 Hello, everyone. I'm so grateful to have all of you with us here today on a Friday afternoon, no less. I'm Ivy Love. My pronouns are she, her. And I'm a senior policy analyst in the Center on Education and Labor at New America. And we are here today to talk about community college bachelor's degrees or as we call them CCB degrees. We have a wonderful group of folks here today to share with you the what, why, where and how of these programs. So I just want to point out a few things before we get started. First, if you click the resources button on your event viewer, you'll find some links to some useful publications that will add to what you hear today. So I'm going to take a quick look at Maria Claudia Soler's brief documenting the growth of CCB state policy over time, a national inventory of all CCB states, colleges and programs that exist nationwide from Deborah Bragg, Tim Harmon and myself. And then finally, a brief from Elizabeth Mesa and myself just published yesterday, looking at CCB colleges programs and student outcomes in Florida and Washington. So take a peek at those at your leisure, and then I just want to reiterate what you heard, we have time built in to answer your questions today so please do not be shy. There are no silly questions, please feel very free to share those with us. And with that, I'm just going to get going through our presentation so let me pull up my slides for you. So first, what is a community college bachelor's degree. Well, these programs are distinct from transfer agreements with universities or even universities having a center on a community college campus. This is actually community colleges themselves conferring bachelor's degrees. So, why would a state want to do this. Well, this list is certainly not exhaustive but what I want to start off with you today is just sharing a few common reasons why states might want to authorize their community colleges to offer bachelor's degrees. One is that in some fields some really critical fields requirements to enter the profession or to progress in the profession are rising. I'm thinking of allied health immediately. While nurses and respiratory therapists for example can enter the profession with an associate degree and successfully practice more and more employers are wanting the extra education and skill set that comes with a bachelor's degree to either further support their professional practice, or to facilitate the opportunity for those folks to move into leadership roles. So that's one common reason. This may also be interested in removing more barriers to bachelor's programs through these community college bachelor's opportunities. The states who are asking who's not showing up who's not enrolling in existing bachelor's programs and our states might observe that they're perhaps not reaching older students or racially minoritized students, or other groups that are being under served the way those states want those folks to have access to bachelor's degree programs. We do know that some groups of students who have been long underserved in higher education enrolling community colleges at higher rates, especially racially minoritized students and older students. So supporting the continuation to a bachelor's degree for those folks might be facilitated by these community college baccalaureate programs. Finally, and this rationale ties in with the second point states that have set goals for themselves around bachelor's degree attainment may be inclined to think about CCB as a means of meeting that goal. If other programs aren't working for folks that they want to reach with bachelor's program opportunities, perhaps expanding to community colleges could really help move the needle. So those are some states rationales that that why they might want to expand bachelor's opportunities to community colleges let's talk about why colleges might want to offer these programs. So first and foremost these programs are about meeting local needs. Most all authorizing states require proposed CCB programs to connect to labor market demand. So while the college may already have experience at the associate level in a particular field. If local employers are running bachelor's degrees it makes good sense for the college to build on the expertise they've already built to build on the program they already have in place to get up to that bachelor's level. We see that in many technical fields which you're going to hear more about later. The flip side of that is that perhaps another local public institution doesn't have a bachelor's program that's connected to a local need but they might not have the capacity to support all the students needed to meet that local need. Together with the community college if they're both able to offer bachelor's programs, they can connect more people to local jobs that are important and good jobs in their own communities. And related one thing you'll hear more about later is that the average age of community college bachelor's students in Florida and Washington to states with the highest number of programs run in the early 30s. These are not folks straight out of high school. And in that chapter of life they may already be really deeply rooted in their own community. This is home. So for occupations where it's really important not just to bring folks with important skills to fill local needs but to keep folks in the community. It makes good sense to bring the bachelor's degree opportunity to them, where they live and where they are rooted. So that can be especially a strong rationale for teaching and allied health professions among many others. So finally, before I hand the mic over I want to show you what students and graduates of CCB programs are saying about why they chose this path to get a bachelor's degree. All of these quotations are from either New America interviews with students over the past few years in Florida, or from the work of Deborah Bragg and Elizabeth Mesa connecting with folks in Washington Community College Baccalaureate programs. So let's look at this first theme relationships. So not all CCB students are going to attend the same institution for their bachelor's degree that they do for their associate degree or gen ed. But for those that do we're hearing that they're really interested in staying close to their support systems. If they already have good relationships with faculty advisors peers and others at their community college it makes perfect sense that they would rather stay there to pursue a bachelor's and then we can look at institutional fit. So a thing that has come up in this is a sense that culturally community colleges may feel like a better fit for students who are older working full time or are different from a student coming straight from high school in other ways. It isn't about prestige here it is not about the college's brand name. It is about a sense of belonging. That's what we've heard from students. And finally there's this practical sense of fit. So core schedules support services and other parts of institutions are just not always accessible for an older student who is working full time, or as a parent or a caregiver in some other sense. In just a logistical sense a program that's developed and offered through a community college that gets these many roles that they have in their lives, maybe the only bachelor's option that works well for them for some students who were interviewed it was a CCB or nothing. That's it. There was no, there would be no bachelor's degree if it were not for this path to get a bachelor's degree. So I'll just leave you with that, and I want to thank you for coming and thank you for your attention. So now I'm going to hand the mic over to Maria Claudia Soler, who's going to share with you what the state policy landscape looks like. Maria Claudia, the mic is all yours. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for the introduction. It is a pleasure to attend this virtual event to speak about state policy adoption of community college baccalaureate degrees. Before I start, I'll tell you briefly about me. I currently work as a channel is that the American Council on Education and my work focuses on domestic and international issues around access and success. When I work at ACP, the research that I'm going to be presenting today is work that I did in a consulting role outside my ACP. I started researching CCB degrees working with Debra from who you will from whom you will hear later today, when I was doing my PhD at the University of Illinois, and later on working as a consultant for the community college research initiatives at the University of Washington. So part of my presentation today, you can go. I draws from a data note that I wrote in 2019 with three objectives objectives in mind. The first goal was to update national landscape of CCB degrees. I wanted to answer the question, where are these degrees being authorized. My goal was to capture sometimes in CCB state policy adoption. Is this new. How is the growth of CCB degrees as a state level happening. Third, I was particularly interested in describing some of the factors influencing state CCB policy adoption. The public work I relied on iPads websites of coordinating boards in each CCB state, including the websites of state legislatures state administrative agencies and institutions, as well as research literature and media. And here that updating the count of CCB states is particularly challenging, especially among states in which authorization takes place at the institution level. So every single effort to collect data on CCB conferring states institutions and programs, including the America's effort to do the same is really really relevant and appreciated. I know a summary of my findings regarding the count of CCB states and the national landscape. Back in 2019, I reported 23 states that authorized at least one public two year predominant degree granting institution to confer baccalaureate degrees. The updates have been made to this list, and today I will report 25 to include Massachusetts and Arizona. In Massachusetts only one institution, Quincy College confer CCB degrees. Arizona on the other hand, it's part of a whole new development that I did not capture capturing my data notes, because CCB degrees were authorized last year in Arizona. What you see here in the slide is CCB states in green, and the full list of CCB states at the right hand side. So my question for everyone here is, and feel free please you have a we have a poll for everyone prepared. Do you live in a state that authorizes CCB degrees. I don't think I can see the results of this poll, but I trust Ivy will collect the information later and share with us. I will indeed yes. So one thing that I find fascinating about being able to go back on about being able to future CCB states in a map like the one that you see in the screen is that it gives us an opportunity to think about accessible pathways to the baccalaureate as I was mentioning earlier, and about bachelors degree attainment from the lenses of geography and equity and that's pretty cool. Something else that I looked at in my data notes relates to the state policy adoption of CCBs over time. I concluded that the growth in state adoption of these policies has been happening at a steady pace for the last two great decades. So they are not really new. This figure shows that the number of CCB states has increased relatively smoothly between 1981 and 2021 at an average pace of point 74 states adopting per year. The factors influencing state CCB policy adoption include first of all, an interest in improving associate to baccalaureate degree transfer policies and processes. Second, attempts to increase college completion rates. And third, efforts to align higher education with the changing labor market. Finally, I was really interested in describing trends in state policy adoption. So I classified states into categories, those in which all two year degree granting institutions are authorized to confer baccalaureate which I called type A, and those where authorization is granted on a case by case basis type B. The current figure reflects such distinction. I won't go over some of the details and patterns in this presentation, those which are included in the data notes, as for now I just wanted to focus on two specific things. First of all, we can go next. A state wide authorization rather than an institutional degree program specific one is especially effective at increasing the number of community and technical colleges that offer a baccalaureate degree. In Washington and Florida, our states with statewide authorization and both states exemplify this point in Washington, 85% of the community colleges and technical colleges over CCB degrees in Florida such figure is 96%. States decisions to authorize CCB degrees in specific fields of study reflect labor market trends and efforts to avoid program duplication for the most part. For instance, Michigan authorizes all community colleges to confer CCB degrees. But the degrees can only be offered on a couple of specific fields with workforce gaps, such as energy production, concrete technology, maritime technology and culinary arts. In California, where only 15 community colleges are authorized to offer bachelor's degree. Program specific health information management, bio manufacturing, industrial automation and a couple of other degrees, I mean back in the pilot phase. Most conversations about authorizing CCB degrees are really at the core of policies that emphasize the role that these degrees can play to improve college degree completion roles to potentially address access and equity. And how this has to do with higher education and field workforce that impact economic development. All these issues are pretty important to efforts to investigate details at the program level, like Tim Harmon has done, and to learn more about the outcomes of students CCB programs. And Elizabeth will tell us later, I really need it. And that's precisely the information that we're going to learn more about later today. So I'll stop here. But if you want to learn more about CCB degrees in the US, we want to take a look at the data note that I wrote, please access it. The link is going to be one of the slides then the next slide, Ivy, and feel free to contact me at mc solar is not you can go to the last slide. I'll just hold the information here. Thank you so much. Yeah, and Tim. Thank you so much Maria Claudia. So to access this data note you've got the first page here. There's a resources button on the event viewer that you can see if you click that you'll be able to access her a link to her data note as well as a couple of other publications that will kind of give you a deeper knowledge of what you're going to hear today. So thank you so much Maria Claudia that was really wonderful. I don't mind the data note I emphasize this part a lot. I counted 23 states, but you know Americans phrase new America's effort for instance has updated two more states that have been the outcome of new development so if you see 25 or 23 again disclaimer, I counted 23 back in 2019, but a lot has gone on since then. As you point out we're authorizing like about one state per year so it makes sense that you know two year two to three years later we have two more states we're on a roll. Thank you so much again I really appreciate it. So now I'm going to hand the mic over to Tim Harman to talk about what's going on with CCB programs Tim it's all yours. Thank you CCB and thanks Maria for that excellent setup to this whole discussion about the trajectory of how this is evolved over time. It's fascinating to me to see how it's kind of been steady progress with a few periods of rapid growth if you will, and it's certainly one thing you'll learn if you spend any time working in this at all is that this is definitely a moving target so every time we turn around something new is happening. So, we're going to spend a little time today talking about the inventory work that we've done, and giving you some sense of the what we're learning from that. And understand that if you look at it today you would see a little bit different array of programs and there's new programs coming online all the time, and maybe some programs being retired so it's a shifting thing. But when we do an inventory we sort of take a point in time and, and that's what we that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I think all of that how the landscape is changing is California, which has authorized recently through legislation, all of its community colleges to offer the the baccalaureate degree, which is a huge change for them because they have sort of pilot status with 15 colleges authorized to do that they've a rational to 30 new programs a year but that's a lot of programs and there's a lot of community colleges in California so that's just one example of how this landscape is changing. By the time we get done with this webinar today it'll probably be different than what it is right now. So it's, it's an exciting time to be involved in this work so this first. So let me just say a little bit about the inventory that we that we have been working on, and we're, we're very pleased with what we've done so far but we know we have a lot more work to do. We had a lot of information about what states were authorizing the baccalaureate for community colleges and why and sort of the circumstances of that but what we didn't know was, which, which specific schools are doing this and what programs of study are they offering. And so we spent a good amount of time over last year. So we're digging into that. And so we really, we can, we first of all we had to say well who who what kind of institution that we're looking at so we were looking at those institutions that are associate dominant or baccalaureate mixed mission institution so that's kind of technical stuff but these are, these are the schools that are primarily associate degree schools community colleges, or their, their so called mixed mission schools. So it's like PEDS categories 14 and 23 if you're keeping score so we had to kind of draw a line around what we're looking at and that's that's the that's the population of schools that we're that we queried here. And so this back between it was April to October of last year it's when the lion share this information was collected. So we gathered information on authorized programs of study from state agency public records websites telephone interviews, etc. And then we drilled down into that to look at individual schools went out and looked at school individual college websites and even college program of websites to gather information about the programs that they were offering, so that we could characterize them in terms of the CIP codes that they were using the type of degree that was being conferred the specific you know occupational area that they were that the students for and a number of other things but sort of when when the program started because we want to have a sense of how long these programs have been in existence so that's just, you know, a little bit of background on the inventory work, and it continues so what you're looking at here is a sort of a diagram that kind of is meant to show the numbers of programs in each state. So the circles there are centered on the capital of each of the states that are authorized provide have authorized a community colleges to provide baccalaureate degree approximately 600 programs of study spread across those states. Obviously when you look at that. The majority of programs just a little over 50% 52% in fact of all programs of study are in two states Florida and Washington. And when we expand that out a little bit you had three more states Georgia, Texas and Nevada, you're going to get 75% of all the of all the CCB programs of study that are in place. But as I mentioned, we expect this map is going to look a lot different year or two from now and we come back and do this again because we have just in counting up institutions I think we have about 1545 institutions that are offering a Community College baccalaureate right now. That's probably different today than it was yesterday but in any case, it's moving target, but we one of the things we've identified that I think is interesting is that there are 200 colleges that live in states in which states have authorized their community colleges to offer the baccalaureate that have not yet fielded a program of study so there's a lot of room for growth week and a lot of that is in California but we expect a pretty significant amount of growth of this over the next over the next few years. Next slide. We asked the colleges are in our inventory we found out what fields of study what program categories are these programs offered in and we looked at that both in terms of the two digit and the six digit classification instructional program codes. And so what you see here are the most common areas of study and it was interesting to me that business like if a single most frequent category was business and a lot of these are very applied programs in in business management logistics management and a range of things that are very specific application oriented management of baccalaureates in the business area. If you we've broken out in this slide, nursing as separate from the rest of health professions and nursing here the 65 programs these are, I think, almost exclusively going to be bachelors of science and nursing programs, but it would be if you combine all if you take all health together nursing and other other health professions as the single most, you know prolific area of program development and that's of course, reflective of both the kind of credential evolution that's occurring in the health field particularly in nursing as was mentioned earlier, as well as just demand, you know, there. We have very deep demand for health care and so we're colleges are responding to that demand in a way that effective for reaching students that otherwise can't be reached or can't get access to these programs. So, you'll see those are sort of the major categories and aside from, you know, business and health care education is probably the user next biggest one and then computer information sciences and information technology generally. So, large numbers of programs in each of those categories as well. And we'll talk a little bit about technology and a couple slides in. So, one other question we asked was, what kind of degree is it in the most dominant degree is the bachelor replied science so it's a bachelor's degree with a with a occupational focus and applied focus. And so that makes sense because these in most states are require that these programs be developed in response to particular labor market requirements and to meet unmet needs and also many states further require that the programs not be directly duplicative of programs at the four year layer. And so that leads us to what you see here where the vast majority of programs are bachelors of applied science that are focused on specific occupational preparation, but a bachelor of science is second most common type of degree. And then the BSN bachelor of science and nursing, which is they sort of a species of bachelor of science but it's one that's focused specifically on nursing is the third most frequent category of types of degree and if you take those three types of degrees the top three, they are for about 90% of all the different types of the programs that are out there so there are other types of programs there are some bachelor of applied technology. And then there's even some bachelor of arts but the primary, the primary focus here are on these applied programs of study. And, and that's true across all the different categories, you know business and technology. Next slide. Oh, so we also drilled in a little bit on common tech programs. And here I think we're looking at mostly, we're looking at CIP codes 10 and 11, which would be 11 is computer information sciences and support services and communication is CIP code 10, those two digit codes. And there's also some other programs in here from like in health information management. That's a technically oriented program. It's really a sort of an IT program but it sits in the healthcare field which category 51 in health professions. And so there are some very applied business IT management type programs that exist in the business category. And so that which is CIP code 52 to digit code there so these, this is about 60 ish programs 70 programs. Bend the definition of tech a little bit and add in some other programs like, like engineering or engineering technology, or mathematics and statistics and we would we would see more programs maybe all together we might have 100 of our 600 programs would be that was what you might would be like, you know, tech tech programs. So what's that maybe 18% of our total program category is in the is in the very technically oriented fields. Okay, I think that's, that's those are my slides and I like to turn it over to Deb Bragg now who's going to talk about the results outcomes and what these programs mean for students. Thank you, Tim. Where are we going to do another poll at this time. We can. Thanks for the reminder Deb so we have another poll for you if you haven't already answered the one about whether you saw your state illuminated on the CCB map please go ahead and do that it's still open. We're also curious what your role is. Are you a researcher employer, are you government staff student. We have another poll for you we're just curious sort of what angle you're coming from to this conversation today so if you have a second, please click the poll link and share that with us we'd be really delighted. Thank you Ivy. Well folks do that I want to just give a shout out and thanks to this panel, especially Ivy for helping organize and put our slides together but I also want to recognize folks who we couldn't be presenting if they weren't part of our research team so I want to thank Iris Palmer and Mary Alice McCarthy at New America, and you've mentioned Elizabeth Mesa who is at the University of Washington and a great partner a lot of this work. There's several other people though, Tammy Nappian tech, Ellen Wasserman, Stephanie O'Leary, and Carrie Bishop, and I'm sure the interns who are at the at New America. And it really is one of those it took a village to get to where where we are today so just a quick shout out to thank everyone. I'm going to dive into what we've learned about students student enrollment student demographics and outcomes in the two states you've heard quite a bit about in Florida and Washington, because these are the states and not only as you would imagine the most programs they have the most students and very particularly large number of students in Florida, which is our you know one of our first states to start this and has now scaled to 100% all of the colleges in Florida now are authorized to confer they're not all doing it but they are all there. This, this just gives you a sense of the students who are enrolled by demographics in those two states. The, the this profile very much matches the students who enroll in community colleges and those two states which isn't too surprising but I do think it's important for us to note that 46% of the Florida students are students of color and 44% of the students and these are students that have graduated from these baccalaureate programs in the community college so quite a diverse group. So go to the next slide. One of the things we've been able to do in Florida and Washington is to look a little bit at the wages of these graduates, according to to the, the programs that Tim was just talking with you about. There's a lot of things you can see on this slide I'm going to go relatively quickly but for our conversation today I'd encourage you to look at the top row and really compare the wages of men and women in Florida and computer and information analysis and also though that those those numbers those wages for Washington, women and men and while we do tend to see a gap between the salaries of men and women with women lagging behind in and many of the fields where we've done this analysis. So in those areas where we see, I think a really interesting finding for for women who have graduated from computer and information sciences programs in Washington and this is a strong rationale by the way, for the state of Washington, that has just adopted a statewide legislation to make computer science programs to be awarded with bachelor of science degrees to potentially eventually maybe every community and technical college in Washington. The strong recommendation for the adoption of these programs was that they were needed to address access and equity issues for women and students of color. So some promising results there. Maybe we can. Yeah, this is the next slide this is somewhat similar. One thing I want to point out in this slide is that I think an important finding for Hispanic and Latinx students in health professions. If you look at that second band, and you compare again fourth quarter wages for students by race ethnicity, we see some pretty promising results there in Florida, actually quite substantially higher than black and white, which is, you know, still problematic that in that black students wages are substantially lower. I think then no we hope they would be, but we do see something going on there with the Hispanic Latinx students in who are completing these two programs and those two states. This is really early I just want to emphasize. You know, some of these are not large numbers yet, but we are continuing to track and look at what is happening. And the number of graduates just like the number of programs is growing. And so we'll be able to do, I think some better analysis as we move forward. So we can go to the next slide. So we wanted to just show you the what we have seen and this is Ivy, her, her good work, I think, looking at the Florida IT CCB graduates so these are community college faculty and just give you a sense of the demographics of that group. And as you can see here 33% of those graduates IT graduates are part of the Latinx group almost 20% are black so we have, we have quite a diverse group there. Next slide. And this is a comparison of the wages of those students graduate wages by race ethnicity, and it compares what those students wages would be when they completed the associate degree to what they receive and a bachelor's with a bachelor's degree in the similar program of study. So these are, you know, good, good comparisons. And we can see almost or around a $13,000 wage bump for the students who have the bachelor's degree. So there is a there is quite a substantial increase and when you think about the relatively low tuition and fee structure for community college baccalaureate programs. I think as Ivy pointed out in a conversation not too long ago. This appears to be a really good investment for students. So the next slide is really showing you the same thing with just emphasizing the difference there in that baccala ban so you really see a difference in those wages of the associate baccalaureate students. This is really promising and work that we we know we need to do in other states and really amass the data so we can speak to this. So we shift gears then and just the last few comments. We've been able to do research in Washington that compares our community college baccalaureate students to university students in again similar program areas and this is the first work that's really been able that we've really been able to do these kind of comparisons of baccalaureate grads. This slide looks at the completion rates of students who are in that upper division program of study to get their baccalaureate in a community college to the students who have have transferred to a university and completing and those completing their degree so this is looking at at students primarily once they've completed that lower division they transferred either to a university or stayed in their community college and what we see here are increasing completion rates for the community college baccalaureate students. The first analysis just looked from the beginning, you know over the last decade, you know what did we see computing just an overall completion rate. Then we said well you know what that's probably not altogether fair because a lot of those programs were brand new. Let's look at programs that are a little more mature. And, you know, more comparable probably to the very mature university programs that have been, you know, probably around for a long time. So we do see a little bit higher completion rate these are quite high completion rates for you know transfer students and baccalaureate students so we will again continue to monitor this but the criticism that you all may know of community colleges generally is that low completion rates. These are completion rates that are, you know, it very high and very admirable for just about any college or university so something continue to watch but at least very promising. Also, we could not we didn't have the data, unfortunately, to compare the demographics of the enough students anyway, and it between the community colleges and the university so we just wanted to show you nursing, which is another big program to give you a sense of how those two groups compare. And this is fairly typical where we have enough numbers is we see fewer white a lower percentage of white students in the distribution with a higher percentage of students of color, and those students tend to be distributed and I also want to point out that we do see multi racial and indigenous students as well who are enrolled in these in these programs so again something we will continue to watch in and because this I this notion of equity and access and completion is just core. I think to these background degrees. So, I just have. Oh yeah, our match so we also looked and compared employment. So an employment match means that using unemployment insurance wage records we were able to identify students as employed. We were able to do that in Washington for that CCB group of graduates and university graduates we were able to look at the first quarter, after completion then the fourth and 12th quarter. What you can see here the dark bar are the community college baccalaureate students. So their employment match is higher than the university. You know graduate match now. There's reasons for this. We can't say. Essentially, there's a lot here one is that many times these older community college batch baccalaureate students are already employed. They already have more of a history than the younger university graduates. We also may find that these students do tend to stay in the state and in the area where the UI wage records will pick them up. Any university graduates may have more, maybe more likely to leave the state, or to be in jobs where we don't catch them in that UI wage analysis but these again are really important to continue to fight. And I just want to point out for the critics of these degrees who often claim that the students won't be able to secure the same kind of good jobs as university graduates. We just really don't see that in the data. Now when we dig deeper, maybe we will be able to see some differences that we all need to know about, but we have not found them in this initial descriptive work. And then there, the one more slide. I want to point out for you the middle computer and information sciences where we are comparing again the CCB graduates and the university graduates. And here is an area that may be of interest to you where the CCB graduates earnings are exceeding the university graduates earnings. In the two years or the two time periods we could compute, which was at one year within the one year of graduation and one year after graduation. So some really promising results here. And also if we had more time we could we could dig in and and really talk about this a bit more but it gives you a good sense, I think, of some of the promising results for finding. And also some of the research will we still need to do to better understand what's really happening with these students and graduates. So I'm going to turn it back to you, Ivy and thank you again for everything you do for our team. Well, thank you and thank you to all of you. I'm just going to stop sharing, because we are anxious to answer all of your questions. While I'm pulling up the questions document I was thinking about what we anticipate might be around the bend for CCB's and so I will talk through that while I'm pulling things up but I would just invite the other panelists to offer your thoughts as well. One thing that has come up a few times over the course of our conversation today is that a couple of states have expanded their authorization of community colleges this is not just one piece of legislation and then the state is done. So as Tim mentioned California has now authorized any of their community colleges to offer a bachelor's degree program so one thing that we see around the bend is probably a lot more programs there. In the last few years, Texas is another state that comes to mind where I anticipate will see a lot more programs. And then there are states like Ohio who recently passed a second piece of legislation that is bringing the bachelor's program to nursing, they are specifically authorized to to offer a bachelor of science in nursing that is a completion program so nurses with an associate degree can do their final two years through this and earn that bachelor's degree. So we'll see more of those. Are there other things that are coming to mind for you all what you think might be around the bend for the community college baccalaureates I will say just to add real quick. I think we might see some first authorizers or conversations about first authorization I know there are other states that are curious about how this strategy may work for them. So we're, I'm feeling optimistic so would love to hear from all of you while I'm looking for these questions. Well I'm excited to see what's going to happen in Arizona. We just held our national conference there as my colleagues know and besides a very large contingent from California there were many folks from Arizona who are very excited and I saw a preliminary list of programs that the colleges are interested in working on and it is quite a long and impressive list so I you know go Arizona it'll be quite interesting to see what they do. Absolutely Maria Claudia did you want to add something as well. Thank you. I saw someone asking about. And how common. It is to have different fee structures. It's not something I covered in in my data notes, but when I was looking at when I first started to look at these degrees I was really really interesting in the cost of these degrees and how we can look at the return on investment. And this has to do with I mean a point that they also covered when she was trying to compare you know like the earnings for like CCB degrees versus baccalaureate traditional baccalaureate. One thing that I found really really puzzling is that it's the information. This is not just about CCB degrees, but the information for many many institutions. It is really hard sometimes to understand what's the total cost of a degree. So, I remember myself trying to classify lower division courses and upper division courses and trying to come up with. How much would be the total, like of this degree I remember calling institutions and asking them okay but can you please tell me how much does this degree cost. No, but we cannot tell you it's hard to come up with a number. It depends on how many courses you've taken. So, I was just thinking for myself, I mean I have a hard time sometimes understanding how much is the cost of this degree and I was again approaching these as a researcher doing the study on the websites and calling institutions. And I was trying to put myself in the shoes of a student who has finished high school or is starting to work or hasn't had a lot of experience to college. And I was just thinking about how hard it is sometimes to come up to understand those types of things. So working on making information accessible for students is really important. And I think that applies to, to most institutions some programs and there are some states in which the legislation clearly says, these degrees not going to cost more than 10k. That's one approach, and some of these legislations have adopted that approach in some other states. That's not the case. So, again to respond to that question about this person who asked how, how, how communities to find different fee structures. My answer is, it's super common. That's probably the norm these days. So working on making information accessible to students is important. So we think about students as consumers who are informed and make informed decisions. That's something for instance, that's an area of improvement, let's say. That was very diplomatic and very accurate. Yes, transparency for students is very central. And I think that's that did either of you have any thoughts you wanted to share on tuition or fee structures based that we got a question from an audience member about that. Can you say more I'm not going to understand the whole question for you. Yeah. So curious how common it might be to have different fee structures for upper and lower division components of students programs. We haven't talked about Washington yet but I suppose we could have the Washington, Washington, Florida do this very differently between the two of them. Well, it depends on states so states approach this differently and some states that are highly decentralized could even approach it differently from institution to institution, which leads to the complexity that Maria Claudia mentioned. So Washington has a policy that says the tuition rate will equal at the upper division will equal the average regional public university tuition rate and the reason for that was that they're in negotiating the authorization of the degrees there was the feeling that cost is a big issue, and that they want to parody in in those two other states have different taken a different tack I believe in a state like Michigan. There is no difference the upper and lower division tuition rate is essentially the same. Now, the fees may vary at the, and that is harder to figure out, as Maria Claudia said. And IDI, the Arizona bill, I said, I think that tuition can exceed 150% of the lower division tuition rate, I believe. So anyway, it's not standardized it varies across the country there is a strong. I think, you know, sort of ethic principle that this tuition should be less than the four year publics, but who are seen as the peer and awarding background degrees. But we need more, we need to know more about that. And I believe our colleague, Iris Palmer is working on this and will be writing a brief to really unpack this and help us understand it, and give some insight from a policy perspective so we all look forward to her work. So we're in the thick of it right now so guess we'll have more to share soon. Before I could have bring the next question to the group I just want to quickly answer an easy question that came in which was, does DC allow CCVs know the District of Columbia does not. And to go a step further, neither does Maryland, neither does Virginia so there are no community colleges in the DC metro area where you could get a bachelor's degree so thanks for sharing that question though I appreciate it. Let's look at, oh I've got a very good question for us. What happens to public four year institutions when community colleges add bachelor's degrees does their enrollment drop or does this grow the pie. I might give that to Deb do you want to take that one first and then I'll open it up to to the group. We, we recently wrote a book chat chapter Maria Claudia and Elizabeth mays and I on Washington and we looked at enrollments at the two year and four year level over time the trend over the time these have been offered. We've seen enrollment growth in both sectors. It pretty much parallels. So it's not as though we see a big increase in baccalaureates at the community college and a big drop in university we see, we see that pretty much the same trend line over time, even during this whole time so that's very descriptive results and we did see that and the only real study that we know has been done that's looked at this is researchers at the University of Florida, who analyzed potentially whether enrollment was impacted at the baccalaureate level in both public and private nonprofit and for profit. What they found was they did not find a drop in enrollment in the public institutions but they did find a drop in enrollment at the private for profit institution so it does look like there could be a shift, and that shift could be that students stay at their baccalaureate rather instead of than getting a baccalaureate at a for profit institution. So that's an important finding. So it's maybe growing the public institution pie. Yes, yes, yeah. I should also say that Mike Potter, who is really a very knowledgeable did his dissertation and just let me know he is trying to replicate that study in Washington has got some interesting data so that is a study that we really would like to see done other places. That's great. Tim, Maria Claudia, do you have any thoughts and then I've got one more question I want to make sure to get in for us. I was going to add something quick to the to address that question and is that when we ask about that question in general terms, we need to keep in mind that when when we say like what type of state that we're talking about these all community college back all community colleges are authorized to offer the degree, and then we look at all enrollment across the state, or is it a state in which we need to focus on specific pro on on specific institutions and more specific degrees that are the ones for which an institution is authorized to for the degree. So all those types of details make answering that question, like, is a challenging aspect because we need to look at different levels of analysis, and many times what happens to be unavailable. So, for the most part what we've seen some programs, as that was mentioned before is that we see that involvement has increased was to trying to figure out what why. But again, what needs to be really careful and focus on what institutions what states what specific programs because legislation happens to be restrictive in many cases and it could be that the community college I don't know 15 degrees but only three out of those 15 are the ones who we can consider a CCB degrees. So, that was just my two cents. Thank you, Tim. I saw you wanted to say something as well. I don't know if it's been if it's been mentioned yet, you know, but this business of what happens needs to have the context of what's been happening with with the pandemic and the significant decline in overall community college developments. And we, I think we have some evidence to suggest that those enrollment declines did not occur in the in those programs that were baccalaureate in the community college layer so that's indication I think that there's significant demand for it, we're reaching a population that we might not otherwise reach, and that maybe traditional students are deferring entry into into post secondary instruction generally during the pandemic, but maybe people that are already working otherwise engaged didn't because they, you know they had they had means to access that so it is a complex situation you have to look at it in the in the context of what's going on right now. I wouldn't worry about too much about run last couple years because it's all been thrown in a in a hat. Well isn't that the truth. Yeah. Okay I've got one more question for us and I in the last three minutes that we have and I might be selfish and try to answer it first and then I'll open it up to all of you. I have a question of, let me find it again here. What are the chief barriers community colleges facing getting their state to approve CCB and what are successful strategies for overcoming those barriers. That is a big old question and I cannot answer it in three minutes but here's the short version that I can give you. I think understandably sometimes universities are nervous about this. They're nervous that there's going to be duplication and that they're going to be going after the same students. So the study that Deb mentioned comparing, you know, the, how this may have impacted state university enrollment versus for profit enrollment is an important finding I think to share with universities and also another thing where I have seen kind of light bulbs go off and talking to folks about this who may be a little on the fence is this notion that the average student in a CCB program in Washington is 32, the average in Florida is 31. You're not fighting for the same students. You're not fighting for the same students and in the evidence that I have seen so far sort of to Deb's point is that the public institution pie is growing. And I think if that becomes clear to folks in the university sector that this is about what we can offer together and who we can reach together rather than going after the same students with public money. That that hopefully will allay some concerns but I mean I would say that, you know, I get the nervousness I get the nervousness but I think there are some reasons that we could allay that. Do others want to answer in about 30 seconds. One all concern about the degree has to do with the with mission creep. So there are many, many opinions around whether a community college that offers a baccalaureate degree wants to be like a university. And that in like some concerns are being raised about what's the, what's the mission of a community college what this has what what this has to do in terms of access and equity. And there are some people concerned about that particular aspect. It's also true that some community colleges did shift to become universities after offering the baccalaureate degree but that's not the norm. And the most part some legislations also include pieces saying that the community college needs to maintain that mission and remain to remain a community college. I'll stop now because I stole those 20 seconds. You're fine you're fine. Thank you all for coming we're so grateful you're here I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of your questions maybe we can try to tweet out some responses later. I wish you all a great afternoon a great weekend and thank you to all the wonderful panelists who joined us. So thank you so much. Thanks.