carolyn levine is a career coach and author and ethan knight is the executive director of the gap program thank you for coming to talk about this. caroline, do employers value both an online degree and traditional on campus degree equally or is one better than the other? >> right now the online degree still new. certainly for certain skills, the technical skills, the technical degrees you can argue it's on par. certainly with your example of penn state that has a brand name offline as well so that will carry over to an online degree but employers will safer what they know and that's the brick and mortar campus. >> the first daughter is going to take a gap year, there has been a lot of talk about pros and cons of that but what is the goal of a gap year? >> i think a gap year when it's done well it frames the rest of your life honestly. if you do it in a somewhat structured fashion where there's some expression involved, students are trying to find out what a career might look like but the process that's in front of them. >> what do employers think of a gap year? is that something for stude

washington metropolitan area transit authority, as carolyn flowers with the active administrator of federal transit administration and the honorable kim levine, chair of the transportation planning board of the metropolitan washington council of government. with i would ask unanimous consent of our witnesses. included in the record and without objection, that is so ordered and sent the written statements are going to be included in the record i request you limit your comments to five minutes and with that, mister wiedefeld, we will start with you. >> good morning chairman graves and thank you norton and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. i'm paul wiedefeld, manager of the transit authority also known as metro. what i thought i would do is summarize quickly my parties have been since i joined on november 30 with with the agency , to talk a little about what we are up against and what i am trying to do about it and wrap up with concluding remarks. in terms of what my priorities are, obviously safety and liability and management so what we are up against, i think it's important to step back and think about th