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00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome back to the At Scale podcast. Tennessee achieves podcast. My name is Ben Sterling. Um, I serve as the chief content officer here have. So for the last twelve years, I'm joined today by a familiar co-host, Tyler Ford, um, our vice president of workforce. And, uh, Tyler, I feel like today's guest is going to speak a lot to what your role is about. I'm really excited about today's guest. Um, we've, uh, for, for a little inside baseball for the listener. We've been talking to this guest for about the past ten minutes, and I think we almost forgot to hit record because the conversation was just, uh, ruminating. It's really fascinating stuff. And I think that as we at Tennessee achieves really take what I would say is our next step, you know, from college access with the introduction of promise college completion with coaching and grant programs. And now really, um, with a keen eye towards workforce supports, making sure students have a great off ramp from their post-secondary credential into gainful employment. Our guest today, I think, is going to provide some excellent context and excellent insight into how we can continue to impact in that space and what the national landscape looks like in this space as well. So really excited to get going. Yeah, I, I agree with that. It's, it's interesting. This is a well, I'll just say we're, we have doctor Jeff Strohl and I'm the only time I'm going to say doctor is now because he's asked me to call him Jeff going forward, which I love. And we love that here. We're very much a a casual organization when it comes to those sorts of things. Uh, and he is from Georgetown Center on Education and the workforce. And this is an organization that at Tennessee achieves, we've leveraged their data for two decades at this point to ensure that not only are we helping students go from high school to college, but do so in an efficient way, that's going to lead to hopefully, uh, family sustaining income and a career that is not just a job. And so, um, I'm going to let, uh, Doctor Stroll and or Jeff introduce himself. How, how did how he got to this role as the director of research for, for Georgetown or c e w as, as it would go by. Uh, so Jeff, welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you for having me, Ben. Uh, it's a great pleasure to be here. And so just a little bit, I'll do a little preamble and then we can jump into the meat. Uh, as we were talking before, I've rubbed shoulders with folks in Tennessee for almost the last twenty years, uh, helped launch the drive to fifty five with the keynote when then Governor Wholesome. Uh, I've done a lot of work with the Tennessee, uh, technical college system, which I hold up as a gold standard across a couple of dimensions that we can talk about and have followed, uh, the work in Tennessee on, uh, trying to get access, uh, across the board. And I think this is a really, really important conversation, because if we look at the history of educational policy and initiatives, we started with college for all. Get them to the door and then slowly we're moving towards get them graduated, which I don't think we're doing a very good job with nationally. I don't know the statistics for Tennessee. And then we're landing on the big Kahuna, get a job. Uh, and since about ninety percent of all of the students, the clients want to get a job, I think it's something that we listen to. And so the next piece on our horizon, if we look at this history is how do we reconcile college going with careers when historically what we've done, we just dump people in the labor market, we educate them, we say, well, we did a really good job and they should get a job. And so we dump them with no counseling, no career supports, no nothing, and we barely track them. So now we're hitting a point in history with enhanced wage records where we're starting to bring occupation into wage records, where we can actually start to think about career pathways as being something different than that defined by faculty, which is what it is right now. My coursework should build to point, you know, where in fact, career institute means labor market and to be able to actually do a better job following people in the labor market to understand what is the relationship between education and luck, for instance. So what causes things like a low wage job? What causes wage progression? What are these things and how do they interact with education and training? And so the efforts that you all are doing. So I think it's very important where you are right now. Absolutely. As an organization, we serve about ninety thousand students. At any given moment, sixty zero zero zero new high school seniors will come into our program every fall. And then we have about thirty thousand that are in college actively. And so we feel a heavy responsibility to not only get these students into college. Uh, right before the pandemic. Twenty nineteen, we launched a statewide coaching college coaching program that we call complete, and that's now fully operational. Uh, I would say that it's really no longer a pilot at this point. And, uh, we're pairing that with emergency grant funding. So you have a coach on our staff who will work with about four hundred students from a specific community college service area. So it's a local placement, and those students can receive up to a thousand dollars each semester to address really anything that could be a barrier to college success. Meanwhile, that coach is building an accountability relationship and, um, weaving in a workforce curriculum that Tyler has been working on so that not only are we talking to them about matriculating through college, but also how this is going to connect to the future employment that's on the other side of that credential that they're pursuing. Um, and so I think we're on the right trail. We're hiking towards the right direction. Um, and so that is kind of what I would like to get your, your opinion on is, um, what are we getting right? Um, and what else could we be doing to enhance that conversation in Tennessee and nationally? Okay. Well, like I said, I've done work in Tennessee, but I haven't been active in Tennessee, so I'm not going to be up to date with your current current, uh, initiatives there. But I know some of the older ones. Um, so let's just start with the six hundred pound gorilla in the corner. AI people are acting like change has never occurred and are acting like the big old boogeyman called AI is going to destroy work as we know it. No future ahead. Everybody should, you know, be in despair where in fact, our education system is very unique in the world in how we combine general and specific education, which is really critical when faced with change, education in particular, general education, cognitive ability, durable skills, whatever language you want to use are really important so that the student turned worker is able to react to change on the job site. And we know that over investment in specific education hinders the ability to react to change. So if you look historically, all of the hype that we're hearing today about AI is almost directly parallel with what we heard about automation. Guess what? There's still jobs. And if I recall correctly, Tennessee has got great progress in automotive. I mean, there's manufacturing going on. Come on. Robots haven't taken over the world. People are still being employed. And so we need to step back and remind ourselves that we actually have a mechanism that works. And it works better than almost any other education system when faced with unpredictable change. What's happening on the other side? So I'll just give you an example. People wanted to mean the humanities and liberal arts. As we get into discussions about skilled trades, etc., um, American history majors, they're the highest paid of the humanities at the BA level, but there's not many historian jobs. So what is it about something like that and many other majors that make it so people succeed in the labor market, are able to hit the labor market and learn the task because of that wider group of stuff. Of course, we need specific education. You know, you don't want an accountant, uh, who has never studied accounting. You don't want a plumber who doesn't know what a pipe is. You know, you don't want an economist who doesn't know what an economy is. But on the other hand, the the basis of the American education system gives us that flexibility. So we got to remember that. And right now it seems like people are forgetting it. Uh, and so this is where we get to, I think some real important things in Tennessee, which is the willingness to start thinking about the connectivity with the workforce. I mean, and historically, education, especially four year institutions, have been really bad about this. You know, we shouldn't be an assembly line for capitalism. Well, you know, the students want a job. Yes. We should be aligned with the labor market. We just have to be careful about overdoing it because that hinders us when new change happens. Uh, so we gotta remember, we've done well. We gotta remember to keep a balance. And, you know, it's, uh, it's, it's an interesting time. Uh, post-secondary has a lot of challenges in front of it, but it's gotta not be pushed into a corner and forget that what we do works. Sure. I think it's a fascinating kind of piece of this puzzle because to your point, you know, I think when we talk about education, post-secondary opportunities, specifically in twenty twenty five twenty twenty six. Hyper specialization is really kind of, um, I would say the trend or in vogue, right? It's something, um, you know, you hear a lot about, you know, micro credentialing and these sort of opportunities. But what you're saying, what I'm hearing you say is the fundamentals of, you know, kind of that generalist education that you're getting if you're going to a community college and specializing in healthcare, you're still taking English, math, you're taking some sort of humanities course, perhaps. And what you're saying is, you know, that model allows for labor market flexibility because it gives that wide breadth of perspective. Is that is that accurate? Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a very interesting book that actually comes out of the CTE, the career and technical education community that defines, uh, general education. And this is really a bit geeky, but it enables people to understand the, the underlying rule structure of a task and transport it to a new task where specific education teaches the task and therefore limits the ability to move and absorb new technologies. And so there's a lot of work done in this area. So I, you know, too often this is an either or debate, either liberal arts or trade school. No, no, no, we mix the two. So the US economy is a really optimal balance of the two. Because of course we need specific education. You need the accountant to have studied accountancy. Right. You want the mechanic to know what a brake is. Right. We uh you know, things like that. But and so if we take a look at, uh, certifications, certificates and perhaps licensure, they're really the pinnacle of very, very, very specific education. They're totally stripped of any of their general education. Very, very few people in the US economy, uh, are successful with those by themselves, only about three percent of the workforce has only a certification, and for those, they don't really earn much of an earnings premium. But if you look at how they're used, they're stacked on top of degrees. So what they're doing is people are taking this general education like a BA from nineteen eighty. Well, it's not fully relevant. So you got to add something that keeps the relevancy. And this is why I love certifications. I've done a lot of work is you have to update them, right? So you have to update your knowledge. You need to keep that specific portion up to date. And so this is the balance that we need to seek. We got to forget this either or discussion and understand that we bring them together. Yeah. This is such an interesting conversation for a couple of reasons. One is this binary. You're either technical school kid or you're a yeah, you would say college kid, but we call college. All of it's college and it all has to work Together. Um, we still believe that the the best path to a family sustaining wage, the best path to economic mobility is going to college. Your post-secondary pathway is a college route. You can start at a technical college. What I'm hearing from you is you should probably build on top of that, but you can start at a four year college and continue to matriculate that way. What would you say to the growing, uh, contingency that says college isn't worth it, where we hear this a lot? And I would say even kind of before the pandemic, everybody was like, yeah, this is the right thing to do. And then post-pandemic, it feels like as we go out into the community, there's more, I would say, naysayers about the concept of college. I'm hearing from you that it's still very much matters. So what would you say to that? Uh, well, I say a lot to that so we can add another, another, add a podcast on that one. Um, so I say had to walk through this on the one hand. Um, I do believe that the College for all movement has put post-secondary on the ropes in the sense that college education was presented as a guarantee that you go to college, you're guaranteed to be economically successful, socially successful, where in fact, if you take a look at the data, that's just not the case, right? And so post-secondary needs to be more honest about that messaging about exactly how much opportunity there is. Because what's happening in the US labor market is a really growing complexity. So even in the skilled trades where you can find lots of good opportunity in the skilled trades, uh, but you've got to be really, really focused because a Delco break certification is not going to do you any good at Home Depot, right? It's not going to get you a CDC license or a crane operator's license, right? So you have to be very specific on on what you're training in and how you're targeting. The more you go up in that level, the more, uh, broad opportunities that you can have to, to morph. And so this is part of getting rid of that, that either or portion. So not only the student needs to be specific, but the institution too needs to be mindful of what the offerings are. Oh my God. Yeah. We need the student. If you think about this, I'm a data junkie from heck and my son, what he goes, you know, went to a very good high school. What do they do? They all the kids apply to the same school, same major as his parents. So all of this information that we're developing that's supposed to inform the students and move the market, it isn't being used, right. It's very, very complicated. So some of the work that I know going on at Tennessee with having supports is one step in the right direction, Because youth and even adults. Come on, how many pieces of information can you hold in your head? Right. So we need that counting to help direct people so that they can find the niche that they want. But let me just step back then to answer more specifically on your question. Is college worth it? Right. If we look at the data, uh, college and I, I like the fact that when you say college, you mean the full spectrum of any type of post of education and training beyond high school. That's how we tend to use it, that the bias still is. When you say college, you mean BA. So I don't know exactly, but so I agree with you. When I say college, I mean everything past high school we say a big tent around college. Yeah, yeah. So the issue at hand here is, uh, right now intra educational earnings variance is at a peak. So the range of earnings inside any education level is larger than the range from, let's say, the median of a master's degree in a high school. And a lot of that is driven by these factors of the alignment between your education and what's happening in the labor market. And this is getting us towards skills. So there are times everybody can find somebody in their group who got highfalutin college and is, you know, serving coffee. And so there are points where it doesn't work. So there's a concept out there called underemployment. And it really, I think is contaminated this discussion because the peak number, which is all the media picks up, is fifty two percent of recent college graduates don't use their skills. We put out a report on this and demonstrated that the range is actually twenty six percent to fifty two percent. So that's like a shotgun, right? But if you buy the fifty two percent, what you're saying is college is worse than a coin flip. So you might as well just shut the system down because we got too many people and you know, this and that's, uh, contaminating the discussion. But if we actually look at long term success in terms of unemployment, employer, uh, labor force participation, earnings, job stability, all of them go up with education, right? But we just got to be a little careful. It's still not a guarantee. So is college worth it? Absolutely. Does college fail sometimes. Absolutely. So we got to find a balanced narrative here to try to figure out how to tip the scales to where we have demonstrated proof that education is and can continue to return to bring returns. Because what's happened and it drives is costs have gone up, right? And so, you know, wages went out the ceiling from nineteen eighty three to two thousand. So it was like falling off a log, right? You could always say college is worth it because it was skyrocketing. And and then it flattened out and costs began to exceed. So now we. The discussion went from earnings. How much do you earn a year to. What's the ROI? And so the ROI is looking at your, uh, how much money you have at the end of the end of the month, right. Can you still pay for dinner? And so if your costs are so high that you can't pay for dinner, that college education isn't worth it. So from the perspective we need to to tackle costs to understand this right in the is it worth it? Uh, does it enhance productivity, which is its initial initial economic, uh, prospect? Yes. Uh, if you look at post-secondary education, on average, it increases wages by about ten percent per year. Post-Secondary education that correlates with productivity gains. If you look at the data, if you take a BA and put them in a job that's even predominantly high school, you can see that they can morph the job, uh, and make it more productive. And there's a lot of factors going on. It's not just the education, but the answer is a qualified yes, but not always. Right. So this gets back to that. We got to be careful. It's, you know, let's dive in deeper because of course there's times it fails. And right now what we're seeing is we've had reduction in force in the US government. We've had, um, all the cutbacks on federal grants and big research grants. This has really increased the supply of educated workers. And what that's doing. We've got a feedstock of about three million college graduates or more who enter in the labor market every May, right. In a big lump. Uh, and they take normally takes about nine months to absorb those workers into, into the labor market. So tag on the reduction in force, plus the research grants you got, you start to run into another cohort. So the, the plight of the recent college graduate is more dire than it has been historically. Now the tech bros want us to believe that's AI. But if you look at the data right now, there's very, very little evidence about how much AI has penetrated the workforce in a way to displace the task structure for recent college graduates. Now, I can believe it's going to happen. I don't want to say that's. But for millions now, it's it's not it hasn't been around long enough. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So some of that, uh, anti college debate and credentialism and I'll, I'll close on this credentialism point. Uh, you know, it's, uh, building hype, right? It's like the sky is going to fall and they hear it enough times, you're going to start looking up and being worried. So the last point is on Credentialism. So as we think about, um, post-secondary, one of the big pushbacks is people are just buying degrees, uh, and they're not getting their value. So two points on this one. You know employers aren't stupid right? And so they've been hiring college degrees regularly in an accelerated rate for at least forty to fifty years. So either you can conclude that they're stupid, right, or that they're actually getting something beneficial. And I would argue that they're getting something beneficial. And this leads to a whole idea of called signaling. Uh, people say that credentialing, well, it's just a signal there. There's no value in that education. The person, Michael Spence, who came up with the idea of signaling and his Nobel Prize speech, he said, you know, I never meant for this to be a debate about empty or full. He says it's a combination of the two. And if we think about how markets function, signals are very valuable because they make informational collection and summarization more efficient. So if we look to the extreme and we, we, we put a credential on every single skill, right? There's something like seven thousand certifications providers in the United States. Uh, and who, who knows how many certifications. What are you going to do as an employer? How are you going to sort through that? Yeah. How do you pick? Right. So we use signals because the experience has been someone with education and training past high school is probably going to be more productive in the task than someone with just a high school degree. So you err in that side and then you train two tasks, right? And this gets to the specific in general. So there is information that, you know, credentialism does exist that we've over overbought into. You must have a degree. But then on the other hand, it adds market efficiency in many cases. And we have to sort through this. And this is going to be one of the big challenges in front of us, right? Which is, uh, when is the credential a valuable signal and when isn't it? And, uh, I'll leave that up to you guys. Well, and you raised so many great points. And I think one of the things that we look at when we talk to students is kind of this north star of like, this is a pursuit of gainful employment or a good job. And so I guess my question is kind of twofold. It's one, you know, how would you classify how would the center for education workforce classify what is a good gainful employment opportunity? Um, well, actually, I'll throw that question out first and I'll come back to my second. Okay. Um, well, we started in twenty sixteen with JP Morgan Chase, a project on trying to define good jobs. And we and this was before the Good Jobs Initiative that was coming out of the administration at that point, which is actually now gotten into controlling your own schedule, etc.. We just simplified to a very easy, uh, earnings criterion. So in Sixteen. We said, if you're earning thirty five thousand dollars a year and between twenty five and forty five, you're in a good job. The logic behind that was that thirty five thousand dollars is the beginning of the middle of the the middle four deciles of the income distribution. And arguably it's the entry to the middle class. I want to be clear. Thirty five thousand is the floor. The average earnings at that median earnings at that point was about fifty six thousand. So people earned much more. So that was our start point. And the basis was that was across living wages and some other stuff from USDA about what type of earnings were necessary for, um the beginnings of economic independence. Right. So that's what we're aiming for. That's sort of a definition. Yeah. That's what we're aiming for. Yeah. Right. So that's where we started. We've refined that over time both by inflation adjusting. So now the floor, you know, like forty three or forty four. That was my next question, you know. Yeah. And but then I think really the important thing for the states is that we've now done that with a state price of living adjustment. So that I, you know, that's the thirty five thousand all over the map. And so for your audience, just explain the importance of this. If I took thirty five thousand dollars and I cost adjust it to rural Kentucky, that's about twenty two thousand dollars. If I cost adjust it to New York City, that's about fifty four thousand dollars. So we want to be really certain that we adjust for cost of living of the local community. So that's the beginning of how we defined a good job. Now, as we move forward, uh, with this, we've begun to think about, uh, economic mobility. How much kind of uplift do you have? What kind of growth potential do you have? Because you might just, I'm going to say, accidentally cross that thirty five thousand dollars threshold and then just flatten out. And so if you think about the life cycle, and we also change it to forty five thousand and forty five to account for, for, for needing to buy a house and family is you want your, your earnings to grow and you want it to grow above the cost of living. So we're moving into trying to sort out how to think about this. And this is one of these problems. And I think maybe we were discussing this before you started recording, which is, uh, the growth of state longitudinal data systems. So they, they give us an opportunity for true longitudinal analysis to follow people to understand what's happening in the career. This is going to be very important. So for instance, some evidence shows that if you stay with the same employer, you actually have larger wage gains across the career. There's a growing belief among them young folk. Uh, that job change is the way to get earnings increases. I don't know which is which because we don't have good data on this. We don't actually have good understanding about the roles played, but this is critical. So in one perspective, if we this is where we'd like to do case studies and we need to ask the client, what do you think a good job is? And so I will imagine with no interviews, that job stability is going to be extremely important because, you know, you could make a big bump in earnings, but only for a quarter. And all of a sudden you're unemployed. That would really suck, right? Uh, so you want to have job stability, you want to have benefits which need to come in. Uh, and then, um, you know, wage gain. And those are the new factors that we're bringing in the administration on their good job initiative. As I mentioned, we're also trying to bring in aspects of ability to control your own schedule. Yeah. So here what we get to, uh, and I don't want to mischaracterize that part of the debate, which is jobs that are on the threshold of economic independence and jobs that are really leading towards more significant economic mobility there. You know, the social problem is at the threshold, right, that we have people in our country who cannot pay for food, right? They're going to college and they've got food insecurity. Wrap your head around that. I mean, going to college and not being able to eat, I mean, Jiminy Christmas. I mean, there's something really wrong here. So that's a very important but distinct, uh, aspect of a good job. And that's really at the threshold. Have you made it far enough that you have a little extra money? And there's a lot of a lot of folks. That's what that's the difference between a good job and not a good job. The rest of this stuff. Are you making sixty five to eighty five? Well, that's kind of a kind of a luxury part of the market important. I, I'd like to have that growth. Right? Right. And so so we need to think more about this in the center where we're just broaching into those nuanced conversations. Oh my gosh. Well, I, I think, and Tyler, I don't know where you were about what you were about to say, but I think for me, what this is really just. It's kind of that, that philosophy of the more, you know, the more you feel like you don't know. And it's like, as we're having this conversation. But before we had this conversation, I felt like it was going to be imperative that we identified these specific jobs for students, that we could say, hey, if you study this, it will lead to this. And we feel pretty certain that you will gain economic mobility because of that, because you followed that pathway, right? But the more that we're talking about this, it's I'm beginning to feel like that's going to be really hard to do because those jobs are going to change year to year. Or no, I think no, I think, well, regional analysis is going to be very important. You don't want to do it overly generalized suggestion, but I do think you're on the right track. Okay. All we have in front of us, and we need to be honest that sometimes it's wrong is what yesterday looked like. So if a job paid non poverty wages yesterday, it's a pretty good bet that it's going to pay. You know those living wages are better today. So I think you're on the right track. We need to combine that with a weighted average of of how many jobs there are. You know so too often we hear about how wonderful high growth high demand jobs are, but high demand is often how fast it's growing and not necessarily how many jobs there are. So we need to balance our advice to the student between the largest industry in the state. That's going to grow by three percent, but that three percent is a million jobs versus something that's going to grow out the window. But it's starting from two jobs and it's going to twenty five, right? And so figuring out how to message that and tailoring some of the messaging to the individual students, uh, to help pinpoint. And this goes back to some things I was mentioning from my experience with the Tennessee Technical College system. They were really pioneers, and I'm not sure if they still do this of using local labor market projections, data. And they would take a look. Okay. They would take a look and they'd say, hey, there's fifty nurse openings in our projections. Let's enroll twenty five. What did they get? Ninety percent placement rate. I mean, it's like, duh. Yeah. And, but that's what we want because what people don't necessarily understand is a good high quality program can create unemployment if it is not aligned with labor market. So if you Subscribe. If you over enroll and graduate, you have too many graduates, you create too much supply and that will drive wages down and or create unemployment. So what we need to do, and this is difficult in the US because we're a free market economy, right? We don't want to become a centrally planned economy where a bunch of, you know, politicians or bureaucrats say, well, today the five year plan in Tennessee is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But on the other hand, we want to use information to the best of our ability to help guide people and the economy, uh, or guide people to where it's likely the economy is going to go. And this goes back to the general and specific education, which is we can guide but not be perfect. It's hard to pick winners. And so this is where I love work done in career and technical education, advanced CTE and groups like that. And I think Tennessee also has created job families. So if one occupation doesn't pan out, you actually your education with minimal amount of additional training or certification enables you to move from occupation A to occupation B fairly at a fairly low cost. Right? So you can imagine a, uh, you know, I used to be a plumber, so a plumber who uses silver solder versus a plumber who uses lead solder. It's a very, very small difference. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yeah. So and this is where all that labor market information really comes in to help guide people. So your initial question is yes, it's hard, but only if you think you can get it perfect. So don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It's good guiding information. Yeah, yeah. It's what we got. So I am so curious as we kind of, you know, start to wrap up this conversation, one thing that struck out to me Is part of the imperative that we have a tendency achieved. It's a marketing imperative. It's. How do you sell the value of a post-secondary credential and the value of a good job to a seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old who really is, is just being exposed to some of these opportunities, perhaps for the first time. How what are your thoughts, your advice, your recommendations on how we can marry the really great data that comes out of places like the center for Education and Workforce and this, you know, real world perspective, we're hearing from employer partners with the very real lived experiences of students who may see people, you know, who go to college and don't quite find a job in their industry. Right. And we're constantly experiencing this push and pull of that real world perspective with the data that shows, obviously, this is a worthwhile pursuit. Yeah. This, you know, if I, you know, if I was king of the world, I would, uh, have a lot more co-op intern, uh, based work experiences. You can call them apprenticeships, but I think apprenticeships, we overuse it. Uh, because when we say it, we generally mean carpenter or plumber, you know, things like that where the idea is, uh, about bringing the workplace in the classroom closer together and getting higher levels of employer engagement. Historically, in the United States, the employers say that they want apprenticeships, apprentices, but they don't necessarily pony up the investment because they're very expensive. Uh, and so we need to figure out how to strike a better bargain with employers because they're so important in this conversation. And one of the things I like personally, uh, our training wages, because training wages mean that the employer and the employee split the risk. So the person comes in and they get exposed to work, they gain an understanding if they actually want to be a lineman or a hospital doing blood, you know, whatever it might be. And the employer understands whether or not the, uh, implicit knowledge backed is generally that that person has the whole combination because, you know, you're not just about your single skill, right? You're about working with your, your, your, um, colleagues, you're about showing up on work on time. You're about, you know, good presentation and demeanor. There's all these pieces. And so that it is something working. And the benefit back to your question about the marketing, if Sally gets a successful job that long term employment with the local hospital, you're going to tell her a sister or a brother that the program that Tennessee has put together, that includes the work based learning and includes engagement with the employer, was very successful. She's happy and that they should take a look at it. And in this bit, and this gets back to these counseling supports, is we need to pull away from always talking about how much money you're going to make and ensure that the students are guided to prioritize also their interests, right? Because too often what we do is say, okay, highest paid BA is a petroleum engineer. They started one hundred and forty thousand dollars. But you know what? There's lots of other jobs back there. But we're talking about historians, historians, you know, in the sixty thousand range. So not everybody can be at the top and nobody wants to be at the bottom. And then by the bottom, I'm meaning a negative ROI where you can't even pay your debt back. Right. Um, but in the middle, you know, we've got all these careers that are very attractive to certain people. And so we have to figure out to help the student balance, uh, between we don't want to put somebody in a job that's going to lead them into poverty. That would be the worst possible thing we could do. But on the other hand, if somebody's interested in being a preschool teacher, very low paid, female dominated occupation, we don't want to tell them, don't do that, because you could be a petroleum engineer. Now, we do have issues on these, what we call socially necessary low paid occupations, where I do think we need to put more societal resources in to raise those wages because we've created we're creating a crisis in that arena as we withdraw, you know, loan subsidization, etc.. But what we need to help guide and then back to your marketing. Marketing becomes, uh, you know, what do they call it in, you know, viral, right? So the more you show successes, the more that success becomes the conversation and the branding. And so this is where I often think about creaming. Uh, any kind of thing that is, I'm going to say social do gooder. I mean, that's what you're up to here, right? You're trying to help people move from, uh, first gen status to economic mobility. So pick winners so that you get that branding of success and then dig deeper. So how do you take risks a little bit more risk while acknowledging the person who bears the burden of that risk is a student. So you need to start off with a guaranteed relationship with the local employer that says, yes, I need fifty nurses. I will look, you create good nurses. I'm going to look at my first twenty five coming in that. Q are going to be from your school. Why? Because the last twenty five you sent me really worked. And so the people in that program talked to their cohort or the younger sister or brother and said, you know what, I got a really great job. And so you build, you build success. Gosh. That's great. This has been a illuminating conversation, Jeff. And I really appreciate you for taking time to join us today. We are at a point at Tennessee where we've really shifted our focus from we're still focused on college access, but we've realized that getting them there is just not enough, and we've got to support them through college to career and making sure that all the steps of that are influenced by good advice and wisdom, and ensuring that students aren't just guessing and and making decisions for themselves when they really don't have all the information they need to make the decision and trying to provide that guidance that you're talking about. And that's really where we're at. We're at a crux in that space. And I mean, like I said before, we or right as we started, um, Tyler's new title is vice president of workforce. It's this idea of marketing the workforce, opportunities and engagement to students, and seeing that college is the pathway to this workforce participation and going into this upcoming year. Twenty six twenty seven I think our message is economic mobility, and we still believe that the best path to that is pursuing college after high school. Um, with that big tent around it. Uh, and so I think the discussion that we've had today has really just, I think, confirmed a lot of what we are on track to do. But also I, I think this is going to enhance the way we're thinking about this work. So, um, I think the listeners will appreciate this. Hopefully some college practitioners listen to this because I think there's a lot of ways that we can work together to improve the ecosystem that students are experiencing. Um, but selfishly for us, this has just been. Tyler, I think you probably agree this has been such a timely conversation for us. Yeah, well, I'm very, very happy to be of help. And I just want to just remind you that my experiences with Tennessee is Tennessee succeeds because it's willing to be innovative and take some gambles. I'm going to guess there's failures in the closet that you don't. But but in fact, you adjust. You do course course adjustments. And so, you know, I mean, not course as in curriculum, but path adjustments, starting courses. Yeah. And so you, you take a look to say, are we succeeding? And so, you know, I wish you that, you know, the best of luck in continuing this because you're helping the people of the state. And that's what we want to be doing. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you, Jeff, and we'll keep you posted on the things that we're doing here in Tennessee. And, um, hopefully we'll have you back on in a, in the future so that we can give you some more updates. Great. Thank you very much. Great conversation.