 Just as Sailor Academy works with its partners to build bridges to help learners overcome barriers of cost, distance and time, to reach the college credit, professional development, and continuing education they seek, we are proud to showcase how three organizations built bridges over the obstacles facing their communities. I would like to present our showcase featuring in this order, Selvon Waldron, Director of Student Services at Carlos Rosario Public International Charter School, Tracy Robinson, Director of Innovative Academic Initiatives at the University of Memphis, and Don Busick Drinkard, Mowen's Consortium Grants Director at the Missouri Community College Association. Please join me in welcoming them. First up is Selvon Waldron, Director of Student Services at Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School. Testing, testing. Can you hear me? Good afternoon. How's everyone doing? I made the bad decision to stay up late last night to watch the Caps win, and I also don't drink coffee, so I'm literally falling asleep right now. So as Jackie said, we're here to talk about building bridges. I like that. What's that? Oh no! It's the first error today. We're here to build bridges. Thank you. And try to address the skills gap. So, here's the slides up. Okay, great. Sure of hands. I'm going to do a quick poll, and this poll doesn't require using the app on your phone. Just a quick poll. How many of you in the room know someone who is underemployed based on the credentials that they have? Okay. And keep your hand raised if that person is you. Sure of hands if you know an immigrant who is underemployed based on their credentials. And also keep your hand raised if that person is you. That's me, okay. So, I think when I read the Cellar Academy presentations or the booklet, we are here to disrupt, and I think that is really what I want to share today. To address these bridges, to solve this gap, we really have to disrupt the existing paradigms. Turn to your neighbor and say disrupt paradigms. We're going to go to church today. We're going to disrupt the paradigms. And to solve the gap to create bridges, we really need to create and solve and close this gap in a way that addresses the inequities as well. The gap closure must be inclusive and must be equitable to include immigrants and people of color as well. Education is a great equalizer. The pathway to a sustainable class is paved with intrinsic interests and drive, early smart planning, mentorship continually in career and life skills, access to low-cost quality education with multiple entry points, and access to a family-sustaining job at the end of this road. This is how I think we should all disrupt the paradigm. And education is really what you decided to be. It could be formal, it could be informal, but this is what I see as the way to disrupt. I'm going to focus primarily today on how to close the gap, how to build the bridges, particularly for immigrants in the workforce. And I'll address particularly the situation in Washington, D.C. So D.C., particularly for the skills gap, has a very large immigrant population. 14% of folks living in Washington, D.C. were born in a different country, born outside of the U.S. Excuse me, 14% or 40? 14%. And of the jobs that the immigrant population possesses, 55% of those jobs are in what is currently termed low-income jobs, construction food services. But even with those low-income jobs, quote-unquote, the immigrant population contributes quite a lot to the D.C. economy. Federal taxes are over $700 million in federal taxes. Accounting for the local D.C. taxes is about $500 million in local taxes. So that's quite a large contribution in federal taxes. And again, there's this gap of skills, unless addressed even more. The gap keeps growing, however. The underemployment for immigrants with college degrees and credentials is in the tens of billions of dollars. Primarily, and it was addressed earlier this morning, the blind spot exists for many immigrants who are arriving in the U.S. And they are fleeing or leaving countries that may be war-torn. Could you imagine you were trying to leave the U.S. with the first thing you decided to take when you had to leave urgently or quickly was to grab your degree? And that's what happens in many cases. The actual original degrees, the actual original transcripts are not present, not existent. And it creates a challenge to credentialize those degrees through agencies like WES and others. So it's leaving a pretty large gap in the earning. Two million highly skilled immigrants in the United States are working in low-skilled jobs or are unemployed. This phenomenon is known as brain waste. And I prefer to name skills on the utilization. And how do you upskill these employees or these residents of D.C. and the U.S. to really be working in jobs that they have the skills previously for? English and learning a language. Folks who do not speak English in the U.S. but have skills from previous countries are the most underemployed and unemployed group. So we might need to have better translation services. And lastly, foreign-educated immigrant men in low-skilled jobs earned $56,000 less than those in high-emitted-skilled jobs. As a partner of Steele Academy, as Connor Cesario has been for the last year, we have been building what is called a student success model through our transition system to try to address and close these gaps, build bridges for our immigrant citizens of Washington, D.C. And I'll go through quickly what we are doing currently at Connor Cesario International Public Charter School to try to close these gaps. It really first starts with the intrinsic drive to want to close the gap, to want to get a family-sustaining job. And our process begins with smart planning. When a student comes into our school, we create a smart plan, a plan that's specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. That addresses sort of a 10-year career plan for that particular student. And again, just so you know, we serve the Washington, D.C. adult immigrant population serving about 3,000 students here in D.C. That smart plan addresses any sort of credentialing or credential validation that they would need to have done as well. We match that smart planning process. If a student said they want to become a doctor working in the U.S., we pair them with professional mentors as well. We have a very formalized mentorship program called the Impact Mentoring Program. And we are in the pilot stages of that right now. And other students outside of that program, we pair them informally with mentors to get that career and skills development. One of the main ways that we access jobs is through our networks. And through these mentors, our students are able to access broader local networks that they may not have had of being immigrants in New to the U.S., New to Washington, D.C. Thirdly, it's accessing and advising and accessing low-cost and quality education that are available through workforce programs here in D.C. And of course, online options as well, like Seal or Academy. And we do provide scholarships as well to our students to continue studying, continuing to enhance their credentials. Last year, we provided about $90,000 in scholarships to our students. And this year, we're providing over $120,000 in scholarship dollars to our students to continue learning in the U.S. And lastly, there must be a job at the end of this tunnel. There must be a family-sustaining job at the end of this tunnel. As I close and as we continue to disrupt these paradigms, one thing that we want to ensure our students understand or ensure that you as the practitioners also understand is we must also put a moratorium on the word soft skills. You know, these are skills that are truly, truly, truly important. They are competency skills that may separate a person who doesn't have the actual diploma to getting a job. And lastly, we may need to invest in better translation services. Services that do not require a student to have the original diplomas sent from universities and foreign countries who may be actually closed or inoperational. One thing I'll leave you with, and to think this through as to what we're talking about when we're closing the skills gap or building bridges, is if someone says they're a mechanic and they can present you with their diploma, why not give them a car, see if they can fix it? If they can fix the car, they're a mechanic. There are a lot of industries that are industry regulated fields that folks may have many years of skills in other countries that they can utilize those skills here. So I want us to shift paradigm around those thinking and let us close this gap. Thank you so much. Hi, my name is Tracy Robinson and I bring you greetings from Memphis, Tennessee. I am fortunate to oversee our credit for prior learning initiatives at the University of Memphis and also our finish line, which is a degree completion program that I'm here to talk to you about today. So for those of you who were here yesterday, Dr. Mason talked about an on-ramp and an off-ramp for students who are earning their degree. So in the spirit of a continued poll, how many of you would raise your hand to say that the first degree that you earned, you had one on-ramp and one off-ramp that ended in exactly four years? And how many of you had a detour or two or perhaps a little caution light in that journey? So the program that I'm here to talk to you about today is our finish line program that we started at the University of Memphis in the fall of 2013, so a little over four years. And this is for students who had several off-ramps or several caution lights or detours along their way to earning their first bachelor's degree. And it is a bridge, thank you Jackie, that we have developed over some choppy waters for these students to help them come back. So our program re-recruits students to the University of Memphis and from other institutions and help build that bridge to the finish line, which is graduation. Our criteria that we have is we're working specifically with students who have 90 or more credit hours. Our bachelor's degree is 120 credit hours, so these are students that are within one year theoretically of graduation. They also have had at least one stop-out period. Our average stop-out period is about four years for our students, but some of them have only been away for a semester or two or three. And they have an overall grade point average of a 2.0, which is what we require for graduation purposes. If any of you happen to have seen the Chronicles adult student report that Goldie Bloomsen did so very well, we talked a little bit about our program. We had a couple of failures before we got to this iteration of the program, and she talks about that in the report. We tried this a couple of times before and really didn't get our messaging right until 2013 when we started this particular program. And one of those messages was that we had a scholarship for students who qualify because in our earlier attempts to reach students, many of them have left for finance reasons. They were out of aid, they no longer had loans or grants that they could access. Many things had changed in their world, and so inviting them back to tell them the same message that they already knew, you didn't graduate, and not telling them about any solutions that we had to help them was a major mistake on our part. And so in 2013, we got a little bit of funding from the institution to offer a scholarship. This was a list of students that I had already kind of pre-assessed and knew they were very close to graduating, knew we had some low-cost alternatives that could help them, and so the email actually went out and the subject line was, graduate on our dime. It was signed by our provost and we really meant that. I had a couple of students who told me they didn't respond to that first email because they thought it was too good to be true. But we were persistent and tracked them down anyway. About a third of our students today qualify for our scholarship and the other two thirds are paying on their own. To give you some results of our program, 493 graduates so far. The picture that you see here is Anisha, one of our first graduates who took four sailor courses to finish her degree. I won't look up there because if I do, I might have some tears formed because what is so compelling to me about Anisha's story is that she had left the university to work full-time to save some money to come back to school, a story we often hear. This is her mother with her at graduation and it was obviously a great day for Anisha and her mother at graduation. But Anisha was also a single mom of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter when she finished her degree. And what that means to me as a first-generation student is it changes her daughter's life as well. She is now, the chill bumps are there, sorry, four years later it still gets to me. That is a different trajectory for her daughter's life as well. She's had two promotions since then, great story, but we have 492 others that are just as compelling. What you see in that funding formula equivalent number is Tennessee is a performance funding state. In our formula we have a couple of premiums. One of those is graduating adult students and one of those is graduating Pell students. Because our average age is 36, the state defines an adult as 25 or older in the month of graduation. We get a premium for 93% of our adult students. We also have a significant population of Pell students that we've graduated. So those 493 turn into 902 in our funding formula. So for us it means like we're almost graduating two people every time we graduate one. You see some of our other statistics there, only 11 hours on average needed. We've had 10% of our students who didn't need any other courses to graduate. No other courses to graduate. Because of catalog changes, because they could graduate in another major that they had no idea about, that they had extra courses that we were able to go back to departments to say, does this course over here look like and fulfill the requirement that they didn't have for graduation? So we do course substitutions. We also have an academic forgiveness policy where students have been out for four or more years. They can come back and have applied for their previous failure grades to be removed. That has actually helped some of our students who ended up with a 1.98 in their last semester. Yes. And so some of those students have been able to graduate just by us processing an academic fresh start for them. About 30% of our students have only needed one course. So between those two, we're looking at 40% needing zero or only one course. And some of these students have been out for 15 and 20 years. Had a gentleman who brought his son on campus for his son's freshman orientation and ran into his RA from the dorm that he had been with who happened to be our dean of students on campus at that time. And he said, you know, I'm really embarrassed I never finished that degree. Very successful career. Life was going great. And the dean of students said, I've got a program for you and walked him over to my office and he finished his degree that December. So about 350 students in progress right now have three academic advisors working full-time. We call them completion concierge. When we bring those students back, we stay with them to the point of graduation. You know, those waters under the bridge are going to get rocky again. There are going to be some sharks coming after them. There's going to be some money issues. So we want to be their person that they always come back to. I'm so proud of these statistics of what we're able to do, helping to close our achievement gap for some of our very important populations on our campus first generation underrepresented minority students and low income students. And so thankful for our partnerships that we have with many organizations but Sailor has been with us from the very beginning. But we knew that we have an interdisciplinary studies program that many of our students choose to use for graduation purposes and they need some thematic studies. We picked out eight Sailor courses, had those reviewed by our faculty and you can see the number of credit hours completed. As a side note, we do have credit for prior learning for many of our other students at the institution. Portfolio clap, credit by exams. Love to talk to you about those offline if you'd like. But we had 293 students receive some form of credit for prior learning including our finish line students last year earning 4,400 credit hours at a savings of almost a million dollars for our students. So thank you for allowing me to share our work and thank you to Sailor for all that you do. It was a game changer for us and our students. So thank you. Hi, good morning or good afternoon now. My name is Dawn Busek-Drinkard and I'm with the Missouri Community College Association. And so I'm going to round up our panel and close with the value of partnerships. The credentialing economy is not just something that higher ed owns, it's something that we all own. And when we started with the TACC program, how many in here are familiar with what TACC is? Okay, I was one of the round ones. We call ourselves the Bleeders. We created and built this thing called TACC in the Show Me State in Missouri. We were the first single statewide consortium. Our governor challenged our community colleges and asked, I want you to start behaving like a system. I don't want you to be a system, but what would your world be like and then address these tough education reform initiatives at the community college level? Like credentialing, stackable credentials, credit for prior learning policies, professional development and competency-based education. What is credit for prior learning, by the way? Many colleges on my 13 campuses, colleges around the state, they all had their own definition. So when looking at the TACC opportunity and knowing my... First, I probably should share with you what I am. I used to be a government wonk in Illinois. So if you can work in Illinois for any of those crooked governors, you can work anywhere in this country. But now I'm in the Show Me State and, yes, I just had a governor last week resign because he was a little... But we have a good guy now, I think, in place, so we're off and running again. So I was a government wonk doing legislative initiatives, SBDC stuff, a JTPA. I'm showing my age here, and then it went into WIOA. And then came into the Show Me State and continued my progress in workforce development. My worst partner was higher education, getting them to be quick and nimble for my 52 job centers around the state as well as all the employers that we have in that state. So when I left the public workforce system, I had a mission to go into higher ed and try to understand their world and see if I can make a difference there. And I think I have a little bit because I've not only managed... I managed our Workforce Excellence Center for Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Missouri for a few years. Prior to my president saying, I need to send you back to Jeff City because there's this thing tact coming and you're the only one that the president's thing can do it. And so I was around one, around two, and around four grantee. $55 million in six years, we trained 11,500 adult learners. We issued 38,000 credentials. Most of our programs were those non-credit, innovative, accelerated, under 12-week-types programs as study. We did a lot of nursing in the Health of the First Round grant. So in order for us to be successful, I want to take everybody back to yesterday morning to what Mr. Michael Saylor said. And that is to be a leader, you have to lead and have other people help you become successful. You have to take other leaders. So with that, I knew the tact was an opportunity to change the education paradigm in the community college level and a little bit in our four-year land grant universities. With that, I knew I had to get our public workforce system on board. And at that time, they hated us. And why did they hate us? Because that administration just sequestrated their budgets. But then Congress turned around and gave these community colleges $2 billion over four years. So I had something that they needed. And why not come to the table with a gift to mend those bridges and bring the public workforce in? Also, I knew we couldn't do it alone. And the public workforce does have definitions of credentials. And they also have access to wage data. And I'm a data geek, and I need data to understand and to validate what I'm about to embrace in these pilot demonstration grants. Is it going to work or not? So we engage with our public workforce system. We engage with our four-year institutions. Our state agencies, the workforce agency, Jobs.mo. We engage with our labor department, which is the wage data that I needed. And then we had a lot of followers like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that wanted to come study us and take a look at, what are you doing over here? And then we started out with each of these grant initiatives, probably 30 to 60 employers that signed on to these projects. I will commit. I will give you time and resources and then some. And at the end of the day, I'm really proud today to state that we had over 800 employers engage. It just started rolling. And how did the public workforce system, the higher education system and employers all begin working together on issuing 38,000 credentials? They all own it. We all own it. This is a little bit what we look like. So 12 community colleges, they all have service district areas. We have one state technical college in Missouri. We have 14 local boards. We have one state workforce board. And in Missouri, our state workforce board is advisory. It's just not, it doesn't have any formal fiduciary guidance. And then we had over 600 employers. This slide's a little bit old. So this is a little bit about what we look like. And then how do we take what we're looking at, all these various initiatives and strategically align, and how does it impact all of us? So let's say if we had, we're serving the same target population. And let's say that if we think, we believe that what we're about to embark on on these new strategies and reforms are going to move our needle in higher education, increase retention and increase completion rates, and issue credentials, then who else does that impact? Doesn't that impact the public workforce system? Isn't that the same target population that they're serving? So wouldn't it make sense if we sat down and started looking at and peeling this onion apart? What if we did co-location? What if I had workforce people on my college campus? What if I had my college campus folks in my workforce center so we can reduce both of our cost in serving the same target population? And better yet, what if we co-enrolled them? You're enrolled in my college, but you're also enrolled in the public workforce system because their core performance measures are the same as ours. Missouri is a performance funding state and we just became that four years ago, thanks to a Senate bill. But having our faculty understand that their classes are now going to be held to performance measures, what do you mean? Well, exactly that. And that's where our partners with the workforce system helped me move that needle in higher education. And then there's our employers. Employers, we held industry forum sectors. We're involved in those sector strategies under the new WIOA. The industry's saying, I love that you give me an applicant. They're saying this to higher ed. I love that you give me an applicant that understands and knows how to learn, but I need an applicant with credentials. The IT industry is a huge one. Healthcare is another one. Advanced manufacturing with the NIMS stackable credentials is another. So our employers in Missouri do know what credentials are and they do talk to us about what they are. And they're in the same meetings that our workforce boards are in and sharing that same message. So it makes sense to all of us in Missouri to own this very, very important issue and to see if we can't all move that needle together. So here's the ways that we do that. We don't do formal contracts. We decided to use memorandums of understanding. So on your WUVA, HOVA, HAVA, I've got three attachments and handouts for you. And so I've given you a sample of an MOU. Many of my colleges and my grant personnel and my web directors had broken relationships. Whatever. Local politics. And this is down at the local regional level. So one way that we could spark that discussion was is I drafted a scripted MOU, Memorandum of Understanding. That's just going to be good for four years. It's going to support this project, but it's also going to talk about. I give that this is my love. I love sharing the love. This is my love to you, my gift to you. I want you to take it home and think about a partner that you need to mend a bridge with and then start breaking down how you do that. Who's going to perform what? How are we both going to reach the same common goal? How often are we going to do it? Are we going to share data? Do I need another agreement on data sharing and in higher ed? You might because of FERPA. Or if you're in healthcare because of HIPAA. All those type of things. Then we did some professional development around that at the higher ed and with the workforce boards about what this MOU is and isn't. Then you put an expiration date on it. This is why, because of the high turnover, people come and go. If an MOU expires six months before it expires, you sit down and say, was this good? Did you learn anything? Did I not learn anything? Or were there best practices? I will tell you this. Clyde McQueen, who is the rock star of the workforce development regional directors in the country, one of my favorite, took an opportunity and led this charge on the workforce side with my other 14 web directors. He said, this is an opportunity for us to reimagine how we serve this same target population. When you look at it, how many of these workforce participants are actually enrolled in a training activity? When we started looking at those numbers in that data, it was pretty sad. Why is that? But all the research comes back and says you teach, if you give them a credential, then the less likelihood they will be repeat customers in your career centers looking for job opportunities. So Clyde took advantage of how can I reimagine how I operate as a public workforce administrator and then how the colleges operate. That MOU came out of their 72 pages long with flow charts. They did referral systems, and then they did reverse referral. They built a no wrong door approach. You can come up at a metropolitan community college campus and enroll in a training program and also enroll in the public workforce system at the same location. You have to go back and make an appointment and you might lose that opportunity. So we were very successful with that. We also took the MOUs and started engaging with employers. Employers started vetting. All of the curriculum that we developed or enhanced with these tech funds had to be vetted by employers. This is where we had an opportunity to talk about competency-based discussions on every position, profiling those occupations because there had to be jobs on the backside of these training programs. The other role that we were regulated to do and mandated is to not only train them but to place them in employment. The beauty part of all of this is we had a 72% completion rate of these students coming in. And this is the hardest to serve. These were unemployed, low-skilled, recipients, veterans, veteran spouses. You know, 11,500 of them. And we had the 72% completion rate on these programs of study. No other higher ed institutions were receiving that type of return on their investment. So I want to talk about another gift that we came to the table with through the civility rules and participation. And that is me coming from the public workforce going into higher ed and into a position that was that non-credit. Many of you, I'm going to say this and you're going to shake your heads, but you know there's the non-credit side of your campus and then there's that credit side and they just, they're siloed and it kept driving me nuts. I believe exactly what John Dyer said earlier and that is for every degree program there needs to be complementary credentials. And I made the statement, campus-wide in a faculty senate meeting that I said, every credit program degree, we need to have a non-credit that complements that stacks into yours. And oh my gosh, the room got silent and the tomato started flying. I also had a chief academic officer tell me, what do you mean Don, we're going to run two systems? And I'm like, I don't think we're going to have two delivery systems. I think we're going to have hundreds. There's no wrong-door approach. We should be running classes 24-7. And the one, one evidence, piece of evidence that I know that validates that and that is through that great recession a decade ago, we decided to run classes at 11 o'clock at night till 3 in the morning and they filled up in three days. And they were with the single parents with children because it was easier for them to be off work, to get someone to stay at home with their children while they were sleeping and take these classes. So if we did that in education, doesn't that, I mean, and we have the evidence to prove it, why are we not doing it? We need to get away from term-based and we need to get away from these archaic infrastructures that higher ed is so embedded to. Another project is the data sharing. So as a workforce director at a community college, I had no data system to track my non-credit students and all of these credentials I'm issuing. This is crazy. So I had the opportunity with TAC to get some extra data money, some $5 million. I also knew that a little bit about data because when I was the state workforce director prior to coming to the college system what a workforce data quality initiative project is and I wrote a grant and was able to get my state agency that money so we could start tracking the credit side and what that information means and we created this super agency MOU on the credit-bearing students and how many are completing and how many are going into occupations that they studied in. But another thing that the Great Recession taught me was at a statewide level we had an all-time high enrollment in non-credit programs and we did in our credit and that's because of all the adults that lost their jobs. They were coming in for the quick skills and getting credentials but we had no way to track the data or to see what that return on investment is. So in two weeks here we're going to launch and go live with the most score system and we have partnered and built on that others. It's a sister system that sits next to the MSAS where we're tracking all the credentials and all the non-credit students. There's a public side of this you will all be able to go out and play and look at it and see if I want if it's for a student or parents or for employers it'll connect training programs to occupations occupation vacancies entry wages to those occupations medium wages to those occupations and then as well as to our state labor market agency that tracks trends and projections of the hottest occupations in those communities. There's statewide reports and local reports. It also will let you know that say I'm looking for a certified nursing assistant program and there's not a program at my community college at a regional level not even just community it's for all higher ed so it could be for profits I'm just the guinea pig test pilot and the one with the gift to go build it but when we open it all the other even like Everest College University of Phoenix WGU our four years are on board with it we'll be populating uploading their data and this is why if you're a parent or student looking for that training program because you want this occupation that pays this kind of money and these skill sets and these credentials it'll bring up for you every college in the state that offers these programs and it will show their tuition so you can make some informed decisions as a potential student this is all this is a huge paradigm and shift change as well as backing the credentials on these non-credit because now we'll know what the return of the investment so me as a college president or an administrator or a chief academic officer or a faculty on the back side of this is the private side each college will see their performance report only they won't see each others just their own but you can make some decisions should I retire this program study or should I take another look I see we've got completers but no one's getting hired in these occupations and why is that so it's going to be a really valuable tool in how we plan to use data to help us become a stronger higher education system so what I might give to you is that take a look at this credential the credentialing economy is not one thing that just you your institution owns we all own it so you need to look at who are your stakeholders who else has the same common goals that you do who else will be impacted bring them to your party invite them to your party and share your gifts and through this distributed leadership you will be successful it's all about how can we work together smarter and just not harder so thank you we have time for one or two questions no questions ok well thank you all for your presentations will you join me in thanking our presenters one more time