>> thank you. [ applause ] >> tonight american history is live look at vietnam war at the time offensive and battle of way with remarks from author mark baldwin author of way 1968 turning point of american war. we'll also hear from stars and strikes photographs who make up a new exhibit. american history tv live beginning at 7 eastern on c-span3. next week marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the vietnam war. and tonight during american history prime time oral histories from west point graduates who served in the vietnam war. starts tonight at 8:30 eastern here on c-span3. >> the president of the united states. [ applause ] >> tuesday night president trump

gives hirs state of the union address to congress and the nation. join c-span for a preview of the evening starting at 8 eastern. and then the state of the union speech live at 9:00 p.m. and following the speech, the democratic response, also hear your reaction and comments from members of congress. president trump's state of the union address tuesday night live on c-span. listen live with the radio app and on demand on your desk phone or tablet at c-span.org. education senator betsy devos took part in the rethink school summit here in washington. over the next hour 15 minutes, stakeholders from across the country discuss ideas for educating and training america's future workforce. >> so we are going to go into our third group of presenters. under the rubric of breaking the mold. we are going to start with

blakely pal el owe followed by michael roark and wrap up by jeff. if we could have blakely. >> thank you. >> so good morning and thank you for the opportunity to be here. we are going to talk about university of maryland, university college which is the public online university that is designed from the ground up to provide affordable accessible quality and career relevant education for adult learners and especially for military learners. and to understand who we are, i into he had to tell you the story of this. we were established in 1947 at the university of maryland as a

department that was charged with serving adult students, particularly those who returning gis from world war ii. in 1949, we became the first university to send faculty overseas to teach our troops stationed in germany. and this was the beginning of umuc global reach. by 1956, we had established divisions to deliver higher education in both europe and asia. and in 1963, we became the first u.s. university to send faculty into a war zone in vietnam. in 1970, we became an independent fully accredited university that is part of the university system of maryland. and over the years, our legendary faculty have travelled overseas to teach boots on the ground classes in the war zones of cost owe vo, iraq, and afghanistan. today we go where the military

goes. our story is important because it is at the core of who we are as a university. today, we are the largest public online university offering four year degrees in the united states. we enroll 90,000 students annually in more than -- excuse me, in more than 90 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, certificate programs, specializations and even micro masters programs. in fall 2017, we served 50,000 active duty military service members, reservists, veterans and their dependents. we have been ranked this year as number one for online and non-traditional schools for military and we offer career relevant programs that use project-based learning to make real world competent graduates. serving adult students and serving the military is in the

fiber of our dna. 75% of our students work full-time, 72% of them are married or in committed relationships. the average age of the undergraduate student at umuc is 31 and the graduate student average age is 37. 48% of our students have children under the age of 18 that are living with them. umuc's students juggle work, community, family, faith and school responsibilities. we are built to provide them affordable, accessible, quality career relevant education. through the use of predictive analytics we have developed tools that enable our faculty, staff and administrators to better serve students. these include building retention models that allow our advisers to actually outreach to those students most in need of support in order to persist and succeed.

giving us insight into both faculty and student engagement in the online classroom so that we can support those types of engagement behaviors that are best linked to positive student outcomes. identifying those courses that we call obstacle courses, high enrollments but lower success rates, so that we know where to target our efforts at course review and redesign in the name of enabling student success. we know that learning, college level learning, can happen outside the walls of our institutions and it happens in the workplace, it happens in community and volunteer experiences, it happens through military training, and so we offer a comprehensive prior learning assessment program that allows students to demonstrate what they know and can do, earn credit for it, and shorten the time and cost to a degree. these include military training, credit for current industry certifications and licensures, workplace credit experience, portfolio assessment and a host

of other mechanisms. we know that our students want career relevant training and education and we have already heard today employers want graduates with career-ready skills. so we are developing a new extended transcript that goes beyond a static list of these are the courses they took and these are the grades that they earned, and instead, identifies what are the expected outcomes a student should be able to know and demonstrate when they complete a program of study and go deeper and show what is the relationship of the courses and the coursework to those outcomes. two years ago, we started converting our programs away from the use of traditional industry published textbooks and moved our programs to open educational resources. the first year, we moved all of our undergraduate programs to the oer model and saved our undergraduate students alone $17 million that they would have otherwise spent on textbooks. the following year, we converted our graduate programs.

in 1993, umuc was one of the first universities to actually offer students an opportunity to complete a degree program remotely, using a combination of media, including computers. today, our 90 programs, specializations and certificates are completely online and we have mobile and responsive mr platforms that allow our students access to their classroom and faculty anywhere in the world, any time of day from any of the technology devices they are using. all of these innovations are things we have developed in response to our students who are at the center of our university so that they have access, affordability, quality and career relevance. serving adult military learners is who we are. my colleague, michael, will talk about how we are actually further breaking down some of those barriers related to cost. >> so we went through an assessment process and said what is core to the university and what is not core to the

university. clearly in the academic space, curriculum and teaching, faculty selection, academic advising, those are things that have to stay inside the university, but we challenged ourselves to say does everything else need to stay in your control, within your definition of scope, and we said no. we said we want to think about spinning off or going to the market for the full range of other capabilities out there. and when we think about, you know, we don't run our own food services anymore. why should we run our own i.t. department? that's a question that universities should ask themselves and we did ask that question. so what we did was created new companies. we spun them off from umuc and stood up new for-profit businesses to create a new market to give options to the university higher ed community. let me give you one example. our analytics group blakely talked about the analytics group being predictive and useful.

we said why don't we sfpin that off, make a company out of it and offer it to higher ed community. so we have a tech-enabled platform that helps universities increase enrollment, improve student success, ensure financial stability, work on the critical questions that universities wrestle with today. we have signed up a number of, ten clients in the last 12 months including systems, large research universities and smaller universities, too, so it's finding a place in the market and it's being useful. it's also creating value as a company and we need to think about how we at umuc think about the value of the company that we create. we have spun off our i.t. department this summer, and these models are predicated on this idea that we can harness the for-profit drive, the great entrepreneurial resource that is part of our economy and our american dna, to create these

companies with a deep expertise, great provenance within higher ed community that are at scale at day one, given our size. our i.t. department is 100 employees. there aren't very many folks who have 100 employees in their i.t. department in the university world. we can share that advantage of scale immediately in the marketplace. and we can put entrepreneurial leaders into the for-profit structure and grow these companies. all of those companies are owned, controlled and managed by our non-profit, umuc ventures which i'm the ceo of. we have a national board and we have given it seed funding to help encourage and think carefully about how we can expand this market and to provide services to the higher ed community. all of the profits that we earn from these processes, either operating profits or capital moments, will go to scholarships. that's our public mission. that's why we exist as a state university and that's what all of this activity will allow us to do. as we gain these financial benefits, channeled through the

non-profit mission, we will be dramatically reducing the cost of going to school. and that's what we were designed to do. we are designed to help working adults finish their degrees, whether it was by plane to okinawa or across the street or nowadays, across the computer. so our vision of where we imagine we will be soon is we will use all of the for-profit, nonprofit and public mission, to make colleges as close to free as possible for adult students finishing their degree in the state of maryland. thank you.

>> so the issue of going last is all your good ideas were taken or either presented in some form or fashion, but with the last name like mine, with my height, i have always been at the end of the line so i tried to improvise a little bit. it's a privilege to be here and it's an honor to be counted among you, and i have learned so much from today and we hope to contribute. i'm the chief strategy innovation officer for southern new hampshire university. homework assignment we had was how we look at the future. we have a great university. our students have a great story. we would love to tell it, but with eight minutes, we are going to kind of plow in in how we orient toward the future. we have everything in our portfolio from a pretty sizeable, we service pretty sizeable student body online.

we have a credible regional college, beautiful regional college that serves a younger population coming of age population, and we have college for america which is a competency based program of zero cost to the student but in partnership, so everything that has been brought up today is relevant. we have earned, kind of earned the place on the credibility scale and to hear quality come up as one of the first topics was most welcome. at southern new hampshire university, our focus is the student when it comes to new ideas and strategies, policies, we start with the understanding of our customer. it's a little bit different. our students are our mission. our customers, the community in which they go out in and industry and economy. that's how we orient on it, on the problems ahead. it was brought up today that the

global reeducation effort, we see the same way, it was delightful to hear that brought up, but we also, you know, if you really look at the challenges we have ahead of us and people that will enter college in about 2030, what you are talking about, you are talking about talent management issue that takes on a national security aspect to it. that's what we are talking about. because the changes that could be made today will have tremendous impact on our competitive advantage as a nation, leader in that and in the values we take forward. i had a section on values, i think if i were to add anything, i can't. so thank you for bringing that up. as a former life in the military, thank you. thank you for what you're doing. i do appreciate it. we will try and learn how to use this.

so i frame our starting point today, here, the class of 2030. to focus that far out becomes a convenience almost to say we have issues now but understanding that the opportunities we have now will affect the world they're in. they are up against a lot. we just finished about a two-year study with many partners, one of which is the institute for the future out in palo alto where we are taking a look at this time frame and it's not just an arbitrary number. about 2030 is the time quantum computing will be in a compact, viable module and it will change everything. it's also when social, economic platforms cross the industries of health care, higher ed, where automation will be acceptable both from a social and economic standpoint. so you have this convergence of

how people accept technology into their lives and then groundbreaking methods and speeds will kind of converge at this time period. that's how we came up with that. there's going to be five forces that act on these kids that you see in front of you, and the future, stuff that we have talked about in the future tense here, it's happening now, it's just not happening everywhere. the examples we bring up, we have concrete examples of these things and then the impact they have both as an opportunity and a challenge. but the first one being the proliferation of intelligent systems. by that we mean the future becomes increasingly more digital, defined and enabled and the experience and expectations of students will change. over the next decade, these systems will pervade everything, social media, health care, we are finding the rates of identifying cancer by automated systems are up in the 90

percentiles. we're looking at those hard to see if we can bring that kind of assessment over into higher ed. the rapid buildout of these systems will challenge learners, workers, managers, to come up with new skills, much of which we have talked about today, on how to manage human/machine collaborations. the definition of not only what a traditional student is but the definition of what an employee is and what is expected of managers. we know it's changing. the second force is the expansion of platform economies. it's come up four times in this discussion on the gig economy where people are taking charge of their own economic futures, the transformation of services, the lowering transaction cost and creating of two-way channels. the continued expansion of these platform economies will challenge people of all ages to build on offerings, reputation, they can take hold of it for

themselves, education, higher education certainly plays a role in that. and the opportunity, income and value streams to build on their own personal economies. the skills that we are teaching now may actually work against people and may work against them if we don't get this right in the balance of the reconciliation. the third is the evolution of the international market. this is simply what we mean here is that alongside current migrations, more and more will be blurred with the traditional demographic is. the data that we have and we work on will no longer be relevant to what we are trying to do in the future. there's good aspects of this, there are challenges that will come along with this. just i think what we just saw from colleagues before, that definition of a traditional student best illustrates this. 31, married, already has a job,

already working. again, future's here, it's just not everywhere. how then do we take up that challenge? because everything becomes blurred and then advanced matching software will challenge everyone to work alongside these new demographics and the new spectrums and create highly individualized reputations and highly personalized services. that's the expectation they will have on us. the fourth is the disruption in distributed computing. that's a major force that's easily overlooked but critical. the coming decade, this kind of computing will create decentralized operational structures. again, it's been brought up in here many examples, the peer-to-peer infrastructures are what's really going to change things that allow people to organize their own economies, their politics and personal service activities. botching technology will continue to take the internet

further. people will own their own data. the definition of a transcript and what that means to an employer will be different. they will eventually challenge today's platforms, often replacing them with new platforms that enable peer-to-peer transactions of money, information, devices. my children are probably the best example of this, when they have a big project they drag the alexa, the google home, they have their ipads in front of you but their tutor is very patient student out at cal tech, because he knows more about math than i do, and they watch this over a modem or platform that was meant to allow other students to watch -- i mean, other kids to watch you play video games. so that's how they met, right. you watch somebody do a video game it's like hey, do this, that and the other and now they are getting quality tutoring.

they didn't need it. they didn't need us to do that at all. how do we match this and how do we make sure it's equal across the board so that these kind of opportunities are open for everybody. but that's what's happening around us. finally, probably most appropriate for today's conversation and future literacies, this has come up. what skills, what are the new literacies or skills that are going to be demanded in this world because today's world is caught on two curves. first, incumbent belief and practices of the institutions, that's been brought up, and the second curve which has not yet come into fruition which is the future, the gap between these two is going to be uncertain, certainly volatile. there's no certainty, there's no urgent -- there is only urgency that comes from this, ranging from income equality to global organized crime that takes advantage of the proliferation

of knowledge and these skills, and at the same time, the buildout of that digital backbone is going to be so important. so these are the things that those kids face. we are asked what's working today. this is a very positive environment. very positive environment. we talked about the jobs. while jobs will be replaced, we know that drones, for instance, they do replace people but then the number of people that it takes to manage and service those sensors has actually gone up so there's this balance and hyperbole that surrounds and causes fear that may or may not be there, just has to be dealt with. as an institution, we operate with a tremendous amount of hope based on what we see our students accomplishing. we also act with vigilance. one source we followed pretty

closely is the georgetown center on education in the work force, and that's where these numbers come from. we have seen a gain of four million good jobs in skilled services and industries such as financial services, health services, s.t.e.m., which offset the 2.8 million jobs that were lost in manufacturing. so it's kind of ours to lose right now if we don't make as an industry or service provider, ourselves relevant. i think that's what you are seeing with the boot camps. i think that's what we're seeing with the new emerging ways that are present here today. so with that, we know some things work such as project based learning. we know it works. then other competency based approaches. it's been brought up clear today. if you followed us, we know the cornerstone of how we define and think about innovation,

hopefully will increasingly define the future of higher ed and where it's going. that brings us to the opportunities that are ahead of us. almost everything -- these issues or these touch items for your consideration, almost everything that was brought up today is constrained by that piece of legislation that was brought up to manage funds and resources for an industrial age base. everything that we have talked about that can happen in the future is touched by this. so this is only offered that if we want to continue down this road and make a permissive environment, these would be those touchpoints. we brought up quality in the beginning but what stands to be said out loud is what comes with that. we can't create a permissive environment at the expense of accountability. so very, very rigorous accountability has to be invoked in here.

so anything in the chance for predatory practices and taking advantage of vulnerable student populations is very real and has to be addressed through everything new. so my time is up. it does come back to this. thank you again for the opportunity to be here. >> good morning. i'm special adviser to president michael crowe at arizona state university. i joined asu as an adviser four years ago, after writing about higher education as a journalist and author for nearly two decades because i was attracted to arizona state's deep

commitment in pushing innovation on multiple fronts, to improve college attainment. it's a mission that is not only spelled out in asu's charter, but it's really, when you go to asu, it's really infused throughout the culture, from top administrators to literally every staff member on campus. and there's really three components that drive this mission. the first is to measure success not by whom we exclude, which is really how prestige is unfortunately measured in american higher education, it's really showered on a small group of institutions, who really today as i said earlier enroll less than 1% of american undergraduates. asu really believes that learning is for everyone and that everyone can learn. second, asu measures productivity, research productivity not only whether it's good for academics, but whether it's good for the public

good and its impact on the public good. and third, we have tackled the challenge that very few universities seem willing to confront and that is to align our culture to one that is deliberately focused on admitting and graduating a student body that is representative of the community that we serve. these components are critical not only for asu's success, but really for the nation's success, because we are living in a new era. we are living in an era at the center of a knowledge explosion, which we have talked about so much today. the knowledge and skills needed to keep up in any of our jobs are really churning at a much faster rate, not only in our jobs, but just literally in our lives. we heard today just about the alexa and google home, where we can literally get knowledge at our fingertips. knowledge is not static, as we see here today, nor should our

universities be static. but the problem is that most colleges and universities are really incremental in making changes. they occupy that bottom left quadrant of this box. but this century really requires much more revolutionary change, more institutions that are occupying that top right. we are living in a digital revolution that's really akin to the industrial revolution that we experienced in the united states and around the world, when we really saw here in the u.s. massive growth in a number of institutions and number of students going to those institutions, and in new programs and new offerings and new degrees back in the 1800s. today, entire, much like then, entire occupations and industries are expanding and contracting at an alarming rate so simply moving at the pace of change in higher education of the recent past is really no longer good enough.

the american higher education system as we have talked about today was really never meant to educate the millions of learners it now serves, or the millions more, more critically, that it really needs to serve in this new economy. the foundation of our higher education system was really built back in the colonial days and we are still trying to squeeze many students, everyone, through that narrow pathway to and through college. then we wonder why so many don't make it out on the other side. arizona state is really an example of these new types of institutions that, with many others, many of them in this room, where we have developed an institution that is scaleable and highly adaptable. and one that provides different pathways through higher education with multiple onramps for a variety of learners and this is key, for a variety of

learners throughout their lifetime. this vision is realized through a blend of traditional learning experiences, much like we are learning today, face-to-face and in technology enabled experiences that are driven in part with partnerships with other institutions as well as with companies and organizations. but at the same time, it's really a vision, and this is not something we have talked a lot about today, it's really a vision that still holds true to the basic belief system of higher education. where knowledge, where knowledge still has a value and a purpose. because if knowledge stops being the driver of education and we consider just everything a process or commodity or transaction that is to be delivered, i think we are going to ultimately fail in that process. so education is not in our mind something just to be delivered. we really think of innovation and learning in terms of different realms of offerings with learners and knowledge at

the core of those. i just want to talk about three of those realms today and how asu is serving those. realm one pertains to campus-based immersion learning. this is where at asu in arizona, we have 3400 faculty members interacting closely with more than 71,000 students. technology driven enhancements cut across all of the realms of higher education that we are trying to serve which really has allowed arizona state to implement strategies for dramatic growth in enrollment along with improvement in retention and graduation rates. it's really that scale play that i was talking about earlier. so for example, more than 65,000 arizona state university students have used adaptive course wear over the past six years that is personalized to their learning style and their

speed. take college algebra as an example, one of the biggest hurdles, i know it was for me, in college and at many colleges. when arizona state implemented the adaptive course wear last year, the student success rate, meaning grades of a, b or c, went up 20 percentage points. perhaps more importantly, the underprepared students, so those were students who had low math placement scores coming into those courses, improved their success rates by 28 percentage points. realm two really includes fully online degree programs. through realm two, instructional designers at asu connect faculty expertise with the unique learning needs of online degree seekers which enable teams to develop courses. on the latest research about how people learn. so the courses, the online courses at asu like they are at

many universities are developed by teams instead of relying solely on the intuition of professors about how students learn. that's how most college courses are designed, kind of as a solo practitioner, where the professor is the sole expert. since its inception in 2009, asu online has gone from just under 1,000 students in five programs to today, more than 30,000 students in more than 140 fully online programs. this enables asu to be responsive to non-traditional learners and work with partners to expand everything that we do and facilitate rapid, scaleable responses to very specific opportunities. for example, like the starbucks partnership which i will be talking about in a minute. realm three is -- has allowed asu to kind of venture even further. so realm one is on campus, realm two is fully online for mostly traditional and non-traditional

learners. realm three really allowed asu to venture further to the frontiers of university innovation and expand in finding new learners around the world and not just those in kind of the traditional 18 to 24-year-old market, which most people still incorrectly think of as traditional college students. so the main, the chief effort in this realm three is -- there we go. finally, i think we are running out of batteries here -- is the global freshman academy. this is a partnership between arizona state and ed-x, a massively open platform that opens certification or badges for completed courses, but the global freshman academy is the first to offer course credit from an accredited university, in this case, asu. in the global freshman academy, it's also priced affordablely. for learners around the world,

less than $200 per credit hour. here is the key. in the global freshman academy, students pay for the course credit only after passing the course and only if they want the optional university credit. in other words, really, we offer the opportunity to delay payment for credit until it is actually earned. it really turns the college affordability argument on its head. an initial enrollment in the first ten global freshman academy courses exceeded 350,000 students. now, perhaps the most well-known partnership, of course, asu has embarked on in recent years is with starbucks. you can't miss these logos, if you go to any starbucks coffee shop anywhere around the country, and until the christmas logos have taken over, asu

logosy to logos used to be on those cups. asu offers access to online degrees reimbursed by starbucks to all its u.s. employees who have flexibility to have six different start dates throughout the year. after all, when you are working, you want access to education on the day you need it, or in a week or two weeks as i talked about earlier. sometimes you can't wait months to start, or only go to classes during the day, when many colleges offer them, or during the week when many colleges offer them. more than 8,000 starbucks employees have enrolled in the starbucks college achievement plan since it was launched in 2014. more than 1,000 graduates are expected to be coming out of this program by the end of the year. we graduated our first cohort of this group back in may. howard schulz, then ceo of starbucks, was the commencement speaker at asu. so we are on track to graduate more than 25,000 starbucks

employees by the year 2025. this is not just good for asu but it's been really good for starbucks as well. i think it really shows the opportunity of such partnerships between employers and higher education institutions because now, the employees that have gone through this program at starbucks have become not only the most dedicated employees in terms of their retention rates at places like starbucks, but they are also some of the more talented that tend to get promoted at starbucks. it really is only the constant ability of asu to innovate that has allowed us to build this program. so i think the question today is how do we spread such innovation further throughout higher education. so that more institutions are occupying that top right quadrant that i showed earlier. i want to end today by making two brief suggestions and

recommendations where asu and president michael crowe thinks the federal government can help push innovation in this sector. the first, this was mentioned in the previous presentation, the accreditation system really needs to be reformed to allow for more innovation. we need to find regulatory relief in working with accrediting agencies. the u.s. in many ways is undergoing an economic transformation that is really, in some ways, similar to the economic transformation we went through in the 1800s with the industrial revolution. we are moving from an analog economy the a digital economy. in the old economy, time and process was fixed. the outcomes were variable. in today's economy, we are focused much more on outcomes, as many of us talked about today. in education as a result, we can no longer focus just on seat time as the primary measure of

success. if you sit in a seat for 120 credit hours, you get a bachelor's degree and that's considered quality and success right now in higher education. the information economy that we live in really needs to be focused on learning, where time is variable and mastery and outcomes are the key. so i think our first request and first recommendation is around regulatory relief on accreditation. the second suggestion is that i think, we think the federal government can help accelerate innovation in higher education by creating spaces for innovation by funding clusters of innovative universities. right now, the federal government supports students, primarily, and supports institutions through students, but not really institutions. we know from the conversations that we had today that scale really matters in the future of higher education. the problems that we face require a response at scale.

not every institution can grow. they can't afford to grow. they don't have the space to grow. not every institution wants to grow. asu is already doing this as part of something called the university innovation alliance, which is a group of 11 public universities throughout the country, including arizona state, georgia state, ohio state, the university of texas at austen, university of california at riverside, and a number of other universities. this alliance has really focused on increasing the graduation rates of low income students on their campuses by sharing resources and by sharing knowledge. in just the last three years, it was just announced recently by the alliance, it has increased the number of low income graduates by 25%. which is going to put it on track for its goal at its creation which was an additional 68,000 undergraduate graduates

from low income socioeconomic status by the year 2025. so 25% increase in just the first three years. we really think we need to do the same for students across the u.s. and for institutions across the u.s., if we are going to tackle the great challenges facing us and give the promise of higher education to the talent that we have across this great country. thank you for the opportunity to be here today. we look forward to the conversation. thank you. >> thank you, blakely, michael, will and jeff, for your comments and your input and sharing with us some of the ways that you are doing things differently to serve students. both will and jeff have given a couple of specific recommendations. i would like to open it more

broadly to the question of what the federal government in particular should be doing more of and conversely, what should we be doing less of, what are the impediments that stand in the way, and i would just like to open it up. i'm sure that there are plenty of thoughts in that regard. >> i will give a couple. one, to reiterate what will was saying, a very important thing to do is redefine the concept of distance education. distance education as defined right now is a huge disincentive for universities to actually implement better teaching pedagogy. basically if you aren't physically carting your students over to a classroom wasting space, money, taxpayer dollar and dramatically lower educational outcomes, if you can

use technology, you therefore are classified in a category that doesn't allow you to bring students from abroad, et cetera. so reform on that is critical. on accreditation, we have been arguing for quite awhile, we went a very traditional route in accreditation, and when you start a highly selective, highly effective university, it's a relatively easy thing to go through. but what i would argue is, you know, we don't certify doctors to perform surgery four years after they are performing surgery on patients. that would be absurd. yet we do that with education. we tell an institution go, commit brain surgery on a bunch of unsuspecting students, then we will see if they are functioning adults and then we will tell you if you are accredited or not which is absurd. it's a very, very high barrier

to entry. it discourages innovation and worse, the accreditation system has the opposite effect which is it has all of these barriers up front and as soon as you're in the club, it never gets taken away from you. university of north carolina committed academic fraud for 18 years, issuing credits for students that did not attend classes, because the classes didn't exist, and nothing happened to the university. no sanctions, no accreditation removal, nothing. so we think that it should be exactly the opposite. if you want to actually teach someone something, if you want to create brain surgery, great. tell us what you want to do, put it in writing, you define your standards. that's the greatness of the american system. it's not about having a central standard that every university has to follow. but you say truth in

advertising. if i'm going to do x, put that in your requirement and provide us a measure with which you decide you will be measured against. then bam, you are accredited right off the bat. but guess what? three years, four years, five years after you graduate your students, we are going to measure it and if you don't do what you say, you are out of business. so it shifts the accreditation from having this insanely high barrier to entry to actually being focused on quality and it's a much lighter touch from a government perspective in the process. >> good morning. bart epstein from the jefferson education at the university of virginia. been sitting in the back row for most of the time because i didn't realize i had a seat. >> welcome. >> thank you for the seat at the table.

so i think the question you asked about what the government should and shouldn't be doing is very important because the federal government's role controlling the pursestrings has a hugely distortive effect on the market, and the analogy i would like to raise is a bit complicated but it's important and it has to do with the roots of the financial crisis. as many of you may know, the federal government chose not to directly engage with the ratings agencies, but -- and to not pay the ratings agencies. the federal government said ratings agencies, you are our agent. we are the principal, you are the agent, we are counting you on to police the issuers and to issue ratings that properly reflect the risk underlying these mortgages. but the government then made the short-sighted decision to not directly pay the ratings

agencies. instead it said to the ratings agencies, you get your money from the issuers whose products you are rating. and this led to those issuers being able to game the system and essentially have the regulatory agencies be captured, the ratings agencies captured, and it led to incremental boiling of the frog and next thing you knew, they had been talked into giving triple a ratings for products that were aggressively less reliable. the federal government in the student loan area is in a similar principal/agent problem. we are -- it is not reasonable to expect that anyone will protect the federal fisk when they do not have an obligation to do so, and if the institutions, including mine, that are receiving large amounts

of student loans are not on the hook in any way for the outcomes that we care about as a society, we shouldn't be surprised that only organizations such as those represented here today who are clear outliers and are acting for reasons of their own that are laudable, we should not expect those to be replicated in a broadway around the country. this is an inherently political issue which i don't propose to have the answer to. that's your realm, madam secretary. but giving out federal dollars in large amounts to every student who wants them, regardless of what they study, where they study, the performance of their university, is -- without their universities being on the hook for any performance past graduation is a recipe for trouble.

>> again, we are defining it simply trying to clarify it as economic performance, job, what is that performance. the big challenge is that the employers, you know, you can count on a couple hands the employers who are sort of interested in engaging. you heard a lot of the names today. that just goes to show there aren't that many of them. the reality is that hr and pre-hire training, that sort of thing, is not something most employers are interested in engaging in. so how do you incentivize employer engagement? i think one critical tool is as i mentioned earlier, the income share agreement. you mandate an income share agreement, you mandate that institutions have skin in the game, that they don't get paid in full unless students demonstrate economic benefit from the program. they can get paid in part, but

that will radically change the current interface that most universities use to engage with employers which is career services, which is a terrible interface. students, half of students don't ever walk in the door, those students that do walk in the door are going to meet someone who is a career services lifer, not someone from the industries they are trying to get networked into or connected into, and that explains the awful underemployment that we are seeing. the other, that might be viewed as a stick. i think there are other ways we could have carrots to encourage employer engagement. you talked earlier about minerva students going off to summer internships and those employers probably would have loved to keep those of those students. i actually talked to northeastern university, they run the country's probably best coop program and asked them what would happen if an employer said we would actually like to keep this student, and the answer was well, they probably wouldn't be

invited back to participate in our co-op program. so we need to encourage off-ramps. right now, schools are encouraged to try and keep that revenue, keep the students coming back. if they had the potential to go off and get a great first job after oniee ieyear, two years, should be building on-ramps to come back on when you want to come and complete but you should say god bless you, you are welcome, go off and prosper and go take that good first job. again, encouraging the unbundling all in the interest of the student. >> madam secretary, ben talked about refining -- reforming the accreditation system. one of the things i also wanted to add to that is also recognizing alternate types of accreditation that are actually more relevant to the type of innovation that we are talking about and in this conversation,

two particular important areas is industry-recognized certifications which have labor market value, as well as competency based certificates which are very tightly aligned toward what the industry needs. these typically fall outside the purview of the traditional accreditation system. so alternate accreditation bodi bodies, we are in the space where professional societies are the gatekeepers for these jobs and they are the ones that work very very closely with the industry in terms of defining these industry recognized certifications. the ones recognized by federal agencies like d.o.d., we do not fall under the traditional recognition system so there should be means to recognize alternate accreditation bodies that are focused on recognizing innovation and new ways of acquiring competency based education.

>> i would echo a lot of what's been said around the table, especially with respect to off-ramps but i would add two other opportunities. one is especially at traditional, whether that's online or on-ground institutions, what we hear a lot is that students are really valuing the flexibility that comes along with some of these innovative models. a lot of times students move more quickly through their program, it means they save money, but more often than not we hear that busy students appreciate the flexibility to fit education into their life. there is no operational challenge with administering federal funds in that way. i think it's time to look at sort of how we expect institutions or require institutions to administer funds in these programs and make sure we are accounting for the flexibility that today's student is really looking for. the second opportunity is just, i would encourage you to continue to i don't tuse the exl site initiative authority you have at the department. it's been used especially around competency based education and the project that was kicked off last year, but continue to use

that as an opportunity to bolster innovative ideas and test them on a small scale before you roll them out to institutions. i would say that process, make sure on the feedback, sort of data collection side at the end of the experiments that you get robust data you can use to make data driven decisions. >> the department of education, the government has incredible power based on the financial aid and who it goes to, automatically creating winners and losers. unfortunately, a lot of the innovation happening in the realm of -- in the realm where unaccredited realm and where -- so in some sense it's just not benefiting from any of the financial aid policies. so two ideas. one is somehow open up financial

aid to more programs that are not necessarily from accredited universities and so a lot of innovation is happening at universities. a lot is also happening outside of universities. and open up federal financial aid to innovative programs. then the natural question pops up all right, how do you control quality. a couple of ideas there. one is, okay, what about credit backed programs. second one is what about employer endorsed programs. the third one is maybe create a separate accrediting body just for these, you know, just for these new kind of programs. that is setting a thief to catch a thief but heck, if it works, why not. the second idea relates to many federal rules really stifle innovation. for example, jeff talked about global freshman academy that edx is doing with asu where it's a very innovative program where students learn for free.

if they complete global freshman academy, the first year of college education, if they complete it and pass it, then they can pay to get the credit. they don't have to pay if they don't pass or don't succeed. it's pay upon outcome. guess what? they are trying to get financial aid for this program and we were told it can't be done. what we were told is if you charge the students up front, you can get financial aid. however, if they pass, tough luck. they succeed, you can't get financial aid. this is crazy. so this is something i would imagine that you could take care of with the stroke of a pen. finally, to rebut, i do not want to allow a sentence ryan made earlier to go unremarked. he mentioned that online programs are solely the province of the rich. look at the data. certainly a lot of the programs

are professional programs, certainly edx and others, yes for professional programs and micro masters, of course, two-thirds or more have a bachelors degree but with global freshman academy, i invite you to come look at the data. this undergraduate level and courses taken by high schoolers where a significant fraction don't have an undergraduate degree. you just need to look at the kind of content that you offer and the data will speak for itself. >> i just came from mexico city yesterday. you would not believe the people benefiting from online education. >> thank you. so since this may be the last time i get a chance to talk, madam secretary, i want to say thank you very much for convening this group and including the people here that you have. i think it's been very helpful. i want to come back to something that's on my mind, which is urgency, dealing with the issues we have now and how we do that on scale. right now, half the students in

this country go to community colleges. if you look at those that go to community colleges in urban areas, the graduation rate over three years is about 16%. it's a scandal. it's unacceptable. i think we can all agree on that. one of the things that cuny has done is create an accelerated studies in academics program where we doubled and tripled graduation rates over the years. it's not rocket science. but it's a series of interventions that make all the sense in the world. everybody around this table is doing them at some level and would agree with them. they do cost money but the cost per degree is much lower because the success is so much higher. it's been reviewed by many independent reviewers, and deemed to be quite successful. it is now being replicated by us in ohio, in california, virginia. just had a group from tennessee

in. that's terrific. but what i think one of the things we could do is if states are laboratories of democracy, they are also laboratories of innovation. when we have innovation, it makes sense that we know what works, the federal government has a role i think in providing incentives, providing encouragement, providing a means to expand that to scale. so we have been doing this in ohio for three or four years. now we are just starting in california. but it works, it makes a tremendous difference in the lives of these community college students in urban areas and we ought to be figuring out how to get it to scale as quickly as possible so that the people enrolled now, their lives are improved. >> madam secretary, i think i got that right this time, i think one of the themes that's really echoed around this table over these last couple of hours that we spent together is the need to create an education

infrastructure that works bidirectionally between education and careers. right now we think of it is education to careers, but increasingly as the number of people have pointed out, there is a need for workers to be able to have access to resources that allow them to upscale. one of the impediments that exists today that i think the education department can play a significant role in clearing is actually a problem of vocabulary. here's what i mean. colleges speak in terms of degrees. employers, even more than they speak in terms of jobs, speak in terms of skills, and the skills that they need. now, at some level, universities are great treasure troves of skills. now, the universities in this room may feel that's a little reductivist but let's run with it for the time being. tremendous amount of learning that takes place and so much of it is the kind of learning that

can be deeply applied. part of the problem, though, is that that learning is locked up or described in a vocabulary that is entirely academic. that means that employers can't appreciate what that learning is about. we can't empower students to make smart choices about what to learn. and ultimately, for higher education institutions, a lot of the potential is lost. i think i'm glad that so much of the conversation today is focused around traditional higher education institutions with a lot of talk about all tern tiives and some of them ar really cool but at the end of the day, our higher education institutions already have a lot of what's necessary. if we can help them label what they have, and this could be as simple as saying if you are a funded institution, institution

that is eligible to receive student lending dollars, that your courses need to be labeled in a job market skill vocabulary, whether that be about foundational skills, technical skills, new and emerging skills. that could fundamentally unlock that treasure trove and make it apply to a much broader swath of the public who needs what in a dynamic economy, a hybrid economy, who needs access to learning throughout their lives and right now can only get it in traditional degree programs for the most part. >> [ inaudible ] that are the gateways to jobs. >> thank you again, madam secretary, for convening this today. i would echo what a lot of people have said. institutional skin in the game is really important but it has to be meaningful.

if college and universities, if it's budget buster, it's not really going to matter. it has to have a bite if dollars are at risk. two, i echo accreditation is broken. i happen to sit on department's advisory committee on accreditation and we spend all our time talking about things that very little meaningful impact on student outcome, student success, institutional success. what bart touched upon, there are perverse situations of who pays the creditors and the third thing is student responsibility. in the laudible goal to drive college access, not enough has been asked of students who are taking taxpayer dollars in terms of grants or loans. are they prepared for college, enrolling in a college they're likely to succeed? the data is becoming more clear, having someone enroll in college and drop out is worse than if they didn't enroll at all, for most of them. putting -- not allowing title iv to be, in essence, where nothing

is asked of the student is critical and my last comment would be to encourage the federal government to have a level of humility that it needs to or can solve all these problems. while the dollars pale in comparison there's an entire separate apparatus called the labor department and workforce development dollars that, in theory, should help people reskill and do lifelong reskilling. i'm not sure it all needs to come from title iv but getting the federal government to breakdown its own silos, getting people the skills they need to succeed would be really important. >> yes? >> i want to echo, first of all, the call to keep thinking about how to use experimental authority and agree with what has been said about how the innovation outside the system --

in our case, you know, he is connected to m.i.t., where i work. so we have that connection but nonetheless the experimental authority is at least temporarily while you think about these other things, a way to use the accreditation of existing accredited places to do some innovative things. that could be very important. one thing that could be thought about there that hasn't come up and that reflects some of m.i.t.s thinking about education innovation broadly, built into some of the platforms are things like pushing for active learning. jeff talked about adaptive learning, et cetera. there's going to be more of that. and there's even beyond that. we're very interested in the connection of cognitive psychology research to educational research. and if we see breakthroughs in those sorts of areas and actually understand teaching and

learning better, then we want to make sure that those things have a way to get into the system. beyond that, you know, m.i.t. does very well in the traditional rating systems and ranking systems that you use for completion, et cetera. but, you know, we have to think about how it serves other institutions who reach a far larger number of students, not counting the indirect impact that we have through our large online programs. you've already heard from qne, asu, valencia and umuc that the traditional student is only a small part of the picture now. there's -- i don't know the exact numbers but it's something like 40% of students who don't fit the traditional model, they don't start and finish at one institution.

they don't finish by the age of 25 or whatever. and both the loan programs and the reporting programs -- if you're going to treat students as customers you need to give them good information about how well the schools are doing. i know some of that is not -- some of that, the department has the ability to change by themselves. some of it requires working with congress. but i think that's really important. it's really important to some of our peer institutions and the research university committee. and i'll say one thing to kind of emphasize that. national science foundation statistics for several years, many years now, have been showing that if you look at stem fields and degree recipients at the undergraduate level and persisting to the masters level and to the phd level, if you look at degree recipients from

underrepresented minorities, a, a large fraction of them, much larger fraction than across the whole spectrum did some part of their education at community colleges, okay. these people are starting at community colleges and ending up getting phds at m.i.t. or at university of illinois or california or wherever. and so we need to make sure that the schools get the credit for that kind of work. >> it's 20% now start at community. >> thanks. >> in addition to the two recommendations i made earlier, i would request that the department review policies from the perspective that their typical students no longer fit the mold of a traditional student. many policies were written from the perspective of students who attend a university full time directly out of high school but they don't know the neighborhood

in which he or she was born and the traditional mold doesn't fit and leaves behind so many of our students. thank you. >> thank you, kathleen. is there anyone else who would like to add? >> yes. nontraditional and today i think most of our education system is based on passive learning where the teacher would bring the knowledge to students. and so as we mention now young people can access the knowledge they want, whatever they need it. sometimes too much knowledge, too many knowledge, right and what becomes the ability to filter it. what's wrong, what's incomplete. and so i believe that education should not be -- not accessing knowledge through -- we can have all the knowledge we went from m.i.t., from the best institution for free. now the challenge is to educate our kids on how to access this

knowledge, critical thinking. and i believe a lot of us are good in passive learning environment where the teacher is bringing the knowledge but i think a lot of us are also not efficient in context where we are engaging with knowledge. so i think that project based learning, active learning, apprenticeship, this type of education can fit a lot of people and can get them access. we think of apprenticeship project based of like blue collar type of path. and because we see people who go through this training, like tesla, and so on. we need to kind of break this etiquette of a way to have a great carrier.

>> thank you. i think we've come about to the end of our time together here. but i want to say thank you to each one of our participants for being here today, for what you had to add to the conversation and importantly for the ways that you are creatively looking at and meeting the needs of the students that you serve. and i think all of you expressed in one way or another the dedication and commitment that you feel to providing opportunities for all kinds of students, no matter where they come from, no matter their background. we know that there is potential in every student that you all serve. and so i thank you for your commitment to that, for the ways that you have added to the conversation today. and i would like to encourage that this really be -- consider this the beginning of a conversation that i would hope you would feel could be ongoing. i will welcome your continued

input to me and to the department on ways that we can better meet your needs to serve students and on ways that we can help the federal government get out of the way of some of the things that we need to get out of the way of and in the ways that we can support, in meaningful ways, the things that you are doing to serve students. once again, thank you so much for your participation and for your commitment to students. thanks. [ applause ]

this tuesday is the 50g9 anniversary of the start of the vietnam war's tet offensive where vietcong and north vietnamese attacked across south vietnam. we're going live to hear from vietnam veterans who will look back at the battle of hue, where some of the most intense fighting took place. mark bowden will join the discussion. he is the author of "hue 1968." we are live.