Speech at ACE

Our country’s demand for higher education has never been greater, and our expectations have never been higher. You--the institutions represented by ACE--will play a primary role in determining whether the next generation of Americans has the building blocks it needs to succeed.

When your students succeed and prosper, our nation succeeds and prospers.

I have three key points to make today:

• The first is that completion matters. In the next decade, higher education needs to apply the same kind of rigor, innovation, and determination to success as it has over the last 50 years to access. We need to do better than 50 percent completion rates in 150 percent of expected time to degree.
• The second is that achieving the goal of increasing completion, while maintaining access and quality, will require innovation and transformation, not business as usual.
• The third is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to partnering with you in this work.

In 2007, when Warren Buffett made his extraordinary gift, Bill and Melinda began asking “What else?” What else should we be doing to reduce inequity? I led an effort for over a year to produce an answer to that question. Extensive research led us to conclude that the biggest problem the country faces is the steep decline we’ve seen over the last several decades in socioeconomic mobility. The painful reality we now face is that if you are born poor today in the US, you are more likely to stay poor than ever before.

Bill and Melinda also asked: What’s the one thing that, if we got it right, could move 70 percent of the problem? Based on all the data, we concluded that the best way to combat this challenge was to ensure that most young adults, especially low income young adults, complete a credential beyond high school by the end of their twenties, so that they can qualify for jobs that pay enough to support a family. As a result, the foundation has launched a new, multi-year, core domestic program: Postsecondary Success.

We hope not just to support promising programs, but to spur fundamental, systemic change in how we all work together. Significantly more young people must acquire the education they need to lead economically productive lives and sustain our nation’s well-being.

For myself, like many of you, this is highly personal work. I’d wager that almost all of you believe that higher education is essential for our democracy and society. You’re committed to the idea that education is our society’s “great equalizer” and that young people should not be denied educational opportunities simply because of where they’re from or who their parents are.

That’s a belief that runs deep in me. I was born in South Africa, eight years into the apartheid regime. My father was South African, my mother American. We came to the United States when I was still young, but we made regular trips back to South Africa, and I saw how a society that fails to treat all lives equally destroys its promise.

My mother founded the first program in continuing education for women at Washington University. This was during the 1960s, when many women were entering the labor force and found they needed to go back to school for education and skills they hadn’t thought they needed. She used to take me and my brother and sister back to the University with her at night because that was the only time that continuing-education classes were offered. She had to coax faculty into teaching them. And she fought hard to create some way that women could get academic credit for prior life experience.

Before joining the foundation, I spent two decades at Jobs for the Future, where one of my great privileges was the role I played in the creation and support of Early College High Schools. Throughout my years leading JFF, we researched and developed strategies to ensure that high school students could get a head start on college level work and that American workers have access to the ongoing training and education they need to compete in a global economy.

Many of you in this room have the same, or very similar, goals. I want to challenge us to reflect on whether we are adapting the goals we share to see and serve who our students really are.

Three-quarters of college students today fit the definition of the “non-traditional” student: they work to support themselves in addition to taking classes; they have families of their own; they cycle in and out of schools accumulating credit but rarely graduating. It is no longer appropriate to refer to these students as “non-traditional.” At the foundation, we call them “the new majority.”

Educating these students well and getting them across the finish line is the biggest challenge facing higher education today for this simple reason: They are the talent that will replace the baby boomers, whose retirements will result in a shortage of 14 million college educated workers over the next decade.

Meeting the nation’s needs will require us to excel at supporting postsecondary success for the rising generation--disproportionately students of color and low-income students.

You know the data, but it bears repeating. Over the next ten years, the number of working-age Hispanics will increase 83 percent. The number of African-Americans in the workforce is projected to grow 23 percent. The share of the workforce comprised of whites will fall by 3 percent, according to the Census Bureau.

And we know who our educational system serves the worst. Hispanics and African-Americans. Most of the conversation around this challenge focuses on the shortcomings of the K-12 system, but these failings are heartbreakingly true of higher education as well. Higher education has done a remarkable job of increasing college access. The entering class at most colleges today looks like America. But the graduating class does not. The students who walk across the stage are overwhelmingly white.

They are also overwhelmingly high income. Belle Sawhill and Ron Haskins at Brookings have documented what to me are shocking statistics. Children born to families in the highest quintile of income are twice as likely to go to college as are children born to families in the lowest quintile. Most of your institutions know this, and are working to change it—although the erosion of needs-based financial aid in favor of merit-based aid should concern us all. The more shocking fact is that children of the highest income families are five times more likely to complete college than those in low income families. And practices and policies directly in control of postsecondary institutions can affect these numbers. How can higher education claim to be the great engine of equity in our society with statistics like these?

That is why the compounding effect of years of budget cuts decimating higher education is so very challenging. We only need to see what’s happening in places like California to understand how necessary it is to keep college accessible and affordable even as we work to improve college completion rates.

We can’t do much to change the fiscal situation in the states, but we can seize this opportunity to innovate in how we deliver education to serve the students who don’t earn college degrees today.

At a time when funding is down and our aspirations are up, business as usual won’t get us where we need to go. For example, the most conservative of estimates of President Obama’s goal of once again being the most educated country in the world by 2020—we’re currently tenth—put the needed increase in credential completion at somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million more degrees a year, on top of the almost 2.5 million degrees we currently produce. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s goal of doubling the numbers of low income young adults who receive a credential by 2025 is even more of a challenge.

These aspirations are ill-chosen at best, crazy at worst. Unless.

Unless we are able to see and serve the new majority of students...Unless we are able to come together and take completion seriously. Coming together will mean gathering the collective will and doing the institutional work necessary to make current pathways to college completion more flexible and focused. And it will also mean welcoming new trailblazers to the journey, other institutions and partners who can create new pathways to success for today’s students. Students who need a system that will allow them to earn a high quality degree and skills at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time. A system that gets them further, faster.

Certainly we at the Gates Foundation don’t have all the answers. And we respect the wrenching financial decisions that you all confront daily. But we are guided by the “impatient optimism” of our founders. Moreover, we are already seeing flexible, focused, and informed models emerging—both inside and outside of traditional academia.

We’re seeing these innovations in places like Western Governors University, I recently had the privilege to participate in one of their graduations and I was deeply impressed by the dedication and persistence of the students I met. WGU is a rare breed: a high-quality, low cost NON-PROFIT university that has not raised tuition in four years. An online university, it combines high-touch and high-tech approaches. It searches out the best curriculum developed elsewhere and focuses on teaching it well. It relies on competency based progression, not seat-time or credit hours, and it uses external assessments to evaluate student proficiency.

We’re seeing similar innovations from organizations outside of higher education. A good example is the military, which, with your help, has pioneered a large scale solution to a widespread problem.

About 60 percent of all college graduates today earn their degrees from institutions different from where they began their studies. In short, students move around. They might start at a trade school, switch to a community college, cycle in and out of school while working and maybe end up at a four-year institution. But as you know, they often can’t take their credits with them.

Students tell us that this is one of the biggest barriers to completion that they face: their credits–earned and paid for–are not universally accepted at other schools. Too often changing schools means starting over—losing money, time and self-esteem

But there is one group of students unaffected by this problem: The men and women who serve our country in the United States military.

In addition to being the world’s peacekeepers, confronters of terrorism and first responders when natural disaster strikes, as we’ve seen in Haiti, the United States military has also managed to solve the credit transfer issue.

Since 1972, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their family members have obtained college degrees through the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges. It’s a network of 1,800 colleges and associations that have dedicated themselves to providing a nearly seamless college experience for soldiers and their family members. These are students who are constantly relocating, and who need a dizzying array of classes, services. and degrees in order to advance their careers and goals. The military recognized this and solved the problem, with your help, as many of you are members of this network.

In 2000, the Army took this idea further, and created GoArmyEd, an online network that allows soldiers to take classes at 29 colleges and universities, anywhere in the world, any time. Through subcontracts and collaboration, GoArmyEd offers 24/7 support, tutoring, a virtual library, and college counseling.

Talk about “non-traditional” students: More than 25 percent of soldiers are new to higher education, and many of them, obviously, are on the other side of the world fighting a war. Nevertheless, GoArmyEd’s course completion rate is 83 percent, and more than 4,000 degrees have been awarded since the program’s inception.

The military example shows us that we can effect transformative change at scale. Yet, in many states, hardworking civilian students can’t get that kind of service, or even take their community college calculus credit to the four-year private university across town.

For decades, Florida has remained the shining example of a simple, clear statewide transfer system that puts students first—and relies on the leadership of faculty to verify the quality of courses. But most other states still rely on institutionally brokered articulation agreements and too many courses completed never transfer. These are the types of efforts we should engage in together so that we can accelerate success for larger numbers of students.

Here’s another example, one you may not have heard of–yet. But you will. The Midwest CREST–a virtual bank where students from 12 midwestern states can park the credits they’ve earned from multiple colleges and universities, while they plot a path toward a degree.

Our grantee, the Midwestern Higher Education Compact, received only a small investment from the foundation. Yet the media attention and interest already from other states shows the hunger felt by those outside higher education for real and innovative solutions.

The Gates Foundation funded this idea because we think it holds enormous possibilities to serve students in ways that turn traditional thinking about higher education upside down. For example, after examining a student’s banked credits, a university could offer the student a “bid” on finishing the degree by offering a specific curriculum and financial aid package that would lead to graduation.

How’s that for a reversal of thinking: Instead of students applying to colleges, the colleges could be applying to the students.

These examples show that universities will face competition from groups that see possibility in places where the status quo seems only to see the barriers of self-interest.

Another example is the unmistakable growth of the for-profit sector, which shows us that significantly more “ new majority” students–for better or for worse--will choose institutions that meet their needs for flexible, student-centered education. We are very interested in the practices of the best of these institutions. Just this academic year, the University of Phoenix eclipsed California State University as the second largest higher-education system in the country, with 455,600 students—behind only the State University of New York.

For-profit universities now educate about 7 percent of the nation's roughly 19 million students who enroll at degree-granting institutions each fall. And the proportion rises to 10 percent, or 2.6 million, if you count students who enroll year round. Twenty-three percent of all low income students attend for profit universities. When we ran the numbers in 2007, before the recent spike in community college enrollments, they showed that if the double digit annual growth rates of for-profits continue, for profit institutions will educate the majority of this country’s low-income students within 10 years. Is this the kind of future we want: in which higher cost for-profits educate our lowest income students, and public institutions, and the privates, educate our middle and upper income students?

This increasing and good flexibility in pathways to degrees needs to be joined by sharpened focus on core issues. At the Gates Foundation, we believe the greatest core challenge in education for our generation is the moral and economic imperative to solve what we call the “academic catch-up” challenge. That is the waste of human talent and potential presented by our persistent failure across the education spectrum to help academically underprepared students get the skills they need to thrive. Despite all of our efforts to reform the K-12 system, the phenomenon of students entering higher education underprepared is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

That is why the foundation’s biggest programmatic investments target academic catch up. We understand that far too many young adults arrive on your campuses with poor academic skills. With complicated family lives that eat into study time. With worries that most of us rarely contemplate. And those factors do, without a doubt, make your jobs tougher.

But we cannot let them be reasons to accept failure, or even 50 percent completion rates.

Here’s the imperative that I’d challenge all of us to adopt: once we cash a student’s tuition check, we must accept responsibility for their success. Yes, success is complicated by student skill and will, but the imperative remains. If we expect students to take responsibility for their learning, we must take responsibility for our role in their completion as well. It’s a tough stance, I know. But it’s one we believe in. And as Bill Bowen and Mike McPherson’s meticulous work in Crossing the Finish Line shows, it is something institutions can influence if they try.

We see the vast inefficiencies and poor track record of remedial education as the first and biggest cause of low completion rates. It’s education’s Bermuda Triangle–students enter it and most are never seen or heard from again. Nobody likes it: Legislators don’t want to pay for it, professors don’t want to teach it, and students don’t want to take it. Yet roughly one in three college students need it, even though most of them won’t emerge on the other side as college graduates.

Developmental education, as currently construed, isn’t working. Yet we spend an estimated $2 billion a year on it. The CUNY system alone spends $30 million on this.

That’s why the foundation has made accelerating academic catch up—which we see as bigger than simply fixing remedial education–a priority. We hope to attract the best intellectual talent in education to tackle academic catch-up.

• We’re investing in solutions like Cabrillo College’s Digital Bridge Academy which has reconfigured the first semester of college to build in the supports and programs necessary to create academic momentum for students who have never experienced it. In a year, Digital Bridge transforms under-prepared and at-risk students into full-fledged, successful college students.

  I am excited to announce that today the Gates and Hewlett foundations are investing $3.6 million to expand Cabrillo to 4 additional colleges, expanding its reach to 1440 students.

• We’re partnering with organizations like Gateway to College which, through dual credit programs, provides drop-outs not only a high school diploma, but an average of 41 college credits by the time they complete. 90 percent indicate that they will continue their educations in college.
• We understand that we can provide some of the R&D capital your institutions need, and we have partnered with Carnegie Mellon and the Monterey Institute to support their work to blend the best of learning science and technology to create, evaluate and continuously improve virtual learning environments that accelerate students' academic progression in basic Math and language arts.
• We support the nationally recognized I-BEST program in Washington, which increases degree completion by integrating academic, technical, and remedial instruction, giving students just the right education in just the right amount of time for students to earn a postsecondary credential.

These are examples of the kind of creativity and divergent thinking necessary to drive completion rates up. If more campuses embraced solutions like these, you would have money to reinvest in your capacity to enroll and graduate significantly more students.

Finally, the Gates Foundation is trying to leverage systemic changes at both the state and federal levels, and one way we think we can do that is through the transparency of information.

The commendable work of the community colleges committed to Achieving the Dream reveals the power of getting accurate, timely information on student success into the hands of educators and policymakers.

Yet nationally, the quality of information we need in order to know how to accelerate completion while lowering costs and maintaining quality ranges from mediocre to nonexistent. For starters, we can’t even decide how to define and measure college completion, let alone collect the data in a standardized way.

But, without good data, how do we know if we’re improving? And, if we are improving, without data how do we know what is causing the improvement? This absence of good information leaves everyone flying blind: Lawmakers whose funding decisions could benefit from a healthy dose of non-partisan data; students whose school selection process is too often haphazard and based too much on school reputation; university presidents who are continually asked to do more with less.

That’s why, through a series of selective grants, we’re working with states to develop and improve data systems that will enable comprehensive student tracking and institutional transparency. And we agree with you that tracking first-time full-time enrollees like IPEDS does gives outsiders an incomplete picture of what you do. That’s why we believe strongly that you must also track and count your part-time students. Not tracking their success ignores their efforts, hurts your ability to serve them better, and it lets you off the hook for their failures.

Some in higher education are resisting this effort for better data. They argue that this sort of number crunching is intrusive and does not account for the complexity of a school’s mission or the demographics of its students. While we appreciate the challenges inherent in developing such measurements, we do not think any of them are insurmountable.

Indeed, as your own president, Molly Broad, said earlier in this conference: Better measurement is coming. With the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act alive in Congress, and with the president’s American Graduation Initiative underway, lawmakers are not going to simply hand institutions of higher education billons in new money and then walk away.

Of course, investments and improvements in the transparency of information on student progress and success cannot neglect the value-add of what students learn and are able to do as a result of their postsecondary educations.

The Gates and Lumina foundations are proud supporters of a new voluntary accountability system under development by the American Association of Community Colleges. This builds on the pioneering work of the Association of Public Land-Grant Universities, which two years ago was one of the first major groups to talk openly about the need for accountability.

And last week, the Gates Foundation and four national foundations (Lumina, Ford, Carnegie, and Kellogg) helped launch Complete College America, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused solely on supporting state efforts to dramatically improve college completion rates.

Governors, higher education and business leaders from 17 states stood up and committed themselves to improving degree completion rates and closing completion gaps by race and income. Working with Complete College America, colleges and universities and policymakers in these states will receive support from leading experts on improving college success, including how to build consensus for reform, how to develop state and campus completion plans, and how best to use federal funding to produce more degrees.

Tennessee, for example, was one of the first states to sign up for Complete College America’s platform. In a special session this past January, lawmakers showed leadership and a desire to recast the state’s higher education system through a comprehensive reform package. By a large bipartisan majority, Tennessee enacted changes should make it easier for its community college students to transfer between schools and to public four-year universities. In a bold move, the law will tie university budgets to the number of students who graduate rather than how many enroll. And it will force four-year universities to stop offering remedial courses to students who lag behind their peers.

These are complicated issues, and there is no silver bullet. What works in one state won’t work – and shouldn’t necessarily be tried--in every state. But, we believe these types of reforms will make schools more accountable for failing students, focus their missions and, ultimately, help more students move further, faster towards their degrees.

In closing, I want to emphasize that we at the Gates Foundation know that you share these goals, even if we approach the problem from different perspectives. We are here to support you, and if you choose, to be your partner in this effort.

Some question whether it is prudent to try to graduate so many more students, and what will have to be sacrificed to reach ambitious completion goals.

But think of the alternative if we don’t embrace transformative changes that reorient entire systems to graduate many more of our new majority students. We’ll sacrifice the diverse, civil society that we treasure, the economic mobility we take for granted, and the futures of young children who would otherwise be first in their families to graduate college—as I know so many of you were.

Getting there will require a clear purpose and determination to ensure that we, as a nation, recognize that access to higher education is no longer enough. Achieving success and completion for the tens for thousands not served today –without diminishing access or quality—must become our new purpose. Let’s work together to make it real.

Thank you.