 Let me welcome all of you. I'm really glad to see so many of you here today We have a terrific guest and a very very important book, but to begin with let me just welcome everybody to the Future Trends forum My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host. I'm your chief cat herder for the next hour And I'm your guide to the conversation that we're about to have now I'm absolutely delighted to welcome back President Paul de Blanc We've hosted him about a year ago almost to talk about the unusual projects the unusual Transformation the unusual successes he's had at Southern New Hampshire University Now Paul is the author of a brand-new book from Harvard University Press called students first This is a book which takes a really close look at the promise higher education has for access and equity The idea that anybody can get into higher education Work hard and get a degree that takes them into the middle class or beyond and Paul dives deeply into this to show how that promise is broken and Then tries to show ways that we can fix it. It's a very very powerful book Which I strongly recommend in order to discuss it. Let me just welcome President Paul de Blanc Brian thanks so much for having me here. I can't imagine a better Conversation partner it's great to do with you. Well, it's great to see you Paul. You're coming to us from Seattle today, right? I am from Renton just outside Seattle Yeah, so we have to imagine that the white behind you is actually clouds about to about to rain You could since it's Washington, but it's actually quite a lovely day This is a room at the Hyatt. Oh good. I enjoy that as it as it lasts Well, congratulations on your new book. I'm really really pleased to hear about that And we're gonna dive into it in a second, but first Paul. I just wanted to ask You know when we brought you on board last time We asked you what you were looking forward to for the next year what are the big projects and ideas and Since then so much has changed Particularly in terms of the pandemic and also your book is out. I'm just curious. What does say, you know fall? 2021 and spring 2022. What does that look like for you? What are the big things that you're thinking about and planning on? It's funny. I was just doing a state-of-the-Union report for an upcoming board meeting and on paper We probably had our best year ever, right? So we in this last year we grew by 40,000 students We hired a thousand more full-time staff to support them we surpassed the billion-dollar mark in terms of operating size We acquired a Kenzie Academy like I'm just you know front after front I think this looks great and then I end up having a saying and I've never been more worried so my worries are The world is different. It's changed and student behaviors have changed and employee behaviors have changed and We're in the middle of it and when you're in the middle of it It's really hard to know right like we the world keeps moving. So we have to place bats and we have to Operate this place and make decisions every day, but we're doing it with you know, the old benchmarks aren't holding up The we were pretty data-driven and all of those sort of things that we used to look at and sort of say year-over-year Like how are we doing? You know 2019 2020 2021? It's like I don't know if those are worth very much to us right now and as my old friend Clay Christensen says you know said Data is a rear-view mirror and I'm looking for more for the headlights. I need to sort of get through the fog here So it's been it's an interesting time and I think what it means is being as active a learner as We can be that's I just met with our group of young leaders who are in a special program that we do Bring them along. It's like we need you to be learners right now. We don't need we don't need a pining We need questioning so Actually, you know Brian has been on this journey. I've been doing my own learning journey in this context is I am Interviewing typically two or three people a week right now Who are leading change in big systems health care? mental health criminal justice You know just kind of looking at them and saying tell me how you're thinking about this and tell me how you're leading your Organizations and it's been fun. It's been fascinating. It's not going to be the source for a book That's coming out next year, but it's been a really helpful for me as I think about SNHU Imagine I imagine I had a epiphany a few years ago where I thought I was trying to think of how to describe the funding model for higher Education to people that I realized the best to parallel was health care financing. That's what I thought. Oh God That's so that's the worst possible one. I could think But but but I hear you making these changes is Is very very complex very deep just friends if you're just joining us I Have a quick question. I want to run by by president Leblanc But the forum is your venue It is a place for you to ask your questions and to raise your concerns in your thoughts So again as we proceed on the bottom of your screen those buttons there that raised hand button Click that if you want to be in line to join us on stage and the Q&A box Just press that into typing your questions or your thoughts It's all about you. I just want to start things off and ask very quickly You know where your book powerfully describes a kind of decline story That higher education was a terrific upward mobility curve for so many people and while we've increased the total number of students massively that we educate from say 1980 to 2012 There's got to be At the same time a sense that this is broken and messed up that the financing of higher education Has been harder and harder. We know from the work of Of sarah golder crab that many many people fall through the cracks because our our financial aid system doesn't doesn't really address realities Given that What are some of your main findings about how we can fix this and how we can restore the promise the higher education used to have Yeah So there are a number of things One is I think we obviously have to bring down the cost So there are policy issues clearly and sarah is amazing. I just interviewed her a week ago for this project I mentioned i'm reading a book she recommended to be called administrative burden By her and more than him. It sounds terribly boring, but it's fascinating Um, and if you know, it's the way that we use administrative burden to actually discourage participation in voting And you know, if you think about the FAFSA Think about what that impact of that administrative process is on low-income students quite often. Um So So we have to bring cost down do that We have to be much more creative about our delivery models And the part of the problem that I hone in on in the book is that We have with the credit hour embedded a deeply inequitable artifact That now informs our system but creates a kind of foundation of sand It's not a good measure of learning and it's really does it disadvantages those who don't have the privilege of time So if you're a low-income learner The thing you have less of than the rest of us is time and control over what time you have So it was all I opened the book the first chapter opens with this very pivotal encounter I had with a student in boston who was this remarkable young woman. I colored me. I mean, it's not a real name in the book And um, and maryon had Gone to two of the local community colleges in boston. She was from the poorest neighborhood of boston rocksbury She was a single mom with very little sort of social capital or financial capital And she had a seven-year-old daughter who had chronic respiratory illness And if you look at her school transcripts from rocksbury community in bunker hill community colleges They were just rife with f's and w's and I asked her about this when I got to meet her I was like and you might look at that and say somebody there's not ready for college or it doesn't have the aptitude or whatever And really what was happening is every time her daughter gets sick. She would miss seven to ten days of school She missed assignment. She fell behind on exams, etc And she could never catch up and if she if it was early enough in the term She took the w if it was too late She took the f and she steadily was eroding her top Pell Grant amount her cap So when we put her in a competency-based program, which was self-paced Now when her daughter got sick, she could just hit the pause button. There is no penalty. There's no time fix, right? Um, and she said she wonderful quote to me. She said i'm the calendar And when we could put her in that program what we saw is Mary's really bright She raced to the completion of her degree. She was gritty and persevering So what was the problem the problem is we built a system that works well for the system But doesn't work well for the student in this case and I think um And I and so the book center is on a critique of the credit hour In an argument that we need to move to competency-based measures skills based if you prefer But I go on to then talk about the implications of that for financial aid for all the creative ways We can then think about programming for all the ways we can capture learning That doesn't happen on our campuses. It's an argument that higher ed no longer hold the monopoly on what counts for learning Um, and that's painful, right? Like we have to let some of that go and it's really an argument that says If we are going to once again make higher education an engine of social mobility and opportunity We can't continue to do what we're doing today. It worked well for an awfully long time It isn't working well for too many people That's a that's a well, first of all, thank you for that very concise Summary of this involving the credit hour and pricing and the monopoly issue Um, it reminds me too of that powerful phrase you used last time where you said the poverty is a tax on time That it really just removes hours and days from our lives Yeah, and you see it play out again and again And then you have to think about because we use a time-based measure of learning It contributes to things like the inefficiencies of our transfer credit system So as michael horn reported in one research study Um, the average community college student who completes an associates degree Then loses 43 of their credits when they transfer to a four-year degree program Who goes to community colleges by and large lower income and more students of color? So again, we're baking inequity into this. Why do they lose those credits? Well, you know the story, right brian So it's because we don't actually have a good measure of learning We're not sure that that course is suspect our intro to site course has to be better than your intro to site course There are also institutional disincentives our faculty disincentives Wait a minute if I give you if I sort of allow this transfer credit for this course That means one more one fewer person in the course i'm teaching and i'm already struggling to make my enrollment numbers So a whole bunch of disincentives that lead to the inequity If we could know for a certain what a student has mastered what they can do with what they know We remove a lot of that arbitrary Sort of decision-making that Opacity that goes around the transfer credit system and can build a fairer more equitable system So assessing learning becomes an instrument of justice Which is really really interesting what you're thinking Yeah, and it also um Forces us to actually be clear about the claims we make for our students and to stand behind them because we really start to shift the spotlight from inputs and content and content delivery To looking at outcomes and assessment and demonstrable skills and knowledge And when you do that when you shift the spotlight that way you can get really creative about delivery models because it doesn't matter Right you can deliver in any imaginative way that you like Because we're going to be able to know the claims you make and and how you know that students can possess those skills and knowledge This is a a definite revolution and we have we have questions coming in. I want to make sure people get to ask them I did want to uh site that uh, we had uh Some good comments in the chat. Jen Wilde says you're referring to transfers She says your three credit hour course is only worth 0.67 of our courses A lot of times as you know, brian those even the even the credits that are accepted Are accepted as electives and not towards program completion So what you often have are lower income students being required to complete well more than 120 credit hours To finish their degree. So we don't only require more time of them than their more privileged peers It also costs them more just a win win all around um well, I I have more questions, but I want to hear from everybody else first and uh, my good friend phil long has a question here You started seeing the successes at southern new hampshire university You are more worried than ever time is held constant and learning or purported learning varies Did any of your peers or peer ready? Yeah, so it's interesting if you take a look at so the At the heart of good competency-based education is to flip that equation I often say that the credit hours like the higgs boson particle, right? It kind of it's the dark matter the holes our higher ed universe together um, but if but in that in that particle as phil said Time is fixed learning becomes variable like we're going to measure learning at the end of 14 or 15 weeks Whatever your term length is and at that arbitrary point why 15 weeks? We're going to say this is how good you are. This is your a b c d grade and by the way ramping grade inflation So it's not a very no one trusts grades any longer outside of higher ed Um, but we're going to do that and we know from bloom and others Todd rose talks about this in his book the end of average That if you simply were to extend the term three four five weeks, you'd see the whole curve go to the right a lot more Like so you just have to give people more time. So why is time important in that? So competency-based education flips it. It says let's make time the variable And let's make learning fixed non negotiable. And that's a very powerful piece. Now what others doing it I think what you've seen with cbe is kind of what you saw with the mooks Like it's the gardener curve. So we saw, you know Irrationally zuberance when cbe came about then we saw the well, this is disappointing slaw of despair And now what you see are about 600 institutions who are quietly rolling out cbe programs of all kinds So if you attend, um c ben for example that whatever their conference is talk to charl along who heads up c ben She can give you example after example example of really compelling cbe programs that are actually fixing this That are actually getting at it and what's interesting in the book We we profile some of these schools and one of the things I wanted to do in profiling schools was include examples That I often hear from critics who say well look at cbe is good for vocational skills Like it's great if you're teaching it, right? That's a demonstrable skill You can either your code compiles or it doesn't but we we profile a school of theology Right. Yeah And in in South Dakota and they're like and and I often say to my colleagues in philosophy for example, hey, you know There's a reason why McKinsey and Accenture recruit philosophy graduates from the best schools in the country Why because they have skills and competencies that those high power companies prize greatly Critical thinking the ability to logic models symbol system language manipulate, right like these are things that they prize enormously and philosophy is a great place to find it And yet philosophers so often don't want to make a case for themselves, which astounds me kind of Yeah, yeah The last thing I just add to that Brian is I think commonly people think cbe Speaks to content or pedagogy and it actually doesn't speak to either competency-based education is an architecture It simply says However, you teach whatever you teach Can you be clear about the claims you make for your students? And can you reassure us that you actually know that they that they that they perform that? So whatever whatever your program is Are you really clear and we don't love that and I came out of the humanities We don't tend to love that in the humanities. No. No, we don't But you're showing us maybe we should think about this Maybe we should love this we have more questions piling up and we have a question from our wonderful friend robin dorosa who's also new hampshire And she asks some folks advocate for public health care while others support private insurance In terms of higher ed. What role is any for public? Do you think there should be in the future? Well, you know adam harris has his new book out I'm sure many of you know which is an argument for again a kind of revival of public higher education I had both it was my access to affordable High quality, but I do think there are a set of hired binaries in higher ed And one is that public higher ed sort of does the people's work of access and private higher ed is for the privileged And of course there I just think that binary has fallen away um, so To the extent that public higher education Can get back to this functional like creating opportunity Creating social mobility supporting that in ways that are affordable Go go at it, but I think to the extent that private higher ed can do the same They should do the you know, I just don't think I think that binary falls away robin. I made an argument I was talking we had a meeting recently But some of the folks at the department of ed and they were talking about free community college and free college models Etc. I said, hey, I think that's great But will you extend that to privates if they meet the same tuition as the public's in the states where they reside? And they're like, oh like But that's too hard a political sell and I would say look at if I can if I can match the Tuition at the public institution down the street, but I can give students as good or better an experience. Why wouldn't you want to make that possible? um It's just among the many binaries that have fallen away My worry is that public institutions actually struggle more with the kinds of innovations I think we need for a variety of reasons That's a huge I'm still just reeling from the idea of thinking about private public as a as a binary We should get passed But there are also more questions from from more people of it Bucknell. Leslie Harris has a specific cbe question Um, if you move to a competency based model for determining course placement and credit What are some ways you use to measure that competency? Yeah, so I think when you when you as soon as you start talking about assessment in the world And there's a whole chapter in the book on assessment, which I call the hardest work Because by and large higher ed doesn't do assessment very well except where our lives matter So we're really pretty good at assessing competencies for nurses doctors and pilots Right because I have a I have a very high stake in the fact that brine is as good at landing the airplane as he is that You know Getting us in the air. So so we do a good job at that If you think about all of those fields, we don't trust courses in grades In other words, we it's great that you had a 4.0 at emory riddle We're still going to make you take fa exams and time in the simulator We're going to put you in the right hand seat under the watchful eye of the captain in the left hand seat Before we let captain the plane You're going to sometimes he's going to let you or she's going to let you take the controls and land or take off All those with a watchful eye of someone who's better at it than you To see if you're really good at what you do Similarly, we do this with nurses great that you had a 4.0 in your nursing program You're still going to take the nursing boards. You're still going to get through the licensure process You're going to put a lot of hours in on clinicals And then we're going to have you under the watchful eye of our nurse supervisor for a pretty long time before we let you free Last example masters of social work You do all of that classwork two years typically with internships Three years in most states before we'll let you lose right three years of clinicals before we trust you Because people's lives matter in those moments But I remember when I did my sabbatical stint at the department of ed we called in a ir highly respected assessment group Right to say I said, you know, look at there's so many staff members of the department who don't really understand assessment Could you come in and do kind of a primer for them? And it was really funny they came and they basically said Honestly, if we're going to be really truthful the state of higher ed of assessment and higher ed is somewhere between bad and dismal Say more about that. I was like well most assessment of higher ed Is sort of produced by faculty who aren't trained in assessment techniques So wouldn't pass muster in terms of validity reliability of general right all those things that the science of assessment tells us Um, there's still so much. It's just pure test taking Right. We are getting the right answer as opposed to demonstrating actual learning matters So to go to the question when we think about this If you think about a competency based model is one that says what can you do with what you know? Right, just hold that phrase for a moment The key there is what can you do that immediately puts you in the realm of performative assessments Demonstrating the action. So what counts for that? authentic assessments project-based learning Simulations those are all examples of performance based assessments Which are harder to design typically more expensive to deliver You know, it's it's a complicated. It's easier to do a test But it isn't actually a very good measure of learning, you know, it's interesting brian Knows that I I think you know brian i'm on the board of chegg and chegg has been implicated in all kinds of errors by cheating In fact someone twitter yesterday said say more about why you're on chegg and it's interesting looking at some of the data I think I can say this i'm not sure this was internal company But something like, you know 40 percent of the exam questions that they see From from actual exams being used in the field Are just from test banks its faculty just generating old test bank questions that have been around for years And those test bank questions just encourage students to cheat because getting the right answer is what gets you through As opposed to demonstrating actual learning and the challenge of course is if you teach engineering and you have 300 students How do you do that? How do you do assessment? So the test becomes easy So cbe really forces us to really rethink the delivery of learning and you know, it's encourages the flip classroom So go ahead do all your studying in like now. I'm going to put you in the classroom where you're working on projects I'm going to watch I'm just going to walk around and see how you're doing Um, yeah, so authentic assessment project based all of those things Which is terrific. Um, thank you for the great really long assessment brian. That's what we do That's what a simulator is. That's what the right hand seat is. That's what clinical hours are By the way, it's a shout out to don shawless who Keeps asking us to rethink higher education assessment We have This is great We have more questions and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask We have one from a betsy kells coming to us from penn state and betsy's been very nice I have asked her questions about her name and she has a better question here Where do instructors fit into cbe? Cbe seems like it would encourage ongoing adjunctification of higher education instructors Yeah, so it doesn't actually cb makes no Assumptions about how learning gets delivered This is again, I think one of those not a common It's I think people commonly think that cbe And because it's sort of performance based assessments necessarily dictates a role for the faculty And if you take a look at the examples wgu thinks about the faculty in a certain way That the school of theology pretty traditional roles It's across the map. I actually think it opens up more possibilities because it invites more delivery models And what I would say to any faculty that thinks well, wait a minute If this is part of the future if this really is a better way to go Then what are the ways that I might want to develop delivery models? So it would be more effective than that, right? So it doesn't that's it's one of the frustrations I often have is that I think people think it dictates a pedagogy It doesn't it can actually work with any pedagogy You could have the most traditional program. You could have right. You could say look at this is my Psychology major. These are the courses. These are the prerequisites. These are the sequences. It looks like it always has looked before The only thing that's different is the underlying architecture. I can say What competencies and skills people will have when they finish this program what they can actually do with what they know And we have been doing this now for three years at SNHU. We are mapping competencies to all of our courses Just as an underlying architectural mapping So we can say these are the competencies. So we use what we call a one c to one c equivalency So the way we've done this is to say One comp every course has three competencies each one is worth one credit And you would say well, wait a minute. Isn't that undercutting your argument? Like if you say the credit hour isn't useful Why would you map your competencies to credit hours? Because the credit hour does two things It's a time-based measurement, but it's a measurement of weight In other words, it says that a three credit course is a certain amount of content Is it well defined not at all can most of us recognize a three credit course when we see one? Absolutely. If I show you a syllabus Brian, you would say That looks a little light for a three credit course. That looks more like a one credit course, right? So we it's an ill-defined measure But if we're going to adopt if we're going to move towards competencies in the interim We need an exchange rate and the credit hour is an exchange rate It says I can understand things in a certain way as a measure of weight not time That's a fantastic answer And and we have just right away. We've a quick Response to that from Pete. Well, by the way, my apologies for putting Betsy in the wrong spot of Pennsylvania She's the University of Pennsylvania not Penn State Pete Wallace has a question that follows right up on that And Pete asks Thank you for your thinking and good to have you in Seattle Renton To what extent do we focus on time because we don't properly resource faculty develop assessment It is easier. In fact in writing the book Pete I'd sort of led me to the second book and it's a you're raising I want to sort of open the aperture and then see if I can come back to this a little bit The question I've come to sort of wrestle with is how scaled systems like post-secondary education in America But like healthcare like criminal justice like k-12 How scaled systems at some point? Put the needs of the system before the people the system is supposed to serve So just think about that for a moment. In fact, I even take a step further I think The system scale systems in America often come to dehumanize the people they're ostensibly made to serve I think a lot of k-12 is dehumanizing. I think a lot of post-secondary ed is dehumanizing Like if I were to ask this question and this is kind of again not not plugging a second book Brian But the the thing I'm working on and why I'm talking to people in other systems is If I posed it this way to you when you look at the Psychological pressure what we do to high school kids around the admissions process If you take a look at the Ways we put burdens barriers up to low-income kids like the FAFSA If you take a look at the way we schedule time You know offices that are open from eight to four. Have you ever met a 17 year old like what's happening at four? What about adult learners who don't get out of work till five? What happens when I need to sort of reach somebody if you think about the exploitation of athletes If you think about the fact that the highest paid person in america as a football coach at the universe of alabama If you think about the exploitation of graduate students if you think about 1.7 trillion dollars of debt Could you sort of take that whole lineup and conclude this is a system that loves that people it serves? I don't know that I would conclude that And and and I think so then but it's it's full like everyone on this call We are all complicit in a system and yet. I know very few people Who don't care deeply about students like there's a calling to do this work people come to higher education because we care deeply About the work we do and yet something happens And that we now become complicit in a system that does this and that's really what I'm trying to Understand in that book and to go to the question That's how I'm going to circle back now The conclusion I have from talking to people who work and who have reformed health care systems or reforming substance abuse and And and opioid treatment who are looking at mental health systems criminal justice systems Is that in the end there's a there's a there's a appointment systems come to serve themselves efficiency becomes more important and and um so profits can become more important in some systems And and sort of status markers become more a whole bunch of things that are about efficiency But they don't actually work well for the people that that we serve and I think this if I go back to Marian's example Our time-based system that needs people to be at a time in the place Doesn't work for very well for someone who doesn't have a lot of time or control over it Um, so the system is serving itself because it's efficient, right? I can schedule classes I know where people have to be like everything makes sense and it's really I see examples of this in my own shop all the time. I had an email this morning Um without going to the gory details that said basically what I said back to him It's like so let me be clear about this We can't serve this group of students in question I'm going to keep this amorphous enough because the registrar says this process is too manual I was like That's a system need Trumping a student need Straight up system Right, but we do this all the time And what sarah would say is that in most of these systems Part of what the system wants to do is push human time out of the mix And we do under fund people we don't like here's the thing that we're seeing in all of these places where That are having genuine success in reforming the system is that you can't shortcut time So much of this work is relational And and you have to make time and the problem is the system will want to pull you will pull people out So a good example this is our secrets us are our academic advisors and they're really more like life coaches than academic advisors And we just did an internal study and here's what we saw The as we've gotten bigger and bigger and bigger They're spending more of their time In putting data And that means less time on the phone with the students that they're working with And what those students need is more time They just need more human time they need to be if we're going to be We're truly going to see them fully as people which is what we need to do particularly the students We want to serve who carry so much trauma frankly poverty Right all kinds of things We need to spend more time with them and yet our own system with all our good intention in the world Is pulling our people away Um, and in the name of efficiency, we we don't properly staff k12 We don't properly staff our mental health system. We don't staff it at all anymore We use prisons instead and then those prisons are understaffed et cetera, et cetera, et cetera All right, I'm I don't I'll tell you Brian depending on what institution you're in If you're part of a committee that's also saying hey the key to promotion is more scholarship and research and other stuff That isn't about students. You're part of the problem as well I don't know any other university president on earth who talks like you call I apologize This isn't good No, this is fantastic And uh, I'm astonished at your vision And and then whether the questioner p. Wells thinks this is perfect And he also reminds us of the borehace quote. Maybe a librarian is just a library's way of making another library I love that quote It is um, but speaking of humanists, uh, we have a great quote from the best scholarly publishing editor In the world, we have greg britain, of course. Who else could that be? And he asked a question about cbe If the credit hour isn't serving us anymore Couldn't we also consider things like a three-year college degree and could accreditors ever be persuaded? Yeah, um, so it's interesting greg If you're asking about the three-year college degree as like let's find another it's just another measure of time It just happens to be three or not four years But if you're thinking about look at if we are decoupled from time Then we ought not to have any degrees to find by the time they take We ought to have degrees measured by the number of competencies or one c1c relations that you have So we've had students the first student who did our college for america cb program Went from zero credits to an associate's degree in 120 days Well, they're the god brine we and it's uh, you can write it you can look it up in the Chronicle there was an article about him his name is zach schermann and we were watching our first students go through the program We were under so much scrutiny and our editor and skeptics, right? They wanted to find fault with this program and we thought this is a friggin disaster If this kid graduates in 120 days with an associate's degree We know something must be wrong. So we Through his work, right? Because he's on the system we could see how much time he was spending what he was working on We looked at his assessments. Is he cheating? Like what's going on here? So zach worked the midnight graveyard shift at a connex of food plant that makes slim gyms three shifts a day Who knew there was such consumption of slim gyms? And he was somewhere in ohio. He was like he was He was super smart He had always struggled with traditional classrooms. He chafed about being in classrooms He was a voracious reader like we could take no credit for any of these things Um, and he was like we could see him when he was on the platform He would come home at the end of his shift at 8 a.m As he later described to us breakfast shower and then he would work for eight hours And then he would sleep like six hours and go back to work And he did it seven days a week because his boss had tapped him on the shoulder and said zach You're really good and you're really smart and I could promote you but you need at least an associates degree So now we had this incentive A reward at the end and he was going to get there as fast as he could and when we looked he was great Zach has gone on to a bachelor's degree. He's left con agra. He's working at some other white-collar job now And he had everything he needed but money And a model that would work for him He was really poor The other thing by the way I would say zach. He's very funny about it was He had no living thing in his house. He didn't have a girlfriend a spouse kids and pat are even a house plan So there were no other poles on He's an exception and people loved the story of speed so to go to your question You could have a three-year degree program You could have a 10-year degree program if someone needs more time to master what they need to master You could have a one-year degree program, but it's not about the time It's about do they actually master the learning so when I tell the zach sherman story I also like to tell the story of lisa So lisa was a student in that same cohort and it took her a year and a half to pass the writing competency She was a you know, honestly, she was a terrible writer. I hate to say it. I was a former writing teacher Right and that was not her fault by the way If you knew lisa's background and the impoverished schools she came out of and the lack of writing when we asked her about this I don't know that she had written 10 pages in all of her high school career, which had been years before anyway Right so lisa plugged away and plugged away and plugged away and go through the rubric and We'd work with her and finally after about 18 months She got mastery on all levels and this was just basic workplace writing. We weren't making Hemingway here We weren't making you know Colson Whitehead we were just trying to make lisa a good competent workplace writer and she got there and the two things she said is um If I had slid by with a c Which would have happened in our traditional college composition course if she could just she never would have been a good writer And the second part was her supervisor Would never have said what he said to her after this which is lisa. I didn't know you could write In the answer was she couldn't Um, so so in her case it takes longer, but the learning is genuine And and the problem part of the problem I think we face is that as an industry The college degree was a signal to the labor market 30 40 years ago That you do stuff That was a trusted signal that you could communicate well that you could comport yourself well that you had quantitative skills There's some critical thinking skills The labor market doesn't believe that any longer Which is putting us in a terrible spot um Yeah, because we're passing students on the way that we long complain that k-12 passes students on 50 of today's first year students can't do college level math or writing Yeah, but if you know even if you hate academically adrift And a lot of people want to attack it. I think there's some there's some painful truths in that book Even if they're only half right And we uh, we hosted one of the authors. Um, yeah those current work We we have we have more questions and I want to get I want to get to them before I get to opine And uh, here's one that comes from uh, charles finley, which is a practical strategic question Which is how do you balance the instructor faculty mentor fixed time? against learner variable time Yeah, I mean it's really hard So the way wgu would do it is that they disaggregate faculty roles. So um And and we're having this conversation with our faculty now, which is how do you get to fair workload assessments? Like what does a workload look like? It's easy when it's just okay. It's you know, it's Three three credit hour courses in the funnel and three three credit hours in the spring and that's a system convenience It's just a box that doesn't work very well for learning or for students So how might you think about that differently? So among the ways one could think about that would be simply how many students are you working with at any given time? It's a reasonable ratio And some will go fast and we go so that's not what's important It's are they working and are they on pace and can we see how much work they're doing? You know, are you helping them move along uh in that work? That would be one way of doing it. Um So I I think you know there we can we can play with the models again Compensate based doesn't assume a pedagogical approach So you could have them in in sort of regular courses and then it looks like something closer And the key there is that you're freeing them of time I mean we all work. So we all have time constraint. Our work is is time constrained, but student learning should not be time constrained So our work should be but student has to be right if we're going to be fair Like there's no way of getting around Time because that's what we're buying any of us are being paid for is a certain amount of our precious commodity Which is our time So that's a okay. First of all, Charles. Thank you for the elegant question He always has these great great probes that just slice right through our discussion and thank you for that equally elegant response And speaking of elegance, we have more people who are just coming in with questions There's one from bill uh hindrick and I want to make sure that we uh, we didn't lose this one because it's a This is more of a strategic question and uh bill asks Bigger institutions are acquiring and merging with for-profit online colleges to acquire the tech and customers customer service tools How will this impact access and equity are the gatekeepers buying more gates? Great question though um I don't know bill. It's like I I'm not sure I'm tracking the logic of the question. That's me. That's not you by the way so You know, these are business model. These are underlying business model questions And I think institutions that now know they have to be in this space They have to be they may decide they have to be in the space because that's what the market demands It may be that their traditional markets are blowing up so they need new revenue streams There are lots of reasons why institutions move into the online space A lot of them recognize that they can't on their own get there So they're acquiring for-profits who you know, it's not good to be a for-profit these days It's a hard place to be so they're bailing out. There's a lot of scrutiny of these models as you know um, there are consumer protection minded folks in the department of ed who Who are skeptical fairly or not? But I don't know that That the business model inherently makes it more or less inequitable in other words. I'm a little skeptical about what happened so the question I'm wrestling with I'd love your audience to tell me how to think about this But as I'm working on the second book What I keep coming back to is the question of late-stage capitalism And is it is it compatible with human serving systems? um Because late-stage capitalism a doesn't doesn't put At least in publicly traded companies doesn't put students first or patients first or prisoners first They put shareholder value first And for shareholder value or EBITDA to go up means you have to find efficiencies In the thing you do and that often means pulling out expensive human resources wherever you can Um, so I don't know I'm really wrestling with this question. Um And in reality is that not for-profits have their own version of profit that they pursue called surplus um But no one gets rich right like nobody gets to walk away with an equity check No, um, no shareholders have to be satisfied every three months um, so it's it's an interesting question I wrestle with but I don't think the The acquisition of for-profits in order to get capacity is inherently Doesn't inherently feed inequity, but I think it's suspicious. I think we need to look at it Well bill great question great question and paul. Thank you for the very rich answer friends people are are showing us lots of uh Text questions I want to make sure that people have a chance to ask us a video question So if you'd like to join us on stage simply press that teal colored button and you will be beamed right on stage So, um, please join us if you can and while people are turning their cameras on and stretching and combing their hair Let me get another one of these great questions up here This is from dinette long at uh, northern state university where she's an instructional designer and she asks More of a connection or a statement this line of thinking makes me consider the systematic rule that says students have to graduate in four years In order to count on university much less obsessed Uh, yeah, dinette. That's I'm glad that seems to be a theme here that we are questioning that But the yeah, so that's all of our financial aid system is built on time-based rules And it's one of the impediments to cbe so when the when The language of direct assessment was created in the last title four act the one we still live with years and years later Um, it said that in lieu of the credit hour Financially it could be dispersed on the basis of direct student learning imagine that in lieu of the credit hour You can actually get financial aid based on actual learning So there was even the kind of an admission in the act that the credit hour doesn't do that But what happened of course is nothing changed with federal financial aid rules So again in this book that I've mentioned earlier administrative burden You sort of see all of these rules that are time-based that make it so hard to do cb So in the fifth chapter of this book this new book I make an argument for an alternative financial aid model not based on time So measurement of success would not be how many people graduated in four years the actual measurement is six years as you probably know Three years for associates, but actually it would be financial aid paid out for performance So as students complete competencies That we get access to more and more financial aid because in the right now what we do is we front load financial aid We pay all of the money up front And then students either succeed or they don't succeed and we have something called return to title four So we have to do this money back to the feds After a certain point and then students have to pay back and they're like what's going on I don't get this and what we end up doing is paying massive amounts of public dollars for failure And what I'm trying to argue is that there's a different model. No, look it We're not going to change the federal financial aid system overnight. I'm not naive about this So what I argue for is a demonstration project Right. Congress can do demonstration projects which say we're going to create a sandbox And we're going to try this stuff We're going to invite a set of schools to do this and then we'll see what the results are and see if it can change things And the most successful version everyone here knows was the demonstration project that lifted the 50 percent rule So in the past as you know 50 percent of your degree experience had to be on the ground no more than 50 percent could be online And then a demonstration project was created that said no, we're going to let a set of schools apply And see they can go beyond 50 percent they can lift the cap And what happened is that a number of schools said, okay, we're going to do 100 online We're going to see how that works and that's what really spurred the creation of online learning as we know it today this kind of you know Behemoth that online learning has become and the reality is in the early years The not-for-profits looked down their nose at it And they speeded the market to them for the for profits and they rushed in and nature was a vacuum There was a real demand and adults voted with their feet And at their height the for profits accounted for 12 of all american college students And now of course what we have seen is that the for profits have gone in steep decline And the not-for-profits have taken back that market, but it took a long time And a lot of bad things happen in the meantime You say that and in one hour I have to teach a class with this fantastic book by tressy codham Lower ed so friends if you don't know this book you absolutely have to read it if if you're if you're interested in this paul, we're almost out of time and we had a technical question Matt you Back I want to make sure he got this question in as well if it takes 10 years 10 years to complete the requirements Should the early competencies be rechecked before graduating Yeah, I wrestle with that, you know, so we we just had this we had the opposite version right Which we had a student and this again, this is the system not being thoughtful about student need We had a student who wrote to me basically say she was about to withdraw Because out of her frustration that we wouldn't accept a math course that she had taken beyond our limit I think it was 10 years of when we would accept transfer credits And I called up the course like this math hasn't changed like why would we not accept those transfer credits It was a very good student every other respect We have to think about that question because one of the arguments for competency-based education Within competency-based education is your competencies time up In other words, not only should we recheck them to know that you still have them And by the way, a lot of us wouldn't withstand that scrutiny If we were asked to do a lot of the things we learned as undergraduates today Like I shudder to think about what my trig would look like for my knowledge of chemistry Um, but but the other thing is we know that a lot of competencies and skills now are timing out But enduring skills tend not to we might want to make that distinction So enduring skills that some people call soft skills would be skills of communication and writing and critical thinking Which tend to get better with accretion Well hard skills called hard skills like engineering skills actually degrade faster and faster and faster I was talking to one of my peers. I won't name the school But she heads up really preeminent engineering program And she was saying that her struggle is to get her faculty to understand that they really have to now shift to thinking about frameworks for learning because the actual engineering skills and technologies they're teaching are going out of date faster than ever So they need to they need to get engineers with the skills to land them a job But more importantly they need engineers who are going to retool every three years because that's about the pace of change right now I saw a project So if I told you this it was at a Connecticut school where they had they brought in speakers To update faculty and staff on the cutting edge fields that were changing that quickly And they decided to publish these results as dvds Why that sounds kind of Retro and they said the idea was that it would it would pin that finding in time So, you know it was printed in 2011 or so you would know that automatically And it would have that and it would recede into the past like a book would But you know that if you wanted to get updated you'd have to get you have to get something more speaking of time We run out again time is fixed an hour Time is fixed and also fixed is the ability of the future transform community to ask fantastic questions And for you paul to have fantastic answers Thank you so much for for sharing so much of your thought Um Are you still blogging or sorry tweeting at shnu pres? I am I am and there's a connection to the blog post and there's a website for the book. So Yeah, okay. Yeah, happy to continue the conversation with anybody. Thank you so much for having me brian It's just a pleasure to be with you as always and with this group. It's a terrific terrific group you've assembled Oh, it's it's it's my absolute my pleasure on both sides and everyone grab this book while you still can and And paul enjoy the rest of your day. I hope the sun stays out in seattle It is out for now. So thank you very much. Take care everyone. Thank you again, brian. You well But don't go everybody. I need to show you what's happening next and I meant it You all are fantastic asking questions Looking ahead We have for future transform sessions on rethinking and learning The iron triangle of quality access and affordability and what eco media literacy might be If you'd like to keep talking about these questions about the fixed and variable time And you'd like to think about cbe and all these issues just keep tweeting at us. Use the hashtag You can tweet at me brian alexander or at shindig events or hit my blog up brian alexander.org If you'd like to look into the past like if you'd like to look into our sessions on cbe or paul's first appearance on this program Just head to tiny url.com slash ftf archive and of course remember to subscribe And in the meantime, uh, we're in autumn right here in the northern hemisphere Things are getting a little cooler and also a little crazier I hope all of you take care that you're teaching and learning is at the highest possible efficacy and that your lives are as Balances can be and above all, I hope all of you take care and are safe and sound We'll see you next time online Bye. Bye