Can Higher Education Be Transformed to Better Serve Society? at Zócalo Public Square

Can Higher Education Be Transformed to Better Serve Society? at Zócalo Public Square

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[Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] my [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] my [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] welcome everyone my name is moira shuri and i'm the executive director of zocalo public square a creative unit of arizona state university at zocalo our mission is to connect people to ideas and to one another everything we do is free and everyone is welcome we publish original writing and convene events like the one we're watching today find out more on our website zocalopublicsquare.org we're launching our new slate of events with the urgent question how can higher education better serve society and this discussion is in the able hands of our moderator jennifer ruach from the chronicle of higher education she covers faculty and student issues and social mobility in her green room interview with zocalo she told us that higher education remains a fascinating subject for her because it's a microcosm of our broader culture and society over to you jennifer thank you moira i am delighted to speak today with three distinguished scholars and innovative higher education leaders about what it will take to ensure that our colleges and universities are working to benefit society thank you everyone for joining me here today i uh want to introduce our panelists michael crowe is the president of arizona state university under his leadership the university has opened 25 new trans-disciplinary schools and has been named the most innovative university in the nation by u.s news and world report every year since 2016. he is also a scholar of science and technology policy and the co-author of the fifth wave the evolution of american higher education gabrielle starr has been the president of pomona college since 2017. she's the college's first

african-american president and its first female president and she's known for her scholarship in the fields of english literature neuroscience and aesthetics she's the author of feeling beauty the neuroscience of aesthetic experience she's also the recipient of a guggenheim fellowship and was recently named to the american academy of arts and sciences and joseph castro is the chancellor of the california state university system in fact he took that position just last week so congratulations chancellor thank you he is also a scholar of leadership and public policy he was president of fresno state university before coming to the csu system he's a first generation college graduate and the first mexican american and i was surprised to learn the first californian to lead the cal state system he was awarded the ugly award from the government of mexico in 2016 for his contributions to advancing mexican-american and latino culture in the united states so we have an all-star cast here today and i'd like to begin by asking about something that it's kind of hard to stop thinking about even as i try to focus on higher education so i'm going to try to connect the two something on everybody's mind the deadly attack on the u.s capitol last week by people who believe the false claim that donald trump actually won the election in november and gabrielle maybe i'll ask you first because you've written for the chronicle of higher education about the ways in which a college education opens our eyes to the truth and i wonder the ways in which the attack is uh is a clear rejection of facts a disdain for expertise is there a way in which it reflects a failure of higher education i think that very many parts of our society have encouraged a truth or fact-free diet uh i think that higher education probably is not particularly culpable in that um except in so far as we may have not done well enough and the teaching of ethics to our graduates so as they develop new technologies and new possibilities of communication the purpose of communication remains the preservation of human sociality and our respectful engagement with one another um i think that misinformation can be very difficult to counter especially when it's connected to um human the fact that human beings prioritize facts or statements that they hear from close people who are close to them over statements that they hear that are more generally broadcast and so here we have a tension between communities of different sizes the community that might be put brought together online as opposed to the larger polity that is the united states of america but i am deeply sorry for the loss of life that happened us this past week and i know that we all wish and hope for a peaceful transition and no more lives lost from political violence joseph or michael do you have thoughts about the ways in which uh transforming higher education needs to address our sort of crisis of truth and expertise yeah jennifer i think i'll i'll jump in just for a second to a very good question i appreciate gabby's answer very much and agree with it i think where what i would add to that answer which hopefully isn't a disagreement is that i'd like to say that something's happened inside academia in general and that is that as our scientific understanding and our theories and our our deep understanding of social complexity and our deep understanding of the philosophical purposes for moving forward with our democracy and the way that it should move forward we the colleges and universities have done in my view a poor job staying connected to everyone but our students and what i mean by that is that we've done an outstanding job with those that come and can graduate and move forward and they've added much and contributed much but i think that we're doing a poor job to stay connected uh and i think that you know setting the insurrectionists uh aside who are nearly identical to the insurrectionists of the 19th century in terms of their motivations and their and their view of the world than looking at the broader population of people that have been influenced by falsehoods and fake science and not believing in science and so forth i do think that higher education is responsible partly for that because we have to figure out how to do a better job to teach teachers and communicators and methods and messaging and ways in which we can help our society to actually fully embr embrace the complexity of the world that we presently live in what you will have noticed uh in in i think many of the insurrectionists and the people that support the insurrectionists and the people that believed president trump's bald-faced lies day after day after day after day is that they were disconnected completely disconnected from where the world has gone and for us in academia we have to make sure that we don't think somehow that that means that they're not smart or that they're not capable because they are both we just haven't figured out the language yet and we're going to have to figure that out so i do take i do think that we should take some responsibility for that i think that's fair i work in higher education because we develop leaders and so in that way i do believe that the csu and and other systems around the country have a key role to play um and are part of the solution through the through our education we can develop a new generation of bold and ethical leaders to use gabby's term who are from diverse backgrounds and who will help us to think through these very important questions that we've been debating and to do so in a way that is non-violent i think that's that's the other part of this what what happened last week is deeply disturbing and sorry my lights my lights go off automatically i may do that a few times tonight deeply disturbing but i i do believe that we are part of the solution and i know in talking to the other presidents last night across our system we're thinking creatively about how each of our campuses can be part of that solution going forward and to build on michael's point you know taking responsibility and how can we better serve our students and and create a new generation of leaders who are going to be more effective than than this generation and it sounds like you're both saying that broader access is one of the answers to to forge that connection with a wider polity a wider community um that's i mean the premise of this whole conversation is that higher education needs to be transformed in order to do that right we can't just tinker around the edges um why is that why why is there such a a sort of deep and um extensive need for change and uh michael do you want to start yeah sorry so so we live in a society now of approaching 340 million people that's probably one of the most if not the most diverse group of humans that have ever come together to try to govern themselves in the kind of democracy that we have constructed we have fantastic institutions like gabby's which are really beacons of of uh you know sort of america's version of greek academies you know full immersions of of students with faculty and so forth and we have massive publicly directed systems like joe is overseeing and somewhere in the middle is a you know kind of a a public university with a public purpose like the one that i'm a part of at asu and it is the case that all of us have to figure out how to be more deeply connected to a broader society that'll be different for each of our institutions but we have to figure this out because what's happened to us is that we have allowed ourselves to sound funny we've allowed ourselves to revert to the british model of social class so universities now and colleges grant social class if you're lucky enough to be admitted that's the granting of a social class i was admitted to highly you know exclusive college or university x or y therefore i have i have made it and then and so and versus i i went to the community college where there was no admission requirements and therefore i haven't made it well that's all silliness these are different ways to learn and so forth and so on and so what i would say is that what we have to figure out in the united states in this in the size of this democracy for it to be able to work successfully how are all of our thousands of colleges and universities going to take on this notion of more deeply connecting to the broader democracy and each of us will do that in different ways some by scaling our educational programs and some by scaling what we have to say and so there there's two different ways to do that but it is going to be a different model the world of the isolated cut off disconnected uh academia of the past really needs to be a rare thing rather than a common thing so when you say scaling what we have to say as opposed to scaling what we offer i'm imagining that you're talking about a small college like pomona which is not going to uh try to grow to the extent that asu has and and offer you know dozens upon dozens of programs and educate how is how many thousand students does asu educate now we we we have many but in pomona's case i used to be on the board of a small college like pomona called bowdoin college in in brunswick maine i was a trustee of that college and so pomona as one of these uh uh you know really uh it's like in a sense a unique learning environment and so you allow that unique learning environment to not only be created for the students that can go there but also so that others can see vicariously the kinds of things that are going on in this learning process and so rather than just letting i'm not suggesting pomona does this but i'm just saying rather than just let a few in and there's not much visibility you let a few in and you allow lots of visibility uh to the learning process and the learning outcomes and the ideas and so forth and so on and that model doesn't work for something you know that we're trying to do and we added i think we added 10 000 more students between this year and last year um you know we're we're we're and joe's even you know greater than that working across all their campuses so we're taking on the mission of scaling and but the entire sector has to take on the mission of connecting i guess that's the point that i'm talking about and how do you do that kind of connecting and and sort of broadcasting from a small college like pomona gabby well this is one way certainly um but i i would say that following on what michael um said so eloquently part of our challenge is really integration of all of the different kinds of higher education that we offer and we are so lucky as a country that we have such an extraordinary variety of kinds of institutions one of my biggest worries in covid um is that they'll be institutions that are really serving their students well but who can't manage the existential threat that has been handed to many uh of us by um constraints around tuition around who can have technology um but if we can better integrate between uh the different sectors with community colleges and private four-year colleges between large research universities and you know the comprehensive schools we collectively have a better chance than we do on any of our own and i think michael is also right in that you look at what what can we provide to the broader populace education seems like such a private good that it's only for you but you know it was in the news today again the tragedy of flint michigan and the poisoning of the water the fact that there were extraordinary scientists um who became involved in telling that story telling the truth that story getting clean water to people which is such a fundamental human right without higher education and the kinds of research and teaching that we do those there would be more children poisoned as simple as that we wouldn't have a vaccine now we wouldn't have good therapies um we wouldn't be looking at the beginning of the end of this pandemic we would have succumbed and i think we need to tell the truth more about what it is that that we can do and we need to tell it together there is a lot of competition among colleges i mean the system is kind of built uh to reinforce that so how do you overcome those uh those forces in order to collaborate more well it's interesting um i think that to a certain extent the con the competition narrative is um overwrought and if you look back in terms of the selectivity of colleges which is one of the things that drives this sense of scarcity right i might i just can't get in where's my kid going to get in a lot of that was driven by the ease with which students could apply to multiple institutions with a pushable button on the common application and that's relatively new so some of the inflation of selectivity comes from the fact that you just can apply like that um there is there are in fact enough seats in american higher education for every student who is qualified and what we have to do is protect the ability of every kind of institution to fill those seats and to give the best education and that is really my concern we are seeing schools going under we are not seeing schools so much oversubscribed and michael has done an incredible job in arizona and expanding higher education access there still are education deserts that we need to get to um and i look at what uh joseph is doing that's just amazing with the csu system breaching some of those those walls that we desperately need to joseph tell us a little bit about that i know that uh csu has done an incredible job in raising graduation rates and closing the racial disparities between them right absolutely i think in many ways um we're at a place that other universities will be getting to in the coming years and i want to take us to an even greater place of social mobility and and true equity but we have almost a half a million students and you know over half of them are pell grant students and i was a pell grant student it's a proxy for coming from a modest income background we have thousands of dreamers that attend our campuses and my hope is with the biden administration coming in that we'll have more opportunities for our dreamers to to get pell grants and and support for them so that they can go to college you know most of our students are from california and over half are from community colleges so in many ways we do i think model the social mobility that is needed throughout higher education and and i'm thinking beyond our system here because i'm thinking of the ecosystem in california with the university of california the community colleges the private institutions and to gabby's point i do think there is a place for the students that want access to higher education we just need to work together to ensure that those that you know are place bound like the ones i used to serve in the central valley uh that you know that they have a place to go that you can't say well there's this great place three hours away and that's impossible for them to get to and then in terms of cost it's very important that we keep a lid on costs and i know that michael's worked on that as well know we've only raised tuition one time in the last 10 years and i i'm proud of that and i i'm gonna continue to keep our our tuition and fees as low as possible we're at about seven thousand dollars uh for for a year of tuition and fees so um i'd like to try to work even more creatively with all the other institutions so that we can serve all of our students and accelerate their their um progress to getting their degrees as well shorten that pathway because we still have challenges where you know students that come to us have a little longer road to travel and i'm trying to figure out with my colleagues how to shrink that without diminishing quality as the pandemic has increased potential students worries about affordability and also about whether they're going to get the training that they need to find a job after they graduate a lot of so-called innovators are pushing cafeteria style stacked credentials as opposed to to full degrees and apparently americans who've been surveyed since the pandemic i'm consistently have expressed a preference for that approach is there anything wrong with that i mean i'll just take a shot at that there's nothing wrong with anyone finding some way to enhance their learning enhance their learning outcomes and their learning uh output you know everything about that what we haven't done a good job is providing to americans because the generally the colleges universities are too separate they're not connected and so forth uh they haven't built a way in which the course that you took when you were in the army which was an advanced algebra class is some piece of something else and the course that you did here or there there's been no way to connect a person's learning to build a what we have a project called our trusted learner network project where we're building a tool that would allow uh university courses community college courses other kinds of courses to be amalgamated around a person and then they could project themselves uh and so we we are rethinking you know you know not that we're going to stop offering pathways to degrees we're accelerating those pathways we're accelerating the numbers of degrees just the opposite but that we're recognizing the broader aspects of learning however i will say and this is interesting i won't name the company other than they're a massive software company training more than a million people at a time and their senior executives were on our campus last year saying that they're beginning to get pushback from individuals who are getting the technical training that they need to be software coders or artificial intelligence coders but they're starting to ask something else other than how to code what does it mean and so what they were talking to us about was well do we have any philosophy courses or history courses or anthropology courses that we could offer to these students well of course we do and what that means then is what we have to stop doing is categorizing learning in a hierarchy and realizing that it's basically a continuum as opposed to a hierarchy and if we can do that we can find a way to recognize and respect all learning and start moving people in a pathway something we call the universal learner where learning is one of their main life functions one of the most important thing any person does and they will have access to learning whenever they need it however they need it across the totality of their life and i think universities and colleges are going to have to figure out how to be a part of all of that and for the most part we haven't i'm going to add to that um michael that there's a really interesting article an american scientist a little more than probably 15 years ago by irving beatleman peterman and edward vessel that calls human beings infivores um it is one of our needs uh to obtain knowledge you know we're not born with what we need and it takes us a long time to get it and the old line the technology is anything that happened since you were born i mean that means the world you are always going to need educational support um we my grandmother um never had the opportunity to go to college my on my father's side my aunt you know had to leave uh in the 1920s in the depression um you know there is i think there's part of our respect for human dignity is to continue to assert that your worth is not equivalent to your educational attainment but we need to help your educational attainment be your own sense of worth and your ability to achieve what you want in life um and that is something that it doesn't matter your political affiliation it doesn't matter where you're from that's a gospel that i think a lot of people can sign on to but where we have fallen down is you know i look at high school graduation rates i look at the extraordinary disparities that are being increased right now in covid kids that have not had any formal education since march of this last year that penalty of a colleague tahir andrade who did work in pakistan that shows that one year is actually equivalent to three years because it takes that long to make up the loss so right now we are in a terrible hole and we have got to dig out of it together um and what that means is that people want whatever i want people to feed that thirst for knowledge however they can get it because that's a net good um and that's again that's the gospel i think we got to preach i think i just add a couple sentences to that jennifer what gabby was just saying just so one of the things that universities have got to do is stop viewing themselves and colleges in some sort of a social hierarchy where this discipline is more important than this discipline or this college is more important because it's more selective than this college those have then led to a devaluation of learning other than college which has then created huge resentment i also i'm a first generation college student i'm also a native of california joe and so and so uh i come from a family in which formal education was ridiculed as the pathway for losers who couldn't work and so believe it or not we we have to figure out how to be respectful going both directions relative to work and learning and i think what gabby is talking about where we embrace all learning and connect to all learning we've got to figure out how to do that within the colleges and the universities in in a in a in a good and respectful way is opening the doors to more underrepresented students the key to that and helping them i mean not just getting them in the door but then helping them succeed um is it enough especially to gain the trust of people who think higher ed is a left-wing indoctrination bill yes i think it's critically important that we work with students and families from their first generation to college i there are so many of those in california and throughout the country that have not yet been touched by higher education and i personally would like to to do more of that here in california i worry a lot about men of color because even as we've seen more students of color come to the csu the number of males of color has not increased and i do think that has something to do with how we're educating our students in k-12 and you know my son who's going to be 10 in a few days he has the only male teacher in his whole school and the only male of color teacher in his whole school so i i do think that we're we're not we're not where we need to be there and i'd like to see more of our teacher education programs get more you know diversified especially males of color and teaching and on the faculty and so forth and i do think that we'll be able to turn things around but it's going to require us to work in a deeper way and i know michael's doing a lot of that work and gabby too we just have to work in a more and deeper way earlier and get those kids excited about whatever career they want to pursue yeah i'll just say this thing that you brought up jennifer you know about the the anti-college rhetoric which i pick up on from a lot of people who are very confrontational with me and us and they believe that we're uh you know a meal for communists and leftists and you know the the modernization of our society and you know all of the transformations that are going on and what i find is that i always look at why does a person think something like that and i give them the benefit of the doubt and then when i give them the benefit of doubt most of them not all of them some of them are just angry people but most of them they're hurt they they feel that they're disconnected and i start talking to them about you know rousseau and descartes and all of the philosophers on which our republic is based who are all college educated or philosophers or jefferson adams madison and jay and hamilton who helped form the country that they so much love and often refer to all of whom were college educated even 250 years ago they were college educated and these things couldn't have come about you know the the united states itself could not have emerged without people educated at this level because but and that's not meant to be an elitist statement it's meant to be a power statement of the creativity that can emerge when you can get people educated and so what i find that we need to do is we have to listen really really careful while they're why they are angry we have to make sure that we are unbelievable bastions for free speech unbelievable bastions for free speech not hate speech free speech they're not the same thing and we've got to protect that and protect that and protect that and we've got to find a way to uh get people to understand that that's not what we're doing you know that that is that's not on our agenda our agenda is individual human empowerment that's that's our agenda if i if i may i'd like to just say say two things um the first uh all actually three things one subdivides when i was younger i used to think that as you got better and better educated things like racism would go away we get educated away [Music] and then i discovered that that's not universally true it depends what people are not are taught not just that they're taught and when we look at what happened uh on the capitol um you know we certainly saw elected members of congress who have some uh educations at the most uh yale law degrees and stanford undergraduate degrees and they barely know how to they barely know how to read you you name it and um that that really worried me because we can't say it's not just having education it and it is how you are taught and what and that very presence on the hill of some very highly educated people on both sides of the congressional aisle should be in and of itself a statement that american higher education is not merely manufacturing um sheep who replicate left-wing ideas um if you did a card check on the senators i think you will find that all of them have higher degrees and all of them have been through this system that supposedly produces merely the same political outcome it's just not true and actually michael sandell the political philosopher from harvard wrote that piece in the new york times uh they got so much attention arguing that we need more people without college degrees in government because that that's one reason that government doesn't understand people and that there's no evidence that having a college degree or being educated makes you a good leader what do you say to that congress needs it needs to be the people that you know made up of some representation of our society absolutely and uh you know only about a third of our society has a degree from college most of people that go to college never graduate uh uh more than half have never graduated that started in college in the united states and so those some of those folks need to be in congress also because they need to be able to to talk about what that means and what that means in their communities and so forth i mean absolutely the case of human respect there um but i also would say that that again the narrative of scarcity that has been so politically productive for almost all of my lifetime i'm i'm 46 and politics has been arguing we have lived in a world of scarcity for all of my conscious life and that world of scarcity means that what people sometimes hear this goes to what michael is saying being angry when people say like like joseph just did we want to make sure that latin um american latino men african-american men are getting the kind of education that they they need what some people are hearing is what i don't get it why are they so special and that narrative of scarcity is what we have to push back against there's a great um bit of research and once again i i think research matters um from uh who i use sebastian sharing and peter halp and educational research in 2016 that shows that minority teachers having the presence of minority teachers in schools is good for every single student not just for minority students and it's a principle of human centered design that if you make something work for those for whom it currently works the least everybody it works better for everyone so when we work to get the poorest students graduated when we get work to get the most disadvantaged or disenfranchised students graduated the ease with which we make it work for those who need it the most makes it easier for everyone a rising tide all boats i'd like to flip this a little bit because in my experience uh you know just recently coming from fresno you know the the leadership of that region um are graduates of the university there there are others who are not graduates but by and large if i look at the leadership and education and business and government uh i can connect the dots to that one university and i i believe that universities play such a powerful role or can in doing that and and i've seen that with my own eyes and i just have to believe that while we have some responsibility here we are certainly part of the solution in uh in developing leaders who are going to be more enlightened and who are going to take us into the future and in lots of exciting ways so i i heard you talk about this editorial i didn't get a chance to read it but that does disturb me because of the positive things i've seen in terms of the development of leaders through higher education who've gone on to do magnificent things for the community i i joe i agree with that and i i agree that you know our our job is to try to make sure that everyone that wants to move forward their life and attain a college level education has the opportunity to do that without barrier and so and and you're dedicated to that all three of us are dedicated to that i think what's happened however uh is that uh you know this idea of scarcity that gabby's brought up a couple times that has infected everything with those those those uh you know hard to get into colleges will they hold a number of seats for these kids or these kids or these kids and then my kid doesn't get to go there it may not be true it probably isn't true but it nonetheless is the model and then what happens also then is and you know this being at cal state fresno and and the cal state system is that well the all the kids that got straight a's well they went to berkeley or to ucla or to uc san diego and and so you get these social hierarchies and so one of the things we have messed up in higher education is that we have allowed ourselves to be socially hierarchically structured uh in a ranked system of status granting that is basically a complete and total replication of the british model and that is deeply and negatively impacting our society and so and so it affects everything and so and so we've got it we've got to figure out a way to fix that how to fix that what sticker do you have on the bumper of your car yeah it's it's but we know that employers will often uh put a lot of stock in the name that's on your resume right where you got your va how do innovators like the three of you fight against that tendency it's it's so weird so i was a faculty member at iowa state university and i got a job as a faculty member at columbia university and i and i sort of grew up at columbia university and it was the weirdest thing i'd ever seen all of a sudden i was infinitely quote unquote smarter than i was the day before when of course i was no different whatsoever and it's just it was just weird and so uh that has come from long-standing assignment of status to institutions that are more scarce i guess that's the better word that i would use and that is unfortunate that is that we can't have that we have to find a way to stop that otherwise we're going to end up with just the same thing they have in england with oxford and cambridge and the 60 or so colleges at those two universities and a few kids that get in and everything else is just kind of below that and so what we've done is we've replicated that and we have to unreplicate that part of it is we have to agree and this goes back to the competition question we have to agree to get out of this status game with each other so one of my favorite um bits of of um anthropological investigation was done by gene enzinger who looked at the history of the end of foot binding as a sign of status and the way that worked was that a coalition of families got together and promised two things both not to bind their daughter's feet and to marry their sons to daughters only who had unbound feet and that pact is what stopped that practice so what packs do we have to have among each other i think we need to get out of that we have so much money an endowment we need to get out of the you know how many of our faculty members come from which research universities we need to get over that we need to get over what conference we play in or why we don't and we need to stop talking about our own status because it does nothing to actually create meritocracy it's like the star-bellied speeches dr seuss has it right you get the right stamp on your stomach but sooner or later it expires i want to ask you one more question before i turn to questions that the audience has sent in um we know that covid has made it a lot harder for some people to think about going to college fall enrollments dropped 22 they drop even more than that for graduates of high poverty high schools and it is uh likely to be worse in the coming months so meanwhile also obviously that um hit colleges themselves financially if you are a college leader trying to stay afloat make sure that your students are healthy figure out remote learning etc how can you make the head space and where can you find the resources to increase enrollment of low-income students and give them all the various supports that they need to succeed joe do you want to start sure well i certainly do have experience with this i i'm happy that the csu actually was able to increase enrollment during this time um and the campus i led in fresno we had a record enrollment during the pandemic and that does show the resilience of our students and families at the same time you know i could feel and i still do i could feel the stress the stress on them their families the faculty the staff and the longer this goes on i think it's gonna be harder and harder from that perspective um on the other hand we've learned so much and and i i don't think we're going to go back um we're going to go to a new place and i think it is going to be more accessible to them so um you know without the stress i think we're going to you know learn a lot from the innovation you know we we basically pivoted 80 000 courses uh virtually in just a few days and i don't think we thought we could do that but we figured out a way to do it and so there in my opinion there are some silver linings here but the the federal funding has been extraordinarily helpful in terms of emergency grants and dollars for technology and uh and so forth and i think that's that's going to be critically important to continue on but i'm actually seeing um you know i'm optimistic about the the ways in which we can be even more innovative in the future after going through this experience yeah i think what i would add is that you know we're we're not even the same institution that we were a year ago we've seen uh you know more things that we need to do to help our students to be successful we also had a very significant enrollment increase and even a larger increase in students from economically challenged uh uh families we uh i i just i just adore our faculty for all that they've been able to do to adapt and adjust and and uh stay focused on the game and the game is to help these students lives to move forward uh in the middle of whatever and so so the fact that we just accepted a 24 7 operation just moving forward in every possible way adjusting this way adjusting that way making things happen and what it means then is that i think the schools that see their mission as the students success and the mission as the community's success they will embrace the learnings from the pandemic and i think be better places as a as a result of that i know we'll be a better place we already are a better place but we can also see that we can do things as joe just said that we didn't realize we could do now we know that we can do them uh including breaking down barriers and and working with students and working with families and working with high schools we have forty thousand high school students attending asu that we didn't have last semester forty thousand in california arizona and utah and the reason that we're doing that is that we have assets that allow these students to be able to go to high school and and attend and and so we wouldn't even know how to do that now now we have more kids going onto a path to college and applying to pomona and applying to cal state and applying to asu uh and so it's so now we realize we can do some things to work with k-12 in ways that we didn't realize that we could do before and now we see that also it's interesting um there's a one there's been a split opinion amongst a lot of people who want to broaden pathways to college and one approach which i respect has been the idea of bridge programs that you can spend some time pre-college bringing students um along getting them prepared for college i well i respect that model i think that the bridge part of what we see and what we're doing right now points to why the bridge is problematic because why does the bridge to college start with bringing students from somewhere to here wherever the here is that's not a bridge that's a transporter and it doesn't do much to give students the infrastructure that they need to move all the way through college what i've heard from my colleagues and faculty from my colleagues who are student teams is that this past nearly year has given them a better sense of who their students are because they see their students in their homes they see them where they study it might be they're two students you know one's on one headset or they're sharing an ipad or i've seen students that they've talked to me about their families but i've seen their brothers pop in i've seen the family dog you know i've seen and you learn so much more about a student by being where they are rather than the student having to be where you are and i think that we can do much more with better infrastructure and with different kinds of outreach to go back to michael's point of meeting students where they are not where we want them to be joe i want to give you a chance to address that too but one of the questions from the audience is specifically about california so i'm going to throw that at you at the same time sure well the viewer says here in california there's so much attention and effort spent on equity and access but the starting point is always maintaining the three separate systems could the shortest path to equity and access be one system how do we make college learning more interdisciplinary and collab well that's sort of a separate question so i'll stop there why not why not one system joe that is a fantastic question for you buddy [Laughter] well i what i can say is that we've been moving toward that in california in terms of one ecosystem and the governor has supported that and the leaders of the different systems have supported that and and i am seeing the silos breaking down uh so i do i do believe that that's going to be possible in the near term because of the people leading the system each system being open to that the governor and the legislature wanting to see that and and i'm encouraged i i would say in the next three to five years our california higher ed and k-12 ecosystem is going to look different it's going to be much more integrated and and better for the students that we serve teaser there's definitely something to come out of california on better integration stay tuned stay tuned uh another person in the audience asks about why america lags behind other countries in social mobility are there things that universities and other countries are doing that the universities here are not well i won't i won't question the the the rationale that somehow we lag behind other countries in social mobility you know the country's history of the united states has been one of unbelievable social mobility across a very very diverse population which we're now realizing is incomplete because we haven't found a way to be as facilitative of socially mo socially mobile individuals uh particularly in the last 40 years uh as we had in the decades before that so it's a long history of social mobility a tremendous history of social mobility but one that has been lagging as our economy has become more mature and aged and so not the people but the economy itself has become aged and so we have to go back and rethink this and this isn't finland and this isn't denmark and this is not a you know a simpler place this is a very complicated place and what we need to do is to figure out how to have a plethora of of institutions and a plethora of mechanisms in which people from every family background can find a way to connect so one of the reasons that we started a thing called asu local in downtown los angeles was to take every asset that we have deploy it into a community where there aren't even buildings for the college there's no college in it and so these are kids qualified to go to college admitted to many colleges in california but they can't go they cannot leave their family they can't be more than a few miles away they have always nearby and so what i mean by that is that we have to figure out ways to enhance social mobility by altering our behavior and altering our constructs and that's really something that we have to figure out we kind of peaked uh uh some time ago in the in the full impact of educational driven social mobility we need to get back to the business of enhancing that as has been the case in the country in the past i worry though also michael um i know that um you have been quite active um in arizona and helping to remove some of the legal barriers that especially um immigrants undocumented immigrants face for college attainment and and one significant court argument that enabled you to offer in-state tuition to students who had graduated from arizona high schools right looking back not too long ago um the in the southwest there were state legislators saying about you know people largely of of um mexican heritage um or who were indigenous peoples that they didn't need education what were they what were they gonna use it for because what they needed these people for was to do labor that did not require a college education and those vestiges still remain i look in my own town and you literally cross the railroad tracks um first avenue first street and you have um the the remnants of brown lining um so these well yeah i wasn't suggesting that it's not there i was just suggesting that there's been a lot of social mobility that education not just college education you know we have a generally literate population now we didn't used to and things like that so educational attainment has been a mobilizing force and then we sort of ran out of gas the last uh the last few decades and we need to fix that i'm sorry to interrupt but i just i just i just didn't yeah i'm in agreement with you michael yeah yeah i mean it's a textured picture there some parts of our system where there's been tremendous social mobility and other parts of the system where there's not been as much and i do think it has to do with uh tuition and fee structure financial aid availability faculty diversity commitment of a university or college to serving that group of students because you know you have to think differently about your services if you're uh you know the campus i served in fresno 60 plus percent were uh pell grant students and so that's different than a lot of universities that maybe five percent or 10 percent i think stanford might be 10 so there's just it's a textured picture and i do hope that over time we'll be able to get more universities positioned to serve students from all different backgrounds more effectively and then i think we'll see more social mobility across the whole system one of the uh viewers in the audience is asking about a different kind of mobility couldn't mobile technology be used more to meet students where they are and enable institutions to reach more learners everywhere not just for small distance learning programs we have 85 000 degree seeking students who are in our realm to learning modality which is digital immersion technology enhanced learning and it's kind of funny we got a snarky letter from some guy that was a dean of admissions at some medical school saying i'm not going to admit you to my medical school because you got your degree online and so our students and faculty prepared a video response that i should share with this group that said oh yeah i'm getting my biology degree online from asu while i'm working as a helicopter medic while i'm working as a er nurse while i'm working as an electronics technicians mate in the bottom of a nuclear submarine underneath the ocean protecting you mr medical school dean and so what he said was that there was no way for students to learn anything about communications et cetera et cetera et cetera while they learned online so what we have is we have massive ignorance which has created a resistance to technology enhanced learning technology enhanced learning is going to have to be an essential part of learning for some people at some part in their life particularly if they weren't able to finish college or weren't able to go to college on the schedule that colleges offer which is 18 to 22 years old or whatever and so so what we found is that is that technology allows you to project the creativity of your faculty in ways that we never could have imagined and what we're seeing are just unbelievable outcomes unbelievable outcomes i'm saying oh sorry for you gabby no after you okay i i was just going to say the same thing that we're seeing in terms of the the use of mobile technology in the classroom for example the studies i've seen of the work we've done in the csu especially in fresno show that there was a greater level of engagement between the faculty and the students and you know you connect that to textbook costs and if if there's a way you can you know go to free textbooks or very low-cost textbooks which we we've done through the use of mobile technology i think that's another win and i i'm particularly concerned about those students who've been on the wrong side of the divide and some of them are in my system here and i want to make sure over time as chancellor that we enhance our mobile technology here and i i think that we need to do that across the country in partnerships uh with with companies and foundations and and others who want to see this occur i got a lovely letter from a student today um and you know i will say getting a lovely letter um is such a treat in um day and age um but i just want to read a teensy bit of it um to you because it goes to this this issue of community and the student says um you know i cannot adequately gra convey my gratitude towards you and the admissions officers for providing me with this unparalleled educational experience well my first semester was not as i imagined it i've had some wonderful experiences i've gotten to know all of my professors to a greater extent that i hoped made some bona fide friends and explore such a wide breadth of knowledge i've been so impressed by the caliber of the faculty and students especially in their willingness to engage deeply with concepts and promote sense of community in spite of the online nature of the courses i expected i would be wholly isolated and lost but i was overjoyed with the welcoming amicable attitude exuded by my professors and my fellow colleagues i mean your heart has to be made of stone if you don't you're like oh my god that said you know there is something missing i think you know when we talk about the prototypical student who's participating in an online learning experience they're not cut off from the world and the way so many of us are now and i look at my own two kids i've got a teenager and a preteen who have been there only pure in-person company now for months and i think about especially students who have um are on the autism spectrum or who have other challenges around socialization that they are not in human contact outside of of their family unit and we've also seen that the incidence of um child abuse and neglect has been reported as dramatically depth not because we think that suddenly people aren't doing horrible things but rather because in this isolated world they can be hidden and so what i would emphasize is that as we hit our new normal for me the truth that we need to hold on to is that being physically together does matter um you know we human beings were not meant to be all the time in these little green boxes um and you know we desperately miss you can get some of it you still can feel human over the over the electrons but we do need that space um to have that residential experience that close physical community because human beings are social creatures well this has been a wonderfully wide-ranging conversation and to wrap up i want to ask you if you could just each of you say as briefly as possible if you had a magic wand and could make uh one change in higher ed tomorrow which of the changes that you've started to discuss tonight would you begin with michael probably probably no more rankings based on inputs just basically assessments based on outputs and that would have a massive change for many many things how about you joe well the change that i put at the top of the list and we may see it in the coming months is his dream support for our dreamers uh you know the thousands and thousands of them across the country who are having trouble accessing higher education because they don't have enough financial support and i think that change at the federal level if i could do that tonight that's what i would do first i would say amen to both michael and anjo um i'll let their magic wands leave me with only one left i would say make it as easy as possible for students to move from community colleges to four-year colleges and across every single state so that you can begin to maximize your educational attainment in a way that works for you well thank you all so much for your insights today and thank you to our audience uh and everybody hang in there thank you jennifer thank you thank you so much jennifer you

2021-01-21 03:44

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