Dwi'n gyd. Yn y gydag y fideo, gallwn ni'n brlyg i chi'n meddwl etsylf. Rwy'n gobeithio y gallwch chi'n meddwl eich bod y user interface a gynnyddio'r tabiau a'r gwleidiau ymddangos ar y tabiau. A i'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i'r eich plwyso definiwnol. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i'r hollegau y byddwn i'r modell etsylf. ac then in the next section I will look specifically at the tax policies focusing on income tax and simplified tax only touching briefly on value-added tax and exercise duties and then in the final section look at the social benefits in particular the direct social support programme ac y bwysicol ffwrdd y myndiad ymddangos.  Mae'r tab wedi'u gwneud o'r ddweud, mae ddwy'r moll yn bryd i'w ddweud, mae'n ddweud yn ei ddweud. A'u'r mod yn un o'r mod, mae'r ddweud i'w ddweud i'w ddweud ac mae'n ddweud i'w ddweud o'r ddweud i'r gwneud o'r ddweud. Yn ar y ddweud i'w ddweud. Mae'r ddweud i'w ddweud. Ac yn ddweud, y ddweud sy'n ddweud ar gyfer o'r ddweud, is conditional formatting. I mentioned in an earlier session that when we make changes to the model we can switch on conditional formatting so that we can look at the changes between one system and the next. That's one of the ones that we most often use. You can actually select to look at a single policy or the full spine but we actually always look at the full spine because it's not a large and complicated model and it's easier to look at it altogether. And that's really all we use in the display. Country tools we use more often add a system I've mentioned although it's only one way of adding a system, deleting a system I've mentioned. I've also mentioned databases because that's updated automatically when you add a new system. The other important one is uprating indices which you'll remember I showed you when we looked at the definitional policies back in session two. So here's the various indices that are used for uprating their names and the values between 2009 and 2015 and here's the capacity to add new years and you also have the capacity to add new inflators and then you can refer in the model itself to the factors by referring to their dollar F underscore names. So dollar for a factor, dollar F for a factor underscore and then whatever the particular factor you're going to be using for uprating is. Then administration tools probably the most important administration tool is variables. This is where if you want to create a new variable within the model or indeed within the data set and introduce it to the model you have to click on the variables tool and introduce the new variable name you want to the model and it has to follow the naming convention of Euromod which means that a demographic variable must begin with D, labour market will L etc. and this is not usually needed except when you're building a new data set or if you're developing a new policy and the output variable isn't within the list that's already here and you need to introduce a new output variable but the good thing is that Euromod gives us an awful lot of output variables already in this list of accepted variables so you only rarely need to introduce a new variable in practice. So I'll close the variables window. I think it's the subject of a training session on its own on how to use the variables administration tool.  There are no add-ons that are relevant and indeed in terms of application the most useful is open output file in Excel. If you have to have Excel on your machine but if you click on that then it loads up or gives you the opportunity I should say to load up the most recent output file and it formats it appropriately into Excel and allows you to look at the data in Excel that's really useful when you're developing a new policy because you can check quite easily and readily that it does what it says it's going to do. So for example if you as we did in the last exercise introduce a new child benefit policy and award it to every child in Mozambique who is 15 years or younger you can check all the 15 year roles and make sure that the child benefit variable bch underscore s has the value you expect it to have and that there aren't children under 15 have been excluded and that the amount allocated is correct. So it's a very useful tool really. Summary statistics is also a useful plug-in but it hasn't yet been finalised for the south mod countries it really is at the moment only usable with the euro mod european countries but during the course of 2017 that will become available and then there's the help and info. This should be used alongside the user manual which we will have produced for the training but it has a help key which gives the kind of standard windows help interface with a search engine and so forth. Okay that's really the tabs i'll go back to countries because that's where we normally come in. The the definitional policies are all preceded by the DEF colon and I can go through them. I've talked to some of these before. Uprate. Uprate is used to upright the income particularly within the model itself income from all sources and the dataset it operates on is of course as we know the EOF 2009 but it has to be specified. The default factor is the factor CPI total. Employment income ym is and and self-employment income are both uprated not by CPI but by the general wage inflator. Now expenditure is uprated separately. It expenditures in this model for VAT and exercise duties but it's uprated by a special uprate policy which I will talk about when we talk about bringing expenditure into the model which in fact is the next definitional policy so I'll close that and open expenditure. Now expenditure is there for VAT. You can see from the comments that we're defining the variables containing expenditure variables for VAT purposes and we're defining the path for that input dataset. It's a separate dataset. It's constructed from the EOF but it's imported separately into the model and it's a very detailed dataset because it contains all of the separate expenditure items in the EOF. So that the variables that are defined all begin with an X for expenditure but the following digits refer to the what's called the COICOP code which is a code for a particular thing. So 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 is rice grain etc and all of them are separately there. I think it's several hundred. I can't remember the exact number where we can go down and look. There you go. It's 991 actually. Different separate items are detailed in the expenditure file and therefore have to have variables defined. We could have put all 900 plus variables in to the model using the variables tool but it's a very laborious way of doing it. This is a quicker way of doing it because we can define the variables within the policy expenditure itself and then we can import the variables. This uses the path. That's the file within that path and that's how the expenditure file needs to be merged by ID person. Then we can define income lists for uprating. So first of all we can uprate food because we know that's separate and then we list all of those items again that we those 900 items and we put a plus alongside all of the food items to indicate in this income list expenditure uprate 0, 1 that they are to be included in the income list. Now remember when we talked about income lists, income lists are like compound variables that are aggregates of the variables that are listed here with a plus alongside them. If they're not to be included there's a not applicable in the side of them. So we've put all 900 here but only pluses against the food items because we're uprating food which is that in income list uprate 0, 1 separately from non-food and then non-food is income list 0, 2 where all the food items have not applicable but all the non-food items have a plus. So what we've ended up with is two income lists, one for uprating food, one comprising of food variables for uprating with a food inflator and one comprising of non-food items for uprating by the CPI excluding food and then to actually do the uprating itself we have this little teeny function called Ylvar op where you take an income list in this case it's the food one and you specify the operand, I'll cancel that, which is the food operand and then you specify the action on the operand which is multiply. So basically that means multiply the expenditure by the food index and then the non-food one is exactly the same. Okay, I think that will be clear when you go through it yourselves. The excise expenditure is very similar we define variables but much fewer just the excise on spirit, cigars, tobacco, beer, wine, petrol because of the petrol tax. But here we introduce variables not just on expenditure which are the first 11 but also on quantity in respect to petrol and diesel. That's because the excise duty or fuel duty to be precise for diesel and petrol is on a quantity not on expenditure. Again you define an input path and a emerging variable and the data set itself. And then different income lists three really, one for uprating alcoholic beverages that's 03, one for uprating, sorry let me just get this right, one for uprating alcoholic beverages, one for uprating tobacco and one for uprating fuel. And you'll see what we've got, we've got the whole list for all of them but we've got pluses against the alcoholic beverages in uprate 03, we've got the pluses against tobacco products for uprate 4 and we've got the pluses against fuel for uprate 5. And then again, if I can close those up now, then we have the operator Ilvarov operation multiplying the alcohol expenditure by the alcohol CPI and exactly the same for tobacco and fuel. Okay, okay the next definitional policy that we need to consider are income lists. Income lists are actually income concepts and hence the title here. There are a number of income lists that are standard income lists, these are income lists that the euro mod expects to be defined, these are income lists such as disposable income, earnings, simulated benefits etc and there are some income lists such as the taxable income income lists which I'll show you in a second that are specific to MozMod and aren't general across models. To distinguish the two, and I'm going to show you one of the tax income lists, the prefix IL underscore taxably 01, the IL underscore indicates that this is a MozMod specific income list. The standard income list I was going to show you for example disposable income are prefix by ILS underscore, in other words, income list standard underscore as opposed to just income list. Now these income lists, you'll recall we've come across them when we actually went through the different power points, but they are basically composite variables is one way you could think of it. So for example this income list taxably 01 contains other income yacht, that's why there's a plus sign, it doesn't contain employment income so there's a not applicable by that, it does contain income from property, it doesn't contain property land because that's not applicable and it's not taxable in MozMB, it does contain agriculture income from agriculture, self-employed income and income from interest. So they've all got a plus alongside of them, that means that they're included in that if you like composite variable IL taxably 01, so they're added together. The things with not applicable beside them are just not added in. If there was a minus alongside of it then those things would be subtracted. So if we look at the disposable income that consists of original income um which itself is defined by an income list higher up plus benefit income but subtracted, that's why there's a minus, taxes and social insurance contributions. So basically pluses add an income source to that composite variable called the income list, minuses subtract things from the total and not applicable simply don't include them. So obviously you can go through every one of these income lists to understand them, when we actually look at the policies in particular the tax policies you'll see that where and how IL taxably 01 is used, that's used in personal income tax for non-employment income if no simplified tax is payable. Good to make a note in comments as to just how things are used and then as IL taxably 02 if I'm not mistaken, yes IL taxably 02, this has still doesn't have any YAM in it but it also doesn't have self-employment income in it, this is YSE and this is used for non-employment income if simplified tax is payable. So you distinguish between the two because the 01 has self-employment income in it and that's where there's no simplified tax but this second list doesn't have self-employment income because this is a case where actually self-employment is dealt with by turnover tax, they're just different income concepts and it's not worth going through all of them but I can give you another one by looking at simplified tax, that's got self-employment turnover and agricultural turnover as the two items in it. Okay and then there are special income lists for the direct social support programme and the basic social support programme means tests and there are particular items of income that are taken into account in those means tests, we'll get to the means tests later but just when we do get to those particular means tests what will be referred to is IL underscore DSA and that will mean YAM income from employment, other income, agricultural income, self-employed income, contributory pension and survivor pension, all added together so it's like a as I said a composite variable. I think that's probably enough on income lists, they're a very useful concept, if you like defining these almost super variables you might call them. There is actually one or two down the bottom, no there are several down the bottom which are income lists for different VAT expenditures and they're used in the VAT policy. Actually in this initial training we're not going into indirect taxes because it's quite complex but the income lists are a very important part of dealing with VAT and excise duty so I hope that's all okay, I'll just minimise in fact I'll minimise all policies so that we've got back to our spine so that's income lists dealt with. The next definitional policy is the tax unit, these are actually quite complicated, they usually don't require altering as I as I again said during an earlier presentation however they do have to be set up for each model and they define what one might call the unit of assessment for different taxes or benefits. The simplest to understand I guess is the household that's all members of the household belonging to one unit that's what it is the definition of the household tax unit. There's a dependent child condition here which is that children have to be obviously zero or over and less than 18 in other words less than or equal to 17 okay that's how we define the household tax unit that's straightforward the other straightforward one is the individual that's simply one member of the household each individual member forms its own unit it doesn't matter whether they're an adult or a child remember these tax units are compulsory parameters in each tax or benefit policy and we talked about that in the last couple of sessions so those are the individual and the household the couple is also used and couple is a subgroup of the household anything that's a subgroup of the household except individual is has to have the type subgroup alongside them obviously individuals are subgroup of the household but it that's an exception to to that rule it's any other subgroups of the household have to have the word subgroup and their type written along subgroup written alongside type and the members are just simply the person and their partner so the members is just partner because the the the individual is taken as given and the partner condition is that they are married and the default is that the head is the partner and the id is the same as the head of household so okay so those are the straightforward ones that's couple individual and household there's actually one other that's used within MozMod and it's quite complicated and special and it's it's it's we're calling it family there's a common standard definition of family which isn't used in Mozambique and MozMod which is a person their spouse and any children that they may have it's not used at the moment in any policy it may become used in in in future times so we've switched it off but this tax unit family two is used and it's used in the income tax policy and it's a more complicated version of a family because it's a subgroup of household but it's for the individual and their dependent children but their dependent children are much more complicatedly described than simply children under the age of 18 they do include children under the age of 18 that's the first condition but it can be children who are over 18 if various circumstances are apply such as that they've got a low income if they're under 26 and so forth all of these things conditions are required to define a dependent child for the purpose of calculating tax liability and we can look at the calculation of tax liability a little later okay so i hope that's enough on tax units the next definitional policy is constants again i think we've touched upon constants during the course of these slides constants are fixed amounts that you know they can be amounts they can be rates and if they're amounts the default periodicity is monthly however if it's going to be yearly then you have to put a hash y to distinguish it as being yearly it's also a good practice if they're monthly to put a hash m alongside them now not every constant within mos mod has actually been put into a constant policy there are for example different rates of taxation which haven't yet been put into constants now you could argue that that's something that ought to be done and i think in as this model develops more and more of these amounts and rates will actually go into the constant definition but how constant definitions work is that there's a function def const and this function actually can be put into any policy so you could put the relevant constants at the beginning of the policy in question or you can group them all together at the beginning the manual talks about this a lot the accompanying manual but here we are we've defined our constants all under a constant definition policy and there's here's one which is the non taxable minimum amount which applies to certain types of personal income tax and that's 22,000 five sorry 225,000 metacals per year and then there are the different rates for excise duty and vat and those are all that we've currently put into constants as we go down through the model i'll indicate other things that could have been put into constants and and and as i said maybe we'll be in due course so that's the constants i'm tempted to do next the final definitional policy that's applicable here um before moving to the tax policies and then finally the benefit policies um so if i can i'm going to do this final definition policy and that's the standard output individual level we we have turned off the household level of standard output so we're only outputting individual level data with mod mod and what are we sending to the output file well the variables that we send to the output file which you remember as a text file are all defined in this output file if it's not they're not defined in this output sorry policy they're not defined in this output policy in this function then they don't get sent out of the model so anything that's in the input data set that you want in the output data set has to be specified in the output policy similarly any new simulated variables that have been created during the course of running the model also need to be specified if they're to appear in the output file however we do this in a quite a comprehensive way first of all file that's the actual name of the output file so the output file would be called mz underscore 2015 underscore std dot txt that's for the on this particular system if it's a new system that would be of course changed to the new system and then what we do is export a lot of groups of variables and the advantage of outputting groups of variables is that you don't have to specify in a long list all of the variables you want outputting so for example by outputting id asterisk as a group you will get all of the variables beginning with id and you may remember that in the input data set there are lots of variables that begin with id for example the id hh that identity of the household id person for the identity of the person id partner id parent all sorts and these identification variables can be put out by using id and then an asterisk that will operate as a wild card and will output all of those variables they all actually came from the input data set so they're straight out again ditto with the demographic variables d star labour market variables l star all the income variables y star et cetera benefits b star now there are benefits that are simulated and they will come out as well as any benefits that were in the input data set providing they begin with b ditto with taxes for t so all very straightforward and if you want to output all of the separate components of an income list you could put def eel and then eels display and that will output the separate components of disposable income if you want to dispose sorry output the actual total of an income list you've expressed it in in this way here with il star and is star okay and you can also output um uh information on a tax unit as well as some of the inbuilt queries and then here we specifically for checking wanted to output certain of the expenditure variables but not all so we didn't do var group x star we only did the few variables that we needed to check and they're historically still there they could be deleted now okay that really concludes all of the definitional policies because now we come to two groups basically of policies the tax policies and i'm going to look at income tax um turnover tax which is sometimes called simplified tax um and i'll include in this also the social insurance contributions um but i'm not going to talk about um excise duty fuel tax and value added tax these indirect taxes on this occasion so i'm going to focus simply on income taxes okay income tax we're going to start with the straightforward income tax relating to people in paid employment as opposed to people who are self-employed and in fact i think we're going to focus on this one because the same principles apply to the other income tax which is payable for people certain people in self-employment and on other income so because it's quite complicated um it's better to focus on the principles of just the one so let's look at income tax for people with pa y e um income okay so first of all you'll see that there is a a variable definition function at the very beginning which is straightforward it just simply produces two intermediate variables the it's actually the amount of basic pa y e income tax and hence it's called i underscore basic underscore pa y e underscore income tax and then the dependence income tax now as you'll be aware the Mozambican tax system calculates a basic amount dependent on what your monthly or annual income is and it puts you into a particular band and depending on what band it puts you in um you can calculate the amount of basic tax payable then there is a supplement which is payable if you have no dependent children and those and other dependents and those were defined remember in that tax unit family too so a supplement if you've got no no dependence but that supplement is reduced if you do have dependence and indeed extinguished in in some cases so so there are two parts to this first of all the calculation of the basic income tax and then the calculation of any additional income tax based on the presence or absence of dependence okay so that's why there are these two variables basic income tax and uh income tax um um in respect of dependence or absence of dependence okay then you'll see that there are a number of ben calcs the first one is all that's required to calculate the basic income tax but then the subsequent um ben calcs are all in respect of calculating the amount of additional income tax payable um which depends on the band you've fallen in the first calculation and depends on how many dependents you've got so let's just look at the basic calculation first of all it looks complicated but it's actually fairly straightforward we're only considering employment income ym and you simply have to go through looking so to speak at where your monthly income falls so if your monthly income is between 20,249 and 20,749 99 then you're in tax ban too if your income is um uh over um 144,749 99 a month you're in tax ban 10 the highest and then if you're somewhere else you're in one of these other bands um between ban two and ban 10 okay so that's straightforward so just say that you your income um is let's let's let's let's put it so that one's like in the middle here somewhere um your income is between 22,249 99 and 32,749 99 in other words you have an income of 32,000 okay if you've got an income of 32,000 per month you go straight into um uh um tax ban seven actually it is mistakenly reading across so that you're in tax ban seven this is because you you wouldn't comply with any of the other conditions the you know comp cond for the first um eligibility condition or liability condition is that your income's got to be greater than 22 20,249 99 and less than 20,749 99 your isn't your assistant it's 30,000 so you're not in ban two you're not in ban three you're not in ban four you're not in ban five um you're not in ban six but you are in ban seven your income falls neatly within ban seven so your basic income tax is calculated by taking your income 30,000 subtracting the base amount which is for this particular ban is 22,249 99 and then multiplying the difference by 0.15 which is 15 percent so that's how you calculate the basic income tax liability and that's how you program it clearly the lower limit is zero that's you you can't pay less than zero and the output variable is i underscore basic underscore pay p a y e underscore income tax okay so that's that but remember this particular person was in band seven because they had their income of 30,000 so we must now look at band seven here because these different ben calcs only apply um sorry not that one either different ben calcs um from 7.3 onwards um are mutually exclusive so we already know that that that that our particular person we're considering is not in band three um there are no deductions and no increases in taxes if you're in an earlier band um in other words not in band two so band three you had to be at least in band three to incur these extra taxes in regard to absence of dependence so but our particular person is in band seven and we'll just open that ben calc and have a look at it because it's quite complicated and i've picked one deliberately that's um well explain the principles of this so first of all um within the family the person has to have the biggest uh uh income so hash val is ym so it's income we're looking at has max val in tax unit and the tax unit we're looking at is these families so we're looking for that person and that person's ym has got to be greater than 22,249.99 but less than equal to 32,749.99 which is us the one we looked at earlier so that's fine and if the number of dependence in that tax unit in your tax unit um that is the family is zero then the amount of additional taxes 200 metacals per month so there's a 200 metacals per month extra and then as you have more dependence if your dependence are one then you pay 150 um dependence are uh 225 300 but if it's four or more dependence then it's only 50 so the more dependence you have the less additional dependence tax you pay if you see what i mean so that's how it works and that's how that particular uh um bencalc operates and then each one operates in a similar way you have to work through each one they'll be exactly the same as the band seven that we looked to looked at um and then the final um arathop simply adds together the basic income tax plus the dependent supplement and puts it into the output variable tin underscore s very straightforward when you think about it and understand the way in which taxes are calculated in mozo and beak for um moving on i'd also like to briefly mention the simplified tax which is the turnover tax okay um turnover tax is a tax um or simplified taxes a tax that's common to most developing countries and it's a way of taxing small traders um in the informal economy particularly um who are not required to take and keep annual accounts um and so they're normally as you know with um um self-employment you pay tax on the um your sales less the cost of purchasing your raw materials etc so it's on the difference between the amount of sales and the expenditure that you make in order to make those sales the difference is profit and you pay tax on the profit um well small traders don't uh usually keep very detailed books and if you don't keep detailed books there is this simplified tax that can be payable in order to qualify for simplified tax though um you must have income from turnover and that was specified in the income list that we talked about earlier of less than now i always get this wrong 2.5 million meta cows per year so if you've got a turnover remember it's a turnover of 2.5 million meta cows a year then you will pay um simplified tax um at the rate of only three percent because you're paying it on the whole turnover so it's a straightforward and reasonably easy um calculation okay um i said i wasn't going to look at the um uh other income tax but it is it's in a simple uh excuse me similar process to the income tax for PAYE um in the sense that there are um these two components of basic tax and then um the dependent adjustment so i'll let you go through that one on your own i did mention however that i would mention the social insurance contributions first of all private sector and self-employed and then public sector private sector and self-employed if you'd like three bank algs one for each um uh type of person um the this uses the fact that you've got to have employment income so YEM has got to be greater than zero and LES01 that's a labour market um sector variable that means that you are in the private sector of LES01 equals one that was constructed in the data set then the employee contribution is three percent and that's put into that variable tscee underscore s um and then the employer contribution is four percent but the same criteria and that's put into tscer for employee er as opposed to employee underscore s again these are at the individual level and then finally self-employed um for self-employed you've got to have um self-employment income and not turnover tax so YSE has got to be greater than zero and turnover tax simplified tax equals zero then it's seven percent and that's all played by the self-employed person obviously so i'll close those and then finally if we look at this policy 601 underscore mz again a single bencalc this is for employees in the public sector this is with LES02 equal one that's a public sector employee but with um YEM this time it's the employment income is it's seven percent of employment income which is a contribution by employee there's no employee er contribution and it goes into this variable tsce02 underscore s right okay that takes us through all of the definitional policies as much of the tax policies as i want to go through on this occasion so it leaves just the um two um social benefit policies which is the um direct social support programme and the basic social support programme okay to finish off the walkthrough of the model bearing in mind that we're not going to look at exercise duties and other indirect taxes um we're going to now look at the two policies that relate to social benefits and that's the direct social support programme um which is a provision of food boxes for a temporary period of time and the basic social support programme which is um a cash allocation to certain beneficiaries if we could take first of all the um direct social support programme which is bot underscore mz um you'll see that it's got a number of um functions um and it's important that we go through them logically because i think then you'll see how they will fit together as with the income tax there's a defining some temporary variables is the first step and then there are a series of eligibility criteria um because there are various eligibility criteria for food boxes um and one or more of these has to be fulfilled um they include different kinds of people within the household also a different household income and also an individual level means test all of that which has to be complied with um before the food box can be allocated and then the food box has to be allocated according to household size so that's how it all works um and how we do it within the model is as follows so okay we'll move to that um we set up a series of temporary variables again which will be used during the course of the policy this is i unscore child unscore headed child headed household i unscore bedridden for someone with chronic and degenerative diseases in bedridden condition i unscore malnutrition children with acute malnutrition i unscore incapacity for work temporary incapacity for work i unscore below individual means test this means that um a person a particular person is below the means test of the individual and then a temporary variable called per capita income because that's how the next thing is calculated which is the household means test need a per capita income first and then there is a temporary variable um called um below household means test and then finally um there's a temporary variable which is set if the household qualifies for um a food box okay so those are the definitional variables i'll close that function up for opening the next the next are a series of straightforward eligibility functions and they set these output variables which are intermediate variables which i just talked about so for example child headed household is the head of the tax unit is the person the head of the tax unit so that's got um a level attached to it hash one so um and the tax units the household so is the person the head of the household um so that level goes with that is head of tu is head of household and are there is their age greater than 11 but less than 18 a child so if those two conditions are fulfilled that person is a child headed household and this i underscore child underscore headed uh temporary variable gets given the value of one because it is a child headed household they all work like that the eligibility conditions so the next one is is it the person with a chronic and degenerative illness well in the data we actually um constructed a special variable that looked at um people who would be um um so to speak bedridden and it's called ddi 01 and if it's if a person is bedridden they get the value of one so and that goes into the variable i underscore bedridden so that's at individual level this is at individual level these are all individual these first conditions um next one is it a child um i under five that's the child under five age greater than equal to nought and age less than five and who suffer from acute malnutrition that's another variable from the input dataset ddi 02 and that gets that's a value of one in the original dataset if the child has acute malnutrition and if that complies then i underscore malnutrition will get the value of one similarly there is um a temporary incapacity for work flag in the original dataset ddi hm equals one that would qualify a person to be included by virtue of temporary incapacity for work um and that's that is set to one in the dataset of all working age adults in the household are temporary disabled and that goes into the iron score in capacity for work temporary variable then we get to the means test of the individual is the individual below the uh individual means test well the individual means test is if that income remember the dsa income list which is the income for this particular benefit the the direct social support programme if that total income is less than a thousand metacals a month then that person qualifies so that person is below the individual means test then there's also a household means test uh qualification so this time we look at the income um list again this is a simple arathot this time because we want to get the per capita uh we want to get the total household income which um is we take in the income list of the um income and um that's at individual level output it at household level into this variable y mn 01 underscore s and that will this arathot because it's at the household level will add up all of the i l underscore dsa's of the individuals within the household and place them within the variable y mn 01 underscore s so that means tested income variable okay the next arathot simply calculates the household income by taking the uh sorry the per capita income by taking the household income and dividing it by the number of people in the household and purse in units one of those queries that uh uremod provide us with which is the number of people in the household and then we get the uh per capita income in the household um allocated and then the household means test is the per capita income in the household less than a thousand per month and if so then the i below hh means test is given as a one and then finally there is a final eligibility to check whether um the households contain one or more eligible people and here that has to be either a childhood household or bedridden or um uh um children with acute malnutrition or with all adults temporary incapable of work and so they've got to be one of those um what is it four categories and below the individual test means test and below the household means test if all of that is um correct then they will qualify for a food box the household will and that will the the output variable i underscore qualifies for vot will be set to one and otherwise it's a household that qualifies um and individuals within the household will be given that value and then the final final one is that we then calculate the amount of the food box depending on household size um and and we actually put this as a a cash met a cow per month the mount which are the average values of the food boxes across the provinces in Mozambique to 2015 there are of course variation um across Mozambique but this is the average so basically the the the eligibility condition they've got to have qualified for the food box at the individual level someone in the household has to and if there's just one person in the unit then the amount allocated is 630 ditto um you look for this if there are um two or three people in the household in which case you get one three ninety and then uh four or more in which case you get two three eight five met a cow and then the amount is put into um the variable um bot underscore s which then goes into the output file so it's quite complicated but um at one level but but also quite straightforward okay i'm going to close up all of that because that takes us to the basic um um social support programme which is called bsad i underscore mz because that's what the output variable is called but it's basic ssp again we make the flags this time it's elderly with permanent incapacity for work living alone or heading a family in need of support or people with chronic and degenerative diseases but not bedridden okay then there's ones on the intermediate variables for the means test at the individual level the per capita household income the means test at the household level and qualifying for bsad i exactly the same shape and structure of the policy as with the bot underscore mz um and similar functions so those are the variables we've defined i'll close that down and first of all an eligibility condition that uh checks on that the person is elderly with permanent incapacity for work so um first of all um i've got to um look at this condition very carefully because remember each individual condition is within the curly brackets but the they're shaped by the um round brackets too so first condition is age greater than equal to 55 and female and then age greater than equal to 60 and male so okay so it's got to be either a male uh sorry a female over the age of 55 or a male over the age of 60 okay and the disability flag must be set to one and they've got to be the head of the household if that's the case then they're uh the elderly plus variable is set to one next possible um qualification for the basic um social support program is individuals with chronic and degenerative diseases but not bedridden so we have a special disability flag for that which is ddi o four equals one and that is the people who are with chronic and degenerative illness but not bedridden that's was set in the in the in the um beta the data's underpinning data set but the person's got to be not a child so over 18 and head of the uh tax unit head of the household and as I said with a chronic and degenerative disease but not bedridden all of that's the case then i degenerative is set to one okay and then there's an individual level means test which is exactly the same as it was for the um direct um ssp and the person has to qualify for that there's then a calculation in the same way of household income as it was for the um direct social support program similarly a per capita income in the same way and then finally um uh a test if the per capita income is less than a thousand metacals a month then the um output variable uh i underscore mt test underscore hh underscore b sady is then set to one and then there's the eligibility criteria at the very end which is again very similar to the one for the um direct social support program so it's got to be somebody who is um elderly with permanent incapacity for work which is that first one or with bedridden um sorry degenerative illness but not bedridden um and individual means test has got to be passed and the household means test has got to be passed then that person qualifies for the um basic social support program and then the final ben count very similar to the one before depending on the number of people in the household the amount is um ranges from 310 metacals a month to 610 metacals a month and that's really all there is to it so another really quite straightforward policy um and that really completes the benefit policies um and indeed um completes this particular walkthrough of the whole of mozmod um i thank you


Hi, so my name is Kais Halcroft. I'm here on behalf of Bloomberg. And what I'd like to talk to you about today is how we've architected our OpenStack Cloud to be highly available and extremely robust. I'd also like to talk a little bit about some of the things we got really right, and some of the lessons that we learned doing it, and also where we plan on going in the next few months. So if you don't know much about Bloomberg, if you walk into almost any major financial institution and even some not so major ones, you'll see screens like this. This is the Bloomberg terminal, or professional service, as it's officially called. That's our core product. There are a bunch of other media products that surround the core terminal, which supplement it and support it. And we're also moving into other industries these days, like government and law and sports. And Bloomberg is the market leader in financial data analysis. Just to give you an idea of a sense of scale of our system, the Bloomberg back-end handles about 22 million instant messages a day, about 200 million messages. It's available in 11 local languages. We pull down about 10,000 data feeds, processing about 45 billion ticks a day. So it's a pretty substantial system. To give you a little bit of a sense of the history of this thing, it was started in 81 with just a couple of guys. That's four years before Windows 1.0. By the time the first web server was launched, was developed at CERN, it already had an install base of about 20,000 people. And the growth has been pretty steady since then. By the time Google was launched, we were up 100,000. And we had 300 employees in R&D alone. Those are essentially programmers. Right up to the present day, 30 years later, 30 years of history with 4,500 people in Bloomberg R&D, and 30 years of code, and 30 years of infrastructure. So that terminal, the core product, has been in development for 30 years. It initially started out in the early 80s as a hardware product, and now has evolved into a software product. But we still make hardware in terms of specialist keyboards and specialist security devices and screens and what have you. So what are we doing with OpenStack at Bloomberg? So when we were designing our cloud infrastructure we had, it was part of a larger cultural shift at Bloomberg towards a DevOps philosophy. The major driver here is essentially turnaround time. For a company such as Bloomberg, time to market is everything. So we wanted to get that increase in developer flexibility, developer productivity, reduce the turnaround time on machine deployment, and get all the benefits you get from machine provisioning as code. If you want to know more about this Jombalone from Bloomberg, gave a great talk, which is public, and is available at this URL. If you just Google his name, you'll find it. So designing our stack, like I said, for Bloomberg, high availability, robustness of the architecture is everything. So that's our primary design requirement. We went with the idea of many smaller clusters, as opposed to one enormous, huge cluster. And each cluster has to be highly available, not necessarily at the machine level or the VM level, but in aggregate. We also wanted a simple architecture, which is fairly homogeneous across the stack. We don't want specialist snowflakes here and there, which could cause single points of failure for the entire system. We also obviously want an infrastructure that scales horizontally, trivially. And one of the key requirements in enterprise, which I think is commonly overlooked, is we want it to be deployable, and the absence of full internet. So that means maybe no internet at all, or heavily proxied internet. And of course, we wanted to make maximal use of all the open-source tools and community that's out there and contribute back to it. So the solution we've come up with is we call it Bloomberg Cluster Private Cloud, or BCPC for short. It's available on GitHub. It's a set of Chef recipes and supporting scripts and what have you to deploy your own cloud. It uses entirely open-source software, and I just sort of give a shout out here for all the various bits we use. It's not a totally exhaustive list, but it's a pretty good subset. So please visit our GitHub repo and take a look and try installing it yourself. We'll walk through the architecture a little bit. This slide looks a little busy, but we'll break it down into individual components. This represents our stack, so this is actually an actual factor, a picture of three example nodes in our cluster. And of course, the immediate thing that you see is they're absolutely identical across all three. We can break down our architecture into sort of four or five layers. Obviously, the host layer runs the OS and what have you. We have a distributed storage layer running Chef, a database and messaging layer, and then the open stack infrastructure as a service layer. And then we have a monitoring and services layer on top. And then right at the very, very top, we put our high availability lab. So we'll break these down a little bit. The host layer consists essentially of the machine hardware and the core OS. Just with our like our stack that we want no specialist machines anyway. We don't want any specialized hardware. We use identical hardware across our entire cluster. We generally, in BCPC, Chef BCPC, we assume three networks, however you arrange those physically is up to you. The first network is a management network which takes all the traffic for open stack and some monitoring traffic. The storage network is dedicated for the storage, distributed storage layer. And then the float network runs the VM traffic. These individual box, just vanilla pizza boxes, you can stuff them full of either HDDs or SDDs, SSDs, excuse me, and then distribute that those disks or contribute those disks into the distributed storage pool, obviously keeping one or a couple back for the OS. We currently run precise. We're moving to trustee in the next couple of weeks. We have some limited support for CentOS. Our distributed storage share uses Chef. Every, as I said, every node contributes to the cluster. It's, of course, rack and host and row aware. So we only need 50% plus one to continue running and keep all our data. The Chef services we run are Rados block device for backing Cinder and the Rados gateway object store for our S3 endpoints. We have boot on volume, so boot from volume and copy on write semantics available. And this has been an extremely solid part of our structure. It's a very well-written piece of software. The next layer up will be our messaging and database layer. We use MySQL Galera in multi-master mode, and that provides the database services for OpenStack and also provides database services for some of the higher layers, such as monitoring and power DNS, DNS services, and a few other bits and bobs. Our Rabbit layer uses Rabbit 3 for clustering, so it's all clustered queues, disk backed. That provides the queuing service for OpenStack. And then we provide a single point of access to these services through our high availability there, which I'll talk about in a moment. Our OpenStack layer, there's nothing terribly exciting here. It's pretty vanilla.  Cinder needed a bit of encouragement, but pretty much everything else just runs almost out of the box in this sort of high availability mode. All service endpoints are published through the HA layer, and that HA layer also distributes a load across every single node. And then these services can communicate, as I said, with MySQL and Rabbit back through the high availability layer. We use nover networking and not Neutron just for the high availability of high availability of nover networking. It wasn't really available in Neutron at the time. Our high availability layer runs KIPA LiveD and HA proxy. So KIPA LiveD publishes a VIP, a virtual IP through VRRP. Every node can contribute, every node participates in that VIP. There's a potential problem here that if you've got a real network partition, then you could have all nodes try and take the VIP. So what we do is we tie KIPA LiveD to Ceph, and you can't take the VIP unless you're part of Ceph Quorum, which keeps the whole cluster together. It's actually quite a nice solution. HA proxy takes the traffic from KIPA LiveD, if you like, and distributes that across the cluster. We actually pass through SSL and do the termination at the endpoint. We've had some scaling issues with HA proxy, which we're addressing, perhaps maybe using Apache or something like it as an alternative. So for high availability, we generally have sort of three or four paradigms we use. We have the VIP, which we use for publishing all the endpoints for the services. We have a lot of our components have an in-built high-availability mode and where that's available, we use it. So MySQL Galera being a good example, Rabbit and also Graphite. For database-backed applications, such as monitoring using Xabix and PowerDNS, we rely on the high-availability aspect of MySQL Galera. And then, of course, for most of the open stack, we just use this sort of shared nothing architecture. So our common services layer, common services and monitoring, we use PowerDNS for our DNS servers. And we have a little sort of trick where we create a view that provides both sort of forward and reverse DNS for all tenants. And our tenants DNS structure is if your tenant foo and you have a VM called bar, then you have bar.foo.bcp. Your corporate name.com. We've had some performance issues with this particular architecture and we're revisiting it right now. We use 389 for LDAP services. There's some more work in going on a ChefBCPC right now to sort of be examined that. Our monitoring layer, we use FluentD and Elasticsearch for log aggregation and analysis. And then Kibana is a nice front end to that. So the FluentD agent pulls all the log files off individual nodes, shoves them through the VIP into Elasticsearch, which is running on all our nodes. Xabix we've been using for monitoring and alerting. We've had some reliability issues with that, that it tends to not deal well with parts of the cluster going away. And also it doesn't really want to run in high availability mode. It doesn't like lots of Xabix service to be running. Graphite and Diamond we use for sort of graphing and analysis and drill down. And all I'm monitoring is on cluster. We're revisiting that paradigm to maybe a two-layered system or maybe a three-layered system on cluster and then some centralized logging as well. So how do you go about deploying this cluster? One of these clusters I should say. Seating is always an issue, especially if you don't have full internet. ChefBCPC has kind of a nice way of doing this. The first thing we do is stand up a Bootstrap node. So if you run just the ChefBCPC Chef scripts, you'll get a Bootstrap node which will run Chef server and a Cobbler server and also pull down any mirrors that we need to get the cluster bootstrapped. So you can stand in one place and pull from the internet and then push onto the Bootstrap server. The reason that we have to go through some of these gyrations is a lot of packages like to phone home. It's like Chef, the unusual Chef installers really want to sort of call back. So you have to do some gyrations to get around that. So these procedure for deploying either the first node or the end node is exactly the same.  And then deployment, whether you can either push or pull, updates onto your Bootstrap node and then rerun Chef. We don't tend to run Chef continually in production. We've had some reliability issues doing that. We tend to run it when an update hits the system. Now I sort of said that we have an entirely homogeneous stack across all our clusters. Obviously that's not entirely true. We run what we call a head node which runs the full stack and we run many of those. But we want to of course expand our cluster beyond just all that infrastructure. So we can add to the cluster just using a work node. And the work node runs a very strict subset of all the available components in a head node. It runs particularly, obviously it runs the host layer but it also runs Ceph OSDs and some subset of the open stack layer usually just a compute API and networking. And you use work nodes to essentially expand the storage and compute capabilities of a cluster. So one of the really cool things about Chef for ECPC, excuse me, is that it comes with its own integrated development environment. If you just download the recipes straight off GitHub and bootstrap you'll get a cluster running in virtual box. Optionally you can use vagrant on top of that as well. So you can have a full Chef PCPC cluster exactly like Bloomberg uses in production running actually on your desktop or on your laptop. 16 gigs is nice. Some people claim eight is doable. And one of the great things about this is absolutely identical system that gets deployed into production even down to the Pixie booting. So you deploy a bootstrap node and then the scripts Pixie boot the individual nodes from there and deploy. So it's exactly the same as what we use or what one would use on bare metal. So of course the question we've gone to all this lengths to make a highly robust architecture. Does it in actual fact work? The actual fact, the answer is yes. Most of the time I'm the guy who gets called if there's a major problem and I spend my evenings doing other things. So it's pretty solid. Where are we going? So the roadmap can be broken down into sort of various components for OpenStack. There's some upgrade procedures we have to work through. We're still sort of rolling Havana. We have a branch or two branches and ChefBCPC right now you can flick between Grizzly and Havana. We're really looking forward to rolling updates in Icehouse. That will be a wonderful thing for us and also the possibility of single version skew within a cluster. That would be fantastic. Neutron versus Nova Networking. We're sticking with Nova Networking for now. It does everything we need it to do and works absolutely fine. Until high availability is available in the last three agent for Neutron we'll stay with Nova Networking. The KeepLiveD VVRP has worked pretty well. Obviously it requires level two spending between racks and we're doing some work on any cast and see if we can use a cool any cast system to sort of host a VIP. We'd like to support some more diverse architectures and also this continues some support for CentOS as a hypervisor. Our storage, we use Redis Block Device and Redis Gateway as the main Cef services that we use. It has a really clear consistency model. CefFS which we've had a look at its consistency model is a little bit harder so we haven't actually used it yet. Cef is synchronous. Brings up some interesting questions of how do you do cross data center replication if you want to do that. Razor encoding, new feature, looks awesome. What does it do for our failure domains? I think we need to understand that. And then there's also some work with HDFS and CefFS. It would be nice if you look at ChefPCPC you'll also see we have a Hadoop branch in there for deploying Hadoop clusters using a similar methodology. It would be nice to be able to unify the Hadoop and open stack storage layers. So that's an ongoing work. And then of course there's a whole thing about cold storage and backups. How do we do that? So in summary, we've been running this for a year. It's been absolutely rock solid. It's part of a very much bigger change at Bloomberg towards a sort of DevOps culture. So it's not just us doing cloud stuff there's a lot of people working on automated deployment and Chef and what have you. Some of the choices we made have been really good. CefFS our distributed storage layer has been rock solid. Some of them we're gonna revisit. We've learned a lot in the last year. And I would encourage people to go take a look. ChefPCPC it's fully available. The community there is very welcoming to requests or rants or whatever you want to do. So come along and take a look, download it, play with it. Contact people on GitHub if you have problems. Open an issue or even better submit a pull request. New features are definitely coming down the pipeline based on our production experience. And that's it. Thank you very much.


I'd like to introduce our final speakers. As you can see, this is our fireside chat to end the day today. We're really excited to have Sharon Liu here, Senior Policy Advisor for the US Department of Education. So very important to lay the current policy context over all of these discussions that we're having. Sharon leads the Office of Educational Technology's Higher Education Innovation Initiatives to increase access, decrease cost, and improve outcomes for post-secondary learners. I know many of you know her name and her work. There are some interesting new efforts underway that you'll want to keep an eye on that are coming out of the Department of Ed. Prior to her work joining OET, she oversaw TACT, which many of you are also familiar with, the Big Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grants. So lots of us were involved with those. So we're really excited to have Sharon here. And we have Amra Alwalia from The Evolution, who many of you also know, one of the best publications we think in this world, he'll be leading the Q&A portion with Sharon and with you all. It'll be fairly interactive. Amra is the managing editor of The Evolution, an online newspaper focused on non-traditional higher education and transporting the post-secondary marketplace. So if you're not a follower, I'd encourage you to follow the publication. As I mentioned, we're big fans. And get involved with this fireside chat as much as you have energy left for. And then at six o'clock, we'll break for some beer and wine. Thank you. Cool. Whoa, hello. Thank you everybody for sticking around. We really, really do appreciate it. As Katie was so kind to introduce us, my name's Amra Alwalia. I'm the managing editor of The Evolution. To give you a little bit of context of what we do. We're an online publication. We publish articles and interviews from pretty much folks in this room and a lot of you have written for us in the past. Thank you. Talking about how the industry is changing and how institutions are evolving to keep up with those changes. I'm also going to allow Sharon some time before we get into the questions part to introduce herself. Ooh, is it this? It's not. Nope. Yes. Yes, okay. Sorry, I was really loud. My man. Cool. So Sharon's going to get into a little bit of the context into where she's coming from. From that point, we're going to get into some questions. And again, as Katie was so kind to suggest, we're going to be posting the questions that we're talking about on the screen so that you guys have an opportunity to think about them yourselves. And as we're progressing through this conversation, please throw your hand up.  The fire is massive. We're all on the side of it. So we'd really love to hear your opinions and thoughts. Thank you. So I'm actually a little disappointed that we framed it in this, like we have to be really serious now and talk about federal policy because we were just talking at our table about my next career as a space tourist. So I'll just, so we will, will we? Okay, so apparently the slides don't work when they're black like this, but anyway. So I just want to introduce myself a little bit more to some of you who I haven't met. I work in the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education, and we do some of those things in the orange words. Let me see if the next one is better because maybe it will not. So I will just tell you what's on the slide, which I don't normally like to do. So essentially the Office of Educational Technology thinks about technology and education. Clearly this is not a success, but you know, we have some large questions that we like to ask. And essentially the question is, how can we apply technology systematically and collaboratively across programs and institutions to help leaders address issues of access, affordability, and completion? And really what we want to focus on is increased outcomes or improved outcomes for students. And that includes the broad spectrum of students that are in our post-secondary education system today. So that's my quick introduction. And I think that we are going to have a little question for the group, right? Yeah, we are. We're going to start off with a question for you guys because we talked a lot in the last 10 minutes and we're going to let you do it too. So we're going to let you take a minute or two to spin your chairs back around. Basically, you know, we want you to think about the top three skills that you use in your current job today. Beyond that, we also want you to think about how you got those skills. And as a third level, how your employers knew that you had them when you entered that position. So, you know, I think we'll take maybe 20 or 30 seconds just to kind of go over that because the tables have gotten a bit smaller. And then we'll go from there. Are you going to? Yeah, let's share mine. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'd say the skills I use most of my job are probably reading. I do a little bit of reading. Some communication. I communicate a lot. And probably some basic web knowledge competency skills. I mean, frankly, we have the team that does our website now but when we started, we really didn't. So those are the skills that I have. In terms of how I got them, I got some of them on the job. But when I was in college, I was at the student paper. So that's really how I learned sort of the basics of doing journalism and stuff. Yeah. And I got the job because the person who was behind launching the evolution worked with me at that paper. So she knew I had the basic skills and competencies. But when I left school, I had a master's degree in comparative international politics, which as you all know, is really, really important when you're talking about higher education policy and transformation. Something that we use every day. But it's a question of soft skills. It's a question of a broad range of soft skills that all apply very generally to a position in the liberal arts. What about you? Well, I would like to hear from the group first. So let's do that just quickly to set the stage for the rest of our conversation. So we can vol untold someone. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're right beside the mic, so I'm going to vol untold you. OK. So do you want position and then skills, or do you want skills first? Let's do position and then skills. OK, so I'm an associate dean of alternative learning. And the top skills I use are communication, research. And what was the other one I treated earlier? Something along the lines of people skills, like interpersonal, HRE type, influence, that kind of soft emotional intelligence. That's the word I'm looking for. So those are the skills that I learned. And I learned them more on the job than in any of the many credentials that Jeff and I were discussing on Twitter earlier. So the last question we had in the series there was, how did your current employer knew you had the skills necessary for your job when you were applying for it? Well, you didn't hire me. So because I had worked, but it's true, the same thing is. So both the person who hired me and my current bosses had worked with me previously on grant funded projects. OK. So it's one of those networking things. OK, so another point for the network. What about someone who didn't network into their current job, who applied for their current job? OK, we have one right back there. My name is George Payne, and I'm an instructional designer for the New England College of Business. So I would say that my top three skills I currently use on my job are digital literacy, digital resourcefulness, and a digital slash analog presentation translation skill. Cool. I'll get into it as quickly as possible. Digital literacy, I worked in a sort of graduate assistant position after my master's degree, where I helped to leverage technology for people's presentations and projects, plain and simple. Digital resourcefulness is probably something that I taught myself over time. I'm not exactly a digital native, but I did spend a lot of time sort of like being the second pair of eyes for my parents' projects. They were graphic designers for a very long time. So seeing that and then learning how to operate and live in that space over time. And the last one, sort of like the presentation and translation skill, I think personally, I probably had like a desperate feeling of being always misunderstood. And so like, how can I then translate this to you? Like, how can I convey this to you in the best way possible, be it analog or digital? And then, how did my employer know? Really hard to tell. But I think that I was given an opportunity to showcase where my understanding of digital literacy came from in the interview process. And they picked up on that. And then right after I was hired, we now actually facilitate a sort of creative test for all the candidates. And we're currently going through that right now, where we give them a clip of audio and a little bit of content, and then we give them a week. And we say, show us what you got. Got it. Actually, just so interestingly enough on that point, so the evolution is owned by a company called Destiny Solutions, which makes software. And they obviously put a huge amount of resources and time into hiring programmers. So actually, I read a really interesting stat a little while ago. Now we're based in Toronto. And I was talking to a room of Canadian deans. And I found a stat when we were talking about how the workforce is changing. That in Canada, in the tech industry, which is one of our hottest industries, only 52% of employees have a post-secondary degree. So a bachelor's degree, we don't have an associate's degree in Canada, but a bachelor's degree or above. And that kind of blew my mind, because you're thinking, this is a space that requires a lot of soft skills. It's not just technical skills and abilities that you're bringing to the table. So talking to the CEO of Destiny about this, again, it just blew my mind. And he said, yeah, that makes sense. I'm like, what do you mean you hire programmers every day? And he said, yeah. The first thing they do when they come into the office interview is they sit down and do a competency test. So they put them through a series of tests to assess their abilities as programmers. And if they get through those tests with flying colors, great, now we'll talk to you. But before that point, whether they went to Harvard, whether they went to Sheridan College down the road, whether they went to edX, done matter. Everything that comes after that, now you're starting to look at the soft skills. Now you're starting to look at some of the capacities to work within our team and to fit into our culture. But that's all secondary to can you do the job? So it's interesting that you bring that up, that you're starting to implement a mechanism, a test for folks coming into your office as a way to assess, are they going to be ready to do this work? And it really ties into some of the conversations we heard earlier today, too. Because I would be really curious. So we'll wrap this up in just one second. So when we asked that question, was anyone thinking, I have a skill right now that I told my employer when I was interviewing that I had based on something like a boot camp or taking an edX course. Because earlier today, when we did that hand raising pull, a lot of people had had more than a PhD, more than a bachelor's degree, but had had an edX or some sort of credential that way. Not so much. What about certificates? So non-degree certificates, credentials, anything of that nature? Turn them up, turn them up, don't be ashamed. So what's interesting, this is actually really interesting. I would throw one more stat at you, then we'll get into the meat of the presentation. But, or the chat. So in the States right now, 31% of adults in the workforce have earned a non-degree credential. Whether that's on top of more traditional degree-based credentials, or rather credit-based credentials, or whether that's as a standalone, 31%. Only 27% of adults have a credit-bearing degree alone. So this room is really not representative of the workforce. That's the, say that again? Of eighth graders. Oh, okay, yeah, that makes, okay. Sure, sure. So what we're saying, the total attainment rate is something in the order of 49.8%, according to Lumina, for total attainment. But of folks who have a bachelor's degree alone, is 27, yeah. Whereas it's, yeah, whereas it's 31 who have a bachelor's and some kind of non-degree credential. That's it, we're in a middle-skills economy, or at least we're moving that one. Sure, absolutely, well, no, so I'll ask you again. How many people in this room have some kind of non-degree credential certification? Okay, see, now that makes sense. Okay, but like keep your hand up if you use that to demonstrate skill during like a job application process. Okay. So you're not good at interviewing, it's a good problem to have. Absolutely, all right. Well, let's dive into the questioning point. Are we after? Okay, cool, so yeah, there you go. All right, so interview time. Yeah, yeah. What is the department's view of alternative credentialing, and how's that evolved over the last few years? That's a really great question. Thank you. So I think this is actually a really great conversation for this particular conference. I think we've heard a lot of really interesting things today about credentials, right? And a lot of the credentials are not degrees, that are not bachelor's degrees, that are somewhat outside of the preview of the Department of Education you would think, right? So traditionally the Department of Education, not interfering with the freedom of institutions to do the things that they do, has really entered the education space through Title IV, right? So Pell grants and or other financial aid to accredited institutions. So we are very much the institution, right? We represent the institution, the degrees. But I think one of the things that has been an interesting trend over time, and I think part of the other thing that the department does is collect lots of data. And so whenever NCES puts out a state of education, we take a look at what it is that post-secondary education looks like. And I think over the last several years, it's been increasingly obvious that post-secondary education does not occur just in a four-year institution. And it's kind of interesting as well. This is a side comment on like silos across institutions within your federal government. When I was at the Department of Labor, everyone was very focused on community colleges. And there is a community college office at the Department of Education, so I don't wanna sort of dismiss that. But whenever we say higher education, it seems lofty and that you should be on a campus. And I think over the last several years, we have started to see the conversation change away from post-secondary education being a single episode in a person's life that occurs at 18 on a campus in one place. Towards a conversation where we start to think about, what does it mean to learn over a longer span of your life? And not just a bachelor's degree to a master's degree to a PhD, but thinking about, well, what are the skills that I need for my work? And can I get it on my job? Or can I get it on edX? Or can I get it somewhere else? And then sort of evolving into a conversation of, well, if that's the case, then how do we document that learning? How do we know that that's high-quality learning? And can we offer it to more people if they need it as a mechanism for social mobility? So I think that as we've started to become more aware, I think as a country, and certainly all of us that work in education that we don't just serve one type of student and that actually all of us in some ways are lifelong learners that we need to have this conversation about how do we document and demonstrate those skills that we have, and then how can we use them and capture them in a way that we can exchange them, right? So we're calling this a credit economy in this conference. So how can what I know have market value in that sense? So there's been a lot of really interesting conversations and I think that's how you've started to see the dialogue shift a little bit. Absolutely. It's kind of neat when you think about the fact that we're at a point where we're a little bit trying to convince 18 to 22-year-olds, as Amy was referencing earlier, that the learning doesn't stop at 22. And it's neat to see schools like Georgia Tech just released their vision of what the future of higher education is gonna look like. We have Harvard participating in the 60-year curriculum project. There are so many neat initiatives happening of what we think of as very traditional institutions, looking at what the future of higher education is gonna look like, and how lifelong learning actually comes into that. I mean, it starts to think about, you start thinking about, well, what are the multiple marketplaces of higher education? And can they kind of coexist with one another? And in that context, what elements of each marketplace start to get adopted by the others? And we think of non-traditional higher education being fundamentally different than a traditional experience. But what do the two share? What can come over from the non-traditional experience color the traditional experience? And I think one other really important element of that conversation that we heard a number of different ways this afternoon is this issue of access to all of this kinds of education, right? So one of the key roles of the department, and it's actually etched on our wall, is this idea of expanding the opportunity for more students or for all students to access high-quality education. And so when we start broadening that sort of the scope of what we mean by post-secondary education, traditional, non-traditional, institution, non-institutional, we still have to ask her a question. Is this actually helping more students who are traditionally underserved by our system to actually access the education they need so that they can grow into economic stability, to prosper and to live, I think, meaningful lives? Absolutely. Actually, one thing that really fascinates me when we talk about this notion of access points, there's this great concept that came out of Oregon State, well, he may not have come up with it, but his fellow named Dave King who's recently retired from Oregon State, and he had this idea of the spectrum of access as this vision of there being multiple access points to higher education, where students are looking for less and less intensive approaches to learning than just credit-based degree-directed programming, whether that goes to modules or workshops or customized professional education, but the majority of content that an institution develops and provides where the expertise lives is gated into credit-bearing programs. So the question he had, and it was from the perspective of a continuing ed leader, is how do we create more access points so that folks who may not have the experience or rather the desire or the resources or the care to jump into a full-fledged degree program, how do they have the capacity to access that knowledge? Please. I wanted to unpack that a little bit more. So right now, there's a lie that happens with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of students when they go to apply at a college or any post-secondary institution, they say, are you planning on doing a degree? And we, by nudging, and this, well, of course I'm planning on a degree because I need Title IV funding and I don't get it another way. So in that same way, the package that's being offered is still founded in two things, one in seat time and another one in a degree. And those are the two things that you can buy. Which one do you want? This degree, this degree. Do you want it in blue or pink or green or yellow? It's still the same thing. Access also in our system also has to do with funding. When will we be able to not have to buy the entire package? When will students have access to be able to do something that is not 18 hours, that may be two hours, and that may be all I can do because I'm first generation, I did not have that knowledge about this, but I could try something, but it would make all the difference for me if I had some funding. So that's the question is, when will we break up or unbundle the package of how that I can also have access to funding? So I'll answer your question in a number of different ways and hopefully some of the combination will be satisfying. So on the first level, like I would say it's very difficult to boil the ocean as we all know, right? So from a policy perspective, going all of a sudden from sort of the binary state of four year to zero is difficult, but there are variations in the middle, right? And so I think one really promising trend that community colleges have been implementing four years now is this idea of stackable credentials, right? So maybe you want a credential, that's a certificate and something. And then later, after you've worked for a little while, you want a permission or a different kind of job, can you complete the associates degree? And I think there are dozens of examples, hundreds of examples of great programs that do that. Similarly, like from the two to four year, like that's also a jump, right? And so what you're seeing more and more is programs where two and four year colleges have agreements where you can complete your associates degree and transfer into a four year degree. So I think like from like a zero to four year perspective, I don't think it's an all or nothing. I think there are, there's a very promising move to more stackability. And I think that that will lend to some access points. I know that the tight, and I will then give you a very unsatisfying answer about the title for funding, which is that it's a very complicated issue that's currently being discussed. So I will not answer and make policy comments. However, you should make your views known to the people who are discussing it. But I think one of the things that we had wanted to talk about, which I think is an interesting segue is the experimental site ability that we have. And so we have very limited ability to waive title for requirements. And I think as a department, we've been trying to think creatively over the last several years about how it is that we do that. I think a number of people in this room have participated in our competency-based education experimental sites where we relaxed the requirement that it had to be like 18 credits, right? So we started looking at subscription-based or limited direct assessments as a way of still allowing students to access aid, but also have the flexibility and the scheduling that they needed. So these are things that we've tried. We also have a somewhat infamous experiment ongoing right now called our EQUIP partnerships, where we allow schools to pick up non-traditional education providers to provide a shorter term, more, I think skill relevant educational experience outside of the institution while still using Pell grants. I think that we are still collecting data on that, but I think this is the way that we can ask the question, how can we do the two things that the department is tasked with, right? So increasing access to education for low-income and traditionally underserved students while at the same time protecting them from low-quality education and protecting you as taxpayers from having to pay their tuition on an education that will only leave them some more debt and not to a job. So I don't know if some combination of that is satisfying to you, but I believe that will... It was actually a fascinating segue because that was the next thing we were gonna be talking about. Just out of curiosity, before we do dive into it, did anyone in this room participate in the EQUIP partnership program? Awesome. Yeah. That's so handy. I know. Well, cool. I mean... We should bring them up. Yeah, I was gonna say. While you guys, or when you very briefly had your hands up, I mean, what were some of the... What were some of the positive takeaways that you got from that experience of participating in the EQUIP? Like, what were the lessons that you learned from those partnerships that you'd wanna carry forward? I mean, and let me sort of refine that a little because I think the topic on hand is like, is there a way to provide another... Is there another way for a student to demonstrate things that they know without having to, I guess, take the whole four-year package? And how can we ensure that that is a quality educational experience? Did anyone who participated in the EQUIP wanna dive? Oh, yeah. Here we are. Okay, and then we'll go to Deb after that. Yeah, just a minute. Hi, I'm Deb Seymour. I was originally with the American Council on Education and also with Entangled Solutions and both of these were quality insurance entities within the EQUIP framework. So I had the experience of working within the EQUIP framework for two different organizations that were acting as quality assurance entities. I would say my learnings and I was not in either situation for follow-through, for launch of the programs that were being quality assured, but I did get two different perspectives. And I would say one of the main impacts that I observed about EQUIP was that it really forced both institutions of higher ed and quality assurance entities to think about quality assurance in a different way. So till then, I think the notion of quality assurance in higher ed had been a little more informal and EQUIP helped to formalize the notion of quality assurance through a Department of Education sanction, which I think had not been present previously. So there was this issue of giving Pell Grant money to students who were taking courses that were not being offered through a higher ed institution and that's really the experimental component that was on the table. But I think from the quality assurance point of view, and I know there are others such as Devidere who's sitting at the same table as I am who was involved with the quality assurance of this. I think from the quality assurance point of view, at least my observation was that the formalization of quality assurance around alternative credentialing and alternative pathways and alternative credit led to a lot of really hard thinking about what quality assurance should look like in an alternative credit environment that really had not been there before. Deb, I'm gonna actually pass the mic to you because I know you have more to say about this. So I just would be clear, we're still in process. It's not done yet. In fact, our academic partner was here earlier, so I won't tell any of his secrets, but I will say, I think just to add that one thing that it did challenge us to think differently about how to evaluate the quality of what was going on. And I think that what it affords because it's a narrow and limited experiment is an opportunity to actually track the individual students that are participating and not just look at things in the aggregate. And so I think that that's a fact, it's very hard to do because I don't know that our systems are all set up to do that well in academic institutions, but the scale is happening and at the very slow speed that it's moving affords a closer look and it gives us an opportunity to do things we might not normally have been able to do or look at. So I would work for a straighter line and we were one of the teams that partnered with Chia and Dallas County Community College District and we were approved a couple months ago and we won't be launching until August, so we don't have data obviously of the program as it runs, but yeah, there was a lot of things to think through. We went through, you know, going through the approval process, well first applying for the application to get chosen as one of the teams then resubmitting to have a more detailed description of how the program would be run, then getting SACs approval and going through that process and then through two, really three rounds of subsequent follow-up questions from the department. So it was a lot of thought, had to go into kind of preparing the statements and then answering the questions and we still have work to do to implement the program, but you know, it's been an exciting project and we're looking forward to it, but it definitely takes time. It's been two years and you know, to get a meaningful cohort through and then really have all the analysis that folks want to see, it's definitely not something that's gonna happen quickly, so patience is a big part of it. Should we proceed or, okay, so yeah, well I was just gonna say like, maybe like we can just go on to the next year because I wanna be cognizant of time. Oh yeah, we are getting there. Don't wanna keep you from your one. Yeah. So anyway, so to wrap up this equip thing and to answer your question to sort of put a finer point on it, I think it's a really interesting question because if you look at the types of students that we are aiming to serve, which are the eligible sort of population of students, these are definitely the ones from low income backgrounds obviously to be eligible for PEL, but also disproportionately from certain kinds of social, from like different ethnic backgrounds, first gen students and who will be disproportionately impacted if they are in a situation where some of us could sort of navigate out of because of our cultural and social capital. And so we wanna be really careful about that because, but then on the other side, there's tremendous potential because if there is a way for us to document what students know, the skills, then actually it does provide them not only educational opportunities, but opportunities in the workforce as well. So, yeah. So we have a little poll, which it's through the app. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, so if you go into our thing in the app, which I know is so descriptive and helpful, our presentation in the agenda, you'll see this question. What are the key opportunities to disrupt or disturb the future of post-secondary education and work? And you'll have four options there. Leveraging new technology, individually curated lifelong learning pathways, marketplace evaluation of credentials or other. So you just want to take a moment to quickly reply to that if you have the app. And how do you see the poll results? I have no idea. Should I get the app? It's like why? Do we know how to get to the responses from the poll? Okay. Oh, the fire is going. Sorry, guys. Marketplace evaluation of credentials, that makes sense. Yeah. So let's give it another, maybe one more refresh and we'll move on. Oh, it's gonna be live. Well, then no more refreshes. Okay, so this is a question that we made up, not sort of randomly, but based on some of the opportunities. So the department has worked on EQUIP. The department has worked on a number of initiatives to try to broaden access and to try to think a little bit about what do we think is the future of post-secondary education in the context of the diversity of students and the different kinds of credentials that are available. And our question is like, we do want to think about like what, how to, I should say this, one of the things that we keep seeing as a theme is that in the future, learning and working will have to be very well tied together. And our question is, how do we sort of disrupt this conversation? And I guess I don't mean disrupting like Clayton Christians in a sense, but like disrupt, like to provoke a conversation. And like what are some tools that we need to really achieve this sort of seamlessness between working and learning? And it seems like number three is the most popular, but I'm really curious, like so nobody thought leveraging new technology or not a lot of people thought that was the key thing. No, okay. So you have a comment, and then Debra. I think there's a mic coming to you, okay. This is what bothers me a little bit about this. I thought it was interesting what Michael Saylor said. And I think in the IT and in the technology fields, this is an easier one to understand how very specific certification and skills can go into the higher. But if you ask Fortune 500 companies what skills they want, you know, they list the same ones every time we want. Soft skills, we got this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they said, that's what we want. But they're the worst offenders of this issue right here because they filter every job by a bachelor's degree. If you go on to these job things, if you go on inside higher ed or all these other things, what you find is you put in all the information and it doesn't ask you what skills you have. It asks you what your level of education is. So that supersedes all of this. The department and everyone else can do all these things and it's a bit of a cart horse issue, okay. Which is gonna drive the change more. But until employers stop requiring and filtering out people by the BAA because there's a glut of BAs out there, okay. They just assume that these skills are associated with the bachelor's degree, okay. So it stops right there. So let me push back a little bit on you then. So let me ask you this question. Is that, do they do this because our bachelor's degrees or the things that we have are, the alternatives to that are not good enough to describe actual workplace skills. They've got some ability to complete. Let's hear from Deb. It depends on what they're hiring for, right. So to hire tech people, we go straight to boot camps. And so especially now with low unemployment and technology tools to identify people based on skill sets and other types of credentials, I think we're gonna see that change pretty fast. So we've had a lot of technology in higher ed for over 20 years and it hasn't really changed higher ed very much. It's just like automated some of the processes we have before. And I would love for individualized learning paths to be the thing that carries us into the future, but if there's no consumer of that on the employer side, I think it's really gonna be employers recognizing that these digital credentials can tell them something about a candidate that's screening for a BA can't do, that a resume can't do, the transcript can't do, and they're gonna be all over it. That's my hunch. Just in the back there, thank you. So I'm glad, Deb, you trended towards answering your question, which is why not the technology solutions? Because, A, if you're really watching the market, can you really trust the tools gonna be there tomorrow? I mean, if you really pay attention to it and the time, effort, and energy, and the political capital you expend inside of whatever organization, to A, convince people it's a good purchase, and then go through implementing it, and then it could go away or get bought or merge or something else.  So I think that's just my response, Sharon, to why I think you're seeing less of that up there.  Well, I think, because we are getting into the business end, and again, we don't wanna keep you from the reception, but I do wanna ask, I guess, the room, and certainly Sharon, is if marketplace valuation of credentials is the most important thing we can do to change the conversation around alternative credentialing, everybody in this room plays a slightly different role in this ecosystem, in this higher education ecosystem that we're all in, whether it's from the institutional side, whether it's from the nonprofit, whether it's from the for-profit, whether it's from the government side. So what are the roles that we can all play in driving that conversation forward to improve the marketplace value of these sort of alternative, more granular, more descriptive credentials that I think everybody in this room accepts is a better fundamental tool to allow students to get the jobs that they should be earning and to get employers, the folks in the door, that they should be hired. So I guess I'm gonna turn it over to you because you're forced to answer the question. I am forced to answer the question, and I'm the government, so I know all of the answers. Yeah, that's how it works, yeah, yeah, yeah. So actually, we know some of the answers, I think, but one of the things that we had talked about that we would want to talk about is, so we don't know exactly what it is, but I think what the Department of Education is good at doing is curating a conversation, and I love the conversation that has happened all afternoon here about some of the things to watch out for, different kinds of population, and making sure all of the equities are on the table. I think we've had great conversations this afternoon. I'm looking at some of my notes about students, like being in control of some of this stuff, and how do we help institutions and the employers be a little bit more responsive to either the dynamics that are in our sort of students, like themselves, and what they offer as well as what the needs are. And so we don't know the answer to that question, and one of the things that we're going to be doing over the summer is to launch a little challenge to ask this very specific question. If you had unlimited resources, right, how would you empower individuals to design their own learning journeys so that they can lead purposeful and economically stable lives? And what we're looking for is this very question that you asked for people to think about what partnerships they need, for people to think about how they would leverage the technology that's available, and how they would address the needs of the kinds of students that they are serving today. And so I think that we're really excited. We will be talking, I think, a little bit more about this at JFF Horizons next week, but follow us on Twitter. There will be a great interactive platform, and what we really wanna do is curate this conversation a little bit more broadly. We want some of the questions that you all have asked to be answered by a broader group of individuals. And I think it's interesting, some of the partners we have brought to the table as well, thinking about the workforce and who some of those players are. And I don't think that we should have technologies just for the sake of it, but it would be interesting to think about like what could we use, right? So if we're saying there's competency-based education, it's really amazing, and so now we can document competencies, like how can we then encourage employers to do skills-based hiring that grab the competencies? Like is there a middle layer that's missing from that? We talk about educational opportunities being all around, like in the workforce and online and in boot camps. How do we make sure that we document what individuals learn in all of those so that they can then translate them into skills that they can translate into a job, right? And so I think we wanna have this conversation, we wanna have it broadly and nationally, and so we will be doing that over the next, I think, three months. So we hope that all of you will participate in that larger conversation. Absolutely. Well, I think that'll more or less do it. Done. So where are we at? Snacks. Yeah, that's it. We're at the, yeah, thank you. There we go. Thank you guys very much.