Do Community Colleges Need an "Intervention"?

[music]

0:00:11.3 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. We’re fortunate today to feature reporter Jon Marcus from the Hechinger Report. Jon joins EAB’s Tara Zirkel to discuss his recent article that goes behind the numbers to explore root causes that have led to steep declines in community college enrollment. Jon is sympathetic to the resource constraints faced by institutional leaders, but he doesn’t pull any punches in addressing what he says are deficiencies in the culture and processes at many two-year schools. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

[music]

0:00:51.0 Tara Zirkel: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Tara Zirkel and I’m a Director of Strategic Research here at EAB. And I’ve spent 15 years working directly with or researching and collaborating with senior leaders in the community college space, and that space is in real trouble. The number of students at community colleges has fallen 37% since 2010, or by nearly 2.6 million people. This includes the 50% of students who will start at a community college but drop out along the way. In a recent article for the Hechinger Report titled, The Reckoning is Here, more than a third of community college students have vanished. Reporter Jon Marcus explores threats to community colleges like under investments in advising and block transfer pathways that have existed for over a decade. I highly recommend you read the article if you haven’t already, but the good news for you is that Jon joins us today on Office Hours, so welcome back to the program, Jon.

0:01:48.3 Jon Marcus: Thanks very much for having me.

0:01:51.5 TZ: So Jon, you don’t pull many punches in your article. What are some of the most damning statistics you found in your reporting that demonstrate just how badly community colleges in general appear to be struggling with their students?

0:02:05.0 JM: Well, you’ve already mentioned one, which is the huge decline in enrollment. But if you look at that even more closely, what you find is that it would be even worse if they weren’t including dual enrollment students, that is students in high schools that are also taking community college courses. One fifth of the community college enrollment right now, one fifth is high school students still enrolled in high school. At 31 community colleges, more than half of their students are high school students. So that could be a good thing. Maybe those students will continue to pursue a degree even after high school. Already familiar with the institution, continue at that community college. There’s data that suggests, though, that community colleges lose money on these students. So what already looks pretty bad is even worse than it might seem. As far as outcomes, the outcomes have been terrible and stubborn. They haven’t changed in years. In fact, in some of the most important areas, they’ve gotten worse. So, for example, only slightly more than 40% of students at community colleges finish within even six years. And remember, these are two-year programs, Obviously, not entirely the institution’s fault.

0:03:18.5 JM: Many of their students go part-time. They have other obligations. They have families. They have jobs. But a 40% six-year graduation rate for a two-year credential seems like a lot. There’s a great line in the sitcom community, if you remember that, about a community college in which one of the characters say, “Britta’s been here six years, another three years, and she’ll have her two-year degree.” So it’s become almost a pop culture punchline how long it takes to finish these presumably short term credentials. About 80% of the students who begin at a community college say that their ultimate intention is to transfer and get a bachelor’s degree. 80% of them. Only about 16% of them manage to pull that off. And that number has gotten significantly worse since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s down by another 15%. That is heartbreaking because that is the hope of these many students who started a community college thinking that it would be a really good entree in transition to higher education and it ends up being a dead end for them. Typically, so there was a study in California that documented the number of credits that community college students accumulate that they don’t actually need. So you need 60 credits to get an associate degree and then to transfer into a bachelor program.

0:04:41.8 JM: Those credits don’t always transfer, that’s another huge problem, not entirely the community colleges’ fault. But nonetheless, on average in California, community college students spent time accumulating and paying for 26 more credits than they need, almost half, again, as many credits as they needed to graduate. So those are some of the really concerning data that have come out of community colleges. And I know you and I both have huge respect for these students. They are some of the hardest working and most persistent students. They overcome so many obstacles to go to college. 29% of them are first-generation, 40% of all the black students in college in America go to community college, half of all the Hispanic students. And we’re all sort of rooting for community colleges, but these things haven’t changed forever. And it’s time to kind of stop letting them off the hook. I know we’re gonna talk for instance about their funding, for example, but there are ways to improve these outcomes and some colleges have done it without spending money. So these outcomes are really not only dramatic and depressing, but persistent and it’s time to bring attention to them.

0:06:07.5 TZ: Yeah, I think that does a really good job of sort of sizing the problem, right? That this is something that’s been persistent. And I think there’s maybe a tendency to kind of say, well, the pandemic did this, right? When in reality, like you noted, you know, for the past decade, we’ve also seen high school graduation rates that have increased, but college going rates as a whole decrease, or it rises in dual enrollment for the past decade. But unfortunately, not as many of those students end up on campus as we would like. And when thinking about the size of the problem that you just described, when you talked to community college leaders for your research for the article, do you think they understood the magnitude of the problem and that they’re ready to make the necessary changes?

0:06:52.0 JM: There are 936 public community colleges in America and a lot of them are working really hard in this problem. And some of them have come up with great ideas. The data that we’re discussing is collective. This is we’re painting all of community colleges with a broad brush. So yeah, I think many people get it. But you touched on something a moment ago that I find happens a lot in higher education, which is the rationalizations and excuses that you get. You mentioned it’s not just the pandemic. No, it isn’t. But if you talk to a lot of people in higher education, it’s the pandemic, it’s the labor market and its demographics. We’re running out of 18-year-olds, that number is about to plummet in two years. That’s true, but that does not account for what’s been happening. It’s not the pandemic, it’s been going on as we discussed initially for more than 10 years now. This enrollment decline far predates the pandemic. And if you actually look at labor market impact on college going, there’s this sort of idea that this perception that students are going directly into the labor market because there are a lot of jobs, especially students who might have chosen a community college who have family obligations or other obligations and feel a responsibility to go right to work.

0:08:14.9 JM: That may be true to a degree, but if you look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the proportion of high school graduates over the last few years who went right into the labor market actually went down when employment went back up, not up. And so I don’t know where they are. That’s a really good question, but they’re not working. They’re not going to college at almost any level and they’re not working. The college going at all levels is down, interestingly. And we looked at this. So this is another misunderstanding about what’s been going on. The proportion of high school graduates who are going to college anywhere is dramatically and dangerously and scarily down by seven percentage points nationally in the last five years and 12 percentage points in states including Indiana and Tennessee. So students are just rejecting the idea of college altogether, students and their parents, for lots of very complicated reasons. There’s a lot of conversation about the value of college going. But the proportion who are rejecting community colleges is much, much higher than the proportion who are rejecting college going at all. We looked in Michigan at the decline in the proportion of high school graduates who enroll immediately in college.

0:09:34.5 JM: And the proportion who enroll immediately in community college is down three times faster than the proportion who enroll in a four-year university or college. So there’s a lot of rationalization going on. So what I do hear from leaders in community colleges is we don’t have enough money. We have to take the students who have the least preparation, we have the least money to support them. That’s true. We give community colleges half as much money per student as we give four-year public universities. We give community colleges less money per student than we give kindergarten through grade 12. So that’s true, but there are solutions that don’t require money. And I think the endless kind of rationalization excuses people in their own minds from dealing with this on a basis that some community colleges have managed to do.

0:10:30.4 TZ: I kind of want to dig a little deeper there ’cause we hear the same things at EAB that I don’t have the people and I don’t have the money, right, to kind of tackle some of these issues. So I kind of wanted to double click on, you know, to what extent can we or should we blame most of the problems that ail community colleges on tight budgets, which hamper their ability to hire staff, hire and staff the institutions appropriately?

0:10:53.0 JM: Yeah, all of that is absolutely true. They have a hard job to do with much less money. But some community colleges have managed to do it. So there are easy things that I’ve seen visiting community colleges, I visited a community college in Maine where the financial aid staff all went to lunch at the same time. And so if you call the financial aid office at lunchtime, which is when many working students have the opportunity to do that, there wasn’t anybody there to answer. So they changed the schedule and made sure that somebody was there to answer the phones. That doesn’t cost any money. You know, it might inconvenience somebody who wants to have lunch at 12 o’clock, but it doesn’t cost you any money. Put all of the service offices in the same place so that someone can go and take care of their registration and financial aid all in the same building or one office next to another. I’ve seen a lot of really good solutions at the four-year public university level, regional public universities, which in many ways have some of the similar obstacles to community colleges, short budgets and students with other issues. And they’ve done things like, if somebody had a question… This had a huge impact on retention.

0:12:06.9 JM: If somebody had a question, they would be… Instead of being referred to go see somebody in financial aid, they would be referred to someone by name, the easiest possible intervention and retention shot right up. We’re talking about students whose parents, as I said, in 29% of community college students, their parents didn’t go to college. They don’t have college going experience. They don’t know how to navigate this very complex process, which by the way, speaks to another thing that would be free, getting rid of all the red tape and bureaucracy that just, I mean, I visit community colleges and it’s mind blowing to me how much work these students have to do just to register for a class. Just help them do that. And it doesn’t cost you anything. So there are ways of addressing this if you put your mind to it, that work.

0:12:56.6 TZ: It’s really interesting you mentioned the bureaucracy. Here at EAB, we just launched a survey that we’re wrapping up that really tries to understand perceptions of how community colleges are doing at customer service. We had almost 200 community college educators respond and in sort of the qualitative part of the survey, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we got was that students do endless piles of paperwork, you know, things that are duplicative, operations overlap with one another and through that sort of inefficiency, there’s bottlenecks not only for the student, but bottlenecks for the staff as well and that both sides are really feeling the stress of the bureaucracy, not just the student. And I think it really opens up a conversation about thinking about how do we modernize our work environments at community colleges to have a better experience for everyone that’s kind of involved with that [0:13:47.0] ____ learner journey. And I think that also speaks to maybe another question, which is, do you think that there’s cultural issues within institutions, you know, aside from financial, aside from capacity that are thwarting improving student outcomes? So maybe another way to ask that is, how do majority of the people who work and study at community colleges become sort of accustomed to the way things are?

0:14:14.4 JM: Absolutely, as happens in any large organization. I think that their hearts are in the right place. I really do. I spend a lot of time… One of the great privileges of my work, we as a nonprofit are funded and have the resources to spend time on campuses and go and visit community colleges. Well, in the case of community colleges, I’ll say it’s a privilege, but it’s also an incredible frustration to meet these students and hear their stories of just completely unnecessary, you know, you used the word bottlenecks, that’s a great term for this. So, but I do think that there are cultural issues. So when we wrote this story, we heard largely from, we heard from some students who were very happy with their community college experiences. We heard from many students saying thank you for finally telling this story. You know, I was lost, nobody was there to help me. We had a student who, you know, stopped responding to faculty and stopped responding to a software program that her community college had to keep track of students. And even though she was reaching out for help, she didn’t get any until she started failing courses, which is much too late to intervene. We had a student who was 25 and independent of his parents who couldn’t enroll in a community college or get financial aid unless or until he proved that he was independent, got his documents signed by his mother.

0:15:41.6 JM: I mean, and just after a while, just gave up in frustration. These were people that really wanted to enroll and really wanted to advance and were thwarted by it. We also heard from, I heard from a teacher, an instructor at a community college in the Pacific Northwest, who was very upset about our reporting of these terrible outcome numbers. And she pointed out as is true, if my husband didn’t work, I wouldn’t even be able to afford to work at a community college. They don’t pay me enough, I work very hard. And if my students pass my course, I consider that a success. Well, so do I, but if they pass your course but don’t graduate with a credential, to them, that’s just debt because even community college students take on debt to pay for living expenses, that’s debt without a degree. And you’re imposing that debt on the people most vulnerable to it. People who come into the system already with low incomes and very nervous about higher education. You just confirm all of their suspicions and doubts.

0:16:51.2 JM: So yeah, it’s great when they pass her course, she teaches remedial English. But they probably, remedial English as you know, is, you know, being assigned to remedial courses is a really good predictor of never finishing a degree. And so it’s great that they pass. It’s great that they stick around at all, take the course, finish the course. That’s already several barriers in, but they’re likely never gonna get a credential and that’s not a success.

0:17:24.8 TZ: Yeah. Yeah. I think honoring the goal that the student had is a really big part of addressing kind of the cultural issues within the institution. And I know one thing that we’ve been focusing on too, and you touch on this in your article is, and we talked about it today is sort of those frontline interactions that we have with students. So making sure that everyone doesn’t go to lunch at the same time, right? Can we entertain the idea of office hours in the evenings? And when I was on campus, when we talked about students from sort of a customer service perspective, people were maybe a little bit resistant to thinking about students as customers or thinking about them in that way. And EAB hosts regular gatherings of college presidents where we set up interactive opportunities, on-site visits to private sector businesses to get these presidents thinking about ways they can apply effective business processes to the world of higher education. Are you aware of any programs like that that have been set up specifically for community college presidents? And what are some of the things you think those leaders can learn from the private sector that might help them deliver on their mission?

0:18:32.0 JM: Yes, absolutely, there’s this very small group of community colleges that over the summer runs a program where they go and visit a private sector company known for its customer service. I went along on one of these trips where they went to visit Ritz-Carlton, the hotel chain, they’ve also worked with Southwest Airlines, which until recently was known for its customer service. Disney, Whole Foods, and among other things, they learn very simple things that we almost probably don’t notice as consumers in these businesses, but which if they were not there, would probably bother us. Which is that if you go to any of these businesses, they all have a rule that if you ask a question… If you ever go to Whole Foods and you ask where something is, they take you to the shelf. They don’t just point and say over there, they take you there. They make sure you get an answer to your question. Disney has the same rule. They never leave a guest until they’re done answering the question or satisfying the guest.

0:19:32.9 JM: So there are community colleges that do this and they take those lessons home to their own campuses, so that, for example, in a financial aid office or a registration area, there is someone who will answer the question and not just point to the next window until they are certain that the student has an answer. That’s, again, a zero cost intervention. You mentioned a few things by the way, that do cost money, but would also help hugely. Having those offices open after hours and on weekends when students actually attend college. Having classes after hours and on weekends when students really want them, accelerating the courses, we’ve seen this in some community colleges in Florida, actually in response to the pandemic, where rather than take a welding course once a week on Saturdays for two years, you go every single day, 40 hours a week, and you get your qualification or credential, in that case your certificate, much more quickly and you’re right out into the workforce. So some of those things do cost more, but they have a huge payoff.

0:20:40.3 TZ: Yeah. And I think we’ve also heard from institutions that have worked with things like Disney. And another thing that we hear come up too, is kind of a resistance to the idea of cross-training, and I’m making air quotes there that folks can’t see, and really kind of challenging the notion that the institution needs to be siloed, and that’s not my job to help the student with their financial aid, that’s not my job, that department handles X, Y, Z thing, and really trying to build a culture and learning from the private sector that you don’t have to be an expert in everything at the institution, but you do need to know how to get that student to the correct person and have sort of this basic foundational understanding of the inner workings of the institution, because that can make a difference to the student.

0:21:26.5 TZ: I really like your example of walking the student from office to office, because we know for our students, for many of the reasons that you cited earlier, these are students that are very vulnerable, these are students that maybe have anxiety about coming to college, that if we say, you have to walk across campus to that office over there, that they’re gonna walk right back to their car, right? So that hand-holding that I think sometimes we’re resistant to is really important in making sure that that student accesses what they need.

0:21:55.4 JM: Yeah, I saw… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

0:22:00.6 TZ: No, go ahead.

0:22:00.7 JM: I saw another great example of this at the four-year level, also again in Maine, at the University of Maine, the flagship public university campus. Maine has a negative birth rate. Maine has already been suffering where the rest of the country soon will see, which is a decline in the number of 18-year-olds. And yet until this year, the university system had maintained its enrollment, and one of the ways they did that was that when a student came to visit, or if a student already was enrolled, everyone in the university was sort of tasked with helping that student. If a student looked lost and they were in the cafeteria, the cafeteria workers were sort of empowered to go up to that student and say, “Can I help you with something?” To a degree, that’s kind of a Maine thing too, it’s one of those rural places in America where people are helpful to each other, but on a broader level, and they told me this, they recognize that this is existential for them. If students don’t come to those universities nobody gets to work there anymore, and there have been layoffs at community colleges and other places in response to these enrollment challenges. And unless they can reverse it, they won’t have a job in the dining hall or financial aid office.

0:23:13.3 JM: So they managed to do that, and it was interesting ’cause I went up there for freshman orientation, and I talked to a student who had been at another university who spoke… And this is so true in higher education, she spoke about having been at another university to which she’d been accepted and been treated like, oh, you’re so lucky we let you in. You are so fortunate to be able to stand here in front of us and give us your money so that we can educate you at our leisure, and eventually maybe you’ll get a degree. Whereas at the University of Maine where she enrolled eventually, she said she felt welcomed and treated like a person. That doesn’t cost money either. And it’s interesting, if you have had the experience of dealing with customer service lately for anything, it’s horrible. And if you confront someone with a smile and an offer to help, that has such a big impact and it doesn’t cost you anything.

0:24:15.5 TZ: That empathy goes a long way. And I know I was on campus for 11 years, and one thing that I would always remind people was, these are your neighbors, these are people that live in your community, these are people that your kids go to school with their kids, and just to your point, that welcoming-ness, that warmness can also not only assist that student, but diffuse those situations that can feel really tense on campus as well, and just the idea of how do I approach this from a problem-solving mindset, again, is something that doesn’t necessarily cost anything, it costs the time to build those skills in people, but it’s a worthwhile investment.

0:24:53.5 JM: They’re not only your neighbors, they’re the person that’s going to graduate and then answer the phone at your doctor’s office, or be your nurse, or your EMT, or your police officer and we haven’t really addressed this, but this huge enrollment decline in community colleges has a massive economic impact. Even if you don’t care about the students, we have shortages in all of these roles that are middle skills jobs for which community colleges train people, and we’re not paying attention. And employers, according to a recent Harvard Business School survey, a quarter of employers, only a quarter of employers strongly agree that community college graduates are ready for work. So there’s already skepticism among employers, a gigantic shortage in areas, line men… A lot of these kinds of people in the new green energy industries, those people come out of community colleges, and they’re not coming out of community colleges anymore because they’re not going into them.

0:25:49.2 TZ: Yeah, and I think that’s kind of a good segue. We’re talking a little bit about employers, and we know that many of our institutions… Our students rather, come to institutions with the goal of, I wanna get this finite degree and go right into the workforce. And then you have the other group of students who might say, I wanna come to this institution with the objective of transferring. And I know you touched on this a little bit in your article, and the data tells us like you mentioned that the majority of students who come into a community college have the goal of transferring. Why do we think community colleges kind of fail or struggle to help students with this task, and why aren’t regulatory agencies bringing sort of the hammer down to get a better grasp on this?

0:26:32.2 JM: So how much time you got? That’s a huge question…

0:26:35.5 TZ: [chuckle] It’s a huge question.

0:26:35.8 JM: It’s a huge question. And some of it is out of the control of the community colleges but, and some of it, again, I said this at the outset too, a lot of the failures of community colleges are because of circumstances affecting individual students. That’s not to say that community colleges couldn’t do more to help and to support them and, especially to advise them, which they’ve often failed to do. But yeah, in terms of the transfer problem, they don’t communicate. So I wrote about the story at the Community College of Rhode Island, a state that is so tiny, and yet even they weren’t communicating with their public institutions about transfer requirements. And I spoke with students, again, it’s heart-breaking to sit around and talk to students. I was in the sort of… They have a big giant kind of study room, and I talked to a Navy veteran who wanted to go on and get a Doctoral degree eventually, and was starting with an associate degree, and she would almost weekly email the department head, the department chair of the department at the four-year institution to which she wanted to transfer and constantly ask, what should I do, what should I do? She shouldn’t have to do that.

0:27:49.6 JM: Someone at the community college should be equipped to do that, and at this particular community college, I was there because they did have an… At Community College of Rhode Island, they did have an advising program to help students to improve their transfer outcomes which were much lower actually than the national average. There are several institutions doing this, and Community College of Rhode Island is one, but it’s voluntary. It’s not mandatory. So you don’t have to do it.

0:28:17.5 JM: Other students were talking about how they had to read the course catalogs of universities to which they wanted to transfer. Hundreds of… Now online typically, but the equivalent of hundreds of pages of courses just to figure out what they needed to do. So those are problems that affect transfer. Another problem, you talk about regulators, many states have mandated these kinds of matriculation agreements among public institutions, community colleges and four-years, but they haven’t mandated that the credit will transfer to the major, and that’s where a lot of students go astray, is they take courses that will transfer toward a General Ed requirement, but then they have to start a lot of things from scratch because they haven’t taken any prerequisites that will transfer to the major. So they end up spinning wheels at the four-year institution.

0:29:10.9 JM: And four-year institutions are really very pretentious about community colleges and whether the degree has any value or whether a course taught by a community college faculty member is as good as… Obviously never as good as the course taught by the university faculty member. So again, we have cultural issues, we do have some regulation and we do have some mandates from legislatures that are frankly really tired of subsidizing all of these students that never graduate, but they don’t go far enough, and it often has to do with the credit requirements for majors.

0:29:46.3 TZ: One thing that we’re hearing in our conversations with community college leaders is that here now in 2023, they are finding that some of their four-year institutions that maybe had been resistant in the past are now suddenly during a climate of enrollment decline very eager to talk about transfer, and I think that this conversation’s really interesting as we see, as you mentioned, sort of this growing skepticism of the value of a bachelor’s degree, and one thing I’m kind of waiting to see if this happens, is will we have a decrease in students who are interested in transfer? I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it’s something that makes the situation, this conversation, even more vulnerable is, will students kind of just opt out of this completely, and will that interest in transfer decrease over the next few years?

0:30:33.9 JM: That’s true, although there’s also an argument to be made that degree inflation accelerates the value of a bachelor’s degree and makes people more skeptical of an associate degree, because a lot of employers are now requiring bachelor’s degrees for jobs that used to require only an associate degree or even just a high school diploma. So there is that credential inflation. The other thing… And yes, you’re right, largely four-year private non-profit colleges are trying to recruit community college students, ’cause they see it as a way to fill seats, especially in… Given that most of the retention problem comes before the first and second year. They end up having lots of empty spaces in their upper class divisions, so they wanna recruit juniors, and they also see it as a way of diversifying, racially diversifying their campuses.

0:31:28.4 JM: And you’ll see this mostly in states like Pennsylvania where enrollment challenges are particularly acute among small regional, very tuition-dependent non-profits, and you don’t see huge numbers. You see some community college students transferring into those places. The other problem though that this also raises is that four-year regional public universities in many of those states are also struggling for enrollment, and they are now competing for the students who would have started at a community college, which is also contributing to the erosion of enrollment.

0:32:05.5 TZ: So we are getting close on time, and I know we could talk about community colleges all day, and I really enjoy this conversation. What I did wanna end on is we talked a lot about kind of what some of the barriers are and hinted at some of the solutions. But what I wanted to close with was, if you had a few pieces of advice for community college leaders, what would they be, and what have you seen work to begin to kind of unpack some of the barriers that we’re seeing today?

0:32:32.9 JM: There are, as you know more than anyone, places that are doing good things. We talked about a few of them in our story. So Amarillo college in Texas used data to create this sort of like virtual student representative of the typical student at that college. Female, Hispanic, working mother, and they named her Maria and they made everyone on campus get familiar with her. I find it a tiny bit ironic that you have to create a fake student to learn how to deal with your real students, but it works, and they’ve just won I think an award from Aspen. As do many, yeah, that’s a really good source for solutions, is the Aspen people who encourage these kinds of interventions and these kinds of improvements. So, I mean, I would… If I was in the role of giving advice, which probably would pay a lot more than being in the role of being a journalist, I would suggest just sort of paying attention to the culture, looking at your institution from the point view of these students, because I don’t think at any level in higher education we have become accustomed yet to doing that.

0:33:49.7 JM: We look at the world through the eyes of faculty, administrators and staff, and we forget… You know, you said they don’t like to use the word customer, but that’s what these students are. And I hope that’s not too general of an answer, but many of the interventions that we’ve talked about here just have to center around changing the student experience, eliminating those places where… And I loved your example, the student at the financial aid office gets told to go across campus and gets halfway and leaves. That’s happening. That literally is happening and you need to fix that first then it isn’t hard. Well, I mean, apparently it is hard ’cause they haven’t been able to do it, but it shouldn’t be hard.

0:34:34.9 TZ: Yeah. I’m hearing you say kind of, back to basics, right? Wonderful. So I think one thing we can all agree on is that community colleges are vital to our communities and transform the lives of thousands of students, and they have the opportunity to be even more impactful with some internal transformation. Jon Marcus, I wanna thank you so much for joining us today on Office Hours with EAB. I know I’ve learned a lot, and I encourage everyone to check out the article in the Hechinger Report if you haven’t already. So thanks again.

0:35:04.5 JM: Thank you.

[music]

0:35:12.6 S1: Thank you for listening. Please join us next week when leaders from Texas Southern University talk about the transformation they helped to usher in at TSU in terms of their approach to student success and retention. Until next week, thank you for your time.

[music]