PJ Tabit
It’s my pleasure to introduce our moderator, Mary Alice McCarthy. Mary Alice is the director of the center on education and skills at the New America Foundation. Her work examines the intersection between higher education, workforce development and job training policies. Prior to joining New America. She worked at both the US Departments of Education and Labor, where she led a variety of technical assistance initiatives in the areas of career pathways, credentialing, and competency based education. Our panelists will include David Miyashiro, who is the superintendent of the Cajon Valley Union School Districtv in San Diego, California. The district serves a diverse community of 17,000 students across 27 schools. David’s team has created a comprehensive K through 12 curriculum called The World of Work and gained national attention on innovations in education.
PJ Tabit
Next we’ll have Jim VanKouwenberg. He’s the training coordinator for Optimax systems, an Ontario, New York based optics manufacturing company, where he has worked for over 25 years. Jim dedicates much of his free time to teaching the next generation about optics, both internally at Optimax, and in the community at a local high school and community college. And then finally, Michael Sorrell. He is in his 14th year serving as the president of Paul Quinn College. Under his leadership, Paul Quinn College has become one of the 10 most innovative colleges and universities in America. He and his wife, Natalie, live in Dallas and have two children, Michael Augustus and Sage Luis Sinclair.
PJ Tabit
Before I turn it over to Mary Alice to start the panel, we’ll take a look at the poll. And it looks like the score of 4.1, that is an increase over the start of the panel. So very pleased about that. Thanks for doing the poll and sticking with us and I’ll turn it over now to Mary Alice.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Great. Thank you, PJ. Hello everyone. Can folks hear me? Just want to make sure I’m doing okay. Okay. Hello everyone. Thank you, PJ. And thank you to the Federal Reserve Board for the opportunity to be here with you today and talk about innovations in financing post-secondary education and training. My name is Mary Alice McCarthy, and I direct the Center on Education & Labor at New America. And I just want to say congratulations to Paul and to Cheyenne and Ethan. That was an excellent panel and I certainly learned a lot. And I know we’re going to have a great panel to follow up on that. That discussion was focused on the very specific financing model, income share agreements and the pros and cons. We’re now going to pull back a little bit and focus on some different approaches that really get at how to help students make good decisions in this post-secondary education marketplace that they’re entering, how to help students find affordable options that can get their education actually paid for, and how to also help students get good relevant experience while they’re in school to help facilitate those transitions from school into work.
Mary Alice McCarthy
As I said, we have an excellent panel for you today. Before we dive into the conversations with the presenters though, I would like to take just a minute to do a little bit of table setting on why these strategies are so important right now, and also why they’re sometimes so difficult to implement and why what we’re hearing about are such tremendously innovative models. I think first and foremost, it’s just very important to anchor this conversation that we’re having in the fact that adults with some formal post-secondary education, whether it’s a college degree or an apprenticeship certificate, but these adults with post-secondary education enjoy significantly higher levels of economic security than adults with no post-secondary education. That came up at the very beginning of the kickoff of today’s panel. And I just think we simply can’t overstate it.
Mary Alice McCarthy
This is a longstanding trend, but it’s one that’s put into particularly sharp relief during recession, such as the one we’re in right now. I’m sure I don’t need to tell this audience that the unemployment rate for adults with high school diploma or less is over 7%, for people with a bachelor’s degree or more, it’s under 4%. So the differences in labor market experiences in economic security and economic mobility by educational attainment are strong and growing stronger every day. And the stakes of getting some education after high school have never been higher and they only continue to grow.
Mary Alice McCarthy
But we also know that, despite these very high stakes and a lot of attention for a whole lot of reasons, many young people and adults enroll in college and never finish. And many others struggle with the transition out of high school or out of college and into actual jobs and careers. Indeed, many young people spend considerable time wandering around after they leave high school or college, wandering out there in the wilderness, not quite sure what to do or how to find their way. And those rocky transitions are really costly for individuals. And they’re also costly for all of us because these are folks who are not using their full potential when they could be. And I think it’s important to understand why, in the United States, this is particularly prevalent. We see it much more than we see in other countries, particularly European countries. And I think it’s fair to say that the way we’ve organized our education and training systems in the United States sometimes makes it particularly hard for young people to make good, informed choices about their future. Right?
Mary Alice McCarthy
There’s three features very quickly that I just want to touch on that we’re going to hear a lot more about from today’s presenters, but that I think are really important for us to grapple with when we think about good strategies and good policy. The first is that, as a society and as a country, we place tremendous amount of importance and emphasis on individual choice. We want young people to choose their own path. We want them to have every choice available to them. And we do indeed give them a lot, a lot, a lot of choices, right? And that’s great and that’s very much who we are. But it does mean that making sure young people can make good choices is critically important.
Mary Alice McCarthy
And that brings us to a second really important feature of our education and training systems, both at the K12 level and the post-secondary level, is that historically these systems emphasize academic learning over other forms of experiential or vocational or hands on learning. Young people in the United States are really encouraged to focus on their studies and academic performance is generally what gets you from high school to college, not how much you know about particular jobs or careers. Right? And so what that means is that a lot of young people are making critical decisions about their future, what to study and for which career, without much in the way of experience. And as we all know, we all make better decisions when we’ve had some experience or some exposure.
Mary Alice McCarthy
And that brings us to the third piece, which I don’t want to belabor because it also came up in the previous discussion and at the very beginning of the webinar, which is that the cost of higher education is increasing every year. And increasingly, we expect students and their families to finance their college education by taking on debt as they need to. And while there’s little question that for students who finished their degrees, the debt will likely have been worth it, many students never do complete their degree. In part, they never complete their degree because they didn’t make a good decision on the front end about what to study, right?
Mary Alice McCarthy
So we’ve got a very high risk system that is built on choice, individual choice and young people and adults need to make very good decisions. So what can we do to reduce that risk? How can we help young people and adults make good, informed choices so that they don’t end up dropping out with some college, no degree or a bunch of debt? How do we help them find those affordable options like apprenticeship, who actually pay them to learn? And we’ll be hearing more about that in a minute. I’m going to, with that, then start us off with a really exciting presentation from David Miyashiro of the Cajon Valley… Pardon me, I apologize. Who is the superintendent of the Cajon Valley Union School District in California. And we are going to start with the K12 system. Over to you.
David Miyashiro
Thank you, Mary Alice. And yeah, and PJ and Federal Reserve Board. A nicer way of saying it is, this is all your fault that we’re having this conversation because the flaws in the K12 system will ultimately result themselves in the economy. And so I’m going to start my timer and play for eight minutes. And I’m just going to share a little bit about our district and jump into the solution because I think Ethan talked about our work with the San Diego Workforce Partnership. You’re going to see a lot of influence from them in this work. And then also California, you’re generous in saying California made a wrong decision, but California’s the fifth largest economy and the first largest bureaucracy. And we’re not shy about saying that either. So if possible here, it’s possible anywhere.
David Miyashiro
But our vision is to have happy kids engaged in healthy relationships, on a path to gainful from employment, with a vision of the best place to live, work, play, and raise a family in our community. And the journey began eight years ago for us when we provided every child with modern technology, ubiquitous wifi, and access to technology in their home. And then recently, we’ve migrated to a single sign on and a very seamless integration, moving from a teacher driven system to a learner driven system where we can have children explore their strengths, interests, and values in the classroom, in real time. We didn’t provide children with laptops for distance learning, which ended up helping us eventually, but that wasn’t the intent.
David Miyashiro
And so this is what learning looks like in the classroom. Our teachers are working with data and students in small groups and individual children, personalizing their learning. And then when we had to transition to distance learning in March last year, it was a fairly seamless transition for us. And here are a couple videos that I’m not going to play because of the media lag, but really our kids were able to transition from March 13th when we shut down to March 16th, up and running in their homes, because they’ve been using these tools in the classroom already.
David Miyashiro
One of the things I will share is in relation to the economy, we were the first school district in the country to open in April, right after the stay-at-home orders went into place. Our parents reached out and said, “You know what? Both of us are essential workers and we have to go to work. We don’t have any choice for our children.” And so we opened up our schools for free childcare for essential workers. And while the kids were there, we just ran school. And then we opened up our classrooms to summer learning and enrichment for those parents that they felt safe enough to bring back. And I’ll just play a little bit of testimony from Leilani, one of our eighth graders back in July.
Leilani
I think the best thing of coming back here was that we all get to see each other again, it’s been a very long time since we’ve seen each other. And that while we’re doing it, we are safe.
Lyndsey Clark
With the start of school closure, we took it very seriously. We went nowhere for a solid three months. Having the opportunity where we can send her our children back to an environment that they’re familiar with, they hadn’t seen-
David Miyashiro
I’ll just stop there. Our parents were largely appreciative, but we saw ourselves in an essential function of the economy in addition to be a place of education. And so all of our kids came back to school in September. And here’s where our board meets. Our vision is happy kids and healthy relationships on a path to gainful employment. We know in order to do that, we have to close the gap between education and the world of work. And that’s what we’ve done with this San Diego Workforce Partnership and our regional economic development council is change the trajectory of the school system to help every child find gainful employment. And it’s not enough to help and serve families in poverty. Our job is to help them get out of poverty. And in order to do that, we will go back to our founding fathers that there are two educations. One should teach you how to make a living and the other how to live. And that’s where our mission and vision came from. Here’s a short of our mayor talking about our community world of work program.
Dr. Bill Wells
The Cajon Valley School district is doing amazing things. This is not just innovative from a San Diego county perspective, this is innovative from a world perspective.
Speaker 7
There can be a large disconnect between the actual workplace environment and what you’re learning in school.
Speaker 8
All right children, are you ready to go on an adventure with me? Then today, you’re going to go on adventure to tell you all about costuming in theater.
Speaker 9
It’s not every day that we do so much live discussion and conversation.
David Miyashiro
The full video’s on our district YouTube channel, but basically the community and the world of work is the curriculum for the children and their learning. I have to give credit for our school board who pioneered this effort. We invested $3 million into the development of this curriculum around these goals. And so these are happy kids in healthy relationships, on a path to gainful employment. We measure this with Gallup. Measures engagement, hope, career, and financial literacy, not just standardized tests for academia. And we found that the results are a game changer. Social emotional wellbeing is directly tied to hope for my future and tools to navigate it. And so the hard skills on the right side that we talked a little bit about in the income sharing agreements, those are going to change over time, the soft skills won’t. And so our curriculum is built around computer science, relationship skills, presentation, literacy and the world of work.
David Miyashiro
And then here’s a couple of our students. Jose gave a speech right before the pandemic at San Diego State University using his presentation literacy skills. This is actually a video that I’m not going to play. And it was born from our annual event, TEDxKids@ElCajon, where we celebrate the best ideas. All kids learn presentation skills, all kids learn how to take an idea and turn it into performance, but some ideas eventually wind up on our grand stage, which is an annual event. These kids’ TED Talks wind up on the TED YouTube channel and what a great resume booster, right, for a seventh grader to say, “Watch my TED talk that I gave when I was in third grade.” I’m going to play a piece of Ruqiya’s, she’s one of our 42 languages spoken here from the middle east.
Ruqiya Althalmi
Do you shower with that on? Do you have hair under there? Are you bald? These are the type of questions I get when I’m wearing my hijab. Imagine every time you leave your house you know you have to be ready to expect hateful and cruel comments thrown at you. Hey there, I’m Ruqiya. I’m an ordinary young girl living life. I am full of dreams that will hopefully become true. I’m a hijabi, that means a girl with a scarf on their head.
David Miyashiro
Our career development starts with self-awareness. Max gave a talk about Tourette syndrome, which he’s struggling through right now as a fourth grader. Api spent several of her first years of education in a refugee camp in Sudan before coming to the United States. And Precious is a high school student who’s well on her path to gain full employment.
David Miyashiro
This is called presentation literacy. It’s a part of our curriculum that builds self-awareness around their career and academic journey and also their own personal strengths and interests and values and how they align to the world of work. We built this into a comprehensive framework that’s scalable and shareable across the country. They’re career explorations that build on social emotional development. SEL will help you get a job and will get you fired if you don’t have those skills. The Federal Office of Student Aid saw this work early on and asked us to build in tools for FSAID and FAFSA completion into K12 so that kids know what they’re doing before they take out any type of post-secondary financing, including in income sharing agreements. And so we drill down. In K2, it starts really easy. What’s a goal and how do I decide what to buy? But ultimately it manifests themselves in FAFSA complete and looking at the college scorecard to see what’s available.
David Miyashiro
When COVID happened, we had to build a system to push it out to kids in their homes. And so we partnered with Be Able to build our world of work experiences where kids explore, simulate, meet a professional and practice in their classroom, in their home, all while looking at the student’s reading ability, their career development and their interests, how they shape over time as they explore a variety of careers.
David Miyashiro
And then I’ll finish with some of the tools that our teachers and parents have to see the development of their children. A report card, when you were in school, probably didn’t look like this, your interest, your career aspirations, and how your academic progress aligns with those goals. And teachers probably didn’t have tools like this to see that type of 360 viewpoint of their students. But this is the work we’re doing with the Department of Finance and Department of Education. We’ve built it in now to a comprehensive curriculum that teachers, parents, and students complete together, looking at the cost of post-secondary education, the types of decisions they can make. And we’ve turned all of our library spaces, with the help of the San Diego Workforce Partnership, into launch pads, career development centers, exploring the regional chamber of commerce and the opportunities right here in El Cajon, but also the greater San Diego area with the priority sectors with the workforce partnership. These are our curriculums, this is our vision and mission. And I look forward to the panel for sharing. Thank you for letting me share.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Great. Thank you, David. Thank you for that excellent and inspiring set of videos. That was great. And so let’s move up the educational spectrum a little bit from our K12 system, a little bit more into our high school and early postsecondary. And I’m going to pass it over to Jim VanKouwenberg. Jim is joining us from upstate New York and is also joining us from outside of the education system, from the business community. Jim, you spend your time reaching into high schools and community colleges trying to help young people find their pathway into the very high quality apprenticeships that you offer at Optimax. Can you tell us a little bit about what Optimax does, your apprenticeship programs and what it’s also like to work with the high schools and community colleges in your area?
Jim VanKouwenberg
Sure. I can. Thank you, Mary Alice. I’m really excited about the work that David’s doing. If we could get some of that in New York state, that would be pretty awesome. Megan, can we go to the next slide?
Jim VanKouwenberg
Good afternoon, everybody. I wanted to thank PJ and the Federal Reserve for having us here today. My name is Jim VanKouwenberg and I work for Optimax systems. We’re an advanced manufacturing company near Rochester, New York. We manufacture precision optics. We have a workforce of about 350 employees. A recent example of our work is on the Mars rover Perseverance, which landed on Mars last month. And we made the lenses that are in five of the cameras on that mission. We also provide optics for a wide variety of industry sectors from medical to aerospace, defense, semiconductor, entertainment, optics are everywhere. And one of the things that we’ve been involved with for a long time is providing work experience for young people.
Jim VanKouwenberg
We think that it’s critical for students to explore career paths at a young age so that they can make informed decisions about their post-secondary development, which is great to see what David’s doing along those lines. Today I want to share some of the things that are working well for us and some areas where we could probably use a little help. I want to talk about apprenticeship as post-secondary education, the importance of career exploration and the value of youth apprenticeship programs. Next slide.
Jim VanKouwenberg
It’s important that students are made aware that registered apprenticeship is a really high quality post-secondary education. It includes structured on the job training and related technical instruction. Apprentices learn the mechanics of the role on the job from skilled journey workers and the technical aspects are taught in classroom setting. And that can usually be in a community college, trade school or some sort of online resource. And another important thing to note here is the employer covers the cost of the related instruction. United States Department of Labor lists over 1200 apprenticeable occupations. In 2016, we created our own apprenticeship. We offer a three year program in the trade of precision optics manufacturing technician. Our apprentices are full-time employees. They fill a productive role for the company while they learn the trade from experts in the field. Our apprentices rotate through every aspect of the company, and they get a strong understanding of all aspects from sales to shipping.
Jim VanKouwenberg
Since we focus mostly on optics manufacturing, the majority of the three years it’s spent on the manufacturing floor. Wages increase on a regular basis as the apprentice can create more value. In most apprenticeships, the starting wage is substantially lower than that of a journey worker and increases incrementally as they progress through the program, ending up at a journey worker rate when they receive their papers. In a registered apprenticeship like ours, the journey worker certificate is a portable, nationally recognized credential in their field.
Jim VanKouwenberg
I looked through a bunch of different websites and I found a lot of information comparing the lifetime earnings of workers completing apprenticeship, and they show that to be on par or slightly ahead of those completing a four year degree, which is interesting. Part of that is because the apprentice has the advantage of earning from day one. And they usually end up with no student loan debt to repay. So over the lifetime, it can actually put them ahead of a bachelor’s degree holder. And these are websites like Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development, several different state websites that showed these kind of graphs. If we could go to the next slide.
Jim VanKouwenberg
David was talking about career exploration in his schools. We do a lot of career exploration in our region. We’re committed to providing students with career exploration opportunities. It’s critical for students to understand what their future career might look and feel like. Career exploration begins with facility tours. In a normal year, we would conduct 50 to 60 tours for groups of students and educators, everywhere from pre-K through college. Our tours provide a view of the products we make, our processes and our work environment. We also make presentations in 25 to 30 high schools and middle schools every year. This past year is a little bit different and being unable to host tours or presenting the schools, we ended up creating a virtual tour. And we’ve been presenting that, in fact, we presented it this morning. And so we’ve been presenting that in a lot of schools, and this has really expanded our reach. We’ve gotten beyond the 25 and 30 normal schools that we would present in our immediate region, and expanded out to about a nine county region that we’re presenting to.
Jim VanKouwenberg
All these presentations, some of these students see us as a place that is very interesting, “This is really cool. I’d like to do that.” And then there’s other students that are like, “No way, this is nothing I’m ever going to do.” And we look at both of those as a win. Students are starting to make the informed decisions about what interests them. The next step in our career exploration would be a job shadow. Student spends four to eight hours shadowing an employee in some area that interests them. And we do job shadows throughout the company, we’ve done it manufacturing, marketing, finance, HR, maintenance, a lot of different areas.
Jim VanKouwenberg
And from there, if the students interested, the next step is a paid internship or a co-op. In a normal year, we have 30 to 40 interns and co-ops working in our facility. And these could be high school students that are enrolled in a CTE program or college students in a variety of disciplines. We offer six week paid internships to high school students during the summer between their junior and senior year or immediately after graduation. College co-ops are usually project based and support the students major. Often our college co-ops returned for multiple projects and many become long term employees. Several members of our management team started at Optimax as co-ops.
Jim VanKouwenberg
Another program that I want to throw in here, which is a little bit different, is our Exploring Post. We have an Exploring Post. Exploring is a branch of Boy Scouts of America, if you’re not familiar with them, it’s open to young men and women, ages 15 to 20. And in our program, we typically take a cohort of about 10 to 12 students all the way through the design and manufacturer of some type of optical system. We’ve made VR headsets, we’ve made telescopes. We let the students pick what they’d like to make, and then we figure out how to make it. We provide a hands on understanding of the math that’s required to design the lens system. And then we take them through the manufacturing process to actually make the lenses. We finish by putting that together and create something that the Explorer can take home that they’ve actually made. Exploring is really underdeveloped in advanced manufacturing and this is one area where we’d like to see more employers get involved, because again, it gives the students those strong career exploration opportunities. Next slide, please.
Jim VanKouwenberg
I’ve talked about some of the aspects of our career exploration. This is how we tie them together for our high school recruiting program. We bring many of these things together and we’re trying to get interested students to become full-time team members. You start with their school presentations. From there, interested students are invited to bring their parents to an open house at Optimax. They get a tour, they learn more about the careers that we offer. After that, students that are interested are invited to attend an orientation. And this is basically a three day job shadow that we do during one of the school breaks. Now, we had a problem with that in 2020, we got our February one in, but we weren’t able to do the one in April.
Jim VanKouwenberg
The orientation gives us an opportunity to gauge the student’s interest in aptitude. And it also gives a student a chance to see if this is something they would like to pursue. Interested students, at the end of that, are then offered a six week paid internship over the summer. Successful internships can lead to full-time job offers, if the students have graduated, or co-ops during your senior year. We started this back in 2017 and we’ve got several full-time team members and at least one apprentice that have come through that process. Obviously in 2020, got a little squirrly that stuff went away and students weren’t in school and we weren’t able to have non-essential visitors in our facility. You can go the next slide.
Jim VanKouwenberg
Fortunately in 2019, Monroe Community College and the Rochester Technology Manufacturing Association received a grant to create the Finger Lakes Youth apprenticeship program, and their mission is to match students and CTE programs with manufacturers for job shadows, co-ops, internships, and ideally, full-time positions and apprenticeships. In their first year, they placed about 35 students with potential employers. Even during COVID, they were able to recruit, vet and match 34 students with manufacturing companies. And fortunately, we were able to sign five of their candidates to come into Optimax and hopefully eventually end up in our apprenticeship program. Some of the benefits of youth apprenticeship is if the student is doing work that applies to a registered apprenticeship, whether it’s on the job or in the classroom, they can receive retroactive credit toward their apprenticeship. When they register with the sponsor. Let’s go to the next slide.
Jim VanKouwenberg
This is a new concept in New York state. The Youth Apprenticeship really isn’t recognized here. But it’s well established in several other states, Idaho, North Carolina and Wisconsin, all have strong youth apprenticeship programs. Our goal is to create a critical mass in our region that’s going to force New York to get in line with some of these best practice states to recognize youth apprenticeship. We see the Finger Lakes Youth Apprenticeship Program as the ongoing expansion of what we started with our recruiting program, just with a little more muscle, and they’re able to bring more students and more employers to the table than we were able to do on our own. One of the challenges that I see at the national level is how can we share best practices between states? How can we take advantage of the work that’s being done in Idaho and Wisconsin to bring New York and other states up to speed? Next slide.
Jim VanKouwenberg
Career and tech education. In New York, we have BOCES centers or Board of Cooperative Educational Services. They offer a wide range of career training opportunities. In other states, these are referred to as different things. CESAs, technical high schools, whatever. But these schools offered great hands on vocational training and a lot of dual enrollment opportunities with the community colleges. We work closely with the five BOCES centers in our region, but often we find that these programs are under enrolled. And if we go to the next slide?
Jim VanKouwenberg
In our conversations with some of the school administrators and school board members, we’ve learned that some of these enrollment challenges are due to the cost to the component school district to send their students to the BOCES center. This is something that, again, where we’d like to figure out how we can help defray some of these costs so that we can encourage more students to take advantage of these resources. Because these are really good career exploration opportunities. Let’s see. Can we go to the next slide? Yep.
Jim VanKouwenberg
And just one last thing I want to throw in, when we bring these students in, we don’t intend for them to end their education. We provide 100% tuition assistance for all our employees to continue their education. In just about every industry, lifelong learning is critical. All the technologies in every industry are advancing so rapidly that if you’re not learning, you’re falling behind. So we encourage our team members to continue their education. An employee doesn’t have to pay taxes on tuition benefits up to $5,250 and the employer gets a tax credit up to that amount. So we feel more employers should be offering this kind of education incentive. And again, we’re curious about how we might be able to influence that. And I think one more slide. And that’s pretty much what I’ve got. Thanks for inviting me today. And I’ll turn this back to Mary Alice and I’ll be happy to answer any questions anyone might have. Thanks.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Great. Thank you, Jim. That was great. And such a great program at Optimax and there’s already some questions lining up in the queue. But next we’re going to turn to Michael Sorrell, who is the president of Paul Quinn College? Paul Quinn College is one of a handful of work colleges. This is an urban work college in the country, and we’re going to hear about how that mile works. President Sorrell, I will turn it over to you.
Michael Sorrell
Thank you very much, I appreciate it. It is wonderful to be here with everyone today. I am particularly excited to have an opportunity to share with you our model, but I’m also very, very excited, Mary Alice, about us talking, learning from everyone else and what they’re doing. I thought I would start off with just giving you some context in terms of why this program was so important for us to create. 85% of our students are Pell Grant students, which means that 85% of our students come from the lowest socioeconomic strata in America. These are people whose lives are defined by scarcity and by the inability to do simple things simply. And when that is your experience, it creates a plethora of deficits that need to be addressed. Some are relationship capital deficits, some are learning deficits, but all of them, in one way, shape or form, have been compounded by the fact that this has been your reality for a sustained period of time.
Michael Sorrell
So when our students arrive at our doors, they are eager to learn, they are eager to achieve, but there is foundational work that must be done in order for them to be successful. As we watched and monitored their performance as we went forward, we began to notice that upon graduation, many of our students weren’t able to attract the type of employment that we felt would be transformational for them. And we went to employers and we asked, “Well, why aren’t you hiring our students?” And many of them were very candid, said, “Well, they’re just not ready. They don’t have the emotional intelligence. They don’t have the relationship intelligence. They just aren’t competitive in the marketplace that we participate in.” Now that was particularly hurtful, right? I mean, that’s not what you want to hear, but it is incredibly important to hear the truth.
Michael Sorrell
And right about that time, we were also an institution that was struggling with what would our path forward be? When I arrived 14 years ago, we were a very, very struggling institution. We were given 18 to 24 months to even survive and exist. We had a 1% graduation rate, which is just something, every time I say it, I struggle to understand how that’s even possible. But we were an institution that needed a different path. Then we realized that our students were averaging around $40,000 in student loan debt. And that was primarily because they stayed in school much longer than the average rate, right? So when you’re coming from a Pell Grant background where everything to pay for school is either Pell Grant or student loans, and it’s taking you an extended period of time to graduate, all that adds up.
Michael Sorrell
And so we took a look at all of this and we were trying to figure out what would we do. And we caught a break. I traveled to Detroit, we were changing our recruiting model, we were going to places where we had a competitive advantage, to borrow Michael Porter’s terminology. And we asked ourselves what’s really our competitive advantage? And we came to conclusion at that point in time, being in Dallas was our competitive advantage. We had a great economy and the weather was warm. So we thought about where would this be advantageous? Where would this message be well received? Cities and states where the economies are struggling and cold weather places. So one of the easiest targets during that period was Detroit.
Michael Sorrell
So I traveled to Detroit and meeting with the public schools there and trying to get a deal done. And it wasn’t really working out well. And I became frustrated after several trips and just told my office, before I left that day for the airport, “Just find me a Catholic school,” right? “Just find me a Catholic school to go talk to.” In part, because I went to Catholic schools, I understand the language, I understand the people, I understand the values. They sent me to Detroit Cristo Rey. And Detroit Cristo Rey is one of the work high schools in the Cristo Rey network. And Michael Khoury, who is the president there, walked me through the model. And it was literally as if the heavens opened up, a light shined down on my head and I said, “Well, wait a minute. Why wouldn’t this model work at the college level?” And he said, “Well, it does. They’re the work college.” I said, “Yeah, but all those schools are in rural areas. Why wouldn’t an urban model of this work?” He said, “No, one’s ever tried it.” Bingo.
Michael Sorrell
I came back, we did the research, we presented it to our board and we hatched the plan of becoming a new model of the work college. And one of the things that caused us to embrace this was that we knew it would give us a chance to focus on getting internships for our students, which would then allow them to develop the way they needed to develop, to be able to attract these jobs. We presented it to the students and we said, “Look, I think I can get your student loan debt down. And we think that we can make you more competitive in the marketplace, if you are willing to change your relationship with the institution and help us run the institution.” The students agreed.
Michael Sorrell
And you’re going to fast forward a little bit, and here’s what’s happened since that time or here’s what it became. We created the model where students work an average of 15 hours a week, either on campus or off campus, in corporate internships that we go out and secure. We reduced the cost of attendance, which allowed us to attack the student loan issue. And early on, we’ll just walk through very easily, we took the Pell Grant amount, right? So this is how students pay for school now. Your Pell Grant pays $6,300, and we charge about $16,500 for everything, right? That’s room, board, tuition, fees, everything, because we don’t think people should pay for college for the rest of their lives. Right? And if you subtract the $6,300 from student loan debt, then you’re down to $10,200, right? Each student gets a $5,000 base scholarship for participating in the work program. That’s another $5,000. That $5,000 reduces your loan debt to about $4,800, right? Or the unmet need to $4,800. Then every student picks up an average of $1,500 in additional institutional aid or SEOG funds, which is another federal program, right? That reduces it down to $3,300.
Michael Sorrell
Now at that point, you have a couple of choices. You can either borrow the money, which gives you, even if you borrow it every year, you’re still down to under $15,000 in student loan debt, which is what we’ve reduced the average student loan debt to. Or you can also, if you participate in one of the $15,000 internships that people pay, you can pay that off yourself with some of the additional money. So you pay an additional $3,300. Now you’ve had an $8,000 scholarship, the rest of the $7,000 is spending money for you to have, which keeps you from then having to take out or go get a third or second job, which then allows you to focus more time on your studies, allows you to graduate either on time or early.
Michael Sorrell
What we have seen since the addition to this program, our retention rates have gone up, as I mentioned student loan debt went way down, but what’s really more interesting to me is the types of employment opportunities that we are seeing our students get. One of our, actually our largest partner is JPMorgan Chase. And JPMorgan Chase, every year they’ve hired multiple students from the program, right? That wasn’t happening prior to this. We’ve sent students to go work at private equity firms. That wasn’t happening. Students are going to work at Verizon in management training programs. Our students’ futures have been radically changed because of internships that they have every semester.
Michael Sorrell
So you come to Paul Quinn College, you’re going to graduate with three forms of education under your belt. The first is your subject matter expertise, which is whatever you decide to major in. The second is the experiential learning expertise that you picked up as a result of being a part of this work program. The last part is our credentialing program, where every year students have the opportunity to earn some type of digital credential that they can then use to market themselves going forward. When you take a step back and you look at all of this and you ask, “Is this program successful?” I think you have to answer, absolutely, because what’s our stated goal? One, to better prepare our students for better employment opportunities. Check. To reduce the student loan debt. Check. To make sure that they are emotionally experienced and that we have stood in the gap and help their relationship capital be develop. Check. But also, our graduation rate is, right now with this current cohort, projected to be 40%. We have gone from 1% to 40%, and an enormous part of that is the work program.
Michael Sorrell
I believe in giving people back time and not going on until people’s eyes roll back in their head and don’t want to hear me anymore. But what I will say quite simply is this, it is really, really important that we understand why people come to college. They come to college to get a career, to have gainful employment. Most students do not have the luxury of just coming to college to learn. We romanticized that notion. People who went to schools like I did, I went Oberlin for undergrad, Duke for graduate school and law school, Penn for my doctorate. Those are families, many times, that have the luxury of talking about lifelong learning. I’m an enormous proponent of lifelong learning, I’m just a bigger proponent of lifelong earning. And our students who are coming out of these backgrounds need to know that they’re entering schools that understand the language that they speak. They understand how important it is.
Michael Sorrell
And one other thing that I would really like to add is we have to understand who’s coming to school now. America’s K12 educational system is now defined by poverty. The majority of students are coming from low income backgrounds. Students who are coming from low income backgrounds are going to be Pell Grant students in college. So all these institutions that think it’s okay to educate 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, 10% of their student body being Pell Grant students. When the majority of students are closer to the majority of students in public schools in their states are coming from low income backgrounds, A, I would argue that’s unacceptable. B, I would tell you that those students need a special set of considerations.
Michael Sorrell
We already know 75% plus of all college students are working 20 hours per week or more. So if that’s the case, if we also know that over 85% of employees expect first year students to come to them for entry level jobs or come to them with work experience, we know that over 50% of all students wish college have given them more real world work experience. And these are the numbers before we get to the majority of students coming out of low income families. Then I submit to you, perhaps it’s time for all of higher education to rethink its model and become more student centered. Thank you.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Thank you. That was excellent. And wow, really deeply impressive work that you’re doing there in Dallas. It’s really exciting. And again, I think we’ve just heard three amazing presentations about how to narrow that chasm between schools and the world of work. Students are already in both places a lot of times already at once, but often ironically, our education system is not, and those barriers are a real problem for students. We’ve already got some great questions that have lined up in the chat here. So I’m going to throw some of those out. And David, start with you. We do have a question for you that says “David, when you talk to other super superintendents, what do they say about the challenges they face in modeling what Cajon Valley is doing?” And I’m going to add on to that too, as I recall too, you had done some pretty serious tracking and evaluating of your efforts. I’m wondering if you might share a little bit of that as well when you talk about this?
David Miyashiro
Thank you. Thank you for the question. Yeah. We do have data around the efficacy of our programs. And we’re measuring through Gallup, hope and engagement and financial empowerment, but also vividness around a hope for our possible selves with specific career goals. And vocational psychology that this is grounded in shows that kids that have a hope for possible selves and believe they have the tools and the ability to get there, are going to stay much more engaged in school. And so our superintendents, they all want the same outcomes for the kids, but until the federal and state governments start measuring these things, like vocational development, self-esteem, the types of relationship skills and capital that Michael talked about, it’s going to be helpful for people to change. But right, now we’re actually presenting with the federal government at the Reopening of School Summit, talking about our solutions. And we’re hopeful that the new administration will embrace new ideas about how we hold schools accountable.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Great. Thank you. Thank you. Jim, I’m going to go to you with the next question, which says that, “It sounds like your programs require a big commitment from Optimax, both in terms of timing money?” And I wonder, Michael, if you might also address this, these programs require significant commitments from employers. I wonder if both of you could address a little bit of how do you, or would you convince other employers that they should do what your employer partners are doing, or Jim, in your case, what you’re doing? Yeah,
Jim VanKouwenberg
That is a good observation. It does. And I’m fortunate enough to work for a management team that really recognized the importance of this work. So it’s been my role for the last 15 years or so. In our area, we’ve created the Finger Lakes Advanced Manufacturers Enterprise, and that is a consortium of employers. And one of the things that we do there is try and share some of these best practices and make it easier for a smaller company to piggyback onto some of the work that we’ve been doing. So, yeah, it’s a strong commitment and it’s a challenge for some employers, that’s a real thing. But again, it’s just, we owe it all to our founders that started the company 30 years ago.
Michael Sorrell
No, I think it’s a great observation and a great point. But I think it’s also in just how you frame it, right? Colleges’ and universities’ jobs are providing incredible workforce talent to the workforce, right? And so why shouldn’t the workforce be involved in the cultivating and grooming of that talent? So its very self-serving. Early on in our initiative, we were dealing with employers that just didn’t get it, right? For whatever reason, they only saw it as corporate charity. And what was amazing was we opened up a second campus in Plano, Texas. And for those of you that are unfamiliar with Plano, Texas, it’s a suburb of Dallas, but it’s this incredibly progressive environment for business. And it’s attracting companies from all over the world to form headquarters there.
Michael Sorrell
And when we approached the companies out there about this project, about this program, they all understood exactly what it was. It was access to talent at a cheaper price point than what you would spend when you go through a typical recruiting cycle, hire someone and then hope that it works out, right? What we’re offering you is almost a freebie, look, I mean, because you’re either going to pay $10,000 for two semesters of a student’s time or $15,000, which is still peanuts compared to what these companies are spending in training, recruitment, retention and all of that. And it gives you an opportunity, with our help, to figure out if these students are going to work out for you. So yes, it involves engaging with the corporate community. I happen to think that we have a responsibility to engage with the corporate community and help and get their perspective in the talent that we’re producing for them. I think everyone wins in this arrangement.
Jim VanKouwenberg
And to your point, Michael, it is self-serving. I remember coming out of a meeting, this was back before all the shutdowns happened, and we were at a meeting where all these business owners were lamenting that they couldn’t find talent. And I walked out of the meeting with our HR director and myself and I was like, “Can we say that?” And we can’t because the work that we do, we were able to hire 95 people in 2019, in one year, and have about an 80% retention rate. So this work pays off. Getting other people to recognize that is the key.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Great. Yeah. Great. All very helpful. And yeah, having that sort of mindset take hold though in the employer community sometimes does feel like it takes some work though. So great to have these examples. And a question for all of you, and answer in whatever you order you’d like, but I think in various versions, this question has come, it’s like, how has COVID affected all of this? But for all of you, yeah, I mean, has there been… Jim, you mentioned that being able to reach a lot more students, which is an unexpected benefit, but I’m just wondering, have there been unexpected benefits, have there been real challenges by the pandemic and what have been the lessons from that?
Jim VanKouwenberg
Well, I’ll take some of that. Our hiring has slowed down over the past year, so we’ve just been… We were up around 400 and through attrition, we haven’t had lay anyone off or shut down or anything like that. We’ve been able to work throughout the pandemic. But we’ve had very limited access to our facility. So a lot of the job shadows and tours and things that we’ve done are just off the table. We’re back at a point right now where, through these presentations, which we’ve just started doing over the last month or so, we’re back to having a ton of candidates that are interested in job shadows and internships this summer. So we’re having a discussion this week about how much of that we’re going to be able to accommodate this year and what we want to. Work is very good, our business is very strong and our bookings are tremendous and we need to start hiring some more people. So we’re going to be finding ourselves switching it back into that mode pretty promptly here.
Michael Sorrell
Yeah. I think for us, it’s undeniable that the corporate work program aspect of our college has been changed. In part, I mean, we went virtual. When we went virtual in March, we did so knowing, or let me say this, really expecting that we would maintain virtual status until August of 2021. And that’s what we’ve seen. Because we didn’t think there was any way safely. I mean, I know others have found a way to survive. For us, the downside of it was so, so scary for such a close knit community like ours. So we’ve had virtual internships, but what we’ve done as an institution, we’ve then taken the students who would’ve been in internships and re-enrolled everyone in an intensive year long training program. Because we identified holes that we could, frankly, improve our performance in and that’s been a gift.
Michael Sorrell
And then from an institutional standpoint, we’ve literally remade the entire institution. By the time the students come back in August, they will see three brand new buildings that will have been completed. They will see that we have partnered with a KIPP charter school and Dallas Independent School District to open two new high schools on the campus. We’ve added our first graduate degrees. We’ve added a path and jogging trail throughout the college. We’ve cleared out land to create a forest for the school. We repaved the roads. We’ve added an honors college, an urban scholars program. So what we’ve tried to do is teach students how you make best use of the disruptions in your life, and that there are no bad experience, there’s only what you choose to do with the experiences you have.
David Miyashiro
Amen. I love that question. When we shut down our schools, we brought all staff together, 900 plus teachers, 3000 employees, and said, “For the first time in my career, we’re called essential. We’re essential workers. Teachers made the list. And that means we have to open our schools up for our family so they can go to work and so the economy can continue.” And our staff showed up to provide meal service, to provide instruction and care. And we were the only district in April that was open for our community for those purposes as essential workforce.
David Miyashiro
But looking at the essential workers, our healthcare infrastructure, Department of Defense, all the different jobs that take care of the community, don’t necessarily have a straight path to a four year university, a lot of trade, a lot of internships, a lot of opportunity where kids can learn on the job and maybe go get a degree later, once they decide, “Well, I like development, but I want to be an architect. So I’ll go to a four year school now.”
David Miyashiro
And it really changed the conversation around essential workforce and validating that all work has value, there’s dignity in all work. Food supply chain, people working at the grocery stores for the first time, thank you for your service. Really, it’s validating in terms of the work that I think that all three of us are doing in our different environments, but we can’t lose sight of this post COVID in terms of how we deem the value and dignity of work and gainful employment as a means to an end. Three quarters of my students come from below the poverty line. And this is why we’ve changed our system so that we can deliver on the investment that they’re making with their 12 years at school with us.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Wow. What a wonderful, beautiful note to end on is how the pandemic has made us see essential workers and appreciate essential work and ways that sometimes maybe we… our conversations from education training don’t shed enough light. So that is really beautiful. And we are at 2:43, and if I remember correctly, I am going to turn it back over to Megan now. Megan Vantoluis, am I right about that? If not, I can also ask another question, but I thought, I feel like-
Megan Vantoluis
Yeah.
Mary Alice McCarthy
… Okay.
Megan Vantoluis
I think go ahead and ask maybe one final question and then we’ll turn it over to PJ.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Sure. Great. Alrighty. You would like me to ask that one final… Oh, I’d be happy to, okay. Pardon me.
Megan Vantoluis
Sure. Yeah.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Yeah. I’m sorry, Megan. Yeah. Going back to our earlier instructions, which I obviously did not pay enough attention to. Yeah, I think as a final question, just for all of you just on the way out, we have a new administration, David, you addressed specifically some things that you hope the new administration does, but if each of you could identify just one or two policy changes or investments that you think the new administration, the new Congress could make, what would you like to see? And what do you think would be helpful to you and your students and your employees?
David Miyashiro
I’ll start it. We’re speaking to them right now. And our mission is to change federal policy around how we measure success. Our vision is happy, kids and healthy relationships on a path to gainful employment. If we’re successful, we’ll have happy adults engaged in healthy relationships, gainfully employed. Gainfully employed people in healthy relationships with healthy self-esteem don’t commit crime. They don’t do drugs. They contribute to society. And so a lot of the societal problems will be fixed if we start reshaping our systems of education around success in the world. My hope.
Michael Sorrell
I love that. I would say double the Pell Grant and make sure that the Pell Grant’s available year round. The Pell Grant has not kept pace with inflation or the cost of living. The Pell Grant, because it hasn’t done so, then opens up students to having to work in ways that really aren’t conducive to the educational experience and the way that we think is important. And it reduces an enormous amount of financial pressures on hardworking people. They’re trying to do the right things. There’s this notion from some people that people who come from under resourced communities, that it’s somehow their fault and that they don’t work hard enough. And that is garbage, right? These are folks who work harder and longer than most. But what it is they can’t catch up for the things that have happened much longer ago. And so doubling the Pell gives them the resources to go through school, not rack up $35,000, $40,000 in student loan debt and alleviate some of the stress in their lives. The alleviation of stress absolutely translates into reduced medical bills, which is a value to our society as well. So the magic elixir looks are from my standpoint, double the Pell Grant.
Jim VanKouwenberg
And for us, I would say continuous support for apprenticeships. Our apprenticeship was started after a nudge by the Obama administration. We hosted Vice President Biden at the time. And shortly after that, we were tasked with creating our apprenticeship. And it’s been a really great thing for us. The Trump administration was positive on apprenticeship as well. And I think that the Biden administration seems to be headed in the same direction. So I’d like to see that. And again, making the students aware that this is a post-secondary education that they should be looking into, or at least weighing out.
Mary Alice McCarthy
Great. That’s excellent answers, very concrete policy actions too, that I think are very much in the conversation right now. So it’s exciting. And I think it’s going to be an exciting year. Okay. And so with that, I think I’m going to hand it over to PJ. Thank our panelists, who have done just an excellent job. Thank you for this great conversation. And PJ, I’ll hand it back to you.
PJ Tabit
Thank Mary Alice. And yes, I definitely echo my thanks to you, to Jim, Michael and David for participating on the panel. And to all of you for attending.