 Looks like lunch is well underway. Glad everyone has found their way to a good lunch. I was given instructions to tell everybody not to wait and hold off on starting their lunch, and it looks like that isn't a problem, and that's good. That's good. We're all hungry. We've been working hard this morning. So thanks again for coming today, and welcome back for our lunch plenary session. Closer? Okay. Great. Okay. Okay. How's everybody doing? Born apatite. Okay. So yes, welcome back. I think I walked around and listened in on some of the industry discussion groups, and I was very impressed with the level of engagement that was going on. It looked like there are a lot of great conversations happening, so really excited about that. So everyone, my name is Mary Alice McCarthy, and I am the Director on the Center in Education and Skills at New America, and for those of you not familiar with New America, we are a non-partisan think tank located a little bit down the street here, and our mission is that we are dedicated to the renewal of American politics and prosperity in the digital age. At New America, we believe that apprenticeship, a centuries-old education and training model, is incredibly well-suited to the modern age and to meeting the challenges of an increasingly complex, globalized and technologized world. So Noel Ginsburg told us today that apprenticeship is the next big thing and we couldn't agree more. We think apprenticeship is a way of the future. So I am just thrilled to be here today, and at New America, we are thrilled to be organizing this conference with our partners at the National Skills Coalition, with our nine sponsoring partner organizations, and with the support of five generous funders who've made it possible for us all to be here today. So again, a big thank you to all of them for all the hard work and all the support. But mostly, a big thank you to all of you. As I said, we've just been absolutely blown away by the response to this conference. We are at, we are over capacity, which is a wonderful problem to have when you're throwing a conference in Washington, D.C. So thank you, and I think we can all take heart in that. So, and thank you. So, first a quick announcement. Now, if you look at your programs, you're gonna see that we were hoping to have Senator Scott of South Carolina and Senator Booker from New Jersey here with us today. Unfortunately, they have not been able to make it. As I'm sure you know, both of these senators are big supporters of apprenticeship. They are co-sponsors of the LEAP Act, the Leveraging and Energizing America's Apprenticeship Programs from 2015, an act that has sort of kept Apprenticeship Front and Center in the Senate for the last year. Both senators convey their condolences. They also convey their thanks to you for all your work. As you may have noticed, there's a few things happening on Capitol Hill today, and we do want to make sure that both those senators are there to be able to vote on our spending bill. That thanks to them and all of our other allies in the Senate and the House does include that $95 million to continue supporting apprenticeships. So thanks for that. They do send their regrets. But now we're gonna turn our attention to two, we've got two fantastic panels lined up for you here during lunch, and we're gonna turn our attention to the second big theme of this conference. This morning, we heard from industry experts and industry leaders, and today we're gonna start talking about that question of how do we make sure that our apprenticeship system reaches many more people than it currently does. I think we all in this room know that apprenticeship is a fantastic way for people to get valuable skills and find their way into good jobs and careers. But America's apprenticeship system is also a very well-kept secret, okay, a little bit too well-kept. Our apprenticeship system is still very small. In 2016, we enrolled just about 500,000 apprentices. Now that number is up from just a few years before, but compare that to the millions of Americans who are looking for jobs and relevant skills and the employers who need them, and it's really just a drop in the bucket. We have, for example, nearly 20 million Americans enrolled in some form of post-secondary education. Many of them who are in programs that they hope will lead directly to a job, but they often don't really know. A lot of those folks will never finish. A lot of them will leave with quite a bit of debt, whether they finish or not. Apprenticeship, if you gave them the option of apprenticeship, many millions of those students would snap at it in a minute. We also have 5.5 million opportunity youth who are neither in school or working. These are some of our most vulnerable citizens. They're at great risk of financial dependency, of poor health, and of a whole host of negative outcomes. A lot of these young people are just kids who just really didn't thrive in traditional school. But as Noel Ginsburg pointed out to us today when he was talking about the Swiss model, we don't really offer any alternatives to kids who don't love traditional school. There's no other real structured options for them. Apprenticeship could be a real game changer for these kids. And without access to education and training opportunities, many of those young people will grow into adulthood lacking post-secondary credentials or valuable skills. In the United States today, we currently have millions of low skilled adults who are looking for opportunities to build their skills and to get onto a career path. Again, apprenticeship could be a really valuable opportunity for them. And we have millions of veterans and immigrants who have already acquired really valuable skills and experience in the military or in their native countries, but they're still having a tough time getting connected to our labor market today. Apprenticeship can be a really great option for them too. So there are millions of people out there that could be benefiting from apprenticeship as well as lots of employers, but we're not currently reaching them. So our system is too small and it's also not very well balanced. If you look at those 500,000 apprentices, they don't exactly match up with what the whole population of the United States looks like. In particular, our apprentices are overwhelmingly men today. In 2015, just 7% of new apprentices were women. And I think about that, 7%. So that's a system that's gotten a little bit out of whack, okay? It's also not reaching a lot of young people. The average age of an American apprentice in 2016 was about 26 years old, okay? And in many of the occupations with the highest wages, people of color, both men and women, are vastly underrepresented. It doesn't have to be this way. In other countries with well-developed apprenticeship systems, apprentices are much