 My name is Mary Alice McCarthy, and I direct the Center on Education and Skills at New America. For those of you not familiar with New America, we are a nonpartisan public policy think tank and dedicated to the renewal of American politics and prosperity during these times of profound social, economic, and technological change. We are located in Washington, DC. The Center on Education and Skills is a research and advocacy program that sits at the intersection of our education, workforce development, and labor policies and systems. Our goal is to strengthen linkages between learning and work, schools and local economies, and education and economic mobility. We're here today to talk about community college bachelor degree programs. And this is normally when I'm meeting with people in person, the moment in which I have to stop for a minute because the person I'm talking to often has a quizzical look on their face of community college bachelor degree programs and I say yes. In fact, many community colleges today across the country deliver bachelor's degrees and a variety of different fields. And while this has not necessarily penetrated into sort of the common sort of understanding of what community colleges do, it is increasingly a reality. In fact, as of last count, 23 states allowed community colleges in their state to deliver some form of a bachelor degree program. And in just the last two years, over six states have passed legislation in relation to community college baccalaureate programs from Oregon and California to Wyoming and Missouri. So yes, bachelor degree programs at community colleges are a thing. And over the last two years with the generous support of Lumina Foundation and the Jury's Foundation, we've had the enormous privilege to be able to dig into these programs and the policies surrounding them to learn about how they're designed, who they serve, and what sort of outcomes they generate. We've been joined in this effort by a team of researchers at the Community College Research Initiative at the University of Washington led by Dr. Deborah Bragg. So a big thank you to our partners in the other Washington some would say the better Washington and these days I would definitely be the load to disagree with that. A big thank you to our funders, Lumina Foundation and the Jury's Foundation, and a big, big thank you to the many people in the colleges and state agencies around the country who have helped us with our research. Today we're going to present some of our findings, our research findings, but before we do I just want to share a few thoughts on why we believe this research and more importantly these programs are so important and so timely. I'm sure everyone participating in this event knows that the bachelor's degree is increasingly a stark dividing line in America. Beginning in the 1980s and the 1990s, bachelor degree workers began pulling away from other workers and today the college premium stands at over $30,000 a year. But it's not just earnings that differ between people with a master's degree and people without bachelor degree workers are able to access better jobs that are more likely to include benefits like health insurance and paid leave. They're also less likely to be laid off and they have an easier time finding jobs when they are laid off and they're generally in better physical and economic health than their counterparts without a bachelor's degree. This has been true for a while and it's even becoming it's even more starkly revealed than ever in this time that we're in right now in 2020 as the country finds itself in another deep and potentially job destroying recession. For the most part, the workers who are suffering most by the pandemic induced recession are those with the least education. And if the last recovery is any, any sort of predictor that's not likely to get better as the jobs that are permanently displaced are likely to be those with the least education and the new jobs that are created are likely to require higher levels of education. But it's not just individuals with bachelor's degree who seem to live in a different America from those without. It's also whole communities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, there is a clear connection between the number of college educated workers in the state and wage levels. People in states with communities, people in states and communities with more college educated workers make more money than people in states or communities with fewer college educated workers. In short, people and places with bachelor's degrees are doing better on almost every measure of human well-being than those without. But if we look at the distribution of bachelor's degree across our bachelor's degrees across our population, we see some very disturbing trends. We understand a much better chance than others of completing a bachelor's degree program, and those differences are not random. Rather, they build on and reinforce disparities and degree attainment based on race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and geography. According to the Education Trust, 14% of African American adults and 11% of Hispanic adults hold a bachelor's degree compared to 24% of white adults, a gap that has remained stable over several decades despite increasing enrollments in higher education across all groups. One group of students that particularly struggle to complete their bachelor's degrees are those students who start at a community college. Many of these students begin their journey to a bachelor's degree at a community college because the colleges are affordable and very accessible. Community colleges are also likely to offer career focused programs that allow students to get into the labor market quickly, which can be very attractive to first generation and adult learners. So community colleges do in fact offer an affordable way to start working on a bachelor's degree and they were designed that way. And as we all know, completing that process requires the student to move, to transfer to a different institution in order to finish their degree. And this transfer process is rarely seamless, particularly for those students enrolled in the programs at community colleges that were more career focused. According to a report from the GAO, students lose on average 40% of their credits when they transfer from one institution to another. And those credits translate into substantial additional coursework at the university level, which is going to be significantly more expensive. So it's not surprising that the more credits a student loses during the transfer process, the less likely they are to complete a bachelor's degree. This is a system that was clearly built before the dawn of user centered design because you would never design something this way if you were starting out today. It's a system designed around the needs of institutions to have clear boundaries between them, not the needs of students for seamless progression. So what can we do instead? One thing we know from a lot of higher education research is that students are more likely to complete their bachelor's degree if they can finish where they start. One of the reasons we got so excited about community college baccalaureate programs is because this is precisely a program model that allows community college students to finish their bachelor's degree where they start. So we started this research, this ambitious research project back in 2018 and we wanted to learn everything we could about these programs, how they operate with and who they serve. With a particular idea, the question of whether they can be an effective strategy for addressing disparities in degree attainment across different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Specifically, we wanted to learn about what these programs are and how do they work? What are the fields that they're in? How are they designed? How are they delivered? Who are the students in the programs and do those students differ in any important ways from students in four-year institutions? In this area, we were particularly interested in whether or not these programs seem to be serving a different student population and whether or not the graduates from these programs were adding to the overall level of, overall number of bachelor's degree graduates in the state, or whether or not we were just seeing students moving around between institutions and it was the same overall number. We'll have some information on that. What are the outcomes for students in these programs? In particular, do they suffer any penalty for having completed a bachelor's degree at a community college? Because that would be the last thing we would want to see would be even more stratification within our higher education system or within our system of bachelor degree awards. And then of course, we wanted to look at what could go wrong and what are the state policies that could help ensure programs are both high quality and well targeted and what would be policies that would not ensure that or have the opposite effect. So it's been a very busy two years and a really fun two years filled with a variety of quantitative and qualitative research activities and a whole lot of publications. Unfortunately, we can't share all of our work with you today, but we will be posting links to our published works throughout the course of the event in the chat box. So please keep an eye out for that. We've got lots of publications that will be popping up there, program profile, student profile, state policy guides, advocacy guides, research notes, etc. Today we'll be sharing the results from some of our quantitative analyses and we'll also hear from students, researchers and state and campus leaders about their experiences with community college baccalaureate programs. So now I just want to close with one more thought before I hand it over. Our research has led us to become strong advocates and supporters of community college baccalaureate education with lots of caveats of course around appropriate state and institutional policies to ensure the programs are high quality and well targeted. But I want to be clear that what we are not saying is that we believe everyone should have to get a bachelor's degree to get a good job in America. And we're also not saying that we're not concerned about credential creep and about the exclusionary effect that bachelor degree requirements have on our economy. Quite the contrary, we actually at the Center on Education and Skills have a robust body of work focused on building pathways to good jobs without having to complete a bachelor's degree. We believe strongly that we need new models of career preparation that can be completed in less than four years and don't require a college degree. And we believe that we do need more ways of assessing and credentialing learning that occurs on the job or through non traditional types of training and education. What we are saying though is that we have thousands of students each year who want to complete a bachelor's degree program and are up against very tough odds for doing so. And we have an obligation to create more opportunities for success for those students. These are our most vulnerable students and we have set up structural barriers to their advancement that is thwarting their progress. Consider this, according to a survey by the Century Foundation, the large majority of students who enroll in community college state that the bachelor's degree a bachelor's degree is their ultimate goal. However, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse, less than a third of community college students who first enrolled in 2010 transferred to a four year institution successfully. And of those only 42% completed their degree in six years. That's 13% of the original cohort. Transfer and graduation rates are especially low for African American, Hispanic and low income students who are significantly more likely to attend community college than white and middle income and higher income students. In fact, studies of community college transfer consistently show disproportionately low odds of a bachelor's degree for minority students, especially African Americans, a phenomenon that researchers call the racial transfer gap. Our own research to just hammered home for us. The need to sort of address these structural barriers in higher education and these structural inequities and the opportunities that community college baccalaureate programs offer to do that. There's a lot of talk about the need for innovation and higher education today. And we think that many of the programs we looked at in Washington and Florida are among the most innovative bachelor's degrees we've ever seen. Not because of technology, although many of them use technology in very innovative ways, but because they are designed from the beginning with adult and working learners in mind. I think sometimes the most impactful innovations don't require a technological breakthrough as much as they require a perspective breakthrough. That is the ability to see the opportunity that's sitting right in front of you hiding in plain sight. We have thousands of community colleges. We have thousands of people who need baccalaureate level education we need to find we believe we can find ways to bring these together. So we're not saying that everyone needs to complete a bachelor's degree but we are saying we need to do better for students and communities that do want them. I do want bachelor's degrees but can't find a program that meets them where they are, which is quite literally at a community college. And that's what we're here to discuss today. We hope you'll engage with us. Lots of questions. Please use the chat, the chat feature and the q&a feature and and please follow up with us after we're always happy to talk about our research and our findings. So again, thank you for attending. Thank you to everyone for participating. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to zooms are Angela. I'm Gregory Hale, the president of Broward College. In 2008, Florida enacted legislation to allow all community colleges to offer bachelor's degree programs. The statute has strengthened the mission of Broward College, which is transforming students lives and enriching our diverse community to academic excellence, innovation, and meaningful career opportunities. In granting this authority to community colleges, the legislature recognized the increased economic and educational needs of older students to access baccalaureate degree programs. The legislation allows us to expand access to four year degrees and areas that meet the skills gap in our local workforce. Community colleges were founded on the belief that a more skilled workforce would result in a robust economy. As curriculum design based on what employers are looking for baccalaureate degree programs create seamless next steps for students in some career programs that may not otherwise be readily available at traditional four year institutions. These baccalaureate degree programs support students who may be older or who because of income, family or life circumstances often cannot enroll in a university program to pursue a bachelor's degree. This is a critical part of our focus on equity. Many of these students are managing professional and family responsibilities. They work full time are often caregivers to children or other family members and do not have the flexibility to participate in classes during the day. Community colleges offer evening weekend and online options to help them pursue their academics while fulfilling their personal commitments. Broward College currently offers nine bachelor's degrees fulfilling professional demands in areas such as nursing, teacher training, business, information technology and aerospace science. In the 2019-2020 academic year Broward College served more than 3200 students enrolled in these bachelor's degree programs. Close to 7 out of 10 of these students identified as black or Hispanic. 50% were over 30 years of age. 26% were between the ages of 25 and 29 and 18% were between the ages of 22 and 24. The highest enrollment in the last academic year was in programs with increased demand in our region such as supervision and management, information technology and nursing. With some 44% of students enrolled at Broward College being first generation and college students. Many of them face barriers to higher education and require student support services to help them succeed. Community colleges have student support services designed to address achievement gaps that result from these barriers and have the capacity to help students build to succeed in their academic goals. Coupled with this is the return on investment to students who pursue their academic credentials at institutions like Broward College. They graduate with lower debt and according to our 2020 independent study produced by Florida Tax Watch, graduates who earn a degree from Broward College substantially increase their earnings and quality of life upon graduation. In fact, for every $1 that a Broward College graduate spends on their education, they can expect to earn $6.63 in additional personal income over a working career. Baccalaureate degree programs at community colleges are not competitive with but complement programs offered by universities. As part of the process here in Florida, we work with the State Board of Education to develop programs based on demand and unmet needs. Our programs are designed to focus not only on curriculum, but also on a clear demonstration of the necessary facilities and academic resources. Offering Baccalaureate degree programs through public colleges like Broward College is even more pertinent now than ever as we seek to help our country recover from our current economic challenges. Thanks to Baccalaureate degrees and other career-focused training, institutions like Barr College and our other community colleges already have programming in place that are structured to respond to our local economy's recovery and its expansion. Hi, I'm Holly Zanville, a Strategy Director at Lumina Foundation. Most folks don't know that I was working in a state, Washington, at the launch of the Community College Baccalaureate Movement there more than 15 years ago. One of my roles as Chief Academic Officer at the Washington Hard Education Coordinating Board was to sit on the advisory group, exploring community college Baccalaureate developments being led by the Washington State Board for community and technical colleges. This was a controversial discussion then, as it is still now in many states. Back then, many folks were pushing the Coordinating Board to try to stop the train in Washington because the four-year institutions were not going to like this, or the mission of the community colleges was going to drift, or community college resources were going to get too thinned out, or community college faculty might not offer as high-quality degrees as the universities, or the four-year institutions would lose students and be negatively impacted. I was determined to keep an open mind then. I was thinking about students and the limited options many students had to complete Baccalaureate degrees in our state, especially in some career areas that were not even being offered by the universities. That's about the time I left Washington and joined the Lumina Foundation. Whereby happenstance, at one of my earliest meetings at the foundation, there was a convening on transfer between two and four-year institutions, and I had the very unique opportunity to have a private conversation with a very famous higher education researcher whose name I won't mention. He shared his view with me that it didn't make sense for the US to expect between a half million to a million students each year to pick up and transfer from a two to a four-year institution. He said the prognosis for this would always be fraught with plumbing problems. We would always have many leaky faucets. Thinking that community college students are going to make the massive migration swimming upstream every year to a four-year institution seem to him like a questionable policy and practice. Yeah, that's the system we have built and mostly standby. He said it would make more sense for many even large numbers of students to stay where they are, complete the baccalaureate when they need to, when they want to, at a community college they know and that is nearby. It was not a popular thing for him to say, and he did not express his view widely, but he said it to me and it has always stuck with me. My takeaway was and still is our job is to make it easier for students to find their educational highways and offer many different pathways to a baccalaureate degree. Remove the roadblocks to degrees and smooth out the potholes in our complicated, not very well built highways and side roads of our credentialing system. Basically, don't build highways that many cannot get to or stay on to complete their degrees. So whenever someone questions the concept of a community college baccalaureate degree, I think of that conversation and the angst back in Washington nearly two decades ago. And looking at the growth and the outcomes of community college baccalaureate programs now, I do have a bias. I am a proponent of these degrees because they offer needed pathways. Most of these students will not go to a four year institution and these programs must meet the standards set by the community of stakeholders, employers, faculty, policymakers and students. I'm looking forward to hearing the latest data from Mary Alice McCarthy and her team at New America and Deb Bragg's team at the University of Washington on the outcomes of community college baccalaureate programs in Florida and Washington and other developments in the landscape. And a huge thank you to those of you working in the community college baccalaureate community to develop more accessible pathways for students to quality and needed baccalaureate degrees. I'm thinking today about community college baccalaureate programs why I think they matter and what we know from the evidence that is currently out there. So, as far as why I think they matter I'm interested in the equity and effectiveness of higher education so that has implications for not only community colleges but also state policies that affect higher education and underserved students specifically. So when we think about community college baccalaureate programs. So what I'm interested in is that it kind of like has a little bit of a deviation from the traditional community college mission. And a lot of my work is really arguing this idea that not necessarily so it can it can be responsive to local workforce shortages. And I think that's directly aligned with the mission of community colleges so what we want to know is what do we know about the impact of baccalaureate programs, and although there's a lot of really strong descriptive and qualitative work. There's a lot of evidence on the impact of these programs. So my work is looked at the impact as far as associate degree production, the impact of tuition increases, and most recently some collaborative work with Dr. Dennis Kramer and one of our doctoral students at the University of Florida Jackie Donovan. We looked at what happens as far as the impact of community college baccalaureate programs. Specifically, we looked at this idea of competition between community college baccalaureate programs in the four year sector of higher education. And what we found we really think is important. Although there are a lot of predatory and problematic practices of for profit institutions. One thing we know about for profit four years is they're responsive to local labor market needs, and they're innovative in that way, and community college baccalaureates really are kind of filling the needs of public higher education to be responsive to local workforce shortages and labor market demands and higher education, typically focusing specifically on nursing programs, teaching programs, it, etc. So here's what we found, we found that whenever community college baccalaureate programs were adopted, enrollment and degree production only went down at the nearby four year for profit institutions. And why is that important because when you offer a really affordable degree program such as the community college baccalaureate program, which typically serves working adults, low income students in a disproportionate share of underrepresented minorities. It's really important to give them an affordable option so with a community college baccalaureate program. There are really important implications when we think about getting access to a bachelor's degree for folks who may not be able to go to college otherwise, and hopefully keeping their student loan debt low, and really providing them with a high quality public education so this is something where we found, although there's a concern, as far as the public discourse as far as will this take away from four year programs what we found in our work is not for public higher education, those enrollment and degree production production decreases are solely restricted within for profit four year higher education. Hi, I'm Samir Gadguri senior program officer for education and economic mobility at the Joyce Foundation. At Joyce, we've been focused on what it would take for us to close race and family income based gaps at the baccalaureate level. And as you may know, those gaps have been widening for some decades and appear poised to continue to widen. The worry is that as the labor market shifts to requiring more bachelor's degrees in fields like nursing and early childhood, and in some cases it and manufacturing. It's ever more important for public higher ed systems to understand how they can adapt to that change and ensure that students have affordable accessible options near them. In order for them to be able to move into those jobs. But worry, of course, would be that if we are unable to provide that. First of all, we are creating more debt for those students. And second of all, we may be exacerbating some of the underlying inequalities in those labor market fields like nursing and making it more difficult for black Latino and first generation students to get to those career pads. As we think about the community college baccalaureate research, it's so important that 23 states have responded to some of these changes in the labor market by allowing community colleges to offer these degrees. We know that when states don't respond to these other market changes, students either can't go into some of these careers, they end up going to more costly, perhaps for profit higher ed options. And they're sometimes have a much more fraught trajectory to get to that bachelor's degree. And so we think that it's really exciting the work that New America and the University of Washington have been doing over the past few years to look into what exactly it means across the country to offer community college baccalaureates. How it's going in the states that have been doing it the longest, and ultimately we're excited that it can be a way of addressing the deep racial and family income based stratification of our higher education system, and perhaps preserving an affordable path to the middle class. Thank you. Hello, my name is Jay Malin Penn, and I am the director of transfer education at the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, which is seated in Olympia, Washington. I'm really excited to talk with you today about some of the great work that we're doing at the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Where we have a really sound, solid mission and our mission is to support and empower the Washington State Community and Technical Colleges that we serve to increase higher education opportunities and student participation. And that's through advocacy resources, information leadership and accountability. And one of the key things that we do at the State Board is we support all students toward the attainment of their educational goals. And that's whether that be with a certificate, an associate's degree, or in our sector also bachelor's degrees. Our population of students is quite diverse. In Washington State system wide, 48% of our students, of our student population is students of color. And many of those students are actually enrolled in our community and technical colleges. Our data that we have at the State Board indicates that there is some racial equity, there are some racial equity gaps in our completion rates, and we're doing some really hard and challenging work to change that paradigm. And so we're working hard to close the equity gap between white students and students of color. And we're beginning to see, I believe we're beginning to see some really good progress. One of the ways that we have prompted this work around closing the equity gap is around a vision statement that was approved through our State Board and Community College Board of Trustees. And that we have imparted externally and shared broadly. And that there is buy into this we're really working on it that vision statement is that leading with racial equity, our colleges maximize student potential and transforms lives and transforms lives within a culture of belonging that advances racial, social and economic justice in service to our diverse communities. And that's really key because we were doing this work but leading this work or looking at this work with leading with a racial equity lens is a little bit different. But it is also something that's essential and that has proven to be quite helpful helpful as we are all working in our system collaboratively to change the paradigm and to dismantle that gap between our white students and our students of color. Another way that we're doing this work is around guided pathways. So we're also looking at closing equity gaps when we look at the work that we're doing around guided pathways and we know in our State Board and Community Technical College sector, we know how imperative it is to get students on an educational pathway early, and that once they're on that pathway that we build a system of support to help them stay involved through completion. And, again, in the past when we talked about completion we meant earning an industry certification, or an associate's degree that led to direct employment in the workforce. But today, today in our sector in Washington State, our community and technical colleges, we have well over 100 applied baccalaureate degrees. And our community colleges offer baccalaureate degrees in many different fields, everything from cybersecurity and radiation and imaging sciences to data analytics and manufacturing operations and nursing. And our colleges are really furthering the guided pathway efforts by helping students to build out their educational opportunities beyond the associate's degree. So our applied baccalaureate degrees are furthering our vision and our mission to really particularly the mission around leading with racial equity. I'm sure that all students, including students of color, are able to reach their educational goals and to be able to find work opportunities upon graduation that meet the needs of their families, and that really helped to serve them in that capacity. What I'd like to share is that 44% of the students enrolled in our applied baccalaureate degrees in the fall quarter of 2019 were students of color, or they are students of color. And this compares to 48% of students of color enrolled in any capacity in any of our colleges. And so you can see again that we've done some really great work with our vision and the work that we've done with guided pathways. And the work that I continue to do as I serve in this particular role, working with our colleges around applied baccalaureate degrees. So as I'm thinking about this, and as I round out this conversation with you, I'd like to talk about community college applied baccalaureate degrees and what we have to offer here for our students. Our programs, our community and technical colleges are quite affordable for our students who have already been with us, completing their applied baccalaureate, I'm sorry, completing their associate's degrees. The applied baccalaureate degrees, the community is quite familiar to them, they know the good work that we do and that we have provided the resources that they need to help them to be successful and workforce. And they are coming back to us and asking us and enrolling in our applied baccalaureate degree programs. And so the results that we're finding is that the students, like the financial aspect of it, they like the locale, because many of them are place found, and we're starting to see results. And what we're learning is that the mean annual income of a graduate with an applied baccalaureate degree is on average 29% higher than a graduate in the field with who has an associate's degree. So providing opportunities for students to increase their earning potential is so very important, especially now that we have come upon unprecedented economic times and downturn in our recession. We really believe and know that we're doing some great work to impact our student populations, particularly our most marginalized and sometimes greatest impacted students of color. We're learning that this recession has really had a profound impact in those communities. We're demonstrating in our system that we're doing the work and that our students are enrolling, they're finishing their associate's degrees, and they're enrolling in a large percentage in our applied baccalaureate degrees. And those graduates, it's really going to impact their lives and make a significant difference. So I'm glad I had an opportunity to talk with you today. Thank you for the time and be well. Hello, I'm Tony Carnavali. I'm the director of the Georgetown University Center on education and the workforce. Let me start by saying that for me, access to the BA and graduate school has become a race and class justice question, increased racial and class based tracking and higher education is already out of control. And seems to be gathering momentum in part because of the growing emphasis on short term training and sub baccalaureate awards that are not directly connected to the BA that is there's no pathway to the BA. I don't think expanding training options is a bad thing in and of itself so long as the programs deliver a good job and particular field of study. But if we aren't careful, they will only encourage higher education's natural instinct in its natural elitist tendency to track affluent white students into BA's and graduate degrees and leave black, Latino and low income white students and the sub baccalaureate educational sector and labor market. And that's that's not a good thing. First of all, the sub BA job market is not where most of the jobs are, including most of the good jobs. And that's true in the past and will be true in the future. For example, if we look at where the jobs were in 19 2019 before COVID jobs that paid more than $35,000 a year give them some income minimum. In 2019, there were 17 million jobs that paid at least 35 grand a year that were available to high school graduates and high school dropouts. 17 million of those and then there were 21 million jobs that paid at least 35 grand a year for those with some college, including certificates or an AA and associate of science degree, or an associate of applied science degree. But in 2019 that same year, there were almost 40 million jobs that paid at least $35,000 a year there were available to bachelor's degree holders and graduate degree holders. That's where the jobs are. Because the economy recovers we need to be mindful that the number of decent BA and graduate school jobs will combine together will actually about equal all the other sub BA jobs that pay 35 grand in the economy. So, and as the economy recovers from COVID, the jobs will come back the usual way. The people with the BA's and graduate degrees will get, they were the last fired and they will be the first hired. And suddenly, I think tracking blacks Latinos and low income whites into the sub BA sector should be a concern, because affluent white families have already built enormous future advantages over African Americans Latinos and lower income white families because of their surge to the BA, beginning in the mid 1980s. The white flight to the suburbs created a white middle class ready for the BA. When in the 80s, the economy made college, the gold standard for membership in the middle and upper middle class in the United States. The result of white flight to the BA and graduate school is an increasing intergenerational reproduction of race and class privilege. For example, among young people 21 to 35 years old, over the last 30 years, the white population is declined by 8.3 million young whites. And over the same period we have added 5 million new white BA's and graduate degrees. Presently the share of black workers with a bachelor's degree or higher is roughly equivalent to the share of white workers with a bachelor's degree or higher in 1991. A bachelor's degree or higher attainment for Latinos is about where it was for white workers in the middle of the 1980s. And only 15% of white youth from bottom quartile family income attain a bachelor's degree or graduate degree by age 25 compared with 63% of white youth from the top quartile of family income. Finally, we all know that starting at a community college that doesn't give a BA has never been the best route to get a BA, even among equally qualified students. The best path to the BA is to start out at an institution that gives them. Among students who start out at a two-year college, only 11% go on to get a BA within five years, compared to 59% among students who start out at a four-year college or university. Right now 30% of black students begin their post-secondary experiences at a community college and only 13% of these black students earn a bachelor's degree within five years. Right now 39% of Latino students begin their post-secondary experiences at a community college and only 18% of these Latino students who begin at a community college earn a bachelor's degree within five years. Right now 34% of low-income white students begin their post-secondary experiences at a community college and only 8% of these low-income white kids earn a bachelor's degree within five years. And it's not just because there aren't enough students qualified to pursue the BA. That's the common excuse. But in fact, every year 500,000 students graduate from the upper half of their high school class in the upper half of the test score distribution in their high school class and don't get a college degree within at least eight years as far as we can follow them after high school. And if they had gone to a four-year college, given their test scores, they would have had a better than 70% chance of graduating from one of the top 500 four-year schools. It's not about an undersupply of qualified kids. That's not what's going on here. Nor does the demography favor BAs for minorities and less advantaged white students in the future. In fact, our future demography virtually ensures a growing divide in BA and non-BA attainment by race, ethnicity, and class. The overall size of the college age population over the next several years, especially in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and parts of the Midwest, will decline. The only growth will be in the south and the west. And a growing share of that growth will be from disadvantaged black, Latino, and low-income white students, all of whom do not tend to have parents with college degrees and are much less likely to ever attain a BA. And at the same time, as America continues to become more and more unequal, the high-income market for selective colleges like Georgetown, where I teach, should also grow, causing even further race and class tracking in the selective four-year colleges. In spite of the overall decline in 18 to 24-year-old population going forward, as income inequality grows, this share of students with both parents who have a BA and the bank accounts and intergenerational wealth that go with that will increase by 7 percentage points. And if they look to be these relatively rich kids, look to be 30% of all enrollees by 2030. So all things considered, I agree we need to allow community colleges to grant bachelor's degrees beyond the 23 states that already give BA's in two-year colleges. But I think we need to go at least two steps further than that. In addition to allowing two-year colleges to award BA's, we also need to strengthen our transfer systems and demand that all public four-year colleges every year allocated at least 20% of their overall enrollment to students who transfer from two-year colleges. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you, Tony. And thank you to all of our panelists. That's really great information. And we love the way you've started. You've started us off today. I am Deborah Bragg. I'm the founding director of the research community college research initiatives group at the University of Washington. As you've learned over the last couple of years, our group at UW has been working with Mary Alice McCarthy and her team at New America. We've taken a deep dive into community college baccalaureate because we think this is one of the most important emerging concerns and innovations in higher education today. We're assessing how community college baccalaureate can create a pathway to high quality credentials all the way to the baccalaureate. And that's something that we don't talk about very much in this context of community colleges conferring those degrees. I want to thank all of our panelists for your really great comments. And as researchers, our team has worked together. And I want to assure you that our approach has been to maintain an open mind, but use the most rigorous methods that we can. As Justin pointed out, much of our work is descriptive, and that's because these programs are relatively new and the numbers of students are growing. And I'm going to a point where the kind of impact research he was talking about is so vitally important. We have worked most closely with the two leading states in the country with Florida, the true pioneer, and Washington State wasn't very far behind as Holly Zanville explained. We chose these two states because we wanted to look at that whole pathway. We wanted to look at access, enrollment, completion, and employment. And we are very grateful to the Florida College System and to the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, as well as the Washington Education Research Data Center for working with us and helping us amass the data we needed to do our work. I also want to direct you to our websites when you get a chance to meet the outstanding research teams from both of our organizations. We won't have time to introduce everybody today, but please do check out our work and see who has been doing this work. Today, I be love of New America and Elizabeth Apple, Mesa, who works with me at UW will be presenting major results from our research. They will use system data to show you completion and employment results. In the case of Washington, Elizabeth will be comparing our community college graduates to public regional university graduates in similar programs. In Florida, Ivy will be comparing CCB graduates to associate degree graduates in similar programs. Together, this collection of work extends well beyond any studies we had had on community college baccalaureate programs today. The results are very important to policy and program changes, and we appreciate this opportunity to study the most mature state in the country. I ask you to listen closely to Ivy and Elizabeth's comments and use the chat box to enter your questions. My colleague Iris Palmer will be moderating the Q&A when Ivy and Elizabeth wrap up. So I'd like to turn this over to Ivy Love for her presentation. Deb, thank you so much for the introduction. Let me just share my screen real quick with you all, and let's get this presentation started. Hi again. I'm Ivy Love. I'm a senior policy analyst at New America. I'm really grateful for all of you being here with us today to hear about our new research that we're discussing. Just today, we actually released my findings in a paper, so I am going to give you an abbreviated version of my findings from Florida today, and I am going to be that researcher and tell you if you want a deeper look to please see my paper. Let's get right into what I can in the 15 minutes that I've got here. So, but before I do that, just real quickly, I want to take a step back to a little bit earlier in our research where we did a national landscape of CCB state policy that was led by the team at CCRI, particularly Deb Bragg and Maria Claudia Soler. And so I want to give you this visual here, just so you can kind of see the expanse of CCB states that we're looking at. So as Mary Alice mentioned earlier, and as Dr. Carnival, I mentioned, we've got 23 states now that authorize community college baccalaureates. Some states, you can see the different colors on the map, like for example, Oklahoma may only allow one community college one public two year institution in the state to convert confer these bachelor's degrees. Whereas other states, like my home state of Missouri, theoretically any community college in the state, if it met a series of criteria laid out in state policy, could operate a bachelor's program. I also want to point out that we have three additional states on this map, Montana, Minnesota and Arizona, for which public community colleges are not authorized to offer bachelor's degrees, but public tribal colleges are. So we just wanted to point that out as well. And as Deb just mentioned, the two states that have been doing this the longest that have the richest data are the two states that Elizabeth and I are going to focus on Washington and Florida. So let's talk about Florida here. So, um, what I had to analyze was aggregate data from the Florida Department of Education to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for helping me get these data. I analyzed the demographics, the employment rates and the wages of graduates. Now that included bachelors degrees graduates and associate degree graduates in similar areas of study. So for example, Florida college institutions Florida community colleges have both associate degrees and bachelor's degrees and respiratory therapy. So those went into my sample. But if it's only one or the other, they did not go in my sample what that ended up giving me was about 42% of baccalaureate graduates from the system in 2016 2017 and 2018 and 10,000 bachelors graduates and 24,000 associate degree graduates in those fields. Those programs were aggregated a bit more into a broader area of study, just to avoid more suppressed values. So for my higher ed researchers in the room, they were aggregated to the two digit sip. Those were the broader groups that they were in so just a broad area of study. As you can see on this slide, I can have three areas that I'm focusing on again, demographics, employment and wages and for my presentation today I'm just going to talk about demographics and wages and the employment is is in the paper I'll drop the link in the chat and if you want to take a look and email me and ask any questions later that's great. All right, so let's look at who's graduating in these years from bachelor's programs at Florida community colleges. All right, so I put all three years of graduates together. And overall, this is the racial and ethnic breakdown that we came up with. So the first thing is that I want to let you know that each one of these groups was within one percentage point of the depth of the racial and ethnic breakdown of associate graduates in my sample. So really, really similar between those two educational levels. We're not dropping off anywhere. I also want to say that for black folks who graduated from these programs, as well as our Asian American Pacific Islander and native Hawaiian graduates and white graduates, they were all within one percentage point of the population of Florida overall. So in those ways, folks who are in this sample did mirror the Florida population. We are coming up short in this sample compared to both Latinx folks in the population of Florida, and compared to the share of Latinx folks at state universities in Florida so I think we've got we've got a little more work to do there but we've got some promising trends as well. So now I want to show you who we had in terms of gender I'm going to give you two versions of this which I'll explain. So without any changes looking at my whole sample, 70% of my sample was female and we had about 1% of students who we did not know their gender. About half of my sample were nurses. That's a very heavily female dominated occupation. So the second version of this I'm going to show you is if we take nurses out, then we're down to 56% women 44% men. This is really, really close to the national breakdown of bachelor's graduates at universities at community colleges at other institutions. This is pretty well consistent with what things look like nationally so really, really similar. Now let's talk about age group as a couple of folks have mentioned already. One of the most important access points for students who are older, who may not be coming straight from an associate program who may have been working for a while and then in their occupation they're expected to go a little bit further in their education. So this is the whole sample everybody in all of the sectors included in the analysis altogether. Here we've got about 58% of folks who are 30 years old or older. I should point out by the way, everyone was in age buckets when I got the data. I didn't have exact ages like a median or a mean within a cell so everything was already an age buckets placed there by my dear friends at the Florida Department of Education. So I'm going to do this again without nursing to show you that even when we take out what turned out to be the oldest sector of CCB graduates. We're going to school to get that bachelor's degree after several years of work. We still have 48% of graduates who were 30 or older. That's really something. So I want to compare that to a study that was done. This is five year old data, but in a presentation to the Florida legislature researchers presented some data that said the average age of a community college student, not a graduate a student was 31. At that time, the average age of an upper division student at a Florida State University was 22. So my findings are pretty consistent with that, that these are significantly older students. I don't want to say significantly because that has statistical implications, they are considerably older than than our associate graduates and then university upper division students in bachelor's programs. So this is really serving as an access point is what this suggests. So now I want to take a look at what the racial and ethnic breakdown looks like when we split into sectors. So I want to say a couple of things here. One is that the areas of study that I include in charts throughout my presentation are maybe going to shift and that is because I had suppressed values for some of them and I wasn't able to analyze. So if that changes, it was not a mistake. I just had data that, you know, did not give me enough to work with to complete the analysis. The second thing that I want to say is Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students who are in this red color here, as well as American Indian elastic Alaska Native students are indigenous students and multiracial students who are this blue category are included in this chart, but they're not going to be in my wage analysis later and that was due to suppressed value so I just want to acknowledge that. And throughout our event today we're going to be putting out calls for other researchers graduate students anyone who's on the call there is so much more work to be done and so I just want to acknowledge that we need to do more to understand the CCB experiences and outcomes of students in those groups and I unfortunately did not have data to really look at their wages. I also want to give a shout out to the IT programs because they were running almost 60% graduates of color in these three years. That is really something this is an occupational sector that sometimes struggles with attracting a diverse cohort of graduates and so this is really really promising to see nursing kind of approach the share of students of people of color compared to the population a little bit short but close and for the other two it looks like we might still have a little bit more work to do. Now let's look at this by gender. So as I mentioned the areas of study at the bottom that you see here are have changed a little bit just because of what's suppressed and what's not in different data that I had. So nothing on here surprised me to any great degree you know the health professions and nursing are very strongly female IT is very strongly male. And kind of a range in the middle here that's communications technology business management and marketing and then that next column is visual and performing arts and I want to say we did not get all business graduates it was only if again there was a matching associate program with it. So I just want to point that out that we did not get all business graduates it's just a subset of them for which there was a matching associate and bachelor's program. Okay, let me just show you what this looks like by age group now. So we've got a couple of cohorts of really young students, about half of students and communications technologies were under 25. So this is interesting because even though in sectors like health professions nursing and even it looking over here. We have several a large group of students that are 30 or older, but there are other sectors where students are pretty young. So they're going fairly quickly from an associate program to a bachelor's program. So this is reaching students in various phases of their careers and I think that speaks to kind of the value of an access point again that these programs are are for Floridian students who are looking to further their education. Okay, so now let's talk for just a few moments about money. I want to just say real quick so you know the wage data that I have are annualized fourth quarter earnings so four quarters after graduation just so you know what I've got. So breaking this down by sector and by race ethnicity. Here's what we're looking at. There are a couple of things here that are promising and there are a couple things that are areas for concern. For example, this is really strong like benefits that are being shown for black and Latinx nurses for example, it's really really strong. But then again I'm concerned about black business graduates where they're coming up short of their peers their Latinx and white peers. I'm not sure what's going on there. So this is the next call for research that I'm going to put out descriptive studies like this sometimes raise more questions than they answer. It's really helpful for us hopefully to be able to see this, but there's a lot more to understand about what's going on here. So I would just encourage this as a foundation as a jumping off point for additional research looking into this. I want to show you now I'm going to keep talking about race and ethnicity and earnings. And just to kind of talk about this in another way. The reason that we wanted matching associate and bachelor's programs in the sample was for this very reason so we could calculate what I'm calling the baccalaureate earnings premium. So I've taken the average wages for bachelor's graduates and subtracted the wages of associate graduates in similar fields, and this is the difference that's represented here in this chart. So the wage premium again is looking even stronger for students of color for black and Latinx students in nursing and education than for their white peers. So really wonderful to see great earnings premiums for them. Latinx folks in health professions obviously like getting a huge wage bump from the associate level. And a little bit of variation in it where Latinx folks are not seeing quite the wage bump with their black and white peers are. So there's a lot going on here and I feel there's like there's much more to draw out of the data with additional studies so again I hope this can be a jumping off point for the research community to take a closer look. There are a couple things that might be going on here. So one of them is that particularly in this health professions area. There are several different occupations grouped in here everything from dental hygiene to radiology tech. They may have different earnings between them so the variations in occupations within that group might explain some of the difference but I can't see that in the day that that I have. The other thing is that I don't know what colleges folks graduated from and I don't know what labor market that they're working in because these are these are statewide data from the whole system. So I can't for example control for cost of living. So you may be getting a huge wage bump but if you're in a very expensive area that may not turn out to be as useful. So I again I'm going to pull out a call for more more research to researchers to take this up this is really critical work to be done and I hope that this is helpful. In just the next couple minutes here I'm going to race through some gender findings. I wish I had better news to report but these findings were very clear. So what you can see here are the average wages for men and women at both educational levels. So I mean I'm going to add my voice to the chorus of other researchers who have observed gender pay gaps and here's my piece to contribute to the literature. I'm not even talking about across occupations I'm really just going to talk about within those areas of study. So there are a couple things I want to point out. There's only one area where I had enough data to do the analysis where women were making more than men and that's this visual and performing arts group here the second column over that's one of the youngest cohorts. And as you can see it's not particularly high paying occupation so it's it's an interesting area for a lot of different reasons. The second thing is, if we look at those health professions graduates real quick, look at the two middle columns. A woman with a bachelor's degree is earning, I will tell you $700 a year more than a man with an associate degree in that area that may be explained again by different occupations within this group, but that's a little disheartening. I also wanted to point your attention to the business column here this is the last thing I'll say on this slide. You see the gap over here. I don't know if you can see my cursor but alright here's the associate folks that pay gap between men and women is $900 a year. Now, scoot over to the bachelor's column that pay gap is $5,000 a year. So it's actually worse at the bachelor's level. And though we're seeing this become an access point for folks who might not go back to school to get a bachelor's degree, otherwise, they're still persistent labor market inequities that we're observing. Now let's, I'm actually going to skip this slide because I know I'm over time. Alright, this is the last one. So what we've got here is, you remember the slide I showed you a bit ago that was just the gender breakdown of graduates. So I've got that and I've overlaid average earnings for men and for women. Men are those red dots women are the yellow dots. So I have two observations I want to share with you really quickly about this slide. One is that generally higher paying jobs have bigger pay gaps. I think that makes sense. I mean it's not good, but I get it. The other thing, the other way to look at this is that the two fields that have the highest share of women have the worst pay gaps for women. So I was also something really disheartening to see in my state of output as I was conducting this analysis. I had to do it a couple times to make sure that I got it right. So, as I said before, you know, this is a great access point for students, but we have a lot more work to do in terms of labor market equity for these graduates who've worked so hard to earn these degrees and, you know, they really deserve equitable labor market outcomes as well. So just to give you a couple of takeaways here. It's an important access point for older students. It's an important access point for students in some underrepresented groups and we have a little more work to do for others to balance that out but really promising things are happening. The labor market outcomes vary by demographic group and there is a lot more work to be done in this area. Elizabeth is going to show some great findings from Washington that on these topics. There's plenty of research questions to go around the community. This area is ripe for additional research. And again these labor market inequities that we find in other literature are present here as well. So there's a lot going on here but one thing that we can say is that the access to the bachelor's degree is paying off, even when I was showing different earnings premiums for folks in different ethnic and racial groups. I don't see in my paper that it's the same story for folks who are men or women. Everybody has a pay bump once they hit the bachelor's level. So even though we're not seeing the same thing across the board, we are seeing some improved earnings for folks who got that bachelor's degree. So I thank you all so much for your attention. I really appreciate it. And I am going to hand it over to my wonderful colleague Elizabeth for her work on Washington. My name is Ivy and I want to say thank you to New America for giving me the opportunity to speak today and to my wonderful mentor and colleague Deborah Bragg who's probably the most well versed scholar and community college baccalaureates in the country. So thank you Deborah for putting these slides together for me today that I can share with you all. So I'm just going to really quickly run through our research questions in Washington so I'm going to share with you a little bit about the student demographics. And then our comparison group is looking at CCB completers versus university completers in terms of their demographics and then also their employment and wages. So we've talked about the growth in CCB degrees in Washington already 29 of the 34 community colleges in Washington confer community college baccalaureate degrees there's over 100 programs. They're now comprised about 4% of the baccalaureate degrees that are conferred annually in Washington state and they're spent about 5000 conferred since their inception. And this data for the first analysis that I'm going to show share with you we have a number of research questions comes from the SBCTC. So thank you to the SBCTC for this data. Thanks. I'm not control. Real quick again is just this enrollment and completion slide so you can see how much these degrees are growing in Washington state there's been a really strong demand among students. And each year we're gaining, you know, five, six, seven, eight hundred up to 1000 students. So they are really popular among our community college student population. And here's just a little slide that kind of shares with you some of the program areas in which the students are enrolling in which these degrees are offered. So we see some of the applied program areas here so the top gray line is business programs followed by health sciences and then computer sciences those are definitely the lion's share of enrollments. And then the one that the next one down you see that's grown quite a bit in their in recent years as the early childhood education programs. So overall, the community college BAS students, the degree that in Washington is conferred as the bachelor of applied science. These students are racially and ethnically diverse group and they're on par with the state's workforce or professional technical education student population. So we do see some differences. You'll see that CCB students are much more likely to be receiving need based aid than their peers in professional technical or transfer programs. And they're more likely to be veterans. They often have dependence and most striking their average age is much higher than students in professional technical or transfer programs. Actually, even a more diverse group than we see in the in the state's professional technical or transfer programs. So to help interpret these BAS completion rates. We use the Washington educational research data center statewide for your dashboard, and we compared fall to fall 200% completion rates for students who transferred from a community college into a public university. So these results show a bachelor's completion rate of 70% for students who transferred between 2011 and 2014, which is the last year for which data was available. So relative to other states, Washington ranked second in the nation for the percentage of students who start a community college and transfer to complete a bachelor's degree at a four year institution that's data from the National Student Clearing House. So suggesting that the most recent BS completion rates that approach that transfer baccalaureate completion rate are particularly noteworthy so we're really getting close to that second in the nation completion rate. And then knowing students knowing that the students who enroll in the accb degree is mirror that professional technical program enrollment population, albeit they're older. And they include an unknown number of students who never intended to get a baccalaureate degree versus transfer or any other means. We think that these results show a promising and improving baccalaureate completion rate. There are some differences by program. And so we see arts and humanities graduates with the highest completion rates with health of sciences with lower rates, although in recent years these these rates are improving as well. So by race and gender, we, we do see some gaps. That as Damelin mentioned her video are more, you know, Washington state is working hard to address. These results are similar to Washington states associate degree completion rates, wherein Asian students enrolled in professional and technical education and transfer programs, complete degrees at higher rates than other student groups, particularly African American students. So these were results also show that completion rates are improving. So if we look in just the last three years the completion rates for every group that set Native Americans have improved. So moving on from from just looking at the population within community colleges then we wanted to compare the CCB students to their peers in the university. I'll just show you a couple we did quite a bit of work in this area so these are just a couple of our findings and I'll like a viewpoint you to some of our other work to get a more complete picture. So both samples of the degree earners that we're looking at here are more than 50% white. So the proportion of white graduates in the sample of be a completers at public universities, 63% is higher than the proportion of white students earning CCB degrees which is 57%. So the CCB sample graduates also contains a higher proportion of next students Asian students and African American students compared to the sample of be a completers at public universities. So we're looking at students who are completing in similar programs based on sub coders I explained earlier. So we'll just look more closely at business and nursing. So the sub samples of business administration degree earners is predominantly white, however, unlike the broad sample substantial gaps emerge across racial and ethnic student populations. So the proportion of Latinx students earning a CCB degree in business administration 15%. For instance, it's more than double the proportion of the student population earning a baccalaureate degree in business at a public or your university, which is only 7%. So likewise gender represents another divergence where quite a few more women are earning CCB baccalaureate degrees in business versus and the universities. Turning to nursing, nearly 10% of the CCB sample earns a baccalaureate degree in nursing. So this is an important contribution of CCB degree earners in addressing this high demand field in Washington's labor market and you can see that they're slightly more diverse than those students who are earning nursing degrees at a public or your university. And, you know, one important question that hasn't really been looked at in the literature around Community College baccalaureates is, are they valuable in the labor market do these students get good jobs that match their university peers. So that was really a major question that we wanted to answer. So we first looked at their employment rates. And we found that CCB graduates have a higher in state covered employment match rate than university graduates, especially in the first quarter after graduating and in the fourth quarter after graduating. The higher CCB graduates have a 75% match versus a 69% match for university graduates, and likewise in the fourth quarter they show a 77% match whereas the university graduates have a 7% match, 70% sorry, percent match. The match rate of the two groups closes to be nearly equal in the 12th quarter, where both of them have a 70% employment match rate. So that higher CCB employment match rate, it may be a result of a higher likelihood that university students move out of state than community college students, although the labor market in Washington is very strong, or was only had this data. And CCB graduates are also older than university graduates, and so they may have higher initial employment levels. So then we looked at the annual earnings of CCB versus university completers in particular program areas, and again these are program areas that are matched by zip code. So in all program areas but healthcare, CCB graduates are earning higher quarterly wages in the first and fourth quarter after graduation than university graduates. And by the 12th quarter the earnings of the university graduates in both healthcare and business are exceeding CCB graduates. Since the CCB programs in computer and information sciences are so new we weren't able to calculate the earnings for them for the 12th quarter following graduation. However, earnings in the first two time periods are higher for CCB graduates than university graduates. So in the fourth quarter after graduate graduation, every CCB and university degree is earning at least the $35,000 annual threshold that Dr. Karnavali discussed. And you can see that many students are earning much more than that. So because our comparisons for race and gender got really complicated looking, we're just giving you bullet points here to simplify our complicated slides. And I'll just say that the differences we saw between the university and CCB students in the previous slide are dwarfed by the differences we see between male and female students. So similar to Ivy's analysis, we saw in the previous slide, you know, you could see maybe some patterns of growth, of course, but you didn't see huge differences in wage premiums between CCB and university students. And when we look at males and females, we see a much clearer wage premium difference there. And then finally, we do see some stronger earnings growth for black and African Americans in particular programs who have earned CCB degrees. So we really would like to do some more research in this area to see if that holds up. So I'll leave you with some takeaways. The takeaways are pretty compelling. So our research shows that CCB degrees are providing access to a group of racially and ethnically diverse students who mirror the state's community and technical college populations. They're older students and those, I'm sorry, racially and ethnically speaking, you're the state's community and technical college populations. However, they are older, more likely to need financial aid, be a veteran's and likely to have dependence. We also find that students complete at high rates and that populations and populations who are not seen in the university are completing degrees at high rates. And initial employment and wage data shows that CCB degrees are high quality credentials that can lead to good jobs for students who are not finding this opportunity elsewhere. So I just want to thank our hosts and research partners New America for the opportunity to speak today and thank you all for listening to this research. Well, thank you both so much. My name is Iris Palmer and I'm a senior advisor for higher education, higher education in the workforce at New America. Since we're running a little long, I think we're going to just limit our Q&A to one big question, although I encourage you to reach out to Ivy and Elizabeth separately, I'm sure they would be happy to answer any questions. A quick technical question for you, Elizabeth. Was your graduation rates 200% time to completion? Sorry if I didn't say that. Yes, it was. Just clarifying question there from someone. So as far as there was some curiosity about if we have any post COVID data to see both how COVID is impacting enrollment and employment, and I think that's an easy one to answer. So I just wanted to put that one out there quickly. Nope. No, I just had up to 2018. It's going to be a while before we can really fully observe what that's meant for students enrolling in and completing these programs. No, I don't have any specific data for that either, although Washington has a great public dashboard available and as soon as they get new data they post that pretty quickly so I think if there are enrollment dips, we'll see that show up on that dashboard. That's really helpful, Elizabeth. Thank you. I don't know if you have a link to that that you could post in the chat so people can take a look when the new data is posted. Yep, I'll find that for you. Excellent. So this one is a little bit more I know I said one question but I thought I'd get the fast ones out first. Yeah, did you all see that the location of the institution where the program is offered the rural urban suburban interacted with the enrollment and completion numbers by race and gender. So my data was statewide. And so that's a huge, huge question is what that means by population density type of community the size of the community. And it's been pointed out many times these are really local labor market focused and so be able to have data that are disaggregated by institution or even having some information on, you know, most recent code or most recent county of residents or something can help us break that out a little bit more but I unfortunately wasn't able to do that for this work. So we couldn't, I can't draw any major conclusions from what I have either, although we do have the idea from our data that particularly we saw a lot of Latinx graduates in business. Those graduates do seem to be coming from rural parts of the state where there is a really large Latinx population over in eastern Washington in particular. There are some really big business programs with really high Latinx student populations over there. So there. I think that's great right it's providing an opportunity to access higher education and a baccalaureate degree that they wouldn't otherwise there wouldn't otherwise be available in those rural areas. Since we have four minutes. So those are these really great questions that are coming in from our audience. I'm saying you can help us answer. Do you think that the wage premium for the, or for the baccalaureate students from community colleges might have something to do with the fact that they retain employment versus the university students and then are you thinking about maybe doing further research, looking at a further period of time out to see if that closes. I mean, I only had data for four quarters out Elizabeth had data for a little bit further out in front but yeah I think that would be really critical to be able to understand a little bit better. For sure definitely a longer time period is something that we're interested in. I mean as I mentioned we were not able to follow the computer and information sciences graduates for longer than four quarters because that those programs and those students are just so new. So as we get more students graduating more data will be able to follow them for further out will be able to see if those the kind of coming together of the wages that we saw with community college and and university graduates. So that is sustained or if university graduates surpass community college baccalaureate graduates at some point and in what degree areas. So, at the moment, they look to be fairly similar but it would be interesting to see more over time. And I'll invite Deb to jump in as well to as we're answering questions since she did a lot performed a lot of this work too. I have a pretty simple one here that came in earlier in the conversations, which is about whether any of these programs and the teaching certificate. I could talk about that one for Florida so. And I am only getting data for programs that have both an associate and a bachelor's program in that same area, Florida community colleges have a wide array of teacher training programs for early at for elementary middle school, etc. But they're not in my data because you can't get an associate degree in it so my education data, you might have noticed on some of the charts is early ed data. So there's a lot more to be learned about those groups. I mean this, I hope this analysis was really fruitful but there's just so much to learn if we were able to get data on folks in a wider variety of these programs and kind of step beyond the associate baccalaureate comparison, which I love doing but there's just so much more to do and one of those things is understanding teacher prep program so great question. Elizabeth did you want to add anything as a last word before we turn it over to Deb and our students. I'll just say that in areas where teachers are in demand those programs are being developed. Many of the programs have to, I'm sorry, all of the programs have to show that there's a labor market need in order to be developed so particularly over in eastern Washington where there is a teacher shortage. Those programs are now in play. Thank you both so much obviously there's a bunch more questions that we weren't able to get to we do encourage people to reach out to us directly we're happy to have conversations and answer any more questions. But with that I'm going to turn it back over to Deb to have a conversation with our students. Thank you, Iris. That was great. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth and Ivy. We appreciate all of the data and all the hard work. I'm now delighted to lead a discussion with two Washington College baccalaureate graduates. It would be important it would be for you all as our audience to get a chance to hear from students. We tap the shoulders of Sarah Baker and Keena Gentry, who are recent relatively recent graduates of CCB programs in Washington. Sarah and Keena. Thank you so much for being with us today. We know you are in demand professionals. And it's a really busy time and a stressful time for all of us so thank you for being with us and I'm just going to get this started and move fairly quickly. I'm going to start by asking each of you to introduce yourself to us just a little bit about who you are. You know your background and how you got to the community college to earn your degree. So Sarah would you start us up. Yeah, sure. I just wanted to say thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today. Yeah, some of you have met me before at the CCBA conference earlier this year, just before COVID happened when we were allowed to be in the same room together. My name is Sarah Baker. I use she her pronouns. I am located in Seattle, Washington. I'm a third generation Japanese American. I'll just give a brief description about what I do now so I'm a program manager for an organization called communities rise that provides pro bono legal services to nonprofits and small businesses in the state of Washington. I'm in grad school currently so I'm in my second year at Seattle University. I'm working on my MP a and I'm on the board spoke locally and nationally of the Japanese American Citizens League. So, super busy. I'm thinking about the BS program so I graduated in 2016, which isn't that long ago but feels like a million years. But I was in the international business program at North Seattle College, which is coincidentally not coincidentally, where I also got my associates degree through, you know I started in the running start program when I was in high school. And then continued on to the BS program. Wonderful. Thank you. And Tina, share a little bit about yourself with us. Hi, my name is Tina Gentry, and I am also Seattle resident. I went through the be a early child education program at North Seattle College. I was working in early child education at the time but wanted to advance my career and doing so. I now work with childcare resources with childcare providers on quality improvement as a coach. As well as I sit on the advisory board for a children's television program called look, listen and learn that can be local viewed in Seattle area. Great. Thank you. I noticed both of you are not only working but spending some of your time doing community and service work and that's so impressive. I just want to thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for the opportunity to provide support to your communities and that means a lot a lot about what community colleges are about. So you do us proud in that way. I'd like to now maybe, Tina, you could start us off by telling us, you know, why, what was your path to this community college baccalaureate degree to your early childhood degree. You know, where did you get your associates. Why did you decide to get the baccalaureate at a community college at North Seattle. Yes, of course. So I worked with children longer. I mean, I always tell people I work with kids since I was a kid. And I knew that was my path early on I worked at a lot of summer camps growing up. I also had my own childcare at one time and then I began classroom teaching and started out as a classroom assistant and moved up to a lead teacher and asked the industry started to change the requirements to continue on in that field started to change as well. But for me being a working student and already in the field. And kind of following that path of the four year program and having that in class schedule was just not feasible for me. Not financially and not time wise. So I began to look around at programs in my area that could offer the classes and resources that I needed, but also were cognizant of the fact that I was already out in the field and in the world and a working as I began to look at the different programs I noticed that there wasn't a lot of programs that one offer to the type of education that I wanted, but had class times that pair well with my schedule. I was very fortunate to end up at North Seattle College where I worked with the staff that was very cognizant that a lot of people that were coming back to school continue to education, we're working adults and that we didn't have the same schedules are maybe the same resources that high school student going straight to college or a four year college hat that we were already in the field our life had already begun in those ways and we really needed something that honored our time and our resources that we had to give to it more. So that was my path. Yeah, thank you, Tina, a lot of you've given us a lot of reasons that you chose the path that you did. I'm going to pass it over to Sarah and I'm also going to ask you Tina if you could pull the mic just a little bit closer. If it's possible we were having a little bit of sound issue there so thank you for doing that before we come back to you. So Sarah, tell us about your path. Yeah. So as I mentioned previously, I did the running start program so I started going to North Seattle College when I was in 11th grade in high school. And so I graduated high school a year early. And, you know, was working on my associates degree, and then through a very curious route it took me multiple years to get my associates. I just did a bunch of other stuff in the meantime I worked, got some life experience. And so by the time I got my associates, you know, I was in the swing of school and was thinking about getting a bachelor's degree and just was feeling really daunted by the idea of going to a four-year college. I was like, oh, like taking the GRE, I don't want to do it. You know, the money is a barrier as well as just like the test itself has a lot of problematic issues surrounding it. So anyways, you know, and I was going to North and was like, well, what am I going to do? I need to keep going to school and then the BIS program started happening. And so I was like, uh, business, and I was taking Japanese at the time. So it was like international business. I'm taking a foreign language. I would love to live in Japan. This would be a really good fit for me. And so it was a combination of things. I mean, definitely economically it made a lot of sense. You know, I knew the campus already. I knew the instructors so that familiarity in that community was a really big deal. And the accessibility, right? You know, thinking about a four-year was just like this huge unattainable thing that I didn't think I would be able to do and being able to like be guided through the process by folks that I knew already on the North Campus just made it so much easier. You know, just use around cost and, you know, having a program that can accommodate your schedules and your family life, work life, you know, just seem to loom really large, you know, as we hear both of your talk. So here you say a little bit about how you think you've benefited from the programs, including the good jobs you're both in right now, but also tell us maybe what you think these programs could do better. You know, how could they be improved or maybe even more focused on the adult learners that they're intending to serve. Keena, would you want to kick that one off? Sure. Can you hear me better now? Sorry. Yeah, thank you. So I think first of all was time I was really surprised to see how many programs require a lot of in class time that was scheduled kind of in the mid hours of the day that for a working student was just not feasible. It really split your day in half where if you're working student will be really hard to continue working either before class or after those hours. So really being cognizant of when you're asking students to be there and how you're asking them to show up. I was very pleased with having a hybrid program that gave you that in class time that is beneficial right and important, but it was done in the evenings it wasn't every day and then you got to pair it with that online learning so you could really tailor it more to your schedule. But that's not something that all programs offered so I think just being really cognizant of that flexibility piece. And I also think that really understanding that you are working with a population oftentimes of students who have been in the field and who are returning, but have a lot to offer when it comes to that practical life experience. That I think that was a real plus going into it and I love that our program honor that that oftentimes you can go to four year college and get a great education but because you may have made that move straight from high school or something you miss out on a lot of that life experience and you miss out on a lot of tools and things that you're learning are being practically used in the world. So a lot of us returning students that's something that we bring to the table and having a program our systems that are cognizant of that and understand that you're not just starting from scratch just because you haven't been in the classroom, a certain amount of time and meeting you at where you are that our staff and the instructors that I had really took that into account and you got to kind of tailor more if you're learning and start at a place that was most beneficial for you that you weren't starting from scratch you weren't starting from the beginning you were furthering your education you were furthering the path that you were already on in your learning so better to account and really letting you own that learning. So Sarah can we hear from you. Yeah, thinking about the benefits of, you know, having been able to go to North Seattle to get my BS, you know, very practically right like I have a bachelor's degree. So that in and of itself you know as we've heard from presenters earlier today is like going to open so many doors. You know when I applied to the job that I meant now, you know it was a requirement like you needed to have that and so, you know, that's just in and of itself been really beneficial. I was able to graduate with no student debt. So that's a big deal. You know, because now I'm in grad school and let me tell you it's really expensive so not having a gigantic hole dug for me already. You know, that was a huge benefit. And then really just the community that I got out of it like there are still folks that I'm in connection with from north and from the Seattle colleges community who, you know, have been able to help me through my process of getting into grad school or, you know, writing letters of recommendation for scholarships, you know, helping me find jobs that kind of stuff. And that's just been one of the biggest benefits. You know, our program was a cohort model. And there are still a bunch of people from my cohort that I'm really close with, you know, and we still use each other as resources so that's been great as well. Great, great. So we're going to give you all our audience a chance to ask these two students a couple of questions. We don't have a ton of time but we have a little bit of time so please type into the chat box. If you have a question for Sarah and Kena and be while we're doing that. Sarah and Kena, one, one thing I'd like to ask you, you know, we are living through and, you know, none of us have lived through anything like this even those of us who've been around a little longer like me. It's just an unprecedented time. And one of the things we've learned and interviewing students in Washington is the degrees bring a sense of economic stability to people's lives that they didn't always have prior to the baccalaureate degree and we're really interested in exploring that. I'm curious if you couldn't share with us whether how your work has been impacted by the pandemic or maybe how you have experienced something and maybe how you feel like your program might have prepared you for something like this even though none of us could have predicted it. Maybe that's, you know, a question you can or can't answer, which is fine. Do either of you want to say anything about kind of life and the kind of work you're doing now in this time? Yes, I was very fortunate to make the change in my career that I made before the pandemic hit and attribute that change to being still employed now. When I was in the classroom, it was, it would have been very difficult in a sense, especially the program that I was previously working for. I know that a lot of cuts were having to be made in the classroom and a lot of shifts were being made where they weren't quite sure of different programs, whether they were going to open, whether they had the resources to stay open, what that was going to look like, and some of the jobs that I might have been qualified for before that would have put me at a disadvantage to be employable or stay and work with organizations that really had the resources to support their employees during this time. I was very fortunate that I was able to work where I'm working now and benefit from being through that program and having that degree that helped me move into the spaces that were better equipped to handle this time. I also feel going through the program and already kind of having that pace set of balancing work and school and doing online classes really made the transition of having to move to this new now heavily virtual reality was smoother for me that I found that I was more disciplined in that way and had a lot of skills to kind of be more flexible and resilient through this time. It also helped me utilize a lot of, as Sarah was saying, some of my former peers and people that I had worked with coming through that program to kind of strengthen collaborations to help get some of the things done that I need to get done now on this new platform. So I think that without that I wouldn't have had the community and just the pool of resources that I have now for sure. Yeah. Yeah, thank you, Kena. And Sarah, when I pass this over to you, we had a question about, so we'd like to hear about how you're doing during this time but we also had a question about grad school applications. Did anybody raise concern because you're a community college baccalaureate graduate in your application to Seattle U's MPA program? That is a great question. No, you know, that was something that, you know, was brought up because I was the second cohort to go through the international business program and so that was, you know, something that our advisor was like this might come up in the future. You should just be aware so that, you know, if there are questions raised like you're prepared for that. And so far, you know, going into the MPA program or applying for, you know, any jobs ever, no one's better than I. Like no one said anything, right? They're like, oh, you like you've done this and you have this hands-on experience. Great. Continue forward. Yeah, and to your other question, so I do program management for my organization and, you know, everything I was doing was in person events, right? So like legal clinics, conferences, that kind of stuff and having to make that transition to be fully online for all of that has been interesting to say the least. It's been a learning curve. But, you know, I would say that the BAS program really taught us to be flexible and it taught us to work with others and just be really clear and consistent around expectations. I think especially in international business, like there's a lot of room for error and things that can happen. And so that was something they really emphasized where they were like, look, like things are going to happen. Hello world. And, you know, we need to be able to be flexible to continue doing our work and doing our best. And so, you know, having that expectation set already and something that's like very instilled and ingrained in me has made it a lot easier. Well, you're both awesome and impressive community college baccalaureate graduates. It's just, it's been really wonderful to have you here today. I just want to mention really quickly a student that I had interviewed was unable to join us today. He's a graduate of the BSN program in community health at Columbia Basin. And the reason he isn't here today is he works in community health and he's directly involved in efforts for that community to deal with a pandemic. And so, you know, we have graduates who are in really, really vital areas forever, but especially in this time. I'm not seeing any other major questions from the audience but keep asking your questions. All of you who are listening we're, we're excited to continue our work and anxious to keep hearing what's most important for all of us to learn about these programs. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Iris Palmer, who's going to close out our day. Thank you so much, Deb. I'm sure you all agree that this was such a great conversation today. I want to thank everyone who participated but I particularly want to thank our partners in Washington, and Keena and Sarah for joining us and for participating that was so meaningful and wonderful and it's always good to hear the student perspective. I also want to thank Lumina Foundation and Joyce Foundation for their generous support of our work. I think what we've heard today is that 23 states now grant community college the authority to award bachelor's degrees. And we're just seeing a ton of momentum on this issue. So, since 2018, six states have passed legislation to allow their colleges to, their community colleges to award these degrees. And states like Texas have lifted restrictions on who offers these degrees and they've continued to expand those degrees. And it's really interesting to see that the least populous state of Wyoming to the most popular state of California have all thought about using a bachelor's degrees from the community colleges a new pathway for access to the bachelor's degree and that's both urban and rural contexts. And I think what we've also heard is that even though we've done incredibly, we've done so much work in our two years of research and we've learned so much we've just scratched the surface. My colleague Ivy Love and my colleague Elizabeth Mesa both highlighted places where we need additional research and it's such a rich area for additional research. And there's so much more to explore and we hope that those of you on this presentation and on this event can pick that up and carry it forward as we hope to do into the future. And thank you all so much for spending your afternoon with us we we think it's a fascinating topic and we're very, very excited to go forward with it. So thank you all.