Post-Meeting Memo: BHEF Member Meeting (Winter 2012)

BHEF members and guests convened on February 2-3 in Seattle, WA to focus on aligning higher education with high demand jobs, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and engage in a discussion with members of President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness around how BHEF's initiatives can contribute to advancing their work. BHEF member Rick Stephens, senior vice president, Human Resources and Administration of the Boeing Company, hosted the meeting including a post-meeting tour of Boeing's Everett airplane assembly center.

Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire opened the meeting by describing efforts undertaken by her administration to meet Washington State’s innovation workforce needs and engaged BHEF’s business and higher education members in a discussion focused on growing key sectors of the state’s economy. Later in the day, members of the Foldit team, led by Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator David Baker, facilitated a session that highlighted how this ground-breaking tool has the ability to change the way we think about science and innovation.

Friday morning focused on advancing BHEF’s action agenda for education and workforce competitiveness, beginning with a listening and action session with representatives from the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness High Tech Education working group, including NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and Darlene Miller, working group co-chair and CEO & President of Permac Industries. Following this session, the first plenary focused on BHEF’s College Readiness, Access, and Success Initiative, drilling into the skills necessary in the 21st century workplace and strategies that will arm students with these skills to meet workforce demands.

The afternoon featured two sessions concerning strategies to increase STEM student persistence. First, Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University discussed how new on-line learning tools based on cognitive science can be used to improve learning in lower division courses, especially in critical gateway STEM courses. The second session focused on how BHEF’s STEM Higher Education and Workforce Project is building new models of university-business collaboration to launch regional pilot projects that will increase STEM persistence, particularly within the first two years of postsecondary education, and degree completion to meet regional workforce needs.

The meeting focused on actionable steps that BHEF members may take to address these challenges. Members unanimously reported the meeting was worthwhile, with a well-chosen and timely focus.

Meeting Takeaways with Action Items

In order to increase U.S. competitiveness and support innovation, BHEF must structure its initiatives and members’ regional work to promote sustained engagement among leaders from business and education, and use members’ core organizational competencies to address the misalignment of regional education outcomes and workforce needs.
Action: BHEF will support members and their peers to ensure that regional projects capitalize on members’ distinct core competencies. Business can be a critical friend, offering strategic impatience and providing new resources to develop innovative solutions to address these persistent workforce challenges. Higher education will need to push its comfort zone, implementing change more rapidly, deepening learning and skills, and integrating technology in more effective ways to meet workforce demand.
Meeting the country’s long-term innovation needs will require fundamentally new models of university-business collaboration that target high demand STEM sectors and ensure higher education has the institutional capacity to serve the increasing number of STEM undergraduate students that industry demands.
Action: Focus BHEF’s national and regional strategies on the first two years of STEM undergraduate education, as these represent the highest-impact point of intervention to address the significant STEM attrition: 50% of STEM-interested and college ready students, particularly women and underrepresented minorities, leave STEM fields during this time. BHEF’s STEM Higher Education and Workforce Project will build business and higher education regional collaborations and support them in identifying and scaling highly-effective strategies to improve retention and increase capacity to serve additional STEM students to meet workforce needs.
Action: Partner with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to develop Version 2.0 of the U.S. STEM Education Model, modeling the U.S. Navy civilian STEM workforce in order to increase the impact of ONR’s investment in the first two years of STEM undergraduate education.
Action: Lead industry and academic associations in co-creating the first national undergraduate STEM strategy and use BHEF unique capacities to implement this strategy through the associations and their respective members. This strategy responds to industry needs and will align industry and higher education associations in support of STEM workforce goals. The national strategy will serve as a link to the President’s Jobs Council, NSF, and other agencies.
Global economic integration has placed a premium on innovation, fundamentally altering the workplace and the skills needed to thrive. The 21st century workplace requires a combination of exceptional technical skills and deeper learning capacities, many of which employers indicate are in high demand, but are lacking among today’s high school and college graduates.
Action: Partner with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to validate these high demand skills and capacities with BHEF members and to identify the cross-sector strategies that can develop them.
Action: Shape a national effort that raises the urgency around student and workforce preparation, collaborating with BHEF member organizations and others to ensure business perspective is integrated into the conversation and that organizational capacities are mobilized to further this agenda.

Session Summaries

Opening Program

The meeting opened with a discussion among BHEF members and Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire. With Rick Stephens moderating, the Governor shared how Washington State is meeting its workforce needs and supporting economic growth.

According to Governor Gregoire, Washington State has a spirit of innovation that fosters the development of a large number of start-ups. However, despite best efforts, a shortfall of STEM graduates remains. This resonated with BHEF members facing similar regional challenges, who then asked about specific investments Washington State is making to address the shortage. Governor Gregoire responded, highlighting the establishment of “innovation schools” similar to Delta High School that integrate STEM into all parts of the curriculum. These schools increase student learning in non-traditional ways and help kids build interest in important academic subjects. Additionally, Governor Gregoire shared that many students are not graduating because they do not transition well from one school to the next. So as a state, Washington is looking at those transition periods with a goal to create a seamless P-20 education system.

Governor Gregoire also provided advice to the business and higher education leaders looking to move their regional economies forward. Acknowledging the massive reset brought on by the recession, she shared that as a part of the reset the country cannot succeed by looking to just one sector to move the country forward. Rather, a true partnership between the business and education communities will ensure needs are being met in a time of global competition. In Washington State, corporations are supporting baccalaureate attainment goals with substantial investments in the new Washington Opportunity Scholarship, which seeks to create a billion dollar endowment to improve four-year degree completion.

Gaming as a Science: Cracking the AIDS Protein Mystery

In the first of the two learning sessions held at the winter 2012 meeting, Dr. David Baker, Professor of Biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the University of Washington, and his colleagues presented Foldit, the multiplayer online protein-folding game in which individuals and teams from around the world compete to solve protein challenges concerning such conditions as HIV, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. As part of the presentation, two teams of BHEF members—Wes Bush and Chuck Harrington representing CEOs and Renu Khator and Jeff Armstrong representing university presidents—took part in a competition to predict the structure of a flu virus. In the ensuing discussion, participants noted the great potential of gaming and crowdsourcing for engaging students and the general public in STEM and contributing to scientific research. Dr. Baker described future directions for Foldit that his laboratory and collaborating teams of programmers and educators are pursuing, including an enhanced educational component that he hopes will enable the development of an expanded Foldit learning community.

The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness

Friday morning opened with a lively discussion among BHEF members and President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competiveness, which just released its “Roadmap to Renewal,” offering recommendations to the President to create jobs in the short run and improve the nation’s competitiveness in the long run. NASA’s Administrator, Charles Bolden, represented the Administration. On the panel was Darlene Miller, CEO, Permac Industries and Jobs Council Member; Brad Smith, General Council, Microsoft; Don Graves, Executive Director, President’s Jobs Council; John Vechey, Co-Founder, PopCap Games and Vice President & Studio Franchise Director, EA; and Nicolas J. Hanauer, Partner, Second Avenue Partners. The session was conducted in an open forum where BHEF members asked questions and shared experiences surrounding education and workforce misalignment, especially STEM workforce challenges, and the role the federal and state governments can play in helping businesses and universities train and hire a 21st century workforce.

The session began with Charles Bolden highlighting the imperative for a national conversation, and national action, to prepare the workforce for the future, with a particular focus on STEM graduates. Indeed, even students not pursuing STEM careers must be able to use STEM skills to enhance their careers—a sentiment shared by Brad Smith who acknowledged the shift in the economy to one that has so many fields dependent on STEM backgrounds. The panel then investigated the reasons the STEM shortage exists. Don Graves attributed the mismatch to leaks in the STEM education pipeline. Students at a young age are interested and inspired by STEM, but at some point during their schooling these students make a switch and are lost to different fields. BHEF members agreed, adding that only 17 percent of 12th grade students are both proficient and interested in a STEM subject. Of those that enroll in postsecondary education, half are then lost within the first two years. The nation needs to increase these numbers and graduate as many students from the university system as possible. Fortunately, the country can reach its STEM goals if a critical mass of leaders support a STEM vision as a number one priority, and use their organizations’ core competencies to mobilize around implementing a shared strategy.

The conversation also included inquiry into the misalignment between the skills demanded by the 21st century workforce and what students are learning. Jon Vechey shared that students find that once they have the degree, there are no jobs for them. Nicholas Hanauer remarked that this was an adaptation problem: education has a hard time adapting to things that move quickly. By the time what is needed is apparent and people are trained for those needs, the problem has shifted. Several strategies were presented to address the skills misalignment: using technology to train the workforce through adaptive technology and gaming, because the current education system is not adaptable and stymies kids who are innovative; using the energy created by the Common Core State Standards and Assessments as a vehicle for change, particularly to raise science standards; and utilizing tools from ACT to determine if students are career ready.

Plenary Session I: Aligning Education with Skills for the 21st Century Workforce

Moderator David Jones, Jr., co-chair of the College Readiness, Access, and Success Initiative and chairman and managing director of Chrysalis Ventures, opened the first plenary session, which focused on aligning education with skills for the 21st century workforce. After framing comments that highlighted the structural misalignment BHEF has identified between high demand careers and student interest and proficiency, Jones suggested that the next iteration of this conversation is a closer focus on the skills required by a 21st century workplace.

Notably, employers in search of the right talent to compete in the global economy have increased expectations of the skills employees need. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has funded BHEF to validate these “deeper learning” skills—content knowledge, cognitive strategies, and learning behaviors—and Hewlett’s Education Program Director Barbara Chow joined meeting participants to provide an overview of Hewlett’s work.

Members and special guests engaged in a spirited discussion that drove toward actionable steps that can be taken to improve outcomes around skills development. Themes included:

Identifying the characteristics of the skills shortage. Chow reported that Hewlett’s strategic philanthropy is guided by the question of how to prepare students for a world of exponential and predictable change. New technologies, such as Facebook, signal a new world, and addressing the challenges that will come along with it will require contributions from all sectors. Hewlett’s focus on deeper learning has been met with some skepticism due to its scope, but Chow argued that this is a transformational time that requires an ambitious agenda. In particular, Hewlett views the Common Core State Standards Initiative as an important path forward, and believes that BHEF is a perfect partner to highlight college and career ready standards.

Members agreed that business and higher education partnerships will be a vital component to building urgency around necessary skills development. The country has been exploring dimensions of this issue for decades, but little headway has been achieved. The Common Core and Race to the Top have catalyzed a series of expectations around the quality of education necessary to ensure the country’s economic competitiveness. Battelle has offered to collaborate with BHEF to spearhead business involvement around Common Core implementation.

Postsecondary members reflected that as they look to preparing students for the workforce, they need to not just prepare students for the jobs in 10 years; they need to prepare them to create the jobs in 10 years. Skills development, then, becomes an issue of broadening intellectual capacity. Business leaders agreed with this assessment, arguing that there is a difference between education and training—and in fact, it is the business responsibility to provide training.

Reaching consensus on the most important skills businesses demand. According to members, the skills most demanded by business include critical thinking, communications and the ability to make presentations, speaking and understanding more than one language, working well on a team, and technology fluency. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative is a national effort that champions the importance of a twenty-first-century liberal education for individual students. As part of this initiative, AAC&U has conducted research regarding the skills most needed by business leaders. Its results confirm the above list and highlight several other categories, including personal and social responsibility and knowledge of other cultures and the physical world.

Identifying tools available to enhance education and workforce alignment. Capitalizing on the efforts of other organizations will allow BHEF to maximize its impact. In addition to collaborating with Battelle and other organizations to promote the Common Core, and working with AAC&U on common agendas related to its LEAP initiative, BHEF will determine how best to utilize ACT’s WorkKeys tool. WorkKeys identifies the skills needed for 18,000 jobs and is utilized in 40 states, offers assessments for potential employees, and provides training tools to help people upskill. Other ACT products allow communities to develop a profile of jobs available, then help local higher education institutions develop the necessary programs to train employees. The National Career Readiness Certificate measures cognitive and soft skills of potential employees to better diagnose workforce preparedness.

Sharing strategies for business-led engagement to build these skills. Meeting participants were particularly energized when strategizing about how to best engage business leaders in the work of skills and capacity development. In particular, Jones recommended that business serve as a critical friend to education, offer strategic impatience, and provide resources that can be brought to bear on persistent challenges.

Practices already underway identified by members include:

Capitalize on current fiscal trends to encourage alignment of the “different clocks” used by business and universities. Multiple participants resonated to the urgency around this issue, highlighting that the U.S. does not have the luxury of waiting for the multi-year planning cycle that some might prefer.
Use WorkKeys to find employees who know how to both find information, and digest and synthesize it.
Use organizational capacities and new business-education partnership models to create “learn and earn” type programs to assist in educating employees ready to enter the workplace. Employers in Boston are tackling this issue, with 12 leading CEOs committing their own time to addressing the challenge.
Form business advisory groups to provide substantive guidance and support in the development of academic programs. In California, the Chancellor’s Advisory Group is the body behind the creation of the Professional Science Master’s program. In Houston, business was invited to assist in aligning academic programs with the needs of industry, and has contributed to the development of practical curriculum as well as offering vital operating support.
Provide business feedback to engineering schools regarding professional performance of graduates. This has been shown to improve teaching practice.
Offer case competitions that provide students the opportunity to develop their technical and interpersonal skills.
Shape new business mentorship models for students in the first two years of college.

Several additional suggestions were made to further increase business engagement, including:

Consider whether hiring corporations have changed their recruiting practices. Businesses should strive to hire from a diverse body of postsecondary institutions, rather than only returning to those institutions from which hires have traditionally originated.
Capitalize on the volunteerism capacity within corporations and ask businesses to provide mentors to students.
Initiate a two-day symposium for business leaders and university faculty to identify the skills needed in workforce.

Open Learning Session: The New Frontier of Cognitively Informed Web-Based Instruction

Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, provided members with the second learning session of the meeting, sharing the new frontier of cognitively-informed web-based instruction. During this session, Thille demonstrated how cognitive tutorials guide students through the learning process by providing tips along the way and allowing the students to learn by doing and practice instead of video and lecture. Specifically, these tutorials uniquely provide: (1) feedback loops allowing students to refine the areas of difficulty; (2) reliable models of each student as a learner, including an accurate visual representation of growth; and (3) a more efficient use of the richness that faculty have to offer beyond teaching basic concepts and skills. BHEF will use this type of evidence-based learning extensively in the partnership with ONR, which will model highly effective practice to improve STEM education and workforce outcomes.

Plenary Session II: Advancing the BHEF STEM Agenda: The STEM Higher Education and Workforce Project’s National and Regional Strategies

Moderator Mark Wrighton, Chancellor, Washington University in St. Louis, and BHEF’s STEM Initiative co-chair, kicked off the session by framing BHEF’s newly launched STEM Higher Education and Workforce Project through both a regional and national lens. Wrighton noted that there is something different and significant embedded in the BHEF STEM project and members should be thinking about how the current projects relate to their own regional workforce needs, as well as what additional projects could be included to broaden the pilot portfolio. Many universities are stepping forward as true innovators, and this project may be a place to enhance and highlight those efforts, and allow BHEF members to mobilize using their own organizations’ core capacities.

St. Louis has made significant progress developing a concrete project that will focus on a public/private partnership between the University of Missouri, St. Louis (UMSL) and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL). Through this project, UMSL engineering students will take their first two years of courses at UMSL and the last two at WUSL. The focus of the project will be two-fold, to transform traditional 2+2 programs such that courses align for students to receive transferable credits from day one, and thus will graduate with an engineering degree from WUSL in four years, and to demonstrate the role a private research institution such as WUSL can play in addressing regional workforce needs. The project will engage St. Louis employers in an effort to attract and retain St. Louis students in STEM to ultimately meet local demands.

The Maryland regional pilot has also been gaining a tremendous amount of traction. Maryland is a very high-tech state with NASA Goddard, NOAA, FDA, DHS, NSA, and many other agencies within a thirty mile radius of the College Park campus. This presents the University System of Maryland with unique workforce development challenges, especially if it seeks to produce the majority of the state’s STEM talent. With Maryland as an emerging epicenter for cybersecurity, this project will develop a cadre of cyber-enabled learners on the College Park campus who span many disciplines, and seeks to create an entirely new way of actively educating students around a developing field. The project will serve to engage business and industry at all levels, from early internships, mentor programs, co-developing and then co-teaching courses, and linkages to training and innovation programs. Northrop Grumman Corporation is taking the lead on the initial business engagement. This work is further underscored with the student migration analysis data that the University of Maryland recently produced, showing that while 82 percent of computer science majors matriculating in 2005 graduated from the University, only a third of them did so with a computer science major. Once launched, the Maryland project will expand to campuses beyond College Park.

In Ohio, the Ohio State University (OSU), Case Western Reserve University, and Battelle Memorial Institute have committed to collaborating around the goals of the STEM Higher Education and Workforce Project. All three view the transition from a community college to a four-year institution as a critical weakness in the current pipeline. OSU has been going through a rapid transformation around how the university approaches community colleges. As such, the pilot interventions will explore redesigning gateway courses to focus on experiential learning, aligning the first two years of a community college to the four year experience to ensure they are taught at the same level, and providing more meaningful internships to students earlier in their undergraduate experiences. Battelle is interested in using its Ohio STEM Learning Network expertise and prepared to assist in extending its STEM network to higher education, coordinating with the multi-state network already in existence.

Isabel Cardenas-Navia from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) presented on the Navy’s strategic approach to STEM, calling STEM education a national security issue. The Navy employs 20,000 civilian scientists and engineers, and the most significant investment the Navy makes in the STEM pipeline is in higher education. In July 2011, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus committed to doubling the Navy’s investment in STEM, from which the STEM Coordination Office was tasked with developing a strategy for making more effective workforce investments, prioritizing diversity, metrics, and scalability across its portfolio. ONR provided BHEF a multi-year grant to assist in its strategic planning by adapting the U.S. STEM Education Model in order to identify effective intervention strategies the Navy can implement.

The ONR grant is supporting BHEF’s development of a menu of research-backed interventions for the Navy, which will inform both the revised U.S. STEM Education Model focused on the Navy’s specific parameters, as well as the work underway in the regional pilot projects. As a result, each pilot will address its unique workforce needs while using different evidence-based interventions that, when taken together, serve as proof points for systemic STEM education and workforce change. In turn, this research will be applied to connect, leverage, and scale BHEF’s regional projects, using the updated U.S. STEM Education Model to determine the effect of scaling multiple strategies. Along these lines, BHEF conducted a very productive STEM modeling workshop at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Carderock, MD in early January attended by approximately 30 representatives from ONR, NAVSEA, the U.S. Naval Academy, the University of Maryland, and other public and private organizations.

The plenary session wrapped with a discussion of the development of a national strategy that will be co-created with academic and industry association partners. For BHEF, the national strategy will highlight the lessons, outcomes, and intervention strategies deployed through the regional pilots, and seek to align with the ongoing efforts of AAU, APLU, and other partners and provide a scaling platform for the regional work. BHEF held its initial national strategy convening on January 19th, hosted by the Aerospace Industries Association, which brought together representatives from seven higher education and industry associations, and a senior officer from the National Science Foundation.

Next BHEF Meeting

BHEF’s summer 2012 member meeting will be held on June 11-12, 2012, and is scheduled to be in Washington, DC. This meeting will convene members of Congress and the Administration as well as thought leaders and policy makers who share BHEF’s priorities. We hope that you will save the date.