President's Report – May 2014

Lane students Audrey Barney and Sean Baker were honored along with their peers from other Oregon community college's at OCCA's 2014 All Oregon Academic Team event in Salem on April 22. Our special guests were Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown and Chief Education Officer Nancy Golden. I appreciate OCCA for offering this opportunity to recognize scholastic achievement at the state's community colleges.

Our spring conference was, as always, energized with the enthusiasm of our faculty and staff for what we do here at Lane to educate students and help them be successful. We had excellent workshops and presentations and an inspiring keynote presentation by Jilma Meneses, Chief Diversity Officer for Portland State University. Special thanks to Donna Koechig, Roxanne Watson and all the team who helped put on the event.

Our workers compensation carrier, SAIF, has confirmed that our insurance experience factor for 2014/2015, otherwise known as the experience modifier or mod rate, went down from 1.09 to 0.90 = a .19 reduction. Experience mod rates below 1.0 are considered very good indicators of effective safety outcomes by employees. Lower mod rates reduce workers compensation premiums by tens of thousands of dollars in annual premiums. Our outcome is a credit to Lane managers and employees who have engaged in safer workplace practices.

I am sorry to note the sudden passing of Peggy Sherman-Hill, administrative coordinator for the Aviation Academy since 1992. She was very supportive of the students and faculty and a tireless advocate of Lane's educational mission.

This Saturday is the memorial service for David Walton, who passed away in January. David worked for nine years in Information Technology.

Congratulations to Cascade Health Solutions for being named Lane's Cooperative Education Employer of the Year at the college's annual recognition event for advisory committees on April 30. Cascade offers internships in medical reception, health records technology, medical office assistant, human services and network operations. They have provided opportunities for 23 students since 2005, and have hired 6 of them as regular full-time employees. Their CEO, Cheryl Boyum, wrote a letter of thanks to the college. Among other things she said, "We appreciate the proactive, strategic efforts Lane makes to assess current and future needs of local employer as you determine curriculum offerings each year."

Congratulations to Jeri Steele in the Foundation Office. She was named April's Classified Employee of the Month. Jeri has been with the Foundation since 2000. She consistently thinks outside the box and as the Foundation's only in-house accountant, she oversees all financial and investment reporting, organizes and manages Finance and Investment Committee meetings, and works with the Foundation treasurer.

Brian Kelly and I, Bob Baldwin and Alen Bahret met with Kevin Boyle this week. We have agreed to move forward with engaging in further discussions on our labor management relationship. The way we are going to approach that work is instead of talking about process, we are going to deal with real issues that we are facing and apply processes to see if we can get to good outcomes. I want to thank Bob and his leadership team for engaging in that work with us.

We hosted the Achieving the Dream coaches at the end of April. The coaches noted significant improvement in retention rates, but we still have quite a bit to do to make progress in our developmental math efforts.

I'd like to congratulate ASLCC on another great voter registration drive. More than 2,000 students were registered to vote for the May primary election. Lane students also went to local high schools and helped register seniors to vote in their first election. Election Day is May 20th; be sure to get your ballots in.

The City of Springfield and LTD have launched a stakeholder advisory committee to examine the long-term transportation needs of Springfield and determine whether there is a need for a future EmX bus route from the Thurston area to LCC. Brett will be representing the college on the committee, and the group hopes to have recommendations sometime next year.

We've had many events lately and I hope you've had a chance to enjoy some of them. Piano Mania was a delight; kudos to everyone in our music program. Thanks to Donna Koechig for bringing Lady Palmo to Lane last Thursday to share her experience and insights as a survivor of the invasion of her native Tibet, and more recently of her battle with cancer. Donna also helped arrange for concert pianist William Chapman Nyaho to play at Lane last Friday. Thanks to Stan Taylor for this year's Peace Symposium which focused on the how the modern dream of consumption is counterproductive to wellbeing.

I want to congratulate Jim Salt on his award from the Oregon Education Association (OEA).

We will all be back just in time to enjoy the annual Employee Recognition Gala on May 28.
Looking a bit further ahead but not too far ahead, we will hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the CLASS project on Monday, June 16 at 10 AM. Brett will send out additional details as the date draws closer.

I want to address what has been in the news this week - the student loan default rates. I think this is very much recession related. When you look at the graph of our default rates over the past several years, you'll see it was in the teens up until the recession, and then we had a spike in 2010 and 2011. The rate for last year was 30.6%. This year, our draft rate is 30%. Over 30% is a flag that we need to do a few things. You'll remember that last October when we were in Cottage Grove, you had a pretty extensive report on Financial Aid, and Helen Faith went through the default strategies we had already implemented to try and get ahead of this. Financial Aid is a federal program and governed by rules and regulations that are outside our control. We have little authority to deny or limit a loan. Basically, if a student qualifies for financial aid, they are entitled to get a loan. However, if the student then defaults, the college is held accountable for that. We need to work on getting some more authority on the front end. We are working with our federal partners. We've been in touch with Congressman DeFazio and Senator Merkley, and they are making inquiries into what the Department of Education is doing. So what are we doing? We've done a number of things to date, but in the short term we are challenging some of the factors used in determining our default rate. We've done a review of all the data. We've submitted 37 challenges to the Department of Education. They are systematically going through these challenges, and we don't need many of those challenges to stick to get us under the 30%, which kind of restarts the clock again. That doesn't mean to say that we shouldn't continue to do what we can to limit the default rate, but it would get us under that 30% threshold. It's a little worrisome that one of the challenges we made was related to students who had passed away prior to their loans going into default. While the loans have been discharged, those students are still held in that number. Just dealing with that would get us under the 30%. This is one of the ridiculous federal regulations that we are challenging. We'll continue to work at the federal level, and we'll work on questioning the data. Then we have a number of strategies that we are putting in place. You'll recall that Helen talked about the SALT project, which is working with students to provide financial literacy, but also to work with them when it looks like they are going into default. By now, most of these students have left the college, and it is sometimes hard to work with them. It is particularly hard because when the federal government moved to direct loans, they hired a number of loan servicing agencies, so now we are working with eleven different loan servicing agencies. It is not as easy as it used to be when there was one loan servicer and the college in this work. I think we are probably going to have to get a little more aggressive on the education side, which probably means bringing in one of the expert companies to help us work with students, and it will probably need increased staffing to comb the data to make sure that the loans servicers aren't making these kinds of errors like including the students who have passed away. The budget we proposed to you this evening does not include additional money, so by the time we come back with a final budget, we are going to have to include some additional funds for this purpose while we work on the policy end. Helen Faith has been doing a great job keeping us on top of what needs to be done. We were part of a national project with ACCT and TICAS, and they have given us quite a bit of advice on next steps and how to try and impact the default rate while trying to work on the policy to try to get some of the ridiculous regulations changed that put us in this position. This is an Oregon problem. Almost every college in Oregon is in the 20% range and some of them, like us, are on the brink of 30% - I think the highest is 35%. It certainly has to do with state disinvestment and increases in tuition, but changes in regulations from a two-year cohort to a three-year cohort also caused some of this problem. We are taking this very seriously. We are implementing as much as we can to mitigate the problem, but at the end of the day, we can do as much education as we like, but we can't make the former student write the check. That is what is so unfortunate, that we are held responsible for something that we have limited control over.

On a happy note, I'd like to recognize Paul Zito as our outgoing ASLCC President. This will be Paul's official last meeting. He has accomplished so much. He is an articulate advocate for students. He is thoughtful, courageous, and calm in the face of adversity. It has been a privilege and honor to work with him this past year. We wish him every success in the future.