 New America would like to welcome you to our virtual event. The program will begin momentarily. While we are waiting, I want to review a few housekeeping notes. This event is being recorded and a recording will be posted to the New America events page within 48 hours after the event. Attendees will be in listen-only mode and you will not be able to be seen or heard by your fellow attendees or panelists. Therefore, we encourage you to share your comments and questions in the Slido box located to the right of the video. Close captioning is available by hovering over the video and clicking CC at the bottom of the video. If you encounter any issues during the event, please contact events at newamerica.org. Thank you for joining us. We will begin momentarily. Welcome to our panel event on varying degrees 2023. My name is Rachel Fishman and I am the director for the higher education program at New America where our vision is a higher education system that is accessible, affordable, equitable, and accountable for helping students lead, fulfilling, and economically secure lives. There have been a lot of headlines lately from Paul Tuft's New York Times magazine article that the title was Americans are Losing Faith in Higher Education to a Gallup poll that has been widely cited that shows a very steep decline in American confidence in higher education where almost a decade ago, three out of four Americans had confidence in higher education and now that stands at just 41%. So we're here today to dig a little bit deeper. Do Americans think higher education is still worth it? For the past seven years, New America has been asking Americans these critical questions regarding their perspectives on the value of education after high school. Our signature annual survey of varying degrees is released every summer and it continues to gauge Americans' opinions on issues regarding the value of educational opportunities after high school, how those opportunities are funded, and how we can hold institutions accountable for that funding. This year, we also had a great section about diversity and equity in higher education, so I encourage you to take a look at varyingdegrees.org. These findings together shed light on what the public's priorities are for education after high school and how the nation's higher education system can be revamped to meet our nation's needs. We're excited to share some of our top findings from this year's report and then dig a little deeper with our panel to unpack the nuances of how Americans feel about the value of education after high school and why it matters for policymaking. I have a couple of thank yous I want to make before we get started. So first, a huge thank you to my colleague and co-author Sophie Nguyen, who is unable to join us for this event as it was like beautifully timed with a long-awaited vacation and a long-planned vacation. Sophie is really one of the big brains behind this full varying degrees operation and she's just very thoughtful with every administration of this survey. So if you ever have any questions about anything, please feel free to reach out to her and myself and my colleague, Olivia, who are also co-authors on this work are happy to field questions as well. I also wanted to thank the Gates Foundation who has generously supported this work since its inception seven years ago. And yes, there is going to be a varying degrees 2024, so stay tuned for that next summer. And lastly, if you're following along on social media, please use the hashtag varying degrees. So I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Olivia Checke to present some of our finding from this year's report. Take it away, Olivia. Thank you, Rachel, and hello, everyone. My name is Olivia Checke. I am the program associate for the higher education team here at New America, as well as one of the co-authors of this year's varying degrees report. And I'm so excited to be highlighting some of our key takeaways from this year's survey. Varying degrees is our annual survey funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that highlights Americans perspectives on education after high school. This survey focuses on issues related to value, funding and accountability and has been conducted annually since 2017. This means that varying degrees provides us a longitudinal analysis of Americans' opinions on these issues. These data not only reflects such opinions at a particular time, but also over a period of time. The survey is administered by NORC at the University of Chicago and samples 1,497 American adults. We over sample black, Latinx, and Asian Americans as well as student loan borrowers, and we collected data in March through May of this year. For the purpose of this analysis, we define higher education as any education after high school that includes any formal education and or training. So this is going to include apprenticeships, technical education, vocational education, and coursework that applies to associates, bachelors, or advanced degrees. And now for the highlights. For our purposes today, we will focus on Americans perspectives going back to 2017. When considering questions of value, we find that Americans do acknowledge the benefit that higher education brings to individuals and society. Just 28% believe that their immediate or close family members can achieve financial security with only a high school diploma. The rest would say that their family members need some sort of higher education to achieve such financial security, whether that be a technical certificate, associates, bachelors, or advanced degree. We find that both Democrats and Republicans believe that their relatives would need some sort of higher education to achieve financial security. 35% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans would specifically say that a bachelors degree is the minimum level of education that they believe their close family members need. However, while most Americans would agree that there is a value in obtaining a higher education, they also do not believe that higher education is currently fine as it is. We have been asking this question since 2017 and continue to find that a minority of Americans agree that higher education in this country is fine as it is. When we break this down by political affiliation, we find that this holds true for both Democrats and Republicans. Ultimately, this indicates that Americans want to see some sort of change to the system. For years now, we have also asked a question of whether Americans believe that someone can get a high quality education after high school that is also affordable. We find that Americans are split on this issue. This year, just 53% of Americans agreed that this is possible, and this number has hovered around the 50% mark since we began posing this question. Republicans are a bit more likely than Democrats to agree that Americans can get a high quality affordable higher education. We also close a question over who should be primarily responsible for funding higher education, the government because it is good for society or individuals because they personally benefit. We find that three in five Americans believe that the government should fund higher education and that this has not changed too much since we began asking this question five years ago. However, it is also worth noting that there is a stark partisan difference when this question is asked. Over three-fourths of Democrats believe that the government should be primarily responsible for funding higher education compared with just 36% of Republicans. Conversely, about two-thirds of Republicans believe that individuals should be funding higher education because they personally benefit. This partisan divide has remained consistent throughout the years this question has been raised since 2018. Ultimately, we find that a vast majority, approximately eight and 10 Americans believe that the state and federal governments should invest more in higher education. While Democrats are more likely to agree with this than Republicans, we still find support from approximately two-thirds of Republicans on this matter. This also remains pretty consistent over the years. When shifting to matters of accountability, we find that Americans are broadly supportive of the Biden administration's new gainful employment regulation. There are two parts to this. The first considers if career education programs should lose eligibility for federal financial aid if they consistently fail to help graduates earn more than those with just a high school diploma. The second part considers if these programs should lose eligibility for federal financial aid if they consistently leave students deeply in debt in comparison to their earnings. We find that approximately eight and 10 Americans are supportive of these components even when broken down by political affiliation. We expand on this with a question over whether colleges and universities should lose some access to taxpayer dollars if they yield poor outcomes. This may be seen through low graduation rates, low rates of graduates earning a living wage, high rates of graduates earning less than the average high school graduate, high student loan debt relative to earnings, low rates of graduates paying down their student loans, and high default rates for student loan repayments. Across the board and over the years, we find that the majority of Americans are generally supportive of the idea that colleges and universities should lose some access to taxpayer dollars if they produce these poor outcomes. For example, we see that around three and four Americans believe that institutions should lose some access to taxpayer dollars if they yield low graduation rates. And around two and three Americans believe that education should lose some access to taxpayer dollars if they have low rates of graduates paying down their student loans. These are just a few of the findings from this year's varying degree survey and there are so many more in our full-length report. If you're interested in learning more, feel free to check out all of our data at varyingdegrees.org. Thank you so much and I'll pass it back to Rachel. Thanks, Olivia. And yeah, I want to put a plug in for varyingdegrees.org because we have a cool data tool that we have every year where you can actually look at all of the questions we ask and we only report on the tip of the iceberg of questions. The data set is very rich and our data tool enables you to put together custom data visualizations based on all the demographics that we've been collecting over the years. So you should take a look just for that because there might be some data viz that you can pull that will be useful for your research needs. So we're going to get started with our panel. So let's dig in as I introduce our panelists. So you will probably see that unfortunately Dr. Noah Dresner is not going to be able to join us today. We sent him our well wishes and if you haven't had the opportunity to engage with Dr. Dresner's work you should take a moment to do so. It's really great. It delves into understanding the public's perception of higher education both as a public good and as a private good and how we should understand its value not just as an individual good but as a good for society. A question that as Olivia pointed out we ask on our own survey. These are critical topics that we're going to touch upon today with our other two panelists and it's thanks to colleagues like Dr. Dresner that we know that even though we're seeing a lot of reporting about this pessimism and negativity about how people feel about higher education there is evidence that communities do indeed value when their citizens get education after high school. And so with us to discuss more today are Kelly Leone and David Schleifer. So I'm going to introduce both of them. Kelly is the Vice President of Communications and Government Affairs at the Institute for Higher Education Policy or IHEP. She leads the organization's efforts to amplify evidence and research-based policy solutions that expand college access and success for students who have been historically underrepresented in post-secondary settings. Before joining IHEP in February we were going to talk about the federal communication roles at the U.S. Department of Education including Prose Secretary. And David is the Director of Research at Public Agenda a national research to action organization that digs deep into the key challenges facing our democracy. He leads qualitative and survey research on people's opinions about experiences with education healthcare and democracy. So I'm going to kick it off to Kelly first with a question. So a lot has been reported in the past couple of months about how Americans are losing confidence in higher education. I mentioned that at the top with my opening remarks. People are questioning whether it's really worth it. Beyond our own varying degrees data which Olivia presented which shows sort of mixed opinions about higher education. We see numbers like in the Wall Street Journal which reported that only two in five Americans think of four-year degree as worth the cost. What do you say to the skeptics out there? Is higher education worth it? And how do we quantify and communicate what post-secondary education means for students? Rachel, thank you so much for the question and thanks to you and the New America team for that presentation. Such a critical question, such a critical issue right now with headline after headline pushing back on this notion. I think I'll begin first by saying that the dividends and return on investment for a post-secondary education is lifelong in nature. And to push back slightly on the Paul Tough article that was in the New York Times magazine a couple of weeks ago, I really appreciated an alternative perspective that was raised by David Deming who is a professor out of Harvard who wrote in the Atlantic just last week an article that I thought was fabulous titled the college pushback has backlash, excuse me, has gone too far. And he pointed out a really, really helpful perhaps oversight maybe shortcoming of that the analysis cited in that New York Times piece which came from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis which didn't quite delve into the reality that the wage premium for a college graduate grows over one's lifetime. It's not the same and that analysis rested on the belief that what the premium is shortly after graduation or shortly after colleges college remains the same and that's not the case. The wage premium for a college graduate grows over one's lifetime. So I offer that as an alternative analysis and understanding of that notion of there is a benefit that is lifelong in nature. I began by saying that the dividends are lifelong in nature with that I'd like to highlight some analysis that I have has done in partnership with the Linda Gates Foundation that really delves into quantifying and communicating post-secondary value and it's not so much about if a post-secondary education it is worth it because I think we know that it is the research is telling us that it is college graduates earn upwards of a million more over their lifetime than their counterparts who do not hold those degrees it's more of what is a post-secondary education worth and along with that how do we best communicate what that value is to prospective students and their families to the tax-paying public to policymakers who are making critical decisions about where to invest finite taxpayer resources so it's a question of not if it is it's what it's worth and how to convey that value. I have been partnership with the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation convened in 2019 the post-secondary value commission that really sought to delve into defining what post-secondary value is ensuring that all students are able to receive value equitably then measuring that value and then seeking to put together an agenda to help policymakers put into practice ways to ensure that all students experience that value so I can get into a little bit more about that and I know we will in this discussion but I just want to reframe the notion around is it what is it worth is it worth it no it's what is what is a post-secondary education worth and how are we best communicating that value to the public to prospective students to policymakers. Yeah I look forward to getting more into that even with our research as Olivia had to point out that we constantly point people in the direction of what we mean even when we talk about post-secondary education because often that was one of the things overlooked by the Paul Tuff article where it conflated different degree types as not being college like I think maybe a plumber was mentioned and like that doesn't need some sort of post-secondary credential when I definitely don't want somebody working on my house that doesn't have some sort of license or post-secondary credential so I think too quickly we think about bachelor's degrees and beyond and we don't think of value in terms of the other degree so I look forward to continuing this thread. One of the more often I think overlooked things about the value of education is really what the value of a higher education means as a good to society versus just as an individual good and so David your research at public agenda has explored both right it's explored both the individual benefits of higher education and how graduates feel what their education has conferred to them and also the societal benefits of higher education what their degree brings to a community so can you talk a little bit about what you've learned from your work and the nuances of how we should value higher education in both of these regards. Thank you so much for having me I think the first thing I would say is just how much I agree with the way we frame the conversation which is that I think there is a lot of concern and hand ring I think about this kind of loss of confidence in higher education and I think there's also we've seen enrollment declines that are not evenly distributed demographically but so there is I think the I think it's really easy to miss I think what I see a lot is a sort of misinterpretation of that as like you know that Americans aren't interested in you know don't don't believe in in college for some reason like they're anti-intellectual or you know they just don't get it right like they just don't get how much their the wage premium is going to benefit them and their their lives and their families and I think that in your the data the very degrees data that public agenda survey data the public agenda has collected I think what we see is people certainly do think that post-secondary education is valuable and also alongside that they think it's too expensive and it takes too long which is like pretty straightforward and I think actually a lot of that's a valid rational concern that people are expressing but so in terms of the these kind of larger benefits I'd say it's we see the ways in which people understand the value of higher education as we ask about that value in different economic realms it's a little different when we talk about the kind of civic value of education so we saw really strong majorities of Americans who think that working adults can benefit from getting a college degree sort of a slightly slightly less but still a strong majority of people who think that people with you know just a high school degree can benefit but then we also asked about benefits to people like you know would do people think that that if more people in their state had a college education would that attract more employers would that you know benefit people's ability to earn a living and we again like we just see this strong understanding that you know people's states really can benefit if more people have a college degree so it's not even asking about them themselves it's sort of asking these population-wide questions I will say people it seemed like people had you know when we frame the questions at the national level you know about the nation's economy that's where we saw some differences where only half of Americans said that the nation's economy would be stronger if more people had a college education and we saw like 24 percentage point difference between Democrats and Republicans on that question but it seems like people may have just a better sense of what their state needs and when we frame questions in terms of attracting employers to your state people are like I got it when we framed it in terms of like the national economy in this kind of big picture way that's where people you know we had a little more trouble picturing picturing the benefit and then just on the the civic side of the equation you know we asked about the sort of you know whether people thought that higher education can help people become more informed and thoughtful participants in our democracy and I would say that you know we did see a good majority of people think that yes that is the case that there is this kind of civic benefit there was about a 21 percentage point difference between Democrats and Republicans but it's still a majority of Republicans who think that you know that higher education has that benefit of helping people participate in our democracy and we also did we did focus groups in preparation for this survey and you know people were pretty nuanced and in their understanding of kind of like you know the importance of you know having an education and being able to think critically and how that can benefit people's ability to engage in our democracy but I will say there are some you know I think we have to be careful in how we communicate about that because it can really easily and we saw this in our focus groups it can kind of really easily flip over into this sense of like well just because I didn't don't have a college education or wasn't able to get one wasn't able to afford one wasn't able to access one doesn't mean that I don't vote that I'm not smart that I'm not you know thoughtful so I think people see the benefits in the the civic realm but I also think there's sort of a risk when we talk about those civic benefits of kind of making people who haven't had the opportunity to get that degree sound you know feel like they're being demeaned in some way. It's interesting because we have had some similar findings when you talk about like local versus then broadening out regionally we have this sense and at least for a couple years now we have asked about how positive people feel about their local colleges versus like nationally and people in general feel way more positively the like the smaller that like realm around you is right if it's if it's more local you tend to feel more positive I think what's also interesting is you tend to feel more positive about community colleges we ask about different sectors of education I think David your research shows this as well people really feel favorable towards community colleges because they have all sorts they provide the really community resources right they provide a lot of different types of degree types they are low cost they educate students direct from high school and adult students they think they're really seen as these important community resource centers and they are well respected as that and then like as things get more four-year or more private or more for profit we see sort of this drop off so I thought that was very interesting that you brought some of this up because we've seen the same in our data and then we've also seen this for the and not for me where we ask a question about type of like type of credential you would recommend your family member should get for to achieve economic security in life versus like what do you think the nation like anybody out there needs to achieve economic security and there is like a big difference between those questions and and people think that they're close family members just need more education than just a regular citizen out there so I always think it's important in terms of understanding framing people generally I think feel good about things locally and about their family but when you start broadening out nationwide I think it gets a little bit more challenging which actually brings me really nicely into my next question which is for either you or both of you you know even though it sounds like from what we know about the value of a degree and the public opinion research that David highlighted that that things perhaps are not as dire as they're made out to be in these headlines that if you start focusing more on small on on degrees that are beyond the four-year degree if you start focusing more on community colleges on local institutions people feel more positive it does remain to be seen that we have seen in varying degrees despite like some positive news this this overall pessimism that simmering in the background so how do we interpret these findings in the context of current national events and I'm going to like zero in on higher ed events because there's a lot going on in the in the atmosphere and people are feeling I think negative generally so like leaving it partially aside what do you think given the context of like what's going on student debt cancellation the attack of race and diversity on campus rising costs how do you think that perhaps influences public opinion and what impact could that have on framing the value of higher education for those doubters out there moving forward happy to begin and welcome David's perspectives as well you know part of I think a fundamental reality about investments in post-secondary education versus other policy investments is immediacy and thinking about what community members experience right now in the near term and what the longer term and more ripple effect downstream benefits of this kind of public investment is and some of the things that you cited Rachel around you know what's happening in the higher education sphere right now there is an element of immediacy and wherever you fall on any one of those issues for or against agree versus disagree it's immediate it's in your face you see lots of you know chest beating and and sign raising and rallying around these issues and that's present but these downstream effects these longer term effects around public health benefits around increased civic engagement around economic vitality around workforce preparation you know increased public revenue and GDP locally and brought like those are things that are all consequential benefits when more people have post secondary credentials and you talked about the for the not me and that's where I have is really squarely focused on this issue was this notion of equity it is not enough for you know the the the loudest voices to push for a policy that is most of that beneficial to one particular constituency now we're concerned about these outcomes being accessible equitable and an equitable matter to all individuals because we know that when as many people as possible are able to reap these benefits like those things that I mentioned increase everyone's public health increases the economic vitality of communities increases and those in term those in turn have longer term benefits for communities like local tax basis reliance on public benefits higher versus lower those are things that are not as immediate as some of these these headlines that are in your face now and I being a you know communications professional I wish I had the public the formula to correct for that I can only offer a diagnose perhaps a challenge and maybe together in dialogue and digging through some of these findings together we can think through some of the solutions might be. Yeah, I think you know you know particularly when we talk about equity you know in in the research that we did last year which I should say was supported but like very degree supported by the Gates Foundation and also by Lumina foundation so in that research you know we asked about a number of policy sort of policy and practice changes that could that states could invest in and we frame this in terms of state investment to improve college access affordability and degree completion for black and Latino students and what we found is that majorities of Democrats Republicans independence majorities across racial ethnic identity support you know all of the investments that we asked about support was definitely stronger among Democrats and independence than it was among Republicans so Republican support for these initiatives tended to land it around just over half to two thirds Democrat Democratic support consistently stronger but nonetheless like you know we're asking about you know very real policies like you know like you know public support for institutions that are especially effective at helping black and Latino students complete their degrees oversight of institutions that are not particularly helpful in helping black and Latino students complete you know effective advising like you know help with financial aid you know we're asking about real things that could really make a difference for black and Latino students and the support is there and on the other hand I think what we did see is that you know when we asked about the kind of the bigger picture question of you know whether people think that racism makes it more difficult for people of color to get a post-secondary education so I think you know when we ask about these kind of in our research we ask about these kind of big picture questions right like you know that's where we see a big split so only about a quarter of Republicans believe that to be the case but about three quarters of Democrats think it's that's the case and half of independents think that that's where we see people polarize but when we ask about really practical things that could help black and Latino students succeed you know the support is there I will say that support that we saw is even stronger when we ask when we frame those questions in terms of income instead of race but you know it's a question of degree right like the support is there either way so you know I think there's kind of a sort of a de-escalation of the conversation that we can have when we focus on some like practical things that we know work like you know effective advising and you know support for you know the institutions that are doing really great jobs with their black and Latino students so I feel like there's opportunities to make real progress and the support is actually there I think to a degree that it feels like you may not realize when the only conversation seems to be about admissions at selective institutions which we know is you know a fairly an important but also a fairly small piece of the overall higher ed picture this is a great lead into a question I had David you're finding on equity and sort of racism and differences among different demographics you know differences or similarities and opinion within demographic groups such as Democrats and Republicans and race and ethnicity are expected and sometimes unexpected like you know there I think you discussed that there are sometimes Democrat Republican divides but the Republicans still believe in a majority it's not like the divide might be fairly large and significant but the support is not insignificant among Republicans like they're still in the majority which is a good thing all things considered if you have Democrats in the 90s and Republicans in the 60s the story isn't like oh Republicans hate whatever is going on the story is there's a partisan divide but both support right but then we definitely see some divides like Olivia showed we have this dark divide where Republicans really view higher education as a individual good and that makes a lot of their downstream answers very different than Democrats who believe it's a public good right and so that's going to change a lot of their downstream answers so you know what sort of differences and similarities within demographic groups that you both have been seeing do you find more like very intriguing and that you think need further unpacking and I don't know David if you want to start since you I think you conduct more of this research or yeah let me see and I think there are a few I mean I think you know on that sort of like public good versus personal good I would say you know there's a there's sort of the personal responsibility factor kind of more generally and I would say like you know we do my colleagues and I do research in a number of different areas right like higher ed K-12 education health and health care democracy and civic engagement and I think that we often see this you know it's not that Democrats don't value personal responsibility but I think you know I think we often see in a lot of our research that there's a greater emphasis on personal responsibility among Republicans and I think independents which don't forget about them because they're like you know 40% of the electorate like they often kind of like sometimes they look like one side of the other but you know so I think we see that greater emphasis on personal responsibility when we talk about debt forgiveness for example the same way we see it in our health care research when we talk about you know health insurance so you know I think that's a kind of like it's kind of part of how the kind of like bigger context of I think how people are thinking about some of these issues I would also say and I know this is not on the demographic or kind of on the question of public funding I really when we did the focus group research that we did to prepare for this survey I really don't think people have a good understanding of two things that I think that I think are really important so one is just like what a public institution is like I think for people who work in higher ed policy that's just such a basic thing right like there's public there's private there's non-profit there's full profit you know like we know we in this field think we know exactly what that means you know members of the public that's just not how people think about institutions and like we were showing people charts of federal budgets and explaining like you know state flagship and you know there's the regional comprehensive and people could kind of get their heads around it but it's just not how people think about the sector and I think there's a real opportunity to help people understand like when there's less state funding for your state colleges and universities like probably tuition is going to go up like I think there's some things that there's some kind of connective tissue that we can help people make and I think as part of that is this understanding of you know we don't use the word trade school anymore or vocational school like you know that's not a term that people tend to use in higher ed policy but those are the terms that people use in everyday life and if I had a dollar for every time I was in a focus group and people said oh you know not so much college but we really need people to get you know learn how to be a plumber and electrician like people are not don't understand that that's a thing that community colleges do that that's part of the post-secondary education picture and I think like if we can help people make those connections that like we're talking about post-secondary education we are talking about your plumber and you know your lab tech I think you know there's are like helping people kind of connect those dots of like what higher education actually is would be really valuable because I feel like people don't necessarily you know people aren't using the same terms that that those of us in this kind of policy world are I I'm compelled by many of the things you mentioned David also speaking as a person with a sister-in-law who's currently pursuing a trade at a local community college where she is upskilling and investing in herself through post-secondary education locally I too was struck by the sort of divergence between the understanding of you know public good versus personal responsibility yet the resounding shared belief that federal and state governments should invest in post-secondary education like everyone believes there should be an investment there and to this to the points being made about this the state setting or even the local setting you know while I haven't done the formal polling research in quite this way I would bet that you know people in my family could talk about the local colleges and local community colleges here and describe ways in which they're enhancing my local community I happen to live in the Metro Detroit area where Wayne State University Henry Ford College are all very present in the local scene and I would imagine that's the case for many people as well they know how the local college the local community college is enhancing either the lives of their own lives the lives of their family members the lives of members of their community and strengthening the fabric of communities but the larger that goes the harder it is to make tangible and perhaps one of the solutions that I was alluding to earlier is getting granular yet accessible and relatable about the ways that we're talking about the value of post-secondary investment it's not this big broad abstract thing it's the difference between this local community college being able to educate this many more individuals or provide this community benefit or offer this service to the people who live and work and are a part of this community and I think that is very much the case in pockets of communities around the country and maybe something for policy makers to think about being very very granular and tangible and relatable when talking about why these investments matter they matter to your neighborhood they matter to your community they matter to your local economy in these specific ways. Yeah I think that's a great point and it goes back to a previous question I had about sort of the what's being reported in the news right and a lot of what we consume is as time goes on is more national and nature right as we've had like a dismantling of sort of local news outlets or like a conglomeration or joining of them and purchasing of them so that we have less like more local news and more granular news and more national news and we see headlines like there's a student debt crisis but we don't really unpack what that means and so it lends itself to all student loan debt is bad that's what people hear and thus all student loan debt is bad does that mean I shouldn't borrow anything and if I can't borrow then I can't afford it and should I not go into higher education so like these sort of national agitations could be feeding into people's framing but when you do bring it even within a survey to something more local people are able to consume that information better because they think about all the things that they're local their local schools are contributing to their community so that's from your comms perspective Kelly that is just I think very useful for anyone who's watching and what do we do with the data given everything that is going on more nationally that kind of captures people's attention and takes them away from the local aspects that they care about so we have time for just a couple more questions and just a reminder to the audience please submit questions and I'll try to get to them but I'm going to ask one more of my questions then turn it over to the audience so the Department of Education just had a gainful employment regulation that they just finalized it establishes a minimum and common sense floor basically a program's graduates must earn more than they would have with only their high school degree and earn enough to pay down their student loan debt we're not going to dig into all of the details because it's a very complicated regulation but that's the gist but our own varying degrees polling as Olivia showed has found you know wide partisan support for accountability and higher education and you know what can policymakers learn from how Americans view accountability I think we're one of the only surveys that really asks every year how Americans feel about accountability how can we translate this for the value conversation and use it in policy discussions I'm going to go first on that one David sure yeah so I'm so glad you asked that question I'm going to like use those questions and some other research that we've done I think that you know so we also did with support from Arnold Ventures we did a survey recently of people who had attended for-profit colleges so that's you know which you know there's certainly variation in the for-profit sector but you know like there's certainly reasons to be concerned about the outcomes that for-profits have a relative their cost and I feel like you know what we saw there this is among specifically among people who had attended for-profits you know was actually kind of some concern about I think because so many people had experienced closures and had experienced their you know paying a lot of money for degrees that then weren't valuable anyway some withhold some concern about you know withholding you know loan dollars or you know withholding money there was concern about anything that could basically lead to the school being shut down because people were sort of just like their degrees already didn't feel like they were worth it I do think one interesting thing again that came up in that research on people who had attended for-profits was a real belief in the meaning of accreditation and again I think in you know the higher ed field we sort of have an understanding of what accreditation means and the limitations of it but you know we often would hear oh well you know I went to the school and it was accredited so I thought it was going to be fine you know so I think again it's this like you know these terms that may mean one thing in a policy sector may kind of signal to people things that they don't necessarily mean so I think that you know I feel like there's you know specific to the game for employment you know again I think there's kind of room to make sure that people kind of understand how their institution is doing kind of how institutions overall are doing and I think there's kind of like you know like ways to sort of help people make choices that are going to work for them you know in terms of choosing between schools but I also think you know ultimately it should be like let's make sure that every school like ideally at any school that someone attends should be you know should be high quality and you know people shouldn't like let's hope that these rules sort of help lift all boats and are not just about sort of punishing schools but kind of making sure that like schools have many good choices and not many bad choices I think in the many good choices spirit a part of the regulations that were recently finalized by the department certainly included the gainful employment provisions but there was another part of the rule that I think is exactly to this notion of helping people families, students, policy makers with good clear consistent information about what is happening with the post-secondary experience and the gainful employment regulations also included a financial value transparency framework that do just this. We have had different elements of you know post-secondary access and outcomes information available but what's in this framework is really a win for students and families and decision makers for the first time we are going to have metrics around program costs likely earnings after graduation debt to earnings ratios and an earnings premium measure which is intended to evaluate whether a graduate is likely to have higher earnings than a typical high school graduate and all of this information is going to be included in a to be built website that the department is putting together but that is information that is not yet available and put together in a manner that individuals are able to compare and contrast between different options and I think that when it comes to decision making and public accountability having that transparency and having that value framework out there so that these types of metrics can inform choice is critically critically important. I alluded to you at the top some work that the post-secondary value commission did and I would be remiss if I didn't come back to mentioning that and our comments to the department as they were putting this framework together were inspired by what we call a minimum economic return framework where we sought to enumerate from T0 to T5 what a minimum economic return should be for a student and it very much is their ability to earn as much as a high school graduate and recoup their cost of investment within 10 years and T5 is wealth parity meaning that there should be no difference between the level of wealth that a white graduate student receives male, female other person and a black, Latino any type of student that there should be parity across the board across all race and ethnicity groups. We at IHEP are thrilled with this framework and think this is a big step forward with respect to public accountability and transparency and understanding of post-secondary outcomes. I agree that the financial value transparency framework should be uplifted I think both for students but also it will be informative for institutions who don't have this information. It actually takes a lot to know this information and the framework actually needs to be built. I think it's important for institutions to understand which of their programs are doing well by students to David's point or quality programs and which perhaps need to be changed. I know we don't have a lot of time but one question did come in that is sort of like a under the hood type question that is for David and myself but when our organizations do these surveys how do we how do we deal with calling college college and higher education, higher education post-secondary like all the jargon what do we do to alleviate what people think by these words? The question comes in the chat and it's a really good one and it's something we struggled with in this there are some questions that we asked in our survey where we were specifically asking about community colleges versus I think we used a term like your state's most selective flagship you know and then sort of like the regional colleges like we kind of came up with some terms for the sort of regional comprehensives I think when we asked about higher education in general we kind of came up with this sort of awkward phrase of like colleges universities and community colleges even though it's a little repetitive we felt like we needed to get that word community college in there for those questions that were about higher ed in general and when I think about work that I would like to continue doing on this is like just to really pull apart those terms you know ask in more detail about community colleges because even though we kind of put it in those general questions I do think people see community colleges differently and in fact more often more positively so it's a great question and I think there's more work to be done on that yeah and I will say at New America for our varying degree survey we did a lot of message testing because on varying degrees unless we're saying otherwise we really want people when they're thinking about higher education to be thinking about all educational opportunities after high school and so we have a definition that it's a predominantly online survey and so we have a definition that appears throughout to remind and center people that we're not just like talking about a bachelor's degree because people's minds so quickly go there also I will say with a survey research as you discover especially on a survey that you do year over year over year is that the way in which you ask questions like two years or five years down the line you get so annoyed that you ask the question and I think it's taking it that like as someone who's done survey research you get very annoyed and like you'll get the results back and you're just like why did I ask the question that way now I can interpret this like a million different ways so even the placement of questions like when it comes up on a survey can change people's answers so I think the really big thing to keep in mind with this research and the terminology is to really be mindful at every step of the way and know that things can easily even though you've had like a million eyeballs on them that you get the results back and you're like why did I ask that this way you can change things but it is hard work to do because people really do have lots of different interpretations about word choice across the board and so it's very important that we are very clear with what we mean and this is often why we use the term education after high school because we found that that really resonated with people and they understood that you are just talking about everything after high school but yeah so I know we're at time I know a few questions came in at the very end I'm going to try to figure out what to do with those questions maybe we could send a little bit of follow up but lots of questions about whether we value trades for or not I think the short answer that we see in our survey and David shake your head if you think I'm right I think the short answer is that people actually do really value trade schools and alternative pathways and I think they often don't see that those are actually funded like people don't think that you can get funding for those but most of those you can get student loans you can get a Pell Grant like those are all viable pathways so I'll see if maybe we'll do a little bit of follow up on those questions and I'm sorry we didn't get to them but I want to thank my panelists for joining me today this was a great discussion and I look forward to connecting with everyone out there maybe in person some time thank you Rachel thanks David thanks Olivia thanks to America thank you