 Good afternoon. My name is Victoria Yu and I'm a future forum board member. Thank you all for joining the future forum today for a conversation on the impact of COVID on higher education. LBJ Future Forum is an organization that brings together individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view to discuss local, statewide, and national topics that affect us today. Our goal is to create civil, informed, and bipartisan discussions, which is needed now more than ever, perhaps. The future forums events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors, including the Downtown Austin Alliance, Jeff Eller Group, Carbock Brewing, and Joe Cook's catering. I'd also like to thank Leadership Austin and Austin PBS, who partnered with us on this two-part series on education. I'm eager to begin today's discussion, which is focused on higher education and how COVID has impacted our institutions of learning statewide. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Colette Pierce Burnett, president and CEO of Houston Tillitson University, and Kirk Watson, founding dean of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. There will be an opportunity to answer your questions at the end of the conversation. You are able to type questions into the Q&A box throughout the conversation, and we will address as many as we can at the end. I'll soon turn it over to our moderator, Jessica Martinez, who is president of the student government at the University of Texas at El Paso, to lead our discussion. But first, Jessica will share her experiences as a student leader during this time. Jessica, can you please share with me a student, but also someone elected to represent? I believe you got a little cut up there, but I'll go ahead and share some of my experiences as SG president and as a student finishing up her degree at Utah. So at the very beginning of the pandemic, it was quite difficult to understand what was going on. Communication was all over the place. As a student leader, I was seeing the administrative side, but I was also seeing the student point of view and all the frustrations that we as students were having, trying to get all of the everything that was going to happen in line. So what was going to happen with our classes? What, how are we effectively going to learn through finishing up the spring semester? And that concern kind of kept up through this fall semester right now that we are going through and we're just finishing up. A lot of the students were concerned about the quality of education that they were receiving. A lot of the students were concerned financially, especially at UTEP, where many of our students are on scholarships on financial aid. How would they be able to pay for the school when they are not going, when they're not having the job? When they do not necessarily have a stable environment where they can learn, we do have a lot of nontraditional students at UTEP. And a lot of students are parents, a lot of students have little ones have siblings that they have to take care of. A lot of our students come from across the border. They cross the border every day to go to and from school, sometimes twice a day. And it really was concerning to see how they were going to continue and how they were going to further their education throughout the pandemic. But one thing that has really, really helped is all of the resources that we've been able to provide and how our university really made us feel welcome. Any questions that students had, they would ask and a majority of the time they would get answered right away. It was really warming to see how everyone came together throughout the summer to figure out what the fall semester was going to be like. In the spring, it was primarily just providing support and being able to teach our students to adapt. And not only just our students, but our faculty. A lot of faculty have never taught an online course. So that was difficult within itself. One thing that I can say about our university was that we maintained that sense of family, that sense of belonging. And I think that is what carried on throughout the spring, throughout the spring semester, the end of it, the summer and now in the fall. We are all eager and looking forward to continuing on in the spring. Eventually, hopefully after spring break, things can get a little bit better with a vaccine coming in. And we're able to figure out our new normal because we understand that it's not going to get back to the way it was before, at least not anytime soon. We're trying to figure out our new normal. But knowing and having that reassurance that our student voice is being heard and we are able to provide some input has definitely helped ease a lot of the anxieties and frustrations that our students are facing throughout the semester. So we will go ahead and begin with the questions for our panelists. So first, we are doing the session today as part of the LBJ Future Forum, which honors President Lyndon B. Johnson's legacy. President Johnson, who began his career as a teacher, saw education as a passport to opportunity. For Ms. Dr. Pierce Burnett, how has COVID laid a bear race, systemic inequalities and access to opportunity, especially as it relates to higher education? So first of all, Jessica, your capturing of the student experience is just phenomenal because of times in higher education, we don't really focus on the student experience quite frankly as often as we should. So I really, I commend the LBJ Forum for having your voice. And then I commend you for amplifying it so well and putting it out there, laying a bear of what the experience really is like. So in response to your question, higher education sometimes I think has a blind eye to inequities and disparities, just like the rest of the nation. During COVID-19 with the murder of George Floyd, et cetera, it's laid bear these inequities. And the virus has just shown a light on it in a way that has never been shown before. It was always there when it comes to the disparities in healthcare, the disparities in education, it's always been there. And the virus has just really exposed it in a way that now we can't turn a blind eye to it anymore. And higher education also is a part of creating these divides. That's not the intention, but it is the impact in our nation and in some pockets across the globe, where what I mean by that is an LBJ in his infinite wisdom recognizing that education is a passport to success. It's also an equalizer. And in our country, because of affordability, we still have my institution, for example, is 45% first generation. So here we are in a nation in 2020. And we still have half of a population of students that are first in their families to go to college. So education has become a private benefit as opposed to a public good. It has become a privilege as opposed to a right because of affordability. And this virus, because it has impacted our economy, and it has impacted those who are in positions where they cannot quote work from home, it's just laid that bear. So the the upside of that is that it has also reaffirmed the beauty of the mission of higher education. So when people say take advantage of a good crisis, one of the things that takeaways, I think, is that higher education plays a very, very, very, very prominent role in addressing those inequities. And for my institution, and for probably for most, if not all, the two things that have been made bear the technology barrier and the mental your mental being your mental well being, just how secure you are in your rent, being having access to food, health care, all those things and the more educated you are, the more opportunities that you have, and those disparities will start closing. And we everybody real thought came to know that the internet is not a utility, not everybody has one. Because I had a pain point learning point in my own presidency back in March, when we were closing the residence halls, because of the virus was just raging, because it's a hidden enemy. And one of my one of my students that were packing up, they were saying, Dr. Burnett, I was saying, we're going to go online. She was saying, Dr. Burnett, I don't have access, access to the internet. And at that time, I was telling her, you go to McDonald's and go to Starbucks, there's free wifi everywhere, not really knowing I didn't have the advantage of foresight to know that everything would be shut down. And we will be left to our own devices, which were not very accurate, which is not very prosperous for us for the online learning community. So the virus has just shown that to us. And the challenge now is, what do we do about that? Do we just receive back when the vaccination comes, and we all get herd immunity and everybody's safe again, and then higher education relaxes into, you know, this is just what we do. People either can afford it or not. And my prayer and my hope is that this has been so astounding, and so impactful, and so just making it very obvious the challenges that we have that we will not retreat. And that we will do what we do best and lean into our missions, and that all sectors of higher education will realize our role in in dissolving in eradicating those disparities as best we can. Thank you so much. Dean Watson, how do we make investments in the nontraditional students? Yeah, I want to talk about I want to emphasize something that was just said very well about how this virus has shown the light. One of the things that I really want to echo about what the President just said is that we shouldn't, and I've been preaching this for a little while, since COVID hit, we shouldn't act like what we're trying, we want to do is just go back to the old way it was. Because the truth of the matter is when she says it's shown, it's put a light on the disparities that are there. Those disparities were there before COVID. COVID has just emphasized it and made it where we're seeing it. So we shouldn't be trying to go back. We ought to be trying to learn from this and build as we go forward. And I will tell you, I've only been actively in academia for a short period of time, although I served on the Higher Education Committee and have been very involved in different roles and hats I've worn with higher education. But higher education tends to want to do it the way they've always done it. It's a very difficult thing to break through. So hopefully COVID and the light it's shining, as the President has indicated, help us break through that. And your question is exactly right, because a lot of this feeling about what the past looked like, a lot of people think that it's the old way you have higher education where folks are coming straight out of high school and mama and daddy support them and off they go. Well, you described an experience at UTEP that is that is less traditional than what many people envision. You know, there are there are roughly 20 million students that are enrolled in post-secondary education in the United States. And almost 75% of them are what we would call non-traditional, meaning things like they've got dependents. They work 35 hours a week. They're only enrolled part time. And a quarter of the undergraduate students in this country are raising children. And most of those students are mothers. So we have to focus on how we deal with non-traditional students. And the President of HT just suggested that she was talking about things like mental health. We need to start thinking from an additive standpoint in higher education, how we provide for those non-traditional students, certain types of wraparound services, things like health care and health care screening, things like childcare. When you listen to those statistics, childcare becomes a very important part of whether or not someone's going to be able to continue their education. We need to be thinking about transportation, how we get people to and from the campus, particularly when they are in a non-traditional setting and they may not have the luxury of even good transportation to get them back and forth. And there are some other things that we're going to have to deal with too, in terms of being able to transfer hours and get credit for hours taken sometime in the past, because you may have had to take a break because of things like COVID impacting your job and impacting your childcare, things of that nature. You end up taking a break from education and then when you come back, will those education institutions give you credit for your past? So it needs to be, we need to be thinking about what's additive and we need to recognize the world is not what we sometimes like to think it is and we sure don't want to come out of COVID trying to rebuild something that doesn't really exist. Absolutely, you are definitely correct. Something that I've seen through my peers here at UTEP and even across some UT system institutions with other SGA peers that I've talked to is that there's a lot more adherence, a lot more of people who have already graduated with their degree back a couple of years ago that are taking this opportunity to come back. They are seeing that we have online classes, that everything's online, it's accessible, students are able to take classes on their own time, but still get an education and they're taking it as an opportunity to come back to school. And I wonder if possibly thinking in the future, this is an opportunity that we would want to continue going and continue having to provide others the opportunity who may want to come back to get another degree who had to drop out of college to raise a family to make money, et cetera, and just come back and genuinely learn and get their higher education degree. One thing that I think about too is we focus a lot on the non-traditional students. I wonder if in the future there will come a time where our non-traditional is actually the majority and our non-traditional is no longer considered non-traditional, it's the traditional student. What will be the non-traditional student in the future? That's something that comes to mind. Well, if you listen to those statistics that I was just yammering about, it's already probably happened, but it gets back to the academia tends to kind of focus on what it used to be. And when you hear somebody like the president of Houston Tillerson pointing out how COVID has shown a light on stuff, hopefully we'll even change the way we talk about people from traditional to non-traditional. The traditional student probably is going to be more like what we're describing right now, and we just need to change our language. I think you make a very good point. Jessica, you do. I want to echo something that the Dean just said about how we think about and words have such power. So traditional versus non-traditional, we tend to set policies and invest dollars around the traditional because we believe that that's the majority as opposed to retooling and that's a challenge that higher education has. So I tie this together often in my mind with Texas's goal to 60 by 30 to have 60 percent of the population have some type of post-secondary degree of credential after their K-12 experience by the year 2030. Now that's a bit disrupted now because no one anticipated such a large disruption. So as we think about that, so what do we do as a state? Where do we invest our dollars in order to be able to capture that number of students? And those are from the non-traditional sectors because if we focus on the traditional, the traditional are already going to college, you know, wealthy, middle-income people are already sending their children to college. So we need to go into the pockets of our society that are the non-traditional to make them the traditional to invest in them to be able to meet goals such as that. And that takes a heartfelt thought process of what do we do as a society to encourage and to give the opportunity for those quote unquote non-traditional students to pursue some type of post-secondary educational opportunity. And those are things that we don't tie together often and we need you across all sectors, government, private, education, just all sectors to think about how do we get to goals such as that and where do we invest our dollars to be able to make that happen? I want to add one thing to what she just said and it also adds to something that you indicated about, you know, now people are going back. When you talk about what we're now probably I'll be calling the traditional student but you to follow up on what the president is saying over the past 20 years we've had 30 million Americans leave college without a degree. Now my guess is that when we look at this we look back a year from now or five years from now we're going to see another big blip on that screen right because of what we're what we're living through right now and people having to leave. They leave without a degree but if we're smart about how we go forward we're going to make it easier for them to come back either by using something like what we're using right now but certainly and I hope we recognize that we don't we ought to be giving them credit and appropriate credit for what they've already done. Again when they show back up when they show up on another school's door they need to get the credit for what they've done because that's a lot of folks that could have a college degree and the statistics also show that there's a disparity about who is having to leave why they're having to leave and then when they come back they're losing so many hours that some some some don't end up finishing. You are absolutely correct and I see all of that and I think of those are some of the challenges that we have been facing in the past with the Texas 60 by 30 and now the challenges that we will face in the future with getting students to come back to school and how we facilitate that process for them because the most of the time they had to do it unwanting. They would they did not plan they did not want to drop out of school because of financial reasons but they have to right now because of the pandemic and it was something that was unexpected. So that leads me to my next question Dr. Pierce Burnett. What have been the greatest challenges you have faced in running institutions of higher education during this time and what are emerging challenges you are preparing to face? So you hit the nail right on the head it's affordability I worry about this a lot. I see we have several of our students now who are unable to persist to the spring because the resources that they would normally have in working or even with their parents or their villages working they don't have access to that because of COVID. So it becomes an affordability issue even to persist so we've been working really really hard to raise funds to close that gap for students. We've always had that gap by nature like 98% of my students are in some form of eight and 70% are Pell eligible. So once again it's not new it's just highlighted and it is compounded. So that affordability and persistence really worries me. We had a calling campaign here on campus to actually call the students but like you said about UTEP your own school we pride ourselves on being a community and you know touchy we're a touchy campus you know we I've said this in interviews and I know it sounds it's not a very presidential word to be like saying you know we're a campus of huggers. I would like I just miss hugging my students and that's a part of their experience so this is this very hard and even as a leader I saw President Obama speak a couple weeks ago and he said that the presidency doesn't make you a leader it doesn't make you who you are it reveals who you are. So even in this moment in leading these kind of organizations it reveals who you are and it has been super heartbreaking for me as the president for me to say that Houston Tillerson University needs to stay online for the term because of the size of our campus the age of our buildings the demographics that we serve all those all those elements are just this wise decision for my campus I have to make the decision for my campus and it's heartbreaking because I know that my institution is a home for many of my students and that affordability for them not to be able to afford to continue to stay connected to their commencement is even it's another layer on top of the sadness I think that this brings us that being said I'm super grateful that we have the technologies that we have right now because if COVID had hit 20 years ago 15 or perhaps even 10 years ago we wouldn't have not have had the technologies that we have to continue education we wouldn't have teams wouldn't have zoom wouldn't have canvas all these learning management systems that my institution was fortunate because we have put it into place we had the infrastructure built out and then we were forced into it like the ship sailed into the storm and we were forced to to you put everything in play for us to be able to sail to get through this storm so that I as a leader of a higher education institution right now the crux of that the the basic foundation of what I worry about crumbling is affordability for people young people old traditional people always say old people seasoned person like myself for them to be able to persist and stay engaged like my students can't afford to take a gap year you know they can't take the year off because they don't have that kind of lifestyle to be able to lean itself to that so and and you know back to you know we're on the lbj forum back to president johnson's wisdom as he gained as a teacher recognizing education is really hope so we're purveyors conveners and distributors of hope and that worries me that we cannot continue to stay connected to our students to continue for them to matriculate the graduation all boils down to affordability and access and how people's incomes are devastated at this time and when you start looking at are you going to pay your bills you know you know when you start putting in hierarchy what you can afford to pay we tend to put education down at the bottom not understanding that is is an investment in your future so and that's something that I've been trying to tell my students this is temporary it will pass and you just have to hold on and keep leaning in and I've been so impressed by the tenacity of my students and the fortitude of them frankly and with and the faculty and the staff of just kind of leaning into this innovation and we will work through this I mean we've seen other crisis before my excuse 145 years old so you've seen a lot of crises and a lot of devastation but this one period and this one is once again something that can shake us that has shaken us to our core so that affordability is a challenge thank you Dean Watson do you have anything you want to share with us on challenges you faced or what are emergency challenge emergent emerging challenges that you are facing well I'll say two things real quickly one is you know I'm I've never met face to face a single one of the students at the hobby school of public affairs that's in my program which I'll go back to what the president was saying my personality just doesn't fit that kind of situation I I wanted I wanted to be in the classrooms I wanted to be seeing them and I've had office hours I set up office hours where people could come in and see me on zoom and we talked and I got to know I'm getting to know the students that way but it just ain't the same right as being around the second thing I want to say is I want to go off of what the president was saying about affordability and what we were saying a minute ago COVID has again highlighted the problem with one of the problems one of the many problems with affordability and that is now she she is the president of a private institution but the state of Texas could do more as a the state could be doing more fortunately tuition equalization grants are there I've always been a big supporter of course when I was in the Senate I represented Houston Tillerson I represented Concordia I represented St. Ed's in my Senate district so and I went to a school that benefits from tuition equalization grants when I went to college but my point being that is a very important thing to help students with the issue of affordability but in addition to that the state of Texas ought to be paying greater attention to things like the Texas grants program and other programs that provide help with the affordability issue so much of the problem with affordability at public institutions in the state of Texas is in my view an abdication of the responsibility at the state level in a very wealthy state to make sure that that hope the president about talks about is available because we make college affordable and I'll give you an example of how COVID has kind of put a light on things we've made colleges cobble together money so that during COVID now they're losing money on parking they're losing money on students in the dorms they're losing money on students eating on campus and though that money is important because that's the money that helps run the school because the state isn't doing all that it ought to do so I think we have to talk about affordability and we have to start thinking about programs that make it where it's very affordable whether that's focusing on how can we make community college education if not free very close to free so that people can ramp up save money and then go on to other other schools afterward or to get that associate's degree there and move forward but affordability is a key part of that I definitely agree with that and I think that we tend to focus more on affordability for an undergraduate degree but in the state of Texas we don't really have the graduate tuition deferral programs so I know having peers who are graduate students sometimes they choose to go to New Mexico State University which is about an hour away from utub they choose to go there because they'll get their graduate degree paid for whether when they're at utub they don't necessarily have that and that's because of the state of that's because of our state and how we decide to run things so I think investing in not just the undergraduate experience but also graduate education is very important um and touching on your first pointing Watson on not really seeing anyone I do have a brother who is a first semester freshman he I was before COVID started I was super excited to get to experience my last year at utub and his first year together I was ready to take him to all the football games introduce him to everyone um but it wasn't possible um he went to utub he doesn't really have any friends um I go to campus and he always wants to come with me just to tag along and just to see and get to know the university and I see how that impacted him he logs on to his Zoom classes and is just there he doesn't have anyone to talk to I tell him make a group chat with like friends and talk to them so you can get through the class together and he's like I don't know anyone and that's where things get hard it's hard on the mental health of the student and that's a really big challenge that we are facing right now within the like from the student perspective um another challenge that we are facing is a communication how can uh the administrators communicate effectively to students and how can we as students communicate effectively with one another how can faculty and staff communicate with students um which leads me to my next question for uh either Dr. Pierce Burnett or Dean Watson whoever wants to answer um how can we streamline communications during this critical time won't you start so the one thing I'm going to say is I think we've become so dependent on new school technology as opposed to old school technology yeah so it's easier to text somebody because we have these mass texts that we send out to students and that's what I was saying earlier about that calling campaign there's something about hearing somebody's voice on something you know just like actually picking up that old school even the cell phone the part of the cell phone where you talk to people has almost become old school technology because we don't do it we don't do a lot of it anymore and I and especially at a time like this where you need that human connection and to make the messages succinct and and um valuable for students not just sending out a lot of things and one thing recognizing that we all want the same thing which is the success the matriculation of graduation I think sometimes we look at decisions that others make whether it be you know student leaders the faculty this the administration the staff as anti something without having an open mind to communicate this to communicate the positive message to communicate that we're all in this together that's the way we will get through this is together I my chief operating officer was on the panel yesterday talking about k-12 the impact of k-12 on higher education students in general for of covid and he said something that really I'm going to give him credit for saying it this time but next time I'm going to say I said it he said it was some he said that we should focus on stop focusing on what's not and focus on what can be so in our in our communications we have to focus on what can be like giving each other that hope and communicating the the purpose of the reason we make these decisions that we're making and have that I really encourage people just to talk to each other I really appreciate what you said about your brother you get you got that skill from being a freshman on campus so it's hard to translate using that's that that that what you're desiring to do into the technology it's hard to do because it's the underlying skill of the humane part of it the human part of it so we have to really say okay we don't have this right now so how am I going to use this technology to communicate that is it in a group me is it you know one-on-one with my faculty member is it a phone call is it a virtual happy hour with my colleagues is it a chopping it up with my peeps you know as my students would say you know just spending time just talking about something that's not related to covid and not related to the the experience that covid is forcing us to have so focusing on what can be that comes out of this because there are wonderful things that are going to come out of this as a result of it for higher education in particular and my own institution is already stronger and will get stronger in spite of and perhaps even because of the pandemic yeah and I think a couple of things one is I think we need to figure out how we don't have to do everything by zoom it is okay now we can't we can't go see somebody I mean you can't walk across campus or you just exactly what you just described you can't have the friend my brother my brother was two years behind me when at the same school when we were in undergrad I won't tell you the places I took him to to initiate him to campus or just off campus let's say but but you can't do that right now but you can you can do things that make communication more efficient by saying first of all not every zoom call has to be an hour you know we can have a zoom call that we're going to end it in 15 minutes and we're going to be done so because for some reason we've assumed zoom calls have to be at least in my world the zoom call has to be an hour and we're going to fill that hour no matter what the other thing is I've got a couple of people that I've just said we're not doing zoom call me I've started doing that with others instead of sending them an email saying can we schedule the time to meet I just call them like I would have done if I walked in their office down the hallway things things of that nature so I think we have to affirmatively look for ways to do that one of the other things that I really worry about particularly as you describe your brother is I think that college is about networking it is where you build your first friendships out of high school that stay with you all your life my wife has three friends and I think all of them were at one time or another roommates together or at least they were so close in college that I thought they were all roommates together those three those four girlfriends they see each other all the time they zoom now they're zooming so that they maintain those coming contacts my my friends made at the time of college in law school or the network that has supported me throughout my life and we're going to lose that if we're not careful so one of the things we've tried to do is create you know we call it a happy hour I don't know they may be drinking by nine in the morning for all I know but we do it later in the day so if they want to it's better but but we break them up into specific rooms and move that so that they can kind of get to know each other as Collette has indicated where they're not talking about COVID they're talking about their lives and what then they develop those networks so we're going to have to work at that by the way I want to say one other thing about making things less expensive one of the things we're working at and you talked about the undergrad versus graduate programs right now the hobby school is just a graduate program I'm seeking permission to have an undergraduate program but what we're doing with other colleges on campus is working with them to develop uh it's a two our program our master's in public policy program is generally a two-year program but we're working with other colleges so that if they if someone graduates with a BBA for example they will have had a certain number of courses that will allow them to get their master's of public policy in one year thus saving money and saving time which also by the way is money time is money in my undergrad program that i'm trying to put into place one of the things i want to do is i want to work with community colleges so that students can come directly into that program save money and in one year get a master's so that that they also will do a four one because Jessica you are absolutely right colleges have got to start thinking about that time and that money and get them the graduate degree if that's what they want absolutely and you mentioned networking is something that comes in with the college experience um but Dean Watson what are some important skills at school should train students to have today to be prepared for times of crisis so you know i remember when i was first elected mayor of austin one of the things that they told me that the business community told me was a problem in austin which is hard to imagine that this was a problem in austin but the problem in austin was that we didn't have a deep enough job pool so that when we recruited somebody or somebody went in that first job they said those people are going to be moving jobs within two to three years and and what what they meant and we didn't and we had to grow that but what was interesting about that was that was a shifting in our time to where things were moving at a much more rapid pace and people were changing jobs every two to three years well one of the things that i think academia needs to focus on is how how do we teach students career what i'll call career spanning skills not the old squared away skill that's going to take them for 50 years of a job but what do we teach are the career spanning skills that will allow them to be nimble and flexible and able to move along and by the way allow them to learn differently and more quickly so things like how to identify and solve problems that's a that's that is something that i think ought to be i think that ought to be embedded throughout the college experience things like how to listen how to ask questions and and by the way listen to the answers how to communicate cultural awareness we need to be doing a better job at the college level of helping teach cultural awareness so that as people people change jobs or have the opportunity for other jobs during the course of their their lifetimes they're they're better prepared for that so um i i think that's i think we need to focus on career spanning skills i think we ought to also pay a better attention to what the workforce is demanding and and be asking those questions so that we actually are training students to go into the workforce of today and not one that that that is uh that is old and past you know i think team building collaboration i think that's not taught the way it ought to be taught on college campuses so i i think that's the that's a big part of what we ought to be how we ought to be approaching the training of students and by the way that would prepare them better in times of crises like what we have right now absolutely Dr. Pierce Burnett do you have any skills that you think we should train students for today i think that Dean captured most of them i you know i'm at a Houston Tillerson is a liberal arts institution and the liberal arts is you know prides itself on the whole person and so i'm very proud of that now i'm an engineer undergrad so i've been working really really hard to emphasize STEM because i i think what better way what better employee do you have who is then you know has these core values these deep core values of integrity diversity excellence accountability leadership all these core values and then it's tech savvy so you because as an engineer i can say this is about engineers we we don't have high emotional intelligence sometimes we don't really you know have these skills and we're not trained in that way so i think that's a beautiful thing that we've come to address one thing that i do not believe and this is a i say this as Colette not the president of Houston Tillerson one thing i do not believe is that higher education has not embraced that we are training people for jobs i think we get stuck on we're for the beauty of learning and don't really tie those things together because higher education was founded on the premises of people being scholarly which is a part of the creating the divide also like what who is a scholar what is what is a scholar and all my students are scholars they're all geniuses they're all you know they're members of genes generation so i need to embrace the fact that realistically they want to get a good job and they want to build a good career so we need to combine the love of learning just for the beauty of learning and growing yourself and being a scholar with readying yourself for a workforce that you have the skills that that workforce needs from you and that at the same time you take to them this whole well-rounded person that's grounded in themselves and i i do believe that that is a role that higher education has to play in young people's lives there's a lot of learning that goes on outside of the classroom which is what we just finished talking about that goes on as well as learning that goes on inside the classroom and we have to address that that the collegiate experience is about learning like my i went to Ohio State undergrad and that's one window in my life that i would not change or anything all the heartbreaks i was dumped my guy and everything all the stuff that happened to me in my collegiate experience is a part of my life journey and then my learning in the classroom was also a part of that and i don't want COVID-19 to totally strip that from us but i do want COVID-19 to teach us the value of that when it comes to what we do as educators as as the as for the collegiate experience because i too hang out with my college roommates they've just came here right for COVID and they are my they're my road dogs my friends for life so college gives you that yes absolutely and something that i've seen that the pandemic has brought forth that i think my generation and the younger generations are sort of becoming accustomed to is adaptability and change we have to be willing to adapt and talking to professors talking to our more our tenured faculty they didn't really want to change their courses to be online they've taught the traditional in-person face-to-face courses with lectures and with like hour and a half long lectures lecturing from the start to the end and they were forced to adapt they were forced to change their method of teaching and as students we were forced to change our method of learning through the K through 12 system we are taught to learning groups we are taught to physically sit down do work while we are learning and engage with our peers but the pandemic hasn't allowed for that to happen very much and i think that's a skill that higher education institutions can start teaching is adaptability and being willing to accept change and bring a bat change that we think may be necessary because we as students we're the ones who as bad as this may sound we're the ones who are paying for our education we are the ones paying to get that quality of education and higher education institutions should be the ones to adapt to how their students are learning and how everything's going to be affecting us seeing the next generation of college students that are going to be coming in they're going to be having that not necessarily lack of education but they're going to have that experience of learning online and getting their high school education online and adapting to how they are going to learn in college is going to be a skill that I think faculty, staff, administrators and even students will need to learn to adapt to and use when trying to learn so go for it so Jessica that's why you're the SGA president fully shown that and it's young people like you who I'm surrounded with by that give me hope and give me courage to do my job because you are fearless you are fearless in that and higher education is not fearless in that but COVID has forced us to be fearless it has forced us to be innovative and also we we do all these studies about self-efficacy of our students this has been a lesson in self-efficacy it's a superpower I think that has been unleashed by for higher education is that we can innovate and be adaptive and adjust quickly we can do this so we so COVID has given us that gift it's a hard way to get a gift of that confidence if you will that we can be innovative and we can be vulnerable as institutions and we can do things to circle back to our the beginning of our conversation that fit the non-traditional and the traditional in ways that we didn't think we could do it because if someone had told me that my university would be fully online one year ago or 11 months ago I would have said that's not going to happen because we're having challenges and people embracing it and I'm very proud of us that we did it within two weeks but if we were forced into it we did not willingly walk into it and I think that's something that we should we should be mindful of and it's something we should embrace and it's something we should remember after we're vaccinated and we feel like you know we're safe again absolutely we started this program talking about education as an engine for opportunity what are the opportunities for innovation in higher education Dr. Pierce Burnett so the the innovation is technology that's obviously you know in different ways of teaching for example my faculty did an assessment and they put forth technologies that they would need to and what we learned we had a lot of lessons learned in the spring so what we would take into the fall and things like virtual labs like how do you dissect a frog virtually great technology very engaging for students and also that's something we wouldn't have done before now we will take that on into the enhancing our curriculum another thing is from our summer school and you said this earlier Jessica from our summer school we had an increase in enrollment in summer school and that being because people were able to take classes and not be here on campus and that's something we learned about that so we probably not probably we will enhance our summer school online offerings if not even to go all the way to have our summer school fully online because we have more students that they can you know catch up if you will like if they didn't get the traditional 14 to 18 hours they could take something over the summer and then work and do an internship somewhere else while taking classes so that's something that we have learned and we will take into this and the final thing I really want to emphasize and this is a human part of it is we need each other that's really been a lesson for us as a campus we really do need each other and we really do depend on each other to make all these moving parts work for us to be successful in ways I don't think we had we had embraced before so that's an innovative because we often think of innovation when it comes to technology and I think we see that the technology is just a tool because students that were challenged before take those same challenges into this online world so it's an emphasis on that and then I just want to keep saying education is the great equalizer just like President Johnson said it's a passport and it is a great equalizer if I had stopped at high school I would not have had the opportunities that I've had in my life and nobody can take my my opportunities away from me once I've worked hard and students earn those degrees they're theirs absolutely Dean Watson what are the opportunities for innovation in higher education from your perspective I actually answered that question extremely well the only thing I would add to it is how we hear our students I think COVID has we were talking about it earlier you know you you don't bump into people in the hallway you don't learn about their lives before class starts because everybody's in the classroom and everybody's just shooting the breeze talking about stuff and then you start the class or after class those kinds of things you're not going out for for lunch or drinks or dinner or doing those kinds of things so how do you I mean for that matter you're not even having real office hours so the question then becomes is can you innovate in how we listen to those that we're most responsible for and actually hear what they have to say I think that surveys become are going to become you know more of a who would think that you would consider to be a survey to be innovative but it is if you're not otherwise talking to folks right and it's not something I think everybody does on a routine basis in non-COVID world but I think that's going to be an area of innovation going forward because I think it's we have to be figuring out how we give voice in a time when we can't we can't actually be with each other and then I think as the president has indicated you got to keep doing it we can't just go back and act like everything none of this ever happened because now everybody's had a vaccine absolutely I definitely agree with that and I think a really big opportunity for innovation that we have within higher education is getting more people to get an education as I mentioned earlier we have the opportunities of taking classes online there's also been I saw a survey that came out that more students are applying for MD and JD programs so law schools are seeing a lot more applicants come in and also our med schools are seeing a lot more applicants come in and I think that this is the perfect opportunity for that we opened our eyes to different opportunities different career opportunities available and as a higher education institutions I think it's important that we tailor the programs that we bring up towards the opportunities to come we foresee what jobs might come in in the future and how we can train our students to be as effective as possible in those jobs and in their professions I know I myself started off as a nurse and now I am on my way to law school I am straightening into that path because I saw all of the all of the inequities and just the challenges that nurses face while on the field and I think that the genuine change comes from the policies and that's something that I've gotten to learn through higher education and I am forever grateful for the opportunities that I have been blessed with not just at UTEP but within the UT system and the state of Texas to meet with different people to get those insights and really further acknowledge what my path and what my mission is and I think that having institutions of higher education really instill that in all of their students is something that we can grow later on and we can learn from this pandemic too great yeah so moving on so we have one question I think we have five minutes we have some time for one question so what is some advice that you would give to non-traditional students to our traditional students and to anyone who's involved with higher education as they are preparing for the spring semester to come the best advice is to stay engaged and to take advantage of every service your institution is offering you because we took everything online all of our services the library is fully online we have our mental our counselor has full services online we even had the crowning of Mr. and Miss HT virtually online and our tutorial services are online the writing lab so take advantage of every service that your institution is offering you so for people who are in our audience today who are members of a village of a higher of a student that's going through this experience right now even if it's in the K-12 experience you know spend a time taking a pulse check how you doing encouraging them if you're if you're not the student but you're a member of a village of a student just call them and ask them how's it going and encourage them that it is temporary and that they can do it they can persist and just to kind of fill up their love tank with encouragement and encourage them to take advantage of the services because if you don't take advantage of those services you're not doing a service to yourself and those services are all wrapped up into you know the tuition and fees that you pay that the institution offers to you to help you be successful because the goal is for our students to be successful and I think that's really important that would be my advice to the student as well as to those who are in the village of the student that you encourage that student and you do a pulse check on them and how's it going I can't get anything that other than to recognize it's not a weakness right now and it's not going to be a weakness in the spring semester to feel overwhelmed to feel the stress seek the help I now have a new phrase fill the love tank I've never heard I love that by the way Dr. Pearson had been up everybody spend some time taking care of yourself and also others take care of the people that are around you because this is this it's not a weakness for everybody to admit this is hard folks Dean Watson you have a question with the session around the corner are you concerned about higher education cuts especially on those programs you mentioned the Texas grants and the TG grants extremely you coming out of the last session you know way way way pre-COVID we came out of the last session everybody was breaking their arms trying to pat themselves on the back about House Bill 3 which was a truly a transformational public education finance bill and lots of talk was next session we're going to take on higher education and we're going to do right by higher education and of course now we've got COVID and I'm very worried that higher ed will get ignored and even worse higher ed will take cuts that it cannot afford to take right now because we will it's going to be a tough budget time that this pandemic and oil and gas the price of oil while not COVID related that happening at a parallel time at the rough the same roughly the same time has made our budget difficult so we got to stay the course on that we're a rich state and we don't want to cut in such a way that we do damage that we can't repair later absolutely it looks like we are running down on time but quick 30 seconds do you have any last minute words any call to action for all of our attendees joining us today well my call to action would be what I said earlier about being a purveyor a convener and a provider of hope that's what higher education is and to use your power your voice because the things that the Dean was talking about about policy and cuts and budget etc everyday citizens have a voice in that so we can't sit by idling and watch it happen to us we have to speak up and use your voice to be able to advocate for the fact that we that higher education does lift people lift people into lives families and it lifts communities in a great way so make yourself heard take the time to be heard and let's not just try to rebuild a past COVID has taught us a lot of lessons and we should learn from them and try to come out of this more resilient and stronger and higher ed can really play a big role in that thank you so much and for any students who are here listening or anyone who's interested in going back to school stay strong you can do this your education is the most beautiful thing that you can do that you can get and never take no for an answer buy for what you believe in because you matter Jessica thank you yeah thanks Jessica thank you all for joining us