 My name is Kevin Kerry. I'm the Director of the Education Policy Program here at New America As you can see I've written a book titled The end of college. I know we have a lot of people here who are employed By colleges or even run them and so on behalf of New America. I want to say sorry We're not trying to take your jobs away Probably not anyway depends No, I title like that I think deserves an explanation So I'd like to take a few minutes before our great lunchtime speaker today To talk about what we mean by the end of college There there is no doubt that Education is crucial to the future economic and civic prosperity of this country. We cannot be Neither a great nation nor a good nation if we don't provide everyone Regardless of who they are or where they come from with opportunity for a world-class education And we are not doing that right now. We heard from senator Cory Booker yesterday about the alarming statistics around education Educational opportunity in the United States of America The beginning of providing that opportunity begins before formal schooling as we've just heard In early education it extends through our K through 12 school system, but it certainly doesn't end there The time when even a good high school diploma could get you a good job in a middle-class income in this country has long since passed Everybody needs high quality education after high school to have a fighting chance in the modern economy and yet the Institutions that we have charged with that responsibility our colleges and universities are Not succeeding to the extent that they should be they are Great, but kind of peculiar Organizations in a lot of ways they were designed a long time ago Most of them operate off of a model that really came to being in the late 19th century they are getting Enormously expensive as anybody who either recently put kids through college or is thinking about putting kids through college Someday is very much aware of The international comparisons again that senator Booker talked about which we are we tend to be pretty familiar with and know that our School children don't compare well educationally to children in other countries. Well, it turns out and we don't know this as much If you look at our college graduates and compare them to college graduates in other countries Even countries that graduate just as many or more people from college as we do they look about the same which is not very good So we have one of if not the most expensive higher education systems in the world and yet one that is deeply riven by inequality One in which typical results are not very good And one in which that we are paying more and more for if you get through college at all And as as Michael crow talked about yesterday many students don't get through college at all Fortunately, we have the opportunity To move in a new direction and there are a lot of different reasons why we came to this place that we are in terms of college But if I was to sum it up I would say that our colleges and universities were designed in a time of educational scarcity If you go back to the very first Western colleges all the way back to the University of Bologna Which was founded over 800 years ago Their formula was pretty simple and it's really still the formula we're using now if you want to create a university What you need to do is provide a place where someone can have access to other students Where they can have access to teachers and smart people who can help them learn and where they can have access to Educational technology which for a long time has meant books and those kind of places are expensive You need to locate them at some kind of center of Transportation and commerce somewhere where all the roads and the rivers come together They need to be of a certain size so you can have access to Someone who can teach you English and someone who can teach you French and someone who can teach you history and someone who can teach You math And it was expensive even after the printing press revolution to provide to put together in one place all of the books that one might need and Because of that scarcity I think we've become very used to the idea that there can only be a fairly small number of places That can be colleges that can provide a great higher education That they by nature have to be exclusive That they have to be comprehensive and that they have to be expensive And those basically are the terms of quality and prestige that we live in that we live with now in American higher education And they have many many very negative consequences, and they are I think the root cause of the problems that we have in higher education today But the great thing is that we don't live in a time of educational scarcity anymore We don't live in a time where you have to follow a road or a river to a place And knock on the door and ask for permission to get inside the walls and Pay a lot of money for the privilege of being there for two or four years We can use technology to connect with people everywhere around the world There is a great story if you haven't read it in the Atlantic this week that was written by Amanda Ripley Who was a new America fellow who wrote the best-selling education book in the United States over the last couple of years the smartest kids in the world It is a story about a partnership between Arizona State University who you all heard from yesterday and Starbucks and A innovative program they put together to help tens of thousands of Starbucks employees finish college And in that article there's a story about a young woman who enrolled in this program and had her laptop computer stolen But she kept on going and she used her iPhone to finish the classes and just that one piece of technology Which many many people have she was able to interact with other students. She was able to watch lectures. She was able to provide Texts back and forth and she was able to talk on the phone with the real person She needed to talk to who helped guide her through these classes And just with that one piece of technology. She was able to pass these classes We don't live in a time of educational scarcity anymore You don't need to go someplace where there's a big building full of all the books because all of the books and the people And the smart people can come to you and it's not just about video or books again We heard yesterday the state of educational technology is advancing rapidly. We are now integrating artificial intelligence into creating amazing digital learning environments actually right at Carnegie Mellon University Who we just heard from recently? And yet most of our colleges and universities look an awful lot like they did a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago So we are at a time that is very familiar if you look at the evolution of human history Where what's possible and what is there's a distance between them and this is the moment where? When we have that distance between possibility and reality that is the moment when ideas matter most Because bridging that distance is really about getting people to understand their world in a different way It's about getting them to understand what they can do in a different kind of way And to get to where we need to be a few really important things are going to have to happen we're going to first of all need leadership from the existing colleges and universities that we have we are going to need people like Arizona State University Michael Crowe somebody who will stand up and say That we as an institution are going to educate students who look like the America of today who look like our students economically who look like our students academically who look like our students racially and ethnically And we're going to do that. We are going to embrace that mission not as an act of charity or as a concession of some kind not as a way to Burnish our reputation, but it's because it's who we are and it's because that's the mission that we have Embodied in our organization, and I think President Crowe has really made that a reality at Arizona State University We need organizations like MIT who just a few years ago said we have this abundance of educational resources and prestige and money and Expertise and technology and we are going to because we technology is advanced to the place Where we can now take our classes and make them available to the world at a marginal cost of essentially zero to the last students That's what we're going to do. We're not going to charge them We're not going to create a for-profit company to try to make as much money as we can We're going to open these resources up to the world And try to try to extend them to as many people as possible So we need that kind of leadership, but that kind of leadership is not all we need We also need to kind of work through the tricky nuts and bolts issues of both changing minds and changing public policy It was really interesting just to see some of the reaction over the last 24 hours to the edX Arizona State University Partnership that we that was just announced here in this room yesterday Even something as innovative as saying Rather than have the traditional process where we someone tries to Come to us and say can I come into your class? Can I come into your class and we say yes or no and then we charge them up front? And maybe they succeed and maybe they don't and only if they succeed Do we give them credit and then if they want to transfer that credit somewhere else? Maybe we let them transfer and maybe we don't that's higher education in America today What we'll do instead is say open the class to everyone let anyone with the will and the wherewithal And the desire to learn enroll in this class if they succeed we keep our standards high if they succeed Only then do we have a conversation about whether it makes sense for them to pay us and only then and if they do The transfer of credit is not uncertain. It's guaranteed Just that reordering of things can really have a profound effect on the kind of educational opportunity that we can provide That we can do things like say if we have two world-class research universities like MIT in Arizona State Of course, it makes sense that we should be able to offer them credit For students who finish these classes and yet that's not the way our higher education system works today There are thousands of colleges and universities in America. Some of them frankly are Kind of sketchy and don't do a very good job of educating students yet All of them can offer credit all of them can offer these credentials that are crucial to American opportunity And yet the best universities in the world because they've been operating in this kind of non-traditional environments in this online environments Credit is somehow something we have to negotiate through the regulatory system and through Our kind of standard way of thinking about what higher education is and is not So our mission here at New America really is to both change people's minds About what's possible and then to change the architecture of our our public policy So when people do start to see possibility they can act on it That they can be encouraged and not stymied by our regulatory systems in the way that we subsidize And help people go through college And the great thing about this effort that we're working on and so when I say the end of college I should say I don't mean the end of colleges I mean a transition from the kind of colleges we have now to the kind of colleges we need in the future a transition from colleges built From this reality of educational scarcity to colleges built from the ground up Based on the reality of educational abundance the world we live in now And the great thing about doing this work here at New America, of course is that we're not doing it by ourselves in order to have access to the kind of Technology driven educational opportunity that we talked about people need access to technology, which is why our open technology initiative is working to Create both the policy and the technological infrastructure to provide that opportunity These things will be less expensive. I think but they won't be free lower-income families will need to have the resources In order to help their students Move toward higher education, which is why our asset building program is working to provide exactly Those kind of assets for people once people have these credentials. They'll need to go and get better jobs It's what and so that's why our Center for Education and Skills And our new opportunity at work program are going to be working to rewire and improve the labor market So that when you when you get that diploma you can actually match yourself up with the employer who has the right job and the Right opportunity for you And it's why our economic growth in our open markets programs are working to make sure that the jobs are actually there Not just for the select few but for the great middle class and everyone in the United States of America So it is really this interrelation Among the programs here at New America that allows us to talk about something like the end of college in such a positive Spirit and that's really the mission that kind of brings us here today So again on behalf of the program I want to say thanks so much to all of you for coming I know I'm the pre-important person speaker and you guys are all very much looking forward to hearing from Governor Kasich and his ideas About the future, but I very much appreciate taking a few minutes to talk about college today. So thank you very much