 I want to thank you all for being here at the New America Foundation. Welcome you to this event on the next generation university. I'm Jamie Marisotis, I'm President of the Lumina Foundation, and I want to welcome all of you for being here. I want to say a special word of thanks to those of you who are here who have participated in the work that's going to be the focus of the discussion today. And I want to take a moment as the President of the Lumina Foundation to say a special thank you to New America Foundation, not only for the great work that's being undertaken as a part of this project, this effort, but indeed for the broader work that it's doing to help advance new ideas and providing thought leadership around higher education and increasing student attainment nationally. This work I think is very important part of what is clearly becoming a national agenda around system level change for higher education, creating much greater opportunities for larger numbers of students, particularly low income first generation and other underserved populations that are critical to the future economic, social, and cultural well-being of our country. Lumina Foundation has been in the middle of many of these conversations. Many of you know where the nation's largest private foundation focused on higher education and we're particularly interested in the issues around creating greater momentum around system level change that will create greater opportunity for our country economically, socially, and culturally. Talent is really going to be the driver of our nation going forward and the talent that we develop at the post-secondary level in our higher education institutions is going to be critical to that success of our talent development strategies as a nation going forward. As important as the economic outcomes of higher education are, we need to equally focus on the outcomes that have to do with equity and the opportunities that equity presents in terms of addressing the challenges that we face as a nation. The work to serve, better serve those low income first generation minority and other populations that are historically underrepresented is going to be critical to achieving higher education goals, goals like Lumina Foundation's goal to increase the proportion of Americans with high quality degrees certificates and other credentials to 60%. The achievement of those kinds of goals is going to require thoughtful strategic collaboration among many different stakeholders, families and students, policy makers, communities, accreditors, employers, and many more. But perhaps no stakeholder is as important as the institutions of higher education themselves because they are really the delivery agents of the degrees and credentials that certify that talent that's so critical to our future as a country. I think many of us are aware of the enormous challenges that are facing higher education institutions today, challenges that deal with resource limitations, challenges that deal with an uncertain policy environment, and challenges that deal with the vast discrepancies in the preparedness of students. When you couple those challenges with the ever increasing demand for high quality degrees as the recognition of that societal demand for talent, I think it's clear that the pressure on institutions to be more effective, to be more productive, and to achieve better outcomes has never been higher. And yet what we're here to talk about today is that there are some institutions across the country that have actually risen to that challenge. These institutions have met it head on and are delivering high quality degrees to more students while increasing access and inclusiveness and also while decreasing costs. The admirable examples of these institutions in the critical public research university sector is what we're here to talk about today. We have some of these exemplars that we're fortunate enough to be joined by here for this conversation today as part of this next generation of universities initiatives. Arizona State University, Georgia State University, the University at Buffalo, University of California Riverside, University of Central Florida, and the University of Texas at Arlington are featured in this report that you'll hear a little bit more about later on in today's programs. Each of these institutions and others that you'll hear about today has made a commitment to putting the needs of students first. They have a strong interest in both knowledge transmission and knowledge development with faculty producing significant national research while also following a purposeful approach to providing quality education to those large, diverse populations of students. These institutions have largely rejected the Ivory Tower persona. They are student-centered. They are service-driven. And they are pillars in their communities, economic engines embedded in service not only to those communities, but to the regions, to the states, and ultimately to the nation in which they are located. There's much to learn from this next generation set of universities. Our partners at New America Foundation have taken a closer look at the vision, the approaches, and the strategies that these institutions have embraced, and the operating models that they've developed. I want to say thank you to Jeff Solingo, to Kevin Carey, to Hilary Pennington, to Rachel Fishman, and to Iris Palmer for the work that they've done and the report that we're going to be hearing about later today. The deeper dive that they've done I think uncovers key factors that have led to these institutions successfully serving more students better while still excelling in that important task of knowledge development through high quality research. So today I'm looking forward to learning more from these discussions about these very important issues. The future of public higher education, increasing retention and attainment, the vital role of research, and the value of harnessing faculty input and expertise to better serve students all through that lens of what's in the best interest of students. On behalf of Lumina Foundation we're very proud to support this work. It's our hope that the best practices elevated through this report serve as a sort of blueprint for institutions to better serve the needs of their students, of their communities, and ultimately the nation at large. With that, let me turn it over to Ron Brownstein, Editorial Director of the National Journal who will kick us off for our first panel. Ron? Thank you. Thank you all for joining us. We have a terrific panel here to discuss the issues raised in this report which really goes to the center of America's vision of itself as a land of opportunity and whether we still in fact can provide opportunity for people to make the most of their talents. To discuss these challenges and where higher education fits into us, we have, fits into it, we have Mark Becker, the President of Georgia State University, Jane Close Connolly who is the Interim Chancellor of the University of California at Riverside, Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, and John Hitt, President of the University of Central Florida. So the report talks about several traits that kind of bind together your institutions, but at the core of it is a question of size. You know, in many of our minds, the kind of the ideal of the university remains kind of a cozy, leafy quad and small classrooms of students with a professor, maybe with a kind of salt and pepper beard. But all of you have thrived by growing big. And I want maybe each of you to talk for a minute about what has worked for you in scale and size. Let me start with you. Sure, I think start off with, you have to start with the right attitude. And in order for the work that's been reflected in the report to happen, in my mind, you have to start with an attitude that the students you have are expected to graduate. And I want to put that in the context, for those of us in the baby boom generation, most of us have memories of being told, look to your left, look to your right, in four years one of you won't be here. And I see lots of heads nodding because I'm not the only one that had that experience. The reality was for an institution like mine, back in the days when I heard that, it was look to your left, look to your right, and in four years one of you is going to graduate. The mindset needs to be that in whether it's going to be four years, five years, or six years because that's one of the first things that we face is, the majority of our students are working more than 20 hours a week, so it's not going to be necessarily four years. So it's not only the leafy quad, it may not also be going straight through classes in a lockstep, 15 credits a semester to graduation. So once you get your head around that the world is not that ideal that you were perhaps brought up to believe was the ideal, you then start saying, okay, got all these students, they're not going to all look the same, they're not going to have the same experience, but we expect them all to graduate, literally every single one of them. If we do our job right, they will all graduate. Most of them with us, perhaps a few will transfer elsewhere. And then the main thing you have to do, and it's really revolutionary is find out why they're not graduating. So Dr. Tim Renic, who's here in the audience and leads these efforts for Georgia State University, the beginning of the innovations was to find out why are thousands of students not graduating? And the answer was you just ask them and they'll tell you. And nine times out of 10, or maybe not nine, maybe eight, it was more financial in managing the financial complexity of navigating the higher education system. And those sorts of issues you can deal with at scale. You can develop the systems and put the people in place to work at scale, whether it's going to be academic matters or financial matters. So I would say you start with the right mindset, you ask the right questions. What you need to do after that actually becomes pretty obvious. Chancellor Mallow. I think I completely agree. In addition, I think we've had to look, as we've grown 150% since the 1990s, we've had to look at what made us special to begin with. How do we build on that and keep offering now students who are coming from first generation homes, many who did not speak English as they entered their K-12 work. And certainly commit to those students, but then commit to how we have to change to involve them in undergraduate research. Commit to how we have to change to use their experiences to inform our research and our writing. So I think as we've come more and more to scale and we're continuing to grow, it's been an interactive process of learning, who are they, what are they come with, how can that be part of the learning experience? How do we change because of that and how do we stay focused on their graduation rates but also on having opportunities that have traditionally characterized the University of California. You will work as an undergraduate in a lab. You will work as an undergraduate with the English professor and write a paper. That's the kind of precious element that we'll talk about later about more specific strategies, but there's all sorts of strategies, technology, use of other staffing that make that possible. But it does start with saying these are the ones who came. There are students, we're a land grant university, we're committed to educating California, whoever California is, and they may not come in, they all come in in the top 12.5%, but they come from very different high schools, but they will leave as elite students and we're committed to that. President Crop. If you look at the timeframe in American history between 1950 and 2050, it's probable that the population of the United States will triple during that timeframe from 150 million to something just slightly less than 450 million. We stopped building with some exceptions, including Riverside and others. We stopped building colleges and universities before 1950. We stopped building them. There's a few that have eked out, there's some that have moved along. And just at the same time as we realized that the infrastructure that we had in the past is inadequate to the level of educational attainment we need to take the whole population to, we've decided to sort of keep this quaint notion that the Salt and Pepper bearded professor sitting in a classroom on an Ivy Quad in Brunswick, Maine at Bowdoin College where I used to be a trustee, that that's the model that we need to have to be successful. I would say that's one of the models that we need to have and a few people will have access to that, but that's not a scalable model, it's not a replicable model. And so what one needs to think of and conceptualize is for this new America, this unbelievably fast growing, burgeoning, diverse, complex, economically challenged through competition country, how do we emerge a new class of institution, a new kind of enterprise in which size is not the enemy, size is the asset. And so in our particular case, what we've tried to do is to think about how we could construct hundreds of learning communities tied together across a university framework and have a frame where you have the benefits of the face-to-face interaction with faculty members and the notion of discovery and research engagement which then takes the learning person to the highest level of creativity while at the same time gaining some advantage through size, some efficiencies through size. And lots of academics, my old colleagues at Columbia University would jump back in chagrin thinking about efficiency through size, but if we don't do it that way, there's no mechanism to find a way to educate to the level that we need to educate folks efficiently or effectively. We literally have run the numbers back to the envelope. We can't afford $40,000 per year per student as the cost of a university-grade education. The society can't contribute that much. And so it has to be something dramatically less than that and size and efficiency and innovation are ways for us to be able to do that. And then as a result, when we get to 450 million people, we'll have an increased chance of being more competitive then than we are now. President, very few institutions have grown as much in the last 20 years as yours. What are the advantages that has brought you? What are the challenges? Well, we've grown from about 20,000 to about 60,000 students. Since I got there in 92. We're a very different institution, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. If you just think of some simple things for all of us academics in the room, if you've got bigger departments, you can have more and better specialization. There are services that are shared between units that one can create if the scale is large enough so that you better serve your creative faculty members, your students and your staff. There are just many advantages we see. There are economies, as Michael was saying. I think it helps us relate to the place we're in. I think place matters. We want to be of as well as in Central Florida. We want to serve a lot of the functions that the Land Grant University served in terms of providing the expertise, the services that the area of service requires. In the case of the Land Grants, it was an entire state. It was a long time ago, and that model seemed to work pretty well. For, I think, these modern, large-scale universities more often than not, they are not Land Grant universities, and so they're serving all of the state or a region of the state, but they've got the same mentality of providing what's needed. It's kind of ironic. If we think about it, the Land Grant, the great contributions America's made to higher education would be, I think, the Land Grant, the GI Bill, and the Community College. All three have been democratizing in opening up opportunity for new groups of people. The Morrill Act says it's provided education for the industrial classes. That was kind of an interesting choice of words for the 1860s. But think about the arguments that were made against the GI Bill. Can't handle that kind of growth. Quality will suffer. Same kind of arguments around community and state colleges, I think. But we really need to take a careful look, as Michael has said, how are we gonna meet the needs of this century with the models we have? So let's dive in a little further where, President Crow, you talked about the opportunities for efficiency and innovation created by scale. I want each of you maybe to talk a little bit about what, a little more specifically, about what some of those opportunities have been at Georgia State. The report talks a lot about the way you use data on the large-scale population to help guide your interventions. Maybe you could start us off by talking a little bit about that. Certainly, yeah, the big buzz phrase in all the business literature today is big data. Well, big data's coming to universities. We look as we go through the technological revolution, how it's changed industries, travel industry. You don't use travel agents the way you used to if you use them at all. Well, now what's happening in universities, we have mountains and mountains of data. And there's a lot of information about our students in those data and a lot of information about who's not succeeding and why. And so we mine those data and then we have focused intervention. So what you'll see in our plans where we've been able to move the graduation rates up significantly over short periods of time in not one intervention, it's a series of them because using the data, doing some focused interviews with students, doing pilot studies, that's the other element. Once we look at the data, like good researchers, we don't assume we know the answer. We have an idea. We generally do pilot studies. And if the experiment works, then we scale it. If it doesn't work, we put it on the shelf and move to the next one. So we've done this around advising. We've done this around courses that have high failure and withdrawal rates. We've done around how we've managed financial aid and work with students on financial aid. So it's a very rich environment. And again, this is where scale's an advantage. This is scale's a big advantage in an environment where you have a lot of data. Ask Walmart. I'll just echo that. But from looking at another perspective, our ability to talk to our community, reflecting really what you've shared, and say we're taking your students, we're taking them from San Bernardino, some of the, and from the Coachella Valley, which is one of the lowest income areas in the whole United States. And we're connected to you in your economic development. For example, we've changed our Vice Chancellor for Research name to Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, and that we're out there talking to those companies who then employ our students. So it's a matter of scale and it's also a matter of targeting, I think, and being very committed to the region that we're in. I'd also say we've started to think bigger because we have more students. So we might have once thought, well, what percentage would it just be a few percent that would actually be in a learning community or what percent might really have connections with faculty and research? Now we're not satisfied unless it's 60% or 70% because now we realize, as we've gotten bigger, we can't have a little tiny stripe of kids who have real access. So it's fueled, I think, our mechanisms to reward faculty for bringing undergraduates into their labs or into their theater productions or their poetry writing. And it's also opened our, I think our energies toward our K-12 system. So we do a lot, because we have lots of students, we do an enormous amount around service learning, connections with AmeriCorps, for example, other agencies like that, where we have a mass of students who can make a difference in a local community and that's an enormous support for us and for what we feel our next steps have to be where some of the specific innovations or efficiencies that SISE has granted you are made possible. Right, so for us, the reason that SISE is even the topic of the conversation is that the structure in which we inherit, which is both partly cultural and sociological as a university that a class should be this size, a semester should be this length, a class should be 50 minutes, all those things we got used to asking the question, well, why is the semester 15 weeks no one knew the answer? Why do we have summer sessions no one knew the answer other than there used to be farmers that would be going to all the colleges that had to go back to work in their fields and so what we decided as sort of our approach was to make innovation Trump tradition, allow innovation to be the thing that's driving us forward and then once you begin to grasp the concept of what innovation allows you, then size is no longer a given. So size is a given when you take a series of sacred cows and you try to protect them. The semester will be this, the class will be this, the size of the class will be this. What we've done in a sense is tried to focus on those innovations which lead us to be able to measure as Mark has suggested the outcomes of our students and those innovations that allow us to enhance the outcomes of our students, the learning outcomes as measured, the achievement potential as measured, then those become our focus and so what we've done is probably that I think the single most significant one for us has been the elimination of the time constraint. So we're no longer operating under a mode that we think that all things should be guided by some universal semi-religious clock called a semester. That then means then you can have classes of various sizes, you can have classes of various lengths of time, you can have people involved in various and different kinds of ways. Well, when you do that, then the model which is constrained from a size perspective is freed. So we have freed ourselves from that model by focusing on the outcome of our students as opposed to protecting the model and somehow believing that the model is in and of itself the path. So President, let me ask you, one of the other threads that bind together all these institutions is a vision of inclusion. I mean, you have a quote in there in the report where you say we define ourselves not by who we exclude but by who we include and I think that is kind of a common view. And we've added four words to that and how they succeed. And how they succeed. But inevitably that means all of you are dealing with a lot of first generation students who have no previous college experience in their families. The national statistics are pretty daunting on their success rates. Talk about what you have learned about what it takes to get first generation students not only in the door, but through the system and out with a degree. I think you have to understand that their needs and their knowledge base are really different. You know, I was a first generation student myself so I have a little bit of insight into that. You know, I went off to college not really understanding what the college experience would be. I say only partly in jest that, you know, I'm by original training a psychologist that when I went to college, I don't think I could spell psychology. But I ended up as one and I think... Was it necessary to be able to spell it? No, no, I don't think so. In my era, you know, I graduated in 62 and that was things were kind of breaking loose. Maybe you didn't have to spell. Yeah. But, you know, if you think about it, we assume a lot of our students and often we assume that things we mention, they will really understand or incorporate initially. We just have to understand that each group of students, whether it's first generation or members of underrepresented groups, bring their own needs to us and we can't treat them like a monolith. So we've gone to things like a peer to peer counseling system for first generation students and for out of state students for that matter. A lot of individual programs that are designed to guide students into productive paths help them make the adjustment to the university. If you're large enough, you can support those rather well. A very small institution, I think would have a harder time. Now, maybe they could give a little more individual attention in some areas, but designing programs that work and having the data, being able to do organized experiments on what works and what doesn't, it's a little harder if you're down at the smaller scale. Chancellor Connelly of the Port says, half of your student body up to half of your student body of first generation students, how do you deal with that? 60%. 60%, wow. First generation students. That's a pretty incredible number. Yeah, it is. And of course, on the positive side, we were talking about scale before, this has made UC Riverside a destination for first generation students because there's a sense, they'll find a home there, they'll find a level of inclusiveness and a commitment to their success. I think we have done, I think a major issue or a major innovation among the faculty has been the learning community that was mentioned early. A vast network of learning communities that really pulls students together. And this peer-to-peer mentoring because there's nothing like another student who's just a year ahead of you. Is that what it is? In the peer-to-peer, it's one or two years ahead? One or two years ahead. And there's, in every one of our disciplinary areas, there are students who are trained in that way, who get kind of special badges to do that. We've also about to launch a major new effort in a student information system that is a highly interactive student information system. So students can log on, they can follow their own degree progress, they can send notes to an advisor, they can, so trying to build on their skills in following their own paths but also giving them tools to do that. President. So for us, part of the key to success for the first generation, students is breaking down the replication of the nasty social hierarchy of higher education. So when I arrived to ASU, we were on the same path as many other large publics where we had a main campus and branch campuses and people were allocated to those campuses based on some perception of their ability at age 17. That then discouraged the faculty on the branch campuses to think that somehow they were second tier or third tier. It falsely empowered the students and the faculty on the main campus somehow into thinking that somehow they were better. And you see this model replicated everywhere. So we decided to tear that down to basically operate under the assumption that each of our 17 or 18 colleges would build its own intellectual identity, its own pedagogical approach, its own student-centric way of doing things, empowering every kid that went to every school so that, for instance, we have two engineering schools. One is called the College of Technology and Innovation and one is our engineering schools themselves. They have different methodologies for teaching. One does not feel or act superior to the other. So it turns out that for a first generation kid, if you come in thinking that you've been granted access to something that has no status, then you will be discouraged from success. If you are with a faculty that believe that they're in a social hierarchy somewhere right above a whales in the ocean, meaning there's this social hierarchy. So what we have is a higher education system for which social hierarchy and social status is defeating our actual purpose. So we had to weed that out of our own institution, which then has allowed us to be more successful in how we engage these students. How do you try to deal with it? Well, actually, I'm gonna go back to the peer-to-peer piece. We have the learning communities which get them in the communities so they have a support neck for early, but when we look at peer-to-peer, we're actually doing something a little bit different where we're using peer-to-peer in the large enrollment classes where significant percentage of the students get Ds, Fs, or withdrawal. And what we've done is we've trained up a cadre of peers to mentor the students who are struggling. And the professors have gone through a different mindset of how they teach. They give assessments earlier so they identify who's starting to fold behind at the beginning of the semester rather than waiting to the middle in a traditional midterm final model. But what we're finding are the benefits are multi-layered because first off, the first generation student may not be inclined to go see the professor for help. That may not be their mindset of where they come from and that's how they do it. But if a junior or a senior reaches out and says, I understand that you could use some help and I did well in that course and I wanna work with you, that we've, A, found the retention rates or the success rates have gone up dramatically in those classes, but then there's the second layer which is the student doing the mentoring gets multiple benefits. The first of which is we actually pay them. So go back to the fact that the majority of our students are working to go to school. If we can pay them to actually get an academic benefit as opposed to waiting tables, stocking shelves or whatever, that's a big win. On top of that, anybody who's ever taught anything knows that you learn it a lot better when you teach it than when you take it. So what we're doing is we're reinforcing the material for the peers so that their likelihood of success whether it's at graduate school or the job has gone up dramatically as well. They've worked on their communication skills by the fact that they're teaching somebody else. They're learning the material more deeply and they're getting paid. So we're getting multiple layers of successes both when they're starting as well as later in their college career when some of them actually become the mentors instead of the mentees. I'd like to add something to Mark. So one of the things that it's important, so people, so Mark says these kids get the D's and F's and they don't pass these courses and so the simpletons out there in the world then say, oh, well, they're underprepared. I said, you have no idea what you're talking about. So our average freshman dropout has above a 3.5 grade point from high school on an SAT score of 1200. They happen to come from families with no income. They happen to come from families that have unbelievable social disruption or they come from cultural experiences that are antithetical to the actual structure of the university itself. And so it turns out that what people are thinking of as lack of preparation, we don't admit anyone that hasn't performed in high school at a level that should produce a research university graduate. We don't admit anyone that can't, in theory, based on how they've done, get through our institution and be successful yet we have these very serious retention and graduation problems and then we're surrounded by people and it's just amazing to me who say, well, you shouldn't be admitting these kids. They're not qualified to do university level work. I said they completed all the hard classes, they took everything necessary to be successful and they're still not successful. So one of the things that we've done is we've gone back and looked at what we think is at least half the causality, which is our own faculty and how we engage with them and what our expectations are for our faculty. So I mean, you're raising, what you're both raising is the usual, the historic concern about large institutions is that kid coming in in a big lecture hall and freshman year getting a D or an F just feels totally overwhelmed, either culturally or academically or kind of socially and would never dream of going to the professor who's this distant figure. I mean, that is the rap, historically, against institutions that grow large. What are the key strategies to overcoming, I mean, you talked about the peer to peer, maybe others could talk about how you deal with that, that fundamental issue, that concern which I'm sure someone's gonna raise before we get out of here. Well, I would add something we do specifically to parents because unlike other universities where I actually have been, where we've been concerned about the helicopter parent and the parent to involve, in fact, we have many parents who because of their own background and cultural perspective would not get involved. They've kind of sent their children off. So we actually have mounted quite a lot of interaction with parents, regular communications, urging the parent to urge the student to contact the faculty member. So it's a little different aspect and I've been amazed at how effective, sometimes not the first month or the second month, but the parents report back to me that they, in fact, have gotten the message, they've called the student, they've visited, they've, and that actually has been a help. President, how about? You've gotta be proactive. You've gotta reach out to the students. If you have advisors who contact these students early on in their freshman year, call them up, ask them how they're doing, even that makes a difference. If you look at supplemental instruction, as Mark mentioned, Jane mentioned, we find that the students who really take supplemental instruction from peers get about a grade higher than students who don't for whatever reason. So you don't do any one thing. There are a lot of interventions that you take. You give a lot of advice and counsel, a lot of encouragement, it works. I think though the big, the big issue here is why are we seeing such big rates of unsatisfactory progress? Certainly a grade of D or F doesn't prepare a student to go on in that discipline. Maybe a C does, maybe it doesn't, but we know Ds or Fs really don't. Why are there such high rates of poor performance in a lot of these courses? We need to look inward and look inward analytically and understand better why these students, who as Michael says, are very well prepared, at least in terms of their credentials. Why aren't they getting it? Carol Twig has done some great work through her group on redesigning these courses. The results are very clear. We had one instance where we raised the satisfactory grade rate from 46 to 64%. That's meaningful, but 64, are we really happy with that? Who? The concept here, starting off these Fs, Ws, is academic bankruptcy. And everybody knows that once you're in bankruptcy, getting out is hard. And so our goal here is to keep students from going into academic bankruptcy. And there are, peer-to-peer is important. Michael mentioned it explicitly and John just touched on it. There are some faculty mindsets that are wrong. And the data will tell you the truth. You've got a professor who has literally been failing half the class semester, after semester, year after year. You've got to do something about that. That's a failing professor. Exactly, and this is a specific real individual who no longer works at our institution. We have some of those also. Please say a name, I don't want to hire. But yet another piece of this that we just put in place this year, which is going to get better as we develop the better technology, because right now it's human-based, we still have semesters. We haven't completely abolished them. And we still have something called spring break. So going into spring break, our academic advisors sent out to, again, the selected group of classes where things are difficult, the list of students and please identify who in your class is not on track to successfully complete this semester. And those lists, when they came back to the advisors, not all faculty returned them, but many did. The advisors then contacted the students and said, spring break's coming up. That's a week for you to basically do something about the fact that right now you are not on track to pass this course. And we had hundreds of students came in on spring break, met with advisors about what they needed to do to get their act together, because this is not a spoon feeding. The student has a role and responsibility in this educational system. It's not literally high school, college is just like high school, it's very different. There's a lot you have to learn. There's a lot of transformation that happens for the student. And it's whether it's study habits, and it's any number of things. But being proactive, so the big part is whether it's the peer mentoring, whether it's the advisors inviting students in over spring break, it's getting information early on how the students are doing and using that to act on their behalf. They encourage them to opt into the system. Well, so when you have a hand selected class, like the students I used to teach at Columbia, the class is hand selected. There's no issues relative to, in general, there's no issues relative to the interaction between the faculty member and the students in general, because the class has been selected through a series of criteria that make that connection almost natural. When you're running a public university, you're bringing in people who are not hand selected. You're bringing in every individual that meets the admission threshold. Now rather than having, in a sense, a social complexity index of 10, you have a social complexity index of 1,000. And so it's the simplified model that appears to be successful because it's simple. Our model isn't simple, so our approach to it is to find a way to do three things. First, to make the institution student-centric. In the simple models, the institutions are faculty-centric. The institutions exist for the benefit of the faculty and the success of the faculty. The students benefit from that environment admittedly, but it exists for the faculty. In our institution, we must be student-centric. Our objective is to serve the students. Once you make that as a fundamental change, lots of things start to happen. And then second, because of our size and because of our complexity, we have to have tools to assist us. So we've spent millions of dollars and years of energy to build tools that are just now available technologically that allow us to know every interactive utterance of a student, and we built a thing called eAdvisor. It's done a fantastic job of assisting each of our students and assisting faculty members. We built another tool called the 360. So we're able to pull up any student, any kid, and know every single one of their interactions at all levels, social, judicial, extracurricular, academic, every course. And so now we have predictive models and other kinds of things that, with the kind of diversity and complexity that we have, it turns out, and this is hard for people to understand, that the traditional elite successful universities and colleges in the United States are not designed for complexity. They're designed for simplicity. A module. They're designed to operate in a certain box. That box is not scalable. So you have to create a different kind of series of ways to get these things done and that's what we have focused on. Let's talk about another area of technology. All of you are innovating and experimenting with different forms of online education. Talk a little bit about what you have done, what the reaction has been, what are the opportunities and limits? Maybe Professor Hitt's starting with you. You've created a system also to train the faculty and who the report says have been kind of mixed in their initial response to the use of these innovations. Talk about how all this is playing into your strategies. Well, the response of the faculty is mixed, or was mixed, probably still some today, but much less so as people gain experience with distributed or online learning. We set up early on a training program for faculty members who are going to teach online. And we thought that was really important because if you just say, go teach an online course, the early adopters generally do reasonably well, but then it dies because it's only those technologically sophisticated people, many of whom are successful, it can carry it on and there aren't that many of them. So we set up modules where we've got instructional designers, we've got web specialists. You know, we have a really good induction program, if you will, for faculty members who are going to teach online. We've had over a thousand faculty members complete that course. We pay them to do it. Not a whole lot, but a little extra stipend. 10 bucks. A little more than that. I had a couple zeros. But it has really made a difference. We're to the point now where 28% of our credit hours are delivered entirely online as a university and it's growing about 2% a year. A full third of our instruction is done either entirely online or in the hybrid or mixed mode courses. We find more and more faculty willing and eager, even eager to do online instruction and it has helped us manage the resources of the university in some very helpful ways. Just think about being able to aggregate demand so that you're not for purposes of meeting a small number of students' needs to graduate, offering a course to five or 10 people or 15 people. You can aggregate demand or offer it to a size class that's economically feasible, scalable. How are you using it? So the technological innovation that has shocked us that we're literally on fire around right now is this term that we use called adaptive learning, which you could also think of it as individualized learning. So through a range of technology partners working closely with our faculty in unbelievable Herculean efforts to re-conceptualize and devise new ways of learning, we found ways to now take the learning in a room like this room where we know every single interactive learning outcome of every person in the room and our faculty are shocked at now what they know that they didn't know before. So for us, it's been this scaling down in certain courses, particularly the general education courses, through the use of technology, ways in which we get dramatically higher learning outcomes. So for instance, in some of our introductory level math courses, we've gone from a 35% failure rate to a 10% failure rate and lowered our cost by 50% at the same time. But more important than either of those things has been our ability to now know that every student is mastering all of the eight principles that the course is trying to get across. So they actually understand probability, which then will help them to not fail. So we built these intellectual roadmaps where we know that this course is essential to success in this course, in this course, in this course, in this course, and through this adaptive learning process that we put in and the technology platforms that we've put in. What we now have is a tireless aid working with our faculty members to ensure that every student can stay on track to meet their individual objectives. And five years ago, we didn't have this. Now we have it with tens of thousands of students involved and it's unbelievable. Chancellor. So one of the things that maybe the casual observer doesn't recognize that both of you have mentioned is that actually in the best designed online hybrid type courses, there's much more student interaction and it can be monitored and it can be evaluated. And so we've had early examples of, if you have a class of 50, there's usually 10 who talk a lot, right? But on the online version, all 50 can be judged on and prodded to do that. One of the- Talking to each other about the course. Talking to each other and collaborative projects and feedback. You mentioned earlier the benefits of scale. I'll mention something at our system level. We have nine general campuses, 10 altogether. Well, we'll be launching just in the next quarter. I think UC online situation where students from Riverside, well, faculty from Riverside might have some general education courses that UCLA or Santa Barbara or San Diego might take because they're impacted in those areas. And same there. And so we intend to have a suite of 100 general education courses. Really for the point, we won't be selling them to anybody. We'll be making sure our students never miss a gen ed course so that they fall behind and they get the benefit of great stellar faculty, like at all of our institutions for those particular specialties. So we're very excited about that. But these are not put up a videotape and watch them. This is not look at the PowerPoints. These are highly interactive situations that do require a person power to make it work. And so the irony to me as we scale up is that the need to personalize continues to rise. So it's not a simple, well, we have thousands and thousands, literally in our case, more students. And so we can kind of segment them into larger groups. No, in fact, now we realize we have to be much more specific in learning about them. And the opposite of a MOOC. The opposite of a MOOC. I'm not going to disagree with anything. I actually want to hone in on this point for where we're going and where the future is. And since the MOOC word has been mentioned, there's this sort of fallacy out there that we're not going to need very many professors. Everything's going to be prepackaged. What the reality is, what we're really trying to figure out right now, and I'm sure this is happening at all our institutions and many more, is what is the machine human interface, if you will? And it's not just how does the person interface with the course, where is the best use of the faculty member in the education? So in a previous life, I used to teach introductory statistics for a living. The problem is, is that hundreds of faculty, if not thousands of faculty, many thousands of times per year give the same lecture I used to give. That is a waste of a faculty resource. We should be able to, particularly for our large enrollment courses, concentrate the content, if you will, just the straight knowledge down into some very high quality products that we all use. But what happens that's important is the interaction between the humans that takes place, whether it's in discussions, whether it's in projects, whether it's in simulations, whether it's in internships. And the most power that a professor has in the life of any student is the power to tap a student on the shoulder and say, have you thought about this? Because almost every time I say that, the majority of the people in the room remember the professor that suggested that they either change their major, consider going into a different sector, going to grad school and becoming a professor. The power of the professor, the humans are actually central to the future. They're not ancillary, but we have to figure out how to use that very precious resource called the faculty member optimally and not waste their time doing repetitive tasks. So is the trajectory, I mean, there was this discussion in the report in the cell where you're talking about hybrid courses. Is that the trajectory? That will become essentially the default, that there will be some online component to virtually all or do you think so? I hope so. For everything that's large. But you have to be disciplined in how one articulates that because a lot of observers again oversimplifies. So we've tiered our educational experience into three basic categories, the general education for which we think technology can be a powerful tool in assisting. There's the disciplinary or transdisciplinary education for which technology again can be useful, but less so because now you're in this deep interaction with the faculty member and then the third level is that which is related to critical thinking or deep analytical problem solving for which that's a completely amorphous, complex overall setting that you've developed. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to imagine the emergence of the opposite of what some pundits think is that somehow the robots will be teaching people is the development of super faculty. Faculty members who are able to work in all three of those spaces, but in the general education space they will be deeply assisted by learning tools and learning assets that allow them to focus their energy on those things that help to sort of produce the ultimate learning experience for the student. Yes. I want to bring in the audience let me try to kind of ask you two sets of broader questions. One is even with all of this innovation and efficiency, you are essentially swimming against a tide of diminished public support for these public institutions. In most cases, California, maybe one of them Legendary. Most severe. Arizona's worst. Yeah. Come on. And we are seeing in effect a generational shift from the idea that public higher education is a common good that should be supported by kind of the broad public to one in which it is seen more and more in effect as a private good paid for by parents and students themselves. I think the report says we've gone from tuition being a third of your educational cost revenue to now half within a decade. What are the implications of that basic shift from this being something broadly funded by the public to something that is much more centered on the parents and students themselves? One thing I just in that question I think that's absolutely important to get on the table but we're at sort of a step function interlude. So it is true that public investment has been going down as a percentage of what people have been investing. It's not true that the public hasn't been investing massive amounts of money into public higher education they have been. What is the case is that as demand for the good or demand for the service has been going up there is no means under the existing model to sustain that level of investment. So as more and more students have been added the investments are still going up but the amount per student is going down. And so what has to happen here is this is what we're here talking about. You have to think of new models in which public decision makers can be then again excited that as we can improve our efficiency and our effectiveness get more for the investment which we've been letting some people down in that particular category. So I actually think that we're at an interlude moment where there is a need for this reworking of some aspects of higher education. So that new kinds of investments can be made it. For instance, if people would make investments in us relative to massive infusions of technology we think that we can operate on a dramatically lower cost but we have to have infusions of dollars to allow us to be able to do that. So there's maybe even new types of investments that can be made to allow us to move in new directions. And so it's not just that they've been going down in resources it's that the system now is trying to educate so many people. I think another part of it is I think the question itself needs to be narrowed down because what happens when the question that you put to us gets out there people then start looking at all of higher education. Okay and so the reality is I would gather that the tuition at each of these institutions that our students will graduate with debt and the majority of them graduate with debt but for our institution the average debt of graduation is in the 16 to 18 thousand dollar range. That's more than zero. But they're starting salaries and the premium that they will get for having that college education will allow them to retire that debt in a manageable way. Where this conversation gets convoluted is when you start bringing in situations where students are taking on massive amounts of debts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt because particularly if they're jumping around getting a multiplicity of degrees from very high priced institutions and then they have a starting salary of 50,000 and they owe over 100,000. That is a different conversation. That is not the issue we're dealing with. We are dealing with being able to financially help large numbers of students manage what is a difficult situation but through different financial instruments and tools that we have at our availability whether they're publicly supported, philanthropically supported and some amount of debt. This is still a great investment with a tremendous return to the individual. What we have lost is the sense that the public should pay for the majority of it. It's not a sustainable model as Michael's already said. What we have to do is navigate the reality we have which is we still get more money but it's not as much as we need to be able to do everything and we just have to manage the situation so that the students when they graduate have an education that's going to allow them to basically have a quality of life where they can retire whatever debt they took on and make meaningful contributions to society and their families. Can you manage your way past the diminished resources? I think we are managing but I worry about something you've written about actually in articles I think you call the gray and the brown that we have an aging population that in fact has been pulling back from a notion that they should be involved in supporting the education of the next generation. So I recognize that tension. I feel that tension when I go out and I talk to groups. The University of California was essentially free. Free for decades and decades and look at the economy of California. Eighth and now ninth largest economy in the world. That California got its, I mean you can trace the economic development of the state to its higher education universities and we generally say University of California but more than that obviously. But yet now we have an almost any group I speak with they say these kids want this for free. Well they had it for free but somehow that's changed in their minds now. That is not so good now that we had it for free but they shouldn't have it for free. So although we are managing and we're doing I think a fabulous job and our cost per student is actually a bit higher than some of the others. At the same time I don't think we can without other infusions and I don't expect them from the state. I do expect them from business, corporate partnerships, philanthropy, other kinds of businesses we will get into to support it but we can't just efficient ourselves and keep a level of excellence that I think we would be satisfied with. Now I hope I'm wrong about that and we haven't hit that wall yet but I do worry about a kind of societal pullback. President, what's the role of the public support? Well I think we've gone too far and at least on a per student basis we've gotten the contribution below where it needs to be. I worry about the very groups that we're most concerned with serving and their ability to afford higher education in the future. If we keep running the tuition up and don't increase the need-based aid that's available at the federal and the state level I worry that we're going to see an even worse distribution of higher education benefit than we have now if you look at it from the standpoint of parental income. If you've got a well-to-do family what is it, 60, 80% of their sons and daughters will have a college degree, a baccalaureate degree, 80%. It's what, 8% from the bottom quartile? That's unsupportable. If we're going to be successful in a knowledge-based world economy we just can't have that maldistribution of educational benefit within our society. But that's why we have to be successful in graduating all students we take because if we're only graduating a third of them and you're a taxpayer would you invest in a company that sells cars and only one out of three cars actually works for more than a year? That's what I was trying to say is that what happened I think was not just the recession which then led to these reductions it was that the value proposition hasn't been updated and so what we've been working on and we're not there yet in Arizona but we've made a lot of progress is a completely new model. So we have abandoned the old failed model of pay the university for the number of students that they have which they occasionally did. And so over, over, so that didn't work. And so we've said okay if we are supposed to be adding to a high wage jobs and we're supposed to be adding to the economic competitiveness of our region let's measure that and based on our performance you will invest in us based on our performance and we have gotten people to I don't want to oversimplify it but we're moving in that direction and when we move in that direction we think and we've already seen this that investments will start going back up. Well that, not from the state though. From the state. From the state. Yes, well okay. Targeted at least. You've raised the final area I want to just raise real quickly before we go to the audience which is this question where the political conflict seems to be intensifying or coming the storm seems to be coming is on this question of completion especially against the backdrop of debt the notion of large number we've expanded access enormously over the last generation but as you know the completion gap between kids who start from the top of the income ladder and those from the bottom is actually wider now than it was three decades ago. So particularly when one aggregates in the four profits and so one of the things that doesn't occur is there's no disaggregation of the data at the national level so we just did the disaggregation of the data so Arizona shows up on someone in these Huffington Posts your screwed lists because you're on one of these bad lists and so who has the highest default rates? So Arizona was one of the 13 states with the highest default rates so we then went school by school university by university 70% of the debt defaults were from one institution the University of Phoenix 70% in one state was from one institution and so what we have is aggregation of data on a national level which is not reflective of the textures of the differences and so one has to disaggregate to really... I think when you do look at public universities four-year universities on their own I think it's about 60% is the number I've seen for six-year completion rates for students that's even higher that's even higher that's in the fifties and for community colleges it's in the public community colleges it's in the thirties that's high that's the thirties those are the most favorable ones yeah they're different there's a range of how you calculate it so what I mean how serious a challenge is I mean is this the core challenge getting more kids not only in the door but out the door and what are what have you learned about what is the most important you as we started this conversation you mentioned the financial challenges but kind of ranked the different issues that you see in improving completion rates and how far can they be improved well first off there should be no limit other than 100% to being able to complete now actually you know you said 55% or it's in the 50% but even with our student population over half of which have Pell grants so by definition fairly low income if you look at the students who start with us over 50% finish with us then if you go to the national clearing house we're actually getting up to almost three quarters already so it shows you can take economically disadvantaged students and move beyond that 8% but I think the single biggest hurdle but it's not the only one and that's the key is the financial issue and it's being able to manage it you're bringing students particularly first generation students who have not grown up in the main with sophisticated financial management skills and you're putting them into a very complicated world you generally need a PhD to complete a FAFSA form and that's where you go to get your financial aid yeah well you know about 60 our four year graduation rate is about 60% and our six year graduation rate is closer to 70% we're not satisfied with that because that's the lowest in our whole UC system so we're not happy with that I think that the financial stuff is huge among our students but I think it's been it's got to be a shift you know Michael mentioned it before and I would expand faculty used to think if I fail half the class that makes it clear that I have a rigorous class the faculty shift to say these are really elite students they are top SAT they are top in their class their GPAs are strong what is it about the way that I teach that is missing half my class or three quarters of my class so I think it is these academic support we do bridge programs of course try to get kids ready before they actually walk in the door do the K-12 work to try to get them ready even before they walk in the door so to me it's that academic readiness because once they fall behind you mentioned the bankruptcy they start to fall behind then they get hopeless oh it's going to take me five years oh now it's going to take me six years but there's nothing magic about that either I think you know we try to talk to our students about you're doing what you're doing now for what reason and most of them among our students are very aware that they are carrying a banner for their families the first one in their families ever they might even they have older brothers and sisters those kids didn't get to go to college they're the ones the hope is on them so they're very as a rule I'd say they're very motivated to do that well how do we support that how do we not discourage them so I think that academic and our student services are extremely robust in terms of getting them involved in organizations getting them committed to service learning projects keeping them engaged and fulfilling the ideals that they have so an ecosystem of success yes so in our case so we look very carefully at why students drop out and financial reasons are not the dominant factor the dominant factor in my view is the higher education culture which we just heard about relative to the faculty that is we have faculty who are either inadequately prepared or do not want to teach across the spectrum of social complexity that we are facing what they often want is they so one of our dilemmas is that let's say 80% of our faculty were 1500 SAT score people they went to college for 20 years they got full grants to graduate school they went to the greatest schools in the country they are high academic achievers well that's one percentage of PhDs in the American population is less than 1% percentage of PhDs teaching at our schools is a fraction of that the people that are successful with tenure are a fraction of that so you have these elite academics now being asked in these large scale public universities to engage a breadth of learning that is beyond their social skills or their personal experience to comprehend that they are failing so one of the things that we have done is we've just taken the mirror and turned it around on us and we have said we are the problem everybody thinks the students are the problem we are taking students qualified to do university level work in a research university and they are failing whose fault is it we have to blame ourselves re-engineer how we do things become student centering and so we have set our objectives as a diverse student body and so we have come hell or high water we are going to perform as well or outperform those institutions which handpick their classes because that's our mission our mission is to take every qualified student every qualified student that's our mission what hasn't happened is that we have never been structured to actually deal with that and no one has so we are facing this in a sense for the first time in American society all the classes were handpicked now some public universities are taking like Riverside a very different student body than they have just a few miles away in Los Angeles or a few miles away in Irvine within Metro LA there's three big UC campuses and they are very different from each other it turns out you actually have to become a teacher you actually have to figure out how to teach across a broad spectrum of people and for whatever reason most faculty aren't willing to do that so we are able to re-engineer our institution where we are starting to last word on completion then the audience I want to come back around to talk about the advantage of scale as you deal with these issues of completion we can afford because of size in our institutions to put together groups who look at these questions and try to come up with solutions if we were much smaller it would be very difficult to pull resources out of much smaller budgets much smaller faculty and staff groups and really make meaningful progress on this so I think once again I'm going to say that size matters scope is an advantage and if we're really going to solve these problems I think it's the larger universities that are in vibrant metropolitan areas that will lead the way great alright so we have we have a microphone and we do and we have a hand so we're going to have the microphone and the hand come together can you hear me following up on what sorry Susan Lehman Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Ed I used to teach at Columbia University when you were there and so I have a question for all of you one of the things your institutions do is produce faculty future faculty so how have you changed your training of future faculty to embrace your new models and how have you changed your hiring of new faculty to hire the kind of faculty who would respond to your new models you know why not get to one of our biggest not yet solved problems yes that's why we're all hesitating here so I'm like wow she's like asking this question that's actually really important so the answer is on faculty hiring what I can say in our institutional case we are attracting and hiring faculty members committed to our new vision this vision of inclusion versus exclusion and we're working with them and empowering them in different ways to the production of new faculty members I don't think we are even ten percent down that path yet because it turns out that the quest of the pursuit of the Ph.D. in whatever the subject is is so overwhelming and so brutal in and of itself and the survival rates are as limited as they are that then to add another dimension to that I can say in our case we have not figured that out yet but that's a very good question I'd say where I see progress at UC Riverside is that the number of training grants and IGIRTS and other where we have our doctoral students and our undergraduates together now this might be just by osmosis and maybe I'm being overly hopeful but we do have many of our graduate students not just as TAs but in research connections with the very students we've been talking about so at least early and they're all required to TA at least one quarter at least early they're exposed to there's a vast array of different world views and experiences out there and if I'm going to be a teacher I'm going to be facing some of those and I'd say that we have the great advantage of having some fabulous national academy science people who are themselves teachers who have committed in addition to being at the top of their game in plant genomics plant biology they have committed to building these labs for genetic discovery of plants and so we there's faculty for these PhD students to look up to but we need 100 more of them 500 more of them to make the scale that you're reflecting I'm sure I will concur that I don't think we've actually changed how we've prepared faculty for centuries it's an apprentice model it's been an apprentice model it's still an apprentice model but there are some things that have changed and there's also some things that go on at places like ours so for example this attitude about not wanting to teach we actually encounter less of that faculty come to Georgia state because of the students we have faculty are attracted to our university because of what we have you know my first three months on the job spent a lot of time with they were attracted to the institution because of the diversity it is meaningful to them and their careers to be transforming lives in the way they are now it's not all them and it's not that we don't have issues with some individuals but we actually see that as an advantage the other important point and this goes back to my time at Michigan on the faculty where I actually was responsible for evaluating every single faculty member every single year in my school for annual reviews is there's a little secret that people actually believe the opposite of and that is your best researchers tend to be your best faculty and part of it is is your best researchers got to be best not only because they were smart but they knew how to communicate the importance of what they did and they do and the best of them do that with undergraduates they do it with freshmen as well as doing it with PhD students and what we need to do is actually elevate that talk about it and celebrate it much more because there's this myth that great researchers are not good teachers and that's actually not the real experience well couple of things I forget who said it the future is already here it's just unevenly distributed and I think a lot of the training and other issues we raise you can find exemplars on any of our campuses but if you ask what are you doing as a broad generality it's harder to answer so we can find really outstanding researchers who are great at working with their apprentices if you will and that works out pretty darn well if you try to force that model though onto everyone all at once it's going to be very difficult so I think we keep working on what I have often thought of as a quiet revolution that shifted the emphasis from teaching to student learning and I think that's been going on at least since the 80s and it's still in progress but I think that's a very hopeful thing in American higher education. There was another question over there. Carol Lavalle you can hear me? Carol Lavalle with the school professional extended studies at American University which is a brand new school and we are trying to put in place many of the ideas that you are proposing but at the university level which adds some additional challenges following up on the previous question and conversation about faculty a lot of what I'm hearing you say puts a great burden on the individual faculty member whether they are trained properly, whether they fire the right faculty member the reality knows that the institutional infrastructure that supports faculty has not kept pace so if you were at the same time not making changes in the way in which we think about tenure and in the way in which we reward and incentivize the faculty beyond whether they are good researchers or scholar teachers I am very concerned how we can make this fit and I wonder what you are doing at your individual universities to actually change the structural constraints around faculty incentives to be part of the solution, thank you this is the question that is always asked by the professor in the room it always comes down to faculty incentives but at least the answer from my perspective what we are doing is at the front of your question is you have to change the infrastructure in the support systems we are not fundamentally changing the criteria for promotion and tenure if anything we are becoming more stringent because we actually want to put the support systems in place and it is back to my earlier comment on how we use technology so the faculty member spends his or her time where it is of the greatest value and they spend the minimum amount of time if any on things that are repetitive or a task that are more appropriately sent someplace else so we have hired professional undergraduate advisors and really made them into professionals rather than going back to where we started this conversation in this leafy college model where the professor had a small number of students individually mentored them as undergraduates that doesn't work at scale what it does it ends up inconsistent advising it ends up faculty doing things that actually are not the best use of their time we do expect them to be excellent as educators and it is student learning it is not just teaching we also expect them to be excellent in research and we are not going to back away from that at any point in time if anything we should recommit to that but we have to have the infrastructure the programs, the people the technology so they are not spending their time in ways that is basically wasteful of this incredibly valuable resource the tenure track faculty member we heard our faculty ask for help in improving teaching and so we worked with our faculty senate to create a faculty center for teaching and learning which is available to help groups and individual faculty members better their instructional skills secondly there was a great program started in our system University system in Florida more than 15 years ago and it enabled us to give to faculty members who demonstrated high quality teaching for our significant numbers of students an increase to their base salary of $5,000 and those awards are available every year in big numbers and individual faculty members are eligible to win every five years we've got faculty members who've won three or more of these some of them are also our best researchers no surprise and we've also got a similar set of rewards for faculty members similar program just focused on research and the scholarship of teaching and learning so we've got a suite of rewards that are suitable that would tip one of my strong concerns is that our rewards really apply to the behaviors we want to see improved so in our case the last 10 years we've seen our faculty that we have now produce twice as many graduates per year from 9,000 to 18,000 quadruple their research activity from 100 million to 400 million a year without a medical school that's a significant number to do a range of other things all related to their creativity, productivity and so forth and while we have not done enough to recognize their achievement because of the great recession that we've just been through what we have operated on is a model of we have a fantastic faculty of deeply dedicated individuals who are able to achieve these fantastic things and so what we've now realized is that we can achieve far more than we ever imagined by allowing the faculty to organize themselves intellectually rather than organizing themselves like every other university organize themselves the way they'd like to be organized, structure themselves the way they'd like to be structured, empower them to move in these new directions and then support them and so I said earlier in the comment this idea that we have now that we're just beginning to emerge of the super faculty member who's supported by archivists and pedagogical engineers and librarians and other kinds of tools and assets and technologies around them and when we resolve our financial model to a higher extent we will take the salaries of these faculty members up dramatically because of their contributions and their level of contributions as knowledge creators and knowledge synthesizers and knowledge integrators and the enabling mechanism for us to be able to do that is freedom from the standard operating model of all other universities we have time for one more question so let's see if we can squeeze in a quick one here in the front hold on wait for the microphone Hi, Jeff Mervis with Science there's been a fair amount of trash talk about the elite universities but yet to the rest of the world US higher education is the best in the world because Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Michigan, Cal, the publics as well as the privates do you see them as eventually becoming irrelevant if they don't address the issues that you're talking about completion scale, diversity or are they just going to be on a completely separate plane are they able to sustain themselves through philanthropy and other means and so they'll become really even more of a second higher education system you know the graduation rate the six year graduation rate at the University of California Berkeley is in the 95% so these are there's an elite university that is at least meeting that goal I don't see them becoming irrelevant, I don't have any big foresight here but I see that as mentioned earlier there's a whole array of universities that this very complicated country needs and so I see them fulfilling a niche as I see us fulfilling a niche so I don't feel like there's there's a death nail to the elitism but there's certainly a death nail to how much people can pay well for example the kind of research that can be done with the investment for example in astronomy just as an example University of California system that could not be replicated in another place partly because we're in Southern California so that has to be done for us to move forward so I think that's one of the niches and why shouldn't kids from every for example Berkeley which I don't usually brag about since I'm Riverside but Berkeley has more Pell Grant students at Berkeley than all the Ivy Leagues together so it's not that this is elite in some sense of you know the ordinary the industrial kids can't get in but it's elite in having built an infrastructure that allows for the kind of research that actually moves us forward in the next century institutions aren't going to go away they're going to continue to thrive and as you mentioned they're held up as you know American higher education is great but where American higher education differentiates itself is a that the number of outstanding institutions per capita is greater than any other nation in the world but b when you go to those other countries after you visit their elite institutions you fall off a cliff in academic quality and that's what does not happen here in the United States we've got literally hundreds of high quality institutions where our goal is to educate a huge percentage of the US population you know I think the numbers are projected to run at least 60% of the country that have baccalaureate degrees at a minimum for us to remain a competitive thriving nation in a global economy we're nowhere near that so it's not going to be that institutions are going to go away but we need to scale up you know the elites are going to continue to be there as long as they can support themselves financially and we're going to continue to be there and we're going to continue to grow we all have to navigate our financial environments but what's different about the US is this system that we have that there are so many points of access for so many people it's not just the top 2% or 3% of the graduating high school class that gets to go to Peking University or Tsinghua University you know in China they've got many more people they don't have nowhere near the institutions of the quality of the ones you see here they just don't exist in any measurable way there so you use the word trash talk that must mean you're a journalist because you synthesize from what we said somehow that there was a disparaging comment in that there isn't a disparaging comment we need this multiversity of institutional types it turns out that some institutions have decided to narrow their sociological complexity by maintaining a highly successful model from the past if all institutions follow that exact same path the country is not successful now that doesn't mean that one is an elite research university and one isn't it turns out that the University of California at Berkeley was an elite research university in 1950 in 1950 it admitted students with 3.0 grade points who took 16 hard courses in high school so we looked recently at the admission requirements for UC Berkeley from 1868 until now and the dozens and dozens of times that they've been changed each time that they've been changed they've been changed to maintain a certain sociological construct there's nothing wrong with that it's just that then that if that was the case if UC Riverside had the exact same admission requirements which it doesn't they take the upper 4 or 5% you take the upper 12% we take a deeper cross section of the high school class than that what we have is we have become delusionally misinformed about what is excellence we believe that excellence is a function of who is excluded from the institution excellence is a function of what is produced by the institution and some institutions take quote unquote elite students and they produce fantastic products Berkeley is an example of that Michigan is an example of that some institutions these institutions represented here have to find a way to take a broader cross section of students and produce as close to equal or equal a product as possible because someone within this large complex society's got to figure out how to do that so it's not trash talk about those schools that maintain that model we need that model it's not the only model and it's also not the pinnacle it's not the model that we all strive to and that's probably half of the reason that we're screwed up in higher education is that we believe that somehow that's what we all have to aspire to be when it is in the case you're with science you know there's strength in genetic diversity we don't all need to be the same there is strength in genetic diversity just as there is strength in the diversity of our higher education system all right we'll let that be the last word I think we have to get let the audience get on to their next panel if not their next class would you join me in thanking this excellent panel of university presidents and for our next session thank you