clocks at one point in time so employees could get out of bed to come to work. I mean, come on now, right? And you think about the fact then, as we've moved this forward, and now we have the this credentialing that goes with it. So when a student goes to that job interview, they're interviewing with Textron Aviation in Wichita, Kansas,

and there's that industry credential of micro work ethics, that means something. That means something. That means that they've learned it, not really learned it, but they've demonstrated that they know what those tenants mean. And those are the things I think that, you know, taking personal responsibility and knowing how to communicate and work as a team and all the things that are being taught in that,

that's, everybody can use that. Everybody can use that. And think about, you know, we think about students that are going into career technical paths, but think about all the leadership trainings that you hear. Think about all the people teaching leadership. I mean, if you take that and boil down, a lot of it is right there in that sweat pledge. So when you're teaching these tenants, or at least discussing them, how do you, like how do you square the fact that nobody wants a lecture?

Nobody wants a sermon. Nobody wants a finger wagged at them. They don't want to be told that they're falling short or doing something wrong. On the other hand, you've got employers who are really not comfortable saying it out loud, but I'll say it, you know, privately. They're just pulling their hair out. They're like, tuck your shirt in. Turn your cell phone off. Show up early.

Stay late. We can't really say these things through our HR department. but somehow or another, they've become conspicuously absent. So this business of trying to reintroduce these ideas into education, I'll be honest, when I realized that you were doing this at this age, like these are 18, 20, 21 year, sometimes older. Yeah, a lot of times. Right.

Average age is 25. So like in my mind, these were conversations that were designed to happen 12, 13, 15, 15 year olds. Was I wrong or is it just a little more universal than I thought? So, you know, I have a theory on this. I don't know if it's true or not, but my theory is, is that a lot of, I'll use myself as an example, a lot of us learned work ethic when we were very young because we had jobs. Yeah.

We, you know, we might have babysit. Guys might have mowed lawns. We might have swept floors. My brother swept floors in a barbershop, you know, when he was. a young kid, you know, I babysit. We learned those kind of things. You learn some work ethic because you did that. So today, we don't have quite as much of that happening at our early age. We don't have as many work experiences. So I look at this and I think sometimes, that's why we have to teach it. And I'll tell you, over the years, you know, it's a push and a pull because I'm like,

well, if we don't do it, who will? And I keep going back to that in my mind. And I keep going back to that in my mind, and I think about that a lot, you know, well, if you don't do it, who's going to do it? Whether we think we should have to teach this or not, or expose, do we have to, should we? But if we don't do it, who's going to? I mean, I think the primary question is, can we? Like, can you teach work ethic? Obviously, I think it's possible. I don't know if you can do it in a lecture.

You have to kind of do it through a conversation, and it's why I was nervous initially about seeing this thing morph into a curriculum. And that's really what it is. It is. Thanks to you, largely, I believe it can be taught. But like the old song says, it has to be carefully taught. You can't teach it like math. You can't teach it like, you know, when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. That's always the way it is.

That's right. It's not that way. No. So it's more of, you know, experience. exposure, awareness, and then demonstration. Like, how are you going to demonstrate that skill? Who do you see demonstrating that skill? And then challenging them beyond when they're with us, when they get to that workforce,

you know, to keep that in mind. Who's demonstrating good work ethic? Are you demonstrating good work ethic? You know, that's what employers need because it's a package. We have to have technical skills. They have to have knowledge. They have to have technical skills of what they're going to do. no matter if they're going to be a nurse or an aviation mechanic or a robotic technician,

they all have to have that, and they have to have this other piece, which is the work ethic piece. Or they can't be successful. It's like an ecosystem of the two together. And if you can blend those two things together, which is really what we're trying to do, because take it a step further, you know, you can reinforce work ethic in our labs and our classrooms beyond the talking of. about this subject. Are you working as a team together? Did you show up early and stay late? Did you take the bad jobs? Did you take the bad, you know, did you help clean up that lab to make sure, I mean, I'm a real stickler on this. I want to be able to eat off the floors of those labs.

I've been in your lab, Sherry. I've been to your campus. It's a little creepy. It's so clean. Every time I walked in another room, I'm like, yeah, yeah, they could take my liver out in here. This is tidy. Well, you want to be like an industry. So everything we do, we emulate industry. That's part of the experience that those students are having. So they're reinforcing those work ethic pieces as they're in their labs, in their classroom, doing all the things that they do to get their technical skills.

Do you think it's more important to forge this association between a decent work ethic and the vocational part of our workforce than it is with the other part of our workforce? I'm just asking because I'm just wondering if I got my own bias going on. But it seems like if work ethic is in short supply, it's in short supply across the board. But does the general population feel it more if the paucity of it is in the skilled trades? I think that's probably true. I think they feel it more. But the real answer to that, in my opinion, it's across the board.

There's just as many accountants. There's just as many, you know, engineers and other high professional type jobs that need work ethic and probably need to have that opportunity to experience it so that they can be successful to. Now, will people admit that? Maybe not. I personally believe, yeah. I personally believe it's a big deal. It's part of the thing. Whether your technical skills and knowledge are from a four-year degree or a two-year.

degree or technical certificate or an industry credential, you still have to have work ethic side by side because none of us would be successful if we didn't have it. Do you think sometimes, though, when we look at, well, certainly AI now and technology in general and our love affair with efficiency, not effectiveness necessarily, but efficiency, doesn't all of that sort of bolster, you know, the old Saul, work smart, not hard. Right? Like the more efficient you become,

the less hard you have to work, therefore good for you. You're smart. It seems like part of what we're fighting against is the fact that every new innovation requires less diligence and more of something else. And I just wonder if that's a smart bargain.

Well, you know, AI is going to, infiltrate, it already has and it will continue to change the world of work. It's going to do that. But part of, you know, the work ethic of that is what's everybody's individual responsibility in their work with that technology? And where's our mindset with it, that it can probably help make us more efficient and more effective? And then how do you adopt that into the work that you're doing? And where's the integrity behind it? And where's the value system that goes with that? And goes with that, with the integration of that technology, because technology is a tool. You know,

the internet, you know, when it came on, when online classes came out, everybody was like, oh, at it's, I'll never ask them, we'll look at today. They're still here. This is not going away, but we do have a responsibility to be ethical about how we use it, how we integrate it, how we understand it. I think it's another layer of all of this that, you know, certainly is going to continue to infiltrate every industry and every person that is in the workforce over the next five to ten years. How do you see the differences between efficiency and effectiveness? What do those words mean to you as an educator?

So I prefer to take effective measures and then create efficiencies instead of vice versa, because I think a lot of times efficiencies just mean you're getting it done faster. It doesn't mean that you're getting it done better. So if you can figure out how to do it better and then create how to do it faster, think about that. Think about the integration of automation into the manufacturing processes we have. It's got to be effective and then be efficient. We have to do it well. It can't degrade product, you know, the way we make, the way we develop, the way we engineer, the way we design products.

It has to make it better. and then you create the efficiencies, you know, through the technology that goes with that. Maybe efficiencies need to be a symptom of something else or an outcome. Or an outcome of effectiveness. Right. That's kind of the way I look at it. You know, I look at a lot of the integration of technology, particularly automation, and particularly in a manufacturing because we do tons of this.

You know, we're building a brand new building that's going to be devoted all to educating and training on, you know, the integration of automation, robotics, Internet of things, PLCs, all that. In a trade school. Yeah, in a trade school. We're going to get to that in a big way, but I'm just struck again, and I've quoted him before, but Huxley said it so great in Brave New World. He said, the greatest threat to freedom is total anarchy, but the second greatest threat is total efficiency.

You know, breezed over the first time I read it, but not a day goes by now where I don't read the headlines and think, oh, damn, man, he was really on to something. Yeah. Because if we don't, if we didn't do the work, and if we don't have the connection to the thing that makes life more efficient, then somehow or another, we took some kind of shortcut. And shortcuts lead to long delays. Yeah. Sooner or later. And then you've got to pick the carnage up on the other side. It's always better to do the heavy lifting on the front side than on the back side.

Department of education. Department of Education. I'm sorry, I'm just going to freelance a little bit here, but what's to become of it? What are your thoughts on it? Do we need it? And if we do, what has to change? D-DU-DU-DU-DU-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-M. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial.

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Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Well, I'll tell you a quick story. I have often said the only other job that I would like to have other than the one that I have been blessed to have for the last

30 years is to be the Secretary of the Department of Education to make some deliberate changes. The thing that has happening is that educators myself and many others in this land are

being asked to work more with industry and to deliver more which we're doing but I'll tell you what. We are you know, the systems don't support that. And that's a frustration. And so you spend a lot of time, I say this all the time, spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to work around the system

to stay compliant so that you don't get in trouble and you don't lose funding, but to actually deliver upon what you're being asked to do. So there is incongruence. That's the only thing that I would say, oh, yeah, I'll be there. Oh, the only thing. Yeah, I mean, it's only ever. Everything, right?

It's only everything. Chuck, find the sweat pledge, would you? Just so I can watch you do something over there. Sure, sure. See if you can put that up on the swing. Take a look. Take a look at you go, man. Speed of lightning.

That is good. Somewhere up there. Can you make it bigger? I'm blind as a mall. I can't see that. I can't see that. I'm going to have to get up and look at it. There you go.

There we go. Where's the part? I think it's number, yes. Number six. I understand that being in compliance does not necessarily mean I'm out of danger. That was meant to talk about an individual's relationship to safety and the role of personal responsibility therein.

But what you just said is so true, it feels like the Department of Education and so many other departments and so many other bureaucracies and layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. My God, we're seeing it here in L.A. right now with the fires and how we're trying to figure you're out, well, just because we were in compliance did not mean we were out of danger. And just because the Department of Education is checking all these boxes doesn't mean kids are graduating with any facility or, well, any education. You know, something in there rhymes with efficiency. It's like when we become too enamored of efficiency or too enamored with compliance, we just start

leapfrogging over all sorts of things. And it strikes me that one of those things is people, like individuals in particular. So with regard to that, and maybe with a slight bias toward the evils of cookie cutter advice, say something smart and unforgettable. What I would say is that compliance is a good thing and it's there for reasons. You've got to keep that in mind. But it cannot stop you from doing the things that you know you need to do. to get the job done. There's a way to walk a parallel path. You just have to know what your comfort level of risk is.

I say this all the time to people in my profession that want to become a president. This is the advice I give them. You need to think about what your level of comfort is with risk, what your board's level of comfort level with risk, if you're getting ready to take that job. If those don't meld, it's going to be a level of comfort level with risk, It's going to be a tough road for you.

It's going to be a tough ride. But if they do, and I'm very fortunate because my board is all senior leaders from industry. They get this. And they're all about being effective along with being efficient. And then, you know, understanding the compliance of all this. So you've got to think about it. I mean, there are 12 different roads to get somewhere. You don't always have to take the same one.

So don't get bogged down by that. figure out a way to respectfully get to where you need to go as a leader and an educator, understanding that you've got the compliance over here that you've got to take care of. It's just that there's so much insane practicality and what you just said. You run a large, robust educational institution. The board is populated totally by people who run industries. who employ the very people that you're educating. So you're accountable to the students over here.

You're accountable to the employers over here. The employers, meanwhile, are present. They're literally there where the teaching is happening. And so when I look at that virtuous wheel of common sense and compare it to what's going on in D.C., then is it really any surprise that I could be at the inauguration and somebody from education walked up and read a sign that said, sorry, I can't talk and starts asking me questions.

I mean, my God. So, all right, if that all led to a question, it would be, why isn't the administration knock it on your door right now? I do. Why isn't everybody, God help you, but why aren't they looking at WSU Tech and saying, this is education done right? This is education with, yes, compliance, but practical. physicality, measured risk, everybody's got skin in the game.

And it's flipping the model. It's flipping the model. What do you mean? Well, you know, what we do is, you know, the old way of building, I don't want to say old, maybe the most popular way of creating a new program for education is, you know, a bunch of people go in a room and figure out what they want to do. They create a program. what we do is we bring industry to the table. And we say, and I'll give you a great example of this,

when we were building the National Center for Aviation Training, which you were in the other day. Impressive, impressive. When we were building that facility, we brought the leaders from aviation in Wichita to the table, and we said, what does your workforce look like in five to ten years? Not only what skills do they need, but what are the new things that are going to happen?

And so we built those programs. Many of the programs that you saw, they were built because the industry told us that's what was needed. So then they bring subject matter experts to the table. They help create the curriculum. We do the academic pieces to make it fit. Same thing we're doing with the MRW curriculum. To make it fit academically to meet the regulations and those kind of things from a state standpoint and a federal standpoint. But what happens is then we're delivering exactly what they want.

16 years ago, they were like they wanted these robotic and automation technicians, and we were just like, what does that mean? Yeah, widgets. Yeah, what does that mean? They wanted a couple of other programs that we've developed in paint, painting different types of aircraft and the different types of applications for that. We didn't know what that meant. but they had people that did in their R&D.

Fast forward to today, every single one of those programs that we built because they told us that's what they needed, those are all active programs at NCAT today. They're all active programs. But then we bring the industry back in, and the industry then continues to say, hey, when we hired these people, they were deficient in this, this or this.

Okay, great. We're going to fix that. So then you just continuously improve what you're doing. doing and you continuously integrate the new technology and the skills that they need in those jobs. What are the placement rates like? So our placement rate is really very, very good. We don't have a lot of outmigration, which means talent leaving the state of Kansas.

Our placement rate remains between like 90 and 92 percent of our graduates. And that's three things. They either are working in the field they studied in, they're in the military, or they're continuing their education and the majority of them continue their education at Wichita State University you know in an educational career path that we've built with them because they understand the importance of the work we do and then how that can integrate to become an engineer or a person in in a business management or business administration or whatever the case may be health care

health professions you know the BSN degree so all those pathways that we've created because that's you know to me education's here, careers here. So bring somebody in where they don't have this big elephant on the table and they, you know, they can think, you know, I can do that. I can do six weeks or eight or 12. And then I can do this job and I can make this money. And then I'm going to go to work.

I mean, maybe I'm going to continue to get my two-year degree, but maybe I'm just going to go to work. And then I'm going to say, man, I really, what she's doing over there, that's what I want to do next. then they come back, they add, and they continue to add, and that can be at WSU Tech, and that can be at Wichita State University, and that's the beauty of this, and the beauty of building stackable curriculum and building a career pathway with education right next to it. So it's just a ladder. But it's more than a ladder.

It's a visible ladder. Like what you just said is super important, I think. You choose your path, you're on your way, And then one day you look around and you go, hey, what, you know, what's she doing? What's going on over there? Maybe I, how often does that happen in a healthy educational ecosystem? And I ask it from the standpoint of when we took shop class out of high school, what we really did was we eliminated the possibility that some kid walking from math class to English class down the corridor might glance in through the window and see some CNC thing going on or see something being fabric. which might spark a thing that says, hey, I wonder, I wonder if I could do that.

Right. So that's kind of gone in a lot of ways, but it is so alive and well in your world. Well, it is alive and well in our world because I'm a huge proponent of that because young kids can't be anything that they don't know what it is. Right. You know, if they haven't had exposure, they probably know what a nurse and a doctor and a teacher is. But do they know what a robotics technician does? Do they know that airplanes have mechanics?

Do they understand that you can be a surgical technician in the surgery room with the surgeon? All these kind of things that they can't see, right? They don't have any. So three things that we've done with that. I'll start with the high school kids. So we've developed, I mean, we're like taking it to the people, right? We've developed what we call these Future Ready Centers. And we're in partnership with USDA 259, which is the Wichita School District,

which is the largest school district in the state of Kansas. We've created these Future Ready Centers, and they're on either one of our campuses or one of theirs. All high school students have the opportunity to go a half a day to these Future Ready Centers. We have one in manufacturing and aviation. We have one in health care. We're building one right now in IT,

and then we'll be building one for applied technologies. So construction science and automotive and those kind of things. But those high school kids then, because our state has what they call Excel and CTE, and a big thank you to the legislator and the governor that have created this program, they provide funding for those high school students to start a career track when they're in 11th grade to go through those career technical pathways. And they pay for it. So here this student comes out, they can take, I guess, 10th, 10th, 11th, 12th. Great example. We have a young man just last May, first generation college student, first in his family, Hispanic young man. In May, last May, the night that he graduated from WSU Tech with his two-year associate's degree in aviation maintenance, he also graduated from his high school and he was the valedictorian. He works at Textron Aviation. He owes no, has no student. loan debt and he got a full ride with an engineering scholarship to Wichita State. Now, he's 18 years old.

Now think about that, first generation college student. So you're building this pathway. So we've done that with high school kids. But then we go, okay, what about middle school kids? Because they don't, you know, to your point, they don't get to see any of that. So what we've done with them is we're bringing them in in the summer. We had over 2,000 middle school kids last summer. We did camps with them.

We're going to continue to build that and have more camps. The biggest idea is to expose them and create awareness. They get to build a drone. They get to fly it in a drone field. They get to have a competition. They get in a flight simulator and fly planes. They get to work on an airplane. They get to build a CNC part.

They get to do all these things hands-on that they would never have that experience for. So they go to these camps. Hopefully, by the time they're in ninth grade, they have to decide what they want to do, maybe they're going to be interested in one of those pathways, career pathways. And then go back one further. We just started a children's book series to go to four through eight, ages four through eight, so that they could read about careers in STEAM education. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources?

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It does. Well, when you take the art out of a thing, I mean, that's what happened to the vocational arts, right? We took the art out. Then it was Votech. Then it was some acronym. Then it was another acronym. Then it was shop. Then it was gone. But the demise of all of that starts with the removal of art. You're putting the art back in it. But, I mean, everything you just said is field trip on steroids. But we're taking it to them. Right. The books are being read in their classrooms. And then maybe, you know, there's, and I'll give you an example.

The first book is written after my oldest granddaughter. Her name's Ella. She has a third grader. What's the series called again? It's called Tech Tykes. And the first one is Ella, the engineer, and the big fix. And so Ella and her friends go to a playground. The playground's kind of, you know, torn up and not up to par.

They decide as a group that they're going to build a new playground. and it's all about how do you use engineering, you know, the curiosity, the building and the design and all that kind of thing, and they do it on the ground. Well, interestingly enough, my daughter, her mother, read the book to her third grade classroom, and I, you know, donated a book to her third grade classroom in my granddaughter's name. And they had this robust conversation, which my daughter was like, I had no idea this was going to happen, and I thought the teacher was going to cut us off. and they kept having it, well, then, I mean, that's the beauty of this because we're bringing, you know, we're bringing that out. We're going to do 10 books, and they're all going to be about different careers. So that four through eight-year-olds, so we take it to them, we bring the middle school kids, and then we take the, you know, we get the high school kids. Yeah, we have over 4,000 high school kids right now at our college.

and we had 700 10 years ago. She calls you Gigi? Yes, she does. That's my grandma name. I'm Gigi. That's awesome. Yeah, I think a curious George. It's kind of like that.

Yeah. It's easy to kind of overlook the impact. I can still remember the first time I saw the man in the yellow hat and that monkey and realized, well, subconsciously anyway, that curiosity was being elevated in some way, like in a very important way, like in the titular hero of the series, curious George, you know. So when did it occur to you to go that far back and start making the case? So it's just kind of been a group of it at home. So we get the high schools and we kind of get this in a really good solid thing. Well, what feeds high schools? is middle school, so you've got to do something for your middle schoolers. And so that's kind of

spurred the summer school camp thing. And we have a girls rock science camp that we do and a boys rock science camp that we do. So we're bringing those kids at, you know, third, fourth, fifth, and then sixth, seventh, and eighth into those middle school. But I've always had this idea in my head about how do you get to these young kids that, they don't have any frame of reference for any of this. and how do you make it fun for them to see that? So, I don't know, I've had in my head for a long time and just, you know, things align, as you well know, and you meet the right people that can just make this whole thing happen. And Mandy Fouse, my executive director of communications and public affairs, she and I are doing this.

She's doing a lot of the heavy lift, and we have a wonderful publisher that we met through an aviation connection. She was the first Latino sport pilot in the USA. And I got to meet her through that and then found out she had a publishing company and I said, hey, I've got this crazy idea. Tell me, should I just kick the can down the road and forget it? Or should we do it? And she's like, let's do it. Do it.

How did you guys become the Center for Aviation Education in the country? How did this happen in Wichita? We named it that. We said we're going to be national. Brilliant. I'm going to tell you, at the time, well, when this was like in the design stages 16, 17 years ago, we were no more. In fact, I've been there 16 years. But I started on the periphery of this project of building NCAT.

But we were no more. I always say we didn't even deserve to be on Web Road. But we said, we're going to be national. We're going to be the National Aviation Training Center. We're going to build to a national posture. We just put in a culinary institute downstairs. I mean, downtown, Wichita, we took an old historic building and made it into a food hall and a culinary institute and an event center. We call it niche, National Institute for Culinary and Hospitality Education.

So, aspirational names to become aspirational national leaders. So you are a believer then in the self-fulfilling prophecy. I am. You've got to put it out there in the universe, and then you've got to claim it, and then you've got to work hard to get there. What else would you do as the queen of the Department of Education? Like, really, seriously. You're in charge. I know people listening right now. I have kids, and they're worried, you know. And I'm doing what I can on this podcast and elsewhere to, you know, shine a light on these solutions of sorts that have arisen between homeschooling and traditional. public education and there's just there there seems to be a lot of connective tissue out there that's just sort of evolving on its on its own but i guess maybe the better question is when i think of the

department of education and when i think of a lot of the other traditional approaches it's all top down and everything that i've seen stand together do and everything i've seen that's happening in your world, and certainly in my little ecosystem, is bottom up. But you're an administrator. I think you're a president. Yeah, it says it right there. You must be, right? If it says it, it's true.

Well, to your point, it's national, so it's going to become that thing. My question is, how does a person in a top-down role stay true to a bottom-up philosophy? Because you have a mission and you believe in the mission, you know, think about the top of an organization our job is to set the vision meet the mission provide resources remove barriers and get out of the way and let great people do their work our success I'm the one that always gets to talk about it but let me just tell you there's 800 people working every single day that believe in the mission of what we do at WSU Tech that makes all the difference in the world so my job is

to help them make that happen. And the more we can do bottom up, the better off all of our organizations will be. Because we've got wonderful people working in great places. We've got to just get out of their way. We've got to empower them. We've got to provide them what they need, remove the barriers so they can be successful, and just let them do things because guess what? They have a whole lot better ideas than I do.

And I, the other thing I think is, you know, don't be scared to surround yourself with really people that are way more smarter than you are. I mean, and I say it all the time. That's really smart people doing things. I don't think we necessarily always do that, but we need to. And that's how good things happen. And not every idea is a good idea, but the more that we can bubble things because bubble things up. So let's, you know, let's think about any organization. There's really good information that comes from the,

from that bottom up. You know, we do this thing. We did it once. We're getting ready to do it again. We've just launched it. It's called shock tank. Shot tank. Shock.

Oh, shock. Shock. And it's a lot like shark tank. Uh-huh. But it's called shock tank. And bubble up, bottom line, you know, bubble up ideas from all of our employees on things that they would do to move the college forward. And then we go through this whole thing. They present to the leadership.

team, they present to the board, the entire college gets to weigh in on the best idea, and then I bring a bunch of community people in, and they get to weigh in on that idea, and then we fund that idea. Is this part of Shock the System? It's a little different than Shock the System, because Shock the System is second chance, but this is called Shock Tank. And it's just a thing that we put together to help bubble ideas from the ground up. And that led to, you know, kind of this whole idea of the community navigator system that we

have and again taking education to the people so we have people that go to work every day in underrepresented neighborhoods within the city of Wichita and they they're not decked out in WSU tech stuff they're just there to demystify the myth that everybody can go to college what kind of college should you go to what resonates with what you want to do and they help they help with time management they help with federal financial aid they help with all the processes. And you know what? We're getting students, but the benefit of it is that you want everybody to have that chance to go to college. Whatever college it is, you know, by, you know, Georgetown education report says by 2031, which is right around the corner, 73% of jobs will

require some kind of post-secondary education. Is that a credential? Is that a two-year degree? Is it a four-year degree? Well, we know 72% and we know that all of them aren't going to be four-year degrees. So we know we have to do this. So how do we get more people into the workforce, more people interested in it, and how do we demystify the fact that everyone can go to college? You just choose the college you want to go to. Man, there's so much there. I can't decide if you'd be the greatest thing to happen to the Department of Education or the work. simply because I don't know that you're like what you're doing and what you've done.

I don't know if it gets better if there's a dot-gov after it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. Not to bring it back to me, but to do that very thing for just a moment, it's like, you know, I had a conversation when I was mute, which was, like, as we've established, doomed and frustrating. But, you know, people in the government saying we can take micro-works. and we can make it macro works. We can reach 20, 30, 50, 100 times the people that you're reaching.

And all you have to do is become a part of what, the Borg. Right? And then the next thing you know, you're in the business of saying things that will hopefully apply to the largest numbers of people, but you know in your head it's not going to apply to everyone. And now you're trading and the very thing that I know you and I agree is the devil's currency, and that's cookie cutter advice. the bromides and the platitudes.

I just keep coming back to this imperfect place where the minute you think you have it figured out, everything in me wants to write it down. Maybe it's a sweat pledge. Maybe it's a curricula. Maybe whatever it is, it's like, okay, I got it. I thought about it. And now I've written it down, so now it's real.

But it's still, its relevance is relative. That's the hardest thing to accept, because as certain as you might be about whatever your morals and dogma are, and as sure as you might be that they're going to apply to this group of people, it's almost equally certain that it's going to fall on deaf ears over there. That's why you have to continue to be a risk taker, understand how to do that, and do the things that you know that you need to do to meet your community workforce needs, your industry

partners. And what's best for students? I always say this when I'm making a decision. You know, we use this as a college. Is it the best thing for students? Is it the best thing for our community and our business partners? And is it the best thing for this college? Those are my filters versus regulations all the time.

Pardon the politics, but what would happen if the teachers' union asked that same question? Do do do do do do do do. Dumb. My guest today, Tom Albanyce, is an American giant, and I'll tell you why. Tom understands, on a fundamental level, that the business of mining is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things. American giant knows this, which is why they committed themselves 16 years ago to make all their excellent clothing right here in this country. It wasn't easy, but they did it. They sourced locally grown cotton, and they built factories in towns across the nation where they could hire hardworking locals who cared about making a quality product.

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We are not unionized as an institution. I've worked for institutions that are unionized, and it's tough. It's a different lens of which they look through. It's a different negotiating skill as a leader as well. I mean, how can you represent, how can you represent the teachers and put the students' needs first? I mean, it's not a criticism, it's just an honest question.

How can you do that? You can. I mean, the whole table is set that the teachers become your priority. And I say this is the son of two public high school teachers who were devoted to their students. But my mom and dad needed a bottom-up approach in the midst of this top-down endeavor. I just find it so human and so poetic and so fraught on a day-to-day basis, and it's just so comforting to see you guys, you know, cracking the code in the middle of our country in a way that's working. You know, you have to have an eye to innovate.

You have to have a passion for what you're doing. You have to have an eye to innovate, and you have to always be thinking about, you know, how things are changing. Our industry is just like everybody else's. It's vastly changing. Think about the whole idea of applied learning. So the university is big on applied learning. We are too, so that every student has that opportunity to work in what they're getting educated in.

And the earlier, the better in college. I lived several semesters with a couple of elementary education majors, and they student taught, you know, the last semester we were in school. I was a business major, a marketing major, and they were in this, and they went to do their student teaching day one, and they're like, I said, how'd to go? Hate it. Not good. I'm like, okay.

Like, that's not good. So how do you do that? Like, we created an education program, an early education program, and week 12, they're going into the classrooms. Now, can they do a lot? No, but they can be in that environment. It's that applied learning. It's that work-based learning. It's taking work and education.

and blending that together. I mean, think about that. So you have work ethic, you have applied learning, you have knowledge and skill education, and you're blending that together. That is the greatest ecosystem that you can put out for students ever, and for potential employees.

How did you get here? Like, I really, I'm just not blowing sunshine. I think you're one of the few, professional educators who truly has your head screwed on straight. And I'm just wondering, you're welcome. But to what do you attribute that? Like I don't want to drag you through your whole curriculum via T. But what are the broad strokes? What's your deal? Well, probably, you know, when I think about that, my career pathway has been very varied. So I came out of college. I had a degree in marketing and I sold advertising for a newspaper and I beat the streets right I had the

worst thing in Wichita Kansas to go to and I would go out and beat the streets every day and my biggest account was Stutes locker company okay there's stoots that tells you what it was they were like a you know beef you know like I don't know they take your deer and make it into meat and that was my biggest account but I moved my way through there so I was in that world and then I I went into private business. And I did a private business with my husband at the time as a general contractor. And I sold outdoor power equipment. And I had an ad agency on the side.

Oh, my God. So I did that. Perfect. And then I had a life-changing time. And I didn't have a job. What do you mean a life-changing time? I went through a divorce, didn't have a job. I had three kids.

And I was like, well, what am I going to do next? So a woman that I had met back when I was selling advertising had moved into a headhunter position and I called her. I said, hey, I got to have a job. I need a job. And so she invited me to this lunch and it was like a total bust, right? It was like, and she goes, now we have another one next week and I really want you to come. Okay, fine. I will do it. Well, I sat next to a woman that I just hit it off with and she was a director at Wichita State University. And she said, I'm going to have a job as a director of marketing in a couple of weeks. And I want you to apply. I said, well, I'd love to. Didn't think anything would ever come of it. She called me, true to her word, a couple weeks later. And she said,

I have the ad. This takes you back 30 years because she said, I have the ad in the paper. The ad's going to be in the paper Sunday. I want you to apply. I went for an interview like on Tuesday. she hired me on the spot. And I started as a director of marketing. And in my mind, I was going to do this job. My dad had worked in higher education as an administrator for 50-some years. I'd always said, I would never do that. I'll never follow that pathway.

Anyway, I took the job. Three days into the job, she comes to me and she goes, Sherry, I don't really need an assistant director of marketing. I said, what does that mean? And she said, I really need an assistant director of this campus, this, you know, this satellite campus. And I'm like, okay, I have no idea what that is. But I'm going to tell you, I'm going to be the best damn assistant director you ever saw. Thus started my career in higher education.

And I just got hooked into it. You know, I say this all the time. And you're doing this as well. You think about this. Who wouldn't want to be in the life-changing business? Because that's what we get to do. That's what it's about. It's about changing lives.

You're changing lives because of your scholarship program. There's people all over. You know, Metallic is giving back and saying, we're going to help change lives because we got to do everything we wanted to do. Your program. All of those dollars and all of those things that are happening. And then, you know, I just have the blessing to be in this for 30 years. And, you know, it's life-changing business.

And who wouldn't want to be doing that? That's kind of my background. So I come from a very business background. I come from an entrepreneurial background, and that's probably part of it. And, you know, it's fortunately suited me really well in the role that I've had the last 16 years at WSU Tech. It's a huge part of it. I think it's a mistake to talk about education in a vacuum, like it's its own thing. Education is sales.

Education is persuasion. All things are persuasion in sales in some degree, you know. and the most honest educators, I think, know that. You have to make a persuasive case for your school. And I think people have forgotten that. I think with respect to work ethic, it's real easy to get lazy around your duty to persuade. It's your obligation to be a cheerleader,

to be an ambassador, right? To be an advocate. In your case for WSU Tech, man, they forest gumped their way into a winner, even if it was a bit of deceptive advertising there that got you to apply. But it just goes to show all the roads are crooked, you know. Well, it also shows you that you never really know what your pathway is going to be. And it's always going to take more education. And it's always going to take, you know, more work on your part to create that pathway.

But that's the beauty of. being part of America, too. The beauty is that you can, seriously, I know this sounds trite, but you can be whatever you want to be. You have to work, and what does that mean? You have to work at your job. You have to have good work ethic. You have to do the things that you're supposed to be doing. You have to be responsible and accountable.

You may also have to work to gain additional degrees. And I'm a poster child for that. I did that. Did I want to go back to school and get a master's in a doctorate? Maybe not. but it was what I needed to do in order to do the job. Therefore, I did it. And I look at that with people, and I think that's the thing because, you know,

whether we're working with a 16-17-year-old or we're working with somebody that's midlife making a change, or maybe a, you know, 50, 60-year-old that wants to learn a new skill so that they can add to what they're doing at their job or whatever the case may be. You know, we constantly have to be learning. We constantly have to be evolving. We constantly have to not be afraid of change. And look, you can't really teach this either, except you have to try resiliency. You glossed over it in your story, but, oh, yeah, I had a life-changing event. And wait a minute, man, you got divorced.

You had three kids. Everything you thought you knew was wrong. Everything. That can upend a person. That can break them or make them. You got to have some grit. There you go. You got to have grit.

And I look at students, you know, when we have commencement and they're walking across there and you know the grit and perseverance that so many of them put in to being there. And then they come across that stage and their families are going crazy and they're yelling and screaming at them and, you know, clapping and it's the biggest celebration. Think about that student walking across there that put in all the grit and the perseverance in order to do it. against, I don't know, odds that we probably don't even begin to understand, that we've never experienced, but they did it. And then they're celebrated like that. And so I think that's the thing about this whole thing that's been such a fun thing for my career

and probably a little bit of a trailblazer in education, because I'm always looking for an opportunity. I'm always looking to open a new door or find a different opportunity or take something that I can find and then how do I make it better, not just for students or for the college or for career technical education across the nation, but also for the other partner.

You know, and I love, I'm not a fan of transactional partnerships, but I'm a super big fan of transformational ones. You're a reverse commute kind of girl. You're looking for an alternative way to do pretty much everything. I think that's awesome. How's David, by the way? He's good.

He's good. He's with me. And we're heading back up to San Diego to the conference I'm going to. We played golf yesterday. That's down, by the way. Or down, I guess. Just so you know. Because we came up to come here.

We're going back down. I know you don't get out of Kansas much. North, southeast, west. You're in California now, honey. Yeah. So he's good. We played some golf Saturday in San Diego. It was fun.

Awesome. Had a good time. We'd love it out here. It's beautiful. One last thought. This is funny. I was singing this the other day. When I saw you laugh.

We're there shooting this video, which is going to be great, by the way. And I learned that a liquor store in town was carrying my granddad's whiskey. So we agreed to do this signing. You remember what happened to me? I do remember what happened. This was so surreal. But I went by for an hour to shake hands and sign some bottles. I think everybody in Wichita came.

Five hours later, you were still signing bottles and shaking hands. I got out of there at midnight. And, you know, it was funny, not to make this all about me, but about three hours in to a one-hour signing, you don't, it's like getting caught in a traffic jam that goes for six hours. You don't know what's going to go for six hours. And as you're getting through it, you start to think to yourself, this will never end. I mean, 18, 20 hours, days, weeks, who knows? There was just no end in sight. and you start to feel sorry for yourself

and you go through the five stages of grief and then if you're me you realize God, Sherry, U-Tash is just up the road and I just spent the day talking to her about delayed gratification and personal responsibility and grit and good God, dude, suck it up and sign the bottle

and count your blessings. But you know what I love the next day when I said to you, why did you stay? You said if people are going to come out to see me, to buy my bottle, I'm going to be there. And that says a ton about you.

That's your work ethic because that was a lot of grit to get through that day because I know what your day was like. And you had a long, long day. And no dinner, by the way, or anything else. So, you know, when you think about it, all the different ways that you're touching people across this nation is phenomenal. And the scholarships that you do, you did $2.5 million last year, the touch, the reach that you're doing, that's the thing.

It takes all of us together. And that's why I say transformational partnerships, that's where the true success lies. And I'm a big fan of, you know, the stool that you work on together that has the, you know, the three legs together to make things happen. And that's when great things do happen. It's when people come together with a common vision, a common goal, like what we have to teach work ethics. And then what comes from that? I can't believe it took an hour and 15 minutes, but we finally have a chance to talk about stool.

Thank you so much for that, Sherry. You're so welcome. Thanks for classing it up. Final, final thought for anybody who was... That was a three-legged stool, by the way. Fancy. When just stop eating corn? What do people need to know about WSU Tech?

Where can they go? Not to overstate it, but I think you guys have set... I think you've set the mark for how to do all this right. And again, it's happening right in the middle of the country. So since your career really is in marketing and sales, go ahead and land the plane. So WSU Tech is Wichita State University Applied Sciences of Applied Science and Technology. And that is a campus that is affiliated with Wichita State University, a four-year university, which is the only model of that in this nation. It is the largest technical college in the state of Kansas.

It is the third largest two-year college in the state of Kansas. 10 years ago, we had 700 students. Today we have over 9,000. And we can educate and train in any industry that you are interested in being involved in. No matter what your career aspirations are, you can find a career pathway with a job at the end of it at WSU Tech. Guys, I've been hundreds of schools all over the country. And nobody, is doing it better than WSU Tech, and I'm not just saying that because they've embraced our work ethic curriculum. I'm saying it because I've shook hands with your instructors, I've met your students, I've gotten the tour, I'm all in. No, you should not be running the Department

of Education. Department of Education should be coming to WSU Tech and saying, oh, oh, that's how we do it. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Anytime. It's such an honor to be here. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on and last a review. I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge But in this world the advertisers

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