 Again, welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a fantastic guest talking about a vital topic and I'm really excited about our conversation. We have hosted our guest once before because she wrote an astonishingly powerful book called Paying the Price and this is a book which has been read all over the world which has led her to appear on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. This has led her to a career from moving from strength to strength, establishing programs and consulting all over the place and her main drive is to focus on what does it mean when students have financial material needs that colleges and universities can't help with or choose not to support. How should academia really meet those unmet needs? I'm absolutely honored and delighted to bring Sarah Goldberg to the stage to discuss this and everything else that she is thinking about. Let me bring her up on stage and you can see her. Hello Sarah. Hi. How are you all doing? Good. Where are you today? Where have we caught you? I'm in Philadelphia, my home. Oh excellent, excellent. On a very somber note, I don't know if you knew Temple's President but my condolences if you did. Thank you. Yeah, she was extraordinary and unfortunately was not the President selected years ago when she should have been and I think we'd all be in place right now if she had been. I agree. That was a sudden loss. But you know we have a tradition on the form of asking all guests to explain themselves by introducing themselves by talking about what they're doing next. So instead of the academic obituary method where you talk about what you did in the past what's coming up for you in the next year? What are the big projects, the big topics that are top of mind for you? Yeah, well I'm in a very different space than I was for the last 20 years. I've recently, I think of it as retired from academia frankly and happily so. So now I am independently working for myself and I'm doing a set of things. The first thing I'm doing is I'm writing. I about 2018 I got a fellowship from the Carnegie to write my next book and I unfortunately never actually had the time to work on it so I'm working on it now. It will hopefully be called Real College and I have a wonderful team of folks. I'm working on my first crossover to trade press so looking forward to getting that out there hopefully in a couple years. Well you have a standing invitation to come here when it comes out. I appreciate it. It won't be before fall 2025 because my number one priority is to be here was my son finished his high school. So I'm not going to go out and book tour until he's done with that part and my daughter is launched into high school. I am doing research with Education Northwest which is a wonderful partner in this work and has been for a long time and they have a lot of basic needs and post-secondary work. You're going to start to see more and more familiar faces over there if you're familiar with my work and my partners. A lot of us have moved over there and are doing a lot of cool stuff supporting institutions with research to help them improve practice. I am still partnered with the Association of Community College Trustees, one of my absolute favorite organizations and I'm actively working on a wonderful project called the Kids on Campus Project which is marrying headstarts and community colleges so that we can help address that very basic need of all of these student parents who need affordable child care. And then I have a couple of other smaller one-offs but the best part is that I get to work with folks that excite me and I spend every single day doing things that help me learn. And I think the other part that I think you can all probably really appreciate is I never ever ever work more than 40 hours a week and I'm here whenever I want to be with my kids and I say that we all deserve that in our lives and it has made me happier than I've ever been. That sounds almost utopian today. Well it sounds like you are in those 40 hours you are working at the storm. This is fantastic. I work when I'm able and I'm most productive when I've had a good night's sleep and I've boxed and so I just get those things in regularly. I'm really, really lucky. I'm just going to start imagining you as you know as this kind of um utopian worker as this ideal this is great. Oh let me add one more thing I can't believe I didn't say this. On October 3rd I start teaching sociology 101 as an adjunct at the Community College of Philadelphia and I've been inspired myself that this is uh something that I'm finally going to get to do. That's great. I'm very, very excited by this. It's one of the things I love seeing as a forum guest who is passionate about teaching. Speaking of forum guests, everybody if you're new to the forum I'm going to put a couple of questions to our good guest and they're general introductory questions but they're not going to get out of the way and make room for all of you to ask your questions to put forth your comments and your ideas. So as we go back and forth start thinking about what you'd like to ask. You know raise the kind of you know see what intrigues you and if we've missed something yeah this is the time and this is the place to ask. Sarah you know as long as I followed you you've been you've been working hard on this idea of real college and trying to get institutions to actually address the reality of students as opposed to a fantasy and you've made so much progress there's been so much work but I'm curious in the year 2023 why do some colleges and universities still fail to actually account for the lived reality of their students? We should know better by now right what's what's the what's the source of that gap? It's because the myth is so powerful and so useful to so many parts of higher education especially the the parts of higher education that already come from the most privilege and have the most power historically. You know I mean we benefit a lot from these stories that we're told about you know what it is that we gain from college economically rather than you know gain from college in terms of our health and well-being and our actual learning because that crops up the student debt system. We gain a lot from stories that we tell about how there's all these colleges that aren't really worth going to and so what you should really do is engage in fierce competition to get into one of a hundred that you've heard of. We're even benefiting from this new social mobility narrative that has replaced other narratives you know I saw Chris Newfield starting to dissect this the other day on Twitter and he's on the right track and I think frankly that I could add more to that you know I think I think frankly that just looking at whether you're going to move up in the world as a result of education is a really narrow way to think about the purposes and functions of education and we should know better because we're living in the middle of a crisis of democracy and we've just lived through a major public health crisis and if we're not viewing higher ed as part of the solution to both of those things if we're not noticing that education right now is viewed as a threat like that people are actually afraid that their children might learn something that isn't what they've indoctrinated them to think people are afraid of folks having second and third chances in life because they might actually gain power in society you know and if folks would rather that we not have access to the skills needed to navigate our own health in an incredibly complex world yes and if you know if we really recognize all of that fear then we can see why they want so badly to perpetuate these myths and why all of us even the so-called progressives and academics who say that rankings don't matter still just spent a whole bunch of time this week oh yes yet again about you know a system that reinvented itself a tiny bit so that it can profit off of all of us just like the college board does every single day we just can't seem to help ourselves we're so invested in the institutional elitism is so pervasive let me ask you to unfold on one point then the the uh college mobility myth what what's what's this can you say a bit more about your thinking on that well i mean look you know Raj Chetty being an economist first of all starts from a place of immense privilege there so you know if he says um you know there are places that don't take many students who really receive the big ROI as we like to calculate it which is to say if you start at point one and you move up in the world which by the way is you know the way that capitalist society in this country likes us to think about things it's not it would be bad if we were all at the same level right because we don't only know how we're doing relative to other people somebody has to be below us right and he you know takes the things that we've known in higher ed forever which is that you know um gatekeeping is a central function and that of course there's this right to fail in higher ed um that means that people necessarily won't finish because frankly some people aren't smart enough don't deserve to finish um you know i mean gosh i've watched so many faculty internalize that to the point that like an engineering professor will tell me it's really good that i weed these students out of my class because you know god forbid that someday one of them build a bridge and they didn't do it well and it falls down and i get blamed really you realize like really you think that right um you know so he's he's he's codified all of this in a set of he's quantified it which of course is the most powerful thing one can do right is quantify the heck out of it make it another number and then say add those things in you know much like uh some people who i'm very very fond of you know have said let's look at percent pelt do you can totally game i mean if you want me to close the the pelt non pelt getting gap in graduation rates and you want me to consult with you on enrollment management come on we'll do it tomorrow and we won't have changed a darn thing i can also close black white gaps by the way how do you mean oh so you're talking about closing it in a fake way rather than a real closing it in a fake way not a real way we you know not all pelt recipients are the same robert kelchin and i've been talking about that for almost 20 years you know we can we can recruit and admit the ones who get 25 dollars of pelt they're gonna have a higher predicted graduation rate to begin with and we can ensure that the non pelt students who would have the higher graduation rates go somewhere else just really grateful ones right who are couldn't get in anywhere else and have lower predicted graduation rates and lo and behold the pelt and non pelt rates will converge do it like i said we do it by race too there's just so many ways to manipulate all of this and frankly we could fix that you can you can fix this we can we can be one of these places that wants to make everybody have a good decent local college option hearing that was the idea that was the idea but you know we're not we're kind of far down this road now we're going to need some major radical shift and a lot of people saying we're not well served by this and then voting to change it i don't think any other force i really don't i don't think the private sector can change by itself i don't think individual students or families can change this by themselves i think the country has to look and go you know what if we don't get more people to think education is a good thing and an affordable thing and a thing that they can actually spend time in their life investing in can you imagine if we hadn't expanded access to high school people were just if we had not have expanded yeah nobody's i have never heard anybody with a straight face say we should roll that back yeah yeah yeah just uh just yesterday on the new york times podcast uh paul tough was making the comparison between the high school for all movement which is in the 20s and through the 40s uh and saying that we should use this as the model for undergraduate degrees sure some of us been saying that for a while i always love it when the new york times discovers psychology but when they say it this usually indicates something happening oh it does it does yes i mean we know this i mean the really really people like mike rose were writing that 40 years ago right i mean bill sewell in 1972 was saying that like we collect our history at our peril but we haven't followed this up and and the the by administrations attempts to try to get some kind of public support for tuition have have been blocked do you think we basically have to wait for another couple election cycles before we can get a president and a congress that will support that you get the people that you deserve is my take so we haven't paid enough attention to this as a um we haven't taken higher it seriously as a voting issue not not in a really serious way we've taken little parts of it like the student debt part i'm not going to say that that's trivial but i'm going to say it's it's only really part of the issue we haven't we haven't you know made it a real centerpiece of any of any of the debates to the extent that debates are real we haven't looked at people's platforms we haven't um we just haven't made this central i don't think we've even done it for public education frankly that we've really made it a central voting issue we talk people vote with their so-called purses and wallets and whatever we haven't connected the dots well enough for folks to understand that you know their everyday anxieties and fears um are both caught up in the way we structured our labor market we've shredded the safety net and we've grossly undermined the ability of education to do what it can do and that so the people who come to us the students who come to us for an education increasingly come through that shredded safety net and the higher education now has generally speaking fewer resources to support to handle them i mean do you think do you think covid perhaps taught us that we should care more for our students i've been seeing more more wraparound services as yeah ish i mean i think one of the things that's really stressful is that we watch some places say during the pandemic oh i get it now right and start to lean in to these services um basic needs services as an example but we're not necessarily seeing them continue that support right and and and double down not take it really seriously this this can't be you look there've been a lot of really good critiques of the way that higher ed has handled the dei positions right you know in a post george floyd era we have to pay attention to these things so we hire one person and we stick them in one seat we give them an impossible job and when they don't succeed we let them go and we say this wasn't really worth doing well we're doing that to a lot of basic needs professionals right now they're not being given the power that they need the resources that they need the support systems that they need you know we have to case manage students through a lot of complicated things bass is just one of them right we have to help students to navigate things like snap um you know wick uh utilities programs and so on and they don't even have the technology that could help them do that let alone enough time in their days to do that and so we run the risk of them looking like they didn't get it done and you know it was sort of predictable i'm curious what right now are you seeing what titles what positions do these basic needs professionals tend to have in colleges and universities yeah i mean some of them are being called basic needs center directors basic needs program managers some folks are just calling them case managers there is a higher education case managers association it's a little bit different hekma's a little different than what we are thinking about here which is really strongly social work informed case management um in some cases they're calling like a one-stop person um you know inside higher ed reported that there are more than 400 institutions now that have at least one position with this name uh i would expect more because there's been state legislation to try to push this um like everything else in higher ed right it we want to make sure it's more than just in name only and my biggest concern is that these folks are often truly fabulous people who've come in with the right values and the right intentions some of them outside of higher ed you know there's i know people who've been hired for example from working at domestic violence shelters such that have come in with really really good trauma lenses right and and i think that's great because the stories that these students the lives these students are leading can actually be very traumatizing also for the staff serving them yeah you feel helpless a lot of the time and those folks come from backgrounds where they're really trained to handle that but um you know like i said if you don't give them real power and the ability to make changes and do coordination across units and so on i don't know what basic needs coordinator working in isolation who's going to be able to do this and certainly not one working alone with campuses of you know 400 to a thousand to 10 000 students who need this help and that's the scale is that big is a basic needs center of the best way for most institutions or should there be some other culture way better than a food pantry so you know that's that's um that's where we began i remember the days when we used to really find hope in the fact that we had 700 800 schools of food pantries uh now they now that kind of worries me because i'm seeing schools saying we have a food pantry we're a hunger free campus food pantries have never solved food insecurity they never even made a dent in it and that's true outside of higher ed as well so centers centers do often things like public benefits access emergency aid and so on now again we're treating the effects of the new economics of college here we're not actually dealing with the economics themselves right i would like to see us for example really lower the price of rent for people while they're in college i would like to see us um you know we obviously do have a movement to try to lower the price of books rent is the much bigger ticket item for one in five students with a child child care is a really big ticket item access to child care while you're in college has diminished over time as more and more people have needed it you know a lot of the a lot of the solutions frankly are not the kinds of things that people think of when they think of higher ed solutions they speak to the broader ways that we handle financial instability and insecurity in this country in the in the chat our good friend lisa dirth asks for you to speak to the root causes here uh what you have and uh and and i think you just started doing that um we're at least talking about some of the uh getting getting further down the stack uh below food bantries yeah so there's a bunch of pieces right so um let's just talk about the safety net for a second so you know back in the 90s we all watched as a democrat you know president bill clinton told us that he was helping low income people by ending welfare as we know it and imposing work requirements well guess what they uh it didn't work um in fact it just made us think that we pushed people out of poverty because we pushed people off of what we called welfare roles but my first book detailed with you know a lot of colleagues to do a lot of research and it curtailed access to college for you know millions of of low income people who by the way it's their kids who have now grown up to try to pursue college in this new environment and fall short in in multiple ways um so you know revisiting the basic tenets of a safety net and the way in which we give people access to support with dignity in this country um is one part another part has to do with the dignity of work and i think there are really good conversations that have been going on about you know who's dictating the terms of work and not just the pay of work but the hours of work in the lack of flexibility and so on um we have an affordable housing crisis i can see the chat there and folks think i'm talking about rent control no i'm talking about the affordable housing crisis and the fact that there are you know from many angles i think one great book on this is rick callenberg's latest book on why if housing has become so unaffordable it has to uh segregation it has to do with profiteering it has to nimbyism um college students have gotten caught in the middle uh i think a quick story might help if it's okay please i think so so um i just came back from milwaukee i was really glad to uh go and you know revisit places i spent a lot of time before and it was in milwaukee the first time that i came to understand how irrational um you know our policies were if you looked across sectors so you know one day i was at the university there university of wisconsin milwaukee and uh interviewing a student and the student told me that she was registered for four courses but she was dropping two of them and i started thinking well you know they must have been too hard for her uh she must not have liked them she didn't like them either right well i'm glad i didn't make too many assumptions and i just asked her what's going on and it turns out that that night before there'd been a knock on her door the the house the home where she lived with her mother and it had been the public housing authority administrators because she lived in public housing they she was growing up in poverty she lived in public housing and they told her that either she stopped being a full-time college student and at least became part time if not leave higher education where she and her mother would have to lose their housing wow oh my god again if she didn't make the change it's not just that she would have to move but because there wouldn't be two qualified adults in the house her mother would have to move regardless because there would only be one and she was in an apartment for two now who's this does this make sense well look from the standpoint of housing is scarce and we're rationing it college students many people um think are relatively better off than the rest of society because we have operated with this assumption that there's this giant gate you have to get through but you don't have to get through that much of a gate to get into the majority of the institutions in this country you enroll it's not a giant competition you enroll and it's a good thing to enroll and so this well-intentioned sort of effort at equity is actually cutting off the legs of folks who i think most of us agree are doing the right thing to try to be able to have an education and this is everywhere this is incredibly pervasive so when I say make housing affordable let's like start by just aligning the rules of public housing for college students let's stop building these luxurious units on campus where everybody has like their own apartment and some shared space they're going to live better in college than they're ever going to be able to live the rest of their life thanks to their debt let's go back to you know I know I think I saw Sean Wooden is here they're doing cooperative living in Florida with support from a foundation to do some subsidy these are not glamorous conditions but rent-free cooperative housing could make a huge difference for many folks and there are a lot of other examples so you know it's not as simple as you know rent control and it's not just a giveaway it's a temporary subsidy to help people be able to get a college degree so that they can afford to pay for housing forever sir I have I have so many questions and responses to everything that you've just so brilliantly said but I want to make sure that everyone else gets a chance to ask questions this is fantastic so folks on the chat please click the raise hand button if you want to be face-to-face with us and you know Sarah is proof that you don't have to have a majestic beard to be on the stage and also or click the Q&A box if you want to type and in fact we have a couple of those Q&As right now Sarah this is one from our good friend up in Madison actually who asks whoop hang on a second let me press the right button John Hollenbeck asks we always underestimate the robustness of the institution of school it's from Herbert Klebert do we need a new institution rather than trying to fix the one we got it's funny Herb Klebert was a member of my department in educational policy studies when I was there it's nice to see um look and I know that there's some folks here interested in alternative credentialing and so on and so forth I'm perfectly open to the idea that there might be more than one way to do some of these things I personally don't think it's the top priority or the main solution right now I believe that we need to I don't want to see bifurcated systems you know I'm a sociologist we have theories that are called and theories that have proven out in the world one of them is called effectively or maximally maintained inequality okay which is the minute that somebody else wants part of something that the privileged have we change the thing itself we do this all the time and higher ed's done that right we said you needed a bachelor's degree then we said you needed a master's degree now we said you need a phd right that's part of what's gone on my concern is that we say you know rather than solve the problem at hand in a direct way right rather than restore or at least try to live up to the promises we already made we're going to go try to create a whole other approach to this and I have a feeling that if we do that children of the wealthy are still going to go down the path and we know how that's going to be rewarded like we know how that's you know sorry my cat's being rather noisy and ironically that's pel making all that noise that's the name of your cat pel well I hope we can grant pel some so you know again we can walk and chew gum at the same time I have no problem you know with people spending time on developing alternatives and I totally agree with taking on employers and I've now gotten to live on both sides of that you know I've been an employee I've also been an employer I've I've employed more than 250 people over the last years and um it's a really tough thing you know I got to tell you you know one of the biggest ironies is if you're someone like me and you want to live up to your values and running a research center then you say things like I don't need a four I don't care if a person has a four-year degree in order to do this job or I don't care if a person has a PhD but if you're in a university they'll say well then you can't pay them well right or you can't even hire them right because we don't acknowledge we we just don't acknowledge you know actual practical work experience for example as an actual substitute for the degree even though it says in the job description that we do um so this is a tough road so we're still back to those myths the stories about uh inequality and and the elite uh john thank you for the for the good question and and the quote and and sarah thank you for answering multiple questions at once um we have another one from our dear friend uh steven airman who's just a little bit north of me up in Maryland today and steve asks back to an earlier point do you know of examples of colleges and universities that have made meaningful contributions to affordable housing in their communities yeah so that's a great question and i would say this is an area where there's just a lot happening at the moment and so i i don't know that we can say meaning i'm a scientist right so when you say meaningful contribution like i would want to put terms around that that are measurable and it'll allow me to see it a little bit better are there promising things happening yeah um they're not usually happening with institutions of higher ed by themselves but rather in partnership so there are um i'm particularly taken with what's happening in portland oregon uh between a partnership with an org called college housing northwest um that has really rethought the way that it does its work in relation to both the community colleges and the private colleges and the public university in the area and remember that you know this term college student does not necessarily mean a person even enrolled in a full course right a full set of courses this could be somebody who took a class one semester and then was a regular person working in the community maybe raising kids and then is taking another class right so i don't like sort of the distinctions between those categories and so they actually do end up housing a fair number of people who might not be in college at any given moment and also those people's family members and they are finding strategies and ways to blend and braid funding to make housing more affordable i think that one of the most exciting things is going to happen when the there's a handful of california community colleges that have decided to build housing and they're doing it at a moment when those presidents have really been schooled in issues broader issues of affordable housing and housing insecurity in their regions in california and they're doing it with a lot of consciousness towards the role of their community in their college right a community college cannot just throw up housing that alienates the people who live around it they will pay for that they will pay for that more they even than the public universities paid for that they depend so heavily on their local communities people like Keith Curry who are currently building housing in Compton you know are really thinking about how that will affect and how it could benefit folks who might not see themselves as part of the college community at that moment i unfortunately can't get much more specific yet i'm hoping that we're going to know in a year or so literally what the mechanisms are and how they can drive improvements but it's it's really around a blending and breeding of funding it's not all public or all private well thank you that's a perfect answer and steven as always thank you for your question this is this fits in nicely with steven's research agenda i think we have more questions coming in and friends these are all q and a questions so please feel free to to add more and if you want to join us on the stage just click the raised hand icon we'll be glad to host you and this is from Elmira Janglu who says students access to resources very based on citizenship status any suggestions for hiring institutions to generate the i'm sorry to address the challenges experienced by non-us citizens and i'll document immigrants and so forth yeah thank you for the question Elmira you're right first of all like we can see it in every data set that that is the case uh you know this is obviously one of those areas where uh other policies right including immigration policy um are going to affect what we do in higher ed and just like it is yes glenn that immigration policy is labor policy right i mean this is often the case these things you know and i say that because one of the things that is hard about being a president at this stage is that you need to know these other areas of policy and you can't just rely on your government affairs people to be expert in that because often they've come out of a narrower space this is where i am in favor of um things that are universal uh and an ungated and not means tested and not means right so undocumented students in our public schools benefit from the national school lunch program particularly when it's implemented in a community school's model approach pretty good reason pretty good evidence that that stuff's working uh you know i think it's a good thing i i think that when when a student has to put their hand up to say i'm undocumented in order to get something whether it's the tuition you know the in-state tuition remission or a scholarship or anything else they run some significant risk and i'm even very concerned and i'll just say this i know that it's gonna upset folks but i am concerned with this push for everybody to do FAFSA completion huh why is that well because it's pretty clear when somebody doesn't have the numbers they need to put on that form they use made-up numbers and um you know even where they say they're not going to file it in some states they do not have sufficient protections around those data and i have confirmation from folks who know these things that ice is having access to those those and i'm very afraid that the well-meaning you know equity-minded folks who are trying to get students more access to financial aid may in fact be creating databases that can be used by people who just want to exit these folks from the country um and i think that if we don't talk about that stuff then we're not being honest um and uh i just you know going back to milwaukee i literally just met with two students um both of whom were enrolled in college last time i had seen them and because they are undocumented and because their parents they didn't get um they have not been caught or so you know ext uh deported at this point but their parents have been they're no longer in school neither one of them is in school um and both of them are working they're happy to be working but yes i appreciate lisa's comment self-identifying is like wearing a yellow star and yes as a as a duo i would definitely say so well almyra thank you for that excellent excellent question and thank you sarah for that terrifying tour of how this is actually playing out we have more questions coming in you know the ice is broken and people have have more questions and and here is one from our mutual friend keel and and keel has a question i may need to unfold this a little bit for people who are new to uh to keels live inquiry a lot of the mountain of college debt is caused by credential inflation i.e. increasing demand for master's degrees long career etc how would sarah address this with her free college plan so if i could kill the uh keel's argument is that we having increasing demand for more and more credentials which is for driving more and more students to more and more a secondary experience which is driving uh student debt up further and further um and if i'm translating this correctly keel you're wondering how free college for all or at least you know well supported college for all would would that make that worse i mean look it may very well not handle it but i also don't think any single policy from a single sector is going to handle such a large problem that problem is intersectional with labor market with the behavior of employers you know i mean part of the inflation and such is you know how do i put this employers are lazy in their hiring many of them they're looking for shortcuts right if we could figure out some ways to i mean i i've i've tried to ignore the credential in fact i advocated strongly within my my own center that we wouldn't look at those credentials and we would find other ways and then you get into this fraught area of what hr allows and doesn't especially around you know tasks and assessments and such that can also be hiring is a really tough thing and especially as pools get bigger and we have things like you know indeed and others that make it possible to just it's like it's like the common app right there's been so many coming for college we have to figure out how to ration the spaces although what i can't stand is that you know if the common app increased the number of applications to college and more people want to go to college then why aren't we leaning on these colleges to make more spaces for students to get bigger right i that seems like something but um i don't think it's i don't think it's on a single free college plan or anything else to sort of solve for the whole puzzle we need mutually supportive changes in society and we need to have those conversations but again going back to the high school thing are we going to blame free public high school you know and common high school for credential inflation and say we shouldn't have done it yeah i don't think anyone's going to go that far thank you thank you for taking the question so seriously and keel as always i really appreciate your work on this we have more questions coming in this is one comes back to fafsa which is something i don't normally get to say but there it is and this is from liz stuffinson hello liz we have fafsa requirements to get access to all sorts of things for instance free laptops what other ways could be using to get those services to students without involving trafsa yeah i really appreciate that question liz i don't think that fafsa should be a gatekeeper to any of those types of basic needs supports uh during the pandemic we we watched um you know the fight that happened in the first kerf if you remember the the carers act under boss and the fact that fafsa was used as a gatekeeper for access to emergency aid and then you watched as administrations changed and we did our best to remove that as a barrier but it's actually the colleges and universities that kept on doing it in many cases because in this regulatory environment and this in this relationship between financial aid offices and federal student aid they thought it was safer they thought that they were going to be accused of giving somebody money who didn't quote unquote deserve it yeah yeah and that's the same thing with the laptops you're gonna you're gonna have somebody say we're gonna give it to somebody who doesn't need it and here we are sitting in the middle of the politics of deserving us and that's not unique to higher ed that's just that higher ed really loves it um because frankly i think that higher ed is run by a bunch of people who think that we're more deserving of everything because we have higher degrees and i think in a lot of cases um and i'm going to say the we here because i think i subscribed to this for a very long time you know uh we are better than smarter than and more prepared to to decide than others who don't have that well we certainly won the educational game by we we mean you know faculty or staff or senior administration yeah absolutely absolutely oh this thank you for that really good question again this is from coming from sacramento city college really appreciate that this and we have a question from now see this does require this is where you get fine facial hair hang on a second you'll see what i mean uh from thomas jatobin a a guest to be coming up in a few weeks uh and thomas asks this uh sarah where are you seeing successes toward the efforts you've outlined who's doing the work well and might be models i wish you might look yeah thanks for that question tom so that is why i'm writing the real college book because i don't just want to be able to rattle off i can rattle off a list of places that i am i am really impressed by and that i think are doing the work and so on but i really want to be able to take you kind of inside that work and show you how the rules of the game look different how engagement looks different on the ground how it's very imperfect because look i mean we're doing something it's a lot of this work is a radical act you know i'm going to go ahead and give you uh an example um that um i have to say the chat is distracting i'm going to try not to look at it because this character don't worry i'm keeping an eye on it um so look i mean you know wrestle lary hart has you know rightly with his team won a lot of attention for his work at amarillo college with kara crowley and a net carlyle and others because you know in the pam handle of texas they decided that the best way to get more folks to be able to complete the education they wanted and this isn't even about just the credential people started something and they want to finish it and the way to do that was to see them as human beings not just as students right student conveys you are the learner you are this you're supposed to we're just supposed to focus on this academic thing and ignore the fact that whether or not you've eaten as an academic contribution and so on right um and so they created this mantra of loving your students to success and that actually does seem to be getting the work done this does seem it's it's because it starts with culture it starts with values and then they started removing barriers based on that so they said it shouldn't take forever to get emergency aid we're going to you know we're going to designate one or two people who can make a snap decision and move fast um we're going to we're going to actually engage our faculty in some conversations about the unintended consequences for example of dehumanizing people with attendance policies that act like the person who misses class because they're being lazy is the same as the parent who misses class because there wasn't childcare is the same as the you know person who misses class because they had to go to work right that we need to understand people as individuals in order to reach them as individual learners and even as they've enjoyed success numerically qualitatively praise winning awards there's also lots of conflict on the campus i was really honored that they trusted me enough to show me so i went in and said let me see the faculty surveys let me see what they say i don't want you to polish it up for me i want to see where people say we're lowering standards right where people say um he's just touchy feely this is his personal agenda right the wherever good work is happening wherever change is really underway you should also be seeing conflict and resistance because that's how this all gets worked out and in many cases let me tell you some of the best works going on in places where the presidents have gotten no confidence votes wow where these two connected i mean did did this work drive the faculty to not in not in his case but in other cases that i am going to hold up because i think that they are doing really important questioning of the basic fundamentals and rethinking centering students while also thinking about employer employees by the way and their working conditions it's not always easy to understand and um and there's a lot of uh there's just a lot that goes on in the politics of institutions and sometimes i see a no confidence vote and i think well that that was totally deserved they are corrupt and in many cases i think what is this person trying to get done that the faculty in their role as faculty as they're right is interrogating and questioning in the governance in the governance yeah so let me just say real quick tom i have a piece coming out in trusteeship um where i gave a bunch of examples of different institutions that i think are doing good work and i offer some advice to trustees um i thought it would be helpful to summarize in one place and it should be online any moment sarah when that when that goes live if you want please send it to me and i can spread it around i was hoping it'd be out by now not quite well but there is something that is that which we haven't mentioned yet i don't think uh and tom thank you for the for the really really good question um on the bottom left corner of your screen there's a kind of tan colored button um which links to another one of your projects sarah and can you can you speak about that while people click on it and run away yeah um the real college resource library is a free collection that i decided that it would be a good idea to put together because um when i left the the last university that i left i found that many of the materials i had created that were publicly available on the university website have been removed so there i've moved a couple of things and it's unfortunate that people couldn't find what they needed and so i just decided let me take responsibility for putting them all in one place and it's a large body of work and so it's searchable um i'm sure i could improve it if anybody has ideas for improving it please send me a note um i've also included the work of uh people i've collaborated with and also the work of people i just think did great stuff in especially in the basic need space that we need to be able to find really readily um and this is not limited to scientific studies so there's resource guides there's policy analyses um i have a whole collection of studio of student stories that they've told over time with permission to publish and i'm going to start putting them up so that folks can use them as they educate each other um you know it's that's what it is it's it's it's meant to accompany the book someday when the book is done well it's there right now and so you know as always i believe in giving people access to the things for free and this looks fantastic um so thank you uh thank you sir uh friends we're in the last eight minutes um and i want to make sure that if you have any questions that have come up um please this is a good time to surface them if you had an idea to camp in the chat or in your own head that we haven't yet shared um please pop into the q&a box or click the retent button and i can bring you up on stage um uh glenn had a question but it's actually i think it's part of a question glenn so if you want to say more about this uh let me know um he asks about the ai and cheating epidemic um well jesse stommel's here um so that's my first uh thing i my take on on cheating comes from what i've learned from jesse and we'll have jesse uh as a guest pretty soon as well yeah i mean you know i will say i have not taught since chat gpt merged so i don't want to presume that my classes will have changed dramatically in terms of my concerns about this but um i imagine a lot of my assignments ask students to do things that i think would be hard for chat gpt to mimic so there's a lot of reflection on their own learning in the assignments um good you know there's a lot more processing i have them assess themselves that's been the greatest thing that i've ever learned i have to say from jesse and shon michael morris because wow i have not had any student argue their grade since i started doing this not once i it feels like a whole burden had been lifted that emotional labor of of of dealing with grade grabbing that's so you know but also i think that um the biggest thing that jesse has ever taught me is that right teaching deserves all of teaching deserves all of the attention that we can possibly give it that it is it should be um exhausting in a good way because it it just deserves so much it takes so much to do it and do it well which is why it's horrendous what we've done to teachers at all levels in this country and um also i have to say that my my starting place with teaching is trust with students and building trust and earning trust both ways so it seems to me as i've like watched this discussion about you know ai and cheating that it's entering into a culture of profound mistrust that is engendered by faculty who also just every day are around people they don't trust and it's pretty sick you know um i i don't i think it's a tough world thank you for thank you for that answer and glenn good get a question from you um we have another one from uh gail mensel and hang on i may need to read this little carefully sarah there we go i appreciate you for honesty we need people to be bold and relentless in leading change in my experience it wasn't possible in my higher education role what can advocates do to push the needle well first of all gail i've i've i enjoy very much your enthusiasm and commitment to the work it's important because this is sort of a relentless situation you know as somebody said earlier why does she smile look if i don't take time to smile a little bit in my life like how do i even get up every day anymore right all i've seen in my career is the many many ways in which people are being destroyed and i've experienced being destroyed by institutions um that are you know again relentless in their own way so i think you have to find um as a sociologist i got to find humor in the fact that we just keep on perpetuating inequality um because it's just so textbook and yet we seem to just rediscover it every day um and i find that mildly amusing in kind of a sick way frankly um i think the best way to advocate for students is to constantly be looking for ways to do it big small and otherwise right so you know the next time that a student says this isn't working even if you can't fix it for them just taking a moment to first of all acknowledge that it's not okay what's happening you know to help them see that it's not necessarily a personal problem that it's happened to lots and lots of people to make them feel less alone that's a very very powerful form of advocacy for their own empowerment um to make them feel seen so that they get up another day even if they leave college they get up another day and they move towards a future yeah you know i think that we can advocate within our own institutions for um you know even for changes like let's not use the FAFSA for determining who needs a laptop to things like you know we really need to really have a plan for moving beyond a food pantry to um you know when this new FAFSA comes out and i know we've talked about the form but why don't we talk about helping people understand that for example if you're lgbtq and your parents are not helping you pay for college that there are new provisions in there that could help you to qualify for more aid why don't we take the advocacy stance of telling people that so that they might be more likely to know right and then of course talk to your neighbors and help them understand what you actually do in higher ed so that you can do some myth busting we need every single day to go and tell them the real stories of what's really happening on the ground so that they don't think that this is all about harvard it is so profoundly not about harvard it's just like telling a story every day of your absolute wealthiest neighbor who you know who commutes using a private jet and making that sound like that's life in america that's uh that's a popular story too um well thank you that's that's a really really good and exciting answer um and an empowering answer and gail thank you thank you so much for the question um we are at our last couple of minutes and and i wanted to ask one question of you sir if if we could pick a a kind of standard public university so not a flagship but one that works for its state um if you were to successfully mobilize it to actually be a real college real university addressing reality what would that look like and say five or six years down the road what kind of transformation would we expect to see first of all um i think that any real institution doing this work is going to have uh a student body full of people who are on their first second third fourth fifth sixth go around in there because it should be flexible and responsive and embracing all of that life experience and opening those doors um second of all the conversation about how they're going to pay for it is going to be individualized but is going to blend and braid from a huge array of resources draw from a school district where we don't just talk about FAFSA but we talk about living expenses and work and we talk about the programs that you can qualify for and so um i think that educators would play a much bigger role much much bigger role in constructing the student experience and also would be required to have a lot more professional development to help them align their own views and work with the real needs of students it would be a regular ongoing kind of iterative you know prototyping and testing and improvement kind of process um and also i think that the college or university would operate in much closer um collaboration with communities multiple communities communities of employers communities of the social agencies in the area community with health and so on they would not see themselves as separate from that but rather just an integral part of the people who work together in a community to do things for the community because i think fundamentally real college is going to be a local thing i don't think i don't think i mean 80 percent of people don't go away to college right that number is actually going to grow i really do i don't think it's going to go away i don't think and that doesn't mean that people aren't going to see the world in such it's just that not necessarily the time that we have to we don't have to put everything on college college doesn't have to be the only way to transition to adulthood it doesn't have to be the only way to learn how to you know to do your bills it doesn't have to be the only time that you see the world we're putting too much on something that needs to be fundamentally about you know continuing to advance knowledge on a certain set of things and then build the habits of mind to be a lifelong learner who revisits it as needed in your life so this might be something closer to a community college model in a way community or or state regional comprehensives and i think that they're going to more and more like going forward i think those lines need to be blurred yeah they should we don't have enough i'm going to say my most radical thing we don't have enough colleges in this country we just have the wrong ones and they're not located properly not and they're not run with enough accountability frankly yeah definitely radical statement definitely radical statement and that i'm afraid is the radical statement that we're going to have to close on today because we are just past the top of the hour uh sarah thank you for being a fantastic guest so many ideas and so much passion and of course reflecting so much research and it's it's terrific terrific that helps too what where can we find you where's the best way to keep up with you i'm still on all the platforms they're all under my name i don't make it hard to find me i i have a blue sky account i haven't started using it so find me on the uh the thing i'm still gonna call twitter and i'm on linkedin and instagram and facebook and you know my website that works for me that works for me having me brian well it's an absolute pleasure and uh i wish you all all the best luck with all of this and please uh when the trustee ship um uh piece comes up please let me know uh so we can see it and uh and thank you so much please be well and good luck with this wonderful wonderful career you have thank you thank you uh friends if you'd like to keep talking about all of these issues about real college about how to support this how to transform institutions please keep up with their conversation you can do that on all these different socials including twitter and mastodon and i am as well on blue sky threads etc just use the hashtag fttt fttt or at me if you'd like to go into our previous sessions including our first meeting with sarah gilbert brab or other sections about student support institutional transformation just go to our archive at tinyurl.com slash fttf archive uh looking ahead we can take these topics to other topics including ungrading uh the uh gastro which was already with us today thank you jessie uh including uh what's happening to academic twitter edu calls information literacy intermediary organizations and more just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to blue and above all thank you for your great questions your great comments today it's been a wonderful conversation thank you so much i hope that uh september is treating you all well and that as the semester continues on that you are all working well and you're all safe and sound take care everyone we'll see you in online next time bye bye