about campus sexual assaults and how they are investigated and

prosecuted. >> this week on the washington journal, we kicked off our month-long series of interviews with university presidents as part of our cspan bus's big ten college tour. this morning joining us on the cspan bus at the campus of the university of nebraska in lincoln is the interim president dr. james linder. thank you, sir for being with us. let us begin with the size of the university of nebraska lincoln and also the cost. >> well, thank you very much greta. it's a pleasure to be with you today and i appreciate the fact that you're doing this service to educate students and the public at large about the importance of higher education. the university of nebraska system as four campuses, one of which is the university of nebraska lincoln, which is a big ten school. it has a little over 25,000

students. there are 51,000 students in the entire system. and that actually represents record enrollment for us. and the cost of an education at the university of nebraska lincoln is around $8,000 a year. which actually that's the lowest in the big ten. >> out of state tuition comes in at $22,000 a year. how much financial aid is there available? >> we made a serious effort to provide financial aid for our students. particularly on the side of grants and scholarship. about three-quarters of students receive some type of grant or scholarship within a year of education. >> the gallup recently just did a poll back in april, young adults cite college costs as their top money problem. i'm wondering, and this has sparked a debate in our country. is college worth it? how do you answer that question, dr. linder?

>> well, i think the university of nebraska regents and our state legislature have had access and affordability among its priorities for many years even before the recent discussions on costs. and we believe in nebraska that college is worth it. really, the opportunity to educate the next generation of nebraskans, that go out and form companies, service businesses, and have degrees that can support higher technology is really a central for both a growing economy and having an informed citizenry. >> how much majors are available at the university of nebraska? >> wow, that's a stump the president sort of question. you know, we have -- we have many colleges and many degree programs, some of which actually

lead to a b.s., then of course graduate programs and certificate programs. it probably exceeds 100 in total and that includes both online education as well as education that occurs on campus. >> how do you address at the university of nebraska lincoln, this issue of job placement. after kids graduate, what's the rate of them getting a job and how do you encourage or do you encourage kids to pick majors, professions that will get them a job when they graduate? >> well, there's a lot of important questions that you've asked there and i'll dissect that a bit. first of all, in terms of the colleges experience, we want our students to be aware of the fact that they should obtain some skill during college, that is valuable to a potential employer.

now that doesn't mean we want to provide a technical education, we want to make sure that students first of all have the range of experiences that lead them to have a full and productive life. so that implies there would be good counseling for those students, as well as opportunities for internships, working with companies, seeing what it's like to be in the workforce so they can develop those critical thinking skills and having experiences at other campuses or outside the country in terms of study abroad. >> the "boston globe" recently reported with this headline that business leaders downbeat on workers prospect. and despite an improving economy and record corporate profits business leaders are skeptical about their ability to compete abroad and down right pessimistic about the prospect increase pay are improving living conditions for american workers. and in this report, they cite issues of higher edges

-- education. what are some challenges you see in higher education that impact our economy? >> i think there are several challenges as you have alluded to. one is a changing social compact between companies and the workforce and companies are increasingly looking for individuals who have some important technical skill which is why there's so much dialogue about stem education, we are fortunate this year at the university of nebraska lincoln to see an 8.6% increase in our enrollment of students in the engineering program. and i think students are realizing that having these skills is important because it is what employers are looking for. >> we're talking to the president of the university of nebraska lincoln, part of c

span's bus big ten college tour. we will continuing next week a month long series here on washington journal, talking to university presidents about higher education issues. we want to get your thoughts as well. so we have divided the lines by students, parents, educators and nebraska residents. there they are on your screen. also send us an e-mail if you would like. interim president dr. james linder is aboard our cspan bus in lincoln, nebraska to talk about the university of higher education. we begin with michael in new jersey. are you a former student at the university of nebraska? >> caller: unfortunately, i wasn't, i was a student in new

jersey. but if i may, i just wanted to comment on the kind of culture around career resources. providing things for students. take lot of students in my experience in the past felt as if their career service offices didn't offer them that much and that with the fact they may be be aware of the resources in addition to the fact a lot of students lack a lot of confidence in knowing themselves and how they belong in the workforce. a lot of it has to do with career resources, juggling part-time jobs after college and factor in the fact that searching for jobs is a part-time job. with that said, it's a management of time and management of really understanding themselves and having confidence in themselves afterward. >> i agree with you completely. it's a process as one goes from being an entering student to

graduating and it can be very enlightening for students to have the either individually or as a group walk into a workplace and feel the excitement of a team trying to say they are trying to bring a new product to market. it can open their eyes what it will be after they graduate. we try to provide that experience to our students. >> dr. linder, we want our viewers to call in and we've divided the lines by nebraska residents and students and educators. nebraska residents, talk about your outreach to the state of nebraska and how much support resources the university of nebraska gets from the state. >> so, the university of nebraska has always felt we have a strong mission to educate the next generation of nebraska. our state is geographically very long, 500 miles.

we often talk about a 500 mile campus. we have resources in every county in the state through our extension services and through telehealth and teleeducation and variety of programs that bring the university to every community. we're very proud of that. we're humbled by actually the opportunity to shape our future in the state. >> you have an annual budget at the university of nebraska lincoln of 1.2 billion, endowment of 1.3 billion and alumni contributing little over 188,000. can you talk about those numbers and what is the cost? how is the money spent? >> the budget at the university of nebraska lincoln is as you say, $1.2 billion. of that money, it is spent principlely on instruction.

there's a strong outreach program in our service activities through the state through extension. of course the research budget is substantial approaching $300 million in itself. we've been very fortunate in the state of nebraska to enjoy solid support from our state legislature, which has helped us keep tuition rates low. we've also had a very successful campaign through university of nebraska foundation to raise funds for student scholarships, campaign that just end created more than 1,000 different scholarship funds. as well as building the infrastructure that supports the university. so really you see a broad gamut of people in the state of nebraska working together to support higher education. >> next in castle wood. >> caller: i'm a parent.

i went back to school after i got laid off from work and got a degree, associate's degree in engineering. and half of my classes were classes i didn't need for that degree like history, music, p.e. i want to go back and get a degree in engineer technologies, the first two classes i have to take, u.s. history 1 and 2. i think that's a big problem. i have looked at all colleges. they all have classes in the degree programs that you don't need to do that job. and i think we want well rounded students out of high school but when we go to college, well trained students in that profession. i think it would drive the college cost down if they would get classes you don't need out of degree programs and colleges don't want to admit that. that was half the cost of my associate's degree was classes that i didn't need for the

degree. you could get the degrees in half the time. >> all right, dr. linder. >> the caller makes several good points, first of all, if you can get a lot of courses in high school, you can shorten your college experience. here in nebraska we offer what's called the university of nebraska high school. this provides university level courses to students throughout the state that are basically dual credit. they are satisfying some of their college requirements while they are in high school. the other important point you make is the issue of transferability. once you've had certain courses in one educational experience, you should have systems that allow those courses to transfer into your next degree. and we have such programs here in nebraska, between our different campuses between the community colleges and our state and university, and we actually have a unique program where we are piloting reverse transfer of credit back to community

colleges so someone who did not complete their associate's degree, can actually use some of their university courses for that purpose. the more dialogue there is between educational institutions, the more efficient it is and more cost is reduced as you point out. >> dr. linder, you said earlier, 300 million for research at the university of nebraska lincoln. what is the university researching? what are the different areas? what's the main focus? >> well, obviously there are a variety of areas but being that we're in an agricultural state, some of our focuses are on how you properly use water resources and how you grow food with less water. we face a population crisis in this world where you'll have more and more mouths that need to be fed to ensure political stability in the world.

we have a strong initiative with the water for food program and nebraska innovation and focused on food and water and this is a handful of programs faculty are working on but key ones given our agricultural roots. >> you're a professioner of microbiology here, this is a headline in the "washington post" this morning. u.s. lacks personnel trained to fight ebola. shortage will hamper the military's efforts against the disease. that's the headline in the "washington post." there is also a recent roiters story, the third to become infected was wheeled from a gurney in the center in omaha for treatment. why the nebraska university hospital? >> yeah, just so for clarity

here, we have four campuses and the university of nebraska medical center is based in omaha, not at the university of nebraska lincoln. we have in recent years worked hard at the medical center in omaha to address some of the threats posed by infectious agents. and so many years ago when there was the sars outbreak, we developed a very comprehensive biocontainment unit to provide care for patients who might be affected by infectious agents. and the u.s. state department recognized that capacity at the university of nebraska medical center and asked if we would provide care for this physician. now, that has been an important learning experience for our staff at the medical center. and they are currently discussing with government officials cdc and others how we can take what we've learned in

caring for this patient in our biocontainment unit and provide educational programs for health care providers throughout the country so they are better prepared to deal with this type of infection. it's a critical issue right now. >> dr. linder, another issue for many universities is their athletic program. roger green on twitter wants to know, how do you feel about college athletes forming a union and being compensated for generating millions for the universities? >> well, the university of nebraska lincoln has had very successful athletic programs. i believe we had 23 different sports represented both women and men. over 620 athletes. the athletic department is entirely self-sufficient from the revenue that it generates.

the question about student unionization and how money is spent in athletics is in the headlines. we try to focus on student athletes first being students and as students we'd like to see that they are fairly comprehend sated with full scholarships and support of their expenses. we think that some of the dialogue happening now to better support those students is very important. but in terms of actually compensating students as if they were employees and unionization, that carries many downsides for the student experience. >> dr. linder, jody on twitter quotes a strong mission to educate, is that why the football coach makes more than the top three teachers at every big university in the united states? >> well, i think that compensation of football coaches is very high. and each university exists in a marketplace, unfortunately.

having a cap on football coaches salaries would be an interesting national discussion. but it's not one i want to participate in. >> why not? you sound reluctant. explain that. >> i think that the question about capping any profession's salary, whether it's a coach, entertaining, ceo is a more complex discussion than we could take on this morning. but we do live in a marketplace. if you're trying to attract top tier coaches at any school, you're competing with those coaches for the employment of those coaches with other schools and i think that's what's driven these salaries to a level where they are. >> dr. linder at the university of nebraska lincoln, what is the state of tenured professors? how many do you have? how does the process work? >> at the university of nebraska lincoln, the tenure density is

around 60%. and the process at the university of nebraska lincoln is a faculty may enter a tenure track and after several years of service developed portfolio that would be assessed to determine whether the faculty would be tenured or not. there are different systems used throughout the country at our medical center for example, in omaha, faculty -- all faculty enter on what's called a health professions track and sometime during their career, three years or ten years, may opt for a consideration for tenure. but it isn't the classic upper out situation you see in some tenured programs. >> back to calls, we'll go to brian in texas. go ahead, william. >> yes, i would like to ask mr. linder how the philosophy of the mentality that would establish

several in the early 100 years ago has changed, it was originally organized to support the agricultural area or the society. how has that changed and is the change in the right direction? >> well, the university of nebraska was established in 1869 and i think by all measures we still function as a land grant institution to provide substantial support for the agriculture efforts in nebraska. we have the institute for ag and natural resources that has many faculty working to develop better agricultural techniques throughout the state. and this is part of the food, fuel and water initiative that i mentioned earlier.

the scope of a land grant institution has certainly increased. so in 1902 the medical center joined the system. so the activities have grown as society needs have increased but we still focus on agriculture as one of the core missions at the university of nebraska lincoln and actually our agricultural programs show the second highest increase in enrollment this year. >> we're talking with dr. james linder, the interim president, part of c-span bus's big 10 college tour. we kicked that off this week. month-long series of interviews with university presidents. on friday the bus will be at the university of iowa and we will talk with the president there, sally mason on friday. this morning though, dr. james linder aboard the c-span bus in lincoln, nebraska. charles in sioux city, nebraska, a parent there. go ahead with your question or comment.

>> caller: good morning. i have a question, i have two grandsons going to your university in the ag department and wondering why is it so difficult to find scholarship or any kind of money to go to school if you don't do the right research, you end up getting none. >> well at the university of nebraska lincoln, there are a wide variety of need based scholarships and in fact at unl 3,000 students attend the university with no tuition charge. there are also other academic related scholarships depending on what field the student is in. very few student scholarships are actually focused on the

potential research that a student might be interested in doing. unless of course, they are a graduate student and we have extensive support for graduate students who are pursuing master's degrees or ph.d. degrees. >> dr. linder, schools get more money for out of state students. do these students get preferences? >> in my experience out of state students do not get preferences. we enjoy bringing students to nebraska to both diversify our student body and hopefully create a student who will stay as an employee of a nebraska based company. we would appreciate if those costs are bringing students in could be lower. but that wouldn't be fair to the citizens of nebraska who are paying taxes to support the in-state students. but we do try and look at students from outside nebraska

to diversify our student body. this current year is probably the most diverse student body we have relative to ethnic min orts -- minorities in the history of the university. >> how many slots are there for foreign students? >> in terms of slots, we really don't think that way. we evaluate students based on their academic activities and each campus at the university has a different number of foreign students. there are several thousand that are studying here and they come from countries around the world. we have exchange programs with brazil, with china, with eastern europe and it's fascinating to walk across the campus and see students from nebraska natively interacting with a student who may have come from brazil, teaching them about our culture

and learning about the culture from another country. >> do they pay the full price of college tuition? >> yes, they do. they pay a nonresident rate. >> charles -- excuse me, bill in florida. bill, good morning, you're up next. go ahead. >> caller: good morning, greta, do you have any affiliation with monsanto and with what they are doing with the foods and new techniques and all of that and how does such -- >> so the university of nebraska of lincoln has had research relationship with a variety of companies that are seeking to improve both crop yields and to develop crops that are resistant to pests that includes monsanto corporation. >> here's a tweet from a viewer asking president linder, with

respect college sports have become big, no huge -- business. why should it be treated as such? why should it not be treat d as such? >> i think that the question is the use of revenue that comes from college sports, if i understand it correctly, and at the university of nebraska that's largely to support the athletic programs. but there's also some strong benefits to the academic mission of the university. for example, on our east stadium of the football stadium, we have two important research activities, one is the nebraska athletic performance laboratory, which looks at motions that athletes migts have and tries to optimize their performance. but it also ties into research

studies done on gate disturbances and people with neurologic problems have. and as well. the center for brain biology and behavior is studying concussions that can occur in sports but looking ats developmental ab -- abnormalities in children. so it's not just a business. it's integrated. for the student athletes, and i emphasize students, they get valuable experiences. i had the pleasure of teaching some of the former university of nebraska football players when they were in medical school. and these are individuals who learned time management and learn how important it is to get tasks done and very motivated. >> the columbus dispatch reporting in june that big 10 presidents and chancellors proposed four major reforms for athletics, guaranteeing

four-year scholarship regardless of whether or not an athlete is able to compete on the playing field and maintaining a scholarship even if he leaves college early and consistent medical insurance for players and athlete scholarships cover the full cost of attendance as defined by the federal government. why do you think these reforms are needed? do you think they are needed? >> i do think these reforms are needed and they reflect the deep commitment that student athletes do make to being both a student and athlete. and they address some of the concerns that have led to the current discussion of how students are treated when they are athletes. i think they are very fair, fair to the student and help ensure their chances of success in

their academic roles in life. the vast majority of student athletes are not going to compete at a professional level so we want to make sure they have the financial security while they are in school so they can complete their degree program. >> we have a few minutes left to discuss higher education issues with dr. linder, aboard the c-span bus as part of the big 10 college tour. by the way, the washington times this morning with this story, americans are saving more for college. the college savings plan network found the average college savings, or 529 plan is now worth $20,671, almost double what these accounts were worth during the dog days of the recession. william in st. paul, minnesota. go ahead. >> caller: yes. i just wanted to kind of touch on a question and it's kind of a two-part question concerning american citizenship versus

financial aid. the reason i'm asking this, we barely make a buck, $90,000. my daughter's first year didn't qualify for pell grants or scholarships. why is it that foreign students -- american citizenship qualification, are you required to be an american citizen? >> dr. linder? >> i think the question was are you required to be an american citizen to receive a pell grant? and that's a question if it came across my desk i would call the director of financial aid and learn what the rules are. i can't give you an accurate answer right now. >> dr. linder, how much support and money does university of nebraska get from the federal government?

>> well, you would have to look at the different categories of support that the university of nebraska gets from the federal government. there is a large research enterprise that receive grants from the national institutes of health and science foundation. systemwide, that approaches over $400 million. those moneys come into the university of nebraska and then they are spent on research that benefits both the faculty and the students who are involved in that research. then there are financial aid dollars that come into the university. counted as part of our budget but thin those are distributed directly to the students, including the loans and pell grants. that's part of that aggregate budget of $1.2 billion that is

money flowing through. >> midland texas. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i have a question from dr. linder. i've been to nebraska, really love the state, omaha and worked in omaha and lincoln. omaha is a beautiful city. but i felt like dr. linder had dodged the question earlier and i would like to hear more why if you're giving an engineering agree you have to have history, which adds a lot of cost to your tuition. thanks. >> if you're pursuing an engineering degree, should you learn anything other than engineering? should you take a history course or english course. take an english course or history course? i think education in the humanities, including history are essential for all citizens to have, there was an extended political discussion that occurred before i came on the air and if our citizens don't

have an understanding of world history, how can they properly vote in elections and understand the issues that face their communities. i think it has to be balanced between your degree program and the things that round you out as a human being. but i do think those programs are essential. they shouldn't be duplicated, which was i think one of the concerns of the other caller, in that she had already had exposure to history and then asked to take it again at the different university, which is why the transfer of credits is important. >> dr. linder, another issue is campus safety, vice president joe biden did an interview with nbc yesterday talking about domestic violence, the ray rice video, nfl and he had this to say. the next challenge is to making sure ironically we get college presidents and colleges to understand that they have a responsibility for the safety of women on their campus. they have a responsibility to do what we know from great experience works, bringing experts and provide people and give young women the support she needs.

psychological support, medical support and if need be the legal support. societal changes taking place, it takes time but i believe it's taking root and we have an obligation to keep pushing it. dr. linder, do you agree and what is the university of nebraska do on this issue of college safety? >> well, i agree with vice president biden and clearly this is an issue that is front page on the news right now. we have a safe environment at the university of nebraska lincoln. as attention to the issue has grown, we doubled do you know on efforts to make sure that students are aware of their responsibility to treat each other in a respectful manner, to avoid situations such as may occur with binge drinking that

could lead to unfortunate behavior. we want to make sure there are counselors available for our students so that this is handled in the proper manner, including law enforcement when necessary. a lot of the bad behavior on campuses has been targeted toward athletes who have been maybe cut a break at the university of nebraska if there are any allegations against athletes such as have occurred on other campuses, it's not handled by the athletic department, it's either handled by the separate part of the university or by local law enforcement. we take this very seriously. our region has past new policies in may for student and employee conduct. we'll do our best to make sure it's a safe campus. the new website for the university of nebraska lincoln that just became live in the last couple of weeks, it's called tips, and it provides any

student, parent or citizen the opportunity to report what they believe to be an unsafe situation that we can address. >> a couple of other tweets for you here, dr. linder. this one from our viewer who wants to know, across the nation there's a movement to privatize parts of state colleges. are you on the privatize it bandwagon? and james says, have the for profit businesses affected you in any way? >> these are two tweets that address a very important issue in american education. if you look at the current number, which is a trillion dollars in student loan debt, 13% of these students who have been at for profit colleges account for a third of that debt. this is driving a lot of the crisis in higher education. i think that privatization and for profit activities have to be carefully scrutinized and

watched to make sure they benefit the students, not the shareholders of the company. >> mike, rockford, illinois, parent, go ahead. >> my question is, to the foreign students that are accepted -- to the nebraska students aren't expected, what do you have to say to local students not accepted like you mentioned? you have thousands of foreign students and we know with the new laws we have for employment, a lot of them are getting first chance at jobs. and for a lesser pay, let's say engineering, of 65,000 for a foreign national student -- >> okay, mike. dr. linder? >> so, any qualified student who

is from nebraska, is guaranteed acceptance into the university of nebraska, in no situation would have denied a student a seat in the classroom because we had a relationship to bring international students to our program. we're very aware of our role to educate first and foremost our citizens. we believe that the international students that come here and most of them do go back to their home country, simply add to the cultural experience that we have on campus. >> dr. linder, if there's one thing you could change about higher education, what would it be? >> oh, wow, that's kind of like the if you get a wish, what could it be? i think the awareness of both

the students as they pursue entry into college, of the citizens and the united states of what the role is of a college experience and then the interaction between the employers and the students as they come out. so awareness is my answer and it's a broad answer. but i firmly believe that if you achieve understanding of a problem and situation, you can really get to the optimal situation you want to be in. there's a lot of misunderstanding, misawareness that currently is surrounding many of the discussions in higher education. >> dr. james linder is the interim president at the university of nebraska lincoln, part of c-span bus's big 10 college tour. this weekend friday night on c-span our campaign 2014 debate coverage continues. on saturday night at 10:00 the

women of color empowerment conference and sunday evening at 8:00 film maker and daughter of daughter f. kenneof robert f. kennedy. saturday morning beginning at 11:00 eastern on book tv live coverage of the texas book festival in austin. sunday our coverage continues live starting at noon. friday night at 8:00 on american history tv on c-span 3 the union army and abraham lincoln's 1864 re-election. and saturday night at 8:00 the modernization of businesses and households in the 20th century. sunday afternoon at 4:00 ronald reagan's 1964 "a time for choosing" speech. find our television schedule at c-span.org. call us at 202-626-3400.

e-mail us or send us a tweet. join the c-span conversation. like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. now a discussion about the difficulties minorities face getting a college degree. it is part of an event hosted by the ucla civil rights project. this is 40 minutes. we start with our main message of the paper which is this college completion is not just a post secondary issue. the data we use out of a state administrative database in texas to track students from kindergarten to graduate school. what we find is what contributes to the gap in college completion by race actually much of that happens before the student ever enrolls in college. two problems or two issues frame

the texas college success or lack of success in texas. the first is growing latino demography. latinos compromise majority of all public school students. the problem is not the demography but the growth in high school graduates is not translating to enrollment in colleges and universities. with black students it is a slightly different story. we have seen an increase in enrollment for the black population. that is worth praising but this enrollment has not translated into completion. it is a very clear example of how success on one side of the pipeline does not translate to the other side. instead we see that from my analysis in the previous paper said black students are going to community colleges as a first choice institution which is likely to decrease odds of

college completion. there is a racial achievement gap. you see six-year completion rate is difference between white and hispanic students is 13.1 -- 14.1%. with black and white students 21.9 percentage points between white and black students. we then start to examine students who enroll in a four year college what is the racial and ethnic composition and key factors that influence college completion. we present economic disadvantage, academic preparation and percent minority. black and latino students are much more likely to be economically disadvantaged and hispanics represent the group with highest disadvantage.

we use trigonometry which is signal for college completion. look at the difference between black and white students who take trigonometry. 23 percentage points to big problems in academic preparation. in terms of minorities in high school we know that racially segregated environments are much less likely to increase student achievement than integrated environments. we see white students attend a high school where there are only 32% black and skand latino stud with hispanics compromising groups attending most -- what contributes to the college completion gap what we call racial completion gap by precollege characteristics and post secondary factors? we use literature in the data set to guide the analysis. the precollege factors i can

talk in more detail for questions of what they are. they represent individual characteristics, high school context choices in curriculum. post secondary factors you can imagine institutional resources. we use a nonlinear variance decomposition method where the differences in the probability of college completion were represented by precollege and post secondary institutional characteristics. we explained approximately 94% of the model. next slide. this is what we find. there are large differences between precollege and post secondary factors. we find precollege characteristics 61% of total variance in explaining for both hispanic and black students as compared to white student counter parts. that is more than half of the completion gap is explained by precollege kwarkte echaracteris

we then sought to explain the gap. next slide. i won't spend too much time on this slide. what we see here is the different factors, economic, academic preparation, high school context and that compared to post secondary factors. what we see here, the lesson is that for hispanic students economic disadvantage seems to be driving the gap. whereas with black and white students academic factors is driving the gap in college completion by race. this signals a different precollege factors may befluencing. it signals the role of finances for latinos. while finances matter for black students academic population represents the greatest gap. much of our work included the role of msis. a diverse landscape of hsis.

our previous work -- not yet, it is a surprise. our previous work looked at graduation rates of hispanic and black students at smis compared to nonsmis. this paper is different. it compares black and hispanic graduation rates to white students. so we are going to see a different outcome. next slide, please. our results for this question using the decomposition method indicate there is a negative contribution of the msi in post secondary factors explaining gap in college completion. this is important and alarming. msi's under rating system are likely to show that they are negative lly contributing to graduation when many factors may have occurred well before enrollment. for this cohort we see 12.9% of total variance explained alone

37% of the post secondary context is by hsi status. the contribution is 9%. 28% is explained by hbc status. these are 2002 numbers. previous cohorts show that hsi's negative contributions has lessened. the analysis doesn't [ inaudible ] as the identity and mission of implementation are difficult to capture in our data set. however, a critical problem is illuminated when we compare graduation rates to that of white students who have more advantages, resources and choices in post secondary institutions, not only texas but nationally. so what can we learn from these analysis if we are to move forward? did you show the -- show the msi slide. you already did. what can we learn from the

analysis if we are to move forward with a national college rating system? to be clear our paper does not suggest that we are against accountability or there is no place for accountability. we recommend there be much more likelihoods of outcomes of educational circumstances that are not likely to change before the ratings system was put in place. as such we leave with you the following recommendations. again, college completion is not just a post secondary student. failing to account for this result would penalize institutions enrolling large numbers of minority students. finally, given the role of economic disadvantage and academic preparation in explaining the gap, policy intervenges aimed at financial aid and developmental education are warranted. and really finally, the use of vaerd and innovative data systems to disentangle where the odds of completion are most

challenged is highly recommended. what we mean by this is that the ncs has wonderful data sets that are useful in understanding gaps in racial achievement gaps in college completion gaps but there are state databases that can also inform this question much better than our federal data sets. so we recommend some form of partnership in which we get the best data to get the best research to form the best policy results that we can in this day and age. thank you. >> thank you, professor flores. now we're going to turn to marybeth gasman. >> good morning, everyone. thank you to everyone for coming, and thanks to all the sponsors and gary as well. so this paper was written by myself and two of my research assistants, ty quinn and an undergraduate student named danny corelle. what we tried to do in our paper

was provide a landscape of the nation's msis, institutions that educate 20% of our college students. oftentimes people forget that. so these institutions, as we know and as most people have been saying today, have a proven track record with first generation students, low-income students and students of color. if you could flick the slide, please. so this will just give you a few numbers that give you an idea of what's going on in the msi landscape. one thing i want to point to is the pell grant percentage. 50% of students at msis are utilizing the pell grant, which is really important. msis are known for their family-like environments, they're known for success in developmental education even though developmental education gets kicked around a bit. there are many examples of msis of their success and they're empowering to people of color.

so msis are deeply vulnerable because of their financial situations as some of the presenters have explained and also due to the risks that they take. sara talked about this extensively as did some of the other presenters. the risks that they take in enrolling many of the students that other institutions don't enroll. and these risks result in unveen outcomes for msis. what we do in our paper is we urge policymakers to examine the unique contribution of msis especially in three critical areas that i want to highlight. so you can go to the next slide. right. so one of the things that i noticed recently when i was reading the my brother's keeper report issued by the obama administration is that there was only one line related to minor serving institutions in the entire report. and msis were pretty much left out of the report. so what i want you to do is just look for a minute at the role

that msis are playing in educating men of color. so 36% of men of color with full-time enrollment are enrolled at msis. if you look a little bit deeper, you can see the percentages across the various racial and ethnic groups that are enrolled full time at msis. then if you look at the part-time enrollment, nearly 50%, 48.6% of men of color with part-time enrollment are at msis. if you start to look at the awarding of bachelor's degrees you see that 24% of all the bachelor's degrees to men of color come from msis and 22% of all the oeassociate's degrees t men of color, but they only ended up with one line in the my brother's keeper report. so we found that problematic, and we really want to point to the contributions that msis are making with men of color. next slide.

another area that we pay particular attention to is teacher education. and another thing that we've been hearing, especially from the department of education under this administration is an emphasis on the need for an increase in teachers, especially teachers of color. and how important that diversity is to young students of color. so one of the thins that we've noticed is that msis are doing -- are making considerable contributions in teacher education. the bulk of these degrees are due to hispanic-serving institutions, and that's important to point out, but we do want to also point out the conferral of degrees by msis in the teacher education area. and we also in the paper talk about the fact that many of the teachers that are educated at msis end up going back to the communities from which they came. so they go back to urban and

rural communities and msis are collecting data on those teachers who go back to those communities. and those are communities that have high concentrations of students of color. next slide. another thing that we talk about in the paper is the contributions of msis in the s.t.e.m. area. our nation is said to need 1 million s.t.e.m. workers and we need much more diversity in the area of s.t.e.m. we know -- there have been countless papers. sylvia hurtado here has done work in this area as well. that shows us that many msis are doing a disproportionate job in the s.t.e.m. area. we don't know exactly what they do and my project is working on things related to that. but we point out these contributions that they are making in the area of s.t.e.m. and what i want to stress here is for us, these are three critical areas that are being

talked about widely across the country. right? we hear a lot about the shortages of teachers, how can we make teaching a career that more people want to get into. we hear much about men of color, especially right now. and we also hear about our great needs in the area of s.t.e.m. what we'd like to urge people to do is when they're thinking about how institutions are funded, to think about how msis contribute in these critical areas. and so we had a variety of recommendations for policymakers. so i'm just going to go over three. and these include -- so for policymak policymaker, one of the things that i think we find most disturbing is the way that msis are left out of discussions. and how their contributions are not included in major national reports and discussions. and we see this over and over. even though there are many, many people in this room who try adamantly to get the -- these discussions -- the contributions

of msis into these national discussions. so what we say is that we don't think that these national reports should be issued or that legislation should be put forward if msis are not part of that discussion. we also recommend for msis that institutions not only larger, overreaching organizations, which are already doing this, but institutions work together in coalitions across the various msi sectors. and this can easily be done within states. it can also be done in a variety of other ways, institutions that have similar programs, similar curricular issues, similar financing. we urge msis to work together because in silos their strength is really zapped. but when you have nearly 600 msis in the country and they're educating 20% of college and university students, you have a lot more strength. then another thing that we

recommend for researchers and policymakers is to focus on what works and what's successful. so a long time ago when i was a brand new professor, my mentor was asa hilliard. i'm a child psychologist. he passed away a few years ago. but one of the things he told me was, you know, we really know what works, but we just don't pay attention. and i believe that. and i think that one of the things that msis can show us is what works with low-income students of color and first generation students. we have many, many examples of what's successful, and i think that we should look to msis for how to be more successful rather than the way that we tend to approach msis which is to see what we can do for them. i think that we should look at msis and see what they can teach the rest of the nation. thank you. >> thank you very much. first i turn for a response to

deborah santiago from exlens ya, one of our partners. >> can everyone hear me? yeah. thank everyone for all the hard work in putting this together. i want to frame my responses to stella's piece specifically with more of a policy lens. i think what her paper and her colleagues have done is twofold. one, acknowledge what we in public policy know, that the train has left the station on the issue of accountability. we're not going to get away with just saying we're different, we have a mass of students that have additional needs so don't hold us accountable. none of us want that. and the second part what i appreciated they put together was looking at how do we identify a fair assessment and valuation of students that have a critical mass enrolled. that becomes a challenge

figuring how do we take the good analysis done and operationalize it in a manner in public policy where we prioritize simplicity over accuracy? and we all have a certain measure of adhd in terms of what our priorities are in the moment, and if we can't put it in a bullet, if we can't make it concise, then it's a difficult thing to implement. and that's the kind of pragmatism we do in trying to translate really good research into public policy. so i was thinking a lot about it. i wanted to push the researchers a little bit, but also add -- >> we shouldn't enact soundbites? >> yes, i will. i have five minutes, right? three minutes now. so yes, simplicity accuracy scale. what if we took the existing information and data that's being bandied about in d.c. and other places and try to weight it by the issues that are raised in the paper that stella put

together? the reality is we don't want two different forms of accountability. that's not the way to approach this. we have to approach it in a manner that doesn't let the institutions off the hook either for enrolling a high concentration of students that have income needs and have college readiness needs overall. so how do we make sure that to stella and her team's point, we create a fair system. so how about if we took a look and so i'll offer this as a suggestion, with the data recurrently collect, ways to weight what is in some ways a relatively perverse way of looking at institutional efforts at hsis and pscus. what we made sure that completion rates -- not graduation rates, completion rates -- add information on part time and transfer students. that's not included and so many of these students have a high concentration of low income needy students and aren't given the credit for what they're doing with transfers and

part-timers. national clearinghouse has data on this. there are ways that we have to focus on from a public policy perspective to collect the data to make sure that happens. what if we looked at financial aid, which is paper race is critical for latinos but the economic disadvantage is a factor and we weighted what we put together in an accountability system by the percent of students that are receiving pell or financial aid? we took a look at the college and structures and what kind of quality is provided and weight it based on that? for college readiness, critical for african-americans and those at hpcus we look at the percent remediation, the percent that are retained and those who drop out as factors. that doesn't mean only for these institutions, but i can assure you that look at these factors, multiple measures, we'll get a more balanced approach. perfect ? no, that doesn't really exist.

we owe it to these students of institutions who have taken on the challenge of jukding to those of most need to make sure they get the quality of education they deserve and our workforce overall. these are all data that are currently collected, not perfect but they are collected. and the last is that, we do collect information on institutions that have a high enrollment of needy students and low general expenditures. there's a way to the financial component of these institutions in a way i don't think we're thinking significantly about that can address accountability. what we can't do is let the k-12 system off the hook, we can't let institutions of higher education off the hook and say because we have students of need that we lower expectations of the students or the institutions that enroll them. >> thank you very much. we'll turn now to my you can la colleague sylvia hurtado. >> thank you. i'm commenting on marybeth gasman's paper and her colleagues.

if you haven't read the paper, you should read it. if you do not know very much about the different minority-serving institutions, it's a good, easy, fast, descriptive analysis of what mint-serving institutions are. and more importantly, i think, the focus of diversification in the workforce in areas of national importance are a key in terms of really having all that data in one place. it's a great paper in that regard. i want to say also that they really focused on key national areas of importance, that teacher education, s.t.e.m. degrees which we know for individuals, that's where the highest paying jobs are going to be in the future. and also that's what we already nationally have indicated is going to be a key area for enhancing american competitiveness. then the issue of minority males. in all those instances, the data in this paper show that if there

are anything to impact either the financing of these institutions or the financing of their students, that we would see serious and drops in terms of the representation of various minorities, low income and first generation students and teacher education, in s.t.e.m. and, of course, in the completion rates of minority males. i think the important pieces that she also brings into the paper are first that the stories of mint-serving institutions are still not entirely evident to the nation and, in fact, we still have to educate publishers and editors about what these are. all the time we try to put some of our publications out. and so sometimes are left out of the discussion, as she well points out in terms of national reports. though they can be severely impacted by any decisions that are made nationally. one of the things that i think probably we need to talk more about is understanding the

research capacity of these institutions because i think both marybeth, myself and several of us on this panel have been really looking at minority-serving institutions and trying to really tell the story, but i think really each institution also has to help develop its own research capacity in the way early in the earlier session dillard began to show how they were doing their own studies. our work with the institutions has indicated that very often they don't have the institutional research staff, the data are very hard to gather in particularly tribal colleges have a huge deficit in terms of being able to pull together the resources to not only report the data but also do and monitor and track the students. this is very important because it points to an institutional research issue. second, i think the paper really shows an important point in terms of the accomplishments are evident even with fewer resources these institutions are

doing something for the nation. and i think i value, for example, for first time i've seen the contributions of two-year institutions that are minority-serving institutions documented in this particular paper, and i thank you for doing that analysis. the third point -- and it's sort of something obscured in the paper and i want you to talk a little bit more about -- is diversity should be part of the metric. i think that's what deborah santiago was beginning to say, how do you incorporate that into the metric? one size fits all is not going to result because challenges are different for these institutions, their resources are different and also they are still making contributions. so i want to kind of open it up, if we could speak more about how diversity might be part of a metric, a national rating system, and deborah's talked about a possible rating component, but also that the notion of social equity and diversity has to be a consideration in all of this. >> thank you very much, sylvia.

now, there are three microphones up here in the front. please come up right away. we rushed everybody along to save time for your questions. go right ahead. >> good morning. thanks so much to the panelists. i'm in rau awe of the research presented today. my name is robin liam from higher ed consultancy. with the competing interests that higher ed has now regard to enrollment, needing to enroll a lot of international students, out of state students et cetera per se regarding funding, how might the focus stay on closing the racial college completion gaps at msis and hsis? >> stella? >> so, i think that's a very good question you know, my perspective comes from not only looking at the post secondary sector, so again, the part of what comprises a racial completion gap is not only what happens at the institution.

and so this doesn't preclude us from enrolling more students from other countries but again i'm going to keep pushing if we talk about the racial completion gap it's not just what's occurring at the institution. so this idea that the high schools in particular, k through 12 can be let off the hook so more collaboration, more conversations of if we're going to keep our graduation rates up, this is not a conversation that should only stay within higher ed. >> yes, can i just respond to that, too? look, we make choices every day, right? and institutions of higher ed, because they're getting less public support, are having to find means. they have to enroll international and out of state students to make the bottom line. and does that squeeze out the very time latinos and african-americans are becoming the majority in the clebollege population? i think so. the reality is it doesn't have

to be that way. we're making those choices because of expediency and facility and reaching back to our core as to why we are institutions and what it is we do is i think primary for us to consider who it is enrolling, why we're doing so and then why are we holding institutions accountable if we're going through a process that the students that we haven't educated in our system. that's not to say we sthoont enroll international or out of state students but the reality is if we're putting primacy to the bottom line financially and not who we're serving and finding that balance the new way, then i don't think we're doing a service as public institutions. >> you know, at our campus at ucla, we get less than 10% of our budget from the state of california. so this year there will be 30% of students from outside california on our campus, which is basically a survival strategy, but if we had a higher education act that gave recognition -- because we have a

very high level of pell grants and there's a lot of diversity on our campus, it would give universities a different incentive if they were given an additional recognition or funding as a result of those kinds of enrollments rather than being punished for them by cutting their budgets. >> thank you. >> hi, dora from the american dental education association. my question is for marybeth gasman. thank you, first of all, for the slides because that's primarily our interest. when it comes to msis on your own website you distinguish between hbcus. i understand it's not the same at hpcus, are they being left out when you're giving statistics about black students

at hpcus, that they should or should not be include? >> they are differently entities than predominantly black institutions. if you're doing research on historically black institutions which are created with the idea of educating black americans prior to 1965, right? that research is typically not going to include pbis unless you include them. for our center, we do pay attention to pbis, but if our research is on hbcus -- like we have a big s.t.e.m. project that is funded by the helmsley trust. one thing i would say there is the outcomes in s.t.e.m. for pbis are different than for hbcus.

they're just two dirt pots. leslie leads an organization that represents both. i do think that pbis need attention because they're growing in similar ways, not in the same way but similar ways to hsis, but they're two different groups. pbis used to be majority institutions, some even have separate alumni groups. so they're just very different. but we want to do research related to both kinds of institutions, but i would say that pbis get a lot less attention. >> so there's a lot less research on pbis? >> a lot less research. there's hardly any research on pbis. >> any of you out there looking for a good dissertation? >> you know, one thing i would say is they're very frustrated by that, too. i often have presidents of pbis

that call and say, why doesn't anyone care about our institutions? why doesn't anybody want to do research related to our institutions? so it is a ripe area and they're looking for attention. >> yes. >> hi, andress enriquez with the national science foundation. i'm still formulating my question. but two things first. i'm delighted that the workforce issue came up, particularly the issues around s.t.e.m. and my question is for stella and for deborah. we have this huge policy shift taking place in the k through 12 area of schools which is called a common core in the next generation science standards and the analytics on that in terms of minority students and in particular english language learners is that the number of dropouts is going to increase significantly. and those that are prepared for

college is going to really shift. and i'm wondering in terms of the precollege piece what can we do to -- we know some of those issues in terms of identifying youngsters who are going to be struggling getting into college from the work. and i'm wondering what we can do. and deborah, i'm wondering if the data points or the analytics that you're thinking about in terms of the data set that you need should not start in college but way beforehand, if that makes sense. >> so i think you bring up some very good points. let me start with this idea of access to -- i'm kind of reframing your question -- to rigorous courses and ell students. we actually use this database to look at the success of ell

students their college access and we found something very important. and that relates to the timing in the ell program. and we found that latino students who participate in the ell program for three years are actually likely to do better than latino students who waivered out of any program participation although qualified to it. so what we're seeing in texas is that some program participation for ell students does not hinder their college access rates but more than that leads them down a different path. and the biggest point of mobility here for those students and this translates for other groups is access to the rigorous course work in high school. so how common core will play out? texas is a different story with common core. but we do know that rigor matters and we know that ell students are not likely to have

access to those courses -- we've got reframe ell as not just exiting the program and learning english and entrance into the rigorous course work. >> i'll take the second half. the second half of the question since i think stella did a good job answering the first part. in the paper, there is a clear reference to looking at k-20 databases and that's what the data are based on so that they presided in their analysis. that reinforces your point about the data overall. i would say that while not identical, those data points i raised are collected in some manner in k-12 as opposed to pell, we have students participating in free and reduced lunch, that's kind of our basic proxy at the federal level for income level. we do have ways in k-12 to track it. we don't see variance on the very things in the paper that

stella raised and others are we don't see great changes in economic mobility at the k-12 level and that's often where we look in financial aid and say you can, you know, apply and have a year waiting and you won't see big differences. so the challenge becomes how do we create public policy that intervenes given the date that we currently have? i think the data are there. we're not using them and making sure whether it's at the k-12 or higher ed level, we're waitieig for these populations. we have to do is better job. >> while the gap is still big, it was frankly i was surprised not as big as i thought it would be. the biggest gap of concern in academic preparation and this will translate to however common core ticks out, is the there's something happening in schools where la tebows may be getting more access to rigorous core work and that's one of the

biggest differences that we see in racial participation and rigorous course work. >> thank you very much. very good question. i'll just take a second at the end to say, some of this panel relates to other work that we're doing. let me take your question, if it's a quick one. >> yes, thank you so much. janelle george with the naacp educational fund. i have a quick question for ms. santiago in terms of assessment. i understand your point and looking more towards weights different factors, how would you factor in and weight the preparation k through 12 lack of preparation or remediation issues with minority-serving institutions? and if i can sneak in one last question to ms. gasman, if you can talk about the impact of minority-serving institutions on women of color as well as men of color? thank you. >> sure. so i'll try to be fast so you

can get in there, too. how we weight the preparation college readiness, so things that i identified, so there is a statistical approach. we do it with a lot of ncs date to to weight the data that's out there. i won't get into the complicated part of that. we do have elements in what percent of students in an institution are taking remediation. we know that. that's a proxy at the college level for academic preparation at the k-12 level. we can do something with that. that's something i would definitely weight. the concentration of students that don't complete what we call the gateway courses, the 101 courses, that's clear. we know those data. we should be able to use them, and looking at what institutions are doing. if you have a high concentration of latin americans and latinos that don't get through, thats that to be weighted when you're looking for completion. completion is the goal, enrollment is the necessary component. you can't complete if you

haven't enrolled but looking at the profile of the students that are enrolling has to be weighted by the concentration of the students that have financial needs whether financial or academic. >> in this paper we did focus on men of color because we did try to focus on three critical areas that the nation is calling on right now. in a previous paper i wrote with valerie lundy wagner at columbia, and is one of my former students, we wrote a paper that looks at the gains of women of color. it's specifically at black colleges. i haven't looked at that across all msis, but at black colleges, if i were to be completely frank, the success of black colleges is due to women of color. i mean, to black women. i mean, the success is much higher with regard to black women. it's especially high in the area of s.t.e.m. they're making really, really great contributions in that area. so i haven't looked across all

msis. it would be a great thing to do. we definitely have that data and could look at that, but that's a really good question. >> i would like to add in our analyses in texas, black males disproportionately, overwhelmingly choose to go to an hbcu over white -- over white -- over black females. so while the stories of black women obviously need to be present in the conversation, the hot spots of where black males are attending college at least in texas, they overwhelmingly choose an hbcu. >> i just wanted to take a minute at the end before we thang the panel to just comment that you can find on our website of the civil rights project a lot of relevant studies that relate to precollege preparation. we've shown in our recent study of california, for example, segregating california's future

that latinos used to be in predominantly white schools in california. they're now in 86% non-white schools, 75% poverty. african-americans are in very similar situations but most likely as minorities within latino schools. these schools have much less availability of qualified teachers with experience especially in mathematics and science. they are very unstable schools in terms of enrollment in many cases. these are coschools that are systematically segregated and unequal. if we take those students into colleges that are ril wiling to take a chance on them and then punish the colleges that take them, we'd be making one crisis into another and cutting off mobility in a very serious way. so it's very important that we thing about all of these things simultaneously. i know it's hard in an environment of sound bites to do

that. but it's essential that we keep those things in our mind. so now after these two intense panels, let me thank this panel very much for a very illuminating discussion. >> friday a discussion about efforts in middle eastern countries to recover national assets stolen by former government officials. experts will be at the center for strategic and international studies. live coverage begins at 9:00 eastern here on c-span3. >> be part of c-span's campaign 2014 coverage. follow us on twitter and like us on facebook. to get debate schedules, video clips of key moments, debate previews from our politics team. c-span is bringing you over 100 senate, house and governor debates. you can instantly share your reactions to what the candidates are saying. the battle for control of congress.

stay in touch and engaged by following us on twitter, at c-span and liking us on facebook at facebook.com/cspan. now more from the ucla civil rights project conference on minorities in higher education. in this session university officials discuss the latest studies on the topic including how perspective students are evaluated by the admissions process. this is an hour and ten minutes. >> okay. well, i hope you're all refreshed and ready for an intense final panel here. so we're going to have three presenters on this panel. sylvia hurtado, who you met before, nicholas hillman, ann-marie nunez. why don't we start at the end

and put ann up first. >> thank you for the opportunity to be here. my particular paper is co-authored with wilda rodriguez who could not be here today. we focused on how the shortcomings of a post secondary ratings system could lead to shortchanging hispanic-serving institutions and their outcomes. so as today's research and other research indicates there are well documented differences in student and institutional characteristics between hsis and nonhsis that would lead hsis to have lower graduation rates on average than nonhsis. and so our analysis at the beginning of this paper -- in the previous session we talked about the possibility of adjusting for some of these student and institutional characteristics. and so in fact at the beginning of our paper, we find that when we account for student

characteristics, financial resources of institutions, policies at institutions that might influence completion, whether or not an institution has an open admissions policy, that the gaps in graduation rates, since that's the most commonly used measure being discussed right now to measure institutional performance six-year graduation rates, that the gap in graduation rates between hispanic-serving institutions and non-hispan non-hispanic-serving institutions disappears. this is consistent with what stella was talking about in the last session. so another topic that came up was the idea of a possibility of adjusting for these differences. so if we were to calculate a ratings system with the data that we have available in data sets like the integrated post secondary education system or

ipeds, that's really the only data system that's national that has data on all of the post secondary institutions in the u.s. we'll talk in a minute about how there's problems with missing data, but it has the most comprehensive data. so what some have talked about is using the method of regression adjustment to level the playing field in terms of assessing institutional performance of minority-serving institutions and non-minority-serving institutions. >> is it something like what deborah santiago was talking about? >> exactly what deborah santiago was talking about. and so in regression adjustment, the idea is to predict a graduation rate based on what we would expect given the student and institutional, financial characteristics, perhaps policies to promote college completion, admissions policies, and compare it with the actual graduation rate. and so if the expected graduation rate was higher than

the actual graduation rate of an institution, that institution might be seen as underperforming, but if the graduation rate that was expected was below what we saw to be the actual graduate of that institution, it might be interpreted as overperforming. one of the takeaways that's sort of been coming up is that msis and hsis are doing more with less. a lot of them may not be underperforming as they appear when we only look at outcomes as graduation rates but when we take into account these other factor, they may actually be doing better than we think. next slide. okay. so we went ahead and once we sort of established that the gaps disappeared, we then went ahead and examined different ways of looking at regression

adjustment. so one of the problems we initially came across with this data set ipeds is that we can only adjust for characteristics on which there are available data, so that regression adjustments may be especially useful for looking at groups, large samples of institutions and comparing them with one another like stella flores did her analysis, but they may be a little less useful in terms of looking at the performance of individual institutions when we break it out. ipeds has a lot of missing data, especially for hsis and this is also the case of minority-serving institutions in general. there are a lot of reasons for that and we talk about that in the paper. we also have statistics on it, but it's a significant amount of missing data. but perhaps one of the most important things we heard in the last session is that academic preparation, the course work that students take, how they perform in that course work in

high school and stella flores uses math as an indicator which is often used as an indicator, that's that the most important predictor of college completion for students. and that data are not available -- those data are not available in ipeds. and so as stella flores was talking about college completion is not a college issue but we can't, with the current data available in ipeds, we can't necessarily take into account that as completely as we might like to yet. go ahead. so one of the things that we did in this paper was we took -- we ran two adjustments where we -- in one of them we look at student characteristics, educational characteristics, financial context characteristics and we took what we could best get at in terms of

precollege which was whether or not an institution had an open admissions policy. that may not sound like precollege but that was the closest we could get to and the most available data for hsis. then we also -- there's also a common measure of looking at student characteristics of incoming admissions test scores, so incoming nact and s.a.t. scores. we ran two, one including the open adjustments policy and the test scores policy. what we found was whether a college seems under or over performing begins on the variables that are included in the model fp in our analysis nearly 30% of the institutions changed direction between when we included the admissions policy variable and when we included the test scores variable. and so the fact that the -- that

this calculation can change this much should raise red flags for the tying of financial aid to these results. we know that in 2015 the performance institutional ratings system is proposed and so we are trying to look at data shr issues, but if we go a step further and think about tying funding decisions to these ratings, that should really raise a red flag. next slide. and so this bring us to our recommendations. the first one is to collect more data known to be predictive of institutional performance. and so what came up in our last session was the importance of academic preparation and characteristics. so that's one example. another example that was raised is being able to track students from institution to institution, and so right now the graduation

rate measure used in ipeds is only students who begin at that institution and finish that institution and are full-time students. so -- and students who finish in six years. and so when we consider that a lot of the students we've been talking about, they may take longer to finish, they may not be full-time students and latino students in particular are more likely to transfer. those student are being left out of these conversations. so if it's possible to collect more data, i think one of the things that sylvia hurtado is going to talk about, too, is not only it is collecting data about the inputs and also marybeth gasman, but rethinking what it is these institutions contribute. what other measures are indicators of institutional performance might there be that these minority-serving institutions and hsis are

contributing? but the second recommendation is that we don't want to make this an unfunded mandate. a lot of these institutions don't have resources for data collection and reporting comparable measures, so providing capacity to do that would be a really good idea. i think part of this could also involve partnering with the national student data clearinghouse as deborah santiago mentioned, to be able to track students. that would be a good opportunity to track transfer students, for example, nationally, students who move institutions. resisting the temptation to implement high stakes poll sis based on inaccurate data and assessment is really key as well and an important takeaway from our analysis. finally, there are several higher education associations right now who are making efforts to find accountability metrics and to find reasonable ways of reporting them. and some of them involve

bringing in measures like transfer students. so to build on what those institutions are already doing and involve them as partners and not reinvent the wheel, the work that's already being done with state longitudinal data systems at the national clearinghouse with these systems and higher ed leaders who are already trying to account better for institutional performance. thank you. >> thank you very much, professor nunez. and we're going to turn now to nicholas hillman, but before we do that, deputy studley is here and we want to make space for her at the table. if you could just move down and grab another chair. >> there's a chair right here. >> okay. so i would turn to nicholas hillman for the next paper presentation. >> great. thank you for the opportunity to share my work here.

a work in progress for sure. so i'd love to have conversations and ideas about where this could go next, but the central argument here for this paper, which is called the differential impacts of college ratings case of educational deserts. the central argument here is a very straightforward one, a simple one that gets overlooked but one that's critically important for thinging about the educations of a federal ratings system and especially tying funds to a college ratings and that's place matters. so often in research and policymaking on college access, we focus on the process of opportunity. questions like did the student take ap courses, did the student apply for the fafsa, did they take the right steps in order to be prepared and enroll and persist in college? and procedural opportunity is obviously important. but there's also geographic

opportunity and the geography of opportunity is something that matters here, and that's what's going to be explored in this paper. it draws on what we might be familiar with, this idea of food deserts which is part of a family of research which is on communities built environments. we have research in social sciences that show low incomes racially segregated and high poverty communities across the country happen to have built-in environments where, for example, they have limited access to public parks, they have high density to industries that pollute, they've got all these characteristics that define the community including access to healthy affordable nutritious food in food deserts is what we might be familiar with, but we should think of community college as part of the built-in environment of our communities and on top of this moving away from the process of opportunity to the geography of opportunity will help us think about how people make choices about where to go to college simply based on

their built environment. not everybody has the luxury to shop around for college, to search across the country or even across the state for places to go to school. and so there are places around the country that we'll explore in just a second and this paper dives into a little bit and i think we're only scratching the surface but there are places around the country where these opportunities are mostly constrained highly constrained and not surprisingly cut along the lines of race and class. so if we hop to the next slide, we can see -- hopefully, we can see a map of the united states and this is broken up into all of the counties, 3,147 counties. sorry anybody from alaska or hawaii, not included in this map. but this gives us a mental image about spatial factors that could matter in choosing a college. so what i did in this study took all the counties, clustered them around what are called commuting

zones. this is not something i made up. this is something people have been using for years to try to find the commuting patterns of counties. this means in memphis, tennessee, for example, people cross state lines, that would be captured in a commuting zone, which is a cluster of counties that kind of share common economies, share common commuting patterns for labor. so makes sense to me that people would also be more or less willing to also commute to school if they live in a common commuting zone. so what this paper does is it shrinks these 3,000 counties down into 700 commuting zones. commuting zones are the unit of analysis here. within each commuting zone i wanted to see how many public colleges are even available? are there commuting zones that have zero, are there xho muting zones that only have one. why public college? because that's where most students enroll, it's their mission to serve the

communities. on the next slide this should appear, if we just take this four-county cluster in southwest texas, eagle pass, anybody from the area, i'd love to talk to you more and hear your thoughts. dr. nunez has more comments prepared. this student is represented by a large hispanic population, a community with high unemployment rates and low educational attainment rates. and this community set of four counties has about 100,000 people who live there. on the next slide you can see that a student who wanted to shop around for college in the eagle pass commuting zone, if they follow the logic you have our federal policymakers they would go to college navigator, put in their zip code, do a search for what kind of colleges are nearby, and this is what they would find. you can't see it, sorry.

they would find, you enare the your zip code on the left and you can say within 100 miles of my zip code, how many schools are there. there are four schools. the first two are two for-profit colleges, the same institutions, the third one is southwest texas junior college, the fourth one is also for-profit college. so a student who lives in this community is probably going to be place bound and if they're looking for colleges, have one of two options, go to the public community college or go to this for-profit school. so we have to really think about how people make choices in these communities. if we advance to the next slide, this takes a squik snipt of some of the details that might be interesting to us in terms of the differences in these two different institutions. apologize for turning around. but we can see the middle group is the community college, its largest program is general studies, has about 5 hss this

student most underrepresented minorities also high proportion receiving pell lower net price than the other school, the for-profit college that serves a tiny handful of students a few dozen mostly in cosmetology. if you're not interested in cosmetology and you live there, you really don't have any choices of where to attend. here's the tricky part. and there are several. and this actually opens up a whole slippery slope about our ratings system. one of the criteria that would probably be included in a federal ratings system is the cohort default rate the percentage of students who borrow in a school and default on their loan within three years of repayment. 30%, if you hit 30%, you're going to be on notice, if you do that for three years you lose access. that's a current policy. this community ledcollege is at% already. if that's included in a ratings system this college has a pretty high risk of being rated poorly. we can play this logic out

pretending that aid is eventually tied to a colleges rating that would probably mean that this college would lose access to aid or have it constrained in some way or another. a student, one of the 5 hss this students who are attending this institution, if they're trying to find a better place to go, where are they going to go? and on the next slide we can see this is not just a problem in southwest texas. and you advance one more slide. it's across the country. there are commuting zones that shas a similar environment to that i just described. in the paper i use this data set -- i'd be happy to share and explore other questions you may be interested with this data, but i've run a regression just to get a simple count of each institutions in the commuting zone according to the commuting zone's economic profile, unemployment rates and several other characteristics that might matter and be interesting to be able to find some patterns in what these institutions -- i'm sorry what these communities are

like. ideally there would be no patterns. this would be completely random. and it's not at all. these commuting zones are drawing a line the lines of race and class just like built-in environment inequalities are drawing the lines between race and class in other ways. so one in ten people in the u.s. live in one of these commuting zones, about one in five colleges, public colleges, i'm sorry, are located in serving these communities, and these communities tend to have growing hispanic populations. they tend to have what i'm assuming is going to be intergenerational poverty, intergenerational inequality because they have low attainment levels already. when we thing about policy context and the college navigator example started helping us to think about the implications, we think about the implications here, is it an

unintended consequence if that's educational deserts because it could have a deficit connotation to it but we've got to call it something and realize that the built environment is different and the opportunities differ depending on where you live. if a policy is going to accidentally affect colleges that are serving these communities it's disproportionately affecting communities and communities that are working class and have already low levels of educational attainment. so we have to think about the roll of place and that place matters and that the current discussion around college ratings is so focused on consumer information that it's dominated by people who maybe don't have a lot of experience living in these communities or having institutions represented in their frameworks. and so what we ought to think

about is the role of place and geography in maybe even giving colleges waivers if they're serving in these communities oar at least identifying which ones they are. thanks. >> thank you very much. professor hillman. we're going to turn for our last presenter of the morning to sylvia hurtado. >> thanks for having me here today to talk about some ongoing research at the higher education research institute. for some of you who have been talking about weighted kinds of measures about looking at graduation completion, we've been doing this for institutions who participate in our national surveys for almost 20 years. we've been working with campuses to create student input adjusted graduation rates providing them equations and more recently calculators so they can understand how they're doing relative to the kinds of students they're recruiting. the other thing that we've been doing is really using now more all of the national databases to really look at what we call efficiency scores. so i'm going to talk about work

related to those two areas. let me just start with the work we've been doing on metrics for understanding graduation rates and degree completion particularly in s.t.e.m. fields. both of these shs are vital to the economy and serving institutions are vital to the economic revitalization of diverse communities. i think nicholas' work is actually beginning to say where you have a college is very important but where they're located is also very important in terms of the communities they serve. the second thing i want to say is any national ratings system must be fair to students and fair to institutions that serve first generation and underrepresented groups. by underrepresented i mean african-american, latino, native american and asian american groups. what we know for those particular groups of students, those targets low income first generation underrepresented, they are less likely to graduate from any college that is they

are more likely to graduate from some colleges, they're more expectative obviously taking only those they know will succeed. but when we control for a whole range of factors we know those students are still less likely to graduate. let me get to the metrics and before i move to the first slid. i'm just showing results. the raw graduation rates are not as effective in really identifying the real challenges of educating large targets of these populations that's stand the most to gan from college. our work is to identify what we call engines of social mobility to help them understand where they are and relative to peers and also how they might move forward in terms of improving their degree completion. but what we know, we know that we need metrics that take into account the types of students institutions recruit and the

resources available. so one of our metrics. i'll start with student inputted adjustment measures using our freshman survey. one year we started, about 700 institutions that's used this data. combine that with the national clearing house data. so we're able to then produce predictors are graduation. and that institution, for every institution we're able to give them a score in terms of actual versus predicted. one of the projects we've just recently completed is really looking at those institutions at the highest performers in terms of student adjusted input measure. what we found of 356 institutions we had all that data on, about 108 were doing better than expected on all three groups. low income, first generation and underrepresented groups. of course, they varied in terms of resources. the first metric does not take

into account resources. the actual versus expected on the first slide, danny, i have basically three institutions that are 10 to 20 points higher doing higher than expected in terms of actually completing students. now we put a 50% line graduation rate kind of at the center so you'll see some institutions are below 50% but doing 10% to 11% points higher in terms of completion. there some are institutions that are expected to be below 50% but are doing above 50%. and some institutions, the top one is a public university that actually is started above 50% and they actually increase that rate. so in a way we're looking at some talent development that's happening with these institutions. so let me -- let's go to the next slide. all right. so we took of the 356 institutions, 108, we tried to

predict what was the characteristics of those institutions that were doing better than expected. and so the key predictors are those that you see on the slide. those institutions with -- that actually had lower selectivity, the amount of financial aid for first time students and also the instruction expenditures per capita. in some ways that's as it should be. students should be well supported. and also your instructional expenditures if you have more low-income first generation, underrepresented groups you need to direct your resources toward those types of students. so that's sort of one way to look at it. another way to look at it is we use the time ratings. if you've gone online, time has a rating system, a ranking system based on graduation, affordability and accessibility. then they have a holistic rank that combines all three.

so we use the time ratings. if you go to the next slide. to compare our institutional performance indices. and, really, what you see is for the 16 campuses that we identified that were actually had an -- had an expected rate that was, well, let's -- they had an actual rate that was 10 to 20 points higher for low income first generation and underrepresented students, that they -- a lot of them do rank higher an the time graduation rank but those with the higher proportion of minority students will be ranking lower. so we know that msis, even though they're doing better than expected, 10 to 20 points higher than what they're expected given their student body, they're going to be -- any kind of school rating system. the next slide is really using the time holistic rank which is

by using access graduation and also affordability. you see then that there's no relationship between our performance index using -- for underrepresented minority students and also this ranking system. but there are a new institutions that are very high on both, ours and also holistic rank. for the most part, others are going to be ranked lower. the other thing that you find is those at the top 16, they rank lower anesthes and graduation because they're probably less affordable and less accessible. that is to the top 16 that are doing well. they might have small numbers of low income, first generation students. okay. the next one -- the next one really looks at our s.t.e.m.

efu efficie efficiency. it's focused an first time, full-time freshman. we used the data including transfers using five years of ipeds data to understand completion. we used what's called frontier modeling which compares similarly situated institutions based on resources. faculty labor, student enrollment and expenditures per student. in a way, this is another way of identifying top performers. one of the things we found and that's a much longer paper and much more papers you can access online is that for the most part, private institutions come out looking better on most kund of rankings. what we find, the public institutions are more efficient. we compare the s.t.e.m. completion rate with efficiency scores. we find that minority serving

students are more efficient at producing s.t.e.m. degrees for blacks and latino students respectively. the other thing is because these particular efficiency scores have not controlled input, that's different kind of measure, is more selective institutions do better than expected. well, in terms of efficiency. but what we've done is really then broken down the selectivity so you can take into account access to find actually the most efficient kinds of institutions. what we're doing next is trying to visit these institutions. it should focus on the degree completion of minorities as well as institutional resources. they help to identify top performers and social mobility and i'm hoping that a rarchging or ratings system nationally would actually be actually used for that.

not necessarilye iingically limit financial aid. they are really serving as engines of social mobility. even though their rates may not look that hot, we're able to see what they are able to do with their students is amazing. one of the questions that came up earlier, what do we do? how do we handle the input? how do we handle some of these things? these are only four year institutions we looked at. two-year institutions are really doing the bulk of this work. that's additional areas to look at. >> thank you very much. i'm going to turn to lorel espinoza representing a.c.e. >> let's play musical chairs for a minute here. thank you, gary. and on behalf of a.c.e. center for policy research and

strategy, i do want to thank the authors, the other respondents and those in attendance today for contributing to this important dialogue. turning to the paper by my colleague behind me and her co-author, i applaud you for taking the lead on attempting to do what many have said would be a good approach to the president's ratings plan which is to rate institutions based on estimates of how they should be performing compared with how they actually are performing. as you'll see when you read the paper and i hope everyone can while a perfectly reasonable approach in theory as your analyses bear out, the approach is flawed and sheds light an how other analyses that may attempt to do will run into the same danger. and that is the data collected by the department of education, particularly the ipeds data used in the paper is wholly

inadequate for the purposes of rating institutions. now beyond the missing data that you cite as problematic, and it is, and beyond the instability of the regression adjustments, given a limited number of data points that fail to capture complex environments as is borne out in the paper, there's really another underlying data reality which is not new. i know for many people in the room but it's something that is worth addressing here. and that is that the ipeds data, and if that is used to rate hispanic serving institutions in particular and other minority serving institutions, it's really not reflective of the students that attend those institutions. now we at a.c.e. have done some looking at the national post secondary stoont aid study which is another data source out of the department that's very robust. nationally representative but is not a census data as is ipeds. and we see to illustrate my

point that 49% of latinos are enrolled part time. that's half of latino students. these students are not going to be represented in the outcome measures in ipeds since ipeds does not currently track outcome measures for part-time students. 65% delay post secondary enrollment. that's another group that won't be recognized. so thissing for t further means institutions that serve these students well will go unrecognized. now building on the first and second recommendations in the paper, i want to caution against the need to collect more data. what we need, and i'm certain that the authors would agree is to collect accurate data. and, yes, this absolutely includes a better accounting of academic preparation given its relationship to retention and to completion. so the arguments in the paper, in fact, raise another issue,

which is central for consideration. and that is how the department and other agencies, and this was referenced by a speaker earlier, can actually empower and incentivize institutions. and i know to not only report out data but to actually utilize their own data to improve student outcomes. so this means in addition to the department needing to rethink its census data, the department and other agencies actually have within their powers the to assist institutions and doing a better job of utilizing date to identify performance and resource gaps and to meaningfully act on that information through institutional policy and practice. and this really means allowing institutions the capacity as was mentioned to have more institutional research efforts within their very own walls. i just wanted to say a couple more things. i applaud nick's paper for addressing environment. we have some work coming up at the center for policy research

and strategy to look at how state context really influences institutions and regional context as well. and i just want to say quickly, we know that institutions of the same sector can reveal vastly different characteristics, depending an the strength of the k-12 system that surround those institutions. the make-up of their community. the students they are serving, the policies around transfer, around undocumented student access to higher education and i really want to applaud a point made earlier. i think it was to look at state data and for the federal government to in fact, partner with states and to incent states to use their data to allow for accountability measures. a final point, i'm almost out of time, i want to let people know that we have a paper that came out earlier this year that looks at the college choice behavior of low-income students. and there's a paper forthcoming for the white house initiative

on educational excellence for hispanics which actually shows the way that hispanic students choose colleges. if we believe that the ranking -- excuse me, the ratings system is a de facto ranking, which i, in fact, think it will become, we know hispanic students don't use rankings. in fact, around 16% of latinos cited in harry's own data, that rankings were an important factor in their choice process. so congratulations again to the authors an their paper, particularly nunez and rodriguez and thank you for having me. >> mary beth? >> all right. let's see. i guess i need a microphone. >> okay. so i'm responding to silvia hurtado and her colleague's paper. i'm going to be short and sweet here because i am short and sweet. i thought i'd get that in there.

so i really enjoyed silvia's paper. i wanted -- i think it's really important that you read this paper for a number of reasons. one of the things i liked the most is in the very beginning, silvia talks about how they wanted to use metrics that were fair to both students and institutions. and i really like the use of the word fair because i think all too often when we see research and when we see a lot of national reports we don't see kind of the fair use of metrics. and another thing i thought was really interesting about the paper is that she does a really good job of reminding us how for so long researchers have been calling for measures that consider student inputs as well as institutional inputs. and it's been so long, right? and yet we still have all of these efforts that don't consider student input. we have all of these ways of

looking at institutions that don't take into account who the students are that attend the institution yet we've been asking for so long for this to not happen. and i'm just -- i guess i'm wondering when policymakers will start to listen to that and maybe we can just stop it right now, right? that would be great. and the other thing that i thought was really important is that the work that silvia and her colleagues are doing, it helps us to look at msis and really dig a little bit deeper and try to figure out why they are achieving greater efficiency and success at many of these institutions. i was really glad you said you'll start visiting them, right, because we do know that there is success taking place at a variety of different msis. but we don't really dig deeper and your point about the institutional research that you brought up earlier, which i

think at some larger hsis, it's not as big of a deal. but it really is a large problem at many rnd resources hsbcs and smaller hsis as well. and that it's very difficult to collect institutional data. that's really important. two things i thought of when i read the paper, i hope that people won't take your very, very good research and start using it as a litmus test. so i really worry about that, and i hope that you'll caution people against that because i could see people taking it and saying, well, it's not efficient, and what i would love to see happen to the institutions that aren't -- that don't come out as being efficient is that perhaps they are given a mentor institution that is of a similar type or size or maybe within the same sector that can work with them to become more efficient. and so i hope that will be one of the recommendations in all that you do because i can just imagine someone coming along and

saying, well, silvia hurtado says -- and so that would be the one thing i would want you to think about. but thank you. great work. >> i'm going to make some comments across the papers, but in particular, my colleague nick hellman's paper, which i want to recommend that you take a look at in full. i think this is a really important and different analysis. he was able to give you just a sort of taste of it now. one of the most important foondings in dr. hur totado's pr is that foonding grant aid and investing in terms of instructional spending pays off. in other words, the inputs actually matter. and she shows this in the paper, and it's kind of remarkable that we've lost sight of this. and in this discussion about accountability for higher education, the question should,

therefore, be, what is this policy effort going to do to help ensure that more students get access to those sorts of resources? if those inputs matter, what is accountability going to do to increase the likelihood the students who need those things in order to graduate are going to get them? will it bring new resources to the institutions that don't currently have them? will it create better matches between students who need to be educated in high resource settings and institutions that actually possess those resources? is there any indication that that in fact is going to occur? i don't think so. it's extraordinarily doubtful. in fact, what it looks like is going to happen is that the institutions that don't have those things, that don't have much instructional spending for their students or enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students will simply be poorly rated n cut out.

so where is that going to leave us? does it mean that disadvantaged students are, therefore, going to know because an institution was badly rated that they should avoid it? whether or not they know it, what nick's paper shows is they are unlikely to be able to do anything about it. are you going to close the poorly rated institutions and leave them with no option? is that a better scenario? these seem like pretty fundamental and basic questions to ask, but they have no answers. and they haven't been addressed. we know within k-12 schooling we closed some failing schools and called them failing and parents still wanted to send their kids there. why? because they are the schools in their neighborhoods. where are they're supposed to go? just because someone declares the school bad because it has a lot of black and brown kids in it doesn't mean that it is in fact, a bad school. so the problem with this accountability movement is not

its interest in institutional responsibility. it takes a starting presumption with the idea that schools don't care about the outcomes of their students. i don't think i've ever been to a school, public, private or for-profit, frankly, that actually doesn't care. there are some, but for the majority, they do. the problem is the system preempts any effort to establish equity and adequacy of resources among schools and does nothing to grapple with the facts of the system that expose the disadvantaged stoonts to the most risk. it's the worst part of our system right now. how risky it is for somebody with disadvantage to enter our system and how likely it is they'll end up with debt and no degree. so i think if we want to experiment with this accountability, we ought to start in a safe place. start with schools that have high resources and are using substantial federal funds. there are more than 500 private institutions today with an average endowment of more than $100,000 per student who are using federal tax dollars to

cover their cost of attendance which are over $43,000 a year. students attending these expensive schools are using federal financial aid to cover 20% of their cost of attendance. what's the national return on that investment? let's start our grand experiment in those settings. where those students are at no risk of noncompletion, but we have significant concerns about the resources that we are spending. why not begin there, rather than in a place where we're experimenting with the poor and disadvantaged students and limiting their educational opportunities? >> thank you. >> i'm just going to comment briefly on nicholas hellman's paper about the case of education desert. and has been mentioned, one of the most important contributions of this particular paper is the

importance of geography in terms of students' college choice. as he states about 7 in 10 students choose to stay close to home and hoe important a local post secondary is. and 10% of the u.s. population lives in an education desert. as we've also heard, such institutions are more likely to receive lower scores or they would be on a lot of the metrics we've been talking about in an accountability system. so utliosing these institutions for low scores by awarding them less finishesing could strain their capacity to further serve their students and in some places could lead these institutions to close. this would disproportionately hurt families for whom that may be the only or one of a few post-secondary options. one of the things that i would encourage us to all consider and for hillman to develop is to emphasize that part of the

limitation of post-secondary options in certain geographic options is influenced by the historical context of those areas and as lorelle raised, state context, local policy context, and this includes historical segregation and discrimination in areas such as texas and other areas of the south. where mexican americans and african-americans have been concentrated and often have had few post-secondary institutional options. so at the federal level, the more land act in 1862 sought to bring post-secondary options to less settled areas of the u.s. maybe education or the frontier at the time. but many states continue to bar the enrollment of african-americans in their colleges and universities. so the establishment of a second more land grant act was required

to encourage those states to build separate institutions for african-americans. and subsequently funding from higher education act of 1965 was also -- was also awarded to those institutions in order to continue their important work. but one of the things that is also important is to consider legal context. so the legislative bills in history and also legal context. in the institution where i work at has been directly impacted by this. in the late 1980s there was a legal case ruling that texas adinequitably funded post-secondary institutions. particularly not funding those institutions that had served large proportions of mexican americans, including many of those along the south texas border. and deborah santiago has also written about this. in effect identifying that south texas was an education desert.

and we see that that is still the case with one of the counties that nick hellman talked about. people in my own department actually teach students at that institution that nick hellman identified -- we actually bring a program out to them so that they can have access to doctoral education and educational leadership and policy studies. and even though i live in a metropolitan area, even though we're located in a metropolitan area, we have to reach out to them. we're still held to the same standards. texas is one of the 25 or so states with performance funding. we're still held to the same standards of meeting outcomes as other universities like university of tixas at austin that serve probably half as many low-income students or fewer and we serve over twice as many latino students. and i think an important point

about the education deserts is that there may be a ripple effect further away from those regions. institutions in my county, it's not necessarily an education desert but we're trying to make up for what's going on in some of the counties around us. and if we also get penalized, then that has even greater ramifications. so i just think that's important to consider in future policy. >> thank you very much. our final commentary this morning is going to be in a sense, this session is trying to bring researchers to talk to people about pending policy issues. fortunately, we have a policymaker here who is in the middle of this discussion and was generously willing to come and meet with us today and to talk about her reactions to what she's heard and what's going on in the government. so deputy under secretary jamie

studley is our honored guest at this session, and we are very pleased to have her with us today. >> thank you, gary. it's good to be doing something with you and the center again. and i am not the only one here working an this project. you'll be glad to know some of my colleagues are here as well because your questions are our questions. the president's challenge, if it has done nothing since last august 22nd, is along with a lot of other work by many of you along the way, is moving the conversation and the focus to better questions. and the best question of all, we can frame it in lots of different ways is, what institutions are successfully contributing to college completion with a meaningful education for students with the least income and the least historic opportunity? that's the way we're coming at it, and i sense in just literally this year that we are asking smarter questions with

that as the objective. to do that, we have to ask what practices, conditions, investments, lead to those positive outcomes. what educational choices, what kinds of recruiting and selection process. what financial aid practices and student supports. and linkages with jobs and the workplace will actually help us accomplish those things. and so one alternative to trying to squeeze months of thinking and reading into five minutes is to simply say, yes, fair question. every question that i've heard and read in the papers is a very appropriate one and you would be pleased to know that the conversations that we are having are eerily similar to the ones i've heard this morning and that i've engaged with with some of you and that some of my colleagues have been having with

many of you over time. we are all trying to think about how to design methods that would capture important differences and advance our policy goal. my own personal test when we have something to test would be whether the places that you think are doing a good job and impressive job in turning access into quality completion are actually well rated in the process. that's going to be my home version of whether what we do is working. and that the ones that you worry about across the sectors, the ones that's you say that place truly is struggling. i would hesitate to let my nephew go there, are the ones we should also be identifying as worthy of concern. it should be very practical and logical. and one of the correctives is -- one of the realities is that we will not leap to a proposal. we will have continued

conversations and what we think is the best possible amalgamation of the issues will be published in draft for further and serious conversation. so we will want the expertise of all of you to help us. as we think about the design, let me pick a few items because i want you to know at a more granular level how we are thinking about some of these. we are thinking about, for example, student academic preparation. but given that not all students do the same kinds of things an their way to a post-secondary experience, we're also thinking about what exists and what markers there might be. is there a way to evaluate high school and yet we would say not everybody comes right from high school. the zip codes. for what home at what moment, but do they tell us something about the academic preparation in a way that's usable enough to

be helpful? we know -- i haven't spoken to a single person about this process who isn't well aware the ipeds graduation rate is a very limited indicatoindicator. folks like you know that it is going to be better. it will account better for part-time and transfer students within a couple of cycles. what can we do with that? how will that affect things over time and will that solve the problem or are there other ways to get at the actual population? first generation status is another element that we're thinking about. one area that you -- that i didn't hear you talk about that's also much on our minds, if you want to go on beyond is the whole area of looking at post graduate outcomes where we have graduation. we can look at things like repayment or cohort default rate. but looking at whether people

work, whether they work at above the bare minimum, whether they are better off in terms of earning capacity after school is an important set of questions and one that students and families know matter to them. but it, like all the others is complicated and freighted by existing discrimination in the marketplace. we think about whether to use earnings information early in someone's career or a little bit later after there's more stability. but a counter narrative is the further out people are, the more their earnings may be affected by race and gender bias. by local and geographic income realities. i don't have to tell all of you this is hard work but i want you to understand that we are working as hard as you are to understand what those are. gary asked me to think about some questions for you, and one

of them that i would have besides how to accommodate all of this and find something that does have meaning and achieves -- incorporates the kind of weights that you are thinking of strongly enough, seriously november that we get answers to what schools are indeed contributing to real outcomes for low-income and previously excluded people. how do we do that to serve the dual purposes of this system to the extent that there are both consumer student family counselor desires to understand, immediate choices that people have to make based on their own options and what might happen for a student at a particular school and that there are policy and potentially federal investment decisions to be made. would you do the same things? would you do different things for them and if so, what would those differences be because it's been pointed oults very

thoughtfully that when you're trying to do two things, you may need variations for those two purposes. and yet there are challenges in using different data. we would love the field's help on that. we -- it's very likely that we would have some experience with ratings and some ability to try them out and improve them before proposals came forward to congress which would have to approve any effects on the way federal student aid or other federal resources are allocated based on a ratings system. so our hope is that we would get -- we would find we had achieved those goals, possibly even revised it to satisfy the questions that you had asked, and be able to use ratings for several different purposes.

one is, this is the rare play where somebody invests $150 billion and doesn't have any accountability for how it is spent in terms of the rultesult that are achieved. we have very soft, subjective, informal measures. but to sustain national confidence in the student aid system and to be able to continue to justify that we are getting what we want as a nation from it, which is education student and education results for all, we need to have a political structure of support that is strong enough to keep us putting precious and highly competed for federal funds into student aid. one very clear purpose is also to help push the state reinvestment in student