They have a free are looking for ideas but it is a broad incentive for colleges to counsel students how much they borrow. Right now the action makes the hard for colleges. So the federal government is a but for that unemployment ruled that is but this is the mandate applied to all colleges a and universities. They dont have to do principate but tennessee has 13 Community Colleges and two are dropping some of and broaden there he was. But what kind of a response did you get . To with that accreditation more than anything else just to give them more flexibility maybe that is true but i can tell you about a student aid and then i can tell about the regulation. To provide students and is there any advance on that . A good reaction the problem i have been authorized eight times since 1965 with the of wellmeaning senators and bureaucrats here is the clause is regulations and stack them up stack of up the stack was already as tall as i was it the new would double the stack that is why we need of good writer for someone to take a bunch of stuff to press it into the language that we do understand. The federal government does not do that very well. Day university of texas has a terrific website to find out all sorts of things are a college costed job placement and what you will make if you borrow this much but the goal is to simplify to make it clear that they understand what theyre getting into. Key has a point but the pell grant you can keep so keep that clear. I have talked to Elizabeth Warren a few times she said her goal was a one page because that 22 pages it doesnt do anything for the consumer because you signed the bottom of every page without knowing what it is. So a lot of good clear one pages. The administration is on track to do its own College System you said i believe the attempt will fall. I dont think they have the capacity. I used to work there. [laughter] we have 6,000 colleges and universities each now has a different name than harvard i dont care what they think there are facts and figures that consumers can find out about to make their own judgments. I think theyre likely to be misleading. But i am pretty the appropriations bill into the department. We need to do a very simple calendar of every rule that they were expected to follow so you can said that college to say january 4th, a generator fit the have to do this they have been working seven years. If they do would you try . Yes. I dont take there will be able to do what theyre receptive go cry such as the outcry a. Now the senators are reading to take amendments. So they have many opportunities. [laughter] spread the Higher Education act youre also critical of employment regulations which is one of a the Court Challenges to stay on track this summer will you try to block those and wide you object . Because it is horrendously complicated and only applies to one sector of the Education Sector to take that broad incentive to encourage a institutions to keep costs down so it is a much better tool to allow institutions to adapt their own methods. 9 to go to for profits. So will you try to block this . More than i expected from the stage today. Shes one of the democratic legislators talking about the idea of a debtfree public Higher Education that they should be altered within a Public Institution and emerge debtfree. No specifics yet they wouldve brought the discussion. Is the next debtfree from harvard in torch down. Thats what i was talking about a minute ago. They are ordinarily free, the average grant is 30 to 60 and the average tuition is 3,300. In california, texas and florida the average grant is more than the average tuition so its already free. So i would like to see the politicians. The governor noticed that Community College already was essentially free. So he found a way to say that Community College is very for every high school graduate. That was such a surprise to students to learn that it was free. So when we have all this talk a lot of people stay home and we say did you know that two years is essentially free. And did you know if you want to go to georgetown for us to find out what your family can pay and benefits and borrow as much as you want for a car you can go to georgetown . We dont say that to people and i think that every political season politicians run around saying youre going to solve your student loan problem hoping they get the votes. I would like to say weve made it easier than most people think, and we have politicians who are making it harder. You dont hear many people saying what im saying now. We have time for one question if we have anybody that needs a microphone or i will ask you. Move yourself to the microphone quickly please. The chairman has to go yield the gavel. Im a student at American University and this is actually a question for both of you and the undersecretary that is here. You mentioned how the department of education is most reliant on for information. Other times they are also the people that are giving us loans. The u. S. Will earn about 107 billion from financing Student Loans. Is there any effort to make sure that it goes back into our education and future or is it too soon to know . There is an interesting difference of opinion about that there are two ways that the Congressional Budget Office decides what Student Loans cost and the proper way to do it they said is fair market accounting but you may not pay back your loan and that doesnt sound like a logical thing to do. If you look at it the way that i just described then the taxpayers are subsidizing the students with the student loan reform that is needed in 2013. The way the law says it is the way it was a bit sad. So the right way to do that i think is the way that i described that it would be revenue neutral and that the money that the students borrow from the taxpayers is as natural as we can get it based on the system. Sometimes you hear the senators say they loan money to banks at 1 . Why dont they do that for students . The federal money loans the money overnight you probably want to student loan for a day. Its a typically it is ten years what would we try to do but we look at the student loan and we did this in 2013. The president was very effective in pointing this out. We asked the Congressional Budget Office please tell us what our language will do in terms of making it written in a journal so the taxpayers are not subsidizing the students and the students are not subsidizing the taxpayers and we try to come as close to that as we could. If i can ask you real quick on the reauthorization when the expect that . I hope its there before the end of the month or early next month. But we give credit to patty murray for being able to work with her on the secondary education act has been good. We just had partisan bills and she suggested that we do a bipartisan bill and we did that. The short answer is by the end of the month or sometime in july if we are able to pass it the house house will be able to pass one, too. The president doesnt agree with everything weve been doing but hes been very constructive and we try to accommodate suggestions hes made as well so its a good process. Thank you. [applause] please welcome the association of colleges and universities the city college in chicago, director on Higher Education reform and the Strategic Advisory and cofounder and the moderator staff Correspondent National journal. Its great to be here today. Thank you so much for coming. Weve had a great conversation so far and i have a million questions to ask. But we dont have a lot of time and we have a lot to talk about so i thought we could dive right in. And i wanted to start with you. I hope thats okay because i think weve been talking a lot about the things the federal legislation and the government can do to enable innovation at the College Level and i know that the city colleges of chicago you look over a whole lot of innovation over the past few years. So i think that from what ive gathered basically in about three years youve been able to double the graduation rate. Is it about 14 or 15 . Which is high at the Community College and theyve managed to do that by doing things that seem like pretty commonsense innovation making it easy for the students to select courses etc. So, do you think that there is anything that the federal government could do to encourage that kind of innovation at the College Level . Yes but i will translate that in a different way. I think that theres a lot the federal government can and should do to hold institutions accountable for those types of outcomes and whining by that i think that there should be more performancebased outcomes. I think Community Colleges and Higher Educational institutions and the federal government should look at how they measure success, and it shouldnt be measured by enrollment which has been the traditional way that Higher Educational institutions in particular Community Colleges have measured themselves. I think the starting point should be how many are completing their area of study which is very much different than many institutions. 90 of students were employed. 80 employed before so are they employed in the area of study . I think i heard them talk that the accrediting bodies. I think that the federal government should look at how institutions are credited very differently and employers should be a part of the Accreditation Process and then last week i think Higher Educational institutions have been divorced from the real world for too long and that they need to be relevant. Their programs need to be relevant and the department of education can support and empower them to become more dynamic institutions that respond to the marketplace and the city colleges that are very datadriven. We have a fiveyear plan with measurable outcomes that we hold everybody accountable to and i think that should be the focus now. There needs to be a cultural shift in Higher Education. I want to skip down because the work with State College president s of the time. Do you agree that there needs to be more accountability, more of a connection in the market or is that something thats more unique to the Community Colleges and the role that they play . As a state institution we are a Public College and university and weve actually been engaged in accountability in a number of different ways, certainly at the state level in the performance funding where they are requiring the the colleges indian diversities to report outcomes. And that the American Association of State Colleges and universities, we have now over a decade of data because we have over 200 of our campuses that actually voluntarily participate in something called a voluntary system of accountability where not only do they report out specific Demographic Data that will help inform students, help inform political leaders, Community Leaders and Business Leaders about the institution but we also look at some of the learning outcomes but we are beginning to look at not just a onesizefitsall in the colleges and universities in defining their outcomes so its something that weve been quite engaged in. I would say that when youre trying to match the educational degree. If you are a liberal arts major perhaps you may major in english which could kick you into a number of provisions but it is teaching or journalism or working for a Corporate Company so some of them are focused on the liberal arts or soft sciences there may not be a quick track. It was a sociology major if we really wanted to go in and on a specific professional degree area. We do offer a lot of professional degrees of course. Cheryls analogy lines right up with nursing. The profession for example some of the degree professions but it is engineering or whatever. We have to be a little bit open because you are moving into a lot of brass divvied co breath and depth in the majors and the arts and sciences. I want to move forward. We dont have a lot of time and i have a lot of questions. You touched on two points i want to go back to later. One is the value of collecting data on outcomes and publicizing and number two, the fact that there is incredible diversity in the College System in the u. S. I do have a couple of questions about the strategy for using federal aid. When i first hear that there are some very concrete strategies the government could use to take on some of the risk. Can you walk us through a couple of the ways that they could structure the Risk Sharing Program . I think that its important to start by acknowledging the status quo and the incentives. We hear this from campuses around the country. They tend to be islands of innovation and progress the reason that the cases because the incentives are not therefore the average typical college necessarily to focus. It is the measure of what default and as long as you push people over the threeyear window its a less meaningful measure for other protections. So one of the people including chairman alexander is that they would put people on for the risk of default or the lack of payment. And the beauty of this is that it sets up an outcome based sort of framework and says to the colleges you should get there however you want to if it isnt a top down here are the indications you have to implement that says heres what we are going to look at accountable for. You do your best to meet those and one is to improve the incentives for the colleges and learn learn a lot more from successful colleges about how that will institute a success since holding the coaches financially responsible for the loans that go unpaid by the graduates. At if the cost is a major issue is there any sort of risk share this promising to you or does the whole approach to seem to be enough where we are going . We should start by acknowledging some of the big news in the last couple of days and when we talk took that risk sharing or accountability more broadly heres an interesting example where students really led the charge for accountability and we were happy to see the department of education step in and provide some relief. Obviously we should preserve those protections are found at the gainful employment. But as we think more broadly or Congress Sharing we very much agree that is an important part of any kind of Higher Education reform is thinking about how schools have some skin in the game and is one of the things weve looked at is based on. Co work in the repayment rates. It should be as if not better than when they graduated from high school we should be able to show some advantage from that and keep in mind the risk is already being borne by taxpayers and by our country when we have schools that fail to do their job as far as giving kids a decent education. So we think we are interested in looking broadly at the repayment. We think any kind of risk sharing should take into account not just tuition but the broader cost of going to school which we know are very dramatic and finally any proposal to do risk sharing which would in part depend on the data being able to better understand command we will talk more about it but eliminating the band of the record is important but also we shouldnt undermine the protections that we already have, so things like in full employment the 9010 rule that we can see are already starting to work. That we need something that goes beyond that. I want to get back to that fought at first i have a question for you. I know in the conversations that ive had its been very clear that the organization has been very interested in making sure that students have good information in general but in terms of what institutions are doing to serve the more diverse student body. When we are talking about the questions of accountability and student making sure they are getting a degree thats going to help in the work force what kind of information do students really need to make the decisions and how much money they are going to be taking out. What kind of information do they need and what are we getting right all of the different private and federal vehicles and getting the students information in that . It needs to be very practical and very real but for the senators comments but i think any student regardless of where they live should have the means to not only believe that act on the college as affordable and too many students in the term that we like to use as posttraditional students are still left navigating a catalog of materials for an institution where loans and grants and scholarships. So thats something thats very plainspoken about the difference between the loan and grant. Its quite different in ive been doing this long enough that i do remember when we use to talk used to talk about Financial Aid to come and it was a. For the population that they focus on over the course of the years that weve been setting up sometimes it looks like for good reason because when you graduate with that kind of loan debt life is very challenging. And we are now talking about it universally so i think at the very least, the information that the federal government and any large entity provides needs to look at what does this mean when the student graduates and one of the practical ways i used to do this when i was a recruiter i used to look at the entry salary because i was looking at the doctoral education and i used to say what is the potential of firstyear salary as an assistant professor asked that the most your loan debt should be w