 Hello, I'm Morna Foy and I'm the President of the Wisconsin Technical College System. I'm talking with Jamie Marisotis, CEO of the Lumina Foundation, about educational opportunities after high school and the importance of establishing post-secondary attainment goals. Last year, the Wisconsin Technical College System, University of Wisconsin System, and Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities established the post-secondary attainment goal 60 Forward. We are changing how we deliver opportunities with the goal that by the end of the next decade, 60% of Wisconsin's adult population have a potential beyond their high school degree. Can you tell us a little bit about the Lumina Foundation, your interest in post-secondary attainment, and especially is this an issue that concerns everyone? Well, Lumina Foundation is a large national foundation. We're really the largest entity in the country focused exclusively on helping more people get into and through post-high school learning contexts. Our efforts are very much aligned with the work that you're doing here. Our goal for the country is that 60% of Americans should have a high quality degree certificate or other credential by 2025, and we believe that for some very fundamental reasons. One is that it's what our chief international competitors are already achieving or close to achieving, but also because it's what we know from labor force projections about what's needed in order to both drive our economy and strengthen our democracy here at this point in the 21st century. So there's an opportunity I think that Lumina as a national foundation, as a leadership organization can do in collaborating with Wisconsin and other states to try to improve post-high school learning, increase attainment rates, particularly for underserved populations in order to strengthen the cultural, economic, and social well-being of the state. Part of the reason for collaboration is pretty straightforward, which is that the sum is always greater than the parts, and so I think that it's important to understand that collaboration leads to better results for everyone. And so in our case, collaboration has several dimensions. We think both public and private sector partners should be collaborating. We believe that within higher education that universities, community, and technical colleges and others should be working together. And so we think that this model of collaboration broadly is extremely important for our country. Our view of collaboration is also driven by results. We know that when you create both bottom-up and top-down pressure, you get greater results than simply doing it from one perspective or the other. And so, you know, we're very happy here in Wisconsin to be working not only with higher education, but also in communities like Kenosha and Racine, where we are finding these collaborative partnerships involving business leaders, community and civic leaders, and educational leaders coming together to actually solve this issue of increasing educational attainment. And, you know, for Wisconsin, which is a state that has an educational attainment rate slightly above the national average, that educational attainment rate is still far below what it needs here at this point in time. It's at a little bit above 48 percent and for the state to get to that 60 percent goal and to probably exceed that goal, given what we know about the future workforce of Wisconsin, it's going to require that collaborative partnership among all of those of those different players. Nature of work is changing and it's changing for everyone, not just people in the tech sector or in healthcare or other fields. It's changing for everyone. If you look at these two examples of agriculture and manufacturing in Wisconsin, now what you'll find is that the requirements for work in both of those sectors are increasing. In other words, these are not static jobs. People working in agriculture are increasingly using sophisticated equipment to improve crop yields to get greater success with livestock, etc. That requires higher order skills, knowledge ability that has to be developed in post-secondary learning contexts and that includes in community and technical colleges as well as in four-year institutions. We can see that in manufacturing. This is a state where advanced manufacturing is taking hold as it is in many of Wisconsin's regional neighbors and this concept of advanced manufacturing is going to require people to not simply be able to do things but to analyze things, to use diagnostic tools to actually solve problems in the workplace so that they can actually be more successful. We're certainly seeing because of automation and now the emergence of artificial intelligence, many of the sort of tasks that we've seen in some of these fields being taken over by machines. But that doesn't mean that those jobs are going to go away permanently. What it's going to mean is that the people who are doing that work are going to have to be reskilled, retrained in new levels of knowledge and ability so that they can manage the tools, manage the automation machinery, actually focus on working with the artificially intelligent tools in order to get higher levels of success. So it's really a world where people used to talk about low skill and high skill. Really every sector, every field has higher skill requirements and as a result more education, more post-secondary learning can be required in every sector. There are lots of examples of individual institutions actually doing a good job of increasing their success rates and creating change. So Rio Salado College in Arizona is a good example of an institution that's used technology to actually significantly increase success for students. A lot of people are talking about Georgia State University and the opportunities that they've had there to use predictive analytics to actually directly intercede in the lives of the students so that those students are actually staying on track, not taking courses that might not be the right courses for them, focusing on meeting them in a real-time way in their lives and so we've seen a lot of that kind of success. And more broadly, if you look at what states are doing, there are several states that are sort of taking this holistic approach to increasing attainment and recognizing that the different partners in the system can actually do a better job of collaborating. Each individually can achieve greater results and collectively they have higher success. So for example, in Tennessee, we've seen Tennessee go from a state being near the bottom in terms of post-secondary attainment to closer to the middle. And much of what they've done there is actually increase attainment by breaking down the problem and understanding that they've got to actually meet the students where they are and so they've done a very good job of improving K-12 education and improving the throughput rates in the colleges and universities. They have a terrific technical college system in Tennessee where the success rates are very high, both in terms of completion rates as well as job placement in those fields. And they've created better articulation between the technical colleges, the community colleges, and the four-year institutions by improving the pathways for learning so that they get credit for what they've done in another system and that they can continue on those pathways to success both in a way that's faster, that increases learning, and that ultimately saves resources. We're also seeing some improvements now in states that are sort of tackling these important questions around equity, that we think it's very important. The changing demographics of states like Wisconsin are no different than any other state in the country in understanding that addressing these equity problems not as a byproduct of what's happening but as a sort of core focus of what's going on for the state is really important. So putting your thumb on the scale of racial and ethnic minorities, first generation populations, immigrants as well as adults is a really important part of the equation of learning then. So we've seen now states really take on this sort of collaborative challenge and actually try to create more opportunities. So states like Iowa are really putting their thumb on the scale of equity in ways that we hadn't seen before creating opportunities all the way through that sort of diverse ecosystem of post-secondary learning opportunities and actually seeing greater levels of success. Engagement of employers is extremely important and I'll tell you that, you know, what we've seen in states where employers are engaged is that employers are recognizing that their investment in post-secondary learning not only meets their needs as a company, as an organization, as an employer, but it serves a broader purpose and many of the employers that we've worked with in different states are recognizing that there is a community benefit, a company benefit, and a sort of broader, you know, societal benefit that comes into play. And this is true both for large corporations, by the way, as well as small and medium-sized businesses. Certifications, apprenticeships, all of these new credentials like badges, we need a sort of broader understanding of, first of all, what they're contributing to the overall ecosystem and then how we assess them on the pathway to further credentials over time. So we've been talking at Lumina Foundation about this idea that a high-quality credentials really got to represent two things. It's got to, you know, create, be a part of a pathway that leads to both further education and further employment, that both things are important, that if it only leads to one, it really is not going to be high quality because what people need in this emerging economy is opportunities for both greater education and more work over time and it's sort of like a ratchet that increases. So I'm very impressed with what Wisconsin is doing in terms of setting an attainment goal. Having a goal is an important prerequisite on the path to increasing post-secondary attainment, and so having a goal is really important. How you set about actually achieving that goal is really going to require this collaborative partnership among all of the different players in the system, the providers of post-secondary learning, the policy makers, the employers, and of course the citizens themselves. I think as you take your journey on the path to 60%, it will be very important to use real-time information in order to be able to change course if you find that you're not achieving the success that you want to achieve. And I also think it will be important to not lose hope if you find some things are working and some things aren't. Having the goal is absolutely essential for economic and social success here in the 21st century. I'm very happy that Wisconsin has set this goal and at Liberty Foundation we hope we can do all that we can to support the attainment of your efforts.