 I think you should be able to hear me whether we have a microphone or not. But if you would, please take your seats. Otherwise, we'll have to adopt my law professor voice and then I'll start calling on people and that won't be fun. So I'm Ann-Marie Slaughter. I'm the president and CEO of New America. Welcome. Welcome to Where Are They Now? A look at America's next generation universities. This is a subject I personally deeply care about. I've spent most of my professional career in what I think you would call first generation universities, universities that vie among each other as to just how old and how pedigreed they are. I came to New America. I met Michael Crow. I went to ASU. I heard the gospel of why, and it is the gospel for the ASU people here, why it is that at least public universities should measure themselves, their success, not by exclusion but by inclusion, by how many people they educate, how well they educate those people, how diverse a cross-section of people they educate. And the ability then to combine that mission with great research. And so here we are talking about those next generation universities. I would say right now is an incredibly important time to do that. Those are the universities that are the crucibles of what we call the new America, the America we're becoming. They are also the incubators of democracy and citizenship. That's never more important than now. So my principal job is to introduce David Leonhardt. I told him this before, but my roommate in Washington, it is Amy McIntosh, the Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Ed Department. And she routinely wakes up and picks up the New York Times and says, I live for the upshot. The upshot, that true story, but the upshot does exactly what David won a Pulitzer Prize for. And I'll read that citation and turn it over to him. It is on a regular basis, it is responsible for quote, the graceful penetration of America's complicated economic questions from the federal budget to healthcare reform and today, higher education. David. We are your first panel of the day. It's a delight to be here. Some of you who have, who I've been at these things before, may have heard me say this before, but I'm pretty much the only member of my family who's not in education. Other members of my family are elementary school teachers and high school principals and college professors and my attention span wasn't good enough to be an academic. So I just like to write about it as much as possible and it's a real thrill to be here with you all today. I'm gonna very briefly introduce the panel and then I'm gonna ask them to do something a little bit unusual which is introduce themselves in the context of their involvement in this work and we're gonna do that briefly and then we are going to dive in and talk really about the substance. So sitting next to me is Hillary Pennington from the Ford Foundation. Next over is Tina Gridiron from the Lumina Foundation, Allison Griffin from USA Funds and our host, one of our hosts, Kevin Carey here from New America. So Hillary, let me start with you and we'll just then move right down the line. Tell us about your involvement in this work which is foundational and how it started and what it's trying to do. I had a lot of early involvement. I had the original idea to do the report. I was lucky enough, I raised the money from Visionary Lumina Foundation and I imagined and put together the dream team to do the research anchored by Kevin Carey and Jeff Solingo and I did it after I had left the Gates Foundation where I ran their post-secondary education grantmaking for five and a half years and I was really cranky because almost never in my time in those years as we tried to lift up the issue of the ways in which higher education was no longer disrupting inequality in the country but in some cases serving to perpetuate it, almost never did I find presidents that I met passionate about that issue, waking up every day thinking that they could do something and should do something to fix it even though the data shows that they were consumed with their own institutional standing in the hierarchy, even though the data shows that the differences in attainment within a segment of higher ed, elite public research, et cetera, there are greater differences between institutions within a segment than between segments. So clearly the things that a president can do herself or himself matter and I couldn't find people who felt that way except for the people that you'll hear from later on today, the presidents of these institutions. So I felt, you know, what would it be like to try to lift up their leadership, the kinds of things that their institutions were doing and create more of a sense of excitement and status for trying to solve that kind of problem? Excellent, Tina. So I have been with Illumina Foundation for 14 years and today I am channeling our president, Jamie Marisotis, who wanted to be here but was already engaged. Our foundation was very thrilled when Hillary came to us and shared this vision for this project and so we were one of the initial funders, both for the research and then for the implementation of the work when the University Innovation Alliance began. My colleague, Kevin Corcoran, was at the table along with Jamie Marisotis when this idea came together and we were excited to be a part of this process. One, because we know that increasing college completion, increasing attainment for first generation low income students of color requires an all hands on deck approach. Doing things the same way and expecting different results is insanity and the excitement of this work was about lifting up those institutions that were taking the risk to do things differently and were achieving different results. It has been an exciting journey for Illumina Foundation to be at the table and currently I serve as the partner with University Innovation Alliance. The project came to me as life happens at any foundation, things shift and move and twist and turn. So I currently manage the relationship with the University Innovation Alliance which is why I am here today to tell the story of where we've been and where we are excited about the future. Alison Griffin with USA Funds and interestingly enough my role with this work has been twofold. I came into the project actually as a member of the HCM Strategist Team which was the firm that was hired shortly after the release of the report to begin thinking about how we actually implemented some of the recommendations and started to bring together the presidents who had indicated their desire to be leaders on this conversation. And so from truly a very administrative and tactical level helped to bring some of that work together. And then my professional life took me to USA Funds where I had the opportunity to actually bring the University Innovation Alliance proposal to our leadership and begin to drive funding support and policy support for the work of the Alliance with our organization. At this point, I do not serve as the program officer but have an external relations function and so I have the opportunity to take what the UIA is learning and align that with the work that we are doing at USA Funds to talk about what has been happening today. I was fortunate enough to collaborate with Hilary on some of the original research that launched this discussion and these ideas along with my colleagues, Rachel Fishman and Iris Palmer and Jeff Selingo. We were interested in this issue because as a nonprofit organization focused on advancing the public good we begin all of our questions about education with students. And in higher education, you have to kind of go where the students are. Like someone said about money once upon a time. And that means going to in higher education large public institutions. That's where most of the students are. And so we became very interested in this question where more students were going. This was four years ago which meant from a state budget perspective a lot of states were still very much feeling the after effects of the 2008 recession. There's this whole thing that happens where a recession happens in year one. Year one, the worst year for education is sometimes two or three years later because it takes that long to really be felt in state budgets. And so universities and colleges were really suffering back then. And so our question was in this more extreme environment for institutions that are having to manage with less public funding. Who reacted to that by instead of withdrawing, expanding? Who went in the other direction and said we're going to actually serve more students and serve them successfully? And so we ran a series of statistical tests to find what turned out to be a fairly small group of institutions that met all those criteria. And then we went out and talked to them. Visited the faculty, visited the leadership, and found out some really interesting and I think lasting lessons that we'll get more of a chance to talk about now and that have now become embodied in the University Innovation Alliance on an ongoing basis. Excellent, thank you. I think one of the things, one of the ways I like to try to think about this is put it in the historical perspective of education in this country as a whole and around the world. And then if you think about what the story was at the beginning of the 20th century, it was the United States racing ahead of other countries as we became the first country to really introduce universal high school education. And the history of this is just fascinating and it's deeply relevant to today. It's covered in a book called The Race Between Education and Technology by Claudia Golden and Larry Katz in which there were people in Europe at the time who argued, well we shouldn't be educating everyone in high school. That's wasteful. Not everyone needs a high school education. Only certain segments of the population need it and we shouldn't spend all of our resources sending kids who don't need to go to high school but instead will be on the farm to high school. There are obvious echoes of that argument today in our society. The U.S. made a different bet. We decided that everyone would benefit from a high school education and we've reaped enormous benefits from that bet. In the blue collar workforce, in agriculture, in the white collar workforce. What's happened since then though is some other countries have passed us by. They've taken our idea of universal education. They've caught off to us on high school and they've passed us by on the higher education front. And so in a way they are more true to our original American idea than we have been. And it seems to me that's kind of a context for so much of the work that you all have engaged in here and that you've engaged in more broadly. I mean Lumina to take a good example but not just Lumina. And so the things that the original next generation report called out is the three real pillars of this. Our expansion, completion, and productivity. And so I just wanted to start by asking the three of you to set the scene nationally for us before we focus in on these universities. To help us think about where we are in terms of expansion, completion, and productivity in higher education. Is one of them clearly the biggest problem and the others are smaller problems? What really is it that is among those three and how do they interact that keep us from again still being the leader in universal education? Hillary, I'll let you go first again. And then from then on you guys should jump in and not wait for it. Yeah, we should just have a free discussion. So I think they're inextricably linked. But if you think about the argument in that book, I would have to say probably completion. So many, many more people who do not usually get included going and completing some kind of college degree. The challenge for the United States, even if you take it by income, and you've been one of the people that's written most about this. Since the 1960s, the number of young people in America from our lowest quintile who get a bachelor's degree by the time they're 24 years old have stayed absolutely flat and stuck somewhere between six and 8% while the numbers of young people in the highest income quintile have skyrocketed almost 80 to 90%. You can't be a democracy with lines like that. And we have the amount of money that we have spent on higher education in that same 40 or 50 years is astronomically more than it used to be. The numbers of institutions that we have are astronomically more than they used to be. But to have a line like that stay flat is a huge problem. So I would say completion and I would say we're barely budging that line and that's why these sort of interrelated practices that these institutions represent are so critically important. I would absolutely agree with what Hilary has shared and would come to the conversation from the glasses half full and that there is hope. And yet it's only half full. So when we think about expansion, when we think about productivity, when we think about completion, we are seeing strides. We are seeing forward movement. There is a national conversation that we can be proud of that is headed in the right direction. When we look at the data, particularly for first generation low income students of color, the gap between their success and other population student success is widening. So while we are seeing forward movement, while the context for our national conversation is elevated around attainment, is elevated around the issue of affordability for students is elevated in the reality that all students need to be well served via higher education conversation. We still are running into barriers and challenges that we have not overcome. That gap is widening, particularly for our low income students, for our first generation students and for our students of color. We are moving forward. We're seeing today's students take advantage of higher education in larger numbers. We're seeing a trend in the right direction, the glass being half full, but the challenges still remain when we look at the gaps that are still prevalent in our nation. I would agree with my colleagues in terms of how tied these three issues are to each other. One thing I didn't say at the outset is the work of USA funds is focused on completion with a purpose. So it's actually the connection between education and employment, college and career. And so when I think about this question, I think about the power of, not only the completion agenda, but also the conversation around productivity and how to think about becoming more successful around completion when you think about the opportunity to collaborate. Whether that is within the institution, across institutions, across other thought partners and key leaders, because then that turns itself to address the capacity issue, which is ever growing given that we have a significant take 12 population comprised of low income students. They are our pipeline to higher education. And so all three of these are very much tied together, but I would agree with my colleagues on the completion on the previous question. Can I add one thing before Kevin talks? Yeah. You didn't mention one word, which is the word quality. And I think oftentimes there comes to be this false dichotomy that's built up between those other three words and that word of quality, and that's what lets the institution stay so complacent. So let's have that and see if we can. My sense is, and I raise this in part so you all can disagree if I'm wrong, my sense is we don't have a huge problem of people getting bachelor's degrees that are low quality. I'm not saying there isn't any of it, but that the bigger problem is lack of completion than low quality bachelor's degrees. Am I wrong about that? We could probably have a good three hour debate about that question. It's an interesting one. The economic signals suggest, right? Meaning the fact that the gap between college graduates and everyone else kept growing. We definitely want a few economists in that room because that's one half of the argument. I would say this. I think expansion happens and has happened just because of demand for higher education in the population growth. And we've seen exactly that in our higher education system over the last 30 years where I think we've had at least a 50% increase in enrollments into a system with nothing like a 50% increase in the number of institutions. It's mostly the same colleges that were around in the 1970s by and large that are around today absorbing a much larger student population. The problem is that its expansion of enrollment isn't the same as expansion of degree completion. And from a financial standpoint, enrollment is what matters, not completion. And I think colleges are financially self aware of organizations and that has a lot of impact on how they see and how they prioritize things. And then from a productivity standpoint again because it's a fairly fixed marketplace in the aggregate and there have been plenty of students to go around, colleges need to be as productive as they have to be. They are not driven to be constantly more productive. And then you layer that on top of that a value system and prestige structure, particularly as you get into the more exclusive and expensive reaches of higher education. I don't wanna say better because I don't think that those are the same things. That actually pushes in exactly the opposite direction which says that success is exclusivity which means you actually don't want to open your doors to everybody. Success is luxury in some ways which is kind of the opposite of cost productivity. It's actually spending more money on the same things in a very demonstrative way. So I think what we run into is the people in the system who are most likely to be the change agents which is organizational leadership, have to fight between those value systems. The public values of access, expansion and productivity but then the in some ways private to the culture of higher education values that run in the opposite direction. I feel like a lot of this work is about helping people manage those opposing forces. But I'd like to go back to your pushback about whether bachelor's degrees are high quality. When we talk about quality we think about in terms of learning and how we are understanding what students know and are able to do. So the mechanisms for capturing the learning for understanding learning whether it's at the bachelor's degree, at the associate's degree or some other level of credential or certification attainment. The lever if you will, the opportunity to identify quality should be around learning and we still have room to grow to capture that learning and to find ways to help students articulate that learning in a meaningful way. Not only for their higher education experience while they're in college but also when they're going into the workplace. I mean yeah, room to grow is a kind phrase, right? Meaning it's, I mean my impression is that there's virtually no way for any person trying to enroll in college or any parent trying to make decisions or any policy maker to have any sense of how much students are learning institution by institution, right? There's no public. Correct, no public, right. Yeah. Before we leave, before we focus in on the institutions, Tina, I wanna ask you one question. The soon to be former president set a very public goal about completion. To what extent is the country on a path? What are the chances we're actually gonna reach that goal? And if we're not gonna reach it, how close are we gonna come? How much progress is there? So from luminous perspective, there is great promise to reach the goal. There is a lot of forward momentum with the institutions that we see as part of the University Innovation Alliance that when institutions come together and they make a commitment to attainment or completion as part of their agenda that movement can happen. We're seeing more students at the associate's degree level and individuals with some college and no degree coming back and taking advantage of robust programs to actually complete. So we believe that the goal is achievable, maybe not by 2020, but by 2025, from our perspective, we're seeing also an opportunity to capture credentials that are not just the bachelor's and the associate's degree, but that there are a variety of other credentials that have high value in the marketplace, have high value for career opportunities. The question will be how are those credentials linked towards associate's and bachelor's degree attainment so that it's not a dead end. It is a pathway toward further education. So our sense is there's great forward momentum and the potential for success. That 2025 is realizable for 60% of the population to have a high quality credential or degree. And was that the Obama goal? 60%? No. That was Luminous Goal. That was Luminous Goal. 2020 was Obama's goal, doubling. Doubling to 60. That was my understanding. Yes. Okay. But I work for Luminous, so I'm gonna share that. It is your choice. Before I ask Kevin to start our conversation of the specific universities, anything any of you wanna add on the national picture? I think to just underscore what you said, Tina, which is that even though there is small progress, the distribution of who gets those degrees isn't changing fast enough. And that's a serious problem in the country. Yeah. Okay. So the six original next gen universities, University of Central Florida, Arizona State, UC Riverside, University of Buffalo, Georgia State, and University of Texas Arlington. Walk us through, if you would, in a little bit more detail why they popped out. Well, we started by just running a series of filters against the whole population of public universities. So we wanted institutions, again, where there had been a combination of an increase in enrollment and graduation, at the same time that there was a decline in funding. Again, that was most institutions back then. And we wanted to make sure that they met some baseline productivity metrics. So we didn't wanna identify someone who was unusually unproductive and hold them up as an exemplar for other institutions to follow. And so we ended up with those institutions. And what's interesting about them all is they're all in this kind of sweet spot in the broader array of public research universities in the sense that they are long-established, great faculty, really good reputation in the job market, in the academic job market, but not so elite that they're essentially prevented from thinking in new ways. So for example, Arizona State, which was one of them, and we'll hear from Michael Crowe, who's a board member here at New America. I think I've said this to him before, and I don't know if he agrees with me entirely, but I think the biggest advantage that Arizona State has is it's not the University of Arizona. University of Arizona is the AAU institution in Arizona. It's long been the sort of number one research university. Again, I think ASU is trying to catch up with them and might even argue that characterization at this point. But if you are the flagship university, quote unquote, in your state, then you're bound by an awful lot of incentives to stay that way. You're on top of a steep mountain that everyone wants to get to. The faculty all want to work for you because you have this status. And I should say, SUNY Buffalo is an AAU institution, although when we interviewed the president, he was very aware of the fact that they were sort of in the lower tier of the AAU, which is like a real thing if you think this way. If you get to the bottom, they can actually kick you out, which happens every now and then. And I do think there's also this psychological political reality that if you are not, Buffalo's not Binghamton, right? And there's this thing that if within your own state system, if you've often been neglected at the expense of another one, it probably frees you more to innovate. I'm sorry. You know, and one thing I think we also learned in that process, and Kevin and I remember more on one site visit to an institution that will go unnamed, but there's a certain amount you can learn by numbers. And then there's a lot that you know by showing up on a campus and beginning to see the degree to which the kinds of things we were looking for truly are believed in, truly are managed for in an intentional way. And that to me was one of the great benefits of doing the site-based research because it didn't turn out that all of them were actually equally committed, equally innovative, equally driven to innovate on these sets of particular things, even though they were great institutions and played an important part in their ecosystem. We had a lot of debate back and forth about whether it should be the research universities or other kinds of public universities, seven out of 10 students who enrolled in higher ed at being in public institutions. But we felt that they played a unique part in their ecosystem. They were influential in their states and in their state systems, they often were nipping at the heels of the established, less innovative universities of. And they were very, very important anchors for regional economy. And that was another kind of draw. Yeah. I think we also saw a real commitment from a resource and leadership standpoint into, pardon me, student support. So, thank you. So not just here's your course catalog, there's your professor, good luck. Which is a caricature, but maybe not so much of one in terms of the typical experience that a lot of students have. A lot of institutions have under-invested historically in effective student support from a counseling standpoint, from a life standpoint. Often the people whose job it is are underpaid. They're kind of in a different part of the institution. They're not connected to the academics. I think, particularly our colleagues in Georgia have really been national leaders in talking about how if you invest both from a resource standpoint, from a leadership standpoint, from a technology standpoint in student support, you can really move the numbers. And I assume we'll hear more about that in the next panel. And the other thing was information technology. There are plenty of ways. There's still a misconception that there's a hard distinction between institutions that teach in person and institutions that teach online. Every college and university in America is teaching online in different ways now. Either formally or informally, they have huge programs. Either it's pure online programs like ASU Online, which is a big part of their enrollment increase. Or it's using information technology as part of student support and as part of increasing productivity. And the successful institutions were very focused on that as a change strategy. What else do others view, what strikes you about these institutions? Well, one of the things that we were looking for at the time was evidence-based strategies that other institutions could learn from. What was exciting about the institutions in this report is that they were willing to talk about the different interventions that they had put in place and to express how it's challenging and maybe difficult, but if you stay the course, it pays off. We see student success. We see forward movement. And from our vantage point, the growth from the original set of institutions looked at in this report, and then the growth of University Innovation Alliance being developed, indicated that these were not the only institutions that could do the work, that could articulate evidence-based strategies, put those strategies to work at scale, and then begin to see success for their students. When we look at the 11 institutions, they are even more, they are as exciting as we see in the first set of institutions articulated. I would say the two things stood out to me, just from the reading of the report and what I've come to know about this work. One is that commitment to the capacity for collaboration. Again, I referenced back to what I said earlier, both on campus, across campuses, within their community and their regional economy. And then quite honestly, the interest in students, other than their own, really taking an interest in, not just the students there on their campus, but students that fed in to their institutions, students in neighboring institutions, really stood out to me as qualities. If we were going back and writing about these same institutions, we'll get to other ones in a minute, these 11 now, what do you have a sense has changed the most since 2013 on these campuses? I mean, I think they have some more financial breathing room to some extent. So it's less about managing financial crisis and more about some smaller financial opportunities. Although again, in many states, the money that went away never came back. Right, it's just not going away as much anymore, which is not as bad, but still not that great. So I think that's part of it. I think technology is matured. I think there are a lot more people in the marketplace who can come in from an outside standpoint and provide options for institutions to work with. And I think there's just been an iterative learning process and the beginnings of learning communities forming between these institutions. Colleges are very isolated places traditionally in a lot of ways. They tend to be kind of city states unto themselves. There's not really a great process or a culture of inter-organizational learning in our higher education system, because it's in some ways not really a system. It's a collection, perhaps. Even in states that put the word system at the end of their collection institutions, they're all very, they have distinct cultures. And so I think we're starting to see more of that happening in many ways out of necessity because a lot of higher education leaders have, I think, long since concluded the state money isn't coming back, at least not, well, I'm gonna be here. So I've gotta put forth a plausible positive vision that adjusted this new reality. You know, I would add, I was also around as the Innovation Alliance got put together and I remember a lot of the early conversations among the presidents. And to me, one of the things that is significant and changing is their willingness to compete against shared goals that they are, that they've been willing to make concrete and numerical. And that was a raging debate in the beginning. Should we all just vaguely work towards increasing our enrollment and our graduation of certain kinds of students? Should we vaguely work on improving our financial aid systems? Or would we be willing, despite our differences, to agree to particular kinds of metrics that we will track our progress? And will we be willing to share those with each other? And would we be willing to consider sharing them publicly? And I'm a little bit further out of touch. I don't know the degree to which those things are more shared publicly, but I think it's highly unusual for a group of institutions to say we're gonna compete against a goal. And whichever one of our constituent institutions is doing better at reaching that goal, the rest of us are gonna take what they're learning, whether it's predictive analytics or particular approaches to student financial aid and we're gonna adopt it and try to get better at that goal ourselves. And that's the spirit of innovation that you often see in moonshots, or the scientific or medical community, but you very, very rarely see in higher education because there's no incentive to reward. Yeah, I mean, few people volunteer for more accountability, right? Which is effectively what it's doing. I wanna add one more thing that I think should have been mentioned before about key components, which is genuine commitment to partnership with community colleges. And we saw that, especially, I think, at the University of Central Florida, but across the board. Institutions recognize that many big public or your universities have big community college systems literally in the same city or nearby, but often different governing systems, different boards, different finances, history of perhaps antagonism or lack of cooperation, lots of technical issues in terms of course articulation. These are all solvable problems if there's a mutual commitment between the two institutions. There's kind of a theory that there is a path to a bachelor's degree, which is two years at a community college, two years at a four-year college that the public has accepted for a long time. It has never really been made a reality from a does it really work for students standpoint? And I think we've seen some of these institutions really commit to that as a major pipeline of students but also just what they're all about. And there's a nice historical echo there too, right? Which is the California master plan which did explicitly say we're gonna set up this system and try to do it. It was supposed to work that way. It was supposed to work that way. But there's a big argument even if it hasn't that it should, right? Particularly when you think about lower income kids who for whom the idea, sometimes they're in the same city but sometimes the four-year school is an hour away and for a lot of low income kids the idea of that hour when they're 18 is insurmountable. But this is what Kevin is saying is very significant. So I won't have the numbers exactly right and ASU should shout out the correction but I think they take something on the order of 10 or 20,000 transfer students from the community colleges a year, 12,000, thank you, Michael. And they freeze the tuition at ASU at the level it was in the year that that student was enrolled in the community college. So in a very viable way on a very large scale in a particular place, families know that if their student embarks on that path and they're successful and they do the things that the faculty in each institution have agreed they need to do, they will have a path forward into the university and I think especially because there are such poor information systems among low income communities and often students quote, under match, they go to universities that they don't think they can afford to or will succeed at a more elite university so they go to a community college. This is really beginning to subvert all of those kinds of mental models in a very significant way but it's very rarely seen as sexy and even foundations who focus on higher education often don't focus much on community colleges. Are there any, I'm sorry. I was just going to note, one of the things that we were excited about the maturation of this work was in multiple leaders coming together and carrying the water together. We often heard as a foundation, one institution coming with a great idea and wanting to do that great idea and then no one else in the field wanting to take advantage of what we were learning because our institution is not like that and what is exciting about this work is that you have 11 very different and unique and exciting institutions that also have similarities but they are running the race together and they are lifting up the success that can be achieved together which means that 28 other institutions now are saying hmm, let's observe what they're doing. This actually has resonance for me. I can learn because there is an institution in this set that looks like me. So the leadership in collection, in collaboration, in concert is making a difference and was very exciting for our involvement early on and we're seeing dividends. You've talked about whether there is public discourse about what we're seeing with the 11 institutions together. We do see that because they share the message of completion, of supporting students from low income backgrounds of not decreasing access but opening access that there is momentum of other institutions taking advantage. That's a perfect segue to what I was going to ask next which is accepting the 11. Are there any other institutions that you all want to cite either as having specifically learned from the 11 or doing something innovative and important in this exact same area, the triumvirate of completion and if we want to add a fourth. What's the, what's the, right, the four quality that you all want to name it, either learning from or doing on their own? I mean, I think if you just run the numbers again. Yeah. Florida International University. Again, I think not a coincidence another one in Florida but a big growing public university in a state that's not Florida, not Florida State doesn't have a football team in the national championship all the time. Maybe that's a good thing if what you're focused on is productivity and quality and expansion. And actually UNC Chapel Hill, their numbers have been improving. They're morally in terms of the firmament of American public research universities but it looks like they're also expanding as well. So yeah, those are a couple. Wasn't Florida International, there are a few Florida universities that have somewhat similar names. Wasn't it the one that was the subject of that wonderful study that took advantage of the discontinuity? So there was a wonderful study in Florida that took advantage of the fact that if you're just on one side of the line, I think it was the SAT, but it could have been a Florida test, you got into a four year college. And if you were just on the other, you didn't. These are basically identical kids, right? One got an eight, 10 and one got a seven, 90. And what they saw is just being on one side of the line which just qualified you for the lowest admission standard for your school in the state brought really big benefits. It made you much more likely to enroll in college. It meant you were earning more at age 30 which is a deeply encouraging finding, right? Because it suggests there actually are real causal benefits to higher education. I think Florida International was... Well, you could also, but it might also be a sign that our community college pipeline is not working well enough. Yeah. Because maybe because if there's only, I mean a healthy system ought to maybe not penalize that difference so much, right? You should be able to start in some place. And if you have, if the academics are by definition almost the same. So that almost feels like a problem to be solved to me. Yes. It is both encouraging and worrisome. Yeah. Both, yeah. Let's talk for a minute about philanthropies, right? So it's a question for everyone but Kevin. What have philanthropies learned from this? And how do you think your engagement with higher education around these issues, completion particularly, but not just completion, will be different over the next decade than it was over the last? We should start with these guys. Okay. So I'll take a shot at that. Again, in the introduction of my relationship with USA Funds, I didn't note that we've gone through a significant transformation over the last number of years. And the work with the UIA actually came to us at a time when we were transitioning our philanthropic focus. And one of the things that we learned early on was the investment in a consortia of institutions. A group of focus leaders had the power to really transform the conversation and the narrative more so than just an investment in a single institution. And has actually informed our philanthropic strategy for the last number of years. And so we're always looking for opportunities for partnership across institutions as opposed to just looking to support one institution. So I think that was a powerful lesson for us. I would also say a focus on, again, for us, it was the connection, the mission alignment, right? The connection to the completion with a purpose agenda. And so looking just beyond completion, but what that meant for the future success of students once they got out of school. Also very significant. And then the last thing I would say is really just the recognition for institutions that are doing what the United States needs as opposed to what the system rewards. It's a really significant lesson for us over the last number of years. That's a really interesting frame. So when Lumina first started talking about the big goal or goal 2025, there was many who said, perhaps that's too lofty. What we find with the University Innovation Alliance institutions is that we can get there. That with strong leadership, that with collaborative work, both at the institution and in the community, with a commitment to serving students where they are and not the students that you want them to be, actually serving the students that you have, that success is possible. We recognize that today's student is that part-time student is the adult learner, is the student that is attending multiple institutions at the same time, is the student that has many dependents. And these institutions are serving those students well. And when we think about the future for our work, more institutions that will embrace students in their ecosystems, students right in their backyard, students who have been educated by the K through 12 systems across the street from the institution, not trying to bring students from other states or from other countries as the viable support. What we know is success is possible and we are excited in seeing more institutions take advantage of what these 11 institutions have already shown as possible as we look to the future. Focus on adult students, focus on learning, focus on all types of learning and securing the credentials for students where they are learning. And I'm at a different foundation, at the Ford Foundation now, which has a single focus on inequality and is a social justice foundation. So unlike the Gates Foundation where I started, we are much less focused on the inside, the institution aspects of changing institutional practices but very much asking the question about the role of education and higher education in a contested democracy. And I can remember conversations with you over the period of time when I was at Gates about what it means for the politics in the country when people feel that higher education is out of reach and not fair and the rules are stacked against them and no matter what they do, they and their families can't afford to go, won't go, won't succeed and how there would be the fear, we talked about this this summer, the Tea Party burst onto the scene, the fear that if we couldn't fix that problem we would end up in a place where one part of the country was against everything and the educated we stood for and believed in. And I think we're in that country and we're in that time. So we at Ford look a lot to this alliance for lessons that have as much to do with our democracy and our politics and what it means for higher education to keep the social contract with people in the states and people in the country and what it means for higher education to also occupy the intellectual and moral leadership for societies as they change. I'm forgetting the author's name if someone knows it, please shout it out but there's the University of Wisconsin professor who did the book about Scott Walker's Wisconsin and what was driving so much of the exact anger that you're talking about. And one of the things that really struck me in her work was how much anger she experienced at Madison in particular. Not as a state capital but as a university town. As an out of touch, politically correct. Taking our money. Taking our money. I wanna open it up to all of you but I wanna do two quick things before we do so. So first I wanna, actually I'll ask this first and we'll answer it second. So and Kevin I'll make you answer it. I wanna invite you all to provide some constructive feedback for these institutions, right? So you've lifted them up, you've highlighted them, you said they're doing a great job. What are the areas where they're not doing well enough? What are the areas where they have the biggest room to improve even more? And I'll let you think about that for a second. And if any of you but Kevin wanna duck it you can. And while you think about that, obviously we're just a few days away, a week away from an inauguration, right? How do you each expect that the transition in the administration will change the debate about higher education in a way that affects these issues, if at all? I'm gonna duck it a little bit. Kind of by answering both questions at the same time. Okay. I mean, because really I have enormous respect for what these institutions have accomplished from a leadership level. I mean, being, running a big university is a super complicated job. And he was a big skeptic starting out. I was a little bit, you know, it's true. I mean, running a big complicated university is an enormously difficult job to start with. Even if all you wanna do is kind of have it be what it always was. Yep. To have it be something different is almost in order of magnitude change on top of that. So I have a huge respect for everyone who is doing that really difficult work. So something I think that would help, if you wanna see this as a criticism, is I don't see that the spirit of this endeavor represented in the national policy dialogue here in Washington, D.C. When as an analyst and an advocate, we have debates here at D.C. about how to structure federal policy, how to get more information out to students and parents, how to perhaps bring some accountability to the question of the funding of how federal funding flows to states and institutions. There is an awful lot of resistance from people who represent higher education to even having honest conversations about those ideas. It is a pretty hard line attitude of keep the system as it is. It's really not your place to even ask these kinds of questions or put this kind of information out there. I would like to hear more of the voices of the leaders who are really operating under a different set of assumptions and from my perspective, a better set of assumptions, a set of assumptions that are more aligned with the public good, to say no, actually it's better for everyone if we reorient the way both institutions and the policy structures that influence them, if we reorient all of those things around a shared goal of completion and productivity because frankly those voices are being drowned out by kind of a, I think more of a retrograde perspective which is just keep the money coming and don't ask any more questions. Any of the rest of you wanna jump on either question? So I would just share that the leaders of these 11 institutions have already shown that a student focused, a student centered approach works. We would appreciate their help in understanding how to support students who are in the not credit, not for credit world to move into the for credit world. So I don't have a message of how they are not achieving success. I would just put forward their leadership and strength in helping students understand the pros and cons of not for credit versus for credit and perhaps having a dialogue about getting not for credit moved over to for credit so that whenever a student learns anything they are able to take that learning and stack it towards future learning so that even if a student today thinks that they don't need the credit they can still benefit from it. We would like some leaders to help us think through that. The second is given the violence and the I would say contentious conversations that we've seen in the political debate and in our nation, the role of higher education in helping students to be a part of that conversation to exercise their democratic right and to be voices for change will be ever present as it always has been even under a new administration. Students from all walks of life seeing the value of higher education for their own benefit and for their community. We are excited about continuing the work towards increased completion. It is needed regardless of who is in the White House. Our nation needs it and the conversation will continue. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think the one thing I would say about the institutions, they have gone deep and there is a need to still go wide. So there's 11 of them. This gets to Kevin's question. You know, how do more institutions begin to benefit and innovate in similar ways? And how does it leapfrog to policy? You know, policy in many ways would be the game-changing scalable kind of issue. And do you want us to talk about your second question? Yes. Yes. So what I would, you know, I think it's very unpredictable with the particular nominee for the Department of Education what the higher education policy would be. But to me, I- Because her focus has been K-12. Has been so much on K-12. But I think to me, the most disturbing thing, something disturbing, something confounding and something optimistic, on the disturbing side, I think the tendency to suppress expression and to suppress academic freedom in our universities would be something to be very concerned about and very much to watch for and normalizing the rhetoric that political correctness or student flashpoints is a bad thing and therefore we should not tolerate that immature set of needs is a very close cousin to a suppression of a kind of speech and academic freedom that I think is important. On the confounding piece, you know, Ford is a global foundation and we are seeing student movements around the world where, and you could see this a little bit in the students who supported Bernie Sanders where students' disaffection with the promise of democracy with larger things that are happening in their society is being turned against institutions of higher education because they feel that those institutions have broken the compact with them. They're too expensive, they're too self-interested. And so I think there's the potential for a global movement of student protests that would look much more like we saw in some parts of the world in the 60s and 70s. You look at fees must fall in South Africa. You look at what's happening in many countries in Latin America. You look at our campaign and there's some degree to which those students are beginning to network with each other. But I think that's gonna be an interesting thing to watch. And then I think on the optimistic side, it is a robust, resilient sector. And there's a large degree of consensus around these kinds of issues. And there's no need for an education war over what we should do about higher education. So hopefully this might be one of those issues where there's bipartisan, relatively more open. Peace, if not agreement. Yeah, right. Okay, let's get to all of you. It's a small enough room. I can repeat questions that people need me to but I just ask you to be clear with it and introduce yourself and oh, we even have a microphone. Excellent, please keep it brief so we can get to a bunch of you. Got a gentleman here in the front. Second row. Abdulalim, a reporter with diverse issues in higher education. And so this question is kind of directing mostly at Allison, but anyone who wants to take it feel free. You mentioned that your organization has an emphasis on not just completion, but completion with the purpose. And I think from my standpoint, one of the biggest flaws of the conversation about completion is that it's been kind of focused on numbers and not enough on actual needs as Allison alluded to. So I'm hoping perhaps you can maybe allude to what sectors there needs to be more completion in, preparation for, for instance, anyone who saw the congressional hearings on the alleged Russian hacks. Throughout that conversation, there was a constant need about the need for more talent in cybersecurity. So if you could speak to just kind of elaborate on that on completion with the purpose, paying attention to specific needs and sectors. Thank you. Thank you. So just to capture the essence of your question, reflection on our mission around completion with a purpose and what sectors perhaps in broader industry are reliant on higher education to adequately prepare students for transition from college to career. So we've started to do a fair amount of work in our philanthropic investment space with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. I'm specifically looking at states and metro areas and trying to begin to decipher where some of the greatest needs are, of course, you know, in the STEM fields, you know, their significant need for talent in those majors and in those areas. You know, but quite honestly, when you start talking about more that the soft skill development and the transferable skill that students can take almost regardless of major, but be able to take, you know, some of those critical skills into different marketplaces and different industries that will allow them to move from career path to career path over the course of time. I mean, we've really just started to do some of that work and that exploration and hope to be able to share some of that in the near future. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a question for Tina. So I was really struck by your educate students where they are, because I thought immediately of European universities. So my mother's Belgian. She was educated the way most Europeans are. She lived at home. She went to the university, the University of Brussels. And on the other hand, as an academic myself in the United States, it was always, well, yeah, but that's just large lecture classes. There are no seminars. They don't really learn. It's wrote. So what I'm wondering is do we have something to learn from European university systems that do educate much more that way than the we go away to school here? So a great question. And when we talk about educating students where they are, we think about students in who are also veterans or students who are in the military, students who are also working either in manufacturing areas or in STEM that have a high degree of learning on the job but don't get credit for that learning when they want to transition to a traditional higher education experience. Learning in community service, whether that learning happens abroad or here in the US. We know that students are developing competencies, skills, knowledge that can be translated into future employment, into education pursuits, into further endeavors. The question that we have is where students are learning? How do they capture that learning? How do they get credit, if you will, for that learning and then transfer that learning from one experience to another? If it happens in the military, how does it get transferred to a traditional higher education setting? If it happens in community service experiences, how is it transferred? If it's happening in the business world, if it's happening in your workplace, how do we transfer that learning? How do we help the students understand what they know and are able to do, articulate what they know and are able to do and then capture that learning for their current needs as well as their future needs? So our connection with learning where you are and acknowledging students' learning as it happens is from a U.S. context and we're just trying to lift up that learning is happening for students. If you take a student-centered approach, if you look at today's students and you help them articulate and understand their learning every step of the way, then we are maximizing their success. We are maximizing the opportunity to capture the talent that we have in our country and to further develop that talent. It seems very closely related to the whole discussion of, I may get the terminology slightly wrong and I apologize, micro-credentials, right? Where people can show, hey, in this job, I learned this. Are there any, what are the places that we all should be aware of that are doing a really nice job with early job with that sort of stuff for anyone? That is a great question and I don't have the answer to that question. I like honest. So I would say that perhaps some of our University Innovation Alliance institutions are engaged in work that is capturing micro-credentials in different places where we might get some of that feedback in the next panel from them but that is an area where we are trying to learn as those credentials are developed and understood how are they stacked, how are they transferred for a student as they move in their academic path. Next panel, feel free to take that on. Yes. Until June, until June, President of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which does work on quality, it works exclusively on trying to make quality inclusive rather than, as Kevin has so accurately said, a part of a stacked system in which some students get access to narrow credentials and others are given access to a big spectrum education. So I just wanted to make a comment and then I wanted to put a question to anyone who wants to jump in. But the comment has to do with challenging your assumption, David, there's a preponderance of the evidence that many students who are crossing the finish line with degrees are leaving without the kind of skills and analysis, problem solving, communication, et cetera, that they need. And by students' own reports, they think they've gotten much less learning about global issues and civic issues and ethical issues than they would look for. So there's a lot of evidence there, the quality needs to be, as Hilary said, part of this quadrant, not try it. But the question has to do with trying to pull together things that different ones of you said, whether it's the mission of the Ford Foundation or the work that I know that Kevin has done and has alluded to trying to develop some metrics for a public-spirited education. When we're talking about graduating students who have a sense of purpose, is that purpose only career-related? Or are we taking responsibility and how could we take more responsibility? How could we make it a national priority to make it a responsibility to ensure that students are ready to give some of that knowledge and skill and commitment back to their communities, back to their democracy? So how should we be thinking about that as part of this conversation? I mean, I think the AACNU has been a leader over the last, as of course you know, over the last 10 years and really through its lead projects, creating authentic ways for institutions themselves to provide evidence of that. And I think we could probably do 100 times more than is happening right now. I think we're just kind of getting started with getting institutions used to thinking this way. And with a lot of things, I think we need to have, I suppose as I'm a little older now, I feel this way more, a little patience about how long it takes for change to happen. Iteration makes a huge difference, right? You try something, you get better, you get better, you get better. I think that's part of it. I also, you know, I think particularly for the broader spectrum education, we ought not to be confined to a, to the fairly narrow amount of time that students are formally engaged as students in colleges, which is a small portion of their long learning life. And I don't think we provide enough opportunity. People are, I mean, people are rational and they are really wrestling with, I need a job. I need a credential that will get someone to hire me. I need to start a career. I can only do this for so long because I'm doing a million other things at the same time. What is my quickest path there? That's a very rational set of choices and we actually could do a much better job of giving people options of paths. But the broader set of skills, which we impart kind of almost by birthright and by virtue of a social status just the very elite number of students and that are very much emphasized at our most traditionally elite institutions, that can get lost in that calculus. I think we need to think more expansively about what kind of post-secondary opportunities we can provide that aren't just college-based and I do think information technology can play a big part in that. I'll just respond briefly to your first comment, which is I certainly I agree that colleges that quality is an issue to take your frame, right? And we could have higher quality. I guess as I think of the ordering of the issues, right? When I think about the fact of the unemployment rate for people in their 20s and 30s with bachelor's degrees is 2.2%, I think. When I think about the gap between college graduates and everyone else being at all time high. When I think about non-economic measures like lifespans and then this evidence like the Florida International that some of it does seem to be causal. I think the quality is a significant less of an issue than completion, whereas I guess I would argue there's a lot of evidence that the average quality is quite good. I don't doubt some of it needs to come up. Whereas with completion, I see huge problems and frankly see too many excuses in higher ed about how if only we had different set of statistics, these statistics would look a little better, which is both true and I think sort of secondary. So I would just put completion above quality. Absolutely, absolutely. I just meant to me, completion is a much bigger problem in higher education than the quality of bachelor's degrees. So defining quality more narrowly as the quality of degrees. Yes. My name is Greg Schekman. I'm with the University of Central Florida and this is not a pre-arranged question. A lot of people forget that the Higher Education Act sprung out of LBJ's war on poverty and to Hillary's point about the lower quartile, poverty rate in 65 is pretty much the same as it is today. But if you look at the UIA institutions in terms of being able to serve Pell eligible students and the completion rates that they have, it seems like there's almost a moral imperative as the HEA reauthorization goes forward to take what these institutions have done with respect to graduating Pell students and making sure that that's part of the national dialogue and almost template for what the HEA should be doing, especially Speaker Ryan's talking about this anti-poverty initiative that he has, it seems to all thread together and with your point about the UIA not having that national conversation or being part of the national conversation, it seems like now is the right opportunity to do that. I think that's a hugely important point and this is where again the crank and me goes back to leadership in higher education because even if you focus on completion and you were a president, you still control the way your institution does education. So you could make sure that it was purposeful and full of all the rich things that AAC and you want. There's no reason you can't structure math or any vocational topics so that it is also rich in critical thinking and learning and then to your point, I think the fact that there is not a consuming passion among the leadership of higher education about how they can serve the nation's need which is around these sets of problems among others is to me a great disappointment. It really does seem like an era of people who are interested in the stature and the financing of their institution and they might be interested in other kinds of problems that are high status research problems but this problem, you would wish we did have the energy that we put towards the moonshot because it's a solvable problem. That's one of the other things that these institutions and others are doing, we could do this. We just have to decide to do it. That's a great advertisement for our second panel. Please join me in thanking our panelists. So I'm handing it, okay, great, great. So Bridget's gonna come up now? I don't know. I would love to catch up. They won some awards. Okay, I won't add that all the people. Yeah, okay. Let's talk for a minute now. Don't lose your umbrella. Time to go to work, buddy. Is that on your umbrella back there? Okay. Okay. So the best way to... So I think we're taking a five minute break, I guess. Techniques or whatever. Get it to me. We'll start bringing folks back in. All right, everybody, if folks could take their seats, I wanted to give you a chance to take a break for a moment, but we are perfectly on time. Well, we'll get started. And as folks head towards their seats, then they'll be able to catch the next phase of this conversation. So I wanna first begin by thanking New America for holding this event. We're very grateful for the opportunity to talk about what we think are the important issues we need to be thinking about as we move forward and talk about economic competitiveness and how we can do a better job for every citizen. So my name is Bridget Burns, and I'm the executive director of the University Innovation Alliance, which you heard a little bit about a few minutes ago. But you also heard about this NGU report that came out in 2013. And so the question that comes up is, well, what's the connection between the two? And essentially what happened is, when New America published the Next Generation Universities Report, they identified exemplars in the field and best practices, and to some degree, for these campuses, introduced them to each other. And so a small group of those campuses who were identified in that report, University of California Riverside, University of Central Florida, Arizona State, and Georgia State, the CEOs of those institutions thought, well, we're really struggling as a country at this challenge, and this report identified that we're actually moving forward and making progress. Perhaps we could come together and find a way to create something bigger than ourselves, find other partners, and see what we can do for the rest of the country. So that's what the University Innovation Alliance was about, was trying to do. Because one of the other challenges in higher education is that most of the rewards, rankings, degrees, all of it is based on individual action, individual reward, so you get the degree, you move up in the rankings, you're going to win that research award. Those to the trappings are focused on that at the expense of collective action, but these institutions have decided to come together to try and address what we think is the big challenge facing our country, which is we know that we're facing a massive shortfall in college degrees. In terms of degree productivity, we're on track to see a shortfall of somewhere between 11 and 16 million college degrees by 2025. We're just simply not producing enough to meet the current economic demands and to keep up for long-term economic competitiveness. The second piece is, for the first time in U.S. history, low-income students are now the majority in public K-12. So the bulge in the pipeline of students who are coming are predominantly going to be low-income. And the kicker is that higher education has historically done a terrible job when it comes to serving low-income students. You heard a bit about that this morning. And so these institutional leaders who partnered up with Purdue, UT Austin, Michigan State, Ohio State, the University of Kansas, Oregon State University, and Iowa State University decided that they have a sense of urgency around these problems and going it alone to address them is a waste of time, energy, and money. And at the end of the day, it's students who are paying the price. And so these institutions have come together and made a commitment that they're going to produce more graduates, that they're going to produce more graduates across the socioeconomic spectrum, that they are going to lower the cost of a degree, and that they are going to innovate together. And so I'm going to give you just a brief taste of what we've actually been doing. And then you're going to have the opportunity to hear from the leaders who, this was their idea, and they're the ones who have been shepherding this movement all along. So these are the UIA campuses. As you can see, they're spread throughout the country. All large public research-intensive institutions, most of them serving over 25,000 students. The largest university, the three largest universities in the country are included, Arizona State, Ohio State, and University of Central Florida. These institutions didn't really know each other prior. Again, the NGU report was very helpful for them identifying. And you'll hear a bit more about how they found each other. In terms of the scale of the institutions, this gives you a perspective. The UIA campuses, there are 11 of them. We're serving almost 400,000 students, almost 120,000 PEL students. And that's just in comparison to other types of institutions for scale and other collective identities of institutions. So you have a sense of what's unique and what's different about this group. So the institutions came together and the work that they are doing is innovation, scale, and diffusion. Innovation is things that we can only do together. The radical idea that 11 heads are better than one. And so one example of that you're gonna hear a bit about is a 10,000 student random control trial the campuses have launched. Scale is the bulk of our work, which is take an idea, find out if it's real, and proven with data and scale it up across the country because the diffusion of ideas in higher education is just too slow. And so an example of some of those ideas that we have scaled thus far, these are the first four scale projects that we've been doing. We're heading into year three and we're about to do strategic financial interventions, but in the first year we scaled predictive analytics and in the second year proactive advising after scaling up our fellows program. And this is just again a high level overview. The third bucket of work we focus on is diffusion. Ideas are not spreading in higher education and part of that is we need to come up with different methods of sharing ideas. And so we are constantly iterating on how we can do a better job, helping people really understand what's happening and what the first three steps are if you really want to adopt an idea. So we also set some very public, don't know what's happening with PowerPoint, but we set some public measurable goals and we're holding each other accountable. We're sharing data. Our campuses are sharing down to the student unit record level in some cases. We set a goal that we're gonna graduate an additional 68,000 students over the next decade. We're now on track since we set this goal to hit 94,000 students in that same time period. So there's accountability, there's a focus, a rigorous focus on data and making sure that this is real. We also, above current and stretch goals. So the other things that we've done, thank you, some other things that have been important products of the UIA is we created a fellows program to seed the talent for next generation leaders. These are the UIA fellows that we've had thus far, but we're trying to train these smart thinkers and doers in how to actually shepherd academic innovation and transformation across the UIA and hopefully into the future leading other campuses. We've also created teams on each campus. So this is not just a project that's held in the president's office. It is deeply ingrained in the institution. These folks are working on a daily basis to take these ideas and to spread them and test them and iterate. In the last two years, we've accomplished a lot of numeric things and this is just a taste of them. I would tell you that the real thing that has changed and made a huge difference for us is now we're at a point where it's a true community of practice where ideas are spreading faster than I can keep up with. Every time I interact with a campus, I find out there's some new idea that has spread between the campuses, which was really what the intention of this initiative was. So now we have an opportunity that you have a kind of a base primer on what the UIA is actually doing. You have an opportunity here from the innovative and transformational leaders who came up with this idea and who have been shepherding it all along. To my right is President John Hitt, who is the president of University of Central Florida. He is one of the longest standing university presidents in American higher education at 25 years and who UCF was when he first became president is fundamentally different than who they are today. They have massively grown and are deeply embedded in not just their community, but just in the state of Florida, really advancing and moving ideas forward. To his right is President Stephen Leith, who is leading an institution that is learning from some of these NGU universities and helping teach them to. He's the president of Iowa State, which in my opinion is one of the most iconic Americana institutions. It is in the heartland. It is in the land grant institution. It really is one of the best examples of what kinds of institutions we know we're gonna need to work with and we need to model the kinds of change that we've talked about. And he has been at Iowa State now for five years. To his right is Mark Becker, the president of Georgia State, which is the national model for student success and has eliminated race and income as a predictor of outcome. So he, President Hitt and President Crow, were all lauded as the most innovative presidents in higher education, according to Washington Monthly, and he has been there for eight years. And the man who needs no introduction to his right is Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University. Lauded as the most innovative university in the country, the chair of the UIA. Mark Becker is the vice chair of the UIA. And the person who can give us probably, as we kick off, a first sense of exactly how we got here and why this got started and where your interest was in the first, as we began. So welcome to the panel. Thank you, Bridget. You know, I, 11 university presidents getting aligned around anything is an unbelievable event, you know, somewhat similar to the formation of a new religion. And so it's a, it's of that scale. But I think that where we are unified among the 11 of us is that we're at the beginning of a social train wreck, but different than what you might think. The train wreck looks something like this. No one could have imagined a country of 320 million people growing to 450 million people with no majority population from any particular ethnicity or cultural background. No one could have ever conceptualized, except perhaps some of our founders who designed the place that allowed us to get this far, that kind of outcome. And so right now what we have in higher education is not a model which just underproduces in lower socioeconomic family income groups, college graduates, but more important than that. And I think we all embrace this completely and totally. We're not tapping into the entirety of the talent and the creativity and the energy and the drive and the perspective of the entire population. So we have virtually a greatly reduced chance of success as a country unless we have unbelievable diversity in our educated population. Women engineers and students from poor families and minority families, whatever it happens to be, every life experience, every cultural background, that's the only way that our democracy at 450 million people will be socially, culturally, and economically successful. And we all get that, we all understand that, and we all realize that in one way or another, each of our institutions, particularly as a public research university, each of our institutions have a very special mission. I used to be the executive vice provost at Columbia University for many years, and I was a faculty member there. I was on the board of Bowdoin College for many years, which is an elite four year liberal arts college. Those are fantastic institutions. They're not designed to scale, they're not meant to scale, they're meant to attract great students who are great faculty and produce great graduates in limited numbers. Fine, very expensive process. The rest of us in the world, we have a country of 450 million people to worry about, and so that is what this alliance was really established to do, that's what we're really focused on, and the way to get it at it is these four very simple goals, produce more graduates, in particular many more graduates from lower income families, work together to lower the cost to both the family and the government to produce the graduate and perhaps most importantly, innovate together, and we got alignment around all four of those goals by all 11 of these schools, and also the willingness to not only open our kimonos, as they say sometimes in certain rooms, to each other, but to then also say that when we're done with all of that, to make available everything that we do and everything that we discover to everybody else so that the entire country has a chance to be able to scale and move forward, so that was the story behind what we're doing, and I'll just say a little bit about my own institution and that is that we're deeply committed to this. We have altered our charter, our structure, our culture, our design, every single thing about the institution so that we do not grow up to be definitively. A university that thinks that its excellence is determined only on how many students it excludes from admission. We will not do that, and so it's a hard road to say that but I will say one last thing and that is we actually thought selfishly that we'd have a better chance at achieving our own individual goals by working with these 10 other guys and figuring out what these other universities could do in terms of being able to help us to be able to achieve that. Great, so we heard a little bit earlier about the NGU model and you're hinting at some of the difference between what your institution's doing and what the general landscape of higher ed is asking. I think it begs the question, why do we need new models of higher education, and so I wanna pose that to the other panelists to give you a chance to talk about that. Well, you actually heard it said in the previous session, definition of insanity, keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The reality is, today in the United States of America, the beginning of every academic year, only about half the students who begin a college education will get one and will complete with a degree, only half. So if we keep doing what we're doing, we're gonna continue to have a 50% failure rate. None of you is going to buy a car if I tell you that the car during its expected lifetime, only half of them are gonna work, or your iPhone's only gonna work for only half of you and the rest of you are just gonna have to be happy that they don't. The reality is what we're doing as a nation is not working, and we have to basically do things differently. And fundamentally, it's to look at, and you heard it again in the previous panel, student-centered, the students who are coming to us today are not the ones that you actually, everybody when they think and you read about it, though there's the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Washington Post, thinks that a college education is four years of a residential experience somewhere and you get a bachelor's degree and you're done. That is the exception, that is not the norm. It's actually the New York Times, some years ago I remember I wrote that the typical student in the United States of America attends three institutions before he or she gets a degree, if he or she gets a degree. So the whole reason for this is if we don't change the game, we don't change the results. Steve, how about you? Well, I'll couple things together, I'll talk a little bit about why we're an intract in this organization and also address that question on innovation. I came to Iowa State, we're 29,000 students and I felt a need to scale the university, provide access, affordability and quality and in those five years we've gone from 29,000 to nearly 37,000 students. But we did have an achievement gap that I needed to address and I come from a historically non-diverse state that's still not very diverse, but the student population is now 23% multicultural or international, so we've become very diverse and we had this achievement gap when I came. And as I looked at growing the university, serving more Iowans and having some of these issues compounded by size and scale, there was no way I was gonna improve retention rates, graduation rates, these things that were so critically important for our partnership with our students by doing what we had done, especially as we scaled the university, I needed help. And we had a lot of good ideas but we certainly didn't have all the good ideas. We're a national leader in learning communities, for example, but I knew I needed help so I turned to one of our distinguished alums, Michael, and said, I need to be part of this organization. You notice we're wearing the same ties here, you know? But... There's too many similarities about everything about us. But... And so the opportunity to work with a group that really wanted to look at things in an innovative new way and test some things, and I could have Mark or John test any things I hadn't even got to yet and still capitalize on their successes, which I have. So it was a perfect place for Iowa State to jump in. John? One of the characteristics of our university is that we think of ourselves and advertise ourselves to be America's leading partnership university. So as I looked at the model of collaboration, it was easy for me to do a little translation and say, look, this is a group of institutions of quality, of ambition, and really led by innovative folks. You've got a chance to learn and your institution has a chance to learn. Now, there'll be some chances for us to help others with problems. They'll learn from us as we learn from them. But it just seemed to me it was an opportunity to be part of something really first rate that could advance the quality and the access to higher education in a state like ours, Florida. We're a very fast growing state, as many of you know, and that's represented to some extent in the institution that I served. When I went there in March 1 of 92, I guess that fall we had had 21,000, two or 300 students. This last fall we registered more than 64,000 students. And there are many I could give you the standard spiel about all of the characteristics, but I'll spare you that for now. But we had, we saw a chance to be part of a group that wanted to innovate, that wanted to work together to improve higher education. So why is this model different? So Steve, you're part of the AU involved in the CIC and a variety of other collaboratives. How does this collaboration feel different on a day-to-day basis when you experience it? How is this unique? Well, I'd say first and foremost, I think we all tend to compete on metrics, in our athletic conferences, in our region, in our states. This is one of the few, maybe the only partnership I've been in where you feel more like siblings in the same family where you don't mind sharing some of your weaknesses and asking for help in some areas and really going forward together. I think that's actually a fairly unique part of this group. Mark? I wanna say, and that was by design. I remember the first time that I was involved in these conversations and meeting that Michael, convene, and Aspen, Hilary was there to talk about it. It was by design that we would be such that we don't compete in other ways. We don't compete for the same students and recruiting. We don't compete each other athletically in the main. So I think that was by design that it was important. But to build on that, while this is unique, I also wanna say about why it's important in terms of the dissemination piece. Because this came up repeatedly in the previous panel about, but what about beyond the 11? Okay, so I look at our work with our 10 partners here, which is very deep, meaning the teams visit each other's institutions, the fellows, very, very deep work, but at the same time, we're also in the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities where there's a number of funded projects looking at very similar types of interventions. So what we're learning and doing in the UIA is spreading to other institutions through that basis. And then in addition, just in the last few years, we've had over 200 institutions visit Georgia State for as little as a day and sometimes for periods of days to look at parts of what we've done. And I know Mike will get similar traffic, probably even greater traffic at Arizona State. So what's important about this is while it's unique, it's not alone. I mean, the work that's happening here where we're very deep together in terms of the depth of the projects, and you'll hear about some of that when Tim speaks next, at the same time, we're also all working with others in different ways, whether it's through other professional associations, collaborations, funded projects, or through one-to-one work with other institutions. And so I think that's why it's so important that we're doing this, is that that dissemination is not just the 11. The 11 is, you know, I just can't emphasize enough how deep the institutions work together. As Michael said, open the Commodomy. You gotta open up all your data. Most institutions are not going to open up their data and let you come in and basically have at it, if you will, for fear that you'll be discredited, that somebody will find something you don't know about and you don't want to talk about. That's one of the rules of the game here. That's, I think, one of the most unique things, is that complete openness that you must have to be a member and to participate. So let's talk about some of those innovations that we're trying to accelerate. There's a lot of hype and a lot of narrative. It's almost too bad that our middle name is innovation, because it puts a lot of pressure on you. And everyone attaches innovation to everything these days. But how do you determine what's real and what's not? When you're going about as a president, when you're trying to decide what to bring to your campus and you're trying to pursue something, how do you suss out what's hype versus reality? I think what I would add is that we've made that simple by altering the culture of the institution from being faculty-centric to being student-centric. Most universities are faculty-centric. They're organized to serve the faculty. The students are the means by which the faculty acquire resources. And so, including talent, energy, money, the whole thing. And there's nothing pejorative about that characterization. That's the way that academies were first set up. That's the way the idea in medieval Europe, that's the way things got going. So for us, it's all about the numbers. In the last 10 years, Arizona State University has increased the number of people that were graduating by 9,000 individual students. There's a 9,000 student increase since 2006. Annually. Annually. Yes, not 9,000 total, 9,000 per year, which is greater than the single-year productivity of almost every university in the country. And it's a very large number. So that's a measurement. But then you don't just stop with that measurement. What were the success of those students in the market? What was the success of those students in life? What was the success of those students in affecting certain kinds of changes? And so there's measurement, measurement, measurement, measurement of everything. And then accountability to everyone. We're just not sitting around passively saying, well, it's really so sad that Sally flunked out of ASU. A person that, quote unquote, flunks out of ASU is our failure. It didn't used to be our failure. It used to be our pleasure. We used to find it our necessity to weed these students out and to move them past. And so that's why we have these unbelievably chaotic histories in terms of number of people graduating and so forth, so it's metrics. I would add to that because I think metrics are absolutely key and student centers actually key. But at least for Georgia State, I think on top of that, it's practicing what we preach. And that is every freshman who takes a science course is going to learn the scientific method. I think I've learned the scientific method probably two dozen times from high school on through college. And the scientific method, it is the data. But it's how you go around learning. And first off, you formulate a hypothesis. And then you design some sort of study that's going to help you address whether or not that hypothesis is true. Do you mean applying this even to the university? Well, what I'm saying is what we do is now we apply it to the university. The historical method in the university is you've got a problem. You convene a meeting. You put a committee together. You bring in a whole bunch of faculty because they run the place. And they sit down. And they all have PhDs. They're all smart. They know what to do. It never occurred to them to actually do a study, to actually do an experiment and see what works. And what I think has changed in the culture of this alliance is we actually believe in practicing what we preach, taking what are the problems, what are the issues, what are the challenges we face, formulating potential solutions. There's a lot of really well-intended solutions that don't work. They may make for nice case studies, but they don't scale. They don't disseminate. And finding out what works and what does work, then go to scale. And I think that is an absolutely central characteristic of this alliance is being able to go to scale. Because so much of what's happened in higher ed, historically, is a bunch of smart people sat down. They did something. They got an idea. And they created a little boutique program. For these 50 students over here, we're going to do this. We'll write about it in our alumni magazine. We'll talk about it. Nobody will ever actually figure out if it worked. And more importantly, if it did work, nobody actually ever did anything to make it work anywhere else. So one of the things that higher ed never does is stop doing things. Do a lot of boutique programs. You're generalizing, right? We don't have a lot of emeritus programs. We have 80 of them. Yes, I believe you do. But Steve, one of the things that's come out of the UIA ISU team has been trying to embark on a full analysis of what's actually working at Iowa State. Can you share a little bit more about that? Sure. Well, when I got there and we started the rapid growth, we formed a committee, a council. But it was a little different than normal. We put student staff back together to find out where the bottlenecks were, where the deficiencies were in the student experience. We even called the Student Experience Council. And we came up with a number of things. But to do that right, we had to put metrics around it. We had to really do assessments. And we put a very rigorous timetable on this less than a year to get this compiled and done. So we had a good menu of things we could fix immediately. But then we had the bigger issues we had to address. So that led us to kind of what Mark's saying. We charged individuals specifically, gave them responsibility, held them accountable to come up with ways to fix these things. Some of these things we learned from other schools, Arizona State, Mark's Institution, to move these things forward. And it was student-centered. It was student-focused. Everyone on that council knew this was a student experience council. And that's where the metrics had to come. That's where the priorities had to come. And it's worked very well for us a long term. And we continue to recycle that in a different format now. John, you've been a president now for 25 years. And so as you hear these whipper snappers over here who've only been at it for a little bit, when you look back and when you first became a president, what benchmarks or goalposts were you focused on that are fundamentally different than what you think about now? What advice would you give yourself as a baby president? Well, when I started as president at UCF, I'd had about eight months at, eight or nine months up at University of Maine, as interim president. And a friend and I had gotten into a discussion about what the goals of that university were. And he contended we had a well-developed structure of goals, that's a chick. We've got 30-some goals, name them for me. And of course he couldn't. He's a brilliant guy, but who could name 30 goals that way? I said to me, if a goal is something that consciously directs my behavior, and I can't remember it, I doubt it's going to be a really effective goal. So he came in the next week with a little card that Gordon Gee had developed at Ohio State. And it had five goals for the Ohio State University. And on a bet, we developed five goals for the University of Maine. I'm an interim president at this point. That's kind of audacious. But by golly, the press picked them up. I went to the dedication of the Hall of Flags and the associate director of the Student Union had picked them up. So when I went to the University of Central Florida, I thought I knew one thing that I would do that could be effective, and we did. And they were effective. They were adopted campus-wide. I worked very hard on that. I think it was one of the smarter things that we've ever done, but we didn't transfer from five necessarily general goals. We didn't transfer quickly enough, in my opinion, today, to having some equally well-developed metrics. You probably couldn't hold it to five, but maybe you could. And if we had gotten away from the more qualitative statements, like, offer the best education and become America's leading partnership university, become more inclusive and diverse, those general directions of travel that any self-respectful university ought to be doing, I'd have made the transition, I think, more quickly to a set of metrics that would have enabled us to judge individual units more fairly than some of the metrics that were in place did. So that'd be one thing. Mark, so you've now shepherded Georgia State through a transformation. They don't look seem like at all this institution that you first came to be president of. And part of that has been your leadership. It's been this transformation you led. Well, what has been the most profound lesson you've learned, shepherding such massive transformation at your campus? I think, on the start, where John started, which is when we did our strategic plan in 2010, you're a new president, you got to do a strategic plan. It's in the manual. And by the way, our accrediting body said we were a year late already, so we had to do it. And we committed to, I committed that if we were going to go through this exercise, we're actually going to use it to do something worth doing as opposed to creating a document that would sit on the shelf and would be repeated five and 10 years later and be left on the shelf. The previous plan had about 80 goals, John. And why would you? Exactly, it's all in the manual. But we kicked off with there would be no more than five goals. And it had to all fit on a single sheet of paper. And you can put the goal statements on a card, but you had to have room for a little bit of expansion. The institution was already committed to student success. Again, Tim Renekou, you'll hear from Georgia State after this panel, had come on board just a few months before I arrived to basically lead, through the provost's office, our success. At point Tim came on board, only about a third of the students who were starting with Georgia State were completing within six years. And that was just considered unacceptable. When we went into the strategic planning process, and the next to last iteration of the final document was that we would improve retention and graduation. And I made a bet at that point, and I had some help in that we'd done some external testing of the report with community leaders, elected officials, corporate leaders, community leaders, foundation leaders, successful alums, et cetera, supporters of the university. And they'd all said, well, the report sounds really important. It sounds really good, but I don't know what it means. So we rewrote the goal that we would improve graduation retention to that we would become a national model demonstrating that students from all backgrounds could achieve success. Would achieve success at high rates. That was a reach for a new president to basically get out there and push that we were going to put ourselves out there in a place that people would say, that's not us, but it's not what we're used to doing. But we did it, and it worked. And that's why this alliance has been helpful, because we're part of that discussion now of what the national model should be. So I think what I've learned from it is, if you're willing to take the risk and actually stretch and put yourself on the line and appropriately resource your institution, make the difficult decisions, you can change the world. So Steve, you heard a little bit earlier this morning about how these institutions are kind of bucking the national trend, that you're doing something that is actually disincentivized by most of the traditional values. Rankings don't reward this. In fact, this is kind of just focusing on what the needs of the country are and ignoring those. So abnormal is I guess would be how they would describe it. So what were you thinking, wanting to hang out with these guys? Well, what drew you to wanting to be part of this other than trying to solve problems on your campus? What value do you see being a part of this pack of folks? We happen to ask a tough question because we're an AAU institution and the AAU metrics don't reward the things that we're trying to do. So the short answer is what the innovation alliance was trying to do was the right thing. So as a president, you sit there and say, I should be providing access and affordability. I should maintain high quality, but there are plenty of islands who didn't have an opportunity to get an education in a place like Iowa State. So to go from 29,000 to 37,000 such a short time, there is a reward in knowing that these people are successful. Right now, with that growth in the student body, we're three years in a row maintaining a 95% placement rate across all majors. And that's a really good rate when you consider all majors. So I sit there and I say to myself, we're doing the right thing for the right reasons. Now we'll have to balance some of these other things, but when I look at some fairly elite schools or highly elite schools that talk about a 90% retention rate from first year freshmen to sophomores, I think, so what? I mean, you've got the upper 10% of the class. That's easy. We're up to pushing 88% and we let a lot of kids in. I think 90% is attainable. And frankly, I get excited about a 90% retention rate at my institution compared to what I've seen in some others and we'll continue to drive in that direction. It's the right thing to do. So Mike, you are in an unusual situation in Arizona and having been there for 15 years now, have accrued some political capital and definitely some wins to allow you to have some tailwind behind you. When you look at other institutions who have a board who are asking them to do something that's counter to what you're talking about when they get pressure from their legislature and they're not getting funding support for what you're doing, what advice would you give to those leaders who don't have as much political capital accrued and don't have as much experience but want to do the right thing and are new presidents? The first political capital is the wrong calculation and I'll come back to that in a political sense. Yeah, I mean loosely. You mean in a broader sense. And so I think the first thing I think is to the boards for the most part, I think are individual citizens that govern all of us who want to see their states be successful. There's no board that wants the state to be less successful. Everybody wants to be successful. They want more people to be educated. They want more people to be educated in a more affordable way. They want the right thing. So given that they want the right thing, I think that where we have found ourselves and where I found myself with my board is we've been able to focus all of our energy on setting the metrics, setting the focus on what it is that we're going to achieve and then asking the board to hold us accountable for attainment of those metrics. And then the second thing that we've done and I think this is really important, it's been absolutely an essential part of our overall strategy. And that is that we abandoned, for those of you that didn't have to take the PhD exams that I took in organizational theory at the Maxwell School at Syracuse. You won't know what some of this means but we got the wrong, it's all rhetoric and jargon. We have the wrong organizational model operating most public universities. They're run as agency-oriented bureaucracies. There's nothing wrong with an agency-oriented bureaucracy. It works perfectly when you're running the army. It works perfectly when you're running some other government function. It turns out to work very imperfectly when you're running a diverse, large-scale, fast-moving, innovative public university. So we abandoned what we refer to as the agency model and embraced what we refer to as the enterprise model. The model of public enterprise. You have public purpose, public goals, public transparency, public accountability, but you do anything possible not to run as an agency of the government. The government is an investor, not a controller. And so we basically have found that model to be not only acceptable within Arizona but now to be desired within Arizona, at least relative to Arizona State. And that has been unbelievably empowering at every level because we did one other thing that was essential. We worked very hard to free the faculty from the coercive bureaucracies in which they were all trapped. The coercive bureaucracies are called disciplines. Disciplines that marry departments. And so you have departments and disciplines called the same thing. And we're like, well, there might be some occasions where that's what you'd want, but in many occasions you wouldn't want that. So not only did we find ourselves freed to follow metrics set by our public governing board, we established a mechanism to abandon the agency model of operating and move to the model of enterprise, seeking investment from the government in that enterprise for a measured return to that investment, which is a completely different logic. And then lastly, we freed the faculty from being trapped inside these immovable bastions of argumentation. And so that then, we're like, you know, the one sign we could put up over the gate of Arizona State University would be free. We're free. We are not trapped in some sort of a box. Once you're released from that box and you're working towards a set of goals with a public body that wants you to attain those goals, and you're free to find resources and free to make your case and free to measure your work and free to design what you want to be, everything changes. We'll have the rest of you any advice you would give to presidents who might not be sitting in the space that you are but are interested in driving change and feel often that they come in and all they hear are requirements, usually a laundry list of about 50 different metrics that are often contradictory. And then they're trying to shepherd change in the face of that. I think you just heard Michael say it and you heard Stephen say it earlier. It's if you articulate the goals that actually in ways that will benefit the state that are things that the state wants. As many of the things that are desirable are actually very politically very popular and more popular outside the institution than within the traditional disciplinary structure. So I actually think just having your eyes and ears open to actually what the world needs actually makes it a lot easier to be successful in articulating a innovation or change agenda because there's an appetite for it out there. That's, I don't think there's any argument on that at least not since November. The thing that we always remind ourselves of is that we like our story just a hell of a lot better when we tell it than when other people tell it. So that narrative that you're talking about is very important and it's something that has to be built on over time. Michael has always had a really great story but it gets better with age. And I think we can all hope for the same thing that as we keep going on, we get better at the important things we do. And I do think that it takes a certain amount of skill and no small amount of foots but to try to move a legislative body toward understanding and supporting some of the goals that universities find very important. And if you don't hone your skill set, you're gonna be disappointed. And one of the things about presidency is there are a lot of people who depend on you for success. Now you know that you can't do a whole lot of things on your own but you can sure screw up a lot of things on your own. I think we all have Republican governors and Republican legislatures. All were from red states, nine of the 11 schools are from red states in the alliance despite the happenstance of the outcome of the election. And the only reason I bring that up is that there's all these people who email me all the time and they say, the sky is falling, the universe is ending. I'm like, no, no, no, the universe is not done yet, baby. We're moving forward. And it is the case, I'll say unequivocally that there's been fantastic response, a bipartisan response to the kinds of things that the alliance schools are working on, the kinds of things that we're moving. We've actually been able to move past partisan divides back to where universities should be, which our public universities should be, strategic assets of their states thought of by all the political groups as a way to move the state's agenda forward. That's our question. Yeah, so one of the questions that we always get is how do you spread these ideas further? And when we do talk about some of the innovations that we've been sharing, you do run into a little bit of the not invented here syndrome. And so I wanted to see if any of you wanted to respond to how you react to that when a campus leader asks you about an innovation, but because it wasn't, it's not their idea, they don't think that their faculty will accept it. Each of you has obviously taken ideas from elsewhere. In our case, we've tried to take this scientific approach. Look, this has already worked. Look at the numbers. In some cases, we've sent leaders and faculty or liaison, Martino Harmer is here with me today, two other institutions so they can say, look, we were there. I made a trip to Arizona State. So you can come back and say, look, I've seen this work. I know it works and I know it's gonna work here. And we use those living, breathing examples. That's one of the advantages we have that we're welcome at each other's place and we can get real live examples and bring them home. Yeah, I find less difficulty with the not invented here. As I said, we've had over 200 visits and there's a lot of interest in learning what ideas are out there that have been tested and produced results. I think the more typical thing that I hear is, but my place is different. That won't work in my place. And the reality is, nobody's ever told me they were different in a way that it wouldn't work, but the only answer I've ever gotten is it won't work at my place because that would force me to change the organizational structure. It forces us to change the way we do it. So for an example, the way that we do advising at Georgia State meant we took it away from the deans. And I've had presidents tell me, why can't you take it away from the deans? They own this. Well, I did it and it worked. And you should quit. Yeah, yeah, and so I think the biggest challenge we have is a lack of courage. Right. Yeah, at our institution, we've had to do the explanation or I'll have to do the explanation. Are you a leader or a manager? Because this is a leadership position. It has some management, but it's a leadership position. You're gonna have to lead on this. So talking about leadership, looking at the next five to 10 years ahead, seeing what you're learning from your colleagues, and I know we're rapidly in the midst of a discussion about what UII 2.0 looks like and how we expand this effort. But what characteristics or attributes or solutions do you think higher education is lacking today that it is desperately gonna need tomorrow? I thought that might be a way for us to end and then we can transition to other folks asking questions, but what do you think that we're gonna need tomorrow that we don't have right now that you're worried about? Steve just said one of the things is that we're hiring too many university presidents to be like country store managers. We're not stocked up, I can't fix that. And so what's needed are more people working who are advancing outcomes for their institutions, facilitating faculty success, facilitating faculty creativity, not taking anything away from the faculty whatsoever. We've gotten lost along the way. We somehow think that the leadership of the university is just the most distinguished faculty member, and maybe it can be that person also, but that would be grossly insufficient for the complexity of the building of a 21st century public university. And related to that, Bridget, we do a great job of training graduate students in physics or engineering and things like that, but one of the neat things about the Alliance is we actually are taking our responsibility to train the next generation of leaders as part of it. So we have fellows. We have people that like at my institution, and Grayland is the roll up your sleeves guy, and he's way in the way back, you gotta stand up, Grayland, because he's the guy that's actually getting all this stuff done. An innovation fellow for the Alliance. Innovation fellow. And he's in the president's office physically, so there's that power, for lack of a better word, so people know this is important to me, but he's out there getting things done, but I think we're gonna have to actually think and push away from our desk and put our feet up for a minute, and think how are we gonna train this next generation of innovative leaders that are willing to do this or seen it be done, but we'll actually work on it at early time in their career because Michael says we sometimes get ourselves trapped into a system and we go somewhere and that's the way it's always been done. And changing culture at university is difficult, especially a big public, and you open to a lot of criticism and a lot of internal passive resistance, and so you need people out there pushing on this and training that next generation how to actually implement useful, positive change is something that we need to spend more time on. It takes a little courage as well, is the perception. Bridget, you talk about higher education, you gotta remember the next generation universities was looking at large public research universities, that's the piece we're talking about here, even though, and we haven't touched on it yet, maybe it'll come up as connections with community colleges, one of the places that John's institution's been a real model, but the behind story is, while we're doing all this innovation work around student success and student centered, the research numbers and the intellectual property, licensing and new companies numbers are also going off the charts at these institutions. You're on an incredible rise. When we started this work eight years ago, we weren't even one of the top two in a research universities in the country. The latest NSF data is 129, and we're bound to determine, we'll be in the top hundred in the next few years. Meaning, you can lead a great institution to do incredible things, and you don't have to do just one thing. There are questions in the audience? Yep, okay, great, we have some microphones, go ahead. We'll give to the front row first, I think she's actually in charge, so. Okay. Thanks, everybody can see you. I have to talk. My name's Julia Abrahams. I'm just here as an interested member of the general public, so since I'm not involved in this professionally, I'm drawing a blank. I can't really envision what you're all talking about. Could somebody give me a specific example of what particular program might have been created that was novel and that had a. I'll give you one example. So we've used a series of adaptive learning courses in new ways to teach math and science to improve our success rate for kids in those classes, which with four or five other things that we've done have increased our four year graduation rate by 85%. So that's one or two things right there. I'll give you a thumbnail of something I think you'll hear more about in the next presentation. So every night at Georgia State University for over 25, actually now over 45,000 undergraduates, we check 800 variables in every student. These are variables that have been found to be predictive of a student getting off track towards graduation. It could be that they haven't been coming to class. It could be that they have signed up for the wrong courses. Courses that won't count towards graduation. 800 different things, checks them every night. Not everything changes every night, but it checks everything every night. And if there's an indication that a student has done something that puts them at risk of going off track within I think it's 48 hours, Tim, the advisor and the student will have a communication. They gotta sit down and actually talk about this. And so the metaphor I use is historically, if you're driving a car down the road and you move that steering wheel just a little bit, it will start to drift. To get that car back on the road requires a minor modification. If you don't make that minor modification, the car's gonna crash. You may never get the car back on the road. Well, the same thing is true with students. If you get them on the road, there are a whole bunch of things, not of their own creation, but of our creation, because of the structures and the systems we have, that actually if you don't make the modification, they're gonna crash me. They're gonna fail out, they're gonna drop out, whatever the case may be. So we're literally being able to watch because of the kinds of technologies available today. Every student, every day on 800 different variables and make modifications, develop interventions as we go. When we first started the Alliance, there were three campuses who were using that technology and in one year we went from three to now 10 campuses who were using that technology. So that's what the UIA's value is, is vetting an idea and actually helping it accelerate across the country on other campuses. I'll just add one point. We have an advising program that allows tens of thousands of undergraduates to plot and map every dream that they'd ever wanna make relative to whatever major they'd like to have, plotting every course that they've ever taken, even some sub parts of courses that they've taken, stuff from their high school record that allows and tells them exactly what they need to do, saving our face-to-face advisors to talk about life, to talk about decisions, to talk about other things that are not that way. So that tool now is being spread throughout the entire Alliance. Also that then enhances students' chances of success and survival dramatically. How do we change the metrics of prestige? Because really when I, this is what to me is most important. I sit here and I listen- This is from a Princeton dean. A Princeton dean, a Harvard law professor, but that's the point that we, the AAU criteria, who's got the smartest students, the smartest, most productive faculty in research? That's those are the metrics. And yet I'm listening to you thinking, if, you know, as public universities, let's stick to that. As public universities, the metric has to be, how well do you prepare students to fulfill their highest potential and be productive citizens of a democracy? Which also means scholarship and research. So that's my second point. So how do we change overall? How do we get people to think, you know, the best thing I could do is to be running a university like the ones you all are running. And second, in particular, I was interested to become a great research university. In my experience, you hire top faculty who want the smartest students to do their work for them. That is not public, well, that is public. But serious, so how do you do that when you're recruiting top faculty to get top research? You know, they're safe if they go to an Ivy League university. What do you do? How do you really change it at the granular level? I can tell you what's working for us because the faculty we're recruiting today are in a whole different caliber of faculty than we were recruiting eight years ago when I arrived. And that is, it comes back to getting that reputation for being an innovative place where you can do things that at a more successful, more established lead institution, you're not gonna get to do because at those places, their structures are set, their leadership positions are set. What you can do and what you can't do is very much prescribed by an existing culture, whereas we're able to get top faculty, outstanding people to come because they look at an institution that actually has an appetite to be ambitious, to do things differently, and they wanna be part of that. But it takes years to do, it doesn't happen overnight. You've been at it 15 years. Yeah, the Kevin Carrey's report on the AAU written under the New America flag was a fantastic report because he said, let's look at the actual total productivity output of these research universities. How much research did they win and do? How many students did they produce? How many students did they train in a research environment? How many PhDs did they produce and so forth? And that report would show, and it does show that the most significant research university in the country is the University of Washington at Seattle, not Harvard or Princeton or Columbia where I came from. Columbia is a fantastic school, but because of its scale, it doesn't have that much impact on things. And so what we've got, in fact, I'll use us as an example, Arizona State University this year without a medical school. Last year's had $510 million of research expenditures. That's more non-medical research expenditures than Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Caltech, any of those schools. So it's a bigger non-medical research enterprise than any of those schools. That same group, the AAU says, but you have so many faculty, you're not doing enough research to show us that your faculty are that good. Your research funding level would have to be several billion dollars a year to be at the same level of the others. And I said, well, you must be forgetting the 60,000 undergraduate students that were training in a research environment. And they say, well, that's your problem. And that's, by the way, a quote. That's your problem. Actually, what they said, the exact quote, was that's your problem and your choice. And so you're like, so at that point you say, really? Okay, maybe you guys will pass on soon or you'll go out of existence. And so the point of that is, is that we have the wrong set of criteria. We have publics and privates all mixed and matched together being compared. We have universities like Caltech, which is really an institute with a few hundred students being compared against the University of Central Florida with 65,000 students as if they're even the same species. They're not. And so we've got really inadequate things. And I think the New America report did a fantastic job of really getting at that and attacking that and working to address it. Now to the issue of elitism and what goes on in ranks and all this other kind of stuff, we have to turn to output and outcomes. We have to start measuring output and outcomes. What did you do? What did you contribute? How have you made the world and the country a better place, particularly for the public? One thing I would add is that what the UIA is doing is trying to make student success sexy for the first time. There have never been rewards or trappings. You don't get headlines. You don't get nearly as much attention. And that has been active work. That's not because we just stepped into the limelight and everyone's been waiting to give us applause. This has been an active work and we're trying to promote this with other institutions, other types of alliances because we think that we need to create a new narrative where there's a value system incentivizing this kind of very hard but meaningful work. We'll move to the last questions because I want to make sure we're wrapping this. Two questions. One is you want to talk a little bit more about this 10,000 cohort experiment that you mentioned. And secondly, can you talk about the relationship between the present methods of accreditation and the like and what you're doing and whether they make any sense whatsoever. So you're gonna hear a 10 minute presentation from Tim Renwick about the 10,000 student control trial. So I'll move to the second question if folks want to. I'll take it from a slightly different perspective which is so we've had some serious accreditation issues we've had to pay attention to because in the last two years we've absorbed the 20,000 student of essentially community college even though the language community college is not formally used in the state of Georgia. And we absorbed it because our Board of Regents wanted us and they were responsible. They have one board for the entire state of Georgia. Basically ask us the question is if you could you take responsibility for this associate's degree access institution and take the programs that you've developed and put them there and get them to work because the results in that institution in particular but community colleges in general are not encouraging. There's a lot of accreditation work that gets done when you accept that assignment to absorb an institution. And we've found our accreditor SACS which perhaps historically has not had a reputation being particularly flexible or creative to be very cooperative. They understand the importance of what we're doing. They understand the challenges we face including some of these questions about who would be your first time full time students and are these 20,000 access students going to dilute your other piece of your academic mission that goes into rankings. We found our accrediting body to be extremely cooperative as we've tried this kind of work. Now we're now eight years into it. We've gotten a lot of attention and press for it and I think that made it easier for them to be very cooperative but they've been incredibly, Tim I think you would agree all the way. So here is our issue on accreditors. So we are under HLC Higher Learning Commission out of Chicago. I think it's a very effective group we've had. We just did our 10 year re-accreditation formal process, came through that with flying colors but here was one of the problems. We actually had people on the accrediting process who didn't believe our data because we're using computational techniques to enhance our teaching outcomes. Therefore they must be flawed and I'm like, is your last name Luddite? Did I read it wrong? I mean what's your name again? I mean you go to where the university is. Wherever you were from, I know where it was. It's in a small city near Detroit. And so, hey now, I spent some time there. And so we've had problems with individuals not with the associations. Now we also have increased the size of our engineering school. People say you can't get people in STEM majors that's because they're not trying. So we had 8,000 students in our engineering school in 2006, we have 20,000 in our engineering school now including 4,000 online which 16,000 face-to-face, 4,000 online. The 4,000 online include 1,000 in a fully accredited online EE degree with ABET accreditation. Fully accredited, fully online 100%. And so the accrediting authority took the time and brought in the right people and they really worked at this and they really got it right. So we haven't seen any problems with them. We see problems with faculty from other institutions who say, what is this? I can't be party to you people all of a sudden turning to computational devices to enhance teaching because teaching's supposed to be done by you and me in the classroom with 22 students per faculty member, we're like. Okay, great. And then Michael's point, and this is the value of the UIA, it's the value of the next generation university's report is prior to the alliance and opening our data up, Tim Renick who you hear from, myself personally and my provost personally, we're all called liars when we actually talked about our work that you have to be fudging the data. And it's not because they didn't want to believe us because once you show that you can actually have success in this area, it now becomes an expectation on others and that's what needs to happen next. It needs to become the expectation that students from low income background, students from under-resourced communities, students who are disadvantaged for whatever reasons and that can be rural, that can be urban, it doesn't matter. They can be successful. They are not intellectually inferior. They just started off in a position where they are not advantaged and there are things that are structurally in the traditional model of higher education that get in their way. You know, earlier you heard in the previous. Well, I mean a short form of that back to Ann Marie's point not all the smart kids are at Columbia, Princeton or Harvard, I think people have forgotten how many really smart and talented people there are in a country of 325 million people. There's a lot more than the few couple thousand seats that exist in those schools with only elite admission standards. I mean, the scale, just people have no idea and so that's the problem. You know, just real quickly on the accreditation side of things again, we just finished our decennial reaffirmation and we did so without a single suggestion or recommendation, in other words, not a single ding on the board. No comments on the dissertation. That's right. None. You know, I think that speaks pretty well for our folks who did the work but also for the people involved in SACs because we don't look like the typical institution. The other thing I'd add is people sometimes have very mixed feelings about performance based funding. It has been a great friend to us because people have to look at metrics and the assumption that someone can't be good because they're big is pretty hard to sustain when they're scoring higher on the agreed metrics than the smaller institutions. So on that note, we will wrap and transition to the next step. The one piece I would add that most people don't know about the UIA presidents is that almost all of them are former first generation or low income students and this is what happens when they grow up and be college presidents is they actually want to try and save the world. So it's a privilege to work with them and please join me in thanking them for their leadership here. Vice President and Vice Provost for Enrollment at Georgia State. He was ranked the number one most innovative person in higher education, according to Washington Monthly this last fall. And he is the architect behind the massive transformation there. And so you're gonna hear a little bit about, you know, you first heard about this report then you heard about the UIA that came after and now you're gonna see how the UIA is trying to help all of higher education. So Tim. Yeah, I have the privilege of being the cleanup hitter here. So we're almost at the end and this is gonna be a very brief talk but it fits directly with some of the questions that were coming out of the last session. We've talked a lot about the broader issues. What on the ground does this work look like? And you know, the first thing I wanna say is the job that the group did, Hillary included in selecting the next generation universities was very able. I mean, they did important work. They also were doing good predictive work because you know, one of the criteria that was used to select the next generation universities is just how innovative are they? And what's been happening and we haven't talked too much about this so far this afternoon is a lot of individual innovations on these campuses. Great things going on. I mean, Central Florida has become over the last three or four years the national model for how you transition community college students to a four year program successfully through its Direct Connect program. You're more likely to have heard about some of the ASU programs because they have a spokesperson you may have heard of from before but you know, things like the Starbucks initiative or what they're doing now with the Fresh and Global Academy. These are innovations for that campus that fit squarely in the space of broadening access and increasing completion especially for low income and first generation students. You just heard President Becker mention at Georgia State and over the last few years we've grown by 20,000 students because all of a sudden we've acquired the biggest community college in the state of Georgia and you talk about the scaling of trying to help low income students one of the charts that Bridget showed the entire Ivy League this fall has 10,000 Pell eligible students enrolled. This fall at Georgia State we had 25,000. So two and a half times the number of students in the entire Ivy League. If we're gonna make national changes if we're gonna change the way our country works educationally, socially, economically it's not gonna be through those most elite institutions although they have a great value and I happen to have gone through some of them in my own education but it's going to be through campuses and programs like Direct Connect like the Starbucks initiative like the expansion of Georgia State into other programs. So I do wanna give a mention to that but then I wanna say that that's not enough. It's not enough to just do things on our individual campuses and if you don't yet if you're not yet convinced by that then this data should convince you. It's the New York Times it's exactly what Hillary was referring to in her opening comments a couple hours ago. It's the percent of Americans who hold the bachelor's degree covers the last 40 years from 1970 to the present and it's disaggregated by economic quartile and what you can see is a very happy story if you're at the upper end of the economic spectrum if you're among the 25% wealthiest Americans by annual household income your prospects of being college educated have basically doubled over the last generation back in 1970 about 40% of the population now it's up over 80% fantastic but what Hillary was drawing your attention to is that bottom line if you're among the 25% lowest earning Americans come from households in the lowest quartile the picture is a very very different one in 40 years we've moved the needle about two percentage points and what you can see graphically is the gap between the least wealthy and most wealthy Americans is not getting narrower far from it it's basically doubled over the last generation so what that means is that we need more than efforts even very effective and important and scaled effort efforts on individual campuses we also need to find ways to collaborate and spread innovations in an efficient fashion and one of the first projects that the University Innovation Alliance took on was one that kind of struck close to home we're all incredibly large bureaucracies we have thousands of courses, hundreds of majors and one of the things we realized is that a lot of the gains that we can make in higher education can come from looking putting the mirror on ourselves and recognizing we need to do things better one of the things we do is totally overwhelm our students that are admitted with choices Georgia State this fall 90 majors 3,000 courses we offered you give somebody a catalog and say choose who's gonna choose wisely the ones with parents and older brothers and sisters who say do this, don't do that the first generation, the low income students are gonna be at a loss and so our first year project for the Alliance was one in the use of predictive analytics to help guide students through academic advising something that's known in the literature now as I pass these integrated advising systems so what we all did is work together explore each other's campuses in many cases bringing large teams to each other's campuses to figure out what the campuses were doing in the space how they were using data and evidence to inform decisions that students would make hundreds of decisions over the course of their academic career to keep them on path so they don't swerve off and end up flunking out or dropping out you know why do we do these things what do these systems look like well in many ways they're just delivering common sense at scale so one of the things that is a very common feature of higher education is we have these program maps this is Georgia State's program map for chemistry it's the courses students have to take every semester to graduate in four years with a BS in chemistry one of the things these platforms do now is track registration for every student every semester so if they're registered as a chemistry major it will make sure they're following the map and if they get off path oh they signed up for the lab course for non-STEM majors and it won't apply to their degree program an alert goes off somebody is notified and an intervention occurs we're also using data more aggressively across the alliance here's an example from Georgia State we found for instance that the first course that a student takes in his or her major is highly predictive of their chances of graduating on time so we've run this data for every major at Georgia State this is just a sampling but if you look in the middle of the chart it's our political science majors they get an A or B in their first political science course they're graduating on time at above a 75% clip which is great they get a C in that first course they're graduating on time at a 25% clip but what historically has an institution like Georgia State or public universities in general done with that C student well really nothing or worse than nothing we pass them along to upper level work so we say you've got a minimum grade of C you're now ready to do upper level work in political science when the data actually shows they're not they only have a 25% chance of succeeding and whatever that additional load is the upper level work has more reading and more writing exacerbates whatever weakness may have resulted in the C grade they begin to accumulate Ds and Fs and then after a few semesters then we would intervene well with these I pass systems now we're intervening at the first sign of a problem and so the student gets the C grade they're immediately called in and they sit down with an advisor and there's a diagnosis that goes on are there reading issues or writing issues let's settle those before you go on and attempt upper level works and begin to accumulate Ds and Fs now the trick at campuses like Georgia State is doing this at scale and at Georgia State last year last academic year we had over 50,000 one-on-one interactions between our advisors and our students that were prompted by alerts coming out of the system now why did the Alliance want to pursue this as its first year project because these kind of systems make a huge difference especially for the type of students who are most in most need of help we went live with our system at Georgia State back in 2012 we immediately saw an increase in the number of students who are being retained and actually progressing taking courses and passing them at a high level and what we saw which was particularly interesting is the biggest gains were not coming from our traditional freshmen they were coming from our part-time students our transfer students our adult learners our military learners the kind of students that historically at big public universities sail under the radar screen don't get a lot of attention don't get a lot of support they're the ones that benefited the most because all of a sudden they're being tracked every day by these systems and their proactive interventions that are helping them realize oh there's a problem that you may not be aware of but we can correct and it'll make a big difference the other things that we saw immediately is that it began to take less time for students to complete their requirements so since we've launched this system at Georgia State we've seen a decline in time to degree for an average graduating student of over a half a semester we heard earlier one of the missions of the University Innovation Alliance is to lower cost of education what did those kind of numbers mean on the ground for the students and their families well for the graduating class of 2016 at Georgia State that's a savings of $15 million in tuition and fees compared to the graduating class just three years earlier not because they learned less but because they managed all the requirements in a more limited period of time by not taking wasted credit hours not flunking as many courses and so forth those are the kind of innovations that the Innovation Alliance is all about and you know bottom line is what was happening at Georgia State is this was producing many more graduates so over the time period since we launched these kind of analytics we increased the number of degrees we were confirmed by 30% but the biggest gains by far were for the at-risk student populations we were up as you can see from this chart over 80% for African Americans over 90% for Pell students over 120% for our Hispanic students because these were the students invisibly in the past who were most disadvantaged from these crazy bureaucracies that were creating confusion and having students make poor decisions these were the students who didn't have the support system independently now that we're offering it it makes a big difference so that's kind of the rationale behind a very big initiative that is currently going on at the University Innovation Alliance it is a collaboration between all 11 institutions to put in a major grant that was funded by the federal government the Department of Education through its so-called First in the World program First in the World a program dedicated to get the United States to be ranked once again as number one in the world in the percent of our population who hold college degrees and the fact that we were able to achieve this grant get funded by it itself is testimony to the power of the Alliance because imagine 11 institutions as diverse as those schools in the University Innovation Alliance having to put together a proposal in a short period of time that explains that how they're gonna share data how they're gonna collaborate and bring about these common studies and so forth we were able to do it in part because a lot of those structures were already in place through the Alliance that existed through the fact that as you heard earlier we've opened up our data we're sharing individual student records and so forth with other campuses that all primed us to be able to put a competitive grant in there and what we're doing over the next four years is with this nine million dollar grant tracking 10,000 low income and first generation students across all of the University Innovation Alliance institutions to try to observe what the impact is from a true empirical and scientific perspective of these systems of predictive analytics that do these kind of trackings and prompt advisors to proactively intervene with students so what we're doing across all 11 institutions for a control group a group of low income and Pell students at each campus is over the next four years we're looking at every time that they register for courses are they registered for the courses that keep them on track every time they try to drop or withdraw from a course there's gonna be a sit down meeting so there's a discussion that occurs every time they get a grade that by the analytics shows they've underperformed in the sense that the predictions say they may struggle in the next level course there's gonna be a meeting and intervention over and over again for these students and there's a control group that will receive what we call the business as usual treatment the advising practices that are currently the norm on each campus and we're gonna do a comparison and see do these kind of interventions make a big impact and to do this and pull it off at scale it's required us to be innovative in other ways we've created a cloud based platform for every advisor on these campuses so when they meet with a student they're now recording what the results were of that particular meeting you know did I advise the student to go out and go to tutoring did I advise them to change their major or and so forth what were they doing and did they follow up on it we're tracking that as well there had never been that kind of tracking of academic advising across the United States in any previous study so this is a really significant innovation in fact the Gates Foundation has been interested in the platform we've developed to see if there's some way of scaling that across other institutions we're tracking the nature of every meeting what prompted it did the student come in on his or her own did the advisor recommended and so forth and probably what's most striking about this is we're doing it at scale for the first time so our projections are that by the end of this four-year study we will have categorized data detailed data about over a hundred thousand meetings between academic advisors and students with then connecting it to a whole list of outcomes not just did the student graduate but what's their GPA how fast did they graduate how much are they how high are they retained and so forth all these kind of data points so that for the first time we're gonna have this body of literature that really begins to test this innovation to see from a scientific perspective does it make a difference why is this important well there's a shocking dearth of good research in higher education I don't know if you're familiar with the what works clearinghouse this is the federal repository of educational research that meets a certain standard of legitimacy so they put it through you submit articles and they have to pass a certain test to be put into the clearinghouse currently there is one article on academic advising in the clearinghouse and it's not a multi-institutional study so we have literally thousands of campuses nationally almost all of them that do academic advising spending billions of dollars a year on the enterprise and we have no real research on what works and what doesn't this study this maps project that I've been describing is designed to make some contributions and we think significant ones to that literature the other difference though the other contribution which is not unimportant at all is if we can replicate the kind of results we've seen from these systems at Arizona State at University of Texas at Georgia State at scale across the alliance alone if we can improve by 30% the number of Pell and first generation students that are graduating from these institutions you can see right there over the life of the grant just this four-year grant that will be 36,000 more low income and first generation students graduating from these institutions you know imagine what that could be if we were to extend those same sorts of gains nationally across all of the Pell populations across all of the first generation students who are registered and then you know we shouldn't just imagine it as you heard from the last panel I think what's important is that we begin to expect it we have increasingly shown that these kind of interventions do make a difference they do change lives they transform outcomes at institutions and they close achievement gaps that others think are impossible you know one thing about the Georgia State story that I didn't mention is that we have 25,000 Pell students enrolled at Georgia State this academic year we're one of just a handful of institutions which there's no difference in the graduation rates for our Pell and our non Pell students you know we were told that that's not doable that low income students are inevitably gonna graduate at lower rates and the importance of the next generation report and the importance of the work of the University Innovation Alliance is confounding those expectations confounding those expectations publicly so that we as a nation can aim and expect of ourselves something much better than what we currently produce so thanks very much and I think I am the last speaker but thanks for your attendance today as well