Irma Becerra on personalizing a university

What this conversation is about

Irma Becerra is the seventh president of Marymount University. She is an electrical engineer with three degrees in the field, and a Cuban immigrant who arrived in the United States as a baby. Glenn Llopis started with something she says alarms her: the spreading argument that college is simply not for everyone.

"College degrees have always been the most important determinant in social mobility... a college degree is a necessity. It is not a luxury." — Dr. Irma Becerra · 00:02:01

Her answer to the argument is a question. If college is not for everybody, then who is it for? Someone gets left outside the American dream, and she is unwilling to name the group. She points to the pandemic as a plain test of the degree’s value: the people who could keep working from home were largely the ones who had one.

"as we see the entrance of artificial intelligence, data science jobs are getting more and more complex, and many of the least complex jobs are being replaced by ai." — Dr. Irma Becerra · 00:02:01

What personalization looks like inside a classroom

Glenn asked what a more personalized education actually means in practice. Becerra started with what students learn that is not in any curriculum: how to think critically, how to hold a conversation with someone whose view is different, how to recognize that an image on social media may have been generated rather than photographed.

"We are very focused on a personalized education here at Marymount... because we know that not everybody, every student learns the same way." — Dr. Irma Becerra · 00:06:07

She learned it the hard way. The university moved to remote teaching within days in 2020, which was the right call for safety. But when she surveyed students that May, undergraduates and graduate students alike told her they were not learning as well: they missed the classroom, they missed learning from each other as much as from the professor, and they were distracted at home. So the university came back to campus in a socially distanced hybrid that autumn, and kept asking students what was working. Her point is less about classrooms than about the habit: she asked, and then she acted on the answer.

Collections of schools

The structural part of the conversation is the part most leaders will recognize from their own organizations. Universities are built as departments inside schools inside a university, and the walls between them are solid.

"I call universities in general are collections of schools, because they are, there's so well-defined walls around the schools." — Dr. Irma Becerra · 00:16:47

During the pandemic she and her provost looked hard at that architecture and asked whether a university of their size needed it. They merged a long list of small departments and the separate schools into a smaller set of colleges and interdisciplinary schools. The result cut structural cost, but the reason was what employers had been telling them: they wanted engineers who could communicate and clinicians who understood some business. Becerra points out that she trained as an engineer and never took a course in communication.

"these are the dangers of standardization. We promote siloed thinking." — Glenn Llopis · 00:20:50

Build your own degree

The second change gives the flexibility to the learner rather than the institution. At graduate level, students can stack certificates into a degree of their own design, choosing modules in areas like data science, cloud computing or entrepreneurship and assembling a master’s in emerging technologies, with similar programs in health and criminal justice. Flexibility in how you learn, and then flexibility in what you learn.

It reframes who higher education is for. Not eighteen to twenty-two, but a continuum: the accountant who wants to move into human resources, the nurse who wants to run a hospital, the analyst whose field did not exist when they took one statistics course. Becerra includes herself in that.

"I was not involved in any kind of public speaking. So I've had to upskill myself to be able to be on this podcast with you today, Glen." — Dr. Irma Becerra · 00:14:05

What no one can take away

Her last move is outward. She describes the university of the future as one that works closely with the employers it serves rather than sitting in an ivory tower, and gives examples of partnerships that bring technical training and clinical mentorship to her students at no cost to them while giving those employers a pipeline of people ready to be productive. Glenn called it co-creation, and said what makes it work is that both sides learn.

She finished with her own story. She came to this country because of the Cuban Revolution, and she has given her career to education for one reason, which is the line at the top of this page. Education, she says, transformed the opportunities not only for her but for her family, and what she wants students to hear is that university leaders are waiting for them and intend to see them cross the stage.