 This is Becky. She works hard and likes her job. One day Becky noticed a promotion announcement. When her co-worker asked her if she was going to apply, Becky expressed concern that she didn't feel qualified and didn't think she had the time or money to go back to school. Her co-worker asked her if she had heard about their company's new degree completion partnership with Sailor Academy. With Sailor Academy's degree completion program, Becky could start earning college credit online at her own pace with no upfront cost. Since Sailor Academy works in partnership with colleges, not competition, Becky's company is able to give her a variety of credit options. With her low cost transferable credits, Becky is filled with confidence and enthusiasm to complete the rest of her degree. Degree in hand, Becky confidently applies for the promotion and is now a team lead helping her company grow and thrive. For the 31 million plus Americans like Becky, with some college credit and no degree, getting a degree will depend on a new view into higher education partnerships. Education must strive to meet these learners where they are, often at work, serving in the military and perhaps additionally taking care of loved ones. Innovative credential models address the needs of working learners in three key ways, providing credit for the expertise learners already have, providing flexible learning opportunities for busy schedules, and most importantly, they lower the cost barrier both for working learners to participate and for employers to provide significant support. These models require strong partnerships among higher education, employers and the recommending bodies that advise both. Sailor Academy is proud to announce its partnership program as allowing the city of Alexandria, Virginia government to leverage its education program to over 3,500 employees. Please join me in welcoming Mark Singer, Vice Provost of Thomas Edison State University, Cara Gwaltney, Director of ACE Credit at the American Council on Education, Lisa Sacks Mahoney, Director of National College Credit Recommendation Service and Cody Cleverly, Manager of Academic Programs at JetBlue Airways. Can everyone hear me? Oh, I can hear myself. All right. Good. All right. Welcome. Thanks. I have to say there's so many moving parts to what we're going to be talking about that finding the way in is a little bit of a challenge. Certainly there are, what we're going to be talking about in the next hour are not only employers and what their goals are for perhaps getting more involved in higher ed and ensuring degree completion, but also, as you'll see here, there are the providers of sort of alternative methods of getting our education, right? And there are the reviewing organizations who set standards and who validate what some of these alternative providers are doing, whether it's courses or training programs, licensing certifications, that sort of thing. And then, of course, there are the employers and, last but not least, the institutions themselves that have to make sense of all of this and to figure out the extent to which these programs can be integrated into the curriculum effectively. So we've got several moving parts here. Why don't we take a moment, and this will buy me a minute or two to think about what I'm going to say next by introducing the folks here and let them tell you a little bit about who they are, what their organizations are doing as part of this whole emerging landscape and some of their concerns and interests as we go. So, Kara Gualini from ACE. Hi. Good morning, everyone. ACE was originally organized almost 100 years ago. In fact, this is our 100th year anniversary this year, so come join us in March. And we were founded as a way to, it was like the emergency council on education. And what we were trying to do at that point was to figure out how we could help people kind of complete their high school equivalency or the GED once they came back from the military. So really, we launched with military evaluations in the 1940s, and that is still one of our largest programs through a contract with the Department of Defense and Dantes to do all of the military service members evaluations. That evolved in the 70s to do occupations for the military, which then we looked at it and said, hey, wait a minute, there are a lot of occupations in the workplace. Why couldn't this translate? And we could do reviews of workplace training, which is how credit came to be. So what we do in credit is we work with over 150 current organizations, but 500 plus in our history to review 32,000 courses and recommend credit. Any course that you've taken in the past that has ACE credit is still eligible for ACE transcript and to be considered by an institution. So we have the records of all the courses we've reviewed back to the beginning of time. Currently we've got about 5,200 active credit recommended courses in our National Guide. So the way this works as an organization will come to us or we will go to them and say, you've got some great training. Let us have a look. Let's see what we can help you do with your employees. And oftentimes in the workplace, they're looking at this as an employee benefit. So how do we keep our employees happy? How do we help them attain their personal goals while they're here with us and further their skills to help our business grow? In doing that, when we look at the trainings, we will match the content of the training course or the non-traditional course, if it's from a course provider, to faculty who are experts in that area. And they have to be teaching for five years. In many cases, they need to have been an active practitioner in the field as well. That's more so when we look at things like engineering, manufacturing, then if we're looking at history. And those faculty dive right in and they look at the content, the scope, the rigor, and the assessment of those training courses. One thing that we don't place a lot of emphasis on at ACE when we do these reviews is seat time. And if you're from an institution, you might be slightly cringing right now, and I apologize, but it's going to make some sense. When you do training in the workplace, you are there to train the employees to get them out on the floor to grow the business to make the money. They can't have them sitting in a chair to learn. So a lot of times the learning that's happening is happening on the job while they are being trained in their new position or during their work day because they can't afford to lose that productivity. So what we're looking at really is what is the employee learning, what is the intended outcome of the time they're spending in this training, and how does that align with a traditional college level course. The other thing we try to do is recruit a very diverse faculty team. So we do not want all community college faculty on a review because we're going to get kind of a single one-sided view of the equivalency. So we try to incorporate full-time tenured faculty, adjunct faculty for profits, not for profits. Community colleges, technical schools, it really depends on the industry because we want to make sure that we're really giving that learner the best chance at the applicability of their transcript, of their credits wherever they take that transcript. So in doing that, we can bring in a more diverse group of faculty, more reliable. So if you're at Thomas Edison and it's been reviewed by someone on the East Coast, then you know, well, it's a similar program. They know what they're talking about. And it becomes more valuable to the institution. We do on-site virtual reviews. Sometimes we take a team in the field and spend two or three days. But almost every week we have at least three reviews going on in our secure portal, which is kind of a benefit because the faculty can stay at home. They can still teach their courses. They don't have to travel. And it's a bit of a cost savings for some of the employers as well. Our recommendations are good for three years. That has changed over time. It was five years at one point. It's three years now. We are always looking at what makes sense for this. So does a course like history or college algebra change? Not really. But maybe the methods of assessment change or the expectations of how the outcomes are going to be demonstrated by the student, that could change. So that's the reason why we come back in fairly frequently to look at it again because the recommendation may change. And we want our participants to keep up to date with what's happening in higher ed. So if they know they have a review coming up, they're going to be more likely to think about, OK, what's happening at the institutions that I work with? How can I make sure to stay aligned? And we also offer transcript services. So we provide transcripts to about 1,200 institutions every year with some high volume partners who receive a considerable number of transcripts, Thomas Edison, UMUC, a few others in the room, high volume. And then we've got a lot of traditional institutions that will receive one here and one there, one here and one there. So that's also exciting to see where more non-traditional credits are being accepted. And then I think our most exciting thing that's happening is we just launched a partnership with Credly. So if you're familiar with Credly and the badging that they do on the open platform, we are really excited for our workforce partners to be able to not only have their employees complete their degrees, but to demonstrate what skills do they have? How are they valuable? How could they move to another organization and continue to carry on those growth segments that they've had at their starting organization? So the badges go with them everywhere. It's not something that once you leave McDonald's, you're no longer recognized. That's your recognition. And you can display it however you wish. So that's very exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing more of these badges pop up on LinkedIn and other places as I'm logging online. So yep. Lisa? This will be a challenge for me to come after care of, because I'm with the National College Credit Recommendation Service. And the challenge for me is to not be redundant in terms of what you've just heard from ACE. We're very similar in terms of the work that we do. There are some differences that I'll touch upon this morning. But essentially, we were also founded in 1973. And we were founded under the auspice of the University of the State of New York's Board of Regents. So Regent Nyquist back in 1973 had a vision that there needed to be a place and space to recognize learning that takes place outside of a formal classroom. So he set forth with a position that we're not serving students as institutions as the academy. We're not serving students well if we're not recognizing the informal learning that's taking place every day, whether it be in the workplace or whether it be through an apprenticeship or so many other models. Now we're seeing such a great emergence of these new models that are coming by way of other non-collegiate educational providers. So Regent Nyquist back in 1973 secured a grant to actually pilot a study on the importance of adult learning and what can be done in collaboration with the academy and employers and other organizations to actually provide access and an entry point to higher education. So through that emerged N-Ponsy. It's a long acronym that I always never fails. I get incorrect, but I think you can obviously understand why there was a name change along the path. So we are now National College Credit Recommendation Service. However, many of you have been in the field for a long time might recognize the old N-Ponsy name. So our work, again, is very similar to ACEs. Our position is similar that our desire is to help provide that access to education, be a partner in the field of higher education, be a partner with employers and community-based organizations. So I won't go over all the specifics, the tenants and the principles and standards and criteria that we use to conduct the assessments and conduct the evaluation and reviews, but we do look at many of the things that Kara had mentioned. So strong emphasis on student learning outcomes, strong emphasis on the assessments, the rigor of the assessments, the breadth, scope, and depth of the curriculum. We also look at the delivery model. And in the years leading up to now, we've witnessed a great change in the field of online education. So we're constantly keeping up with the guidelines around proctoring policies and those supports for students. So we're looking at all of that when we're conducting a review. We too have a peer review model. So we are reaching into the academic community to find evaluators. And these evaluators are vetted and screened and trained. And we also not only look at the subject matter expertise of faculty, but as Kara mentioned, we're also looking for those evaluators who have a willingness and desire to embrace non-traditional learning that also have been shared, the same values that we do. We're also looking to ensure that if we are reviewing online courses, we want to work with faculty that have experience and expertise in online learning. So I think some of our challenges stem around some of the new disciplines that have been created, which I think we'll talk about in a little while. However, NCCRS continues to refine our process, but I will say that we're guided by 40 plus years history. And many of the tenants and principals are the cornerstones that have withstood the hands of time. And they are based on the input from the academic community. So as Kara mentioned with a credit recommendation, we're not issuing a credit. We're making a recommendation. That recommendation becomes an award of credit when and if a college deems it awardable, if you will. And at that moment, it becomes placed on the transcript issued by the college in our case. We follow a five-year model. I think Kara mentioned they follow a three-year revalidation cycle. We have implemented a five-year model. We do, and I also agree it's very important to stay connected with the organizations that we're working with to ensure that we're capturing the changes. Any substantial changes made to programs have to be communicated to us. What we're seeing at this time and space is in terms of ensuring that quality piece for all of you that are looking at these credit recommendations is doing a lot of work upfront. So if you will, I hate to be so colloquial with this, but we're really stopping a lot of people at the front door. So we have a lot of organizations that come to us and we're vetting them very strongly at the front and we're doing a lot of consulting and we're telling them they're not quite ready yet. You may want to consult with an academic faculty and a great number of colleges. You may wanna bring a board, a curriculum developer or instructional designer, but you're not quite ready. We'll steer people to some resources for self-directed learning, if you will. And generally speaking, at this point, it's 60, 40, 60% of new organizations coming to us for credit reviews are eligible and ready to move forward, 40% or not. And I think that's an important measure of the quality that's embedded in our process. And I think with that, I just wanna thank all of you for listening to this very similar speech here. And I think we can turn it over to Cody. Yeah, although I just wanna point out before we move to, if Cody actually has anything he wants to say. I don't have much to say, no. But the two of them, despite the cordiality, you see here are bitter rivals. They really, they just, I'm surprised we didn't make Cody sit between them. I'm just introducing that now in case the conversation flags a little bit later. We can sort of go back to that. This is actually the first time anyone has dared put them on a panel at the same time. Yeah, that's true. It's true. It's never happened before. And we're actually nice friends. Kinda funny. But when we take this on the road, it's in the contract that next time I'll introduce Lisa first. All right, yeah, you want to? Yeah, I'm ready, I'm ready. Yeah, so at JetBlue we have a program called JetBlue Scholars. And I started at JetBlue about three years ago just in time to start building the program. We formally launched it in January of 2016. And the reason we created JetBlue Scholars primarily is because our crew members, we call our employees crew members, but they were asking for educational development. They were asking for tuition reimbursement. They were asking for educational assistance. And JetBlue's a pretty new airline in the industry. We've been around for 17 years. And in our first 15 years we didn't have any form of educational assistance. For some of you that know JetBlue, that may seem at odds with our culture and our values. But the reason we didn't do it is because our annual budget that we could allocate was $1,500 to $2,000 per year. And so we asked ourselves, is this going to make a difference? And the answer was no. Because if you tell a crew member or an employee at any organization, hey, we're gonna help you get your college degree. Here's $1,500. It's almost more insulting than anything, right? Because you all know that you can't do hardly anything for $1,500. And so we did a bunch of research and we figured out that if we could leverage non-traditional pathways to college credit, through organizations like NCCRS and ACE, that we could actually cover an entire year of our crew members college on that same budget. And so that's what we did. We built a program that enables us to cover the entire cost of a full year of school, 15 to 18 credits or more. Some people take more than that while working. And it's all built on this non-traditional credit model. And so when people enroll in the program, they first we help them get credit for the knowledge they already have. We help them get credit for FAA licenses and certifications, IT certificates, work experience, JetBlue training that they have to get when they come on the job. And this is true for pilots and flight attendants and mechanics and airport operations crew members and in-flight crew members. And so we help them get that credit and transfer in any college that they have. And then we enroll them in online courses that we pay for up front through those non-traditional course providers. Like many of you have heard of straighterline, say.com, Sophia. We enroll them in those courses and essentially they take all the credits that they need to then enroll in Thomas Edison State University or another university of their choice. We don't require them to enroll in Thomas Edison, but we partner with them because they're so innovative and so forward thinking about what type of learning is college credit. And so the typical student takes one course at the university and they already have 117 credits when they enroll and they graduate with a degree from Thomas Edison State University. We've had graduates from other universities as well who have taken a slightly different path using these same methods. And here's the really, really cool part about this model is that our crew members who withdrew from college in the past or have taken online courses at universities in the past tell us that the courses that they take through our program are better than the online courses that they took at their university. And that's probably hard for some universities to hear. I took online courses when I was in grad school and the problem with many online courses at universities is that what tenured professors try to do is they take the in-class course and they try to cram it into an LMS. And that typically does not foster the type of learning experience that our adult learners need today in order to be successful. And so there's something that I think universities can learn from these alternative credit providers by taking a look at their courses and seeing that they've removed significant amounts of overhead costs, reduced the cost and quality and increased the quality dramatically by hiring subject matter experts who ensure the academic validity and soundness of the content but who can create online courses that are really engaging, mobile, compatible, that allow people to progress at their own pace. And so that's how we built Deplu Scholars. And I'm here because I'm really passionate about the fact that I think employers have a huge responsibility to help the 31 million Americans with some college in no degree. And I use the analogy of healthcare. So many Americans have healthcare because their employer provides it. And most of us rely on our employer for healthcare. And I think employers have a similar responsibility for higher education. And if we, as a community of higher education institutions and credit recommendation agencies and employers can work together to reduce the cost while using the technology that we have at our disposal today to ratchet the quality up significantly, then we can expand access to education by giving employers the ability to take that budget that's not typically $15,000 per year per employee. It's typically closer to that $1,500 to $2,000. By making these pathways more accessible by more universities finding ways to leverage this type of credit, we can open it up to where employers are really adopting this. And then those 31 million Americans who most of them are working Americans can benefit from this movement. So that's my spiel, I guess. That's great, thanks. Yeah, and I should probably just say a word or two about Thomas Edison, because I'm also a panelist. Yes, sir. So just, we're a bit different from, I think, many of the institutions that your folks represent, although UMUC would be an exception, they're more, I guess, one of our sister institutions. And you don't work at Empire State anymore, so I'm not gonna talk about Empire. They're not here. So Thomas Edison was founded along with a handful of other institutions to focus on adult students, people who might have had some college but no degree. We were all founded in around the early 70s, although I guess UMUC was founded in the 1940s for some different purposes, partly. And so our model is flexible enough because we were always focused on adult learners to allow us to be able to embrace some of the things you've just heard about from our other panelists. We've always been an outcomes-focused institution rather than an inputs-focused institution. And in fact, I think that's one of the things that makes our program with JetBlue so successful is that JetBlue reminds us, as do ACE and NCCRS, that it's really the outcomes that matter. It's not the seat time. And so that integrates very well with our model. We've got about 18,000 students, 17.5, I guess. Almost all adult students, all distance learners. Almost all of them come to us with credits already in hand from previous experiments and trying to get a degree. For some of them, we say life got in the way. So they might have been college material or something, but something interrupted their studies. Increasingly, our students tend to be people who may not have thought of themselves as needing a degree when they first finished high school. They wanted to go into a trade or something else, but they're finding increasingly, and you heard me talk about this yesterday, increasingly that when they look at the WAN ads, they see that most jobs require degrees now, even jobs that did not just a few years ago. And sometimes that's a good thing. I know one of our biggest programs is our nuclear engineering technology program. And a lot of the people who are operating nuclear power plants have a high school diploma and can drive a forklift, and that's pretty much what it was then. Now it's not anymore, so don't worry, you can sleep easy tonight. But those things have changed in many places. And so these students are coming to us maybe not as academically prepared or maybe don't have any previous college experience, but what they do have is training knowledge that they've gained from their workplace experiences or through the military or through other things. And that is one of the things that because of our work with these folks, we were able to incorporate into our system. So in fact, we have no residency requirement. Again, because when we started, we didn't even offer courses, we were just sort of an aggregator of credits from different places. We would point people to portfolio or other forms of prior learning assessments, opportunities, we would send them to other places to take courses. And over time, of course, we do now have courses. But that model is still relatively intact. So I say this not as a way to brag because I didn't do that stuff that was before I got there, but really as much to point out that your institution is likely not as flexible as that. And yet there are still a number of ways that you can take that model and adapt it in some ways and incorporate some of it, I think, into your degree programs and as a way to establish partnerships, as a way to create pathways for adult learners, which I know is increasingly of more interest to what we used to consider traditional institutions. So with that in mind, I just wanted to ask you, so I think this will give us a little bit better sense of how to answer some of the questions that we're gonna address. But how many of you consider yourselves, so I'm asking you questions first. So how many of you consider yourselves to be employers? Not just educators, but employers. Two or three employers. Does anyone here ever hire people? Are you responsible for hiring? All right, so somebody works for you? So that's you're an employer. Okay, do you require a degree as a condition of hiring somebody for employment? Most of you are nodding, right? Okay, this is a rhetorical question because I can't, I mean, unless you all wanna shout out at once, what purpose does that degree serve for you? Let's see if it is rhetorical for now and we can deal with it later in the questions, right? Is it, does it represent something like, I think Stephanie Crowns yesterday mentioned, does it represent social capital of a certain type, right? But does it represent anything else? So that leads me to my next question. What is important about that requirement of a degree? Is it the knowledge it represents? Is it experience or is it the degree itself in which of those is really the most important for you? Somebody answered this yes to me yesterday when I asked, but could you instead of that just administer an assessment of skills and knowledge at your institution as part of the hiring process and have that be your basis for hiring or does that degree still matter, right? So this is all, this is not just me soliloquizing, this is where we're gonna get to something here. I guess another question then, let's shift away from that for a minute. How many of you would consider yourselves to have been non-traditional learners? People who didn't go through the four year traditional or five or in my case, 11 years of getting a bachelor's degree. So only one, two people, three. All right, sorta, maybe a little bit. All right, so with maybe the three of you, I'm asking more than anyone else, but would you say that there should have been a better way of acknowledging what you knew besides a degree? I mean, were you able to do more things than your degree represented? No, right, this is pretty much with it, no? Well, just non-traditional. Did you take a traditional route to getting your education? Yeah, so that's Temple University, not the Jewish. Which would be fine, I'm not saying. So you sort of had to force your education into that more traditional mold, even though you were sort of into your career already. Okay, that's good, that's good. All right, we'll get back to you in a minute. Just hang on, no, it's fine. All right, so that helps us to really get a sense of who folks are, so by and large, with a few notable exceptions, we're somewhat traditional, and we hire in traditional ways, and yet we're here at a summit talking about how we can work around that system in some way, or how we can open up that system, right? And that's what these folks here represent. So let me turn to the panel now, you knew I was gonna bring you in at some point, right? Why don't we start somewhere in general? So should employers have a hand in shaping the curriculum? Should they be more involved than clearly we're allowing them to be, or have allowed them to be right now, but why don't I start with Cody? Yeah. I do, I think employers have a place. I think there's some, I've been posed the question, should employers be the accreditor? So should employers ultimately be the ones to say, this is what we need in industry? This is what we need in order to fill these skill gaps? This is what we need in order to fill these jobs? And I don't think employers necessarily should fill that role, and I say that because employers have a certain set of objectives that sometimes are at odds with the objectives of academic institutions, and so I think it's important that there's a check and balance in place, but I would say that by involving employers in the conversation, institutions can really add value, economic value to both employers and the entire nation and the world. And I think a way to do that, rather than just asking them what do you want, I think a really compelling way to involve employers in that conversation and refine as educational institutions the types of learning outcomes that you target, the types of learning opportunities that you offer. I think it's just a question of actually partnering with those organizations, finding where there's mutual value and creating opportunities for you to help them build a talent pipeline. And I think, I mean, that's something that Thomas Edison has done a good job with at JetBlue is we're building a talent pipeline through the offerings that they have. Lisa, would you go to? I absolutely think that employers have a responsibility to help shape the curriculum. And I think in my many years of higher ed and I've worked at different colleges, we've always seen models where industry was brought in to review curriculum that was developed by faculty as really kind of an end product moment of a, okay, what's missing, is there something missing? And that was about it. And there was an endorsement from industry that yes, this is good curriculum and then move done. And I always found that there was so much more to be done in helping shape the curriculum. And I started to really see good examples of that when there were new jobs that were created in different fields that were being created that required academia to develop degree programming. So one for example, I would say is mechatronics. The mechatronics hasn't been around forever. And once we started to see the need grow in industry, industry and academia came together to really help shape that curriculum that is very much reliant on an interdisciplinary approach. And it requires the employer input and it requires the academic subject matter expert to drive the curriculum with the input. So I do wholeheartedly believe that employers have a responsibility and a role in shaping the curriculum beyond the traditional conventional way of just providing that surface level glance. Yeah, and I'm in complete agreement with both Lisa and Cody. I'd like to add though that I think that what's been happening is everyone is operating in silos, right? So the institution says, these are our programs. This is what you're going to do. And here's your degree. And the employer says, well, that's all great, but they can't do X, Y and Z. And this is what I really need them to be able to do. So the first thing that probably needs to happen is that the employers and the institutions in a community should be communicating a little more regularly about what their needs are, how they can help provide those jobs and how the institution can be the pipeline to the jobs or vice versa, the employer can be the pipeline to the institution. There's some data out there that says that over the next 10 to 15 years, your traditional high school graduates, the numbers are going to be stagnant. There's not going to be a lot of increase there. So if we're going to meet the need to credential millions of people, that's going to come from this non-traditional group of folks who don't have their credentials yet. This group's going to stay flat and then you're going to have this whole area of individuals who could be credentialing in a lot of different ways. A great example, I think of this happening is if any of you are familiar with the Department of Education's EQUIP project, which I know Mark's school is a part of and ACE as well. And one of our partnership is with Northeastern University and GE. And they have worked together to build a curriculum to help the employees on the floor of the GE warehouse factories up in Massachusetts to build the curriculum using GE values, using Northeastern's great curriculum developers and their foundational learning and then ending in these grand challenges where they're solving a problem that's on the floor of the warehouse. So it's a real life experience. It's got the foundational learning necessary. You go have the theory, you've got your gen eds. It's a full degree program, but they have developed it together because it meets the needs of their community and one of their most important industries right there in the state. All right, so here's my next question sort of related to that. I think you've all sort of touched on it. Whose responsibility is it to promote learning that guides or helps workforce development? I mean, is it who it's always been or is there something changing about that model? Yeah, I mean, I would say, I mean, I think it's something really powerful about taking existing employees that are already working at an organization and developing them is that you are, an employer already knows what they're dealing with. And so if you take an organization like Walmart and you take the entry level employees at Walmart and partner with a university to create a curriculum that takes those people to the next level, whether it's college, whether it's customer service or whether it's leadership. I think what it does is it creates a really compelling curriculum that both adds value to the individual and to the organization because the individual is looking for growth and if they're gonna stay at Walmart, they need to see some advancement or some growth and that may be career advancement, it may be personal development, but that's what we're seeing at JetBlue is 96% of our people enrolled in our program say they're more committed to staying at JetBlue over a longer period of time because we offer this program. And so I think tying in those outcomes is a really important piece that the business outcomes. Karen, doing that? No, I was just agreeing that the employers, as Lisa said, there's a mission that employers have in order to make the business run, but they also have a responsibility to their employees if they wanna retain them and so forth. So I completely agree with Cody that it's kind of a group effort. I would agree with that. I think that, I'm harkening back to yesterday's conversation, I believe it was Katie who was speaking about the RN program and how there was a shortage at the same time there was a wait list. So that really required that community and multiple people within that community to identify a positive solution to help fill the gap and so I think there was, I mentioned that there was an alternative education provider that helped to fill the educational needs to prepare those RNs then to go into the academic program. Then of course you have the employer side that is helping to have the hiring commitments and is the one that's driving the bus in terms of identifying the shortages and the needs. So I think it does take equal shared community to come together to help develop the programs, to help create the awareness on the workforce development side and identify not just the regional and local needs but globally and how we can work together to actually meet the goals that have been set forth that are based on the needs that we have as a society. I think one thing I'll add and Mark that I think is really important just in this broader topic is the fact that I think many institutions are reluctant to embrace alternative credit because of the perception that it's going to cannibalize or cut into revenue on the traditional side. So you think if I create an open source course, marketing, introduction to marketing, no one's gonna enroll in my marketing class that I actually get revenue for that people pay tuition for and I think there's a concern there. What we're seeing at JetBlue is that people enroll in our program and many times they don't succeed right out of the gate because they aren't a self-directed learner because they don't do well in the online environment because they need someone teaching them and in our courses it's self-directed learning they teach themselves, they have the technological and educational resources at their disposal but online self-directed learning which is what this whole OER movement is all about does not work for everyone. It typically doesn't work for your 18 to 22 year old maybe even 18 to 25, 26 year old and some 46 year olds it doesn't work for them and so I think what educational institutions need to be comfortable doing is embracing the fact that looking at it like a business and saying there are different market segments and we need to target these segments differently based on what their individual needs are and one example is the fact that online courses at universities typically cost the same or more than what in-class courses cost and when you look at the fact that the overhead there's no overhead basically I mean you have your LMS up and running you create the course you should be able to offer those courses at a very reduced rate but what worries them, what worries universities is if we charge less for our online courses no one's gonna enroll in our in-class courses but my argument is that there's a ready population of learners who are willing and ready to take a traditional class and there's sometimes their parents if they're an 18 year old their parents are telling them no, no, no, go get the college experience go enroll on campus live in a dorm and that's fine but there's this population of people who are being forced to go the traditional route who are not succeeding who are drowning in student debt because of an unwillingness to target their specific needs for fear that it's going to crumble the current model and I think as we talk about employers employers fit I think in a really distinct place because employers have the ability to help figure out who those people are and what their needs are and tailor a program that works for their population so we have people that we frequently direct to Thomas Edison, no enroll in their courses or they'll come to us and they'll and we'll identify that the community college that they went to before is better for them so how can we help them succeed in that environment and that's okay but the whole alternative credit movement is about targeting those people who are underserved and who are not getting the education they need and finding scalable ways to reach those markets and I think institutions, you guys all have I mean, raise your hand if you are representing a higher ed institution. Okay, so a good chunk of the room. Raise your hand again if you have no residency requirement like Mark. Okay, so that's really promising, that's good so no residency requirement enables you to really embrace this model. Raise your hand if you have a 30 to 60 credit residency requirement. Okay, so there's a handful of you. Imagine if you could create OER courses online at a low cost to fulfill that 30 credit residency and embrace the same model but they're taking those courses at your university. I mean there's a lot of different ways to think about this and that's what this conversation's about is really getting us thinking about the fact that if you're really careful about targeting those individual market segments you can get a lot of value from new students without suffering on your traditional path. So that's great. We've done, there's a fair amount of research out there of some of it's been done by Cal, some of it's some research studies in the world of OER but all of it suggests that students who use these alternative methods to earn credit whether you consider them to be prior learning assessment are really what we think of them as external learning. Those students end up taking more courses with us and graduating at a much higher rate than students who don't do that. It's partly because they persist a little bit longer than our typical students who may or may not make it all the way through and I wouldn't say that these external learning experiences are teaching them more although some of them tend to be rooted in their experience which can help but it's that as Cody mentioned these tend to be completed by people who are self-directed who are disciplined, a bit more motivated and those tend to be the kind of people who make our numbers look good if nothing else. Clearly there's the other people we also want to have them succeed as well but these folks don't take anything away from us and then I'll just mention one more thing which is that we're at a state institution. What that basically means is we lose money on every course we offer. I don't know if everyone is aware of that. That's why we need money from the state. It's because we would go broke otherwise. Maybe you're at a special place where that doesn't happen and I don't want to single you out but I don't think any of them are profitable. No, no. So really these things don't cost us at all. In fact like I said they tend to enhance what is really our mission which is not to make money necessarily but although you want to be sustainable but to have people graduate and then become contributing members of society. So there is one other concern though. Cody mentioned of course that faculty or others might worry about these people taking away your courses. The other concern though is the question of quality. And so it's fine that these courses exist but then people will say well we have an accreditor who looks at what we do, our regional accreditor but who's looking at this stuff. So I guess I want to turn to, I'll start with Kara this time, is it your turn? Okay. So what are the quality assurance things that are built into what you do so that you could reassure institutions, employers, everyone that what you're reviewing is sound? So like Lisa we also have standards of eligibility that they must meet and we revise them every few years to align with what's happening so do they have a proctor? Is there a lockdown browser? Are there time constraints around assessments? What types of assessments is it only tests? Are there papers? Are there rubrics? So all of these things built in which I think for years as a credit recommendation service we just assume that people knew we did this. And one of the things that we're learning is that there's not nearly enough transparency around what Sailor is doing in their course. For example, since we're here, an institution may be more likely to accept non-traditional coursework if the syllabus is more readily available. And of course that Sailor it is, but at other places it's not. If the rubric for assessing the credit recommendations was more public. And I think that that's part of the challenge is that institutions receive these credits and they say, well how do we know? How do we know that they've really done this? So there's a level of transparency that's missing and there's also a level of trust amongst the institutions and the credit recommendation service. They know we do good work for somebody else. For somebody else's benefit. And so I think that that's one piece that when we do the quality assurance checks of organizations, if they don't have certain components we're not even going to go in and look at their courses. They have to meet the baseline expectations of delivering a course and an assessment in a manner that an institution would find similar to their own. And in some cases that means there are additional fees and in other cases it's built in and it really depends on that provider's model. It's the hardest for workplace to wanna shift and become more like the academy is. I find that the non-traditional course providers are more than happy to do it. They will jump at it, it will take them no time at all. But an employer may be a little more, well we've gotta stick with our mission so it takes some more time. But I think transparency is the key to that quality assurance piece and getting more acceptance all the way around. I would definitely agree. I do think transparency and also transparency in the process itself. The NCCRS has always tried to be transparent in terms of making sure that our policies and procedures are available on our website. But unfortunately if you go to our website it has 40 plus years of history and it might take you a while to navigate to find it. So our issue with transparency is bringing in some really good marketing and web people and ensuring that people can find the information that they're asking for. And one of our challenges I think too is creating the awareness that we exist and how we do things. And then in terms of being transparent about specific organizations, if we're very cautious we have very well detailed reports. So if a college or institution does have a question as to why something was assessed at a certain level or in a particular manner, we encourage the calls. We encourage the colleges to reach out to us and ask and we certainly can't provide the detailed report. Oftentimes there's proprietary and confidential information there. But we can give you a solid lens as to what the evaluator's feedback was that the determination was based on without giving away the proprietary information. I think beyond the transparency and understanding the process is being more connected to the colleges and universities themselves. You know again we've been in business for so long and in operating for so long we assume that every college in the nation knows who we are, where we are. But there's so much turnover in colleges and universities particularly in the registrar's office that we need to continuously re-engage and re-educate. So I think that that would give a little bit more of assurance to have an understanding of our history because you also have a lot of newcomers to the space that may not have history, that may not be keeping the data. And my fear or my concern is that these newer entities if they're not, I don't want them to use our exact process but if they're not using a strong rigorous process and they make a misstep, it will come back on our organizations because we're in that space. So one of the things that we've been working towards I think is a collegiate group not just AC and NCCRS but many others, DEAC, case group and we'll, I'm sure this can be exploited a little bit further. There's a group of think tank leaders in the field if you will that have come together to have these conversations, quality assurance. And one of the things that we've done is a body of collegiate organizations. We've shared our processes among each other. So groups like Quality Matters, DEAC, the President's Forum, individual institutions, AC and NCCRS, there's many more that I'm sure I'm failing to mention. But that was also very illuminating about the importance of quality. So we've come together in sort of a collaborative to exchange and discuss what are our metrics, what are our standards, what criteria are we using and where you are in a way serving as a peer reviewer of one another. And coming upon a standard that will lead to an internal seal of approval of our own processes. I mean, I'll say that I've taken a lot of courses in the alternative credit space and in the traditional space online because if a university comes to me and says we want you to use our courses, I say enroll me in your course and I take the course or I have someone on my team take the course. And in our, because we're the first employer to do this alternative credit model, I had to personally and have my team personally and our employees personally that all of the courses that we were going to take and to start purchasing on behalf of our crew members. And actually, I've noticed that AC and NCCRS actually take a really hard line in certain areas because they're under a microscope because the accreditors and the higher education institutions are really, really looking around to see are they doing what they're supposed to be doing. And I've actually seen that in a lot of cases the quality is actually higher among these courses because they feel like they have got something to prove these course providers. They have to prove that their courses is college equivalent. I mean, I had an entrepreneur, a graduate level entrepreneurship class at a reputable university and the first day of class, my professor was walking through the syllabus and he said, oh yeah, yeah, this required textbook, don't buy it. And then a bunch of the students said, what? We don't buy the, I already bought it, I already bought it. He said, you guys are, I can't, you don't buy the required textbook before the first day of class. Are you kidding me? You wait until your professor actually says you have to use it. He said, that's just an accreditation thing. We're not gonna use that textbook. And he acknowledged that he put that in the syllabus so that when the accreditor looks at the syllabus they won't ask any questions. Now I will say it was a phenomenal entrepreneurship class. And I learned a ton from it. But the point is, I think higher education institutions get away with things that these alternative courses would never get away with. Because there is that level of transparency, the forced transparency, because there's a microscope on these courses. And so that gives me a lot of confidence. Having taken them myself and having experienced the whole space firsthand, I have tremendous confidence in these courses. I will say about Cody and his team that some of them are the most annoying people you ever wanna come because they do, not you personally, that's the other people. But they do enroll in all of these courses that they're considering. They give us detailed feedback on them. They give us detailed feedback on our courses, on our curriculum, on why is this course required and why can't you do this and take this one over here and put it over there. And all right, so what's annoying about them is that they're usually right. And they've really forced us to think through the logical implications of what we say our model is. You know, if we say we're student centered and we're outcomes focused, they'll always call us on that and they'll give us detailed observations on how we can be more like that. So, which raises the question that I think Cody's raising for me about the current model of accreditation. I don't know if anyone wants to really get into that right now, but I'll throw it out there. Because what I'm hearing here is with this emphasis on quality assurance and getting into this almost down to that microscopic level looking at courses, which accreditors don't do, it sounds like we're moving in a different direction or there are implications to the current model. Now, I didn't tell you I was gonna ask you that, so I don't wanna put you on the spot, but I wonder if you have any thoughts about like where do you see this going? Is this better, different, more of the same? I feel like it's better different. I think that education just like when you can choose your grocery store, when you get into your grocery store, you can choose the product you're going to buy, which brand of bread you like or whatever, it's kind of the same thing. It's not, it can't be one size fits all and this is your only option. At A.C.E., and I'm sure at MCCRS, the A word is a bad word. We do not talk accreditation, we choke on accreditation, we don't want any part of it because we want to be able to recognize different opportunities in an agile environment. So if something comes up that is really innovative and offers an opportunity to connect to college learning, we don't wanna have to go through a substantive change request in order to look at it. So I think that there are going to be some new models evolving to stay away from the politics. I think that maybe not as quickly as they may have in other worlds, but I think that it's a good environment that's right for the testing. Great, at least it- I agree, there's not much more I can add to that. Thank you. Oh, all right, so far I haven't gotten you to fight about anything. No. I feel like a failure. Good luck. No. We have a minute and four seconds. But I'd like to give folks an opportunity to ask short questions apparently at this point and somebody might have a microphone somewhere or maybe questions. So people with loud voices first until we get the microphone, is it Matteo? So for the ones watching the video, the question was what are the requirements for proctored exams and final exams? We have some requirements around proctored exams, obviously, and we steer our organizations to different platforms and vendors and vendor products. So Procter U is a good example and we have a whole slate of what we consider, I don't want to say approved, but those of which we have sanctioned as good proctoring environments, we look at student verification platforms, student identification platforms. So I don't know if I'm fully answering the question, but we do have a list of approved platforms and a list of protocols around proctoring and requirements that are published on our website. So obviously security is a big issue, but more to the question or more to, I guess the part of your question about how do we ensure that it's the student? We at NCCRS, we're at the back end of the process in terms of the organization is the one that's administering the program. And so we're overseeing, monitoring how that organization is ensuring the student verification identification of proctoring and they have to submit to us all of the information that pertains to that and the documentation, the evidence. We go on site physically to examine the student record keeping, the platforms that they use and the proctoring protocols and guidelines they have set up. To the point of which there has to be student declaration signed, attesting that students have been apprised of collusion, fraud and whatnot. There's a whole list. There was somebody in the back, I believe, you know? Can you break that because it's the leadership that's following that? How can we say that you're going to develop a commercial application that you get this credential if you're a mechanic but you get this one every second? How do we balance out this larger social thing and take back for it those inspectors? From time to time the employer is back. Right, yeah, and I think you draw out a really good point. I think you're actually helping me more than hurting me with that question because you're really drawing out the fact that there really are two market segments at least where there is a demand for that really expensive in-class, high-touch experience among certain populations and you're drawing out one of those, the MBA, the executive MBA population. Some corporations are willing to pay a fortune for that. And so I implore you as institutions find a way to capitalize on that, definitely. And then also find a way to capitalize on this other population and you're capitalizing in a very different way. You're capitalizing in volume, you're capitalizing in exposure by targeting a much larger population at a very different price point. But you bring up a good point. Those corporate America is perpetuating those different segments in a lot of ways. And I think there's demand in both of those areas and it's just a matter of finding a way to leverage those two different market segments. Oh, there. We're good, answered everything? All right, that's too bad. I had 12 more questions, but... Oh, wait, can we let somebody ask a second question? Is that allowed? Is it a different question? Yeah, different question. I think it's amazing that you guys let people get a degree taking one course there. Can you talk about the benefits to you? Yeah. And then also, can you talk about the benefits to JetBlue of helping these people get degrees? I'm like, how does it help you and how does this partnership help you? I'll start, I guess. Yeah, so the benefits to us, well, it's a question I've been thinking about a lot lately. To what extent is the institution itself cut off from the rest of the community in which it operates? And we were really established because our flagship institution Rutgers in New Jersey was not really interested in these students. And yet, the state and our region really saw a need to provide opportunities for these non-traditional students to move up and onward, economic development-wise. But just increasing the knowledge, the pool of educated people within the state. So we were really founded with that as our mission. And I think most of the people, maybe most as arguable, who work at Thomas Edison really do feel committed to that mission and think about it regularly, about how to make that go forward. So really, it's only in the last few years that institutions have really had to think about their business models and how they make money. We were always much more focused on our mission, whether we're research institutions, which were not, or community colleges, which have a very different mission. So we don't really think of our students as being branded as like Thomas Edison graduates in the way that you might look at somebody and say, oh, that's a Harvard man. He's been educated in the Harvard way or a Wellesley woman or whatever. We think what's out there, what we try to do is have people be educated in a way that represents what a bachelor's degree, maybe I don't think we call it like a generic bachelor's degree, but what a bachelor's degree should represent or a master's degree, or maybe actually have a doctoral program too. And so we're not thinking we wanna make these people in our own image so that you'll always recognize, oh, that's a Thomas Edison grad, I can tell. That doesn't really happen. I don't think. So we're just thinking, what are we contributing to our state and to the community in which we're operating? I know that sounds a little highfalutin, but that's really where it is. Yeah, so my quick response is you'll notice, I'm gonna talk about JetBlue's mission and Mark is talking about Thomas Edison's mission and that's why we chose Thomas Edison largely as a partner is because we needed another mission-driven organization to partner with because JetBlue Scholars is all about JetBlue's mission, which is to inspire humanity. And that's a really lofty mission for an airline, especially in today's landscape in the airline industry. So essentially, inspiring humanity just means not dragging people off of planes. You guys don't do that, right? You don't do that. We were stuck on the loft. None of that, none of that. But truly, our mission is to inspire humanity and that drives everything that we do, both how we fly people from point A to point B, how we treat them, but it also impacts what we do with the rest of our time. So they hire people like me and when I walk in the door, the CFO just sees dollar signs walking in because I'm massive overhead, right? I don't generate any revenue in any form, not directly anyway. I like to think that I help us inspire humanity to the point that customers don't want to fly on JetBlue and I think that actually is a real, hard to quantify but tangible thing. But as far, I won't get into the academic outcomes, but our graduation rates are great, our pass rates are incredible because we've put a lot of support in place with our own staff. But 85% of the people enrolled say they're more engaged in their job as a result of their enrollment in the program. 96% of them say they're committed to staying at JetBlue longer so we're reducing the cost of attrition and keeping people longer. And not only are we keeping people longer, we're keeping the smarter people longer because we're educating them, which is wonderful. So we're letting the dead beats go. We don't have dead beats, we only hire great people. But of course, but we're keeping the best, most engaged, most educated people because they feel so committed to JetBlue because we've invested in them. And it's amazing. We have an engagement survey and we get comments from people who aren't enrolled in the program where they're saying, oh, I love JetBlue so much. This JetBlue Scholars program is so inspiring and I love that they're willing to invest in us. And then we go look and they're not even enrolled and they already had a degree before they came. And so it's transcending the individual and it's impacting the entire corporate culture and just creating an immense amount of commitment to the organization. And people want to get back so people are volunteering to tutor. I'm a math expert. Can I tutor people who are enrolled? I'm a graduate. Can I answer questions about the program? So it's a pretty amazing community that's organically growing within the organization of really engage people who want to stay at the company and who want to give back and help other people grow. So we're seeing some really amazing outcomes. No, and I know one other thing that's great about the program is JetBlue has been willing to share. Like, it's not a secret program that there's a website. Yeah, JetBlueScholars.com if you want to learn more about how it works. But we strive to be an example for other employers who hopefully will do something similar because, again, our mission is to inspire humanity and this is just one small way that we're trying to do that. Sean, are we good? All right, well, is there a break or something happening? Or is there, I don't have an ending written here. I think it'd be the wrong person to ask about. All right, that's why I asked you because I knew you wouldn't have anything. All right, well, if there are no other questions, I mean, we'll all be around for a while. But thanks very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.