 Thanks so much for coming this morning. My name is Kevin Carey. I direct the education policy program here at New America. We are really excited to have a great panel and a great discussion and to be here today in partnership with Washington Monthly Magazine. Long time friend of New America, producer of the annual Washington Monthly College Guide. Their copy's outside and in the lobby for all of you. And for those of you watching online at Washington Monthly and the College Guide. The Washington Monthly College Guide is well known for a lot of things. It's a pioneer in different kinds of college rankings. There was actually a good article in Politico this week critiquing the U.S. news rankings. It was well done, but I liked it better when I read it in Washington Monthly 12 years ago. And pretty much every year since then. So the Washington Monthly Broad College rankings have become very well known as really the definitive measured not of what colleges do for themselves but what they do for the country. What they contribute in terms of research, social mobility, and crucially a focus on public service. There are some fantastic long pieces of narrative journalism in this year's article. There's a great piece by New America's Steve Byrd about the borrower defense regulations and how the Betsy DeVos administration is rolling back policies that the Obama administration put in place to try to help students who borrowed a lot of money to go to colleges, for profit colleges that defrauded them. So it is a great although disturbing and kind of unhappy story. I encourage you all to look at that. John Marcus of the Heckinger Institute has a really good piece on Midwestern research universities and the growing strain and threat to some of the large public universities that had really been a foundation of America's, both America's higher education system but also our research system and economic development in the Midwest. Gilad Edelman from Washington Monthly has a really interesting piece about college advising and how there is this real deficit in the way that the advice and the information that we give to students who really need it most at very kind of crucial points in their lives. And Kim from Washington Monthly has an interesting piece on college endowments which is a piece that I think may once again kind of rise up as a politically interesting debate here in Washington DC and elsewhere. And then Paul Vasterst, Editor-in-Chief of Washington Monthly has a great article thinking about the growing polarization and partisanship around higher education and this question of whether higher education will fall victim to the essential partisanship of everything that seems to be a component of the times we're living in. So again, I encourage all of you here online to take a look. It's really I think the premier journalistic treatment of where contemporary higher education is. And I think if you read it every year you'll have a sense of what you'll be reading again in a few years and the issues that will be debated in the White House and on Capitol Hill. So before we start our panel, let me introduce Paul Vasterst, the Editor-in-Chief of Washington Monthly, a friend of New America and a friend of mine, Paul. Thank you, Kevin, for that. Kevin is a great friend. We've been doing this college guide together. He is, by the way, not only the open markets, the education program director but also the guest editor of the Washington Monthly College Guide every year. And a lot of those stories that he was talking about, he had a hand in picking and editing and making great. Thanks everybody for being here. We got a nice audience here. We've got some reporter friends. We've got some folks from the department, from Capitol Hill. We've got some folks from the trade associations, the universities and a really nice group of folks watching online, a very distinguished group. I wanna thank the Lumina Foundation, which is the chief supporter of our higher education coverage. Also, the Gates Foundation for supporting our work on innovators and innovation in higher education and the Kresge Foundation for underwriting the expansion of our rankings into two books. One is called the Other College Guide. You can see a copy out there on the desk and order it online. And the other is Never Too Late, the Adult Learner's Guide to Going and Going Back to College, which will be published next spring by the New Press. So universities, as we all know, are full of bright, brilliant people. But as institutions, they tend to be slow learners. By that I mean they take years to recognize facts that ought to be screamingly obvious like their graduation rates are embarrassingly low. And then years to figure out what to do about that if they figure it out at all. Another way to put this is that American colleges and universities as organizations are not very innovative, or at least they're not innovative in the areas where they most need to be innovative, such as delivering college at a reasonable price and so forth. They do tend to excel at finding new and better ways to hit alumni up for donations. They're very good at increasing the number of applicants so that they can cut the number they actually admit, all these sort of games that colleges play in order to rise up the US news rankings. So in order to push colleges in a better direction, as Kevin said about 12 years ago, we started an alternative ranking system for the Washington Monthly, one in which schools are rated not on what they do for individuals, but as Kevin said, what they do for the country, what they do for the $170 billion, the American taxpayer invests in them in student aid every year. What do we get back for our tax dollars from this investment? So instead of rewarding schools for the number of applicants they reject, we give them credit for enrolling unusually large numbers of low income and first generation students and getting them to graduation instead of assuming that the most expensive schools are also the best we recognize universities that produce research, train the next generation of scientists and PhDs and instill their graduates with an ethos of public service. Also in recent years, we've been profiling the most innovative people we could find in higher education, college presidents, administrators, faculty members, outside researchers. By highlighting these individuals who are devising reforms that make their institutions measurably better on the measures we care about, our hope has been to encourage more people to try. This year we focused on innovation in the area of adult students where the institutional slow learner problem is particularly severe. The sheriff, people don't know this, the sheriff college students who are over 25 or 25 or older, which is the definition of adult, the official definition of adult, is now 40% and the percentage of all undergraduates who are adult is 30%. But most colleges haven't adapted to this new reality. They still schedule the majority of classes around midday which is exactly where you want your classes scheduled if you're an undergrad and you've been up late with your friends last night but it's exactly the wrong place, time to have a class. If you're a working adult, balancing job and family, for them you need classes on evenings, weekends and online and very few colleges have adapted to this new reality even though a growing portion of the student population are adults. So to find the most innovative colleges in this area, we began by looking at our own rankings. Last year we produced and this year also the first of its kind ranking of colleges that are do the best job for adult learners, two year and four year colleges. We looked at the percentage of, the metrics we use for this ranking are the percentage of students who are adults, what the tuition they pay is, what salaries they have 10 years after getting out and adult friendly adaptations like for instance weekend and evening classes. Now you might expect for profits to dominate these lists because they're for profit and for profit institutions are usually pretty good at taking advantage of new market openings. As a matter of fact, only one college made the top hundred four year schools and none made the top hundred two year schools. Why? Because for profits relative to other schools charge a high tuition and they're students who graduate to the extent they graduate don't command the salaries that they might relative to these other schools. You also might expect elite colleges to do well in this area. In fact, elite colleges get this, 30% as I said of all undergrads today are 25 or years or older. The percentage of undergrads at Stanford is 1.2%. At Princeton it's 0.7%. At the University of Chicago it's 0.2%. So basically the elite colleges do not recruit and do not do anything aren't involved in the education of 30% of students. In fact, only one college William and Mary cracked the top hundred in our rankings. So what schools do well, right? Well in our best for adults list it's the regional public universities sort of private universities unheralded by the usual media gatekeepers and community colleges which by the way US News does not even rank community colleges. And instead of resting on their laurels a handful of these top hundred colleges do something else. They are continually challenging themselves to get better. They're innovating. They're finding new and better ways to serve adult learners. And those schools are profiled in a feature in the current issue called the 12 Most Innovative Colleges for Adult Learners. And representatives of two of those schools are here today, I'm pleased to say. These are schools and these individuals have a lot to teach higher education generally and the country generally. So without further ado let me introduce our panelists and then Kevin will come back up and moderate a discussion. Dr. Courtney Brown is the Vice President of Strategic Impact at the Lumina Foundation. The nation's largest private foundation focused specifically on increasing America's post-secondary success. In this role she oversees the foundation's efforts in the areas of strategic planning, impact and learning. She also leads Lumina's international engagement efforts. Previously she was a senior research associate at the Center for Evaluation Education Policy at Indiana University. Dr. Pam Ettinger is President of Bunker Hill Community College, the largest community college in Massachusetts with approximately 14,000 students enrolled each semester. She was previously President of Moore Park College in California and Executive Vice President of Mass Bay Community College. And she's done some spectacular things that you're gonna hear about. Dr. Todd Oldham is Vice President of Economic Development and Innovative Workforce Services at Monroe Community College in Rochester. He was previously Associate Vice President of Clark College in Vancouver, Washington and program manager at Chapman University in Orange, California. Again, fascinating stuff that he's gonna tell you about. Finally, the only other person who doesn't have a PhD after his name other than me is John Locke. John is also the only recent adult college student on the panel, so you'll have to speak to that, John. He graduated last January from the University of Houston downtown with a B.A. in Psychology. He was the student body president and as such he led something called Walk to Vote, a student-created civic initiative designed to get more students to the polls. And there's a story by Sahil Desai on the current issue all about Walk to Vote, which I recommend. John has since gone on to create a nonprofit to spread Walk to Vote to other campuses and we're glad that he could make it out of Hurricane Ravaged Houston. We also, speaking of hurricanes, we're gonna have Mildred Coyne who is from the executive director at Broward County in Miami and she could not make it because of the floods. So we're sorry about that. So, thank you and we'll go straight to our panelists. So let's start with Mr. Locke. Based on your experience, if you could give advice to college president or college trustees about how to make colleges more, serve adult students better based on your experience, like what works, what's important, what are people missing? So my experience has been an interesting one. I believe what works is empowering the students to come up with a solution for the schools. I think, you know, who better to know based on their experiences, how things could be better for them than the students themselves. So my experience at University of Houston downtown is they created an atmosphere that was very empowering for the students. You know, everyone from the president to the provost to being a student was very accessible to the students there. And we also had the privilege of having very smaller classes. You know, generally when you go in these larger universities, you own a classroom, there's like 400 students there, very hard to build a relationship with the professor and build those connections to help kind of empower people through that experience. So I believe it has a lot to do with the mentorship, with the professors, having the administration and leaders of the College of University to be accessible to the students in a real way and not, you know, just like a high and by way or just for like one event to, you know, kind of shake hands and make friends. But actually having real relationships and having real concerns for the students there and to help foster, you know, ideas and empower those students to help implement those on the college campuses. Great. Dr. Edinger, you work in a very higher education centered place, probably the one part of the United States that we associate most with higher education but maybe not the kind of higher education. It's much more on the elite level in terms of public perception but your institution is, I imagine, doing more to serve the actual community in the greater Boston area than some of these institutions. We would love to hear about your thoughts on that and your work. Yeah, we sit in the middle of Boston and I would love to tell you the Bunker Hill is a special place and we're different from everybody else but we're not. We are the typical urban community college that is the center of adult education, right? So the mix of our students are interesting. The average age of the college is 27. Only a third of our students are traditional age out of high school. So we never call our students kids because they're not. And the other piece that's really important to know is that education is not at the center of these adult students' life. Their family is, their jobs are. And one switch that we've made in the way that we think about our students is that we're only a part of their lives and we have to be ready for them rather than having them being ready for us. They can't turn back to 17 year olds to go to school at 12 o'clock in the afternoon. That just doesn't happen. We know that three quarters of our students work and many of them full time. So they're carrying 40 hours a week and two or three classes. Three out of five of them are parents. And a lot of their children are on free lunch programs. So we know they struggle. Yet the parents come to school. So that dynamics in play. But the most important piece of statistics that I've come to understand is that 77% of our students are in the two lowest quintile of income. 77% are in the two lowest quintile. Yet they all know that what's going to move them up is the education. That's not at the center of their lives. So there's a real dynamic and struggle there. But we do know that students who finish with us who get a credential or getting an associate degree in transfer, very eventual income will jump to quintile. You will never see that at any other kinds of institution across the United States. I mean, I look at John, right? John is the example of how a student at that level can jump up in a very short period of time and have lives transform. So as we talk about the kind of innovations that we do, I think those basic facts are really key to changing the way that institutions think about who exactly it is that they're serving. Dr. Brown, the Luminay Foundation has a really unique and broad perspective. Higher education has built an entire organization around this goal of increasing the number of people with post-secondary credentials. Can you talk to us a little bit about Luminay's approach to this and how adults fit into it? Absolutely. First of all, I wanna say thank you to New America and the Washington Monthly and my panelists who are really doing innovative thinking and making a difference for our students. But yes, as you said, so Luminay Foundation has a goal, goal 2025, that by 2025, 60% of Americans will have a certificate, degree or other high quality credentials. What you may not realize is to reach that target, we need to reach 71%, 71% of that target are actually adults. So many people see that goal and they think, oh, those are traditional age students who complete high school and go away to college for four years and that's actually not true. 71% of that target are returning adults, adults that started and for whatever reason had to stop out and another part of that are adults who have not ever touched higher education but need to find a pathway back into higher education. So this is really at the core of what we do and I'm so grateful to the Washington Monthly for adding adults in last year's publication and really ramping it up again because there's nowhere else for adults to go to find information on what institutions can better serve them. And at Luminay, we really think about, we envision a new system that would better serve today's students and they are the students that are working. Five million students are parents. Many millions of students fall below the poverty line. Many students are going part time and those students that are going part time are less likely to complete than those students that are going full time. So working with institutions like all of yours and your experience, we really need to find new and innovative ways to scale these approaches so we can really make a difference to all Americans. Dr. Oldham, tell us about Minerope Community College and sort of its role in this effort. So our approach has been really to try to better understand where the needs are with employers and match those to students. And so a lot of our work has been one to try to quantify and monetize what's at stake with these gaps in our region. We really kind of did a lot of work early on to try to understand what a gap means. That's not enough for us to use this gap. Why is there a gap? What's the quality of the pathway that's there so we can try to understand why some of those things are happening, but from that really have determined as it was already mentioned earlier, we have not the highest completion rates within community colleges. We believe that contributes to less efficiency in terms of us being a producer of a worker if we have low completion. So we've been very focused in from what the data showed us to really do some interventions where we're offering programs more designed for that adult audience, more designed for the parent of perhaps the student that might be coming to us that needs a job to offering programs that are more accelerated. We have had a lot of success with the machining program that we run about four years now. We actually offer the same curriculum that we've had traditionally in a separate format, same curriculum, but it's taught in about six months. And then they come out with 31 credits. We actively place them for a job. Highly structured, intensive, doing that now in office, a medical assistant program where it's actually designed for a mid-morning to an early afternoon schedule so that students in many cases, these are mothers, can put their kids on the bus, they can go to school, come back and be there for them. So the goal here is to try to have more workers being produced, but those in pathways where we know that they're on a trajectory really to lead to those self-sufficiencies and above within our region. Let me ask, I mean, this is a question for you because, but I'll open this to the whole panel. The one of the major components of the adult rankings is these measures of economic outcomes for students. And this was a big advance during the Obama administration where they were able to, I see the eyes raised down there. So maybe, advance is my word. I'm not used body language, I understand my word. But you can feel free to disagree with me. A big change during the Obama administration where they were able to match student records with information from the IRS and start to calculate how much money people are making and you can do it right now, you can go on to a website and look at earnings for various time periods, for various student subpopulations, the percent of all graduates who make at least $25,000 if that's a big peg as what the typical high school graduate makes. Is this a good thing that we're thinking of college in these economic terms? Are there dangers? What's your perspective on that? And again, any of the panelists could look at this one. I mean, this is something that we've pursued pretty actively. We have done just recently a set of relationship up with the New York State Department of Labor where we're actually able to match in a very secure way our students to the labor market outcomes in New York State. So as long as they're working in New York State, they're part of the unemployment insurance records. And so we've just literally looked at the class of 2011, 2012, a little over 200 students. They're CTE, we're in technical vocational. In this case, we're talking about the patient part of college. And we see that in the three periods, three tax years following the graduation, they're right around all students, about 15.7% compound growth rate. So that's about a $6 an hour spread of where they started. And a lot of these students in these programs will start a little low, but what we're seeing, and this is what we need to know, they are an introductory, they are on a pathway that will lead them up to in this case $18 an hour, just shy of that. In our region, that's the self-sufficiency standard for a single parent with a preschooler. So what we're trying to do with that is to try to understand, and we'll be looking as longitudinally across all of our classes, and then looking at the difference between different types of graduates. So certificate versus AAS, and also by area. Because if we can understand that, then we can start to see what that value is. But we think it's very important. We've used that, we think successfully in order to show funders, in order to show other investors and the region what the value is. If there's truly a skills gap, we have a very high rate of poverty in inner city in Rochester. There's a, knowing that value, some folks have been uncomfortable with that because they feel that we're sort of sterilizing the educational piece, but we don't feel that way because we feel by doing this, we have a much better appreciation for how important education is and the lives and the initiative of trying to address some of these skill gaps for the employers who need the workers. But more, it's just as important. The students who are in generational poverty, and this is a way for us to understand how important it is for us to make those investments and hopefully get other investors and policy makers to pay more attention to it. I made the face not because there is a need for data. And in fact, there is a conversation going through Congress now about unit data for students. So I have trouble with the concept of just simple scorecards, right? Which tells you nothing about the student and what the remediation needs to be. The idea of being able to figure out what the impact of one course or three courses or certificate or degree has on overall income is the kind of look that we need. The fact that folks complain about low graduation rates. That's kind of like a scorecard. Given that, yeah, we have low graduation rates, but why do we have low graduation rates and how do we then put our intellectual minds to it to solve the problem is really the larger conversation. There are a lot of shiny objects in the data world, you know, the scorecards and sort of short-term, short-hands and just judging. That doesn't help us. But that longer question of where's the value and the more nuanced look at solutions, that's really where the key is. So I was only making half a face. Here to have agrees. I think it's good for the vocational side where you're going to school and you have the idea that you have a direct job lined up after that. I think it gets tricky when you're talking about like my degree, like a psychology degree. You know, a lot of students, and I think this is a big issue, they assume that you go to college and then you graduate and then like, here's my job, everything's great now, but it's not, it hasn't been the case. You know, I know a lot of my friends, they graduated and they end up working at a $10 an hour job or something that they wouldn't necessarily need a degree for. So I think when we talk about these things, we need to look at how much is the student investing as far as financially into the education and how does that translate from that investment, right? I think, and kind of going back to your first question is as far as helping students, I believe adult learners are in a kind of a conundrum of sorts is that I believe, in my experiences, if you just go to college and you just go to class and go home, you're not fully getting the experience in all the good things that come with attending a university or a community college. It's the extracurricular activities that in the high-impact learning opportunities, I think that really carry you and help you get a real feel about what you wanna do. So with that said, I think having more involvement at school in different organizations, it helps gives you like that high-impact learning opportunity, right, that where you can connect what you're learning in the classroom to the actual real world, because everybody doesn't necessarily connect the things that they're learning to how it applies when I get out of college. I think transparency is essential. I think it's the right thing to do. And I think income is one piece of that. There's a lot of other outcomes that somebody gets from participating in post-secondary education. But most people, especially adults, don't have the luxury to say, I'm gonna go spend all this time and money so I can be more civically engaged. I'm gonna spend all that time and money so I can get a job and pay my bills. And so I think students have a right to know what those outcomes are going to be if they're gonna invest that time and money. I think of the Americans, we spend more time analyzing what the ingredients are of a loaf of bread than we do what the ingredients are, what we're going to get out of spending tens of thousands of dollars, in many cases, and years in post-secondary education. So I think I applaud the look at the outcomes and I hope that we focus more on that. I think there's a Lumina Foundation, I believe it's doing a piece where they're trying to translate your extracurricular activities that you do in school and put that on your transcripts, which I think is very amazing because sometimes it's looking at something and seeing, A, D, just a letter, it doesn't really define how what you receive in your education but being able to say, hey, I initiated this project or I volunteered here or I did this program with this professor, really gives employers a clearer view of what type of education experiences you have outside of just the normal standard that we've been going by. I'm always struck, I've heard it a bunch of times, but I'm always struck by the statistics. I think someone said five million students or parents, is that the number? Undergrad, I think, is that the number one? A lot of. Three out of five at my place. Yeah, right. I mean, I'm a parent and there are times sometimes when I have to bring my daughter here in the office. I mean, people are cool about it but mostly because I'm the boss. No, no, no, no, no. So to kind of juggle that and also I think being a student is probably harder than what I have to do when I kind of come in here. And so surely we can do more but what can we do? I mean, is it, it gets to this area where particularly public institutions serving, again, quote non-traditional students who are the majority of all students, the needs and missions really are much more than education. And so as a college leader, how do you think about your job in that sense? It is definitely more complex than what I realized when I started 24 years ago. I think part of the excitement about working at an urban institution like a community college is that you can't just say, okay, here's the civil bullet, right? So the civil bullet has multiple parts and the goal of a leader within an institution or a system like that is really to get folks to think about the various areas for students' life. So ultimately, if you wanted those students to succeed, you got to think about, of course, the academics in the classroom, they've been away a while, what does that mean for developmental education? They get them up to speed. What does it mean to have a social network around them? Because a lot of our students are first-time college goers who don't talk about college around their dinner table. They didn't get it from their parents or not getting it from their friends. So what does that mean when you're an immigrant in your own educational system and a lot of our students are? So there's that. And then ultimately, it's the total cost of education, right? We hear a lot of programs that will say, oh, free community college and there are a couple of really good ones out there. And it's a wonderful movement, but it's about tuition and fees. Well, if you're driving a cab and working a second job in order to support your family and somebody gives you tuition and fees and say to you, you need to take 25 hours for your week and go to class and do homework. Well, I'm sorry, the math just doesn't work. So for us, we think about tuition and fees, yes, but we think about what about food? What about housing? What about transportation? Those are college costs. So the leader's role is to say to my staff and my colleagues, think about those pieces and meet your students there, right? So make sure. And when I realized that this is a problem on my campus was one day I came into work and at the lobby of the B building where my office is, there's two huge carts of bread being donated by Panera. Thank you, Panera. So this was eight in the morning. When I left for my meeting at 9.30, those carts were gone. The bread was gone. And I said, this can't be. You do this five days a week. How can anybody be this hungry? Well, then I found out that I'm signing our purchase orders on peanut butter and jelly because we run an emergency office. Parents will come in, make a sandwich for themselves, make one for the kids. And that's what they eat that day. That's not okay. So, but that awareness, I had been in community college work for over a decade. And that was a surprise to me because I was not at an urban institution. And I would suggest to you that it's happening everywhere. 45% of my students is food insecure, which means they're not getting enough to eat or they don't know when their next meal is coming from on a consistent basis. 14% is homeless. They're couch-surfing. They don't know where their next rent check's coming from. They're choosing between paying the electric bill or paying the light bill or buying food or paying rent. But the magic is that they come to class, right? So that's a transformational piece that we gotta keep. And I would challenge you that anyone right now in the United States has comprehensive programs that will take care of the total cost of education. We don't even mention it in our classes. We have a syllabi, right? That tells you what you have to do about your academics. But that's syllabi to tell you, if you need a sandwich, you can go to single stop and make a peanut butter and jelly for you and for your daughter. We don't have that kind of comprehensive look yet. Yet we worry about our graduation rate because it is the shining. It is the shiny object right now. And we worry about completion. But a large part of the silver bullet for completion and for retention is food and housing and transportation. And understanding adult students' lives are complex. There is no simple solution. Don't look for it. So that, I believe, is the leadership role for community college president. One thing that strikes me when you look at the finance numbers in higher education and how much money we spend is that, even on the public side, we spend a lot more money for students on the elite public universities that serve the wealthiest students, the students with the most social capital. Students who are probably gonna graduate from anywhere. And we spend the least amount of money in the institutions that serve low-income students and adult institutions. That's a trend. It's true across the United States. So I'm interested, Todd, you know, you have been involved in political engagement with students. And this is a tough question, so I don't expect you to have all the answers. But I feel like the student voice in bringing, in solving what is in some ways a political problem of resource allocation, we have all these adult students out there whose interests are not being served by the decisions that our politicians make. What are some of the things we can think about in terms of activating their interest in their voice? I've noticed in the experience myself, students come out of, we're talking about any students, but students come out of high school are not necessarily, they don't know how to vote. They don't know how to participate in an election and they don't have any experiences with that. So what we did at University of Houston, downtown started a program called Walk the Vote. And the unique thing about those couple of unique pieces, one, it's looking at voting in a different way. You know, every time, you know, a lot of times when I talk to other people about voting, they talk about young people and they're like, you know, people died for your right to vote, right? This is true. This doesn't necessarily motivate people to vote, right? You can, it's like you're trying to shame people in the voting. So the approach that we took was more of a positive message, right? Instead of, you know, saying that nobody votes, we need you to vote. Please say, you know, who wants to go to a party that nobody wants to go to, right? It's like, okay, well, I guess I'll get you there. So what we do, we try to make voting fun again. We make it a celebration. As it should be, it's the fabric of our country is why we celebrate, you know, America's democracy. Yet we have students that go through K through 12 and don't know how to vote. So they go into college. So this is another like high impact learning opportunity. So we hope the concert, we have musicians and performances, guest speakers. And then we march as one to the polls and vote together. Now what's important about that is you think about, you know, half of our students that participated walked to vote are first time voters. And for a first time voter, you know, if you voted before you probably don't realize, but you know, it can be a little embarrassing, right? You don't want to go there and do something wrong. It's like, well, if I hit the wrong button or you know, end up getting in trouble for something or whatever. But when you have somebody like your friends going with you, and it's their first time too to go vote, then it empowers you, right? It's like, well, we're all dealing with this together. So let's go do it. And then that, you know, gets their foot in the door where they're comfortable to continue doing that, right? Once they vote one, it's like, okay, I know how to do this now. I've done it before, I've experienced it. So that's really about like high-intagoring opportunities. You can read things in the textbook and be taught in class, you know, about government, which I think he teaches that backwards. He discusses more about the president and federal elections and not focus on the local elections, which I think he should teach people the local elections because we can actually see the outcomes of our vote. You can actually experience that. I can go to city hall and see the city council member that I voted for and actually speak directly to them about whatever issues is going on at the time. So in other words, I think that we need to look at voting differently. We need to use different language for voting. If you talk about politics, what is that? When you hear a politician, if someone's a politician, what do you think immediately? To me, I think negative things. I think dishonesty, I think corruption. I think all these negative things. So to me, there's a negative combination to politics, right? So it's trying to change the language and change the view of what you're doing. And really, and I think the goal of democracy is right is to empower the people and the citizens. And I think that's what it can do if you can actually see your vote and your work actually manifest itself in front of you. So be more active, vote more, and get more engaged. Teach students more about local politics where they can actually make changes in their city and their state and their county, et cetera. I think I'm taking on the politics and it is all about policy and practice. There are huge discrepancies, you said, about the amount of money we invest in some institutions versus others. And I think it goes back to who today's students are. And we've thrown around a lot of facts and figures in at Lumina. We've really been trying to reinforce today's students. They are not this 18-year-old that is walking into a brick building for four years with mom and dad sending regular checks. They are working. They are parents. They are low income. They are racially and ethnic diverse. They are first time generation students. And so how can we continue to enforce that and talk about that? And that, again, is why I think the Washington Monthly publication is so important because it really talks about those pieces, those characteristics that really matter and the schools that best serve them. It's publications like that that I think are really gonna turn the corner so that policy makers begin to understand and then hopefully deploy resources to better serve those students. That we try to sort of patch on a day-to-day basis like hunger, like transportation, all of those things that we struggle with. We can take care of one student. We can even take care of 100 students. But ultimately it will not change until we have policies that will help it to be sustainable, right? Because what we're really talking about here is urban and rural poverty. Ultimately that's what it comes down to. In terms of the hunger on the campuses, one of the things that we did was we locally convened almost all of the educational institutions in Massachusetts in higher ed to come together at least once a year to talk about what are you doing now? What are you doing day-to-day to help the issue? But what are we doing together as influencers of policies to be able to maybe bring a program like free lunch programs to community colleges what is really needed? Very recently we, the three community colleges, Bunker Hill, North Shore Community College and Berkshire Community College came together and asked our senators to support a nationwide data study through the General Accountability Office to find out what hunger is like across the United States on our campuses. You don't get that kind of movement until you come together as a local community to ask. So Senator Warren, Senator Markey, Debanow and Murray have now done that for us, they've pushed it, and the study is starting. So the next piece locally is for us to say to all of our higher educational institutions across the United States, participate when they get here, tell them your story, get through the stigma, or else it will never change. So yeah. Local parts, I believe that we have the ability within our government to create local solutions to national issues. So it may seem too big or too, when you're looking at like the whole United States, you look at Congress and it's like, oh man, ain't nothing going through there, right? But no, but we can create solutions locally. You talk about some of the programs that has free generous community college, that is a local solution to a national issue. And I think that more focus is to be on the localizing solution, and allow them to be models for the national. I think another element of that is that we really need to have an understanding of the policy level in a way that higher education, we need to rethink how it's an access issue. I mean, as a community college, obviously we consider ourselves open access institutions, but I think stretching and understanding how broad that really means. And so we've talked about understanding the real serious issues of hunger in the inner city and rural poverty, but it's also how these students in their economic realities daily are gonna access education as well. Are we offering the curriculum in a way that makes the most sense for the 21st century? Are we taking into account transportation issues, childcare issues, obviously hunger, as we've talked about. I don't know, I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done, both within the institution of understanding that, as well as clearly policy that helps institutions be able to become more accessible in these different ways, in which for most of us is a budget, a very constrained budget reality. So that's, I think that's from the work that we do, that needs to happen. A lot of that also understanding the modern realities of secondary to post-secondary transition and how that's occurring and the lack of academic readiness in some of the students that come to us, whether they have a diploma or not, there's still incredible needs for that. So these things are, models aren't necessarily working well, policy can reflect that, but some of it is us changing our business model. I mean, higher ed runs on a fairly old business model. There's not a lot in the modern era. There's not organizational models that are older than 20, 30 years. There's not too many organizations that you can point to that function on that. Maybe we should look at it from that perspective and clearly that would have changes probably in how we're incentive and how we're ultimately funded in public education in a way to work. I have one more question for the panel and then we're gonna open it up to the audience. So I think you've mentioned one of the programs that you're working on in Rochester is a medical assisting program. So the large majority of all the medical assistance programs in this country are run by for-profit colleges. And as Paul mentioned, even though for-profit colleges are much more focused on the adult education market than sort of a disproportionate share of adult students, only one of them showed up as well-ranked basically for two reasons. One, because they're very expensive and sometimes students with a lot of debt. And second, because often we don't see the payoff in terms of a return to investment. And one thing that I've always been kind of fascinated by is that you can go to some areas and you'll see a community college offering a medical assisting program that actually works pretty well where there's a good relationship with the local healthcare community and students are getting jobs and it might cost X amount of money. And there's a for-profit college in business offering a medical assisting program that isn't as good and costs five times as much, 10 times as much. So why is that? And how do we fix that? That's a really great question. It's, reality is, I mean you have a publicly funded institution that's receiving taxpayer subsidization to offer an education where in the private institution obviously they're not. I would say this, and let me talk about our situation. I mean our program, what we're focused on there is really a certificate. It's basically roughly a 30 credit sequence. It's two semesters, it can be completed of it's part of a two year path that they choose to take it. You know, it's, in the end, we think we're a much more efficient, much more better, I think, return for the student. If you just think about it in terms of economics, if you're paying much less for the education, if you're getting highly vetted through a very formal educational process, obviously a traditional process of vetting those faculty, linking them in many cases with interns and linking them directly with industry, I don't really know why a student would want to go. I think a lot of it has to do with a very different marketing model. We don't market student, we're not marketing for profit's sake, we're not in some cases predatory marketing. We're not on commercials in the middle of the day, targeting folks that are maybe unemployed. There's a lot of these things that we see. We don't do that. We're more recruiting from working directly with industry partners that are in the community, that are in those populations that they have more authenticity than we do. Working with them to try to understand is just the right pathway, assessing them. There's a lot of assessment before we put somebody in a program to make sure that it's the right fit and make sure that they've got, have a background that would make them not hireable. I certainly can't speak for those private schools. I don't know that that happens in those environments. I think the motivation is very different, even though perhaps they're still taking title four dollars. That's a whole thing itself. But obviously several of us here are with the community in the technical college world, but community college is a tremendous value for both the transfer students and also the vocational-oriented students. So it's hard to know why maybe some students would go down that road. I think in those cases, they're just not informed consumers and hence more transparency, more understanding of what you're likely to make if you go down that road. And if you still want to go down that road, then go down the road that you make, the investment is adequate to you being able to coop your dollars in the money you're likely to make versus getting really upside down. And when you come out, you really have no viable way of recouping that investment. I think it's really kind of that basic cost benefit, but we perhaps need to do a better job in the country and in our states of making sure students and as consumers understand that reality before they actually enroll. First, we always talk about higher education and data-driven, evidence-driven decision-making. It's a little bit in an echo chamber. It is our consumer and our clients and our students who need to have that evidence-based decision-making. We don't have the marketing machine. We simply don't. That's not where we put our value. And I think popular culture is not helping. When you think about community college and it's popular image in the media, you know what they are. I mean, I don't even have to explain it. And unless we have folks like responsible media helping us turn that narrative around, yeah, you're gonna have people buying brand name and the difference is probably not a whole lot. So I'm not ready to own as a community college system that we need to do more marketing by ourselves. We really need friends to carry a different kind of a narrative for us. This is where the value is. Let's look at the evidence. That's what you said. I mean, word of mouth goes a long way. We have a lot of our alums talk about how much they love our university, the University of Houston downtown. So I think word of mouth and being able to have that share with friends. But there's also some unfair marketing. Like we've had some unfair marketing towards the University of Houston downtown. We talked about graduation rates. This system is flawed in how they calculate that. So if somebody transfers into the University of Houston downtown, that doesn't get counted towards our graduation rate. And then also if people transfer out and go on to graduate somewhere, that gets counted against us still. So I mean, the majority of our students are transfer students and they either transfer in from like a community college or they transfer out because we don't have like a specific program. So they're basically kind of using us like they would do like a community college. So I mean, there's a lot of work as far as the education system itself and how schools are measured. And looking at the population, that at risk population that I've involved our schools taking in these other factors into that. So there's a lot of unfair marketing but unfortunately, like a lot of universities or I mean their business is right. So it kind of comes with that where businesses are fighting against one another. The good news is I think the federal government finally is calculating graduation rates for transfer in transfer out of students as of like four days ago. It's just happened. So they're working on it a long time. The data are now finally getting up there. So it's gonna be really interesting to kind of take a look at that and see if we can find, as you say, a more accurate and a more fair perspective on institutions where transfer is like a lot of what they're about. Yeah. Okay, let's go to questions from the audience. We have someone with a microphone. So please identify yourself and phrase your question in the form of a question. Good morning. Karola Vile from American University School of Professional and Extended Studies. I am struck by sort of a presumption that all private universities, all elite colleges are not supporting adult students. And I wonder if we could put a little bit more detail on those blanket comments because I would argue not wanting to be defensive but that in fact many universities, four-year universities have come to the same recognition that our community college colleagues have and others that we do in fact have seen demographic shifts that we're trying to adjust to those. One of the challenges really is on the financial side in that federal financial aid is much more limited to the traditional aged population. And so our foundation's doing anything to fill those gaps because we're trying to stretch dollars across the entire spectrum now from 18-year-olds to 70-year-olds and a little tough to do that at times. Thank you. I mean, I think it's the fact that private colleges are not as represented as mostly just a function of how the rankings are calculated. As Paul said, there are private institutions that I think are successful with adult students so there just aren't that many there. And that's one of our kind of foundations of the way the magazine thinks about serving adult students is that you really have to serve them at some kind of scale in order to show up on our rankings and that kind of informed the way the panel discussion was put together. I mean, if you don't mind, do you want to talk a little bit about what America is doing for adult students or sort of what the, how many students there are and how they're working? I am afraid I don't have the exact numbers and we have a total population of about 16,000 students and yes, adult students are still a tiny minority of that number, but we are focusing much more on making sure that we not only have the courses that are relevant to mid-career students, we do a lot more online learning. We now have, I would say probably a dozen professional master's degrees, graduate degrees. We don't offer degree completion in part because our colleagues are doing such a good job of that. We don't want to step into that field. But the other part that we're looking at really is the point that was mentioned earlier about quality of life on campus and having high impact learning experiences. So thinking about experiential learning, 99% of American University students, including the adult student population, have some kind of experiential education experience as part of their experience while they're there and that is something regardless of whether they are online students or face-to-face students and that is something that we think is super important to the quality of the career readiness that comes afterwards is have they done some kind of internship or their practicum opportunities, capstones and that like. But also the engagement, the service engagement, political engagement, intellectual engagement and so I would just hope that we don't think of higher education as simply being a pathway to a job. Thank you. I actually wanted to pick up a portion of that comment. One is the idea of bachelor's degree completion. We do have a number of private universities or good partners who come on campus at the community college to offer the courses to complete a bachelor's degree. It is important to see that kind of partnership is still small so I would say that that is an area where expansion can happen and I know that our colleagues at North Shore Community College has the same thing and I'm not quite, I don't know if they're in Monroe but I would imagine that there must be some pieces. The other is about experiential learning. It is really terrific for all students to have some sort of external work experience. I've got 14,000 students. It is almost impossible for me to find 14,000 internships for these students but think about the population. If three quarters of them are already working and they're almost working full time, what is it about the experiential learning that we're giving our students, our traditional students, that we can layer on top of their work experience? To me, it makes no sense for me to say to three quarters of my students quit your job so you can get an internship. Really? How does that work? Or take an internship on top of your job. So what is it, what competencies are we thinking that the experiential learning is giving our students that I can pluck up and overlay? I don't think we should do our work twice. This is an area that I have not heard talk about and it's really worth some discussion. Well, I think that sometimes the idea of working somewhere is different than when you actually work there, right? So if they're not necessarily working in a place and they feel like, let's say a nurse, like I go through school and I really want to be a nurse. But then I actually, I graduate and I go there and I actually, I find out I don't really like blood. A lot of people have the idea of where they're working and that they're in love with the idea but the actual job itself in working there is completely different than what they imagine in their head. So I think it's vital for students to have the experience relative to their field and where they plan on going so they can decide, is this truly what I want to do for the rest of my life? Which is different than where they're working probably before they went to school because that's probably why they went to school so they want to kind of paint their job up further there. So I think it still applies and I think there's a level of empowerment to be able to, because usually when you're doing internships and things like that, you're being able to interact with people with high levels of their field and interact with a professor that's been in their field for such and such amount of years. So I think that experience itself helps empower and have people start believing in themselves when they see how other people value them. I think there's also a lot of other ways you can accomplish that. I mean, you can do that through project-based learning, some of the models that we've used where we're moving to more cohorts, so peer instructional groups that the students stay together and they're preregistered and they go through a complete sequence, let's say 30 credits together and we have a faculty model similar to that, where we have a very limited number of faculty teaching. That doesn't work in every curricula, it works in some of the ones we've been doing and as a result of that, we can carry a project from one class to another, which wouldn't be able to happen in a typical cafeteria model of higher ed, the traditional model, so you can do that. You obviously, in our case, because we are more industry, talking about workforce programming, we have the industry that's coming into the classes. A lot of our faculty are teaching from the companies where these organizations might hire, and in some cases we're even teaching some of the classes in the labs because the labs at the companies are higher, more advanced than what we would be able to invest in. So there's a way to kind of cross-pollinate and get some of that experience, but I think the point we've all taken that Pat mentions is that a lot of our students are already working, so in some cases you kind of have to understand, I think before we rush to that model, what are we really trying to give the students that they're missing, what's the gap in the competency of the experience? And the good thing is that there's increasingly more and more models that don't have to be a vanilla flavor across the board, but that makes it more complicated, though, too, obviously. I'm not American in about the role of four years in elites and privates because we're all in this together. I think everybody has a role to play and I applaud any efforts that you're doing. The two years in community colleges have been at this for a lot longer. They've been serving adults. You're still doing some amazing innovative things now, so I applaud that, but I think we need to, our system is not set up to serve today's students, and so their barriers, their financial barriers and institutional barriers that I think we all need to really look at and figure out how we can solve these together and learn from each other because the community colleges cannot solve this on their own and serve today's students and reach our goals. Thank you, and thank you for this panel. I think this is such an important and increasing issue, so I'm Lindsay from the Institute for Women's Policy Research and we do a lot of work on students with children, parenting, college students, so I've loved to hear all the talk about parenting parents in college, but my question is actually, piggybacks really well with this last discussion because I was at an event a few weeks ago where a college president, I asked them, what are you doing, it was a couple of college presidents, what are you doing to serve your adult and parenting student populations, and one of the presidents basically said, well they just shouldn't come to our school. This is then, we're not set up to serve those students. So my question to you is, how would you make the case to these, and your point is apt, private four year colleges, elite universities have to be part of this conversation, I think the whole system has to adapt to today's students, so how do you make that case to these institutions that just feel, well they need to go somewhere else? We had an issue at our university, our students made the case for them. We had very active students at University of Houston downtown that came together, and it took four or five years, and so different cohorts of students took on the mantle, but we were able to get a daycare at our campus, which we didn't have a daycare, which made absolutely no sense for our population, like not to have a daycare, not to have some type of facilities for our parents, so our students, a lot of the changes that happen at our university is students like, what, why is this not happening? And they're so empowered by their relationships with administration and stuff, they're like, well we're gonna do something about this. So me being like a student, kind of friendly, or a student-first kind of person, I think that coming from the students, it becomes the loudest voice when that happens, when your actual constituents are the people that are using this resource, right? When they're the ones that speak up and speak out against those things, I think it makes a world of difference as opposed to an administrator or maybe even pathology. I think students need to be involved in the conversation, and I think that doing surveys and things like that, starting from, I guess, grassroots level within the university or community college itself, is the best way to hit home with it. With convincing elite universities to do this, is that they aren't as under the gun to recruit students. They can have their pick of 18 year old upper middle class students, and so they're just the market pressure isn't there for them to serve the adult population. So how do you get to them? And I think one way you get to them is through the same argument about diversity that we're having in other realms, racial, gender, income, wouldn't it, when you're the University of Chicago, and 0.2% of your students are 25 years or older, I think you have to say to the leadership of the University of Chicago or Stanford or whatever, look, the whole idea of diversity is to provide an environment for your students where they're learning from each other, they're seeing other backgrounds. Wouldn't it be great if some of the students in those classes had spent 10 years as an ICU nurse, or had trained combat troops as an NCO, or who had supervised a factory floor. These are experiences which they can, your 18 year olds can have with these other students, perspectives that otherwise they wouldn't get. And that's just, I think, one way you can talk to folks. I really do, and I usually tell them a story of one student, right, if you really believe in human potential. I had a student who came from Vietnam. When he first got here, stop and shop wouldn't hire him because he couldn't speak enough English. Four years later, five years later, he's getting his bachelor's degree from MIT on biochemical engineering. So if that top university is willing to say, oh, this is kind of unusual, I have multiple examples of that, so it's a matter of values, right? If they really do believe in human potential, and you shouldn't be in education if you're not, then you can't deny the lives that we've turned around and the lives that we've changed. I think this is sort of in a different room kind of story. Somebody needs, a colleague needs to take this person into the other room and say, are you sure you're in the right business? Can you guys do that next time? More questions? Yes, perfect. I'm Wallace Gatewood, a semi-retired college professor. Been there, done that. I live over in Columbia, Maryland, and I've been in the New Zealand system, and a number of systems throughout the United States, as well as a couple of foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia. I want to link briefly, if you would please, the incarceration component and the loss of the education training in the Gulf of people who are lost for good reason or bad reason in our penal system. We seem to be moving into an era where we are dispensing more and more people who have one struggle or another. I hear the message and the focus on the community colleges and other non-mainstream groups of our population that we're trying to educate. But what might we do to link our efforts to diversify and bring into the educational system? A large number of people, especially men and especially black men are men of color who are being abused to a significant extent by our very poorly performing penal system in the United States of America and in other parts of the world. I was very impressed with the time I spent in Saudi Arabia looking at the extraordinary gender discrimination that exists in that particular set. Just wanted to put that out as a possible question. Yes, so, thank you. So I'm a high school dropout. I didn't graduate, I dropped out of school in like 10th grade. And I had hanging around the wrong people and dealing with addiction was incarcerated myself absolutely living in a shelter right before I started at UHD. The shelter is literally maybe like a block away from UHD and because I solved the university that I was like maybe I should go over here and sign up. And the experience of going to UHD and being so welcomed by the staff and faculty there was transformative for me. In my experience in my life, I didn't have a lot of examples of success. And specifically like a male figure in success. I've never been around like lawyers and doctors and all these fancy titles and things. And when I went to UHD, I got exposed to that and actually was mentored by a number of professors and administrators and that was eye opening. Like that really empowered me to start believing in my own potential because what I saw was that regardless of people's titles, regardless of the backgrounds and what they're doing in their careers that were all the same. I realized I saw a piece of myself in like my professors and like the Polos or whatever in building these relationships. And when I saw that, I realized how we weren't so different and it started to allow me to believe in my own potential. So to go from like dropping out of high school and being jailed and with addiction and being homeless to being like a student body president for a school representing the school at like the White House or like these different conferences and things. It's a really, I don't know, it was really empowering, really special for me. And it leads me to believe that like anybody can be successful in college if I was able to do this with having such a horrible background and different struggles and homelessness and things of that nature, then everybody can do it, right? Like everybody can be successful in college. Everybody can become a leader and become a voice for their community. So I know it's probably gonna be difficult politically to have like a campaign of having people that's been incarcerated or dealing with addiction issues to like a big recruitment effort to go to schools or go to college because you will get people worried about like safety and different things and everything's always described by their extremes. So they'll give you the extreme case scenario and everybody will be thinking about that like the whole time. So I think that's gonna be a struggle. I think that as a country we need to start recognizing more the struggles with that whole penal system and why people are being incarcerated and a lot of times I feel that we're using our gels as mental health institutions. We have a very failed mental health system here. We're not addressing those things and it bleeds out in different social issues. A majority of our homeless population deals with mental health issues. Addiction is a mental health issue. So a lot of you have to come to terms about the system itself. That there are programs where they allow you to take college courses I believe in different gels and they definitely allow you to get your GND and things of that nature. But the experience of being in college too is something that's unique and as I said, my experience of being able to interact with these very successful people. I think it's important. Hopefully we'll probably have to be done on an individual basis. I'm not sure exactly what type of system that's put in place to help people that were incarcerated or in jail to go to college. But that's definitely, from my experience, the best option for someone wanting to change their life and turn it on. I think that's the beginning of some of that. The governor of Massachusetts has encouraged two community colleges, Roxbury Community College and Bunker Hill to come together and deliver courses at correction facilities. We're also trying to reach the young people who are in youth services and doing dual enrollment with them so that there's a pathway for them to come. And there's a successful program called 100 Nails to College. And they're really talking about males of color. People of color between Mass Bay Community College, one of our 15 community colleges and one of the state colleges at Framingham State College. So they're sort of holding hands with the students on one side and then sort of handing off. But what I don't see really is a consistent source of funding to allow the support services that makes it, that makes it successful. And if we're gonna have national funding sources to sort of seed and scale up some of these programs, it will make a huge difference of keeping students out of jail, much less educating them in jail. So I think you're right. We need to sort of fix it in multiple places. As Lumina, we work with all those who have been underserved in the incarcerated population. It's one that we're committed to find some solutions for, some solutions that we can scale. We don't, I don't have any answers now, but it is within our current strategic plan and an area of focus for us, both those that are currently incarcerated, what sort of program, there are a number of partnerships that exist in communities with a community college and with a jail or a facility, but also those that are newly released and how do we get them on a pathway to a credential that they can provide some value. So we're thinking about it. Really important. That's where we've done a lot of work, particularly with African-American men in the high school where we're bringing them on campus and exposing them in the college classroom with the labs. And the neat thing about this, not only these are students, and these are individuals who in many cases have high levels of IEPs. They have history. They're essentially individuals who the system has sort of begun to sort of move out. They're not as interested in. By bringing them on board, there's two, there's a flip side benefit to this. It's not just exposing students to these programs. And some of them may or may not go on those pathways, but it also diversifies the classrooms as many of our technical programs are largely the white male. And so by having that happen, we're actually creating a more diverse classroom environment which has a lot of benefits. But that's, I really believe that they're one more piece at a younger age. We also are doing some of the programs where we're teaching programs through the sheriffs and the contract within the jails. But certainly I think that the younger we can intervene and show an alternative reality within our inner cities, probably that's a way, I think it's a community college and public education in general, in higher education can be effective in helping to change some of those perspectives on what is available in reality. In a lot of these, Donna, I don't know if you had this experience or not. I certainly did as a minority woman coming through the higher education system. It's really about how the conversations are conducted and the narratives around it, right? So when we talk about minority populations, they're needy, they're poor, they're in deficit, they need developmental education. No one has, very few folks have said they have incredible cultural wealth. They have amazing family networks that's got them through. There are different ideas of wealth that we don't talk about when we talk about our, our people of color. So people don't come because you're trying to save them. They come because they see value and they see validation in your cultural background. That conversation is so in deficit right now in higher education. I mean, personally, as a woman of color, I don't want to be saved. Right. You know, I have things to offer. So I think flipping that conversation is really gonna be key to how we approach these programs for our students. I see we are out of time. So please join me in thanking our panelists just for the quick discussion. Located throughout the discussion. Thanks everyone, that was great. I really appreciate it.