 Thanks to all of you for joining us for today's webinar, Getting Students to the Finish Line. I'm Tina Deneen, Associate Executive Director at ACRO, and I'm excited to serve as your moderator today. I'd like to begin by introducing our presenters, Jacqueline Arnold, Director of Strategic Relationships at Sailor Academy, and Tracy Robinson, Director of Academic Innovations at the University of Memphis. We welcome you both, and thank you for being here. As we get started, let me remind everyone that questions will be answered at the end of the presentation, as Mike mentioned, but go ahead and enter them in the Q&A box. Now, I'll turn the mic over to Jackie. Thanks so much, Tina, and thank you all for joining us today. Just to frame the issue, and we could go on to the first slide in the presentation, the second slide, sorry. Just to frame the issue that we're talking about today, as we all know, and as you know, because you're joining us, degree completion is a major issue in our nation today. So far, up to this year, almost half of incoming freshmen, first-time incoming freshmen, have their education disrupted in some way and do not finish in six years. Those students then go on to become part of the adult population that is considered some college and no degree, and that population is twice as likely than their peers who have degrees to live below the poverty line. They kind of get a double whammy economically, where they are unable to reap the benefits in most cases of having their degree, but still have to pay back that debt, the student loans from that experience going to college. So Tracy and I today are going to be talking about an innovative way the University of Memphis has decided to address this problem, and how Sailor Academy has been a very proud partner in supporting that. And I think that this discussion is very prescient at this time, because if we really think about it, 100% of students who are on campus have now had their education disrupted in some way. Many of these students do not know if they are coming back and how they are coming back. And it's incumbent upon us as educators to think of more flexible and welcoming ways to encourage them to come back whenever they are able to. So this is just one pathway that we're going to discuss. Tracy, would you like to do the next slide? Yes, Jacqueline, thank you so much and welcome to everyone. Thank you to ACRO for giving us the opportunity to talk about our work and really focus in on those students who have not completed their degree yet. This is what this program is for. And so as Jackie mentioned, there are so many students who have started a degree and not finished. And we realized at the University of Memphis how many students were leaving our institution when they were really close to graduation, literally close to the finish line. We really started to look at this work back in 2011, 2012, there were some changes to federal financial aid. We were moving to a different performance funding model in the state of Tennessee, kind of shifting away so much of our focus on enrollment and looking at our retention, looking more at our retention and graduation numbers. And through a couple of partnerships and talking to our financial aid partners in this work as we started trying to recruit students back to the university to finish their degree, we realized something that really is still at the heart of what we do in our program here in Memphis. And that is not only are students not finishing their degree, but many of them, the only credential they have from their university experience is student debt. So it really is even worse than not having a degree. It's having no degree and student debt that you're straddled with. And so this program really started out of a call to action for us that we needed to do something to help these students. And so we came up with some criteria for our finish line. You see that on the screen. We were looking specifically at students who had gotten to senior standing, which for us is 90 or more credit hours. We are a four year institution granting a bachelor's degree and advanced degrees beyond that. So these are students who got within 30 hours of graduation and they had had a semester stopout period. So they had left us for one reason or another and that they had an overall grade point average of a 2.0. So that is our graduation requirement of at least a 2.0. Looking on the next slide, we launched this program after a couple of attempts at trying to get this population back that weren't as successful. We launched this particular program in 2013 and in some of our previous campaigns, we had learned that the messaging to these students was more crucial than we ever learned before. Students in this situation know they didn't graduate. They typically know what requirements they did not finish to get their degree. And so we had to focus on what we were doing differently at the institution to help those students overcome whatever barriers or challenges they were facing and finishing their degree. And so we really focused on accessible, affordable, accelerated options. And those kind of fall into four buckets for us at the university. One is prior learning avenues. We have been working in prior learning avenues or opportunities for over 40 years. We've had a very robust credit portfolio program that we've had at the university also utilizing American Council on Education credit recommendations, military credit, credit by exam. And so we really wanted to make sure that students knew if they were to return to the university at Memphis and had not explored these prior learning avenues previously, we were going to help them do that. And so potentially they could be earning college credit for the things they were doing since they had left. We also focused on change elements. And so what I mean by that is catalogs are good for us. Undergraduate catalogs are good for a seven-year period. Sometimes students left in a seven-year period where a new catalog came around and had less credit hours as a requirement than before. So back in my day, I was required to have 132 hours to graduate for my bachelor's degree. And over time, we changed it to 120 credit hours. And so students maybe were still thinking they had to have 132 or 128 credit hours. And so we focus on some of those curriculum changes that have occurred while students have been gone that maybe they weren't aware about or aware of. We also have academic advisors that we call completion concierge. This was a term that we came up with that hopefully would relay the message that when you come back to our program, you are going to have one point of contact. You're not gonna have a need to call five different offices to ask five different questions. This completion concierge is your person. He or she is going to help you navigate whatever paths you have to completion, perhaps the degree that you were pursuing previously, but perhaps there are other options to consider as well. They are going to help navigate financial aid, readmission, whatever you need, we wanna be your person. And so we actually stay with the students until they graduate from the point they come back until the point that they graduate. And so that's been very important for our students to realize that they have a person on their side, that they have an advocate in their corner. And then we also launched with a scholarship opportunity. We determined very early that the reason why so many of the students had not returned is because of financial reasons. And so we looked at any low-cost options like some of our prior learning options for our students. We also had a small fund that we had started at the institution that would provide scholarship money for our students. And specifically, we were looking at students who had exhausted all of their federal financial aid. If that was the case for a student, then we told them we would pay for the remaining tuition and fees for you to fit a sure degree. So whether that was taking two more classes or whether it was taking 10 more classes, our scholarship would be covering those costs. And so that was a big deal for a lot of our students. There was not a GPA requirement for that scholarship. It was literally if they had exhausted all of their federal financial aid. And so we sort of simplified that process of scholarship and many of our students had not been scholarship students before. So this was a very attractive message for them to return and see if they might qualify for our scholarship. So if we look at the next slide, here are our exciting results. Over the last seven years, we have been able to graduate 713 students from our program. While I wish there was a comma in there and it was 7,013 students, we are very excited about the lives that we have been able to change through this program. This started out as a pilot program and I was the only one working in it. It was my other duties as assigned. And as we began to get more and more students interested in coming back and began to have more and more students graduate, the university began to provide support in the way of a first-hand, one-part-time person assisting that grew into a full-time advisor position to the point that we now have three full-time advisors in the working in the program with myself directing it. So we have grown over time and shown the success that we've been able to garner. I have a note there about a funding formula equivalent. Just to mention briefly, we are in the state of Tennessee. We are a performance-funded institution and there are some additional incentives within our funding formula when we graduate adult students and we define that as at age of 25 at the point of graduation or students who have ever received Pell, our low-income students. And essentially we get almost one bonus point for graduating those students. So the 713 actual students that we have graduated with those additional incentives has turned into 1,950 points in our funding formula. So that's a great option that we have here in the state of Tennessee and that definitely attracts interest in our program from administrators and deans and others who see that having one student graduate through finish line almost counts as two in our funding formula. So it's exciting. You see some of the average for our student population. You'll see that our average age is 36, GPA of a 2.6 and surprisingly they have only needed 11 credit hours upon return. In fact, we found some students who didn't need any additional credit hours once they've returned. Either because of those curriculum changes or we have an academic forgiveness policy that was updated during this time. And so some students were able to qualify for that. So a variety of different reasons but on average only 11 credit hours needed. And because of some of the low cost and the prior learning options that we have for our students, the average cost of completion has only been $1,800. And so whether the finish line is paying for that cost through our scholarship or the student is paying on their own, we make every dollar count. And we have been able to do that because of our partnership that you're gonna hear from Saylor in just a few minutes. We currently have 325 students in progress with our fingers crossed 60 of those students graduating by the end of 2020. And we really do take each story to heart as you see the picture of Chris here with his daughter at graduation. This is the best work I've ever done in higher education. I can tell you without a doubt of being at the university for over 20 years. But the smiles on those faces, both the daughter and the father are the things that keep me up and going to work every day. We know that that changes Chris's life but we also know that him earning a degree changes his daughter's life too. Not only for the additional funding that he may have in the next job that he receives but also research tells us that when a parent has a college degree the child is more likely to earn a college degree as well. So we are so excited about the way that this is changing lives and really changing our community here in Memphis. So exciting to see those smiles all the time. If we could get to the next slide you'll see that this is also a little bit more about our population. Almost 50% of our students are first generation. Almost 70% are low income students as defined by receiving Pell at some point in their college career and a little over 70% is underrepresented minorities. And for us these are areas where we have had a graduation gap on our campus for many years. And so this program has helped us close some of those graduation gaps or get closer to closing those graduation gaps for these particular populations and something that we're really proud of in our work here in the Memphis community. And then the last slide for me right now is next just to tell you a little bit more about our scholarship. I know I usually get a lot of questions about this but we currently have about a third of our population who do receive our finish line scholarship. One of the first things our completion concierge do when a student is inquiring about the program is work directly with our financial aid partners to see where the student stands whether they've ever received financial aid whether they have any left and all of those things. And we do pay for tuition of fees associated with whatever it takes to graduate that student. We do not cover books or housing. Those kinds of things we do just cover the finish line. I'm sorry, the tuition and fees. So, and again, I think I mentioned previously our average scholarship amount is about $1,800. So we've been very lucky to have community donations to our scholarship fund, institutional donations. Our president believes in this program so much he even made a personal family contribution. We have it set up where it is part of our employee giving campaign as well. And so the scholarship is something that is we're very proud of because it is community driven as well. So Jackie, I'll turn it over to you to talk a little bit about Sailor and then our partnership together. Excellent, thank you, Tracy. So Sailor Academy, as some of you may know is an education focused nonprofit. We are committed to providing access to higher education and skills education to people worldwide. And we've been doing that by creating and providing free online courses that are self-paced, some of which have been reviewed for college credit, which I'll talk about in a bit in a moment. But as you can see from the slide, our courses kind of fall into two buckets. The university level courses, which feature general education and business and kind of tech and computer science subjects, those entry level subjects, as well as shorter professional development courses. On the next slide, you'll see some of just me diving a little bit more into what those example subjects are. So professional development, a lot of those career readiness skills that are needed, leadership, decision making, those are very short. Most of our learners are coming to us for some sort of skill development. So you can earn a free certificate in any sailor course. But for students who are interested in those college credit courses, you have to go a step further and take what is called a proctored exam. And some of you may be familiar with proctored exams in other subjects like CLEP and AP. In those college credit courses, we have more of the business and computer science courses as well as what you would typically see in the first one to two and a half years of a liberal arts education. So introduction to biology, introduction to chemistry, psychology, those type of things. A couple of exciting developments. One exciting development is we recently launched in English as a second language program, which we think will be a great gateway for international learners as they are looking to either study in the US or learn English to kind of advance themselves in their own countries. Next slide, please. So why sailor academy courses have been ideal for this program and ideal for college completion, degree completion in general, is our courses are self-paced and they're completely asynchronous, which means that a student could start at any time, study for as long as they need to, if they need to take a week off to do something else, they're able to do that. All of our content is built into the course. So there's a digital textbook in many cases, quizzes, knowledge checks, there's study guides and student forums. There's a lot of support that's built right into that course experience. They are designed to be rigorous, but they are easy for students to access. They just have to be able to study and put the work into those courses. Next slide, please. And so these are just a couple of great selfies from our sailor selfie campaign, where our students, as you can see, are worldwide. I believe the gentleman, the first gentleman is from Nigeria. I can't recall directly. Second one is from the Philippines. Third gentleman at the top is from Egypt and the young lady at the bottom is from the US. So our learners are coming to us from all over the world and we're really excited about serving them. And I think on the next slide, we have a video that we'd love to show of our finish line, one of our finish line students, hopefully that we'll be able to show, Diane testimonial, she talks about the program. Sailor horses were a great option for me because I could take them at my own pace. I was there online classes and I could do them after work or on the weekends. It gave me an opportunity to just fit it in around my busy schedule because I work full time. So, and I run a small business on the side on the weekends. So it gave me an opportunity to take my classes when it was convenient for me. Plus, they're economical, they're affordable and that was a big deal for me. I took four classes through Sailor Academy and let's see, I took American Renaissance, Human Resources Management, Negotiation and Conflict Management and Principles of Management, I think. There were four classes. And so, it's just been a really energizing experience, emotional actually because it's been a long time. I didn't know if I could do it. Just knowing that I did this for myself is huge. If I pursue a secondary degree or a master's degree or not, just knowing that I took the time for myself to do this, it's just a huge sense of accomplishment for me and it's energizing. I did this, I did it for me, not for anybody else. And just another story from one of our amazing students and Diana's amazing student, you may, if you read the article, you may have seen her picture, her graduation picture there. So that's a great story that we're happy that we can share with the University of Memphis. And we're really proud to share in this program. This is another testimonial from one of our students who actually based in India, was able to earn a US-based degree through our courses. And we're just really proud of all the learners that were able to serve in this way and the institutions that were able to serve in this way as well. Next slide, please. Now, how we're able to do this is that all of Sailor Academy's courses are built by and peer reviewed by credentialed faculty. So these are faculty who are actually teaching and have the proper academic expertise, the same courses in a university or community college setting in institutions worldwide that work with us because they wanna support our mission. So they help us research commonly taught learning outcomes. What are the gateway learning outcomes to the next course in that series or what would enable a student to be prepared for the next course in the series that they should be able to take. In addition to them being created by those expert faculty, they're also all peer reviewed. And then the courses that go through the ACE process, the American Council on Education review process for those who are familiar with ACE credit are then peer reviewed again by faculty that work with ACE to judge the courses for academic rigor, accuracy, the proper sequencing. So we have a course process that closely mirrors ACEs, but those courses go through a secondary process. It's interesting to note that for University of Memphis's purposes, they needed higher level courses than the courses that we currently have reviewed by ACE. So Memphis's faculty, and maybe if we have some time, Tracy might be able to talk a bit about this process if you all have questions about it. Independently reviewed a set of our university level courses that were outside of the set of courses that have been reviewed by ACE and found them to be worthy of college credit for purposes of this program. So we're really excited. That's another reason we're really excited to be a part of FinishLine. It's kind of a testament of the amount of work that we've put in the commitment to quality that's really enabled us to be a part of this really innovative partnership. We also partnered with other universities that are using those ACE recommendations, but we hope that more universities will think about models like FinishLine because we have a lot of learners that need to be served. Next slide, please. So again, a little tiny little plug for a Sailor Academy, I guess. When we partner with folks, we're doing that at no cost. We are a nonprofit in the strictest sense of the word. We don't charge anyone anything to do anything with us. And we're really fortunate to be able to do that and invest our money and time into having great partnerships like ours with the University of Memphis and creating quality content. But we do partner with universities, nonprofits, skill development partnerships. We recently partnered with a group in India that's looking for digital ways to help upskill their communities. But we are excited to serve students, particularly in the U.S., and we're just looking to be a part of this equation. It's a big problem to tackle. And we look forward to talking with more institutions to see how we can serve more of these adults with some college and no degree. Tracy? Thanks, Jackie. And I just want to give just a little oversight in how this partnership developed with FinishLine and University of Memphis and Sailor. When we were launching our FinishLine program, we ran into Sailor representatives at a conference that we attended and learned about their great nonprofit organization. And we were looking specifically for courses that our students could start at any time. We typically work on a semester-based schedule. We do have seven-week session classes within our full semesters. So we do have about four or five different start times throughout the year. However, we learned from some of our earlier campaigns that once we got an adult student back and got them interested in returning to finish their degree, they needed something to do right away. And so the Sailor courses are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so if I talk to an adult student tomorrow that may be interested in getting started, these Sailor courses are basically a no-risk way for them to get started. They can jump in, they set up a free account online with Sailor, they start taking those courses. They do have to receive a minimum score on the final exam in the end to get credit at the University of Memphis. And we specifically chose 10 Sailor classes that we knew were going to be helpful in our degree completion program. But it also helps the students sort of learn, are they ready to go back? Are they ready to try out online learning perhaps? So it's been a great way for us to help our students get started quickly and to keep them involved perhaps while they're getting readmitted, while they're waiting on the next semester to start with us. So I just wanted to give a couple of points here if you're interested in replicating a program like FinishLine on your campus. Certainly happy to have more in-depth conversations with folks offline about that, but really just a couple of points here. Gage, interest on your campus. Remember we started this as a pilot program without a lot of commitment monetarily from the institution. And we thought we were onto something and had a good idea, but this pilot program was a way to test that out and see if we were really going to be successful. We kept data on everything that we were doing from the very beginning. And you know that that speaks volumes on campuses today. We had to determine where we wanted to start. We first looked at the number of non-completers that we had on our campus. With any number of credit hours, I think we first looked at students with 60 or more credit hours. And that was a pretty daunting number for us in the thousands. And so through different conversations, we personally decided to focus on that 90 or more credit hour student. But there are lots of other programs who do start at 60 or at a community college. They start at 30 hours since that's halfway to the 60 hour associate degree mark. Decide on your outreach, get that message complete and make sure you know what's gonna resonate with your audience. Determine a timeline. You know, I couldn't email thousands of students at a time when it was just something I was doing in my other duties as assigned. So we really decided to focus in on students who had the most credit hours overall, the number, the most upper division credits that they had earned because there's a certain requirement for that for graduation. We started out at students who had been away from the institution less amount of time. So someone who had just been out for a year, we found it's easier to get in touch with someone who's been out for five years just because of their contact information changing. So you need to decide on all of those things. Big lesson we learned from the beginning was to be sure to run your list through the National Student Clearing House to see if they finished a degree in another institution. So that was a big lesson from the beginning. Develop a communication strategy, both inside your institution and outside. The inside is as much important as the outside because you wanna make sure that everybody on your campus knows who is doing what and who's responsible for what so that when they get a random phone call saying, hey, I heard about this new program but I don't remember the name of it, that people know a general idea of what you're doing and then can direct those phone calls or email addresses to the right person. So that students don't like to be passed around and so you wanna be sure that they get to the right person. If you could get to the next slide, I just, we've highlighted, there was recently an ACRO witchy paper you may have seen about prior learning and some of the institutional barriers that students may have in trying to work through prior learning. And we just wanted to highlight a couple of those things. Certainly we could talk a lot about prior learning in a whole nother webinar but we do transcript this credit, this sailor credit through our prior learning program at the University of Memphis. We had our individual faculty members who were subject matter experts in those fields look at these 10 courses from sailor and determine if they were college level learning, if they were lower division credit or upper division credit and then those decisions were how we moved forward. But the paper from ACRO and witchy, identified that institutions do still struggle in this area in policy, not a lot of clear direction on PLA, a lot of awareness issues and concerns about prior learning and its effects on students. Luckily, we've been doing this for a while at the University of Memphis and have been able to address many of these things but they are certainly something to consider if this is the route that you decide to go with your sailor credit. And the next slide just indicates some of the benefits of prior learning. Many of you are probably familiar with Kale, the council on adult and experiential learning has a famous study called Feeling the Race and looked at the benefits of students who were graduating with prior learning credit versus students who were not earning prior learning credit at the institution. And that study found that, and they're doing a new study currently, some of the preliminary results have been released here and the University of Memphis was happy to participate in that, but basically they did the same research study 10 years later and have found that students with PLA graduate almost three times more than their peers without prior learning. And the graphic on the side, the gray bars are students that were enrolled at a four-year institution and the yellow bars are the students that were enrolled at a community college and the blue lines are the students that the total students in the population research study that they were looking at. And overall found that the benefits of prior learning far outweigh the students that don't earn prior learning in terms of graduation, retention rates and even taking more credits at their institution that grants them PLA. So more from that study will be released later this year but certainly confirmation that prior learning is a great avenue to attract and graduate students at your institution. And finally our information is listed here. I'll turn it back over to Jackie in just a second but I know that I can speak for her in saying that we are happy to have out flying conversations with institutions that have questions. Certainly we didn't have time to cover all the details but you do see our websites and our email address and contact information on this slide. And I know we have some time for questions that have been coming through in the chat. So I'll turn it over to Jackie just for a wrap up and then Tatina for some questions. Tracy, thank you so much for kind of framing how institutions can replicate this program and what the barriers to students and both two institutions have been. Yes, we're really excited for questions. As I said before, Sailor Academy is very honored to be a part of this great work that Tracy is doing and we're just looking forward to continued success. Excellent, both of you, thank you so much. What an impressive partnership between Sailor Academy and the University of Memphis. So thanks for sharing that with us. The degree completion is a major issue in our world, particularly in this current time of disruption. So I appreciate personally the work that you're doing and I'm sure it's rewarding for you as well. So we can take some questions now and we have had several to come in. So let me just start asking them. Cassie would like for you to elaborate on the academic forgiveness policy. Thanks, Kathy, for the question. The academic forgiveness policy, we call it academic fresh start at the University of Memphis and we do have a state policy with some guidance on this but essentially the policy states that for students who have not been enrolled in a higher ed institution in a period of four years, upon returning to the University of Memphis can apply for academic fresh start, which forgives their previous failing grades. It is basically a wipe the slate clean for students. There's a process that they go through but it is very beneficial for students to work for our students. I'm thinking of a student that we worked with who was a student athlete at the University of Memphis and went pro and her last semester and she did not finish and thought that she was going to still be able to finish up her coursework that semester but she wasn't able to do to her commitments. She has not been enrolled at the institution for 10 years and has recently come back. And so we are able to work with her to remove those abs in that previous semester and then get her back sort of on a fresh start. It's very rewarding for the students because they feel like they've been given a second chance but again, it is a policy that removes all previous failing grades for students who have been out for four or more years and have not previously earned a degree. And so Tracy, my background is a university registrar and a registrar at a few different institutions and what I've found with academic forgiveness is that as some schools it removes the F grades like you guys are talking about right now but for some schools, it will wipe out the entire semester, whatever semester the student chose to be forgiven on which means they're losing coursework. Is that, Kate, have you seen that be an issue where you are or is it truly just getting rid of the F grades? So our previous policy prior to about eight years ago was that you had to remove the entire semesters including the passing grades and it would remove the failing grades but it also would remove any of the passing grades also which was really detrimental to students because they could have held on to one class and worked really hard in that one class and earned that passing grade but they would lose it. And so our state pushed for a revisit of that policy I believe it was about eight or so years ago and that's when we changed our policy to be that it would just remove the failing grades. There's a lot of debate about it certainly schools have differing policies about it but the way that we looked at it is that for a student they could have very well focused on one or two classes in that semester and we shouldn't punish them completely by wiping out everything. Yeah, I applaud that so that's really good to hear. Steve asked the question, are your 713 graduates strictly University of Memphis returners? It's a great question, Steve. No, most of them are the University of Memphis students. When we started the program back in 2013 we were just looking at previous University of Memphis students but about three years into the program we started to get a lot of as we were growing in awareness we started to get a lot of inquiries from students outside the University of Memphis and through discussions with our provost at the time we decided to expand and work with students from any institution. Now of course we do have residency requirements for graduation purposes at the University of Memphis. And so students do have to earn at least 25% their degree credits with us in order to have a degree from the University of Memphis. So that means those students who are new certainly have to earn a minimum of 30 credit hours in order to graduate with us. But yes, I would say we're probably still about 90% former University of Memphis students and 10% students that never attended Memphis previously. Okay, so that should answer Laura's question as well but Laura, if you're listening and you have another aspect of the question you wanna ask go ahead and type that into the question box please. And we're assuming that the sailor classes transfer in as electives is that a safe assumption to make? Actually our sailor courses because we handpicked them can apply as major courses in some of our degree programs. Those were reviewed by faculty in those degree programs to satisfy those particular requirements. But yes, our sailor courses do count as major courses in addition to elective courses if needed for students. But that was all faculty approved and only in specific degree programs, not all programs at the University. Perfect, and Laura asks whether there have been any issues with accreditation using sailor courses that have not been recommended by ACE? No, we haven't had any issues because the process that we use to evaluate these courses is the same that we have used for the last 40 years and evaluating any prior learning that students may bring to the University of Memphis. So to give you another example, we have students who present different certifications or licenses to us through our prior learning program. If they've received a real estate license in the state of Tennessee, many years ago we had that evaluated by our real estate faculty member and he determined if that was college level learning and how many credit hours that it could be awarded. So we use the same process for these sailor courses. It is faculty evaluated and as long as the faculty members are eligible to teach courses at our institution by SAC COC standards, which that's our crediting body here in Memphis, then those faculty members are also eligible to evaluate prior learning credit. And so we do all of this through the same policies and practices that we have always used for our prior learning. Okay, perfect. You answered, like you clarified about students, they're students who can be in your program who are not University of Memphis students but are students who weren't University of Memphis students eligible for the scholarship as well? Yes, ma'am, the eligibility for our scholarship is that students have exhausted federal financial aid whether that was at the University of Memphis or at the University of Texas. Okay, and what percentage, if you know this, what percentage of returning students use tuition assistance as provided by their employer? That's a great question and one that we are continuing to build on here at the University. I don't have a percentage, that a specific percentage that I can give you but I can tell you that we do have several partnerships that we have developed here in our community that are having, that are elevating the use of tuition assistance programs for our students. One of the barriers that we typically see with tuition assistance for the students is that very often that is a reimbursement program. So the students have to up front the fees, register, pay for, enroll, complete and then get paid back on a certain percentage sometimes based on the grade that they earn. So one of the ways that we've addressed that is that we have established direct bills to many of our corporate partners so that the students do not have to pay up front the company is billed directly from the institution to for that student's tuition at the end of the semester. And so it's really helpful to those corporate partners also because they receive one bill from us with 25 students on it. It's easier for them to process that instead of getting 25 different individual things to process for their employees. And it has removed that barrier for the students of having to pay for that upfront cost which is not always an easy thing to do, right? Just our tuition just to give you a reference point for a three credit hour class is about $1,250 or so. So coming out of pocket with that sometimes it is a challenge for our students. And you noted earlier Tracy that the average number of credits required to graduate from these returning students was 11, which is just there ready to graduate. What are the most common reasons reported by your students for why they stopped out to begin with? Well, Tina, the reasons are varied. I could tell you a lot of those but they basically bull down to that bucket of sort of life getting in the way. I would say that more than half of our students are in the site financing as an issue for them returning which is why our scholarship opportunity is so important in our messaging and also that many of our prior learning options do come at a reduced rate for our students. So for example, portfolio credit for us is $75 a credit hour. So a student could get credit for a three credit hour class for $225 through our prior learning options saving about $1,000 per class. So that's pretty big as well. And the other thing that we see our students citing is just I'll call it sort of a lack of direction. They didn't know really what all their options were and they were very frustrated in trying to figure that out on their own. So should they go back to their original major and try to figure that out or should they look at other options? Very often they don't even know that that other options might be available to them. And so having that completion concierge approach someone on the inside who's going to help you figure all of that out I think has been very valuable for our program. Thanks for that and kind of returning the policy. Peggy asks whether you have a policy whereby students or by courses are too old for a student to use? That's a great question also. And one that we get often very often when students return they think they're starting over from scratch. And so that's a very common misconception out there. Our average time away from the university is three years but we've certainly had our fair share of students who have been out for 10 years and some that have been out for more than 20. And so they very often think that their courses have expired. So how we explain that to students is that the catalog under which your degree program that you were pursuing previously may have expired. So again, I mentioned earlier our catalogs undergraduate catalogs are good for seven years but the courses themselves did not expire. And so we pick up students in the catalog in which they return. And so all of those courses are still good for them. We just have to see how they fit into the current degree requirements in that catalog. Now there are a couple of exceptions to that. Some majors like nursing or engineering do have specific time limits on there. For example, science courses have to be more recent within the last three years or five years. Some of those things differ by major but the courses themselves don't expire for us. It's the requirements that are updated every seven years. Right, got it. And what happens if a student doesn't pass a class that's direct bill to their employer? So in those cases, the students are then responsible for the payment of those courses. So whatever threshold that those corporate partners have set, whether it's a C, C minus or whatever it may be when the grades are finalized for that semester, instead of that bill going to the corporate partner, that bill would go back to the student. And they obviously we do a lot of conversation and coaching up front and have a student agreement that they sign where they understand that that is what will happen. But yes, the student would be responsible for paying for that course. Okay. And one of our attendees is wondering what the top three majors of your graduating students are? That's a great question. And one I meant to answer during the presentation because it is one that I get often. So many of our students finish our Bachelor of Liberal Studies which is an interdisciplinary studies program. It was hard to say for a minute there. It is basically a general studies degree where we may be able to take upper division coursework that they've completed in history and pair that along with their work experience working in the nonprofit world through our prior learning options and they can finish their degree that way. We also see a good number of our students finishing our Bachelor of Professional Studies in organizational leadership. And then I would say the third most common major is psychology. Okay. And do these students complete beyond the sailor courses? Do these students complete their other courses online through the University of Memphis or how does that work? They can complete those courses in whatever manner that is best for them. We do have several, I would say the 60% majority of our students do complete the other courses online. We do have students that are not geographically located in the Memphis area anymore. And so online is really the only option that they have but if a student is located here in the Memphis area they can take courses on our campus if they so choose. And we do see some students doing a combination of both even if they're in the Memphis area. If they need to complete let's say a math course they may prefer to do that on campus and take the other classes online. We do also see a lot of students who put off that oral communication or public speaking requirement even though they got to senior standing. And so we do see some students do that course on campus but we do have an online option as well. Well, this has all been great. We're getting close to time. I want to be respectful of everyone's time. Jackie, did you have anything else to add at this point before we wrap up? No, other than I'm very thankful to Tracy for joining me today and to you Tina for hosting us on behalf of ACRO. This has been a great presentation. Look forward to talking with folks more. Absolutely, thank you so much for being here and for this valuable and timely presentation. And thanks to all of you for attending. And we also invite you to join us for our upcoming webinars on August 4th and 5th. The first one will be an introduction to the learning and employment record and the second one will give us national perspective on the student experience when transferring earned credit. So just pay close attention to the ACRO website because as we develop more webinars, they will be listed there. So with that, I want you all to take care and stay safe. Thank you all. Bye-bye.