 Hello, and thank you for tuning in. This is Higher Education Matters, an occasional program on events at the Vermont State Colleges and also on higher education issues in general. I'm Jeb Spaulding, the Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System, and our guest today will be Shyvana Bent, a student at Johnson State College, a senior of Vermonter. Before we begin our conversation with Shyvana, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the Vermont State Colleges System as a whole and a little bit about what this program will cover. So the Vermont State Colleges as a group are the de facto extension of the public K-12 system into the post-secondary years. Vermont's very lucky to have a large number of colleges and universities in this state, but where most Vermonters go to school is one of the Vermont State Colleges. We enroll more Vermonters on an annual basis than all of the other universities and colleges in this state combined. We have five institutions. In alphabetical order, they start with Castleton University, a little bit west of Rutland, Vermont, Community College of Vermont that has 12 locations around the state, a site within 20 miles of all Vermonters, and hundreds of online courses at Community College of Vermont as well. Johnson State College, where Shyvana is a senior in Johnson, Vermont. We have Linden State College in Linden, known for its professional programs, things like Atmospheric Sciences, might not know that like 16 of the founders of the Weather Channel were graduates of Linden State College, and of course, Vermont Technical College, which has near 100% placement in good-paying jobs, offering Sochi's degrees, Bachelor's degrees, and a new Master's degree in computer software engineering. So that's the Vermont State College's system. What we do is enroll Vermonters and transform lives. Higher education is more important than ever in this day and age. It's been very clear that your lifetime earnings are going to be likely to be significantly higher if you have higher education in your resume, but it's more than economic. People's health outcomes are better with post-secondary education. People vote more when they have been to college, and they are much less likely to get into trouble with the law if they've got some college education. So when we use the word college, we think of it as transforming lives, and that's what we do. So as far as this program goes, we're hoping to highlight some interesting people and things that are happening across the Vermont State College's system. So for example, in the coming months, we'll have Elaine Collins, who is the president of Johnson State College and who is going to be the president of Northern Vermont University. So that would be an interesting topic to figure out what that's all about. We'll be talking about affordability issues in general. Right now, there's a lot of attention on Senator Sanders' proposal for free public college. What's that about, and how does that fit into the whole college affordability question? So there'll be plenty of issues that are either highlighting some of the interesting people at the Vermont State Colleges, or covering topics that are outside of our unique college system but that are still important to higher education matters. I can envision having leaders and faculty members from institutions outside of our system and in the system. Today, our guest is most important because what we do is work with students. And, Shyvana, I want to welcome you to today's program. It's nice of you to come. Thanks for having me. Why don't we start with just a little bit about yourself? You are a Vermonter? Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in Braintree, Vermont, which is a little town right outside Randolph. We share the same zip code with Vermont Tech right up the road. So that's where I'm coming from, and ever since I was really little and definitely through high school, I knew I wanted to go to college. So did your mother and father go to college? No, I'm actually a first generation college student within my direct family but also extended. That's great. It gives me an opportunity to point out that compared to most colleges and universities, the Vermont State Colleges are often the destination for students that come from families where nobody's been to college before. Again, it's a little bit like being the public education system for the post-secondary years. We have lots of different kinds of students, star students like yourself. We have students that have an expectation from their family of going to college and a history of doing that. We have other students where that's not the case. And what we like to think is that we don't measure our worth by how many students that apply that we reject or how high our SAT scores, but what we do with Vermonters that deserve an opportunity to better their lives. So I'm glad that you chose to go into college. Did your parents support that, Shyvana? Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that brought me to Johnson was my parents were really supportive of me going to Johnson and to college, but they were encouraging, I think like a lot of first generation students' parents are, that I'll pay it myself. And so Johnson was a really affordable option for me. But what's kept me there is just like the really high quality education and the faculty that cares. So it's been both, it's been affordable, it's been a great academic experience and all of the above. Yeah, one of the things I'm always interested in at Johnson and all of our state colleges is that the faculty seem really interested in teaching and students. And at some bigger institutions, universities and such, it's often that the faculty are busy doing research and you might be being taught by a graduate student and large lecturers and all these kind of things. At Johnson I found, and at the other colleges too, that the professors are there because they like to work and interact with students. Have you found that? Oh yeah, absolutely. Even from my first visit at Johnson, my first day in classes, professors remembered me from talking with them during that either orientation or accepted students' day. So even from not going to Johnson, they really knew who I was and what I was interested in. They remembered little things I had said. So it was really exciting to know right off the bat that the faculty really cared and I've absolutely found that they care about each student individually and if you go to their office hours, they're really available and I think that's one of the highlights of going to Johnson and I'm sure it's the same across the VSC. Sort of like, I expect if you do go to college, you know, the experience is somewhat what you make of it, but for a student such as yourself, it's a pretty accomplished student. Have you been challenged or had the opportunity to challenge yourself at Johnson State College? Yeah, absolutely. The coursework I've taken has been really challenging in studying biology with a mathematics minor. So there's always homework to do and more learning to be done, you know, papers to read, but additionally because it's such a small school and the faculty really care, they do do research and they care about their students' teaching but also about their research. So I've had the opportunity to conduct undergraduate research which is really shaped what I'd like to do in my career and my entire experience there. Can you give us a little bit more of examples or an example of undergraduate research, the kind of thing you've done? Yeah, absolutely. So I started the summer after my freshman year studying with Dr. Liz Dulcy and we looked at the bacteria isolated from the vermont asbestos group mine and so it's an extreme environment and I wanted to know if they produced antibiotics or not and something that could be clinically relevant. So I got to design my own protocol. Liz, because we call our professors by their first names, she was really great and supported independent thinking and that really has helped me grow as a person, as a scientist, as a researcher and all of that and that opened the door for me to go to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute this past summer, which is, you know, a tier one research institution and I want to study the ocean so it was really great to spend the summer in my case. Wow, that's exciting. So I was going to ask you, you know, what you do with that research? What have you done with it? You just sort of gave an answer to it, but do you go out and make presentations places with a researcher? What happens with it? Yeah, absolutely. So I've gone to, I think, four different conferences. Three of them were national, but one was international, so two of my colleagues, my lab partners and some of my greatest friends at Johnson, and I had the opportunity to travel to Doha, Qatar last November. It's hard to believe it's already been a year. So we went and presented our research at the First World Congress on undergraduate research and got to interact with students and faculty from around the world and see what kind of research is going on, but also just be immersed in a different culture for, you know, almost a week. That's fantastic and it's a point I really did want to make and highlight, Shyvana, because in Vermont roughly half of the students that are going on to college from high school are going out of state and nothing wrong with that. I mean, my own daughters went to 12 years of public schools in Montpelier and wanted to see some of the world, but oftentimes people don't realize that at, whether it's Castleton or Johnson or Lyndon or Vermont Tech or even Community College of Vermont that we have opportunities for our students to experience other parts of the world. What kind of opportunities are available to students at Johnson to see other places? Absolutely. So the conferences are one option and a lot of students do go and present, you know, the research or their art or whatever at different conferences and that's just usually a week or so, but they've had many friends take advantage of the national student exchange to explore different parts of the country, so instead of going for four years, you can go for a semester or a year and discover a different place. And there's also a lot of service trips that go out for a week and classes that go for a week to different places. Yeah, so we might be working on a water plant, water system or something like that in some developing part of the world. Yeah, absolutely. So the national student exchange, you mentioned it, just to sort of really highlight that for the viewers, allows students at Johnson and the other colleges in the system have similar programs where you could go to one of hundreds of other colleges and universities around this country at the same in-state tuition you would pay to stay at Johnson. And I noticed that Johnson has now expanded to the international student exchange program, so that similar model where you go at your in-state tuition to some place else in the world for, as you mentioned, a semester or a year is something that we offer, and it's an affordable way to do it. I've run into students that say, this was really, through my college experience, the only way I could afford to experience other parts of the world, which is pretty nice, so, well, that's great. So I'm curious, you know, when you went to Johnson, was it a, I mean, did you go to Randolph High School, or where did you? Yeah, I went to Randolph Union. Was it a big change in, you know, a life sort of, was it scary, or what was it like when you went from a, you know, a small Orange County High School to a college where you're away from home? Yeah, absolutely. So, when I was applying to colleges, I kind of, you know, I had the same thoughts as your daughter. I wanted to get out. I applied to probably an exorbitant amount of schools, and I landed on Johnson, like I said, because of the affordability issue. And I was a little bit worried, you know, there are a lot of students from Randolph that go to Johnson. So I was nervous about having a similar experience to my high school, but I have found that's not the case at all. Right. You know, you don't have to see the students you went to high school with unless you really want to. And just the classes and the rigor and all of the academic differences really, you know, it's not the same at all. Okay. And so it was a great experience to see, you know, I'm only an hour and a half away from home, which is just enough for me as it turns out. You can still go home. Yeah, I can still go home. I can still go home into my laundry. It's far enough away and it's different enough that I'm really happy with the choice that I made. And I expect that, you know, even though, as I mentioned, we are like the extension of the public K-12 system into the post-secondary years, at our K-12 system, too, you have diversity. And at our colleges in the Vermont State College system, there are, you know, students from over 40 countries from around the world. If you sort of add them up, there's probably more like 50. Yeah. There's definitely the opportunity to interact not only with Vermonters, but other students from around this country and around this world. Has that been your experience, Yvonne? Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely, you know, a much greater diversity than at least in my high school. And that's, you know, in viewpoints from around the country and around the world, but also just, you know, seeing the way people think in this new setting and really asking challenging questions to themselves and opening up their minds. So that diversity has been really interesting as well, you know, from Vermonters, but also opening up the worldview to other people and having the different experiences from students from everywhere. And I think one of the other interesting things that I found is that at Johnson at least we have a lot of students continuing their education. So you have older students coming back to school and, you know, learning from their life experiences and their wisdom has been really interesting. Yeah. That is interesting. That actually brings up the other end of the spectrum, too. In Vermont, there are somewhere around 60,000 Vermonters that have some college education and no degree. Yeah. And one of our strategic priorities for the Vermont State College's system as a group is to be offering more online programming, flexible programming and being accessible for sort of your non-traditional, perhaps your older students. We also are welcoming high school students. And I wonder, have you ever run into any of the students that are doing courses through the dual enrollment program or early college? Yeah, definitely. I have run into them. So tell our viewers what the early college program is. Yeah, absolutely. So early college is just a program where you can take classes at any of the Vermont State Colleges as I understand it for free during your senior year of high school. And you have that first year under your belt. You have credits. And you get to get a diploma from your high school as well as, you know, that first year is paid for. And you have the experience. Yeah. So, I mean, that's, it has been growing. And, you know, what we found from a state interest is that students that either take a course, like, you know, like through the dual enrollment program, so they're still going to their high school, but they can take a course. Or if they combine their senior year of high school and first year of college or they're really going to college for that year, you know, are more likely to continue on to college than a same similar demographic group that didn't have that experience. And, you know, from a state perspective, in terms of trying to get more students to go on to college, it's a very effective way of doing it. But also, from the student and family perspective, and I think people really ought to think about this, you know, if you were going for an associate's degree. You're halfway there. You're halfway there. So, you just cut your tuition costs in half. If you're going for a bachelor's degree, you just cut the tuition by 25%. So, in terms of people, you know, that are parents maybe or students thinking about, you know, the affordability issue. The early college dual enrollment is an opportunity that Vermont's put in place for high school students to really have the opportunity to, you know, get more challenged and interested in their senior year, which, you know, it hasn't been that long ago that my children went through high school. And oftentimes, people in their senior year of high school are kind of coasting along. This is an opportunity to avoid that and cut down on your college costs as well. You know, I did want to talk just a little bit, Shyvana, about athletics. And I actually don't know if you've been involved with athletics or not, but, you know, across our state colleges, I mean, if you think of a place like Castleton, I think they've got 27 or 29 varsity NCAA sports. Castleton brought football back to Vermont into the public university. It's the only public institution in the state that has a football team. You know, Johnson is, you know, women's basketball and soccer and they have rugby programs and all kinds of athletics. So is that something that you see students taking advantage of on a widespread basis or just a few? No, definitely. I think that going to the small school and, you know, having those opportunities, I think a lot of students that maybe wouldn't have done athletics at big institutions feel comfortable with it. They know that they can work personally with their professors to manage their course load and do sports. You know, we have three season athletes pretty regularly. I like to consider myself an honorary member of the cross-country team. I'm friends with all of them, but I don't run. So it's definitely, everyone has the opportunity to do a sport, even if they don't take advantage of that. It's really not easy to do because it's a lot of work to be a student athlete. I have recognized that, which is why I don't do it. I'm a student, Shyvana. And a motivated student. I think it's kind of interesting that I've noticed that as a group, oftentimes the student athletes, you know, as far as grade point average, do better or better than the entire college population as a whole. I think having something where people, I mean, you've found other ways where they've got something that motivates them and involves them, sort of makes them organized overall. Absolutely. And they form, a lot of the teams do their own study groups, so their teammates will help them with subjects they struggle in, and it's really just a big community of people that's there for you to support you in academics and athletics. So one of the efforts that we're making across the Vermont State College system as a whole is to try to make sure that students that show up on the first day of college actually make it to the other end with a degree. And, you know, while we understand that if we are going to offer the chance to most Vermonters to go on to college that is opposed to a very exclusive school, let's say, a fine school like a Middlebury College where everybody's prepared and everybody's supported and they don't really they tend not to have as many of the emotional and financial challenges that a lot of our students do, while we realize that we're trying to do everything we can to support students early so that they can actually stay and graduate hopefully on time. Are you aware of what kind of efforts Johnson makes in that regard? I'm just curious. Absolutely. So even as I would consider myself a pretty prepared student coming to school I've accessed their academic support services and in my senior year, my junior year, I've been an academic coach so there's a lot of focus on students teaching other students but there's also a lot of professional resources available as far as academics and then at Johnson at least, and I'm sure it's the same across the VSC, there's our wellness center and that really helps students transition through either, you know, their financial hardships that are causing some emotional stress in their life or whatever they dealt with during high school and really helping them be successful in college and getting over that as a person and growing through it. That's great. So I'm curious, you know in the Vermont State College system we have a diversity I mentioned community college in Vermont 12 locations around the state night courses a lot of certificate programs which is something that we're all working on and it's clear that unless you're a superstar like LeBron James, some kind of college is important or some kind of post-secondary education but it's not always a bachelor's degree or even an associate's degree for some people getting, you know, a certified bookkeeping certificate or some kind of a credential plumbers or electrical apprenticeship program. There are different ways of acquiring that post-secondary education and we have the diversity from community college to Vermont technical college but with places like Castleton and Johnson and to a large extent Linden there are strong liberal arts colleges how do you see that preparing students for the workplace these days I think parents are saying I want to make sure that if my child and we make that commitment and oftentimes work hard to pay for it that it leads to a job what's your take on liberal arts as a way to get people into the workforce, Shyvana? You know it's funny you asked that I was just up to dinner with my parents last night and they sort of posed the same question to me since it's my last year and I do plan on going on to more school but the thing that I think is most valuable about the liberal arts education is that I've really learned how to think critically and my little brother just graduated high school he's going for a trade at Vermont Tech and that's what he wants to do so he's going to have this skill and I don't necessarily have a skill set that will prepare me for a specific job but I do think what I've learned is how to problem solve and how to find the answers so in any job that I might take on I have this background that allows me to go out and you know be a problem solver and really find the answers that my employers are looking for and I think that has made me and I'm still nervous to graduate in May but I feel like I'm really prepared to go and either get a job or go to graduate school or continue on and I think that that is something that's really hard to define especially to parents you know my parents are sort of questioning what are you going to do you know what skills do you have but I feel like I'm prepared well there's some you know interesting statistics out there that you know most of the CEOs in this country are liberal arts majors most of your political leaders are liberal arts majors and the world is changing rather rapidly and you know like I think probably the top 10 job categories that are out there right now may not even exist 10 or 20 years now so being able to have those critical thinking skills your communication skills analytical skills is very important I think it will serve you very very well Shyvana so we don't have too much more time but I thought since you're at Johnson you know we could just briefly touch on the unification and what that is for the viewers is that Johnson State College and Linden State College two relatively small institutions in the northern tier of the state are being unified into northern Vermont University with campuses and Johnson and Linden and the idea behind that is actually to make sure that the limited dollars we have are used to enhance the student experience so even now instead of two presidents we have one president we have one CFO and so forth and that allows us to put money back into the students I also like to think of it before you had two institutions each with their own faculty don't even really know each other and now we have one institution two campuses but a faculty that's twice as big and you can offer more programming and using technology for the students that could otherwise but I'm just curious are students aware of this going on if they are are they nervous about it excited about it or some of both what's your thought on that Shyvana yeah so as the government president I've kind of you know all of the meetings about unification and tried to really get students involved and their input about it and from what we can tell myself and my executive team and the senators whatever students are excited they're a little bit nervous because you know doesn't necessarily mean that I'll have all of my classes here on campus you know I might take it remotely through the ideal classroom at Johnson and the equivalent at Linden so there's the ideal classroom the ideal classroom so that is our telepresence classroom and some other weird word but it's essentially just we have two TV screens and one can be written on as a smart board so it functions as a white board and then the students and teacher are recorded and so it's actually I've taken my first class in there this semester it's a really neat system because I missed class for the board meeting and I was able to you know attend virtually because there are these different options for remote viewing and attending classes at Linden which is really cool like they have some great programs like atmospheric sciences that I thought were awesome but I didn't want to go to Linden yeah I think that it actually has the potential I remember reading about some more senior level accounting course last spring that really didn't have enough students to justify it's running at Johnson or at Linden but when they combined it and use those electronic classrooms it could actually run the class so it was just an example of providing opportunities for students yeah and I think that's a great example and I think a lot of the mathematics examples of the classes I'm taking now are math and just department wide you know there's these opportunities for growth and I think that as we move forward Dr. Collins, Elaine Collins is going to really be a leader at Johnson and I hope that the students at Linden like her as much as we do because she's really great and made us feel comfortable with the transition yeah it's exciting to you know in terms of looking through what the sort of the brand and the logo and the name were going to be how much attraction and pride there is in being from the northern part of the state and I know that Dr. Collins wants Linden and Johnson Northern Vermont University to be recognized and in reality a key player in the economy and the social well-being of the northern part of the state so that's very exciting you know Donna I should have mentioned that you are a member of the Board of Trustees and that's a pretty exciting opportunity too I know you're fairly new you've been to a couple of committee meetings and a board meeting any thoughts about that I think the biggest thing I've learned so far is that the caring I felt at Johnson is really system wide from you know the top from yourself and then all the board members each person really cares wholeheartedly and deeply about the Vermont State Colleges and feel that sense of welcome and caring on every single campus well great you know I think that's a pretty good place to stop because we really only have another minute or so Shyvana are there any things that you were hoping I was going to ask you that I didn't that you actually would like to just sort of finish up with um no other than that I really you know I recommend going to college I recommend the Vermont State Colleges I really I love Johnson so I am a little bit biased but they're all really great places for all types of students from Vermont I think it's a great option thank you for being our first guest and I want to thank the viewers for tuning in this is Higher Education Matters I'm Jeb Spaulding the Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System and this is going to be a monthly program that will be broadcast and re-broadcast around the state at various times it's a chance to highlight some of the interesting things and people within the Vermont State Colleges System but also to address higher education issues in general so I wouldn't be surprised if we have some esteemed visitors from the University of Vermont or VESAC or some of our workforce partners certainly faculty and students again so I want to thank the viewers for taking the time to look at this program if you want to find out more about the State Colleges go to vsc.edu and if you want to make suggestions on future programs we'd love to hear from you thank you very much