this year, i embarked on a rethink school tour where we visited learning environments and institutions that are taking creative approaches to education for students of all ages. i continue to travel the country to see the great work that's being done, and i have been inspired by the innovative educators and administrators i've met thus far. but there's still not enough. we need more like them and like you. the reality is that there are a number of challenges and opportunities facing higher education, and washington, d.c., does not have all the answers. government is not the best at finding new solutions to tough problems. government isn't the best thing at being -- isn't the best at being flexible or adaptable to a constantly changing environment. and government certainly isn't the best at questioning the status quo. but government can be good at bringing people together to highlight their creative thinking and new approaches. so today, we've brought education leaders and entrepreneurs from across the country to share how they are improving education for the students they serve. while you represent a diverse group of institutions and organizations from across the higher education sector, the common denominator is that each of you began by seeing a problem or a deficiency or an inefficiency. you questioned why it was that way, and then you developed a solution to fix it or make it better. it's that type of thinking that we need more of in american education today. we need to question everything, to look for ways in which we can improve and embrace the imperative of change. you've embraced that mindset and your students are reaping the awards, because at the end of the day, success shouldn't be measured by how much ivy is on the wall. it should be determined by how you're educating and preparing stuj students for today's and tomorrow's challenges. so let's treat today as an opportunity to share what is working from your respective worlds and where the impediments at any level of government are preventing you from achieving your mission of serving students. thank you again for being here today. and i am really looking forward to today's discussion. >> thank you, madam secretary. we're excited to get under way. we're going to call up the first group, as you see on your agenda, it is beyond seat time. our first speaker and forgive me if i get your name incorrectly, jeff from corcera, followed by annette, followed by ben nelson from the minerva project. we'll have the presenters do their presentations. we'll then join at the table and the secretary will lead us in a short discussion. thank you so much. >> good morning. thank you to secretary devos and the department of education for convening this group and giving us a chance to talk about what the future of higher education might look like. my name is jeff. i'm the ceo of cosara. and i've only been on the job for six months, but it is a remarkable company, i think, with a remarkable purpose. coursera was started in 2012 by two professors at stanford who teach computer science, and they got the idea that maybe there would be additional interest in learning computer science from around the world, so they put their course on the internet and over 100,000 people came to take the course and they thought, wow, there's a real opportunity here to make what dwe do available to many more people. we now have 30 million learners from around the world who have registered to take courses on coursera. about 6.5 million are from the united states. about 2.5 million are from indian, 2 million from china, 1.5 million from mexico. those are our four largest countries, and they're taking courses on machine learning, on bitcoin, on english for career development, on financial markets, on python for everyone, and many other courses. we've teamed up with 150 universities who have published 2,400 courses on coursera. ranging from anthropology to accounting to philosophy. we also have recently launched four degrees. one of our partners is the university of illinois. these are fully accredited master's degrees. and they are delivered to a global audience at a fraction of the price of what a traditional master's degree would cost. the diploma actually comes from the university of illinois. it is identical to an mba that you would get if you were on campus. i was at the university of illinois recently, and i was talking to students and professors who teach, and i do believe that this is a glimpse of what the future of higher education looks like. we have professors who have been teaching for 40 years who are on multi -- two-way video, teaching classes of 500 students around the world in realtime, face to face -- when i say face to face, i mean they see each other's faces through the video conferencing. they're all networked together in chat communities, the whole team, the whole class, study groups, the teachers and tas and they're having live sessions on a global basis. the study groups, when they break out, talk about these problems as they relate to all the different countries around the world. in addition to the 150 university partners, we also have 18 industry partners. these are companies who are publishing content and courses on coursera, especially on topics that are very business oriented. some of these industry partners include google, pwc, ibm, and sisco. recently in the last year, coursera has been offering coursera to enterprises because fundamentally the need for higher education is being driven by a change in the world that is happening at an accelerating rate, through technology, new jobs are requiring new skills and many jobs are going to be replaced by software and robotics, and so there's a whole new class of skills that will be required in enterprises, and so companies are hiring coursera to put these types of courses and these types of competencies in the hands of everyday workers. honeywell is one of our 25 of the fortune 500 companies who have hired financial coursera. at&t is another one of those companies and they're basically offering coursera to upscale their employees. we also are working with governments, including singapore and the philippines, to retrain their workforce, especially in topics like data science, technology, and business. and what's really fascinating is to see how these businesses who are hiring coursera are working with university partners to deliver entirely new learning experiences and even entirely new credentials. so, google, for example, has created a certification called the google cloud developer, which teaches people how to actually develop software in the cloud. recently, we announced, with google, the google i.t. certification. this is a program that's designed for people who do not have a college degree but would like to get into the field of i.t. and technology. and it will be delivered entirely online and qualify people to have technology jobs who don't have technology backgrounds. we also have a company in silicon valley, a technology company, who is mixing together content in very novel ways. so, they have taken a machine learning class from one of our university partners. they have coupled that with a deep learning specialization from one of our industry partners. and they are actually offering content themselves as a business, and they're putting all this content together so that from universities to industry partners to their own custom software courses, they're putting together curricula for their employees, and they're creating new credentials within their corporate work space so that when employees complete these courses, they get credentialed and recognized for the competencies that they have delivered. so we're very excited to be here. i'm very interested to hear what everyone has to say, and i hope that coursera can participate. it's a pleasure, and i think that what we're looking at in the future of higher education is extremely exciting. thank you. >> good morning. it is really exciting to be here and join this many innovators and transformation folks in one room. i'm delighted to talk about digital education transformation. and how we're going about it. but before we do that, i'd like you to sort of put your minds, just calm down, go into yogic pose, and think about 2030. no thoughts. just think about 2030. i'm going to ask a simple question. what fraction of today's jobs do you think will be around in 2030 because of automation and technology and ai? just yell out the answer. according to the international education commission, 50% of today's jobs will be gone by 2030. half. so each hands you shake hands with somebody, remember that by 2030, one of those hands will not be there. 50% jobs will go away because of these new technologies. what that means for education institutions, whether universities or other institutions, is that we have a planet-scale reskilling challenge on our hands. this is not just to educate a few people. it's going to be planet-scale. half of today's jobs gone all around the world. and this is not just the one challenge facing universities. the question is, can universities play in that space? and the way universities are structured, students come in at age 18, study for four years and go away. there's no concept at universities of lifelong education. and to me, this sounds very much like, you know, we are close to pentagon here, like missiles, fire and forget. the age of 18. but we need to move to a completely new model of education where universities and education systems can work with learners throughout their careers skpl aand not just the four years. many other challenges facing the education system. one is the costs are crazy. second is that there's not been a lot of innovation in the education space in tens, maybe hundreds of years. and so, edx was founded in late 2011, founded by harvard and m.i.t. we are a nonprofit. the basic mission of edx is to reimagine education. okay, we're a nonprofit. and our thinking is, how do we work with university partners and corporations, governments, and other nonprofits to really rethink education as a system? it's not just about us. it's rethink education as a system. today, we are based in kendall square in massachusetts. in the technology hub. and we really think like a start-up, even though we are a nonprofit. we have 14 million students from 196 countries. over 2,000 courses being offered by 130 institutional partners like oxford, m.i.t., harvard, georgetown, berkeley, columbia, penn. the list goes on and on. and a lot of corporations like microsoft and systems like linux foundation and others. we have 50 million courses enrolled so far in our roughly six years in existence. and we've also moved into credit bearing programs where the courses on edx convert into credit. maybe some of our colleagues here will talk about it from asu, like global freshman academy. edx is a nonprofit and nonprofits give things away for free. so our content is available for free. the learners can come and learn for free. so today, virtually all courses on edx are free. there are moocs, massive open online courses. it's completely free, not just the videos, but videos and exercises are all free and we are pretty much the only mooc provider left today that offers all its content for free. we've also made a platform available for free as open source. what does this mean? just imagine if google were to say, i'm going to take our search algorithm and search software and put it out there so anybody can use it for whatever they want to do. that's what we've done. we've given away our software to anybody that times it as open edx and it's been incredible. in addition to the 14 million learners on edx, there's at least 14 million learners that we know of on open edx platforms. there's over 1,800 edx instances around the world today, including options by entire countries. so for example, you just see some of the countries here. ministries of education in these countries have launched national infrastructures, countries like china, france, russia, hong kong. how cool is that? how cool is having russia adopt an open source platform created by the u.s. for educating their people? companies have adopted edx like mckenzie for education and also universities, stanford's online platform is also based on open edx. so, you know, part of this meeting here is to think about innovation and the future of higher ed. and i'd like to, you know, think ahead to five, ten years, and i want to predict that education is going to look like this and then tell you what we are doing about it. the trends in education are that education in five to ten years will become modular, will become omnichannel, and will become lifelong. i'm saying it will become, because we are going to make it so. it's not going to happen by itself. we are going to make it happen. why is modular a good idea? modular is good, because it can create new efficiencies and new scaling and unbundling of components that can create much better efficiencies. just imagine phones in 1982, the boxy beige at&t phone that now gets converted to this when the whole telecommunication industry got unbundled. so what are we doing about it? we've launched a new credential along with our university partners called the micro-masters. the micromasters is about 25% of a master's degree. you can learn completely online and you can learn for free. you can do it completely for free. if you want the credential, it's about $1,000. and if you get admission to the university, it offers a pathway to credit and accelerates your masters program. so, m.i.t. is here. m.i.t. launched a supply chain micromasters on edx. if you complete it, you get admission to m.i.t., you can complete the $60,000 master's degree at m.i.t. in half the time, in one semester, and half the price. similarly, we have micromasters in robotics from penn and a.i. from columbia. the list goes on and on. we have 45 micromasters, all that you can learn for free, all offering a pathway to credit. and enabling you to do clever things. once it's modular, you can get all the novel things happening. you can stack them up. we've launched a fully stacked online master's degree with georgia tech. the campus degree costs $40,000 in data analytics. once you make things modular, you can build things together like legos. there's a micromasters for $1,500 and you can add more courses if you like and complete an online masters from a top ranked university for $9,000. it's a very novel stacking idea. you can share. a number of universities are now sharing the micromasters. so, as an example, in pakistan, the university uses the micromasters in data science from ucsd, san diego, as a component of their master's degree and they've taken 70% of the courses from cs degree, bolted on this component and now they offer a data science degree and the sharing is happening in the u.s. rit is accepting credit from m.i.t. for supply chain. many other universities are doing this sharing and we hope to keep expanding on that. at the end of the day, it's about learners and what benefit they're getting from it. so here's just one simple story of a student in cambridge. she had a job. she did the micromasters in supply chain, put that on a linkedin profile, got interviewed and got a job and doubled her income. just one example of a learner's story that benefitted from something like this. corporates are buying into this. charlie baker, massachusetts governor, a month ago announced that through a partnership with ge, ge would guarantee an interview to any candidate out of massachusetts that completed a micromasters in cloud computing from umuc, who's here, on edx, or a micromasters in ai from columbia or cyber security from rit. they guaranteed an interview. so we're getting more and more corporates involved in similar job-related approaches. so, once we make education modular, omnichannel, in that universities begin to offer not just in-person courses but efficient online courses as well, we can move into life along learning where learners can take these kourgcourses throughout life. here are some examples we can expect in five to ten years from universities if we do it right. one example. why not create new modular programs like micromasters. we will launch microbachelors within the next year or two and do the same modularization of the bachelor's degree. already launched with asu, that's a precursor to the microbachelors. another example. imagine if the government could recognize micromasters for financial aid. wouldn't that be cool? employers are already recognizing it for jobs. imagine if we could create a universal credit exchange where a micromasters and microbachelors got recognized for each other. and just imagine if every campus said, hey, look, i'm going to allow my students to take 20% to 50% of credit from somewhere else. you could halve the cost of education in a short amount of time, and this is already happening. georgia tech and m.i.t. are already allowing their students, so far, one course at m.i.t., one course, a number of students took completely online, for credit on campus. so we could do a number of these things and really think what reimagining education, once we make things modular, omnichannel, and lifelong. thank you. >> hello. my name is ben nelson. i'm the founder of minerva, and i wanted to take a little bit of a different perspective, which minerva -- anybody who knows about us always is different. but i wanted to go back and think a little bit about what is the purpose of higher education. because oftentimes, i think when we talk about technology and education, we really just focus on the how. take the same product, the same degree, the same courses, stack them differently, raise them differently, and then let more people have them. maybe cheaper, maybe more effective. but effectively without really going back and thinking about what the core educational offering is. now, the reason that it's particularly important for us to think about how, especially when we're gathered here in washington, d.c., is that our founding fathers spent quite a bit of time thinking about what a university education should be all about. in fact, specifically in the context of how to ensure the representative republic, which we are, is supposed to function. and they constructed an idea around a liberal arts education, an education that educates a citizenship broadly such that when individuals will be called upon to govern, rather than being born into the ability to govern, like in a monarchy, they will be able to transfer their practical knowledge that they've learned in their trade and apply it to decision making for the benefit of all of us. now, when you describe that, it actually is very much akin to what businesses want. they want employees that potentially have demonstrated some facility in one field, then have the ability to transfer to a different field, a different job, a promotion, right? go to a different context. change industries. which, by the way, in a world where 50% of jobs are going to disappear, that core understanding, that core skill is absolutely crucial. it's crucial to the survival of our society, let alone survival of an individual in this economy. and so, when you take a step back, and you actually evaluate how universities are doing in this field, you get a difference of opinion. gallup issued a fascinating survey a few years ago where they asked, does your university do a great job at educating its students, preparing them for the jobs that are out there, not the jobs of the future, the jobs that exist now. and 96% of chief academic officers of universities said that, yes, our universities do a fantastic job at preparing students for the jobs that exist today. employers who were given the same survey responded 11% positive. so there is a disconnect. and this is where minerva comes in. now, the funny thing is that we don't have a big debate about what it is that people should be tooled with. there's actually tremendous consensus about that. you can see that consensus in the website of pretty much any university or college in the united states. it's making sure that students have these practical tools, such as critical thinking, or problem solving, or effective communications, the more sophisticated, more rare, would be to actually think about having their students think systemically and think about interaction effects and unintended consequences and deep thinking and analysis. but the problem is, is that university curricula, as they are today, constructed course by course by different professors, different sources, nonrelated to one another, field specific, don't wooiind up doing these things. in fact, there's a third party assessment called the collegiate learning assessment that for years has been enabling universities to measure how much value they add to their own students. they provide the test at the beginning of the first year, and at the end of the fourth year, and see how a group of students actually progresses on critical thinking, problem solving, scientific reasoning, and effective communication skills, all of the things that universities purport to teach. well, it turns out, a third of american undergraduates do not advance at all on these measures between the ages of 17 to 21. we' where merely being alive should enable you to advance on these measures. and there is minimal learning for those that do. so, we at minerva have created our own undergraduate university program. and we decided to actually use the same measure to see if a revamped curriculum focused on actually providing students systemic ways of thinking, various tools that they can apply, practically, to any field that they will pursue, will be effective. now, we focus most of our energy at introducing, merely introducing these ideas in the first year. and then, as students go in their second, third, and fourth year, into their major, their concentration, take electives, they then exercise and transfer and make more generalizable these broad skills while they cement them in their brain. but we wanted to see what would happen only after the first eight months, only after one year at minerva. and so we gave our students the test, the cla test, at the beginning of the year, and we gave it to them at the end of eight months. and it's important to note that the deans at minerva, the ones who created the curriculum, had never seen the cla test before. they have no idea what it tests. they knew the headline subjects. but there was no concept of even what the questions were. okay? and so, not only do minerva students, after eight months, have a higher composite score as a cohort than any graduating class in the country that has taken the test -- that's us after eight months versus anybody else taking the test after four years -- but perhaps much more importantly, the delta difference, the improvement these students make in eight months, are greater than the cla has ever seen a university be able to accomplish in four years. that doesn't measure the full extent of our education across all four years. so, when we talk about bringing education into the 21st century, which we're well into already, when we talk about preparing students for the jobs of the future, it's crucial that a conversation about general education, the baseline, what underpins the individual's capacity to be successful pursuing any field is central to that conversation. and we hope we can contribute to that. thank you. >> thank you, everyone, for that. before we get into some discussion, i was remiss in not asking everyone to go around the table. we will start with you. just give your name and organization. so we all know who's at the table and then we'll start with a discussion. thank you. >> good morning. i'm jo ann kline. >> i'm bill with m.i.t. >> speak up. >> phillip, also m.i.t. >> good morning. vijay with the american national standards institute. >> ryan craig with university ventures. >> jerry davis, college of the ozarks. >> chuck from coursera. >> valencia college. >> blakely, university of maryland university college. >> michael rourke from the same place. >> jack welsh management institute. >> southern new hampshire university. >> edx and m.i.t. >> minerva. >> jeff, arizona state university. >> julie young, arizona state university. >> justin. >> i'm j.b.-millican, the chancellor of the city university of new york. >> i'm matt from glass technologies. >> rick o'donnell from skills fund. >> diane from the kansas department of commerce. >> thank you. >> well, i'd like to thank our first group of presenters, jeff, anant, and ben, for giving us a lot to think about. and certainly what your presentations have generated a lot of questions amongst this group and probably beyond. so, i'd like to just start our discussion with a question and then invite any of the rest of our participants to join in and pose questions. let's just have a free flowing discussion about what we've heard in this first section. i'd like to begin by asking each of you to comment briefly on when you were considering your unique approaches to meeting students' needs, how did you go about considering the question of delivering quality and ensuring quality? >> i can give a quick answer to that. so, we built minerva -- actually, we just published a book if you're interested in how we built it -- intentionally. and the idea was we started with goals. for our graduates. and then we worked backwards. so rather than saying, oh, you know, we have professors and departments and then how do we piece together what they do in order to assemble an education for the students, we instead said, well, what kind of things do we want to see our graduates be able to do in the real world? what kind of positive impact do we want to have them do in the world? what kind of systemic thinking do we want to have them provide? and then what kind of careers should they be ready for after graduation that gets them to that point? then what kinds of experiences should they have in order to supplement what we do in the formal classroom? so we built an entire institution from the curriculum to the teaching methodologies, to the student selection, to the student experience, to where they study, et cetera, all with the idea of achieving that final goal. and when you have a purpose-driven design, and you can -- and you start with a clean slate, it's pretty easy to design for quality. >> we took a little bit of a different approachment. we took a little bit of a different approach. we have a really, you can think of it as a learning platform. which facilitates a learning ecosystem of learners and universities and enterprises, businesses who are hiring us to offer these services. and i would say the quality sort of starts with our partners. they're the ones who produce the content. they've been doing it for a long time. the professors, obviously, have a lot of experience in front of students. there's a lot of innovation going on, but there's an awful lot that universities know how to do well. so, we well have partnered with what we think are some of the highest quality partners who can produce high-quality content. a second big piece of it is the platform itself and the way that we designed the pedagogy into the software so when instructors create courses, they do it in a certain structured format. this provides a certain amount of consistency across courses so when a learner is taking multiple courses, it's a familiar format. and this platform is really nice, because it can provide a lot of feedback on how learners are actually doing. so when you have 30 million people taking tens of millions of courses, you can watch how they're doing. you can see where are they getting stuck, where are they missing questions. so there's a huge amount of analytic data about the success and sometimes challenge that learners are facing. in addition to the quantitative data, which is really help. and we provide feedback to our partners. the professors have dashboards and they can see exactly, at the item level, they have these little five-minute videos, they can see how many people started it, how many people didn't finish, how many people missed question two, et cetera. and they're constantly improving their courses based on the data they're watching. the final thing is we do allow learners to provide course ratings. so, a lot like uber or amazon, put a little star rating on there and when you have millions of people taking the course, you can learn a lot about whether those learners find it's a good course and we provide that back to the professor as well. so i think the feedback loop, sort of a customer-focused point of view is a really great way to allow universities and professors to improve their quality. >> we've done, you know, four things to make sure that the courses and education have good quality. the mission, after all, is to increase access and improve overall quality of education. so, we built a learning platform that i like to call credit grade. since we offer micromasters and other programs that translate to credit. but we have to build a platform that enabled faculty and other instructors to offer the kind of pedagogies and courses that they want. the pedagogy of the platform is called active learning, where you interweave interaction with content transmission, and active learning is a proven technique that improves student outcomes. the format that we have for quantitatively improving quality are, one, more and more of our programs, our modular programs, are credit. >> backed, so the micromasters, for example, we will not offer a micromasters from a university on edx unless they accept it for credit at their own university. so this is eating your own dog food. so that is huge. you cannot believe the level of quality improvement because of the credit-backed nature. the second thing is, as jeff mentioned, we have peer reviews of students, star ratings, like with products from amazon, so to speak. that helps a lot. the third thing is that we developed a quality rubric for moocs. initially, we called it a quality rubric. it's a checklist. we will not put a course on edx unless it passes the quality rubric and as many universities have moved platforms, many of them were not allowed to run on edited edx because it hasn't passed the rubric. many of our university partners were unhappy with the word quality, and someone else telling people what quality is, so we've now called it a mooc development checklist, but that's the third thing that we do. and the fourth thing, of course, is data analytics. i like to think of our digital platform as almost a particle accelerator for learning where we capture every single mouse click and make all the analytics available to the instructors and schools and researchers so they can do ab testing. so just like amazon will show you two web pages and see who buys more stuff and then use that page as the new page, we are bringing engineering to education and really we should think of education something that we can improve just like we improve smartphone and other products through ab testing and a platform supports ab testing in a very generic manner. >> thank you all for that question. i'd like to open it up now for the rest of our participants. if you have questions, please, again, state your name, if you would, and pose a question to this group, the first group of presenters, and/or if you have comments based on what you've heard. >> i'm vijay. i was really glad to see secretary's first question starting with quality. we have been around for 100 years, and we have focused on quality for the 100 years, starting with products. you know, the past 100 years, it was all about product quality. for the past ten years, we have been focusing on credentials, certifications, and how do we make sure that there is quality recognition from employers on industry and when we started our certification and accreditation program about 12 years back, we found there were over 4,000 certification programs in this country, and no one had any idea in terms of what those certifications actually meant and less than 10% of them met any standards. and so from consumers like, you know, you hear all these words, certificate, certifications, registered, licensed, and so the huge, you know, chaos in terms of terminology and people trying to understand, like, as a user, for instance, if you're looking at a finance market, there are over 162 designations for a financial adviser. so, as a user, you have no idea in terms of which of these meets any kind of standard. so, you know, i see there are two bigger challenges. one is, like, you know, the traditional education system and what we need to do to make sure that it meets the industry requirements. but also, things that are outside of the system. like, you know, certificates, certification, apprenticeship, there's a big focus on that. but how do we bring all of them together so that as users, as students, as employers, have real emphasis on the quality aspect of it? >> i would just be interested if any others have any comments on that. >> hi. i just wanted to bring a new type of vision that we brought to education, so we have two-year alternative to college where we have no formal lectures. students learn by practicing and collaborating with their peers. so, one of the, like, one of the most important measurements for success is are students getting jobs. so in terms of quality and i like to reiterate on what vijay said. we don't design content like coursera or edx. we build projects. so students are learning by doing. so instead of, like, being in regular education, where we are, like, hey, here's the content learning. in two weeks, you have an exam. we are like, hey, here's the exam. make it happen. so we designed this project with industry leaders who ultimately will hire the students. the second thing is that this project -- students can get a direct correction on their work. so you don't need to go through a semester and then do the final and eventually get your grade. you can get your grade directly. the third thing that we do is that we work with industry professionals who are coming to the school and who are doing mock interviews. so basically, our students are ready to enter the industry. and secondly, the last thing that we do is what the outcome. and so, so far, we are 90% of our students who enter the industry through a job or an internship. so, basically, i just wanted to frame this thing where certain institutions might come with the knowledge. we come with the problem first and then see how it happened. >> i just want to support sylvain's introduction of the idea of employment as a key measure of quality. i'm convinced one of the main challenges that we have in our system in defining quality is that there are so many bottom lines, there's effectively no bottom line and it's true in k-12 and higher ed. it doesn't have to be true in higher ed. we're experiencing, in higher ed, a crisis of affordability with record levels of debt and student loan defaults. and also, record underemployment among college grads as well as among students with some college and that's due to changes in technology in the workforce. it's also due to changes in hiring in terms of how employers have hired. but today, we know that the way students are increasingly young people are increasingly making decisions around matriculation in post-secondary programs is around the question of whether this program will help them get a good first job in a growing sector of the economy. they're no longer buying that higher education line that we're preparing you for your fifth job, not your first job. and so, while we can't do it in k-12, i suggest that getting a good first job in a growing sector of the economy really needs to be core to the definition of quality. it's incredibly clarifying to be able to do that. it helps solve many of the challenges that we have in the system if we can begin to think about higher education in that way. >> hi. jillian kline. i just want to echo that. i think part of the conversation, and it's so great to hear about the technologies and the infrastructure that's being built to sort of move higher education forward, but then how do we work with employers to help them rethink how they think about hiring, right? so, we talk a lot about competency-based education and we believe in it but how do we get employers to start hiring based on competencies instead of based on that degree. i think there's work there to do, and i think these are some of the right people to be at the table but how do we extend that hand across the aisle to employers to help them move and understand sort of how education can look different as well. >> so, one idea on that, we have now 600 companies who have hired coursera and it's fascinating to see how they're thinking about upscaling. one of the big questions is -- they're asking is, what skills do my employees need over the next five years. that's not an obvious answer to that question. but what they're doing is they are basically identifying the competencies that they believe they're going to need and then matching the curriculum, both from universities and from nonuniversities, some of our most popular consent is not from universities, it's from technology companies and they do competency first and then think about the curriculum and through assessment, which includes progress, making sure they actually develop those competencies in the workplace so i think a lot of this learning's going to happen, driven by employers who designed based on competency requirements and then test through both regular kind of testing but also through project-based work to show that those competencies are actually being developed. >> so, let me add a little bit of, just, our experience with this. so, you know, we started a university from day one that competes with the most selective universities in the world. and so the assumption was, and what we told our students, is that if minerva students wind up getting the same kinds of jobs as ivy league students, et cetera, then we have failed. because obviously, if we're going the same that the ivies are doing, we're doing a terrible job. and so what's the point? and so, our bar was to raise that substantially. and our first test came about two years ago, we had our first batch of first-year students going out looking for internships, and it turns out that in the first year, just to remind you, for what i said before, students at minerva don't take a single subject matter course. not one. all they do are these competency-based practical knowledge skills. so they haven't even started their major. for a first-year students, we had a 100% placement rate at the kinds of internships that typical ivy league juniors, rising seniors, would be getting. and 90% of their managers said that our first-year students exceeded their expectations of any undergraduate that they've employed before. most of them being upper classmen. these are not magical unicorns that we've discovered that have never gone to higher education. these are normal students from all over the world, from every socioeconomic background you can think of. and the difference is, the skills they were taught were ones that were useful in a work environment, and it wasn't just that we taught them those skills. they learned them. and one of the problems, when we think about certification, right, because you mentioned about credentialing, you know, accredited universities are credentialed. almost no accredited university actually complies with accreditation requirements. they're supposed to be three out-of-class work hours according to in-class work hour. three to one. the average american student spends less than one to one ratio. if these universities are still accredited. by those standards, by those rules. right? and so, the issue is that higher education has a good understanding of what it should be doing. it has structure that it should be complying with. but the delivery of the product can be vastly improved. >> i want to -- i was inspired by ben nelson. i'm from cuny. i want to take a step back to what is the real issue here. not how do we solve it. and so i'd say a couple things. one is that one of the great challenges we have in this country today is that we're missing too much of our talent. we're not educating them and preparing them for these 50% new jobs. the second thing is that we are not living up to the ideal of american higher education to be the equalizer, to provide the opportunity to immigrants, underrepresented students, low-income students, et cetera. so, what's the problem? well, the problem is that achievement, both access to higher education and success, is still heavily correlated with wealth in this country. and so we have to do a better job of making sure that we tap the talent, which is evenly distributed, and provide opportunity in an equal way too. across the population. and we have to do that at scale. we have to do it in a way that's affordable. and to do it right now. it's great to think about what's going to happen in 2030, but right now, we are undereducating a huge amount of talent in this country and not preparing them for the workforce. so, we have a dramatic, i think, moment earlier this year when raj and a team of economists matched up 30 million irs records and 30 million student records to show who's doing the best job of propelling students from the lowest rungs of wealth in this country to the middle class and beyond. and so i'm going to make a shameless plug here. the city university of new york, of the top ten institutions in the nation that propelled the lowest quintile of wealth students to the middle class and beyond, cuny was sixth out of the top ten institutions, and we do that at a tuition rate of $6,200 a year, where 65% of our students pay zero in tuition. and i think we need to think -- we have 275,000 degree-seeking students right now. we need to think more about how we capitalize on these engines of social and economic opportunity that are working today and what kind of support and investments the students need to come to places like cuny and many of our other institutions in this country so they can have the same opportunity that their peers have. >> i'd like to follow up really quickly on a question that vijay and others asked, which is, how do you certify something is the right quality or, like, ansi or others. there is no such thing in education, unfortunately. so you do the best you can. so, we do a couple of things. one is that for the micromasters, for example, or for a global freshman academy with asu, each of the courses is backed by credit. in other words, if a student completes it, that will -- and if they get admitted to the university, it will need to count for credit at that university. so in some sense, it's like saying, if, say, lyft drivers or uber drivers were to become a driver, then they need to qualify for all the taxi cab medallion kind of governances before they can drive. i do imply here that our intact credit system of universities is probably, i'll be very bold here, anti-diluvian as the taxi cab medallion system of the transportation industry. we get employers into the mix. each of the micromasters is endorsed by the university. and so by doing that, you get the employers to provide testimonials that the content and the outcomes are the kind of skills they need for the people that they want to hire. >> hi. this is rick o'donnell. i think the -- this is how you measure quality is a great topic and a couple of people have talked about accreditation today, and i think we have thousands of universities in this country that are credited that are producing really poor outcomes. and so accreditation really is not -- it's supposed to be a seal of quality assurance, but it doesn't really work. and i think if you want to measure outcomes, employers, someone has said before that, you know, employers are the accrediter of last resort, which i think is good. other ways to look at it is who has money at risk. one of the things we do at skills fund, is look at software coding boot camps to trucking schools to nursing schools and we go in, do due diligence at the quality of outcomes and finance the students, provide student loans for the student to go and if we get it wrong, we're going to lose money. so we track the outcomes over time, over the lifetime of that loan, to make sure the students are getting jobs, they're getting income and can track that back, pretty granularly, to the outcome of tto the specific skill building so i think part of it is aligning incentives in who's paying, who's financing, who's underwriting programs so that employers and, you know, ultimately the federal government is spending a lot of money on higher ed, but it's not really using the data from student loan defaults at a granular level to go back and say, these institutions aren't doing their job. >> good point. >> i'd like to piggyback off that for a second. we offer a surgical training platform that is growing into a technical skills based platform and i just, you know, in terms of current paradigms no longer working, our medical education system is really sort of lost the goal of its purpose, and so you complete four years of medical school and then, you know, we're focused on technical training and you go on to five to seven years of surgical training and right now, the data shows that 20% to 30% of those graduates after that sort of 10 to 12-year process are unprepared to operate independently. so that system is no longer working and you're $200,000 in debt and it's unclear what the point of that education is. and what's happening is more years are being stacked on at the end instead of re-adjusting what the sort of initial investment of your time and money is. and you know, what we're seeing, i'm seeing a lot in the space in the medical field and outside, is just rapidly changing job landscapes. so people are needing to switch jobs faster and more often than they are before as the data we saw earlier, and so people need a way to rapidly accomplish knowledge transfer, which is a lot of what we're seeing here, with modularized programs, which is great, where you learn the cognitive aspects and funds of knowledge necessary to succeed in the workforce. but the technical components of those jobs hasn't been adequately addressed. so as people need to change jobs more frequently in a single sort of work life span, they need to ability to rapidly learn new skills at a rate that is really unprecedented. >> i just want to extend two comments, one from ben and then one from j.v. one of the things i think that's interesting about minerva, which i have had the chance to see up close that i don't think ben talked enough about, was that while you had the chance to kind of reset education by starting something anew, you still have a physical face-to-face experience so it's not just fully online. and i think what's interesting is that it blends both the best of a broad education and the best of a practical education. and i think that one of the debates that we tend to still have in higher education is, is the purpose for a broad education or is the purpose for -- to learn a job. and it's a debate that has to end because it's for both. and i think one of the things that minerva does well is that it blends both of those things. and i think what j.b. brought up is really kind of the great challenge that we're facing. you know, the vast majority of learners, particularly coming down the pike out of our k-12 system in the u.s. are going to be from the lowest socioeconomic status in the u.s. over the next decade. but yet, the institutions that we tend to talk about in the u.s., meaning our most elite, most selective institutions, do a pretty poor job at enrolling those students and of course the ones they do enroll, they do graduate. but we really, you know, those institutions educate fewer than 1% of american undergraduates, and so this is a scale problem. and i think that a lot of the people around the room are trying to figure out how to -- how do we create the scale we need? because in many ways, we're still stuck with a higher education system that was born at the birth of the country when we had to educate a lot fewer people. for a lot fewer jobs. >> may i suggest something bold? since we're in the department of education. like if you -- >> please do. >> secretary, bold idea. i would -- i would encourage you to change title iv regulation in cooperation with the irs, which is to say that if any university's undergraduate student body is not broadly reflective of socioeconomic distribution in the united states, you lose your nonprofit status and all access to federal funds. i bet you, tomorrow, harvard is 90% bottom 10%. guaranteed. and all of our issues with social mobility will be gone. so, that's an idea. >> i would actually like to state something also bold. there is something called isa, income share agreement, and i would like to iterate. two institutions on that scheme in that game. the higher students, they take the money and, well, is the education quite as good? it's fine, it's not too bad. one thing that a lot of higher education are doing, the students don't pay anything up front but they pay a percentage of salary if they get a job. opportunities for students who may not have otherwise thought about the possibility of going to college. there's certainly a lotf indication that when they get that first successful college experience in high school, they're much more likely to continue on to college and earn a degree. we're also working very hard to expose young students to career possibilities they might not have otherwise realized were options. how do you get a child thinking about a career in mecca tronnics? right. so in addition to having field trips to see traditional college classes. we have school buss of third graders going to the advanced manufacturing training center so they can see what it's all about. and we have really great similarity equipment so we can give stud thnts experience of what it's like to be a welder. it's about exposing students to possibilities and opportunities to help them find their passion in life. >> another thing that weicide be thinking about is how technology changes the learning experience. your comment about breaking down silows between high school and college i think is dead on. we should also realize we're breaking down the silos between higher education and work. today, right now people are taking college classes at work and it's going to happen far more. so the idea of educating for the fifth job is great. but people will be at work learning what it takes to master those competencies that don't exist today. it's going to be very dynamic. i mention it university with industry content together with industry they're offering. and what that's going to look like in five years, i have no idea but making sure that people can mix and match and the market can be decided in what skills are needed is going to be i think what the future of higher education looks like. >> i just want to go back to something that matt said earlier. they might not be interested in developing large amounts. i think what we're seeing we have launched a partnership with right skill which sort of flips the model. and so employers are subsidizing the program for job seekers interested in these high needs fields. so areas where employers can't keep qualified applicants in the job. front end web development, it support, restaurant management. we're training those folks in short-term job training programs and placing them with these employers who are funding the program. so i think as we continue to look at ways to innovate, recognizing there are values, value in some of the public/private partnership that are bringing together a different way of looking at education. >> i think it would help if you could get some public high schools to actually teach a student how to write a sentence and a paragraph before we start throwing credit at him and they can't write a sentence and then we have to deal with that. so we see a lot of that. maybe missouri's different from every other state. i doubt it. >> sorry. the importance of career exploration really at all levels of expectation. only 4% of women of i believe 2014, which is absolutely insane. but studies show you can almost double it application rate to the field. it has such a disproportionate impact as opposed to taking people to the factory to show what is possible and i want to point out how interesting this bite size program is in such high demand that you can't train people fast enough and how important programs are like this between job, one, two, three, four, five, each job typically will have a skill you don't have. but there's not enough of that to train everybody. >> so i have a couple questions for jerry. i'm fascinated by the work college model. 80% of our students are working and we're constantly thinking about how we get it to 100%. one, you talked about what you're spending your mini on. but where does your money come from? and number two. what are some of the pit falls you see in operationalizing a work college model as far as students not doing their hours or other issues that can come up? >> sure. first of all, we don't need to be preaching to students about debt if the instugzs are head over heels in debt. so we score high on that. we have an endowment, 525 million. people don't give us money to be like everybody else. they bought into the self-help basic american style and i think we're going to see more colleges look at this model. liking the one in texas, which is a historically black school. but it would almost be easier to create a work college than to turn a college into a work college. newt gingrich, who seems like he has an idea every minute. he thinks there should be a work college in every state because of the values that go along with that. for example i'm sitting here listening to what i already know and that is that technology's moving fast in this country. but if we're producing graduates that there late and dishonest and can't follow direction, it's not going to make a difference what kind of skills you have. you're going to get fired. so we need look for ways to if still these values while we're looking at every technique out there. but we'd be happy to have you come visit our college. ben stein said on the way out of town he just kept shaking his head and said i did not know that a college like this actually existed in the united states. then he went on to say something that was not very complimentary to alma mater. he said i think we ought to have brain surgery to transfer what's here up to yale university. i doubt they liked that but i know what he meant by it. >> two thoughts. one is we've been talking mostly about the traditional pathway between employer and employee but the -- some of the biggest growth in the economy is in the gig economy and in free lance, even among white collar workers and so this is really i think going to change the nature of education because mostly after college, most education was directed and in many cases paid for by employers. but if you no longer have an employer/employee relationship and you're working on your own, who's going to help direct that learning for you and in some cases who's going to help you pay for it? and so this sort of reskilling throughout life is going to be largely self directed and we're going to have to enable students to be able to do that. and a second thought and this is on kathleen's great presentation is the credit of long and short-term programs that i think don't get enough attention. when you're unemployed or underemployed the most important thing is to get a job and get a job quickly and to get the skills necessary to get that job. but part of the problem with most degree programs is they might not start for a couple months. they take a couple of years in some cases and when you need a job and in many cases they provide you much more than you need to get that first job and so if you think of these noncredit programs which can be articulated to have credit and stacked to get a degree, it would enable us to get people employed more quickly while they're being educated and i don't think even in our financial aid system we give enough credit to these noncredit programs. >> thank you, jeff and thank you all of you. fascinating discussion and we will continue with it after we take about a 10-minute break. my name's jaime baker i'm the chair of the standing committee on law and national security. one of the missions of the standing committee