 Hi everybody. My name is Hillary Pennington and I'm going to be the moderator of this session. So welcome back in, grab your seats. We're making some adjustments as the day goes along. I hope you'll think of them as improvements, not just adjustments. So we're going to give you a longer lunch break, about an hour of a lunch break, so that means we'll do this session for about an hour. And before we start, having heard such fantastic overviews from Ron Brown and these presidents panel in the morning, let's just start learning a little bit more about who's in the room. So how many of you here work in higher education institutions? Just raise your hands. Okay. How many of you work in the U.S. Department of Education? Raise your hands. And how many of you are here from the Hill? Zero. I think they have hearings today. So that's how many from the media? Okay. And then any other, and how many other trade associations? Oh my goodness. And would that be mostly associations? Yes. Well welcome. And we are going to get to the Q&A, I think a little bit more quickly in this session that we got great questions, I think, from all of you the last time around. But we're going to start out. So this is a panel that is going to dive a little bit deeper into the strategies these institutions are using, particularly around student progress and student success. You heard a lot about the kinds of things that they're doing. To me, one of the most striking things about participating in this research and listening to the first panel this morning is the importance of the vision of the leaders of the institution. There's a coherent vision for what these institutions are about that is driving every choice the institutions are making. So this panel hopefully is going to give us a little bit of a chance to go deeper into those, a chance to go deeper into some of the trade-offs you all have made as you've made the choices that you've done. I know you're going to talk a little bit about failures and what's worked well and what hasn't and what you think some of the lessons are for others. But we're going to start by just letting each of them start off with about a three-minute quick overview. And I, they know already, will cut them off at around the three-minute mark. So we can get more quickly to interactive part of the conversation. But let's start with you Mark. You've got to do this in three minutes. Yeah. Okay, we'll follow up on something I said in the earlier session is there is not one solution to the issue. So you got to start with the commitment that the goal is if you admit a student, you expect that student to graduate. And then literally what we've done is we've chipped away at the barriers. What are the things that students trip over, stumble over, get blocked by? So it is more proactive financial advising, working more closely with students, trying to identify who's going to have financial issues before they hit so that they don't become a problem. It's getting them into freshman learning communities early, getting them engaged so that they become part of the institution, even if they're first generation, so that they have a social support network. Having the peer mentoring system in place if they do get into academic trouble is important. But one of the things I didn't mention this morning, which is another important example of what we're trying to do to improve success, is we didn't talk this morning about actually figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. Students come in and they have majors and one of the things we found is we could have a student who has amassed 120 semester credit hours, which at most institutions in the country will get you a baccalaureate degree. And yet with 120 credit hours, they're nowhere near a baccalaureate degree, because they've been circulating through different parts of the pond, if you will, and they haven't settled in one place. So working with the Educational Advisory Board, we've put in place an electronic advising system where we can now tell no later than the end of your third semester, in many cases after one or two semesters, whether or not you're likely to be successful in the major you've chosen. And it turns out that in most cases it comes down to a single course. And that is that if you don't get at least a B or better in that course, you're probably not going to make it in your major. In nursing, for example, it's your first lab science. You get a C in your first lab science, you're not even going to get into the nursing program, let alone get out of it. If it's physics, my guess would be calc one. You know, if you can't do calculus, you can't do physics. And then there's a lot of things in between. So there's a course for finance, there's a course for all these things. So it's again, looking holistically at the entire ecosystem for supporting the students, trying to remove barriers and obstacles so that they can get on track and continue on track to graduation. So I think that's less than three minutes. Great. He's at a high bar. Well, let me just dive a little deeper, as you said, into one of the strategies I think that we all mentioned was the learning communities. We have now more than two thirds of our students involved in learning, our entering freshmen involved in learning communities, but they haven't all worked. So the ones we did in one college, for example, our College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences much more successful than the ones we did in our College for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. So we've had in this data driven approach that you've mentioned, we've had to go in and look about that. And it's not, it increased, at its most successful, it increased our freshman retention to sophomore year by about 8%. So it's not, you know, not one thing that made the big difference. And different students, there was differential positive effects. So for example, our lowest income, our women and our Hispanic or Latino students benefited more than other students in there. So it gives us a way to target perhaps or to know what to do. We've all mentioned supplemental education. Well, part of supplemental education, the student has to, they can be identified. We say, we have an early warning system, you're in trouble. Faculty can say, you need to go. But we also need strategies to get them to do it. We found that students who took advantage of supplemental education improved by a half to a whole grade. But we had a whole bunch that didn't bother. So we're, we're in the process of figuring out motivational strategies that would say, look, you can do it. And we think that this peer approach and, and something that might be counterintuitive, because we've been talking now about maybe, you know, reducing risk, is that we have expanded by 100% our honors program. So where we used to have just 50 or 60 kids in the first two years. Now we are have moved to 100 students a year. We've been moving up to 200 students a year for all four years. And so what that does is create, these are all able kids, but it creates a magnet for kids to be motivated to do it exceptionally well. And that has turned out to be a great strategy. And we hope we'll be up to 800 kids a year, 800 kids over the four years. Because the retention rate for honors kids is enormously high, 90, 100. It doesn't matter whether you came from a low economic family or a Latino family or whatever, that that has proven to be a really kind of two by four intervention. And I guess the last thing I would mention is that, you know, we've spent some money on creating incentives for faculty, small grants for faculty to include undergraduates in their research teams. Not, you know, some students are volunteers and some get a little bit of payment. But that's another area where if we can get an undergraduate involved with a faculty researcher, that the chances are 90%, 95% that they're going to finish. And actually choose to go to graduate school. We would have three strategic thrusts that we focus on mainly. The first being advisement. Second is learner support. And the third would be engagement. Now the advisement we've talked about, we've gone to the professional advisor. It's a much more efficient system than asking faculty members to take their energies away from instruction and research to do student advisement. There's still going to be a fair amount of faculty involvement and advisement, but you don't ask them to go through the course schedule and do that that sort of work with students. We also focused early on on the first year. We looked with some amazement when I first got to the institution back in 92 at freshman, the sophomore persistence rates that were below 70%, about 68 or 69%. That's an excusable for the quality of students that we had. So we've been able to raise it to about 88 or 89%. And we're still, you know, we're going to get it above 90%, fairly soon, we believe. And we've also focused on trying to get our four and six year completion rates. We're at about 65% now. And there's no reason why we can't get above 70% in a reasonable amount of time with the resources. We're now devoting to it in the learner support area. I like what Jane said about the honors program. We bring in about 500 honors students each fall. They are really top quality kids. They are the leaven for the loaf in many, in many areas. And their, their retention rates are really good. We also have, in addition to supplemental instruction, we've redesigned some freshman courses that are high attrition courses, typical things that are being being done, a math mall course that's got students from sort of dreading math to talking about going to the computer supported work that they're doing and logging more hours than are required. In the engagement area, you know, the undergraduate research is an underappreciated tool. I think we spend about a million dollars a year supporting undergraduate research over and above what faculty members who are principal investigators of their own grants are able to do. That pays, I think, a big dividend in student satisfaction and completion. We haven't documented the completion, but I think it's really important. We've got the biggest partnership with junior achievement in the world, we're told. And that's a way for students to get out into the schools and help community organizations succeed in educating junior high school and high school kids. So we're doing a number of things. One issue I would say that we addressed early on was how can you scale because we were growing even then and, you know, to some extent growing from the low 20s to 30 was a big jump. And what we found was we couldn't really expect a lot in the way of continued increases in funding. So we had to reallocate and that if you're going to if you're going to operate that way, you really have to understand what's likely to work and that calls for some good data and some good some good analysis. I would say now we're moving from descriptive analytics where you just look at how well this and that seems to be working more to predictive analytics, but that's a work in progress. But even the descriptive analytics really let you focus your your attentions on things that are likely to matter. On your point of scale and mentioning undergraduate research is what we try to take what I'll call a broader look at learning beyond the classroom and that that's the engagement piece. You know, if you've got 20, 30, 40, 50,000 students, not all of them are going to do undergraduate research, but it is realistic that every student should have at least one of the following experiences. Undergraduate research, study abroad, a meaningful internship, service learning, an educational experience that's deeply embedded in the community. If you take it broad enough and we actually let the disciplines do this by major because the opportunities are different for the different majors, but every student should have a signature experience as part of their education and getting a college education is not just consuming knowledge that's in books. If it is, we could just go to the library and read the books. It's the experiences as well and trying at scale to have a breadth of experiences so that all the students can have have them in meaningful ways. Great internships are pure gold. I wish we could have some kind of student service learning. We've got over 20,000 students a year in service learning, but I wish it could be a much bigger number than that. So can I have a couple of questions I want to ask you before turning to the audience and thank you. Community colleges and partnerships with community colleges, that is a major part of each of your strategies and I know for ASU as well. Can you talk a little bit more about how you see yourselves as part of a sort of education ecosystem in your regions and what that relationship with community colleges looks like, how it's changed over time, what you hope for it for the future. And John, let's start with you because you've done some of the deepest work there. We've got a great consortium that exists today between four community colleges or state colleges and our university. It's called Direct Connect to UCF and sort of the baseline description of what it does is if you graduate from either Valencia College, Seminole State College, Daytona College or Brevard Community College, which is now under a new name I'm blocking on right now, and you get an Associate of Arts degree, you are guaranteed admission to the University of Central Florida. In turn they work with us as they structure their own academic offerings so that in Florida now I think all 28 community or state colleges can offer baccalaureate degrees. And in some parts of the state there's a lot of acrimony between state universities and state colleges over who will offer what. We don't have that. We have an agreement, a general person's agreement that we will coordinate with one another. And I've insisted to our people a simple thing, something can't be our job not to do. So if we agree that something needs to be done and we can't or won't offer it, we really have no basis for complaining if a state college does. Now that levels the ground a little bit in this area. But it has worked out very well and we've got tens of thousands of students in the pipeline who are coming on to the university. We take more community college transfers than any other state university in Florida and they are successful. It's been a very good partnership for us. We do advising on the campuses, we're pushing more and more of that out there trying to identify the impediments to student success. And roughly how many transfer students a year do you take? We bring in about 6000 in the fall and not quite that many again in the spring. And there's a big group in the summer so it's substantial. Significant. So we have, you know, also have those connections. Although you have a better name, I like UC Direct Connect. I'm going to try to steal that and figure out how to put UCR at the end of it. It's a serious form of flattery. I got something there. And also I'll just add a little innovation that we learned about. I don't know that we knew we were doing it so differently. We have a very streamlined way to make sure that a course taken at a community college in Lua, for example, they haven't gotten their associates but they took this course. Will that count? At some of other universities, this is a major deal. It's got to go through a big committee. But in fact, UCR, there's one faculty member can look at that and make a decision and then it's approved from then on. So it's in the system as an articulated course and that has turned out to be, much to our delight, a big promoter of understanding about what's offered. And I think the communication between the university faculty and the community college faculty is so critical. Because the community college faculty, from my experience, they want to do the best for their students. And they are taking a very undifferentiated group of students. They're working very, very hard to really teach them well. But they have to know what we expect. So I think that has been an enormous, enormous help. They're also doing things that we don't do but we are now building even more robust pipelines. We'll be opening our four-year medical school this fall. And one thing in the new healthcare world will be the roles of physician assistants and nurse practitioners. And so we've committed to actually, and a lot of those beginning preparations started in community colleges. So we've committed to close partnerships with them. Looking at that pipeline. Looking at that pipeline and knowing that, for example, by 2020, I believe, or 2021, physician's assistants will need master's degrees to practice. So we've committed to be part of solving that kind of pipeline to really populate the healthcare system with the kind of professionals that will need to be successful. John, do you want to get a board in that twice? Yeah, we don't. I won't make claims that Florida does all that many things really well. But we've got the common course numbering system. Yes, you do. And the statewide articulation. And so that makes it very easy for community college students to come on to state universities and to know what will count and what won. It's a big advantage. That's actually perfect because my neighbors to the south, I don't know whether we copied them or they copied us, but we also have a common set of undergraduate courses that articulate between the institutions. So they don't even need to complete an associate's degree to enroll at Georgia State. But we can tell them if a student applies, and this is, you know, Michael made this point earlier, there are admissions criteria at Arizona State. Likewise at Georgia State. We get 13,000 applications. We only admit about half of those. But we then follow up with the students not admitted and saying, you know, you are not ready to start at Georgia State today, but you can go to the following place. And if you do the following things, we guarantee you a space down the road. And Georgia Perimeter College is a community college that has multiple campuses surrounding the Atlanta Metro is our biggest feeder of their students who go to four year institutions. We get 80% of them. And then Atlanta Metro College, which is a smaller community college just due south of us, is another feeder for us. But the interesting part is it's actually even more of a two way street. We talked a little bit earlier this morning about online education. Georgia Perimeter, it's got size, it's got scale, it's got multiple campuses. And because of its geographic dispersion has put a lot of money into online versions of the courses that are in the state general education requirements. So the one thing Georgia State University is not going to do is duplicate that. There's no reason for me to staff up and create online versions of what the community college already does. And our students can take those courses at Georgia State count towards a Georgia State degree. We allow for all that. So it's actually a two way street if you've got your system working together around common courses, around common elements of what's required for a degree at the general level and the ability to share resources such as the development of online or other materials that require significant investments. It can work very well and it has for us. So let me ask you two other quick questions before we turn to questions from the audience. The idea of replication, you know, you hear over and over again that higher education is a very autonomous sector. Faculty play an enormous role in what institutions decide to do. Leaders like you don't necessarily come to their institutions deciding to do the kinds of things that you've put in place with the visions that you have. If you were to look at the level of urgency of the country's need recognizing that we need diverse kinds of institutions but we are nowhere near on the path we need to be to educate all of our citizens to the degree that we need to, what would be your, what do you think would be the most powerful and most effective ways to get more institutions to do more of what you do? And I guess the sub part of that, I'm struck by how common how much each of you is trying is. How did that come to be? You know, are there ways you talk to each other or are there things you read? What are the mechanisms? It's just in the air. Once you become student-centric, talk to us about sort of the idea of how this could be scaled, these strategies could be scaled not just within your institutions but across higher education as appropriate. There's one limitation that I'll throw out. We can do many of the things we do readily because we are in vibrant metropolitan areas. We've got population basis, there is demand. And so when there's enough demand pushing you, it's easier to get state agencies, trustees, your own faculty, the community to realize that you need to be in a dynamic growth phase. We've always said, you know, we've grown from 20,000 to 60,000 but it's not our goal to grow. Our goal is to meet the needs of the region we serve. And if that means growing to 60,000 or 70,000, if we can manage it, we will. We'll quit growing when the need is met or we just can't do anymore to meet it. So having that sustained demand lets the working to scale happen easily. And then I think if you've got pragmatic student-oriented administrations led by top administrations who share that commitment or engender it, you're going to come to a lot of the same conclusions. So it would seem. Yeah, I think, you know, for me, the message of the Landgrip University and just using that as a philosophy rather than an actual badge. When I taught at University of Nebraska, Lincoln, for example, I became absolutely convinced that this was the way a university should be. It should care deeply about its citizens and the whole development of its citizens. It's civic development, it's social development, economic development. So I think I would say that's motivated me. And then the literature that really is at the basis for assessed learning, assessed outcomes rather than inputs. Once you do that, then all this other stuff starts to fall away as being important. You know, what's the rank, what's do they call you? It's really, are we producing, are we creating environments that allow students to develop and really leave us with tremendous new skills and critical analysis and obviously new information but new understandings of the world. So I think to me those two things, and then, you know, certainly reading about what others have done, very inspiring, but no, at least for me, we don't get together and talk very often, but maybe these guys do. I'm glad I'm here today. Mark? For me it's actually, I'm gonna say it's a mix of the personal and the political. And this is not a linear path. When I was 18 years old, I didn't sit there and say I'm gonna do what I'm doing today. But when I was 18 years old, I was a student in a community college. And then I transferred to a public institution, Towson University, then Towson State on the edge of Baltimore. And then went to Penn State and got my Ph.D. And it just so happened I got excited about research. And so I spent the first part of my professional career in the main as a professor at the University of Michigan, full professor at the University of Michigan. I had grants, I had publications. I got all the good stuff that happens if you're a successful professor at an elite institution like Michigan. And then eventually decided to go on and become a dean, provost and president. But along that way, you know, I wasn't really focused on these issues even though this was the world I came from. And then about five, six years ago, the opportunity to lead Georgia State came to me. And in a sense, the light bulb went off of these are kids. They may their skin may look different than mine. They may come from different places, but they have the exact same sort of background and opportunities and challenges I had and decided to pick up the mantle at the institution and basically say, if I was able to go from community college through public institution to be full professor at the University of Michigan, every one of these students should have the same opportunity. And it's only a question of why aren't they succeeding at higher rates than they are and digging into that. The other part, the political part, is then the period from which I've been dean, the provost and president has primarily been in recession. Had a conversation with David Ward, former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who's just stepping down from his second term. And I asked him how it went the second time. And he said it's a lot harder than it used to be because you have to cut budgets. And I said, well, David, that's all I've ever gotten to do. I became a dean in 2001 and then 9-11 hit and then they cut our budgets. And I've seen many fewer budget increases than budget cuts. And so I've grown up in an environment where I need to justify why the public should invest in my institution. And it's back to what I said earlier this morning is, I don't think I have a very strong case if the public's investing in my institution and my students aren't graduating. If they're giving us money to fail out students, that is not a wise use of anybody's money. It's not a wise use of the tuition dollar the student pays. It's not a wise use of the taxpayer's dollar. So I've basically considered an obligation both for political reasons but for moral and ethical reasons that we commit ourselves to the success of our students. I have to say for me, that is one of the most striking and surprising things is to hear how uniformly you each speak to that issue. I think you're unusual among college presidents. Having heard many college presidents speak about the importance of higher education, the need for continued resources without really connecting it to what the institutions produce. I'm going to save my last question for the end of the session. I'm going to turn to the audience because I know we have so many people with depth of knowledge and also probably good and harder questions that I could ask you. So let's open it up and start with you. Are you trying to fail yourself? Yeah. Just keep you around here, Steve. Yes, please identify yourself. And I don't know if the microphone is still in here. It's traversing the hall. We went so much faster towards our goal. There aren't ready. So hang on just for sex size. I was going to add your first generation. Let me just get to the bottom line. So many of our faculty at UC Riverside are themselves first generation scholars. It's really made a difference. Thank you. All the way up to the front of the room for the first question. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Name is Jamal of Dalim reporter with diverse issues in higher education. My question concerns undergraduate research. This is something that is associated with higher rates of persistence. But it's an uncommon thing and my question is what message do you send the students in terms of getting involved with undergraduate research? Is this something that who delivers the message and how is it delivered? And I think more importantly when it comes to students who are first generation low income, et cetera. Are there opportunities to do research that they feel is relevant to the realities from which they come? Thank you. Well, I can say that our current look is that about 67 percent of our students take part in some kind of research associated with faculty oversight. So some of it is in the lab, a real genetics lab. Some of it is with faculty in creative writing and theater and art. Some of it is supervised kind of work that's outreach and math or other community development with our K-12 system. I think right from the beginning in the orientation we tell our students, approach your faculty member, go to their office hours. This is really important and that is repeated over and over to the students because some of them don't have the natural inclination to go do that. So we're constantly encouraging them and we're rewarding our faculty for engaging in these activities. And so in that kind of meeting in the middle, going from both sides, we find that faculty and students do find each other. And it is a tremendous advantage for persistence rates and for professional careers and graduate school careers. It's got to be a multi-pronged approach. We talk about it on our website, we celebrate it. I don't actually know whether we do this or not, but I'll go back and check, make sure we put it on our Facebook page and our Twitter feed because a lot of our students track the opportunities through Twitter and Facebook as opposed to the website or email. Actually, this generation doesn't believe in email by and large. But the most powerful thing that can happen is what I referred to earlier and I'll use you again as the faculty member tapping the student on the shoulder saying you should try this. You know, that's one of the opportunities that we have not yet capitalized on to the extent that we should is as diverse as our student bodies are, our faculties are not that diverse. And there is no set of institutions better positioned than the ones here today to fill the pipelines with a diverse set of individuals going to graduate school. We need to become more intentional about tapping students on the shoulder from all backgrounds and encouraging them to be the faculty of the future. We encourage students whenever I do an orientation session, which I don't I don't do more than about maybe a fourth of them because my travel. But I always mention research as a way of boosting post graduate education opportunities among other things. And we've now gotten to the point where we have our annual student research poster day where we're looking for bigger spaces to put it. It's overflowed the large ballroom and our student union will probably have to go to the arena, the basketball arena. And I think to part of your question having participated in the site business to these institutions because you are trying to solve your region's problems very often the research that the faculty are doing are relevant to the communities from which the students come. So there is I think that kind of there is both theoretical research and there is research. But and there's different ways as you mentioned art is art as a medium. You know, when we have our undergraduate research conference, we've got plenty of students displaying their art and it's, you know, telling their story from their perspective. Well, you've got nursing. You've got all sorts of applied disciplines. Social work, psychology, public health. There are lots of opportunities for students to do work. It would be relevant to their backgrounds. Other questions. John Nelson with Wall Street Without Walls. Wondering how the universities might be able to partner with your surrounding communities by use of assets that you have that may not normally be utilized. For example, you have endowments that could that have investments. And those investments could be used to guarantee investments and loans by the private sector and by other partners. So you could work with community development organizations, the cities, et cetera. A place like Yale has an endowment of about 25 billion dollars and Harvard about 40. How are they using their endowment to help with community development and connections with the community in a way that would foster a true next generation university? Well, we don't approach the 17 or 45 billion dollar mark. But in fact, the state does. But we have some assets. We have some debt capacity. But across the use and now currently at UC Riverside, we are in fact exploring what we're calling public-private partnerships for example, capital improvements as one area where in fact, it would be good for our surrounding community. They can make money. We can get things done that we can't get done based on the situation that the state's not going to give us any more money to build buildings. So we are very specifically looking for that. We also, for example, offer some consultation from our School of Business to startup companies and have had some pretty dramatic big successes. They in turn have supported scholarships for our students. And our new vision for a research building is to have the top couple of floors filled with startups or entrepreneurs who are looking for the next big thing and have our engineers and material science people on the first three floors and that there would be easy communication among and between the two. So it's a great question and I think it's definitely the direction that we see that we must go. I would say, I think if again, if you get all four of us that you've heard from today and others you'll hear from, we'll all talk about incubators. We'll all talk about startups. We'll all talk about bridging the business community. In Atlanta actually, the Atlanta Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce has formed a business higher education council to find it more seamless ways for universities and businesses to work together. So all those good things are happening. However, I'll draw a line on the endowment issue. First off, the endowment belongs to a foundation that is a separate entity that is a support of the university. We do not control it. Secondarily, the endowment has a fiduciary responsibility which is to provide a return and to do so responsibly. They do not exist to support anything other than the university. And so I think it's actually a slippery slope to try to direct the endowment to do things that are not in the endowment's direct interest and consistent with the fiduciary responsibilities. What you're talking about is basically alternative investments and they can invest in alternative investments. Right, right. They can do alternative investments and we do alternative investments. But their primary responsibility is to support the institution by stewarding the resources available to the institution. I wish we had the problems that Harvard and Neil do with their endowments. We would be a rounding error. Yeah, it's a difficult thing. I think the more hopeful way of helping the community would be through more private public-private partnerships and frankly, public-public partnerships. We've got some instances as I know Michael does at Arizona State where we've worked with local governments to create facilities that enable us to help local businesses thrive and do a better job of bringing in people from underrepresented communities through separate programs that we operate in those facilities. We've got a big dynamic media center that the city of Orlando gave us the facilities for. And part of that is meeting the needs of electronic arts for game developers. But there's another component that has brought in K-8 students from a local minority dominated enrollment elementary school and middle school and that's doing a heck of a job in preparing these kids better for the digital environment that they're in and will be in. Other questions? Yes. Thanks for a great discussion so far Rob Muller. I teach at the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown and also at the Business School at Maryland and I have three college age kids which makes me totally conflicted on all these issues. So a couple of quick things. One is the discussion about kind of high expectations all kids, all students really harkens for me back to what's been going on in K-12 for, you know, 10 or so years about if you're going to set your expectations high then it's about student supports. Second thought is a lot of what you've been talking about is really systemic change and culture change and I'm wondering about your thoughts on, you know, not kind of innovative programs here and there but how do you systemically, you know, change an entire culture? And then my main question is about the Carnegie Unit, you know, which hasn't come up at all. There's an effort underway at the Carnegie Foundation to kind of look at the Carnegie Unit and how it's really an impediment to doing a lot about what you're talking about. You know, we measure what we do in terms of seat time and is that a two Carnegie Unit thing or a four Carnegie Unit thing? And I'm wondering as a barrier how can we achieve what you've been talking about as long as we still define ourselves in, you know, credits to degree and not proficiency. So you had three questions there. He had two switch ones. Which one do you want? Well, I just wanted to make a comment on the K-12 comment that you made. Certainly there's been rhetoric about setting higher expectations but actually what's happened is a focus on the floor of achievement that hasn't really helped us get a more ready K-12 population for university work. It's my own view and my own read of the research although there may be arguments in the other direction. I think what we have found in research at the K-12 level, the high school level and certainly at our university is that setting high expectations with supports students generally rise to that and specifically when, you know, there's a tracking system that happens in California right around middle school and kids get tracked into a kind of math that will never get them the units they need to qualify to get into a CSU or a UC. When we have moved those students into the right math 80, 90% of them have succeeded with good teaching obviously and it's not easy because when you're teaching kids with lots of diversity it's not easy to do it. So I think high expectations certainly are, you know, an absolute key but as you say, with support but I would question whether or not we've actually set high expectations for our K-12. We recently reviewed research that showed in California at least only the children who scored in the highly proficient band of the state test were college ready but yet the schools were being judged on proficient and above which was the much larger. So in fact, we were giving them a test that was going for most of them nowhere by state policy. So I'll jump to the systemic change part of your question which I think it's exactly what this report is about is systemic change, a different set of attitudes a different way of doing business and being able to do things that have never been done before by anybody in the world being able to educate a broad spectrum of society in large numbers and at high rates. Now the trick is getting to systemic change. You do not get systemic change by walking in and saying everything here is wrong. We're going to reorganize the university. We're going to do this, that and the other thing and everything changes next semester. That's not how it works. A very wise man who said it before I was even at a point because I heard it through generations of faculty lore once said you do not achieve change in the academy by attacking the disciplines head on. You get at the interstices. You get at the spaces in between. You make your change there. You prove that things work and then they will seep in and change the system. So it's much more of a diffusion model. But in order to get that to get that catalyzed to get it started to grow it and diffuse it you need leadership that is consistent day in and day out with the message what the goals are. How we get there you know if I'm going to California I've got a variety of highways that will get me to California. I've got a lot of really bright people called faculty and staff that can figure out the optimal way to get to California. One thing that I would volunteer on this is that if you really want to see systemic change work you've got to have consistent continuity of leadership and you really have to have people at the presidential and provost level who are willing to take a position on where you need to get and then be willing to talk about that and talk about that with faculty colleagues and talk about it some more. A friend of mine told me when I was putting in five goals for our university shortly after I got there I commented geez I'm tired of hearing myself talk about it. You know I'm doing my best. He said John when you are sick of hearing yourself talk about it you are just getting started. And that's true. You've got to be willing to make a personal commitment professional commitment to the kind of change you want to see and then you've got to ask yourself are the rewards and punishments in the system and focus on the rewards are they ones that support the attainment of your objectives? It's surprising how often they really don't. We talk one game and we reward another. So if you know if you're willing to make the commitment if you're willing if you can attract around you a group of leaders on the faculty and in the administration who buy into it and you'll stay with it and be consistent in how you and how you reward those who are working with you. It's surprising how far you really can go. Make your comments very specific and very real in our case if for no other reason that our accrediting body requires it we have a strategic plan. It's one of our accreditation requirements. When we started our current strategic plan did a public presentation said this going to be a very serious process. We want the whole campus involved because if we're expecting new results things are going to change on the campus. Okay. So we got very engaged when the faculty committee that was working on that plan came up and came up with their language they had five goals five's a good number. One of the goals was improved graduation and retention rates and it was their third goal. Well we put the five goals out to 24 external stakeholders elected officials business and community leaders significant alums people that have had a high profile in the community and all 24 people and maybe in 27 said the same thing. This all sounds very nice. I have no idea what it means but it's probably good for a university to do. And so working with the committee basically shared that information of course they were forlorn. They're sitting there going you know what do we do with this? I said what we need to do is rewrite the five goals in a language that they all understand. And we took that improved retention and graduation rates and rewrote it as we will become a national model to demonstrate that you can graduate students from all backgrounds at high rates and we made that number one and I talk about it and it's number one on our webpage it's number one in our publications and we just drive that message home. It's not that we want to improve the rates it's that we want to actually show that you can do something that has not been done in the world by hardly anybody and it is possible and we are doing it but it takes that commitment and everybody in our campus knows that there are no resources for anything other than those five goals. The biggest challenge at a university we've got so many people want to go in so many directions people that want to tell me how to invest the endowment people that want to tell me what I need to do for K through 12 what I need to do for the business community what I need to do for this discipline or the other discipline we stay focused on those five goals and our resources drive them because if you don't have focus you're not going to get anywhere. Well that's what we've done for 21 years we've had the same five goals and the first is to offer the best undergraduate education available in Florida. Are we there? Probably not but we're working on it and we're closer than we were 21 years ago. Especially if you have metrics that would illustrate to you that this is the best. Well what I tried to do was establish in effect directions of travel. So I didn't say we want to have this number on some some scale. We want to go in this direction. The America's leading partnership university. So I think I would be very interested Jane to hear you comment because you are not a new leader and you are not an established leader you know because it's oftentimes you hear well as soon as the leader leaves things fall apart. So you're an interim. What did you experience as you stepped in and how has that how has that role worked? Do you see something driven down in the institution that's hard to take away? Well I think there's a couple of thoughts. One when I was appointed by our president President Mark Udoff he specifically said I'm putting you there to enact the plan that had been set up by the previous Chancellor Timothy White. It was a strategic plan with a very you know clear focus with very clear goals and so that was a good message. Now I would have I have to I would pat myself on the back to say I think I knew that because I've read the leadership literature and there's a funny thing in higher ed you know most faculty think department chair dean provost boy you're a failed person the old academic you weren't good enough to be a really good full professor you know so in fact there's not much honor associated with being leader but when you look at the really successful universities they have had consistent leadership over time and in fact a book in the business world I think Good to Great Jim Collins book he points that out it's not the flashiest all the time but people who have a consistent focus so I have so I got very clear marching orders from our president you know don't screw this up they're on a good path so and in fact I they our university is on a really good path and I think saying it over and over the tradition is for the chancellor to send a letter out every week to the larger community about seventy thousand people including students and parents and faculty get it and I really take that seriously that there's some part of the strategic plan I re-mention every week because I think it has to it's you know they say in psychology say it nine times before people even notice so you know we all get tired of hearing ourselves say the same thing again and again again but it's important that we do it but then people are surprised I didn't know you thought that I get that every week I didn't know we were doing that yep okay well and I think I think that is one of the powerful things that I take away from this conversation you know it's easy when you sit in a foundation as I used to or you sit in Washington and you think you could pass a law you could create a grant program and you know there's one silver bullet of a practice that could somehow magically scale and change everything or a set of rules I think it's obviously much much more complex so what I what I appreciate also about all of you is that while you are sophisticated about systems change and understand it for the long haul you also have enormous urgency and so you have been able to calibrate moving institutions actually relatively rapidly one would say at warp speed when you think about change in higher education so to sort of or we have one more question let's do the two more questions I may not ask my last question let's let's go to set it up yeah her first hi my name is Natalie Johnson and I'm with the new faculty majority foundation board and we are a coalition for adjunct contingent non-tenure tract faculty and I think that with a lot of the high-impact practices that you've espoused as being essential for students of color underrepresented students to succeed you need to have faculty there to enact it and with 70% of faculty now being off of the tenure track and if you look at 10 if you look at the 10% of faculty of color underrepresented groups who are on 10 who you know who are on tenure track another 76% of those people are not on tenure track how are you looking at the composition of your faculty to move from non-tenure track back to tenure track so that there are people there who can support the students who need the support good question thank you I'll start with we have many types of faculty we have we have tenure track faculty we also have full-time faculty who are not tenure track or they're primarily for instruction they're actually some of our most innovative faculty particularly with using technology because they're doing exactly what they want to do we also have adjuncts who teach part-time and maybe only for one semester or a year we have professionals in the community to come in and come out and I think the reality is to be able to manage all the things that we're doing we have to have a variety of different types of faculty and that there there is not going to be again this is sort of cutting away at the the myth of the university where every single faculty member is a tenure tenure track faculty member teaching a small number of students that's that's not scalable and sustainable and I think reward systems have to follow that you know even among faculty we have options for their rewards to be shifted over to a teaching for example at particular times in their in their career we have an option that I really love in the university California where we have lecturers who actually can gain tenure and they can move from lecturers to you know senior lecturers distinguished lecturers they are part of the academic senate and I think this really raises the role of teaching people worry about that and probably inordinately worry about teaching because I would agree that most of our best researchers are also our best teachers and but I love this particular employment series because we actually offer security of employment over time for people who meet very very high rigorous standards but in teaching and evaluating their teaching and changing their teaching to meet the needs of students so John before you answer I think she was asking a slightly different question which is given the large dependence on adjunct faculty in many institutions what are the strategies to help empower them in this vision and also make sure that that that their roles and you know combat their place in the university is thought through yeah I want I want to hire more of them as into this role of of this lectures with with tenure because I want them in the academic senate if they're of that quality to be really promoting the the creativity and innovation of all the faculty on the teaching side and that they're they're cutting edge and their understanding of research from from that interaction yeah from time to time we ask our deans to go through and and look at the number of adjuncts who are teaching multiple sections and sometimes you you find things that just astound you you may have an adjunct who's teaching two courses in three different departments you know if you don't have a good human resources system to warn you about that you'll see it probably not anything you ought to be super proud of but you ought to be looking for a way to take that person to a full-time appointment if it's a lecture instructor or tenure line faculty position first off just from a humane standpoint they'll get benefits that not they're not going to get is adjuncts I think that offers some opportunities if you move people into these roles we've got a a promotion path non-tenure track faculty members for the first time and just added in the last year or so so we're trying to make a better trying to give better employment status to the non-tenure track faculty members as as you are Jane I think this is a real issue we're going to have to deal with because there's been a big shift away from tenure track faculty members although I must say the number one element in our work plan for the coming year as filed with our our Board of Governors is to add more tenure track faculty I don't see us reducing the number of tenure track faculty I do see us hiring more full-time instructional faculty with a career a lot of replacements to the tenure line faculty but that's really I would say that's a strong theme we heard across your institutions ASU included so and I think that's not you couldn't have the vision you have about getting better and better and better at a student-centric institution without asking those questions of your of yourselves one one other last hand last question between us and lunch I know something about the advantages of large organizations and also the disadvantages I was wondering whether our leaders could comment about the tradeoffs between growing an existing organization and building a new organization IE I was young enough when I was very young I remember people in California arguing about what the optimal size of a UC campus was was 5,000 and since those limits have been busted I wonder if anybody has an ideal optimum optimal size especially since we're talking about innovation nowadays I don't know what the optimal size is but I know that we are thinking differently for example now we're thinking instead of building out out out we're building in in so so that students can actually walk from place to place so doesn't exactly answer your question but I'm aware that we're all considering in terms of our capital planning and other scheduling about how to keep no matter you know even though we've went from 3,000 5,000 8,000 17,000 now 20 almost almost 22,000 so we're not huge yet but how do you keep that at a human scale so students can really access what's there so I'll stop there I'd say we don't have the answer for optimal and I don't know if there is an optimal across higher education what I can say is that what we do understand is markets okay and that's something else that you probably remember from IBM is you can only thrive as an organization if you have a market and so we start we're celebrating our centennial this year a hundred years ago we were an evening school for working businessmen they were all male they were all white and there were 48 of them today there's 32,000 students their majority female their majority minority which means there is no majority put student population Hispanics Asian Americans African Americans whites and students who have self-identify as mixed race all exist in large percentages on our campus what we do know is that we can serve our markets at scale and the key is as we grow is that we never lose the ability to deliver a quality education that gives the student the opportunity for both the academic experience but that engagement piece that we've talked about and we haven't hit a scale barrier yet that's all I can say can I come back to the first part of that question which was also I think about how you innovate you know the tension between innovating in a large institution versus SWAT teams smaller or starting new you made a comment early on about aim your innovation at the end of the first disease well it's also is you do pilots you do pilot projects you there's no sense in doing a university-wide big change if you don't know have the data to show it's going to work so you start off small you try it if it works then you figure out how to scale it and we do that again and again and again as we attack different issues that are barriers or or obstacles for students on the path to success and the good news is we have brilliant faculty and staff and they have a lot of ideas I don't have any trouble finding a good idea about how to improve I have trouble choosing among a variety of a wide variety of of great ideas that I wish I could find all it's a high class problem to him it is it is I'm lucky you know we really need to ask the question about whether there is an optimal size in some Aristotelian sense I'm not sure there is I used to think there probably was because I watched Texas and Minnesota one or two others and when they got above 50,000 they said we want to go back to being a little less a little smaller than 50,000 enrollment well we worried a lot about that and then you know we passed 50,000 and the data keep looking better and students report real satisfaction with their experiences we're we we receive more SAT referrals than any other institution in Florida so we're an institution of choice now we're not as much of an institution of choice as the Gators are probably not quite with the Seminole but we're you know we're we're doing pretty well and I I I sometimes am criticized by people who think we're too big and I often have to bite my tongue and and say well let's compare metrics that are two institutions but I think technology is allowing to push back those barriers we're we're able to do things at scale that we couldn't have done without some of the emerging technologies particularly in the area big data predictive analytics some of those as well as instructional uses of technology the other thing we have to acknowledge I think is that as you have sustained growth and it's fairly rapid there are systems that work at one size and don't work at another right and there are people who work at one size and don't work at another and if you're unwilling to address both you're headed for problems if you're not ready to say to someone who's been a good and productive employee you know things worked really well for you and we were this big but you know we're this big now how do we how do we deal with this that's a problem I think that's a great note to end on because our panel after lunch is going to be coming back to these questions of leadership and and all of the kinds of challenges that come together with them and I think also you know implicit in your responses was somebody asked over here earlier about the question of seat time the one thing we haven't changed the Carnegie unit I think you did hear across each of your institutions and particularly I think when Michael was speaking earlier about once you take once you take away I think you are thinking about time in a very different way and that to me seems to be a critical way to unlock how you get a highly personalized experience within a large a large institution so thanks to the panel lunch is served outside thanks to all of you for hanging in for an intense discussion