 I want to start by thanking June Speakman and the Senate for having made the arrangements to let me talk today. This would have been the first meeting of the Senate, but I prevailed upon June to push that back a week, because tomorrow is the grand opening of the Providence facility. And I wanted to be able to speak to you about that today, rather than have you read about it tomorrow or Friday. So with that in mind, we'll get started. I'm going to try and do something that I'm not really terribly well equipped to do. I'm trying to inspire you. And if I can inspire you, then maybe I can excite you. And if I can't excite you, perhaps I can agitate you. But one way or another, it's important we breathe a little life into today, because I think the trajectory we're on as a campus is just terrific. We've turned a lot of corners, and we've got a bright future, but we also have some challenges in front of us. And what I want to do today is not talk a lot about the state of affairs of higher education in America, but talk instead about how Roger Williams is surviving in that difficult set of circumstances we find ourselves in. And where this started for me was a few days ago, on move-in day for the freshmen, my and I always walk around to talk to the incoming students and their parents, and also the students that are returning students who are helping in the move-in, just to get a sense of how things are going. And it was really pretty remarkable, the enthusiasm that these students and parents were showing for the fact that they were here at Roger Williams. I don't have the data yet, but I'm expecting that we'll see about 80% of the incoming students will have said that Roger Williams was their first choice institution. And that's a number that has been going consistently over the last several years. And it's indicative of a campus that is really finding its stride and making a very good showing for itself in a highly competitive atmosphere that we enjoy today. Many of you have had the experience of having your own children going off to college, and you know that it's a traumatic time for parents and for the students themselves. But the parents, they see this as a mixture of pride and sadness. They're very proud of the fact that their child has been accepted at a first-rate university, that they're going off to make something of themselves, that the parents have done a great job during the early years of their child's life. But they're sad because they know that this is one of those passages in life, and it's one way. The students are forever changed by the experience. They go off to college. They come back, obviously, and visit. But it's never the same again. The parents will never again have their little boy or little girl in quite the same way that they were used to. And so it's quite remarkable, given all of that, that parents, for historically, have come to colleges and say, we're entrusting you, relative strangers, with the lives of our children, the things most dear to us because we believe that you will look after them and you will do well by them. And we're going to pay you a great deal of money to do all of that. And the great part of it is that I think overwhelmingly, we don't let them down. We meet or exceed their expectations. Maya and I do a little event, three or four days before commencement, for the graduating seniors. It's a senior reception. And the students come and they're all wearing their best clothes. The girls in their high heels and the guys in their suits. Sometimes looking like it's the first time they've had those suit on. But nonetheless, they come and there's a very bittersweet quality to this event. And the reason that I say that and the comments that we give back from these students are the kinds of things that should make your ears burn. Because they are so grateful to the faculty and staff of this institution for having done so well by them. Their parents feel the same way. I hear that at commencement. But the students themselves are torn. They don't want to leave Roger. This is a place that has become their home. They know they're ready. They know it's time. But this has been such a comfortable environment for them. Such a welcoming place. They're just not anxious to go. We have between 150 and 200 students over at the residence every year in groups of seven or eight. We ask them why they chose Roger Williams. If they have any regrets, what were the high points? We always hear the same story. Over and over again comes down to the fact that the faculty support them. They feel well served by this university. And I will tell you having worked at a lot of different universities, every university has their loyal graduates. But I've never experienced what I see here. With the percentage of students that say, this was a place I am so glad I came. This was the best decision I've made in my life to date. And it's not offered hollowly or out of a sense of obligation. It's out of a sense of sincerity. And it's very gratifying to hear that. And so this is something that I think represents what Roger Williams is all about. It's who we are. It's who we want to be. Meeting and exceeding expectations is something that I think that we do extraordinarily well. Now, the fact is that higher education is a beleaguered industry. We know that we get a lot of blame from people outside of our immediate families. For, in a general sense, we're too expensive. We cause too much debt. We don't necessarily teach the students what somebody else thinks they need to learn in order to get a good job. And it's tough to work in that kind of environment. Would you get that kind of negative feedback? But it's offset by the positive feedback we get from our own students. I think we can be very proud of what we've accomplished. I think that the whole idea of affordable excellence, the project-based learning, the combining of liberal arts and professional programs, the revamping of the core, the consolidation of student services, student academic services are all things that are continuing to refine and polish the university that is Roger Williams. And it's something that I'm thankful for the efforts of all of you. When you are involved in accepted students' days or in open houses, this is hugely important. We were learning today in a briefing by some consultants at the cabinet. There are three things that are hugely important to the selection of a particular campus by a particular student. And they're all roughly equal in value, the price. What is the actual size of the check I have to write? That is important to me. It's not all by itself determining, but it's important. Is the campus a place that I think I can thrive? Is it a friendly campus? And are the faculty supportive of me? Will they be supportive of me? How do they learn that? Well, the price is pretty easy. But the other two require people to be, I'm fading out apparently. The other two require people to be present on the campus, talking to students and talking to you at the open houses and at accepted students' days to learn firsthand. Is this a campus where I can thrive? And obviously the answer is yes. So we're collectively doing a very good job because they're making the decision to come and what we're seeing this year is the largest and strongest class in our history. We have 160 more freshmen this year than we did a year ago. Last year was a pretty much a disaster, but it's not nonetheless. It's a very large class. We are, however, not trying to grow the university. 4,000 is a good number for us all in. But it's important that we make our targets because that's what allows us to balance our budgets and we do start this year unlike last year with a balanced budget. The other thing that's involved here is that the changes that we've made have attracted the interests of the philanthropic community. So we've started a program very recently here called The Program for Civic Scholars. It's designed to attract contributions from various sources to support and expand on project-based learning. And you've recently heard, I hope, about the $500,000 grant from the Hassendfeld Family Foundation that supports that same enterprise. So the $3 million three-year proposal, we are already basically at the first year goal of a million dollars. And that would not have happened, but for the fact we were able to convince people that what we were doing had real meaning for the students that we are serving and for the broader community as well. The law school has made a dramatic turnaround ever since they adopted affordable excellence as a way of thinking about how they deliver services. Three years ago, that is to say in the fall of 2013, the law school welcomed a first year class of 108 students. For the last two years, they've been in excess of 150. And that's at a time when law schools all over the country are struggling and we are doing really quite well with our law school. So hats off to the folks in the law school, they did a terrific job. And we've got further validation from places like US News. The criteria they use for evaluating campuses are not the ones that I think are appropriate. They tend to rely overly on historic reputation and on money. But the fact remains that in 2013, we ranked 55th in the Northeast among comprehensive universities and this year we're ranking 35th. So we've moved 20 positions in four years, which is pretty respectable. And I don't think we're done yet. And for people that are using that source of information and helping make the decision, obviously it's better to be well ranked than poorly ranked. The issue for us though is that right now, pretty much everything we do, the law school accepted, is focused on traditional age students working in a residential campus. And that's a very crowded field and a challenging demographic. And that was in that spirit that the Board of Trustees met at their retreat in June to talk about going forward. What should we be doing as a campus? They have producer responsibility and in the bylaws, the responsibility for setting the tone and direction of the campus. And their question was, are we safe if all we do is teach undergraduate students at a time when that market is challenging? They took note of the fact that we have an entrepreneurial spirit on our campus. They took note of the fact that the faculty have over time always been willing to try new things. And they've said to us, let's double down on that. We need to think about how we expand the School of Continuing Studies to start serving populations of students that we've always served somewhat. But now the need is greater than ever and we have both the capacity and the interest in doing that. If we're going to be true to our mission and goals to build the University of the world needs now to strengthen society through engaged teaching and learning, shouldn't we be doing that kind of work with a broader society and not just the recent population of high school graduates? So we think about this historically, our own adaptability. We started by inserting ourselves as Rhode Island's first two-year school into a population of campuses that was already feeling pretty full. But we did that nonetheless and we served a population that was not well served at that time. And then a couple of years later when the state said, you know, we're going to have a public two-year school, we said, we've just had an epiphany, we're going to become a four-year school. When the state said, and by the way, we're building our new campus for the two-year school in Warwick, which is where we had acquired land in order to move the campus from downtown Providence to the suburbs, we sold that land and bought land instead at Bristol. And that's how we ended up here. So we've always been flexible in terms of how it is that we've seen our mission. And that has served us over the years very well, and now we need to do it again. Because I want you to think about this a little bit. Higher education across America is focused on 18-year-olds. 18-year-old high school graduates, that's what we do. And the problem is, it's not just high school graduates, it's the high school graduates that are ready to go to college. So, we've got this paradox. Nationally, the high school graduation rate is 82% plus, the highest it's ever been. I don't know what we do, but the 18% that are not high school graduates. But leaving that aside, 82%. But less than half of them demonstrate that they're ready to go to college, that they're capable of doing college-level work on day one. The rest, we would say, require some level of remediation. Well, most schools don't want to start with kids that need remediation. So the focus then becomes on that fraction of the high school graduating class that is ready to do college-ready work. And not just all of them either, because we want the best of that group. And so, we've got this strange situation where all the campuses are trying to serve the same population of students, pretty much. High-achieving high school graduates. To come into a four-year residential kind of setting where they get their college degree. We compete vigorously for those students. And right now, the competition is, sadly, is about who can throw the most money at them. So campuses that are in a position to do so are buying their classes. Most campuses aren't in that position. And so, there's a struggle. We have to sell on something else. We have to say, at Roger Williams, we're going to do the best we can on affordability. But we're not going to sacrifice quality. Because at the end, that's not a good bargain at all. And if we can't convince you that we are worth the additional money, then I guess we've got a problem. But that's what we're going to try and sell. We will do a better job than anyone in getting your son or daughter ready for their future. Not just for a job, but for life. And we've got some data that backs that up. And so far, it's been a little bit ragged. But four years in the last six, we've exceeded our freshman targets. And this year, by the largest number ever. So I would like to use this year as the indicator year, and not last year. Because last year doesn't take us in a good direction at all. But the reality is, we just don't know. We're trying to do everything we can to ensure that we will continue to be successful in the future. We're back to this issue that we're working in a very tough environment from the standpoint of the numbers. And it's not going to get better anytime soon. In the next 10 years, most of the states that supply us students are going to see a drop in their high school graduating classes, in terms of absolute numbers. Rhode Island will be down by 5%. New Jersey and Massachusetts will be down by 7%. Connecticut will be down by more than 12%. These are all shrinking pies. And we're trying to draw the same number of individuals from those pies every year in order for us to say, OK. Well, this year alone, nationally, half of the private schools did not make their numbers. And the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. So the question for us is to protect what we have here, to ensure that we don't wake up one day and find ourselves not able to pay the bills. Pragmatically, we need to think about how we serve different populations of students, even as we protect the reputation and the interests of the campus. As it happens, this is a population that is not well-served at all right now and has historically been marginalized. These are people that need someone to step forward and help them. And in Rhode Island, we have very few institutions that are willing to do that. Even the ones that are charged with doing it are not doing it. Or they're doing it in a way that is not particularly useful. So there are opportunities here for us to do well by ourselves by doing good for others. And I'm suggesting this is where we should go. And certainly, our board thinks that. So I've called this an inflection point in the history of higher education. It's one of those times where we think everything is going along more or less than it has always been. And then things get messy for a while. And we're not aware of it necessarily. But it turns out looking back from the vantage point of the future to the present, we realize that big things change. And we weren't aware that it was changing at the time. We were just aware things were chaotic, but they change. And so when you go back in time, in 1790, two states began public institutions. That was an unheard of idea. All the institutions up until 1790 were private. Suddenly, the states are involved in higher education. What a concept. Fast forward to 1863, you've got the Morrill Act. And suddenly, we're teaching engineering and agriculture at college. Imagine. That's just really weird. We shouldn't be doing that. Fast forward again to 1944 and the GI Bill. And suddenly, we're opening the doors of higher education to people from blue collar backgrounds. Well, Western civilization is hanging in peril. This will change everything. Higher education only works because it's exclusive. We can't make it inclusive. That's awful. And then there was another element going on. In 1876, Johns Hopkins began as a graduate institution, a graduate research university. That's not what higher education did. Harvard and Yale quickly developed graduate schools to keep up, but they established the first German model university in the country. And it changed the direction of how higher education thought of it. We're no longer undergraduate teaching institutions. We're now suddenly, it's about research. In a 1950, when the Feds established the National Science Foundation and began to reward faculty members with grants in certain fields, then suddenly, the tilt began again. It's all about graduate education and research. We can get federal dollars, but only we have the right kind of faculty. And these things transformed how we see higher education. So I sent you some notes a day or two ago from the Truman Commission of 1946. There are some very interesting things that were mentioned by the Truman Commission. It must have been a crazy time. I was not really all that conscious in 1946, but I was around, but I wasn't conscious. But I tried to put myself in that position. Here's a country that has just come through the Great Depression and the worst war in our history with hundreds of thousands of casualties. And before the powder was dry on the ratification of the peace treaty with Japan, Harry Truman was putting together a commission to talk about the future of the country through higher education. Higher education will change the direction of this country. Higher education will do everything right. We made a mistake by being xenophobes. Now we've learned that lesson. We need to be citizens of the world. We need to know more about other people. They need to know more about us. We're going to do everything differently. And when you read that report, and it's in six volumes, so take your time. But when you read the, by the way, the idea that a commission out of Washington could write six volumes in 18 months is a little hard to comprehend today, but they did it back in 1946. They're looking at the situation with such high aspiration, such ambition, and positive thinking, we can do this. And by this, they were remarkably progressive. They talked openly about the fact that white America had college degrees at 10 times the level of black America. And they said, this is wrong. This was eight years, seven years before, eight years before Brown versus School Board. This was still a very segregated time in America. Four members of the 28th member commission dissented on that point. Predictably, they were the presidents of the University of Arkansas, the Washington University, and St. Louis, Emory University, and the editor of the Richmond newspaper. They were people of the South. They weren't going to go back and start lobbying for black America. But the other 24 members of the commission did. And this is, I say doubt one quote. I want to read you one quote here that I think is pretty special. This is their warning, their fear. If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at all at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them. And of course, that's pretty much what happened. Fast forward 70 years to today. When we look at who is getting college degrees, 54% of all the degrees are going to people in the top 25% of family income. They're earning college degrees at more than twice the rate one might expect statistically. Less than 10% are going to people who are in families in the bottom quarter of family income. And that figure has gotten worse, not better, in the last 40 years. So the model of higher education we're using today is doing nothing to create opportunity for social and economic advancement from one class level to another. Nothing. And if we don't change the model, we have no reason to expect it's going to change in the future. And the consequences of locking people into the class in which they're born is nothing short of tragic. Our ancestors, many of them, certainly mine, left Europe to come to a place that gave them opportunity to be judged by who they were, the strength of their character, their ambition, their intelligence, rather than their place of birth. We have become more stratified as a country than the countries that our ancestors left. They surely must be rolling over in their graves at the irony here. I think of the opportunities that I've had, and I know I speak for many of you as well, by virtue of having the chance to get a college degree. My grandfather emigrated from Scotland in 1911. He was a baker. He had sixth grade education. He had no future other than being a baker. He wanted more for his family. He was 24 years old. He came to steerage. He had $25 in his pocket. He was coming to a country where he knew no one. I find it hard to imagine the courage it takes to do that. My father, all of his kids, graduated from high school, all four of them. Timing wasn't very good. My father graduated from high school early in the Depression. That was the end of his education, but he wanted to see his kids go to college, and all three of us did. Eight college degrees among us. Higher education completely changed my life. It opened doors that I didn't know existed. And one of the things that I am most grateful for, and again, I know I speak for many of you, is that we get the opportunity to do the most noble and important role that society offers, and that's to help transform the lives of the next generation. To give them opportunities they didn't know existed. It's a very ennobling kind of activity. I think about the people, like my father, who worked for a living because they had to put food on the table and a roof over their kids' heads. And my father did a job that he hated for 40 years, so that I could have had a job that I loved for 40 years. And if there's one thing that drives me personally, it's the opportunity to open those doors for other people. Not just the ones that are destined to go to college anyway, and the question is only which college? But the ones that don't think today they have the opportunity to go forward. What can we do? What is our moral obligation as educated people to provide those opportunities to people who right now are on the margins looking in? They're all around us. And I'm not saying that everybody should be coming down here to the Bristol campus and getting a four-year degree. I'm saying are there things that we can do that will help raise the economic level and the opportunities of people in our broader community? The answer to that is yes, there are. The question is how willing are we to take that on? So President Obama several years ago said, you know what we need in this country is to get to the point where we have 60% of the American adult public with some post-secondary something. A certificate, an associate's degree, a bachelor's degree, a graduate degree, but something that gives them skills more than what they got in high school. 60%. There are disputes on this particular statistic, but a commonly referenced stat is that 70% of the jobs in the future will require that kind of education. So 60% is not being excessive if 70% of the jobs are gonna require those kinds of skills. So here are the numbers. Today, 12% of the American public has a post-graduate or professional degree. 20% have a bachelor's degree. So 32%, at least with a bachelor's degree. 9% have an associate's degree. 5% have a high-quality certificate, it's 46%. The Lumina Foundation has been pouring millions and millions of dollars into changing that number. As has the Gates Foundation. It hasn't moved at all. And the reason is that colleges not unreasonably say, well, look, send us better students. The K-12 system is not getting the job done. Get more people ready for college. We'll take them in, but we can't do that for you. And by the way, states stop cutting the ground up from under-public institutions. You're privatizing them and making it more difficult for anyone to get a college degree. And federal government start putting more money into Pell grants. You haven't begun to keep pace with the rising costs of higher education. We have no obligation whatsoever to rescue you. Policy has to change. And incidentally, your tax and wage policies, Washington, have led to the situation where we've got tremendous inequities in wealth and income. Family income has been flat or declining for almost everyone for the last decade and hasn't moved very much for the two previous decades. Adjusted for inflation, the average individual salary had its maximum buying power in 1973, 40 years. The only reason families have a little bit more money is that more mums went back to work. So there were two wage earners, but average family income, so of course we're unaffordable. I mean, families aren't any more wealthy today than they were years ago and the costs have all gone up. We can't fix that here in higher education. We require being told what to do. Well, I think we can wait a long time and not see this change. We will not see the 2026 goal of 60% college graduates or post-secondary ed graduates. We will not see that goal achieved if we're waiting to do it through 18-year-olds and the improvement of the K-12 system. It's not gonna happen. The only way we can do that is going after adults. There are somewhere between 80 and 100,000 adults in Rhode Island that have more than a high school diploma and less than a four-year degree. 75% of them, through a poll, said I would love to get my undergraduate degree. I just don't see any way forward. I can't do it. I'm a single mother of three. I've got a cocker spaniel. I can't move down to the residence halls in Bristol. Just not gonna work. And I don't have the money and I can't give up my income. So, no way forward. We can solve many of those problems. You will hear stories coming out of our Continuing Studies program tomorrow of the people that we're serving today whose lives are being changed. Doorways of opportunity being opened because Roger Williams had the courage to step forward and do something about it. I'm not telling you, we're making everybody's life better overnight. I'm saying that we've already started that work. We can do it on a larger scale. The scale of Rhode Island is such that a school of 4,000 undergraduates in Bristol can actually imagine changing the trajectory of the economy of the state of Rhode Island because it's only a million people. And the money that is supporting these programs incident is not coming by driving students into debt. It's coming from workforce development funds through the federal and state governments. It's coming from corporations who are hiring us to do non-credit training. These are all things, by the way, where we actually turn a modest profit that falls back to our bottom line here. We require adding $5 million of net revenue year over year to keep our budget flat in Bristol. We have a $160 million budget. We grow at 3% a year. It's very close to $5 million. Every year we have to find $5 million of more money. We cannot grow the size of this campus, not realistically. First, we're full, so we'd have to start buildings and more buildings. But secondly, the demographics work against us. We're trying to go bigger when the population of traditional students is getting smaller. We just today received a first pass at a study on tuition levels. Where we ask the question, is it ready? Are we ready? Is it possible for us to raise tuition and not kill ourselves in the marketplace? And the answer looks like it might just be, but it's gonna be on the margins. 3% increase in tuition would bring in, for the entering class of next year, would bring in $1 million. That's not $5 million. It's $1 million. Now we can do that on a recurring basis, I think, successfully, but the $5 million figure is a challenge. We're seeing growth in philanthropy. Lisa Rille and the Advancement Operation brought in $3.5 million last year. It's the largest number we've ever had. It's not where we need to be. We need to be substantially higher than that, and we're hurt by not being higher, but we cannot flip a light switch and suddenly people send us lots of money. We're working on it. There are lots of little places we can go. We look at graduate programs, we look at rental of facilities in the summer. We're maxing out those right now. We can go to the summer school some more, a little bit. But a lot of what we will do in the future may well depend on what we can do with the non-traditional population that need our services and for whom providing those services would be an economic benefit to us. So this is where our board is going. They're saying to us, they're saying to me, so we're not gonna tell you what to do other than to do it. Just make some stuff happen. We've got it. We're already covering the additional costs that we've incurred by taking on a new and bigger building by virtue of the growth that we've seen in SCS over the last couple of years. We're turning a quite a nice net profit. We're growing every year. Can we grow fast enough that we continue to protect the integrity of the Bristol program while we are continuing to build a reputation that will allow us to charge higher amounts of tuition? It's a race. And so we need to be smart about all this. But I think the point of the exercise is that we are to the point where we have the capacity and I think the will to go ahead and do some things that will put us into a position among other things of leadership in higher education in America. If I'm correct on this idea that we're at an inflection point and that the future of higher education is not gonna look very much like, the institutions will not look very much like they do today in many instances. What will they look like? They will be far larger purveyors of educational, excuse me for this, product to people at all different stages of their life in a highly individualized way than is true today. So I've used this metaphor and forgive me, it's clumsy, but somehow I find it accurate. Traditionally, higher education institutions are like fruit sellers. They run a fruit stand. You come to us between the hours of nine and five, five days a week, and you buy what we have. We have apples, we have oranges, we have bananas. If you wanna come caught you're at a lock, we don't have come caught. If you want a half an apple, we can't give you half an apple. You've gotta come to us when we're open and buy what we serve. The future of the fruit stand is the smoothie. We will give you whatever you want. You can put any combination of stuff you want into your smoothie. We've got it all. You can be a big smoothie or a little smoothie or whatever size smoothie you want. By the way, we're open 24 seven and we deliver. That's the kind of situation that we're gonna be in using technology, the opportunities that are in front of us. Thinking about ways other than seat time to qualify people for their academic programs. Thinking a lot about how we do the acquisition of skills that are needed by the people who are seeking a better world. It's not that we become, I want you to think that we're gonna try and give undergraduate degrees to everybody in Rhode Island. That's not where we're going at all. We need to find people where they are and do what they need done. It's like medicine. Higher education is tracking what's happened to medicine. The old model of medicine crashed and burned. New models had to emerge. And we're seeing this very specifically in the treatment of cancer. A few years ago, we have these drugs that all but kill you, but hopefully they kill cancer cells more than they kill regular cells. And maybe just maybe you'll survive with the cancer cells gone and the rest of you intact, but we can't be sure. And now what we know is the genetic basis of that cancer determines whether or not that chemical is gonna be effective. And we don't administer the chemical unless we know it's effective. Individualized medical treatment. Individualized education is ways what is gonna be in the future. Not for the 18 year olds, but for the adults that are coming and saying, I have particular needs. This is what I am. What can you do for me? So tomorrow, we cut a ribbon. We actually cut a ribbon in Providence. And we say as we're doing that, now is the time to raise expectations. Raise expectations of ourselves and of the people who we purport to serve. The irony is we're going back to where we started in downtown Providence, serving the kinds of people that we served 60 years ago. So it's back to the future, Roger Williams. And I think we're looking at a great future. Thank you for coming and thank you for standing for this entire time. I'm happy to answer any questions or hear any comments that you might have. We've kept to the 45 minutes. Those of you who are seated and therefore have been resting. Do you have any questions or comments? Okay. Lisa, did we have ice cream available anywhere? Was it all melted? There is ice cream? All right. Okay, well, we're gonna break. And I again, thank you for coming today. It's been a pleasure to have you here.