 I'd like to introduce our final speakers. As you can see, this is our fireside chat to end the day today. We're really excited to have Sharon Liu here, Senior Policy Advisor for the US Department of Education. So very important to lay the current policy context over all of these discussions that we're having. Sharon leads the Office of Educational Technology's Higher Education Innovation Initiatives to increase access, decrease cost, and improve outcomes for post-secondary learners. I know many of you know her name and her work. There are some interesting new efforts underway that you'll want to keep an eye on that are coming out of the Department of Ed. Prior to her work joining OET, she oversaw TACT, which many of you are also familiar with, the Big Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grants. So lots of us were involved with those. So we're really excited to have Sharon here. And we have Amra Alwalia from The Evolution, who many of you also know, one of the best publications we think in this world, he'll be leading the Q&A portion with Sharon and with you all. It'll be fairly interactive. Amra is the managing editor of The Evolution, an online newspaper focused on non-traditional higher education and transporting the post-secondary marketplace. So if you're not a follower, I'd encourage you to follow the publication. As I mentioned, we're big fans. And get involved with this fireside chat as much as you have energy left for. And then at six o'clock, we'll break for some beer and wine. Thank you. Cool. Whoa, hello. Thank you everybody for sticking around. We really, really do appreciate it. As Katie was so kind to introduce us, my name's Amra Alwalia. I'm the managing editor of The Evolution. To give you a little bit of context of what we do. We're an online publication. We publish articles and interviews from pretty much folks in this room and a lot of you have written for us in the past. Thank you. Talking about how the industry is changing and how institutions are evolving to keep up with those changes. I'm also going to allow Sharon some time before we get into the questions part to introduce herself. Ooh, is it this? It's not. Nope. Yes. Yes, okay. Sorry, I was really loud. My man. Cool. So Sharon's going to get into a little bit of the context into where she's coming from. From that point, we're going to get into some questions. And again, as Katie was so kind to suggest, we're going to be posting the questions that we're talking about on the screen so that you guys have an opportunity to think about them yourselves. And as we're progressing through this conversation, please throw your hand up. One of our kind colleagues over here will bring you a mic so that you can share your thoughts too, because this is a fireside chat. The fire is massive. We're all on the side of it. So we'd really love to hear your opinions and thoughts. Thank you. So I'm actually a little disappointed that we framed it in this, like we have to be really serious now and talk about federal policy because we were just talking at our table about my next career as a space tourist. So I'll just, so we will, will we? Okay, so apparently the slides don't work when they're black like this, but anyway. So I just want to introduce myself a little bit more to some of you who I haven't met. I work in the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education, and we do some of those things in the orange words. Let me see if the next one is better because maybe it will not. So I will just tell you what's on the slide, which I don't normally like to do. So essentially the Office of Educational Technology thinks about technology and education. Clearly this is not a success, but you know, we have some large questions that we like to ask. And essentially the question is, how can we apply technology systematically and collaboratively across programs and institutions to help leaders address issues of access, affordability, and completion? And really what we want to focus on is increased outcomes or improved outcomes for students. And that includes the broad spectrum of students that are in our post-secondary education system today. So that's my quick introduction. And I think that we are going to have a little question for the group, right? Yeah, we are. We're going to start off with a question for you guys because we talked a lot in the last 10 minutes and we're going to let you do it too. So we're going to let you take a minute or two to spin your chairs back around. Basically, you know, we want you to think about the top three skills that you use in your current job today. Beyond that, we also want you to think about how you got those skills. And as a third level, how your employers knew that you had them when you entered that position. So, you know, I think we'll take maybe 20 or 30 seconds just to kind of go over that because the tables have gotten a bit smaller. And then we'll go from there. Are you going to? Yeah, let's share mine. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'd say the skills I use most of my job are probably reading. I do a little bit of reading. Some communication. I communicate a lot. And probably some basic web knowledge competency skills. I mean, frankly, we have the team that does our website now but when we started, we really didn't. So those are the skills that I have. In terms of how I got them, I got some of them on the job. But when I was in college, I was at the student paper. So that's really how I learned sort of the basics of doing journalism and stuff. Yeah. And I got the job because the person who was behind launching the evolution worked with me at that paper. So she knew I had the basic skills and competencies. But when I left school, I had a master's degree in comparative international politics, which as you all know, is really, really important when you're talking about higher education policy and transformation. Something that we use every day. But it's a question of soft skills. It's a question of a broad range of soft skills that all apply very generally to a position in the liberal arts. What about you? Well, I would like to hear from the group first. So let's do that just quickly to set the stage for the rest of our conversation. So we can vol untold someone. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're right beside the mic, so I'm going to vol untold you. OK. So do you want position and then skills, or do you want skills first? Let's do position and then skills. OK, so I'm an associate dean of alternative learning. And the top skills I use are communication, research. And what was the other one I treated earlier? Something along the lines of people skills, like interpersonal, HRE type, influence, that kind of soft emotional intelligence. That's the word I'm looking for. So those are the skills that I learned. And I learned them more on the job than in any of the many credentials that Jeff and I were discussing on Twitter earlier. So the last question we had in the series there was, how did your current employer knew you had the skills necessary for your job when you were applying for it? Well, you didn't hire me. So because I had worked, but it's true, the same thing is. So both the person who hired me and my current bosses had worked with me previously on grant funded projects. OK. So it's one of those networking things. OK, so another point for the network. What about someone who didn't network into their current job, who applied for their current job? OK, we have one right back there. My name is George Payne, and I'm an instructional designer for the New England College of Business. So I would say that my top three skills I currently use on my job are digital literacy, digital resourcefulness, and a digital slash analog presentation translation skill. Cool. I'll get into it as quickly as possible. Digital literacy, I worked in a sort of graduate assistant position after my master's degree, where I helped to leverage technology for people's presentations and projects, plain and simple. Digital resourcefulness is probably something that I taught myself over time. I'm not exactly a digital native, but I did spend a lot of time sort of like being the second pair of eyes for my parents' projects. They were graphic designers for a very long time. So seeing that and then learning how to operate and live in that space over time. And the last one, sort of like the presentation and translation skill, I think personally, I probably had like a desperate feeling of being always misunderstood. And so like, how can I then translate this to you? Like, how can I convey this to you in the best way possible, be it analog or digital? And then, how did my employer know? Really hard to tell. But I think that I was given an opportunity to showcase where my understanding of digital literacy came from in the interview process. And they picked up on that. And then right after I was hired, we now actually facilitate a sort of creative test for all the candidates. And we're currently going through that right now, where we give them a clip of audio and a little bit of content, and then we give them a week. And we say, show us what you got. Got it. Actually, just so interestingly enough on that point, so the evolution is owned by a company called Destiny Solutions, which makes software. And they obviously put a huge amount of resources and time into hiring programmers. So actually, I read a really interesting stat a little while ago. Now we're based in Toronto. And I was talking to a room of Canadian deans. And I found a stat when we were talking about how the workforce is changing. That in Canada, in the tech industry, which is one of our hottest industries, only 52% of employees have a post-secondary degree. So a bachelor's degree, we don't have an associate's degree in Canada, but a bachelor's degree or above. And that kind of blew my mind, because you're thinking, this is a space that requires a lot of soft skills. It's not just technical skills and abilities that you're bringing to the table. So talking to the CEO of Destiny about this, again, it just blew my mind. And he said, yeah, that makes sense. I'm like, what do you mean you hire programmers every day? And he said, yeah. The first thing they do when they come into the office interview is they sit down and do a competency test. So they put them through a series of tests to assess their abilities as programmers. And if they get through those tests with flying colors, great, now we'll talk to you. But before that point, whether they went to Harvard, whether they went to Sheridan College down the road, whether they went to edX, done matter. Everything that comes after that, now you're starting to look at the soft skills. Now you're starting to look at some of the capacities to work within our team and to fit into our culture. But that's all secondary to can you do the job? So it's interesting that you bring that up, that you're starting to implement a mechanism, a test for folks coming into your office as a way to assess, are they going to be ready to do this work? And it really ties into some of the conversations we heard earlier today, too. Because I would be really curious. So we'll wrap this up in just one second. So when we asked that question, was anyone thinking, I have a skill right now that I told my employer when I was interviewing that I had based on something like a boot camp or taking an edX course. Because earlier today, when we did that hand raising pull, a lot of people had had more than a PhD, more than a bachelor's degree, but had had an edX or some sort of credential that way. Not so much. What about certificates? So non-degree certificates, credentials, anything of that nature? Turn them up, turn them up, don't be ashamed. So what's interesting, this is actually really interesting. I would throw one more stat at you, then we'll get into the meat of the presentation. But, or the chat. So in the States right now, 31% of adults in the workforce have earned a non-degree credential. Whether that's on top of more traditional degree-based credentials, or rather credit-based credentials, or whether that's as a standalone, 31%. Only 27% of adults have a credit-bearing degree alone. So this room is really not representative of the workforce. That's the, say that again? Of eighth graders. Oh, okay, yeah, that makes, okay. Sure, sure. So what we're saying, the total attainment rate is something in the order of 49.8%, according to Lumina, for total attainment. But of folks who have a bachelor's degree alone, is 27, yeah. Whereas it's, yeah, whereas it's 31 who have a bachelor's and some kind of non-degree credential. That's it, we're in a middle-skills economy, or at least we're moving that one. Sure, absolutely, well, no, so I'll ask you again. How many people in this room have some kind of non-degree credential certification? Okay, see, now that makes sense. Okay, but like keep your hand up if you use that to demonstrate skill during like a job application process. Okay. So you're not good at interviewing, it's a good problem to have. Absolutely, all right. Well, let's dive into the questioning point. Are we after? Okay, cool, so yeah, there you go. All right, so interview time. Yeah, yeah. What is the department's view of alternative credentialing, and how's that evolved over the last few years? That's a really great question. Thank you. So I think this is actually a really great conversation for this particular conference. I think we've heard a lot of really interesting things today about credentials, right? And a lot of the credentials are not degrees, that are not bachelor's degrees, that are somewhat outside of the preview of the Department of Education you would think, right? So traditionally the Department of Education, not interfering with the freedom of institutions to do the things that they do, has really entered the education space through Title IV, right? So Pell grants and or other financial aid to accredited institutions. So we are very much the institution, right? We represent the institution, the degrees. But I think one of the things that has been an interesting trend over time, and I think part of the other thing that the department does is collect lots of data. And so whenever NCES puts out a state of education, we take a look at what it is that post-secondary education looks like. And I think over the last several years, it's been increasingly obvious that post-secondary education does not occur just in a four-year institution. And it's kind of interesting as well. This is a side comment on like silos across institutions within your federal government. When I was at the Department of Labor, everyone was very focused on community colleges. And there is a community college office at the Department of Education, so I don't wanna sort of dismiss that. But whenever we say higher education, it seems lofty and that you should be on a campus. And I think over the last several years, we have started to see the conversation change away from post-secondary education being a single episode in a person's life that occurs at 18 on a campus in one place. Towards a conversation where we start to think about, what does it mean to learn over a longer span of your life? And not just a bachelor's degree to a master's degree to a PhD, but thinking about, well, what are the skills that I need for my work? And can I get it on my job? Or can I get it on edX? Or can I get it somewhere else? And then sort of evolving into a conversation of, well, if that's the case, then how do we document that learning? How do we know that that's high-quality learning? And can we offer it to more people if they need it as a mechanism for social mobility? So I think that as we've started to become more aware, I think as a country, and certainly all of us that work in education that we don't just serve one type of student and that actually all of us in some ways are lifelong learners that we need to have this conversation about how do we document and demonstrate those skills that we have, and then how can we use them and capture them in a way that we can exchange them, right? So we're calling this a credit economy in this conference. So how can what I know have market value in that sense? So there's been a lot of really interesting conversations and I think that's how you've started to see the dialogue shift a little bit. Absolutely. It's kind of neat when you think about the fact that we're at a point where we're a little bit trying to convince 18 to 22-year-olds, as Amy was referencing earlier, that the learning doesn't stop at 22. And it's neat to see schools like Georgia Tech just released their vision of what the future of higher education is gonna look like. We have Harvard participating in the 60-year curriculum project. There are so many neat initiatives happening of what we think of as very traditional institutions, looking at what the future of higher education is gonna look like, and how lifelong learning actually comes into that. I mean, it starts to think about, you start thinking about, well, what are the multiple marketplaces of higher education? And can they kind of coexist with one another? And in that context, what elements of each marketplace start to get adopted by the others? And we think of non-traditional higher education being fundamentally different than a traditional experience. But what do the two share? What can come over from the non-traditional experience color the traditional experience? And I think one other really important element of that conversation that we heard a number of different ways this afternoon is this issue of access to all of this kinds of education, right? So one of the key roles of the department, and it's actually etched on our wall, is this idea of expanding the opportunity for more students or for all students to access high-quality education. And so when we start broadening that sort of the scope of what we mean by post-secondary education, traditional, non-traditional, institution, non-institutional, we still have to ask her a question. Is this actually helping more students who are traditionally underserved by our system to actually access the education they need so that they can grow into economic stability, to prosper and to live, I think, meaningful lives? Absolutely. Actually, one thing that really fascinates me when we talk about this notion of access points, there's this great concept that came out of Oregon State, well, he may not have come up with it, but his fellow named Dave King who's recently retired from Oregon State, and he had this idea of the spectrum of access as this vision of there being multiple access points to higher education, where students are looking for less and less intensive approaches to learning than just credit-based degree-directed programming, whether that goes to modules or workshops or customized professional education, but the majority of content that an institution develops and provides where the expertise lives is gated into credit-bearing programs. So the question he had, and it was from the perspective of a continuing ed leader, is how do we create more access points so that folks who may not have the experience or rather the desire or the resources or the care to jump into a full-fledged degree program, how do they have the capacity to access that knowledge? Please. I wanted to unpack that a little bit more. So right now, there's a lie that happens with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of students when they go to apply at a college or any post-secondary institution, they say, are you planning on doing a degree? And we, by nudging, and this, well, of course I'm planning on a degree because I need Title IV funding and I don't get it another way. So in that same way, the package that's being offered is still founded in two things, one in seat time and another one in a degree. And those are the two things that you can buy. Which one do you want? This degree, this degree. Do you want it in blue or pink or green or yellow? It's still the same thing. Access also in our system also has to do with funding. When will we be able to not have to buy the entire package? When will students have access to be able to do something that is not 18 hours, that may be two hours, and that may be all I can do because I'm first generation, I did not have that knowledge about this, but I could try something, but it would make all the difference for me if I had some funding. So that's the question is, when will we break up or unbundle the package of how that I can also have access to funding? So I'll answer your question in a number of different ways and hopefully some of the combination will be satisfying. So on the first level, like I would say it's very difficult to boil the ocean as we all know, right? So from a policy perspective, going all of a sudden from sort of the binary state of four year to zero is difficult, but there are variations in the middle, right? And so I think one really promising trend that community colleges have been implementing four years now is this idea of stackable credentials, right? So maybe you want a credential, that's a certificate and something. And then later, after you've worked for a little while, you want a permission or a different kind of job, can you complete the associates degree? And I think there are dozens of examples, hundreds of examples of great programs that do that. Similarly, like from the two to four year, like that's also a jump, right? And so what you're seeing more and more is programs where two and four year colleges have agreements where you can complete your associates degree and transfer into a four year degree. So I think like from like a zero to four year perspective, I don't think it's an all or nothing. I think there are, there's a very promising move to more stackability. And I think that that will lend to some access points. I know that the tight, and I will then give you a very unsatisfying answer about the title for funding, which is that it's a very complicated issue that's currently being discussed. So I will not answer and make policy comments. However, you should make your views known to the people who are discussing it. But I think one of the things that we had wanted to talk about, which I think is an interesting segue is the experimental site ability that we have. And so we have very limited ability to waive title for requirements. And I think as a department, we've been trying to think creatively over the last several years about how it is that we do that. I think a number of people in this room have participated in our competency-based education experimental sites where we relaxed the requirement that it had to be like 18 credits, right? So we started looking at subscription-based or limited direct assessments as a way of still allowing students to access aid, but also have the flexibility and the scheduling that they needed. So these are things that we've tried. We also have a somewhat infamous experiment ongoing right now called our EQUIP partnerships, where we allow schools to pick up non-traditional education providers to provide a shorter term, more, I think skill relevant educational experience outside of the institution while still using Pell grants. I think that we are still collecting data on that, but I think this is the way that we can ask the question, how can we do the two things that the department is tasked with, right? So increasing access to education for low-income and traditionally underserved students while at the same time protecting them from low-quality education and protecting you as taxpayers from having to pay their tuition on an education that will only leave them some more debt and not to a job. So I don't know if some combination of that is satisfying to you, but I believe that will... It was actually a fascinating segue because that was the next thing we were gonna be talking about. Just out of curiosity, before we do dive into it, did anyone in this room participate in the EQUIP partnership program? Awesome. Yeah. That's so handy. I know. Well, cool. I mean... We should bring them up. Yeah, I was gonna say. While you guys, or when you very briefly had your hands up, I mean, what were some of the... What were some of the positive takeaways that you got from that experience of participating in the EQUIP? Like, what were the lessons that you learned from those partnerships that you'd wanna carry forward? I mean, and let me sort of refine that a little because I think the topic on hand is like, is there a way to provide another... Is there another way for a student to demonstrate things that they know without having to, I guess, take the whole four-year package? And how can we ensure that that is a quality educational experience? Did anyone who participated in the EQUIP wanna dive? Oh, yeah. Here we are. Okay, and then we'll go to Deb after that. Yeah, just a minute. Hi, I'm Deb Seymour. I was originally with the American Council on Education and also with Entangled Solutions and both of these were quality insurance entities within the EQUIP framework. So I had the experience of working within the EQUIP framework for two different organizations that were acting as quality assurance entities. I would say my learnings and I was not in either situation for follow-through, for launch of the programs that were being quality assured, but I did get two different perspectives. And I would say one of the main impacts that I observed about EQUIP was that it really forced both institutions of higher ed and quality assurance entities to think about quality assurance in a different way. So till then, I think the notion of quality assurance in higher ed had been a little more informal and EQUIP helped to formalize the notion of quality assurance through a Department of Education sanction, which I think had not been present previously. So there was this issue of giving Pell Grant money to students who were taking courses that were not being offered through a higher ed institution and that's really the experimental component that was on the table. But I think from the quality assurance point of view, and I know there are others such as Devidere who's sitting at the same table as I am who was involved with the quality assurance of this. I think from the quality assurance point of view, at least my observation was that the formalization of quality assurance around alternative credentialing and alternative pathways and alternative credit led to a lot of really hard thinking about what quality assurance should look like in an alternative credit environment that really had not been there before. Deb, I'm gonna actually pass the mic to you because I know you have more to say about this. So I just would be clear, we're still in process. It's not done yet. In fact, our academic partner was here earlier, so I won't tell any of his secrets, but I will say, I think just to add that one thing that it did challenge us to think differently about how to evaluate the quality of what was going on. And I think that what it affords because it's a narrow and limited experiment is an opportunity to actually track the individual students that are participating and not just look at things in the aggregate. And so I think that that's a fact, it's very hard to do because I don't know that our systems are all set up to do that well in academic institutions, but the scale is happening and at the very slow speed that it's moving affords a closer look and it gives us an opportunity to do things we might not normally have been able to do or look at. So I would work for a straighter line and we were one of the teams that partnered with Chia and Dallas County Community College District and we were approved a couple months ago and we won't be launching until August, so we don't have data obviously of the program as it runs, but yeah, there was a lot of things to think through. We went through, you know, going through the approval process, well first applying for the application to get chosen as one of the teams then resubmitting to have a more detailed description of how the program would be run, then getting SACs approval and going through that process and then through two, really three rounds of subsequent follow-up questions from the department. So it was a lot of thought, had to go into kind of preparing the statements and then answering the questions and we still have work to do to implement the program, but you know, it's been an exciting project and we're looking forward to it, but it definitely takes time. It's been two years and you know, to get a meaningful cohort through and then really have all the analysis that folks want to see, it's definitely not something that's gonna happen quickly, so patience is a big part of it. Should we proceed or, okay, so yeah, well I was just gonna say like, maybe like we can just go on to the next year because I wanna be cognizant of time. Oh yeah, we are getting there. Don't wanna keep you from your one. Yeah. So anyway, so to wrap up this equip thing and to answer your question to sort of put a finer point on it, I think it's a really interesting question because if you look at the types of students that we are aiming to serve, which are the eligible sort of population of students, these are definitely the ones from low income backgrounds obviously to be eligible for PEL, but also disproportionately from certain kinds of social, from like different ethnic backgrounds, first gen students and who will be disproportionately impacted if they are in a situation where some of us could sort of navigate out of because of our cultural and social capital. And so we wanna be really careful about that because, but then on the other side, there's tremendous potential because if there is a way for us to document what students know, the skills, then actually it does provide them not only educational opportunities, but opportunities in the workforce as well. So, yeah. So we have a little poll, which it's through the app. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, so if you go into our thing in the app, which I know is so descriptive and helpful, our presentation in the agenda, you'll see this question. What are the key opportunities to disrupt or disturb the future of post-secondary education and work? And you'll have four options there. Leveraging new technology, individually curated lifelong learning pathways, marketplace evaluation of credentials or other. So you just want to take a moment to quickly reply to that if you have the app. And how do you see the poll results? I have no idea. Should I get the app? It's like why? Do we know how to get to the responses from the poll? Okay. Oh, the fire is going. Sorry, guys. Marketplace evaluation of credentials, that makes sense. Yeah. So let's give it another, maybe one more refresh and we'll move on. Oh, it's gonna be live. Well, then no more refreshes. Okay, so this is a question that we made up, not sort of randomly, but based on some of the opportunities. So the department has worked on EQUIP. The department has worked on a number of initiatives to try to broaden access and to try to think a little bit about what do we think is the future of post-secondary education in the context of the diversity of students and the different kinds of credentials that are available. And our question is like, we do want to think about like what, how to, I should say this, one of the things that we keep seeing as a theme is that in the future, learning and working will have to be very well tied together. And our question is, how do we sort of disrupt this conversation? And I guess I don't mean disrupting like Clayton Christians in a sense, but like disrupt, like to provoke a conversation. And like what are some tools that we need to really achieve this sort of seamlessness between working and learning? And it seems like number three is the most popular, but I'm really curious, like so nobody thought leveraging new technology or not a lot of people thought that was the key thing. No, okay. So you have a comment, and then Debra. I think there's a mic coming to you, okay. This is what bothers me a little bit about this. I thought it was interesting what Michael Saylor said. And I think in the IT and in the technology fields, this is an easier one to understand how very specific certification and skills can go into the higher. But if you ask Fortune 500 companies what skills they want, you know, they list the same ones every time we want. Soft skills, we got this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they said, that's what we want. But they're the worst offenders of this issue right here because they filter every job by a bachelor's degree. If you go on to these job things, if you go on inside higher ed or all these other things, what you find is you put in all the information and it doesn't ask you what skills you have. It asks you what your level of education is. So that supersedes all of this. The department and everyone else can do all these things and it's a bit of a cart horse issue, okay. Which is gonna drive the change more. But until employers stop requiring and filtering out people by the BAA because there's a glut of BAs out there, okay. They just assume that these skills are associated with the bachelor's degree, okay. So it stops right there. So let me push back a little bit on you then. So let me ask you this question. Is that, do they do this because our bachelor's degrees or the things that we have are, the alternatives to that are not good enough to describe actual workplace skills. They've got some ability to complete. Let's hear from Deb. It depends on what they're hiring for, right. So to hire tech people, we go straight to boot camps. And so especially now with low unemployment and technology tools to identify people based on skill sets and other types of credentials, I think we're gonna see that change pretty fast. So we've had a lot of technology in higher ed for over 20 years and it hasn't really changed higher ed very much. It's just like automated some of the processes we have before. And I would love for individualized learning paths to be the thing that carries us into the future, but if there's no consumer of that on the employer side, I think it's really gonna be employers recognizing that these digital credentials can tell them something about a candidate that's screening for a BA can't do, that a resume can't do, the transcript can't do, and they're gonna be all over it. That's my hunch. Just in the back there, thank you. So I'm glad, Deb, you trended towards answering your question, which is why not the technology solutions? Because, A, if you're really watching the market, can you really trust the tools gonna be there tomorrow? I mean, if you really pay attention to it and the time, effort, and energy, and the political capital you expend inside of whatever organization, to A, convince people it's a good purchase, and then go through implementing it, and then it could go away or get bought or merge or something else. I mean, I think for me, that's the biggest fear, is that I don't ever wanna be on the bleeding edge. So I think that's just my response, Sharon, to why I think you're seeing less of that up there. So, oh, go ahead. Well, I think, because we are getting into the business end, and again, we don't wanna keep you from the reception, but I do wanna ask, I guess, the room, and certainly Sharon, is if marketplace valuation of credentials is the most important thing we can do to change the conversation around alternative credentialing, everybody in this room plays a slightly different role in this ecosystem, in this higher education ecosystem that we're all in, whether it's from the institutional side, whether it's from the nonprofit, whether it's from the for-profit, whether it's from the government side. So what are the roles that we can all play in driving that conversation forward to improve the marketplace value of these sort of alternative, more granular, more descriptive credentials that I think everybody in this room accepts is a better fundamental tool to allow students to get the jobs that they should be earning and to get employers, the folks in the door, that they should be hired. So I guess I'm gonna turn it over to you because you're forced to answer the question. I am forced to answer the question, and I'm the government, so I know all of the answers. Yeah, that's how it works, yeah, yeah, yeah. So actually, we know some of the answers, I think, but one of the things that we had talked about that we would want to talk about is, so we don't know exactly what it is, but I think what the Department of Education is good at doing is curating a conversation, and I love the conversation that has happened all afternoon here about some of the things to watch out for, different kinds of population, and making sure all of the equities are on the table. I think we've had great conversations this afternoon. I'm looking at some of my notes about students, like being in control of some of this stuff, and how do we help institutions and the employers be a little bit more responsive to either the dynamics that are in our sort of students, like themselves, and what they offer as well as what the needs are. And so we don't know the answer to that question, and one of the things that we're going to be doing over the summer is to launch a little challenge to ask this very specific question. If you had unlimited resources, right, how would you empower individuals to design their own learning journeys so that they can lead purposeful and economically stable lives? And what we're looking for is this very question that you asked for people to think about what partnerships they need, for people to think about how they would leverage the technology that's available, and how they would address the needs of the kinds of students that they are serving today. And so I think that we're really excited. We will be talking, I think, a little bit more about this at JFF Horizons next week, but follow us on Twitter. There will be a great interactive platform, and what we really wanna do is curate this conversation a little bit more broadly. We want some of the questions that you all have asked to be answered by a broader group of individuals. And I think it's interesting, some of the partners we have brought to the table as well, thinking about the workforce and who some of those players are. And I don't think that we should have technologies just for the sake of it, but it would be interesting to think about like what could we use, right? So if we're saying there's competency-based education, it's really amazing, and so now we can document competencies, like how can we then encourage employers to do skills-based hiring that grab the competencies? Like is there a middle layer that's missing from that? We talk about educational opportunities being all around, like in the workforce and online and in boot camps. How do we make sure that we document what individuals learn in all of those so that they can then translate them into skills that they can translate into a job, right? And so I think we wanna have this conversation, we wanna have it broadly and nationally, and so we will be doing that over the next, I think, three months. So we hope that all of you will participate in that larger conversation. Absolutely. Well, I think that'll more or less do it. Done. So where are we at? Snacks. Yeah, that's it. We're at the, yeah, thank you. There we go. Thank you guys very much.