 Hello, everyone. I'm here with Dr. Peter Smith, who is the author of Free Range Learning in the Digital Age, as well as a former congressman, former higher ed administrator, founding president of the Community College of Vermont. And looking forward to talking about how this book can be useful for educators, as well as students and policymakers and pretty much anyone who's interested in learning and helping adults have access to higher education. So Dr. Smith, would you like to tell the audience a little bit more or tell me a little bit more about yourself and your background and what interested you in writing free range learning? Well, what happened, it is the fourth book I've done. And what happened to me was I come from a very fortunate background. And during high school, I was able to go to something called Outward Bound, which was a month in the woods learning survival training. And I had a profound experience there. I was from Vermont. I knew about the woods. I thought, this is going to be a breeze. But what I learned was that you need to be on a team with people and the guy who can light the fire in the rain is just as important as a person who can hike all day. And you have the slow walkers and the faster or the long walkers. Well, what you need is to know that someone has to be able to read a map. And everybody's got something to contribute. And we had to keep a journal every night. And that experience got me going on a path of what I call experiential learning. I wanted to pay attention to the learning that people do in their lives, whether it's in a union hall or a corporate setting or personally on their own or whatever. And that was when I got going, it was the late 60s. So this was a long time ago. And that got me into the community college of Vermont. And I was the founder of that college when I was 24. It's a very unlikely story. And the only reason really I think I got the job was because no one else wanted it. Because nobody thought it would work. It was going to be adult community-based learning in rural Vermont. Because there are not enough people in Vermont to have a campus. And so we were going to do it differently. And we're going to use experience. So we started with Head Start Mothers. And they were having a personal experience of raising children. But they were also reading books and going to training. And it just rolled out from there. And I'd been involved in what would be called an assessment of experiential learning ever since then. And that led to this book. It's been as circuitous as most life paths are. And I wasn't politics for a while. But when I left politics, which is what you say when you get beat, I went back in the higher end. And I really think that's where I was meant to be. And this book is the outgrowth of my third book, which was called Harnessing America's Wasted Talent, A New Ecology of Learning. And that was in 19-2010. But it was so early in this revolution that we're experiencing now. It was so early that it was a more of a prospective book. And then, so three years ago, I said, I want to bring that up to date. But the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to talk to people. And so that's the short version of how I got where I am. And I believe, as I say in the book, average adult spends more than 700 hours a year learning things purposefully. And that learning affects them. And we in college need to learn how to recognize it, value it, and put it to work. And that respect of the individual, the ending of knowledge discrimination, I say, we value learning today based on where you learned it, not how well you know it, and what you can do with it. I want us to go to that respecting all learning. And that's the tenor of the book and the stories of the learners who got left out the first time around or got a degree but now need something else. And they can't because they're trapped. And I wanted those stories to go out to people so they would know they're not alone and that there are opportunities. So there are some of the opportunities that are laid out in the book as well. And you mentioned knowledge discrimination. That's one of the key terms that you use in your book as well as hidden credentials, which I think are kind of related. Would you talk a little bit more about those? Sure. Hidden credentials was actually the title of my first book. And the whole notion was that we were seeing people walking around with talent and ability, but they weren't. And so they knew how to do things, how to apply things, but they couldn't get the chance to do it because they didn't have a formal credential. So as I've gone through the years, knowledge discrimination was the word that came to me or the phrase when I was doing these interviews because as I'm listening to people and there's one fellow in the book who says, I think he actually emailed me. And he had this guy three different times. He had done his supervisor's job when the supervisor left and he did it very well. And his employer said, yeah, you did it fine, but you're never gonna get the job until you get a baccalaureate degree. And he couldn't get it because he had to work and he had a family. And he said, I'll leave the profanity out. But he said, I drive by that college every day, going to work and coming home from work. That's no shining city of opportunity on the hill. That's a castle of exclusivity with the drawbridge drawn up. He was furious, he was bitter. And that is knowledge discrimination because he knew how to do something but he couldn't get his ticket stamped. And so that's where the phrase came from. And there is, around that section of the book, you talk about the remoteness, the facets of higher education that can be remote to adult learners. How can higher education fix that? That you would think that that would be something that they would be interested in considering that the market for adult learners, people who have some college and no degree is 10 times as large as the market for people who are coming straight out of high school going to school. You would think that wouldn't you? The thing of the matter is, and this is a very important point, I think many, many institutions are either gonna learn how to respond to this change. I mean, it's a technologically enhanced change. It wasn't possible to do it with thousands of people or tens of thousands of people, even 15 or 20 years ago. But in places like Sailor, who are offering the resource for learning and people are coming and using it every day, thousands of people, I'm sure, that wouldn't have been doable 25 years ago. And so higher education in many regards, better watch out because the only thing they can't do is stand still. Now, the whole notion of disruptive change, we talk about disruption these days, and the fact that what's hard about colleges changing is that their academic structure is an economic structure as well and the campus is an economic reality and the faculty by history run the curriculum and it all happens on the campus. Well, now we can have a college degree at the University of Maryland University College, we have 90,000 students on four continents and it's online and blended and they're place-based as well as online, but the fact is the curriculum is consistent and it's high quality and so you don't have to do it the old way. And I think the thing that's interesting is that higher education historically has been able to control the change that comes to it by language and because if you think of colleges even 20 years ago as an oasis of information in an information poor desert, the community around it, you had the libraries but that was about it and you had to go to a college or continuing ed to get something. Now that desert has gone green. There's information everywhere and learning anytime, anywhere, anything with some limitations but not many is possible and so you have new nonprofits and new businesses like DeGreed and Portfolium which I write about in the book as well as college, what I call adult friendly colleges so four or five presidents that I talked to are in the book. So the fact is there's about 10 different ways now and I think there'll be many more to skin the, if you will, skin the learning cat. That's not a very nice metaphor actually I don't think but there's many ways to do it and so what's disruptive is if you think of a college as having its alumni and its faculty, they're happy with the way things are that's what they know how to do but along comes a UMUC or sailor or other combinations of who can do something just as good or better in terms of content and quality for a fraction of the price or in your case for the content there's no price at all and that's a great place to start. So if you were a higher administrator now and you were trying to change a traditional campus and make it more adult friendly, what would you do or what changes would you advocate for? Or what advice would you give? And I write about this in the book and I use what was really interesting as we talked to five or six college presidents independently they all said different versions of the same thing and which was really amazing and they're all doing business quite differently but first of all, I would look for data analytics to help me understand every week how engaged students are, the learners are in the curriculum so and that is possible today and some colleges are doing it and I write about some of the nonprofits and for profits that are helping do those data analytics but high support you need to have high support and that is more than me just holding your hand that is giving you good information about jobs, good information about the value of the curriculum so you understand if you do these things it'll lead to that future and then keeping you on that path and not asking you to do things that are extraneous or not pertinent to where you wanna go. So there's good information, high support and then content and evaluations that are adult friendly and respectful of the learning you bring with them I would assess the learning you bring with you it's something we do at UMUC and write about Kale in the book C-A-E-L I helped found it 50 years ago that's a national association committed to assessing your prior learning and then there are models and I would say there's the online model or what's called blended so I could go to school every other Saturday all day long and then during the next two weeks I would have material that was available to me online that I would do and it's like listening to the material, taking notes, doing whatever and then I go back every other Saturday all day or two nights a week or you can do it but it's called low residency and I think that's gonna be more and more popular and it's cheaper and it's a different use of the property if you have the campus or I think you're gonna see learning in union halls and I think you're gonna see learning in the workplace and I know there's learning going on in some public libraries where you can actually run a class or run a college program in the back room of a library with computers where people don't have to leave their community to go to school so I think what's gonna be under pressure is the notion of a full-time student going to school 20 hours a week living on a campus or commuting who's the 18, 19, 20, 21 already 75% of the learners in America who are involved in higher education are over the age of 24 so that's changing and that means the campuses have to change because if I'm 30 years old, I've got a life and a family maybe and a job and kids and other things going on so I can't, parking matters, child care might matter. Absolutely. Distance to the campus might matter, time of day matters so now we can do something about all those things. And let's talk a little bit about the students so in your book you feature a lot of student interviews. What's the common arc that you see in each of these students' journeys? Are there certain paths that the students end up taking? The first thing that happens is for whatever reason and it ranges from my parents never went to college so it never occurred to me to go to college too, I tried to go to college and flunked out one guy left four times or there's all sorts of reasons why people missed the boat the first time around, okay? Then what happens is they're going along, working usually in this case that there, I'm sure some who don't are unable to and then they come to what I call a turning point and I write about turning points and it's an aha moment when you say, I don't wanna continue like this and so the woman who heard two people talking about her at work and she'd applied for another job up the ladder and they were saying she's not gonna get the job because she doesn't have a baccalaureate degree and she just said that was it. I was my own worst enemy, my kids were in college, I loved to read when I was a kid, I went into the military, I came out, I didn't spend my education benefit money well, nobody really helped me think that through and so I just never did it and now my younger daughter is about to finish college and I just said I'm doing it and that was for her the turning point and what happens after that and I write about this as well is a transition in which you say I'm going and you experience the notion of a change in your assumptions about yourself, about your view of the life path you're on and you move to a new place for you a more powerful place, a more assertive place in terms of wanting to get and working to get things that you need in order to live a better and I'm not talking just about working life but your social life, your community life, your civic life, we know that people with the more education you have the more involved you are in politics, in your community, in issues and you vote more, you're healthier, you live longer and there's pretty good reasons to change your path. So there's this missing the opportunity the first time around then there are these turning points that happen then there's doing something with them and if my term is if you have come to a turning point and don't do something about it you become a prisoner of your own experience in other words you're really caught and it's never too late but you've got to be able to go through the transition and get the resources and then proceed and so that is really the steps that I walk people through with the stories the stories that I got from real people. And so I've noticed in the stories that there's also something transformative that seems to happen with the students who are doing the prior learning assessment process itself. Each student seemed to talk about some intangible that they didn't realize they had whether it was assertiveness, kind of a new sense of self accomplishment or self confidence. Is there a way that that process or something like it could be used for traditional ages? Well, I think it's, if you're under 25, you've had less experience unless you went into the Army or the Peace Corps or something like that. I think you can use reflective assessments much earlier but the thing that is great about the assessment of prior experiential learning like there's the fella who got credit for I'm gonna call it a computer 101 class and he went into computer 202 and that wasn't the title of the course. And he said, I knew everything that the people who took computer 101 knew except I had learned it at work so I know how to employ it. So it wasn't just knowing about it I had actually used it and that was much more powerful than fellows who had men and boys and girls in this case who had done it but they hadn't ever done anything with it. And so that what happens and the other thing he said and you saw it again and again in the book I had no idea how much I actually knew and what happens is we know people learn 700 hours or more a year, that's the average. But the other thing is that they take in this learning and they essentially forget that they did it. So it's just in there influencing them and they're using it but nobody ever put a pin on it and said, oh, by the way you just learned a lot about Brazil and speaking Spanish because you decided you wanted to go to Brazil and in Brazil's case it probably Portuguese but anyway. And so what happens when you go through this assessment process it's a class and you build a portfolio and you have there's a rigorous way of going back and inspecting all the jobs you've held all the things you've done that are important to you remembering them and then getting inside them and really pulling out the pieces. And it blows people's minds and they say, oh my God. And I had this first experience when I was at the Community College of Vermont we had our first graduation in 1973 maybe, maybe of 72 and this woman, we had eight graduates, okay? Oh, big day. And this woman came up to me, one of the graduates and she said, thank you for the degree and thank you for the college and all of that. But she said, what I really wanna thank you for is putting together my experiential learning. She ran a childcare center. And she said, I really wanna thank you for the assessment of my prior learning the portfolio course we'd call it today. I said, why? And she said, because now I know I'm a learner and I've always been a learner and I'll never stop learning. And I thought, oh my God. You know, I was thinking of it as a fair thing to do and an academically appropriate thing to do but I hadn't thought about it as a transformational experience in a person's life. And that is what you hear in the book and the story is again and again is I'm in charge of my own life now. I know and people become very conscious about the learning they're doing every day. It was one of the most powerful parts of this. I've always known that but it's one thing to know it up here, it's another thing to know it down here. And I really, my appreciation for the power of this stuff and assessment of your experience for learning value really deepened with the writing of this book. So say you were giving advice to somebody who wants to start this process. What would be the kind of, what would be the four or five steps that you would have that or however many? How would you break it down into bullet points? What should someone do? Well of course if they were, I mean the first thing I'd do is say check out the University of Maryland University College because we do this. But you know, not everybody wants to go to the same place. And so depending on where they lived, I would say probably the thing I would do would be most helpful is say go to Kale, it's C-A-E-L, go to their website, kale.org and look at the colleges in your state. And I talk about this in the book, so it's all how to do it. In your state that are members of Kale. Kale is the council for the assessment of experiential learning, okay? So if somebody's a member, college is a member of that group and they're in your state or in the region of your state within 30 miles of where you live, that may be a place to just find out what they do. Now maybe they don't do what you need, maybe, you know, because everybody has a different approach and some people frankly say they do it and then really not so much, you know, kind of. And so you need to sort those things out for yourself. But some people I think a lot of people are gonna be very interested in either a topic and they wanna find a college that is the best at that topic and maybe online or another might be interested in a college that's local within 25 miles of where they live with a distance learning or remote learning where you come to campus once every two weeks. And they do these assessments. So people need to sort through what is most, like if somebody wanted to do this and it was in cybersecurity, I know we're at UMUC really, really strong, award-winning in cybersecurity. If that's more important than going to a college 10 miles down the road, cause you live in Georgia, then you might wanna come to a place like us. But I write about it in the book because there is now increasingly there are ways to really find out where the best fit for you with a college or a learning program of some kind, how to get that best fit. And that's as opposed to just saying, well, here I am so I'm gonna go there because it's five miles from my house. Maybe that's good, maybe it's not. And you wanna be a discriminating thinker about like that when you're putting your life on the line, if you will, to change it. Absolutely. And so I'm gonna play devil's advocate a little bit. So if I were a faculty member or someone in charge of reviewing whether or not credit should be assessed for or should be granted for something, I would probably argue that personal learning experiences are very nuanced, it's very difficult to, how can you standardize it? Everyone understands something differently. Everyone's definition of mastery is different. How would you counter the, how do you really attach academic rigor to, of course people are learning, you have to continue to learn and evolve to survive. How do you really attach academic rigor to that? What would your response to that be? Response would be good question and you're right. It's hard, I mean it's, but the fact is every course you have in your college has a curriculum and it has a set of assumptions about what somebody needs to know at the end of the course. And historically we would line those, the personal learning that you're putting together in the portfolio in the class, you're putting it against courses. So you're saying this equals that and there's a faculty member teaching the course that's helping you do that. That faculty member does not review your portfolio. You have a separate content expert or multiple content experts depending on how many courses you're claiming, looking at your assertions. It would not surprise you that most learners who go through this, well one, it was really cool, most learners who go through this graduate, finish their programs at like 60% higher rate than adults who don't go through it. So it really helps. But also most people who finish a portfolio and get it assessed, they claim more credit than they get. I mean, so I think it's usually, the awarding of credit is sometimes between 60 and 70% of what all the claims were. And what happens now with computer or technologically enhanced and algorithms, we can begin to do these comparisons with a high rate of validity using technology to get you 80% of the way there and then having a subject matter expert do the final okay. And that's a very complicated topic but we're gonna be able to, what matters is, in my mind, we have accounting one and accounting two and accounting three and accounting four. If you say you can do one and two and we agree, the question is, can you succeed in accounting three? If you can't, we need to go back and look at the process. The way it happens now is, if you don't have accounting one or two, we just assume you need accounting one. And you're bored to death and may quit. Two thirds of the adults that leave higher education without their completion do so for non-academic reasons. Two thirds. And it's like, wait a minute, I know this. This is so freaking boring and I'm paying for it and I'm wasting my time and the heck with it. So I turn the proof around. If we can legitimize your claim, let's give you the shot at accounting three. If you can't do it, we can always move you back to accounting two. We don't have to charge you more, we'll just move you back to accounting two and say, no. So the point is you've got to perform according to the award of the credit once you go to school. And what I think colleges have to learn how to do is not take your money and then charge you again or make you finish the course. With good data analytics, I would know at the end of the third week, whether you're participating actively and substantially with the material and whether you're over your head and move you right back to accounting two. Boom. And so this also has, not only does it have implications for higher education, but this has implications for employers, people who are looking at workforce development. They kind of, there's always a lot of talk going around about the skills gap. And you are in the book, you argue a little bit of the skills gap and the credential gap. And I would say the communications gap or a candidate's ability to communicate that they have the skills that are needed in a way that an employer would accept are all related. Could you talk a little bit about that? Well, that's the new frontier that's getting worked on right now. And I'm hoping that I'll be able to be part of that. And it's really what I talk about in the third section of the book, which is that I say a GPS for learning and work. And essentially, if you think about, I've got a portfolio and it's all my formal learning and my informal learning and it's all been validated by a third party or a college. Here's all this information. And then I've got academic standards over here and I've got employment standards over here. I can take this and we know it can be done and apply it to the academic standards. I can take the same information and apply it to the employment standards. They're different standards for different purposes. But when you create those translations, you're then hooking academic level to employment readiness. And so that's where I think a lot of the AI and data analytics are gonna become incredibly helpful. And I think we'll see models like that operating at least as model demonstrations within 18 to 24 months. And so you're absolutely right. And I think you'll see employers, like I was talking to someone the other day and she said, we have warehouses in 20 states. And we've got men and women driving forklifts and I know in those people, there are future managers of the warehouse. I don't know how to find them. What are we gonna, can you help us look at those? We're gonna put together a cohort of learners and then find out whether they're ready to learn about management and be ready to get promoted when the time comes. So I think, and I talk about some of the innovators, portfolio, degree, cred-link, what degree does, for instance, is you say what you wanna learn and they just start throwing learning resources at you. And then when they keep what you've done and read and then they connect to employers and say, Peter Smith's ready to do this. And they've got several hundred employers that are considering that. So it's all gonna get better and better. And then beginning these things can be raggedy because it's never been done before. I mean, Columbus sailed in a 93-foot, three-masted galleon and now you can fly to Paris on a 787. Things get better, things change, but you gotta start somewhere. And I think there's gonna, the world, the whole HR world and what it means to be successful in school and be successful at work is going to be redefined and how to do those and be those kinds of successes is gonna be reinvented in the next. And I think it's already started, but whether it's a three-year horizon or a five-year horizon, you're gonna see amazing, just take sailor, there's gonna be amazing uses that sailor's courses are put to and things that people who dream this place up may never have even thought about. That's cool. I think I agree. So if you were, well, that wasn't, I'll come back to that question. For employers, what are some things that they could implement that would be able, that would allow them to be able to accommodate free-range learners now and be able to hire them efficiently in the future without using a bachelor's degree as a screening tool? I don't think the tools really exist yet, but I think we were just talking about the kinds of translation algorithms that will make that possible. I think the thing that employers right now need to do, frankly, is be much more assertive with colleges or other sources of training about telling them what it is they want, not just taking stuff off the shelf. And when I say what it is they want, that means they have to look at their jobs and they have to look at their jobs three ways. And jobs are, there's vertical and there's a horizontal and then every job. So depending on where you are. So I'll say you're a GS, we're in DC right now, so we'll use general services. So you're a GS8. A GS8 all the way across the government is assumed to know and be able to do a certain level of performance. That's what makes them an eight. But in their agency or in their unit, they have a vertical set of skills and they are not a nine or a 10 or 11 or 12, they're an eight. So say they're in the EPA or wherever, the National Science Fund or wherever they are, there's a horizontal standard they have met that is peculiar to being an eight and then there's a vertical standard they have met that is peculiar to their unit. And if you can take those two things and understand those two things in three ways. One is what are the skills? Okay, that's like screwdriver screw or writing a code or that's a skill. Then what are the cross-cutting intellectual abilities like problem solving and critical thinking, numbers, math, writing that you need? What level of that sophistication do you need to do this job well? And then finally, there's the issue of values and teamwork and your behavior. In other words, that's, and what are the behaviors you're looking for that are desirable to teamwork, leadership, diversity, whatever it may be. And so you've got to, I think we're gonna see is people coming at all three of those things. Right now we do the skills and we don't do, it's like I remember that the Civil War was in the 1860s. Well, what did it mean to the country? How can I describe that? How do I write about it? Think critically, what did it mean? And then what were the behaviors that people were exhibiting that got us into it, got us through it, got us out of it? See, it isn't about liberal, I found of saying it isn't occupational or professional versus the liberal arts. It's both because you need this problem-solving, critical thinking, writing, numeration, the ability to work on a team. These are things that we associate with liberal arts education. There are other ways to learn them, but they need to be learned. And so it isn't a choice. You've got to do both, got to do all three things. So that's, and that's where we're going, but it's going to require employers and HR people to get much more granular about who it is they're looking for, what are the skills and abilities and behaviors, and live with that, which makes a lot of them pretty antsy, frankly, today, and then asking colleges to do this. This is what we need. We don't need what you have on the shelf. We need this, and getting colleges to do it. So if you were a policymaker now, what advice would you give to people who are policymakers now, who are looking at the issue of how do we get people out of industries like trucking that may be automated out within the next three or four years when they're fairly lucrative for getting a credential that didn't necessarily require an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree? What advice would you give to policymakers now? One of the things, we're right at the beginning, but I think we've got to change the way we spend money. Now, institutions need financial support, and I believe that public higher education and private higher education, but public, I'll stick with that for now, is part of the checks and balances of a civil society. In other words, we all think about that as the government and the constitution and all that. Yes, but more broadly, in the society, there is a check and a balance around people's lives, social, civic, and economic lives and the overall good of the society. And I think that's what's at stake here. I think we're going to see a movement. I read an idea today that some of the federal funding, I think it was Title IV, the idea was it might be put into personal learning accounts. There may be ways to alter tax policies so that when you spend money on yourself in specifically pre-approved programs or pathways, you get a tax break. But I think, so I think if I were a policymaker, that's one thing. The other thing with accreditation and federal regulation, I would promote what I call innovation contracts. And that's my term, there's nothing special about it. But what I mean by that is if a college sees a way they want to change the way they do business, maybe they want to affiliate with a boot camp. Maybe they want to do something else. But it will be in violation or it will rub up against the federal regulation or their accreditation. So this would be a way for them to approach the accreditor and say this is what we want to do and the accreditor has five criteria and you have to meet these criteria and then we'll give you five years to try it. And if it works, by the end of third year you're going to build it out and at the end of the third year if it isn't working you're going to put it to bed. But giving people the ability to experiment without losing their accreditation. And if the accreditor says it's okay then the federal government says it's okay. That would be my, that way I'd do it. So I think there are things we can do that loosen up the reins of authority on what is quality higher ed and what is not to let people experiment. Because some of them are going to succeed and some of them are going to fail. But if we can't experiment and try new things we're not going to get out of the box. So I would think, I guess the last thing I'd say is innovation contracts, that's my term for it. I think, and changing the way the money flows a little bit I think those things are going to happen. Okay, well thank you for that. What about for entities like Sailor Academy and as you already know Sailor not only provides free courses for anyone anywhere to learn but we partner with colleges particularly a lot of the adult friendly colleges that you mentioned in your book to provide credit pathways and lower cost pathways to a degree. What advice would you give Sailor Academy and entities like ours who are working to lower the, to partner with higher education, lower the cost to education and create opportunities and access to education worldwide? I think I'm not as comfortable talking about that just because it's not where I have lived my life. But I think it's the same as what I would say to a college and that is in the world we're going into nobody's going to be good at everything. So you need to decide at Sailor what it is you want to be world-class at. And then you look for partners. Wherever they may be academic partners, employment partners, data analytics partners, to maximize the value of what you do very, very well and don't make the mistake of thinking you can be all things to all people or you can control all of the drivers of quality because nobody's going to be able to afford to control all the drivers of quality. So you gotta sort of see, where do we want to be in five years? And then you sort of reverse engineer back to today and say, where are we now? And so then that will tell you do we deepen our partnerships with higher education? Do we find someone who wants to do this job conversion translation to the workplace? Like Burning Glass or MC are two companies that are really doing great stuff with job information. Or do we want to create a personal pathing application so when somebody comes to Sailor and I only get content but they get a chance to try out different career paths and educational paths in a game like atmosphere without having to risk their skin. So, you know, but the main thing is to decide the one or two things you want to be good at, decide longer term, what is the impact you want to be part of and then find the partners because it's all going to be partners. Awesome. Any other parting thoughts about either the book or what you've learned from kind of the journey that you've taken that you'd like to share? Yes, I think, I didn't know you're gonna ask me that question but there are two or three things that come to my mind and I'll try to be uncharacteristically brief. One is that I think of people getting the learning they need and having it valued as a social justice issue of the first rank because we have been very good in our society at telling people that they didn't go to college, it's their fault and even more implying that they're stupid. It's just not the case. We have talent and capacity walking around this country that is unrecognized and potential that is unrecognized and we need to tap it and we need to do that for their good and for the society's good because everybody when you make more money you spend a little more money and that's good for you and good for the people who are giving you the services of the food or the haircut or whatever it is you want. So I think there really is a compelling social issue as well as a fairness and respect issue. This is about respecting if I am an indigenous, come from an indigenous background, I have history, I have culture, it should be respected. We should find ways to count my life experience, anybody's life experience in a legitimate way but there's respect and all the things we're talking about I'm respecting the life. We are respecting the lives of people who come to us. So I think that's really, really important and I think the last thing I'd say is that if we can make, that this is, I'll put it in, what I learned personally I'm pretty much what I look like, okay? I was born unfortunately not to a lot of money but to a lot of privilege and I have redefined privilege having done this work. My privilege is that I've never lost a fight that I didn't choose and I've chosen some and I've lost some but I chose them. These folks were losing fights before the turning point they're losing fights every day they never asked for and that's what this is about is saying we've got to get straight with these folks. It's not a personal blame, it is a condition of life and we have an obligation to do something about it with them and that to me is what has motivated me for 50 years but I really got it much deeper doing these interviews, much deeper. You see kind of a common thread of people realizing or having heard or having told themselves that they're not necessarily college material which I hate that term but then kind of taking almost a harder path because they're not being pushed through a path or facilitated through a path they're having to initiate it on their own and coming out of the process even more empowered and able to self-actualize. And they exactly and it is harder because you and that's where the high support doing this is hard enough all by itself so what we need to do is make the adult friendly college the experience itself. Think of this, when you go to Nordstrom's or shop on Amazon, they give you a cause here. It's a friendly user experience. They want you in there and at colleges we've made it historically hard and the term we use for graduation is persistence. Well the whole image is that it's like going uphill in the winter in an ice storm. Well no, we want the learning itself is hard enough so let's make it as user friendly as we can so that you can get to the learning and stay with the learning and complete the learning. To me that's the key. Absolutely. Thank you so much Dr. Smith, really appreciate your time. Thank you, thanks Salem. Yes, absolutely. Well please do, if you are an adult student know an adult student or think you might be interested in any facet of learning, please do check out free range learning. We'll include a link as well. And Dr. Smith, thank you so much again for your time. My pleasure, my pleasure. Absolutely.