 We're going to transition. I don't want to, but we are. Ben Conriff is one of our education directors for Wisconsin Technical College System. He's going to take this high-level 60-forward goal that we talk about and really help us all make sense of it so that after today we continue to know how this really is something that we can attain and I challenge that we can exceed it. Thank you, thank you. What a tough, tough act to follow there. So, good morning everyone. My name is Ben Conriff. I'm an education director at the Wisconsin Technical College System Office. What I'm going to share with you today is an overview of our Wisconsin 60-forward goal and progress to date. So, how close are we to achieving said goal? I have a series of multiple-choice questions that I'm going to throw up on the screen and we have some table discussions that I hope you'll engage in as well. To start off, a little bit, a little bit of history about 60-forward. So, back in 2016, the three Wisconsin higher education post-secondary partners collaborated with the Lumina Foundation to establish a statewide credential attainment rate goal. This goal was created to not only increase credentialing within Wisconsin, but also to continue our commitment to providing employers within Wisconsin skilled labor. Ultimately, this goal was branded as Wisconsin 60-forward. And the goal specifically, as you can see on the screen, is that 60% of the population, aged 25 to 64, will have a post-secondary credential by 2027. Again, the goal is 60% of the population, age 25 to 64, will have a post-secondary credential by 2027. So, let's jump into our first multiple-choice question. This relates to our current credential attainment within Wisconsin. So, what I'm going to have folks do at other sites as well, just raise your hands as I say the actual multiple-choice question. I'll see how it looks here in Madison and report to folks at the other sites. So, our first question, Wisconsin's credential attainment rate is blank. The national credential attainment rate. So, is it less than, show of hands in the room? Alright, equal to, or higher than? Alright, it looks like the majority of folks are saying higher than. Some of you have done your homework. You read that Lumina Stronger Nation report that was emailed out. The answer is higher than. So, what you see on your tables, hopefully that were passed out at other sites as well, is the stronger nation report. The Lumina Foundation annually publishes this report that identifies credential attainment rates across the nation and across individual states, across the nation. So, within Wisconsin, our overall credential attainment rate is roughly 50.5%. This is comprised of certificates and associate degrees are higher. So, associate degrees, bachelor's degrees, graduate degrees, et cetera. Now, when we look at the national rate, the national rate is 47.6%. So, we are leading the national rate. Within Wisconsin, we also wanted to include apprenticeship completions within our calculations. Lumina does not have access to a national data set that includes apprenticeship. So, we worked with the Department of Workforce Development and their Bureau of Apprenticeship Standards to collect that data. What we estimated is that roughly 3.5% of the population currently has an apprenticeship degree. So, if you add that up, our overall credential attainment rate within Wisconsin is roughly 54%. So, we've got six more percentage points that we have to reach in order to get to our 2027 64-word goal. So, that leads into the next question. Based on historical rates of credential attainment in Wisconsin's aging population, Wisconsin is on target to meet our 2027 64-word credential attainment goal. True or false? How many of you say true? Show of hands. All right? I see one lone person here in Madison. False? Everyone else. All right. Well, the correct answer is false. So, we did an analysis in support of our 64-word work. And within this analysis, we held all things constant, looked at historical rates of credential attainment for younger populations, and projected to answer the question that you see on the screen. How many more Wisconsinites must earn a credential to reach our 64-word attainment goal? So, to explore this question, we first started by estimating the population within Wisconsin between the ages of 25 and 64 in the year 2027. We found that number to be roughly 2.8 million individuals. So, in order to reach our goal, 60% of that population has to obtain a credential, right? So, we multiply that 2.8 million by 60%, and the product is 1.7 million individuals. We then started assessing current credential holders within Wisconsin. So, we looked at the populations 25 to 54, age 25 to 54. You might be wondering why. The reason we did that is that 25-year-olds will be 35, 54-year-olds will be 64 in the year 2027. Anyone older than 54 will not be included within the calculation. Again, the population, it's 25 to 64. So, we looked at post-secondary degree holders, which are individuals with an associate degree or higher. We looked at certificate holders and also apprenticeship holders within Wisconsin. We then looked at future credential holders by 2027. So, folks who are currently aged 15 to 24, again, 10 years from then, 10 years from now, those 15-year-olds will be 25, 24- year-olds will be 34, and we applied historical rates of credential attainment for younger populations and estimated that a little less than half a million individuals will likely hold the credential by 2027. So, we added all that up, got roughly 1.6 million individuals within Wisconsin that were projecting, and then we compared what we needed to what we're projecting will have. So, we subtracted 1.7 million from the 1.6, and we have a shortfall of about 90,000 individuals within Wisconsin. So, if we hold all things constant, rely on aging demographics, and look at historical rates of credential attainment for younger populations within Wisconsin, we'll miss our credential attainment goal by roughly 90,000 individuals within the state. So, the question becomes, what are we going to continue to do that we know advances student success and student access in our institutions, and what are we going to do differently? So, what I'm going to have you all do, take a couple minutes at your table. I want you to discuss the question that you see on the screen. What are some of the activities or initiatives currently happening at your college or in your classrooms that you believe will advance progress towards reaching Wisconsin's 64-word goal? So, talk about some of the things going on in your classrooms or at your college that you think will advance us towards that 64-word goal. I'm going to give you a couple of minutes. I'll walk around the room. Once I come back up here, that's the sign that we're going to start again, all right? Thanks. All right, everyone, I'm going to bring us back together. I heard a lot of great conversation around the room. I'm curious, are there any brave souls that want to share some of what they talked about that they believe will advance us towards 60 forward? You can project your voice across the room, and I can repeat it, or I can bring the mic to you. Raise your hand. Do you want me to bring the mic? All right. All right, so at UW-Whitewater, they talked about developing learning communities, having faculty as point people there, developing relationships with folks to help students be successful. Any other comments from the room? Go ahead. Technician and credit for their prior learning. Oh, thank you. With the assumption that we feel important to equity, that students come to us with the knowledge base that's worthy of recognition, and often worthy of college credit, and that if we truly want to engage students in our communities and our classrooms, we need to develop methods to recognize that. And the work that we've done in the past shows that adult learners who do go through a recognition of prior learning project report that they have better internalized validation of their learning. They feel like they discovered that they are, they come in with sort of a confidence of, I'm behind, and after they have this confidence of, I'm ahead. So we think that this could be an important strategy to actually engage specifically the population that we need to to get to that goal. Thank you so much. How about one more? Is there one more person that wants to share? We've got a couple more. Okay, regarding Whitewater, so I am a faculty there and I'm in the finance department. So we have the community of learning, and we started from Middleton Library and then went to UW Whitewater Rock County and also Whitewater Library. So we engage community. We as a, like three of us faculty, we started this program, how to build your credit, how to apply for mortgage for senior people, how to reverse mortgage. So we engage people and we talk and how to be better in financial aspects. And another good thing for the students that we started last year, which is just we are talking about it, the emergency funding. So for example, the students car got hit or probably got broke something, and they can right away get $1,000 or so. I think $1,000 or more for scholarship just to get the fix or baby daycare for the day so the student can get back immediately and is not fall behind. So that's two good things that I just we discussed and wanted to share with you. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing. We have another over here. Thank you so much. So I'm a full time nursing faculty here at Madison College and we identified over the years quite a gap between particularly students of color and students from diverse backgrounds coming into the nursing program and having a fairly high attrition. So together with our Dean Kendricks Hooker and Associate Dean Ernese Watson of the nursing program, we started putting a lens on on this gap. And a couple of initiatives that have come from it. One of them is we this the college here has a scholars of color mentoring program. It's been in place for a while here and in this building for liberal arts students and gen ed students and we started that for specifically for nursing students pre and current nursing students and they're matched with a mentor faculty person or someone in the community. But also what we have found from that is it's actually created a community within for these particular students to feel welcomed and included. And so we've gotten some really interesting information from that that we've taken to our year and a half old equity and inclusion committee for the Associate Dean for the Associate Nursing program. Students have shared with us particular issues like someone's a single parent and they have to drop their child off at school at eight o'clock and they have an 830 class here. How many people work at Madison College and know what the parking looks like or okay, so you can imagine the impossibility of dropping your child off at eight o'clock and getting to the classroom at 830 here. And what the students shared with us is that they were being locked out of the classroom until the break 50 minutes after the class starts. So I heard then I was like, excuse me. And so we took that back to our equity and inclusion committee and we developed an attendance policy that doesn't include that practice. And it's interesting. As many of us know, I just think it's important to say this is a big ship to turn around. Right? It's a big ship to turn around ahead. People, faculty say, well, you know, we're teaching our students about reality. And I my I say, I think they're dealing with a reality that a lot of us will never know. So so is it education for a lot of us, a learning curve for a lot of us. But what this has done, we we have first generation students who weren't aware that this college has a policy of letting students register early as part of our rise trio SCMP programs. A lot of our students in our program were not aware of that. So now we have created an environment where they can register early, they know about this. So they become part of say register early. So then they have an opportunity to get into the classes, clinical rotations, schedules that work for their families. So it's little it's step by step. But I just wanted to share that because it is. It's been, like I say, a tremendous learning opportunity for all of us. And our students are recognizing and seeing that and that is their again, their the positive aspects of what they're feeling is incredibly powerful. Thank you so much for sharing. Sorry, cameraman, as I walk around the room. It's hard for me to stay tethered into one place. I just have a few more comments before I release you all for break. And what I want to share is just to highlight the importance of equity and the urgency of equity within Wisconsin. And I hope that this will help situate the rest of today's activities. So within Wisconsin over the last several decades, we've seen growth and racial diversity as well as the proportion of immigrant families that have moved to Wisconsin. This is something consistent that we're seeing across the state. It's especially pronounced within suburban regions within Wisconsin. So areas outside of Milwaukee, outside of Madison. We've also seen growth in poverty. So according to the Department of Public Instruction, for all public high school students, there's been an 8 percentage point increase in the proportion of students that are eligible for free and reduced lunch. So within 2018, 41 percent of students were eligible for free and reduced lunch. So the question becomes, how have we responded to these changes? How have we ensured that we're providing the sports resources necessary to help all students be successful? Have we evaluated our institutional practices and policies to ensure they're not inadvertently creating barriers to student access and success? Well, the reality within Wisconsin is that we have a significant opportunity in front of us. According to a report by Penn State and their Institute for Research in Higher Education, Wisconsin is ranked 49th in the nation for education equity. How many states are in Wisconsin? And I'm sorry, in the country? Is it 50? Right? We're right at the bottom. And this educational equity is derived from disparities in access and participation in education, as well as disparities in educational outcomes like graduation. Further, according to the Luminous Stronger Nation report that's on your table, there's 20 percentage point differences in credential attainment by race ethnicity that's striking. So what is our path forward? How are we going to dig ourselves out of this educational attainment debt that we have within Wisconsin? Well, that's why I'm so excited to hear from our keynote speakers today to talk to us about building an equity mindset in the classroom. So as you're engaging today, please consider your existing knowledge and practices around equity in the classroom. Your role as an education leader in the importance of data to monitor progress and ensuring that all students are successful. Thank you. Alright everyone, I'm going to release you for a break. Please come back by 10-10 and we'll have Gloria share her keynote speech, which I am so excited about. Thank you all.