 My name is Jennifer Wang. I'm the policy director at Young Invincibles. We are very excited about this next panel on higher education and the workforce. If you read the description, everyone knows that a college degree is becoming increasingly important in today's economy, particularly for my generation. It's a competitive job market. But there's no question that for most people, higher education is expensive now, much more so than before. And so our panel, I really wanted to have this panel to question the current assumptions about our generation and how we go to school, how they're paying for school. And I also do want to talk about how these degrees, how this education is translating to skills in our economy. So just for background, I'm going to introduce my co-panelists. Kevin Carey is from the New America Foundation. If you read about higher education, you've probably read his work. Keisha Bird is from the Center for Law and Social Policy, CLASP, as we like to call it. Keisha and I collaborate on some work focused on opportunity youth, which we will get to later. Very excited to have you, Keisha. And Zakiya Smith is from the Lumina Foundation. You should check out all three panelists' bios in the back of the handout. But I'll let Zakiya talk about the foundation in my intro question. But I wanted to kick off the panel to give each person two minutes to give their opening view of higher education and workforce training. So I'll start by sharing Young Invincible's perspective. And then I'd like to give you all a chance to share your perspective. Because something that I've noticed in the short time that I've worked on higher education policy is that we come at the issue from many different areas. We look at it from many different lenses. And so I want to introduce you to Young Invincible's. We are a national nonprofit dedicated to amplifying the voices of young people, 18 to 34. We mostly work in three big issues, higher education, jobs in the economy, and health care. And so the way that we come at higher education and reforms to the systems that we have in higher education is that we're very interested in reforms that make it easier for low income students and families to become empowered first. And so just as an example, Young Invincible's is very interested in protecting and boosting the Pell Grant. Because we know that that has a very proven return on investment that is very well targeted. And also of the view, I think this is no secret if you saw my boss, Jen Machore's panel, that young adults' voices are, until recently with this event, rarely taken seriously in discussions around policy reform. So it's really our mission to change that. And so I'll start. Zakiya, I'd love for you to tell us about how you approach higher education at Lumina and even before Lumina. Sure. So I'm Zakiya Smith. I'm at Lumina Foundation, which is a relatively new foundation. It's only been in existence since the year 2000. But we focus on higher education, and specifically on a goal that by 2025, at least 60% of our nation's adult population, including millennials, have some type of post-secondary degree or credential, high-quality post-secondary degree or credential. So I'm coming to this from the presumption that higher education is a good thing, that going to college is a good thing, despite all the challenges that more people should go and that more people should complete. And I focus at Lumina on student finance, and so thinking about how people pay for college. And our working assumption there is that the way people pay for college right now is broken. We think about who needs to actually complete college in order for us to reach that 60% goal. And we think about the changing demographics of America. We need more minorities. We need more low-income students. We need more first-generation college students. We actually also need more older adults, or there's an opportunity for older adults. There's a lot of people that have some college but no degree. And because we heard earlier of how large the millennial generation is, there's a lot of millennials, people on the upper end of that, what is it, 34 years old range, that have probably gone to college before, didn't finish first one reason or another, and are in the workforce with some college or some college experience that didn't actually get a degree. So we think a lot about how do you help people who are returning who are not necessarily first-time college goers. And I think about how they pay for college and how we change the system to be better for people that maybe it's their first time going to college, but people who are, again, adults that are returning. But in general, how does the system work so that more people are likely to enroll in college and complete. So I'll just end with the biggest piece that is probably a barrier is that many people say they would like to go to college if you ask a room of eighth graders who wants to go to college. Everybody raise their hand. We have done a good job of getting across the message that college is the way to the American dream, the middle class, yada, yada. But we don't have the majority of our citizens with a college degree. And so something is missing somewhere and about 50% of students. I don't like the term dropout because it makes it seem like it's the student's fault, but for some reason or another, 50% of students do not attain a degree, right? We think a lot about how do you change the system to make that not happen. Thank you, thank you. And Kisha, I know that class and we have worked together for some time on opportunity use. And these are young people who are not in school and not working. And can you tell me more about how you and how class come at the questions that we're talking about when it comes to workforce development, workforce investment, and higher education and this realm for young people who are not doing either? Yep. So thank you for having me, Jennifer, and this is a wonderful space that I have to get that out there and it really facilitates an open dialogue. So Zakiya, I like that you say you don't like seeing dropping out because we like to really think about young people get pushed out, they drop out or don't finish their secondary education for a number of different reasons. So we start on a premise that it's to dispel the myth that if young people don't finish their secondary credential or they're out of school and out of work that they have some kind of low skill attainment. And it is true that many young people, we have low literacy, low numeracy, the low sixth grade level and so forth, but young people drop out for many reasons. We've done lots of work surveying young people around the country, just figuring out what happened that you had to leave school and didn't finish your secondary credential and what brought you back. And we heard a range of reasons. One, family reasons needed to work, needed to earn and learn. I know we'll get into some of that a little bit later in the panel. What was apparent was apparent and had a young child who was sick and then fell behind in school to not really being connected. Something happens in that eighth grade to ninth grade transition to not really feeling supported and being connected. So there's just far too many of our young people who fall through the cracks and it's a systemic issue that we're not supporting them in their development. So our youth work, policy work at CLASP is really nested in a broader kind of premise that workforce development, higher education and pathways to those is an anti-poverty strategy. CLASP is an anti-poverty organization. We've been around for about 45 years and over the time our work has morphed from civil legal aid to really approaching what are some of the other strategies that communities, families need to get ahead and be successful and have economic mobility and stability. And so nestled in between that, it really is for young people in the millennial generation who are falling through the cracks, they're idle, they're invisible for the most part, even in many of these policy conversations, how can CLASP and our local partners on the ground be a voice to them and also support organizations, I see the court network and other people in here, who want to also support those young leaders who have been reconnected to also joining us with policy solutions. Thank you. Kevin, can you tell us how you approach higher education reform and what priorities inform your writing on the topic? Sure. I think in thinking about the millennial generation and higher education, I think it's noteworthy that a lot of the trends in higher education that we're still grappling with happen to start right around the same time as the beginning of the millennial generation, which I guess we think of as starting in the early 1980s. That was when you see a sharp inflection in the price of college. College prices hadn't actually been rising all that quickly and then right around 1982, 1983, they started to go up. That was also the time where there was the beginning of another kind of parallel trend in which the labor force really changed itself a lot. We lost a lot of blue collar jobs, a lot of union jobs. But they were by and large replaced by jobs. Phil Lohman's going to yell at me if I say this wrong here in the front row. But there was a growth in jobs in the white collar sector that were many of which required a college degree. So we saw a real widening in the college wage premium, the difference between what college graduates make and non-college graduates make. So with that that was by the time millennials got to college age, college had gotten more expensive but college was also worth more. So it still seemed like a pretty good deal and I think that's very much reflected in the enrollment statistics. In 1980, 40% of high school graduates went right onto college. By 2010 it was 70%. I mean that's a huge change in some ways not that long a time. And I think what we realize now is over the last 10 or 15 years all of the positive trends flattened out and all of the negative trends kept going. So the wage premium didn't keep growing. It sort of got to about where it was in 2000 and stayed there. It's not really declining but it's not like there are additional returns to college. But college did get more expensive and somewhere along the line we kind of crossed the line to where the typical family could afford to pay out of pocket to go to higher education and we went from debt being unusual to debt being the norm. And so we kind of find ourselves in a position where we have a very debt focused higher education conversation. In ways that I think don't always exactly reflect the reality of typical students. I think it's important to realize that the underemployed NYU graduate like with $80,000 in loans who lives in Red Hook or 14th Street is like not the typical millennial person. I think most of them are on my Twitter feed. One or the other. The typical millennial experience with higher education is probably more like borrowing some money but not that much. Maybe dropping out of college. A lot of two year associate's degrees, a lot of certificates. Living kind of all over the United States kind of dealing more with the great sort of middle of our economy and basically trying to end up on the right side of it. Because the other thing that happened and again that I think has been accelerating over time is the inequality that we are all faced with all the time in this sense that the stakes are higher for everything. That and if you end up on the wrong side of the line between the haves and the have nots like you have a tough road ahead of you and that's very much bound up with questions of educational attainment. So when we think to get back to your question, when we think about higher education reform, I think we are looking toward a future in which there's gonna be a real change in the kinds of institutions that offer higher education and that's one thing that didn't change at all during the millennial generation. So whatever colleges existed when you all were born are pretty much exactly the same colleges that exist now. Except for for profit. Except for the for profit colleges. They all appeared and now hopefully are gonna disappear. We're working on it and so is everybody else sitting here. All of my colleagues here. So we basically have the same types of institutions kind of educating people in the same ways for a lot more money. That I think is kind of both untenable and the classic like unsustainable trends that can't be sustained forever by definition. Sense of unsustainable. And also just not something that people are gonna put up with for a long time. So I think I have a daughter who's four and a half and so she's a part of whatever the next yet to be named generation is after the millennials. I'm not buying the homeland thing for a second. I think that someone's definitely gonna come up with a better name and make a lot of money by marketing it somehow. But I really think that we're trying to think now about two populations or three I would say all the people who are coming into our higher education system now who are by and large gonna experience higher education as we did. The revolution's not gonna come overnight. We have people who are adults who are already out in the workforce who either it didn't work out for them the first time they went through they didn't get the degree they needed or they didn't get a degree at all or they're subject to the increasingly perilous economy to go back and get more credentials and more retraining and then thinking really hard about what the real longer term future of higher learning is gonna look like which I think will be a proliferation of new and interesting kinds of higher education organizations. A whole lot more different kinds of credentials than we have now we're not gonna be just stuck with the traditional bachelor's degree, master's degree however many years you were in school degree and that has really profound implications for how we finance higher education how we think about questions like access and completion if you set a goal for X% of people having a credential like how do you know if you've met it if all of a sudden your definition of credentials is changing. And also the integration of technology into higher education which I think is only just beginning then. So I think we all touched on this issue I think Zakiya you probably most that when you ask young people today do you wanna go to college? I think overwhelmingly the answer is yes. And people are going to college in much higher numbers than they were before I know we all agree on that. But having everyone on this panel I think that the dichotomy is that affordability is becoming a much larger struggle even though the culture is now for many people in our generation that we need to get these degrees that we need to get this education. Zakiya I'd love for you to talk about some of the more salient themes around affordability and completion that you're working on today. Sure so one piece that I think often gets misrepresented and Kevin brought this up is and when you talk about affordability in the popular media there's a huge meme of the selective private college graduate that's working at Starbucks as a barista. And I would actually bet that there are higher percentage of selective college graduates that are working as baristas than there were 15 years ago. The problem is that when you look at student debt or people that are in default that's where it did some really good work on this Claire McCann at New America Foundation of who's in default on student loans it's actually not that person by and large it's usually the person that did not finish. So one of the biggest challenges that I think we see with higher education and I don't want to minimize the concerns of folks that feel like the opportunities are not as great as in their parents' generation because that may very well be the case. It's just that in the broad scheme of everything there are a lot more like pressing concerns and there's at least two markets in higher education but one of the things that struck me most reports in the past two years or so that struck me most was the separate and unequal report out of the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce that showed that I think it was 82% of white high school graduates went to the 400 most selective colleges in America and 73% of black and Latino students went to community college. That was like crazy to me and then they showed like what the trend lines are but you've really got at least two separate systems of higher education and when you say college to any given person what's going on in that higher education market could be vastly different and so to bring it back to affordability one thing that I've been if anyone has talked to me in the past month or so I've been on this event on living costs and how you know so the public average the average tuition at a public four year right now in state is about $8,900. The total cost of attendance is about $23,000 and that means that living costs are accounting for more than half of the price of tuition at public four year colleges. When you look at community colleges if you're low income the Pell Grant to cover the average tuition at most community colleges I think that average tuition at community colleges in 48 states across the country or would be covered by a Pell Grant. So what you're facing and when people face affordability challenges is how do I get to school? Like what if my car breaks down? Do I have childcare if I have a kid? Can I pay my rent this month? Do I have to work more? Which means I can study less and those are the real affordability challenges that I think we need to be concerned about not to say that and there's an answer to the affordability challenges on the other end which I think, I would love Kevin's last one which is around quality. So is it necessary to go like, are some of these new insurance making them very, very, very expensive places which had been, you previously thought of expensive means high quality and if it doesn't necessarily mean that expensive means high quality is it the same if I go to the public college that's down the street as if I go to, I'm not gonna name a college but some, you know. And if that changes, if that like if it's true that you can get just as good a job at your local like public in state college then you could at going away to like whatever your dream school was with the rock climbing wall does that make the whole house of cards fall down on the very, very expensive colleges and I think that's something that we need to grapple with. Yeah, yep, yes. Keisha, sorry, Kevin I'm curious, you know as we're talking about the cost of college and how people are paying for college and how that's changing I do wanna go back to this issue of debt because we're at $1.2 trillion not staying debt that number is increasing and young invincibles we hear day in day out about what this debt actually means for people people not buying homes, not buying cars recently there was a new, I saw an article out about how my generation is moving home to live with their parents in droves. I'm curious for our generation I think it's clear that for many of us a lot seems out of reach. Can you share what you think this growing body of debt means for us as a generation? Yeah, that's a big question a lot of people are trying to think about and as is usually the case there's spirited argument among economists about this relationship between levels of debt and family formation purchasing a home. I mean there are a pretty specific and limited set of signifiers that two conventional thinking marks the end of the transition into like full adulthood. Not judging anybody about their choices about adulthood but I have a car, I have a house, all that stuff so. So you're an adult. So I guess. So a couple things that I think are important to keep in mind about debt. A lot of that debt is graduate debt so we need to make a distinction between undergraduate debt and graduate debt. I think undergraduate debt is a substantially larger problem than graduate debt because graduate debt is almost overwhelmingly taking out with the expectation of a very specific labor market return. You take out money to go. So I'm not worried about the doctors of the world with $200,000 in debt because they're all paying their loans back. So that's part of it. We need to make a big distinction between the amount of debt and whether you've defaulted on a loan. It's less clear and intuitively it makes a lot of sense that you can only owe so much money and so if you owe more money for college you have less capacity to borrow to buy a car or buy a home. Figuring out the trends is complicated by the fact that credit standards tightened like a vice after the 2008 recession. So it's not just that people owe more, it's harder to borrow, like a lot harder to borrow. And so figuring out the interrelationship between those things is tricky. What we do know is that if you default on your loan no one's gonna lend you any more money after that. Now the average loan balance of a defaultor is not a lot. What is it like, Alex Clare, $1,314 or not? Our average loan balance for a defaultor? $15,000. $15,000, right. So it's actually, the average loan balance of a defaultor is less than the average balance of somebody walking out of college with a bachelor's degree and a loan, which is about $27,000. If you just, that average includes, doesn't include all the zeros, it only includes those people who do borrow. Yes. So and a lot of the default problem is driven as much by the fact, to get back to Zakiya's point, that the education people are getting isn't very good, doesn't allow them to get a job that they can then use to pay their loan back. So we see this interrelationship between the quality of education people are getting, the amount they're borrowing, and whether they're an undergraduate or graduates. And so in a lot of ways, I think, probably the best strategy to mitigate the unfortunate and growing bad relationship between debt and moving ahead in life is increasing the quality of degrees that people get while we push on the affordability side at the same time. That makes a lot of sense. And I think, the stories that we hear about people who take out student loan debt and don't graduate are the most egregious ones, I think that's certainly something in our work, a theme that we hear. Tisha, I'm curious, in your work on the opportunity youth issue, can you share some of the barriers that currently exist for opportunity youth to go to school or to get a job? I mean, what really are those barriers? And what are some policy recommendations to address those barriers? Good question. Listening to my colleagues on this panel, and I'm thinking about the nearly 6.7 million young people with this conversation is, they're far from being a part of it. And so just by way, there's about 6.7 million young people around this country who are idle, not attached to school or work, but 3.3 million of them have been unattached since 16 years old. And so when we're thinking about barriers, we're also thinking about, how do we take that unattached 16-year-old from rural community in Appalachia or just down the road in Washington, D.C., so that they can even consider being a part of this debt problem, being a part of this debt problem. Or hopefully a solution that you guys will help solve. And so we think about really in the long-term pathways. And so there's really no kind of one policy solution because these young people fall at the nexus of a failed education system, living in communities that are devoid of work, and where work is not even an option for multiple generations, as well as then these other kind of systemic issues that happen in high-priority communities. We all know that the list, crime, lack of access of housing and so forth. So you take all of that and then we're trying to say, well, we need this young person to at least get on an on-ramp to finish their secondary credential. Can't say GED anymore because that is all busted up as high school equivalency. And then how do we support them into a pathway that maybe it's not college just yet. You were saying quality degrees and I was just thinking quality certificates, multiple certificates that then can mean something and lead to a degree. With communities who are working on these issues with young people, we found that getting them access to a foot in the door, to a job, to early work experience, having multiple certificates, credit bearing and non-credit bearing, one increases their own self-efficacy that they can do something and achieve something and that they do matter. And it also makes them more marketable to employers who would want to invest in them. So we can't underestimate the value of a work readiness certificate as well as some kind of occupational skills certificate that then may be a part of a credit bearing program. Lots of times in Washington DC, we have these conversations about what does a credential mean and we should not focus on non-credit bearing credentials but taking again that young person who's been unattached since they were 16 and they're now 22 years old, we can't just dump them. They're not ready to be dumped necessarily into a community college that's gonna fill them anyway. They'll need lots of these supports and it takes a lot of community-based efforts. So back to your question about barriers, I mentioned some of them in a broader sense but I'm always reminded of the conversations we've had with young black and Latino men in five different communities around the country and when we asked them what were some of their barriers, the first thing, and this is community different, Hartford to San Diego, work experience. I do not have work experience. I don't have a reference. I don't have a network and so what is our role in policy workforce and education policy combined to help these young people get access and to have work experience? So in that vein, some of the solutions are obviously internships, subsidized employment is very important, try out employment, transitional jobs. Those strategies are very important and key to this population so that they can be on a trajectory for unsubsidized employment that can lead them to increase credentials. So one of the themes that I think is important with millennials, there's often a meme that like we're a lazy generation, right? Like we don't wanna work, we just wanna sit at home, whatever. And I think what we know is that they're actually want to get ahead, they want opportunities so whether you're someone that is in college or isn't in college or didn't finish secondary school or is trying to, what we don't do a good job, what I, from my policy experience, prior to Illumina Foundation to now, I struggle because I feel like we don't do a great job of helping someone figure out what the next steps are. Like we, as Americans, we want that American dream, we want to be successful, most people don't sit around saying yes, I would just like to be in my pajamas all day watching Jerry Springer. Like most people actually have, or hanging on the corner, like I, they have a vision of themselves, but we don't help them through policy connect the dots. And so one thing that I've been frustrated by, I mean I think one of the things Kevin told me when I was working in the Department of Education was, we've been pushing the message of college and I'm so pushing the message of college as if every college was the same and as if every opportunity were the same. And I am most frustrated when it's those young people that have struggled so far, so they like struggle to get that secondary credential. Like they, maybe, you know, they went through a special program or something like that and then we drop them into a higher education system. And they're only in, like no one just takes out, like there's all these means about people taking out student loans just to buy stuff and I don't buy that. Like you have to, like you're taking on these loans, you're taking on this debt, you're not working or you're doing something, you're going to school, right? Like you're in school. When you're doing that because you think it's gonna lead you to a better path and then we fail them at the higher education level. So how can we change that so that we're not crushing people's dreams even further? I wanna leave some room. I think every person leading a panel up here strives for a community discussion on these topics but I'm wondering if anyone from the audience so far has any questions or comments for the panelists. I think, you know, I've certainly got more questions but I wanna hear what's going on in the audience. Sarah, do we have a microphone for Sarah? There's several. Thank you, Sarah, that live from Generation Progress. Kisha, thank you for bringing up the point about young people looking for job skills and really wanting experience for their reference, for their resume. But I wanna, and this is a conversation we've had at some of our state summits on young people in the economy, is for a lot of young people, they actually do have quite a few skills that would transfer to a resume but we don't name them as being things that would fit because it's not like within a traditional idea of, oh, that was like a job. If you're babysitting for your siblings and folks on your street, there's a lot of skills that go behind being able to take care of children. So I'm wondering if you have any examples of ways that community organizations or groups have really taken more of the youth development assets-based approach to working with these young people to name the great experiences a lot of these folks already have as these job skills, don't they? That's a great question. Yeah, well, I think you just said with community-based organizations, how many community-based organizations are doing, but having the community-based organization that lends itself to really investing in the infrastructure of our youth development system, they are sort of like vouching for young people. It gives them credibility in their community with employers, it gives them credibility, even partnerships that they may have with the community college system and so forth. And so what we've seen is even, I think you're gonna talk about a little bit about it tomorrow, but even with service learning, community service, America, all of those kinds of skills, community-based organizations have been helping young people to figure out how they map that out and in terms of their personal goals, but also in terms of how they catalog that. And the community-based organization serves as a reference. So anyway, that's just a plug for investing in those organizations. Yeah. Kevin, please. Yeah, your question reminded me of an interesting initiative that's going on in Chicago right now, where the Mozilla Foundation, which are the people who make the Firefox web browser, are partnering with community organizations to create what they call an open badging architecture. And basically, open badges are a, essentially it's a non-centralized credentialing system. So you're not relying on existing institutions that sell you traditional degrees to get degrees. Anyone can bring evidence into the system to create credentials that actually are clear and communicate valuable information to other people, including educational organizations and employers. And so they're partnering with community organizations to look very specifically at the population of young people who may have lots of skills, but not skills that they acquired in the traditional kinds of environments that we're used to. So I think that that's exciting. Yes. I was just wondering what you guys thought about what state governments need to do to make their public universities better and their community colleges better. I mean, I was thinking about your question about, are colleges created equal? And yes, some private four year colleges are just as good or bad as some of these public universities, but often the reason why people are going to private universities are because they feel let down in some way by the community college or the public school system. So what kind of policy solutions are we looking to see so that these schools don't like get starved by their state governments? Well, I think one thing would be to have some standards of outcomes of what we think quality means because if I asked people here what they thought high quality, higher education means, I'd probably get a lot of different answers, but there are very, very few state or federal policies that outline what it means to have a quality. So right now it's a dichotomous thing. You're accredited or you're not. And I think some colleges that advertise online like to advertise that they're accredited by the same group that accredits Harvard. And I would dare you, I don't think that, well I know that employers don't view that degree in the same way. So and then there's criticism of just making it all about what employers want. And you may have heard President Obama has this kind of plan to rate colleges based on some type of outcome measures. And there's a lot of criticism about that. States are doing the same type of thing. But I think, and I would push back a little bit, I don't know whether private four-year colleges are better than public four-year colleges. So I just meant like funding why. Oh yeah, they definitely have more money. Because we gave it to them. Right, people are sitting alone. Like they definitely have more money. Although that's actually not, there are a lot of, I'm thinking of my friends that work at very low-resourced private four-year colleges like historically black colleges or others that actually don't have that much money. That if you don't give them student loan money, they will not open the next year. And so I think it's a very nebulous world. It's like really vague. So what we've been using to determine whether we think something's better quality is like, well, if they're charging me, it's very similar to what the last panel said, if they're charging me $50,000 and telling me to take out student loans, they wouldn't do that if it wasn't really gonna pay off. Right. Like it's like the faith in institute, no, no, no. I'm gonna guess what you want me to say. No, I mean, I'm sorry, I just told you. I just mean like, no, that's a whole other question. I just mean like what, like the elephant in the room here is like, obviously people are paying more money because state colleges are not funded correctly. What can we do about that? They should fund their colleges better. Yes, they should. You know, I'm sorry, I said that to say, yes, states should fund their public colleges better. Yeah, I mean, but I don't think that should be, and I'm a huge, huge, huge proponent of states are doing a better job to fund their public colleges. I'm a huge proponent of that, obviously. And I said all the other stuff that I also am concerned about, which is that we fund things to no end without end goals in mind. Like what are we asking for in return? And I'm not, I don't think that necessarily one or the other public or private is doing a better or worse job, but I do think that this connection of quality has to be, because you could make a better argument. I'm thinking if I was a president of a state college and said, hey, I'm far more efficient with resources than this other place, which is why you should give me more money, that's like a good argument. But if you don't have any outcome measures, you can't make that argument. Yeah, I think many of us are struggling and working through this accountability question in higher education. But I wanna also answer your question about state disinvestment or divestment from higher education, because Young Invincibles has a direct engagement project that actually partners with young people who are actually in their communities right now advocating for their state budgets to devote more money to higher education. And this is an issue that we know is affecting how much people pay for college, right? Like I also went to UCLA, I hear all the stories about what it used to cost in the 80s, it's certainly creeping up now. And for a lot of students and families, it almost doesn't even really make that much of a difference now between some of the public institutions and private institutions, at least for some of them. And so I think in talking directly to young people, they're excited about having these tools to ask for that, to ask for states to invest. Because if you look at trends across the board nationwide, states have pulled back and students and families have made up the difference by taking out student loans. I think it's understanding that the last dollar into the system is the next, the last dollar the federal government essentially prints and lends to people is really important to answering your question. So I mean, the reason that states can cut funding is because you cut funding to the university by a dollar, the university raises tuition by a dollar, the federal government lends one more dollar. And you just end up right back where you were except the student now owes the dollar. The federal government will keep doing that and has no opinion about officially embedded in public policy about what the, I think to use your phrase, like the right amount of state investment is. It doesn't say, hey, you know what, you can't just keep cutting funding. We're not gonna just keep printing money and lending it out to make up the difference. In fact, that's exactly what it does right now. Automatically without any consideration or any sort of public policy or any budgeting process. So states have been exploiting that system pretty ruthlessly for the last 15 years because they can get away with it. They can't get away with it in the Medicaid program. They can't get away with it in the Highway Transportation program. All the other programs where there's a high degree of fiscal interrelationship between state finances and federal finances, they can't get away with it. They can in higher education and so they do. Yes. All right, I'll use my teacher's voice. My name is Sri Chauhan and I'm with the National Urban League. Oh, thank you. Sri Chauhan with the National Urban League. And we actually published a higher education report earlier this summer called From Access to Completion, a seamless path to college graduation for African Americans. Not hashtaggable. But what we found was that 65% of African Americans are considered a non-traditional or independent students which means that they're balancing both work and family. And this is actually a trend that's happening amongst, that's also growing amongst the general population as well. So what is it that high education needs to do to meet the needs of these non-traditional students because in the way that colleges and universities are set up now, it's not really working for them, which is why some folks are turning to community colleges or places that have flexibility that meet their needs. So what's going on in that space? Well, just a couple of things that class has been working on, our higher education and post-secondary work really is around non-traditional students. And so a couple of things, obviously, is really supporting year-round and part-time fail because a lot of times students come in and out, obviously, and also are juggling many different schedules. And also thinking about how do we leverage other public programs, income and work support, to support those students. And so we're a part of a project, a benefits access project and there are a number of community colleges around the country that are not having these students who are juggling so many things, they're working part-time, they have family, but they need to go to five different places to get their childcare subsidy to apply for their cash assistance, to think about Medicaid and so on and so forth. So there's a way to really think about not only do we co-locate services for students, but how do we think about our policies not on separate tracks. So this is higher ed and workforce and I see higher ed bigger than workforce, but it should be higher ed and workforce. We just passed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, you know, I was going to mention that, but now HEA is on the same track. What lessons can we learn from the good things we like in WIOA to make it translate to opportunities in HEA for those very students who are not following the traditional path. They did not, you know, finish school, high school, 18, and then cry with mom and dad and then got, you know, dropped off at NYU. That's not was in their path. So how do we then think as policymakers, as advocates on the same track? So we're thinking about a lot of that at class. I love that. That's actually a question that I want to open to the panel. You know, Keisha brought up a really good point. We talk about higher education and the workforce very, you know, siloed in a very siloed way. And Keisha, you bring up that there is a higher education act and there is a workforce investment act, but my question to you is, should we even be looking at these issues in that way? And I think the answer is probably no, but if you could all elaborate on these two systems and how they really should be integrated. So I'm gonna use this opportunity to plug a paper that a colleague of mine named Mary Alice McCarthy published today. It's on our website, edcentral.org at the New America Foundation, that is on exactly that topic. Her argument, which I think is very powerful, and she's someone with a career of experience in workforce is that, you know, we hear a lot about the skills gap, that there are jobs out there wanting and people wanting jobs, but we can't make a connection between the two of them and that's true. But, and we hear also about sort of the perpetually dysfunctional federal efforts to support workforce development, how there's like 69 different programs and they're all over the place. And that's also kind of true, although there are reasons why we have more than one federal program. But her point is, if you add up every federal, quote, workforce program, put all the money on the table and it's just much money. And maybe you look at how much workforce training, things that can really only be reasonably qualified as workforce education is happening in our higher education system, bankrolled by the Title IV system, it's like this much. So we had chosen, we chose a long time ago in this country that we were going to train people for jobs in colleges. But the problem is that we don't regulate or hold colleges accountable for success in that in any meaningful way. We don't really ask whether or not they're doing a good job. We're starting to with our for profit colleges now for the first time. And that's a huge struggle to even make this step to ask just basic questions like, how much money do your graduates make and can they pay their loans back? Or do they graduate? Or do they graduate? We didn't ask that question, we just asked the other two. But that set of questions can be fairly asked about a much broader set of programs than just the, you know, still only 10% of the students in for profit colleges and declining, frankly, as some of them are struggling, thankfully. We don't, you know, none of those programs are required to interact with the processes in their local communities that actually could help them shape their programs for the workforce needs of their communities. There are ways that we do this in the labor world and in the workforce world where you actually have organizations that represent both employers and educators and the community to talk about what's our strategy gonna be and how are we gonna help move people into careers. Colleges aren't part of that process because they don't see themselves as being in the workforce training business, even though that's mostly their business and that's mostly where their money comes from. So there's just a vast disconnect between the way we effectively finance workforce training through our higher education system and the way that we think about it through our labor system. And I think they both of them said the things that I would have said. So I'll say the thing that I always hear when we start down this path and when I'm among higher education leaders, which is that college is not job training and that, you know, there's so much more to getting a college degree than just getting a job and then you learn skills for life and that, you know, all of these things, which is reflective of a certain type of college experience and I think, you know, it's true. My counter is yes, but student loans are not paid with the intangible benefits of higher education. They're private US dollars that you get from working. So from a federal perspective, those things are kind of, that said, I think that we have some, we do so much in, like I'm now talking about federal higher ed. So when we talk about federal student aid and student loans and like affordability from the, just the higher education opponent, everything from cosmetology school to I picked on Harvard because I went there to Yale is like in the same, and then I just made a presumption that Yale is somehow, you know, at the top. But I think in our minds, we think of Yale as very different than cosmetology school, but they are funded with the same, and they're funded under the same higher education act with the same rules. And so it's really difficult to make a coherent policy. So I'll leave it at that. There's a lot of, you know, details that you should read in the papers that these people wrote on, like how you should make that more coherent. Yeah. Yeah, back to the community. Any questions? Lots. She was happy to spend a lot on the red. Yes. You're not fully productive in gender equity. And I wanted to go back to this question and please remain. Oh, sorry. I actually didn't say it. I'm Nona Wills from the Academy of Scenic. Awesome, thank you. Nona was talking about in terms of states not funding higher education. When I first went to the university, I went to public college, a university in our state budget by 40%, which of course we know that led to getting rid of, I was an ethnic studies student. So they got rid of the Native American Studies program. They got rid of multicultural centers and just had a lot of discussion courses, everything like that. And so I wanted to know if you could talk about how, on the one hand, yes, it's important to try to hold, ask our states and fight for policies on a state level to continue to invest in schools. But how do we also hold universities accountable because we know we don't have programs like that, especially for communities of color, we do get pushed out. So can you talk a little bit about that? That's interesting. Your question is kind of making a distinction between the fact that the state cut and then the decisions that this institution made because of the cut. Exactly. So, you know, I don't know, it's really tough. It's almost like what should they be cutting instead of those things? And when you get cut by 40%, I think I've never been a university administrator, but I can imagine that it's really tough to figure out how to do what you consider to be your core operations. And that you would argue that we had to cut really, really, really bad things because of the 40% cut. So it goes back to what is the adequate amount of funding? And I don't know the answer to what happens when you almost half your budget is cut and how do you hold people accountable for making the right kinds of cuts because that's really a question about what we value in higher education. So I actually will go back to my old mainstay, which is what are the outcomes that we would like to see? Do we wanna see diverse students graduating from college? Like that might have something if they were held accountable for those types of things. But there is literally, I shouldn't say literally, because there is some system of accountability. It's just very, very poor. But do we don't really do a good job of ingraining in any real policy way what the outcomes are that we would like to see? We do a lot about the incomes, the inputs. So how many books are in your library? How many of your faculty are tenured? How many of those things? But not a lot about. And I'm looking at my colleagues from the Washington Monthly which do a great job of looking at how colleges do on some of these societal outcomes that might lead them to not maybe make those decisions. But I do also wanna reiterate that it's important that we fund higher education in the public in an adequate way so that those kinds of dire circumstances don't have to come. I mean states vary a lot in how they regulate their colleges. So some states run them as sort of state systems and they differentiate about which programs you can have and which ones you can't. And they're all sort of satellite campuses of one central board of regents. And that's one way to do it. And other states just have a autonomous collection of public universities that receive sort of semi-random subsidies from the state legislature to do whatever they want. And the accountability stops at the trustee level. And really it's not, you know, there's no, it's not as if when the governor goes to run, he or she is sort of running on the decisions the universities are made because they're really not his or her universities. They're quasi-public organizations. You know what I mean? It's like the state like Pennsylvania. They're not even really state universities. They're sort of state-funded private universities in an odd kind of way, you know? And so the publicness of the institutions that we think of as public colleges is actually varies a lot and is in some cases less public than we believe they are. And I think this is actually, I'm gonna make a plus for something that I don't really talk about a lot which is student government, student governance. Not just student government, but student governance and having students voices in the governance decisions of colleges, which I think we don't talk a ton about but it's really, really important for reasons like that. Yeah, those are some of the most active and engaged young people that we partner with on the ground and you're right. It makes all the difference when their voices are heard. Yes. Yeah, so I'm gonna piggyback on the question about the skills gap and also the state investment in education. It seems like there's one potential for more of education that we may be overlooking. I'm thinking of a book that came out a couple of years ago. I think the guys at Wharton, it's called Why Good People Can't Get Jobs. You probably know it. And the main complaint is employers, part of the renegotiation of the labor contract is they don't wanna train anymore. Why not have some of these corporations, especially ones that are located in states, invest in a workforce, whether that's through an apprenticeship program, actual grants. I mean, they've got the money and they're the ones grasping what their employees are not properly trained. Yeah, that's a great question. I think for a long time, our organization is advocated for not just strengthening apprenticeship programs and pre-apprenticeship programs, but urging those programs to take the experiences of young people into account. And also expanding the reach of those programs. A lot of young people today don't know that there are a pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship opportunities. And that some of the outcomes that we're seeing after those programs are actually very good. And these are programs that young people can go to and get on the job training that is many times employer, that has the influence of the employer and what the skills the employer wants. And they come out debt-free and they're also paid and valued during that training. And so I think in looking at other areas to explore as we're talking about this bridge between workforce and higher ed, but that's certainly a very valid point. There's a new initiative. She was actually a former colleague at Class of the Downs at Aspen. And part of their work is really how do we on a broad scale, not just community by community or program by program, but engage employers, larger employers who have many satellites in various communities and to investing in their own workforce and being partners at the table with their workforce boards and to a large extent that higher ed folks aren't at the table. But in so many communities they are. And so we need to do a better job at knowing what's happening and how do we lift that up to help influence the larger discussion about employer responsibility in terms of shrinking the skills gap and bringing those up into the fold. I think there are a couple of things going on. I mean, one, the nature of people's relationship with employers has changed a lot over time. And whereas once upon a time you might have a long-term relationship with a company, with an organization, and you might occupy different roles in that organization. Now you really have a relationship with a field, right? So you, as opposed to, I'm gonna go work for General Motors, it's I'm gonna enter the accounting field. And the difference is, accountants can move from one company to another. And so the sort of rational incentives of employers, I think, to the perceived payoff. I don't wanna attribute like, ultimate rationality to employers. Maybe they're wrong about everything too. I think we do that a little too often with the private sector. But they seem to be reluctant to make an investment in terms, just purely from a cost payoff standpoint. Finding ways to sort of induce them to do that is tricky. And I think they're also just, they think whatever one thinks, which is wouldn't it be great if the government paid for something valuable that I could then have? In this case, it's a skilled employee. You know, and so then it just, you just have federal policy. Right, so in this case it's skilled employees. And so, you know, they're gonna continue to complain about it. But I find that dichotomy to be frustrating also. We are out of time because an hour is never long enough for discussions like these. So I'd like to give the panel a round of applause. Thank you.