 I'm going to first tell you a little bit about the Lumina Foundation. It's a private independent foundation located in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was founded in the year 2000. And really it's one of the few foundations in the country that's solely focused on higher education and especially higher education attainment. The grant making goes to states, systems, individual campuses and communities. You have a couple of their community grants, I think at least one in Milwaukee here in Wisconsin. Oh, and let me just, I'm sorry. There's a focus on attainment. The national goal is 60% by the year 2025. And some of this may be redundant for some of you, but I think I always try to make sure that we're all on the same page at these events. So this shows you a map of states with attainment goals. Most states now have goals in the work that I've been doing. I worked in the upper Midwest. Michigan's still kind of working on theirs. Nebraska, California are working on it as well. But you can see that in the upper Midwest we've got great representation there. So why bother with a goal? I think the main point here is that it really is a way to increase your economic prosperity as a state, improve the quality of life here in Wisconsin, improve your outcomes education overall, and just decrease disparities in your population. And I think the previous speakers really spoke well about you have a well educated workforce, but are you positioning yourself in a way that allows you to really stay ahead of competition and maintain the wonderful quality of life that you have here? So just to kind of do a refresher here on attainment versus completion, I think most of you probably know those differences, but for those of you who don't, completion really, they're both very important. Completion refers to the credentials awarded annually to students at an institution or a system. So UW, the tech colleges, the private colleges, you can roll that up to your system level or desegregate by campus, but that's really important. But attainment is something that looks at the state as a whole. And so completion rolls up into attainment, and it's something that funders pay attention to, your employers pay attention to that. And you get to count people who come over the border from Illinois or Iowa or Minnesota, they all get to be counted in your attainment level. And it's sort of a measure of economic prosperity. So you've got the Stronger Nation report that looks like this in your folder. So I'm gonna kind of zip through the slides that refer to the Stronger Nation report, but that's in here if you're interested. And it's also available online. This just shows, I did a screen shots here, so the quality is not as nice as I would have liked. But this just shows your attainment levels in your state, so your education level. So shows you the percentages of students with high school credentials, some people that have some college but not a degree yet. So those may be folks that need a creditor to, right? Or there's somebody who stopped out, raised their family and now wants to come back. It's a great place to focus. And then this shows the breakout of credentials, certificates, associate degrees, bachelors, etc. Certificates are an evolving area for the Lumina Foundation in terms of the ability to count them. And I'll talk a little bit about that more in a minute. But they're a really important part of your overall attainment. So your overall numbers are 48.4% for Wisconsin. And you're above, of course, you are, the national average in terms of your attainment. And then this is just a trend line that shows over time your progress. I think it's that the certificate number, people get better at figuring out how to count that, whether it's within a system or it's outside of a system. A certificate awarded by a board or by an employer, those numbers will increase. But this just shows your trend over time. And one of the questions, of course, is, well, is 60% too high? I think the idea is not to get too hung up on that percentage. It's more about having a stretch. So Minnesota's at 70, Iowa I think is at 70. I think other states sort of anywhere between 55 and 70% is where states have decided to peg their goal. And then the important thing is you all figuring out how you want to approach improving attainment in your state. And that's the reason I like the work so much is that it's very tailored and state-specific. I'm not going to go into detail on this slide. It's in your packet and Neil's going to talk more about it. But this breaks down the percentages by county, which people are always interested in. And so what's the value of a statewide goal? You know, why bother on doing this? So it sets a target for all the people in your state to strive towards. It addresses the talent gap, better connecting education and the workforce. Gets everybody on the same page. I think as Neil will point out, it shows the region in context, you in the context of the region and the country. And I really think it's important. You can't know where you want to go unless you know where you are. So you need to know where you are in order to begin to position yourselves for the future. So the work that I've been doing in the state with you in 2016, there were a number of meetings before this 2014, 2015. But in 2016, there was a joint board resolution. And this is kind of special because I don't think another state has done this, where the private college association or group has also signed on the line. And I actually worked for the private colleges in Minnesota and they did not do that. They're part of the goal, but they did not do that. And I just give a lot of credit to them for stepping up. So this was among the Wisconsin Technical College system, the university system, and the private colleges all signed a joint resolution in the fall of 2016. That the goal would be 60% of folks in Wisconsin ages 25 to 64 by the year 2027 would hold a credential of high value. And that's something Neil will talk more specifically about later. We announced the grant in 2017 that was a $100,000 grant. You were one of only 12 states that got the grant, so it's great. And there is a focus, of course, on adults and underserved populations. Student success, secondary to post-secondary transition. There was an internal partner meeting held in Madison in November of 2017. And today is really your public kickoff, the first of your two meetings. Here's the letter that was signed by the three systems. And then there's one thing I want to really highlight that's kind of a non-negotiable for the Lumina Foundation is the importance of addressing equity or underserved populations. You know, for some folks, it's a moral imperative that everybody's in. And for others, it's an economic imperative. But for me, it's both. But no path will get to your goal without making sure that you're focused on your underrepresented populations. Older folks, you know, older students, students of color, et cetera. This slide, too, is in your packet, but this sort of shows race and ethnicity. This is a stagnant slide. It's a lot better online and clearer in your packet. So, high value credentials. You've seen one credential. You've seen one credential, right? So, one of the things that is important to focus on is better aligning credentials in the workforce. I've heard Senator Harstoff, former Senator Harstoff talk a lot about this and many of the rest of you as well as how do you better position your state, giving your population to align better with workforce needs. And it's hard sometimes to predict those needs, but it's important to work on that. Some of the early leaders on the work of identifying high value credentials are in New Jersey and Florida, I believe. And the Workforce Data Quality Campaign is an entity that I've been working with. You can Google them if you'd like that has some great research on this. And I think Neil will talk about this as well. But how do you also, when you're looking at credentials, figure out the ones that make the most sense to focus on in your particular state? How do states go about setting a path? Well, you've already done a lot of the heavy lifting, which is getting the goal in the first place, engaging your stakeholders, developing a plan, identifying metrics to measure progress and report that data publicly. So one of the things that I wanted to just highlight is I know that the university system has a dashboard. I know that the technical college system has a metrics and that sort of thing. But are there some metrics that you could identify across all three of your systems or institutions that you might be able to agree upon? Are there five or six things? And then could you then, there could be support for this, technical assistance for this. Could you then put together some sort of a dashboard that's not redundant but then cuts across all that would be available to policymakers and the public? Because that public reporting is really important. Tracking your progress is important to meeting your goal along the way, identifying your key measures and reporting some of that data annually. So I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about that later if there's interest in pursuing something like this. Sometimes branding is fun, right? So here are a couple examples from around the country. What other folks have done? You have decided on 60 forward, Wisconsin 60 forward. And my understanding is there's now a domain. There's a site so that you can look at all the presentations and that sort of thing at your leisure. So what are the next steps for you? Gathering input from this meeting, taking an opportunity to collect and analyze the data, keep focusing on underserved populations, look at your strategic plans and then really think about what you want for your students and communities and workforce. So this is a unique opportunity, I think, and I'm always heartened when I am at a convening like this where I see such wonderful representation of stakeholders across the board.