Transcripts For CSPAN3 Higher Education Innovation Summit Part 2 20180126

Future work force. So were going to go into our third group of presenters under the rubric of breaking the mold. We are going to start with blakely polietto followed by michael rourke, followed by will zimpf. If we can have blakely. Thank you. So good morning and thank you for the opportunity to be here. We are going to talk about university of Maryland University college, which is the public Online University that is designed here we go designed from the ground up to provide affordable, accessible, quality and career relevant education for adult learners and especially for military learners. To understand who we are, i need to tell you the story of umuc. We were established in 1947 at the university of maryland as a department that was charged with serving adult students, particularly those who were returning gis from world war ii. In 1949, we became the First University to send faculty overseas to teach our troops stationed in germany, and this was the beginning of umucs global reach. By 1956, we had established divisions to deliver Higher Education in both europe and asia, and in 1963, we became the first u. S. University to send faculty into a war zone in vietnam. In 1970, we became an independent fully accredited university that is part of the University System of maryland. Over the years, our legendary faculty have traveled overseas to teach boots on the ground classes in the war zones of kosovo, iraq and afghanistan and today, we go where the military goes. The story of our history is important because it is at the core of who we are as a university. Today we are the largest public Online University offering fouryear degrees in the United States. We enroll 90,000 students annually in more than 90,000 excuse me, in more than 90 undergraduate and graduate Degree Programs and certificate programs, specializations and even micromasters programs. In fall 2017 we served 50,000 active Duty Military Service members, reservists, veterans and their dependents. Weve been ranked this year as number one for an online and nontraditional schools from military and we offer careerrelevant programs that use projectbased learning to make realworld, competent graduates. Serving adult students and serving the military is in the fiber of our dna. 75 of our students work full time. 72 of them are married or in committed relationships. The average age of the undergraduate student at unuc is 31 and the graduate age is 37. 48 of our students have children under the age of 18 living with them. Umucs students juggle work, community, family, faith and school responsibilities. We are built to provide them affordable, accessible quality, careerrelevant education. Through the use of predict ivan littics we have tools that enable the faculty staff to better serve students and these include building retention models that allow our advisers to outreach to those students most in need of support in order to persist and succeed, giving us insight into both faculty and Student Engagement in the online classroom so that we can support those types of engagement behaviors that are best linked to positive student outcomes, identifying those courses that we call obstacle courses, high enrollments and lower success rates so that we know where to target or efforts that redesign in the need of enabling Student Success. We know that learning collegelevel learning can happen outside the walls of our institutions, and it happens in the workplace. It happens in community and volunteer experiences, it happens through military training and so we offer a comprehensive Prior Learning Assessment Program that allows students to demonstrate what they know and can do, earn credit for it and shorten the time and cost to a degree. These include military training, credit for current industry certifications and licensures. Workplace learning experiences and credit by examination and portfolio assessment and a host of other mechanisms. We know that our students want careerrelevant education and weve already heard today, and and so were developing a new, extended transcript that goes beyond a static list and these are the courses they took and instead identifies what is the expected outcomes that a student should be able to know and demonstrate when they complete a program of study and go deeper and show what is the relationship of the courses and the course work to those outcomes. Two years ago we started converting our programs away from the use of traditional industry published textbooks and moved our programs to open educational resources. The first year we moved all of our undergraduate programs to the oer model and saved our undergraduate students alone 17 million they would have otherwise spent on textbooks and the following year we converted our graduate programs. In 1993 umuc was one of the universities to offer students an opportunity to complete a Degree Program remotely using a combination of media including computers. Today our 90programs specializations and certificates are completely online and we have mobile and responsive platforms that allow our students access to our classrooms and our faculty anywhere in the world, any time of day from any of the Technology Devices that they are using. All of these are developed at response of our students at the center of our university so that they have access, affordability, quality and career relevance serving adult military learners is who we are and my colleague michael is going to talk about how were further breaking down those barriers related to cost. We went through an assessment process and we said what is core to the university and what is not core to the university, and clearly in the academic space curriculum and faculty selection and academic advising. Those are things that have to stay inside the university, but we challenged ourselves to say does Everything Else need to stay within your control within your definition of scope . We said no, and we said we want to think about spinning off or going to the market for the full range of other capabilities out there, and when we think about, you know, we dont run our own Food Services anymore, why should we run our own i. T. Departments. Thats a question that universities should ask themselves and we did ask that question and so what we did is we created new companies and we spun them off from umuc and stood up new forprofit businesses to create a new market, to give options to the university, higher ed community. So let me give you one example and we talked about the Analytics Group thats predictive and useful and why dont we spin that off and make a company out of it and offer it to higher ed community . So we have a techenabled platform that helps universities increase enrollment, improve Student Success and ensure Financial Stability and the critical questions that the universities wrestle with today. We have signed up a number of ten clients in the last 12 months including systems and Large Research universities and smaller universities, too. So its finding a place in the market, and its being useful. Its also creating value as a company, and we need to think about how we at umuc think about the value of the company that we create. Weve spun off the i. T. Department in the summer and created accelared and the models are predicated on the idea that we can harness the forprofit drive and the great entrepreneurial resource that is part of our economy and our american dna to create these companies, with the deep expertise within the higher ed community that are at scale at day one and given our size and the i. T. Department is 100 employees in their i. T. Department in the university world. We can share that advantage of scale immediately in the marketplace, and we can put entrepreneurial leaders into the forprofit structure and grow these companies. All of those companies are owned, controlled and managed by our nonprofit umuc ventures which im the ceo of. We have a National Board and given it seed funding to help encourage and think carefully of how we can expand this market and provide services to the higher ed community. All of the profits that we earned from these profits or capital moments will go to scholarships, and thats our Public Mission. Thats why we exist as a state university, and thats what all of this activity will allow us to do as we gain these financial benefits, channel through the Nonprofit Mission will decrease the cost of going to school and thats what we were designed to do. We are designed to help working adults finish their degrees whether it was by plane to okinawa or across the street or nowadays across the computer. So our vision of where we imagine we will be soon is we will use all of the sectors of the economy and the forprofit, the nonprofit and the Public Mission to make colleges close to free as possible. Adult students finishing their degree in the state of maryland. Thank you. [ applause ] so the issue of going last is all of your good ideas were taken or presented in some form or fashion and with zemp and my height ive always been at the end of the line and im taught to improvise. Its a privilege to be here and its an honor to be counted among you and ive learned so much from today and we hope to contribute. Im will zemp and im from the university. How we look at the future and we have a great university, our students have a great story and wed love to tell it, but with eight minutes, were going to plow in and how we orient towards the future. We have everything in our portfolio from a pretty sizeable, we serve a pretty sizeable student body online and we have a credible, Regional College that serves a younger population, a coming of age population and we have college for america which is a competencybased program of zero cost to the student, but in partnership so everything that has been brought up today is relevant and weve earned the place on the credibility scale and to hear a quality come up as one of the first topics it was most welcome. At snu, the Southern New Hampshire university is the student. When it comes to new ideas and policy, we start with the understanding of our customer and its a little bit different. Our students are our mission. Our customers, the community in which they go out in industry, an economy and thats how we orient on it on the promise ahead. It was brought up today that, you know, the global reeducation effort, we see the same way, and it was delightful to hear that brought up, but we also if we really look at the challenges we have ahead of us in people that are in 2030, what youre talking is youre talking to the Talent Management issue that takes on a National Security aspect to it and thats what were talking about because the changes that can be made today will have tremendous impact on our competitive advantage as a nation and the leader and in the values that we take forward. Jerry, i had a section on values. If i were to add anything, i cant and thank you for bringing that up, and as a former life in the military, thank you. Thank you for what youre doing. I do appreciate it. Well try to use this and our starting point today is here and the class of 2030. To focus that far out becomes a convenience almost to say we have issues now, but understanding that the opportunities that we have now will affect the world theyre in and theyre up against a lot and we just finished about a twoyear study with many partners and one of which is the institute for the future out in pal palo alto and 2030 is when quantum computing is when its in a compact, module and it will change anything and when socioeconomic platforms with higher ed where automation will be acceptable from a social and economic standpoint. So you have this convergence of how people accept technology into their lives and then Ground Breaking methods and speeds will converge at this time period so thats how we came up with that. There will be five forces that act on on on these kids that you see in front of you, and the future stuff that weve talked about in the future tense here is happening now. Its just not happening everywhere. So the examples we bring up, we have concrete examples of these things and then the impact that they have, but theres an opportunity and a challenge, but the first one being the proliferation of Intelligence Systems and by that, we mean the future becomes increasingly more digital, defined and enabled and the experience and the expectations of students will change. Over the next decade, these systems will pervade everything. Social media, health care, were finding the rates of identifying cancer by Automated Systems are up in the 90 degrees or the 90 perce perce percentiles and were looking into bringing that kind of assessment into higher ed. And well challenge learners, workers, managers to come up with new skills, much of which weve talked about today on how to manage human machine collaborations, and the definition of not only what a traditional student is, but the definition of what an employee is and whats expected of managers. We know its changing. Its come up on the gig economy where people are taking charge of their own economic futures and the transformation of services and the lowering transaction cost and creation of twoway channels. The continued expansion of the platform economies will challenge people of all ages to build on offerings, reputation that can take hold of it for themselves and education and Higher Education certainly plays a role in that. And to build on their own personal economies and the skills were teaching now may actually work against people and may work against them if we dont get this right in the balance of the reconciliation. The third is the evolution of the International Market and simply what we mean here is alongside the current migrations will be blurred with what the demographic is, and the data that we have and work on will no longer be relevant to what were trying to do in the future. Theres good aspects to this and challenges that will come along with this and just, i think what we saw from colleagues before that definition of a traditional student best illustrates this. 31, married, already has a job and the future is here, its just not everywhere. How then do we take up that challenge . Because everything becomes blurred and then advanced matching software will challenge everyone to work alongside these new demographics and the new spectrums to create highly individualized reputations and highly Personalized Services and thats the expectation that they will have on us. And its easily overlooked, but critical and the coming decade and this kind of computing will create operational structures and its been brought up here many examples and the emersion of peertopeer structures will allow people to organize their own economies and policies and service activities, and the Block Chain Technology will continue to take the internet further. People will own their own data and the definition of a transcript and what it means to an employer will be different and theyll challenge todays platforms often replacing them with new platforms that will enable peer to peer transactions of money and my children are the best example of this and they have alexa, google home and ipads in front of you, but the and they watched this over a platform that was meant to allow other students to watch other kids to and you watch someone to do math, this and the other and theyre getting quality tutoring and they didnt need us to do that at all. How do we match this and make sure its equal across the board so these opportunities are open for everybody, but thats whats happening around us and finally and probably most appropriate for todays conversation with future literacies, and what are the new literacies or skills that will be demanded in this world because today is caught on two curbs. The institutions thats been brought up and the second curve which has not yet come into fruition which is the future and its the gap between the gap between these two is going to be uncertain, certainly volatile. Theres no certainty. Theres no urgent the only urgency that comes from this that ranges from income equality to global organized crime that takes advantage of of the proliferation of knowledge and these skills and to do and at the same time the buildout of the digital backbone will be so important. So these are the things that are that those kids face. We were asked whats working today . This is a positive environment. A very positive environment. We talked about jobs and while jobs will be replaced and we know that drone accident, for i and we know theyve gone up and theres this balance and hyperbole that surrounds and causes fear that may or may not be there. It just has to be dealt with and as an institution we operate with a tremendous amount of hope based on what we see our students accomplishing, but we also act with vigilance. One source we follow pretty closely is the Georgetown Center on Education Workforce and thats where these numbers come from. Weve seen a gain of 4 million good jobs in Skilled Services and industries such as financial services, Health Services and s. T. E. M. Which offset the 2. 9 million jobs lost to manufacturing. Its ours to lose right now if we dont make as an industry or provide ourselves relevant, and i think thats what youre seeing with the boot camps and i think thats what were seeing with the new, merging ways that are present here today. So with that, we know some things work such as projectbased learning and we know it works and then other competencybased approaches thats been brought up clear today, and if you followed us, you know the cornerstone of how we define and think about innovation and well increasingly define the future of higher ed and where its going, and that brings us to the opportunities that are ahead of us. Almost everything these issues or these touch items for your consideration and almost everything that was brought up today is constrained by that piece of legislation that was brought up to manage funds and resources for an Industrial Age base. Everything that weve talked about that can happen in the future is touched by this, and so this is only offered that if we want to continue down this road and we want to make a permissive environment that these would be those touch points. Now we brought up quality in the beginning and what stands to be said out loud is what comes with that. We cant create a permissive environment at the expense of accountability. So very, very rigorous accountability has to be invoked here and so thats anything in the chance for predatory practices and taking advantage of vulnerable student populations is very real and has to be addressed through everything new. So my time is up. It does come back to this and thank you again for the opportunity to be here. Good morning. Im jeff salino. Im special adviser to president michael croat Arizona State university. I joined asu as an adviser four years ago after writing about Higher Education with a journalist and author for nearly two decades because i was attracted to Arizona States deep commitment in pushing innovation on multiple fronts to improve college attainment. Its a mission that is not only spelled out in asus charter, but its really when you go to asu, its really infused throughout the culture. From top administrators to literally every staff member on campus and there are three components that drive this mission. The first is the measure of success not by whom we exclude which is really how prestige is unfortunately measured in american Higher Education and its showered on a small group of institutions who really, today, as i said earlier enroll in less than 1 in american undergraduates and asu really believes that learning is for everyone and that everyone can learn. Second, asu measures productivity, Research Productivity not only whether its good for academics, but whether its good for the public good and its impact on the public good, and third weve tackled the challenge and they seem to confront and one is deliberately focused on admitting and graduating a student body that is representative of the community that we serve. And its for the nations success because were living in a new era. Were living in the era of a novice explosion which has talked about so much today and the knowledge and skills needed to keep up in any of our jobs are really churning at a much faster rate, not only in our jobs, but literally in our lives. We heard today just about the alexa and google home where we can literally get knowledge at our fingertips and knowledge is not static as we see here today nor should our universities be static but the problem is that most colleges and universities are really incremental in making changes, right . They occupy that bottom left quadrant of this box, but this century really requires much more revolutionary change, more institutions that are occupying that top right. Were living in a revolution akin to the Industrial Revolution in the United States and around the world when we really saw in the u. S. Massive growth in the number of institutions and the number of students going to the institutions and in new programs and new offerings and new degrees back in the 1800s. Today entire, much like then, entire occupations and industries are expanding and contracting at an alarming rate so simply moving at the pace of change in Higher Education of the recent past is really no longer good enough. The american Higher Education system was never meant to educate the millions of learners it now serves or the millions more that it needs to serve in this new economy and the foundation of our Higher Education system was built back in the colonial days and were still trying to squeeze many students and everyone through that narrow pathway to and through college and then we wonder why so many dont make it out on the other side. Arizona state is really an example of these new types of institutions that with many others, many of them in this room where we have developed an institution that is scalable and highly adaptable and one that provides different pathways through Higher Education with multiple onramps for a variety of learners throughout their lifetime. This vision is realized through a blend of traditional learning experiences much like were learning today face to face and in technologyenabled experiences that are driven in part with partnerships with otheren stug other institutions as well as companies and organizations. At the same time its a vision and this is not what weve talked a lot about today and its a vision that holds true to the basic belief system of Higher Education where knowledge, where knowledge still has a value and a purpose because where knowledge still is the driver of education and we consider everything a process or a commodity or a transaction that is to be delivered i think well ultimately fail in that process. So education is not in our mind just to be delivered. We really think of innovation and learning in terms of different realms of offerings with learners and knowledge at the core of those, and i just want to talk about three of those realms and how theyre serving those. Realm one pertains to campusbased immersion learning, and this is where asu in arizona where we have 3400 faculty members interacting closely with more than 71,000 students. Technology driven enhancements cut across all of the realms of Higher Education that were trying to serve which really has allowed Arizona State to implement strategies for dramatic growth along with improvement in retention and Graduation Rates. Its really that scale play that i was talking about earlier. So, for example for example, more than 65,000 Arizona State University Students have used adaptive course where over the past six years that is personalized to their learning style and their speed. So take College Algebra as an example and one of the biggest hurdles, i know it was for me, one of the biggest hurdles at many colleges, where the Student Success rate meaning grades of a, b or c went up 20 Percentage Points and more importantly the underprepared students and those were students who had low math placement scores coming into those courses improved their success rates by 28 Percentage Points. Realm two really includes fully online Degree Programs and instructional designers connect faculty expertise with degree seekers which enable teams to develop courses on the latest research of how people learn and the online courses at asu like they are at many universities are developed by teams instead of relying solely on the intuition of professor, right . About how students learn, right . Thats how most College Courses are designed as a solo practitioner where the professor is the sole expert. Since its inception in 2009, asu online has gone from just under 1,000 students in five programs to today more than 30,000 students in more than 140 fully online programs and this enables asu to be responsive to nontraditional learners and work with partners to expand everything that we do and facilitate rapid, scalable responses to very specific opportunities, for example, like the Starbucks Partnership which ill be talking about in a minute. Realm three has allowed asu to venture even further. So if realm one was on campus and realm 2 was fully online for mostly traditional and nontraditional learners and realm three has aloud them to venture further into the frontiers of the university and finding innovation to expand to find new learners around the world and those in the traditional 18 to 24yearold market which most people still incorrectly think of as Traditional College students, and so the main, the chief effort in this realm three is what anance mentioned earlier. Finally, i think were running out of batteries here and its the Global Freshman Academy. This is a partnership between Arizona State and its a massively open Online Platform and offers a certification or badges for completed courses and the Global Freshman Academy is the first to offer course credit from an accredited university in this case, asu, and in the Global Freshman Academy is also priced affordably, right . So for learners around the world less than 200 credit an hour and here is the key. In the Global Freshman Academy, students pay for the credit only after passing the course and only if they want the Optional University credit. In other words, we offer the opportunity to delay payment for credit until it is actually earned and it turns the College Affordability argument on its head, and an initial enrollment in the First Academy course has exceeded 350,000 students. Perhaps the most well known there we go. The most well known partnership and asu has embarked on in recent years is with starbucks. You cant miss these logos. If you go to any Starbucks Coffee shop anywhere around the country and until the christmas logos have taken over asu logos used to be on many of those cups and its through this innovative partnership, asu offers access to online degrees reimbursed to starbucks through all of its u. S. Employees who have flexibility to have six different start dates throughout the year. After all, when youre working you want access to education on the day you need it, right . Or in a week or two weeks as i was talking about earlier. Sometimes you cant wait months to start or only go to classes during the day when many colleges offer them or during the week when many colleges offer them. More than 8,000 starbucks employees have enrolled in the Starbucks College Achievement plan since it was launched in 2014 and more than 1,000 graduates are expected to be coming out of this program by the end of the year. We graduated our first cohort of this group back in may when howard schultz, then the ceo of starbucks, was the Commencement Speaker at asu, and so were on track to graduate more than 25,000 starbucks employees by the year 2025. This is not just good for asu and starbucks because the employees that have gone through the program at starbucks have become not only the most dedicated employees at places like starbuck, but theyre also some of the more talented that tend to get promoted at starbucks, and it really is only the constant ability of asu to innovate that has allowed us to build this program. So i think the question today is how do we spread such innovation further so that more institutions are occupying the top right quadrant that i showed earlier. I want to end today by making two brief suggestions and recommendations where asu and michael crow think the federal government can help push innovation in this sector. The first, and this was mentioned in the previous presentation is that the accreditation system really needs to be reformed to allow for more innovation. We need to find regulatory relief and working with accrediting agencies. The u. S. In many ways is undergoing as i mentioned earlier an Economic Transformation that is really, in some ways similar to the Economic Transformation we went through in the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution. We are moving from an analog economy to a digital economy, time and process was fixed and the outcomes were variable, and in todays economy were focused much more on outcomes as many of us talked about today. In an education as a result we can no longer focus just on sit time as a primary measure of success. If you sit in a seat you get a bachelors degree and thats considered quality and success right now in Higher Education. The information economy that we live in really needs to be focused on learning where time is valuable and mastery and outcomes are the key and so i think our first request and first recommendation is around regulatory relief on accreditation. And the second suggestion is that i think and we think that the federal government can help accelerate innovation and Higher Education by creating spaces for innovation by finding clusters of universities and right now the federal Government Supports students primarily and supports institutions through student, but not reallien stugs and we know that scale really matters in the future of Higher Education and the problems that we face require a response at scale and not every institution can grow. They cant afford to grow and they dont have the space to grow and not every institution wants to grow. Asu is doing this as part of the University Innovation alliance which is a group of 11 public universities throughout the country including Arizona State, georgia state, ohio state, the university of texas at austin, the university of california at riverside and a number of other universities. This alliance has really focused on increasing the Graduation Rates of lowincome students on their campuses by sharing resources and by sharing knowledge, and in just the last three years, it was Just Announced recently by the alliance, it has increased the number of lowincome graduates by 25 and which is going to put it on track for its goal and its creation which is 68,000 under graduates and low, and the socioeconomic status by the year 2025, right . So 25 increase in just the first three years. We really think we need to do the same for student across the u. S. , and across the u. S. And give the promise of Higher Education to the talent that we have across this great country. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today, and we look forward to the conversation. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. Blakely, michael, will and jeff for your comments and your input and sharing with us some of the ways that you are doing to serve students. Both will and jeff have given a couple of specific recommendations and id like to open it more broadly to the question of what the federal government in particular should be doing more of and conversely, what should we be doing less of, what are the impediments that stand in the way and i would just like to open it up. Im sure that there are plenty of thoughts in that regard. Ill give a couple and to reiterate, will was saying a very important thing to do, is as defined right now is a huge disincentive for universities to actually implement different pedagogy. Basically, if you arent physically carting your students over to a classroom wasting space, money, taxpayer dollar and dramatically lower educational outcomes if you can use technology then you therefore are classified in a category that doesnt allow you to bring students from abroad, et cetera, so reforming that is critical. On accreditation, weve been arguing for quite a while. We went a very traditional route in accreditation and highly selective and highly Effective University and a relatively easy thing to go through, but what i would argue is they dont perform surgery after theyre performing surgery on patient. That would be abure is the, right . We do that with education. We tell an institution, go, commit brain surgery on a bunch of unsuspecting students and then well see if were functioning adults and then well tell you if youre a accredited or not and its a high barrier to entry and discourages innovation and worse, it has the opposite effect which is it has all of these barriers up front and as soon as youre in the club it never gets taken away from you. The university of North Carolina committed academic fraud for 18 years, issuing credits for students that did not attend classes because the classes didnt exist and Nothing Happened to the university. No sanctions, no accreditation removal, nothing and we think it should be exactly the opposite. If you want to teach someone something and create brain surgery, great. Tell us what you want to do and put it in writing. You define your standards and thats the greatness of the american system and its not about having a Central Standard that every university has to follow and you say truth in advertising. If im going to do x, put that in your requirement and provide us a measure with which you decide youll be measured against and then, bam, youre accredited right off the bat, but guess what . Three years, four years, five years after you graduate your students were going to measure it and if you dont do what you say youre out of business and so it shifts the accreditation from having this insanely high barrier to entry to actually being focused on quality and its a much lighter touch from the government perspective in the process. Good morning, bart epistein from the university of west virginia. I have been sitting in the back of the room because i did not realize i had a seat. Thank you for a seat at the table. [ laughter ] i think the question you asked about what the government should and should not be doing is very important because the federal governments role, controlling the Purse Strings has a hugely distorted effect on the market and the analogy that id like to raise is a bit complicated, but its important, and it has to do with the roots of the financial crisis. As many of you may know the federal government chose not to directly engage with the ratings agencies and to not pay the ratings agencies and the federal government said ratings aej agencies, and were counting on you to police the issuers and to issue ratings that properly reflect the risk underlying these mortgages, but the government then made the shortsighted decision to not directly pay the ratings agencies and instead it said to the ratings agencies you get your money from the issuers whose products youre rating and this led to those issuers being able to game the system and to, sshlly have the regulatory agencies be captured and it led to incremental boiling of the frog and next thing you knew they had been talked into giving aaa ratings for products that were progressively less reliable. The federal government in the student loan area and it is not reasonable to expect that it would protect the federal fisk what they do not have an obligation to do so and if the institutions including line that are receiving large amounts of Student Loans for the outcomes that we care about that any organizations such as those represented here today who who are clear outliers and they should not be replicated in a broad way around the country and this is an inherently political issue of which i dont propose to have the answer to and thats your realm, madam secretary, but giving out federal dollars in large amounts regardless of what they study, where they study, the performance of their university is without their performance past is a recipe for trouble. And theyre trying to clarify it as an Economic Performance job. The big challenge is that the employers, and you can count on a couple of hands the employers who are sort of engaging and you heard a lot of the names today and that goes to show there arent that many of them. And the reality is the hr and prehire training and that sort of thing is not what most employers are interested in gauging in. So how do you incentivize Employer Engagement. I think one critical tool is as i mentioned earlier the income share agreement and you mandate an income share agreement and you mandate the institutions have skin in the game that they dont get paid in full unless students demonstrate economic benefit from the program and they can get paid in part, but that will radically change, you know, the current interface that most universities use to engage with employers which is Career Services which is incredible interface and half the students dont ever walk in the door and those students that do walk in the door are going to meet someone who is a Career Services life and not someone from the industry if theyre trying to get connected into and that explains the awful underemployment that were seeing. The other and they could have carrots to encourage Employer Engagement and then you talked earlier about minerva students about going into summer interp ships and the employers love to keep some of those students and i talked to northeastern university. They run the countrys probably best coop program. What would happen if an employer said wed actually like to keep this student and the answer was, well, they probably wouldnt be invited back to participate in the coop program. So we need to encourage offramps. Schools are encouraged to keep the revenue and keep the students coming back and if they have the potential to get a great first job after onyear, two years and you should be building onramps, but you should say god bless you, you know . Youre welcome. Go off and prosper. And encouraging the unbundling all in the interest of the student. Madam secretary, ben talked about in order to reforming the accreditation system and one of the things i wanted to add to that is also recognizing alternate types of accreditation which is more relevant to the types of innovation that were talking about and two particular important areas is the industry recognized certifications which have labor market value, as well as competency based certificates which are tightly aligned to what the Industry Needs and these typically fall outside the purview of the accreditation system. So alternate accreditations, and the programs and we are in the space where we work with professional societies which are like the gatekeepers for these jobs and they are the ones that work very, very closely with the industry in terms of defining these industryrecognized certification and theyre recognized by federal agencies and we do not fall under the traditional recognition system so there should be means to recognize alternate accreditation bodies that are focused on recognizing innovations and new ways of requiring competencybased education. And especially with respect to offramps and one is especially at traditional, and whether thats online or on the ground institutions. What we hear a lot is that students are valuing the flexibility that comes along with the innovative models. So a lot of times students move more quickly through the program and it means they save money, but more often than not we hear that busy students fit education into their life. There are operational challenge wes the federal funds in that way and so its time to look at sort of how we expect institutions or acquire institutions to administer funds in the programs and make sure that were accounting for the flexibility that the student is looking for. The Second Opportunity is i would encourage you to use the experimental author they you have at the department. Its been used around competencybased education and the project that was kicked off last year, but continue to use that as an opportunity to bolster innovative ideas and test them in a small scale before you roll them out to institutions. And i would say that process, make sure in the feedback and reporting the Data Collection site in the end of the experiments that you can use to make datadriven decisions. The department of education and the department has incredible power based on Financial Aid and who it goes to automatically creating winners and losers. Unfortunately, a lot of the innovations are happening in the realm of the unaccredited realm that are benefiting from the Financial Aid policies, so two ideas. One is somehow opened up Financial Aid to monitor programs that are not necessarily accredited universities and so a lot of innovation is happening at universities. A lot is also happening outside of universities and open up federal Financial Aid to innovative programs and then the natural question pops up, all right. How do you control quality, and the couple of ideas there, one is, okay, what about creditbacked programs and the second one is what about employerendorsed programs and the third one is maybe create a separate accrediting body just for these, and and the second idea that links to many federal rules and stifle innovations and so for example, they talked about global academy, and the program where students learn for free. If they complete it and pass it them they can pay to get the credit. They dont have to pay if they dont pass or dont succeed and they pay on outcome, and we tried to get Financial Aid for the program and we were told it cant be done. If you charge the students up front you can get Financial Aid, however, if they pass, tough luck, they succeeded and you cant get Financial Aid. This is crazy, and so this is something that i would imagine you can take care of with the stroke of a pen. Yes. And finally to rebutt, i do not, and he mentioned that online programs are the bachelors degree are on, and look at the data, and certainly a lot of the programs and professional programs and others, and yes for the professional programs and micromasters, and of course, that twothirds or more have a bachelors degree and the Freshman Academy invite you to look at the data and the course taken to High Schoolers where a significant fraction dont have an undergraduate degree and you need to look at the content that you offer and let the data speak for itself. I just came from mexico city university. You would not believe the types of people benefitting from online education. Thank you. That may get the last chance i have to talk and madam secretary i want to say thank you very much for convening the group and the people here that you have, and i think its been very helpful. I want to come back to something thats on my mind which is urgency and dealing with the issues we have now, and how we do that on scale and half the students in the country go to Community Colleges, and if you look at those who go to Community Colleges in urban areas the Graduation Rate over three years is about 16 . Thats a scandal. Its unacceptable. I think we can all agree on that. One of the things that cuny has done is to create the asap program, the accelerated studies acceptance programs. Its not rocket science, but its a series of interventions that make all of the sense in the world and everybody around the table is doing them at some level and agreeing with them and the cost for degree is much lower because the success is so much higher. Its been reviewed by many independent reviewers and deemed to be quite successful. It is now being replicated by us in ohio, in california, virginia and just had a group from tennessee, and thats terrific and i think one of the things we can do is if states are laboratories of democracy and theyre laboratories of innovation and we have innovation that makes sense and we know it works and the federal government has a role in providing incentives and providing encouragement and providing a means to expand that to scale. So weve been doing this in ohio for three or four years and now were starting in california, but it works. It makes a tremendous difference in the lives of these Community College students in urban areas and we ought to be figuring out how to get it to scale as quickly as possible and the people who are enrolled now and whose lives are improved. Madam secretary, i think i got that right this time, and one of the themes that have echoed around this table over the last couple of hours weve spent together is to create an infrastructure that works bidirectionally between education and careers. We think of it as education to careers, but increasingly as a number of people have pointed out, there is a need for workers to be able to have access to resources that allow them to upscale. So one of the impediments that exists today, and its significant role in clearing and actually a problem of vocabulary colleges speak in terms of degrees and employers even more than they speak in terms of jobs, speak in terms of skills and the skills that they need. Now at some level universities are great treasure troves of skills. Now the universities in this room feel thats reductivist, but lets run with it for the time being. A tremendous amount of learning that takes place and so much of it is the kind of learning that can be deeply applied. Part of the problem, though, is that that learning is locked up or described in a vocabulary that is entirely academic. That means that employers cant appreciate what that learning is about. We cant empower students to make smart choices about what to learn and ultimately for Higher Education institutions a lot of the potential is lost. I think im glad that so much of the conversation focused on traditional Higher Education institutions and theres always a lot of talk about alternatives and some of them are really cool, but the end of the day our Higher Education institutions already have a lot of whats necessary. If we can if we can help them label what they have, and this could be as simple as saying if you are a funded institution, institution eligible to receive Student Lending dollars that your courses need to be labeled and whether they be technical skills, new and emerging skills, that could fundamentally unlock that treasure trove and make it apply to a much broader swath of the public who needs what in a dynamic economy who needs access to learning throughout their lives and right now can only get it in traditional programs for the most part. [ inaudible ] thank you again, madam secretary for convening this today, i would echo what a lot of people said said. Institutional skin in the game is really important but it has to be meaningful. If college and universities, budget dust or a rounding error, its not going to matter. It has to have a bite if dollars are at risk. Two, i echo accreditation is broken. I happen to sit on the departments add visitery committee on accreditation and we spend all our time talking about things with very little meaningful impact on student outcome, Student Success, institutional success. What bart touched upon, there are incentives of to who pays the acreditors, who runs the acreditors that can be fixed. I think the third thing is student responsibility in the laudable goal to drive college access. I think not enough has been asked of students who are taking taxpayer dollars in terms of grants or loans. Are they prepared for college . Are they enrolling in a college theyre likely to succeed . I think the data is becoming more clear. Having someone enroll in college and drop out is worse than if they didnt enroll at all is worse for most of them. Not allowing title four to be an open entitle i think is critical of the student. My last comment would be to encourage the federal government to have a level of humility that it needs to or can solve all of these problems. While the dollars pale in comparison, there is an entire separate apparatus called the Labor Department and Workforce Development dollars that in theory should be helping people reskill and do life long reskilg. Im not sure it all needs to come from title iv of the education department. Getting the federal government to break down its own silos between programs that are trying to get people the skills they need to succeed would be really important. Great. Yes . I want to echo, first of all, the call to keep thinking about how to use Experimental Authority. I agree with what was said about how a lot of the innovation is happening outside of the traditional system, and in our case, you know, hes connected to m. I. T. Where i work so we have that connection, but nonetheless, the Experimental Authority is at least temporarily while you think about some of these other things, a way to use the accreditation, existing accredited places to do some innovative things that can be very important. One thing i think can be thought about there that hasnt come up and that reflects some of m. I. T. s thinking broadly. As adnan said, build into some of the platforms are things like pushing for active learning. Jeff talked about adaptive learning, et cetera. There is going to be more of that and there is even beyond that, were very interested in the connection of cognitive Psychology Research to Educational Research and when we if we see breakthroughs in those sorts of areas and actually understand teaching and learning better. We want to make sure those things have a way to get into the system. Beyond that, you know, m. I. T. Does very well in the traditional Rating Systems and rank systems that you use for completion, et cetera, but, you know, we have to think about how to serves other institutions who reach a far larger number of students, not counting the indirect impact we have through our large online programs. Youve already heard from kuni and asu and valencia and unuc that the traditional student is only a small part of the picture now. There is there is i dont know the exact numbers, but its Something Like 40 of students who dont fit the traditional model, they dont start and finish at one institution. They dont finish by the age theyre 25 or whatever. And both the loan programs and the reporting programs on, i mean, if youre going to treat students as customers, then you need to give them good information about how well the schools theyre doing are doing. So i know that some of that is not some of that the department has the ability to change by themselves, some of it requires, you know, working with congress, but i think thats really important and its really important to some of our peer institutions in the Research University community. Ill just say one thing to kind of emphasize that. The National Science Foundation Statistics for several years, many years now, have been showing that if you look in s. T. E. M. Fields at degree recipients, at the undergraduate level and persisting to the masters level and to the phd level, if you look at degree recipients from underrepresented minorities, a large fraction of them, a much larger fraction than across the whole spectrum, did some part of their education at Community Colleges, okay . These people are starting at Community Colleges and ending up getting phds at m. I. T. Or the university of illinois or california or wherever. And so we need to make sure that the schools get the credit for that kind of work. Thank you. Its 20 now started at a Community College. Yes. Kathleen . In addition to the two recommendations that i made earlier, i would humbly request that the Department Review policies from the perspective that there are typical students no longer fit the mold of a tragtsal student, and it seems that many policies were written from the perspective of students who attend a university fulltime directly out of high school, but genius doesnt know the neighborhood in which he or she was born and the traditional mold doesnt fit and leaving behind so many of our students. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, kathleen. Is there anyone else who would like to add in a moment . Yeah, id like to speak about nontraditional students and i think also we all learn differently. And today i think most of our Education System is based on passive learning, where the teacher will bring the knowledge to students. And so as we know we mentioned now, young people can access the knowledge they want whenever they need it. Sometimes too much knowledge, too many knowledge and what becomes available is to be able to filter it. Whats wrong, whats incomplete, what has bias . So i believe that education should not be, like not access knowledgeable through this, we can access all the knowledge we want from m. I. T. , from the best institutions for free. Now the challenge is to educate our kids and professionals on how to access the knowledge, pass it, have Critical Thinking on it. And i believe a lot of us are good in this passive learning environment where, like, the teacher is bringing the knowledge but i think a lot of us are also inefficient in context where we are engaging with knowledge. So i think that projectbased learning, active learning, apprenticeship, this type of education can fit a lot of people and can get them access to white collar jobs. Today, we think of apprenticeships or projectbased as blue collar, but thats not true anymore. And im telling you this because we see people who go through this training and work for Companies Like tesla, apple, linkedin, and so on. So i think we need to kind of break this etiquette of only passive education is a great way to have a great career. Thank you. I think weve come about to the end of our time together here, but i want to say thank you to each one of our participants for being here today for what you had to add to the conversation. And importantly, for the ways that you are creatively looking at and meeting the needs of the students that you serve. And i think all of you expressed in one way or another the dedication and commitment that you feel to providing opportunities for all kinds oh students, no matter where they come from, no matter their background. We know that there is potential in every student that you all serve, and so i thank you for your commitment to that, for the ways that you have added to the conversation today, and id like to encourage that this really be consider this the beginning of a conversation that i hope you would feel could be ongoing. I will welcome your continued input to me and to the department on ways that we can better meet your needs to serve students and on ways that we can help the federal government get out of the way of some of the things that we need to get out of the way of, and the ways that we can support in meaningful ways the things that you are doing to serve students. So once again, thank you so much for your participation and for your commitment to students. Thanks. Thank you. [ applause ] here on cspan 3, its American History tv coming up next with a focus on abraham lincoln. First, well look at lincolns friendships and then hear about those who disliked or opposed him during our presidency. Later, our lectures in history series looks at the portrayal of lincoln in art and photography