The next item of business is a statement by Keith Brown on the Queensbury crossing. The Cabinet Secretary will take questions at the end of his statement, therefore there should be no interventions or interruptions. I would ask members to wish to ask a question however to press their request to speak buttons when the Minister is on his feet. Ie dweud i ddim ni wedi brif Weinfordd creu试ym o respostau sp Americasbynaredd posiblen iawnai gwyd position ty Ancient Bridgeadanr photography actor i ddealadu arladas o gwera Maurice Magdawn hefyd yn treff Starship.  Until May, FCBC believed that they could mitigate those weather effects, however the impact of the weather in April and May was particularly severe, with 13 days and 12 days lost to weather respectively. As a result, FCBC have advised ministers that, due to the combined effects of the time that is lost in these two months, they can no longer deliver the December 2016 target opening date for the structure. It is important to remind Parliament that the contractual completion date for the bridge is actually June 2017. December 2016, though, was a target date that would have seen the bridge open six months ahead of contract. I advised Parliament of the changes to the expected opening date earlier today. I should also stress that what I am reporting to Parliament today is a very recent development. As recently as March, I visited the construction site and I was assured by FCBC that the project remained on schedule to complete by December 2016. Every possible measure has been taken by the contractor in a sustained effort to meet the December 2016 target. In all of those actions, I think that it is very important to stress that they ensure that health and safety of the workforce has been paramount. In order to mitigate the on-going weather impacts that have arisen over the past few months, FCBC has procured additional physical resource, increased staffing by taking on 100 additional workers, increased working hours, altered construction methodologies again consistent with safety, done that where possible and also challenged critical construction sequences to identify where any programme efficiencies could be found. The contractors have now reached a stage where further additional resources will not bring the delivery date forward due to the complex technical nature of the construction work, which means that the complex sequence of operations must be used to complete this innovative structure. The deck lifting has to be carried out in a balanced sequence on each side of the three towers. You cannot do two on one side and then just one on the other. The balance has got to be kept and one has to follow the other. The loads applied by the various construction activities such as road surfacing and crucially the wind barriers have to be very carefully controlled across the structure to ensure its structural integrity. Under robust challenge from ministers, FCBC has confirmed that they had firmly believed up to May this year that their previous programme, showing that December 2016 target date for opening to traffic, could still be met with the help of the mitigating actions that were being taken, albeit that it was becoming increasingly challenging due to the continuing weather impacts. The subsequently revised FCBC programme, which was submitted on 1 June, has already been the subject of extensive internal challenge by senior management within the FCBC partner companies. The programme includes the effects of weather to date and the impact that it has on pushing future activities into periods of greater weather risks, including particularly weather-sensitive activities such as waterproofing, road surfacing and, as I have mentioned, the installation of wind barriers. The contractor has also built in allowances for future weather based on the experience to date. Over the last week, independent experts employed by Transport Scotland have also provided further robust challenge to FCBC's revised programme, analysing each critical activity to ensure that everything possible is done to ensure an opening date as close to December as possible. This review concluded that all that could be done was being done to open the bridge as soon as it is safe to do so. FCBC has also assured us that it will continue to target the earliest possible date that the structure can be safely open to traffic. However, at this stage, the programme shows that the Queensferry crossing is now expected to be open by mid-May 2017, prior to the actual contractual completion date of mid-June 2017, but, of course, some months after our projected target date of the end of this year. We will continue to work closely with the contractors and I will personally ensure that every pressure and every resource is brought to bear to deliver safely or indeed better than in advance of the date that I have just mentioned of May next year. To date, FCBC has successfully managed every risk to the construction of the project that is within their control. The only risk that the contractor has no control over is weather, although they have made significant efforts to mitigate weather effects where possible. Ministers have always been ambitious about this project, and, in being so, the project has always worked to a deliberately ambitious target of December 2016. Originally, Parliament may recall that this timescale was set to address concerns about the long-term condition of the 4th Roar bridge, where it was originally believed that it would suffer usage restrictions that HGVs had to come off the bridge as early as 2017. Those concerns, notwithstanding the problems that we had in the bridge more recently, have proven to be less immediate, and the recently installed structural health monitoring system on the 4th Roar bridge is providing additional surety on the ability of the existing bridge to sustain traffic loading into the future. However, that had not decreased our determination to complete this once-in-a-generation project at the earliest opportunity, as I say, consistent with safety. It is important to stress that FCBC fully expect the project to be complete well within the timeframe of their contract. We will not meet the December opening target. It remains true that the project itself will be completed by the contractual date, and, additionally, there will be no impact on the public purse. I would like to confirm in that regard that there will be no additional cost of taxpayers, and that our previous projection of a £245 million saving will still be the case after that announcement. The project directly employs more than 1200 people, many of whom have been performing some of the most complex civil engineering ever seen in Scotland, in the highly challenging environment of the 1st of 4th. Over 12 million work hours have gone into the project so far, and we should not lose sight of the hard work and dedication of that workforce. Anyone who looks at the 4th works in the 4th cannot fail to be impressed with their achievements to date. We have been and will continue to be fully transparent about the delivery of the project, both in terms of cost and timescale, providing regular updates to Parliament, communities and the public. With that in mind, I would like to offer the opportunity to any interested MSPs from across the chamber to attend a dedicated technical briefing this Friday, when any questions that members may have—which you do not get the opportunity to ask just now—can be asked and answered. It is important to remember that, in my view, that, in the space of around nine years, remarkable progress has been made in advancing the project, from feasibility study to near completion. As you have also mentioned, it is the expectation of the contractors, their expectation based on the robust timescale that they have laid out, that 94 per cent of the project will be complete by the end of this year. However, it is expected that the project will be largely complete with both the approach roads or the approach roads on both sides ready for traffic and a continuous structure spanning the forth. By the middle of next year, the May date that I have mentioned, traffic will be flowing across it. That is the timescale laid out by the contractor, which we will hold them to and try to improve on. The Scottish Government, for our part, will continue to ensure that its iconic structure brings benefits to the people of Scotland at the earliest opportunity. The cabinet secretary will now take questions. There has been a large number of members who wish to speak, so if members could well keep their questions and their answers, we will get through them all, Mr Fraser. I thank the cabinet secretary for his statement and for the advance copy, indeed, for answering my written parliamentary question earlier this morning. I am sure that all of us in the chamber will wish to applaud the contractors working on this ambitious and challenging infrastructure project, particularly in the difficult weather conditions that the cabinet secretary has outlined. My constituents in Fife and across the east of Scotland will well remember the catastrophe at the end of last year, when the fourth road bridge was closed for weeks, causing huge disruption to people's lives and untold damage to the local economy. At that time, we were assured by the Scottish Government that the long-awaited new crossing would be delivered on time and under budget. On 5 January this year, the First Minister told the chamber, that, by the end of this year, the new Queensferry crossing will be completed. No ifs, no buts, no maybes, no dependent on the weather, a clear promise on one that today has clearly been broken. The people that I represent in Fife and further afield will be dismayed at today's announcement of a delay and worry about the implications. So can the cabinet secretary help them by answering those three questions? Firstly, what guarantee can he now give about the new date for completion of mid-May? Is this also weather dependent? Can we have more confidence in this date than in the First Minister's previous assurance? Secondly, given that the existing road bridge will have to carry heavy traffic for up to six months longer than previously planned, can he assure us that it is up to the task and there is no risk of a further catastrophic closure, either to cars or to HGVs? And finally, is it true that contractors working on the new bridge were aware of this delay some weeks ago and were asked to sign confidentiality agreements, not to disclose this information until after the Scottish Parliament elections on 5 May? A series of questions from Murdo Fraser. The first point that he made was about the weather and I would, in addition to any other spokespersons from other parties, make the offer to say that if they would like to come to the top of the towers of the bridge, because there is a perception—I think that we have to acknowledge the fact—from people that they see— I'll be happy to accompany Murdo Fraser on that visit. I think that there is a point where the public see what they believe to be relatively fine weather, but it can be a completely different environment on top of those towers as I can testify myself. I think that it is important, actually, on the website today of Transport Scotland, if members want to see the video of the two men in the basket pulling the strands for the cables, we get some idea of the pressures that are there. I think that it's also true to say that it's never been the case that we've said no ifs and no buts. I'm not resiling from the target date that we had. I've said that repeatedly, but if you look at the testimony given to the committees of this Parliament by Transport Scotland, by the contractors, they have always talked about whether there is a one variable that, as I've said earlier, they cannot control. In relation to the new date and the conference that surrounds that, I would say that the conference on the part of the contract—and I have to take the words of the contractor, although, of course, we get Transport Scotland to interrogate those things and we, in turn, interrogate Transport Scotland as well as the contractor—their conference is based on the experience right up to date of the weather during the most critical part of this project, which has been over the last few months. As I say, they expect their intention is to have 94 per cent of the project complete by the end of this year, and that will allow sufficient time to make sure that they can finish by the date that they've given me of mid-May. I will do everything that I can to hold them to that project, but yes, to be perfectly blunt to Murdo Fraser whether there is still a factor and that we cannot control. I can also confirm to Murdo Fraser that the existing road bridge is perfectly able to take any traffic, as it has been now for quite a number of months. In addition to the work that was carried out to carry to effect the repairs that were necessary around the bridge, you may remember that those repairs had a further few stages to go to make it permanent repairs. Those are on target and there is no question of the bridge having to close. In addition to that, we had a full health check of the existing bridge and also the crucial point. The reason why we ended up in the first place with the December 2016 target was because we expected, because of the cables that were examined back in the 2000s, which has shown moisture, could necessitate the removal of HGVs from the existing fourth road bridge. Back in 2012, Parliament may remember that we had looked at it again, dehumidification was carried out and we are confident in the ability of the cables to carry the traffic in future that is required to carry. The fourth road bridge in summary will carry traffic for many years to come and we are confident in that. I have no knowledge whatsoever and certainly the Scottish Government has never entered into any confidentiality agreements with contractors saying that they cannot speak about this until I think he said after the election. I repeat the timescale in which I have given him this was in May this year, April and May, with the months when he lost most days, which have necessitated this change. I am happy to provide Murdoffraiser with a timeline on that and I would conclude by once again inviting Murdoffraiser, any other spokespeople, to come up top of the bridge and see what the weather is like for themselves. Alex Rowley Thank you, Presiding Officer. Today's announcement will be greeted with disappointment in five and beyond. As someone who has campaigned for a new crossing for decades, I would say that, although the delay is disappointing, we need to keep it in perspective and make it clear that this new bridge is good news for five, good news for the east of Scotland, indeed good news for the whole economy of Scotland. That is why it is important that ministers do not announce unrealistic deadlines and it is crucial that there is full transparency on this project. Can the minister firstly confirm that there are no further concerns with the existing bridge and that the volume of traffic that it carries every day is not a concern? When did the Government become aware of the delays on the new crossing? Finally, if bad weather in April and May has delayed this project by six months, what steps is the minister taking to ensure that bad weather this winter does not delay the opening even further? Can he therefore commit that June 2017 is absolutely the latest day at which this bridge will open? First of all, I agree with him that this is very good news. I think that sometimes we lose sight of the fact of how unique the structure is. If you think just of the central span, it will be the longest structure of its type in the world, the longest structure ever built in terms of the cables that support that. There are huge challenges. Allot really knows just as well as me. I live on the other side of the forth as well, the challenges that you can have in the forth. That is what is allowed for this disappointment that we are having to express today about the timeline in terms of the end of the year. It is good news for Scotland. To me, that is hugely beneficial. I would love for this decision to have been taken many years ago more further down the road with that, but it is not that we took the decision. I mean, we moved on this very quickly. Alec Rowley, I do not think, was in Parliament at the time, but we actually started the procurement at the same time that you started a legislation in order to try to get this bridge done as quickly as was possible. On his point about fuel transparency, I have already said to any member, including Alec Rowley, that wants to go along on Friday and ask any of the contractors, any of Transport Scotland officials that will be there, any questions that he has, which he feels have not been answered today, will be answered. There is also a great deal of transparency already occurred by the attendance at committees of this Parliament, by Transport Scotland and by the contractor. Alec Rowley also asked about the existing bridge. I think that I have given those assurances that I can to Murdo Fraser. The action that was necessary to get the bridge back into operation was taken. There are still further steps that were not jeopardised the continued use of the bridge but will further ensure that the bridge is made safe for the future, going well into the future. We have a full health check done on the bridge because of the work that was required recently and also the point about the cables. The cables have had a process of dehumidification and that risk has receded from where it was as we expected back in 2005. As to continuing to make sure that we get this at the earliest possible day, I have given the contractor a statement that I will be doing that personally as we have been doing. We will make sure that we are consistent with safety. The contractors are impressed by their approach to safety. The chief contractor, Michael Martin, who is in charge of the whole project, meets every new member of staff coming on. They all ask about the priority and they all say that it is getting the bridge open and he says that it is not at safety. That will be the approach that it has taken, but consistent with that I will be making sure that everything that is possible is being done along with the contractors and Transport Scotland to make sure to be open to this bridge as soon as possible. Alex Cole-Hamilton Thank you to the cabinet secretary for his statement and indeed for the advance copy that we saw before now. Much about the statement now suggests a project in abject distress. How on earth does 25 days lost to weather in April and May equate to a 180-day delay in opening the bridge? Does he take us for fools and does he now expect Parliament to believe that the first that ministers learned of this was just conveniently days after the Scottish election? Will the minister now publish all correspondence pertaining to a potential delay in the opening of this crossing? Michael Martin Cabinet secretary. The idea that this is a project in abject distress will produce, I am sure, some distress in the workforce that are working on this project. They think that they are involved in a fantastic and unique project that will benefit the infrastructure of Scotland, and to hear that kind of statement from Alex Cole-Hamilton does him no credit whatsoever. It is also true to say that he would not find a project in abject distress that had a saving of £254 million attached to it. If he compares that, for example, to the cost of the Lib Dem's favoured trams project in Edinburgh, I think that he will see that was a project in abject distress. I have said already that we will have full transparency. I have said the process by which that will be carried out. Of course, any documents that are required and we can release, there are issues of commercial confidentiality, none of which amount to any statement trying to get anybody to not speak to anybody, not in the part of the Scottish Government. However, we do have, of course, information mechanic available. I commit to making sure that information is made available, but over and above that, any question that is required to be asked by any member of either the contractor Transport Scotland can be done on Friday. I repeat the offer. I do not know whether Alex Cole-Hamilton is his party's spokesperson in relation to the subject. I know that he is a local member, but if he wants to come along either in that capacity or as a spokesperson to the bridge, I will make sure that that happens as well. There is no shepherding of the officials or the contractor by ministers. They are open to answer any question that is required. I think that we have ensured transparency and we will continue to do that. I deplor the comments of Alex Cole-Hamilton in talking about an abject distress. Jenny Gilruth To ask the cabinet secretary what steps have been taken to keep the Queen's Very Crossing project on schedule. As I have mentioned, every possible measure has been taken by the contractor in what has been a sustained effort to meet the December 2016 target. Just to once again repeat, of course I and everyone else, as Alex really says, will be disappointed that we cannot meet that target. However, they have procured additional physical resources. They have increased the staffing, taken on additional 100 workers. They have increased working hours, consistent with safety, and again consistent with safety altered construction methodologies where possible. They have also challenged the critical construction sequences to identify where any programme efficiencies could be found. Somebody, Alex Cole-Hamilton, said, why is it the case that the days that have been lost in April and May are so critical? If you think about the bridge, it has to be completed in a sequential manner. You have as limited as two people working in a very small space at the crucial points where the decks are lifted. That produces constraints that no amount of additional resources can now recover because of the time lost. However, the contractor has confirmed that at this stage further additional resources will not bring the delivery date forward, partly for the reasons that I have mentioned, and partly because of the complex technical nature of the construction work and the sequence of operations that must now be undertaken to complete the structure. However, everything possible is being done, consistent with safety, to make sure that we bring it in as soon as possible. During the period in which the timescale was being reviewed, the project suffered its first and thankfully so far its only casualty. Could the minister tell me if during the period the days were lost in the construction process as a result of that incident? Given the anecdotal suggestions that there may be health and safety compromises taking place, can he guarantee once again that the pressure that he has undertaken to place on the contractors and management of the project will not result in compromises over health and safety? I say first of all that the tragic death of which Alec Johnson refers was Mr John Cusin, who I think everybody on the bridge knew as a very popular person, somebody very committed to the bridge and the project. It is probably hard to convey how devoted to the project those people that are working on it are. It is unique and it has produced a real loyalty to it, and it was of course tragic that Mr Cusin lost his life, and quite rightly that has been investigated by the health and safety executive. Yes, there was a delay. The bridge was closed in respect of Mr Cusin for two days, and I once again for one day think it was on his funeral. I am not going to be applying any pressure which jeopardises safety. I have made that clear to the contractors that, more importantly, the contractors have made clear to me that they will not be doing anything that jeopardises safety. They had, of course, until that tragic accident, a very good record in terms of safety, so I will not be doing anything which jeopardises that. I think that that was all the questions that Alec Johnson asked, but if there is any more, then he can come back to me. Emma Harper Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the cabinet secretary, given the weather dependence of the Queensfury crossing construction, what other aspects of work have seen weather-related delays? Cabinet secretary, whether you can have varying impacts on construction activities. However, the critical activities that have been delayed due to wind in particular have been deck lifting and cabling operations. Since that work, that part of the work that commenced in September last year, the downtime due to adverse weather, specifically wind, has been 40 per cent compared to the 25 per cent anticipated by the contractor for this activity. That, in turn, creates an unavoidable knock-on effect for subsequent activities, road surfacing and wind barriers. The wind barrier cannot be put on to the bridge until the bridge is substantially complete, because if it does, it will produce an unacceptable stress on the structure. That will now have to take place in wet and cold conditions during autumn and winter 2016-17. Overall, the contingency built into the construction programme from 2011 was 20 per cent, but much of that was eroded during the weather that we had last year. Emma Harper In the interests of full transparency, will the Government publish all dates from the start of the project that was affected by adverse weather? Has it just been mentioned in terms of safety? We cannot forget that it has just been mentioned death earlier this year of a worker helping to build the bridge. Can the cabinet secretary assure us that he has spoken to the trade unions to assure them that there will be no undue pressure put on as a role of the timescale of the project? On the last point that Neil Bibby raises, that is properly done by the contractor. I conveyed my views to the contractor, the contractor is the employer and they have done that. The idea that we would allow for or pressure the contractor into doing things that were not consistent with safety, we just wouldn't do that. I am sorry, I have just got the first part of Neil Bibby's question. I would say that we already have the data for the crucial periods April to May, which shows day by day when it was not possible, because the wind at the crucial levels exceeded, in one case it is 28mph for the cabling operations and 35mph for the decklifts. We have that information for the crucial period. I will check what further information is available going further back and, of course, we will produce all the information and pass it on to Neil Bibby and to any other member that is interested. Problems with the marine foundations of a new crossing have played any part in this delay? I can say that the contractor has confirmed to us that they firmly believed, up to May, that the previous programme, showing the December 2016 target date for opening to traffic, could still be met with, as I have said, the help of the mitigating actions, albeit that it was becoming increasingly challenging due to the continuing weather impacts. However, in relation to the point that David Torrance raises around the marine foundations, no, they have not played a part in the delay. Jeremy Balfour Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thank the cabinet secretary for his statement and advance copy of it. In his statement, he said that, back in March of this year, when he visited the site, he was guaranteed that it would be completed by December of this year. If that guarantee has now been broken, what confidence can we have that this project will be delivered under budget, now that he has missed his target, what other targets will he miss? Jeremy Balfour's question was about, apart from the other question, the budget that is going to be no impact. We have projected, and it is worth repeating, a saving of £245 million. Just to be clear, this project, when it was first tendered, was for a tender range between £1.75 million and £2.25 million. We expected it to come in at around £1.3 million, but the savings, since the earlier figure came in after the tender, are around £245 million, and they are not impacted by the delay. Any further work having to be done, any further resources having to be applied, are done at the expense of the contractor. He asks again the question about the guarantees. I have tried to be specific in saying that the mid-made date that we have been given by the contractor has been robustly investigated. We have made the same point that Jeremy Balfour just made to me. We do not want to be announcing or applying a date that cannot be met. We are told by the contractor that they can do it in that time. They have, of course, until June for the contract date to end, but we will do what we can in the meantime—everything that we can—to try to work with the contractor through Transport Scotland to make sure that that date of mid-may next year, which is what they have said, they can do and they have given the usual caveat around whether they have said that they can do that. We will do everything that we can do to make sure that they either meet that or indeed improve on that. I will give that personal guarantee. Thank you. The cabinet secretary has said that he aims to be fully transparent. What states will be taken over the next six months to ensure that local partners are kept informed of the progress? My understanding is that, until the statement was made today, people were not aware that a delay was about to be announced. Can I say to Claire Baker on her last point that we can only announce it with me of that information? I have said how recently that information came to us. She is right to say that communities and stakeholders want to be kept up-to-date. I think that there has been an excellent track record from the project on both sides of the bridge of communities that are in keeping them involved and up-to-date. I undertake to make sure that, in relation to what we have announced today, that that information is passed out to those communities and that they are kept up-to-date during the rest of the construction project. I am glad that the cabinet secretary has confirmed that there will be no impact on the public purse as a result of the delay. However, I am curious, cabinet secretary. Can you please let me know whether any finance has been released to the forth crossing bridge constructors for meeting contractual milestones in accordance with the December 2016 target? Of course, we have paid for that. John Swinney had to pay for the project. As we went along, it was not like a normal project where you could take other action for borrowing, so we have had to pay for the project. Of course, any moneys due to the contract that has been paid. That is very disappointing. If you link the recent record on large-scale public infrastructure projects, the M74 delivered on-time and on-budget, the M80 delivered on-time and on-budget, Avery to Bathgate, the Borders Railway, we have taken great strides in making sure that we bring those projects in on-time and on-budget. That project will come in substantially under budget, and it is with great regret that we cannot meet the original timescale that we had, but we undertake to do everything that we can to get the project in by the end of the contract date, the target date being mid-May next year, and we will try to improve on that. That ends questions on the ministerial statement. Apologies to those who wish to ask questions but were not called.


Hi everyone. My name is Kevin Carey. I'm the vice president for education policy and knowledge management here at New America. I just want to welcome everyone who has come to join us on for our virtual event today. This event is something of an annual occasion that New America does in partnership with Washington Monthly Magazine. It's an organization that we have a long relationship with and have worked on in many different areas in the past. It's an especially exciting, interesting time to be talking about the future of higher education given the tremendous tumult and in many ways sense of crisis going on right now. It's always a challenge around our ability to provide a great affordable higher education to everyone. Always a challenge in the best of times, a particular challenge in these times. We are very fortunate to be joined today by Jamie Marisotis, my friend and colleague and the president of the Lumina Foundation, which is a generous supporter of both New America's higher education work and Washington Monthly and this event. So on behalf of New America, thank you to all of us for joining us today.  Thank you so much, Kevin. And I just want to say I'm really happy to be with you. I want to, I want to congratulate you and the New America team and Paul Glastres and his colleagues at the Monthly for, you know, just another outstanding college issue where we're proud to partner with you at New America and the Monthly in supporting your independent efforts to help make higher education better for individual Americans and really for all of us as we share in the collective well being that results from a better educated society. So, so like every Washington Monthly fanboy or fan girl I've got this enormous stack of back issues of the Monthly in my house that I absolutely refuse to throw away, and the pandemic left a lot of time for many of us to kill so like any good policy one would do I've started rereading the back issues of the Monthly as a sort of window on American history over the last 50 years and honestly it's a fascinating and frankly at times depressing read fascinating to see how much some things have changed and depressing to see how others haven't changed at all. So in this latter category I dug up this this issue right here of the Monthly from 1983 the same era when Paul and I were actually interning for Charlie Peters and trying to find out if we could cut it as nationally regarded journalists, spoiler alert only one of us could. Anyway, the cover story for this issue written by Tim Noah is called high brow robbery. The colleges call it tuition we call it plunder. Now, given the headline I don't think I need to tell you what the piece argues but what struck me actually was the opening line setting up what I think is a soundly reasoned reasonably articulated argument for an income based student loan repayment plan. So Tim Noah writes quote, everybody seems to agree these days that college costs too much. 1983. So clearly the monthly has been at this task for a very long while and clearly we've made very little progress on accomplishing the fundamental change it's required. Now of course a lot has changed in the nearly 40 years since that piece was written. And one of the things that's among them is that college tuition have outpaced ability to pay measures for four consecutive decades, and yet the demand for talent continues to rise, mandating that more Americans, especially people of color, and others who've been systematically excluded from the system, gain access to high quality programs that lead to a better life, or as Tim Noah said in 1983 for generations of Americans a college degree has been the passport to success, promising upward mobility both professionally and socially.  COVID-19 the surge of unemployment, the George Floyd killing all the things that Kevin was talking about have exposed the inequities that have for too long plagued our country and held it back. So I think the monthly a new America's decade long task of assessing colleges and universities not by their wealth, or their reputation, or how well they serve the elite among us, but how well they reach all of our citizens, and how they serve the country as a whole couldn't be more fitting and over the years the monthly rankings have put a special focus on the best colleges for adult students, the best colleges for vocational credit programs the best for turning students into citizens, and the best for innovative approaches to providing education to all of our citizens, especially those who've been disenfranchised. This year's issue takes another important step by including schools that make sure majors popular with black students lead to well paying jobs. The first time I think that any publication has done this. So all of this I think points in the direction where higher education needs to evolve. It needs to do a much better job serving today's students. What we know are more diverse and ever many working fuller part time balancing school with raising their own kids, it needs to do a much better job of holding down costs and providing past to good jobs and careers. And it also needs to mold the citizens were counting on to ensure the health of our democracy with a spirit of engagement, integrity, determination and imagination. For the last several years I've been ruminating on a question that I'm sure is familiar to many of you. The question is education for what what's all of this focus on high quality learning for I have a new book out that takes a whack at that question and I conclude that as machines get smarter and smarter. We have to prepare people for human work the work that only humans can do Machines are good at repetition and patterns but they can't understand things like subtlety and nuance. The more work involves interaction among humans, the less likely it is that machines can do it. Human work blends these human traits like compassion and empathy and ethics with our developed capabilities like critical analysis interpersonal communication and creativity. Now if you hear a strong echo of the monthly work I don't think that's any coincidence. And if my premise is right, we're clearly going to have to reimagine our system of higher learning and do so in ways that both the Washington Monthly and New America have long been championing. For example, the system we need has to put equity first in all that we do. We have to recognize that we have a post-secondary system built on assumptions and policies that go back hundreds of years that were specifically designed to deny opportunities to people of color. Without access to high quality learning, many won't have the opportunity that's necessary to advance economically and fully participate in society. So when the Washington Monthly puts a spotlight on those schools that serve not only people of color, but also immigrants and first generation students and lower income students, this is good for individual students and good for our country. We're also moving past the time when education is one and done when we learn at one stage of our lives, then earn and then serve or give back at, you know, in distinct phases. In my book on human work, I talk about a new education system one that fosters a virtuous cycle of learning, earning and serving others a system in which all three occur continually. And in this annual college issue, the Washington Monthly has always championed such a system. This year's issue does that I think on steroids. This year was as we face multiple crises caused by denying facts and science by inflaming fear and exclusion by promoting selfishness and greed. The Washington Monthly is lifting up institutions who exemplify enlightened education, broad inclusion in service to community and country. You know, COVID and racial injustice have been rocket fuel that's propelling disruptive change in higher education. And I think these rankings are important guideposts about which institutions are best capable of preparing the human workers will need more than ever. Now I'm going to leave it to Paul to introduce our panelists and moderate our discussion, but I just want to say how pleased I am to share the airwaves with all of them today and to thank them all for the great work they're doing. They're looking at higher education with fresh eyes and applying their best thinking to improving the enterprise. I think that's something all of us need to do. And I look forward to their thoughts about how we might do it. So thank you all for joining us and special thanks to Kevin and Paul and everyone who contributed such thoughtful and timely analysis to this issue. The 40 year journey of trying to make colleges and universities better to help them answer the question, what can colleges do for the country? I think that question has never been more urgent. So let me turn it over now to Paul. Jamie, my friend, thank you very much for that kind of introduction. I would urge everyone to read Jamie's book. We have a review of it in the current issue and on the website and Jamie, you're right. We are on rocket fuel now when it comes to the need for and honestly the demand for fundamental change in the higher education system on issues of cost, quality and equity. And we have a superb panel of experts to present to the audience here. People are really at the cutting edge of rethinking that new system that needs to be born and it needs to be born very, very quickly. Our first speaker is going to be Kevin Kerry who introduced himself earlier. Kevin is my, you know, one of my partners in this along with Jamie and the folks at the Washington Monthly I work with. He is, as he said, the vice president of education policy and knowledge management at New American directs the education policy program guest edits the Washington Monthly writes regularly for the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and is the author of the book, the end of college, creating the future of learning and universities of everywhere. And Kevin I'm going to just turn it over to you and then when you're done I'll introduce the next speaker and and so on down the line so Kevin Thanks Paul. Thanks Jamie. And again thanks everyone for coming today. I see we have 217 participants out there so that's fantastic more than we could fit in our, our events facing in Washington DC. The article I wrote for the The issue this year really kind of goes to this question of it argues that it's time to really rethink and restructure the basic way that the federal government supports higher learning. You know we have been working for about 50 years now. A system that basically rests on two assumptions. It is essentially a voucher and loan based system we provide vouchers to low income students through the Pell Grant system and loans to anyone else who needs it. And it's a voucher and loan based system that requires two things one. A well functioning market for higher education where students are matched to institutions that will provide them with a high quality education and affordable price. And it also assumes that state governments will do their part in investing in higher education and providing the public institutions that educate the large majority of all students with an affordable high quality option. Basically both of those assumptions are breaking down and they are breaking down in ways that are interrelated to one another and they are getting worse over time. The fact that one million students new students a year default on their student loans. And that we have now $1.6 trillion in counting and outstanding loan debt. Really says to me that we cannot assume that the market for higher education will operate by itself. Different markets work in different ways. And I think we've applied sort of a crude econ one on one assumption to the way to a very kind of complicated set of interrelationships between students and institutions. Particularly students who are more susceptible to marketing and innuendo and information that turns out to be not right for them. The students will not just match with institutions on the market can't be just assumed to work by itself. And we've sort of witnessed the long term deterioration of state funding to higher education. I should note not in and this is important not in the same way and not across the board. Some states have done the right thing and continue to support higher learning. We saw that especially after the 2008 Great Recession where basically all states cut funding for higher education because of huge revenue losses. But over the next 10 years, some states brought the money back to the point that before the current economic crisis there were some states that actually had fully restored funding that had been lost in 2008. Other states didn't other states just cut and left it there let tuition rise, let debt rise and kind of let their institutions go on this essentially slow road to privatization. Now we have another economic crisis. And basically, as I talk about if, if the same thing happens this time that happened last time and by that I mean 12 years ago. We're going to end up with probably something like we're going to end up with a bunch of states where the public institutions are getting twice as much money from tuition as they are from the taxpayers. And I really question about whether you can call them public institutions at all at that point, you know, they become publicly governed but they're not really public, they're market actors. And they will act like market actors and again we've seen the tremendous problems with just exposing students, particularly vulnerable students to the depredations of the free market. So what I propose is a new way of funding colleges and universities through federal funding. And of course we've had a very robust dialogue mostly through the political system over the last couple of years around one way of thinking about that, which is this idea of free college. And I should say I very much support the goals and the impetus behind free college I think it's fantastic to see whole political movements energizing voters particularly younger voters around really the restoration of a great American promise that we had in this country for quite some time. This is not a pipe dream this is not about making something that we've never been able to do it's about brings back something we had which is the idea that anyone could be able to go to a public college university, affordably, that you could go and do what I did I'm, you know, I'm 50 years old I'm not that far removed although more and more all the time, but I went to a great public university and my parents were able to pay for it out of pocket I didn't have any debt I never even talked about student debt with, you know, my colleagues that's how much things have changed in just one generation. But there are problems with free college as it's been articulated, and I can go into them in more detail but the long and short of it is, if you just replace all the tuition that is being paid right now what you end up doing is replicating and entrenching a lot of inequities that are already built into the system. You reward all those states that I just talked about that this invested from their higher education system and let tuition rise, you essentially give them all the money that they refuse to spend themselves. And you also end up giving a lot more money to colleges and universities that tend to serve wealthier students and which are also the colleges and universities that charge students more that are almost quasi private now, and you give a lot less money to community colleges. To open access regional institutions that don't spend as much and don't charge as much. And what you don't do is invest in the quality of the education of those institutions. You don't make sure that they can hire more tenured faculty you don't make sure that they can invest in the kind of programs that Jamal Abdul Eileen who we're going to hear from word a fantastic article about in this, this issue of the monthly programs that don't just make college more affordable but actually make it more likely that students are going to learn a lot and they're going to graduate. So what I propose is a different sort of system that colleges can opt into that would provide basically a standard federal subsidy in exchange for a couple of things. One adopting a uniform pricing system that would be the same everywhere that would be affordable free for many students and affordable for all students. A system of accountability for kind of a baseline level of accountability for outcomes so that we don't allow institutions that just aren't going to serve students well into the market. And a level of cooperation among institutions that we don't have now built around an assumption of credit transfer and a lot of other things. So I hope that we have an opportunity as a country to seriously consider this kind of new approach to federalism a new approach to funding higher education. One that will kind of break us out of this pattern of deterioration that I've talked about. So and I think all the other things that the panelists are talking about are going to kind of get it that big super challenge in different ways. So I'll stop there. Thank you Kevin. You know you speak so calmly and reasonably the radical nature of your plan does quite come across but we're going to try to tease that out a little bit in the Q&A. Next up is of our panelists is Jamal Abdulalim, part of our editorial team. He is the higher ed editor at The Conversation, a former crime reporter at the Milwaukee Sentinel. He's covered higher education for more than a decade here in DC writing for publications like the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News, and of course Washington Monthly. He was a Knight Wallace journalism fellow, a Spencer education fellow and was named 2013 chess journalist of the year by the chess journalists of America. I know Jamal, I never want to have to play you in chess. Anyway, he's going to talk about a, as Kevin said, a fantastic piece that he has in Washington Monthly. Jamal, take it away. Thank you Paul. I guess I would start out just with the point of clarification, you know Paul said this was a superb panel of experts and I don't consider myself an expert. I just know a few and I quote them in stories. So if anything, I might be good at that. Some of those experts are actually my co panelists today. And I'm very pleased to join you. When I set out to write a story about the degree and three program in Ohio. I applied a rule that I apply for just about any program that I write about and that is I have to talk to those who are being served by the program in order to understand it. I don't really want to talk to people who created the program, who evaluate the program, unless and until I talk to those who've been served by the program, I think that's key for understanding it. And talking to the students, you know, there were a number of things that they said that they liked about this particular program which is replicated after a program called CUNY ASAP in New York. There's many benefits, right. So one is money, just to get to and from school, which especially in a city like New York and make a tremendous difference even in DC, you know, sometimes the metro fairs are just unaffordable for for some people. And one thing that all of the students spoke glowingly about was personal connection with advisers with academic advisers and that rain true to me for a number of reasons. One is that, you know, when I wrote about my own experience at my alma mater the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and I went, you know, to visit the school after, I don't know, maybe closer to two decades after I graduated. One of the things I did was to go visit the advisors who had helped me along the way, and also got tremendous insight into some of the issues that were going on in terms of why graduation rates were lackluster among black students at my alma mater. I got a lot of those insights from the academic advisors. And speaking with the students they just time and time again they said, you know, that they felt like they had someone cared about them, someone with whom they had a connection at the institution. And I think sometimes, you know, maybe we might overlook the importance of something like that, especially maybe if you don't come from a family where anyone has gone to college.  And so to have individuals there that are kind of like rooting for you, and giving you points and tips on just how to navigate the system, I think is of tremendous value. And I guess I got like further confirmation, you know, just the other day and editing a story about community college transfer, which will, which my story actually deals with, and that is, you know, the percentage of students who transfer from a community college to a four year school, you know, a lot of times students set out to do that. And it sounds like an easy thing to do. Oh, I'll just start at community college is more affordable. There's a lot of classes out there and then I'll transfer to a four year school. The reality is that doesn't happen as often as it doesn't happen as easily as people may think it does. But one thing that made a difference according to a story that I just edited around the other day is when you reach out to an advisor at the four year school that you want to go to. If you establish that connection early, then it makes you more likely to, to actually transfer. And so we saw elements of that in the program that I wrote about for the article for for Washington Monthly. This program and the advising component led students to graduate twice as much as those who didn't get this type of advising. And I guess it's important to point out that advisors are academic advisors are just overwhelmed. We see this at high schools throughout the United States where sometimes advisors have quote unquote caseloads of, you know, 500 600 students. I put the word caseload and quotes because I think, you know, the best academic advisors don't like to think of the students they serve as quote unquote cases. But that's a term that she was just kind of as a matter of convention. But, and then at the community college level as well you'll see advisors that just have to just overwhelm in terms of the number of students that that they're expected to serve. And so one of the things that you see in the necuny ASAP, which was the model for the degree in three program in Ohio that I wrote about for the article is that the advisors have a much smaller, more manageable caseload, so to speak, of students with whom to interact. And I think that based on the fact that, you know, just every student I spoke spoke with that was like the first thing they mentioned. I think that speaks to the importance of the role that the advisors play in terms of helping the students get through the two year program and into a career or to afford your college. Now, here's where things get a little bit complicated is that in order to get those lower caseloads, so to speak, or, you know, lower student to advisor ratios, it takes money. It takes, you know, a few thousand more dollars per semester per year than it would otherwise. And so then you can almost hear skeptics and cynics asking questions and in fact I asked this question just as not as a cynic or skeptic but as a journalist trying to tease out and kind of anticipate what others might say, which would be why should taxpayers pay for, you know, they might speak of it derisively as like hand holding or something like that. But the students say, look, you know, we come from families and backgrounds where we can't rely on parents to teach us or show us how, you know, to do this thing called college. And if you think about what affluent parents do for their children, right, the amount of money they might spend on an independent consultant, you know, someone to help with applications in the essays, you know, all the steps that affluent parents take for their children to get to the best or what they consider the best colleges. You know, the question that the students that I spoke with, they shot back, they said, well, you know, who's going to help us. And so that was, you know, their rationale for making the case for the investment and in the type of advising that they get through this particular program. But then, you know, some people might still be unconvinced. So, fortunately, in this case, there's information available in the form of an evaluation that speaks to people who would still have concerns, even if, you know, the case for, you know, helping students who don't have, you know, the kind of background that helps them get to and through college in their favor. And that is that this just makes economic sense. And it makes economic sense in terms of, you know, students who are in this program graduate more frequently and they transfer to a four year university more frequently. And when they stay in school, as a result of that, the schools are able to get the funds, you know, to serve them. And so the program ends up actually paying for itself in a sense when you think about how it becomes you know, the students in this program, in the long run, it costs less to educate than those who are not in the program. So it actually makes economic sense, but the problem is that the way higher education is funded is that a lot of times, you know, those who are responsible for allocating the funds are not really in a position to you know, think about, you know, four or five years, you know, because they're budgeting on like a year to year basis is one of the experts in the story pointed out. And so what that points to is, you know, either there has to be some type of a rethinking of priorities. And someone, you know, to come along with the vision to say wait a minute, we end up saving money in the long run. So this is a worthy investment. And it's not just about, you know, I wouldn't want us to think that this is like just a narrow discussion about just completion rates or graduation rates. What this is really about is enabling students to get the credentials, the education, training, if you're okay with that word, I know it's objectionable to some, but the type of preparation they need to get into jobs that, you know, make a difference, you know, and enable them to serve in society. So I think that Christine Abate, the person who is the primary focus of the article, you know, she is a nurse. And so right after graduation, she found herself on the front lines of fighting the COVID-19 epidemic. It's not just completion. It's not just degrees, but it's getting people prepared for, you know, jobs that, you know, display a vital role in society. I could say more, but I think that's kind of a, you know, made a good overview of the approach that I took to writing the article and some of the findings. Thank you, Jamal. Next, I want to introduce Nicole Cockett. She is president of Utah State University, which ranks number 10 on the Washington Monthlies list of national universities. She served in many leadership roles at Utah State, received her PhD in animal breeding and genetics at Oregon State University, spent five years as a research geneticist at the United States Department of Agriculture and is an active and accomplished researcher in the area of sheep genetics. But what she really does is run a large enterprise in Utah that manages to break all the meters on the Washington Monthly equity and success rankings. And I hope, Noel, you're going to tell us how Utah State does that. Alright, thanks so much for this opportunity to be in this important conversation about what we are doing with higher education. I was actually assigned two topics. The first was a brief overview of how we're handling the COVID pandemic, followed by how our ranking with Washington Monthly is so strong.  It's every day is just full of decisions and things that need to be considered. We call it flying the plane while we're building it. There's no prior information or experience that we can fall back on. It falls into two three different time periods. The first was when we had to move all of our classes to remote based on a request from the governor of the state of Utah. We did it with very short timeframe and with essentially no warning. This involved in our instructional technologies, those that could help our faculty convert their classes. As well as the registrar staff who had to figure out things like pass, fail and withdrawals, how to do testing in a remote environment. We got through that and figured that the pandemic would now be over and that by fall semester, we would be back to usual. Well, as you know, during the summer, that's not how it turned out. And we began to develop the policies, procedures, practices, plexiglass, et cetera, et cetera that we needed to be able to have class safely in the fall. Because we were hearing the students wanted to be on campus and that became our goal. In June, we asked our faculty what they would like to do as far as course delivery. In June, 35% of the classes were requested to be face to face 16% online and the rest of mixture of blended hybrid some face to face with other modes of delivery. By fall semester, because the numbers of COVID continue to increase, we had more than 37% of our faculty wanting to be online and only 16% with face to face. We did the social distancing in our classrooms as well as masks. That's an important tool for limiting the number of people that have to go in quarantine. We were ready to begin and started our classes on August 28. We had started a wastewater treatment wastewater sampling to look for hotspots. We immediately found that one of our fraternities had an outbreak. We followed that on the day before classes starting realizing one of our resident halls had an outbreak and finally three weeks in, we had a resident hall with over 50 cases of COVID. This then brought all of our practices, all of our policies, all of our thinking of what we would do to a head and we had to quickly, frequently, hourly make adjustments. We're in week seven and we're going strong. We have tests, our numbers of active cases among students is about 200. But what we've noticed is our staff numbers of positive cases are increasing. And I think that's because of just simple social fatigue. People are wanting to get out are wanting to see other friends, etc. and as well, many of our staff have children in public education, and by Utah being in person public education, we're anticipating more cases in our staff. We will go remote after Thanksgiving and finish the semester by about December 12. So we've learned a lot. And I did want to mention, though, that the faculty and students who have been doing the best in the classes are actually those that are doing zoom. The students are comfortable with that they feel like they do have the real time interaction of their faculty teacher and their fellow students, and they save themselves for having to get to campus when the weather turns cold. It also allows the faculty to record their lecture right while they're giving it so the students who might be in self isolation or quarantine can still have access to those lectures. The next thing I wanted to talk about then was our ranking with Washington monthly and we're very, very proud of it. In fact, that's one of our talking points each year. The measurements of Washington monthly does are exactly aligned with our core values. We are the land grant institution for Utah. Among its many definitions, it is that we provide access to educational opportunities across the state. We do that through nine different campuses and 21 educational sites. We are located literally across the state from the northern part where Logan the main campus is located. We have about 17,000 students there all the way down to the southeastern corner of Utah with planning a thousand students in a residential campus, of which about 75% of those students are coming from the Navajo Nation and the southern you try. We also through our other campuses and educational sites deliver courses programs all the way through masters and an Edd to students that are non traditional or place founds. These students take their classes in the evening through us you and a rarely full time they do these bachelors etc, with just nine credits or less every semester so the perseverance there is very, very strong. So when we look at the monthly Washington monthly measurements one of the things we're proud about is access. We can through the Morrill Act created the land grants and he did it to provide higher education opportunities for the tolling class. Prior to that higher ed had only been available through the Ivy Leagues the private colleges, only fluent families could afford. We've continued with that access model, both in price and who we allow to join us. And we continue to serve the students of modest means our first generation rate is about 20 to 25%. But this also includes not only incoming freshman who would be first gen students, also older people, such as a 45 year old person, and you went to basin, who started in the workforce immediately out of high school, but realize they needed more education to get to the career that they would like. And we accept between 89 and 92% of the students that apply to us you so literally providing that access to those who want it. We also focus on value. Now we're one of the states that are fortunate to continue to receive strong funding about 50% of the instructional cost is paid by the state, and the rest comes through tuition. We also though have provided different scenarios for our tuition again to serve the populations where we're located in the southeastern corner about the one quarter of Utah, some very serious economic depression there. The economies that based on natural resource extraction and agriculture. There we've set up a tiered process for tuition. We offer tech certificates at about $2 and 25 cents per hour associate degrees less than 65 credits. You can get for about 9000 and then the bachelors down there could be a tape for about 23,000 total. The rest of our system offers associates bachelors masters professional and research PhDs and doctorates, including doctorate of veterinary medicine. We love the streamlined way that Jamal spoke about how to get people from a tech certificate to an associate to a bachelor's to a master's whatever their credential they're seeking. We help them get that and we call it stackable credentials. The tech certificate fits in an applied associate, the applied associate fits into a bachelor's and that's really key for moving students and people into where they want in their education. We also have a tuition plateau. This is where students pay the 12 credit amount between 12 and 18 credits. This is like a scholarship for two classes every semester that you don't have to apply for and you don't have to meet the GPA requirements. The students simply take up to 18 credits and pay 12 credits. We recently added our online classes which had been on a flat per credit basis to the plateau. Our time students responded very, very quickly by adding an online or two online classes to their face to face classes. And this is driven then a really improved completion and lowered our time to graduation. I will point out it cost us tuition dollars that adding online to the plateau. We have a loss of tuition of about $8 million a year. And the third thing that we really focus on is quality and Jamal spoke about how important advising is to get students through. We also have focused on faculty involvement with our undergraduates. Research institution, meaning that the vast majority of our faculty have majority research assignments and they are scholars in their field, but they are in the classroom. 65% of our classes are taught by tenure track faculty and even more importantly, they work with our undergrads. We say at Utah State undergrads get the kind of experience most places reserved for graduate students. This means that they are active out of class engagement with our faculty. In fact, we have the second oldest undergraduate research program in the country following MIT. So with that experience early on as undergraduates, we noticed our attention is strong, our completion is strong, and our finish is strong. And one of the measurements that Washington Monthly uses is social mobility. So with a low cost in tuition, the strong focus on undergraduate experience outside the classroom means that these students are getting placed in their careers right out of college and we're very, very proud of that. So I'll just conclude and say that I think of Utah State as access with success. So thank you. Thank you, Noel. Really appreciate it and congratulations to your whole institution. Our final panelist, Ebony McGee is associate professor of diversity and STEM education at Vanderbilt. After working in electrical engineering, she earned a PhD in mathematics education from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and post-doctorate fellowships from the University of Chicago and Northwestern. She co-founded the Explorations in Diversity Engineering Faculty Initiative and was the lead editor of the recently published book, Diversity STEM, Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender. Her research has been featured in the Atlantic NPR Inside Higher Education and most recently in a story by Daniel Block, our own Daniel Block in the latest Washington issue of the Washington Monthly. And that's what I'm hoping Ebony is going to talk about. She's deeply informed that work and on what are the motivations for African-American students who have all the credentials and capacity in the world to go into STEM or succeeded STEM, but don't and what needs to be done to encourage them to choose and complete it. So Ebony, over to you. Thank you very much. So do I have two minutes or do I still have five minutes? Because I know one minute till the Q&A. Well, you know what? We're going to give you the full five minutes. Okay, thank you so much. Okay, thank you. I'm going to share a sentence about four black engineering and computer science faculty who embody the topic I'm going to be speaking about today. Dr. Joy Bulawimi is a computer scientist, but she's also a founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, exposing racism and AI, particularly in racist facial recognition designs. Dr. Brooke Coley is the engineering faculty who is pushing the bounds of traditionally heteronormative engineering environments through transdisciplinary approaches. The president of Florida A&M University, Dr. Robinson, uses his nuclear engineering PhD to support environmental justice by establishing the Center for Environmental Equity and Justice. And lastly, Dr. Ayanna Howards, who's a robotics faculty, and she uses robotics for physical therapy on young people with cerebral policy. I have listed only four, but I could have listed hundreds of underrepresented students and faculty of color. A greater degree than racially dominant stemmers, black, Latinx, and indigenous participants in my studies of high achieving stemmers of color from undergraduates to university presidents with a stem background, expressed profound concern about people who have been marginalized because of their race or ethnicity, and they also shared broader concerns about global racial disparities. Now, many government reports will say that excellence in the STEM community is necessary to maintain global dominance to be China and particularly in both military and industry, but that perception of STEM using to dominate the world remains really troublesome for many underrepresented STEM students and faculty. Interestingly, if you ask students on the higher level what their most immediate career trajectory is, it centers around very traditional ways we think about STEM careers. Engineering researcher, actuary scientist, computer program, but if you ask these same students of color about their dream job or where do they see themselves in 10 years, that's when traditional STEM ends. So they come up with these justice infused careers such as a global health policymaker or a cosmetologist particularly for dark skin tones. Lots of things and self help lots of entrepreneurial, you know, passions side hustles like getting a pilot license to give free rise to the elderly, and becoming a professor particularly that stem professor of color that they did not have in their educational experiences. Importantly, I discovered that these talented students of color sometimes leave STEM after they get the degree. So I'm talking about folks who maybe have even spent double digit years in STEM, loving stem by stem not necessarily loving them back, not because they are intellectually incapable, but because of the traditional goals of stem generating wealth maintaining US scientific and technical dominance does not meet their desire to do meaningful justice oriented work. So in short, there's a strong professional and personal dissonance that make it difficult for them to stay in STEM fields. So after seeing this phenomenon over and over again with my students and faculty and presidents, I became to understand that stemmers who are marginalized, often by race but sometimes by race gendered. So giving a shout out to women of color who are also raised and gendered have suffered their own suffering and want to challenge these inequities through their stem work. So my research demonstrates that they gravitate towards empathetic social causes, eliminating disparities, social justice efforts, and it's their own marginalization that translates into concerns about both local and global disparities. So this is what I call equity ethic. And I believe it is the key to improving recruitment and retention of underrepresented students of color in STEM.  Like I said, being that professor or researcher that they that they never had. And it's not like these students and faculty of color do not face plenty of difficulties within their STEM departments, racial assaults, open and veiled questioning about their abilities, continually feeling as they have as though they have to prove themselves and a conspicuous lack of other students and faculty that look like them. So I will lastly say what I believe we need and stem higher education is robust opportunities for stemmers of color underrepresented stemmers of color to apply their scientific, technological and engineering insights to solve societal problems. It could be a very powerful approach for retention as it could lead to healthier, more satisfying STEM degree and post career attainment, because students and faculty of color consistently voice their desire to help others as a motivation for pursuing stem encouraging this type of stem could lead to technological advances that could be a bit to a benefit to us all. And oh yeah, they might actually just save the planet. So I am ending I want to say more. I want to get my new book, not the one that was mentioned but my new book called black brown rules. How racialized STEM innovation stifles, excuse me how racialized STEM education stifles innovation. Thank you. Well, thank you, everybody. I'm glad you ended with the global warming nod and because I was going to say that one of the amazing things about the about your work and the article that Daniel block wrote about it is, you know, not is it not only is this insight that African and other students of color are motivated to do, you know, some kind of good for humanity social justice work their careers, but if we can get more of them into those careers. They're going to lift everybody's game. Yeah. I'm going to move some of these technology companies to be thinking about new ways of utilizing technology and engineering for equity for global warming, all the stuff that we desperately need for all of us to be done so it would be very, very good for, you know, African American education equity but very, very good for everybody else. Let me ask just a couple of questions of the of the gang here and then we're going to ask some questions that come from come from the the listening audience. Jamal, I want to ask a question of you. So, what you found in looking at the Ohio ASAP program, this one that provides some financial help advising and so forth as students of modest means was when you say paid for itself over time. My recollection from the story is that actually the cost of a graduate in this program goes to this program is actually lower per graduate, then the same sort of students who would want to be in that program, who don't go through the program. So like in every other industry that one can think of right when an enterprise figures out how to make something at a lower per unit cost. Right, then that enterprise grows there's investment they produce more of that stuff at lower cost and everybody's better off. That didn't happen has not happened in the case of this wildly successful when I say wildly successful I think the it from your article. It looks like really nothing has worked as well at at succeeding in graduation rates and transfer rates like this ASAP program. And yet it hasn't been, it hasn't been. It hasn't been replicated very much around the country and it's been going on for a while. So, what are your thoughts about what needs to happen to make that happen and would Kevin carries idea of providing say $10,000 a year as a base amount of funding for say a community college that would join his proposed network. Would that do it. One thing I would point out is that, you know, even where this program began, you know, in New York City, it was almost next due to budget concerns related to Kobe. And the same thing happened in Ohio. I mean, I think they had something like $180 million worth of cuts that they had to make to higher education. In terms of the question in terms, you know, like how to finance it. You know, I think the conundrum, you know, the problem that higher education faces, you know, based on the way it's funded on the way higher education is currently funded is you know they're looking at, you know funds they have, you know, to get them what they need for that particular year or to follow that. And I think that has to be, you know, fundamentally rethought, especially in a case like this, you know, it might require some type of external funding some type of investment fund. You know, policy makers don't see, you know, the value and investment something that in the long run is going to, you know, lower the cost per student in terms of Kevin's idea I would defer to Kevin to to elaborate on that though. Kevin, he's deferred to you so what say you would your system, as you designed it, solve the problem that Jamal identified it. Broad yes, in the sense that if you provide a, if you provide that level of funding. The large majority of community colleges and open access public universities, which is, which are the places that would that enroll the students who would absolutely most benefit from something like the Ohio program. They would be much better off financially, they would have the money needed to implement these programs which again goes to the point of if we're going to rethink all the way we finance higher education, it can't just be about price and access also has to be about quality. Because, you know, price is only about enrollment.  We don't fund higher education based on graduates we fund based on enrollment and credits, not to say that students are like widgets but it would be as if a firm was getting a dollar for every step along the assembly line, and it doesn't matter whether they get to the end or not. That's the way we find higher education both from a state subsidy and from a tuition standpoint. And so that's why people, it's actually a it's that's why people make these financial decisions this way and don't invest in the programs that actually would help students get across the finish line, providing that extra level of federal subsidy would do that. Thanks Kevin Noel. Let me ask you the the the. Thank you also for letting us in on how a college on the front lines is coping with the coven epidemic. Let me ask you tough question. Are you going to open for in student classes in the next semester. We anticipate that the spring semester will look very similar to fall. So with our social distancing, our classrooms have about 25% of the normal seat occupancy. So a cohort comes on Monday, a separate cohort comes on Wednesday, a different cohort comes on Friday. But what's interesting is as time's gone on, if the students can zoom, they actually don't come in person. So they want the real time. They want the scene everybody on the on in class, but they don't necessarily want need that in class experience with and what they also want are for the events and the activities of our university to continue which we are. So where maybe they felt that remote meant, you know, online, no social interaction zoom is actually working for them. So I, I think we're going to be fine. But what we will have is more zoomed classes. So, thank you, Noel. Ebony, we got some questions from our audience.  But some more examples of the kind of work that you've seen black Hispanic and other STEM students professors want to engage in engage in. I think our audience can't really get enough of that and just wanted to give you a, you know, a chance to kind of inspire us a little more with some stories. Yes. So many of the black Latinx and indigenous high achieving STEM students that I interviewed really talked about not feeling as though courses that are non stem or valued in their, you know, stem paradigm so getting being able to not not worry about taking a course in cultural anthropology or psychology or sociology and really feeling is that their stem department has like this kind of superiority complex. And this superiority complex is actually keeping stem from making products that are more humane, more, yeah, more humane, more innovative more creative because we are not seeing the benefits of multidisciplinary education to actually make them better. Right. And they're also talking about when they go on faculty or to stem employment, that their employers think, first of all, they assume that everything that they do towards equity is just more like tokenize this diversity stuff, you know, we're going to give you all the diversity stuff. And they sort of feel a tug of war between wanting to be on the diversity committee for their job or in their faculty position, and then wondering why are they always the person for it to be part of their diversity committee. So there's a dissonance, even when stem faculty and employees get into stem where they think that the diversity or the equity stuff is like the side hustle. So it doesn't, it doesn't farewell for for tenure and promotion.  And I think we should talk about reinventing the reward system, because you know black faculty retain black students. So the reasons why black students sometimes stay in stem is because of their black faculty members so like we are retention we should get some acknowledgement or some kind of incentive, you know for doing that work. But at the same time, you know, I've heard it express and I think it was in the article it's not really fair for the handful of black faculty members to take on all this extra burden. When you know it should be shared and and you know, there's a lot of young people going through the system now that that at universities that don't have any black faculty so so it needs to be a bigger a bigger structural change, and we need to have a quick. One of the young men who was featured in Daniels article is a PhD student at Berkeley, and I love his story because he was a young man he's a teenager at during Katrina, and his family his house was filled with family members who'd been flooded with their homes it was quite traumatic for him, and he got into stem and did his PhD work on reshaping transportation models. So that low income neighborhoods wouldn't be the last in line to get emergency services. And he's been very successful with that and it's an obvious good thing. Even there he had to defend his, his project against people saying well is that really stem. Exactly. Exactly. And you know that the number is actually 37%. So 37% of us engineering schools have no black tenure or tenure track faculty. So one can be raised in stem spend double digits in educational programs and never see a black faculty. That's not only bad for black students is bad for white students Asian students, Latinx students and indigenous students. And it really shows like who is valued, whose knowledge whose body is valued in stem and who isn't. Absolutely. Kevin, there's a question from one of the audience members asking you to explain what role accreditors might have in the system that you envision. I think accreditors would play a really important role in the system. One of the things that I think we need to do more of and that I'm trying to incent is more cooperation among institutions, you know right now we see these hundreds and even thousands of institutions struggling mostly by themselves to kind of get through this public health crisis and what may be for some of them a financial and economic crisis as enrollment declines and state support declines. To get institutions to cooperate very important and legitimate issues about academic quality come up, you know, if we're going to create a network of institutions where there's more where credit transfer is easier, which we need to do and credit transfer is an enormous barrier to students earning degrees as the majority of students were accredited from different institutions, as we try to create these pathways from two to four to master's degree and so on and so forth. We do need to ensure academic quality. Accreditors I think need to play a more aggressive role in that and they need to help institutions set up systems so there can be trust both between the students and the institutions and between the institutions and one another as they work more together. Jamie Marisotis is joining us here in in our Q&A and I wanted to ask Jamie a question. You heard Ebony talk about the need for STEM programs to send a signal to all students but certainly African American, Hispanic and other students that social good, social justice is a legitimate and honored aspiration for your degree. As you know the Washington Monthly, one of our three criteria for judging colleges is whether colleges set a good example and encourage students to serve their country in the military and the Peace Corps vote. How important in your mind in the new model of higher education that that you talk about in your book and we've talked about between us and in the monthly how important is service. Social justice being a good citizen giving back. How important is that in your vision. It's hugely important for a couple reasons. One is, you know, one of the points I try to make in the book is that as machines take over more and more of the tasks that humans do. So what we don't want to end up in a situation where what we are doing is what's left after the machines do their work. We have unique human traits and capabilities that machines probably will never have. I talked to a lot of roboticists and writing this this book on human work, and they say, you know, look machines are never going to understand subtlety or nuance they're not going to have ethics they're not going to have empathy those kind of things. Those things are really important as we think about trying to change the social order to improve social good and thinking about social good and how we can realign higher ed programs around this idea is incredibly important. And what what you're doing at Vanderbilt what we see in in some of the schools that have been highlighted in the monthly rankings are unfortunately still exceptions to what we see in terms of the rest of the system. This needs to become the norm this needs to become part of built into the built into the model and so I think it's hugely important I think at the end of the day. We as humans are going to have to continue to advance our knowledge skills and abilities in ways that distinguish us from machines going forward. And one of the best ways to do that is to understand that our ability to influence other humans to improve the social good is one of the things that's going to take us the longest and so it doesn't matter whether you're in stem, or whether you're in a field that is, you know, humanity space or whatever it may be, this should be embedded in all of those programs, and underscore something Kevin said it's really important that we we reward that in the systems that actually allocate resources to institutions. The actions follow the money. And if we don't reward it, they will continue to be rewarded for what they've always done which is bring people in the door, moving through the system but at the end of the day it doesn't ultimately matter in most states, whether or not they complete and get a high quality credential that's got to change. And my point is that the definition of a high quality credential has to include that focus on social good. Well, you know, I do think that the system has to change the way we look at schools has to change. I want to point out, you know, Noelle's Utah State does extremely well on the host of metrics but also on our service and national national service and voting metrics. So, schools that do right across the board on research on social mobility and on service, really ought to be the ones that get rewarded by the systems the system does not do that now. Not to not to embarrass Noelle and her fine institution, but she's Utah State is number 256th in the US news ranking. It's number 10th in the Washington monthly ranking. And so a lot of what we're trying to do at the Washington monthly with Lumina with Kevin and his folks at New America is to reimagine and make a case for restructuring our higher education system to provide what as Kevin used to said we used to have we used to be able to provide a low cost high quality education to every American and and begin to move this country forward in a way that's fair and that that brings out the best of us, not just in terms of us getting ahead as individuals but doing something good and right for our communities for our country for the world. And that turns out to just be a great thing for everybody. I know it sounds corny but it's but it's true. And you've heard a lot about that from a lot of smart folks here today and I want to thank our panelists for coming and talking to us for providing such great insight and writing for the Washington Council. And I want to thank Kevin and New America for working with us and hosting us and I think my buddy Jamie Marisotis and all the folks at at at the Lumina Foundation. We've reached our time thanks to the hundreds of people by the way who logged in. You represent people from Capitol Hill from the Department of Education colleges over the country average citizens and and so and I also want to thank also the Gates Foundation that is supported the Washington Monthly's dissemination of this college work. So thank you all for being here and we'll see you again next year.


Item Number – SCP-470 Object Class – Euclid Special Containment Procedures – No items or personnel are to enter or exit SCP-470 or the external containment area without approval by site command. Anything entering SCP-470 must be examined both before and after contact. Anything exiting SCP-470 is to be contained and examined. Resistance by any items or staff to this process may be overcome by whatever means deemed necessary by site command. Any staff entering SCP-470 must be equipped with a long-range GPS tracking bug. Staff entering SCP-470 are to remain in groups of no less than 20 at all times. Should staff become separated, data expunged, or any combination thereof, they are to immediately exit SCP-470. Staffer equipment lost within SCP-470 are to be declared missing 48 hours after loss of GPS contact. Staffer equipment located after disappearance of GPS contact are to be recovered whenever possible. Should the GPS beacon data expunged? Description – SCP-470 appears to be a large abandoned office building in- SCP-470 has had no registered owner since when it was abandoned with the collapse of the corporation. The building is seven floors, including basement levels, and in a general state of disrepair consistent with its term of abandonment. SCP-470 appears to be or to house a dimensional anomaly, causing its internal rooms to shift and become other locations that have been abandoned for extended periods of time. The ability for an outside location to appear within SCP-470 appears to manifest after 20 and 30 years of little to no human observation, interaction, or habitation. This anomaly appears to be limited to the rooms of SCP-470, with the halls remaining primarily stable. The rooms of SCP-470 appear to exist both in their original physical location and within SCP-470 simultaneously. All rooms appear to be internal locations, such as store rooms, abandoned offices and factory areas, with no external locations, such as abandoned lots or storage yards, ever recorded manifesting inside SCP-470.  These locations appear to be unstable and will flicker, ceasing to exist within SCP-470 at random points, and remaining unmanifested for random periods of time before manifesting within SCP-470 again. Anything inside a room when it unmanifests will be transported with the room to its original physical location. This process also works in reverse, as any objects inside the room will be present when it manifests inside SCP-470. The flicker rate appears to vary, ranging from 6 seconds to several years. Addendum It appears possible to remove a room from rotation by increasing the level of observation and activity inside the original physical location of the room. The longer an area is left outside of observation or activity, the stronger the connection with SCP-470. Initially, rooms are able to shift only when no humans are present, or actively observing the area. After longer periods of abandonment, rooms are capable of shifting with as many as 14 people inside. The danger of SCP-470 comes from the fact that some of the rooms do not appear to originate in our reality, dimension, or time-space. Some are constructed of non-terrestrial elements, or have items that parallel with no known technology or construction. For example, data expunged, at least 80% organic, with the non-organic portions showing signs of infestation. Also, there have been four recorded escapes by beings, transported by shifting rooms within SCP-470. Notably, Subject R remains at large within SCP-470 itself, and is thought to be responsible for some of the deaths recorded inside SCP-470. The death toll currently stands at 8 staff, and 45 civilians at last estimation, with several hundred more listed as missing. Many of the civilian deaths and disappearances are attributable to youths exploring abandoned areas when they shift into SCP-470, becoming trapped inside, shifting inside a different room, data expunged, or other dangers that may be inside manifesting rooms. Addendum 2 As of 25-11-2016, a total of 38 instances of rooms located within decommissioned SCP Foundation facilities have been observed within SCP-470's rotation. Most notable of these are several rooms from the top basement levels of SCP-1730, showing the initial cessation of exploration attempts by Foundation personnel. Attempts to remove these rooms from rotation via observation of the facilities is currently ongoing. Lesson complete. If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-469, Many-Winged Angel, right now, or for the complete course, watch this playlist.