 Good evening. Welcome to the Kellogg Hubbard Library. My name is Rachel Sanichal. I'm the Program and Development Coordinator here at the Kellogg Hubbard Library and I want to welcome all of you here. It's very nice to see you. Some of you I know quite well and some of you a little bit and some not at all. So that's always a nice mix. This program is particularly special for me. It is sponsored by CCV and we will have the pleasure of having the President of CCV, Joyce Judy, introduce Peter Smith this evening and I'm thrilled that my friend Samantha Colbert is here with Bear Pond Books and is selling Peter Smith's books and my friend Wendy is back there and she and I took three or four CCV classes together. So we have a special affection for CCV. We took photography and digital image management. So CCV is for all people and all ages and I just love that. So I also want to thank Orca Media and John Jose who's videotaping tonight's program and the video will be on their website so you'll be able to go and watch it anytime and tell your friends and neighbors and family members that they can see it. I'm not exactly sure where it will live online but under some series. Sometimes it's the library and sometimes it's Bear Pond Books. So either one if you look you'll find it. So I would like to invite President Joyce Judy to the stand. And thank you Rachel and thank you for inviting us to cosponsor this with Bear Pond Books. It's really truly a pleasure and it is an amazing opportunity for me to introduce our founding president Peter Smith. Hit the core values of accessibility affordability innovation and the importance of the adult learner have been part of Peter's thinking and development for 50 years. And those are the same core values that he instilled at CCV when CCV was founded in 1970. We are soon to celebrate our 50th anniversary which is quite quite amazing. Peter you've been at this for a long time. But you know what as I was thinking about tonight I am pretty certain that Peter in 1970 could never have imagined when they started with 10 classes and 50 students here in Montpelier that today CCV would be this fall we have enrolled 6,000 students in 850 classes and a third of those classes are online. So we've gone from a teeny little institution Peter's sort of vision to today the second largest college in the state of Vermont. And we serve more Vermonters than any other college which when Rachel was talking it is for everyone you will see whether you're in a class of photography or English comp or whatever. You'll have 17 and 18 year olds who are in classes for dual enrollment. They're still in high school taking a college course. You will see we serve a lot of veterans. We serve career changers. We serve people who are senior citizens who are looking to either pivot to a different career at that point in their life or just want to pick up a skill. And then we also see people for whom never they never thought that college was possible. And all of a sudden they've decided they want something better for themselves and their families. So you see just a huge diversity. So CCV has become a force in the state of Vermont. We have 12 locations where in each of the 12 labor markets. And you know we I still so believe that we are built on the same bedrock that and we continue to flourish on the same bedrock that Peter thought about when he and Governor Dean Davis helped to found CCV. But Peter has had a really long and distinguished career in higher education. But I think the thing that's for me that sets him apart from other people that have spent their life in in higher education is that he really has a passion for innovation. He is always pushing the envelope. CCV is an example. But throughout his career he has always been sort of pushing that envelope. And so just as for people who don't know this and this is why I had to bring some notes because it is long I could never have memorized this. So here's some highlights from his career his professional career. I think many of you in this room probably know that he was a state senator here from Washington County. He also served as lieutenant governor for Vermont. Then he was Vermont's congressional representative to the U.S. House. They got into academia, left academia, got into political life came back to academia. He was Dean of George Washington University's Graduate School of Education and Human Development. He also then founded CCV but he also founded the California State University at Monterey. So he's had the distinguished pleasure of creating two colleges. One in a small teeny state and one in a really big state. In addition he was also the assistant director for general for education of UNESCO for people who don't know that United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization. He also served as senior vice president in Kaplan. But today he is currently the Orkin chair and professor of innovative practices in higher education at the University of Maryland University College. And I believe Peter if I counted right this is your fourth book that you've written on higher education but what I think is really important about this book is it really draws on and connects his whole career. It talks a lot about how important it is if we are going to content that higher education continues to need to be innovative, flexible and will look more like the CCV that Peter created than what we have come to know what we see in a lot of higher education institutions. So to read to us tonight from free range learning in the digital age, the emerging revolution in college career and education. Please welcome Dr. Peter Smith. Wow. Let me destroy the microphone. Okay. Reinforce one thing that Joyce said and you know it was one thing to have the idea and to have the great opportunity to work with an amazing group of people in those first seven or eight years when none of us had a clue as to what it could turn into and it's because of people like Tim Donovan and Joyce and I think remarkable staff and frankly from our state colleges boards who have been consistently supportive of a notion that was so far out of the mainstream at the time that it was almost hard to find it with binoculars. I'm at the risk of making a mistake but I want to choose John Turner who was on the ground in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1971 and you want to talk about nasty. He was really the he and Tommy on and those original people down there. They were really amazingly courageous and so this is I love my role. You know nobody's ever asked me to run a university or college. They've only asked me to start and there's a reason for that because I say I make snow and then people like Tim and Joyce and John and they make snowballs but my job is to help create the snow so that the real work can then be done to benefit people and it's just been a wonderful a wonderful ride. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the book and I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it. I want to spend more than a little but I'd really love to get any questions any of you may have about what I'm saying about the logic that I'm trying to wrestle with and any questions that it that may raise and I know that it's a beautiful night and I know that people want to go home at some point so we'll try to keep this humanly humanly doable. There's there's three dimensions in this book on one is a human dimension I interviewed about 50 people and I have to say that it was for me a life changing experience as well in terms of how it deepened my understanding of some of the things I've been fighting for and standing for all my life but not maybe understanding the human dimension of the importance of this work and what it has become. And then I interviewed five college presidents of what I call adult friendly colleges one of whom was Joyce because how could I not because the CCV is still in many ways I say regrettably unique almost in American higher education which is crazy because it's so good and by the way we have something here in Vermont and yes I still say we that I don't think operates the language sounds the same but we have the relationship they have with their 12 learning centers with the local high schools and with the Vermont State colleges and the university and the coming and going and up and down and the external baccalaureate degree and all that there really isn't another system and then we have ironically sort of a non-system here I mean you know there's no coordinating board but there's nothing quite like this still in the rest of the country. There are systems people would use the same words to describe but it doesn't work the way it works here and it's just really a story worth telling. So there's an institutional part I call them adult friendly colleges and trying to identify what it is about the institution of the future regardless of what it looks like or where it operates or any of the rest of it. What are the characteristics and then I went and talked to some entrepreneurs about there are people out there trying to put together learning support services related to jobs and all sorts of other things they don't give to who it's about higher education they want to help people get where they want to go in their life's journey and some of them are making money at it we may have feelings about that others are non-profit but the uniting factor is they're saying wait a minute you know there's there's things we can do and if colleges and universities don't wake up and start doing some serious adapting I I think some of them are going to be some real trouble so that those are the three I'm going to focus tonight on the human element because at the end of the day this is all about people and their lives and their position in the community and the opportunities they have or don't have and if you add that up it really becomes about the soul of the United States of America the soul of Vermont and what are we trying to do with and for people of great talent who simply got left left out of the out of the game in many cases through no fault of their own and I'm going to tell you some of those stories one step back I don't know how many of you know the theory of disruption and not to get too arcane on you here but there's a guy who did some work in the 90s he was trying to figure out why of the five largest mainframe computer companies four of them went bankrupt from being blue chip to bankrupt in three years and the only one that didn't was IBM and they damn their debt and what he finds names Clayton Christiansen what he discovered was that the whole culture of these businesses which is wildly successful and they're making four million bucks every time they sell a mainframe computer and they got customers and they got branding and they got employees well along comes this funny little gizmo I can't remember what it was called but made by some guy named jobs and it was 200 bucks and it was a clunky game and time for that and then they cost 400 bucks and it did more than games and then it cost like 700 bucks and it could do almost everything that big ol fat mainframe could do but they couldn't figure out how to make money on a $700 machine when they were selling four million machines and their customers loved them so the theory of disruption is this guy saying these people are dumb but they all went out of business and they went out of business because the way they were set up was simply being attacked from outside by forces they didn't control and the only reason IBM survived it turns out as I think it was Lehigh a coca that I'm any big fan but they he took $200 million and 200 people and send them to another state and said we're going to be out of business in two years if you don't figure out what the new IBM ought to look like so we took them away from the culture and away from the economics and away from it said just and they invented the new business services IBM that barely survived so there's there's a thing about when culture can be the greatest thing in the world and we guessed right or instinctively were right or inadvertently were right in the sense that learner centeredness has become more and more and more real and important and doable in the 50 years since we started in a way that nobody could have imagined and so what's happening today this is not a critique of higher education the stories are going to be they're going to not shed a lot of positive light in some cases because the life examples of these people are hard and these are the success stories and several of our CCV or Vermont State College external degree program graduates but the whole notion that higher education is now beset by forces that it can't control all this information complexity richness AI algorithmic intelligence none of which I understand I just ask questions and get smarter people than me to answer them then we go do it but the fact of the matter is the old university was an island of information richness in an information poor community and today and so you have labs and libraries and smart professors and there was no other option no other option and what has changed in our day when we did the work here was a philosophical statement about values and what we thought was a better way to do business today it has become an essential reality that if people don't adapt and institutions don't adapt they're going to be hurt compromised and in some cases die because the reality we can do really good things for significantly less money to let develop marvelous learning outcomes including the liberal arts this is not about DIY does not mean or free-range learning does not mean DIY learning learning the social activity learning takes people takes people working together but it doesn't mean we can do things almost anyplace anytime very effectively and efficiently with a very high quality and in a way that can be done not just with dozens of people but but with thousands of people and tens of thousands of people so to me that's why what's changed and what the book is about is showing it from a human perspective and I want to to me the rest of it if we're moving away from colleges being about themselves and making the learner adjust as opposed to learning opportunities being about what the learner needs and wrapping their resources and their aspirations around the learner and are there some exceptions sure I mean do I want a brain surgeon who learned you know informally no probably not or an engineer of course there are exceptions but for the vast vast majority of people we can do things in a way that we can never have dreamed of before there are some terms that I employ in the book that I want to just describe first is called personal learning and personal learning is all the learning you do in your life whether it's in a college or in the military or in a club or informally it is the whole aggregation of everything you do and how it affects you and the thing that's interesting there's a fellow named Alan Toff who recently passed away unfortunately a Canadian researcher and he identified which has been has been proven again and again and again in a studies that started in the mid 60s the average adult in America but it's also true and on every other continent spends more than 700 hours a year learning things purposefully now to find that by 50 just to keep it simple I know there's 52 weeks but by 50 that's a lot like 15 hours a week doing something focused that is going to because you want to because it's going to change you and if you think about it our folk culture promotes that live and learn school of hard knocks older beweiser but we don't know how to convert it do it CCV but in general in American higher education you don't know how to convert all that learning to value to academic value and to social and civic value and to economic value and to me the other thing that tough found out is that for all the learning people do they forget that they know it so and you think about it it goes in there and it structures who you are and you're always changing and growing but you can't say well yeah 1972 I learned about China you know you don't remember that until you're asked to go back and think about all those experiences and I'm going to read a couple of stories about what happens when people understand in my first first time I really got a picture of this as our first graduation which the sergeant at arms and the state house regretted as long as I knew him because it was 95 degrees and we were using chairs from the inside of folding chairs out on the the tarmac and they all some they all sunk into the pavement into the tar and then we pulled them out and all the rubber stuff so the bottom of the chairs since I looked like been a pogo stick convention for eight graduate she was not had read paint as his name I'm sure he never forgot me either but this woman Nancy Burns came up to me and she said she ran a child care center in Montpelier and she said thanks for the degree and thanks for the classes you know and thanks for the assessment of prior learning but she said what I really want to thank you for is that now I know I'm a learner and I've been a learner all my life and I'm never gonna stop learning and I thought holy well I won't tell you what I actually thought but holy we'll go with holy because she had become a reflective person in the process of going through her assessments and her learning and once you learn the power of reflection which I expect most of us in this room have developed formally or informally you are you're a learner you're beginning to extract meaning from everything you do good or bad happy or sad you're beginning to be more in charge of understanding the consequences of things that you engage in and so I went back and said that was the beginning of my first book which is called Hidden Credentials because the idea was these people walking around with all this knowledge and we don't recognize it and they don't recognize it and then but there's something we can do about it so it really and so personal learning and I'm gonna a couple of a couple of stories here if I can just get them and I'll try not to bore you to death with it but one of one is a guy I interviewed here named Jason and I'll leave it at that since although he did give me his names in the book and he's talking about his personal learning one of the things I had to do was write an essay he had flunked out of college twice once he said it was his fault once was life's fault but then ten years later he goes back one of the things I had to do was write an essay that told my story from high school to that point in time 20 years I was astonished at how much I had forgotten about what I had done and what it had meant to me I had forgotten so much of what I had done and learned I loved the experience and it changed my life the unanticipated gift was something very powerful mentally and emotionally when I first dove into it I thought there wasn't going to be any there there I wouldn't have enough learning but I was selling myself short wow you know that's that's about more than getting an associate degree that's about repositioning your yourself in life or another problem with with the I'll call it a problem with the denial I call it now knowledge discrimination we discriminate in the book this is not made some people happy but or made some people not happy but we discriminate based on where you learn something not how well you know it or what you can do with it and as I'll get to this huge waste human as well as economic so this guy Phil Barrett my boss was talking about retired tiring in a few years and I wanted to sit in his chair his job description required a bachelor's degree I got my associate degree and I spent my time taking classes that were convenient one week seminars one day workshops I'd accumulated all this time and experience I'd never gotten any credit for it I discovered there's a college nearby who consider giving you credit for learning and done outside of school so I looked into it and made a big difference because I received a lot of credit but beyond getting the credit it changed the way I thought about as I got more into the programs I found out that I knew way more than I thought I did I started listing all the things I had done and I realized I did more than I thought I think we lose knowledge because we aren't challenged to use it so there are a lot of stories like this and to go to Alan Tufts point I'll talk about a woman named Julia Weber who is an HR director in a new company in Denver was a new company when you interviewed her and they were trying to figure out what to do with professional development because they didn't have a professional development program and so they thought they better get one together and she says so I enrolled in a webinar they're discussing a learning survey this was another group I was blown away by what the research revealed namely the people learn very important and sophisticated things informally they learn all the time in many different ways I was blown away then I put the same questions to my in-house learning needs assessment and guess what I found out the same thing going in we believe there wasn't any learning going on because we weren't providing any programs but even without a formal program our people were learning skills behaviors and talents that they needed all the time it turned out that over 75 percent of my organization had learned something informally but purposefully in the last week so the point of the matter is that there is this enormous richness of learning there is talent which is something that has been developed there is capacity which is the thing that lets us develop talent and knowledge and it is not a restricted commodity to people who are fortunate enough as I was and as most of us were to get it right get get lucky the first time around I have a new definition of my privilege as a result of these interviews which is I have never lost a fight that I didn't choose so I lost a fight to the NRA so you know that I picked it choice fight these guys I'm sorry I didn't win but that's okay and there have been a few other times but the point is I'm talking to people here who are losing fights every day they never asked for and they operate without the support and encouragement that we take I think most of us take as an item in our lives so to me this is more than just it transformed it from being more than just a value that would be preferable academically to given the technology and all the things that are enabling learning today it becomes I think an issue of social justice say small s small j but but what kind of a what kind of an opportunity net do we want to have for people if we know these things to be true people learn all the time they spent 700 hours a year it's got value we can help them figure it out that helps them do things humanly economically socially civically that they couldn't have done before and the way it the way it weighs on people this knowledge discrimination this woman wrote me an email I'm an experienced older American worker I've gained streams of workplace experience that were obtained without a formal education my life situation forced me to take this path now to get the same job I felt for so many years I need a degree I can't change my past but what about me now I shouldn't be ruled out people like me hold wells of workplace experience that are still useful and productive but I don't know what to do or this guy Alan who emailed me said I'm one of the two-thirds of Americans without the degree that you mentioned I was writing a blog at that point I've acquired new I've been running my own business I've learned a whole lot now I'm going to point to my life when I want to move on but any job listing I come across that I am qualified for I don't meet the educational requirements and so the point is because of the emerging revolution this this concept of consequences for people has become unnecessary it's become solvable it's become something that we can and I think here in Vermont we do a much better job than in many places we can always do better as we understand what the opportunities are the other the flip side of this is something I call in the in the book the parchment ceiling and it is exactly what Alan and faith are experiencing they can't break through to a future that they want without that piece of paper and they're either going to be alternatives which I think there will be but also the colleges are going to have to learn how to respond humanly to meeting people where they are in their life's journey understanding what they know what they bring with them and then what's the gap and what do they need to know so that we all know the journey we're on and that's what I think ccv today does so marvelously the I mentioned the talent and the capacity and I'm gonna stop in a minute here and see if there are any questions because I could read just I can read your stories all night and there I mean another woman I talked to in Montpelier she says well I'm my family was new to America and I was the first one to graduate from high school and never even thought about college and so I graduated from high school got married had a baby got divorced now I'm coping I'm just coping and so eight years later she's driving around with her son Billy and she says Billy what do you want to do and he says well I want to be a marine biologist but I guess I can't and she said why he said because Nina your dad went to college so I guess I'm not going to college she said that was it she went home that night I'm happy to say called the community college of Vermont by the time I caught up with her she had her baccalaureate degree and was working on her master's degree but and I said so what's up with Billy she said oh he's a senior in high school he's going to the university next year and I said what's he gonna do do marine biology she said no I said well what happened what you gonna do she says oh he's gonna be a civil engineer he's changed but what you see and if you think about it we've all been I know I've been through it and I write some of my own personal experiences you come to a turning point in your life where you know that if you can you've got to do something and how you handle that how you're able to handle that turning point for me leaving the United States Congress was to put it mildly a pretty major turning point and I had mentors and friends like sister Janice Ryan and I write about who helped me understand what wobbles up and what I might do and what I might not do but there's all these other people don't have friends like sister Janice Ryan or other people to help them sort this stuff out and so you come to a turning point and if you can use learning of any kind it's usually negative you can have a powerful transition that's what Nancy Burns was talking about it's what Jason Deforge was talking about it's it's what it's what Kelly Lawrence was talking about and these stories are all people who got to a point where they said something's got to change and they were able to reach out to an adult-friendly institution and get the support they needed to make the change and what I'm arguing here is that these very drivers that make this possible can be adopted by employers as well as institutions of higher education and we can do miraculous things with people that were probably at scale anyway impossible 45 50 years ago I mean we used to assess prior learning and know people walk around with huge cartons because I mean Xerox machines were brand new and dial phones were it so we you know the paper guys loved us now you can do that all online you can get great job information online you can do Gapinel you can do all sorts of stuff so the point is that we have the ability I think the thing we think about this is all the right thing to do a good thing to do maybe a moral thing to do I agree with all of that but in terms of the the good of the country and I don't know the Vermont data so um and those of you that know me know that I have a way of sort of doing things on the back of a matchbook and then saying voila so I'm gonna do a little of that there are 60 to 90 million people in this country with a high school diploma and no college or some college but no degree there's an argument about how many but it's a lot so let's take 60 million we know there are six million jobs that are unfilled going begging we also know that I can't put a number so I'll leave them out millions of people are underemployed and because of the things we're talking about here we can't upskill people in the workplace because we haven't the traditions of the how we treat and educate the workforce haven't changed in too many cases and I know it's something you're working on but I think it's really cool so let's say and the and the data is something like if you've got a certificate after high school you're gonna make $6,000 a year more you got a social degree you're gonna make eight or nine or ten thousand more if you got a BA you're gonna make 12 or 13 well let's just take 10,000 as an average all right pick five if you like I like 10 because I can multiply by 10 what's six million times 10,000 an earned income every year 60 billion dollars that sounds like a lot of groceries at the corner store a lot of self-esteem a lot of taxes because we all know who's paying the taxes in this country now everybody I won't go there but the point but the point is all that talent that wasted talent has a cost it's a human cost it's a social cost it's an economic cost self-esteem earning the whole thing now I know the picture I just painted is not realistic in the sense that there are a whole lot of other reasons why those jobs are vacant but the opportunity we have to add human value respect economic social civic value to the lives of our communities and in so doing enrich the base of those communities is awesome and I know in Vermont we're wrestling with small rural schools and people leaving rural communities and moving to the cities or doing whatever and there are solutions to this I'm not signing up to try to dream them up but we can do something about it whether it's New Mexico or Vermont or downtown Washington DC so my point is simple in this book I wanted to try to show the way forward not in terms of models because there are going to be more models than you know cargo has pills that's that's an old metaphor you know Carter's little liver pills there there's more there's going to be a lot of different models but they're going to have characteristics so all I try to do here is tell the human story as to why this is damned important for us all to do beyond being a cool educational idea and then to to say what if you're trying to develop an adult friendly program or you're looking for one or you're looking for an employer who is treating people in a different way what are the characteristics you would look for what are the you know rather than there it is it's like that's the campus let's go it's not going to be that simple it's going to be what are the characteristics of these programs and what does it mean to be adult friendly how do you understand standards how do you understand quality in an environment where we just assumed it because it happened there in that campus and it's going to become I think quality is going to become much more precisely defined and I think it's going to be interesting enough great news for liberal arts and liberal arts the soft skills human skills you get studying liberal arts because it turns out that's what employers are looking for that they're not getting today when they get the graduates who have done occupationally oriented baccalaureate programs they find that they're really good at that stuff but when it comes to critical thinking adapting on the job writing well all those kinds of things not so good and so there this isn't the end of one thing in the beginning of another in terms of what's important for people to learn and know it's how we do it and how we can do it with many more people and do it I think successfully with many many more people so as those of you who know me know I could go on for another hour and a half but out of respect for all of you I'm not going to do that I'd love to take any questions or thoughts or disagreements yes I'm thinking I have two thoughts and if you agree with those two thoughts then I'm looking for a model that brings those two together there's a time when higher education was for the elite and with the cost of education today it almost feels like we're going in that direction again that we're not there already so what I'm hearing from families is that they're encouraging this is Vermont mostly I can't say you know nationwide but uh that they're encouraging their kids at looking at a two-year going to community college for two years and then transferring to get their bachelor's degree yet having worked with adult learners myself I know many who went to ccb and what was there were many things that was valued but one of the biggest things that they valued were other people their age and so they could you know you you had people who were motivated and it's not to say that 18-year-olds are not saying that 18-year-olds are not motivated but they're very different learners than those who have worked for a while and are going back to school so what does that model look like then if you have kids who are going two years let's say community college at 18 and then you also have these adult learners who want to be with adult I'd say it's lucky for the kids uh seriously I think the average age of community college student is still high 20s low 30s so it's come down a little bit but the the fact of the matter is if you think of a perfectly capable high school graduate and you put them over here for $25,000 a year I'm making the number up with a whole bunch of other people their own age who don't quite know what they want or you can put them over here for $5,000 a year with a whole bunch of other people who are very purpose driven and trying to figure out what they want I would argue that that second is a much better learning environment for them and the mistake that any college could make would be to start organizing their services around the 18-year-olds inside the pedagogical environment the assessment environment in which case they would come less friendly to adults that would not be good but if they can figure I think see it as a strong learning relationship and situation for the younger people precisely because of who they're hanging out with Jason DeFord says really important things is I learned computer and I learned how to work computers at the print shop I worked at and then I assessed and I got out of I'm going to make the numbers up I got out of computer 101 and 102 now I'm in computing 103 and I'm doing just fine he says but he said what's really interesting is the other people in the class who've learned it all in school don't know how to do it I know how to do it they know it I know how to apply it it it was just he said it so he said a lot better than I just said it but what he what he was saying is that if we could get to a more problem-based project-based learning and I actually think the workplace could be the learned place of the future well why not if I'm working on a strategic plane could that be part of a learning experience or if I'm learning supervisory skills could that be part of a learning experience yeah I think so so I think that the workplace is going to be going to be an important part of the learning terrain I don't know what your experience here is at this point but once employers begin to figure some of these things out I think it's going to be so I think good concern could be done poorly but at the end of the day the other thing I will say we saw this I never could get my hands around the information until I was in California and we had people leaving in the first two years and I thought that's you know they're called dropouts we went back and talked to people and it turned out yeah for some wrong fit for some home life you know stuff happens but for some they got what they came for they wanted to take five courses in XYZ they took five courses in XYZ and they went home and we called out a failure and they got what they came for so we got to learn how to count better because the if what you're after is a baccalaureate degree fine but if what you're after is a personal or professional learning or occupational learning goal you know that is very personal to you and you meet that goal that should be that should be called a success not a dropout so changing our understanding of participation patterns and rates and a lot I think in a reasonable way you know I mean you could do that really badly too but I think I think that would help us understand why people come and go a lot better than we do yes sir so you you in the book you you make a reference to the parchment ceiling I think a lot about all the mythology that surrounds the parchment the mythology from the learner about what it means or could mean in a in a in an economy where few jobs are chasing lots of candidates I think there's a mythology that it means that it's a that's some sort of benchmark that has more meaning than it does and and you also made a reference to you know I don't want my brain surgery done by somebody who's on their own and yet in many many fields we're seeing employers say the parchment doesn't guarantee me anything so I'm not going to value it any longer and I wonder how that starts to chip away at that midradiate I was that's a great question and I think in the next two years you will see the beginning of sort of algorithmically driven quantification or validation of learning and ability to do things that is far more reliable or at least specific than what traditionally colleges have done and I'm working with there's a group called Strata and they have an advisor group on the future of work and I'm lucky enough you know I continue my graduate education by hanging around smart people and learning a lot but what they're finding is that one of the big problems is that employers and academics are using totally different language to describe the same thing so there's just there's no connection in terms of the language or the understanding in both cases neither are being rigorous enough in there breaking down what it is they really want in terms of job holding skills which are more of the liberal arts cross cutting soft human skills job getting skills which are the technique you know I can do accounting whatever it might be and they need both and so what people are working on there's a group called credential engine that now has something like 35 thousand certificates in a active database and they're trying to figure out the algorithmic ways to read it and but the idea being that there will be a common language that will also be hierarchical that will explain the value of something you know or are able to do and if you think about it all that information about me or you or anyone it's the same data over here you're using it for academic requirements over here you're using it for employment requirements but if you can figure out the translations you can do a much better job now danger stranger in the whole thing is that we get so artificially structured that we suck all the life out of everything and I for one don't want the government to set those standards you know I don't mind if there's some competing sets of standards and there's a robust discussion but what what we need to include is what I call evidence that I know the title of the course I'll just use it like accounting or supervisory management one and then we need another set of outcomes that are how do I employ that knowledge project-based problem-based what have I been asked to do that then creates evidence that I not only know it but I can apply it right and then there are some more behavioral things like Peter Smith was a sophomore at Princeton he thought he was going to be a diplomat and just nice man in the Woodrow Wilson school took me inside and said you know Peter I really don't think you're going to make a very good diplomat I think you probably ought to think about something else I was crushed but was he right or wrong he was dead right it wasn't and that was a behavioral analysis because he cared enough to get to know me and that was a wonderful part of my life there and just knew instinctively that that was not going to be a good very productive match so but we can do that now Gallup has a has a thing called the Strength Finder whatever it is there where you can actually learn the way you process information and how that affects your behavior so I mean surprise well this might part of my view I'm ADHD never knew it you know what a shock never knew until I was 50 so I was having a little trouble on my job so I went got diagnosed and so what happened was the guy said do you do you like to draw attention to yourself do you like to advocate and make speeches you just start asking me a whole and I said yes yes yes and I said why and he said because that's the way you organize communication because if you're in a crowd and you're not organizing all that noise it's just noise and it's almost painful but if you can organize it so you're I was doing the back and forth then you can handle it well that made me feel better for all the times I know that I had done that and and but there are my point simply is that it when you understand how you process information and there are some like 35 ways you make sense out of the world and everybody has five ways they do it most of the time and of those five two are the way they really do it and if you understand that kind of stuff which is soon going to be available contextually to anybody who wants to do it for a tiny amount of money you can understand why peter smith wouldn't have been a good diplomat or airplane pilot or certified public account because he never met a detail that didn't drive him crazy and then that wasn't elected it was just delay I came onto the earth you know so there's all these things are going to I think be available at finger at the fingertips and the question is huge question is how do we handle it humanly so that we don't get caught in a world of algorithms that tell us things like if somebody had told me I was a good salesman when I was 16 oh maybe I would have gone into real estate well you know part of what I did at CCV was sell an idea so I'm pretty glad I didn't take all these assessments when I was 16 so there's a lot of a lot of downside that can happen but the thing is the potential to ground people in a reality of their choosing that can bridge and you're going to see a bridging between some higher education institutions and major employers and third party nonprofits to look for common language and common validations I gives me the willies frankly a little bit but if we do it well it will be a real plus for the people who are trapped losing fights they never picked other questions got to say my uncle Jeff is here he's a gifted poet and I really I'm honored you're here to listen to some low-level non-fiction writer anyway thank you so much for coming any other questions you are yes sir Richard oh Jesus I I actually well if I couldn't guess the future of the community college of Vermont how the hell can I guess the future of anything else I think what you're going to see Clayton Christensen who's the disruption guy predicted that 50 percent of all colleges will be out of business in 20 years I think he's wrong about three years ago and I understand I mean there is a serious disruption but what you're going to see is some colleges frankly aren't going to do anything Princeton would be one of the well at Princeton and Northwestern and Chicago and the Columbia School of Physicians and Surgeons have all done is create a debt-free graduation for any student because they got the endowment to do it so at Princeton I'm probably one of the few things I've been really pretty that is a lot so at Princeton they they figured out that they were need-blind on the front end but people were leaving after two years because they were accumulating all this loan debt and they just freaked them out because they were first generation of colors so they made the commitment that if you graduate I believe it's in five years we will pay every debt you have within a circumscribed amount you know room, board, tuition, transportation all that we'll pay it off when you graduate and Northwestern I believe has done the same thing Columbia Physicians and Surgeons too late for my son Ben unfortunately has done it so that's an adaptation to what we're talking about they got the money to do it okay it doesn't solve the problem then you'll have adapters who are going to adapt their programs and they're going to and you're going to see I think many more low residency programs and you know technologically enhanced delivery systems and I think there may be some of the solutions for Vermont's rural K-12 system in there but it's going to be institutions that say we got to do this to stay relevant and they're going to have some that go out of business and in the meantime like if you want to have one example there's a new university or college called Minerva and if you want to go home and google Minerva I don't know why they picked the name but of course I forgot that part but but Minerva you sign up and in four years if you go the four you've studied on four continents you do community service and learn the language and the four countries you work in you're going to college you want exercise you go to the local YMCA whatever it is and then you go to college at the same time and it is a everybody's taking the same curriculum so you have a local instructor who's there to work with you but you have one worldwide expert leading the lectures that are delivered technologically so yeah Singapore Melbourne Paris London Cape Town Delhi boom boom you may have a hundred people listening to a course and then it's all the same of the same standards then they turn off the boob tube and you're sitting there with a local professor and it costs something like $18,000 a year now and that is actually started by somebody who actually had a hallowed background so of course it's well branded the signals from the marketplace Harvard um that place um but the but the point the point is it's it's just a really interesting model that a bunch of men and women thought of um or georgia tech which has got one of the five best computer science on campus masters programs with 150 of the brightest people in the country for $60,000 a year i think it is and now they've created an online masters in computer science exactly the same curriculum same degree same standards they got 2,000 students in that program paying $15,000 a year the retention rate in the second program is something like 88% they're all working okay when i asked the guy at georgia tech what did you learn that you didn't expect to learn he laughed and he says really interesting we are so used to skimming the bet we learned two things we're so used to skimming the best for 150 75 a year two-year program we would admit them and then we'd fight to get 75 we wanted but we were just skimming over here we had to figure out if they knew enough to do the work could they benefit from the program were they ready for it he said that's a totally different judgment and i thought to myself yeah and and when you think about what that dynamic suggests here's a whole bunch of plenty talented bright people they're working they probably had to go to work right out of college or maybe in some cases high school or community college and they're coming back and they're able to they're they're capable of doing the work georgia tech has figured out a way for them to do that work and benefit economically and knowledge wise that's that's a big deal and as a model now MIT is about to do the same thing and i worked on the MIT open courseware advisory board 20 years ago they were afraid to have a program so this is the second thing they learned at georgia tech it didn't hurt their on-campus program they could still get 75 very very bright people to come and be there for two years um and didn't hurt it meanwhile they got 2 000 people over here and they're learning how to do their whole business with different people a different way and in the book a woman named denika parker canadian i don't remember how i found her but she was going to the MIT edX it's one of the big mooks and they had a deal that if she i mean wasn't just her if you took eight courses and passed them and then you took an exam and you passed the exam you could come and finish a masters at MIT in whatever it was i can't remember the degree program now in six months so she's taking eight courses for five hundred dollars a piece in vancouver british columbia kicks them takes the test kicks the test goes to MIT she wrote me the other day because i wrote her i wrote them all to see if they had gotten the books i had sent them and how everything was going and she said it's hard to imagine that when i talked to you a year ago i had done none of this and in six months i took the i think it was eight courses and the whole thing cost her something like fourteen or sixteen thousand dollars that's a different world and so there are adaptations to your point there are adaptations coming from the rich and the powerful and the and the best ever and so it isn't it isn't just one part but then there are going to be other colleges that are figuring out how to just make more sense to the people who live within 40 miles of where they are so i think there'll be a lot of adaptation but linking it to work every one of my adult friendly presidents that i interviewed starting with dr judy um said if you can't help people understand work not to just train them for it and none of that was the point but to help them understand the economic consequences of what they're doing and making sure that it's relevant and that you're giving them the whole coterie of skills and knowledge they need we're all going to have to do that much better and the people i talked to all agreed they all have different models five different colleges five different models but they all said essentially the same thing which is relating knowledge to work in a human and interesting way is critical and we're we're not good at it right yeah have i bored you to death anyway i think it's a good time to um say thank you and for anyway goes to sleep right in front of me and no i thank you so much i mean for coming out on a beautiful night and um i hope i hope this was interesting thank you