 Is that one more to tell you the story about Bruce Babin? That's a potential candidate, do you remember this? Hello, good afternoon, everyone. And thanks for joining us today, both here and online. For a conversation with Professor David Gerb about his most recent book, The College Dropout Scandal published by Oxford University Press this past summer. My name is Emma Garcia. I'm an EPI education economist, and I'm delighted to be here to introduce David Gerb, who is presenting his research. I believe this is his 18th book. Today here as part of EPI series of book talks. On behalf of EPI and myself, I would like to start by thanking you, David, for your book and for having raised awareness of such a significant topic. Severe challenge our society is facing. Before we hear from David, I would like to mention some facts that may help convey the magnitude of the crisis David will be talking about. These facts come from David's book, as well as other sources, including the NCES, the CCRC, the Hope Center, the Century Foundation, CUNY, and some media. 40% of college freshmen never make it to commencement within six years after having started college. This is what David labels the higher education's little dirty secret. For students seeking a two-year degree, the outcomes are even worse. 70% had not completed their degree program within three years and within six. Only 40% had either completed their degree or transferred to a VA program. In terms of preparation at the beginning of their college experiences, about half of all college students and nearly 70% of community college entrance had taken at least one remedial course within six years of college entry. In terms of resources needed, barely one in 10 students whose families are in the bottom quarter of the earnings bracket will earn a VA degree compared with more than three in four, 75%, among those whose families belong in the other extreme of the income distribution. Roughly half or more of the real college survey respondents had been food insecure in the previous month or housing insecure in the previous year and 17% had been homeless in the previous year. A large share of post-secondary students work or are parents. The average educational-related spending per FTE is close to four times as large in private research institutions as in public community colleges. And the national student debt snowball continues to roll and grow, estimated at around 1.5 trillion US dollars now. So the dropout rates and challenges in the way towards completion are much larger still among the new gen members are the term David introduces to group poor minority or first generation students. And there are many more. But what do we have behind these statistics? In short, we are people who aren't having it easy. Let's pause for a moment to think about them. Students who drop out of college are not only worse off than they would be if they had completed their degrees, but also in many cases worse off than if they had never attempted to go to college in the first place. While they may get a little payoff from the skills and training they received, they also bear a heavy financial debt that requires repayment. There are plenty of shocking and somewhat embarrassing facts and findings in David's book. But despite these alarming statistics, his book offers a great deal of hope. He writes about real program successes showing how students benefited when institutions and policies paid attention to their circumstances. David's book offers multiple examples of how institutions moved from good intentions to good ideas all the way up to great programs that got implemented, where evaluated and where scaled up. All these programs moved students in many cases new gen students from difficult early circumstances towards graduation, proving what can be accomplished for them and for our society. I encourage everyone in the room and watching us online to read David's book to learn more about these programs, institutions, amazing leaders, and incredible students. I hope this conversation wets your appetite for that. Please join me and our moderator, Pedro Dacosta, in welcoming David Kirp. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us, David. I really appreciate you taking the time. And I really enjoyed reading the book. And I think the lack of university engagement with students is something that most of us that went to college can relate to because a lot of universities don't really take the time to nurture their students at an individual level, so I really appreciate the work that you're doing. I wanted to start just by asking about the genesis of the project, how you became interested in the topic and how you became aware of the scandal and decided to explore it. I'm glad you mentioned scandal because Oxford Press manuscripts are... No. Yeah, it's gonna be, yeah, for an hour standing, it's gonna be a little tricky. But there are orchestra seats. That's right. There's plenty of seating in front of us. Center orchestra, A1 right here at cheap prices. We'll get a stage eventually. Point well taken. So Oxford, it's a little nervous about, at least the reviewers, our academic reviewers, get nervous about, you talk about college dropout scandal and one person said, why don't you call it the college dropout problem? And I sort of fell asleep in the second syllable of that. I asked the word that you just added. And it really is for the reasons that Emma is describing, a scandal, we can get into that in greater, I mean, in brief, huge problem, strategies to address the problem, no significant change in terms of outcomes for students. So colleges are falling down, big time in the job for students, generally and for new gen students in particular. How do I, well Emma actually knows the story of the origins of how I got into this. It's Hank Levin who is an economist at Teachers College and an old, old friend, often a font of ideas calls up and says, there's this amazing program at City University of New York and we've done this evaluation. And it, by the way, the CUNY programs are the only programs I know that really have this kind of top rated academic quality match sample research that's being done. And so there's this study that looks at enormous impacts in terms of the students who are graduating from community college because of this intervention and big payoff, big economic return on the investment. So I go and I look at the program and I write about it and then I hear about another program that no doubt we'll talk about, Georgia State, which is an amazing institution. And I go down there and I write about that and then I start looking around at the statistics. I'm sort of backward mapping and I discover, oh my gosh, I mean, these are the numbers that are here and the question that I as a policy guy am asking myself is why? This is not, as you and I were talking about before, this is not brain surgery. Really, the stuff that you can do is doable, affordable. It requires a lot of leadership, a question that no doubt we'll get into, but that's the launching pad. So what were the most compelling stories that you came across? There's a nice thing about the book is it has a very personal touch and you stick to very real concrete stories that give people a sense of how things might get implemented in a real sense. And I think even your opening story is very compelling about the gentleman who's breakup becomes fateful in his professional trajectory. But what were some of the personal stories that touched you the most about? Sure, absolutely, yeah. Sorry about that. So I'm a great believer in the maxim that the six most powerful words, most commanding words in English language are let me tell you a story. Works for three-year-olds, it works for 83-year-olds. And what the social psychologists tell us is people make their decisions based on stories and back them up with statistics. And I'm a lawyer by training, we start with stories, I'm a journalist by part vocation. And the stories are sort of what powers me in the story. There are any number of them in the book and I think we're compelling, but in some ways the most, one that grabs me the most still comes out of a community college in the Bronx in New York. And I hear a lot when people, the pushback from people is these students aren't college material, quote unquote, these students aren't college material. So the students who are in this class, I mean they are absolutely the kids that are critics or the critics are talking about. These students, I don't know how they got their high school equivalency degree. They're doing, they're scared by fractions and negative numbers in math. They're writing three paragraphs, simple essays in English. That's all, that's third grade stuff. So that's where they show up and they failed every one of their CUNY entrance exams. It's an open institution. So once you got your high school degree there you are. In mid-November, when I'm visiting them, they are asking about their simplifying square roots. Which by the way, those of you who have or are thinking about going to grad school or business school, that's the level of math that you're gonna be asked about. So they're ready to go to business school I guess right away. And they're reading VS Nipal short stories and critiquing them which is college level stuff. And those aren't kids, right? I mean those are people who really have gone through the ringer. There are a couple of women whose stories I really remember. One of them talks about how at lunchtime she's expressing breast milk, her husband is on kidney dialysis and she's got to work. And somehow she's in this program and those students are gonna make it one of the women said to me, ninth grade guidance counselor calls me in and says, you're just gonna get pregnant when you're 16, you're gonna drop out of school so why don't you quit now? Say the taxpayer is a bunch of money. And there they are in that program making it. So I figure, this is, if you ever wanna, we can talk about the data on this which really speaks as well to the same point. But that's a story that's really compelling. And there are a bunch of stories in that as you say in that book that kind of power my feelings about these goings on. I do wanna ask you about the data. Did you get a sense, were you able to determine whether there was a turning point at which this became a scandal or crisis? Was there a particular event that led students to begin dropping out or has this been a slow cooking phenomenon? I think this has been around forever. I mean forever meaning you go back to 1970 which is where the data that I have begin you find the same dropout rate. And people say, well, okay, we got a different student body now. Isn't it impressive that the dropout rate hasn't increased? I said, fine, go back 15 years and do the same dropout rate. And the difference is we know the tools. We got some evidence base for what it is that you can do to move the needle on graduation rates and shrink the gap. And I think the first question that started getting asked was the question about the whole social class issue that Emma talked about. Who's going to these colleges? It's the access question. And then people begin gradually to start noticing what's been out there under their noses. And it's a really good question as to what is, what launches that concern? I think the concern builds up slowly. And so we're kind of at this weird point where the political tagline of the day is open access to community colleges. We can talk about why I actually think that's a bad idea. But the point, the more positive point is let's not just talk about access. Let's talk about success. Let's talk about those 40% of the students that Emma mentioned. Half of the students at public universities don't get degrees in six years, half of them. And the graduation rates for the new gen students are 10, 20% lower. You mean people who are going to college for the first time? Well, this whole group of students that we're talking about, minority students, poor kids, first time college students, immigrant students, that group of those students, the graduation rates are between 10 and 20% lower. And you have universities, people will have all sorts of under their breath things to say about that. You have universities which have closed the gap to zero and you have universities like Georgia State where all the new gen students, each one of those categories graduates at a rate that is higher than the overall graduation rate. That's a remarkable, hold on to that one for a second. That's remarkable because it does give a line of the notion that these guys aren't prepared to go to college and it's too bad they got a terrible high school education and so forth and so on. Maybe very well be true. Look at that poor woman at the Cooney College, but you can do something about it. I guess that one big difference between high dropout rates in the past and high dropout rates now is the cost of education is surged of course in the levels of debt that people leave with. So the opportunity cost and the real cost is much higher I think. Now I wanted to ask you about the public private divide because it seems like while the dropout rates appear to be higher at the federal level, it also strikes me that the success stories that you point to also happen at the- You mean the public level, not the federal level? The public level rather. Yeah, well I'm writing about regional, big regional public universities and community colleges. This is where American students go. They don't go to Harvard, they don't go to Berkeley. They go to Cal State, Florida, or George Mason or Valencia Community College in Florida. Those are the places where they go. I'm concerned about the debt issue. I think it's misleading. The average of a student has taken out loans. Students who borrowed money. The average undergraduate graduate who's borrowed money graduates has $28,000 in debt. Now $28,000 is a lot of money, folks, but if you start hearing about a trillion and a half dollars, you start thinking what's that all about? Well a lot of what that's about is graduate programs. And I want to shine a light on the kind of disgracefulness of places like I'm Columbia, USC, which charge, USC charges $50,000 a year for a social work degree. Well think about it. Those guys maybe they'll graduate making $50,000. That's just astonishing. I don't doubt that money is a big issue in folks' lives. So when I ask the presidents of successful institutions like Georgia State, what's the maximum graduation rate you could hope for? What are you aspiring to? I say 75% and the reason for that is the reason for that other 25% is money. There's nothing we can do about that. And it's not just tuition or fees, we can deal with that issue, but it's just life. People gotta be fed, they gotta have a house. Emma gave you the numbers on the number of folks who are couch surfing or going without meals. That's a big deal. But, but you look at, so here's where the numbers come in. You can look at colleges whose entering freshmen look exactly the same, same freshmen profile. And their graduation rates will differ by as much as 15%. And then you can look at universities with the same graduation rate. And the gap, the opportunity gap can vary by as much as 25% or 30%. So you get some places that are absolutely scandalous. And these are not, I'm not sort of inventing this stuff. College success, I think it's called collegesuccess.org, which is a really good website. If I got that wrong, let me know and I'll come back to you guys. It's where a lot, you can go to this, to that website. And you can find out how the school you're interested in does on these and other criteria, how it's done over time, how it compares to a bunch of schools that you're interested in, how it compares to schools that they think are comparable. Ed Trust puts out this data. One of my wishes is that students and parents who are thinking about what's the college major like, what's the school like, what's the college life like would look at graduation rates. So I wrote a piece in the New York Daily News and I love shining lights on success stories and problem places. So you have a student named, I'll just call him Jose Miranda, just to give him a relevant name in the story who graduates from, and is a first-gen student, graduates from high school and is choosing between two of the State University of New York schools, Old Westbury on Long Island and Albany. Now, if he goes to Old Westbury, the chances are about 50-50 that he will graduate. Little lower because he's a minority student. It's kind of like 50% overall, 48% for minority students. If he goes to Albany, the chances that he'll graduate, the overall graduation rate is 71%, if I recall, the minority graduation rate is 72%. So if he's thinking about the stats, he's 50% more likely to get a degree if he's willing to go upstate to Albany. And there are a lot of these examples out there in the world that are worth having a look at. That's when I hear from folks, these folks, students aren't college-ready, or give us better students, we'll have better graduation rates. Kind of drives me nuts, both in terms of the stories and in terms of the numbers. I wanted to read a quick passage from the book where you say that every university president faces a jam-packed agenda, raise money, build classrooms and dorms, massage faculty eagles, coddle alumni, respond to crises, negotiate with state lawmakers, doing something substantial flow of dropouts requires a leader like Georgia State President Mark Becker, someone who's fixated on student success and willing to break a few eggs if that's what it takes. So my question is how much do success stories rely on kind of strong personalities who are driven to that and how much is any success model replicable to other, in other cases? You know, social scientists hate leadership as a concept because it's squishy. I don't think, and I actually got a version of this question from a faculty member recently, in other words, there's something that we can do and the answer is for your class, your own class, there are things you can do in terms of making yourself accessible and aware of students and there are some great examples in the book about that very same professor that you talk about in University of Texas. Maybe you influence your department, but unless there is a president who has said student success is my top priority, it's not gonna happen. Naive me, I started out thinking it's a college. What should a president care about? He should care about how it is that students do. Do they get a decent education? Do they get a degree? Well, you just read a whole bunch of stuff about other things and the one thing I left out of there that I shouldn't have is that they're focused on US news and we'll report rankings. So US news and we'll report says, we're gonna rank you high if you reject a whole lot of students because then you're selective. And you got it. So Mark Becker who you mentioned, they take a beating in terms of their overall ranking because they won't go down that route. Any student that gets a B, they could raise their graduates, their requirements, they could get students who look better on paper. They've been pushed to do so by their board, they've been pushed to do so by state lawmakers. And again, it's kind of our job is to educate the students that we have. And I heard that over and over again from the places that I'm writing about, you know, it's Long Beach State, it's Rutgers Newark, it's University of Central Florida. You know, what are they gonna do? They're gonna reach out to community college students who don't have fancy credentials and they wanna do it just fine because of the kind of program that they operate. So yeah, it takes a leader, that's the Becker phrase, break a few eggs, it takes a leader to do this because well, a lot of the things that go on in a week, if you wanna talk about the strategies, a lot of the things that universities can do that make a difference happen at the margin of the institution. So it doesn't take a big data analysis to say, collegemate requiring algebra is gonna have a huge effect on your graduation rate. Okay, so what are we gonna do? How do you get rid of either really reform how algebra is being taught with math labs and or better substitute statistics for anybody who's not a STEM student because stats we use, all of us wind up using stats, but unless you're a STEM person, you're not gonna use algebra. Well, hello, there's a math department out there and a math chair and a fiefdom. I mean, among other things that people don't realize is that stats can be taught by a whole bunch of departments, not just by the math department. So all of a sudden, they're losing, I mean, this is real, right? They're losing power. They're losing positions in their department. And academics are really great at rationalizing things that are in their self-interest. Oh my God, we need rigor here. Well, you know, I mean, as opposed to what? Now, we just teach mush. So if you can do the rigor part, we can do the mush part. It's not gonna happen otherwise. And these guys, the successful presidents, men and women will tell you, okay, so Rutgers Newark is doing this really interesting program. Nancy Canner says, you know, people come to us and it's an honors college for students who are there because of grit, not grades. I mean, the students who are in this program are tough. Their survivors, their academic record is lower than the overall academic record of the students at Rutgers. So she says, you know, people come to us and they say, so what can we do? And the same thing I hear from Mark Moden and the, you know, every place else. These are like people know about these programs. College presidents know what's going on. They come and they say, okay, what's the magic bullet? This is the conversation. And the institution says, there isn't a one thing that you can do. You're gonna, if you're gonna do what the City University of New York does, you gotta do this and this and this, and then they go away. We can't do that. You don't have it in us to do that. So unfortunately, you know, there's nobody, there's no accountability in this world, in this higher education world. High school with a graduation rate of 50%. That's a dropout factory. The principal is gonna be looking for another job. Teachers are gonna get transferred. Nobody gets fired because of dropout rates. So you've gotta have a moral gut check to do this. That's a really fascinating comparison. I think one we can all relate to because we all hear about failed schools and the resources that suddenly dry up. In talking about the array of policy solutions that you do see happening at individual schools, what, could you separate the ideal solutions that you see as a scholar of this issue and then talk a little bit about what you see being talked about in the realm of possibility and political possibility? Because even though candidates are talking a lot about student debt and college education, they don't seem to be talking about it in the ways that you're focused on. No, it's true in a little sort of political side when I was talking to the Buttigieg campaign, which is about to release its higher education plan. It sounds just like me, which was really, you know, which as opposed to free, right? Free as a, it's really great bumper sticker. Free as a great bumper sticker, but all the kinds of, they really are focused on an array of student success issues and you'll see that when that comes out. There really isn't much pushback. I mean, this book got a great review in the Wall Street Journal. It got a really good coverage in the Washington Post. You know, there's nothing ideological about anything that I'm saying here. You know, there are cost questions, real. So people say to me, okay, can you do this without a ton of money? Well, you can't do what City University of New York is doing without a lot of upfront money and to find 3,500 extra dollars per student is gonna be outside the realm of possibility for most community colleges, which is about what they're spending on their students. But you can do lots of other things. For one thing, and Cooney does not do this, you know, the flavor of the month is big data, data analytics. And that's very expensive. And I think if I were a university president, I'd say, I can be a free writer. All these other schools have done this. They can tell me some of the really interesting things they found out, like living close to campus makes a big difference in whether a student graduates. And we can just use that information. You know, hiring counselors, you know, not adding to the administrative staff but hiring more counselors and advisors, really important because if there's one big theme other than leadership in that book and making students excessive priority, it's the power of the personal. When you, this is where you began your comments about not being much noticed when you came to college. You know, if students feel that they belong, if they feel that they're not imposters and think back to your own first days as a college freshman and how insecure you felt. And then, okay, some of you know this firsthand, others don't, imagine yourself, and let's say in Texas coming from the Panhandle or coming from the Rio Grande High School and you're at the University of Texas now and you have this professor who we're talking about in chem one and you are scared to death. You might not have had a chem lab in school at all, take any chemistry. And in a class of 400, this professor wades into the middle of a class. First thing out of his mouth is, I'm on your side. Just for a second, think about how that feels. I'm on your side. And that's what you, that's the key to this story is to make students feel they, the institution, is on their side. And there are a lot of particulars that the book describes, a lot of strategies, but they're all built around that as a premise. How do we get rid of the roadblocks to graduation? How do we get students to feel that they're more than check writing machines or they're being batch processed like birded chickens? What do we do to make that happen? In the sense these are lessons that faculty themselves need to absorb, I assume. Yeah, and that is the hard part of the story because a lot of the things like add more counselors, that's great. Have a summer program to deal with this issue called Summer Melts. 25, 20, 25% of students who are accepted by one of these universities pay their first installment, never show up. How do you deal with that issue? That's a shocking number that people don't know anything about how do you go about dealing with that issue along the way. But those are the challenges that these places face. When the spirit of keeping it conversational, I wanted to open it up to the audience, although I have more questions and I'll retain moderator privileges if needed, but if anybody has any questions, yes please. There'll be a mic coming your way, just wait one second, right here. Hi, Dr. Kerp, I'm Megan Boynton, I'm a reporter with Arizona PBS. I'm also a graduate student at Arizona State University, so I can appreciate the point that you're making about graduate student debt because for three semesters in a master's program in journalism, it's over $75,000 in debt. So I think you're at a public university, so I think you're really getting to the truth of the matter there. But I wanted to ask, have you found any regional implications in the research that you've done because we all know that public education in the South is very different from how it is on the coast? In what sense, regional in what sense? The places that I went to quite deliberately are all over the country, and they have very different resources. So you get, I mean, Arizona State has, for many programs, a well-deserved reputation for doing, for offering up a higher education program for lots of folks. It's got a president who's very good at describing the successes of his institution, University of Central Florida, which I had never heard of and which they've got to turn out to a great football team, their Division I football team, and that's why many folks know them. They're the second biggest university in the country. They've got no money, and they're doing really well. Rutgers has substantially more money. New Jersey is a more generous place. California, not a generous place at all. Long Beach State is one of the places that I highlight. So I think one of the messages of the story is, it's great if you've got a lot of money, and we know that if you give more money to community, if you give more money to the community colleges, graduation rates improves, lives improve, because those colleges are, they're in starvation mode. What are they gonna do with that money? They're gonna hire counselors. They're gonna hire, they're gonna have more sections, of course, they're gonna be able to hire more tenured, permanent faculty members as opposed to adjuncts. All of that winds up making, we know, from the research, makes a difference in the lives of students. But I'm looking at places that you can't say, oh, you're just talking about the wealthy schools, or you're talking about the flagship schools, or no, it really isn't across the strategies that local cultures vary. What you can do at a given university depends a lot on where it's been and what its history is and what its expectations are. But the guts of what you do, the guts of how you promote student success, that's very much the same core across the board. Thank you. Who else? Sir, right here. Got you. Oh, oh, oh. Yes, Bill Berkson. Could you give us say two or three of the most effective interventions that you've seen? Quickly, yes, it's great. It's a great question, great sort of lead-in question. So we start with the college saying, okay, we're serious about this, and then saying, okay, we're gonna look at the roadblocks from day one all the way through. So start with Summer Melt, which I talked about before. I mean, if 20, 25% of your students don't show up, what do you do? Well, you try to figure out what's going on, and a good part of what's going on is that these new gen students are faced with the need to make sure their high schools get in there as second semester grades to college. They gotta sign up for classes, they gotta sign up for orientation, and they've gotta fill out the FAFSA. Now, that is not, the FAFSA is not a student-friendly form. California has done interesting experiments with changing the language. Just the introductory letters inviting high school students to begin to participate in the California version of FAFSA. Language difference, just changing of writing it in English makes a big difference. Adding one sentence which says, college is a great experience or something like that. Just that one sentence increased the take-up by 2%. All the time. So what are these, how do they deal with Summer Melt? Through texts of students. You send a text to a student that says, your FAFSA form is due next week, and if you're having problems completing it, we got folks who can help you work on that. So you get, at Georgia State, you go from a 19% Summer Melt to a 13% Summer Melt. Cost, more or less, nothing, right? Because the help is gonna be online help by the machine program stuff. There's everybody question that any student is gonna ask and they can answer it, and there's gonna be somebody behind that computer who can help them answer that question. That's huge. That's at one end of the story. The other end of the story, universities discover, and again, I'm gonna tell you a Georgia State story. There are a lot of other places I could be looking at. Actually, I'll mention one from elsewhere. They discover that second semester seniors are dropping out. It's like, what's that about? That's weird. And they go look, they take a look, and they go to the bursar, versus they say, well, they didn't pay their bills wide and why didn't they pay their bills? Because they're short, $500 or $1,000. Their scholarship money ran out or their loans ran out or whatever. They just couldn't get there. So what does Georgia State, and now happily a bunch of other universities do, they contact these folks and say, we're gonna give you $500. We're gonna give you $1,000 to get you through. And let me tell you initially when those calls came in, the students thought this has gotta be a scam, right? Hi, this is Georgia State. We're giving you $1,000. It's kind of like too good to be true. That gets three, I mean, it's a big school. That get 300 or 400 more students wind up graduating now. That's not the only factor in that story, but it's a big factor in that story. And finally, let me move away to Central Florida and Valencia College. So we talk a lot about articulation agreements between community colleges and universities. And the problem is you get a degree from a community college and you may well not be prepared for the next step in the university. University of Central Florida, this is Orlando and Valencia College, which Aspen rated the best community college in the country, their first best community college in the country have a deal, which is they're gonna make those courses mesh and the way they do it is that the university faculty and the community college faculty sit down and write the curriculum. So there really is not a gap between those places. Now that only happens if you've got people who are willing to put their egos to one side and say, we don't wanna talk to those folks. And starts with leadership, it starts with the presidents of two institutions, trusting each other, seeing a common problem, figuring out what they can do about it, making it happen, communicating their enthusiasm to the faculty. And you go talk to the professors, all that kind of snobbery that university professors might have toward community college instructors, it's not there as folks are around. Maybe one final idea, one from another community college idea from Valencia College. They require, those folks survive on the basis of adjuncts. That's a horrible situation. I mean, you have to love teaching to teach for $4,000 a course. Do the math, I mean, it's astonishing. The teachers who are in their tenure track have to do research, but the research is develop a curricular innovation that you think is gonna improve student outcomes and test it out and compare the results between what you've done before and what you're doing now. Well, and then all of a sudden, those teachers are doing better and now you got a pool of ideas that help other teachers. None of what I described costs a lot of money. Much of it costs no money. It just takes both a leader and with smarts and somebody who's able to communicate to the faculty and the community, this is a crisis. What's happening to us? This is a crisis that doesn't have to be this way and we can fix it. You get that first message across and then people are ready to hear the second message and then the rest is filled with blanks. There's a question back there. Go ahead, sir. We have Arne Fagu with Public Advocacy for Kids. First of all, Dr. Krupp, thank you for all of the challenging stories that you're giving us this morning and my organization's actually used improbable scholars as part of our mission statement. So we wanna thank you for all of the work that you did at Union State. Thank you for that plug, I appreciate that. My question then is, is in the work that you did with higher ed, did you find that the more successful students were in K-12s that talked to higher ed where there frequently is a disdain between the higher ed academia and the K-12 program and did you see any relationship between organizational changes like you did at Union City and the colleges that you were studying? So we're talking now about connections between the K-12 system and the higher ed system. There's not enough of it. There's absolutely not enough of that and what I would buy sort of dream idea is that you take a metropolitan area and you create a web of relations among the four year publics and private so they wanna be part of that system, the community colleges and the high schools. And they really do on a more macro scale what it is that Valencia and UCF are doing on a single institution scale. And my God, why not if you've got five universities in a metropolitan area, why not have those places basically be opens where students can take courses across those institutional divides? In fact, why not think about consolidating, every, there don't need to be five and I'm gonna mention the course because I'll get in trouble, but okay, they don't need five medieval history classes in five institutions, even find something else. It's not as though I'm suggesting that everybody teach the most practical subject in the planet, but you can figure out ways of using resources more effectively, getting those institutions to talk to each other, getting them to connect to high schools. Now, those of you who are in the education business know, I mean, that is incredibly tall order. It's only one way it's gonna happen, money. Somebody's gotta say, here's the check. If you sign on to do this and you and I will take these metrics along these outcome metrics along the way, so you're doing X, Y, and Z over this, now you sign on the dotted line you tell us what you're gonna do and the money will come accordingly. That's the only way that's gonna happen, but I think that strategy. And let those guys figure out what they need to do to improve student success. There are a bunch of ideas in the book but it is not a cookbook. It says different places to go back, different regions, different institutions, different cultures, different leadership styles, et cetera, different answers. Make student success your number one priority. Get rid of your, my program, not made here, get rid of all that. And amazing things are gonna go on. Thank you, up here. Hi, Shinoah Sinclair, Brookings Institution. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about gender differences in dropout rates, what may be driving it, and what we can do about it. Well, all across the landscape, you find gender differences in high school graduation, college graduation, et cetera, and in all cases it's the men who are doing worse than the women. What can you do about it? Well, there's somebody who thinks that women are the better sex in all respects. I'm not sure, this isn't the natural order of things. But more seriously, I don't know the answer, I don't know the answer to that question. I do think that if you actually, being aware of the reality leads you to say, so this is a classic example. Okay, our university says our big problem is men. A really big problem is minority men. If you look at, there's the biggest gap is between minority men and minority women in terms of graduation. Okay, what's going on? Well, if I'm gonna be at that institution, the first thing I'm gonna do is to get together a bunch of students and say, what's going on? What can we do? A lot of the best stuff comes from bottom up. One of the aspects of the program at Cooney is free public transit. I mean, that's a big draw for these folks. It's called a Metrocard program initially, right? Because there you have it. Well, ask students, what's going on here? What's the barrier? What can we do to help? Just the question makes a difference. What can we do to support what it is that you're about doing? And again, I don't think there's gonna be an answer to that question. I think a lot's gonna depend upon the part of the country. Can we talk about urban rural school? Where are we? What kind of resources do we have? What are the attitudes of students coming in, et cetera? Back here. Shawn Michael Love, APLU. Thank you, David Kurt, for coming. Question in regards to some of the policies and programs that these universities are bringing about. I was a first generation college student and there were some programs that were available, but one of the things that happens for kids who drop out is those programs aren't retroactive. So what advice do you have for kids who have dropped out and fell victim to the scandal that you bring up? So it's not just about incoming students, but students that have already left and now looking back for that opportunity. What advice do you have for them? Well, thanks for that. That's a great question. And it's, you know, one of the things, by the way, one of the things I love about forums like this is that I'll get questions like the gender question that I thought of a little, but not a lot, or that question. So you get to see somebody thinking in real time analyzing a thing, you know, it's not just giving you stuff that I know. That's a, institutions are not, one of the things that colleges are now doing is reaching out to folks who dropped out, you know, with a year or less, they're starting there, with a year or less to go. What can we do to help? How can we make courses available? What if you've moved, take courses, you know, in your local college, we can get credit for those courses. That turns out to make a huge difference. I think universities could do a lot more because the big dropout issue is after freshman and after sophomore year. And those students disappear into the universe. Unfortunately, they disappear into the universe. And colleges aren't doing much. And I think it's a really interesting and important challenge, one that I've not thought about because it is difficult to track down those students. But reaching out to them, just reaching out, you got the records, go find them. You got an email address, probably still good. And then again, what can we do? I think of, let me just give you a high school example. So there was a, Union, Oklahoma, my favorite school district in America for reasons that, you know, I wrote about them in a New York Times column. They're amazing. So how are they amazing? Well, there were 60 students who were just short of being able to graduate from high school who didn't finish, didn't take their last, whatever. So the superintendent goes knocking on doors, knocking on 60 doors, what's going on? What do we need to do to get you through this? So 40 more students wind up graduating. Well, those numbers are small. You've got big numbers at big universities. But again, there is no substitute for the personal connection. As any of these programs that I know about what's really crucial and often you're gonna hear, it's my advisor, my counselor, my big, she's like my big sister, she's like a mom. He has my back. So that's, you know, apply that to the students you're talking about. And I think you'd make a, you'd really make a dent in the problem. One more question up here. Hi, Rick Collenberg with the Century Foundation. David, I agree with your reading of the research that greater investments in community colleges will yield increased completion rates. One question is how much more should we be investing? And at the Century Foundation, where I work, we have a working group that's trying to tackle that issue. As you know, at K through 12, there are dozens of these studies usually driven by litigation that say here's how much more we should be spending. But our project will take a long time. So just what would be your advice to the Buddha Judge campaign or any other campaign? How much more should we be investing in community colleges? If I could tack on a question, because you mentioned that you don't believe in community colleges for all you earlier. I don't believe in free community college. So let me just put the two things together. I think the answer is one more dollar is gonna help. I mean, these places are on life support. And, you know, we're not gonna get the kind, you know, I'm not Elizabeth Warren. I don't have, you know, a plan for this, which is gonna cost eight figures or nine figures for everything that I might wanna do. So I don't wanna put out some unrealistic number. But if you brought community colleges up to, let's say, two thirds of the expenditure of four year colleges, that's a number I just pulled out of my, it's a great question. It would be an incredible investment because again, what would they spend that money on? Not rock climbing walls, not sushi bars, but which is what, attracting students many four year schools are doing, they'd spend them on more sections of courses, professors, they'd spend them on things that have a demonstrable impact on students. Why do I think that community college, free community college is not a great idea? Well, one obvious reason, and the obvious reason is it's a free ride to folks who don't need the free ride. Right, I mean, it's not giving the folks, and all across the board, I'm not a believer in free, I'm a believer in high tuition, high aid, so that the folks who need free college are gonna get free college, and those who don't are subsidizing those who do. But the less obvious reason is the data show that if you make community college free, students who otherwise would go to a four year school where there are chances of graduating where greater are gonna take the free and they're not gonna graduate. And I looked at my best example was to go to Tennessee because when Barack Obama proposed free community college, he holds up Tennessee as the exemplar. So, you know, inquiring minds wanna know, I'm gonna go look at Tennessee. Okay, 11% more students go to community college as a result of its being free. The community college graduation rate in Tennessee is 16%. Those, and then I go look at a regional public university, I picked Middle Tennessee State, essentially an open enrollment university. Students who go there, graduation rate 50%. 16% will get a two year degree, 50% will get a four year degree. That's why, you know, these are great bumper sticker ideas, but not good policy. Take one. Yeah, you go for it. Take a question. Exercise your judgment back to your release. Josh Protas, I'm with Mazona Jewish Response to Hunger and we've been very involved in the issue of food insecurity for college students and have been engaged in the Higher Education Act, which Congress is looking at for reauthorization now. So, just curious about any federal policy prescriptions you have for the dropout rate and with Higher Education Act potentially up for reauthorization. If there's any recommendations you would make to members of Congress right now. Well, you mentioned one of them. I think people get fixated on tuition, right? Free tuition. Well, for starters, that doesn't cover fees. State of Massachusetts has low tuition, but higher fees. So you wanna sort of watch out for that. And then there's food, housing, books. There's living, right? All that stuff needs to be folded in to what's going on. And then, you know, having Pell Grants are wove, have begun to keep up with what the tuition costs are and wanna talk about increasing Pell Grants. And then I think you wanna condition aid, support to institutions, and this at the state level in particular, not on the number of bodies who show up, but on the number of bodies who depart with good degrees and to make sure the colleges don't game the system by being more selective, you make that money contingent on increasing diversity, increasing the number of new gen students and how successful they are. Those are some of the things that I would wanna promote. Hi, thanks. I'm very interesting. My name's Carl Pulser, my project, the Center on Capital and Social Equity. I study the dynamics of wealth concentration and but I also advocate for inclusion of the bottom half. So this question, I really support the cultural change that you outlined, but I'm wondering if there aren't changes in the legal and fiduciary responsibilities of the university, whether they have enough incentive to do anything about it. I see universities kind of, as you see the departments, as large guilds or have considerable monopoly power in the economy and they have considerable influence over the government and how they've constructed the loan system, the student, it's really relies on the university, which has invested interest for advice on the loan. They get a letter saying you can get this money. They don't tell the student that the government can actually reach into your social security, can reach into your tax return and they do. So in other words, do we need some kind of third party to advise the students that's in their interest, not in the university's interest, and some kind of remedy for these, what might be contracts of adhesion of a sort, if somebody ends up in great debt, that they can go back and get some recourse. Does that make sense? It does make sense. This is not by and large my territory, but I think having advocates for students is part and parcel of my notion of how you need somebody that students can talk to. And this is a big area in which that's true. I mean, you could start by changing the bankruptcy laws. Why is it that college debt is one of, the only one, it's certainly one of the big areas where you can't declare bankruptcy. So what does that mean? It means dropouts have a default rate that's twice as high as students who get a degree. What is, how does that, that's unfortunate, in hugely unfortunate, it means harder to get a car loan, harder to get a mortgage. And the effects don't stop there. One of the things that we don't realize is that jars at various points in life, going all the way back to prenatal care for mums have lifelong effects. So you can look at the impact of that sequence on the mortality rates of the people who we're talking to. So this is really, this is serious, serious stuff. And I think you're asking, I mean, these are big questions which I haven't thought enough about, but this is very much a part of where the conversation ought to go. I'm Peg Grisham, I do cognitive science. One of the things I'm interested in is the difference between learning. It turns out that there was a gathering of historians and a very good professor of literature tried to read a history document and they all laughed hysterically and complained that she wasn't reading it right, which was true because you read differently in history than you do in literature. You use as examples mathematics, the success in the mathematics course, the problem of, I think you called it a math fiefdom. Mathematicians, people have to read if they're mathematicians. So what do you think about when people want to invade one of those fiefdoms rather than take things away from them? So literature people are not necessarily the best people to be helping first generation students learn to read in journalism or mathematics. I'm trying to figure out, I hear what you're saying, I don't get the... Do you have any examples about, you had examples about mathematics in some ways. Have you considered examples about university barriers in students learning to read? Oh, no, is the answer to that question. I mean, that really is your turf and it's very important turf, but the answer is no. And I have, you know, I've tried to find good data, I'm very basic question, good data on performance in remedial classes in writing, in reading and writing. It's very hard to get that, because all of the focus, all the focus is on the math performance, which is true. Yeah, you find, yeah, and you look at strategies and places that are using strategies, the focus is so much on the things that you can do to improve math as opposed to the things that you can do to address the reading and writing issues nationally. And I wish that were, as somebody who's in the, right, reading and writing business, I wish that were otherwise. It's also the case, as you know, I mean, a very mundane level. Professors are not, professors of almost any field are not neither interested in, apparently, or particularly competent to help students write better. And if you look at, you know, when students would tell me at Berkeley, you know, I'd never had anybody comment on my papers like this before. I think this is, you know, it's like, and this is shocking. We're not, you know, we're in a place where that, certainly, I mean, if anybody, it shouldn't be true, it shouldn't be true there. So I think that there is really, you know, what, there is no, there are very few people in the system beyond getting out of your freshman comp class or whatever, who are ever gonna pay any attention to your writing. Maybe when you're doing your senior paper, that's gonna happen. The biologists are gonna focus on content, they're not gonna focus on language. And that's unfortunate because, as we know, right, for most fields, including the number crunching fields, you gotta be able to express yourself clearly. And, you know, it is to me a neglected terrain, but again, not really my turf. We're, look, we're starting with my books. And no, I'm sure, absolutely, you need to read and to write to succeed. Gentleman in the back. So I'm a, Jerry Dantus, I'm a retired professor of mathematics from the University of Maryland. And just a quick foot, go on, all right, separately. So you mentioned having the colleges talk to the community college colleges. So the state of Maryland decreed about 15 or 20 years ago that the community colleges had to, the colleges had to accept the basic courses from the community college, which forced them to talk to each other. Now, you mentioned that the students show up in community college and they're scared of fractions. And of course, maybe the middle school should be held responsible for that, but unfortunately that's not going to happen. And when students show up in calculus, there's a fair number of them who are not comfortable with fractions and that results in, they're not doing well. Now, there was a program developed at Berkeley back in the 70s, which addressed this, and I can say a little bit about it. Is your question, sir? Yeah, it's right. I don't know if you're aware of the program at Berkeley for calculus students, but that's the... No, but could you just, could you just make it into a question, please? We don't have that much time left. No, I mean, it would be nice if people knew about the program that was developed at Berkeley where students who were at risk and had expected not to do well ended up doing extremely well. So there are, I mean, always, I do know something about that program. There are, and there's a program like Statway, which you may know, or Quantway, which developed at the Carnegie Institute. There are great programs out there. They demand a ton of the teachers and scaling is always a big issue. And the data are very impressive in terms of the impact of those programs, but it's been very hard to broaden their reach. One final question up here, and it goes out. Thanks so much for your book and a really interesting conversation. I wanted to ask about a population that we haven't discussed explicitly that might be included in your discussion, but incarcerated populations or people that either started their education and got waylaid by arrest rates and became incarcerated and or prison scholar programs and in prison education programs. And if you think that the same success models apply to those populations, if you looked at any of those in your analysis, or if there's something unique that needs to happen in those kinds of populations, which is an often ignored sector of the electorate, but is a fairly substantial portion of how we think about education and how you place that in this crisis. Yeah, well, we know about the barriers, including the lack of availability of funding, and the states are saying, we're in a much more punitive mode, we're not gonna spend money educating those guys. That's what I'm beginning to focus on are ex-prisoners come out, wanna go to college, and they face two huge barriers. One of them is they can't get Pell grants, that's a lifeblood, and on many college applications, there is, have you ever been convicted of a crime? And those are killers between the two of them. They really, despite the data that say that former prisoners are no more likely to engage in the kind of campus miscreant behavior, less likely actually, very hard to persuade institutions of that, the lack of money, a serious problem. So in the book, I actually write a bit about, I tell a story about one student, this is also one of the more moving students, of course the story is in the book, who was a gangbanger who's, sent to prison for 20 years for attempted murder, and I mean he's in a drive-by shooting, he's in the car, and winds up educating himself, becoming the jailhouse lawyer, realizing that the judge's charge was not consistent with legal rules, getting a lawyer out of jail, getting, applying to community colleges around the state, and he goes to Valencia because, everybody sends him a catalog, they send him a catalog with a poster that says, we look forward to seeing you, six words, we look forward to seeing you, and the rest of it is, now he's finishing up his third year at Miami Law School, lots of other stuff that go on, and this is not by any means a unique story, if you were to go to any of the local universities and say, so how many former prisoners do you have in your university? Most places, I don't know, many places have programs, but this is an underserved population that needs a whole lot more attention. I just want to call out one other group. We haven't talked about foster kids, not a trivial number, so foster kids are new gen students on steroids, all the same problems, plus the fact that they've lived this chaotic life, right, so you get a graduation rate for these kids ranging from 8% to 2%, 2%. So then, you look at, Western Michigan University, Western Michigan University, they've got, their overall graduation rate is 54%, their graduation rate for foster kids is 44%. 2%, 44%, what do they do? The same thing that City University of New York did, the same thing that all these other successful programs did, they really give those students lots of support and lots of attention. They give them money to go to school and they're living together, they're living together with a dorm, mom and dad who are there, somebody they can go talk to. That's just an example of how you take a population that people have just totally given up on. And you just provide the kind of support that other students, other new gen students and other students are gonna flourish with and they're gonna do just fine. So that's the, I mean the bottom line message of the story is, Stevefold, leadership is crucial and you can't underestimate the power of the personal. Those are my takeaways. Thank you so much, David. You really helped bring the book to life. Thanks to everybody for coming and thanks for watching. Thank you. Have a nice one.