accessing completion but specifically how to create stronger partnerships with states so they continue to invest in public post secondary education. >> thanks for having all of us. it's great to be here. the report is a fabulous start to a conversation that we need to have. as you noted, david, there has been systematic disinvestment by states throughout the great recession in higher education. i think it's critically important as states' economies and the national economy improves for us to remind our partners at the state level that where he this are is not okay. that taking what was a fairly balanced three party compact between states and families and the federal government and unbalancing that in a way that as you have shown really does

disadvantage the students that we are most concerned have access to and through college needs to change and it needs to change dramatically. in the department, we have as you well know, carmel, we have for the last several years put in our budget proposal opportunities for the federal government and states to work together on many of the lines of contact we're discussing here this morning. the state higher ed performance fund that we have proposed would seek to reward states that create stable funding platforms, that make sure that their commitment to low income students remains in place and that would also move states

toward a more performance based budgeting overall. so we want to continue to have those conversations. we see great virtue in aligning federal resources with a state's willingness to fund higher education and to make that funding centrally available to low income and middle income families who we need to get into college and across the finish line if we're going to meet the president's goal and i think if we're going to meet our moral imperative of providing opportunity and access to the middle class for families across the country. >> ralph in the face of pretty deep cuts in terms of state investment, your institution has been able to make strides in

terms of completion. can you talk a little bit about how you are able to do that? in our report we are calling for greater state investment but also changes in policies at the institutional and state level that hopefully bring down costs but increase outcomes. it seems like you have done the latter. >> we have. first of all, thank you, carmel, thank you most particularly for including a voice from the universities and colleges on this panel. while it's a thrill to be here with policy leaders, we're the ones that have to implement that policy and that sometimes comes with challenges. what's interesting about the university of south florida, as you pointed out, it is a large institution, it's a young institution. most particularly, it's a top 50 research university public or private in the united states. and i mention that because all too often it's the research universities that lose sight of the focus on serving the needs of the students and enhancing student success. over the past six years, we have seen an 8% increase or an eight point increase in our freshman retention rate, a 15% increase

in our six-year freshman graduation rate, which only tells part of the story. because a large number of students entering the university of south florida come to us as transfer students as well. we have also seen an increase in graduation rates there from 60% to 68% in four years over -- in recent past. so we're pleased in the direction we're moving. we're not yet satisfied. i think first and foremost, it's been our institutional wide commitment to student success that really has lifted all of the students in terms of demographic profile at the university. yes, we have seen a growing number of pell recipients from 19% six years ago to 41% of our undergraduate are pell recipients. that's as much i think a product of the economic downturn as it

is any particular effort on our part to recruit lower income or middle income students. but we know those are the ones that are most significantly impacted by states declining investment and efforts to increase tuition to help offset some of those limitations. >> so what steps did you take in order to achieve the level of increases in completion that you are seeing? >> well, first and foremost, we have raised expectations. we have raised it's everyone's responsibility. but we have raised expectations with regard to college preparedness and readiness of students, whether those students are coming to us from k-12 community or through our community colleges and state colleges.

we have raised expectations with regard to student engagement through a number of initiatives. freshman are required to live on campus. and we know that while that adds to the cost of attendance, we have implemented some initiatives to offset the impact of that requirement, because we full well that students that engage fully in life on campus are more likely going to be retained and progress toward graduation. our shift has been from inputs -- a focus of inputs to three puts throughputs and outputs. we have enhanced student support -- financial support, academic support, structures and scaffolding student's experience. because, again, with so many students who are first in their

family, they don't have the privilege of a network at home to help guide them through what is sometimes a complex and even confusing pathway to completion. and we don't stop at completion. today, our focus is on placement as well. placing our students in high skilled, high paid jobs as well as providing them the support necessary to progress to graduate school or to first professional programs if that's the path they're pursuing. >> david, at the community college level, as our report points out, community colleges

were hit harder in many ways that four-year institutions. so you're educating more students than ever, fewer investments from the state level. do you see your institutions making the kind of choices that ralph mentioned in terms of investing in things that help children -- students get to graduation and having to reallocate funding? how are the institutions dealing with it. >> that's a good question. i think he would should start with the factual grounding irrespective of enrollment or changes in state funding, which is the fact that the colleges educate students for less cost than the other sectors of higher education on a per student basis. what we saw in the recession is what we call a double whammy as it were where we had cuts in funding as your report points out along with dramatically increased enrollment. 22% increase enrollment over the three highest years, the peek years of the recession, which has tapered off. so starting with that very

limited amount of resources or relatively a small amount of resources that colleges have, there is an ongoing tension i think it's fair to say between the desire of the presidents and deans on campus to provide as much education as they possibly can. that is, faculty members in the classroom, whether full-time, permanent or whether ad juyct, which is important to get more students to graduate. we have to say that for all the attention that has been placed upon the need for our colleges to graduate more students, progress in that area is stubborn to come by. i mean, we're dealing with low income students. of course, they are higher percentages are from the lower two income core tiles and was case ten years ago, which is a very disturbing trend on a number of different ways. so we have lower income students. correlated with that is the fact

that they're not -- most of them in fact are prepared to do college work. when i say that by virtue of the fact that more than 60% of our students are tested to be in need of some remedial work. you are starting with low income, relatively unprepared population. you want to get them to graduation. as you well know, and the audience knows, there's a strong correlation between income and propensity to graduate. what the colleges would like to do is have the mrn to provide support services that help students get to graduation. the counseling they need, the academic enrichment services that they need, the further advising in terms of their personal lives, because one of the things that our presidents point out to us constantly is you are not just dealing with

educational deficits for a lot of students, but these are people who as you were mentioning, that the students don't necessarily have models of college going in their own families. so they have really got to find their way in an environment that's not natural for them the way that it is for other students. figuring out a way to triage the limited resources we are talking about at a time where resources are less available than they have been, also at a time where we responded to obama's challenge to graduate more students and it's not unique to the president has really been a difficult needle to thread for a lot of our colleges. but having said that, one thing that i do feel very positive about, not as a practitioner but very positive about is the fact that without a doubt the emphasis on completion and the need to get students to attain an educational credential is enhanced from even five years ago. the way i look at it is that no community college president can get away without having an elevator speech about what his college is doing in terms of working on completion. all that that elevator speech implies about the real commitment across the campus to get students to graduate. the last thing i would say is that while it absolutely requires leadership to increase graduation and get more students to complete their programs, there has to be investment across the campus.

that includes particularly the faculty, which traditionally have not had the same incentives that they might have needed to take individual responsibility for getting students to get up on the podium at the -- and the stage at graduation ceremony and get the sheepskin. >> sarah, what are young people doing to advocate for themselves in this regard? is the focus -- are they directing their energy towards state policy leaders to get increased investment in public institutions? are they focused on the price versus quality or completion aspects of the issue? >> thanks. young people are getting engaged on this issue in many different ways.

we have activists who are directly targeting their state legislators to say you need to invest in us. they are targeting members of congress. i think when we have so many peoples who will go on the floor and will say things like, i painted houses over the summer to pay for my college tuition and then we laugh at the idea of a minimum wage job being able to pay for a whole year of anything in college. those are -- young people are calling out members, they're called out their electeds to say you had a better deal than we do and that's not okay. on the same account, we're also seeing young people who are speaking out to what you were saying before about some of the other social services that are needed for young people when they are in school. if you look at the millennial generation, we're the most diverse, 40% of us are young

people of color, but also 15% of us were not born in the united states. so when you see young people, dreamers in particular, calling for resource centers, when we have young people who are first in the generation and have had to do things like translate for their parents to access other services in the community, we're needs to see a whole wrap around support for the young people so they can academically do well, but also socially take care of themselves, take care of their family so they can succeed in school. similar to lgbt students, because 6% of our generation identifies as lgbt. those are all things needed so young people can do well academically. they have been doing an amazing job calling out electeds but folks within the university system to say here is what we need to succeed. >> ted, we have called for a major investment from the federal level to create incentives for states to increase their investment. the administration called for similar program. given the level of activity in congress that might not happen in the short-term. hope it will. if it doesn't happen, what are the other levers you have at the federal level to address these issues? >> it's the conversation that we're having, what can we be

doing while we set the big targets up and they're important to have? because i think as your report is doing, it starts to change the conversation. so i think it's important to not walk away from the big challenges. i don't think any of us are, which is great. but there are other things that we can be doing. you were centrally involved, for example, in helping to craft the first in the world grant competition, which we put out to the higher ed community a little over six months ago. the response was overwhelming, 500 institutions put in applications for innovative practices that they wanted to experiment with to try to improve access and improve outcome, drive down cost or accessibility. the fact that 500 institutions, to your point, the institutions are responding saying, we have to do our part, too. so at the state level, i think

our work is to help identify some of the things that we're learning from the first in the world grantees and scale those up so that they can become more common state practice. in the same vein pshgs one of the areas in which the k-12 and state have a common interest is teacher preparation. in that area of overlap, we are working with states now to create a set of regulations that will put more tools in the hands of states to be able to work with institutions to raise the level of teacher preparation, which we think is a key lever not just in the higher ed world but in the k-12 world if we're going to really seek to bring high school graduates to the door of college ready to do college level work. so there are tools around

innovation. there are tools around empowering states with new policies and regulation that we're certainly pursuing. >> ralph and david, to that point of the connection between the postsecondary system and the k-12 system, we point out in the report that one of the areas of cost that seems surmountable is the fact that -- i think david mentioned, so many students are showing up on campus and they're not ready for college level work, which means they have to take remediation courses, extends their time to degree. there's a cost to the student, increases their debt, cost to society because we are teaching them the same content twice. are there ways that your institutions can help tackle that issue which is really a k-12 issue, but help ensure that by the time they get to your door they are ready for success at college -- at the college level? >> absolutely. we work on a regular basis with

our local school districts in providing precollege programs, summer programs in particular for students that are looking to move on to postsecondary education. most particularly though, as i mentioned earlier and to david's point, we have a very close articulation and transfer agreement relationship with our community colleges and state colleges. one of the great advantages of being the state of florida is that we have a well established two plus two articulation. we have a common course numbering system that i noticed you mentioned in your report as being an essential mechanism, i think, for streamlining passage

from -- and preparedness in community colleges to universities. we're actually working toward jointly admitting students to the university as they're admitted to our partner in community colleges and state colleges. so they receive a joint admission letter. yet, these are the conditions that they must meet along the pathway to enter the four-year university. we recognize the strain that our feeder institutions are facing. tuition for students in a community college or state college in florida is about $3,000 a year compared to what we think is a very reasonable $6,500 per year in the state university system. again, that's only part of the story, because the full cost of attendance is closing in on $20,000 a year. we realize that's an immense strain on the coffers of limited income families. >> before i comment directly on your question, let me just say that i think it's important to understand and appreciate the

broader context of the relationship between the federal government and its roll in higher education traditionally and state government and even local government. the reason why it comes to mind in this particular context, because much of what's being done in this area is really being done at the state and local level. so there's a question about, what is the best largely new role that the federal government might play in this area? we know that the traditional role of the federal government has been providing student financial assistance to a greater or lesser extent. and i would be remiss if i didn't note in this context as we talk about the impact of the

great recession that the funds that the congress and the president provided in 2007 with the ccraa moving on through the higher education act, reauthorization of 2008, the stimulus bill, the increase in pell grants, the american opportunity tax credit provided played an essential role in plugging a hole that would have been created otherwise through the increase in tuition which was caused by state budget cuts. so the government through just providing dollars to students from our point of view the federal government did something that even a few years down the road from that deserves to be remembered and applauded. and we need to make sure that we continue to keep that level of support for students. because they are at this point in time dependent upon it. so in terms of your question what our colleges can do to help students be more prepared, in fact, they're doing a tremendous amount right now that i think is

some to some extent unheralded. probably most people here at least are aware of the fact that community colleges provide in almost all cases some type of dual enrollment, which is an opportunity for high school students to acquire community college credits while they are in secondary school. they might be having the courses delivered to them at their high school. they might be going to community college to take the courses. but this concept of dual enrollment is relatively new, although it's very broad based at this point. and it was designed interestingly and importantly not for your classical advanced placement type student who is an honor student in high school, an a or b student, who students maybe on the margin of college participation.

maybe they weren't sure they were going to go, they didn't know enough about it. the original animating idea behind this was to give the students who might not have attended exposure to college. so that's really being done on a very broad basis right now. so that does play a role in preparing, orients students to be ready for community college. another thing the colleges are doing -- this is more at the local level than the state level -- is you find many presidents at institutions doing very aggressive reaching out to the local high schools to simply increase college awareness for those students who maybe don't know about student financial assistance, they don't know the various options available, they might not know that if they attain an associate's degree at the community college, they will have transfer opportunities to a four-year institution and do all the sorts of things. in fact, some of the presidents

are so effective, i heard one griping that he was providing great resources and then they were going to the four-year institution. by that as it may, they -- it is something that the colleges i think are doing. but it's not so much a state-based policy in most cases but really up to those individual presidents to do that. i guess one other thing i want to mention, because it is so interesting and i think potentially helpful in increasing college readiness is the administration of placement tests at community colleges require almost all students to take when they enroll at the institutions to make sure they are ready to do the community college work. in more -- in a number of states and local areas, the institutions in some cases on their own dime are administering the placement tests. there are a couple of tests that are commonly used across the country. and then letting the students know whether they are ready or not for college level work. if they are not, and these tests would be administered no later than 11th grade, then they will take what is the remedial course work in high school where they might have been thinking that they were just fine to do a course work at a community college or four-year institution.

so they come to the door much better prepared than otherwise. i think these few innovations stand to increase college readiness in a dramatic way. we have heard about the common core. but i think other things which is consistent with it really stand to make students much better prepared when they enter our institutions or other ones. >> quickly on david's point about administering the placement tests earlier. i think it's an example of a great opportunity for state policymakers, because there are few states, california is one of them, where they imbed those placement oriented questions in the regular state testing regimen so that sophomores and high school juniors can get an accurate picture of what they need to do to really be college ready on day one. i think that those kinds of policies take what is good institutional practice and lift

it up to the level of a state i policy decision all to the benefit of the students. >> if i could also add, with regard to financial aid and particularly for students who are first in their family to go to college, not all of those families fully understand fatsa. they fully understand the federal funds available to help them. we do participate actively in college goal sunday. we work closely with families and community organizations to help fill out the federal forms, which incidentally have been tremendously simplified and improved in recent years. thank you for that. but we still find in florida where our pell grants have more than doubled over the past six

years, we still find that we leave $138 million a year of pell funding on the table. florida isn't alone. there's an awful lot of available pell awards that aren't utilized. and we all need to do i think a better job of communicating and facilitating the application process. >> the bills that david mentioned that dramatically increase student aid, the student advocacy groups played a huge role in getting those across the finish line. do you see the millennial generation getting engaged on this issue, not just additional aid but demanding that the k-12 system give them what they need to be ready for college as well? >> i think so. i mean, especially with the points made about remedial courses. i have mentored young people who when they are ready to go to college, they realize they have to take remedial courses and it

adds on the time. for young people living in poverty and working to support themselves and their families, that time, that extra semester or two is -- it's like the difference between college happening at all or not at all. young people are not -- not having to take remedial courses so they can finish school sooner or on time. these are things that young people are ready to mobilize on. even if you look across generations, parents want to make sure their kids can go to college. their decision for employment. so many of my peers and i'm sure people in the audience have stories where friends maybe wanted to go in public service and maybe they wanted to be teachers or nurses but have

drastically shifted their career course because they have so much student debt that they can't imagine possibly paying down the debt with some of the public sector jobs that exist. whether it's student debt or access to higher ed, these are issues that mold the millennial generation and all generations are mobilizing on when they talk to the state legislators but taking it to the ballot box as well, which is something that is very exciting. >> the president has obviously made it a top priority to increase student aid and then he admirably changed the conversation from one about access to one about completion, big focus on making sure there's good outcomes in the

postsecondary sector and he has talked about the need to keep price down, because there's only so much the federal aid can do if the price continues to go up. one of the big concerns in that space is pressure around price could lead to reduced support at the state or the institutional level for low income students, because as you know not everybody pays the sticker price and we want to make sure that low income students are getting the support they need to be successful. how do you think about that at the department in terms of pushing the policies in a way that doesn't have an unintended consequence for low income students. >> it's a great question. it's really at the heart of a lot of the policy conversations that we're having in the department. a place where it comes out, for example, is in our discussion about college ratings. how can we create a ratings system that doesn't create the unintended consequence of encouraging institutions to

accept the easiest students to teach and perhaps even the cheapest students to teach or those who can afford higher education in the way it's currently being framed. so we're thinking about a mixture of different metrics that identify an institutions ability to attract and move through low income students, first generation, pell grant students as a focal point so we're not creating an incentive to take those people out of the equation and find people who are better prepared, wealthier. we don't think that that's in the public interest. i want to shift just a little bit to go back to sarah's point about some of the other underlying dynamics around student debt and affordability. i think student debt is not just

people changing their behavior once they are in. one of the things that i worry about is that the student debt issue may be preventing more and more young people from pursuing a college degree, because they're afraid on the very front edge that what they're about to embark on is going to make it hard for them. so i think the more we can talk about and get very clear about public service loan forgiveness programs, about the president's income driven repayment programs, just beginning rule making on the pay as you earn, expanding the pay as you earn program. we need to work on reducing price. we need to work on reducing cost. and we need to make sure that young people understand the range of opportunities for dealing with student debt. >> the ones doing the worst are

going to school but drop out with debt load before having any degree. that's a population we should do a lot of focus on to make sure they know about some of these programs. i just met with a group of latino interns here in d.c. they're very committed to public interest. they all have student loans. i asked them, do you know about the public service loan forgiveness? these are young people who are seniors in college. they didn't know about it. these are programs that we should make sure students know about when they graduate but in the junior and beginning of their senior year of school, because they could be making very different career decisions if they knew some of these programs existed. so i think that's something where we have a role in from the university system to it the department to us as individuals in talking with our peers. >> ralph and david, are those programs something that your member institutions or, ralph, your institution is taking action?

it seems like if there's students who could benefit from these programs that they don't know about them. >> absolutely. we're tireless in our efforts to communicate such opportunities. i would like just to go back to ted's point a few moments ago. and that is the administration's focus on funding or support and accountability with regard to completion. again the throughputs and outputs rather than inputs, if you will. and it's true after six years of diminishing public investment and increasing tuition in

florida, for the first time this year, in a long time, we have seen an infusion of new investment in public higher education around performance-based funding. while performance-based funding across the nation has perhaps received mixed reviews, for a state that is now investing $100 million a quarter of which came to south florida, so we like it. based upon completion rates, based upon retention rates, based upon the percentage of pell students served, based upon the number of students graduating with excess hours -- without excess hours to sarah's point. if we keep piling on the completion expectations, many of our students will never get them. they will become so discouraged that they drop out and we lose them for a long, long time.

so, yeah, i think this is representing a change for us. new funding came to us six or seven years ago on the basis of opening our doors wide open. it's one of the reasons why i think five of the top ten largest public universities in the united states are in florida. we haven't recovered from access for the sake of access. now with the refocus on completion and placement, i'm very confident we're moving in the right direction. >> a couple comments. first of all the issue that the money the students leave on the table in the form of not filing is very disturbing across our sector. the numbers are different depending on which source you cite. clearly at minimum, a quarter of college students don't complete the application process. as i say, it's a very bothersome

fact for our institutions. colleges are doing what they can to promote awareness and counseling students throughout the application process. but it remains a hurdle for them. getting back to what i started talking about about the quandary that institutional ceos have between where they allocate resources, a lot of them have problems processing the papers as opposed to making sure everybody files. in terms of the issue of student debt that's been touched upon, fortunately, because of our low tuitions, our institutions are able to ensure that the vast majority of community college students don't graduate with debt. about a third of our students who attain a associate's degree have debt.

only 17% of our of our credit students borrow. that is a function of our low tuitions. in terms of getting students to complete though and providing incentives and there are institutional incentives at play, performance based funding, which is gaining ground across the country at the state level, one of the things that we think would enhance completion would also be better information about student outcomes. and we do remain disappointed that there is not a national data system which would follow students through their course so that institutional performance would be accurately reflected in the federal data. but also that individual students who are perspective students who are considering enrolling would have a more complete picture of their likelihood of getting a college degree. and then related to that and the basic architecture is currently

in place in the form of the gainful employment regulations, my association believes in community college presidents believe is that we ought to know what types of earnings students get after they leave college at some appropriate point. we understand that there's a lot of complexity in interpreting this data. we understand it's not comprehensive under all cases. we believe that students who complete a given program at a community college -- we believe they should apply for all programs, not just gainful employment programs as it were. they ought to know two years, five years after graduation, on average, how well are students doing economically? because the fact is is that most students go to college first and foremost to increase their career prospects. it's by no means the only reason they go. they get other benefits that come along free of charge or just along with the ride of going through college. but the notion that students go to institutions simply for learning sake is wonderful as learning is and as much as it transforms lives is denying reality. so we are hopeful at some point

through some mechanism, that when a student enrolls at their local community college they know not just what the graduation of 150% of normal time is but how likely they are to graduate from any institution, whether it might be four-year, and then after that what they might expect economically, what the returns would be. we all know the best investment you can make in your future is going to college and completing college. >> david, just answered what was going to be my next question for david and ralph, which was if there was one thing you would like to change at a policy level, federal or state -- david, you can have an opportunity to add to this. but i think that the access to the data you are describing is something the federal government, state governments could provide on a policy basis

to help your institutions improve their performance. just wondering if there are other either federal or state policies that you think -- if you were king tomorrow you would enact in order to help your institutions be successful. >> well, one concern i've always had with federal data reporting is the seemingly myopic focus on traditional -- the path of traditional freshmen. while that may indeed have been the experience of many in this town, the reality -- the increasing reality is that more and more students are finding their way to four-year colleges and universities through community colleges. so recognizing that reality and tracking transfer student pathway to success, to completion i think -- i think would add an awful lot to the experience today. >> if i were educational king for a day, i would solve,

resolve the transfer problem once and for all. of course, your proposal including or has embedded within it a seamless transfer within the states. this is really a tragedy for lots of students who accrue credits at community college and move on to the four-year institution and find the credits can't be applied to a degree at the four-year level. although we're making progress in fits and starts, both through entrepreneurial community college presidents and chancellors who are hashing out articulation program -- on the programmatic basis with local colleges and although there have been improvements at the state level, there are still in far too many places students are not able to transfer credits and all the data that we have show that if you are able to transfer all your credits to a four-year college, that you are much likely -- the data almost belie the fact that even if you just

lose a few credits on average, you have a lower likelihood of getting a degree at the institution that you transfer into. we all know the institutional complexities and obstacles that one might confront in doing that. if i could wave a wand and create common course numbering and seamless articulation and perfect information for students when they enroll in community college, like in some -- arizona is a good state and florida is a very good state as well. i think that would probably have the single biggest impact in completion certainly back laureate attainment in this country. >> i could also say, i think from a student perspective, if we have, it would be free college, absolutely. this is something that we have students demanding and organizing across the country. that's a starting place for so

many of our young people. in the meantime, going back to some of the thingings i brought up earlier about pell money left on the table, we need to let sophomores and juniors in high school know they are able to access pell money. family income does not change so drastically. i think that's really important to make sure that students know this is how much federal aid you could get which would cover the cost of a community college in most cases. i think the other thing that we have seen with students is that far too many students are taking out private loans before they max out federal loans. this is i think it's something like half of students who have private loans have not maxed out their federal loans. this is a huge concern, because federal loans have so many more consumer based protections than the private loans do. whether it's income-based and public forgiveness.

we need to do a better job on educating students before they get the private loans, that you have federal loans that are a much better use. you don't have to take them at all, but if you do, it's much better -- a better decision to take out the federal loans. >> ted, if you were king? either the federal or state level. >> i think on the -- i want to go back to the reason for our gathering and to your report. i'm going to wave a couple -- one is the basic point that your report is raising, that states need to get back in the game and provide equitable and fair funding to their students. that would be one. second i get to take everything they have done, which i support. but i would like to go back to ralph's point. not only is the traditional student not the majority student any longer, but even those quote unquote non-traditional students are consuming higher education in different ways. into david's transfer, the mecca that you created for transfer credit, i think we have to

recognize that students aren't just transferring from one institution. sometimes it's two or three or they are assembling course credit online. so i think it's our responsibility to develop a financial aid system that is every bit as flexible as the students are today and likely to be tomorrow. i think that that would be my add would be flexible student aid. >> with that, we will turn it over to the audience and give you all a chance to ask our terrific panelists questions. >> good morning. reporter with diverse issues in higher education. i was hoping you could say a bit more about the proposed compact itself. it makes reference to 10% of funding a.

i'm unclear what that 10% refers to. after you speak a bit about the workability of a compact, i guess perhaps you could say something about the likelihood of such a thing coming into existence, what needs to happen in congress, things of that nature. thank you. >> i will let david answer the part about 10%, because i'm not sure what you are referring to there. but in terms of congress's role, it can't happen without congress. ted doesn't have a magic wand at this point to have a substantial new funding stream. they would have to enact the program. but we think they should. it's an issue where it has historically been a bipartisan issue to ensure that people have access to postsecondary education. it would be our hope that they would take action in next congress. >> our proposal calls for 90% of the money that's provided for the program would be distributed among the states. the formula takes into account the pell grants.

10% would be held by the federal government to be used to help support the work of states to do evaluation and do other kinds of -- provide other technical assistance that might be helpful to states they go about doing their work. also it could support maybe some work in regions where communities that are closely linked could come together and develop holistic solutions to higher education problems in a geographic region. we were thinking that a substantial amount of the money would go out to states and states would use it and use it effectively, but there should be some reservation of funds to make it possible for the federal government to support that work. we think that this is going to require very substantial

investment of funds. you know, when we talk about this internally, we benchmark it to work that's been done by our economic policy team where they have identified about $1.4 trillion in additional funding that could be made available through bipartisanly agreed upon tax reform. so you could say that 10%, 5% of that money is the kinds of things that the dollar amount. we would think about being necessary in order to drive the kinds of changes we want to see happen at the state level across the country. >> other questions? nobody else? okay. great. maybe each of our panelists could give some closing thoughts before we finish up.

ted? we started with you. we'll finish with you. >> we're all shy. so it's difficult. i guess as a closing comment, as a closing comment, they had mentioned this earlier, but i would like to re-enforce it. i think at the heart of both this report and the plan and a lot of our discussion today has been this move, ralph, you called it a move from inputs to three puts. i think the increased focus on outcomes for individual students, outcomes for taxpayers, outcomes for us as an economy and a society is probably the most critical issue on education over the last ten years and i think it's important

as we think about outcomes that we do it in a robust way that doesn't narrow our focus. i would like to look at the rark of things that we seek to gain as a society from higher education. i guess i'll go next. maybe we can go in line. i would like to get back to a comment that terry made at the beginning of the panel, and that is the fact that we have an implicit but very real cooperative triad of sorts of federal governments and states to finance higher education. at the time we could call it historically defined in that the it's saperred off to the state implus sit share of that

partnership and that bargain, states haven't been keeping that bargain and there are a lot of reasons for that, and -- because of the growth in medicaid spending, which has crowded out a lot of other spending. but we also know that the sharing of secondary education has increased. for trying to put the spotlight back on the need for state government to be morrow bust in terms of support of post secondary -- some of the particulars in your proposal, is obviously extraordinarily ambitious proposal, but a lot of the goals that are implicit are specific in the proposal that we certainly would agree with and would like to see enacted. the reason why i mentioned the unit record data issue and the earnings data is that is perhaps

one of the last best chances we have to stimulate state governments and legislatures to provide greater support for post secondary education and have greater documentation of the impact that we v and as i was thinking over the weekend about this panel, i was remembering back to the goals 2000 network that you'll remember and president herbert walker bush did in this area, trying to perhaps potentially galvanize or that's what he tried to do some time ago state leadership in the area of k-12 education, but that perhaps something ought to be done nationally by this administration or maybe congress or maybe both or maybe something they agree on actually that the states need to provide more robust support for the institutions 24e7ss.

the federal government has been doing certainly more than state relatively speaking as stepped up to the plate in the way over the last five, six, seven years that the government -- wherever that balance needs to be changed. so again i just want to thank you for having me and again for thanking the center forecasting a spotlight on the fact that we need state government to provide more support for post secondary education. >> i think what i would like to close is to -- one of the challenges that exist is the -- we are the most educationed generation in this country's history and are seeing massive increases in the amount of-that should be applauded both to this generation directly but also to the college system and a parent

to get young people to go to college. so i think we have to remember that as well. and we have to remember to -- -- it was just last week i met a young woman over coffee who was telling us about some struggles that she was having with her pell grant that we hadn't thought of before but it was because of directly speaking to this woman -- i think if they're really talking about making sure that we continue to be the most educationed generation, that even future generations will be more educated. whether it's the amount of vets that are in school, which i was really excited to see, is that we're talking about students with -- it is our generation that's gone to war and it is our

generation that had high amounts of low income students. i think the other thing that i just mentioned is that we need states to get involved, when students are attempting to make the right decision to go to school, there are a lot of bad actors out there that will swoop them up and that will take advantage of them when they could be going to great community colleges that are not going to charge them nearly as much as they are going to have -- we all have a roam to play in this but as for those who are the decision makers out there, yes there are 18 and 19-year-olds and there are 28-year-old moms and dads that are going to back to school. ralph -- >> i think what's become clear this morning and again, thank you so much for putting the spotlight on this, that higher education today is not your

grand parents edge experience in college or for that matter, your parents. in the state of florida, half of the degrees and in fact half of the student enrollment in the state universities occur at three of the 12 institutions in most populous areas, university of south florida, the university of central florida in orlando. recipients across this state, their experience is quite the

fight. we're committed to collaborating, to sharing best practices, to leveraging resources across the three universities in the minds of ever serving the new population of college attendees and college graduates in the state. we believe it's absolutely essential if florida and this nation is going to compete successfully in the global economy and maintain what has become a commitment to providing social mobility opportunities when it comes to education. >> thank you all for doing this and thank you all for joining us this morning.

>> with live coverage of the u.s. house on cspan and the senate on cspan 2, on weekends cspan 3 is the home to american history tv with programs that tell our nation's story, including six unique series, the civil war's 150th anniversary, visiting battlefields and key events. american artifacts, touring museums and historic sites. history bookshelf with the best known american history writers. the presidency, looking at our nation's commanders in chief.

top college professors devilling into america's past. and our new series, real america, featuring educational films from the 1930s through the 1970s. watch us on hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. tonight on cspan 3, congressman pete session -- conference on -- center for american progress hosts a discussion about the costs of higher education and later a look at the role candidate debates play in elections. and act on immigration through executive order if congress fails to pass a comprehensive immigration bill.

pete sessions spoke to reporters about the issue and asked the president to work with republicans on immigration policy. we would like to see the president not do whatever he's planning on doing, but we would like to work together with him. but the american people deserve to have competence in the actions that the house and the senate take and the president and the president unilaterally goes and does this, he is risking once again a false hope for people who are in this country what would like to have a say and an understanding of what's going to happen, it will cause chaos, it will cause another rush to the boarder,

that we have already been through, that is very dangerous for people. it creates uncertainty. we will -- is going to come up with a great bill in the new term where we are going to work carefully with groups and the american people to understand why we need to have an immigration bill that will be a guest worker plan that would involve the american people understanding and having confidence in what we're doing. >> but don't you have people in your conference who want to over -- go to the mat and take us right back where we were? >> will be very thoughtful and careful about what he does, we can avoid that. >> there's an equal chance that the president can understand that the ramifications of these unilateral actions will have significant impact on this

country, and we have got to work together. >> can't necessarily control some of these factions that want to work with -- >> we're not here to control anybody, what we're here to do is work through thoughtful ideas that will make circumstances better for employers and people that are here. and that's what we're going to do. >> isn't the reality that you know exactly what the president wants, it isn't a secret what he wants both politically and legally. >> should challenge us within the first six months to produce a plan of the new year, that's what i said, if the president wants to get engaged in this, he should challenge us to that the president can be thoughtful about and understand.

>> just so i'm clear, you think that republicans in the house are able to get something done that could become law, that the president would sign into law within the first six months of congress? >> what i will tell you is that we will work on a guest worker plan that will allow people in this country to understand their responsibilities which will not cause a rush at the border, that we can thoughtfully, carefully plan what we're doing and the american people can have a voice in it and can be able to be in support of that. yes, i do believe that it's possible. he cannot go and unilaterally do something, whether he threatens iter not, the american people resoundingly said to barack obama and democrat this last election they do not have confidence. that's why we have a governor in maryland that's a republican and a governor in illinois.

the president should -- what kind of leader he is that will cause these factions to want to revolt in kind. what happens is for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. if the president -- unfortunately he will get that back from some who we're trying to say, let's stick together. the president needs to help us to help the country to work through a process that is well understood, that is logical and makes sense, and then he will do honor to his service as president to this great nation. and that's how america works. america works when we work together. and the republican conference is up to the task. thank you very much.

now more on immigration with a conference hosted by georgetown university law center. he's followed by a discussion about what local governments are doing to integrate immigrants into their communities. >> let me introduce director rodriguez now. i'm really delighted to have him with us. he was confirmed by the senate in june of 2014. and sworn in july 9th this summer. he previously served as the director for the office of civil rights at the department of health and human services and he held that position from 2011 to

2014. from 2010 to 2011, suffered as the chief of staff and the deputy assistant ag at the department of justice. his other federal service, of course, he was -- done more than this in private practice and worked at montgomery county as well, his other federal service includes work at the u.s. attorney's office for the western district of pennsylvania from 1997 to 2001 and he was a trial attorney at the civil rights division at the department of justice from 1994 to 1997. and in that capacity, he was heavily involved in prosecuting human trafficking cases, which is a little nope fact, i think. he was actually the lead prosecutor in u.s. v florez. his co-counsel in that i believe, was ambassador lucy b z debacca and that case involved the enslavement of mexican and guatemalan farm workers in south carolina and

florida and it resulted in a 15-year prison sentence for the person who was behind that. he was also a number of you would be interested to know, a board member of casa of maryland for many years. he has a remarkable family immigration history. he was born in brooklyn, the son of cuban immigrants, but his grand parents actually migrated to cuba from turkey into pole land to escape anti-semitism and oppression. so, director rodriguez is going to talk, he is going to walk around and talk about 2025 minutes and then take questions. we are going to ask you at that time to line up and he will call on you and he has to leave here promptly at 9:45. i would like to have you join me in welcoming director rodriguez here today. thank you. [ applause ] >> so i'd like to begin this morning, can everybody hear me okay? with a little bit of a confession. how many of you here are george up to law students? actually nobody. a couple there in the badge you will appreciate the following anecdote.

i have -- this is actually my second opportunity to speak in this room in the last few years. prior to that, the last time i was in this building was roughly 28 years ago when i was waitlisted at george up to university law center and i came here to meet the deep of admission and pry to persuade him to actually let me in and he looked at my undergraduate transcript, he looked at the rest of my file. and he said, it's actually miracle that your even on the waitlist. so, forget about actually getting admitted. i wanted to come back azle director of a federal agency and i wanted to tell this story, i'm thinking to myself what is the relevance of this story, why does it matter to the discussion

that we're going to be having this morning and the discussion that you're going to be having? and i realized that it actually is a great metaphor for immigration. because what we do in immigration policy is decide who we want to admit to the united states and who we don't. and it's based on a whole set of factors that i want to talk about a little bit this morning but the basic idea is that we are predicting that this individual who we admit to the united states will be good for america. that in some way, they will promote our values, they will

promote our objectives. i now pose the rhetorical question, looking back, george up to, would you have admitted me, had you known this information? would you have had different policies if you would have known whatted outcome was? i really just wanted to tell that you story. [ laughter ] the you can stance of my speech, thank the center for migration studies, the migration policy institute clinic and georgetown itself for putting together and hosting this conference. this has been going on a decade and has become one of the key for rah for discussion for discussion and exchange on immigration policies.

i really thank you all for creating this sort of forum for us. i also want to recognize doris meissner, who was the director of immigration and naturalization services back during the clinton administration. now with the migration policy institute. if you come to my agency, and i know i have a couple of examples here with phyllis coben and chris bentley. phyllis coben is the director of the new york field office, chris is our bent prest secretary, one thing that people speak of with plied is that they are "legacyism ns" that they were in the agency back in the ins days and i think that really owes energy great part, to the kind of leadership that you provided during those years. and we not only have federal officials former federal officials part of this dialogue. we have someone from the new york city mayor's office, engaged with an ambassador in el salvador, opened an office in texas. gives you a flavor for the broad spectrum of individuals, of organizations, that really play a role in this critical, critical issue. i have three personal experiences that really inform my vision of being the director of uscis. first of all, you heard as part

of my bio that i'm son of cuban immigrants, the grandson of turkey and poe la fleeing anti-semitism. because of those experiences, i understand the aspect of immigration based on seeking refuge. fleeing a situation that has become in some way no longer tolerable and coming to where the situation can be better. miami i grew up, although born in brooklyn, i actually grew up in miami, the miami of my childhood really provides a case study, not just in what it means

to be seeking refuge, but also in what immigrants do for america, this point i was talking about immigrants are good for america. and the miami of my childhood was really this amazing cauldron of energy. it wasn't just people from cuba where my parents were from but people from all over, jewish immigrants or children of jewish immigrants from eastern europe, people from all over the caribbean and what it made even then and it's only continued until now, miami, with all its chaos with all its craziness, was also one of the most economically vibrant cities in the united states. so i'm actually a real believer in the notion that immigrants are really what energize our economy, what actually make us the kind of powerful economy that we are and it's not just the software engineers, although we love them and we want as many of them as we can get. but it's also guys that laid the railroad tracks, the welders,

the agriculturals, the broad spectrum of individuals who really have created and then really energized our economy. there's a second experience that informs my work as well. as a law student at boston college law school, i was the coordinator of something called the holocaust human rights research project and what we did in this project was to analyze the precedence of nazi war crimes law, litigation, to other situation of human rights abuse. and a big part of the discussion that we would have about nazi war criminals was the role of the immigration process here in the united states and the denaturalization and deportation

proceedings of those individuals. and they were really a very early lesson before we were really talking about september 11th and talking about all these examples of terrorists abusing our immigration system of the fact that our immigration system could be abused by bad people, by people who in this case, had engaged in harm in the past, or as we have learned all too tragically, individuals who could abuse our immigration system to come and in some way harm the american people. and that it means that as we offer refuge, as we look to energize our economy, we always have to worry about the fact that there are people who can abuse our immigration system and come to do us harm. and there is a third experience, in fact, that professor showen holtz underscored.

and that is comes from the -- my prosecution of human trafficking. and you there the florez case, i spent a lot of time with a number of individuals who originally came here undocumented from guatemala and mexico to work in the tomato and cucumber fields of south carolina and also the citrus groves in florida. and as people talk about individuals, like the victims in this case, there are two dominant far this rat it was and i want to offer a third one about those individuals. the first narrative is what i would call the law enforcement bureaucratic narrative. these are individuals who have broken the law, and they have. they have come to the united states illegally. we have a responsibility to

enforce that law. there is a second narrative, which is a social justice narrative, also really important, which is that these individuals have fled circumstances in the countries from which they come that are intolerable, both politically and economically. and frequently saw themselves as having no choice but to come here to the united states, where many would argue, they continue in many respects to be victims where they are abused by abusive employers, where because of their undocumented status, they live in the shadows. again, all things that are true. but as i got to know these individuals, i saw a third thing. i actually saw potential americans. because these individuals will two core val news their life

that seemed very, very familiar to me. the first was work, typically, these individuals would engage in back-breaking labor for 14 hours a day. as i met them they did not impress me as victims, but they impressed me as people just like my parents whose lives were really built around the same exact values as those of my parents. so as i leave the agency that is responsible for adjudicating immigration benefits as they play a role and give my voice to the development of immigration policy, these three experiences are frequently ones that i see in my mind as we engage in this discussion.

many of those abroad and really i have to say, having now been in the agency for about 100 days, a really fantastic, passionate, very professional group of workers, people that we really can be proud of as americans. and i view my role to ensure that we apply the laws fairly, that we do our work professionally, that my folks

have what they need to do their job well. but at the same time that we do it with a sense of justice and a sense of customer service. you heard that i used to work for montgomery county and i was actually the county attorney in montgomery county, more or less the general counsel for montgomery county, and before i came to that job, really, my entire profession had really been in some version of the criminal justice arena, i had been a prosecutor, i had been a white collar defense lawyer, so now the largest part of my job was actually zoning. and i will tell you that i love zoning, i thoughts zoning was extremely interesting. and in fact when i interviewed with janet napolitano, i said i can make you love zoning, i

think i can make it extremely interesting to you, and she looked at me of course like i was crazy, but here is the reason and there's and an log to immigration that i want to share. zoning when you think about it implicates every single value that we have as a society. zoning requires us to think about economics, how we want to develop our local economies, it requires us to think about economic justice, do we want to have zoning that provides opportunities to low and middle income people, it's about the environment, we have to think about how the zoning affects the environment in which people are going to live, it requires us to think about how we want to talk about families. one of the big debates that we would be having in montgomery county was how many people could live in a dwelling, because most

of us in the county had this traditional suburban view, that there should be moms and dads and a traditional household. but there could be an uncle or a grandparent that comes from another country to be with the family. and i would say that immigration is exactly the same way, the reason there's scotch to talk about, about immigration, the reason we have such a -- an intense debate about immigration, although i would suggest there is more consensus people think about immigration is exactly because just about everything that people think and feel about our civic society is i implicated in immigration, so it begins with humanitarian notions, to whom do we want to

provide refuge, that is a core american value that we provide refuge. the challenge comes that we don't necessarily agree on refuge from what? so typically, the sort of vision of what we are providing refuge from is refuge from torture. good old-fashioned government sponsored in jail torture. that's something that everybody can visualize, everybody agrees upon, we all agree that we can provide refuge from that. but then it starts getting a little bit more complicated from that. how about intolerable economic conditions, conditions that none of us would ever follow rate for our own children, should we provide refuge from that. then the debate gets more intense. how about situations where what the government has done is failed? what the government has done is

failed to protect its people from the kind of harms where we here in the united states would ordinarily expect that our government would protect us. is that a situation from which we provide refuge? so that ee's one value. another is economic development. the one thing that i think most americans agree upon is we want a vibrant economy, everyone agrees that the more vibrant economy, the more everybody benefits, the problem is we don't necessarily agree on what fuels a vibrant economy, right now as you picture and you talk to university presidents, they rightfully say, one thing we don't want to be doing is educating people in our university and having them go back where they came from and not benefiting our economy. so we agree that people are a high level of technical

expertise benefit our economy, but how about small business people? how about going out to bladensberg, maryland, where if you drive down kennel worth avenue, you will see this amazing level of economic vibrant shops. but what -- another issue. family, obviously, another big thing we look at, educational, national security, all of these are different values so when we talk about what it means to be a nation of immigrants is that

what we actually mean is that the in the eye of the beholder. one of my favorite documents that i got to look at during the confirmation process, was the annual statistical tables from the bureau of immigration statistics, fascinating document, because one of the things that you learn is that in fact most migration actually occurs in the southern hemisphere. so while we picture that these sort of primary vector migrations people really moving east so west, either coming here to the united states from western europe, most people are moving around in the southern hemisphere in the world. but the single place per capita that most people migrate is the united states, legally and illegally is the united states and so we ask ourselves, why is

that? and that really go ---there's nothing like the values of america. my time is going faster than i thought it would. so i want to get to a couple of things. so i want to talk about deferred action for childhood arrivals. i had an experience shortly after i got here, where i was introduced to 20 kids, all of them from los angeles, they were all students, and they were all docca recipients, many of them a classic case from docca recipients spent a great part of their life not knowing they were in this country illegally. they came here that young.

this was an amazing group of young people. there was a young woman who had graduated from high school. there was a young whoman who ha started medical school and was trying to decide what field she should go into. she was considering becoming an obstetrician/gynecologist, i am married to an obstetrician/gynecologist who told her that she should go into determine kolg. in query, if there is not a fundamental problem in the structure immigration system, if there is not a path for this society to take advantage of what these young people have to offer, but they're not the only part of the picture. because for as many kids like that as there are, there are

kids willing to break their back and work hard in a number of fields. kids who want to be really good plumbers, really entrepreneurial plumbers, opening businesses businesses--potential to energize their economy. but what that experience really reaffirmed for me is that we have to approach immigration in a way that gives individuals like this a chance. the president has made clear in the absence in the swak of the failure of congress to really give him a credible comprehensive immigration reform package, that he will act on hiss own sometime between the

election and the end of the year. and i'm sure that everybody's here to affirm the details of that program. what i will tell you is that. we're going to be ready. our agency will be shouldering the primary responsibility for executing whatever it is that the president and then in turn secretary johnson orders, and we have been busy making sure that however this is done, we do it in a way that actually works. so that's the one commit mngtd that i can make to you, the other thing that i would point out is that as we think about a broken immigration system and as we think about the failure to actually pass a comprehensivie i

immigration reform, it's important to remember that this discussion is about much more than individuals who are in the united states in an undocumented status. so not only is it a symptom of a broken immigration system that we have 11 million people in the united states in an undocumented status, many of them by the way, i know we have migration policy institute has done a lot of work on this, many of them now in the united states for a long time, i know we're talking a lot about what's going on on the southern border right now, but many of these folks in fact have been here for ten plus years, 15 plus years, 25 plus years, they are now part of our society, whether it is-that is recognized or not, they are now part of our society. so that's one issue. but that's not the only issue. the fact that we have a basic immigration structure that is out of line with the needs of

our economy is another issue. the fact that you're very often your access to different kinds of immigration benefits can take years is another symptom of a broken system. a lot of people talking about this negotiation of waiting in line. but there is no line. so all of that, all of those kinds of questions are a simple tom of a broken immigration system. i also want to talk about the situation that we have on our border. and i want to talk about it as a situation on our border as opposed to the situation of the uacs and this is part of it but

not really understood by the general public. the general public is focussed on this negotiation that children, who they would like to not admit are children are coming to the united states and sort of finding some path to staying here, in fact the migration of migration of people of all ages coming over. our agency plays a significant role in all of these scenarios, more and more the adults coming over are making different kinds of claims of persecution, and we have done what we needed to do and more and more kids once they're settled here in foster

families, or otherwise with the auspices of hhs, presenting asigh colu asylum claims of different kinds. and the complaint is that the somehow we are recognizing these claims where we should not. and the one assurance i want to provide in this area is that we are doing our job. one of the first things i did when i became a director was to sit in on an asylum interview. i have made people confess. and so i was able to watch the quality of this interview. and i was really struck by two aspects of this interview, one it was a thorough interview, and everywhere where i thought the young man was conducting

interviews was following up, he asked those second and third questions to really probe the validity of the claim being made. but at the same time, it is part of our responsibility to make sure that these individuals are afforded due process. and we will uphold that responsibility. because as much as anything else, given our history, where i started this conversation as a country that offers refuge, the one thing that would certainly be a tragedy is to not provide due process and then finding that somebody who really should have been afforded asylum was not provided asigh wlum. so we're going to continue doing our job, we're going to ask those hard questions, we're going to do good interviews, we're going to deploy so that this process can go on as efficiently as possible, but we're going to safeguard due process at the same time.

i'm really excited about the conference that you guys are going to be having here this morning. i unfortunately will not be able to be here for all of us, but i'm really excited to see the readout because so many of you have been working so hard in this field that i believe a lot of really, really important insights are going to flow from this, so i'm interested in hearing the readout and getting to work with you in the months and years to come. so with that i think i'm going to open it up to questions. and i believe the -- yeah, there we go. >> yeah, if you could introduce yourselves first and just line up at the mikes here. hi, my name is penny starne with

cbs news, i know you have mentioned that there are people that are coming across the borders, not just from central and south america, but indeed all over the world, and i wonder if you would address please, what health screenings, how are they a part of how people are interviewed and checked, you know, where does health come in in the screening process for people, especially given ebola now? >> yes, and i know there are health screenings, specifically there are screenings for tuberculosis, those would be great questions to direct to hhs who actually conduct the screenings. >> julia preston from the "new york times," i wonder if you would give us more -- how many people are you anticipating, what are you doing in terms of

hiring in a situation where i'm sure you have a fee based agency and to a certain extent your hiring is based on the applications that are coming in, just what is the dimension of the program that you are anticipating? >> those are great questions. and what i can tell you right now is that we are doing our job. >> i tried. >> i'll let the editors know. >> i wonder if you could talk as we hopefully move forward, whether it be through these rules or maybe one day congressional action, and we reform our immigration system to be one that is more forward looking, more along the lines of what you talked about, what it brings value into our country and into our economy. how do you plan to use local

government in the integration process. a lot of us who deal after the federal issues adjudicated. a lot of these issues play out at the local level with schools, with municipal governments, with local economies, have you thought much about how to include local perspectives in the immigration process? >> that's a kblaet, great question. >> there is no substitute for actual comprehensive immigration reform, so whatever we do, and the president himself has said this will direct us to do, will not be anywhere near what we could accomplish with actually legislative reform. the potential of local governments to play a positive role in this space is immense. as it stands, even now, we collaborate extensively with local governments throughout the

united states in promoting access to citizenship. one thing -- one of my favorite aspects of my job is going to naturalization ceremonies and seeing folks become new americans. the kind of collaborations we have had with new york city, municipal governments are actually models that we can do in other areas as well or things we can expand in the future. so there is very definitely a role for that. >> yes? >> good morning. >> when we talk about unaccompanied children and mothers and family, and now we're talking about a facility with 140 new beds. how are you making the decision as to who is placed in detention and who is sent out to sponsor. >> that's a question to direct

to customs and border control and ice. children, these unaccompanies children just to be very clear, they are not permitted under law to be in detention for any sort of extended period of time. there are a number of family units, kids who are here with their parents who could be in some sort of secure setting and also adults who are expected to be in their parole in some way in a secure setting. those are really ice and customs and border patrol. customs and border patrol in particular, so i recommend directing that question to them. >> i think we're going to take two more questions here, but i actually wanted to interject one, not the follow-up on julie, but to ask you on implementation, if you can talk about is displacement of other resources, because i know that citizenship is a major priority

of yours as well. and if we're talking about a major executive action program covering millions of people, that obviously takes a lot of people. it also takes huge amounts of coordination within dhs, the department of justice, eor and others, could you talk about the implementation from a broader perspective. >> sure. i think one of the really important lessons we learn from docca, we did experience some impact on our other lines of business, family bees has experienced some longer processing times, as we really learn how to surge in a way that we really never had before. and so as we prepare for another potential surge, i think wire going to be leaning very heavily on the docca experience, modeling based docca experience in order to minimize impact on the existing lines of

business with ncis. >> could you address a claim that children coming from south america could be refugees in a similar way as whole populations and moving from one place to another are considered refugees in other parts of the world and what is the imp indication of this? >> sure, i have heard that and certainly there are situations where we have made positive credible fear findingings, which essentially means there is a claim for some kind of refuge and where we are finding that some of the unaccompanied children do appear to qualify for asylum. what i'm really not ready to do and the record has not sustained this notion, that as an entire

class, that as a matter of law, there's sort of a normal understanding of what it is to seek refuge, but as a matter of law, absolutely everybody crossing the border is a refugee. i'm not prepared to say anything like that. do some of them state very solid climbs for asylum status and the answer i would say is very clearly yes. >> i was interested in what you were sayings about matching the immigration system with the economic needs of the country. i was wondering how you see government working with private sector agencies like this to best achieve that goal. >> i said economics among many factors, i think that's why i was making the abnalogy to zoning.

even now there are particular visa categories that actually require the sponsorship of a company or involve the transfer of the individual within a company from one role to another. >> would you michkd one more question? >> yes, you'll take it. >> i'm a student at virginia commonwealth university and my question is in regard to the back lock in the informative asigh wlum process and i was just wondering what strategies usas is going to be using to address some of these major backlog issues. >> no and those are great questions because in fact the overall asylum case load as green dramatically related to the circumstances we're

discussing. a and in order to process individuals more efficiently at the border, the unact companied children making the claims, we have had to redeploy, we're also hiring more asylum officers in order to meet this additional case load. we do have a workload to catch up so i don't want to minimize -- we are moving affirmatively forward to deal with what is a significant impact in our asylum case load. thank you for your question. >> thank you very much director rodriguez, we really appreciate you being with us. >> thank you. >> we're going to go ahead and get started, we're a little bit behind schedule and i want to get us back on track.

>> i'm delighted to follow director rodriguez because he really set up this partial that i will be moderating this morning. he also mentioned how the federal government, how the administration is looking at stepping into the void created by the lack of congressional action and that is essentially what we're going to be speaking about this morning. since 2007, state legislatures have introduced absolutely 1,3 hung lawings and resolutions relating to immigration each year wide range of issues including higher education, enforcement and my grant and refugee programs. at the same time civic

organizations are focusing attention on immigration, on the economic, cultural and social values that -- distinguished panelists who will speak about how states, cities and local entities have filled the void of congressional action. they represent three different sectors engaging in immigration issues outside the purview of the federal government. in the interest of time, i'm not going to read your bios, you have them in your program and i encourage you to look at them because they have very expensive experience that i would like you to read got. i would like to introduce nisha to my immediate right, she is the commissioner of the new york city may year's office. the 323rd district in the california state senate and steve is the director of global detroit leading the economic -- the city's economic revitalization. i'm going to stand because we're going to do this in kind of a question and answer format so that we can look at some issues

from these different sectors, and i will save time at the end for you all to have questions. misha i would like to start with you, can your commission plays in helping to fill the gap in benefits and gaps in new york city? >> sure. so first of all, thank you so much for having me and for the conference organizers for having new york city represented here today on this panel. i guess one thing i'll say to start is some context, which is that in new york city one out of three individuals is foreign-born or an immigrant. that's more people than the city of chicago. when you add their kids, it's 60% of new york city. there's not an aspect of life in the city that isn't impacting immigrant families and vice versa. so it's really something that's been front and center for city government for a long time. my office is essentially the bridge between city hall and new york city's many immigrant cities. we have a very simple mission which is to promote programs and policies that improve the well

being of immigrant communities. we have three broad goals by which we sort of fulfill that mission. the first is really to think about how to embed immigrant inclusion throughout the city's dna in a way. so it's not just the mayor's office affairs but it's a part of the code of the city overall. and i think one good example of this that the mayor announced in january when he first took office is the city's municipal id card program. this is creating a government-issued local identification that's available to all regardless of immigration status and is meant to focus as a key to the city to open doors that were closed before to equalize access to many of the services and amenities in new york city and i'm happy to talk more about that later. another broad goal of ours is access to justice whether it's on one end of the spectrum of individuals facing deportation

and needing adequate representation to defend themselves in those cases all the way to naturalization and citizenship, the city has invested a lot of resources and has a number of different programs available to help people move down that continuum and how to prepare for that at the local area. that's the goal. the third is where my background comes in which is advocacy. how does the city of new york serving at the state level and how do we function as an advocate at the federal level for eventually immigration reform and certainly to support the president when he announces executive action. so that's really how we think about our role and happy to talk about any of those initiatives in more detail. >> that's great. senator, can you tell me what the california legislature has been working and how do you see l.a. and san francisco working on this? >> it's great to be here.

buenos-diaz. congress's complete failure to enact any comprehensive immigration reform, california has to lead. given the fact that we are the most diverse, most populace state in the country. we need to serve as that role model in terms of how do we effect positive change and ensure that we incorporate all of our immigrant communities into our society. so in california, we've continued a path legislation after legislation with the hope that one day we get comprehensive immigration reform. but until then, there's families in california that continue to be torn apart. we see it on a daily basis when we go back to our districts, when we're in our community, when we're in our churches, we see the struggle that people are going through right now with the fact that we can't come up with some sort of comprehensive immigration reform.

and so the the responsibility fams on the different states and city governments and local organizations. and so what we've done in california is continued to lead where congress has continued to fail. and when it comes to the driver's license bill, we finally got that passed, but we got that passed with the safeguards to ensure that we protect the individual's identity and protect their human and civil rights to ensure that they're not victims of any discrimination. and like wise, we've seen case after case and i'm sure you guys are aware of how professional students that are now graduating and are dream act students are graduating, finishing law school, finishing their professional studies yet lack the opportunity to actually pursue their career. and so this year instead of doing it by piecemeal like we

were doing it in the legislature we decided to do a blanket bill to cover all the different 40 professions that require a professional license and no longer receive a social security number to qualify. and allow them to pursue their career and act as an independent contractor or open their own business. understanding that more folks have an opportunity to economic prosperity the better our state is in. california being a nation state and being the eighth largest economy in the world, continuing to promote that amongst all our residents remains a priority. we've just surpassed russia and italy's economy. we're on schedule to surpass france and the uk putting us back as a sixth largest economy, so our legislature wholeheartedly believes that we need to ensure that everybody has that opportunity for that economic prosperity and that includes our undocumented community. >> thank you. steve, i will mention that steve was a former michigan state

legislature. as we talk about the interaction in these, he brings a second layer to the conversation. can you tell us a little bit about global detroit and what your role is in interacting with the city of detroit as well as the state of michigan? >> sure. so, again, also i want to thank the sponsors for inviting us and having a voice from the midwest, the heartland. we have a very different demographic makeup than either of our coasts. but a critical and important place where i think we're trail blazing new concepts and new ideas about imbrags and what it means for our communities. in the heartland. global detroit are not an immigration per se initiative, certainly not an immigrant rights or advocacy organization. we came together in the height of michigan and detroit's economic crisis in 2009.

i could get into some really woeful statistics. really no state has ever had a decade as bad relative to the other states in the country as what michigan had in the 2000s. at the height of this economic depression in michigan, the detroit regional chamber of commerce foundations in other community leaders began to ask a number of questions about what does the future look like? one of those questions was what role do immigrants play in the economy? what are the opportunities and what are the challenges? and so out of that we found a number of really powerful statistics that are shared all across the rust belt and the industrial heartland of this country where immigration and immigrants really make jobs and power the economy in largely untold ways here in either national media or federal congressional debates. so just briefly i'll just try to throw two of, boy, 30-some

factoids or statistics that we commonly use at global detroit. from 1995 through 2005, according to research at duke university and uk berkley, 32.8%, about a third, of michigan ice high-tech firms had a immigrant founder or co-founder. there's only 5 to 6% foreign born. you're six times as likely to start a high-tech firm than those born in the u.s. who live in our state. and it's -- i could get into all kinds of statistics on we happen to skr an immigrant population that's more educated than our native born population and frankly educated in the right fields, international students may a really powerful role in our universities and colleges. but it's not just high-tech immigrants and not just the stem and the h1bs. frankly, we are the only state

that lost population. and our city, the city of detroit, you know, you read lots of headlines largest municipal bankruptry in the history of america. there's lots of reasons for that. and there's been a lot. but one that i don't think gets published often enough or very rarely is that we are still the 18th largest city in the country with about $700,000 people in the 2010 census, we have the 135th largest foreign-born population. the region, metro detroit has 400,000 immigrants and compares fairly well across the midwest, but the city really struggles. in fact, there's no other of the top 25 largest cities in the country that fall outside the top 100 and only one other that falls outside the top 50. so in a state that's rapidly ageing like much of the midwest, like pennsylvania and ohio,

frankly immigrants across the board from working class immigrants who work in our agriculture industry which is our second largest industry after manufacturing to powering our research universities and medical complexes and tech firms and automotive design, information technology, are really probably the most powerful economic development strategy we have going for us. and so i lead an initiative that seeks to capitalize on that that has launched between six and ten depending on how you want to count independent initiatives like the first international student retention program and i'll conclude with this. as i mentioned, we are part of a growing movement in the midwest that has come to this reality. so, in just the last four years, st. louis moe say yak initiative was launched, welcome dayton was launched. the chicago office of new americans, vibrant pittsburgh, global cleveland and sir