 All right now we want to welcome everybody I'd like to welcome you all to this week's future transform This is a special form for a couple of reasons and I'm delighted to see all of you here to begin with I'd like to say Join me in congratulating us. I'm celebrating four years of the future transform We started this off in 2016 We have had more than 200 programs since we have thousands of people who participated enormous amount of people who will follow us as guests or as people through Twitter, and I just want to say congratulations to everyone It's a delight. I've been working with you for four years. Whoo now Let me get into introducing this week's program So first of all, you should know the future transform is a discussion-based program We have conversations here about the future of education. It's all about discussion What I'm doing right now showing you slides will only last for a minute The idea here is to have ideas topics reflections arguments and support all Across all these different venues Now the future transforms part of an ongoing project called the future of education Observatory and that's a multimedia Multimodal attempt to grapple with the future of higher education that includes this form It also includes a blog a book club the monthly FTTE report If you'd like to learn more about that just head to futureofeducation.us and you can learn more Now we can only do this work with the support of some sponsors and other supporters And I'd like to thank them before we start to begin with I want to thank Nizer net in New York State This is a nonprofit that does fantastic work connecting that states colleges and universities to broadband Internet They also do great professional development work and we're delighted to have them as a supporter We're also grateful to our supporters in shindig because as you can see they make this technology that we're using right now So let me just walk you through it so you can see how it works Where I am right now and where the slide is again just for a minute is called the stage And we call it that because everybody can see and hear everything that goes on up here This is where I'll be for the hour. This is where our guests will be in just a minute And this is where you can be and I'll show you how to do that Right below us you can see a bunch of different people maybe up to 20 at a time Each of them is represented by a single image and they may be a video feed So you can see rocks and risk him or you may be a photo or a silhouette like christine wolf Each of those represents one person maybe a couple more signing in from somewhere on the earth's surface Now that group will move and change as we go along And if you want to have contact personal contact with anyone in that group Just double click on them and you'll have a few options for that But how can we have this discussion that I was talking about? Look at the bottom of the screen You'll see different a few different buttons lined up One of them is a chat box and if you press that you'll have a just be able to chat with everybody who's here So if you haven't done that already just click on the text chat and say hello to everybody who is here Say hi and say where you're from so you can say for example Of what state you're in or what country? Now if you want to talk to everybody else there are two major options to know about First you'll see a question mark and next to that you'll see a raised hand If you press the question mark you'll be able to type in a text question And I'll read that out loud for everybody to hear and then I'll flash it on the screen so everyone can see it as well That's pretty effective people often do that if they're having bandwidth issues or if they Are in a hurry or if they aren't in a place where they can actually speak out loud but If you have a video if you're in a place where you can do that Press the raised hand button that tells us that you want to join us up here on stage And that's pretty nifty because everyone can see and hear you you can have a face-to-face conversation In fact, we can have up to four people here at your time So we can have a kind of pop up diy panel of conversation So if that's not enough if you're a twitter user and you want to use twitter and tweet at us Please just use the hashtag ftte or Tweet at me brian alexander and we'll be glad to have your conversation there So those are a few different ways to participate a few different ways to participate in this conversation about the future of education We're grateful to shindig for making the technology available We're also grateful to our supporters on patreon Patreon is a crowd funding site where people collaboratively fund a project that's ongoing in this case They fund the future of education observatory and our work in it So people contribute as little as a dollar a month to keep all the machines running and the lights on And I want to thank people who contribute even more these folks here contribute more than 10 dollars a month Folks like steve airman shrimp bassin bar armor collin karmie jeff mclerk and christen echelman elissa woo They're really really grateful people. We're grateful to them for being such great people and you can join them Just go to patreon.com slash brian alexander. We'd love to have you So by the way, want to further a note if you have that chest to check it out yet My new book academia next has finally appeared Here's a visual aid for it And you can grab this from amazon or from johns huppins university press It's about the future of education and it draws heavily on our work here for the past four years so that's All the introduction that we have to have for the program now. Let me introduce our fine guests We have two people lanae erickson and robert kelcham Lanae is at third way where she researchers policy including education policy Robert kelcham is a professor at seat in the home who researchers higher education Both of them have been working very very hard on a lot of interesting questions involving Where higher education is headed and what's interesting is that two of them have just had a kind of debate about where Congress should intervene to try to help graduation rates and this debate Really covers an awful lot of ground. So let me bring them one up after the other first. Let me start with lanae erickson And let me bring her up on stage like so Greetings Hello, thanks for having me. Oh, I'm really really glad to see you. Thank you for making the time Um, just you know to introduce you let me ask a couple of things. First of all, where are you today? What you're going to be working on for the next Four months, what are the big topics the big project for the upper most for you? Well, I work on a whole variety of policy issues including higher education But in our higher ed work really focused on trying to get congress to Pass federal policies that would improve student outcomes We think that a lot of federal policy around higher education has focused on getting students into college Not necessarily getting them to successfully Complete it or go on to the success that we hope that college promises. So Uh, maybe we'll see some actual movement this year. Um, it's one of those issues It's a little less partisan than some of the others that I work on like immigration or LGBT rights And so I still have hope that congress might act this year Oh, very good Besides that enormous issue. What are some of the other policy issues that are most demanding of your attention the next year Well, I'm spending a lot of time analyzing the 2020 race First with the democratic primary and then in the general election. So that's kind of all encompassing this week And then I I do work a lot on immigration reform and How we can Talk about immigration in a way that brings Americans together rather than dividing them, which I think is is what's happening in too many circles now So I do a lot of public opinion research to try to understand how people think about immigration and and how we could kind of move forward on that issue Oh, fantastic. Um, if you can figure out what happened in Iowa, please let us know Let me uh, I'm I'm really glad you're here. Um, I'm in all of your policy work and um, I'm really excited And let me uh, just add to you. I mean, um, we have robert kelton from seat in the hall. Hello robert Oh, your uh, audio is off. Yes. You're muted right now. So if you How about now? All right Yes Yeah, done. It had to reset it Understand, you're good. Well, it's good to see you here professor kelton Well, let me ask to introduce you to everybody. What are you going to be working on for the next 12 months or so? What are the big topics and projects that are up in this room? So I'm spending a lot of time looking at how states fund public colleges And a lot of states tie a portion of their funding to student outcomes And then also looking at the federal policy landscape And one of the big things that's happening now is more information on outcomes at the program level And thinking about what that might mean for future higher education act reauthorization Oh, excellent. Excellent. When do you think we're going to get around to reauthorizing higher education act? Well, I was saying for years that I'd probably get tenure before that happened. I got tenure and I'm going to say I might retire before that happened because I think we're looking at a few years still. Okay. Okay Great. Well, um, you're uh, your Description of your work on state funding really feeds into this um Now if Friends if you haven't had a chance to read these articles, you can look in the bottom left hand corner of the screen There should be two buttons. I'll give you links to this Um, and if I could just to both of you wrote kind of a pro con article about this idea tying federal support to college and university graduation links Then I just asked the two of you How did this question arise? How did the uh to the website approach you? With this idea or was this something that just you both care up with on your own. What's the back story? They it for me. They definitely approached me. They said we need somebody to write in defense of using completion rates and uh of all of the kind of accountability policies that we work on This is the one that has the fewest people that will go on record to defend it. I think and so They came uh, you know, there's there's a lot of other folks who are out there on things like debt to earnings, you know things like some version of um cohort default rate or repayment rate looking at outcomes in general But completion is is one that's pretty dicey. And so uh, they asked me to jump into the fray And I knew uh, it might be that no one else would so I decided to uh, spend some time writing a 2000 word essay on it Or which is which is terrific Um Robert, how did you get involved in this there? Yeah, they they asked me to write a piece on this and usually whenever Someone calls to write a piece or reporter calls for a quote. They basically expect me to be the skeptic on everything Oh, that's the role that I ended up playing here. Ha ha. Oh, that's interesting. I'll let that says so much. Um So it's interesting. So you get to be the skeptic and uh, lene you get to be the If I remember rightly from your biographical page on the third way site, you get to weigh in gleefully on contentious topics That's right. Oh terrific Um Friends I have all kinds of questions for our two experts But I want to make sure that you have time and comfort in asking your questions of these two So let me just ask a couple of quick ones just to get the ball rolling to get the ideas out in the open And then please either click the raised hand button to join us on stage Or type in the uh type in the question mark button so that you can Share some some of your thoughts and comments. In fact, we had a slightly ironic one on twitter right now, which robert I think you in particular will appreciate Um one person said I would love to make it but I gotta do a bunch of attendance reporting to justify the support We get from your friends Uh our good friend returned to title four That faculty have to fill out and staff at the fill out document saying that Students attended at some point during the semester after the add drop date And good luck getting faculty to do this because they don't understand why in most cases That's really hard. You get do you have to play that role at uh seat normal yourself? Yeah, I'm department chair. So I have to make sure that these things get done But I mean at least for me, I know why it's happening So I I do it but it's hard to get people to do things that they don't understand why they're doing it Well, let's let's dive into the why and uh the main effect if I can start with you Your article talks about the urgency of tying federal funding Or some federal oversight to graduation It's because you point out that on the one hand our national goal seems to be to increase as much throughput through higher education as possible because Many students as many people from America to graduate with some degree, you know everything from associate's phd What you point out that our graduation rates are actually abysmal Uh, I think at one point you say we graduate that 10 percent 15 percent of students actually succeed in graduating Well, it's about 50 overall But there are lots of federally funded universities that graduate one in 10 of the students that enter So that that that gives you a sense of crisis and urgency This is where car and given the especially the huge investment that the federal government makes that the federal government should step up What would this look like? What would this uh, what was kind of tied between federal funding and graduation rates look like? Yeah, I think you know just to punctuate the crisis. I think the Federal government has been so focused on access on getting people into Any kind of higher education? But what we didn't realize was Especially because our system is often funded by loans. We're asking people to take out debt We could actually be leaving them worse off if they get walk through the door They take out a bunch of loans They don't actually finish their degree and they can't ever pay those loans back The students are in a worse position. The federal government's not getting the the return on its investment. So really It it, um, you know could be to the detriment of all of us if we are completely Agnostic as to whether or not someone graduates once they sign up for college So and and that's where I think we are now right now We basically are agnostic as to whether someone completes in in federal policy But there are lots of ways you could go about fixing that and you could go really really heavy handed For example, say all of your funding You only are going to get this money if this student actually graduates. That would be like the extreme, right? I think there'd be a lot of bad impacts of that including You know passing students. This shouldn't be passing You know moving students into shorter programs that they can complete more quickly and then you can get your money There's all kinds of of ill intended consequences there, but there are other things you could do for example, say There is a bottom line That if you don't graduate say 10 of the students that enter Maybe you're not doing a particularly good job at educating them And so, uh, you know, the federal government could say Let's let's look at ones that are below a really minimum rate of graduation You could also say a creditor should look at this because accreditors are supposed to be looking at a subjective lens for you know, is this school actually providing value to the student and So it wouldn't need to be a bright line. They could take into account completion rates right now. They don't And so, you know, you could do something like that. You could also invest in some of these evidence-based programs that we've seen really increase in complete completion rates. So Things like wraparound services You know programs that are looking towards completion from the very first moment a student gets on campus We could fund those programs more and then that would in turn Hopefully increase completion rates at you know, the places that are serving the students we care the most about So there's a whole range of policy options. I think some of them are are could be bad policies And we need to make sure not to overcorrect, but that we should start thinking about what the options might be Thank you. I really appreciate that. That's a whole set of many options Well, um, Robert, you're the skeptic and and and you're you're to be fair your piece wasn't entitled Why this is a bad idea? Your your piece was about this being a mixed policy or so far the results have been mixed Yeah, we want to dive into some of the problems as well as some of the ways this could work Sure So first thing in response to lene that Accreditors at least are starting to look at colleges with low graduation rates The regional accreditors that get most traditional four-year and two-year colleges Do put more scrutiny on colleges with graduation rates below 15 to 25 percent So there is something happening there. It's pretty small But my skepticism comes in that even if a portion of funding is tied directly to outcomes evidence from these state policies shows that Colleges are trying to do things like restrict access to college Or get people into shorter-term programs They may try to make programs easier, but that's something that's really hard to get at empirically And the other issue here is is there a political will to close down low performing institutions? Because looking at the traditional graduation rates Some of the lowest performing institutions are community colleges where students come in and out or transfer to four-year institutions Also minority serving institutions Often have low completion rates and there is no way that congress has the political will to Close down those types of institutions Now with that being said is it possible to tie a small portion of federal funding to outcomes? Maybe states have done this and states have basically said The only way colleges are getting more money is if some is tied to student outcomes But at the federal level, we just don't have that history yet. And that's why it's hard to make that kind of shift That's interesting So it's tricky to do this And and the state the state experience so far doesn't exactly Give us a lot of enthusiasm for Well, I would say, you know Robert said it this way, which is that the results are mixed. I mean, I think what we've seen from the states is There are lots of different ways to design Um incentives in this structure and there are some that are very bad and have had bad outcomes And you know, we can kind of see what's happening there. So for example We don't want to create a structure We have uh, thank you. Thank you. Uh, we we have a comment From jeff alderson at mathworks There's a corollary to your question of federal incentives for data connection analytics The federal program for state longitude of data systems Giving money to states to link state to state to higher education and workforce And I think he needs to follow up with that. Um, jeff if you want to add a second point to that That he actually wants to join us on stage. So jeff, let's see if we can get your camera working. Um, and you can join us Let's see Josh. Hey So I was listening into this, um To that to that discussion with with baited breath a little bit because so part of my background in education technology As I was involved in setting up a lot of those state longitudinal data systems And there was a lot of federal money that was thrown at that and I don't know what the scorecard was I think over 45 states eventually implemented some form of Connection between k-12 higher ed and workforce and I haven't heard a lot about that recently There were a lot of federal agencies like the and campaigns like the data quality campaign that sprung up to take You know to try to get the word out about why you would link datasets to look at completion across these boundaries these traditional boundaries Um, there were even some state compacts like the southern regional education board and others that were trying to share Data amongst these sort of consortia Because these state data systems didn't really cross state boundaries very well And I remember some stories about how even louisiana in texas had to struggle to try to share data amongst your systems because they had these weird, you know Laws and restrictions in terms of what they could actually share Um, and that was about the same time that the you mentioned that congress came out and sort of legislated the You know an inability to share data across these boundaries I haven't heard a lot about it since then maybe because i'm not so close to that to that Part of the the industry anymore But uh, I'd be curious as to if you think if you've heard any examples or anything about where there's some success stories coming out of there That you know that people are talking about how they've used those systems in present day