 Hello, my name is Kevin Carey, I'm the Vice President for Education Policy here at New America and let me start by saying welcome to all of our guests here at our offices in Washington DC and also to everyone joining us online today for what's going to be a great discussion about looking forward to the future of community college baccalaureate degrees. It strikes me that community colleges really are about beginnings for millions of college students. For some of them it's the very beginning of their post-secondary journey, often a place that's affordable, often a place that's close to home and their communities and for other people who are coming back into higher education, often people with families and jobs, it's about the beginning of a new career, a new path towards a job and for many of those students that journey begins and concludes at their local community college whether it's a short term credential or an associate's degree that leads to many of the jobs and fields where that's the credential they need. But for other people and for a lot of people the journey doesn't end there. What they're headed toward is a bachelor's degree, a credential that has for a long, long time and continues to have almost an unrivaled importance in the way that we've organized our economy and our labor market. There are just enormous differences in opportunity often between people who have bachelor's degrees and people who do not. There are whole parts of our economy and labor market including all of the parts that come after the bachelor's degree but many of the other ones as well that are unavailable to people unless they get that key four year credential. And so the challenge for community college students is and has been for a long time, successfully making the journey that started in the community college to the bachelor's degree. And we all know there have been and can be some bumps along the road, some obstacles in the way and sometimes that obstacle is credit transfer from a two year institution to a four year institution. Sometimes the obstacle is changing where you are. You started perhaps closer to home and you might have to move to a new place, some place where you don't have connections, you don't have roots, where they don't know you. You have a whole new environment to acculturate to. Sometimes the difficulty might be some discontinuity between how you were taught and what you learned in the beginning of your college career and how you were taught and what you learned in the second part of it. So increasingly over the last several decades, the solution that has been arrived upon in a number of states and community colleges is to grant bachelor's degrees in community colleges. This was once a very rare thing maybe kind of heresy to the great mid 20th century architects of state higher education policy who had a vision of layers and power relationships that didn't that wouldn't quite make sense to them. But in a lot of states that has been changing. We now know that 25 half of the states in America there are community college baccalaureate degrees. There are 140 out of our some close to a thousand community colleges now that offer bachelor's degrees and over 500 programs across the country that are doing this. And more now than ever before. This is controversial in some places as we know we saw some news last week about some pushback about efforts to expand in California the idea of community college baccalaureate degrees and it's understandable from some perspectives why this kind of thing would raise questions. It gets outside of our boundaries a little bit in terms of who we think is ought to do what and maybe on some level who we think deserves what. But here in New America we are very committed to this idea of community college baccalaureate degrees. It's been a significant focus of the community college program in our Center for Education and Labor. And it's why we are all kind of coming here today for this event. So you have a treat in front of you for the folks who are really interested in this. We've got a great panel discussion. We're going to be looking ahead to upcoming legislation. Today we released two new policy briefs. One of them really focused on the going in great detail around some of the really interesting labor market data where some community colleges have done a really good job of kind of tracking the way certain kind of credentials are trending in the job market and being there to meet them. And again that's one of the real advantages to community colleges offering bachelor's degrees. They are in high growth fields, healthcare, cybersecurity. They're the institutions that have forged connections with local employers. They know what they need. They know what the skills are. They've got the faculty. They are really best positioned to make that beginning and ending that ends with a bachelor's degree. And we see, and matching what we know are changing requirements in the labor market where there are certain fields where it used to be a one year or a two year credential was enough, but more and more the four year credential is what students need and so these institutions are there to meet it. And then we have another great brief around the public policy and the financing of all this which is very, very important. We really need to make sure that the way that we provide financing to the institutions and the students that attend these institutions matches up with these new structures that we're building to be responsive to both what students need, employers need and the economy needs. So again, we've got a great group of experts and researchers here. It's going to be a combination of more information and a great panel discussion. And now I'm going to turn it over to the person here at New America who has really been leading a lot of this effort, Ivy Love, our senior policy analyst who is going to bring you on to the next part of our discussion. So again, to all of you, thanks so much for coming and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Thank you so much, Kevin. Hello, everyone. I'm Ivy Love. I'm a senior policy analyst at New America. I want to thank all of you for spending part of your afternoon with us today. We're really grateful to have a group of folks here with us in the DC office and the 100-some-odd of you streaming online. Welcome, everyone. And before we continue today, I do want to offer thanks to a few folks. So first, I want to thank our extremely generous funders, the Joyce Foundation and Ascendium. We take their faith in our team very seriously and cannot thank them enough for supporting this research. And we hope our work that they have supported will empower policymakers, practitioners, and other researchers for many years to come. And not only are we deeply grateful for the financial support from Joyce and Ascendium, but we're really lucky to have some fabulous program officers that we have the privilege of working with, Emily Goldman at Joyce and Sue Chouay at Ascendium. Both Emily and Sue make our work sharper through their insightful questions and thoughts, and it's always a joy to meet with them and talk through this work. And I also want to thank our first program officer from Joyce, Samir Gadkari, who's now leading the Institute for College Access and Success. He had college access and success at the forefront of his work before making that transition and his engagement around CCBs and this recognition of the potential and the purpose of these programs as an important way to expand access to bachelor's degrees really made this work possible. So thank you, Samir, as well. And I finally want to say that New America did not do this work alone. We were so privileged to partner with Dr. Deborah Bragg over the course of this work. Deb, over the course of her career, has advanced our understanding of community college bachelor's degrees by leaps and bounds. And her insight and her vision and her commitment to equity and access and higher ed were essential to every step of this work. And we just can't thank her enough. Thank you, Deb. Now, just a second, we're going to move into our research presentation for today. So you're going to hear from three of us about what we've been finding recently around community college bachelor's programs or CCBs as you're hearing us say if this is a new topic and what's around the bend in terms of our work. So after that, we'll move into the panel discussion part of our event. We'll have a great conversation around what's happening now and what's to come. And then after that, you only have to listen to me for a few more minutes and then we'll call it good. So now we'll have an opportunity, I want to say, at the end of the research presentation and then again at the end of the panel presentation for any questions that you all might have for us. For those of you who are online, I'd encourage you to submit your questions at any point as they come to mind during the event. We'll bring up as many of those as we can during question and answer time as well. So with that, thank you all so much for being with us. I want to invite the other research presenters to come up here and I will pass the mic to our first presenter, Dr. Elizabeth Meza. Hi, everybody. Thanks for being here today. I'm excited to share with you some of my research. I'm going to very briefly talk about the evidence around student outcomes in community college baccalaureate degrees. There's a lot of recent research going on and this won't be comprehensive, but it should give you a good taste of what's been happening recently. So as I've said, I'm Elizabeth Meza. I want to thank New America for having me here today. My partnership with New America started about five years ago and they've been just excellent partners to work with. I'm at the University of Washington and they've really helped to sharpen my thoughts. It's great to see an organization that's so policy focused and in such a practical way. So I really want to thank Ivy, Iris, Mary Alice, and now Chris on the New America team for allowing me to be part of this work. So I'm just going to briefly go over the problem that community college baccalaureates are seeking to address. Many of you already know this, so this will be pretty quick. But students in the bottom part of the socioeconomic quartiles are much less likely to earn bachelors degrees than students at the top and we know that transfer is often a problem for these students, especially students who are racially minoritized or who live in rural areas have difficulty achieving bachelors degrees often and often don't have the access to those bachelors degrees. The pandemic has only magnified these challenges for students and although many programs have been brought online, often times what we found in our interviews with community college students is that they really do value the personal touch and the community that's formed at community colleges around their own personal interests as well as students who look like them, have had similar experiences and are able to relate to their learning styles. Unfortunately many of the interventions that have been happening around transfers such as university centers, articulation agreements, et cetera, have done little to move the needle. I have started my career at a community college at Bellevue College in Washington state, which is one of the first colleges to introduce community college baccalaureate degrees in Washington. And I have seen a lot of time spent on these small articulation agreements, small university centers which really are just unable to move the needle on transfer in the way that we really need, community college baccalaureates offer this promise to really expand access to a bachelors degree to many more students than are able to be reached through smaller articulation agreements. So there are possible policy solutions to these problems. Right now 25 states, it will be 24 in a second I've been told, will offer community college baccalaureate degrees. Often offered in very high demand fields that the labor market is interested in. Chris will talk a little bit more about that, the programs in a moment so I won't go deeply into that. But they are often limited in scope as well, which Chris will tell you a little bit more about. But there's controversy as we heard from Kevin. So there's fears of mission creep, of duplication, of quality. There was just an article published today in Inside Higher Ed in which our colleague Dr. Debra Bragg is quoted and it kind of goes over what's happening in California, so I encourage you to look at that article if you haven't seen it yet. It's really lays out some of the controversy that's happening pretty well. And makes the point that the community college baccalaureate is not about a piece of the pie, it's about expanding access to the pie. So who are these students who enroll in CCBs? Are they really that different from students who would attend a traditional university? Well, what we did is looked at some students in Washington state and the reason why we chose Washington is because they do have a robust data system, so shout out to the folks in Washington who work on that. And we looked at, are the students who are in CCB is different from the students who are at the community college. And you'll see here that they're really not. Students in community college baccalaureate programs mirror those students who are attending workforce programs and transfer programs at the community college, but they're actually more likely to be receiving financial aid. They're more likely to have dependents than transfer students, they're older, their average age in Washington is 30 years old. And they're more likely to be veterans. So those are the student population that these community college baccalaureate degrees are reaching. I'd like to tell you a little bit about Cat and Cat's story to drive home this point. So we, my colleague Dr. Bragg and I and Dr. Wetztein also from the University of Washington were able to interview 17 students. And Cat was one of them. Cat is a 30-something mom of two. She is a veteran and she worked as a pharmacy tech. And what happened was at her pharmacy tech, she had a job, they switched the software. And we all know when you switch the software, you know, problems arise. And so she really saw this and she saw how it was affecting her patients. And she thought, I would really like to get into software development. It's a high demand field in the Seattle area, as you might know. And so she looked around to see where could I get a software development degree. She had lots of credits from lots of different institutions. When she was a veteran, she had taken community college classes in Hawaii and in Maryland and a couple other places. And so she had this kind of myriad of credits that she thought could apply towards a bachelor's degree. And she was looking around and not really finding much success. And one of the places that she looked were local for-profit institutions. Many researchers have pointed out that community college baccalaureates actually compete more with for-profits than with the local nonprofit or public universities in their regions, researchers from Florida. Well, Kat wasn't really finding much out there. She couldn't really find anything in the for-profit world that was, she felt high quality and affordable. She looked around at some code camps, but she really thought, no, I really want a bachelor's degree. This is really the next step for me. So finally, she heard about a program at her local community college in the suburbs of Seattle. Let me back up one sec. Kat had run on to what we are calling at New America opportunity mirage, where you think that there might be opportunities because there should be, right? Software development is a high demand field. I live in a suburb of a big city. There should be somewhere where I can go, but she really didn't find that. And so she had, we know about education deserts and that's been a well-documented phenomena, but we really think there's also this opportunity mirage that's happening that Kat ran into. So finally she heard about her local community college program and she was able to enroll and achieve, or she had to take some credits to actually even get an associates degree, right? She actually didn't even have an associate degree at that point. So she took some credits, she achieved the associate degree and then she was able to enroll in the baccalaureate degree program and now she's a software developer in Seattle, making quite a bit more money than she made as a pharmacy technician. So she's really got a great success story. So the students that we interviewed didn't see an alternative to the CCB. They didn't see college as a choice. They saw the CCB as the only option that they had to stay where they were, to stay in a place that they knew that would fit their schedule, that would be flexible and that would cater to their needs as adult learners and adult students. So a little bit about completion rates and these are racial, completion, racial and ethnic completion rates in both Florida and Washington, but we also know that the completion rates of students are about the same as students who after they transfer. So in Washington, if you transfer and to a traditional four-year university, your completion rates are about 65%. That's about the same for community college baccalaureate degrees. Researchers in California have found similar completion rates. So there's not a lower completion rate for students who attend a CCB than who attend a traditional university. And what about employment? The big question that everyone wants to know. So what we were able to do with our dataset was take students who had graduated in similar programs at universities and at CCB degrees and compare them. So we're really comparing apples to apples. So for example, we were able to take particular healthcare degrees and match them up with the same exact healthcare degree at a community college and a bachelor's degree and say, well, are these students employed at the same rates? And what we found is that CCB completers in the first quarter after graduation, which is that blue bar that you see, actually have a higher employment rate than students who graduated from a traditional four-year university or regional university. And probably that's because they do tend to be older and more working adults, right? So they're already in the job market in that first quarter after graduation. But you can see by the 12th quarter after graduation or three years out that gray bar, they're exactly equal. So students who are graduating with community college baccalaureates are employed at the same rates as students who are graduating from local universities with a similar degree. And then what about their earnings? Are they making the same amount of money? Well, if you look at that first set of bars over to the left, you'll see that the community college baccalaureate students actually look a little bit higher in general, depending on the degree type. And also, and this is probably likely the fact that they're working, right, as they are graduating. But if you look over to the 12th quarter for the data that we had, they're really very similar. In fact, we really didn't find statistically significant differences. So students who graduate from a community college baccalaureate program versus the similar program at a university are really earning the same amount of money three years after graduation in the data that we have. This is something that we're following and we're trying to get more data on because we don't, for example, you'll see one of our bars disappeared there in computer and information sciences. They had just started offering that degree in sizable enough numbers at the community colleges where we would be able to actually compare that now. So that's something that we're moving forward in our research and wanna look at is does this trend hold up over time? Okay, that's all I've got for you today. But I do wanna just leave you with a couple of takeaways. And that is that we feel like these degrees are really expanding access to the pie rather than focusing on a slice of the pie. Students are completing at very similar rates to students who attend traditional universities. And the CCBs are creating a pathway to employment and jobs at very similar wages and employment rates as students in universities. So overall, we're really feeling like the CCB is a good policy solution. There are some caveats, of course, we do have to make sure that we pay attention to equity. There's been some concerns raised about whether the degrees are focusing enough on equity concerns, whether the financing methods are taking away from other parts of the college. So we definitely are interested in that and keeping our eyes on that. But in terms of the student outcomes, that's what I really wanted to share with you today. So I'm gonna turn it over now to Ivy. Thank you so much for your attention. Hi, you know me. I'm back. Great, thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was wonderful to see how much that we've learned in the last several years. So what I'm gonna share with you now is some new research that we have just published today that Kevin alluded to in his opening remarks. So you can find those two briefs on our website right now. And what I'm gonna do is just walk you through a couple of the key findings to help guide you through those. So the first brief that was published today, I'll start with the one looking at the supply of degrees versus labor market demand as that relates to CCBs specifically. So this brief was written by Deborah Bragg, who I mentioned earlier in opening remarks, who has come up in Elizabeth remarks. You'll hear her name a lot with good reason. And Tim Harmon, who has co-authored another report with us doing a whole inventory of all community college bachelor's programs across the country that we published last fall. So these are longtime research partners of ours. Now in most states that allow community college bachelor's degrees, the college has to demonstrate some level of labor market demand to be able to do the program. They're required to show some data that there is a demand for folks with these degrees. But what does that look like? So what this brief gets into is a look at how colleges can actually do that. So what you'll see in this brief is the use of job vacancy data and job posting data alongside higher education completion data. So the number of degrees completed for each college or region using iPads data, putting those next to each other and using two examples. One from Ohio, which does allow CCBs. And one example from Illinois, which has a long history of discussion around CCBs but still no law, around whether there is a regional need that can be observed, where a CCB program could step in and start helping local folks prepare for local jobs. So I would encourage all of you to take a peek at that brief. And I so appreciate the author's enormous time and effort that they put into this brief. This has been a long time in the making. So congratulations to Deventim on their brief publication. Now what I'm going to do is talk about our second brief release today that I and our deputy director for community colleges, Iris Palmer, who you all will meet in a moment if you don't know her already, who the two of us co-authored this brief. So first let me start with, actually let me back up. Why did we do this work? So two years ago, Iris and I published a brief that was a state policy framework for CCBs. We compared legislation across states, approval processes for programs across states, and we dipped our toe into the financing of these programs, but we really realized that this runs very deep, looks completely different from state to state, and so that's where the genesis of this report started from. So wanting to understand sort of the thorny questions around how colleges are finding and using resources to support these programs. So actually let me just start with the states that we used in our sample. So we've said there's 25 states that allow community college bachelor's degrees. We cut down to the states where theoretically any community college could operate a bachelor's degree. Then we cut down a little bit more to those where there's at least five programs in the state already operating, so we have something to go off of in terms of observing where the resources are coming from. So once we got our sample pinned down, we looked at three components of financing that I'll walk you through now. First one being startup resources. We'll look at formula funding and tuition policy in just a second. I'll show you some comparing and contrasting around how states are using these strategies to finance their CCB programs. So the first component, startup resources. What we mean by that is the resources provided to colleges to start usually their first CCB program or programs. So often that first program is the most expensive for institutions to start because it's at that point that the college has to substantively change their regional accreditation that is an expensive process. That is sometimes a long process. It can be a challenge and so having those resources upfront to defray those costs can be really important for colleges. And then after you deal with the overall accreditation, they may have requests for you like you might need to expand your library holdings if you're going to offer bachelor's degrees. You might need more faculty who hold terminal degrees. So there are a couple things that colleges might need to think about on early costs and a state offering resources to defray those could be really valuable. So in this sample of 10 states that we were working with, a few did offer grants of a few $100,000 per college. It ranges by state. Two colleges in a pilot program. So some states will start with just a small cohort of colleges and then expand later. However, we noticed that none of the states who did so for pilot programs of community college bachelor's degrees were actually able to sustain that. It was only for the first few colleges in the state able to do so. I'll use Washington, Texas, California. That was the case for all three of those states. So yes, as Elizabeth mentioned earlier, not everyone in higher education loves CCBs, believe it or not. And sometimes just getting that legislation over the finish line to allow these programs is enough of a hurdle. But still in early stages of figuring out CCBs, it is really, really important to consider which colleges in the state have the most potential to fill regional and occupational needs for bachelor's degrees in the state are those the most highly resourced colleges? Are they drawing from a local tax base? Is that enough to support the program? If it's not, if it doesn't match up with the occupational and regional needs, then having startup funding can really make a huge difference to making sure that the supply and the demand back to the first brief match up very nicely. And if not, those additional resources could make a lot of difference. So let's go to the next piece of financing. So we looked at state formula funding. There's a ton of variation here and even just figuring out what formula or formulas a state is using to finance community colleges and community college bachelor's programs is really not as straightforward as you might think as straightforward as I thought. So we used several resources that were extremely valuable. Thank you, Shio, for doing great work. Thank you, informed states for producing some wonderful reports, HCM strategists. When we send a follow-up email after this event, I will share these resources with you. They are essential reading for practitioners. They're essential reading for any students or faculty members taking a break from taking or grading finals right now who are tuning in. I will make sure that you have those. But just for now, let me give you a little compare and contrast on what's going on in some of these states. So there are some states where colleges get more resources for the completion of higher level credits, so junior, senior level classes, than for students taking first or second year freshman sophomore level courses. But that happens for different reasons depending on the state. So let me start with Washington. Remember from earlier that almost all of the time, colleges have to demonstrate there's labor market value for a program if they're going to offer that program. Well, in Washington's performance funding formula, if you are earning credits in a high-need area, that comes with a little funding bump. So just by definition, CCBs have to be in a high-need area. So that comes with a little bit of a bump. It has nothing to do with the level of education. It's more about the targeted need in a specific occupational area. But then there are states like Nevada, for example, where if you earn credits at the junior, senior level, that does come with a little bit of extra funding than a freshman or sophomore level, 100, 200 level course. So for different reasons, CCBs might come with a little bit of extra funding in some states. Not always the case. I'll turn to Michigan next. So Michigan's law around authorizing CCBs is pretty restrictive. There's only four possible majors that any college could have if they're starting a bachelor's program. They don't even acknowledge CCBs in the state funding formulas. There are only a few programs. They're pretty small programs. They kind of just leave it at it as is and don't recognize those one way or the other in state funding. And then while we're talking about California, in California, the completion of a CCB degree is associated with a little bit less funding than the completion of a transfer associate degree. This is not a huge share of college funding, but in their performance and their student success formula, if a student earns an applied baccalaureate degree from a California community college, the amount of funding or the points in the funding formula that come from that are actually a little bit less than for an associate of arts degree that's designed to transfer out to another institution. So even though California right now doesn't have a ton of programs, they're just moving out of their pilot phase. And even though those programs are fairly small, and this is probably not making a huge material difference, we do have to ask ourselves, so why is that difference in there? I'd say it's more than possible. And this has been shown in other states that colleges can have their cake and eat it too. They can support transfer and successfully offer bachelor's programs. They don't have to compete with one another. But there you have it. In one state, the formula funding does have an incentive, albeit a small one, to deprioritize CCBs. And even though every state has their own way among these funding options to make this work, we feel pretty confident saying that we recommend avoiding funding penalties for CCB enrollments and completions relative to other programs. So let me just go to my last slide here. Tuition policy. Like other options, it varies by state who gets to make the call about how much or how little tuition is charged for a given program. So states and colleges' ability to use this funding lever really varies. Overall, though, we did observe some differences in some divergence strategies on how folks are using tuition to fund CCBs. So let me start with an example of where tuition is higher for upper division courses than for associate level courses. We use Washington. So there, community and technical colleges have to keep upper division tuition comparable to what regional public universities in the state charge. They can't charge way less for upper division tuition. So then what you have is community college students paying a little more for their bachelor's degree courses than they did for their associate courses. The similarity in tuition for upper division between regional public universities and community and technical colleges in Washington does sort of perhaps address a concern about competition or where students might go. On the other hand, if you have higher prices at the bachelor's level, that could impact students who are really price sensitive. It's a trade-off that's something to think about. And that's one of the things that really came through in this report. There are a million different ways to do this and it will look a little different for everyone. It's about trade-offs and knowing what your options are. But for a more level option, I'll use Florida as an example. Technically, it is more expensive for upper division tuition in Florida, but the difference between one credit hour of lower division and one credit hour of upper division is about 10 bucks a credit hour. So all but exactly the same. And that consistency might help students stay the course after an associate degree if they know the price that they're paying is going to be really similar to what they're already used to. So prioritizing that level tuition and affordability might help those price sensitive students who are thinking about that in terms of their pursuit of a bachelor's degree. So there are some highlights for you. That brief along with our supply demand analysis is online and available. We will also share that with you in a follow-up note. So I thank you all for your attention and I hope those briefs are useful to you. And now I'm going to pass the mic to my colleague, Chris. Alrighty. Great, so my name is Chris Geary. I'm a senior policy analyst here at New America. Also this is the first time I've met Elizabeth in person and I'm seeing some other folks in the crowd that I've been in Zoom rooms with. So nice to meet you in person. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the next steps of our CCB research. But before I do that, I just wanted to help paint some context that kind of illuminates the decisions we're making and why. So this map just shows all of the CCB authorizing states nationwide. Again, we've said that's about half of the states across the country. But there are very big differences in the number of CCB programs per state. We see a handful of states have much larger numbers of CCB programs than others. And so we've looked a little bit so far at some differences between rural and urban institutions in terms of the number of CCB programs they have. For this slide, we had a sample of 25 different CCB institutions and we found that there were some differences across rural and urban institutions in terms of how many programs they actually offer. We also looked at differences in program area of study between the most rural and most urban CCB providers. And you'll see some differences that jump out and some may make sense, others may not. I did want to point out that there were more health profession CCBs at urban colleges, which is potentially something that has important implications down the road. And so the next steps of our CCB work at New America focuses specifically on rural CCB programs through three main components. I'll talk about each of these in more detail, but we are working on a gap analysis, state level data analysis, and then learning communities. So in terms of our gap analysis, we will observe trends in rural CCB expansion and we're really trying to see, are there different geographic trends or even lags in CCB implementation? To do that, we'll also interview representatives from rural colleges that have either already developed CCBs or have made the decision not to develop CCBs. So we really want to learn from their perspective about their decision making, implementation processes and any challenges they've encountered so far. So we plan to supplement this with state level data analysis, looking at data at three states in particular. We've already received data from Texas and Florida and are kind of in the works to secure that third state, but we have three overarching questions, similar to the questions that Elizabeth went through at the beginning in our prior work, but we really want to know who enrolls in CCB programs, who graduates from these programs, and then what are the labor market outcomes for those graduates? And overall, there's kind of two main goals here. The first, we want to understand if CCB graduates earn a family sustaining wage and whether CCB programs are enrolling and graduating diverse students. And this is really all part of a fundamental question. Are these programs advancing educational and economic equity? And then finally, we are establishing learning communities to learn and disseminate important findings to the field. So from these communities, we will identify key lessons for rural colleges that are building CCB programs. We'll publish implementation guides on best practices for CCB programs that are establishing at rural institutions, and then we'll identify and propose solutions to some of the policy barriers to rural CCBs. So that was a pretty high level overview of what's to come, but we did want to pause and give time for questions. And if you do have a question, which maybe someone's demonstrating right now, but please do answer in the mic so that folks and the webcast can hear. Thanks, Chris. So this is actually a question from online that I wanted to share. We're just gonna play musical chairs while we're answering the questions, if that's okay. That's a really interesting question. And two things come to mind for me. So one being that in Florida and in Texas, both they did for some time, $10,000 bachelor's degrees and promoted those as all four years of higher education available for that price. I don't know that we have evidence that that convinced any state universities to reduce tuition in any way, but knowing that these programs are available for applied in technical and professional fields, I could see it having that impact. Sometimes what happens is what I talked about in Washington where community colleges by state policy have to have that elevated tuition. So it is equal to comprehensive universities, sort of, perhaps to avoid that in some way. It gets complicated, but we don't have evidence of that right now, but I could foresee that happening at some point in the future. Thank you all for being here today. I know Ivy has already said that, but I just wanna echo her. I'm Iris Palmer. I'm deputy director for community colleges here at New America. And I'm joined by an amazing panel of guests who have come from across the country in states districts who are authorizing at different times or like our different, I would say different points of authorizing community college bachelor's degrees. And what we're gonna focus on today is really where we see community college bachelor's degrees going into the future. What are the goals? How do we think about implementing these? How do we think about the issues that they can solve and how we can make them function as well as possible? So thank you all so much for being here. So can each of you tell me about what you do, what your occupation is and how that connects to community college bachelor's degrees? Sure, I'll start. Thank you for being here. I just wanna say. And introduce yourself to it. My name is Stephen Gonzalez. I'm the chancellor for the Maricopa Community College District that's in Arizona. I just wanna say it's an honor to be here and to share some of our story. As the chancellor, I've been officially in this role since September of this year. I served as the interim chancellor for two and a half years prior to that. And so when I became the interim chancellor, we were beginning a legislative session where we were making our 23rd or 24th attempt at asking our state legislature to support our ability to offer bachelor's degrees. And we were making a nice run during that time and then COVID hit. And it shut down the legislation. And we picked it up again and of course we were successful, otherwise we wouldn't be here today talking about it. So thank you. Wonderful. Okay, thank you. Good afternoon. Carrie Henderson, executive vice chancellor for the Florida College System Office. So I supervise our academic and student affairs team, our research and analytics team and our Florida Student Success Center. So a lot of the work that we do intersects with baccalaureate degrees Florida is one of the first states to offer and authorized baccalaureates. We have almost 200 now. So for us now it's just sort of the way that we do business and is sort of woven into everything that we do. Specific to baccalaureate degrees, my team is responsible for approval of new baccalaureate. We have a very rigorous review process that takes place over the period of about nine months if it moves as fast as it possibly can. So in addition to looking at local evidence around building up things like library resources and making sure you have enough faculty, I also interface with our statewide department of economic opportunity on creating a data dashboard that institutions are required to use to demonstrate demand. And then I also work on an annual accountability process for baccalaureate degrees. So that includes two components. One, looking at labor market data. And I'm really proud to say that in the three years we've been doing this analysis, no community college baccalaureate has ever run into issues with labor market data. The program performance side is a little different. And I'm sure we're gonna talk about that a little bit more. Constable Lee, thank you, Ray. Thanks, Iris. Ray Martinez. I'm president CEO of the Texas Association of Community Colleges. And so I'm really glad to be here. My thanks to Ivy and to Iris and the folks here at New America for having me. I'm really honored to share the stage with Carrie and Stephen as well. Looking forward to our discussion today. The Texas Association of Community Colleges is a non-profit association. We're located in Austin and we are not a state agency. We are a non-profit that represents 48 of the 50 community college districts in the state of Texas. Although we work closely, truthfully with all 50 of our community college districts. So we're very involved in not just advocacy work on behalf of our community colleges but a strong research component through what we call our Texas Success Center which is our team is about 14 full-time individuals about half of which maybe a little more than that are really focused on the research and guided pathways work that we do very much related to CCBs and how CCBs have expanded in Texas. Not a great deal, we'll talk some more about take a deeper dive into what each of our states are doing but certainly expansion since our pilot community colleges were able to do this back almost two decades ago or perhaps about two decades ago. And then the last thing I'll say is that prior, I'm new to my position. I'm three months into the job as presidency of this association. Prior to this I served as deputy commissioner for academic affairs and workforce education at our state agency in Texas, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Similar to Kerry in that role, my job was to work with the team, with a division within our agency that oversees the approval process for any new degree program from any of our public two or four year institutions. So the process itself that community colleges have to go through to be able to establish a new CCB is something that again I wasn't day to day involved in but as the deputy commissioner, I worked with a great team of public servants at our coordinating board that continues to help oversee the approval process for CCB. So looking forward to discussion today and really glad to be here with you all. It's wonderful, I just wanna point out to everyone that we have someone from a district, a state agency and an association who was formerly at a state agency. So some really great diverse perspectives here which we really, really appreciate. So for our first question, can you tell me a little bit more about why each of your state's institution district were interested in CCBs? What was it that wasn't being met through programs that other institutions or other programs that were being offered in your context? Yeah, we'll just go down the road again and then maybe I'll popcorn it later. Yeah, so a couple of the things that I didn't say in my introduction about Maricopa Community Colleges is that we serve approximately 150, 175,000 students a year, comprised of 10 independently accredited institutions and we're certainly the largest provider of workforce development in the state of Arizona. So whenever large companies come in and need to produce a workforce, they look to us and another piece of information about Maricopa is that we also have nine of our 10 institutions or Hispanic Serbian institutions and one will likely become a Hispanic Serbian institution in this next year or two. So when we begin to look at the gaps, particularly equity gaps in completion, success and then in the workforce, we are the greatest opportunity to close that gap and so in convincing our state legislators to support this endeavor, that was one of the strongest cases that we made is that as do you want to have your largest provider of workforce development, to have this ability to offer an extended degree beyond the associates and certificates, associates degree at an affordable cost. That was the driver force behind it and so we have to make a case, to be quite honest with you, we're not in front of a state body asking for permission, but we do need to demonstrate that we are helping meet workforce demands and to help fill those gaps. You don't have an authorization process? No. Ah, interesting. Wonderful, Carrie? Sure, so I heard someone say this the other day and I feel obligated to say it, in the late 1900s. I think it seemed like it was so long ago but in the late 1900s, Florida had a critical teacher shortage and a nursing shortage. Both of those things are still true but that was really what the state legislature was focused on was looking for individuals who had a baccalaureate degree to be in those fields and so the institutions at the time there were 11 public state universities, 28 state colleges or community colleges back then and there was an external research group that the legislature subcontracted with to analyze the statewide data to see if the university system could bulk up to take on just the sheer number of students who were needed to fill those roles and there was not evidence that they could do it on their own without significant investment and so that's when Florida started allowing bachelor's degrees to be approved at select community colleges and select programs. Teacher education I can spend a little bit talking about later is an area that we still have a need and we need to start thinking about maybe redesigning how we think about teacher preparation. Nursing is the one baccalaureate degree offered at all 28 colleges so that is a continued focus and to date we have I think almost 185 active programs so all of them are in kind of critical workforce areas, IT, business, healthcare, that sort of thing. Very interesting, right? Yeah, so the evolution of CCBs in Texas is sort of in two phases. It is three of our community colleges, three of our 50 community colleges that were given legislative authorization to move forward and it still remains the case that our baccalaureate degrees for community colleges are in applied technology and applied sciences essentially and nursing now but back in 2003 there were three community colleges that were allowed to move forward with establishing a limited number of baccalaureate degree programs and these three colleges, Brasov Sports South Texas and Midland College all move forward in doing so. So then fast forward it was about 15 years later that maybe a little less than that that the public policy discussion became very much more compelling about the importance of having not just those three pilot institutions to be able to offer CCBs but allowing a broader number of our community colleges in Texas to do so. In 2015 so our legislature meets every other year, every odd numbered year so when I talk about 2015, 2017 it's because my life is structured in odd numbered years. I've been through so many legislative sessions and about to go through a very monumental one that maybe we'll talk about there in Texas in January of next year. But in 2015 there was a very strong push to move forward to give broader authorization to Texas community colleges to allow for the establishment of a larger number of CCBs didn't quite make it in 2015 but the momentum was really there in 2017 and that's when the authorization did happen. Interestingly I was wearing the hat back in 2015 and 2017 representing our independent college sector. I've worn many different hats in Texas higher education and so I was the president CEO of the Independent College Association in 2015, 2017. There are at least 40 independent colleges not for profit private independent colleges of Baylor, Rice, SMUTC and a lot of other or a lot of other independent colleges and the sector of independent colleges and public universities. There was tension around the strong momentum that materialized in 2015 and eventually was successful in 2017 against the passage of legislation and we'll go into this I think in further questions but there were compromises made around coming to a consensus on the need for community colleges to be able to move forward with CCBs and sort of some sort of gatekeeping around what exactly could occur for those community colleges that do wanna move forward with CCB establishment. So but the public policy rationale in 2003 I think is also true in 2017 and remains true today. It is about yes, greater access but it's also about the fact that our community colleges really are very much in tune with the needs of their local community and their regional community. So it is, as Kari has said, it is the meeting, the demand for a certain for an increase in certain professions like teaching and nursing and that's true today, particularly for the teaching field as it maybe it was for Florida back when they established this but it certainly is acute around the country and certainly in Texas today. Nursing has always been and continues to be a critical need as well. So it is about empowering community colleges to be able to meet workforce demands in their local and regional areas and that remains the rationale today and if you look at community college enrollment in Texas this is true for our public two year universities across the country. We've seen a steady enrollment decline for our public two years across the country. In Texas that was accelerated as it probably was in every other state by the pandemic. So over the last two academic years we've lost almost 11% of our student population at our community colleges in Texas. Our total amount of students right now is about 640,000 students across 50 community college districts but that's down about 85,000 students that we've lost since the pandemic occurred or really hit back in calendar year summer of 2020. So looking back at those last two academic years we've lost about 85,000 students. We are committed to trying to sort of reengage with that lost student population and I think one of the ways to do it is to be able to offer more pathways for a credential whether it's a workforce education credential whether it is a non-credit continuing education credential of value of which our community colleges offer an array on the non-credit side as well. These are industry based certifications that truly have value particularly for adult learners who are looking for greater career mobility but also greater array of program offerings on the academic side of what we do as community colleges. It's the right approach. It is compelling from a public policy perspective and I think it's pretty well settled in Texas that this was the right move. Again, we can talk about what parameters are placed around community colleges to move forward on this but this has been an important step forward in terms of access and identifying critical fields for Texas higher education since it was passed in 2017. The effort from each of you is that you're at very different places in establishing sort of your CCBs. You're sort of in a startup phase, a sustaining improvement phase and a scaling up phase kind of to summarize it in a very neat think tanky way but I'd love to hear what your thinking will happen or sort of how you see this evolving over the next one to five years given that you're each in very different places with your CCB journey for lack of a better term and for that I'd love to start with Carrie since you're obviously the most scaled maybe we can kind of go backwards like that. Sure, so I would say there are a couple of things happening within the state and the word credentials of value is definitely the conversation we've been having. So not this legislative session but the 2021 legislative session we had a huge workforce bill, House Bill 1507 that required a new credentials review committee be formed that have representation from all education, post-secondary education, public, private and it also required a number of industry representatives be a part of it and ultimately the goal is to create a statewide framework of quality for all education credentials, degree and non-degree and create a statewide master credentials list and the evolution and the next step in that is assuming that future funding opportunities would be tied to credentials on the master credential list and then also having discussions if something doesn't meet the framework of quality is it still meeting its initial kind of goal and so Florida is still in the process of developing that framework but the question about community college baccalaureates is there, I think I mentioned earlier this is the way that we do business it's sort of baked into the work and we have a very rigorous process on the front end to ensure demand is met and then on the back end there's an annual review process where every year we're looking at data on retention, completion, job placement, wages and if we start seeing trends we're going to ask institutions to really reflect on is this program necessary now in this context? So I think seeing how the credentials of value work and where the community college baccalaureates kind of fit in is probably what's next on the radar. It's really helpful, right? Yeah, so enrollment in our, there's about 12 of our 50 community colleges in Texas that currently have CCBs in place and then perhaps a few others that have the authorization but haven't moved forward with any CCB program offerings. Enrollment has been steadily increasing in our CCB programs with each passing academic year. Again, it's still relatively new. 2017 is when the authorization was allowed for a larger array of community colleges to be able to offer CCBs. The three pilot programs or pilot institutions from 2003 have a little bit more flexibility around both funding and it used to be more flexibility around the number of CCB programs they could offer now that inflexibility has been sort of opened up. It used to be limited to only three for the 2017 and beyond institutions but that's been expanded in the last legislative session to up to five CCB programs that an institution can offer. And so there are differences in that regard but again, I think that what I see for the future, it's kind of, Kerry just used the phrase baked in. I think it's baked in in Texas. We have seen that there might have been concerns back in the 2017 time period around discussions of whether CCBs should be allowed to ramp up or community colleges should be allowed to ramp up with CCBs about whether that would be a threat, whether it would be competition either for students or faculty or other resources to our universities. And I think that has really settled down to it's no longer looked at as competition but primarily there's not been a huge amount of CCB programs that have been suddenly flooded the Texas higher education market and I think what we've seen since 2017 is a move away from looking at this as a competition between our community colleges in our four years and rather to it being complimentary. So the CCB programs that we see being established in Texas are truly done with a lot of cooperation. It's part of the approval process. If you look at what a community college has to submit to even begin the process, you will see that one of the first things they have to do is to notify area institutions. It's probably true in other states as well and find out is there opposition and if there is opposition to the establishment of a BSN program at a community college, then you have to work that out and see if you can come to an agreement before you can even begin or initiate the approval process through our state agency. So again, without going into much detail about all of the parameters, there are significant barriers that a community college has to overcome to be able to move forward in the approval process. They have to show that there are articulation agreements in place. They have to show that with data that there is a workforce need in that locality or that region and a lot of other things that they have to show. All of that I think has shown that again, these are meeting critical workforce needs that we continue to have in Texas and there is a place for community colleges to help meet that demand without being in competition but instead being a partner with our university colleagues. So you see them continuing to expand maybe despite or maybe because of all of us. I do see a continued expansion. I don't see we're gonna ramp up from 12 to 50 in Texas, right? It's not gonna happen the next five years. And we do have an important legislative session coming up in Texas because of some funding, some very important funding recommendations that have been made to change how we're gonna fund community colleges in Texas. I won't go into detail about that right now but because of that, it's important for us to be able to focus on the funding needs of our institutions on a broader basis and that's gonna take some diplomacy and some partnering with folks in this coming legislative session. So my guess is that we'll continue to do what we're doing with CCBs slowly, a slow expansion, again, where there's a demonstrated workforce need in particular. Well, as I listened to my colleagues, I don't know if I should be concerned or elated about the amount of latitude that we have. I'm frankly envious though of the amount of coordination that happens at the levels of higher education which we lack in Arizona quite frankly. In fact, in Arizona, not many people realize this but Maricopa Community Colleges and Pima Community Colleges became the first community college systems in this country to lose state funding entirely. So there is no funding that's tied. Any of the research that we saw up here that had to do with funding is a non-starter conversation for us. So our primary sources of revenue remain as tuition and our ability to tax property and those aren't easy things to do either. So what does the future hold? Well, we recently learned that seven of our bachelor's degrees that we plan to offer in the fall of 2023 were approved by our Higher Learning Commission. So when you asked if we needed anyone's permission, it's the local governing board that approves or disapproves our ability and it's really our demonstrated need and funding around that that would allow us to garner that support from our governing board. So I think that there's a number of people that are really excited about this and want to see us succeed. There's probably an equal amount that we'd like to say we told you so that they could not do it, that they weren't ready to do it and we firmly believe that we are. We clearly have a body of faculty that's well positioned, well qualified. We have many of our faculty in the Maricopa district have the terminal degree in their area of teaching, which is critically important. Our bachelor's degrees will be in areas to meet workforce demand. Nursing will be one of the ones that we look at next, but the first seven include the high level areas are IT, health care and education and then our first responder community really came out strong in support of the bachelor's degree and said we'd really like to see you offer bachelor's degrees in a space that allow our employees to move up the organization to develop leadership skills and further training. And so these are really generic or general degrees to support folks that are in the field of policing, fire science or emergency medical technicians. So our immediate future is the role these out is successful as possible. And we do have a limitation on a number of degrees that we can offer at any given time. And ironically, the only place those limitations on Maricopa and Pima community college districts, which in the first four years, we can only offer 5% of the number of degrees and certificates that we offer now, which we're perfectly fine with to be quite honest with you because we probably have close to 700 degrees and certificates that we offer at Maricopa. So you take 5% of that and you get roughly 30 degrees. We're not gonna be able to launch 30 degrees and I don't know how long it will be before we have 30 distinct degrees, but we're gonna keep moving forward with offering bachelor's degrees and the demand is what's really gonna drive that. And demand will be either through the workforce and also what our students will sign up for. I mean, we will not be able to afford to offer a bachelor's degree and only offer to two to 10 students that if there's no interest, there's no interest. Yeah, so I mean, there's two sides of demand, right? There's obviously the workforce demand and then there's the students actually signing up for the programs, which we may go into a little more with you, Carrie, later. But one thing that's definitely come up through this conversation is the importance of resources and funding at these schools and how that allows the programs to start up or not and what they can actually do. So we obviously heard about the new funding system that's being proposed in Texas. There's obviously a very interesting non-state funding environment in Arizona and so you've got sort of a district structure and then Florida is like a totally different thing. I was wondering if you could talk, each of you could talk a little bit about how colleges are funding the startup and sustainability of these programs. We taught, we heard a little bit earlier about how this can be very expensive to change your accreditation. It can be very expensive to increase some of your library holding, some of these other things and then you are offering programs that are generally pretty small to a cohorts of small cohorts of students. Can we talk a little bit about the sort of funding structures and how you're doing that? So we'll start with you, Steven, since you're the last one to mention. Yeah, I'll take the least amount of time on this question. It's, you know, internally it's really a reallocation of resources that allows us to spend time researching this, developing the curriculum behind these programs and now the delivering of these programs. In the legislation, they did allow us to charge up to 150% of our in-state tuition rate. Our current in-state tuition rate is $85 a credit hour, so I think that puts us just under $130 a credit hour, which is still one third less than our state public universities charge for per credit hour. So the notion of a 10 to $12,000 bachelor's degree is a very realistic opportunity for our students. And so we think that with the ability, and by the way, we do intend to charge up to that 150%, we think that that will help support the additional cost of delivering these degrees. Yeah, that's really helpful. So are there any more taxing, like, districts? No, again, it would just be a reallocation of existing resources. If our governing board chose to increase tuition, if our governing board chose to increase property tax, that might be the only new source of revenue behind that. I don't see property tax increase in the foreseeable future. Tuition is something that we're considering. So over the last seven years, we've actually decreased tuition by a dollar. Yeah, so in Florida, we have, what's known as the Florida College System Program Fund, and so that's mainly where funds go and institutions receive an allocation and it's up to them to choose how to split the funding. There are other one-time performance incentive programs and then capital-type funding as well. So there's not a state award that institutions can apply for for a baccalaureate degree. Some of it is reallocation of existing resources. So in the process of seeking approval, each institution's required to outline a four-year budget of revenues, which in many cases are tuition and fees. Private philanthropy oftentimes will provide like an equipment piece that is needed to really ramp up the program or they're going to be using funds from other sources, unrestricted funds in that way. And then essentially what we're looking at is to make sure that institutions are able to sustain the baccalaureate program in the future with what resources they have. I think the important thing to note is let's say a baccalaureate degree in nursing is added. Most of our colleges already have the ASN program or an LPN program or both and they have partnerships with hospitals already. They probably have faculty that are credentialed. So they are able to realize savings in the process. It's not like starting a new program from scratch. So most of the time what we'll see is using existing resources or there's like a one-time infusion of dollars from a private partner. And do you see your future sort of credentials of value list having any impact on these programs and their funding? If any, I would expect to see it more on the reward performance side than on the startup side. I think we're moving more and more to performance-based performance incentive programs. And so I think that's probably where the future's going. Yeah, so overall in Texas, the resources of funding for our community colleges would be tuition and fees, the collection of revenue through local property taxation and then state revenue. And the way that breaks down, again without going into a lot of detail, on average the state revenue portion of that sort of three-pronged financial structure is on average about 24, maybe 23% of funding for a community colleges comes from state appropriations, from general revenue. And that varies of course from college to college depending on different factors. In terms of our CCB funding, I know that for the three pilot institutions, there's flexibility to be able to charge tuition slightly above or above for the upper division courses if they want to. But I don't know that our three institutions actually do that. I read the policy brief that you all put out. Great information. I think I shared it with the team back at my association and I think everything you all put forward were like, yes, that is exactly as we understand it. Now, the institutions beyond the three pilot programs are the three pilot colleges from 2003. Any institution since then, and again we have 12 now, so we've gone from three only in 2003 up to 12 colleges in Texas that are offering CCBs. For those other institutions, there is a prohibition that they cannot charge more for tuition fees for anybody enrolled, for any students enrolled in the CCB program versus what they charge for their other academic degree, for their associate degree programs. And in fact, there's an attestation that I saw when I looked at the form that they have to fill out for our state agency, and one of the attestations is that they are not charging more tuition for these CCB programs. And so that's the landscape right now. But again, what we're about to go through, and I think there is a lot of momentum in Texas that this may actually happen, but there has been a 12 member commission that has been meeting for the past year since November of 2021. It's a high profile, very prominent, 12 member commission appointed by legislative leadership including our governor. It includes several community college CEOs, a community college trustee, some elected officials, and then some additional higher education stakeholders. They released their report just in the past six weeks or so with final set of recommendations that again cover a broad array of activities for our community colleges, but the headline recommendation is to move away from our current funding model of contact hours, so based on enrollment and course offerings, to one that would be based almost 100% on outcomes and performance. And so there's a lot that comes with that discussion, but there's much to be worked out, but right now the way things would be envisioned is that the driver of the outcomes-based formula, there'd be four metrics essentially that would drive this new outcomes-based formula, and the first one would be degrees, certificates, and credentials of value. The second would be credentials of value in critical fields. The third would be transfer from a two- to four-year institution, and the fourth would be what we call dual credit, known around the country's dual enrollment. The amount of dual enrollment credit hours that a student would get before they actually enroll in a community college beyond their high school degree. And so those would be the drivers, but again in looking at that top metric of degree certificates and credentials of value, what we would envision is that the formula for degrees would actually be a little bit higher for bachelor degrees conferred by community colleges than for associate degrees. Now, I'm speaking out of turn here and hopefully nobody from the Texas Legislature is watching today, actually I hope they are, because I don't wanna make it sound as if things are a done deal. There is so much to be worked out and this is up to our legislature, let me be clear. It's up to the legislature, and they haven't even convened yet. So there's a lot to be worked out, but right now I think what we would hope that there would be additional value for the different types of degree and credentials that we offer to community colleges. And this commission again has been truly done outstanding work, our commissioner of higher education, Harrison Keller has been a tremendous leader and a tremendous partner for our two-year sector, our community college sector in the state. And I'm not giving him a shout out because he's my former boss, but he is my former boss, but he's been a true partner for us. And so yeah, Harrison's been terrific. And so anyway, I hope that's somewhat helpful. No, that's really helpful. That is like a really good roundup of the more money, less money, like the situation in each state, which is like very different. So now I think I'm gonna go ahead and ask each of you an individual question, sort of more individualized to your state context. Is that good? So I think I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, Carrie. So you have been working at the system for a long time. I mean, not in a one-on-one age or anything, but you've been there for a while. The state of California's, or excuse me, Florida has been doing this for a while. So what are some of the things that you've seen change over time and sort of looking forward, what are your goals for CCBs in the state of Florida? Yeah, I think change over time has been support for community college baccalaureates. When the colleges were initially authorized, that is where a lot of the initial discussion and concern is expressed. And so we operated for probably 12 to 15 years where our baccalaureates just continued to grow. We had a change in legislative leadership and a lot of our colleges rebranded to reflect expanding mission. And the story is one of the legislative tours was driving on an interstate. And they saw Florida State College at Jacksonville and like tiny font and there was concern. Like, well, that makes it look like it's Florida State University. And so that prompted moratorium on community college baccalaureate degrees in the state that lasted for a few years. And so it feels baked in and it feels like we're sort of post that concern. I think our institutions statutorily have to maintain their traditional missions. There isn't a percentage threshold on the number of students or the number of programs. Though around the time of the moratorium, there were discussions on no more than 5% or 10% or 20%. So that has been the change over time is support, not support, back to support. And then are we growing the right way? And so as a person working at a state office, everything that we look at regardless of who's in leadership in the state, you want it to be able to withstand scrutiny in the future. So the programs that we receive to even be reviewed have already gone through local processes and we put each program through more processes because we wanna be able to stand behind creation of the programs. And fundamentally, it's about filling workforce demand and then ensuring that the institution has the infrastructure to support the program over time. In terms of what's on the radar for the future, teacher preparation is something that we're really looking at closely. Many of our colleges offer four-year initial teacher certification degrees and many of our colleges also offer what we call Educator Preparation Institutes which are post-baccalaureate, come back, train for your certification and then get a job. And what we're seeing is many of our secondary education programs have closed in recent years. So if you were to look at the inactive programs on our list, almost all of them are secondary chemistry, secondary biology. And so one college recently created a secondary science education program that we're hoping can kind of serve as an umbrella for that. But we continue to have discussions in the state about teacher preparation and is the four-year baccalaureate degree the right thing and if so, how can we support students in that path? The other thing that we'll continue to look at is the structure of the baccalaureate degree and what I mean by that is a lot of, all of our baccalaureate degrees right now are built on a two plus two model. So every student in order to be admitted has to have the associate degree. What that means from a practical perspective, we have statewide general education requirements is a student coming in with a ASN degree has 24 hours of gen ed that they have to complete once they're admitted to a baccalaureate program. And so depending on the structure of the baccalaureate, if it's built on an AA program, their gen ed is covered so they're taking all program courses. If they're coming in with an AS program, they only have 15 hours of general education, they have to have 24 more hours to get the baccalaureate degree. And we also have state requirements around things like civic literacy, foreign language competence. And so trying to figure out like, are we structuring this correctly? Our nursing, for example, I said all of our programs are BSN, they're all technically bridge programs. So no student is coming to a state college to declare a BSN degree and it's worked in the past and we're starting to get a little bit of pushback from our colleges saying we might actually do a better job by the student if we structured it more like a university does. We haven't gotten there yet, but I know those discussions have been happening. You're not alone in those discussions and I think the teacher prep piece is so interesting. It's something a lot of my colleagues here at New America do work on and it also gets to that, there has to be two sides of the demand. Like you have to have those people that want to be secondary teachers in chemistry and that can be really challenging when you have some very specific programs. It is, and the discussion and we're fortunate to have the ed certification folks in our building and so when I had a discussion one time about I don't know if we can keep this secondary chemistry education program in this county and she looked at me and she said, Carrie, if I can get one graduate from that program, that is a successful program and if you're just looking at it by the numbers, like yes, the scale isn't there. So it's definitely a balance that you have to find. That's fascinating. It really does put a point on some of the real issues with teacher supply in certain areas in this country. So please, everyone be thinking about questions. We're gonna open it up pretty soon here but I'm gonna go to Steven. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the process of launching the programs has been like so far, sort of where you are, what have been the challenges, what's worked well, what would your advice be for others? Well, so at this point, like I said, we just had a HLC approval. Currently we're working on ensuring that these programs are also financially eligible. It's just that the basic mechanics of enrolling students in these programs were so brand new to this. Certainly been an arduous process overall. We're extremely complex, as I mentioned, we're 10 independently accredited institutions, which means that we had to work with higher learning commission to develop a mechanism to come in and to evaluate our programs. So they developed a model for us to expedite this and to make it more efficient than coming and bringing 10 different teams to evaluate seven or eight different of our programs. And so we're appreciative of them really being flexible. And so, yeah, I mean, that's what's been going on. I'd like to come back at some point and say, hey, here's how year one went and these are some of the things that we learned. And if we could go back and change anything, this is what we would change. But I can't give you what we would do differently at this point. I'm happy to report that everything that we lay out on a calendar so far is on schedule. And I'm gonna knock on the wood when I say that because the real test will be when students are sitting in those quote unquote classrooms where the bachelor's degrees come in about nine or 10 months from now, which will be upon us extremely quickly. So that's where I think our true success will be measured at least through this phase. And then I see the next phase is how are students performing while they're in these programs? And then more importantly, how are these students performing when they exit our programs and enter into the workforce? I would love to be able to stand up someday and see data that's similar to what Elizabeth presented for the state of Washington to compare our community college baccalaureate earners compared to those that went to our state universities. And so that's, I wish I could say so much more right now, but that's about it. I would not sell yourself short. HLC approval so quickly is really impressive. And the fact that you were able to work with them to expedite it and have like that structure, I think is something that many colleges may want to talk to you about in more detail. I'm happy to do that. I don't know if you're so short. So Stephen, can you tell us, sorry, I already said Stephen, Ray, sorry, Ray. Can you tell us a little bit more about what particular areas of study and regions are most interested so far in creating the bachelor's degree program? You talked about 12. I think you've talked a little bit about some of the areas of study that you've focused on. And then if you can tell us a little bit more about the context and why you think that might be, like why are certain places interested in certain areas of study and who is interested in actually creating the baccalaureate? Yeah, so the limitation in place right now is that our baccalaureate degrees are in the areas of applied technology, applied sciences, including early childhood education for at least some of our institutions, and then nursing. And so it's a concentration of health sciences, computer and information sciences, some business, and so there's an array across these 12 institutions, and I think that's the future, essentially. But I think added to this list, similar to I think what Kerry is saying about what's happening or what's been happening in Florida is that we are going through a real teacher shortage in Texas right now. And I know that there's probably some momentum to see what greater role the community colleges can play in helping to meet this need for teacher shortage. So my guess is that there's probably gonna be some momentum in that particular area as we move forward. Sorry, would you need legislative approval to do that, or can you do it as a, okay. Yeah, my guess is that, I mean, again, given the limitations that are in statute, now we would need approval to be able to expand. But I do know that we've had a lot of conversations about this and I served on a panel just last week with the commissioner of our K through 12 system, Mike Marath, and my former boss, Harrison Keller, and there was a lot of discussion about the teacher shortage and what are we doing to try to meet that need. My guess is that there's a lot of momentum for that even if it does, even with that legislative approval needing to happen. And then just a general step back, I mean, if you look at the state of Texas, if you look at the last census, we added four million new residents in the state of Texas between 2010 and 2020, fastest growing state in the country. My guess is that in the two years since the 2020 census, we continue to be likely the fastest growing state in the country right now. That is something that we need to be mindful of from a policy, from a higher education policy perspective. I was at the Illumina State Policy Conference in September and I recall Doug Shapiro doing an online presentation about the numbers, the 39 million Americans between the ages of roughly 25 and 64 who are some college, no credential category. That translates to about three to four million Texans for us in that same some college, no credential category. I say all of that because, and then of course you can also look at the fact that particularly since the pandemic, we've had changes in occupational pathways of need. We see labor market data, labor market information that tells us that from a workforce training capacity, there are shifts away from certain industries towards others. And in a state the size of Texas, the petrochemical industry is dominant along the Gulf Coast region of our state. Advanced manufacturing with Tesla and Samsung is dominant in central Texas and it varies from region to region. So all of that, the growth of the state, the large amount of some college, no credential population in Texas, the shifting patterns requires that it's an all hands on approach for higher education. We should not be in a mindset of limiting access to opportunities and programs. We should be in a mindset of absolute growth, growth with caution and with reason, growth in partnership with other sectors of higher education, but we absolutely have a huge demand that needs to be met and in my opinion for Texas and I think this is true, certainly in the states on the stage but across the country, our community colleges are uniquely situated to meet that particular workforce need. That's really, really helpful. So I'm gonna open it up for questions now if we have any in the audience. Hello everyone, Mary Alice McCarthy from New America. Thank you for the excellent panel. I have a question sort of following up on something that Elizabeth Mays had talked about in her research was that so many students are facing sort of an opportunity mirage. They live in areas and they feel like they should be able to get into the economy but they can't find their way. So particularly for Chancellor Gonzalez and Dr. Martinez where you're growing new programs but also for you in Florida, how do you let people, how do people find out about these programs? How do you get over the kind of established mindset of community colleges aren't for bachelor's degree so I wouldn't even think about that and sort of is this something you do particularly in Florida? Have you been doing this for some time? Who do you partner with to sort of make people aware of these programs and the opportunities? Well you know for us we had students be a part of our advocacy for these at our state legislature. In fact, I wanna thank New America publicly for coming and spending some time with our state legislatures and a lunch and learn opportunity. So thank you both for doing that. We really appreciate that. And we've also had our students help through the development of the curriculum and decisions around the types of programs. So that's helping build awareness in terms of marketing. We couldn't market any specific programs until we had HLC accreditation. That's just an outright rule. So we've had this ability now to market these programs for just a week and a half. But we have talked about the fact that bachelor's degrees are coming soon to Maricopa and social media is probably the biggest platform that we're using to do that. I know that we're developing a marketing plan specifically around our bachelor's degrees. I couldn't tell you exactly what that entails, but it will be robust. But I have a feeling that it's gonna rely mostly on the social media aspect. That's where our students are. Does anybody else have any pieces they wanna add? I mean, I think the only other thing I would add, I agree with what Stephen said. I think that there's also a strategic and very deliberate emphasis upon making sure that we are socializing these with our internally with our various constituencies within the community college, particularly with our academic advisors. So in Texas, we've done a lot of work over the past many years, but in particular over the past few years, because Commissioner Keller has an emphasis upon increasing transfer pathways between our two and four year institutions. So we created a new, what's called the Texas Transfer Framework. And we're taking articulated fields of study in various disciplines. And we've got about 16 fields of study in Texas, which are discipline specific courses that a student satisfies those courses and should be able to transfer to a four year institution without having to repeat any of the upper level courses for that particular major. There's a very deliberate effort to be able to have this cooperation between our two and four year institutions around these fields of study that has been an emphasis by the coordinating board. And one of the pieces of that work, and it's been very successful in implementation so far, one of the pieces of that work is to actually bring all of this information to our academic advisors at our community colleges so that they know that they can inform students, hear our pathways that are already lit up. Runway is lit. Here's how you can do it towards being able to transfer and finish a degree at a four year, or increasingly now with some of the CCBs, it makes it easier for a student to have that seamless path towards a baccalaureate degree. And so all of that is critical, I think. Carrie, is there anything you wanna add on that? I would say sort of two things. I think the biggest pipeline of potential students are your current AS and AA students. And so a lot of it is just internal. And students don't know that there's a baccalaureate degree associated with it. But as a state, we have a statewide coordinated library online student services system on the website, supportashines.com. And it advertises all of the programs and all of the offerings across the institutions. It has a transient student admissions application process. So other states may do this as well where a student over the summer is at a university but wants to go back to their hometown and take a few classes at the local community college. There's an automated process for that. We also have a common prerequisite manual. So if you're getting a BSN, you can go to this website and it will tell you these are the common prerequisites across all bachelor's degrees. So we're fortunate to have kind of that statewide coordination and advising services as well. Absolutely. And so we've heard a lot about transfer actually. So that was really good that you brought that up because that was actually one of the questions from online which is what is the relationship? And this person says like what, how is the community college bachelor's degree a better solution than transfer? We like to present it as a compliment to transfer but like how do you all see the relationship between transfer and transfer degrees and the community college baccalaureate? So for us, because our baccalaureates are built two plus two, the student's going to get that lower level credential, the associate degree. In terms of once they get that degree where they go, we do have partnerships and we're fortunate to have a good statewide data system where we can see AA transfers, AS transfers and then transfers with no degree. Florida has recently adopted a statewide reverse transfer policy and then we also have some recent legislation around universities being required to award AA degrees if a student requests it. And so the share of students transferring before they earn a degree is actually increasing. Ultimately, and when we do our metrics, what we're looking at is from the student's perspective is that student persisting or they being successful. So we don't ever want to penalize a college if a student chooses to move on earlier but it does sort of beg the question of how do you keep students in that lower division program, get them what they need in order to transfer and be successful. For us, just transfers built in with common course numbering and statewide common prerequisites so it becomes a lot easier. So they're not in opposition, the transfer and baccalaureate programs that really are complementary in Florida. Yeah, and roughly 45% of our AA grads go to a state university, about 15% go to a state college. So the share of students are still going to the state university. It's really helpful. I don't know if you have- Well, the only thing I would add it for Texas is I think we're very similar to what Kerry just said about Florida. I would describe it as complementary. We too have a common course numbering system. We have instituted a requirement for recommended course sequencing across these degrees from a two year to four year to make it easier for students to understand that pathway. No, we don't see this as competition at all. And again, the CCBs that are established, I think are done very intentionally to meet specific needs for a locality or for a region. And as I've described already, they're done in a manner that I think everybody agrees there's a need for these particular CCBs and I don't see that changing in Texas. And for us, we're probably approaching 30 years in strong articulation agreements for students transferring guaranteed admissions into programs right out of their associate's degree experience. And frankly, I think it's in the interest of our universities to ensure that those continuing with us have an opportunity not only in their bachelor's, but if they're gonna pursue a graduate program, our universities will still be the primary provider of that graduate program. So I think it remains in their interest to continue to support that articulation agreement through the bachelor's degree experience. That's a really good point. We hear a lot, we actually get a lot of questions about graduate programs. And I know in Florida, they have some very close relationships between the CCB programs and graduate programs at the university system. I think that's gonna be our last question today, but you have been an amazing panel and I hope everyone can say congratulations and give them a nice round of applause because this was really, really wonderful. Well, thank you so much everybody. That was an awesome conversation. We got some great questions as well. Really appreciate all three of our panelists making the trip and actually Kevin, Iris and I are the only people who live in the DC area. So I'm also grateful to Elizabeth and Chris for making the trip to DC to be here. And thank you to all of you who came to an in-person event. We are still figuring out hybrid events and are grateful for you joining us in-person for this one and for all of you who joined online, really grateful as well. We hope that hearing about how CCB's programs are usually small but can really be mighty and can serve important purposes has been useful to you. I hope our new publications are useful to you. And I just wanna throw out there one more time. Actually, something that Chris mentioned in his presentation, which is our forthcoming work on rural colleges. So if we do have any folks joining us from rural institutions, either in-person or online, as we develop these communities of learning and practice over the next couple of years, please shoot us a note. My last name is Love. I'm very easy to find. Please send me an email. Would love to chat with you about that possibility and how our team can support your learning and potential program growth in this area. So I won't keep you all any longer on this lovely Monday afternoon where it's unfortunately already dark outside on the East Coast. So I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and we'll have more to come for you in the next year. Really grateful to all of you for coming. Thank you.