Insights from Year One of EAB's "Moon Shot for Equity"

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0:00:13.5 Mark Mone: Civilization, and I would argue democracy, is a race between education and chaos. And I think that we have to look at ourselves and say, “What is the role of higher education in particular?”

0:00:26.7 Tom Sugar: That was Mark Mone, Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and our guest today on Office Hours with EAB. You don’t wanna miss it.

0:00:44.2 TS: Welcome to Office Hours with EAB. We’re delighted to have you with us today, and I’m very, very excited about today’s guest. I’m Tom Sugar, Vice President for partnerships at EAB, and I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Chancellor Mark Mone of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Mark is a compelling leader for so many ways, and I am looking forward to unpacking each and every one of those in our conversation today. Welcome, Mark, to Office Hours with EAB. We are delighted to have you.

0:01:18.4 MM: Good morning, Tom, it’s great to be here, thank you.

0:01:21.2 TS: You bet. You know, Mark, we’ve known each other for a long time, and I was preparing for our session today by going back through my calendar, and what our listeners should know that is most important in my mind in this moment, is that you represent the largest institution and the first institution to take up the challenge of the Moon Shot for Equity. And when I looked at the calendar, Mark, that conversation started all the way back in December of 2019, when you and your colleagues and the other institutions in the Moon Shot invited me up to dinner and a visit, to reflect on and think about whether the Moon Shot for Equity was the right match for you. Now, think about that, listeners, December 2019, how different the world was in that moment. No pandemic yet, no George Floyd, no Ahmaud Arbery, no Jacob Blake. And still, and after all of those experiences, this leader, Mark Mone, and his colleagues, chose to press forward. Mark, I gotta take you back to that moment.

0:02:31.8 TS: When you think about it, that dinner in December, our visits in January and February, and then boom, March hit of 2020 and the pandemic struck. And here you are over a year later and working deeply in the Moon Shot, and so much has been accomplished. What made you go forward when others fell to the wayside, when other regions said, “Tom, I gotta hit the pause button,” you chose to go forward. Why?

0:02:58.2 MM: Well, I think there’s two factors. One, when you visited with us, it was at a time that was perfect, because we had momentum. And when I say we, there’s a powerful partnership across this region, and I think that’s the beauty of how the Moon Shot is structured, that it’s not working alone as an institution but recognizing the collective power. These issues that we’re facing societally are so big. No one institution alone can really address them adequately, so the partnerships between two-year and four-year educations, the partnerships between K-12, higher ed, all of that has to be part of the system. So you rolled in, EAB really caught us as we were gaining momentum and it was rooted in a social consciousness. And so that was the context, that was number one. And then as we’re rolling along, recognizing the inequities, recognizing the, frankly, racial disparities and other gaps that exist in our communities, and the role that education plays, the pandemic exacerbated. And while other communities absolutely had to address those, higher education communities in particular really had their financials turned upside down, enrollments were going sideways, we had to let students go, we had to break contracts, it was really financially devastating, it was existential, it was one of those moments in higher ed.

0:04:17.2 MM: But in that, in all of that murky fog and uncertainty, we knew one thing was critically important: The hardships and the challenges that were being faced were disproportionate. We saw that immediately, we saw how many fewer students of ours had access to technology, had access to the kinds of tools and resources that many of us might take for granted. So we said we have to have even more commitment to closing the racial and equity gaps that exist.

0:04:47.6 MM: And that’s the central part of Moon Shot, we are eliminating, we’re not cutting them by 10% or 20%, we’re getting rid of them entirely by 2030. And the only way to do that is to make sure we are committed all the way around, so it was a stand-up moment, and I’m really proud of our partners in this region, from Carthage College, UW Parkside, Milwaukee Area Technical College that joined UW Milwaukee and really forged ahead and said, Now is the time. This is the social issue of our time, and it didn’t just happen at the time of the pandemic, it preceded that. But those conditions actually underscore the importance of the work that we’re doing together. So that’s a good look at back in time.

0:05:28.4 TS: Well, one of the things that surprised me most as I prepared for my first visit to Milwaukee was learning that Milwaukee has some of the most segregated high schools in the country, some of the worst outcomes for Black citizens in terms of health and social mobility, in the country. Who would have thought Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of all places? And I remember that was top of mind for you when you decided to organize the Higher Education Regional Alliance, and you served as the first chair of that organization, bringing people together to get serious about those disparities.

0:06:08.2 MM: There’s a real need. When you combine those that have been left behind and the racial segregation that exists, and you combine that with the employer needs, you see this huge opportunity, you see this opportunity for education. And I’m firmly…

0:06:28.2 MM: Just one of the most bedrock things about me, is that I firmly believe that education is one of the… Between education and employment, these two pillars are the answers to so much of the issues that we’re facing, not just in this region, but frankly, in society. When you look at the outcomes of what education leads to in terms of social mobility, employment, home ownership, health outcomes, incarceration, number of different outcomes, that to me is critical. There’s a line, and I think it’s so relevant today, and it’s… I cannot recall who the original author of this line is, but civilization, and I would argue, democracy, is a race between education and chaos. And I think that we have to look at ourselves and say, “What is the role of higher education in particular?”

0:07:19.5 MM: And one of the things that I noticed, having been at UW-Milwaukee for a long time, is that we often times can be insular at higher ed and we can do everything to try to increase success once students get here, but we don’t reach out and we feel like the borders and the boundaries are the physical perimeters of our campus. That’s not working, that flat out is not working, and we have to take on the ownership of recognizing in our communities, especially as urban universities, what more we must do. And so that’s what I’m really excited about in terms of the progress that we’ve made, the actions that we’ve taken, and especially the mindsets with which we’ve been attacking these issues. But that’s what’s needed, and that’s what’s so cool about our partnership, and we need to do it together.

0:08:05.4 TS: Share that quote again, Mark. It’s a compelling one. Please, about civilization and chaos.

0:08:11.3 MM: So I’ve added a little bit to it along the way, but the idea is that civilization, and I’m arguing democracy today, is truly a race between education and chaos, and which one is getting ahead of the other. I think that that’s a big question.

0:08:26.6 TS: Boy, that’s super powerful in this moment. Super powerful, as we speak this morning, on an election day, actually, in this country. A significant…

0:08:35.5 MM: Yeah.

0:08:35.7 TS: Drawing lots of national attention, in the week when a trial is beginning in Kenosha, the aftermath of last Summer and the racial unrest that broke out in Kenosha, part of the Moon Shot for Equity. Big cultural questions, big questions around education. And you hinted on that, you said, “It’s time for higher education leaders to really step up and embrace and accept the unique responsibility for leadership that you must provide in your communities.” I suppose we can step back and… Mark, you remember me, I was a Chief of Staff, United States Senate, so I’ve seen the limitations of government and the excesses of partisanship firsthand. I firmly believe that leadership is going to have to come from a lot of different sectors today. Waiting for government to be functional enough to address these issues, is not a recipe for success. And so that’s why it matters so much to me, that leaders like you have decided to accept these responsibilities. But it’s so much more than that. I remember our conversation. Have these all around the country too, Mark, where many university presidents and community college presidents look at the Moon Shot for Equity agenda, look at the 15 best practices that are required and the synergistic connections with technology, and they like to say, “We’re already doing that, we’re already doing that.”

0:10:10.5 TS: And Mark, they’re thinking about the “We’re already doing that” in a very siloed approach. They may be committed leaders, they may have advanced student success initiatives, but they’ve been doing it within their institutions, not between their institutions. And that’s where I wanna go next, is this notion of leadership through connectedness. Connectedness, really understanding that your responsibilities aren’t just to yourselves, but it’s to your larger community, and especially in partnership with your other higher education leaders. So you guys were working on reforms at UWM, you were focused on many of these things, why did you see the value of the Moon Shot in starting to create those stronger connections with your peers?

0:10:56.0 MM: The issue that you point out is a barrier to progress that I’ve seen, not just at UW-Milwaukee, but frankly, all the institutions, and we’re talking about 18 different institutions with which we partner, and that is this idea that we’re doing it, or we’re already working on student success, and they can trot out any academic institution across this country, can trot out their formulas, their paths and what they’re working on. And I admire and I uphold and truly do think those are the right tracks, but I ask this question, “How much of that is lip service versus how much of that is student service?” And I really ask people to ask the fundamental question that my colleague, Vicky Martin, who is the President of MATC, said when she continued to encounter that same issue within her institution, and when others were expressing this, “We’re already doing it,” she said, “Yeah? And how is that working for you? Look at the data. I’m sorry. Look at the data.” I’ve gotta repeat that. Look internally, look at your gaps, and I can almost guarantee that you would say your academic institution is not A) graduating students at a high enough rate, and B) especially when we look at gaps between different student populations that we serve. Very few academic institutions in this country are.

0:12:41.8 MM: I would go so far as to say, if we were to evaluate by using the traditional standards of four-year and six-year graduation rates, Tom, it’s unacceptable. We’re not passing, in an academic institution, I would not give us even a C grade. As an academic industry, you cannot have a six-year average national graduation rate that is less than 50%. You can’t have a four-year graduation rate in the 20s and then go lower than that when you’re talking about different racial populations that we serve. So those are things that I look at and I go back to this idea of, even in public education where we’re so accessible…

0:13:04.0 MM: Is it the price point alone or are there other avenues, other aspects. So let’s talk in specific detail about a few of those. Transfer situations. Transfer situations are a classic one where we can have all sorts of policies and even articulation agreements, and we can take pride in the number of articulation agreements, but in reality, when you talk to students, those don’t work a lot of times. So what are we doing to take, physically, our advisors, and go into two-year colleges, to go into high schools, to really spend time listening to the voice of the customer, of the student, and live a day in their life and really work through what those processes are. I can tell you we thought we were pretty good, and then our provost’s son was trying to transfer from… He was trying to transfer, and he started saying, “Dad, how does this work?” And our own provost got into understanding the problems… We claim we do this, and yet there’s three different confusing aspects on the website. It’s just these little barriers, it’s all these little things.

0:14:07.0 TS: There’s so much to unpack there. You hit on a couple of very, very important themes, Mark. This notion of transfer, and I’m gonna open that up with you a little bit because I really do think that’s the next stage of the work. But it’s the cross-institutional aspect of it. Again, you guys were looking at many things, and tried many things, and some would say, “Okay, these graduation rates aren’t what we want, we have to do even more internally to fix them.” But what you discover in the Moon Shot, a year into it now, is that your internal efforts at reform are actually accelerated by working simultaneously across institutions. Peer pressure is a real thing. And when folks gather together on a task force around academic holds, or financial holds, as one example, something you guys have worked on, you start comparing notes.

0:15:26.3 TS: Institution to institution, you see the best practices, you hear the advice from experts like Georgia State, who’s a national mentor in the Moon Shot, and then you go, “Oh my gosh, we have studied this thing forever, we have admired this problem in perpetuity, we’ve audited our processes, but we never pulled the trigger.” And when you sit there around the table with your collaborators, your peers academically, in the two-year sector, in the private sector, in the four-year sector, and you’re comparing notes, you’re a little embarrassed, honestly, that you haven’t gotten the work done. And so the stage was set, the table was set for action, but it was the cross-institutional work that made you pull the trigger. Tell us about that, Mark, and tell us about the wonderful result you already had on that issue alone, around retention grants and the calls.

0:16:01.7 MM: The power comes… This is a great question you’re asking, because it deals with both mechanical issues, but also the bigger, and what I consider more important cultural ethos. And let me explain what I mean by that. EAB brought to the table, things around equity-mindedness training, working with Shaun Harper and colleagues at USC, working with this mindset and learning together, so absolutely. But looking internally at registration holds, and how they could be reformed, and transfer pathways, these are mechanical aspects. To your point, we’ve admired, we’ve known about these issues. But what happened with EAB and Moon Shot, and what I really think is the power and the… I call it the Pal, [chuckle] what I really like about this, is the focus and accountability. And what that’s driven, is today, 350 more students are on my campus, because of elimination of artificial barriers, these minuscule things that we knocked out.

0:17:03.2 MM: We had 28 different holds, reasons why students couldn’t register. We knocked them out, we took them out. We said, “That is holding students back.” And you know what? The net cost for us was trivial, in the big scheme of things. But students, between that and our retention grants, the additional… Recognizing the impact of the pandemic, we have today, 450 more students that started college this Fall, that otherwise would not have been able to continue. And when you’re talking about retention, when you’re talking about graduation and ultimately time to paycheck, that is powerful. Now think about the magnification of that, semester over semester, and how the magnification of that really increases. But again, it comes down to accountability and focus, and that’s the differentiator. It’s a cultural ethos for getting things done. And that’s what Joel State, Cal State, Fullerton, the Amarillo Colleges, the best practice is sharing those, learning from others, with others, that’s powerful.

0:17:58.2 TS: Yeah, your colleague, Vicky Martin, the President of Milwaukee Area Technical College, told me last week that they have accomplished more with the Moon Shot in a shorter period of time than anything else they’ve done before. And the real differentiator is the cross-institutional work. I had the pleasure, Mark, of tuning into the Transfer Pathways Task Force, listening to the folks across Milwaukee, your team members and others working together on those issues, and it was exciting. One of your staff, one of your vice provosts said out loud to the group, “Isn’t this amazing? We’re together doing the things that we always dreamed of, but never got around to doing.” And that is the power of the Moon Shot. But that transfer pathway stuff, I wanna go back to your point about transfer, because as I reflect on all that we’ve learned these last dozen years or so, Mark, and as you know, I helped co-found Complete College America. And I think back to 2009, where people were still throwing rotten fruit at me when I just talked about their own data. I mean, they would give me the data, I would.

0:19:12.1 TS: I would focus them on time to degree, or how to serve remedial students or part-time students or credits to degree, what have you, and it was complete denial. They didn’t want to accept it, but we’re not there now, people want to do the work, they’re running to the work, and so it’s an exciting thing, but I think, okay, so here we are. So what next? What is the next phase of the work? The best practices have been discovered, the data has been recognized, internal efforts within two-year institutions, within four-year institutions, and those silos has been underway for some time. I really do believe in next phase of the college completion movement, and the essential element, if we’re truly serious about equity is transfer, and when I say transfer… I’m sure you’ve heard this before Mark, I get frustrated almost with the use of that word now.

0:20:08.9 TS: It’s a well-understood word, it’s been around for a long time, but it also is one that is sort of reflexively dismissed by saying what you said, we’ve got an articulation agreement for that, “Oh, we’ve got an articulation agreement for that Tom. Brush it off the shoulder, done.” And yet we do know, especially when you think about transfer through an equity lens, the transfer is multi-dimensional. It’s not just an academic process, it’s a financial one, it’s a cultural one. It’s a psychological one, when you think about a sense of belongingness.

0:20:45.0 TS: As I’ve been reflecting on it, Mark, I feel like we need a new word. If you want people to do something differently or think differently about something, sometimes it requires us to rebrand it, so when you really think about this moment we’re in, maybe we need to dismiss the old notion of transfer or at least expand it into transitions or something like that, some more wholesome supportive experience where students kinda feel pulled into the four-year institution instead of pushed out of the community college, what do you think about that?

0:21:18.3 MM: I think you’re right, I think that naming something is often one of the most important things we can do to recognize that what’s currently in place isn’t working. I’ll make a couple of key points, one is that what I’m seeing today through greater connections is we’re taking the problems we’ve had historically with transfers and trying to own that, and Tom, I think implicit in this discussion, we oughta make something explicit, we need to, oftentimes recognize that we’re a big part of the problem, it’s not easy to say, but we need to own that and say that it’s no longer just something that we need an improved paper process, or we need an improved website or we need to improve the one way communication.

0:22:04.3 MM: But we need to immerse ourselves, and let me give a couple of examples that are gonna, I think, dramatically transform the concept of transfers, we see more institutions doing it. Number one is the idea of really dual enrollment types of situations, dual admissions, whether you come into a two-year institution, you’re automatically accepted, so think about a transfer, we call it the technology transfer partnership that we have with Parkside and Gateway Technical College. So students can enter and they are automatically accepted into our four-year engineering degree program as freshmen, and then they have to meet certain criteria, they have to meet with advisors, they have to hit certain grade points, they have to take certain courses, but that changes the whole dynamic, but they’re accepted right out of high school into a program like that.

0:22:55.3 MM: So those students who wanna go… And we know this in terms of the population of two-year institutions, how many students want to go to four-year degrees, but the majority of them don’t, because we don’t have enough of those changed relationships in place, and that’s what a lot of it is about.

0:23:12.1 TS: Yeah, I can help you with that data point actually. When you ask community college students in this country on their first day… “What do they aspire to achieve?” 85% of community college students on their first day will say, “I want a bachelor’s degree.” And Mark… You know, they get it, they get it. There are associate degrees, there are certificates of economic value, they’re rare, but they exist, but we all know that the bachelor’s degrees become the ticket to the middle class. And so what a wonderful opportunity, what a wonderful thing that 85% of them say they want one. And what a tragedy that only 25% of them ever transfer, and even worse, when you look at the outcomes based on a race and income, first generation status, even fewer are successfully moving forward, and so why is that?

0:24:06.6 TS: We have to own that. Like you said, we have to own that, and God bless you, you’re a four-year president, an institution with 26,000 students in the heart of your community, and you’re owning the fact that too often it’s the four-year institution that’s been a problem child, right? And so owning that and thinking more creatively about making the dream of a Bachelor’s degree possible at the earliest possible moment is the kind of way we need to rethink our responsibilities.

0:24:39.5 MM: I think if you talk to Vicky Martin, who is the President of our biggest area of technical college, frankly the biggest in the state, which is by the way, our largest provider of students. Okay, we get more transfer students than any other four-year institution in the state. And more of Vicky’s students come to UWM, it’s a wonderful pipeline, it’s one that we’ve had a lot of intentionality about. But we try to establish those types of relationships with two-year colleges across the state, it’s vitally important for us. So this concept is really important.

0:25:12.7 MM: And my view… Some people say, “Well, aren’t you concerned about the Promise Program at MATC? Or aren’t you worried about them taking our students that would come here?” My view is the more that Vicky and MATC and other technical and two-year colleges are successful, the more that is success for me, because it lowers the price point, it gives them a better economic and confidential confidence in their footing. And here’s an interesting stat, and I have shared with you earlier, when we look at success in our graduate programs, both Master’s, professional degrees, and doctorate, the most successful students in UW Milwaukee and those graduate courses, their background consistently is the two-year college pipeline. Isn’t that an interesting status?

0:25:55.6 TS: Yeah, there you go.

0:25:56.0 MM: It is amazing, so the grounding, the foundations that they get, and I also like to think the work ethic. I have to acknowledge that. Our students are pretty special, and it’s a real honor to be able to work with them. But Tom, more broadly, I also think, again, back to the societal question, 90% of Milwaukee public schools, K-12 are of color, and we have taken it upon ourselves to really immerse ourselves with dual enrollment and going into high schools, going into settings where we have better advising, better pathways. And I’ll be the first to tell you, we got a long way to go. Do not by any means think that “Mark’s doing it all right. This is a fantasy. It’s all working.” The issues are so significant, they’re so deeply eroded, decades and decades of issues.

0:26:44.3 MM: But we’ve recognized that we cannot… You mentioned remedial education earlier. Tom, we cannot address… And if there’s been deficiencies in math or reading or any study habits or socio-cultural sport, we cannot, once somebody gets to college, fix those or address those. We need… And that’s what started us on this journey long ago, was when we really moved to help where we could and to be helped by our K-12 partners for us to understand issues around curriculum alignment, for us to understand much more through actual visits, being feet on the ground, going into those high schools, understanding what it’s like to have a completely different background, and that’s why we do so much to try to support our K-12 system as well as tech schools.

0:27:33.2 TS: Well, I told you this whole articulation agreement excuse, frustrates me. Another one, another excuse that frustrates me is this fear that everybody has about the demographic cliff, the demographic cliff. Alert, alert. You’re never gonna have fewer students, and you guys… People in education are always challenging us to have a growth mindset, and yet when they talk about the demographic cliff, they do exactly the opposite. ‘Cause the demographic cliff is all based around the idea that we’re gonna have fewer White wealthy students. “Uh-oh! The ones we’ve always depended on to feed our pipeline,” and instead a growth mindset would say, “But you know what? There are a lot of students who need higher education. There are students that look a lot differently than we were accustomed to. They come to us with greater struggles, but there’s enough of them.”

0:28:28.8 TS: And so when you think about the demographic cliff, it’s sort of based on the assumption that students of color, low income students, first generation students are kinda continue to have the outcomes they’ve always had, and therefore the cliff exists. Well yes, that’s true. If we continue to do the things that we’ve always done, right? But a growth mindset suggests that if we serve those students more effectively, they will be retained and they will succeed and they will produce important outcomes for our entire community.

0:28:58.8 TS: I noticed in a recent report by the Center on Workforce at Georgetown University that they are actually estimating, Mark, that the racial disparities, income disparities, the equity gaps in higher education cost this country $956 billion annually and lost economic power. When you think about Milwaukee, the loss of manufacturing jobs, social mobility, the great reset that’s going on right now. Education is the way to address it.

0:29:34.1 MM: Exactly. We have left so many people behind, generations behind. We have. Tom, a sad stat is that one out of every two Black men in Milwaukee has served time in prison. That is a failure of education. That is a failure of society, and that’s why closing the equity gap is the most important thing that we can be doing to address those generations left behind. We’re only as strong as a community as those that are left behind, those that are the weakest, and with a large population who have been disenfranchised, marginalized in so many ways, I continue to argue, the way to bring the two Milwaukee’s together is through education and employment. It’s the answer.

0:30:21.9 MM: And that’s why I’m so proud of what we’re doing with you, and know that this is truly… Not just the issue. I can’t change national landscape of higher education, but where I can influence it and with your help, the coalition that we’ve built, it is the greatest hope that we absolutely have for this region to make a bigger difference in the future, and also acknowledge that those individuals that are left behind aren’t all going to find a four-year degree as the answer, it’s not realistic.

0:30:52.4 MM: But that’s where again, working together and the powerful synergies that we have through coalition building, and EAB is a big part of this, is to find answers. Sometimes it’s badges and certificates. Sometimes it is just that two-year degree. But some education is better than no education. But we don’t wanna get into a situation where we continue to have individuals who accumulate debt that don’t have something to translate into higher wages, higher employment mobility. So those are all collective goals. And what I really like is the greater attention to this by raising our culture, the equity-mindedness, the types of things, the tools that you’re giving us, and that frankly, I think you’re finding a lot of people very hungry for and eager to engage in.

0:31:42.6 MM: And so what I love about this is historically, student success might have been owned in one part of the campus, but now we’re broadcasting it. It’s bringing greater awareness, education and engagement. Just yesterday, I brought my entire leadership team together around discussions of Moon Shot, student success, and it’s a wonderful mantle, it’s a wonderful engagement tool for individuals as diverse as our HR, our legal, our athletics, all together, not just the traditional undergraduate Office of Admissions or some of our advisory staff. So it’s a really powerful tool, and I can’t say enough about how much it’s done for us in a short period.

0:32:22.8 TS: Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that. I wanna just offer a couple of final comments here and ask you to respond to them, and then we’ll get back to our busy days. I’ve been talking about the Moon Shot all around the country. Mark, you’ve been very helpful and other leaders across Milwaukee in talking to regions from coast to coast about the impact that Moon Shot has had for you guys and the difference it can make for them too.

0:32:49.6 TS: And I deeply appreciate that as you know, we announced two additional Moon Shot for Equity regions. The Greater Philadelphia area is a rapidly growing ecosystem. And the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area. So now, three ecosystems in the Moon Shot for Equity, and we’re on the hunt for four more, to get our goal of seven ecosystems in this wonderful National Learning Network. At this moment, I alluded to this earlier, this moment of division, cultural strife, raw politics, excessive partisanship. I am sad to say that for some, the word equity has become an ugly word. It’s being used in a negative way. I had that experience with one region we were talking to, and I reflected on it, Mark, I said, “Well, I suppose I could have called it the Moon Shot for Student Success.”

0:33:47.5 TS: But you know why I didn’t? Because of all the things we talk about today. Because of the honest approach that we have to take about what it’s going to take in order to address these long-standing issues. And I remind our listeners the Moon Shot for Equity has three dimensions. We mention that success based on race, ethnicity, based on income, and based on first generation status. And I wanna wrap up today by sharing the old JFK speech, a great line from the old JFK speech, which sort of summarizes why that goal should be the one that we shoot for.

0:34:26.2 TS: When JFK was talking about the Moon Shot, 60 years ago, and giving his famous speech in Houston. He said that they needed to go to the moon, because, “That goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone. And one which we intend to win.” He was saying there’s no better way to know how good we are at this stuff, than this audacious goal, because when we accomplish it, we’ll lift everyone up, transform our society, we’ll have all kinds of spin-off benefits. And so, go for the big audacious thing and enjoy all the benefits, all students will do better because of the Moon Shot for Equity, but those who would be most helped are those most often left behind.

0:35:25.6 TS: And so thank you, friend, for embracing that goal and owning it. And I wanna recognize that there’s a special announcement that’s coming up, you guys have won the EAB Connectedness Award, Connectedness Award. Now, I will say, Mark, traditionally, that award has been given to institutions that were just doing a good job of being better connected within their campuses, for the first time this award is being given in recognition of connectedness to each other across an entire region. So, congratulation, my friend on that, national recognition, it’s well-deserved.

0:36:04.1 MM: Well, thank you Tom, we’re exceptionally proud of that. And the reasons that you just mentioned for Moon Shot that JFK, and your passion, your charisma, these are the things that are so well organized and well thought of here on our campus, and you really help make it. And we’re especially proud to share this award with our friends at Carthage Milwaukee, they are technical college in UW-Parkside, it’s a special honor. In the last year, since we’ve announced this in October, our participation in Moon Shot, we’ve made great progress, we still have much in front of us. But we’ve got smiles on our faces and we’ve got a lot of success already. And it’s just gonna continue to grow and I couldn’t be more optimistic about the future, especially with the tools that we have and the continued culture that we’ll create and implement as we go forward.

0:37:08.3 TS: Thank you so much, Chancellor Mark Mone from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, you’ve been a wonderful guest today and a significant and substantial leader for our entire country. Thank you, Mark.

0:37:20.3 MM: Thank you, Tom, I appreciate your time with our involvement here.

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0:37:30.0 S3: Thank you for listening. Please join us next week when we take a fresh look at how colleges are rethinking space utilization on campus, to better accommodate a hybrid working environment. Until then, thank you for your time.