 All right, hoping everybody can start to find their seats. I feel like we're having a little reunion party here. I don't know if this, is this microphone on? I don't think this, hey Julie, I don't think the microphone's on. Is it? All right, if everyone gets to take their seats, we'd appreciate it. Hello everyone, welcome. It's always good, you know you got a good crowd when nobody wants to even have the event start. That's like a good sign that there's some good catching up happening everywhere. All right. Welcome and thank you for coming today. Welcome to New America. My name is Mary Alice McCarthy and I direct the Center on Education and Skills here at New America. And we have a great event lined up for you this afternoon with some exciting research findings and two excellent panels to put those findings into context. For those of you not familiar with New America, we are an independent, nonpartisan public policy think and do tank dedicated to the renewal of American politics and prosperity. And we put the word do into our description because we want people to know that we don't just sit around here and think, we really don't. We're very actively engaged with communities around the country in practices of public problem solving. Indeed, as an organization of researchers, technologists, advocates and storytellers, our work addresses many of the toughest challenges we face here at home and abroad. From climate change to income inequality to declining trust and democratic institutions. What unites us as an organization is our shared goal of ensuring our country live up to its highest ideals of equality and opportunity for all. So our gathering here today is part of our 20th anniversary event series. New America is 20 years old this year. Since our founding in 1999, we have been very focused on the disruptive effects of technology and globalization forces that are very much at the center of our conversation here today. And for 20 years, we've been looking at how those changes create both opportunities and challenges for creating a more inclusive and equitable America. I think it's fair to say that a belief in the capacity for renewal and progress is really at the heart of the American story. And as we look forward to our next 20 years here at New America, we're thinking about how to support that vital and dynamic process of progressive change. One way we do that is by what we're doing right here today, sharing our research as broadly as we can and engaging with thought leaders and change makers from around the country in a dialogue about what that research means and how to make it useful. So I'm here to kick us off today and let me start with some thank yous. First, thank you to Lumina Foundation for supporting this research effort and this event. None of this would be possible without them and we're deeply grateful for their support. Next, I want to thank the research teams that did all the hard work that got us here. Our partners, Dr. Deborah Bragg, Dr. Graham Bloom and Dr. Elizabeth Appelmeza and our New America research team of Iris Palmer, Ivy Love and Sophie Nguyen. Their reports are all out front. Please take one and feel free to take another to share with family and friends. Let's get the word out. All right. Next, we wanna thank our friends from the U.S. Department of Labor, particularly Robin Fernkis, Cheryl Martin and their team in the Employment and Training Administration for all of their help through our research process, help tracking down more than 200 independent evaluation reports. And next, thank you to everyone who is participating on our panel discussions today. We have two really fantastic panels and the people on them are all very busy people who are taking time out to engage with us today on this important topic, some of whom have traveled quite a long way to be here. So thanks to all of you for joining us and sharing your thoughts. And lastly, thanks to all of you for taking time out of your day to join us for this conversation. How's the microphone doing? Okay, it's like reverberating back to me so I keep hearing myself talking. That's why you're seeing me pause. All right, everything's okay. All right, so what I wanna do before we dig into the research here is provide a little bit of context for our event today. And let's start with what it was all about. Getting people into good jobs that pay good wages. On Friday, the Labor Department released its monthly jobs report. And for the most part, it was full of good news. Unemployment hit a historic 50 year low of 3.5%. And the labor force participation rate ticked up slightly along with wages in some sectors. 10 years ago, that same first Friday in October couldn't have been more different. And not just because it was not 90 degrees that day. Okay, the unemployment rate hit 9.8%. A month later, it would rise to 10.2%. It's peak during the Great Recession. More than 15 million Americans were out of work. And during every week in the preceding year, more than 500,000 people filed a new unemployment insurance claim, again, every week. It was a dire situation. I'm sure many of you remember it viscerally. I know I do. I had just started working at the Department of Labor that summer, and I can tell you that the sense of alarm and urgency was palpable. Everyone there knew this was no typical recession. In particular, what was already becoming clear was that many of the jobs were never coming back. And that those permanent job losses were concentrated among workers who had been able to earn good, family-sustaining wages without having completed college. In fact, one of the central challenges of the recovery was already taking shape. The need to help adults, many with families and financial responsibilities, acquire new skills and post-secondary credentials. Now, the federal government responded to the Great Recession with a wide range of targeted investments designed to stimulate the economy and get people back to work. The Trade Adjustment Act Community College Career Training Grant Program, affectionately known as TACT, was certainly not the largest of those federal initiatives, but it was unquestionably the most poorly named. And I think it should just tell us how freaked out everybody was at the time, because it was like, we don't have time to come up with a name. We gotta get this thing done. Okay, but it's also a great example of the Obama administration's efforts to address the immediate needs of communities to get people back on their feet, but also to build an evidence base of what worked and what didn't to inform future policymaking in practice. The $2 billion program awarded grants to community colleges around the country to build their capacity to serve adult learners and meet the particular needs of adults, the kinds of programs and services that would really need their particular need to transition directly from school into the labor market and also the fact that they were not young. They actually had lots of experience, sometimes they had good experiences previously with higher education, sometimes they had bad experiences with higher education, and they also were people generally with a whole lot of responsibilities outside of just going back to school. So the folks at the departments of labor and education scoured the field for promising strategies for serving adult learners, and then they put those strategies into the tax grant solicitations as priorities in each of the four rounds of solicitations. These are strategies like prior learning assessment, integrated education and training, technology enabled learning. Also beginning in round two, the departments required the grantees to hire independent evaluators to evaluate the effectiveness of the activities that they were implementing. So here in New America, together with our partners, we have spent the last 18 months digging into those independent evaluations to try to answer two questions. Did tax make a difference? Did it help people get back to work and get back into the labor market? And did the particular strategies work? And what can we learn from these evaluations about those strategies and about what worked and what didn't? So now the researchers are gonna come up over the course of this event and share their findings in detail. But I will say this. The answer is yes, tax made a difference. It helped. Of course there are lots of nuances of how we came to that conclusion and I'll leave that all to the researchers, okay? But yes, our analysis indicates it had a positive impact on adults complete, earning post-secondary credentials and moving back into the labor market. And but I wanna be very clear about why we feel like this matters so much. It's not because we feel a need to pronounce a final judgment on tax, right? But rather the fact that these results were positive means that we really do need to look at two-tact as a program that can tell us about what we should be doing today and in the future to support adult and working learners. Because even though Friday's jobs report was a far cry from what we were looking at in 2009, the underlying labor market conditions facing many workers are still quite similar. Most good paying jobs require some amount of post-secondary education and training and many workers are vulnerable to job loss due to technology and trade. So as I reflect on what we've done over the last 18 months, I have three big takeaways from this project to share with you from our research that I hope will inform federal and state policy moving forward. The first big takeaway is about the importance of investing in the institutional capacity of community colleges. The tax grants did not pay tuition, they just went to the institutions to build their capacity programs and services to serve adults. Many of our policy discussions today are focused on the federal student aid programs. They are incredibly important programs. But they are not the only way to bring financial support to community colleges and there are some real downsides to relying on them to the exclusion of direct support to build institutional capacity. The second big takeaway is the importance of investing in the people inside those colleges. The advisors and counselors and navigators, the outreach specialists, the job coaches. One of the clear themes that came through these evaluations over and over again was the importance of the human connection, the human interaction for helping adults make good choices, persist in their classes, tough it out even when they were starting to have doubts and then make those successful transitions into the labor market. And the third big takeaway for us is that we need much more evidence around what works. We're just really starting to scratch the surface. And I will say our research probably raised more questions than any answered. And what it really showed a bright light on was the need for more efficient and better ways to collect outcomes data on students. So with that, I'm now gonna introduce our next speaker. We're gonna get this event underway. So it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Wendy Sadlak of Lumina Foundation. Dr. Sadlak oversees the strategic direction and implementation of Lumina's research and data portfolio. This includes, among other things, establishing and synthesizing the evidence and data necessary to advise Lumina's strategic direction, documenting effective practices to inform Lumina in the field and measuring progress and success against key metrics with specific emphasis on Lumina's priorities for action, opportunity populations and national attainment. And previously, Dr. Sadlak was a senior director at Equal Measure where she managed and directed projects across various portfolios, including many large-scale, complex national evaluations. So she seems like a perfect person to be commenting on that work. Dr. Sadlak has a PhD in sociology from Temple University and a BA in anthropology and sociology from the University of Wisconsin. So with that, please welcome Dr. Wendy Sadlak. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome. A big thank you to New America, to Deborah Bragg and all of the research who worked with you on this. The evaluators who were involved in all the tact evaluations and all of the colleges who were a part of tact, without which we wouldn't have the great research and findings in evidence-based to talk about and discuss today. So I'm thrilled to be with you here today and really looking forward to hearing from the research team and learning a little bit more about the findings around student outcomes and employment outcomes as well as learning a little bit more about what worked and didn't work in terms of some of the student support strategies that were implemented in colleges across the country. I'm thrilled that we have panels of experts here from the policy and community college side of the house, experts who can help us connect the dots from the research and help to inform us along the way in understanding sort of the implications for state and federal policy as well as the implications for policy and practice within colleges as well as for our communities. I know and appreciate this work, both of the colleges who implemented it and the evaluation teams who helped to gather the necessary data and evidence from these initiatives because before coming to Lumina Foundation, I was working as an evaluator and I see some of my old colleagues and friends in the house that I met through that endeavor. I was able to work on three different teams from 2012 to 2018 on rounds two, three and four of TAC grants. So this is personally or professionally really exciting day as well to see all of this come to fruition and to hear about the data and evidence that's coming out. Given that experience, I recognize the tremendous effort on the part of colleges that went into making this initiative a success and the challenges they faced in working to implement a systems change agenda and sustain some of the pieces that were put into place along the way to support the populations of interest, including dislocated workers, veterans and adults. As many of you know, Lumina's goal is that 60% of Americans hold a high quality post-secondary credential by 2025, which is essential to meeting our nation's growing talent needs. By 2025, Lumina Foundation calculates that nearly 11.6 million adults will need to earn a post-secondary credential to meet the nation's talent goal with 5.5 of those credentials earned by adults with no recognized learning beyond high school and another 6.1 million awarded to adults with some post-secondary experience, but no credential. So while many adults gained valuable experience out in the field and knowledge and skills outside of colleges and universities, it is mathematically impossible for these goals to be met without the support of colleges and universities. Community colleges in particular play a central role given that community colleges are where our adult population goes where they're coming back to earn a credential or entering the post-secondary space for the first time. Also, community colleges are the leader when it comes to creating these quality short-term programs that lead to a credential and in ensuring that we have quality and fair-valued labor market outcomes. The time for sweeping systemic change to better serve adults is now and I would argue was yesterday. While we have some of the data and evidence, and this is what Mary Alice was speaking to, for what works, we still need to learn more because simply put, we're not where we need to be. We know that many colleges have launched efforts to bring back adults who stopped out of college, but the question remains as to whether the circumstances and conditions that led students to stopping out in the first place have fundamentally changed. Are adult learners who are enrolling for the first time going to find inclusive environments by leadership faculty students that value their life experiences and the experiences they had before enrolling? Have colleges structured pathways to meet the needs of adult learners, including recognizing their prior learning that comes from work experience, comes from the military. Are they creating the necessary short-term pathways that stack to associates degrees, but also where learners are earning multiple credentials as they go? They're lattice, so they provide the necessary flexibility along the way to move in and out of the post-secondary space, ultimately optimizing the likelihood of adult learner success. Are colleges providing and sustaining the necessary holistic wraparound support services that are huge within the tax grants, but so difficult to sustain after the fact? And I know we have some superstars in the house who are able to do that, but we need to learn more about the conditions and context under which that is possible. Because in particular, issues around support services where you're talking about childcare and transportation are so critical for adults. These questions and more need to be answered if we're gonna support adult learners on their pathway to education and employment. As you've already heard in a little bit of the framing remarks and conversations before today, we're at a pivotal moment with the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the upcoming election, concerns about the economy and a potential recession. Furthermore, due to technological changes, demographic shifts, globalization, and a host of other factors, we're all facing a changing economic climate. Current practices and policies weren't necessarily designed to address where we are at now. We need to further build out the evidence base to support and understand new models of education and employment preparation, and then use that data to develop more innovative programs and credentials. Given this, the time is ripe to step back and to reflect on all the data and evidence coming out of this analysis as well as related efforts of what works and for whom under what conditions. And when it comes to helping adults acquire the valuable skills and credentials that lead to further education and employment, and then share and promote that data and research with the field, including two and four-year colleges and universities, state systems, philanthropy, policymakers, because, as Mary Alice mentioned, community colleges cannot do this alone, and it's not without the support of all of us that this can be possible. We need to understand what works and then begin scaling those efforts. And in doing so, we may learn that these practices and policies benefit adults, but also benefit the full post-high school work and learn ecosystem. So thank you for your time, and for being here today to hear about and contribute to this important body of work. And without further delay, let's dig into some of the data and discussion. I don't know if I'm turning back to Mary Alice to introduce Deborah. All right, I'll turn it over to Deborah. Thank you. Realizing I didn't figure out how to use the clicker here. There we go. Well, hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I wanna echo the thanks that Mary Alice offered to so many people in this room who had made this day possible, and also to just share it felt a little bit like a family reunion coming in here. I, too, was a former and lived through the period tack evaluator and understand what that world means, which I think helped tremendously in terms of leading this work. This is actually a relatively short presentation. We could go on and on about this meta-analysis, but we won't. There are papers outside that we would encourage you to get. So I'm gonna kind of hit the highlights here, and we're gonna move on to panels where we can dig in and really get into the Q&A. We had some pretty big goals for this project. I think in some conversation, Mary Alice, Iris, and I were at a meeting and talked about, sort of drifted into our tack part of our lives and said, gosh, I hope we are able to sort of squeeze every drop of knowledge that we need from that incredible investment and began to talk about whether or not there might be something that we could do. And so that's where this idea emerged about, actually about two years ago, I think, so time flies. It is really our goal to contribute to this body of work. We recognize that we are only a part of this story. We are very grateful to colleagues at the Urban Institute and app for informing us and steering us and guiding us because we anticipate the great work that they're doing as well. So we see this as part of the picture, but definitely not the whole picture. I'm going to report today on the meta-analysis findings. If you're not familiar with this concept of meta-analysis is the idea of reviewing systematically a large body of research to try to aggregate those findings and estimate the impact of interventions on outcomes. That is a tremendous project when you look at a program like TACC. And I'm going to try to boil down what we did over the last 18 months in about 10 minutes. So let me start again by acknowledging the Urban Institute work. They have done an incredible job of really amassing and describing for us what some of the evaluation work has been about and the TACC program itself. So I want to especially thank Lauren Eister, who I know is quite busy these days, and thank her for the conversation she has had with me and our team over the last year. I want to point out a couple of other things in this slide. It shows you how many evaluations were done. 206 evaluations are acknowledged in this graph and that's a lot. I will show you in one of our diagrams we actually ended up reading 216 evaluation reports of the total 256 grants. So that is the pool of studies that we're looking at. We also focus like the federal evaluation primarily on rounds two, three and four because of the requirement for the external evaluation. There's another important little item in this graph and that is that you can see the increased use by the evaluators of administrative employment records over time. So somewhat increased use of student administrative records or institutional data and coupling that to administrative labor employment records. That was an absolutely critical activity to enable the use of quasi-experimental designs, which is the focus of our work. So just a couple of points there that I wanted to make and again thank the Urban Institute team for their help. Our approach to this project, we worked collaboratively throughout which I think was incredibly valuable to have the policy expertise of Mary Alice coupled to some of the research that we do at the University of Washington and in my consulting for Bragg & Associates. By the way, I want to introduce Grant Bloom. Dr. Grant Bloom was the designer of our meta-analysis design on our statistical analysis. So I want to give him credit. Grant was instrumental in developing the review process which actually took somewhat, the line is somewhat real in that the review of these studies took about two thirds of that 18 months. A lot of time goes into designing the rubrics and just determining how are we gonna look at this because we did a lot of the work independently and then came together to evaluate the studies. That also included some efforts to actually go back to evaluators and gather some additional data. And I want to thank some people who are in this room who enabled us to add studies to the meta-analysis because they were open to sharing additional information with us. So this process is one that's painstaking but absolutely critical to doing a meta-analysis. The phases of the meta-analysis review are captured here. Those 216 studies were the foundation for our work. And two independent reviewers read them, produced results that were then aggregated and analyzed by Grant to make decisions along the way. We decided immediately that there were about 73 studies that we could not include because the findings were primarily descriptive and really didn't have a quantitative analysis. So that was very important and a pretty easy decision to make. We then, through an additional review process, determined that there were another 77 studies that unfortunately we also needed to exclude because those studies, while they talked about comparison groups, which is why they got into that analysis, indeed, were not quasi-experimental designs. And a decision that we made in this meta-analysis in this particular design is that we would focus on quasi-experimental design. So we did not include regression or other forms which are fine ways to analyze but not what we were looking for in doing this particular meta-analysis. So those 66 studies became the basis and we feel pretty good about those, approximately 66 or 70 studies that were conducted do meet a standard of quasi-experimental design, which I think is fairly similar to what the Urban Institute found in a conversation I had with Lauren. We then were able to include 36 of those studies. Unfortunately, we did still have to exclude some studies because there were some missing statistics or there were some design decisions that did not meet our requirement for this meta-analysis. So just to give you an idea, those 36 studies, let's see, where do I have that? 12 of those studies are single institution studies. 15 are single state consortium studies and nine are multi-state consortium studies and that's a fairly good representation when you look at the grant program overall. 31 states are represented in these evaluations. I'm not sure how many thousands of students and I don't know if you recall grant, but many. More than 200,000, I believe. Yeah, yeah, so we're talking a lot of students even though 36 doesn't sound like nearly as big as 216, but these do tend to be large-scale studies. Ohio, Minnesota, and Florida are most represented because they're in multiple consortium grants and single institution. And manufacturing was the largest industry followed by healthcare and then followed by IT and multi-industry or occupation. And again, that seems pretty representative when you think about the tax grants. So with that, drum roll please. Here's what we found. We found statistically significant average effect average effect for our educational outcomes and our employment outcomes. Much stronger effect for the educational outcomes. Our analysis looked at both program completion and credential completion and based on recommendations from meta-analysis experts and a number we consulted, we combined those outcome measures and that the average estimated effect size, odds ratio is 1.95 or almost twice as likely if you're a grant participant to complete a program or complete a credential or maybe do both of those and many students did, as you might expect. The employment outcome is not as strong. And we think that is consistent with what we're hearing from some of our partners in the national evaluation. It is statistically significant. So a 27% increase for grant participants in terms of getting employed and or a wage change. So those are important findings. And I think they provide a really nice basis for our conversation today. Let's have one more piece of information that I think is very important to our panels. Once you do this analysis, you boil it all down and you say, well, that's great. What does that mean? I wanna thank Ivy Love, who is a real trooper. Ivy joined me in creating something called a heat map, which means we go back and look at all those 36 studies and look at all the strategies and core elements that are described in those studies to determine which of these elements really show up in this meta analysis. So what we're showing you here is part of the heat map. The heat map is in the paper. The darkest boxes are the most consistent strategies or core elements in the studies that are in the meta analysis. So career pathways, stackable and lattice credentials and employer engagement show up in over 75% of those studies across the board in all four of those elements. So those are really strong. Those elements probably don't surprise you at all, but it's good to know that they show up a little bit lighter, green or aqua or whatever that color is. Those are elements that show up in over 50% of the studies and in some of the outcome areas it is again more than 75%. So those are pretty strong elements and the focus of two of our panels today are on this area of comprehensive student supports and prior learning assessment. So I think we did a pretty good job selecting a couple of strategies that seem to contribute in some way to the findings. I wanted to point out too that sustainability shows up as a strategy in the TAC grants in over 50% of these studies. So that's pretty important and I know it was a big emphasis of the TAC grants. So people were listening and learning and I wanted to include evaluation so while it's not as consistent as a strategy that will be continued, it is still present and one of the things I found that I think is important is it is more likely to be in those studies where they were evaluating employment outcomes. So evaluation again reinforces the importance of its connection to measuring the effects on the labor market for learners. So I wanna end with just a few recommendations. The implementation evaluations are absolutely critical and we think that those need to be continued and they need to be more rigorous. They need to, we need to focus on fidelity studies and help people understand how to measure implementation. Outcomes are indeed also important, very important to align outcomes to the purpose of the grant. We see some misalignment in what people were measuring what the interventions were and what they were measuring. Better alignment of those and I think some technical assistance around that would be very, very important in the design of evaluations. Impact evaluation is what we're talking about today. Our recommendation is that those impact evaluations be done in a bit more strategic way. We think they are critical. We think maybe if there had been more focus on fewer impact evaluations but more strategically focused impact evaluations, we might be able to say more than we can today. And let me just make a point, I think it's really important. Over the time that we have been engaged in the TACG grants, the whole use of meta-analysis has really evolved in education and I keep thinking if we were to do this again, we would go into it knowing that we want to do a meta-analysis or a meta-regression. We would approach it differently than we did at the time but we now know I think what it should take to produce the kind of evaluations, not every grant but I think there are some very important investments that do deserve impact evaluation on a pretty large scale and finally this whole area of sustainability is just critical and there are some excellent TAC evaluations that have addressed sustainability that we can learn from right now. I was so impressed with some other people looking around this room that did some really, really good evaluation work around sustainability that I think is probably as cutting edges as any in the evaluation world. So thank you so much. We look forward to the rest of the day and a continuing conversation. Thank you Deb and thanks to the whole research team. Okay so now it's time for some discussion, right? We've gotten some pretty heavy duty information here and analysis so it's my tremendous privilege to introduce our next guest who will be leading the panel discussion, Dr. Martha Cantor. As many of you know Dr. Cantor leads the College Promise campaign, a national nonpartisan initiative to increase access, affordability, quality and completion in American higher education starting with America's community colleges. Dr. Cantor also serves as a distinguished senior fellow at New York University's Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy. And the reason we asked Dr. Cantor to join us here today is because of her central role in the TACT program. Martha Cantor was the US Undersecretary of Education from 2009 to 2013 where she was responsible for overseeing all federal post-secondary policies and programs including the Department of Education's role in the TACT program. She was appointed in the spring of 2009, right smack in the middle of this economic maelstrom and what better person than a former chancellor of a community college district, Foothill D'Ansa in California, to lead the Department of Education's response. But the TACT program was actually administered by the US Department of Labor in collaboration with the Undersecretary's office in the Department of Education. So as you can imagine, making that kind of collaboration work is no small task, but she did along with her counterparts at the Department of Labor. And it was more than just a matter of reviewing grant solicitations or proposals or having a few conference calls. This integration of high quality workforce development strategies and higher education strategies is actually what was at the foundation of TACT. It's also what works well for serving adult learners. And I think the TACT program really laid a foundation for this ongoing collaboration and understanding of the importance of bringing these kinds of strategies together rather than siloing them in different parts of a community college. So I want to ask Dr. Cantor to take the stage as well as the panelists who will all introduce themselves and we'll have a great discussion on finding out what these findings mean for the future. And I'm thrilled to be part of this presentation. I feel like I'm the grandmother of the TACT grants with Jane Oates who could be here today, but I do want to recognize Jane because she was the assistant secretary of labor and literally what it took to do this was meeting pretty much every week or every other week throughout all of the years that we brought this up. And I think we had partners to do it with. So I'm thrilled to have four panelists. I know we're a little bit running late so I'm gonna have them introduce themselves first and then we have a couple of questions we're gonna ask them. So Ji-Hang, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, Ji-Hang Lee. I'm with the Association of Community College Trustees. I'm Zulu Consultant formerly with the Education Department and Labor Department during TACT. I'm Zora Mulligan. I'm the commissioner of higher education in Missouri but I was the executive director of the State Community College Association at the time the TACT grants came out. Casey Sacks, I'm the deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education currently for community colleges. And when TACT came out I was with the Colorado Community College System. You can see there's a range of impacts that each of you experience both internally in the Department of Education and out in the field and that's why it's so critically important for us to have this conversation about what are the implications? What are the impacts? What were the outcomes? And what more can we do going forward? And I think that's the whole purpose of this meeting this afternoon. So I'm gonna start off with the first question I'd like you to each take a crack at it and maybe we'll start with Casey first. Why don't we do that? We'll go backwards this way. So the question is from your perspective, Casey, what's a policy lever that could break down the education and workforce silos at the different levels? We have community colleges, we have states, and we have the federal government from all the takeaways from what you've seen in the research and all these years investing in capacity building and support and the people that Mary Alice talked about. What do you think? What's the lever? Is there a lever or there are a few levers? I think there's a lot of levers and many of you in this room can help me articulate many of them. Your team laid a great foundation for what could potentially in the future look like merging the departments of education and labor. I mean, that would be a big one. Maybe not as big, last summer we saw Perkins reauthorized and there's a lot in the Perkins Act that directly impacts community colleges and so helping states really understand what the capabilities are. In the Perkins Act we see states do all kinds of things from spend 70% of the dollars on K-12 to 70% of the dollars in community colleges and so just understanding where the flexibilities exist and what's possible in that space. WIOA has broad waiver authority but I didn't know how to use that when I was in a community college and so now I have much better understanding but there's just so much work to do to really help states understand what flexibilities could look like. We had a partnership opportunity out twice now. It's run, it's called P3 Performance Pilot Partnerships I think is what it stands for but it allows states to combine any of their youth programs and to say, gosh, we have four different youth programs from four different federal agencies, we really like one set of metrics and you can do that as a state and it's a great policy kind of lever or opportunity if you will but it's helping people understand that it exists and how they might use that and what the future might look like if they take advantage of it so I'll stop because it's time So Zora you've had so much experience both at the community college system level and at the state level now as the commissioner what do you think, what's the lever? Sure, so I think the alignment of systems is the lever. I led last year along with our director of economic development and initiative to look at workforce needs in the state of Missouri and think seriously about how to address them and so we came to Washington DC we met with New America and a lot of other think tanks. Our last conversation was the most sobering which was a very smart person who works at McKinsey Global Institute and he said, whatever you do don't create another program and really to focus instead on alignment of systems and so we did create another program we couldn't resist, just a really exciting one I think that will provide a lot of support for adults who need to get a credential to get a better job but we're really focused on the system and aligning the system and so until August 28th I led the department of higher education after August 28th I lead the department of higher education and workforce development and so really is that department of talent that Loomina Foundation has envisioned in the past making that all that it can be is a challenge that is still significant and ahead of us but to start to think about how to align resources available through the public workforce system and available through the higher education system to work together I think is the most significant work that we can be doing. So Sue, breaking down the silos what do you think the lever for change is going to be going forward? So I think just what I kind of look at is more of the federal lens just because I've been at labor and I've been at ed and I've been through reauthorization of WIOA and the TAG there's so much lessons learned from this big investment with TAG that I think there's so much that happened locally and at the state level within the consortiums and at the schools that I think all of that has to be really taking into stock in terms of how they work together because WIOA has so many requirements and it all just lines up with each other. WIOA has basically very similar participants participant characteristics you've got the same players you've got the same industries hopefully building on some of the TAG coordination that's happened I think locally and at the state level so why not take all of that and build on that for future policy efforts? And Ji-Hang last but not least lever for change policy lever to break down the silos of education and workforce. So as a community college advocate I would say that you should involve community colleges more in these conversations so if you take a look at career and technical education for example in the Perkins Act my institutions receive pennies on the dollar my home state of Virginia, Nova where my local community college gets very few dollars in comparison to the size of its institution for a career and technical education. So one of the things that as policy makers and I know that certain policy makers are listening think about the role of community colleges in this broader system that we're talking about WIOA, career and technical education the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act if you perceive community college as the leading entity around workforce training and post-secondary education give us the resources to do so just don't do a little carve out here and there but think broadly about like the role that we have and one of the most important things about the tech grant was the size of the grants the fact that there was $500 million and you knew it was being an application process for four consecutive years was important and I think the other thing that's part of the tax grant that I think is also an important policy mechanism is that inside the grant there was a priority that all states receive some type of funding for the tech grant that in and of itself was something that was very vital especially to smaller under-resourced institutions and those of them in under-resourced states that they knew someone was gonna get a grant and I think that is something that I would just throw out there as policy makers think about the role of the community colleges think about all these various pieces and figure out how we fit if you want us to fix all these problems you have to give us a little bit more than pennies on a dollar. So the next question we have three questions so everyone understands this and when I think about the second question you saw Dr. Brad slide about the findings and about how there was much more significance in the education findings and I think I read 350,000 completers in credentials and success stories for those actual students who were tapped by tact. Wow I said that. But the employment outcomes were not as strong even though I think it was the third of the or something like 27% I think you showed benefited and made progress so that's not a small number but it could be bigger we want it to be bigger obviously because we want to have documentation that our students are getting those jobs they're prepared and they're advancing beyond whatever training and education they got I try to think about it in the college promise the world as lifelong advancement you're preparing them to really move through a multiple opportunities that they're gonna have in their lives so I think I'd like to start with Zora if that's okay and go this way and with Casey just to have a different perspective so this question is about the findings so when you step back and look at what has been created and reading all the papers that are out there that I hope you'll all take away what is one solution from your perspective that would mitigate the biggest education barrier to increasing workforce outcomes what do you think the biggest barrier is and then what's the solution I really think it's time the ability to deliver meaningful short-term credentials to adults who can come in and out of the system as you say to get on a path I think is the most critical barrier that we need to address and it's also one of the hardest ones very few of our community colleges in Missouri are really truly set up on a stackable credential model and so they're really offering students a choice of a non-credit certificate which has some value but also could be better if it had credit associated or a full associate degree which is often not a realistic goal for adults at the point that they are in their life so I think time is the most critical issue to tackle so what do you mean by time like how much time do you have to invest to get a credential that will increase your earning ability and your ability to have a better life with your family so enabling the capacity building of the institutions to give the students who are maybe less prepared really time to be successful yes and I think that's the most difficult issue is convincing faculty and administrators to really rethink the experience that students have whether it's a student who is 18 years old and has a full-time job at a gas station or a student who's 36 years old and has a full-time job at the public library the schools really struggle to think about their approach through the eyes of students and Sue what do you think about this question what do you think is the solution to bring the education barriers down and to increase the workforce outcomes so I think just kind of building on some of the earlier work before reauthorization there was a program in place that brought because the agencies I think do work together it's actually very organized and coherent but I think what happened is there's not like a fund that's pulled together that helps I would say the education and workforce stakeholders so I mean something similar to that which is what was called the incentive funds that was in the prior law I feel could help bring together the two agencies in a mandatory fashion but very concretely around standard procedures but also would give the core programs which are the agencies and WIOA a lot of an additional carrot I would say and sort of exceeding their agreed upon their indicators of performance for WIOA so based on that these are things that are really important and if you're sort of racing to meet that threshold within your state with all your core partners and you put together a proposal that everybody agrees with and gets buy in and sign off from all your key partners the agencies would then come together and sort of say okay we approve this proposal we'll transmit money from Treasury to you so to me that's something that's very concrete and would work but would involve the engagement of both agencies or I would say three agencies as core partners and what do you think? So I will actually follow up with something that Zora said I think one of the things that we see collectively and you have to think about and when TACT came around it was 2010 and March 30th Yes and the signing ceremony was at NOVA so I think one of the things that if you think about how higher education has kind of evolved or if you think about different things today than we did in 2010 one of those is student supports we're talking about a very vulnerable population we're talking about primarily adults who are entering this space the TACT program was designated for those trade adjusted or unemployed think about being a single parent trying to figure out how to go through this program manage a child or two children so I would say one of the things that we as a sector and as policy makers as the next iteration of TACT support tuition support student benefits we need to figure out how to help these individuals get from point A to point B because then point B will lead to point C that is one of the things that we as an organization have been pushing constantly within CTE within Viola is that we want to build skills but we also want to build a pipeline for credentials we know that with automation and with other things that are going on with our economy people are going to need more education not less education so at least building that foundational piece is important as part of this process and Casey, last word on the solution to mitigate the biggest education barrier to workforce outcomes so I actually spend a lot of time worried about the adults that are sidelined right now the folks Gallup released some data maybe a month or two ago that said that a full 40% of our adults who could be adult learners don't want further education and for those that are interested in engaging with us they expect that additional training or workforce development will come from their employers and so when I think about the work that I was able to lead under the TACT grant and the work that's really happened so critically in this space I worry a lot about those people who are sidelined and who aren't really interested in engaging with our education system as it currently exists and so it makes me think that we need to be a lot more creative about engaging with employers we need to do a lot more around the credit for prior learning work that's highlighted in the papers that we see out in the hall that it really is so important for educators to come into the space and to say you did this training with Gestamp and here's how that counts for our mechatronics certification and now let's come back in and you're gonna come back and do this associate's degree in mechatronics because when I think about the jobs that she hangs talking about that are going away every time I go grocery shopping and I check myself out I think somebody doesn't have this job and while there's a whole bunch of checkers who currently exist if Walmart decided to just automate their whole process we'd have hundreds of thousands of people out of work and the jobs that exist are not checker jobs they're can you fix the machine that you check yourself out on and that's a real different skill set and so unless the companies like Walmart are committed to taking their existing employees and doing some kind of work-based training to get them to be able to be the people who can fix the machine which is the skill we actually need we have a big disconnect and so I worry a lot about that and it's programs like TAC that I do think help our colleges develop more capacity to address some of these issues. So my next question, I'm gonna start with Ji-Hang and this one is how can states be more this is about states how can states be more intentional in leveraging federal and local resources together to increase community college workforce outcomes? What can states do? How are they thinking about the partners at the federal level and the local level and community colleges? Well I would say certain states that I won't name their names should probably fund their community colleges so those of you probably know a couple of states that is first and foremost but I think programs like ReConnect programs that kind of focus on adults to come back into the institution gain their credentials, gain some skills are important. The other thing and I would just mention this as we think about all sorts of bills and all sorts of stuff and I wanna address a concern here that was mentioned as part of the metal analysis where it's not that institutions don't wanna provide data they just don't have a great mechanism to provide the data we're talking about we have two individuals from two state systems they could talk to you about our rural community colleges where the IT director teaches IT he's the IT director and he's the IR director. So from that broadly speaking he or she probably only really does some stuff for iPads and that's all it, and the clearing house maybe the clearing house, maybe not the clearing house and so I think states if they want robust data from their institutions they have to support better data and I think that is one of the things that drove a home point to me when I'm looking at the data is like we need better data but how do we get better data unless you support the institutional IR capacity? Sue, what do you think? Resources, I mean I think about when I think about resources I also think about policy lovers because policy does open doors for a lot of decision making opportunities and so to me it's kind of understanding the landscape in which what the policy looks like where there are flexibilities with all the policies that you're working with because there are things that you may have some discretion on that you can make judgment calls and that may actually pave the way to be more strategic for example and so to me it's kind of understanding that landscape and getting all the players in the room to really just delve in really deeply on that and I think to cornet on that and I think in instances where you realize it's maybe a state policy that's a state thing maybe it's a federal policy I would encourage talking to your federal contacts just to get that clarification and if anything to get that communication so that you can move forward because of anything that in my work I've seen that really open doors for some states. I was gonna ask Nora, Zora sorry about state intentionality you talked about bringing workforce and education together in Missouri and I wondered what would success look like in five years if it were running perfectly under you? So it would look like something that we talked about a lot with the tax grants which was the idea of no wrong door so a person can get enrolled in a training program whether he or she approaches through a job center or through a community college admissions office there would be similar access to resources regardless of how you come in. We did a ton of work around this during the tax grants I think we made a lot of progress really the seeds of this combination of the two departments were planted during my time working with the tax grants and realizing that we have very complimentary resources if we can just figure out how to work together so we made a ton of progress and then last week I was in a small town in northern Missouri at a job center that's co-located with a branch of a community college a same building they share a wall and I said do you work much with your community college and they were like well we share a conference room I said oh well I feel like this is gonna change a little bit in the next couple of years so there is still you know there is this regression back to the way people are used to doing business and it takes constantly pushing the quote-unquote two sides together but that's really the focus of our work with the new department. Yeah I mean to me when I think about the silos and I think about the kinds of things that could happen you know it is how do you blend these systems together that are going to impact those students in literally systems. I mean as Jingang says institutional research capacity is a tremendous challenge but literally our systems don't talk to each other so you know the system that the public workforce system uses is completely separate from anything in a community college let alone a public university and so just the logistics of overcoming those enormous challenges are substantial but they're worth tackling. So I guess Casey you know you can maybe weigh in on this question about you know what could the federal government do from your perspective to help states be more intentional to really draw on the capacity building in community colleges that's sorely needed the integration of funding systems and any other things you'd wanna share. I mean I think we have a lot of funding streams that currently exist and so in some ways it's looking at exactly I'm so anxious to see what happens to Missouri in the next five years so thank you for leading that. I think you should sit in a job and show me state of Missouri. No I'm very happy where I am but thank you. But when I start thinking about WIOA reauthorization right now the WIOA legislation has a provision that states give some of their Perkins dollars to administer American job centers. What if we closed that loop and said gosh what if your community college had right a first refusal on those training dollars that are coming out of the American job center or what if we said that a percent of those training dollars had to go to your local community college. I think there's a lot that could be done in that space and the governor could even decide that's a good idea and do it now but certainly with the reauthorization it's one of those things that I feel like we need to be considering with higher ed act reauthorization the same thing. What are the pieces that we can pull in and say gosh we can make this a lot more relevant to the workforce system and to have both systems be more integrated across our federal legislation could really help states think more critically about instead of having the state silos to think about gosh we really are this sort of P20 system and we really are designed to try and get people to get into further education and into jobs and back and forth again. So anything we can do here federally to help ease that process from the states I feel like is what our responsibility is. Well I think that was those were my three questions of you and I think what we want to do is move on to the next panel so that we can then. Oh okay great great would love that I just didn't know if we're you know time wise. Okay then we are happy to take two questions from the audience of any of the panelists. Come on be brave. Yeah there's real pressure. Where are you from tell us where you're from. Rainer Roberts plus associates of the consultant populations all state based. And so the idea of the finding that career pathways and stackable attest credentials were keep two of the three core elements and I kind of consider that those two go together kind of curious from the panel's perspective what do you see as kind of the state of the art in the systems the colleges today and what's it going to take without tact or something else to move the systems and the colleges further along to take advantage of that finding. So I can speak to that a little bit. I mean it takes money largely you know in Missouri we're moving forward with a lot of things rather than waiting for the federal government. So we have you know grants that we give on a one year basis to expand capacity in programs that are in high demand. Last year was the first year this is the second year and even just between the first and the second year with the colleges having increased confidence that there is a likelihood of them getting funded and that there is a premium on more innovative models that are likely to be a better fit for people who aren't otherwise succeeding in post-secondary education money is largely the answer. The other is just thinking you know throughout all of your policy framework how do each of those frameworks support or not support shorter term credentials. So for example if you have a performance funding model and you're saying that you value credentials of quality performance funding should also count your credentials of quality. And that's one example. I mean we're also doing a new financial aid program that is similar to Tennessee Reconnect and it provides financial aid for adults who want to go back and get a short term certificate including a non-credit certificate which has been a little bit controversial but there's a lot of workforce demand for those kinds of jobs. So money and intentionality. Casey you want to do that since you worked in two state systems. Think about the, what would it require of our institutions? I mean so I think it depends on the state and it depends on the institutions and what they have in place. So one of, I've worked in both West Virginia and Colorado's community college systems and they're really different from each other. And so to step into West Virginia and say gosh we need to do more work around English and reading and integration so that we don't have this many developmental education courses in this particular part of the sequence is a really different ask than doing the same thing in Colorado. In Colorado that was relatively easy work and in West Virginia that would be relatively very hard work. And the flip would be true for math. In Colorado it was much harder to do that work in mathematics and much simpler in West Virginia for a variety of reasons and a variety of personalities. And so when I think about something like the Guided Pathways Initiative which is going to be so critical for the work that needs to do around stackable credentials. We have places that have some amazing capacity in that space and that it's kind of tinkering around the edges and maybe they can already do some of this. And we have places that have critical infrastructure needs and they really don't have the capacity and I would argue with Ji-Hang that any infusion of funds still isn't gonna solve some of the problems that they have. So I think the space really matters a lot and what it is exactly that we're asking people to do is also just as critical. Do you wanna make some comments? I think it's fine. Okay, one more question. One more question. I think so, I think they wanna move to the next panel. Okay, well thank you, thank you to the panelists. Thank you so much. No, they've already, they're already like that. Before I advance to the next slide and start my presentation, I just wanna turn your attention to the bottom left corner of the screen. So we have a hashtag for this event. This hashtag invest in CCs as we're talking about investing in community colleges today. So if you enjoy Twitter, if you tweet or just read tweets like I do, please join in the conversation here. So I'm Ivy Love. I'm a policy analyst with the Center on Education and Skills at New America and today I want to follow up on the research that Dr. Bragg presented looking at the quantitative impact that we've observed over the tax grantees and I'd like to turn to some research conducted by our team at New America doing a deep dive into two common strategies that grantees used to build the capacity of their institutions during the Great Recession. So for both briefs, which focused on prior learning assessment or PLA and coaches or navigators who are individuals assigned to support students throughout the course of their tax funded program. For both of these to conduct our research, we reviewed the interim and final grant evaluations and we also interviewed folks who were either tax evaluators, folks who worked on grants that were of focus in our research or those who were subject matter experts to produce these two briefs, both of which are right outside. The first brief I want to discuss focuses on prior learning assessment, PLA. So one of the goals of the tax program was to advance students through programs, get them a credential of value and help them smoothly transition into the workforce as quickly as possible. And one of the strategies that colleges often use to be able to build that capacity was prior learning assessment. What is PLA exactly? A bit more. It's the process of evaluating, assessing and awarding credit for learning that happened outside of the institution. That can mean lots of different things. So for example, an AP exam, an advanced placement high school exam or a CLEP exam, so you don't take a gen ed class in college. Those are forms of prior learning assessment, but it can take other forms as well for example, if a student enters a program and they already have a credential in hand from previous education or corporate training or perhaps military experience, those may all in some circumstances be exchanged for college credit. So through our research on PLA, a few findings rose to the surface. The first of which is that grantees noted the value that PLA could bring to these institutions and to support student progress. So many grantees either built new systems for prior learning assessment or they honed what they already had. PLA has existed for decades and decades in some form or fashion. So some institutions already had these opportunities on campus and took the resources from tact as an opportunity to hone what they already had in place. However, a student uptake of PLA was often low and we have a few reasons why this might have come to be. So it could be that students didn't know that these opportunities existed for them to get credit or they didn't know enough to walk themselves through that process. Some students indicated when evaluators interviewed them that they didn't feel that they're learning that they had gained outside of the classroom would count so they didn't bother. And then the third reason is that students often perceived the process of getting credit as arduous, confusing, it was just too much. So they didn't end up with a credit in hand even though they had the college level learning that could have helped them move through their program more quickly. The third finding that I want to share with all of you connects to the second one. So four colleges that were able to have more success with PLA, those that deliberately introduced PLA into early conversations with advisors, with faculty were most successful. So instead of just indicating to students that PLA exists and then moving on, assigning someone on staff, on campus to walk students through the process of acquiring those credits seemed to help students make use of these opportunities. And to follow up on these findings, I want to give a few recommendations that surfaced. So first of all, as I mentioned, having an advisor who knows the PLA process isn't able to support students through that process is really critical to students being able to get PLA credits. And the second piece of this is that the more automatic the PLA process is, the better it is for students. So let's say that a student enters a tax-funded IT program and they've already got some short credential in hand from previous experience or corporate training. If the faculty at that institution have already decided this credential is worth nine credits, once that student walks in the door, there's no more faculty assessment that needs to take place, it's already done. Advisors know how to communicate that and it's clear for students, that's easy to understand. So the more automatic the process is, the better. The second is that PLA systems and PLA advising are really critical. And another piece of that is the college culture. So institutions can think about what does it mean for us to be the type of college that values learning that happened outside of our four walls? And that can happen from faculty being closely involved with every aspect of developing PLA policy and executing PLA policy, including advisors in those conversations and also presidents and upper level administrators, communicating that they value the learning that students have gained elsewhere. The third one is that consistency is really valuable as well. Sometimes even within an institution from academic department to academic department, the credit a student can gain from a credential might be really different. So communication among those units is really critical and then between institutions within a state is also really important. And this kind of brings to mind one of the things that I feel through our research showed as a real bright spot for tact, which is that these resources were used to support communities of practice where institutions in consortia could learn from each other as they were building these systems out. And so for PLA, no one needs to reinvent the wheel if all the institutions in a consortium or in a state come to a consensus on what this should look like. That's better for students and it's better for institutions again, because they don't have to start from the very first square. I want to now move on to our second brief that we published that focused on navigators or coaches. Those are individuals who were one person kind of fulfilling multiple roles for students. So some of those aspects of the role may have been familiar. So advising students throughout their program, sometimes recruiting and admitting students and offering career counseling. But instead of having multiple folks, it was just one person who was focused on the student's intact funded programs. And one of the reasons that we chose to focus on this for one of our qualitative research briefs was not just that it was incredibly common for colleges to hire someone or assign someone to this role in a tact grant, but there's a very positive perception in the evaluations that we reviewed of coaches and navigators. So for, I wrote this brief and for this, I focused on five particular grants. And for three of those in particular, there are some quantitative findings in the evaluation that kind of point to the value that coaches and navigators had. So for example, there's new research showing that in the healthcare profession's pathways grant, the H2P grant from round one, that interacting with student services positively improved students' likelihood of gaining a credential. In the Boost Consortium, around three grants, students who visited a coach to discuss wraparound services, so some kind of need outside of the institution or career guidance, those visits were positively correlated with attaining a credential. But it's not just quantitative findings that point to the value of folks in these roles. When students were interviewed by evaluators about their coaches, they said things like, I wouldn't have graduated without my coach. I went to my navigator for everything. So these positions were really valuable to students who were entering tact-funded programs. So I wanna speak a bit more about the role of navigators. So for those of us from the higher ed world in the room, as I mentioned before, some of the roles that navigators and coaches took on are familiar. Academic advisor, career counselor, admissions counselor, all manner of student services, some navigators fulfilled those roles, some or all of them. And it kind of turns the traditional model of those positions on its head. So instead of a student going from step to step to step in their journey as a student, trying to find an office that can help them with this, trying to find an individual who can answer this question for them, instead they have a navigator who's kind of side by side with them, accompanying them throughout their program, all the way to hopefully a successful workforce transition. So students didn't have to figure out the bureaucracy on their own. They had someone there designated to be with them the full time. And as I mentioned, students said things like, I went to my coach for everything, for all sorts of questions. They were there for them. They built trusting relationships with students and students perceived that as valuable. Something else that emerged from the research on navigators is that there seem to be three main areas of practice where navigators worked. The first is the college, where they were supporting students in navigating the bureaucracy, finding the office they needed on campus, walking them over to the financial aid office, having a meeting with students and faculty together to try to make sure that things went smoothly. Another area of practice is the community. And this consisted of both formal and informal networks that the navigator had within the community. For example, a student in one grantee college had a very short window of time and a very long walk to get to campus and no other means of transportation. That student was missing class and showing up late to class. They went to their coach and said, this is the situation. And by the end of the day, after their coach had reached out to their informal local network in the community, the student had a new bike that was theirs to get them where they needed to go on time. So the navigator made use of their local community to support student success. The third area of practice is industry. So focusing on a navigator being aware of the skills and credentials that are valued in occupations that were targeted by a particular tax grant, building and enhancing relationships with local employers to be able to support that final step of transitioning into the workforce. And I will say that navigators kind of brought their own backgrounds into their roles. So most were stronger in one or two areas than all three. Every navigator role was a little bit different based on that and based on the college's needs. But following up on the research, a few recommendations kind of came to the surface that I hope will be useful. So the first is that students valued navigators. And so further state and federal investment in navigators who support student success is really valuable and something to think about. To think about centralizing student services in a way that takes the student experience into account and gives them that constant support alongside them throughout the program. The second recommendation I wanna offer is similar, but I wanna say that investing in the positions is really critical, but professional development after that point is also very critical. When we think about how I just mentioned navigators have strengths in one or two of maybe the three areas of practice that surface. Additional professional development can help them enhance their ability to serve students in an area that was maybe a little less familiar to them. For navigators who were from industry moving into a college, sometimes that was a steep learning curve for navigators, but the flip side is also true if someone internal to the college was hired, they had to start potentially from scratch building knowledge of the relevant occupation in industry. So professional development to support learning for navigators in those areas is critically important. And the final recommendation that I wanna offer is that data matters and our ability to understand when students are going to their coaches or navigators or advisors, how often they're going. What are they asking about? What are the challenges they're facing? And then to connect that data to their outcomes and see what happens after their coaches offer support is really critical. First of all, for institutions to be able to hone what they're offering students to make sure that they're meeting students emerging needs, but also to be able to advocate for resources for high quality navigation and coaching in the future. So now we're about ready for us. Oh, yeah, if we've got time I would be happy to take a question or two if anything comes up. We've got a question over here. There's a mic coming around to you. I had a question about employer engagement. Yes. And when I think about community colleges they're the ones we turn to when we try to find out how to engage with employers. What are some of the new areas of engagement with employers that came out of this work? If you're aware. The way that colleges engage with employers well that partly through the navigators. So instead of being just located in a career services office that was working with students some colleges actually hired a navigator to be more outward facing. So that is to say instead of being more focused on students within the institution they said, you're the navigator. Go meet this employer. Go build a relationship with this employer and then you kind of take the student by the hand and pull them through at the end. So I would say that was really innovative where it is a designated person on campus who is offering career guidance to students but is more focused on building those outward relationships. It depended on the institution what would be more valuable to them. But that was something that stood out to me as something that was innovative. Any other questions that come up? Sophie's gonna bring you a mic. So there is so much value in having one person who is knowledgeable about all the process but something that we consistently heard was a sense of isolation and a sense that in many colleges there was like one person who was working on tact and that person often wasn't empowered to change the system issues that needed to be addressed in order to successfully navigate. So did you see much evidence of that? Yeah, that is a really great question. And so physical space within the institution turned out to be an interesting factor. So in some institutions the navigator was placed with tact grant staff or they were the tact grant staff kind of off in the grant office but in others, for example, I'm thinking of institutions in the H2P grant early on they were placed in the academic unit where the students were and so where those folks sit when they have those roles is really important. Especially if they're new to the college environment there was one coach I spoke with who was placed in an academic unit as the navigator and that helped them build relationships with faculty that were so important to being able to advocate for students. When students are passing by her door that's when she's able to build her roots in the institution. So that's a really great question. So physical space did end up mattering. Yeah, maybe another question anywhere? Be curious just quickly. I assume the navigators were funded with tact funds so I wonder what you found around sustainability. That is also an excellent question. It varied a lot from institution to institution. Navigators are not cheap. I mean it's another position to have. Some institutions split the role in kind of like distributed among faculty or student services professionals after the grant was over but tried to maintain the practices that seemed to work well. So that's one way to think about sustainability more than just that one person. But some colleges really bought in and were able to sustain the role even though it was a little tight because they saw the value that it provided. At the beginning of my navigators brief I profiled Jan Pomeroy who was a coach at Anoka Ramsey College in Minnesota. And she had a conversation with upper level administration at the nearing the end of the grant and said so okay so what now? And she's now the adult student services director at the institution because they were able to work out because the folks could see the impact that she'd made on students. So it varied but with upper level support some colleges were able to sustain the position. Well thank you all very much. I would love to move into our next panel and so I am delighted to introduce our moderator for the next panel. Dr. Karen Stout who is the president and the CEO of Achieving the Dream which is the nation's largest movement to improve success for all students especially low income students and students of color. Dr. Stout travels and writes and in her writing and speaking she focuses on strategies that enhance student success and completion, accelerating and scaling innovation and I'm so very happy to have her here with us. So would you all join me in welcoming Karen please. I think this will be a wonderful segue from Ivy's presentation because we have three practitioners and I have three questions just like Martha did but I'm actually going to have four because I'm gonna ask each of you to introduce yourselves. Say which round you were in and which part of the heat map your grant touched. So let's start with Eric. Eric Heiser I'm the dean of the school of applied technology and technical specialties and the CTE director at Salt Lake Community College Salt Lake City, Utah. Round two a little bit round four the whole way. Most of the heat map but prior learning assessment was a big draw for us. Annette Parker South Central College in Southern Minnesota and we were round four and I would say on the heat map we hit all of the strategies. Hi I'm Harry Burgessando I'm director of talent and business innovation at Lorraine County Community College just west of Cleveland and I submitted a unsuccessful application in round three and we started right away working on our round four and we're successful in securing a single state consortium grant. Great when I was president at Montgomery County Community College before I moved to achieving the dream we were involved in round one, two and three grants either as part of a state consortia proposal or cross state proposal around advanced manufacturing and biotechnology and then achieving the dream was also involved and I think Meredith round two and three with some of our achieving the dream colleges that were involved in the grant work so this is near and dear to my heart too so I'm gonna start with Annette because we heard a little bit about leadership making a difference. You said your strategies hit all parts of the heat map so tell us a little bit about what you learned from tact and especially on what it meant for shaping student support services. Okay so what I don't think I mentioned that I'm the president of South Central College and you know when we started out I knew I was a new president to the institution and I knew that all of the strategies that we would undertake needed to be sustainable within our institution and so we really brought industry and education together. We focused on manufacturing and we brought in 85 employers and our two senators to really look at what we were gonna do together and then we joined achieving the dream and we really wanted to think about what was the transformation that our institution needed to take to make a difference. And you know I came out of the manufacturing sector so I really understood what we needed to do and felt that it was important that we had leadership at the highest level within the institution so we partnered with South Central College and 11 other Minnesota State colleges and two of the universities to really look at some of the work that was already done around credit for prior learning really delving into apprenticeship and sustainability and all of the strategies around that. Did you learn anything specific about student success with the PLA because we saw some of the recommendations up here and I know your model was very intentional in connecting students. Yes, so we started out with the Minnesota State System I've led the statewide effort in credit for prior learning. I had to bring together a group of cross-functional team from across the state of Minnesota to really look at how we were gonna do and sustain and really do something big with credit for prior learning. And so we had to really get into conversations with faculty and staff to really understand that we weren't watering down curriculum or assessment but really understand if we believe foundationally that assessment, we were doing assessment effectively that we could scale something big. And so that's what we really had to do. At South Central College, we went through a vigorous process with the Faculty Senate or what we call AASC at South Central to put together policies and procedures that really has scaled credit for prior learning not just in the state of Minnesota but at South Central College and we're having conversations right now with the statewide faculty around is South Central's model the model for the entire state? And so it really takes that kind of work. Thank you. You can hear and that begin to talk about institutional transformation that is beginning to take hold, I think because of the tact work. Eric, what did your institution learn from tact and specifically around supports for student success? So we learned a lot of lessons learned, right? So our round four was based on moving formally non-credit clock hour-based training into competency-based. So we moved, the biggest lessons learned was don't ever write a grant like we did. We said, yeah, we've never done this before so 20 programs in four years, really three years. They didn't tell you that at the beginning but then they said, oh, by the way, your four is your evaluation year so you don't get to do anything. So we wrote the grant and said, yeah, 20 programs, we will transition completely 20 non-credit clock hour programs to competency-based education and no one was harmed in the process so that was a big win for us. But from the student support side, the interesting part for me when we call our folks success coaches, we started having interventions towards the last couple of years. We mainly focused on our advising staff and found that there was still a disconnect. There was still advisors not seeing it as necessarily their job to walk students or work with students through some of the non-advising types of issues. Faculty wanted to help as well but they teach, right? So we're left in this area of we've got three quarters to half the circle filled. What about that last quarter that is oftentimes the most important, the life, right? The phrase that I use with, so the programs that we transition were all short-term workforce base, one year less certificate programs, mainly adults, average age 34, 35 years old. So the phrase that I would often use is life happens to our students much faster than happens to others. And what I mean by that is one little thing can throw them off kilter. And to us, it looks like a little thing to them. It's a huge thing, whether it's $50 for gas, whether it's childcare, whether it's a situation at home, whatever the case may be. That's where those success coaches stepped in and continue to do so, to provide the students the resource necessary to fulfill completion and then hopefully onto placement of the job. So I think for us it really did open our eyes in showing us that you had some of the puzzle connected but not the entire piece of it. And I would say if you talk to our students, especially those touched by the success coach, they would say a lot of the same things that you heard Ivy say earlier. And that was that they couldn't have done it without them. Relyed on that person. That person, we're a huge, huge community college. 60,000 plus students. It's very easy for students to get lost in a college like that. 10 campuses, excuse me, 11 campuses around the valley in Salt Lake City. So falling through the cracks is a very real thing. And we found that those success coaches were, they gave us a way to close some of those cracks so that students knew. A lot of times they were asking questions that we absolutely supported. We had those resources, they just didn't know about it. So it was a very, in some parts, very convicting process to go through to say, are we really doing what we need to be doing to serve our students? But at the same time also very rewarding to see it help. Did you stand up all 20 programs? We did. Are they still in motion? We have 27 programs now. Okay, there you go. There you saw some sustainability and scaling and momentum. Terry Lorraine, what did you learn from TACT and specifically about the work around student success? Sure, well one qualification I would put is that Lorraine County Community College, specifically our TACT grant came right about at the same time that we were launching a completion by design initiative. We were one of three colleges in Ohio supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We also had, I think, fairly recently become an achieving the dream college and I was brand new to higher ed relatively. So there was a lot of things going on at the same time. I would say there are some things that happened under that that were important to all of our students when you talk about guided pathways, the recognizing the importance of that success coach, really a lot of policy, institutional changes and transformations were happening at the same time. So there were actually times where I felt like that person in the corner office going, well, what about workforce, what about the adult worker? But so I would say while all the heat maps were important to us, the most important was the employer engagement. When you look at what specifically did TACT do and what data did it give us, 100% it was the capacity needed to really not just engage employers. We all work with employers every day but I mean in a strategic tactical way to problem solve with them together. And today that became very important because now with all these years of student success data we see that some of the biggest lags in equity are for our adult students. They are still, and so there is a lot of great transformative work happening at our institution and across the state. What we did see and a big flip for us was of course when TACT was born was during a time of high unemployment. By the time our program was launching, we had flipped. We were at a period of very low unemployment. So 70% of our participants were employed in some fields. So our employment numbers looked awful but our earnings numbers as you would anticipate were great. So we definitely saw increases in completion of some type of post-secondary credential. We saw really significant like 40% increase in earnings over the comparison group. So these were numbers that we could really take to the presidents and but like this is why we have, this is on top of all the student success work. This is, these are exactly the achievements we want. But when, of course when you talk about short-term stackable certifications and easing the path to PLA, well what you're talking about are industry recognized credentials and all of that. And then you get into the chicken and egg conversation with employers and I don't care if they have it, I just want them to have the skills. Faculty, I don't know, well our employers aren't asking for them, why do I, so it just takes a lot of time. And so that is something that we've seen with long-term benefits for us in Ohio is having those partnerships established to continue those conversations. So let's stay with you around employer engagement. So the next round of question really is around what types of new partnerships were formed, maybe internally and externally, based on the tacked work. So our project was 11 community colleges focused on advanced manufacturing. We have been successful in sustaining that consortium. We represent today all 23 community colleges and six public universities. So we're really excited about that. So and really I attribute that to a fantastic partnership that we were able to establish through the tax grant with a statewide association called the Ohio Manufacturers Association. They represent Ohio manufacturers, many of whom are small and medium-sized companies. And the other partnerships that we were able to establish was really working closely with a number of the Manufacturing Innovation Institutes. So again, about the same time that we won our tax grant, we saw the establishment of America Makes, the first institute in Youngstown, Ohio. And today there's 14. And as a workforce professional, I was going, oh my gosh, how am I supposed to keep up with all of this information? And so we were very strategic in leveraging. So all of that led to a really solid partnership with OMA, which during the course of our grant was recognizing that it needed to take a leadership role in solving the workforce crisis. We were able to bring capacity to the table. Where so often we are the ones going, hey, can you help? We had capacity in the form of people, and in some cases some resources, to say, let us help you stand up a workforce strategy. So that partnership continues today. Plus our college partners among our 11 colleges worked with over 500 employers. So that was documented, we started I think with 47 employers at the start and over 500 really deep partnerships. So that continues to be transformative. OMA has a voice to the state. So they now convene all the state agencies that touch what we do on a quarterly basis as well as they have an industry leadership committee. My mind has a bubble map emerging from all the partnerships that you just touched on. And how about for your work at South Central? Well, our work, I think it's important to put in context that when I was a faculty member for 12 years I taught and I would teach high school kids in the morning. And then I'd go out and do corporate training in the afternoon and I'd come back and teach college classes. And I always saw the same content just delivered to different audiences. And so when we set our strategies together it was focused on industry recognized credentials that were lattice stackable. And also to finally bridge the gap between credit and non-credit. And so all of that was in the design intent. And so initially we pulled together, we had a manufacturing summit that brought together about 86 manufacturers. We also pulled in a couple of really big manufacturers, Bosch and 3M to kinda help lead for the small manufacturers on the grant proposal. And so when we began to help them really understand, so the conversation about the industry recognized credentials. What the employers would say, well, I don't know what that is and I don't care. But when we sit down with them and show them the outcomes they say, oh yeah, I want that. Okay, so that's AWS, they don't care. Okay, so that helped bridge the gap there so that whether they're getting certified welding training on the non-credit side or on the academic side is the same, okay? And then you start bridging the gap with credit for prior learning. So helping them to understand that piece was probably the biggest part of bringing together the employers. We brought in other people because apprenticeships was a part of our proposal as well. And so we ended up working with the Minnesota legislature to create the pipeline grant, which is funds apprenticeships and it helps the employers pay for the apprenticeships. So to get the subject matter expert in the plant to work along with us, so we did that. And to continue to fund the pipeline program and the dual training program in Minnesota. So we partnered with the Department of Labor and Industry in Minnesota. That led to partnerships with the Minnesota Department of Higher Education with what we call the Minnesota Reconnect, which is for adult students that have stopped out with 15 credits or less and getting them back into the system. And then with the Minnesota Department of Corrections, we have a program in the correctional facility for low-level offenders. Well, now it's starting to connect and spiral like this. So, Eric, how about it Salt Lake? I think I'll just continue to help it spiral. So a lot of common connections there. I think, again, one of the things that as we re-evaluated or even evaluated how our industry groups worked, that we call our groups Program Advisory Committees, PACS for short, some of them worked very, very well and others, if we were being really honest with ourselves, were either non-existent or folks were showing up for a free lunch. So it was like, okay, what can we do to make the higher achieving PACS that way across the college, as opposed to three or four that operated really well and 40 or 50 that did okay and then another 10 or 15 that really didn't do anything. And the common theme that I think you're gonna hear in all of this is when you engage industry, it has to be honest and you have to really be willing to take their feedback. It can't just be token input. It can't just be to check a box. You can't just say, well, we had industry at the table and yeah, they were fine with it, so that checks the box. Now, they wanna see that what they're telling you is actually getting applied because if it doesn't, that's why they check out. If they see that you're really not willing to engage with them and make the changes that they're asking or engage to ask questions, hey, you say that this doesn't matter, but you've got this, this and this on your position descriptions. Are you sure that that's what we're talking? Oh, I didn't know that's what you were talking about. Absolutely that's important. So it really is kind of being willing to incorporate what they're asking you to do, in many cases, checking what they're asking you to do to say, I hear you saying this, is this what we're looking for? And once you start doing that, that starts that snowball rolling down the hill and then the other industry partners, I think Aerospace is one of the big ones in our area, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, all the big dogs, well, one sees one getting attention from the community college, that brings the other one to the table. So those were kind of the things that spurred us even further. And again, to look intrinsically and internally to say, you know what, honestly we're probably not doing as well as we could be with our industry and we need to fix that. So that was one of the big results of our tax evaluation was, what are you gonna do going forward with your program advisory committees? And so the presidents convened a team of folks to say, here's your stars, model it after them and let's spread this out to the entire institution. So it sounds like the tax investment kind of set up an architecture for you to engage with a broader community and has turned the flywheel that all of you have sustained those partnerships and are building new ones. So I'm gonna turn to the third question and we have a room filled with policy makers and leaders and we're hoping that this type of investment in community colleges at some point can be replicated. So what is your message for federal and state policy makers and other higher ed leaders about what might be done differently in an investment like this going forward? You wanna kick that off here? Sure. So I think for the Twitter users out there, the hashtag says it all. We need investment in community colleges and it can't just be tacit level investment. If, so community colleges in some cases we are our own worst enemies in that we do more with less but that paradigm needs to shift. It really does. If we're gonna depend or continue to depend on our community colleges to deliver for the communities in which they serve, the level of both state and federal investment must go up because we're at a point now where we can only do so much and the last thing that you wanna be doing is chasing dollars that should have already been invested because you're looking to tie up loose ends wherever they may be. And so it doesn't, you're not gonna get away from the investment side of things on the other side of that though when you look at efficiencies created at community colleges, the bang for the buck as well in Dr. Bragg's report I think you see close to 30%, that's a huge number. I mean we can say that it absolutely can be bigger but when you look at return on investment there are very few areas where you could point to say we invested this much and then got 30% of that returned in the form of higher wages which spurns tax growth and things like that. So I think it all comes back to investment though. It all comes back to saying we value what our community colleges can do, see that they need to have more investment to do more and then moving in that direction. And that's both I would say federal and state level policy. Seeing states also being more robust within investment, again, community colleges help the entire communities that they serve and they are the boots on the ground. So the tax investment being one in capacity building has come up over and over in the presentations today, the first panel and this panel and that's I think what made it so unique and being from achieving the dream where we're really helping our colleges with data capacity, hearing the messaging about the importance of data capacity to really hit home. So without the additional investment, it's hard to get the data to do the kind of institutional transformational work that is important to make these investments efficient and effective. But Annette, how about advice from you? Well, I would go back to a comment I heard earlier around sustainability. And I think it was important to look at how the Department of Education and the Department of Labor worked together to look at the sustainability that needed to be built into the TAC grants. It certainly helped me to think about how I set my college up for success that would go beyond a single grant. And I think that as leaders, as higher education leaders, we really need to think about all of the tools that we have in our tool chest to advance those goals. Really getting involved, having the opportunity to do the Minnesota ReConnect came out of that. That has benefited the state of Minnesota. Our second chance program with corrections and other programs have shown the value of the initial investment from TACC that now is not just leading South Central, but the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. And so I would like to just, as you look at the data in the meta-analysis of what really came out of it, there's a bigger impact that goes beyond the grant itself. The sustainability and commitment from me for example, to make sure that our apprenticeship coordinator is still funded. And as we know, that's a big initiative now too. But we were out on the forefront with that work that now we're in a good position. And we actually had, my institution had 20% of the last round of funding through the Minnesota Department of Labor for apprenticeships. And that started with this grant. And so when you look at what that means for the economic sustainability of communities, and that's the way I like to look at it, it's critical to our success. But to your point, Karen, also getting involved with organizations like it helps seed us to be a part of achieving the dream. And now we have a research and institutional effectiveness office that's really ramping up our data and analytics. We were part of the right signals with Lumina that took the credentials and said, okay, now we're going to another level. And so really building capacity that does transformational work. So the significance in the way that the grants required sustainability and thinking about sustainability at the beginning as a leader was very helpful for you. Yes. And then a lesson would be finding a way in the future, I think, to better articulate the additional partnerships that are the unintended kinds of things that come out of an investment like this. Right, and Karen knows as a couple of years that I wanted to get in achieving a dream, but I said, I'm not ready yet. And so I needed two years to really set my institution up to do that, but now we're fully in and doing good work. And that's the institutional transformation piece which will keep your tech work sustainable. Terry? Yeah, I would say, I think if I'm correct in the early stages of tech, there wasn't funding budgeted to allow DOL to even do technical assistance. And we really benefited from technical assistance. I'm looking at our friends there. Really played a critical role when we were at a really important pivot point for us around sustainability where we really had to convene presidents and heads of state agencies. So we were able to have a visit from DOL which really helped and technical assistance. So that, I would say, please always do that. Maybe it's just because I'm a geek, but I always went back to the six core elements in the original solicitation. That was really helpful to me. And I think we shouldn't let go of those. Those were, we had to be evidence-based and those six core elements themselves were evidence-based. And in a state like Ohio where we're all independent, that was very helpful. So we actually ended up with a lot of innovation in what colleges did as long as they were hitting those six key marks. So I would say keep doing that. So yeah, we ended up with schools that did modularization, schools that did competency-based, a lot of earn and learn and apprenticeship. So that was kind of nice. And then because of the capacity focus of tech, and we had that collaborative infrastructure, it was much more efficient by the end of the four-year grant to share and do that peer-to-peer learning than we were at the beginning. So that was super important. And what ended up happening is we became, we are today a recognized front door. We are approached by funders or entities that want to work with Ohio in manufacturing around workforce and including the state and come to us and say, okay, we want to leverage this network. So, and I really want to thank we had some great philanthropic support to help us get through the year between the end of that grant. We luckily were successful in getting a scaling apprenticeship grant. But, and then the last thing I guess I'll say is don't forget about Skills Commons. I think that was another really smart thing. DOL did. It just, it's just again, one of my personal pet peeves that as taxpayers we fund the same things over and over. So that requirement to create an OER system to support that system and please keep promoting it and letting people know. Thank you for putting in the scaling apprenticeship. It's, you know, those are things that we've paid for and so if we can accelerate our own progress. I guess that would be my last thought is I think sometimes as program managers we do get, we have to stay head down and focused on the tactical. And so finding those opportunities to help us lift our heads and be reminded that, you know, hey, there's a national defense imperative to our work. You know, my little work in Lorraine County, Ohio matters to our national defense strategy, matters to our economic development strategy because sometimes that can feel very, you know, 60,000 feet up in the air but truly all of our work matters. So whatever you can do to help us remind ourselves of that and our, and our presidents is very helpful. Thank you. I think we have some time for some questions. Hi, I'm Paul Bucci, President of PTB Associates in Bethesda, Maryland. I'd like to, we've worked with four consortia grants. One single, one multi-state, and now I'm in Florida, and three state grants in Michigan, the MCAN project, in Ohio, the Ohio TechNet project, and the Menant Project in Minnesota. I'd like to put a question to each of the panelists. If you had another tax grant program similar as the original tax program, and you were about to go about planning and designing your new project, would you do anything differently or would you do exactly the same as you did in the original proposal? All right, who wants to start? I'll start. Paul and I spent a little bit of time together. Our project, I was on President Obama's Advanced Manufacturing Partnership and we named our grant Menamp just to position ourselves for attack, round four, because we figured that would be next, and we were fortunate enough to get one. Looking back as the president, because I was driving a lot of the direction and the vision of this grant, and it was a big deal for me, for the college to be on the president's committee, I think that my deans or my, you know, had a lot of pressure on them to work with the faculty on the curriculum because we did it on both sides, credit and non-credit. And I think they really wanted us to be successful but if I had more, looking back, I would have made sure that the work up front in building buy-in was better, at least for one of the programs involved. The others are continuing that work and the one that had a hiccup is still using industry-recognized credentials, but we had to have some conversations and so if I had to do it over again, it would be about building capacity. I talked about that with credit for prior learning and everything else. I really feel if you're gonna have change in an organization that it takes the time to do the work up front to get buy-in. Hi, Dr. Bocci. And again, thank you for all your help with that. I think probably one thing in hindsight I would do is ask every college to pick one program where that they would work on making it competency-based, you know, not realizing then how hard that is for colleges and how much capacity that takes and so we didn't see as much of that come out as we'd hoped. Sinclair Community College continues to be a leader in our state, our college has done some, but that's something I wish in hindsight that we had asked every college to really cost out and I wish I had been able to better advise colleges and, you know, what does it cost? How do you help colleges figure out, budgeting-wise, what is that going to take? So I would say the good news is I would do it again. So by far our biggest lesson learned was biting off probably much, much too much to choose. So 20 programs in most of those programs being right out about a year, a little bit less, transitioning them from non-credit clock hour old, and these were built on the old clock hour, 50 minutes out of over 60, and then flipping that onto its head with competency-based where time doesn't equal learning and it has everything to do with mastery and assessment. So we would be definitely much more cautious in terms of how many we said we would do. If knowing the lessons that we've learned, if there was something like that, another tacked out, I think we would focus much more. We've built the capacity now to be able to turn programs into competency-based and we've got a good model for that where I think we would jump now would be more on the student support side. So I'd fund more success coaches. I'd fund more advisors. That would be the area I would jump into now. I established the capacity, which is exactly what TAC was hoping we would do, right? Not only establish your capacity, but then carry it on. We've done that the next round. We would build that the other side of that. And again, I don't think it's not necessarily saying we did one thing right or one thing wrong. It was you didn't know what you didn't know. So when you got into it and then you saw the areas that needed to be addressed, that's where, and we're doing that institutionally, but one of the enormous values of TAC was the ability to scale. It gave us the ability to scale with the amount of money that we got. We were singular. We were not a part of a state consortium in round four. So it was almost two and a half million dollars. I think we would have gone that way regardless, but that two and a half million pushed us into where we are today. In Pennsylvania, in a state consortium, the first round, if I were doing it over again, I would have required the colleges to make some very specific commitments rather than leaving the organization of participation somewhat loose. In addition, asking the colleges to really use data-informed decision-making about their projections on how many adults they really could serve, which were way off as the grant was monitored moving forward, so those would be two changes and they probably are related to one another. Right, Karen, I just wanted to add basically the same point. There were 11 other community colleges as part of our grant and I believe, and we all had the same goals, but I don't think everyone understood the depth of the work around embedding industry-recognized credentials across the curriculum initially that I would want to really help them understand what that commitment meant to them. I think we have time for one or two other questions. Or not? All right, well, thank you. We really appreciated being able to share. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, you're the president, hi. Palmer, I'm a senior advisor for higher education in the workforce here at New America, and I think there were three points that came through Loud and Clear today. Number one, we really, really need to support adults in college. With the changing workforce, the changing labor market, we need to give them more support to get degrees and credentials in higher education. And investing in the capacity of community colleges, whether it be through policy, bringing them together and actual money, as we heard many times today, is an effective way to do that. And number three, we're starting to see some preliminary evidence about what works to support those students, and we need to invest more in both research and in funding to scale and think through some of those interventions and what they're gonna look like. And with that, I wanna thank some people here. First of all, I wanna thank Lumina Foundation for supporting the research and also investing in the TA around the TAC grant. We heard a little bit today about how valuable that was for people who were actually implementing these grants. I wanna thank my colleagues, Ivy, Sophie, and Julie for helping us put together this event. It was a lot of work, particularly given we were finalizing four publications at the time. And I wanna thank you all for attending today, for listening, for lending us your brains, and for helping us think through this important work. And with that, I wanna wish you all a wonderful afternoon and we hope to hear from you all in the future. Thank you.