>> 5 g is being rolled out next year. it will be in place for a decade or so. it has specifically built into it what they call slices. each slice can be compromiustom a particular service. that violates that idea of same treatment of bits. so that throws net neutrality out. >> watch the communicators tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span 2. next, a look at the impact of education technology on race and the american class system with google's chief education evangelist.

featuring 1291 speakers in 23 cities, seven states and six countries. but i am pleased to say as of today we're really proud to announce this is our home, the national center for the preservation of democracy. trust me, we're very happy about it. of particular interest to me, our offices will be next door in the building that was constructed in 1924. i'm told it's haunted. i'm a little freaked out by that. the other cool thing is my great grandfather was a bricklayer on this building in the middle of los angeles. so i own the place, by my logic. all of our events are followed by a reception to which everyone

can grab either a glass of wine or water and continue the conversation with tonight's featured guest and one another.

please give a warm welcome to ms. goldie bloomenstick. >> good evening, everybody. thanks for joining us here tonight. i understand they're going to be showing the bat signal tonight at 7:30 in l.a. we have a terrific panel here tonight. i'm going to introduce the panel. we have darryl adams who's a former superintendent from coachella valley school district. jamie casssup who is the google education evangelist. marie senie. michael crow.

we have a really cool topic tonight. can digital education dismantle the class system. we've got 45 minutes. should be a piece of cake. no problem there. last week i put that topic out on twitter and i asked people what would you ask. i thought maybe i'd crowd source a few questions. the first answer i got back, someone who said, what are you smoking. the second person said ask about decades of research showing access to technology doesn't improve learning and takes up needed time, money and other resources. it's a big topic. >> for me, it means that digital

education must break down the class system, especially in america. born and raised in memphis tennessee during the civil rights moment, our lack of access to knowledge prevented people like me from getting ahead. now with the tools that are available, power and knowledge is there for everyone. students are going to have the opportunity to use these tools to access information like never before. that is power and opportunity. >> what does digital education really mean? >> you're right, technology doesn't improve learning. great teaching improves learning, great education improves learning.

the higher ed system itself actually, i think creates even more of a class system. if you know of someone who's done to harvard --

>> i get this question all the time, is education broken. it's hard for me to answer that question because i am a first generation american. i was born and raised on food stamps and welfare in hell's kitchen new york. i grew up in the old hell's kitchen of the '60s and '70s, not a great place to grow up. i went to college and i get to do what i do today because of education. more importantly, the impact that we have on students goes on for generations and generations. my kids are impacted by this. my daughter went to college.

she never thought she wasn't going to go to college. she assumed she was going to college. she asesumed she was going to graduate school because her mother is a teacher and she went to graduate school. she assumed i was going to pay for it. that's a good problem to have. has it impacted everyone? can we do more? we need to do a better job with that. but the opportunity to do it is real. it's been real for a long time. >> one thing i've been wondering is, is there something about digitizing -- using digital technology that changes education? are we talking about something different in 2017 than we were in 2000 even? does it have a power now than it didn't have before? >> i think it does. now for the first time we can

truly personalize and individualize education. i dream of a day when we can have an app that can read your biorhythms and tell you what you need to learn. you see schools springing up like that at school in the bay area. they have cameras in all the classrooms and kids are helping to design their own program. students are able to design programs from as early as sixth grade or seventh grade. technology can allow us to do that. you've got to train your teachers to be able to use it if not it's just another tool that sits there. we have students coming out of institutions like in maryland and arizona state now that they're ready for this, but now we've got to bring the leadership on board and make sure parents are involved in the process as well. >> i'd like to make a distinct between actual learning. i keep going back to the

question. you know, i thought it was awfully broad and a little like really how do you dismantle an entire class system. there's the learning that goes on in institutions and again i'm thinking about colleges and universities. and then there's the signaling function. i know that many of our students in my institution are getting really good quality education. there's still employers that will question it. >> because it's an online education. >> because, yes, it's an online education, but we're in the university of maryland so there's that signal. it's a public system, so it must be good. if you come from an institution that does a good job but isn't a public brand, that signal isn't there. so i think we still have -- if you look at who runs the country, look at who's on the supreme court, look who's elected -- except for our president right now, but we

won't go into that. he is the smartest guy that's ever been elected. he did go to wharton for his mba. we segment as people leave and that creates even more of our ossified class system. >> we have found ways, as has been suggested, to create intelligent tutor devices that would allow an individual to tirelessly be assisted in their own individual learning process in addition to their teacher, not in lieu of the teacher. one of the things that's kind of interesting is this constant just posit suction jux juxtaposition. the rate of acceleration of change and our brain capacity is

very substantial, is got to find ways in which learning can be enhanced for every human, accelerated, broadened, deepened, personalized and made as human contact as possible with all of these other things that are there to assist you. all we're doing is enhancing that process and finally getting to the point where we can actually say there's maybe a chance that the full capacity of a human brain might be visible to us and operationalized across everyone. as opposed to, oh well, those learners are slower learnings. that's the whole way human beings have operated. they class structure everything. it is time to dynamite that stuff out of existence and use these tools to be able to do it. >> you mentioned employers and what they're looking for. what i'm excited about is this

next generation of students just starting to come into our college system. in terms of generation z and the fact that 70% of them don't want to work for you at all, they want to go their own thing. because of technology, because kids can pick up laptops and have some server space on google or amazon, they can run everything. this idea of employers controlling who dpegets to say t skills are needed is kind of going away and i'm excited about it. >> we hear that digital natives are coming in. is that really true? are all these students that digitally savvy? >> this is the first generation that doesn't know what the world looked like before google. they don't know what that world looked like before technology, the internet. so they're going to have a

different expectation of what learning looks like. but more importantly what they can do with technology. >> we're trying to get the name of the species altered. everyone born before 2000 is a homo sapiens. everyone born after is a homosapien.net. they can ask questions that we have no idea where this is going. we have no idea what it means. if you could if you were a self-disciplined person, you could basically educate yourself at the moment. >> you could educate yourself with a lot of things. earlier you could have gone to the library and read a lot of books earlier. for some reason we didn't. >> some people did. >> we still developed schools and colleges and systems. >> frederick douglass educated

himself in an unbelievable way. he taught himself to read. he is a far better writer and speaker than anyone i've ever met. if he could have had access to a broader learning environment, who knows what that genius could have been able to do. >> i was born in memphis. i couldn't have gone to memphis state university until 1972. we didn't have that opportunity to even learn in that environment. now with the power of technology, i could do my own thing. i can google it. i can research it. we can't forget the fact that we still have to have that connection as human beings, body, mind, heart and soul. that's why we're going to be in high demand soon. when all the robots take over, what the heck are we supposed to do? we've got to remember there's a balance that has to happen here as well. >> there's some sky net officers up there. >> there has to be a balance as

well. >> you kind of raised this with me when we were getting ready for this discussion. we talked about whether the knowledge economy and the digital technologies would create a different kind of class system. people would be connected in different ways. >> i wish we were talking about two different things. one is i do think there's all kinds of advances in not just technology but learning science. we know how people learn now. higher ed still has a ways to go. i know the r 2 institutions are trying to use learning science. i do think we will be able to hit a point soon where more people have been able to learn in far better ways than ever before. but i don't think it's just digital education that will up end the class system. i think it's this coming acceleration, as michael said, of all things in our society. so between the internet, computing power, i can connect with anyone on the internet.

i can link into anybody. the power of small is actually now quite big. we can form networks. there are ways that power is going to shift, i think, pretty quickly. >> at the moment, though -- i don't know if some of you have been reading a little bit about this new book that just came out by english author richard reeves where he talks about he thinks the american class system is more solid than the british class system. >> more rigid? >> yes. he says in the united states, though, we have the top 20%. >> don't they have like a queen in england or something? >> they've got that whole queen thing going, yeah. >> it would be hard to have a social class system less rigid than one where there's a hereditary leader. >> we kind of have our own king now, so to speak, with what's

going on in d.c. edit that out, please. >> he does talk about this top 20% as being sort of the dream hoarders. >> dream hoarder? >> that's his new phrase. >> this guy must be angry at things. >> he does sort of say silicon valley has this notion that the technology is open and you can play on the internet and be a tech billionaire. that's not exactly how it works. >> no. being a billionaire is hard. not that i would know. >> you work for some. >> i have a couple friends. it's not about just being around technology. all of us were born around when there were 18-wheeler trucks. doesn't mean we can all drive an 18-wheeler truck.

when i was a kid, when i needed information, i had to go to the columbus library on 51st street and 10th avenue that was closed on the weekends, that would close at 5:00, that when i would look for a book, it wasn't there. the limited amount of resources available to me predetermine what had information i had access to. that is no longer true. i know a picture of google when it first started. that can happen anywhere in the world now, anywhere with a good internet connectivity. there's power in that. >> michael, you and i have known each other a long time. i dug back in the archives to a quote you had in 2012 where you were talking -- you were worrying about the future of higher education. you said you worry about a future where we let rich kids get taught by professors and poor kids getting taught by

computers. >> absolutely. i still worry about that. what we're talking about is the enhancement of the teacher, the professor, the learning network. what i was concerned about were some investors investing in for profit companies where they thought there was no need for the knowledge creator, the profess professor. there was no need for the master teacher. there's always a need. the machines around them are the enhancement. where that was going five years ago was it seemed that people said rich kids and smart kids can talk to humans. everyone else can talk to machines. our online courses are derivative of our core faculty. >> even more so in this world that we're building. if we talk about what are the skills that kids really need, everyone will agree, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking. a teacher has to be able to look

at a classroom and say what team can i put together. >> you also mentioned this other notion i've been thinking about a lot. what about the students who don't want to go for a four year degree? we heard the president today talking a little bit more about apprenticeship training in this country. there's a lot of discussion now about more people going for certificates and programs that are not leading necessarily to a four year program, an associate's or even a sub associate's. we haven't seen that much innovation in digital education in those areas, have we? or am i missing the boat on

this? >> that isn't my strongest suit. but, no, we don't have an apprenticeship program, per se. >> applying that to the sector of the information economy. >> we got carried away with that four year degree, like everybody needs a four year degree. there needs to be better opportunities for jobs in that blue collar, working class kind of group. which i came from a working glass background. it's hard to be in the working class and truly middle class anymore. that's an area that we have to pay attention to. the move towards more apprenticeships is a really good way to go. >> i think there's huge movement in this space for middle skill jobs. the plumber and pipe fitter unions are some of the most sophisticated education enterprises, using technology, using the internet to drive things forward. there's all kinds of skill based

professions that are becoming more and more sophisticated. human beings have more potential than we gave them credit for. and they can learn more things and faster and broader and take on more things and make things happen. what we're seeing from trade skill jobs to military training, is we have too much of a social hierarchy assigned to all of this. that somehow if you were admitted to some elite, exclusive, admit almost no one, four-year college, you're somehow better than everybody else. i'm sorry to say, you're simply not. we should move on from that point and say everybody's finding their niche and they're getting themselves educated along the way to be able to do that. >> one of the things we worked on in my district was it doesn't come down to who goes to class and who doesn't. they all should be prepared to go. you make that decision when the time comes. you also should be prepared to go into a career, a passion, a purpose that you really want to

do in your life. as opposed to fuss feus feeding into square boxes and this industry and that industry, you could do a plethora of things in your life. you you can a plumber, a musician, a doctor, a lawyer. >> has the education jumped into this? >> it changed in our district because we insisted on it. the model was preparation for college, career and citizenship. some of my kids weren't even natural born citizens here. but we don't care think about. we care about the fact that they are here. they're a product of society now. that community took off because that was the belief. every kid should have a device, every kid should have access. and they should have the ability to have choice when they graduate from high school. that's what education should start really focusing on. >> are we seeing education -- to

these careers, to training that isn't just at the b.a. level. >> we're starting to get into this stuff. let's start with the fact that at google you don't need a college degree to work at google. >> how many people at google don't actually have a college degree? >> the guy who runs infrastructure for google doesn't have a college degree. there are some people who never graduated from high school. that's a supply and demand thing. people want to come work for us. it's not a requirement. it's not something you have to have. at the same time, i think the technologies that are coming have an interesting angle on those technical skills like vr, ar. what we could do with training around these things -- when someone's -- when i'm going to have surgery, hopefully no time soon, but i want that doctor to be able to have access to the latest and greatest information

at their fingertips. that's true for a lot of different industries, mechanics, technicians. >> how many people in this room have looked at vr stuff? i'm just curious. >> we're on day one of that. >> i watched a few demos on it. >> we're launching a digital high school in august. the digital high school, like we just heard, is prep for life, prep for career, prep for college. it doesn't say prep for college. it's going to be the asu digital preparatory academy, prep for life, prep for career, prep for college. that means designing it in a way where it works for all of those things. there's certainly no one that wants to be less skilled, less capable, less adaptive. it's not just about college. >> absolutely in the sense that those jobs are very technical now. if you are in an apprenticeship

to become, i don't know, some sort of journeyman, et cetera, they're highly technical, so the training does have to be highly technical. how many parents really say, if you want to be a plumber, that's great. we will support you. there's this sense of status, though. >> maybe the world that you're in. in many communities there's not necessarily that sense of status. still 30% of the country has a b.a., the rest doesn't. >> about 90% of the population wants their children to be maximally educated, 90%. they want their children to have a life outcome as good or better than theirs in healthy life span, healthy life outcome. education is a part of all those things. it's not just about jobs or money. >> here's another thing about this generation that's preparing

to go to college. they know that 70% of americans are disengaged from their work. they don't want that. we grew up with the, you get your education, work hard, you advance in the company. they watched that promise be broken. they want purpose, they want to have mastery around the skills they need. but they don't necessarily want to work for companies in advance from director to vp or whatever. that's gone away. how does the work force need to reshape itself to prepare for a generation that thinks that way? >> the vr stuff that i've seen is really cool. it's not cheap to create. i want to sort of get back to that question that the tweeter percent to me early on. a lot of this has costs associated with it. are we as a country prepared to spend the money on this

technology and are we going to use that to sort of replace the things that we should also be doing like regular investments in education? >> no. i'll tell you why. because when you look at the cost of devices, when we started in 2011, we had almost zero devices. and our district, pretty much the pipe that gave us our broadband was about one gigabyte. we go back and say, all these kids should have devices. the governor's not going to give it to us. the state's not going to give it to us. but you can give it to your own community if you band together, put your money together. this community agreed to tax themselves, one of the poorest communities in america, by the way, they agreed to tax themselves so they could provide devices to all of these students so they could learn in the 21st surgery. there are some communities that don't have access.

they're in trailer home parks or areas that are too rural. i said you've got to do whatever it takes to get these kids connected. if not, they're going to be at a disadvantage when they go out in the real world. now i got people saying, you know, you have an aviation academy. here's a corporate jet so these kids can learn how to fly and be a part of this industry. here's a construction union who wants to come in and train the kids in some of those high paying jobs. now you open up this community to possibility because the technology and ability to come together and provide it changed that community. when president obama talked about it at the white house, those kids were in that classroom yelling and screaming like they one the super bowl, because the president of the united states was talking about them. it's possible to make this transformation. you've just got to have the will

and togetherness to do it. >> was there a debate about whether that was the best place to put the resources, as opposed to other kinds of resources? >> if you don't, you know, you're already at a disadvantage. you're on the wrong side of the tracks. 100% of our kids can reduced lunch. it was about 99.9%, but i said just give it to the other 10. it was that much of a challenge for that community. when they said we can do better and we can do it together, they were like, let's go for it. now, there was some tension later on with those who had lost power in the community because the parents had taken over their school district. the district that does it to you, we're normally the district that does it with you. some people didn't like that. but that majority of those parents and students, they will never go back because they see the power that they have together. >> the reason i ask that is because i think some of you may have read the article in "the new york times" that tooked about google's role in

education. jamie, you featured prominently in that article, but it talked about some concerns some of this emphasis on technology and devices becomes somewhat of a distraction for districts and some schools and maybe for colleges as well. and it takes away from some more fundamental discussions about broader investments in higher education. people start to say, we'll just invest in technology and that will fix some things we don't want to make the other investments. >> it seems like we have oversimplified thinking in both of those arguments. the notion of somehow technology doesn't reduce cost, i have been thinking since you posed that for a single example where that's the case and i can't come up with one. there are some examples in health care, but not when you measure it against outcomes. if you value the lives that are being saved along the way -- >> because the way you calculate savings, right? >> yes, but on the other side, relative to this sort of impact of technology, i think what people are reacting to is it's different. we have three times the number of graduates, eight times the number of learners, about five

times the level of funded research at my institution than we had when we started this process, and our faculty is the same size. technology is one of the main ingredients that we have been able to put on the table, so it has dramatically enhanced our ability to do things in a different way. now, was it easy and are there issues? easy, no. issues, yes. does it in the long run look like a path for us to greatly enhance education? >> you think the quality hasn't suffered? >> i'm certain of that because we measure our quality against all of the other colleges operated in different but differentiated technologically rich environments and we hold their market position and their awards and recognition up against anyone anywhere. >> well, and the other argument against that is this idea that somehow it's choosing one thing over the other as opposed to investing in both. this idea that we're going to give you very little money but don't spend it on technology, as opposed to we should be getting the resources schools need.

that's argument number one. >> but we live in the real world. >> but we live in the real world. this idea that you don't want to give a kid a portal to all the world's information, to access to all of the things that are available to them, the tools that are available to them, is going to create even a greater digital divide because it's not going to stop the parents of kids who have money from not giving them devices and not giving them tuck knowledge, not giving them those tools. the problem is you have kids from districts like this where i grew up going to college because they didn't have technology, they didn't have devices, they go off to college and they don't know house to use technology, they don't know how to take advantage of t they don't know how to search, research, look for information and they drop out a semester later and we wonder why. it's almost like a no choice situation because parents that have resources and have money are investing in their kids' education. >> one quick example. a few years ago, i was on a native american community in arizona, and they had a school funded by the united states government by taxpayers under the indian education school program. the library in this school was

in complete disarray. books were laying on the floor, no shelves. there was essentially no library. i was about as mad that day as i had been in a four or five-year timeframe by the time i got out of that community and back to the university because i realized if i could just push a button and say to every kid in that school, don't worry about the fact that the people that work at the school are lazy and can't get this library fixed and aren't fulfilling their mission, here's your library. everything you ever imagined that you wanted to read. there's never been a technology that could empower that outcome in the history of humanity. there is your library. anything you ever wanted to be able to read is there for you. >> we had some resistance from some teachers. like, i don't know if we want to do this technology thing. i said that's okay, fine, the kids are going to have it and they're going to leave you behind. you know what they did? those teachers came forward and began to learn and became true educators of technology. >> i also, the cynical part of me wonders about people who say,

like, who are against the technology use in schools. with this idea that how do you control people? you control information. and all of a sudden, you're limiting the amount of information that kids that grew up in communities like this have access to. to me, it's a little striking. i worry about those things. >> i heard your question, though, was about i think the cost of doing virtual reality and augmented because we're sort of talking about general technology, and i think there's an agreement that kids have to have access. adults have to have access. but i think institutions also have to ask themselves some hard questions and a lot of institutions will just chase a new technology. instead of asking, what is our learning model? what outcomes do we want? because you don't have to go right to virtual reality, right? but i know it sounds sexy and like all people do it. >> no one wants -- >> and obviously, everything i read about the technology failures always talk about implementation and context, and that's usually about the

technology itself. i want to -- we have a lot of people here, i think a lot of people may have questions. actually, don't know how we're handling questions here. do we have people stand up? >> talk for five more minutes. >> we can talk for five more minutes and then they'll talk. >> talk about what you talked about before, leaving the teachers behind and leaving the professors behind. and implementation. that seems to me one of the places where a lot of this breaks down. you have good ideas, but it's hard to get the people who need to -- the implementing it comfortable with it, accepting it, and that's not because necessarily because they're enemies of it. >> our approach is we don't make anyone do anything. if you want to move in this new direction, if you want to use technologies for the way you teach your course, we have people who can help you. be my guest. if you don't want to, if you want to teach in some traditional way, be my guest. there are certain courses that can only be taught in

traditional ways. we were teaching lyric opera to music majors, there's only one way to focus on that, so we don't force anyone to do anything. >> i'm not thinking about forcing it, but you need -- >> i mean, there's self-selection. someone wants to do it. >> but it takes resources and expertise. >> so we provide that. >> in k-12, you're right. just taking technology, look, if you take technology and put it on tap of our current model of education, we're making old education faster and more efficient. >> you're sending the worst education back out. >> we need to bring education to the next level. it's not just bringing technology in. it's part of all these other things. i was part of a team at google where we built a google transformation framework. it's not technology that transforms schools. it's leadership and culture and professional development and technology and community engagement and so on. and learning models and so on. it's all these things that have to be happening at the same

time, so yes, you're right. you did it well. it's about looking at all of those things, implementing all those things for real transformation, not just putting technology in and hoping things will change. >> if you're trying to change and transform a k-12 education system, it's like trying to move an aircraft carrier. it takes time, but if you get everyone enlisted in the mission and that's what it's all about. that was the division, the dream, and how are you going to say no to that? how are you going to say, some kids get this, some kids that. every kid got it. once you have that, you have training, training, training. you train the teachers until they don't want any more training, you're going to be successful because they bought into it and they want to be a part of it. what we did even better than that, and i'm not saying empowered the parents or students, but true leadership, true leaders will bring out the power in the people. they don't empower the people. so once the parents knew, hey, this is my school dict. and students said i do have a

say. you saw this ground swell of support for transformation that could not be stopped. it could not be stopped. that's what we need to see more and more in education as a whole. and you'll see this country and nation really start to minimize that gap between the rich and poor. which is the big challenge of the future. if that is not looked at, whether you use digital learning, regular learning, or magic, you know, we're going to have some issues, and that's why we're thankful to be here to talk about the digital side of it, but it's really the american side of it. we have to eliminate and minimize that disparity between the rich and poor. that has to be dealt with. >> but that's only gotten worse in the last 10, 15 years. as technology has advanced. what's going to be this leverage point that's going to suddenly make technology become a vehicle for reversing that and reversing that trend? >> so -- >> in education. >> the assumption is in that in argument is that the should have happened 10 or 15 years ago, when your reality, you have to

remember that in 1995, 1% of the world was online. 1995 was not that long ago. we're at the very beginning of this, of what's possible. it took ten years to get to the first billion people to be online. and even today, 20 years later, only 42% of the world is online. so we're at the very beginning of this. can we close the gap? yes. was it supposed to happen 15 years ago? no. technology is finally at the point where it's useful. some people were earlier adopters, but we're just getting to the point where the tools can be useful in what you were talking about, what does good learning look like? we don't have to invebt anything new. we just have to look at good research that tells us what learning looks like. and ask how do we use technology to bring these things to life. if we have those conversations we can go far in this space. >> what we have is uneven distribution of the tools that enhance outcomes. we have very uneven distribution. this spread in outcome differentials is a function of

that unevenness. we see it, we can understand it. technology can help us to narrow that spread. we can hopefully reach this point through empowerment and the defeat of many forms of prejudice that have created this dynamic history which is not the direction we want to go in, we can find a way to get down to, and this is my main point, down to the level of the empowerment of every single individual. not classes of individuals, not groups of individuals. not individuals who look like this or look like that or act like this or act like that. every single individual. we now are on the precipice of being able to do that. >> and i guess i sit here and wonder, does the momentum take us -- help us reverse the direction or does the momentum of this sort of re-enforce some of the divides we have already been building? by class and race. >> i think jamie is right. we're at the early stages of an extremely complicated process. we have never lived in a species where everyone was actually equal. >> yeah. but it's possible. the impossible is possible. we showed it in the coachella

valley school district. that small microcosm, but i see it as a microcosm in this nation that's going to take all of us, parents, students, forcing our governments and our state legislatures to give money for textbooks that are static. give me tools i can truly use that are going to prepare the kids for the future. and that's possible. and i think it wastes a lot of money sometimes because we are still stuck in that traditional way of we could get a textbook in california, and i was like, kicking and screaming. they had to force me to sign that thing. i did not want to sign that. that's $3 million or $5 million for a book that's supposed to last ten years. how often does information change in the technology age? six months, 12 months? you're going to give me a static textbook. we need to make the changes globally as a nation, but all of us need to get involved in it and not just say, well, you know, my district is doing well. i'm good.

we all are going to be affected by this. >> that's a great example for open educational resources. at my university, we have moved completely away from publisher textbooks. all open educational resources. >> for all 85,000 students? >> all 85,000 students. no cost to their students, but they're high quality, curated by faculty. what was interesting is we did it because it was the right thing to do for our students. the students at college park, the traditional campus, got wind of this. the residence hall, and front page of their paper, you know, how come unuc can do this but we can't do it for us? so there's this whole move over there now for a faculty to adult oers. you're seeing students rising up about this because the cost of textbooks is ridiculous, and they're out of date. >> yes. when you have to lease your textbook, what does that say about us? come on now. a house maybe, but not a textbook, please. sorry. >> that's a great point. the next part of our program, we

now have time to take kwekzs from all of you. there are two of us going around with microphones. raise your hand and we'll come to you, and if you would please say your first and last name before asking a question, we would greatly appreciate it as the session is being recorded and will be published on our website, and it will also be broadcast by c-span at a later date. first question in front. >> hi, my name is ung lee. i feel there's an undertone or assumption in this conversation that these inequities and what causes these inequities are passive things, racism and sexism, and when we provide these tools to people, they would lead to these doing good things with them, which we know is not true. so i was wondering, knowing that, what role do you see sort of the intersection of education and technology play in this need to actually sort of mediate good things? >> like the civic life in

effect. >> at least in the comments i made, and i appreciate your comment very much. it's not that these tools are passive ingredients to the defeat of racism or sexism or other isms. it's that education is the means by which those ideas based on ignorance can ultimately be defeated. so it's not a simple process. it's education is a process. we're talking about the enhancement of the educational process with these tools because if you are not ignorant, you have a better chance of not being a racist because racists are ignorant. >> another good example of that, suppose i live in rural appalachia, and i don't know that this new health care bill is going to be detrimental to me, but suppose i have access and i can read about it, and i understand there's an opportunity to have a debate about it. i'm going to be much more informs and have a better decision making process when it comes time to go to the ballot box. that's how technology and education is going to play a

role in helping us change things. it truly has to start there. >> that's kind of an ideal world, because i think right now we're also in this environment where just because people have access to information it doesn't mean they're getting access to the right information. >> sure. >> at least they have the information. they have something. >> a lot of times, they might be getting, you know, fake -- to -- there is fake news out there. there is disinformation out there as well. it could re-enforce a lot of the really wrong information. >> one, there's always been fake news. two, actually, it was worse because you could spread fake news easier through people and it was harder to stop because you couldn't stop it. but two, and the assumption is we need to teach kids how to use these tools. there's a stanford study that shows you that 82% of elementary school kids can tell you the difference between a sponsored website and a real news site. that's scary. so we do need to do education on teaching these kids how to use these tools. we do need to do education on

how to research, and adults. it's not to assume that just because they're there, that they are used for good. we have to be able to take advantage of the tools that are available to us. >> next question is on your left. >> good evening. my name is steven. i tautd in the classroom for a few years, a special education teacher in ucla. we had a full blended learning model where every student had 101 access to a tablet or to a chromebook, thank you, google. and through that experience, a lot of our students had access to articles that were at their reading level, and they were exposed to a lot of information that benefitted them tremendously. however, we delved deep into racial inequities in the tech industry. when 18% of black and brown graduates have a computer science degree and only 5% make up the tech industry, that's an issue. when only less than 1% of executives and managers in silicon valley are black, that's

an issue. >> yes. i'm a leprechaun. >> that's an issue. that's an issue. so my question is, how do we insure beyond the classroom, beyond the fact that we provide this access to technology to our students, where they're learning so much, the fact that they even get the degree, that they get the paper is not enough. what is google, what is apple, beyond these tech industries, what are they doing to insure our students of color have acwitable access to the breaking down of multigenerational poverty? >> that's a great question because i get to -- no, it's important. i'm a lonely person. i want more people like me. so there's a couple answers for that. one is awareness, right? i go around the country, i speak a lot at events. one of the things i always bring up at a school district or wherever i am is the stats. for example, computer science graduate makes 40% more than a regular college graduate. the fact that in california, i just did this a couple weeks

ago, in california, there are 68,000 computer science jobs available and only 4,000 people in california graduated with a computer science degree and only 15% were female and only like 9% were black or latino. there's an awareness issue, and then we need to build the systems to support that. in phoenix, i was part of a program that built a school called phoenix coding academy. computer science is embedded in all the subjects. kids are learning art and computer science, and history and computer science for four years. what we talk about is what can happen at the end of four years of computer science embedded into their curriculum. we're going to have a 3% college admissions rate because they're going to be valuable people when they graduate. we need to build a system to support that. i know google has done a lot of work in this space. we have great programs like cs first. we sponsor black girls code. there's a lot of things you can do, but at the system level, in california, only 15% of the schools that offer a.p. program,

offered a.p. computer science. that's insane. we need to recognize that computer science is embedded into everything that the future holds. we need to do a better job at the system level. >> i tell my kids, create your own apple. don't wait for apple to call you. that's what i told them. and they started believing it because they started coding. they started building robots. and doing things they never thought they could do. because now they have access. so they create the opportunity. you guys -- those kids now, they're finding their own way. they're determining their own destiny. so i understand what you're saying, but again, you know, that community took matters into their own hands and those kids, they may be the ones who cure cancer or create another apple or google or whatever. and then that opportunity, you'll see start to spread out amongst everyone. >> you don't have to build another apple. you can build a tool or feature that a company like google or apple needs and get bought out.

>> an entrepreneur. >> next question. >> hi, my name is julian. i'm a freshman at asu or sophomore now, i should say. >> there you go. >> my question is, as tuition rates continue to rise year after year, the recent trump budget shows the pell grant program will be cut by $3.9 billion. and i receive a pell grant every semester in order to attend. and if i didn't receive that pell grant, i would not be able to attend. as a political science major, i have this idea to maybe earmark tax revenue to go towards funding the pell grant program even more rather than cutting it, but my question is, what can be done at the federal, state, and collegiate level in order to make college education more affordable? >> so are you an in-state arizona student? >> i'm out of state and i should add i'm receiving a substantial amount of scholarship funds. >> what we have tried to do is we have said and say this publicly, that certainly for a

kid from arizona, where we're doing everything we can so that there are no financial barriers whatsoever, so our net tuition cost, that is a student's payment at asu for a year of attendance, is $1800 after grant, on average. we're very excited about that. if you come from certain family income levels and below that, there's no cost for attendance. you're coming in from out of state. you earned a merit-based scholarship. you're winning a need-based scholarship. all of us need to find ways to lower our costs. we're working to lower our costs maintain access. we try to keep our out of state tuition at average, the average of the country. i'll say something on the pell grants because i'm not sure what that document that came out of omb is. it's one of the most farcical federal budget proposals i ever had the opportunity to read. it's filled with farce after farce after farce. what's interesting though is politics is different than -- politics is different than the budget proposal.

congress in its last action on the pell grant actually increased pell grants to the individual, expanded when a pell grant could be used and expanded the number of people who would be eligible for a pell grant. i don't see the congress of the united states yet so cynical that they don't continue to want to invest in people exactly like you, the next generation with pell grants. there's a number of us out there fighting for that. all of us nide to find a way to maintain access. we need to make sure there are no financial barriers to access. we work hard to do that. >> yeah, i would add, look, we need help advocating for money that is given back to the state so you can have these great public university systems. that being cut left and right, we try to keep our in-state tew ishz in maryland, we're the second lowest in the entire state for the public schools. and we give our community college partners large

scholarships. but they're essentially discounts. so we are trying to do everything we can. we have really got to start reinvesting back in public education. we're giving up a little bit in saying we have to find other revenue sources, and we do, but we need you all to help us. get elected and get more money. i'm serious. we need good people in public offices. >> honestly, one of the revenue sources people are using is revenue that they're making from the distance education programs. a lot of universities are using their distance education programs not to cut costs for -- not to cut cost of attendance for students, but to sort of generate revenue. they're charging revenue, they're charging tuition based on the market, not necessarily based on the cost. >> uryour forgetting one thing. there's the cost basis for the delivery of the program. if the cost base is low for the online program, that's not an illegitimate way to generate revenue to lower the cost for the rest of the institution. any organization has to find the programs that are more expensive to offer. those programs that are less

expensive to offer, for us to produce a nurse, for instance, is very, very expensive, but we don't charge the nursing students that tuition level. so we have to balance this through all of our programs back and forth. >> but it's a place to be -- just to be sort of more transparent about it, this is a place where technology and digitization is helping the universities achieve savings, but you're using them to make -- to use to help your institution yourselves, not necessarily like lower the tuition bill for the students. >> so 17% of our revenue off the top for a number of our programs is taken for financial aid for other students who can't afford, and that includes our online students. so we have ways in which we generate revenue internally to be able to affect the cost basis so we can live up to our responsibility to make certain that students are not left out for financial reasons. >> i have to say this, i'm sorry. how many of you utilize some type of assistance, raise your hand, when you went to college.

okay, oh, boy. so i have four kids. two of them -- i have five, but two of my daughters have finished us. that's $250,000. i have two kids, that's probably another $250,000. if i moved back to memphis, tennessee, i could buy like four mansions with that money. to your point, why don't we start thinking about, you know, doing this together again and not, you know, alienating different populations. and if we stratify -- i'm going to correct this. if we go along with that budget they put out there. >> the farcical one. >> the farcical one. but anyway, it's bad. i didn't want to go there, but that's draconian. we can't allow that. everybody needs to speak up and make some phone calls. same thing with that health bill. i don't want to go political on you, but i am. but the fact is that what you're saying is we have to help students like him.

he should not come out of college drowning with debt. but he never gets ahead again. a lot of kids are dying still owing money and now their parents owe money. we can do better. that's all i'm saying. >> next question is on your left. >> hi. i'm jack. i wear a number of hats. i'm the chairman of the health futures council at asu, which is a group of thought leaders related to some of these issues related to the health care focus. what i really wanted to address in relationship to the technology application is we're constantly battling the whole issue between health care expenditures and expenditures for higher education. at the end of the day, i had an epiphany today. i was fortunate enough to be in washington, d.c. i'm working with the secretary of the v.a., and there is essentially a little known fact that the v.a. has the largest telemedicine program in the world. 2.5 million visits occur vis-a-vis their telemedicine

program from a company actually based in scottsdale, arizona. the question i'm bringing up is that in relationship to the focus of the cost expenditures that could be reduced using these technologies are prohibited by a variety of different political and social and administrative work processes and agendas in such a way that's almost impossible to use technology efficiently to reduce significant cost that could then be reinvested in the education or health care area. what are your thoughts on bringing more efish aengss with technology to some of these tougher area ss? >> is it cultural, political? >> it's political. i'm sorry, this raises my -- >> blood pressure. >> yeah, blood pressure. because this is political. we let it happen. you know, we go to the ballot box. we vote for people who support these kind of limitations, then we're letting it happen.

people have to get more involved because if you have the technology to lower the cost, that's going to help everybody. you know, i call it the profit over people syndrome. we have to get away from that. but people have to stand up and participate. you know, we can't let what happened last year continue to happen. those kind of people are going to support people who don't care about people dying, because they don't have health care. or we can't lower the cost because we won't use the devices available to us. i'm off my soap box. >> dr. crow, who by the way has never made be chairman of any committee, but that's okay. talked a little bit about this. universities also have a responsible to transform themselves and to figure out how to use digital tools, not just to provide learning for students, but also to run their businesses. every industry, every organization's trying to find ways to digitally transform themselves and universities should be no different. there are opportunities for

great cost savings in terms of how you structure things. there are universities who are running four or five data centers when you don't have to do that. universities need to look at themselves and figure out how to digitally transform themselves so they can actually run more efficient. not that they're not trying, but we can do better in that space. >> that wasn't just a commercial for the cloud, was it? >> no, it was a commercial for, you know, besides -- i spent seven years at accenture working in strategy. 20 years we have been talking about how organizations have to transform themselves. universities have been slower than that. >> there's still human cost. i live this every day. we do try to be more efficient using technology. i mean, we are in the cloud now. we got rid of our data center, but there's a cost to this. there are human beings that have to -- that are laid off or that we try to find them other jobs but often they're not.

so we need -- that's some of the cultural piece of it, but i do think we have to take that seriously. because it is hard when you displace people. this is what's coming, though. there's going to be more and more of this displacement. we have to help people realize, and this kind of goes back to an earlier part of our conversation. we have to help people realize it's long life. you're probably going to have nine different kinds of careers, right? and so keep going back and reinventing yourself. there's just many different careers out there for people. you can't just stay. >> i think the only thing i would add, there's a story a few years ago, i was asked by the editor of a magazine called nature magazine, which is one of the top comprehensive science magazines in the country. he said i need an article in two weeks describing what you think about whether the national institutes of health should add a 28 nature institute. i wrote this thing and said no, they shouldn't. what they should do is have three institutes. one should be focused as the

greatest center in human history on understanding the body, biology, medicine, everything about the cell, everything about cancer. nothing left off, whatever it costs understand everything about how we work. not 28 institutes working at one with lots of programs in it. then a second institute should be designed on outcomes. how do you even out the outcomes at the highest possible level for everyone in our society and how do you figure out how to do that? that's new structures, new designs, new organizations, new economic models and so forth. the third institute was about lower the cost of health care. which is now at $9,000 or more per person per year in the country, for relatively marginal outcomes for large segments of our population. that article was not well received. and so a few days -- after it got published in "nature" and then the "boston globe" said we want to run it in the sunday edition as the main article in some sunday thing. i got more -- one guy said i was

an illegitimate child of mccain. and what they meant by that, i don't think my mother knew him, so what they meant by that was, surely, i had been mentally corrupted by some kind of conservative logic. and that now all i was doing was spewi spewing vile that would somehow take money away from science. that's literally what the articles said. no interest in the lowering of cost, no interest in the maximumization of outcomes across the broader elements of society. so the answer to your question is it is culture. >> that's all -- >> just wrapping up there at zocalo, and live here on c-span3, a former deputy director of the cia, david cohen, will be discussing sanctions against russia, venezuela, and north korea. introductions under way. >> i want to kick things off, first