 And I'm glad that we're talking about coherence after everybody's had a chance to have a bit of coffee because I know I'm not coherent until I have a couple of cups. So thanks to New America for putting this together and for OECD for doing the work. I think some really good issues brought to the surface here. The issue of coherence is really grounded in some fundamental realities. Of course, some of them are economic. And Tony, Karnavali, I'm sure will address some of this next related to the demand for skilled workers and particularly the shortages, particularly at the sub-baccalaureate level. Looking at the demography of this country and who is going to be seeking some of that education and training and how our institutions are and are not structured to really deal with that. And that's something that we're supposed to be really digging into here. And then, of course, the frame that's around all of us, which is the fiscal reality. We are not going to have a tremendous infusion of new dollars in our education and training systems to do this. So what are some of the rewiring and the workarounds to do this? And really strengthening those handoffs then naturally comes to the fore as an important strategy to really get to that level of attainment that we need in those areas that are most critical. And so I think we've got the right people in the room to really tackle this question of transitions. Immediately, to my right is Sandy Vito. She is from the 1199 SEIU League Training and Upgrading Fund. Did I get that right? Yes. And the Greater New York Education Fund. It's really focused on health care industry partnerships. To her right, Marlene Seltzer, president and CEO of Jobs for the Future. Marlene has seen the education workforce relationship, both the hiccups and the connections from a lot of different angles is quite seasoned in this. To her right is David McCord, the director of the Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee. David knows a lot about non-political power. I learned from reading his biography. He understands apprenticeships at a very deep level as a practitioner and as a leader. So I think we'll ground us in the reality on the ground. To his right is Dane Lynn, vice president at the Business Roundtable, formerly from the College Board and the National Governors Association. Synonymous with the words education reform and whether you like or hate the Common Core State Standards, he's your guy. And to his right is Susan Gallagher, who is the project director for the National STEM Consortium, which is a multi-institutional, multi-state collaborative that focuses on the STEM fields, community colleges, through the Trade Adjustment Act. I won't go through the whole acronym. But Susan also has a lot of experience in the state policy world and at the institutional level. So I think we've got an all star group. Marlene, I want to toss the first question to you, but I want others to jump in on this. And I want to start on an optimistic note, which is, where are we seeing some best practices for really smoothing student transitions, both secondary into post-secondary, inside post-secondary, in and out of workforce training? Where are we seeing really promising practices, particularly for at-risk populations? And what's it going to take to do more of that? We talk about and throw around the word scale a lot. What does it really mean to get there? And I want to get others to weigh in as well. But Marlene? Great, thank you. It's wonderful to be here. So let me start with one kind of overarching kind of concept and framework. And that's the kind of movement towards a adoption of a career pathway system that is really gaining a lot of traction in this country. And if you looked at that five years ago or six years ago, it was a strategy that really sat very much on the margins of education discussions, education policy, education reform. And if I were a betting woman, which at times I am, I would have bet that this wouldn't move into mainstream conversation. But in my mind, the good news is it has. And I think that's to the credit of a lot of people in the room to state leaders like Jay and to leaders like Brenda and Johan and the department, large education, labor, and the philanthropic community really made concerted efforts to try to drive this, not as a marginal strategy, but as one that would be a very inclusive strategy that would have nine through 14 pathways, nine through 16 pathways. But you're creating this articulated system of competencies and credentials. So I want to put that within context and welcome the audience's thoughts about that. I'm going to talk about just three very quick innovations and strategies that we actually mentioned today. I think Simon mentioned the first one in his presentation. It's something that sits near and dear to JFF's work across all of our both adult and youth. And that's the use of dual enrollment, early college credit, co-enrollment strategies, co-requisite strategies. There are kind of a body of innovations that really are about acceleration models that work for not only advanced kids, but very much so for underprepared, low-income, underserved students. And I'm going to use just very quickly three examples. Early college high schools and their iterations of early college designs with STEM designs being really critical to that. When you look at that, you've got 23% of kids graduating simultaneously early college with a high school diploma and 60 credits or transferable degrees. The outcomes are very significant. And the idea of acceleration has traveled down to the community college, particularly in developmental education and co-requisite, co-enrollment into gateway credit courses, as well as linking your ABE and GED programs to these technical pathways of study. The second issue, which again has been talked about, is about labor market alignment. And I just want to give a shout out to Jay and his team about using real-time labor market information to align curriculum to determine demand. It is a winner. I mean, if you want, and Burning Glass is not the only one they're very high quality, but there's probably a handful of organizations that do this well and right. And with using ONET and other BLS statistics, you can get a really good idea of what's in demand locally in your market. And a lot of that is kind of popping up at the state level and at the regional level. Within this alignment of supply and demand, the other issue I would raise is one of how you organize employers to really understand and get involved in the education process. If you think about doing a system that really does have work-based learning, that really is about apprenticeships or increasing apprenticeships, that brings learning and work together, you're going to need a way of thinking about how to organize employers. And I think the work of the National Fund and of others across the country really have got the formula right about how you do that. And just one stat. The US, and Tony will, of course, correct me, has about 6 and 1 half million payroll employers. We have a lot more employers, but they don't have payrolls. Switzerland has about 165,000. And I don't mean it to say there's not a comparison, but we really have a big organizing job to do, and that job needs to happen regionally with some great examples nationwide of how that gets done in Cincinnati and Philadelphia and Boston. All over this country, they're doing that work at the regional and state level. And figuring out how we put that into policy is something that I think is really important. And the final and third thing is, which was raised by the last panel, how we think about competency-based education. It's all not great. What's good about it in the sense of combining online learning, competency-based credentials? How do you put a system together that actually allows people to determine their own competency, speaks to the employer about the competencies they hold? And there's something there that we need to explore collectively. I'm going to stop right there. You had wanted to weigh in on that. This notion of moving from the seat time really to the do it when you're ready competency-based, what are the plays there? And to your constituents, the business community, what's their role in that? To Marlene's point, how do you organize to best leverage business into that transformation? Great question. Just a couple of things to follow up on Marlene's points. I think it's always important to remember, and some of this was addressed in previous panel, that we're talking about two populations here. We talk about the students who are coming out of high school and participating in the early college models. But we're also talking about a huge number of adults, some of who have been to post-secondary, have the 30 hours, 15 hours, and others who have not been to post-secondary, any college at all. And what's it going to take for us to bring those individuals along, build and develop their skills so they're employable for the types of jobs that Tonya Carnivali talks about that are growing? I mean, that's the most difficult population to serve. Yet we're not going to be able to, as many people say, get America back to work unless we think about the strategies that are going to be most effective for that group as well. And I think of a specific example, and then I'll jump in and answer your question, Travis. We have a company, Siemens, who recently built, two years ago, built a plant down in Charlotte, North Carolina, looking for 1,000 workers. And they could hardly find the number of workers they needed for that plant. Advanced manufacturing, very high-skilled jobs, average salary, $70,000 a year, doesn't necessarily require a bachelor's degree. And, granted, there are some individuals who may be living in Montana who, for one reason or another, couldn't relocate. But they struggled just in the southeast to get 700 employees. What they ended up doing was bringing their curriculum developers over from Germany, working with North Central Piedmont Community College to develop a program of study so that, in effect, they were creating their own supply chain of workers who could take those jobs and, through attrition, fill the jobs that were being vacated or individuals who were retiring. But they brought in a number of adults who had some post-secondary. But now there's a lot of interest from individuals who've never been to college in that area. How can they take advantage of those jobs in Charlotte, which is, for all central purposes, a second-tier city? It's not a Chicago where you can draw hundreds and hundreds of individuals. So they're looking for ways in which they could tap into that market of individuals who have no post-secondary education. But to answer your question, I really think that we have to do a couple of things, one of which is, and some work that we already have underway, is to take a look at those industries that do and those industries that don't have industry standards. And what could we do, as employers, more than just simply saying, there's a supply problem? What can we actually do to identify what are those essential competencies in the field, for example, of data analytics? It doesn't matter if you're Macy's or Northrop Grumman. The number of jobs that are going to grow in the field of data analytics are projected to grow substantially over the next 10 years. So what can employers do in partnership with traditional and nontraditional partners to create those standards, which are, in my opinion, an articulation of the essential competencies that individuals can have? And then how do we work in partnership to align the assessments so that we're measuring the performance of those individuals and employers in their opinion don't have to provide the remedial services for the individuals coming in? Because there's an articulation of what you have to debt, what you need to know. There's an assessment instrument on how you measure that. And hopefully, you end up with more employees that come into the marketplace with the essential knowledge and skills. Susan, that sort of raises a question for me as you get working at the institutional level with employers, there's another dimension to this in Sandy Jumping as well, and that's policy. What do we need to do more of, or what do we need to do less of, i.e., get out of the way? And what is your experience in working with the TAC grantees, maybe informed or taught us, or Sandy, your experience in working at high levels of state government, of where we best play a role or step back and let industry and institutions work it out? It's interesting. My grant is 10 colleges in nine states. And that has its benefits and its minuses. We bring more people to the table. We can bring businesses from all over the country to the table to help us create curricula. But we are also dealing with 10 different states policies, 10 different college policies, credits versus quarters. So that is a difficult thing. But one of the things we're noticing is that we're looking at industry organizations, manufacturers, organizations, et cetera. And if they do have, they've already identified an industry-recognized credential. We're embedding that in our programs. If they're not, we're encouraging them. And I think by us working coast to coast, I think we're building a momentum in terms of trying to get businesses to work together and to work with colleges. I've heard earlier in the last session talk that it's still a struggle to get businesses to work with our colleges. And I'm not saying that. They are stepping right up to the table. And I think even at a local level, at a high school level, we're getting businesses more involved with education. As policy, the education systems are requiring businesses to step up to the table. And it's helping us to make sure that what we're teaching students is what businesses need. Cedar? Well, I guess I want to answer from two perspectives. From the government perspective, it really is about businesses and labor and coming together to demand more of the higher ed system. It's particularly when you talk about transferring into college and then between programs. So I don't think it's, in that respect, it's an organizing job. And the government really serves both to incent through things like the TAA grant and some of the things we did in Pennsylvania, very little bit of money just to incentivize and serve as a catalyst for that kind of engagement. But I think the thing that's been missing from public policy and frankly, I wish that when I was in Pennsylvania doing this work in government is setting much higher standards around expectations. And that's getting back to the conversation we had the last panel. Some of the accrediting bodies, we have lots of successful examples in pockets. You've heard some, there's a lot of successful examples in the healthcare industry where I'm working now of, say, taking a non-credited certificate and moving that to the credit side and then having it articulate. That's a really important outcome for both students, adult learners, because the time to completion is so important as well as employers. The thing that we're not very good about is setting high expectations and really taking that innovation and making it the standard through the accrediting bodies, through the different types of funding streams. So that's, I think, the piece that's missing. So I think we need to be a little bit demand more, frankly, from higher ed. And I don't think organizing employer engagement is that challenging, frankly. Well, I want to pick on Dana and Marlene, all of you that have worked with policymakers, why is that hard? Why is it hard to really set and articulate those expectations, whether it's from a governor or from another policymaker, or is it hard? I think what's hard, I agree with Sandy, it's not the employer organizing, it's more getting the policies aligned. So if you think about how we fund things in this country, we are in very heavy, deep silos. So if you could imagine, and I could imagine it, a way of aligning and integrating those funding sources and holding joint accountability for outcomes. Now, you ask why that's hard? I mean, you've got a million constituents that are holding the status quo. It's also pretty hard to figure out what funding source will support what. The higher ed act is everybody wants to cut and limit expenditures. If you want to increase completion and if you want everybody included, things like ability to benefit need to get back in. You need to try to figure out a financing strategy that supports adult workers while they're in training. It's, you know, if we had the political will to do it and we had us all the horses aligned, I think the technical nature of it is simple. I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think that's the problem is largely, it's a political will problem. Now, I don't want to dismiss the fact that, you know, in higher ed too, recognizing the varying governance structures that we have for institutions, that creates an additional complication. You have fiefdoms within fiefdoms. And I think they all want to hold on to what's right for their institution, sometimes for the benefit of the state and sometimes not so much. And that's not just the four years, but the two years as well. But I think, you know, there is an opportunity. The more and more, I mean, I would have never have thought states would be looking at data as closely as they are. But the fact of the matter is, as you started out this session, Travis, the pie has shrunk and the pie isn't getting any bigger. So there are limited resources and there's gonna come a point. And I think we're really, really close to that point where people are saying, and you're investing money in this because, and just questioning some of those decisions, and state leaders, institutional leaders having to be accountable for those. But this is a huge, I mean, the post-secondary system, as you know, Sandy and others, this is a huge elephant to be able to try and move. David, I wanna loop you into this and shift gears a little bit. One of the things that the report calls for really to build some more coherence into the system and smooth these transitions is to bring more of the actual workplace-based learning into our system, so to make that interpenetration, particularly secondary to career technical, that there is more of that onsite. What's, looking at it from the business perspective and from the provider perspective, what's the reaction to that? At probably at some level, that sounds really good, but how do we get there? What's business gonna say we really need in order for that to come to fruition? Yeah, for my role as the director of apprenticeship at the Local Union 26, which represents both NECA, which is the National Electrical Contractors Association, which we talked about, Businesses, and the Local Union or the membership. Employers, some of the employers are gonna be reluctant. The profit margins are slim, and they may view training as a negative impact on productivity, so that's gonna be a big hurdle that we have to overcome. We implemented a new program for training at the Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee back in 1998, and we started to bring the students into school during the day, and this program had to be sold to the employers in the respect that the employers were gonna pay them to go to school, and I had to make sure that there was clear evidence that there was gonna be a return on their investment for doing that, and it has been a huge success for us. The students buy into it. There is no cost to the students, and the employers recognize what they're getting for their money, the return on the investment, and apprenticeship, many times when we talk about apprenticeship, and I've experienced it so many times that it gets pretty old for me, is the fact that it immediately arouses this union non-union, you get this conflict mentality as soon as you say apprenticeship, and we forget about apprenticeship. Apprenticeship combines work and education simultaneously, and when you can get away from all the politics and everything else, the apprenticeship model is fantastic. I'm a perfect example of that. I went through high school with very little direction, wasn't sure what I wanted to do, there wasn't any guidance, we'll talk about that later. Then I went to a community college, and again, there still wasn't a lot of guidance. Then I went to a four-year institution, still kinda wondering, where is this all relevant? How is this gonna work for me as a job? What am I gonna do with Socrates, you know? Then I happened to come across the electrical industry, and it happened to be a union apprenticeship program, and for the first time in my life, it made sense when I was learning in the books, I immediately applied to the job, and that's what made the apprenticeship more difficult for me, is that what I learned in the classroom, I had to remember and utilize and provide to the contractor the very next day. So it's very important to engage the contractors and get them to play into how is it important, and I think it's gonna be a matter of education for these employers, they've never had to do this before. This is new to them, so they're gonna have to be educated as well. Sadie, how's that look from the healthcare side of things? Well, it's interesting, in the healthcare side of things, it really goes back to one of the things that the author pointed out, this the economy between the higher learning and the workplace skills, and that really, in healthcare, frankly, almost all of the occupations involve some sort of workplace learning. Think about nursing, right? I mean, there's a clinical rotation. That's true for most of the credentialed occupations. You must have some, whether it's respiratory therapy, nursing, they all have some clinical rotation. So the challenge, of course, is employers do see the advantage in the field. The challenge, I think, to make that scalable in other industries is to really overcome that divide between thinking about education, sort of in this lofty setting and workplace learning in this separate setting, when in fact what you really need is integration. One of the things that I would wanna just caution is in that divide, it's important that workplace learning include the rigor of some of the general education because really what's needed in the labor market now are good regardless of your occupation, good writing skills, good math skills. So that integration is really a challenge and it sounds like it's a challenge nationally and that's the key thing to overcome. Again, I think it's an organizing job, frankly, to have employers and labor come together and understand that that investment, as Mr. McCord said, is critical because the outcome is so much so beneficial. You can't imagine a nurse, for instance, graduating without ever having clinical experience. That's, and there's an agreed standard there. In other occupations, I think you can get there as well. Marlene, you were looking poised to jump in. No, no, no, I agree with Sandy. And I think the dilemma is if we view this as something that's critical to every program of study or every field of practice, then the question of who is doing the investment and how do those conversations happen is really important. So is it an employer responsibility? Is it a combined responsibility? Could we use the current resources and work study to restructure that a little bit? I think it's close to a billion dollars to support those kind of very rigorous work-based learning experiences. We have great examples of work-based learning that they get credit in some programs, 18 to 22 credits. We have the best, the investment question is big for me. And I really think there's a national conversation around this with employers because if you look at this, we've had the luxury of a very active labor market in the past, so the young people and workers have been able to enter through entry-level jobs. We no longer have that luxury. So how do you actually structure the employment experience in a way where they're contributing to the productivity of the firm and the gaining educational competencies? And I would really look forward to that conversation if Dame would organize it. I'm glad. Oh, you are a funny woman. One of the things that hasn't come up but I think we've inferred relative to some of these points is the role of career technical education. Because we talk about the fact that there is no more new money, but yet we have an existing infrastructure in states that in some places we find those islands of success that are doing a really good job of aligning what they're preparing individuals for, whether they be the high school student or the adult for putting them on a trajectory or I'd like to think a trajectory for not just a job but a career path, but how can we, I think there's an opportunity to make much better use of the career technical system that we have in place today. And that's I think the most underutilized part of the set of pathways that we have in place today. And if I were to take that to the federal level for 30 seconds I would say we have all this conversation around the Workforce Investment Act. We're gonna apparently see, at least we've been providing input on discussion drafts of the Senate version of the Workforce Investment Act and yet we're not talking about the relationship between the Workforce Investment Act and Perkins. There's something inherently wrong with that. And the two of those I think could not just leverage one another but could actually help accomplish some of the goals that we're talking about in this conversation this morning. Can I just make one more point? So I have the luxury of working for a joint labor management job training fund where the employers contribute to our fund in order to provide education. That investment that's negotiated as part of the collective bargaining agreement is critical to the ongoing engagement of both obviously the union and management into the outcomes related to education, both the workplace skills, but also that investment I think puts a higher level of demand on the higher ed institutions as well. So I think there is investment that happens in the private sector that's important to look at as leveraging, so it's not just government funding, there are real private sector investments. Obviously, I frankly like to see the investment negotiated across the entire economy in this way because think of the outcomes that we're able to achieve for the members in New York and elsewhere in the country. But the network of these types of training, job training funds, I think there are real lessons to be learned in terms of the leverage that they can bear on the higher ed sector. And in my situation, I meet with the committee every month that's labor representatives and contractor representatives and we talk about curriculum, we talk about certifications, we talk about what are the needs today, what are the needs next year? Is the need here today? No, but we're gonna take a little bit of a risk and we're gonna invest in solar training as we did three, four, five years ago. We're gonna invest in electric vehicle infrastructure training programs because we know that that's coming. It's starting, but it will be bigger. So you have to have a little bit of risk taking at the table, but it's not once a year, it's not once every two years that an ad hoc advisory committee meets. These are actual contractors and labor representatives that meet and talk about how do we get more qualified people out on the job site that can actually do the job that is being required of us. I wanna open it up now to some questions or comments disguised as questions or questions disguised as comments. Take your pick. Got one in the back there. I think there's a microphone coming. Ibrahim Mukman with Progressive Partners here in DC. I appreciate the comments about apprenticeship have long been a fan off of a distance and I'm just wondering, are there some opportunities to expand the number of jobs or industries that are apprenticeship? It seems to work well in construction, but I'm not familiar with who's doing a whole lot beyond that and if it works so well, is it applicable? Can it be done someplace else in other sectors? I think the answer to that is yes, absolutely. As she's talked about, the nursing industry, you've got firefighters, you've got policemen and the list goes on and on. And I think again, it's just a matter of education, of telling people what is apprenticeship? How do you implement apprenticeship into the labor market and the workforce? And it can be done. I think the challenge has been, and I think it's wrong. I think the challenge has been that there's a segment of higher ed regulators and higher ed institutions that look at work-based learning as lesser than. And I think the goal is again, going back to that great slide, we have to see this as an integrated system because work-based learning isn't lesser than and it should be in combination with real academic learning as well. And so that I think is gonna be critical to expanding it into other industries. And there is an attempt right now to resurrect it in the manufacturing industry. I think it's been slow going because of that very thing that I just raised, this duality. And I have to say that experience on the job is education. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely is. I agree. There's one way back. Bob Lerman again. Some of you may be unaware of the fact that, A, we invest almost nothing in marketing apprenticeships. The budget for the office of apprenticeship is less than $30 million, a trivial amount compared to what other countries are doing. Second, we've seen in South Carolina that where you do invest a bit in marketing, you can have very big results. They've increased their numbers of employers from in a period when employment was declining rapidly from about 90 to about 800. And almost all of that is outside of construction. Third, there's a myth that flexible labor markets will not coexist with apprenticeships. That is untrue. Can you repeat that? You can see flexible labor markets will not coexist with apprenticeships. That is untrue. And one indication of it is the success of Britain in going from a tiny number to over 500,000 with a workforce that's probably one-fifth of ours. Canada, which has a union penetration in the private sector of 16%, has a higher absolute number of apprentices than we do with one-tenth of the workforce. And so it's very frustrating that you're talking about all these things, career pathways and so on. When there exists a system that is operating in almost every country, growing in many countries, like Australia has tripled theirs in the last 15 years. And we seem unaware of it. We seem to say, well, our employers won't invest. And again, South Carolina's not a very heavy union state. And they've managed to grow theirs with some serious marketing and technical assistance. But it's a different model than a workforce investment board or a community college. You need technical assistance and marketing. Employers don't know how to do it by themselves. But if we put some money in, we could make a big difference. I think we agree. You just got an amen. Got time for one more in the back there? Thank you for allowing comments as well as questions. I just want to say, I hope it's coming up on the next panel, but the Department of Labor does have industry competency models that are used as a framework for developing curriculum related to employer needs. And we have also made them flexible tools. Because of all the challenges that we've talked about with establishing a national skill standard in the US, which is so diverse and so large, we have these competency models as frameworks, but then there are tools to customize them for regional and local economies. And we actually have success stories. We've worked with the geospatial community and they developed the competency model and then they looked at their curriculum against the competence and said, oh look, one course covers this, we have this competency covered four times and several competencies not covered at all. And that way you can develop the curriculum that is competency-based to industry needs. And I'm hoping that on the next panel, manufacturing will talk about that a little too. Reactions from this group? I mean, just a comment on that. I think the work that they did was tremendous on the competency-based models within industry clusters and programs of study. Good base. And there are new standards out of apprenticeship that can be registered that has a competency-based model in it and I see that as part of what the future has to offer for us as apprenticeship directors and people involved in the apprenticeship. So some themes that I think have surfaced in the last 40 minutes or so and they all start with RE, return. The return on investment is going to increasingly matter. I heard that in multiple strands of this conversation. Relevance, I mean, and that is the bridging, I think Sandy, you nailed it in bridging that divide that we've constructed at times between the academic and the skill-based. It's relationships. It's building those really intentional, David, I think to your point, thoughtful, consistent, regular relationships between and among different providers. And then I think all of you touched on the last one, which is a combination of reallocation and reinvestment because of those limitations we find ourselves under, fiscally speaking, we are going to have to broach some tough conversations about where we reallocate some of those resources based on what we look at in terms of return, but it's gonna rely on those very durable relationships and some degree of trust in order to pull that off. And so with that, Susan Gallagher, Dane Lynn, David McCord, Marlene Seltzer and Sandy Vito, I wanna say thank you very much and it's been a pleasure. Thank you.