 One thing to remember, you know, there's lots of credentials as we popping up as we know, but there's still a credential that remains very important that doesn't always get put into those discussions about disruption and credentials and that's the degree and of course the universities are the primary and the only issuer of those credentials, but they've also now are Getting themselves more well-rounded issuing different credentials and certificates as well. So we thought it was really important to have University representation not only in the audience, but of course on the stage So I'm very excited to welcome Ronald Mason, Jr. He served as president of the University of District of Columbia since 2015 UDC is a very unique university in house. So houses a community college And it's the institution serves as a critical access point in this region for those looking for higher ed We're very pleased to have president here today Prior coming into UDC. Mr. Mason was a seventh president of the Southern University and A&M College system Which is the only historically black university system in the United States Briefly, so he also served as president of Jackson State University An earlier in his career he served 18 years at Tulane where he held appointments as senior vice president and General counsel and his vice president for finance and operations Among the many other awards and activities he's been involved in president Mason has served on the president's board of Advisors for HBCUs. He served on the National Advisory Committee on institutional quality and integrity and The American Council on Education Board of Directors He's received both his BA and his Juris Doctorate degree from Columbia University So again, very excited to have his peer and share from perspective. Please welcome president Mason Good afternoon How's everybody this afternoon I thought a lot about what I wanted to say to this group but after hearing the prior speaker, I think I'm going to modify it a little bit and talk add a little bit about Adderall and and Credentialing and so on and so forth But let me just see who I'm talking to now. How many folks here are from the district? Can you raise your hand? Oh good. Oh good. So it's a district crowd and me being the University of the district That's important for me to know who I'm talking to Let me Let me start with Adderall and so I had a son in middle school who By all observations was a bright young man But he'd make a's and F's and Depending on the semester he might switch up which course he had a an or an F in right and he was he was diagnosed with ADHD and we put him on Adderall and After a couple of months. He just refused to take it again. He said dad like I just don't like the way it makes me feel And so we didn't force him and at the end of the day He ended up graduating from high school with honors Score to perfect score on his SAT Got a full ride to an engineering scholarship Where he went to college and proceeded to make a's and F's And so now he's traveling a road that will take me to The next thing I want to talk about Which is the work we're doing at the University of the District of Columbia And I'm gonna have a few slides to walk us through that But we've been doing a lot of time spending a lot of time thinking about What higher education should be And you know in the past it's been sort of a highway where you have one on ramp and You travel to one exit and then you get off with a degree But we're starting to understand more and more that it's it's more like a series of on and off ramps and In order to be able to serve the students that we in particular serve we have to think through You know how to enable that student to reach his or her or their highest level of human potential Which changes over time which means that they may be in one place Potential wise at one stage of their life But then need to get back on and reach a higher level and we'll talk about that a little bit But in order to do that we had to sort of rethink This this question of credentialing Because one of the other things we're going to talk about is that you know the education system in America Really is about it's a mining operation You know we identify We extract And we refine and produce and put out into the market human talent that's our job and What I'm going to talk about a little bit later on is that we've been very narrow in our ability to do that work Which is why America has a talent crises today? We have workers, but we don't have his talent. We don't have people who are Reaching the highest level of their potential to serve the economy that our nation needs to to develop and so One of the new programs that we just just put in place is something called the capital builders The capital builders Center and what it is it's It's a program where we use a Gallup to Gallup the Gallup poll organization to identify The top 20 High school graduates in the district who have a knack for entrepreneurship And it's a it's an interesting assessment too because unlike Standardized tests typical standardized tests, you know and I do a lot of work with the educational testing service With the council for the advancement of the aid to education which has their own assessment to there are a lot of assessment Tools out there and really all they are are Tools to determine whether or not someone is qualified to do whatever it is. You're asking them to do But this particular and most of them are race and gender Correlated not racing gender racing class correlated, but this particular to BP 10 isn't And so we administered it to well as many high school graduates as we could public high school in the country I mean in the district and And we found the top 20, but what we noticed was that We have a great deal of difficulty finding students from Ward 8 And Ward 7 in the district those are the two poorest wards in the district But when we gave this race and class neutral assessment it turned out that some of the high scores on This assessment came from Ward 7 and 8 Which brings me back to my son because we realized that students that make a's and f's Really generally speaking end up being entrepreneurs They don't make a's and b's they make a's and f's because they're very smart, but they're also very high risk takers And so this particular assessment Sort of cuts through that at least we hope it does we're starting to sort of study it But what it also identifies is something they call grit You know a spirit of determination to do whatever it is you set your mind to do and so the byproduct of this too We're hoping is that not only will we identify? Students who have a high knack for entrepreneurship, but also Who have the grit to overcome the challenges that these young people have coming out of war at 7 and 8? To get the ultimate goal, which is a bachelor's degree, which is really the credential that our nation needs So having said that Let me just say a little bit about now about the equity imperative I'm gonna see if the slides work and so we've been as I said rethinking the university and If you're from the district you've probably heard this phrase from our mayor more than once We need to put more people on the pathway to the middle class and We made the case to the mayor that in the district the pathway to the middle class Which is education and I'll show you why Really is a four-lane highway up through the 12th grade and then it turns into a one-lane dirt road with a lot of potholes at the at the end of the public education pipeline Which is the University of the District of Columbia? It will explain why there as well? But the crowning moment of this effort we took this slide all over the district We turned it into a political campaign in order to get the resources. We need needed to do the work But at the state of the Union State of the district address the mayor Made a statement that was dear to my heart. She said The president of UDC has finally got me to understand that higher education doesn't stop That public education doesn't stop at the 12th grade and so with that We got some money to actually get the work done with that. We needed to do and so the the sub theme here is Completing the pathways to the middle class and the mayor directly Correctly noted that education is the the the primary pathway to get there Let's see now. I'm not sure what I'm clicking at. Is it here? Is it here? What's my tech guy? Here we go. Good. I got it. And so You know in America median middle-class income is $59,000 but in the district it's $75,000 Medium house so incomes if you break it down by race If you are white, it's a hundred and twenty-seven Asian ninety-nine Latino sixty-four and black is thirty seven thousand dollars and So you can see Let me give you another another little slide here And so in the district the median salaries are sixty thousand With a bachelor's degree you earn sixty five With a high school degree you earn thirty, but look at the distribution of those credentials Only twenty-five percent of African Americans forty percent of Latinos have some sort of college level credential But if you're white, ninety-two percent have have that credential and so You know these folks that look like this Really all the ones that need a pathway to the middle-class and they want to experience the same type of middle-class values that everybody else does Let's see here you got me here good if I do this and it doesn't work just just do it And there their pathway is public education because in the district the P-12 system is seventy percent African American seventeen percent Latino and Eighty percent economically disadvantaged up too many too fast And that feeds directly into the only public university in the district, which is the University of the District of Columbia Where we're sixty percent African American ten percent Latino and forty percent economically disadvantaged but sixty five percent of our students are a degree-seeking students are district residents and a hundred percent of our workforce development students Are district residents one of the unique things about UDC is that we really have three doors in We have a workforce training door that is free to every district resident We have a community college door that is open enrollment and we have a selective admissions door But but the point is that the university we're designing every door will lead to the next door When I when I talked about on and off ramps, you know Some will come to us with the potential for a workforce certification But then in that process the light will go off and they'll get into an associates degree program and then That light will go off again, and they'll end up getting a bachelor's degree And we've had several that have have already gone through that entire process But their pathway is incomplete because how many people here remember the control board so in the in the in the late 90s the federal government took over the district had to Cut the government budget fired a lot of people Reset the future But Alice Rivlin who chaired the control board for a few years made this statement recently That of all the cuts they made in hindsight She felt like the cuts to the University of the District of Columbia were much too deep Now since then the district has sort of reset itself And if you've noticed they've reinvested in most of the major institutions the libraries are becoming world-class The parks and recreation system are becoming world-class the public K-12 facilities and some of the schools are becoming world-class The one thing that they left off the list was was the public University which in a way ties it all together But I'm happy to say that this campaign we did was successful and the mayor announced that she Was going to make a down payment on the strategic plan that we have in place and that down payment was pretty good So now we can start to join the ranks of the other world-class institutions in the district now And this is not a heavy lift because if in the district We spent only one point one percent of our local funds budget on public higher education that's compared to three point eight percent in One of those is Virginia one is Maryland and the five point eight percent is national and all we're asking to do is Go from let me go back and even with that lower level of investment that very low investment You know depending on who you asked we're doing a pretty good job We're not going to ever be in the top 10 us news and world reports schools in America, and that's because we don't want to be We're not the Harvard was sort of the anti Harvard Harvard's expensive. It's elite, and it's very exclusive We want to educate everybody that walks in our door and help them reach their highest level of human potential at an affordable price And so we have all these neat national rankings we saw to speak to the kind of institution that we are and Where's my back up and so at the end of the day all we really asked to do was go from one point one percent To one point seven two percent over four years, and I think we'll end up getting there now And if we can with a variety of credentialing options You know we believe that we can do make a big dent in the level of talent that's developed to serve the economy of the district And let me just speak a second about our this graduation rate up here You see we say it's 17 percent now, and we think it'll get up to 54 percent by 20 28 But here's the here's the point of it so graduation rates in America are Come from a national definition and It is the number of students that start in year X and how many of them graduate six years later, right? And so in our case we have 2,000 students coming in in their freshman year, but only 500 of them are actually first time full-time Freshman that you can expect to graduate six years later and for that group On a bachelor's track, it's about a 35 percent graduation rate, which is not great, but I've seen worse But then we have the open enrollment door, which we call a community college And that's a three-year graduation rate three years later and for that group It's about a seven percent graduation rate because it's open enrollment But that that's not great, but it's not bad either compared to other community colleges I've seen so the graduation rate is a blended rate With open enrollment in bachelor's track, and that's why we end up at 17 percent But the point is this how many people know what the tag scholarships are Those are those are great those are federal scholarships that go to high school graduates in the district To go to school anywhere but UDC Anywhere in the country but UDC and so a lot of them though end up leaving and coming back to UDC But they don't count toward the graduation rate because they didn't start as freshmen at UDC We're also very very heavily part-time because a lot of our students work part-time students don't count toward the graduation rate and then There's another one in there, but you get the point The point is that we're never going to win a graduation rate contest because we just don't have those kinds of students that we educate Oh, we also don't have student apartments, which makes the education challenge even even more difficult So I needed to explain that but at the end of the day we think we can double or triple the number of credentialed Qualified people that come out of public education in the district if the mayor keeps a word and continues the investment into UDC Now those are the local challenges that we've been able to overcome, right? But there's a big national sort of structural challenge That I want to talk a little bit about And I want to engage you in the conversation as much as I can because this is something that I've had a growing insight into and And there was recently an article in Atlantic magazine. I don't know if you all saw it It was called the new aristocracy The nine point nine percent that anybody see that or read it. Okay. You should read this. It's about 50 pages long So if you want to train somewhere and you're looking for something good to read It would be a good read But I think it helps explain Something I've been trying to figure out for several years now and let me explain to you what it is so in public education right We always talk about public education reform and I've been around this industry to see about three cycles of reform and What happens is that? The students are not getting educated and then there's a public outcry. There's outrage and Then there's a call for reform and then these industries crop up to try to figure out What's wrong to try to develop products to solve the problem to try to be consultants on how to fix the schools to fix the problem and then at the end of the day it doesn't work and There's a public outrage and the cycle starts again And I've been through about three of these cycles and I've you know, I kept asking myself You know if you listen to what the prior speaker said about the wealth That's available to us about the modern tools that are available to us about the nation's need for talent You know you have to ask yourself Why can't we figure out a way? to fix our public education system and I think it has something to do with that article about The new aristocracy and a talented temp And so one of the other things we've learned at UDC and we're trying to get the faculty to buy into is that you know our students come from a different world from that that we can even imagine and You know if you're my age you we have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from us And so we're trying to grant transition our teaching Methodology from being a say a sage on the stage to a guide on the side Where it's a teaching and learning environment and we understand that we walk this journey with the student And that we have as much to learn as they have to teach and vice versa And that even that student that comes in as a freshman today Will be a different student four years from now because the world is changing so fast And so I want you to be We want to be each other's guides on the side as I work through this this piece that I'm about to work through now and so So this is the cover this is the cover of the magazine, right and it's called of the 9.9 percent the new American aristocracy the class divide is already toxic and it's fast becoming unbridgeable and You're probably part of the problem now Which means us I'm gonna try to work as much as I can from this lies as other slides But I think I think I can kind of explain it from here And so this is the way America is divided up Point one percent of the Population about a hundred and sixty thousand households Own in control about 22 percent of the wealth in 2012 right and 90 percent of the wealth is Allocated to or in the hands of I'm sorry. Yeah in the hand. I'm sorry scratch that 35 percent of the wealth is in the hands of about 90 percent of the population Okay, and so that's 45 percent of the wealth in basically 90.1 percent of the population But the 9.9 percent The the ones in the middle control most of the wealth as a group and that's 55 percent and in that 55 percent the median net worth is about 2.4 million dollars Which is 25 times the median net worth of the people in the 90 percent You follow me and in that 9.9 percent 88 percent or white okay, which would make perfect sense You know because we live in a country that's built on a philosophy of a white privilege It's just just a fact. And so what happens is that? If you notice from 1930 to 2010 the wealth of the Top 1% the goal line right I Was high and then it dipped and it went back up again and Then the wealth of the bottom 90 percent Was about in the same place in 1930 and then it went up and it came back down again, okay but the wealth of the 9.9 percent stayed fairly steady and So the transfer of wealth in this country really takes place between the highest and the lowest parts of our society and if you look at what's happening now with the tax code and And other things that are going on you can see this goal line Continuing to go up and the black line continuing to go down right and So this is sort of the way America is set up But the point of the article is this It's that the 9.9 percent Are the beneficiaries of our system of education? Because remember I said earlier that we become very skilled at identifying Extracting and developing a very specific type of talent and that specific type of talent is the talent that's in that 9.9 percent Which is why our standardized tests generally speaking correlate to race in class Which is why our best schools end up being populated with these types of students and Which is why it's very difficult for us to get people out of that 90 percent Which is more and more becoming black and brown, but not just black and brown But get them out of that 90 percent into the 9.9 percent because it's a fully integrated system And it's really two different mining operations The one is built to mine the 9.9 percent and the other is built to mine the The 90 percent are you following me on this? So let me I'm gonna there's a lot of language in the next slides when I'm gonna try to convince each one of them right and so the way this works out Trying to click is You know equino economic mobility really Isn't what it appears to be in this country, you know the American dream is it works for the people who already live in the dream But the ones that aren't living the dream generally speaking never get out of that 90 percent if you're born in it You tend to stay in it and This is just a way to calculate that it's the IgE, which is the Intergenerational earnings elasticity It basically says what you how much you let how much more your child's gonna make than you than your parents do at UDC We're proud to say that our students End up we're like 99th in the country for raising that that that income level But that speaks as much to where our parents income level are as it does to where our students end up But look at America America has one of the the worst IgE's in in the world And it's because of some of the things we're going to talk about Let me get to get to get another one and so Only 2% of the nation's students graduate from private high schools for example But 28% of them end up at Harvard and Princeton 5,000 elementary schools in California the top 11 Which also sends students to Harvard and Princeton's type schools Have a median income value of the homes of three million dollars Half Ivy League graduates end up being finance management consulting medicine lawyers But if you ask economists how they keep their income levels high, they'll tell you that You know the matters medical field is really a cartel You know, they limit the number of people that can end up being box doctors so that they can keep their income high And the same thing with the bar association and be me being a former lawyer I can sort of confirm that much And then this was a cute line from the from the from the article Five minutes really? Oh man. So imagine Imagine if workers hire consultants and compensation committees consisting of their peers at other companies to recommend how they should be paid The result would be well, we know what it would be because that's exactly what CEOs do. So I'm gonna have to cut it short now But the point is this the point is this We have to figure out a way to identify extract refine and produce The talent that the nation needs and most of the talent is in that 90 percent But when you live in a in a system, right? That's designed to minimize who has access to the means of talent development To our own detriment You're gonna lose a lot of the talent along the way and So the real challenge for us is you know, how do we how do we? Overcome our comfort our security our fear of letting others in to the nine point nine percent in order to be able to Find a way to extract these vast Suppressed Often hidden Reserves of talent that our nation has but doesn't really know how to develop It's pretty much the idea. I'll leave the other slides for you, but even better read the article I thought it was a really good article and then I had some more about UDC, but I guess you want to do five minutes of So this is what the middle class should look like if you did if we did it correctly You know everybody represented an equitable portion and sort of wrap it up the next one is Wait, no go back. The next one is yes if we get our job done correctly then UDC really will be the Pathway to the middle class Questions yes, sir, you know it's interesting we have we're actually about 10 percent International and they come a lot with the intention of going back home We have a better reputation outside of the district than we do in the district And so a lot of them come and go back home But most of most of our students are from the district and most of them end up staying in or around the district As far as we know Yeah, our data systems aren't quite there yet, but with the new investment will start to have that data more available Yes, sir. Yeah, so you'll be seeing a major marketing campaign coming out Soon because we're putting it together as we speak with the new investment that we have But one of the things we've been able to do is we started something called DC University partnership So that students could start to see UDC as a first choice And so any public or public charter school graduate with a three-point or above Get some sort of scholarship if you're a three point seven or a valedictorian or a salutatorian You get a full scholarship and you get housing And so the first year we had 40 This year we had 120 Next year expecting a couple of hundred and I say that to say this, you know, these are high-end highly qualified students Which will not only drive up our graduation rate over time because they're they're they're Retention rate is hitting the 80 90 percent mark But also your best recruiters are the students that you they come to your school and go back and talk to the students at the High school and so that's part of our marketing campaign as well to answer your question. Yes, ma'am Sure, I'll give you an example. We have a partnership with Cisco the technology group and so at the workforce training level entry-level certification We have a program for that that group of talent But that curriculum is actually a seamlessly connected to an associate's degree So that if you get certified at that level you can move on to the associates level Or you can leave and work and come back and then the associates level is connected to the bachelor's level Please Yeah, so I'll give you another example We just we're about to start a PhD. It would be our second in Urban leadership and entrepreneurship Because we're going to claim the urban space We're a land grant that is exclusively urban, which is unique in the country and 80% of the world is going to be urban in the next 40 something years, right? So we're claiming that space. We're starting his PhD, but we're partnering with Fielding University Fielding University has a couple of it's very good at a couple of things that we want to be able to do one is online learning the second though is Credit for credentialing based on workforce expertise and so you can get academic credit Which I think is what you're asking toward the Act toward the PhD degree based on our assessment of how much Experience expertise you have that can be applied toward that work. Is that your question? No, okay Well, I think it's more than that though First I do believe there's a place for a liberal learning in general, right? but also And I think the prior speaker said it You know at the end of the day if you ask employers what they really want They want students who can read who can write who can think critically who can speak the language whatever the language is and a lot of at least in our case for our students a Lot of that work we have to pick it up because it didn't happen at the K-12 level And so I think there's a way to integrate it in a way that Now you can test out of it if that's your question and in some ways we already do that, right? But I think I think those are minimum skills that we have to be able to Certify that we pass on When we graduate a student into the workforce does that answer your question? Good. Thank you anybody else. Yes, ma'am in the back. So I mentioned the capital builders program And that is where we assess with this BP 10 assessment product from Gallup every grad every high school graduate who is interested in a full-ride scholarship and We picked the top 20 and we put them in an 18 month program where they get they get a suit They get a computer they get free tuition for 18 months. They get a housing subsidy they get an apprenticeship and an internship and They get to pitch a business at the end of the to venture capitalists and the interesting thing back to the later That asked the previous question is that they get they get a certificate at the end of the program that will allow them to To leave us after 18 month with a higher higher education Certification and entrepreneurship and some of them may come back for the next level of Certification some may go off and get rich which we're hoping like Bill Gates and you know come back and By the way, I want you to he he also mentioned Amazon and the and the the headquarters Actually wrote a letter to to Jeff Bezos and I offered him UDC You know, I said look, you know, we're about Workforce credentialing and we're developing a new model and we sure could use a partner to help us think it through He hasn't answered me yet, but I'm never hopeful Yes, sure Interesting question because I'm in middle of middle of union negotiations as we speak So We've been able to recruit 70 young new faculty members in the last three years very bright Yale Harvard MIT Because they all want to get into the district right and our challenge for some of them Especially engineers and business faculty is that when they perform? Well, the other schools around us, you know Radice And so our challenge is this in these negotiations For the most part the liberal arts faculty are paid at or above market The engineers and the business school faculty are paid below market. The business school faculty are 40% off the market in some cases and so we've been with tricks We've been able to sort of work around that but it's a structural issue We have to resolve and the challenge for us is that the liberal arts faculty outnumber everybody else and they control the union And so we're in the middle of those conversations as we speak Yes, ma'am in the back One more question. Well, he's he's had his hand up a while Yes sure Well, I'll answer your question and I'll tell you the real question, right? I Think the answer is yes You know the market needs will drive The need to figure out ways to identify talent You know at the end of the day at the end of the day a degree is just a credential, right? You know, it's a credential that says that you know This student has a certain skill in a certain area and is able to do certain things. That's what credentials do, right? The problem though is that and nobody commented on my little piece about the Atlantic article And I'm assuming that's because it's a hard conversation to have But the problem is that if you really think about it We've been credentialing students as Certified to succeed in a in a war in a country based on a philosophy of white privilege You follow me and as long as that philosophy is there to credential doesn't make a whole lot of difference because if you listen to mr. Saylor about his You know the things that he assessed right, you know You know you bring that philosophy into whatever credentialing you're trying to do Because that's the environment in which you're trying to be successful so until we examine how that philosophy is minimizing our ability to our ability desire and wear with all To identify other types of talent and most of it is in this vast pool of the 90% You know the credentials will change how we identify the talent, but it may not change what talent is being identified Does that answer your question? Well, thank you. I appreciate that Is that it sir? Thank you all very much. I enjoyed it