 My name is Kevin Cary, I direct the Education Policy Program here at the New America Foundation. And let me just start by saying thank you to the representatives of our universities who were very generous with their time coming to spend the day with us, and to all of you for staying as well. It's been a really interesting discussion. I've enjoyed all the conversations and livened by some great questions from the audience. So this is our last panel. It's going to be relatively short. I'm joined here by Jeff and Hilary and Margaret Rosa from Georgetown University. Is that the best way to... And what we wanted to do is kind of a final conversation was to come back to some of the original themes that we explored in the first panel about what it is that the universities that we studied and that were represented here today are doing on behalf of the broad national interest in helping more students go to college and finish college with valuable degrees. We talked a lot about scale and this notion of what really big and growing universities can be. We talked about information technology. We had a couple of great panels about relationships with faculty. We've seen at a lot of the institutions and all of us actually spent as part of the project and there's a paper that was released today that you'll find on our website that was the result of a series of case studies and we spent most of the last year flying around the country and visiting a lot of these institutions firsthand. We saw strong relationships with community colleges and really... And then a lot of the research that we talked about in the last panel. So it was really... What was striking from my perspective was that all of these institutions were pursuing each of these very difficult aims in concert with one another. They were very aware of how the research mission intersects with the mission of bringing more students to the campus, which changes the kind of faculty that you need, which changes the kind of relationships that you need to have with your community and partner institutions. It's a very complex system and I'm always impressed by the indefatigable people who become university presidents and yet they have time to come and talk to us today. So one of the questions that really preoccupied us in doing this research and we'll continue to focus on going forward because this meeting is not the end of this project by any means, is what can we do to... Incent, encourage to help more public institutions pursue these kinds of strategies. Because one of the challenges of this kind of work is that the people who end up here on the stage are never randomly selected from the population of college presidents. We find them, in this case, based on a statistical analysis of all the public research universities in the United States, finding those that were graduating students, that were making efficient use of resources, that were growing even as their revenues were declining. But that's not typical. These are the institutions that we can learn from, but they're not typical institutions. And for us to really take seriously and to achieve the kind of policy goals that Jamie Marisot has talked about this morning, 60% of all American working age adults having some kind of credential in what is becoming the near future. We're going to have to do what is now atypical will have to become common practice. And so one question I wanted to put to the panel to sort of wrap things up is what kind of public policies, what kind of communications efforts, what kinds of ways of thinking about higher education could contribute to that sort of scaling of practice. And so I'll start with Marguerite, who is one of the, really the nation's foremost experts on education and money in all of its kind of intersections. I hope you can share a little bit about the research that you've been doing and then respond to those questions. Sure. I've been looking at the sort of financial structure of higher education and when I usually say that, people usually mean the revenue side. But I'm actually more interested in the expenditure structure and how that expenditure structure is one that reinforces the kind of patterns that we're trying to move away from. So we even talked in the last session a little bit about how do you get faculty on board and the comment was made that faculty aren't necessarily incentive by the same things that everybody else, but nor are they, or they're not incentive by the things that the institution is seeking. But they're not actually compensated on those either. Many times they have a fixed salary that seems independent of workload or productivity or success with students or numbers of students taught or amount of research produced or any of the kinds of things that were labeled as goals. And so there's some curiosity about whether or not you could change the incentives or layer on a new set of incentives with incremental money over time. That would actually get faculty into seeking the same kind of outcomes that their institution is prioritizing. So I think that's one whole area for opportunity. But another one that we've seen a lot is around state revenue structures for public institutions and what kinds of things they reinforce. And we're noticing that a couple of papers that were out this morning, one on the excess credits, when state institutions fund excess credit taking in the same way that they fund the needed credits, then we may over time see patterns of excess credit taking that are sort of subsidized from the state even though they might be inefficient for many reasons and unnecessary and relatively easy things to change. So we mentioned in the papers some opportunities around changing practices for one about state subsidy for those, two then changing institution behavior so that students take fewer of them or if they choose to take them they're not publicly subsidized. So that's certainly one area for an opportunity. And another paper that you saw that we had produced was around whether or not changes enrollment could be a revenue strategy. So institutions, many of them have reacted to the downturn or the lack of state revenues by saying we'll go get more out of state students or we'll raise tuition. And those are two financially lucrative strategies and many of them have done that. But another one is simply to take in more students and not necessarily out of state students because all students come with some tuition dollars and if you take in more students you have more revenues at which point you're probably thinking well don't you also have more expenditures. And that's where we get into this interesting question of well it's probably unlikely that the scale economies are such that each additional student drives up the expenditure structure proportionate to what the average per pupil cost is at an institution. And there are many ways you can put the institution to work at trying to figure out how if we increase the enrollment that individual units or colleges or departments get some share in that and then they might change their delivery models in ways that can serve an additional student at a pretty low cost. That has this benefit for states of course of getting more graduates through the door or more students through the door and likely more graduates. So when we practically talked about that with universities though the biggest pushback was what happens to ranking. And so there's that whole discussion. And I think that's when we could talk about here not necessarily a policy solution but one that policy could impact over the long haul. Jeff do you want to... Jeff's the author of a great new book College Unbound available at Find Bookstores, eBooks, Amazon.com, etc. And I know one of the things that you talk a lot about in your writing and thinking is what motivates higher education leaders. Marguerite talked about ranking which kind of goes to questions of status. Is status something that we can bring to bear on this challenge? I definitely think we need to because we can't take status out of this conversation because status still matters. There's this great quote that I came across in my research that prestige is to higher education as profits are to corporations. And so there's this idea that something drives something motivates people on higher ed whether it's presidents, trustees, alumni, lawmakers and faculty and it's all trying to get to that next level. And there's this real inability and we saw in our research in the universities that we looked at this ability, they kind of said you know what status matters to us but we're going to still kind of pursue these policies because they're important for the state. But now we're giving them some status by including them in this report, right? So it still matters to them. I mean all of them were kind of excited about being in this report so we need to come up with some alternative, some and I hate to say another ranking because I don't think we need another ranking but we need to have some sort of status whether it's another AAU or another group of institutions that we can hold up on a regular basis as saying they're able to serve the needs of their state whether it's on research or whether it's on students and they're still doing quality research, quality education they're increasing graduation rates, increasing retention and so forth and so I think that to say status doesn't matter to these institutions I think it does. We also, there's a role I think of the government's play in the way that they regulate colleges and universities in addition to the main paper there's a great additional deep dive policy analysis on state policy environments written by Iris Palmer, Iris Razorhand from HCM Strategies it's fantastic and that was something that actually impressed me that I learned by participating in this project was we particularly here in Washington or if you're looking on the US news list sort of think public research university, public research university but when you go to the institutions you really find that the state policy environment matters quite a bit and public research university in one kind of system is in some ways a different organization than one in another kind. Some states are very prescribed and controlling in the way that they regulate their institutions others are more laissez-faire and at the same time we now have I think a growing set of questions being asked here in Washington which traditionally has not chosen or thought it was responsible for asking these kind of questions its role in higher education was basically to find research, fund the Pell Grant and get out of the way Hillary can you talk a little bit about the role of public policy and where that where those kind of conversations ought to go? Well I think you know it's an interesting moment because we will be beginning at some time over these next month's discussions about reauthorizing H.E.A. the Higher Education Act and wouldn't it be interesting if we put aside the piece of legislation that exists and rather than thinking about tinkering with this piece of it or that piece of it started out with a series of hearings or conversations that were more what does the country need from its higher education system today for the 21st century given who our students are given the growth of the country given the point Michael Crow made that we sort of stopped our last great building time of colleges around 1950 with the exception of community colleges to see more of a conversation about these big means that's not to be naive about the ability for a piece of federal legislation to then be creative or you know created new but I think it's striking to me how out of step and really behind our public policy makers in Congress especially probably a lot of the people in Congress are about all the kinds of issues that we've been talking about today and I think for the future of the country we have to figure out how to educate well the next generation students to a very high standard in a very different country so I think from a sort of national point of view we need to figure out how to have that kind of conversation to establish almost the goal posts of what matters and then think about legislation moving backwards from there so I think that's one thing important I think we will also faster than any of us wish or hope be involved in yet the next presidential campaign for I know yet another administration that will have a new president so I think you know we should be taking the long view and understanding that many many kinds of decisions or culture calibrating conversations will happen in this next three to four year window so what do we want those conversations to be about and what images do we want to lift up about what the quote pinnacle of higher education should be so when Michael said, Crow said earlier this morning you know we keep coming back to that one pinnacle that narrow little group of elites that really in many many ways are not that relevant to this particular need I think from a policy level and then I think it would be very beneficial to have more leaders of institutions in those policy discussions I was struck throughout our time in the interview process that many of the things that everyone focuses on at the federal level the structure of accreditation the Pell grants are structured they matter to these institutions but they're not the great be all and end all levers for change for them or ways of helping them do more of what they need to do better so I think it would be interesting to ask the leaders themselves what would you need more of in order to be able to do more of the kinds of things that you guys are trying to do on behalf of the country at the state level you know I think really really really important for state legislators to begin to understand the public good of these place based regional institutions and the role they play in their regional kind of ecosystems with community colleges and the K-12 system and I think there's much positive movement there the emphasis on completion on performance funding I think that's faster and better targeted at the state level but there too I think there's a lot more that could be done to be proactive about the kinds of practices and strategies that we heard about here today last but not least I think we don't need another college ranking but it's really tempting when you hear someone like Chancellor Connolly say a lot of first generation students we're now a college of choice we're a destination of choice wouldn't it be interesting to figure out some way through an advertising campaign or some kind of communication vehicle to get the parents of next generation students to ask much tougher questions about what colleges they want their students to go to if they really want them to be successful and to raise the status and the the stature of these institutions as destination colleges because chances are they are going to be the ones that crack the code and what it means to serve the students that we need to serve better really well is there a we're here in Washington so I'll ask like the easy Washington DC panel question which is there is there a political dimension to this this is to any of the three of you everything that particularly in these days all these conversations tend inevitably to get refracted through you mentioned presidential politics but sort of larger ideological questions I mean I'm always one of the reasons that I tend to be optimistic about these conversations is that I tend to not detect any a lot of politics in the broad goal of helping public institutions succeed and more people go to college I've worked for elected representatives and it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you on you have a lot of constituents who want to be able to send their kids to college and don't want to bankrupt themselves to do it so are there problems or there are opportunities as we stay in the policy realm things we need to watch out for whether it's on performance funding or new kinds of status or new sorts of relations with institutions and how do we what are the political elements of that well take one crack at that you know I remember sitting in a Washington the state of Washington has gathered together all the presidents of its public institutions for a big series of forums backed by the Seattle Times last year and those presidents were absolutely tone deaf to the issues that we heard talked about here today by the presidents who were here it was all about them we should continue to exist because we need to exist because we're the greatest thing that ever happened to the country and we need more resources and we need the public to value us and there was when they were done there was a probably 50 people lined up at the microphone because what they wanted to talk about was value for money and whether or not they their students had access whether they could graduate at a predictable time whether tuitions were going to go up you know unexpectedly so I think to me what was striking today was to hear four presidents who did not coordinate their remarks at all speaking such an owning such an incredibly different language they'd already crossed over to a different kind of value proposition for higher education and I think that is a politically powerful thing that's only going to accelerate and I think that if higher education stays as tone deaf as many of the flagships and others are today I think they will find eroding public support I think one of the aspects of the universities that we looked at that kind of surprised me is that universities tend to be conservative in terms of the way they small see conservative but many of the universities and Mark Becker I think talked a lot about this this morning this idea of scale allows experiment and there was what surprised me going into this project some of these universities I knew pretty well through my previous life but others I for the first time and what surprised me about all of them was that they were willing to kind of take these chances on these experiments and some of them were pretty public in terms of the experiments that they were conducting and might not work so the stuff that Mark Becker was talking about this morning where they would try something out if it didn't work they shelve it try something else change it right most universities don't want to do that right because they don't want to be publicly exposed and not knowing what they're doing in some cases and they don't want to try these things out and so I think that we need some way that universities can operate in somewhat of a safe space away from the criticisms of state lawmakers and federal lawmakers to try things out Marguerite I want to put the question to you a little bit more specifically so you had a home at the University of Washington for quite some time part of the research also a couple of great papers from Marguerite also released today also on our website and your colleagues using some of that data University of Washington is a public research university that could have ended up on this list but didn't didn't meet our criteria in terms of enrollment growth and all the rest of it and you talked a little bit about these conversations you're having and rankings what are the other barriers what would it take for some place like a university that you spent some time in to not just a seed to but embrace the kind of agenda that we've been discussing today so it's usually when you said so when we talk about the politics of it I think the politics are shifting between the individuals in the institution who want it to stay the way it's always been and for anyone and I'm sure I'm not the only one in the room who sat in faculty meetings you just you know how many hours are spent resisting things that are coming down from the top and in different sorts of ways so the politics are very much about those that want to still keep this even an outdated major department that no one is signing up to take the classes and no one is majoring in but there's the sense that we have to keep it for some other sort of reason and the politics of wanting to potentially change and increase the number of graduates and yield greater return for dollar and those kinds of things and I think that those tensions are very real but if we look at them from another angle I also see sometimes if you look at these big institutions that haven't changed yet they're still very decentralized in the sense that these units that they own the university and they do in many different ways and there's a potential to harness that in the sense that if we could find units that are interested in game and willing to try new things we could cut them loose and let them free and try to build something new and I think of the individual departments or the new program offerings we're seeing this a lot in institutions where the office of continuing studies or whatever is the most profitable or largest number of students going through at lowest cost or it's the opportunity for the most entrepreneurial faculty to earn some additional money through this side program that they're doing and in that sense I think we might be able to unlock even if the institution isn't we might be able to unlock some of that innovation from inside it which will actually then ultimately affect the institution and I think where possible where an institution not sure that the politics are on their side for opening up and going for these changes it might just be enough to unlock some of that and let it happen on the inside and I'd say that's probably why I left University of Washington and I didn't think it was willing to unlock and let that happen and we heard before about like many faculty aren't interested in this for the money they're interested in for the reputation and I think there aren't many of them interested in it for the money and a lot of them are earning a lot of money on the side right now and that in a sense there's a way to sort of embrace that entrepreneurial spirit even if it's with a subset of your faculty and make it part of what the institution does so I think there's a way to do it that way so you've partially answered my next question I'm going to ask one more question to the panel and then we'll open it up to the audience and we'll have a person with a microphone like last time but it does seem like the faculty are a huge part of this equation as is normally the case in higher ed panels we've invited no faculty to come and sit and participate in this discussion but that's okay that's on me a lot of our discussion in the faculty panel was about the relationship between research faculty and everything else which makes sense because this is a this was a project focused on research universities but as we know most students are not enrolled at research universities or universities that they may be at universities but they're not universities that are really seriously in the knowledge production business just objectively speaking and a lot of the implications about again the premise of our project was resources are limited our national need is growing how can we become more productive you know lurking behind these fairly kind of benign or even positive words like productivity is labor productivity increasing labor productivity means labor is not getting paid as much as it would have if we hadn't increased labor productivity so it seems like a lot of the anxiety I mean okay I think we only have 10 minutes to go we can go both ways with that I don't so how do we get the quote rank and file faculty what's the place for them in this agenda that's my question yeah well I cut them in on it I guess that's what I would say and I know many of them are but right now if your salaries is detached from your productivity then your statement will be true but you could change the way compensation works and people are doing that with their side time already but I think even if we just talk about teaching and put research aside that we've got our headset on this we can either do an online course or we can do a traditional course and I would say that somewhere in the path on there is a whole lot of stuff on the in between and that means that potentially an I teach a niche subject I'll admit education finance is sort of a niche subject but I could take just the subject matter I teach or that anybody else teaches and say how can I use technology to potentially teach a whole lot more students in my niche subject and we might say well there aren't a whole lot more students at this university want to take this niche subject in which case we could talk about scaling one set of expertise across other institutions and I'll just give you an example from my own personal experience which is I also teach at Rice University and teach a program in Las Vegas and in some other places where students are aggregated, experts are brought in and sometimes it's a two week long institute and I teach a two day segment of it or sometimes it's attached to some other institutions MBA and then the students get a stream in education leadership where they bring their expertise and the expertise can send in videos in advance and then we can come in and do an interactive part and then we can do an assignment and they can email the assignment later and the teaching can take on different forms that both uses the technology and also uses the in person learning and that allows you to scale and also allows you to increase your own wages while increasing labor productivity so it means there's a lot of things have to change in that equation but I can give you any different example of how it's possible even right now Questions from the audience? Yes, in the back. Lawrence Peters, Internship Institute I wonder if you could just address this issue of youth unemployment students today are coming out to a very changed job market one that we could hardly recognize there are no real careers anymore we're talking about students who have to hope for an internship even an unpaid one as the next step and I wonder how our colleges are addressing this because in the good old days just having a degree was a ticket to a good job now work experience of a very specialized kind is usually required so do universities feel they have a responsibility to up their game to change what they're doing to prepare students differently because of this changed job market? I think one of the experiences that we saw at the universities we studied and this was particularly true I think at the University of California at Riverside was kind of using research at an undergraduate level so kind of connecting students to the research experience so undergraduate research experimental learning so having the experience of whether it's co-ops kind of built into the curriculum so I think that all the universities that we looked at where the curriculum is not kind of the main thing and the job is on the side but that the two were very much integrated especially in the learning communities whether it's at Georgia State or again at UC Riverside so we saw I think in the universities that we looked at that the curriculum is really meant to not only broadly educate the students but also to prepare them for their chosen career I think we also heard from the presidents that having internships letting students have access to internships out in the community while they're in college so paid work is an increasing differentiating factor that's something that increasingly parents and students themselves are looking for and comparing institutions between so theoretically that's a place where a great regional research university should have a comparative advantage but it would take again as I agree it was talking about before conceptualizing a major or a field of study so that it included partnerships with companies that were trying to solve real world problems or opportunities to work and that's a there are lots of different ways that different institutions organize themselves to try to help make that easier and more powerful so I think that that's definitely a frontier that needs innovation and expansion and you know the real youth employment problem just to digress totally from this topic is much less for the students that are in some kind of two or four year institution and much more for the students, the young people who don't go to any institution at all but I think colleges and universities could do a lot more in the internship arena Yes, Jim Snyder, a former New America fellow and somebody who's written on education issues fairly frequently for Education Week in Washington Post and several others popular type of articles my question relates to the relative opposition to these productivity enhancing uses of new technology in the K to 12 system versus universities so we know in K to 12 there's tremendous, in many districts union opposition to these productivity enhancing tools, online education because they're very disruptive in a lot of respects and I'm wondering occasionally it's been mentioned with the public universities also unionized I get a sense that the level of opposition is actually much less in the university space than in the K to 12 and I was wondering if you also had that feel or if there are similar obstacles how would you compare the level of union opposition to these productivity enhancing tools in the K to 12 space versus the unionized university space well it's first of all really depends on the labor environment in the particular state so it wasn't that long ago that there were some discussions and conversations, proposals in California to make online learning more available and the president of the Cal State Faculty Senate came out and said we're not in favor of that we're not going to put up with it, we're not going to agree to it we feel like we have veto power over those decisions and academic labor in California is heavily unionized at the post secondary level we tend to think of K through 12 as the unionized part of our education system in higher education everyone's a free agent but that's not true in some places it is and in some states it is but in some states it's not I also think that Marguerite spoke to this a little bit that there is a lot more flexibility both in terms of career path and source of compensation at the post secondary level now some of that flexibility is really rebounded against labor where you find this big pool of adjuncts kind of scraping together a living on what amounts to food stamp wages but at the same time there's not as much institutional control and roles are not as heavily defined so in K through 12 you're never going to teach hopefully if all goes well more than like 35 students or so at a time that's the model we have and that has a lot to do with the developmental progress of children particularly children at the young level I think this conversation changes substantially at the high school level where there really is a lot of these conversations that we're having about lower post secondary are substantially applicable to upper secondary a lot of the same classes a lot of the same models so I think I mean from my perspective I think those are the things that are sort of driving and increases in productivity at K 12 really might just put you out of a job whereas in higher ed there may be all kinds of different arrangements where you could find some other place for yourself they also might not be publicly is objecting but just as effective at objecting and saying and we're not going to put that into place yeah that's a great point so in K through 12 level you might have a person who speaks on behalf of 10,000 people with a very strong and clear public voice on higher ed you might have 10,000 people each of whom have agency but it comes much more by department or institution by institution level we have time for one more question if there is one okay again let me just on behalf of the numerical foundation thank you to all of our panelists and to all of you for coming thank you