 Hello. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. I'm Paul Glastres. I'm editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly Magazine. We're a magazine of politics, policy, and government that's been published out of Washington, D.C. for going on 50 years. And for the last 13 of those years, we've published an openly seditious alternative college rankings to U.S. news. Instead of rewarding colleges for exclusivity, wealth, and fame, we rate them based on what they're doing for the country and with our tax dollars to encourage social mobility research and public service. Go to our website, WashingtonMentally.com, and check out how your alma mater did. I want to thank our partners at New America for hosting what I guarantee is going to be a fascinating discussion. I want to thank the Illumina Foundation for its generous and abiding support for our college issue and coverage. The Gates Foundation for its great support, Travis. Randall is from Gates is with us. Thank you, Travis. Also, the Kresge Foundation for supporting our new book, Never Too Late, The Adult Student's Guide to College by the New Press, by Betsy Klein Collins out January 1st, and available for pre-order right now. So while you've got your phones, go to Amazon. The title of today's event is Higher Education for Everybody. And it's our attempt to put a label on what we think is a coming wave of reform in higher education. Pressure for this wave is building up from a fundamental tension that exists and has always existed between colleges that were founded and often prefer to serve the select few and the demands of our democracy, that is the desires of average citizens to be cut in on the deal of higher education and get some of the benefits. We've seen waves like this in the past in American history, the creation of the land grant college system during and after the Civil War, the period in the mid-20th century that saw the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act. Since then, because of changes in the economy, expectations have changed for higher education. A post-secondary credential has gone from being something every American ought to have a right to pursue to something every American needs to pursue just to have a shot at the middle class. Higher education as a sector, however, has been drifting in the opposite direction. We've lavished more money and more attention and dollars on a small number of highly selective schools that increasingly cater to upper middle class families while the bottom 90% of students struggle to pay tuition, typically at underfunded public institutions or worse, predatory for-profit colleges, hence the building pressure for reform. You see it in the rising college enrollment rates among low-income students, even as all Americans express frustration at rising costs and student debt. You see it in pleas by business and philanthropic interests for change in the system to help a broader range of Americans receive post-secondary skills and credentials. You see it in calls on the left for free college, on the right in a tax on large university endowments that was part of last year's tax bill, and in support on both sides of the aisle for reform ideas like allowing federal funding for short-term certificates, vocational certificates. Most of all, you see it on the ground when you go looking in innovative new efforts by colleges and universities to create financially sustainable models to cater to citizens who have been either poorly served by our higher education system or ignored more or less altogether, including first-generation students, ethnic and racial minorities, rural whites, and the incarcerated. These under the radar programs, largely unknown even within higher education circles, are many of them profiled in the current issue of the Washington Monthly and I hope you all picked up copies, but they are so impressive and frankly cool that I think in five years you're going to be reading about them on the front page of the New York Times or hearing them in a presidential state of the union address. And the people who know the most about these new innovative ideas and programs and in many cases invented them and run them are here with us today. So that's why we're here is to hear from these folks. One of those is our first speaker, Dr. Danette Howard. She's the senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Lumina Foundation. Quick story about Danette after graduating from Howard University, earning a master's from Harvard and a doctorate at the University of Maryland College Park and serving as assistant director of higher ed policy at the Education Trust, sort of the font of a lot of great talent. Kevin had the same position. Dr. Howard was asked by Governor Martin O'Malley, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, to serve as cabinet secretary for higher education. Now if you know anything about Martin O'Malley, he's a big believer in using data to improve public services and in Danette Howard, he found the perfect person to stir things up. She and her team created the One Step Away program, which helps Maryland colleges and universities identify and reach out to what are known as non-completers. These are students who have earned 75% or more of AA or BA degree, a college, two-year or four-year degree, but for whatever reason, either dropped out or moved on without actually obtaining the degree and then provide them with whatever help they need to re-enroll and get their diplomas. It's a fabulously successful program and it's been studied and copied by colleges all over the country. Today at Lumina, Dr. Howard oversees several of the foundation's key strategies to increase America's, American's attainment of high quality post-secondary degrees and credentials. She's going to set the stage for this discussion with some framing remarks, so please give Dr. Howard a round of applause. Good afternoon, everyone. I am very excited to be here today. My CEO, Jamie Marisotis, usually has the opportunity to be at this event, but I'm really excited that he had another engagement. It couldn't be here because that means I get to be here. Well, I thank you for that introduction. What you didn't share is that one of the reasons why I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be here is that I am a big fan of this particular addition of Washington Monthly. Some people know that I really love college and university rankings. I have been particularly, I won't say fond of them, but maybe I've had a love-hate relationship with them for a long time. Some people might say that I've been obsessed with college and university rankings for quite some time, so much so that about 13 or 14 years ago, I actually decided to write my doctoral dissertation on the influence of college and university rankings on institutional behavior. When I made that decision, I found that there was actually a term, a little-known term, called Institutional Isomorphism. Say that three times quickly. You can go ahead and try. That describes the influence of college and university rankings on institutional behavior. Unsurprisingly, I found that institutions put strategies in place that are designed for the sole purpose often to help them ascend the rankings. Rankings that were never designed to be the arbiters of institutional quality. Strange, isn't it? These rankings actually incent institutions to become more selective. These institutions increase their admission standards. These institutions begin to admit and select students that have higher entering test scores. These institutions often shift the balance of their institutional aid to buy, I mean, attract and recruit students with a more selective entering profile. Presidential performance evaluations are often based on whether or not the institutional leader will help the institution climb the ranking systems. All the while, institutions move away from their original missions, from the original purpose that they were created for, and moving away from the students that they were intentionally created to serve. Now, of course, this isn't all institutions, but when I wrote that dissertation many years ago, I found many, many institutions that were influenced because they wanted to ascend the rankings. I think you know which rankings I'm speaking about, not the Washington monthly rankings. Now, the strategies that the institutions put in place to ascend those rankings were also not strategies that had anything to do with increasing student success. They were focused on student inputs, not at all on what the institutions themselves did to facilitate student improvements. This was happening at a time when we actually needed more people to acquire learning beyond high school, exactly as Paul said in his introductory comments. Also happening at a time when today's students are more diverse than they've ever been before. We have nearly 40% of today's students who are older than 25 years old. Nearly 60% of today's students are working at least one, many of these students more than one job while they're trying to navigate their way through the post-secondary system. Over a quarter of today's students are raising children while they're trying to get those post-secondary credentials that they know are going to make a difference in their lives and in the lives of their families. Nearly half of our students today are financially independent themselves. Do we have a system that's working for those students? Nearly 60% of our students are attending two-year colleges. Only 13% of our students are living on campus. Yet when we at Luminar speaking to policymakers at both the state and federal levels, we often hear, well, when I went to college or my kids in college, and those students are attending college in very traditional ways. They're attending usually four-year universities, oftentimes more selective institutions. And so the policymakers don't have a frame of reference in terms of what's needed to help the vast majority of learners today make their way through the system and to those credentials that they very desperately want and need. So yesterday, I had the great privilege of moderating a panel with three of today's students, Jamika, Lauren, and Michael. These aren't necessarily students that institutions are thinking about when they're trying to ascend the traditional college and university ranking systems. Jamika is a single parent. She just earned her associate's degree in January, but it took her six years to do it. And when she got to her final course or what she thought was going to be her final course and she went to apply for graduation, they said, oops, we forgot to tell you, you've got one more math course. And then when she went to apply for that math course, they said, oops, you ran out of financial aid, Jamika, sorry. And then there's Lauren. Lauren's a senior now at the University of Michigan. But Lauren is a low income student. At the University of Michigan, where two thirds of students come from families who are in the top quarter of income, the top quartile of income in the United States, and 50% of undergraduates at the University of Michigan are actually not Michigan residents because the University of Michigan is looking outside of the state to get wealthier students who can pay the full cost of tuition. So Lauren and students like Lauren have actually reclaimed the title of being low income students because the University of Michigan actually refused to even use the term low income student. The University of Michigan, so Lauren says, issued a guide to help first generation students, which is the term that they use to apply to all students, some of whom were low income, they issued an affordability guide to help low income students make their way through the university. And that low, that affordability guide had things in it like, well, if you need to save money, fire your maid. If you need to save money, sell your car. Well, for low income students like Lauren, that affordability guide totally rang of tone deafness. So Lauren and her fellow colleagues at the University of Michigan are really doing something about that. And finally, Michael was on my panel. Michael is now the policy director at the anti recidivism coalition in California. But 15 years ago, when Michael was 15 years old, he was sentenced as a juvenile for a murder that he didn't commit. But he was in the backseat of the car when his friend did commit that murder. He received a 15 year to life sentence for that crime. Thankfully, he now works for an organization that overturned his sentence. He received his associates degree while he was in prison. And upon his release, he earned his bachelor's degree from San Francisco State University this just this June. I asked Jamaica, Lauren and Michael what they would say if they had the opportunity to speak to a room full of policymakers, which they did yesterday. Jamaica said, I would tell them not to think of us as non traditional students or post traditional students or 21st century learners, just call us students and think about what we need to be successful. You don't have to make the case to us that we need credentials. We know that just help us get the credentials. Michael said, education equals public safety. Make sure that every individual, regardless of where they're located, even in prisons, have the opportunity to pursue a higher education, because these individuals, many of them will be returning to our communities. And if they can get an opportunity to get an education, they will have a much higher likelihood of being a good citizen. And Lauren said, don't be afraid to identify who your low income students are. Don't be afraid to call them by name. In order to serve them well, you have to acknowledge that they exist. So one of the reasons that Lumina Foundation is so pleased to continue to support the Washington Monthly's rankings is that they remind us that there are institutions out there that are serving all of today's students well, adult students, lower income students, and now students who've been incarcerated or currently incarcerated. And so I'm really looking forward to today's conversation where we'll be able to explore more about all these institutions and the leaders who are paving the way so that we can continue to learn more about the great work that they're doing. Thank you. Thank you, Danette. Really appreciate it. Let me just tell you how this is going to go. I'm going to read the biographies of our four speakers. They're going to each come up, give a presentation, then we're going to all come up and take your questions. We're very eager to do to get to that part of the program. Our first speaker after Danette is Dr. Todd Clear. He's on the faculty of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. He has served as the university's provost, interim chancellor, and Dean of the School of Criminal Justice and held faculty appointments at SUNY Albany, where he got his PhD, DePaul, Florida State and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the author or co-author of 12 books and the founding editor of the Journal of Criminology and Public Policy. Dr. Todd helped found and run the New Jersey Step program, a fascinating new college program for ex-offenders that he'll be discussing today. And Kim is a senior fellow and director of domestic and social policy at the Progressive Policy Institute and a contributing editor of Washington Monthly. And she's been a practicing attorney having earned a degree from Duke University and held positions at a number of think tanks, including Third Way and on the staff of Congressman Jim Cooper. She's written for the Atlantic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Politico, the American interest, Democracy the Hill, and of course the Monthly. She'll be talking about her story in the current issue of the Monthly entitled An Innovative Fix for Rural Higher Education Deserts. Then Dr. Joseph Nairn is the founding president of Northern Pennsylvania Regional College, which is one of those innovative fixes that Anne wrote about. He's held administrative posts at Finger Lakes Community College in New York and Rochester Institute of Technology, where he developed a tuition plan for dislocated workers that received national attention. Here at his doctorate at the Community College, in Community College Policy and Administration at the University of Maryland College Park. And finally, Kevin Carey, my partner in crime for many years. He is vice president for education policy and knowledge management in New America, where he directs the education program and is the guest editor of the Washington Monthly's annual college guide. He writes regularly for the upshot of the New York Times, has written feature articles for WIRE, the New Republic Pacific Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Other Publications. He's the author of the book The End of College and a feature story in the latest Washington Monthly entitled Why Colleges Should Treat Students Like Numbers, which he'll be discussing. So without further ado, who did I say comes first? Dr. Clare. Thank you, Paul. And thank you to New America and Lumina and Washington Monthly for doing this work. Very important work. I have a PowerPoint that somehow might get up on that screen. And if it doesn't, I can sit down because it's also my speaking up. There we go. Great. So I'm going to talk about a little bit about New Jersey Step and Mountain View, which are an in-prison and on-campus education program for people who are incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. But then I'm going to talk about that area of initiatives and the opportunities that are there. Let me see if this is right. So, yes. So New Jersey Step has an in-prison program, which has an A.A. degree that is operated by actually the College that has the number eight ranking in the Washington Monthly Rankies that just came out, Raritan Valley Community College. And then we have a Bachelor of Arts program and Justice Studies that's operated by Rutgers University. That partnership turns out to be an important way to make this work financially feasible. What's important about the way that we do the work is that every class we offer is a class that counts towards somebody's degree. So there are lots of college programs out there now that offer courses that whoever's interested in teaching can teach, but whether those courses end up counting toward a degree when a person leaves prison is an open question. We also have an infrastructure that enables our students, when they are released from prison, to transfer to community colleges and to Rutgers University. In fact, when a student is incarcerated and moves from the A.A. to the B.A. degree, they're automatically accepted as Rutgers University students while they're inside. And the in-prison outcomes that we've accomplished, by the way, I recognize I'm doing about a 30 minute talk in 10 minutes, so it's cruel to make me do that, but I'll do it anyway. So some of the in-prison outcomes so far, since 2012 we've served over 1500 students. That's in a prison system with 20,000 people serving time. We offer the A.A. major in seven of the nine institutions in the state of New Jersey, the far south institutions we haven't started serving yet. We have 500 current students and we offer about 200 classes in each academic year in three terms, a fall, spring, and summer terms. We gave 150 A.A. degrees since 2012 and we currently have 70 inside B.A. students and we will give our first 15 degrees this year to the B.A. in the three B.A. institutions that we are serving. Our on-campus program is called Mountain View and it's talked about in the issue and you'll read about some of our students and some of these data. We have Mountain View communities operating on three campuses. We call them communities because they're really sets of individuals who have had criminal justice experience and then come to Rutgers University to study. And also connected to those communities are faculty members and advisors who volunteer their time to work with those students. We have accepted since 2008 more than 145 students who were released from prison who took a college course in prison under this consortium and are now studying at Rutgers University. Currently we have 54 students enrolled on one of those three campuses, going to school full time, taking classes with everybody else. Our retention rate and our undergraduate GPA for those students who come into the Mountain View program are roughly speaking the equivalent to everybody else on campus. As an aside, their disciplinary report rate is lower than the incoming classes of students. We have had 58 students receive a B.A. Eight of our students have gone on to get master's degrees in various places including Rutgers University. So we think that this kind of program in a very small number of years has blossomed to show what can be done when a state university partners with a community college to serve students who are incarcerated and then continue to serve them after they are released from prison. But I want to talk to you now about the general idea of college in prison and why it's such an important area for us to invest in. As a former provost I want to say first and foremost this is a population of students who are untapped. So the number of graduating seniors in America is declining. The sets of colleges in America are competing for a smaller pool of students. There are 1.6 million people in prison. We estimate in New Jersey at least 5% are college ready. If that's true, that's 80,000 students who could be part of a college system right now in the prison system in the United States. And the impact that you have is pretty substantial. There are studies that show obviously very low recidivism rates, high employment rates, high family constitution rates students go back and continue to live and raise their kids. But even more importantly the marginal impact is just amazing. So you look at the difference not of what these students do compared to other college students because they do very well compared to other students. But what they do compared to what would have happened if they had not gone to college. And that is the amazing story here. The kinds of life trajectory changes that happen with students who are exposed to college when they're incarcerated and continue in college when they are released is simply jaw dropping. You will not find a more impactful experience than talking to one of our students about how going to college changed their lives. We also have a number of successful models of engagement around the country. There are probably a half a dozen different major ways of doing this work. Step is one of them. And I'm going to spend the rest of my time talking a little bit about why this work is not only financially feasible but also potentially profitable. So to make this by the way I became dangerous when I became a provost because I started looking at university budgets. And you should never let a college professor look at a university budget. So so one of the secrets here is to cost the in prison programs at their true cost rate. So at a university when you when you do look at your cost factors you have cost of classrooms cost of dormitories cost of football teams cost of in some cases bad football teams. That's supposed to be an inside joke. And for a big 10 university anyway I won't say anymore. So and the point is all of those costs are borne by students on campus but none of them none of those costs are borne by students who are incarcerated. The classroom is paid for by the Department of Corrections. The housing is paid for if you want to use that metaphor by the Department of Corrections. So the point is that a lot of the costs that go into the college's budget for producing a class don't apply to these students. In fact if my math is correct roughly roughly half. At Rutgers University the students don't even use the the in our incarcerated students don't even use the library. So even the library costs aren't part of the factor. Two years institutions as your partners giving the first two years of classes toward the A.A. degree have a much lower cost factor than universities and they can generally speaking cover all of their costs through regular Pell dollars. And there's no gap in the in the cost of attendance and the and the and Mount Pell allows them to get. And then and if the four-year institutions use a discounted cost the actual cost of providing the services rather than the cost to an on-campus student turns out that those craft classes inside are also much more affordable. And then here's the secret. If you can get those students who take some classes in college to come to your institution when they come to your institution they pay full tuition. And these are students who are now paying tuition that they these are students you are having on campus paying you tuition that would not have been on your campus paying tuition if you hadn't offered those courses in prison. They'd be doing something else but they would not be students. And they pay the full cost everybody else. Now they get a package you know they get loans they get Pell they do college work study they get some get merit tuition. But the point is from a university standpoint that is all marginal increases in your in your balance rate. And so the administrative portion of your in college program pays for the cost of your on campus program ends up paying for the cost of running the in college program. Let me just give you an example of how the basic financials work. These are not real numbers these are made up these numbers. They're not that far from the Rutgers numbers but but I didn't want to use Rutgers numbers because I have to go back. So if you have in prison program and you're offering to about 400 students the Pell cost the the Pell rate would at about two thousand dollars a student going to taking six credits would amount to about a hundred thousand dollars in Pell income of which four hundred thousand dollars a roughly half would be administrative cost of the program. The rest of the go to cost for pay for teachers and books and so forth. At the in prison discounted rate roughly speaking if you have 80 students taking in class inside prison classes you would get about a hundred sixty thousand dollars from Pell. Now I understand that Pell will pay more than that but typically speaking you don't get that much within incarcerated students repel but you get an average of two thousand dollars per student that would give you a hundred sixty thousand dollars in income of which eighty thousand dollars would be used for administrative costs. You have to integrate the operation of your program at the four year institution because you because it has a registrar's office and you're doing marginally more registration. It has a financial aid office there's a marginal increase in financial aid work but that's all that infrastructure is already there. You use that existing infrastructure to provide those services. You may end up having a counselor or two so you may end up having some marginal staff increases somebody to run the program some in prison counselors to make sure you get the students to be able to come to campus some advocates for those students on campus and so on let's say that you have a staff of the cost you about a hundred thousand dollars you can do a lot for the hundred thousand dollars a year that will give you and then if you have sixty on campus students paying about ten thousand dollars in intuition they will generate six hundred thousand dollars a year of which three hundred thousand dollars is administrative costs and if you add three hundred and eighty and four hundred you get about half you get about the entire cost of the infrastructure marginal costs so these numbers actually work it's not like you have to find some more money somewhere and buy this program it's the program if you do it at scale pays for itself and I now want to say we could spend more time talking about this I just got the flash that my time is up so Pell turns out to be very important and there's some real issues about Pell which we should talk about you may have to make sure that all classes count toward a degree if you waste classes you're actually wasting that money and the students Pell money you have to make sure students transfer to your colleges you have to model your finances correctly you have to integrate your programs across the institution so that you are not adding lots of marginal costs and of course you have to run this thing at scale because if you do it for only a handful of students it's all marginal costs and none of it comes back in the form of income thank you very much hello everyone my name is Anne Kim from PPI enormous privilege to be up here as Paul mentioned my topic is rural higher ed and I want to begin actually by telling you about a small town in south central Virginia called south Boston it's just about a half an hour away from the north Carolina border and quarter century ago it was a thriving blue collar middle class town you know they had textile manufacturers JP Stevens Burlington Industries they had a big Russell Stover candy factory that was there and it was also in the heart of what was then Virginia's tobacco country used to be the host of the national tobacco festival about 2000 bottom fell out of south Boston the textile manufacturers shut down tobacco went away first to China South America the town manager there told me that the region Halifax County lost about a hundred million dollars in payroll over four years so you are talking about a wrenching rapid dislocation community dropping from middle class to disconnection over an extremely short period of time if you go to downtown south Boston today I talked to one shop owner downtown and she told me she had done six dollars of business in three days so this is not an uncommon story you know with automation globalization these kinds of wrenching dislocations are happening all across America and south Boston faced a particular handicap because it really had no access to higher education Virginia the state of commonwealth of Virginia has some of the best universities in the country but they're mal-distributed you know they're in Richmond they're you know northern Virginia they're in Blacksburg but this little region of south central Virginia somehow missed out just for instance Longwood University which is the nearest public university is an hours drive in one direction and the nearest community college Danville Community College is an hours drive in the other direction and this lack of higher education access didn't matter quite so much you know 25 years ago when the textile factories are going strong and you could make a living harvesting tobacco but as Dr. Howard mentioned today having a post-secondary education not having that can be fatal to the prospects of both individuals and to that community so as it turns out you know south Boston is also not alone not just in the dislocation it experienced but in the fact that it is a rural higher education desert you know the urban institute did an analysis and found that 41 million Americans at 17 percent of Americans nearly one in five lives in a rural higher lives in a higher education desert many of these are in rural areas now a higher education desert is defined as being a half an hour away physically from a college of college public college university or that you only have one community college within that half hour community distance and that also includes three million Americans who are also cut off in broadband internet access as well so that means they are completely cut off from any education opportunity electronic or physical so what kind of impact does it have to have these many this many deserts around the country well I think it leads to it's a prime mover and kind of two major inequities that our country is facing today you know first is this deprivation of opportunity for rural students you know we already know that rural students are less likely not only to go to college but to complete it you know for instance 61 percent of rural students go on to college after high school versus 67 percent for suburban students and in terms of educational attainment just 20 percent of rural students ages 25 to 34 have a four year degree by comparison 37 percent of young people 25 to 34 in urban areas have a four year degree and you also have a rising disparity in the amount of educational attainment in rural versus urban locales so just an example from 2000 to 2015 the share of college educated adults rose by seven points in urban areas versus just four percent in rural areas and that disparity is widening the second inequity that this in turn is driving is a vast regional inequality something that the Washington Monthly has tackled over you know several issues I came across a statistic from the economic innovation group from 2000 to 2015 there were 6.8 million net jobs created in the country but 6.5 million of those net jobs were created just in those top 20 percent of zip codes mostly urban very highly educated in the top 10 percent of zip codes 43 percent of people have a VA were better when you look at the bottom 10 percent of zip codes again largely rural just 11 percent of residents there have a VA so I think this leads to a policy priority that's pretty urgent which is that we've got to ensure universal geographic access to higher education and that means we need to work toward eradicating these higher education deserts wherever they are because so often these higher education deserts are often opportunity deserts as well okay so how do you do that it's not practical it's too expensive to establish a new college or a new university in every place in the country that doesn't have one right now but as I talk about in my article there are a few states that are beginning to experiment some really neat ideas using technology in particular to come up with innovative delivery models so you can reach these students where they are Dr. Nair is going to talk about an amazing model in Pennsylvania but I'm going to come back to South Boston and talk about what's happening in central South Central Virginia because it turns out that South Boston may have a happy ending after all so the state of Virginia very fairly recently created what they call higher education centers and there's five of them that are in this new in the South Central region and what they do they're not a traditional college or university in the traditional sense they provide infrastructure for other accredited institutions to come in so Longwood University and Danville Community College can offer courses through this physical infrastructure that's provided here and the second thing that they do is that they are very closely tied to the economic development efforts in the region so they offer courses that are going to meet the needs of either existing businesses or attract development because communities can't reinvent themselves until the without the ability of the people to reinvent themselves and that's what these higher education centers are trying to do so the southern Virginia Higher Education Center which is in South Boston is in a refurbished tobacco warehouse turns out there are a lot of tobacco warehouses in South Boston and there's one hundred thousand really gleaming square feet a lot of investment that went into this they have a welding laboratory they offer courses in mechatronics and IT it's new but you know having more of these centers I think would create two really significant benefits and we're already seeing that in southern Virginia first is creating economic development and opportunity by upscaling the workers around them so for instance the southern Virginia Higher Education Center in 2017 put 173 workers into new jobs and in a community like South Boston that's a really big deal actually they also customize training for local businesses and another thing they're doing is they provide manufacturing support for some of the new businesses that are trying to attract so when I took a visit there earlier this year they were working with a consortium of Virginia wineries because they're trying to get the winery business going in that part of the state and they were working on developing a recyclable wine barrel with these so there's a lot more than just higher education that this new model of higher education can deliver to these communities but second and most importantly this new model of education I think can really change people's lives one by one and in the story I mentioned a man named Michael Isdale he's a resident of Martinsville which is a small town also in this area and he'd actually gone to the University of Pennsylvania for a couple years but work, life, everything he ended up not finishing and he moved to Martinsville to help take care of his mother-in-law who was ill what he told me was that you know he had a work experience but he didn't have that credential so he was working security you know he was working he said pretty much anything he could find what changed his life was when he was able to enroll in an accounting class that was offered to another one of the Virginia Higher Education Centers called the New College Institute Virginia Commonwealth University enabled him to get a blended opportunity for a degree in accounting and then he landed a job as a chief accountant at Hooker Furniture which is a major employer in Martinsville and that put him back on a track to upward mobility middle-class life being able to support his kids so I think we owe it to all the other Michael Eisdales who are out there to create the same kinds of opportunity elsewhere and we can do that by turning greater attention to this issue of higher education deserts which I think has not gotten the attention it deserves and are working to eliminate them so Joe thank you so much Ann and thank you also to Dr. Howard a lot of what has been discussed already are issues that we were addressing in creating the Northern Pennsylvania Regional College and where we came from. I also want to say I'm a first generation student myself and so I'm very passionate about the needs of people who just don't have that experience there's a lot of research out there about how young people or adults fail to complete because of the cultural barriers it's not just physical it's not just distance it's not just financial it's a matter of fitting in the institution that you're in as well. So we've talked a bit about educational deserts and I want to show you one. This is where Northern Pennsylvania Regional College is based it's more in Pennsylvania. If you take a look at this and I apologize for the quality of the map it's from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. You'll see that the clusters are in the east and west and primarily in the south. Coming back to Pennsylvania I'm a native of Pennsylvania and I'm from Aliquipa in the western part of the state but I've lived in New York for the last 30 years. Coming back to this region and knowing something about it I was just shocked to see that we had never addressed the issues of affordability and access for people in this region. There are some colleges in the various places as you can see but in some cases they're not affordable for everyone to attend and as I took this job and moved into the presidency I found that there were two different definitions of access being used as well. Access for many of us means convenience and that's part of the model I will discuss in a few minutes of the Northern Pennsylvania Regional College business model is to provide convenience but for me coming from the community college I worked at in New York access also means lowering those barriers to entry. We are a college of opportunity for people who have just a high school diploma or a GED and so we're providing opportunities to young people and adults throughout the region that wouldn't have chances otherwise. So we've got a big part of Pennsylvania primarily north of Route 80 if you know the geography of the state. The area that we serve again I apologize that the maps aren't better but these Northwestern counties are not served by any community college there's not a two year school in the region and so we've established what we call hubs and strategically placed throughout the region to serve 18 different educational sites. Our base of operations is in Warren Pennsylvania there's a site there in Warren similar to what goes on in Virginia with their higher ed centers we have what are called community education centers that are neutral arbiters of higher education that can bring in various institutions to offer. What happened over time was that the end of students that were there if you're basing a section on 20 students being able to come to one place and study together that doesn't always happen and as those numbers started to melt the institutions were pulling out of these centers there was no longer an opportunity to study somewhere near your home. What we do and I'll get to this with the next slide of our business model we are able to aggregate enrollment across our region. We've got students studying in various locations using cloud based interactive television technology an instructor might be in Erie or Warren or Meadville or Couttersport it could be in any of the cities teaching students live but they're connected to others throughout the region in real time and so what we found for us and there was a lot of research that went into this prior to the the college sort of coming together the people in our region needed the discipline of a real time classroom interaction online didn't work for them for two reasons one is in many cases they didn't have the discipline necessary to be able to do that successfully the other is as was mentioned earlier broadband access in our part of the state is not available. Personally I think that the one of the 21st century policy initiatives ought to be similar to rural electrification in the 30s we should be talking about rural broadband access in the 21st century but that's part of the problem we were trying to solve and so we've brought education to them as well as putting them in a situation where they could learn better they were actually interacting with their faculty you show up for class you have a chance of being called on just as if you were in a classroom you have to have your assignments completed you have to meet with that professor throughout the course of your enrollment what it doesn't accommodate what we're moving into right now is identifying through collaboration and partnerships sites where we would also have laboratory facilities and so if you sign up for a course that meets Monday and Wednesday you take your lecture portion then and you know as you're going in that Friday that several Fridays during the course of that semester you may have to go somewhere else to complete your laboratory so that you'd have that hands-on component as well the collaboration is very important one of the things that is kind of my mantra my staff I'm sure are tired of hearing me say we complement not compete there are four-year institutions in our region there are other colleges and universities our intent is to complement what they do we're reaching people that they don't reach we're reaching students that would not get to them otherwise we're reaching students in some cases that they wouldn't consider Dr. Howard's comments about selectivity I am appalled that when our state institutions reject our students in favor of someone coming from somewhere else it's to me it's bad policy but we are providing that opportunity bringing students into classrooms that wouldn't have the chance to get there otherwise in order to provide the spectrum of services at these various locations our students success specialists we've got a staff of people in the field who not only are working with students to advise them help them figure out financial aid work through the whole process of getting into college but also can address some of their needs in terms of I'd really like to take classes but I have a childcare need I really like to take classes but I've got elderly parents that somebody needs to look after so these are folks who can go in and connect them with services that enable them to be successful there's an example of our class delivery you can see a couple that are in action I'll finish with a story of one of our success stories and I hope you read Ann's article in the Washington Monthly but Tesla more I happen to meet very serendipitously I sat down with her at one of our completion ceremonies and got talking to her and then she got up and spoke and her story was just incredible this is a young woman who had started college in the traditional manner became pregnant, had a high risk pregnancy couldn't stay in school came home to her small rural Pennsylvania town and started raising her child she was a single mother of two children now was working jobs that were not going anywhere was recognized that her economic opportunities were limited and she decided after talking to someone else I'm gonna go back to school this opportunity has come to my community I'm gonna take advantage of it she did that she interviewed for a job with one of the banks Northwest Bank is based in Warren, Pennsylvania and just through the process of interviewing the interviewer when she said well I'm going back to school said this is the kind of initiative we like to see will hire you she has finished her degree she's been promoted several times and she bought a house I mean she is the kind of story that we want people to realize it's attainable we were able to bring education to her we were able to bring it to her at an affordable cost we're at $185 a credit hour and before I run out of time I do want to mention one of the things about an NPRC education is you're not paying for a climbing wall you're not paying for a lazy river you will not be able to go to the vegan bar in the cafeteria and enjoy the treats there you will not play junior college basketball I tell students and I've told a lot of groups that I've spoken to if you're looking for those things we're a very bad choice but none of those things in my mind have anything to do with teaching and learning that's not those are not the things that are part it may be part of education but they're not core to education and so what we're doing is primarily teaching and learning we have excellent faculty we're partnered right now with Gannon University out of Erie we'll be going independent within the next year but we are continuing to keep the focus on teaching and learning student success and providing people with an affordable and accessible education in their communities thank you very much Hi everybody I'm Kevin Carey I direct the education program here at New America again thanks to all of you for coming and especially thanks to our guests for their excellent presentations as Paul said I wrote an article for the college guide which I'm sure we have copies of outside for everybody and it was about the University of South Florida which is in Tampa and that confused me a little bit to start because Tampa is in the middle of Florida not the south part of Florida but as was explained to me the University of South Florida was actually founded before the invention of air conditioning and so it was like the southern part of Florida that you could live in it made sense then University of South Florida is a very large public research university it is actually more selective than your typical public university or community college but like almost any big diverse public institution it has a big challenge when it comes to student retention hardly any college admits only students who are most likely to succeed and so both in terms of their public mission and also their finances nearly all institutions have a vested interest in being better at helping students stay in school and graduate and you know if you care to look there's a pretty long history of academic literature around student retention that comes to some you know frankly fairly commonsensical conclusions about the correlation between certain certain kinds of student characteristics and you're likely to graduate and so we know the first generation students are like broadly speaking less likely to graduate and low income students and various other kinds of non-traditional students but that kind of information is of limited value I think to an institution that's trying to really get better at retention because if you're the University of South Florida you enroll tens of thousands of students who are in one of those categories and they're all really different from one another their needs are different their risks are different you can't just treat them all as non-traditional and you know like give them something extra to read when they enroll and hope that that is going to solve your retention problem it's not but fortunately for University of South Florida and increasingly for all universities they live in this new era of digital information that we're in now and so in addition to all of the information that they gather about students in terms of their grades and their academic work that comes through the enrollment management process which is increasingly sophisticated in a lot of institutions in terms of kind of figuring out where students are before they enter school the very kind of act of having a presence as a student on a university campus now means you're constantly engaging with all kinds of digital information systems you know the university has a learning management system like any university does where you log in and you get your course assignments and maybe you submit work and maybe you get into an online chat room or even watch some videos you're doing a lot where you're kind of engaging online and you have a student ID card which is also the card that lets you into your dorm and lets you into the library and where you buy your meals and all that information is recorded somewhere in the university system just kind of as a matter of administrative course and so what the University of South Florida did and an increasing number of institutions did was they hired with an outside organization a private organization called Civitas Learning that engages in what are called predictive analytics which is a very present phrase in higher education these days I would really point you to the research of my colleague Iris Palmer who's in the back hi Iris as well as Ernest Oswego another one of our analysts here in the higher education program they're really leading the way in terms of understanding predictive analytics they have a vendor guide that we've published recently so if you're a college and you're trying to figure out which of these firms to hire please go on our website there's a lot of great information there about predictive analytics and so what this process was able to do was to provide very specific and very real time information to the University of South Florida about which of their students particularly freshman students were at risk of dropping out in the kind of crucial vulnerable first couple of months of school and it turns out they had all that information those kind of broad correlative information in the system and that was helpful but none of those things mattered nearly as much as what they were learning from what students were doing while they were in school so the most important predictor of whether you were or were not at risk of dropping out was what you were doing were you logging on to your classes were you going to the library were you engaging in these chat rooms were you engaging with the University and your peers and your classes and the less you were engaging the more likely it was that you weren't going to be there very much longer so this creates this kind of early warning system for institutions and again that's very valuable and it's something that it's a tool that universities have now that they haven't had before but what I thought was most interesting about University of South Florida was what they did next because what they realized was that just knowing which students were at risk of dropping out wasn't enough to actually help them not drop out because there could be a lot of different reasons why you weren't going to class and you weren't logging on maybe you were having terrible, terrible problems with your living situation in which case you essentially had a residential life problem maybe you were having a really hard time paying the bills there was some kind of family financial crisis you didn't know if you were going to be able to come back for the next semester and so what you have is a financial aid problem maybe you signed up for a bunch of classes and it turned out they were the wrong classes to sign up for and you're really, really struggling and that's an academic advising problem maybe you're really struggling with mental health problems which is a real risk and a real present factor for many, many college students these days and so what you have is a health services problem the issue at the University of South Florida and I think many, many universities is that the residential life people are over here and the financial aid people are over here and the academic advising people are over here and the health services people are over here and they all work for different people and so they don't talk to one another they don't collaborate they all have their own defined jobs they work very, very hard they're very good professionals but they work on what they work on they don't work together so the University of South Florida reorganized all of those different departments under one person whose job was Vice President for Student Success which is a very unusual job title in American higher education and I think we got to think about that for a minute and I think it's possible that more students would be successful if student success was an idea that colleges were administratively organized around and so in part because the Vice President of Student Success had jurisdiction over all of these different people who were working very hard to help students every week all of those different people and about 10 other departments of the University sit down and look at what the latest numbers say from their predictive analytics dashboard because it turns out that the symptoms and the cure aren't the same thing you may know that you have a list of 20 or 30 or 50 people who are probably going to drop out pretty soon if you don't do something but what you need to do you need more than an algorithm and more than a computer in order to help them so what I think is really interesting about the University of South Florida I think this is something we're going to see more and more of going forward is this marriage of technological innovation with the predictive analytics and machine learning and all the great things we can do and for lack of a better term administrative innovation so you actually reorganize your your college or university in a way that you can use technological innovation to its best degree you know this these new data tools are not not something to be used without caution I think one of the things that again my colleagues Iris and Ernest have found in their research is that if you don't watch out you can kind of wander into some troublesome territory an algorithm is not a smart thing you don't want a computer system for example running the numbers and determining that for example on average students of color are more likely to drop out of organic chemistry and therefore we should advise them not to be doctors that would be a really bad thing to do if you don't pay attention to what the numbers are and bring the human judgment and the human wisdom that career educators bring to running colleges and universities to bear on the problem finally I will note I think there is still one missing piece of this whole this whole system even at some place like the University of South Florida which I think is pretty close to as good as it gets and that is the faculty it might be a human a door problem might be a financial problem might be a mental health problem might be another kind of problem it might be that the class isn't good enough it might be that the student isn't being well taught and that's why they're not doing well and that's obviously a challenge for anyone whose job it is to manage a college and university I congratulate both of you I'm glad I don't have that job it sounds really difficult but I do think that this is the frontier of organizing higher education and using information we've got to bring the faculty to the table we have to put these questions of how classes are designed how they're taught how they're integrated with one another how they're sequenced on the table that is a student retention challenge as well so with that thank you so much for our speakers and I think everyone's going to come up to the up now for our group discussion so everyone please come on up this is a part of the program where you all get to ask questions but before you get to ask questions I get to ask questions but first let me just say we've got a really terrific audience here we've got reporters we've got people from the House the Senate the GAO the IMF the Department of Labor we've got people from ACE and NGA and different trade associations 12 I think different universities are represented both here in the room and we've got quite a few people watching online so I think we're going to get some very good questions but let me just kind of put to all of you it's just kind of ask a question that draws out the similarities on the programs and ideas that you've talked about one is that in each of these programs it seems to be a melding of new technology and some market or finance driven imperatives to serve new students so my question is is it your sense that this is that these two things are going to drive more of what you're pioneering and if so what is the one thing or two things that would stop that what are the real barriers to you guys maybe not you taking it to scale but your idea is becoming broad in America and anybody can start well so let me let me start with the students who are incarcerated and I think that I want to say that at Rutgers the decision to do this in a committed way was in no way a market decision all of the stuff that I'm talking about about money follows an earlier decision on the part of the Rutgers leadership to do this as a part of our mission and if the money the money has been tough actually in the early years to work through because if you budget this as a separate item it turns out to be pretty expensive and so you have to think about it and it's been really years of sort of trying to think that through internally in the university I did say something about Pell I think Pell is a key here we are part of the Pell experiment and we can charge our students we can we can we can maintain Pell dollars for our students turns out to be not as many Pell dollars as we thought there would be so that's an interesting part of the story but I think what would I think more than anything else what would stop this work universities around the country are trying to get into this area and I'm committed to trying to help them do it in a wise way and in a fruitful way but one of the things that will stop this is the politicization of the population of people who are incarcerated thinking of them as only cost centers rather than potential investments places where you can really really change your world and change their world through education and so there's bad pandering politics around that population as the governor of New York state found out I'm still turning your question over in my mind a little bit one of the things that's unique about us you saw that we're a regional college we're not a community college and that is because legislatively we can't call ourselves a community college we don't have a county sponsor the nine counties that are served by NPRC are largely so rural and so so sparsely populated in some cases that a county legislature could not pony up the kind of money necessary to run a community college and so one of the things that we are we're going to struggle with is continuing that support where right now we are considered a regular expense of the commonwealth with preferred status and as I said we're still in the transition to independence we our Pell and and FIA funds come through our partner being with Gannon but when we get on to our own we're going to have to budget very carefully and we're going to have to anticipate our expenses the beauty for us is that we have no infrastructure physical infrastructure we don't have buildings I don't own any any real estate if I were to have accepted the real estate I've been offered I would be a land baron I mean the reality in Pennsylvania and I think it may be true in many other states is we overbuilt the system I don't know why nobody is talking about data data analytics nobody looks at birth rates and high school the number of students in a school district every school district has a report card that shows you how many kindergarteners there are through 12th grade and we continue to think that 18 year old somehow spring up magically you have to plant 18 year olds 18 years ago if that's your if that's your market we're not exclusively traditional age students we're looking a lot at adult learners so I think the opportunity is still there the struggle for us will be on the funding side making sure that we can make the argument to sustain our model and keep it going I want to build a little bit on Dr. Nair's point about funding but also turn your question around a little bit to be more like what could help these kinds of invitations grow I think part of the challenge here because we are talking about adult learners for the most part is finding different ways to finance career and technical education as well as traditional credit bearing is not necessarily practical to go back to a two year to finish a two year degree or four year degree but you know back to Southern Virginia part of what they're offering are these you know four month certificate classes in IT or a six month training and welding or you know X number of months in mechatronics things that have credentials that have marketable value and of course question is quality of course for these credentials but the traditional Pell Grant may not necessarily be the best way to finance it in fact a lot of these programs aren't even eligible right for Pell so one way to help finance non-traditional education quote unquote for non-traditional students quote unquote is to kind of break open college financing and think about new ways yeah title four has a lot of limitations and as you said not everything is qualifies and when you do get into the workforce side of it the characteristics that you have to have to qualify for that money are difficult to overcome and we have people very frankly in the region who don't pursue work because they don't have to and so you tell them while you're eligible for this type of funding okay you know we've got to make it so that people who want that can access it but the people who want it don't always qualify Kevin on predictive analytics stuff you and I have had this discussion but I'd like to you to share it what what do you see as the future of it how fast will it spread how what's the is this like really the new big thing in higher education or do you think it's inherently limited by something I think it will become a standard part of the administrative toolkit for people who are in charge of running colleges and universities in the future so in that sense I think it has a lot a lot of room to go I think there will be probably much more widespread adoption and we'll get better at it and learn surprising new things about how you can run an institution that's aware of its students in this way you know I mean I kind of use the a little bit of a cheeky phrase like it's time to treat students like numbers and which is always the rap on big colleges and universities well they just think on a number and my response is they don't even they don't even think you're a number they don't think you're anything you know you they don't know you're there they don't know what's going on they don't know if you're enrolled they don't know if you're coming they don't know if you're going they just don't know they're not paying attention because it's really hard to pay attention to 60,000 people simultaneously so this provides a level of awareness and a level of timeliness and a level of specificity to understanding students in a balanced statistical way that I think will help institutions like all that said it's it doesn't change the financial aid challenge it doesn't change the health services challenge it doesn't change the fact that you might be assigned to a roommate who you're not getting along with very well so I don't think that it'll you know I think it it will have a significant effect on the abilities of institutions to be successful but it won't sort of solve the problem by itself yeah I was gonna say can you get maybe a 50,000 you know foot view because you're at Lumina you're you're seeing a lot of programs a lot of us are looking at you know our individual ones but you're seeing a lot and maybe you can draw a thread through a lot of this well I'm analytics to see if Kevin agrees or not and in one comment just generally about the adults of Pete but in terms of of the predictive analytics work which I am a big opponent of you add some caution and I would just add another that as good as the predictive analytics systems can be one word of caution is that they won't be a silver bullet if an institution doesn't have the general infrastructure in a place that can support a predictive analytic system so you can't overlay a predictive analytic system on top of structure that is just not capable of working a predictive analytic system we provided some support to a university that just the systems were capable of connecting or speaking to each other and therefore a predictive analytic system couldn't help because the the institution just wasn't ready for it so that would just be another caution that I would add to the the good comments that that Kevin already offered and to the adults comment one of the I think challenges might be this is something that we see at the state level right now many states are still focused or state legislators are still focused on a six-year graduation cohort rate that looks at first-time full-time entering students and many institutions aren't rewarded for the incredible work that they are doing for returning adult students who aren't counted in that first-time full-time cohort rate and so how can we incentivize more institutions to enroll more adults and to do well by those adults that they are enrolling who might have some college but no credential when people are still fixated on the small cohort of students that are coming in at first-time full-time and are are we not getting at some point better data on transfer students those who are not full-time first-time part-time students and I'm confused as to where that is in the process maybe somebody knows but when we get that will that be an incentivizing event for anybody in other words you know we were in a college guide we like to think that we create incentives for colleges to do the right thing and disincentives to do the wrong thing but we're only as good as the data that we have with better data do you get better incentives to do what Danette just said I think that there are there's certainly the data available at the state level the better data are becoming available at the federal level I do think that it depends on whether or not people want to use the data that are available it depends on the leadership at both the state and the federal level so if you have a governor that's going to insist that we are looking at adults we are trying to incentivize thinking about how states are considering adult affordability ensuring that more adults are getting into and through credential programs but it has to start with leadership of both institutional leaders and leaders at different levels as well yeah I mean I'll say so you know we have now recently at the federal level we have completion rates for part-time students who we didn't have them before we have completion rates for inbound transfer students so we have a much fuller picture and for some institutions that serve a lot of non-traditional students particularly in the two-year sector it's made an enormous difference statistically in terms of being able to really fully look at the whole student population and come to some fair judgments particularly since they also added a couple extra years on the back end so we can go out to eight years so we can sort of see the full picture for the first time you know that said I think institutions that were the data we had was about the students who were broadly speaking more likely to graduate right first-time full-time degree-seeking students so if you were as an institution we're struggling there for whatever reason what we're not seeing is that you were doing way way better with your part-time students or inbound transfer that's generally not the pattern so it kind of gets to some of the issues the fundamental issues that the net brought up which is there are just real needs for investment and capacity in our institutions that serve particularly diverse students that are on address right now and it's a big challenge at the better level and at the state and local level and what's our definition of student success you know you mentioned the there's some fairness being applied to the two-year sector now but as colleges of opportunity we very often see people who don't need a full degree that's not what they're there for they get coursework that enables them to move to a better job be promoted in the job that they're in they're successful they came and got what they needed and were successful but we get penalized when those students don't finish because they say well that's attrition well not if the person never intended to complete a degree in the first place but it's a very difficult thing to measure yeah I would say two things one we can look at post-college outcomes in the labor market in much more specifically than we could before so if we're funneling a lot of students in we're adding value they're getting better jobs we should be able to pick that up using those numbers and also there's a there's a credentialing opportunity there right instead of just you only get a two-year degree or a four-year degree if we can actually move to more of a competency-based credentialing system where people can walk out with it one they'll be in a better position to get a job and you'll be able to count that as a success when we start when we're kind of in the accounting business we're very much about stackable credentials that's the term of art all right open it up to the to the crew here we've got some microphones and since coming up we'll we'll start with this gentleman in the second row if that's okay and please state your name and your association if you care to Hi Steve Crawford GW Institute of Public Policy in listening to these inspiring stories about how to promote access and retention and completion and success I'm thinking in particular about Kevin's statement about the faculty as a possible impediment and as a faculty member and I'm thinking about the conversations going on around town about another part of campus life and that is rating colleges on their success in their graduates getting jobs how much money they earn loan default rates etc we all know that college scorecard will soon be by program not just by college and we all think that'll be a major improvement I think we all think that but that does that puts a lot of pressure on the faculty to say I want students who are going to be good I don't want to make great efforts to keep marginal students and help them struggle through to completion if they're not likely to be very effective students going and get a good job and make my program look good in the ratings that are going on and the comparison shopping that we're trying to make easier with things like credential engine so my question to the panel and those of you who feel ready to answer it is how do you deal how does the faculty deal how do the systems it's a collective action problem at one level deal with this tension between trying to look good at the sort of output end and promote access retention and completion by students who traditionally had some some challenges well I'll answer take a crack at that myself you know in the Washington College guys we don't we compare like to like so we take it into account the demographics of the students a university gets we compare them to schools that have similar demographics and if they on our different measures of earnings and loan payback and you know a host of other things do better than the mean they get points if they do worse than the mean they get less points so in that way I don't you know were the Washington Monthly the ultimate arbiter of what is good and I think it should be but it's not yet you know I don't think the faculty would be put at a disadvantage to go out and teach the students who actually come in rather than the ones they want to get this gentleman here thank you I'm Alan Sessoms I'm the managing partner of what we call a higher education innovation group I've been the president of three universities including the University District of Columbia and I have two questions the first one to Kevin I think data analytics are really important and they will focus on some of the key issues the students have but then what do you do with it because for example most of the institutions don't have the resources to intervene in the mental health space they don't have the resources to intervene in the residential problem space so we get the information and we say okay what the hell we do now and we have to think about whether that becomes a problem for the institutions in fact the second question is on teaching students who are incarcerated back in the day it was a little long and when the state started cutting back on funding for education that master became well why should we educate these malcontents which we should be spending money educating the folks who will actually take care of the business so those programs went away and in some cases were legislated away how do we deal with that political reality I mean on the first question it's I think you're actually right and I think I mean like a broad observation about the way that many colleges and universities are set up administratively is that they're not often designed to invest money now that pays often the future right and so that's one of the barriers to kind of getting these systems in place is you have to kind of get all the data together and you've got to put some money on the table and you know nonprofit institutions and I understand this you know they're just struggling to kind of like make sure enough money is coming in to pay the bills so you can come back around and do the next thing next year particularly a lot of our private nonprofit institutions which really just kind of run a tuition but even public institutions that are you know under resource to start with and getting less now from the government than they got you know say 10 years ago so in that budget situation say we've got to find even more money right now because we know it's going to pay off in five years and 10 years that's a hard leadership decision to make and I think that's a public policy challenge and I think that as we support our institutions we need to you know give them the capacity to sort of build their own ability to respond whether it's by getting getting better at using information or getting better or reacting to information because otherwise you just kind of stuck on this treadmill and you don't make any progress I would want Todd to answer the second part of your question but I just want to say one thing one of the things that excited me when it was in fact Danette that introduced me to Todd and his program was I remember those days when law makers were saying why should we fund free college for you know convicts when I have to pay for my kids education and tap my 401k what is interesting about this model is that these are these are full paying tuition full paying students they're coming with their own dollars and the universities as Todd explained and they're looking for people they have fewer and fewer young people coming in so they're in the market to try something different try something new innovate to bring in those dollars and so you can see the potential here of you know we have as Todd said this huge 1.6 million population of incarcerated individuals that's going to be drawn down over the next 20 years and this decline in student potential students and you can imagine universities seeing the the New Jersey model and saying you know that's you know not that there's you know we should be driven by buddy but let us let us understand the universities like every institution need to bring in revenues to operate becoming advocates for prison in car sort of you know education in prisons and after prisons and when you have major institutions at the state level advocating for something like this because it's in their financial interest as well as in their moral interest then I think you can you know the politics of this can turn around a lot easier well let's spend it on Pell but so so as my kids gets Pell and and and hey the politics is tough there's no getting around but I'd rather have a politics in which universities are advocating for prison programs because it's in their financial interest to do so and they're the ones walking the halls of the state house pressuring legislatures to do this then then not so at Rutgers University Newark any student in New Jersey who is accepted to Rutgers gets a package put this is a commitment we make to any any New Jersey resident gets a package put together that will enable them to attend so finances will never be the reason why a person is not coming to Rutgers University Newark so that sets the backdrop for a conversation about students who are in prison and I I think your point about the politics of this is a good one I was giving a public talk a few years ago a couple of years ago about this work and somebody said I'm going to tell my son to go do some burglaries so he can go to go to college for free in New Jersey and in that moment you know every once in a while you get the right answer comes to you you know and I said go ahead you think that's a good deal for your son do it and you and what you could feel in the room was nobody thinks their son should commit a burglary in order to get an education they want their son to get an education so we if you get accepted to Rutgers University Newark you will come here and get an education at the 34th best on our rank in that ranking system the 34th best university in the nation so and and if you are incarcerated you will use your Pell Dollars you have a lifetime limit on your Pell Dollars this is why we have to make sure that everything this is why it's a real issue for me because if you teach a class to a student in prison and they're using Pell Dollars pay for it and they get out and they can't use it to get a degree then you've actually exploited them for your own profit right so we have to make sure that what goes on in the prisons really does lead to a degree but they're using their lifetime Pell they have zero income to you know 10 cents an hour income to pay and you're organizing your resources so that you can do that to give them an education so that when they come out they can become students and become contributors to society now if you're opposed to that then you're opposed to that but it's hard to understand why you'd want to not to have the other trajectory for those students where they're they're not allowed to use their limited Pell eligibility to get in college and they're not allowed to change the trajectory trajectory of lives and when they come back to Newark, New Jersey we've got a thousand people in Newark every year for the prison system in New Jersey when they come back to Newark, New Jersey they don't have those choices that we have put them on the line and if that's what you think is good public policy then we have a disagreement about good public policy but if your son wants to come to Rutgers University, Newark and gets accepted we'll make sure they they have a financial package that enables them to attend that's what makes the difference by the way Chris Christie was the governor when we started this week we can also have for folks who are watching online you can you can send in questions and Riker's going to tell me how to do that at New America on Twitter at New America Ed on Twitter thank you so all of you feel free to send in your questions other questions this gentleman right here my name is John I'm from the National Governors Association and so it shouldn't hopefully come as a surprise that higher education especially affordability and accessibility is a big issue on the elections that are going to take place in a couple of weeks so as you know we support governors in a lot of ways as they will be taking their seats at least 18 new governors just by virtue of folks that are retiring or our term limited will be taking their seats in January so I'm interested in what practical advice any of you would have on governors looking to either institute or scale any of the programs that you have addressed here today I can't I can't help have this because this is why I came here to be able to talk to people like you so every state is trying to reduce its prison population there is no program that has been offered to people who are incarcerated has even half a success rate on reducing recidivism of college programs in prison nothing comes close as a recidivism reduction program alone I don't think that's the way you want to evaluate it but if that's the way you want to evaluate it it is there we now educate five percent of the people who are incarcerated in New Jersey we think we could at least double that so there's a large pool out there of people who could benefit from this and there's a state university in every state there are community colleges in every state they have as their mission educating the citizens of that state the people who are in prison are the citizens of that state there's a marriage to be made here and it's straightforward and it doesn't cost that much and there's some costs getting it started but once you get it going it could be at cost or even produce excess revenues I think one very practical step at least as far as rural higher ed is simply just to map where the higher education deserts are in a particular state I mean that's a question that we don't even know the urban institute actually has a beautiful map of this but you know in your particular state where is that desert and then there are clearly resources around the country for people who've set up successful models for how you address that and different models may work in different communities but just finding where those deserts are the first step one thing that I I just came from the rural community college alliance meeting a month or so ago one things that concerns me and if I were talking to governors who are looking at the issue and trying to solve it is do we need to have the same thing in all these places I'm talking with colleagues who are saying we need to have residence halls you have to have athletic teams and I'm saying that's those are all nice things you know I was fortunate enough to go to a four-year residential college and I refer to it as four years of deferred adulthood you know I didn't have to grow up for a long time but the students that I serve the people who come to my institution are very adult in a lot of ways they have families they have jobs they have responsibilities and you know I facetiously mentioned the climbing wall and the lazy river earlier but that's a reality we keep adding these things and you know when my colleagues at other two-year institutions start talking about replicating the residential college experience a red flag goes up for me I don't think that that is the future I think what we're doing is disruptive I think what NPRC represents is a change in the way that we look at higher education and its delivery and the utility of it we're very much interested in career and technical education and yes we will serve a transfer mission as well but I don't have to have residence halls I don't have to have dining halls I don't have to have athletic teams for our students to be successful in life quick anecdote we interviewed a woman who is the president of a very very fine exclusive liberal arts college that does a tremendous job of recruiting and graduating lower income students and I asked her you know what are some problems and she said well the higher income students want things that make it tough for us to afford the lower income students give me an example she said well they wanted organic zorgia grass the grass on the campus was they were using chemicals or whatever we so we had to go to an all I forget what the zorgia grass was but there was a particular high maintenance zorgia grass that if they didn't provide the parents and the students would think I'll go to the school across the road so often these lazy rivers and so forth and it's an overused you know metaphor but I mean it's true that there's lots of this is often driven not by the students who desperately need a sound education but those that can afford you know a lot to get zorgia grass yes Hi my name is Kathleen I'm from EAP and this is a question for Ann and Joe answer can you speak up just sorry is the mic work yeah so I'm Kathleen I'm from EAP this is a question for Ann and Joe so in that in these higher ed deserts how are you facilitating collaboration between institutions to share resources and share space and to since internet access is a problem how are you identifying and reaching the students that are eligible for these programs that's all you Ann deferred to me very thank you I think the one of my trustees spoke at my inauguration a couple of weeks ago one of the things that Kate Brock said in her remarks was about how much trust had gone into the establishment of the college and that really is these partnerships and collaboration really are based on trust and from my perspective mutual respect that we you know I said earlier compliment not compete well we're going to compete that that's inevitable but I believe that what we're doing is complementary to the mission of the other institutions our mission is very simple it is to serve the post-secondary needs of the unserved and underserved residents of northern Pennsylvania so that's a pretty broad and we can work with others to utilize what what I refer to maybe I shouldn't but I say there's a lot of lazy assets out there there are institutions that are not using their laboratories in evenings or weekends there are classrooms that are underutilized there's space in different career and technical centers or community education centers or or other institutions that we can partner and collaborate there's some revenue coming to the institution for use of those facilities and we haven't taken on the overhead and the infrastructure costs of of building a lab so it's you know the I hope I'm answering your question but that that's the the approach we've taken is to work with others and recognize when when is possible I mean we don't have to say there's the student and we're going to fight over and rolling them we can look at this student and say who serves them best and maybe long term we're both we're both going to see them be well served I will say one thing about collaboration is not just within the institutions but I think these institutions are unique because they also collaborate with the business community and the community around them I didn't mention that in addition to you know Pennsylvania and Virginia Texas has a few of these now Maryland has higher education centers as well and another disruptive element of what these these new institutions are bringing to the table is that they are collaborating with the economic development authorities in their region too so that the coursework is actually narrowly tailored to success as is defined by these institutions which is career success and labor market success as well as credentialing success so that collaboration is also proving to be extremely important I'm glad you mentioned that because I was remiss and not saying I believe that a big part of our mission is to be an engine for economic development in the region to listen to those employers and work well with them to make sure that we're all moving forward yes yeah please y'all lady hi I'm Richelle with the college board I have a question about student debt many prospective students see the potential for accumulating student debt as a barrier to seeking higher education what opportunities do you see for institutions programs to reduce the the burden of student debt for students who are post graduation or current students I will just answer anecdotally one of the things that has been attractive to students about us is that very few students are incurring much debt the cost of attendance is low I said we're $185 a credit hour right now and that's for a regular adult or regular student we charge $60 a credit hour for dual enrollment students who are in high school because they're not eligible for any sort of aid we keep the price down for them we've had students graduate with no debt we're not charging fees we're not charging very often the problem with college tuition is it's not telling you the whole cost there's a lot of other expenses that go into that and especially in the residential experience we're just charging for courses right now and so you can predict what your cost is going to be and the young woman I was talking about earlier Tesla graduated with a two-year degree in business is working and had no debt because it was affordable college with no fees and no debt how can that be that's terrible what a concept and I would just add that we're trying to get states to think differently about how they're supporting adults in terms of financial aid many statewide financial programs are really targeted toward recent high school completers and so we're asking states to think about what an adult promise program would look like what would it look like if you included adults in in those efforts we're also asking institutions to think about what it would look like if you really expanded prior learning not just to prior learning assessment but what if you had stronger partnerships with your employers such that students could get credit for the work that they are doing and all the training that they're getting from their employers if they can demonstrate that they have mastery over some areas that you actually offer courses for can they get credit for that and then move further along toward a credential such that they don't have to pay to take those courses over again so that they're so there are ways to think more creatively about making credentials more affordable so that students don't have to take on more debt that they need to the gentleman here thank you initially college and college credit or college graduation with association I'll get there in a second okay great college credit or graduation with no debt my undergraduate education cost me $32 a semester in the city university of new york there are ways that we have done it in the past if we had the will to do it now my name is fred winter I'm a retiree from the fund for an improvement of post-secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education which in Washington terms means now I'm a consultant Dr. Howard, I'd like to go back to your introduction you talked about institutional isomorphism and the way institutions are responding to the ranking surveys that have been published do you have hard data on how students are using and responding to the rankings that would complement that very interesting so I didn't look at student behavior but I have a hunch you didn't ask me about my hunches so I won't respond in that way but I looked at institutional behavior not student behavior my sense is that students from more affluent families are looking at the U.S. news and world report rankings and perhaps being influenced by them certainly parental behaviors being influenced by those rankings but I don't have hard data on that so several parents worked for that yeah bless you mm-hmm a little support for Dinez's point is that I think the figure is either 70 or 80 percent of students attend college do so within an hour's drive of their home or something like that so the student who's foot loose enough to choose a college somewhere other than where they live is in that 20 percent and that's who that's who we're talking about so the impact of the rating systems is directly correlated with income of affluent yeah I mean the upper middle class and wealthy drive a lot in this country as we're learning more and more young lady here hi my name is Amy Smith I work with National Campus Leadership Council so we have a network of student leaders across the country so my question is I guess a little context we're all saying that you know today's universities institutions or credentialing agencies don't reflect today's students and I would argue my organization would argue that maybe we haven't been listening to the students about what they need all along and so with these new innovative ideas I'm curious to know how you're going to create infrastructure so that you're consistently listening to student voices and the data analytics piece is very interesting I think but I think coupled with student stories and making sure that you're always going back to the students to understand what they need so that we don't get 50 years from today with today's institutions not reflecting those future students thank you yeah I mean it's uh there's a whole field of trying to get different kinds of information and understand it like we like the explosion of available information is way ahead of our ability both to understand what it means and then to react to what it means I mean there are like consulting firms right here in the DC area where all they do and they mostly are working on the behalf of corporations is like throw a huge net through the entire world of media and social media and try to figure out what it means for the company's reputation and bottom line and it's all like natural language processing and then they were getting good at that and now they have to figure out what emojis mean so I mean because like for real it's a non-trivial part of the dialogue and so they've you know they kind of figure these things out and so you know I think that can be part of it like I mean students students are always engaging and communicating but in a way that's maybe a little more accessible to institutions there's a kind of a surveillance piece of it that starts to get a little scary when you think about it so we need to be super careful that we respect student privacy but it does feel like there are a lot of opportunities to not just assume we know what the students are thinking but actually to ask them and to see for ourselves so the students who come to Rutgers from the prison system are we have a prison review board it's called of a faculty and staff who review any applicant who wants to come on to campus from prison and go over their work academic work in prison and their readiness for being on campus we've every student we propose to them has been accepted so we've never had a no now I don't know what'll happen when we get a no but those 145 that's exactly the number we propose and they come to campus and they are expected to join a Mountain View community that is a community of students and they will in the first year they take their first college class as a unit together and that class studies college success what do we know about college success and then they go into their majors they all get an academic mentor in the Mountain View community and they all get a personal mentor in the academic community and so there's this a lot of peer support going on because frankly their community understands more what they're going through than anybody else in the university but they have direct access to leadership in the service areas on each of those three campuses and so I hear a lot about because we talk with them a lot and we highlight them a lot they're almost never does an issue come out on something that Rutgers is doing that we don't talk about one of those students in one way or another we're quite proud of that work and so there's this way in which they have become a part of what we listen to in doing our work Rutgers University has this Newark has an honors program that is called that is for students not the traditional honors side but students who have shown great success in overcoming barriers and and we admit a handful of students to a residential program there every year and every year some of those students or people come to us from the prison system This is perhaps my favorite question because we've we try to be more intentional about not having conversations like this about students without having student voices present in the conversation and I spoke about Jamika who was one of our panelists yesterday and she said that now that she's graduated her college constantly calls on her to be the voice of students and so they called on her recently and said you know we we heard that there's an issue with hunger insecurity and so Jamika how do we find these students who are hungry what do we do and she said have a meeting and serve food like the students and so there are these you know common sensical things that administrators seem to just not understand and and so we're trying to really just be mindful of that at likewise we often ask you know how can students be more college ready and we're trying to turn that around and say how can colleges be more student ready and so these are just these little things that we're trying to constantly remind ourselves not to put the onus on the students but to put the responsibility back on ourselves thank you which is kind of the opposite of the way the higher education system is set up exactly all of us who went to college you know we were told hey sink or swim it's up to you you'll make the best of this or you'll fail and there was just no sense that we were taught or that we got in terms of feedback that it was on them to make us succeed and you know that's fine with very well prepared students who are probably going to succeed anyway it's it's just it's insane in a system where you know the country sinks or swims by the percentage of our citizens that have higher education credential do we have some more questions and if so maybe we've only got a couple of minutes so maybe we can double or triple up the questions we'll start with this gentleman my name is Artem I'm from Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce my question is these are all good ideas so expensive access and expending opportunities to more people but how do we deal with the entrenched culture of meritocracy that sort of has been developed that that stands in a position that stands as a barrier to many of these things okay do we have any others yeah this lady here hi Janane with American Council on Education piggybacking on his question is also how do we think about new ways to evaluate students and programs because I think even sitting here today as much as we might not like some other rankings most of us probably went to some of the institutions listed in the top 20 of those rankings so going with him these entrenched notions of meritocracy and value along with how do we incorporate more systems of evaluation that will span the reach of the students we're serving and any more okay let's lightning round of answers from our from our esteemed panel on the evils of meritocracy and new models of evaluating students I guess the answer is go vote so the in the last 10 years only two Rutgers students have won a Riddle Wilson Fellowship and both of them took their first college course in prison so so merit if you count it right it's not a problem and you know I would say to your institutions you'll see a lot of literature that calls us democracies colleges you know that they're the open door the opportunity to to come in and it's on us I think somebody said earlier it's on us to me to help people be successful an open door can't be a revolving door it has to be it has to be one that provides support for the student that takes the initiative to cross that threshold and help them be successful you guys ought to run for office you're very good at this I do want to say that we count merit badly because it's my dad has a lot of money and has given a lot of money to the university therefore that's meritocracy that's not meritocracy we know that so meritocracy is the students at Rutgers who you know grew up in a single parent family with parents going in and out of prison and that student is getting a 4.0 in biology as a biology major let's make investments there and make sure those students have everything they need to succeed yeah I just want to say one thing out of valuation the federal government spends an enormous amount of money subsidizing the cost of higher education and almost nothing studying whether what works in higher education as generous as the Lumen Foundation and the other foundations are they can't do it by themselves and we cannot rely on institutions to voluntarily ask tough questions about themselves so we had a gentleman here from Fipsi from the department of education if you're out there I don't know if you're more anonymous in this room that's a good question if you're out there if you're out there in any position to affect federal spending priorities for relatively speaking not an enormous amount of money we could learn an awful lot of new things that we need to know about what works and what doesn't work all right ladies and gentlemen I want to thank again New America I want to thank Riker our guy who put this together my colleagues at the Washington Monthly Alice and Norman and everybody and a big round of applause for a great panel