Banner image for Uneven Outcomes in the Labor Market: Understanding Trends and Identifying Solutions - February 1-4, 2021

Day 3: Education and Credentials

In the third session of the Uneven Outcomes in the Labor Market: Understanding Trends and Identifying Solutions virtual conference, panelists discuss findings from new research on disparities in education and training by geography, race, and age. Patrick Harker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, offers his remarks.

Transcript

Keith Wardrip: Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning to those joining from the West Coast. My name is Keith Wardrip and I'm the community development research manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. It's my honor to welcome you to the third day of the Uneven Outcomes in the Labor Market conference. This conference was organized by the community development staff from the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks of Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. This is probably the right time to mention the views express ready not necessarily those of the hosting Federal Reserve banks or Federal Reserve Board or the Federal Reserve System. During this week, we are convening researchers, policymakers and practitioners to examine disparities in labor market outcomes and to explore policy solutions to address these inequities. Today our conversation will focus on the role of education and credentials. Just a couple of notes on logistics: We will be using Slido to communicate throughout the day. You can go to slido.com and go to the #Uneven outcomes or you can simply use the frame to the right of your viewing window. On Slido, you can participate in polls, vote for your favorite question or ask a question of your own. I would encourage you to ask questions early and often. We'll get to as many of those questions as we can at the end of the program.

There are also links on your screen to speaker bios and to the conference website, where you can sign up for tomorrow's webinar if you haven't already. Finally, if you have difficulty viewing any of the slides, you can use the full screen mode or download the slides using the materials button on your screen and click along with the presenters.

Now, it's my distinct pleasure to introduce our first speaker, and I can't think of anyone better suited to provide opening remarks for an agenda focusing on education and credentialing. Patrick G. Harker took office on July 1, 2015, as the 11th president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Before taking office at the Philadelphia Fed, President Harker was the 26th President of the University of Delaware. He was also a professor of business administration at the University's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the College of Engineering. Before joining the University of Delaware in 2007, President Harker was dean at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published or edited nine books and more than 100 professional articles, and from 1996 to 1999 served as editor-in- chief of the journal Operations Research. And speaking of credentials, President Harker has a PhD in civil and urban engineering, an MA in economics, an MSE and BSE in civil engineering, all from the University of Pennsylvania. President Harker, the floor is yours.

Patrick Harker: Thanks so much, Keith. Good morning, good afternoon and maybe for some people, even good evening. Thanks for having me here today. It's a real honor for me to be here to talk at this conference. As a recovering academic and a recovering university president, I am particularly delighted to be here on Day 3 where we will be discussing credentials and higher education. This is a vitally important topic for the health of our communities across our country. I really thank you for having me here today. Before I proceed, though, many of you and Keith just did this, but I'm going to do it again, are familiar with the standard Fed disclaimer: The views I express today are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone else on the Federal Open Market Committee or the Federal Reserve System.

Education has long been a long engine of economic mobility, and economic mobility is something approaching a national creed for the United States. We believe that anybody, no matter how humble the circumstances in which they were born, should have a pathway to the middle class. For me, that pathway was actually football. I grew up in a blue-collar town right next to Camden, New Jersey. My dad, a union pipefitter, died when I was nine years old. Much needed financial aid landed me at Penn where I was a first-generation college student. That was the beginning of a journey that I could simply never have managed as a boy growing up in south Jersey. Other pathways are going to look different than mine. Given that 40 years later, I am still carrying around the injuries I got from playing football at Penn, that's probably a good thing that there are other pathways. But unfortunately, far, far too many Americans born in tough circumstances, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, are having a tough time, a tough time finding their pathway out. I believe it's incumbent upon all of us, as Americans, to think hard about how we are going to fix what to my mind is a profoundly moral problem, the lack of economic mobility.

So what do we do? I'm a career academic and a former university President, so this probably sounds like Ronald McDonald admonishing you for life to lay off saturated fats. But the truth is, many, maybe most Americans don't need a traditional four-year college degree. What they need are the skills that will propel them into middle-class jobs. For my dad, my uncles, my brother, that was pipe fitting. For many, that's still a great option. For others, it will be something else. Many skills today are gained through a variety of short-term programs that do not lead to degrees but can provide marketable new skills. These courses can be as short as two months and students, many of whom are in their mid-career and looking to retool, gain a marketable new skill. According to a recent Georgetown University study, these can make a meaningful difference in an enrollee's career. Certificates in engineering technology can lead to higher earnings, information technology and legal studies.

The Georgetown study found some of the certificates can yield earnings that rival those of bachelor's degrees in other fields. These short-term credentials can be gained in many venues, from traditional community colleges to colleges, to private academies like computer-coding bootcamps both online and in brick and mortar and to public-private partnerships designed to provide pipelines of talent to the private sector. The way the latter works is that companies essentially outsource a portion of their employee training to outside vendors, using a pay for success model. That means the company reimburses the entity that paid for the training in the first place, say the local publicly funded job board. If the new hire hits certain benchmarks, like staying on the job for six months. It can be an effective way to entice corporations to hire from populations they may find too risky or for which they simply lack sufficient familiarity, particularly those in underserved communities. The workers will benefit of course, but also so will the companies who will have access to an untapped pool of talent. All in all, getting people new skills strikes me as a situation where we need to experiment across a wide variety of approaches and methods. We have a lot to learn and the task could not be more important. I think this task is crucial right now.

At the Fed, we've also have been studying ways to get people into what we call opportunity occupations, jobs that pay the median wage or better and that don't require a traditional college degree. What's truly exciting is that our researchers found many workers already possess the skills they need to increase their income. All they might need is a little additional training. My colleagues in Cleveland and Philadelphia looked at the skill set of people who are holding at-risk or low-wage jobs. They then matched those skills to jobs that would pay at least 10 percent more than their current wage and that don't require the traditional four-year college degree. Looking at 33 metro areas nationwide, they found that nearly half of lower-wage employment can be paired with at least one higher paying occupation requiring similar skills. For transitions connecting the most similar occupations identified in the study, the average bump in wages was almost $15,000. That's real money.

On our website, we recently launched what we call an occupational mobility explorer, where workers can plug in their own skill sets and see where they live as well plug that in, and see what is out there, what kind of opportunities are out there for them. For others, a four-year degree is going to be the best option. But far too many students through no fault of their own, enter demanding institutions without adequate preparation. Many have unfortunately attended high schools that left them ill prepared for college-level work or they've had life challenges that have left them unready for the demands of the selective college or university. That can be disastrous because we know that once a student falls behind academically, it is very, very difficult to catch up.

I would like to talk about a program at the University of Delaware where I used to be president. U-D, as we call it, U-D's associates in arts program not only provides a pipeline for students into the university, but also makes sure they're poised to succeed once they get there. I hope our experience in Delaware can provide a useful example for states nationwide. The way the associates in arts program works is this: U-D courses are taught by U-D faculty, in small classes in Delaware Technical and Community College—we call it Del Tech—their buildings throughout the state. So this is a collaborative effort between Del Tech and the University of Delaware; Del Tech of course is the public community college. Students in this program receive an associate degree in university studies by earning credits in core courses required of all undergraduates and then transitioning to U-D's main campus to earn their bachelor's degree. Most full-time students receive money from the state to cover this tuition. The program is high touch, with small class sizes and lots of interaction between faculty and students. I am really proud of this program.

I'm thrilled to report that 64 percent of students in the program graduate with their associate degree within three years. That's well above the national average of around 33 percent for such programs. Of those who graduate, 88 percent go onto the main campus at U-D and nearly 80 percent graduate with a bachelor's degree. Because the program is taught by U-D faculty, the transition from associate to bachelor's degree becomes something approaching seamless. For example, a member of the English faculty who is teaching in the associates in arts program knows exactly what her students are prepared for once they enter a U-D English course on the main campus. Is the associates in arts program going to be replicable in every context across our vast country particularly when state budgets are under pressure and education funding is under threat? Of course not, but as with certificate programs, I'm suggesting we let a thousand flowers bloom. Now is the time to experiment with new models and new pathways to success.

As with so much else in our modern life, a big question surrounding all of this is how do you pay for it. The traditional student loan has become a millstone around the necks of far too many Americans. Total student debt now tops $1.7 trillion, surpassing credit card debt and second only to mortgages. Researchers at the Philly Fed and throughout the Federal Reserve System have studied the ways in which student debt burdens affect subsequent credit outcomes and life events Student loan programs are often disproportionately inaccessible to lower-income and minority borrowers due to their stringent credit criteria. Besides, many micro-credentialing courses like coding bootcamps typically are not eligible for federal student loans, meaning many students dig deep into their own pockets or borrow money from family and friends to make the necessary investments in their careers. Even among those students who receive student loans and generous financial aid, that sometimes isn't enough.

At the Philadelphia Fed, we've studied the effect of Bridging the Gap, an innovative program at Rutgers University-Camden that significantly reduces or even eliminates 100 percent of tuition for middle- and low-income students. What we found is that even though reduced tuition was a huge help, many students still had challenges managing ongoing living and educational expenses beyond tuition. They needed to work to support their families, for instance, or scrimp and save for books and other educational material. Another challenge for students is geographic as it can be emotionally and economically difficult for students to leave their hometowns for education, particularly again if their family members count on them for financial support. Income-based repayment programs offer one potential alternative worth exploring. They are designed so that students make payments once their income rises above a minimum threshold and they will never pay more than a cap that is set at the onset of the agreement. But absent strict oversight, income-based repayment programs could be ripe for abuse, so regulators will need to keep a very close eye on them. The bottom line is this: There is an urgent, urgent need for education, certificate or degree-based, to be more affordable for more people. This will take input and action from many segments of society, government, civil society, corporate sector, and perhaps especially from universities and colleges themselves. The Fed has a role to play there, too, with our research and convening power. To me, increasing accessibility to education in all its forms is not only an economic imperative, but as I said earlier, a moral one as well.

Indeed, the economic effects of the pandemic are already having a noticeable impact on enrollment among our country's most disadvantaged. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, enrollment at two-year institutions was down significantly in the fall of 2020 versus the prior year. First-time enrollment and enrollment for many well-paying vocational programs is even further down. These declines are concentrated—among freshman enrollees, particularly Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. This is a trend we need to do everything in our power to reverse. Once again, too many pathways, too many pathways for these students are blocked.

With so much at stake and this being such an important topic, thank you again for having me here today. Before I go, one bragging point from my old employer. With recent changes in the administration in Washington, in the White House and the Super Bowl coming up, I can't resist making one more plug for my old university. You know, the University of Delaware is one of only five schools nationwide to have graduated both a Super Bowl starting quarterback and a U.S. president. As an old Penn guy, I can tell you, Harvard and Yale aren't in that mix and definitely not Princeton. Again, thank you for having me. Let me turn it back over to Keith.

Wardrip: President Harker, thank you for setting the stage perfectly for today's conversation on the way that credentials and education affect labor market outcomes. Before I introduce our next speaker, we have a poll question for you to answer. You can go to Slido.com or you can respond to the poll using the Join the Conversation on Slido frame on your screen. We pulled this question from the Board's Survey of Household Economics in Decisionmaking, or SHED, survey. The question is: How would you say the lifetime financial benefits of your education compared to its financial costs? Are those benefits larger, are the costs larger, or are they about the same? I will give everyone a second to answer. Early results indicate that the financial benefits are larger for most of those in the audience. I would say the same, and I think we can count ourselves among the lucky ones. As we're going to hear from our research panel and as I think we'll all aware, the cost and benefits of education can weigh out differently for different groups of students.

To further frame our agenda and to introduce our research panel, it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Julie Ajinkya, senior vice president of APIA Scholars. Dr. Ajinkya assumed this role in January to provide strategic direction to the organization as it builds its research and advocacy agenda. Prior to APIA Scholars, Dr. Ajinkya was the vice president of applied research at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, where her research interests included equity and post-secondary education and innovative models that improve degree completion for underserved populations. Dr. Ajinkya, take it away.

Julie Ajinkya: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm happy to be here with you. As Keith mentioned, my name is Julie Ajinkya, and I currently serve as a senior vice president at APIA Scholars. For those of you who may not be familiar with our work, we are the leading nonprofit provider of scholarships for Asian and Pacific Islander American students from low-income households and communities, making sure that we meaningfully connect talent with opportunity, regardless of ethnicity, national origin or financial need. I was asked to offer some framing thoughts for the presentations you are going to hear about uneven outcomes in the labor market, focusing specifically on the role of education and credentials. I am a big fan of both; I work in education policy; I still teach college courses. I have a PhD, so I won't pretend that I don't think credentialing as a system to signal what we know and can do is important.

Using good data and research to look at outcomes is critical to identify disparities and has been at the core of my work. For instance, the number of times that APIA students are left out of conversations centered on equity is mind boggling to me. If the same conversations and leaders demanding better disaggregation of data in one breath would simply follow their advice and disaggregate a category that spans 40 countries, even more ethnicities, hundreds of languages, various religions, distinct geopolitical reasons for migration, resettlement, and asylum, then they would see that leaving APIA communities out of the conversation is just plain reckless, especially at a time like now. Once you do look at the data, you will see that Pacific Islanders, for instance, have some of the highest COVID mortality rates regardless of where they live, incredibly high poverty rates for subgroups of Asian Americans like the Hmong, Cambodians, and Bangladeshis -- and that the real struggles of the fastest growing racial group in the country are simply being rendered invisible because we can't be bothered to be smarter about how we collect our data.

I'm always going to be a big proponent of talking about as much data and research as we can to really identify where we are failing our students and our workers. But I would like to use my moderator as prerogative today to push us harder about what data help us do. It's not a secret we are most often trained to think in a linear fashion. If A leads to B, or if you fix X, you will likely improve Y. But I argue that we actually need to push ourselves to think outside of that box and think about why we make these assumptions and how it is in fact very rare for such linear relationships to work in isolation. So education and credentials, for example, incredibly important, but they cannot alone fix uneven labor outcomes because if they could, we would not have solid research that demonstrates that even though higher educational obtainment is associated with higher wages and lower joblessness, for workers across different racial and ethnic categories, it does not eliminate racial gaps. Why? Because these gaps are deeply rooted in problems of segregation that concentrate communities of color and low-income communities in schools and neighborhoods and ZIP codes that are systematically underfunded. So unless we actually use this data to truly probe and understand how systems work, we will only be kicking the can down the road.

Let's just stop for a moment and really think about what defines a system. A system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or interconnected network, but it's also a set of principles and procedures according to which something is done, a set of rules, an organized framework or method. I would love for everyone to think for a second, every time you created a system. I know that in the audience today there are probably a number of people who are at the helm of organizational systems. But we all create and work in systems every day. How we check our email, how we pay our bills, how we figure out how to home-school while working full time, which for some of us is very real. You organize yourself and others to get something done, pretty simply put. But what's harder to see is that we make 100 decisions along the way as we build those systems to determine those principles and procedures that dictate how that system is run. Those decisions are based on what we value. Systems then require moving parts, players, they are created for a purpose, and they have values at their center. And those systems intersect, work with each other, work simultaneously, complicate each other.

If we see uneven outcomes in the labor market, we would be doing ourselves a favor to keep asking ourselves why. The easy answer would punt to the moment in the linear journey right before a person enters the work force, which is why it makes sense to really pay attention to education and credentials. But a systems approach would ask us to consider the importance of education credentials, simultaneously with the other systems that are in place and leading to higher rates of economic insecurity for certain populations over others. Importantly, learning about what some systems have changed or tweaked, tried differently to disrupt these outcomes that we observe. I do say disrupt deliberately instead of just improve, because one of the most insidious problems of system is that they self-perpetuate. Generations of privilege turn into cycles of wealth, and they continue to exclude certain populations, and then the privilege gets baked into every fiber of social fabric until it is so implicit that many people have a hard time detecting that privilege. The three papers you will see presented in this session all talk about systems. As you hear from each participant, I would love it if we asked ourselves some questions.

First off, how many systems are at play in each presentation and why might those systems have been designed that way to really understand how we get at the root of these uneven outcomes that they might be producing. For instance, when we talk about social mobility in rural America, let's also make sure we keep in front of our mind the systems that mean rural America is typically drained and defined by economies of extraction and less connectivity, both including transportation but also broadband. We also know that 41 million Americans are considered to live in higher education deserts, defined by at least half an hour's drive from the nearest college or university and limited access to community college. What are the systems that have given rise to that dislocation? Then when we think about historically black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, let's make sure that we also keep at the front of our mind that HBCUs came to be as an alternative system itself that was built because of segregation. Given that traditional higher education was never designed for black students, and as a group of institutions, this system relies on federal, state, and local funding, more than their non-HBCU counterparts and have experienced the steepest declines in federal funding as well.

Then on top of it, these HBCUs interact with yet another system, of minority serving institutions, which now include Hispanic serving institutions, tribal colleges and universities and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions, otherwise known as AANAPISI, who all compete for more federal resources so they can best serve the targeted needs of distinct student populations who are all trying to go to college in a system of higher education that was never designed for them to be there. Finally, when we think about older workers, who are turning to new jobs later in life, think about the education and work force system that they exist in, that are not well known for thinking nimbly and what it would take for the systems to adapt to changing needs quickly.

Thank you for letting me share some of my thoughts about how I make sense of these conversations and how I think about eliminating disparity. Especially now. We've had multiple national crises converge this past year as all of you know, but students and workers have been struggling long before COVID, long before this moment of reckoning over racial justice. The silver lining of this past year for myself at least, is that it made conversations about systems and their interconnected web of relationships but also their failures and potential really seem to resonate more with people recently than at any time in my own experience that I can remember.

With that, I would like to introduce our panel and remind everyone that the full bios are available on the conference website. There is a button on your screen that will take you there. You will be hearing from Ryan Parsons, a doctoral candidate in Princeton's Sociology Department who will be presenting research on higher education as a mobility pathway in the rural South. He will be followed by Julie Hotchkiss, a research economist and senior adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, who will present her research on the differences in black student graduation rates between HBCU and non-HBCU institutions, and finally, you will hear from Isabel Cardenas-Navia, who is director of research at Work Cred, and she will be presenting research on variable impacts of new credentials for the older worker. They will be joined by Chauncy Lennon, who is the vice president for learning and work at Lumina Foundation, and he will serve as the discussant to discuss how this research can be used in policy and practice. Now I would love to turn it over to our researchers. Thank you.

Ryan Parsons: Good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation to be here. My name is Ryan Parsons, and I am a PhD candidate in sociology and social policy at Princeton. My talk is drawn from my dissertation work, which concerns the spatial concentration of mobility and immobility in the United States. The larger project is an ethnographic community study of persistent poverty county in the Mississippi Delta region. Today's talk concerns the prospects of higher education as a pathway to social and labor market mobility for low-income students from this context.

This map serves as a motivation for the project and today's talk in particular. This map may be familiar to many of you, this is a visualization of Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren's work on the effects of [inaudible] intergenerational mobility. An arc of red colors indicates counties where poor children have a lower likelihood of moving into the top income quintile. Two patterns are immediately obvious. The first is that there are clear spatial clusters. Regions like the Mississippi Delta region and the blackout regions, the lowlands of South Carolina, parts of Appalachia, parts of the Rust Belt, and native and indigenous nations of the West– all have some of the lowest rates of upward mobility in the United States. The second pattern to note is that low mobility rates are not a rural problem, per se. The rural parts of the Deep South, which are predominantly Black and African American, have very low rates of upward mobility. By contrast, rural regions of states in the upper Midwest, like Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Iowa, have some of the highest rates of mobility in the United States. If [inaudible] isn't the problem, that is to say if the structure of the local economy doesn't explain the spatial concentration of mobility, then what does? I tackle a narrower problem in this paper: How and when does higher education fail to be an effective pathway for social and economic mobility?

The overall argument of the paper can be summarized as follows. This paper's chief argument is that for rural youth, especially rural youth of color, enrolling in college and finding employment that uses that education requires a permanent transition from one opportunity structure to another, a transition which is not often expected of students from more privileged backgrounds. By opportunity structure, I refer to the linkages between educational opportunities and occupational hierarchies that are in turn embedded in the given spatial context. A student in New York City, for example, could complete her education in the city and find a job that rewards her educational attainment, all while remaining close to her home neighborhood. Even a geographically mobile student from such a background is not required to make a permanent shift. A student from New York, who studies finance in California, and finds her first job in Chicago can easily imagine returning home one day. For disadvantaged rural students, the permanence of this transition incurs significant economic, social and emotional costs, costs which inhibit upward mobility even for academically strong students with upward aspirations. Students who opt to bare these costs also face marginalization as they traverse through these spaces.

The study draws on data from ethnographic and interview-based study of a community in the Mississippi Delta that I refer to as Central Delta County. In particular, today's paper draws on interview and observations with a cohort of high school students in the county, each of whom aspires to attend college and begin a professional career. I have worked with this group of students for two years in a variety of after-school and summer programs. Today's presentation will focus on the components of the argument rather than an elaborate presentation of the raw data. My email address will be on the last slide. I will be happy to share the draft paper with anyone who's interested. While the project draws on a single case study, many of this county's problems will be familiar. The region has long been plagued by poverty, depopulation, and the lack of economic progress as the region's dominant agriculture industry mechanized and shed the majority of the jobs it offered. The county has a population around 25,000, down from a prewar peak of 70,000 in the 1930s. A third of the county lives in poverty, a sixth of the county lives in deep poverty; deep poverty refers to incomes that are less than half of the federal poverty line. Historically agriculture was the primary source of employment and the driver of the regional economy. Today the county has almost no manufacturing jobs. For the kids in the study, Central Delta offers almost no opportunity and certainly no opportunity that would make use of the skills provided by a college education.

For the remainder of the presentation, I want to talk about a couple of different barriers that students from this context face as they try to make higher education work for them. The first barrier is simply a lack of information. One of the greatest constraints the local opportunity structure imposes upon college aspirants and others who want to imagine themselves as economically mobile, is a lack of available reference points to inform their ambitions and make them feel possible. Often the only college educated people they interact with are their teachers. For families in rural communities, this combination of parent and teacher expectations and parent discussions of college are key predictors of students of aspirations for their future. In Central Delta County, these expectations are affected by low rates of educational attainment of previous cohorts. That is a lack of role models and social capital is a compounding problem that [inaudible] with each generation.

In addition, upward mobility comes with social costs, students in this context understand that leaving for college means leaving behind their old networks with little hope for returning. Quite simply, upwardly mobile students have to give up their social networks and distance themselves, physically and socially, from their families. My work with these students highlights the complex social dimensions of upward mobility that students from opportunity structures like this must grapple with. Philosopher Jennifer Morton frames these as ethical costs, in so far as they determine how people find value and meaning in their lives. An economic logic of upward mobility does not account for the social and emotional costs that come with migrating from one context to another. Families like those in this study have close knit ties that enable them to make ends meet. ...in this context draw from important sources of financial sources and emotional support. These ethical costs are born by students with disadvantaged backgrounds. Upward mobility would put them in an economic strata and cultural context that come with social distance from the lives they leave behind.

Finally, traversing through these spaces can lead to experiences of discrimination. Many of the students I worked with were able to attend prestigious summer programs at places like Yale and Andover. Students who attended the elite summer programs as part of their preparation, frequently reported experiences of exclusion and overt racism, often for the first time in their lives. Even students from places like Central Delta County that take steps to move up the social ladder often end up in spaces that do not fully welcome them because of their racial, class, and rural identities. In many cases, these encounters are not motivated by specific racial animus, but white students in elite settings often project assumptions about class onto their nonwhite peers.

Learning to work in an elite space comes with the added pressure of adapting a .... or a dual set of cultural norms and codes. In the long run, learning to transition to a new way of life diminishes the ability of students to serve as role models and mentors to students in communities they believe behind. Just to wrap up, the concern of this paper is to demonstrate why the saying go to college is not always an easy solution to the challenges faced by young people in communities like Central Delta County. Going to college and by extension getting a job that leverages that college degree requires transitioning to a new opportunity structure on a permanent basis. For students from places like Central Delta, this transition is difficult to imagine and internalize because of weak local labor markets, costly for students who have to sever family and social ties, and risky for students entering spaces already marked by exclusion, elitism, and racism. As we think about cases like this in a wider context, we should hold two things in mind. The first is that social mobility is increasingly linked to geographic mobility, a relationship that's not been fully theorized in discussions of social and economic mobility. The second is that in this case, this is a challenge linked to historical patterns and mechanization. The mechanization and automation are increasingly features of the urban service sector and other sectors of the economy. Ordinarily, policymakers should thus think critically about how to support students who have the potential for mobility and strong labor market outcomes, but who are also embedded in social networks and opportunity structures that make that process more fraught. Thank you, and now I would like to turn it over to Julie Hotchkiss from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Julie Hotchkiss: Thank you for including our paper in this important conference. Of course, all opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta or the Federal Reserve System. I want to acknowledge my coauthors on this project. Let's start with some background. HBCUs are historically Black colleges and universities who have a rich history dating back to the end of the Civil War, and at that time they provided the only means of attaining post-secondary education for about 90 percent of Black college students. Serving primarily students of color, these institutions are unique to the United States.

As you can see from the map, most of the HBCUs are located in the Southeast with about 40 percent of them located in the Sixth district of the Federal Reserve System. Overall, there's about 110 HBCUs across the U.S. There is a long literature documenting significant differences in educational and labor market outcomes between graduates of HBCUs and non-HBCUs. However, many of these differences disappear once student and institutional characteristics are controlled for. Since they are so difficult to quantify, there are few studies that are able to capture social, psychological, and emotional benefits accruing to students who attend HBCUs and of course we are not going to be able to measure that either. But if outcome differences disappear when characteristics are controlled for, this begs the question of whether there is anything left for HBCUs to learn when it comes to improving outcomes relative to non-HBCUs.

Our research digs deeper into the educational and labor market differences between HCBU and non-HBCU students. Because of limited time, I'm only going to be discussing the differences in six-year Black graduation rate among students observed between the two institution types. This graph shows that non-HBCUs have on average an eight-percentage point edge over HBCUs in six-year graduation rates among Black students. Any measured outcome is a function of both student and institutional characteristics. This table—I know full of numbers--it illustrates some of the characteristics that are most different and thus most likely to contribute to differences in graduation rates between HBCU and non-HBCU students. Non-HBCUs have higher endowment expense ratios. They also have higher tuition and fees. Students at non-HBCUs are less likely to receive Pell grants; Pell grants are needs-based grants. They also score higher on entrance exams, are overall less likely to be Black and are more likely to be part-time students.

Now in addition to differences in characteristics, there are also differences in how successful the different institutions are in translating these characteristics into outcomes. We refer to this as differences in mechanisms. Some examples of how these mechanisms might differ, might be how do institutions translate tuition and fees into graduation rates. Is the relationship stronger for HBCUs or is it stronger for non-HBCUs or do lower SAT scores handicap success of students at HBCUs more or less than they do for non-HBCU students. In order to uncover the relative importance of differences in mechanisms and characteristics in determining differences in six year Black student graduation rates, we make use of data from the U.S. Department of Education for the years 2009-2018. We perform the analysis at the institutional level since that's the focus for policy levers we want to discuss.

Since HBCUs and non-HBCUs are significantly different in observed characteristics, there is concern that there's a lot of differences between unobserved characteristics as well. Those differences in unobserved characteristics would end up biasing any results. We therefore create a sample of comparable institutions through what is called propensity score matching. In this matched sample, we then perform a regression analysis to decompose the difference in observed graduation rates into differences in characteristics and differences in mechanisms or how those characteristics translate into outcomes. Recall the eight percentage-point graduation rate gap between HBCU and non-HBCU institutions. By creating a matched sample on average the graduation rate difference disappears, which is what has been found in the literature before. The theory in applying the matching methodology is that the more similar the treated or HBCU and control non-HBCU samples are in their observed characteristics, the more similar they will be in their unobserved characteristics, allowing us to be more confident in any causal interpretation of the results.

There are caveats to this methodology of matching, but I won't be able to go into those. We also recognize that the difference in graduation rates differs across the distribution. While on average, non-HBCUs have higher graduation rates than HBCU, there is a greater relative share of HBCUs in the upper tale of the graduation rate distribution. This means that there may be different things that are important at different points of the distribution for HBCUs to learn in improving their graduation rates. Regarding institutional and student characteristics, we find three important differences between HBCUs and non-HBCUs. Higher tuition in fees at non-HBCUs increase the graduation rate gap at the low end of the distribution. This doesn't necessarily mean that HBCUs need to run out and raise tuition. This result is likely coming from a correlation with other characteristics that are still even left unmeasured.

We also find that lower SAT scores among HBCU students at all points of the distribution increases the graduation rate gap. In response to this finding, HBCUs could skim the cream and reject students with lower SAT scores, but this policy obviously would not be consistent with the mission to undo the effects of systemic racism that may be manifesting itself in low SAT scores. The third important characteristic we identify is that a lower share of part-time students at all points of the distribution decrease the graduation rate gap. The implication of this result is that fewer part-time students give HBCUs an edge, suggesting that they should continue to support focus on studies as a full-time endeavor.

We've uncovered two important mechanisms that could improve HBCU graduation rates relative to non-HBCU institutions. We find that first generation students at the lower end of the distribution have a harder time graduating from HBCUs than they do from non-HBCUs. Students with similar SAT scores have a harder time graduating from HBCUs than from non-HBCUs. These two results suggest that HBCUs could devote more resources through grants, federal funding initiatives to students arriving at college without familiar experiences to draw on and to students entering college perhaps with some need for remedial attention such that might be manifesting through lower SAT scores. The bottom line the research is that even if outcomes differences are erased by comparing comparable institutions, digging deeper tells us how outcomes among HBCU institutions can be improved even more relative to their non-HBCU counterparts. Thanks very much, and next up we are going to hear from Isabel Cardenas-Navia from Workcred.

Isabel Cardenas-Navia: Hi, thank you for the opportunity to be here today to present this exciting research that we have done at Work cred. It's focused on the impacts and new credentials on the older worker. I want to take a minute to thank and acknowledge all of my teammates at Work cred. So jumping into the purpose of our analysis, the goal is really to determine the impact of new credentials on older workers. We used the PIRL files from the employment training administration from the U.S. department of labor to examine this impact and looked at workers eligible for the work force innovation opportunity act worker programs and those programs are gauged to support individuals who have been displaced or who are under-employed. I won't go into a lot of detail on the dataset other than to highlight this data is not representative of the older worker population. We did think it was a great way to understand how new credentials can impact unemployment and reemployment.

Our analysis looked at credential choice and completion, reemployment earnings and occupational choice, and a number of other items like older workers versus younger workers which are in the paper as you can see, a lot of additional analysis in there. Demographics here you can see, this was the data demographics or the data we had. You can see different demographic groups going down the left-hand side and those who train and don't train as well as the entire group. Jumping right into the first analysis that I'm showing you today, it focuses on credential choice and completion.

Looking at the left-hand side, I wanted to first say there are six different credential choices that are—that's how the data is categorized. The first is industry recognized certificates, state and federal licenses, certificates issued by community colleges, apprenticeships, associate degrees, and bachelorette degrees. And what you can see is that overwhelmingly, older workers choose industry recognized certifications. The second largest, most common choice are state and federal licenses. They are looking at shorter-term credentials, that typically can be earned in under a year. Completion rates by credential type, looking at the same six categories, now looking at younger, under 49-year-old workers, versus 50-plus workers. And what we can see is for state and federal licenses, bachelorette degrees and industry recognized certificates or certifications, there is much larger completion rates ranging from—in the 80 percentiles compared with the longer-term associate degrees and certificates.

So we really see that older workers who enter these programs are completing them at quite high rates. If we look at that data, looking at reemployment and earnings by these six different credential types, for this particular table, we are looking at reemployment on the, going along the vertical line here and then quarterly earnings along the horizontal line. When we look at reemployment, it ranges from 70 to 80 percent for the six different credential types. What we see when we look at the left-hand side is that bachelorette degrees and certificates or certifications are in the sweet spot of higher reemployment, 75 percent or greater as well as high quarterly earnings.

When you take this data combined with the data I showed you on the previous slide, what you see is there is overall greater value for industry recognized certificates or certifications. They have high completion rates, high reemployment rates, good quarterly earnings and they are the credential of choice with the majority of older workers. This highlights the value in that. The other thing I want to mention is that we saw this value across all the different demographics we looked at. We saw it for men and women, we saw it for veterans and so we really—it was sort of a finding that carried across the different demographic groups. We also saw across all occupational choices.

Here in this slide, I highlight two different data points on occupational training choices for older workers. On the right-hand side, we had listed the top 20 occupational choices that older workers made using these WIOA training funds. The top 20 choices account for 80 percent of the training choices, the majority of the training choices they are making. The top three are the motor vehicle operators, computer occupations at the health technologists and technicians. When we look at the reemployment rates after the first quarter for these top 20 choices, we see they are consistently high. At the lowest level, there are 56 percent for other management occupations, and they range up to 83.5 percent for health care diagnose and treating practitioners. We did this analysis after one quarter and repeated it after four quarters. For some of these occupational choices, you will see up to 10 percent increase for the number of reemployed. The numbers did go up a little bit after we looked after four quarters. The colors on the left hand match the colors on the right, if you wanted to look across you can see that. Again, those reemployment rates were high across the different demographic groups, although we did see gender-based differences on the different training choices that you made. For example, with motor vehicle operators or some of the construction trades were male dominated versus others that were female dominant.

We think about the current situation we are in, it's interesting to try to look at infield versus out of field employment, how the training choice to select training occupations in field or out of field, what impact that might have on the outcomes. What we saw here, we have the out of field probability is the open circle and we have the in-field probability is the open square. You see a shift from the circle to the square, left to right for the majority of these top 20 occupations. It shows an increase in employment probability after six months. I'm not showing the data today, but we see the same increase in wages or in earnings infield premium in terms of earnings when you do infield training. That's really something that we can think about, why that is, but what impact it might have given the current work force situation.

Finally ending with recommendations. I will highlight that we definitely think more research is needed on understanding the value of earning credentials. That can understand -- what the impact is on the types of analysis we did like, reemployment, earnings, job satisfaction, also how they can help support older workers transition into their current occupation or transition into new occupations. To support that, we need stakeholders to share their data so we can link data to understand how we and be able to perform the analysis to determine some of these different -- to understand how we can answer some of these research questions. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to present here today. I would like to hand it over to Chauncy Lennon from the Lumina Foundation.

Chauncy Lennon: Thank you, Isabel and Ryan and Julie as well. I'm going to offer thoughts on the implications for policy and practice from these three excellent papers, and then we will have a chance for some Q&A. Think of questions you would like to ask and submit them to the chat. It's widely recognized that the U.S. post-secondary education and workforce training programs, policies, and practices were built for an economy that's been transformed over the recent decades. We can debate how effective the system was in the past but many of us would agree that it is not well-suited for the realities of the world we live in today, and this is especially the case for those who face the greatest disadvantages in the labor market.

The question then, is what does an educational and workforce system that meets today's economic challenges and addresses our persistent social inequities look like. What are we trying to build and what do we want to get to? These three papers not only help us think about this question but, maybe this was the intent of the conference organizers, they help us think about it from three distinct and critical angles.

Ryan's paper looks at students, Julie's at institutions, and Isabel's at credentials. Any successful new approach will need to address these three institutions, stakeholders. We need to think about how we serve the needs of students and how institutions are going to respond to the new roles and the expanded scope of what they need to do, what that will look like, and we need to understand better how the credential marketplace can better promote labor market mobility. Broadly speaking, one of the more promising ideas about how to redesign education and training to improve outcomes has been to think about developing more clearly structured coherent pathways. Some of this is within a post-secondary conversation, in particular at community colleges, efforts from access and student success, involved fundamental design or redesign of programs' instruction and student support services. There has been a lot of talk as we heard this afternoon about the role of apprenticeship programs, which again are about creating a clear pathway for students who don't want to go to pursue a two- or four-year degree or want to go from training, high school into labor market, via a structured training program.

There has been some of this has been in terms of thinking about how we make pathways work from high school to post-secondary and involving the kinds of programs described in Ryan's research, and in the workforce field it's almost become a basic organizing principle to talk about a pathway design and that is really in some ways shaping everything we think about and how we structure the workforce system. In all these cases, the underlying problem we are trying to address is the world of poorly explained programs and career options, many of which are disconnected and many which don't have particularly good outcomes. Sometimes this is described as the cafeteria style approach to post-secondary education training, and I think we recognize that a system that is designed around choice or consumer choice has really significant costs. Choice in some ways becomes the barrier to success.

President Harker at the beginning of today's session talked about more pathways, that's true, [some] pathways don't lead anywhere, we are creating more pathways and none are getting students to the outcomes they are looking for, we are not doing ourselves any favors. As a response to this problem, the focus on pathways is well warranted. I think what Ryan's paper reminds us is that simply building pathways is not enough. There are economic, social, and emotional costs to pathways and they not being sufficiently addressed especially not for the low-income rural students of color we meet in his study. The paper captures the significant challenges these students face, but the question I would sort of ask and what this paper inspired me to wonder is as we see one of the most acute examples of the disconnect that the pathways create given a host of other dynamics around the economy of the South and access to institutions, I think we have to ask ourselves, we shouldn't be trapped into thinking that this is just about some of the most disadvantaged students.

There's other evidence we see of efforts to try and connect students to college opportunities that have also not proven very successful. Many of you may be familiar with the work that was done on college undermatching, where there was an attempt to help high-performing low-income students from across the country; they were offered incentives to attend selective but geographically distant colleges, which didn't succeed at all. We need to think, we need to recognize we do need to do a lot more here, but we don't yet have the kind of depth of understanding and the best ways to respond are. The paper helps us begin to think through what we need to do to build that more thoughtful response.

Let's move over and look at institutions. Julie and her coauthors are looking at a well-known set of institutions, historically black colleges and universities. But what we learn is, I think, instructive for the choices many institutions are facing. -- For me what stuck out was the authors wrote in the conclusion that the greatest contributing factors to explaining the differences and outcomes between HBCU and non-HBCU were student characteristics. They note that there is not much that the institutions can do to change the characteristic of the student body to improve outcomes other than skimming, looking only to take students who have higher SAT scores and so on or not offering financial aid, essentially cutting the support for admitted students coming from lower-income backgrounds. Even a casual observer of the college admissions over the last many years knows we have watched many institutions pursue the change the characteristics of the student body approach.

While HBCUs remain committed to the students they long served, for them the path to improved outcomes lies actually, as the authors point out, in spending more resources in developing new strategies to support first generation students and other students who come with other kinds of learning and other barriers. In short, what they're recommending is that community, HBCUs have to think about an important aspect of the pathway model which is supporting students and navigating a set of academic and nonacademic demands on the path to a four-year degree. One piece of good news is we've seen recent interest and support for HBCUs, from various government programs and philanthropy. My hope is that some of those resources are a help to build out a strategy in HBCUs that think about what the kind of comprehensive support services look like to promote greater attainment.

Let's turn to Isabel's research, which shows us the value that nondegree credentials play, especially for older workers. Industry-recognized certifications are an affordable short-term employment focused option that often get less attention in a system which has focused on the goal of BA attainment, BA or bust system, as many call it. This research shows that the value of certifications across is real; it's real across demographic groups, occupations, and it has a greater benefit for those who are building on workforce experience and other credentials in a given field, so there is power to stacking certification on top of other kinds of industry-specific skills and credentials. It's perhaps not surprising that older workers would gravitate to these options.

The important question this research raises is again a pathway one; what does this tell us about the kind of navigation system that we need to build? Is there more to the story here than just older workers know more about industries and what is valued and that's why they understand the certifications matter, or is there some other set of dynamics, whether that's counseling, coming from the workforce centers where they are accessing other kind of industry insider knowledge, employer signaling. How can we better understand how this choice is getting made. We need to remember that the credential marketplace—in the U.S. we have over 730,000 different credentials. It's overwhelming and confusing; there is not particularly great information in many respects about the quality of different kinds of credentials. What this research shows us is that when we have a clear understanding, when workers understand what the value of industry certifications are, that leads to a choice that seems to have positive outcomes.

To sum up, I think we all probably can recognize that in some way or other, we are all sort of building a pathways model. This has become the way in which—the road we are headed down. What these papers help us understand is that we are very early in that journey, we have a lot of important work to do. That work has to look at experiences with students, institutions, and the role credentials play, and I think the insights we gained here will help us continue forward on this journey toward a pathway model that meets the needs of today's students and the economy at large.

Let me ask the authors to join me and we will have some questions and get to hear from them. Let's start with the first question. I will address this to Ryan but Julie and Isabel please also join in. The question is if we want to help students switch opportunity structures, are there proven programs to ameliorate the invisible social and emotional costs that students incur?

Parsons: It's a good question, and I'm sure there have been success stories through nonprofits and other sort of context specific programs. I think if we wanted to think about a generalizable solution to this, I would suggest looking at HBCUs. Many of them are located in these regions that have experienced persistent population poverty and finding ways to invest in those institutions and sort of expand their role into more of a community development and more comprehensive role in students' lives could help facilitate this transition but only out of the economic conditions where they are starting but also if they choose the geographic constraints of where they have grown up. Certainly open to hearing more about success stories. This is obviously a problem that's larger than my own case study. Certainly something that needs to be an ongoing conversation.

Lennon: Julie, let me ask you, I know it's a bit outside of the scope of the research for your paper, but what is your sense of how HBCUs think about designing their programs around the needs of their students who have need of additional support and services to make it through?

Hotchkiss: I can't speak to any specific decisionmaking process, but our hope was to perhaps give some guidance to institutions who are trying to make these those decisions in terms of, you mentioned more money is perhaps available to HBCUs these days and more money is great, but the question is where are they going to get the best bang for the buck. So hopefully we can point them in some, in a small way to some directions of things that are working and other things where they could use some improvement.

Lennon: Isabel, let me ask you a question, when you think about the way your data is telling you, how much do you know about the kind of intentionality of the older worker? Is there evidence to suggest they began knowing that industry-recognized certifications were going to have the pay off that they did, or was it a less clear process for them?

Cardenas-Navia: Unfortunately, our particular data set doesn't give us the insight to address that question. But it does raise another interesting question which I didn't fully get into my presentation but is in my paper, which is that the way that the WIOA programs are run, there is local control, and that is so that these local workforce boards can adapt to local economic situations. I think that also means that each has different criteria for how they put credentials on their eligible training provider lists and how they select who has access to funds to get those credentials. One of the things we discovered was that there are up to 20 full differences in how older workers have access to WIOA-funded credentials. I think that it just shows there are policy issues and structural issues that impact access to credentials. It's not –so part of it may be choice and part of it may be what credentials they have access to.

Lennon: I think that's inevitably right. What we are trying to understand hear is this complicated and often murky set of how much is it driven by the workers, who are clear on the goal, how much is the system sort of channeling them, creating barriers to different kinds of options. I think it makes clear what an important question that is to pursue.

Julie, I have a couple of questions for you. HBCUs have different histories, purpose, missions and student populations. What did your research tell you about this, how did you account for it in your research? The second question [is] what mechanisms might explain the lower graduation rates of first-gen HBCUs, and if you had to guess, the person who posed this question says if they had to guess they would have expected the opposite.

Hotchkiss: That HBCUs would have higher graduate ...yes, that might be something they might expect. To your first question, we accounted for the student and institutional characteristics that we could in order to match up and make the comparisons to non-HBCU institutions as similar as possible. We also are cognizant of the fact there are several tiers, not only in HBCUs but non-HBCU institutions, in terms of the quality of instruction, the quality of support that students receive. So we perform the analysis at different levels of different places of the distribution. Some results are applicable across the board such as struggles with low SAT scores, for example. Other characteristics, other mechanisms are more important at the top end of the distribution than the bottom. That's why we split it across to see whether there were different messages at different points in the distribution.

The second question is what accounts for the lower graduation rates. Specifically, I don't know exactly what those are, although there is a very strong correlation between first-generation families, low-income families and having difficulty getting across the finish line. An example that comes to mind, I used to be a faculty member at Georgia State University, and they recently have been, they have been doing some in the last few years, small things in order to help, so little mini grants—somebody might be $300 from graduating. And if they know about that, they can help it, and they've increased their graduation rate significantly. Those are an example of some of the characteristics.

Lennon: It's interesting in some ways, Ryan's point about the accumulated intelligence HBCUs have; they have always been dealing with students who have a lot more financial challenges than other kinds of institutions. They have a base to build on in thinking about how do we adapt and meet the needs of the students that come with these kinds of challenges. Ryan, two questions. One is, I think in the research you shared in the paper, we see this grim challenge for students who are trying to figure out how to stay. They would like to get, go, get an education but potentially stay connected to the community. There are lots of other research that talks about the experience of students in some ways who are looking to get out. The goal of going to post-secondary is to move away. That has a lot of consequences for the sending communities. Can you say a little bit about if that dynamic was also present?

Parsons: I think the key here is that while most young people want to get out as it were, the idea of being able to come back, maybe later in life, is attractive. You think about where you want to raise a family or be close to family and for students from places like the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia, that's not necessarily an option. They go to get a job as an accountant and not much of a pathway back home. I think that's sort of the area where this is difficult for these students. They recognize they can have a better life elsewhere but they also have to grapple with the permanence of that transition in a way that many other students do not have to.

Lennon: And a follow-up question. What is your sense of how the move to virtual schooling, how is that playing in the rural context?

Parsons: I can talk about this for a long time. It's been a disaster. We know anecdotally that broadband infrastructure in places like this is not great. There are economic costs associated with having access to reliable Wi-Fi devices. This will be something that's important to watch over the next few years are the outcomes for these kids. And something we will have to account for as we try to help them transition into the workforce or higher education.

Lennon: Let me Isabel a version of that question. When we think about what we call short-term credentials, certificates, certification, even to occupational AA, two-year degrees, what impact will, is the shift to remote learning having? A lot of that work, what gives it its value is the in-person training components where technical skills are developed that really are what often is driving the value of these credentials. What is your sense of where we are with those options?

Cardenas-Navia: It's been really interesting. I think there have been positives that have come out of this. I will highlight those a little bit as well as some ways in which there's had to be a lot of adaptation. Just to remind folks, half of nondegree credentials are offered by not-higher education institutions. There is a whole world of folks who have not always been bricks and mortar. They are not new to this, but they offer distance learning classes or the certifications. I think that there are many certification bodies, I will speak specifically, who have always done in-person proctoring to offer certification exams for reasons that are due to quality of assessment, have made the transition now to online exams or assessments. That has increased access to those exams. They have seen an increase in demand for their certifications and for assessments, which is probably a positive for folks to have increased access and not have the additional burden of getting to a testing center particularly if they don't live near one.

I think that it's also pushed more access to training and other types of preparation for certificates or certifications that are there. In many ways, that's been a positive. It's been a challenge to develop some of those hands-on training modules that even if you were taking the course remotely and doing the material, there would be a day or a series of days in which you would come in and do the training in person. I will say that I have been pleasantly surprised, thinking about laboratory courses in science and technology fields, that there has been a real innovation in terms of how you can still teach those concepts and that hands-on portion remotely. I think while it has been a challenge, I think there has been a lot of innovation and creativity in trying to find solutions so that people still have access to earning those credentials.

Lennon: Let me ask a follow-up question. One of the important components of industry-recognized credentials is the industry part. We think back to your research and the different patterns among older and younger workers; what do you see as the opportunities for industry employers to play a greater role in helping people understand the value of these credentials?

Cardenas-Navia: Part of it certainly is signaling which credentials they find valuable, and that signaling is not just in the hiring process; it's also in the promotion, retention process, and offering benefits to earn additional credentials. We are currently doing another study where we are interviewing employers, credential holders and hiring managers and supervisors to understand how companies, employers think about credentials. And how that is transmitted and perceived by employees. It's a nice compliment to this study which looked at the data to look at those more qualitative pieces which are professional development, certainly wages, but also getting your foot in the door to get that job interview or get hired. I think that from, there were more signaling, that can be data from employers and being more open with their employees about what they value and how they are looking at it.

We are still in the early phases of our other study. I heard from many employers, supervisors and hiring managers saying yes, we absolutely value those credentials. You will hear from the credential holders that they are not sure how much they value that credential; they're not sure how much their employers value it. There are pieces that are about communication from employers.

Lennon: Terrific. We need to wrap it up. I want to thank all three of you for these great papers and this great conversation. Now, I'm going to hand it back to Keith to wrap us up.

Wardrip: Thank you so much, Dr. Lennon, for leading such a great conversation. On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to thank all our participants for sharing their time and insights today. I would like to thank everyone in the audience for being with us on Day three of this webinar series. Please join us tomorrow at the same time for the last webinar in this series. The day is going to open with remarks from Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, followed by Elisabeth Jacobs with the Urban Institute, and a presentation of new research on career pathways, including how they have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The registration link and tomorrow's agenda are available on the conference website, which you can access using the link at the top of your screen. In just a second you will see a link to our daily survey. Please fill it out, we value your feedback. We want to make sure we do this better the next time. Thank you again.