I think we've got two trends that are coming together to make the focus on adult learners critical right now. The first is demographics. We have a declining number of high school graduates. And secondly, we've got a booming economy. Business is moving into the state, more than $20 billion invested, 10s of thousands of jobs being created. We need to make sure that employers who are locating here have the skilled workforce that they need, and we also want to make sure that N Carolinians are getting opportunities and access to those jobs. If you think about the My Future NC Commission, there's no way we hit that mark without really engaging with adult learners. Just taking students who are fresh out of high school and helping them get those degrees or credentials won't won't get us to the two million goal. Baby boomers like me are retiring. That wrap it rates and they're not enough younger people because birth rates are declining to be able to fill those gaps that are being created. As a leader. I just think this is something that we have to do focus on our adult learners because we can't fulfill our mission without doing it. It's good for the economy, it's good for the student, it's good for the family and it's good for our bottom line. It's smart money in a lot of ways we are coming right back to founding principles that we offer pathways into. A good economic opportunities and more often than not the people looking at that are going to be 25 and above. I was 33 when I returned to college and I had stopped out and I had two kids. It was difficult. It was hard to find the resources. It was hard to come up with that money to pay the tuition and to pay for my books and feed my family. It's a struggle to be an adult, to to have a job part time or full time, have a family and then come back to college. I was that student, which took me 12 years to earn. A bachelor's degree, and many of them have those same stories. They can't just put down their backpack of issues and challenges at the door and then be fully engrossed into the conversations that need to take place in the classroom. They still carry that baggage for several years when those priorities would get in the way of their education, we felt like there was nothing that we could do, and we sort of just accepted them. The shift is. We recognize there are specific challenges to specific adult learner populations, and if we can identify those, then we have some responsibility to address them. They really need us to build our systems around those kinds of struggles and barriers that they have. And so we've done that. We do smaller modules. We do more than just eight week. We have many more work based learning options. We've changed our advising. Being auto reconnect really helped us understand how much we were our own enemy in bringing adult learners back that our admissions processes are registration processes, even our recruitment processes did not feel customized to someone who was coming back. Reconnect really helped us shift our thinking in terms of looking internally versus externally. What are we doing? How can we be prepared to help them? We've extended hours, we have Saturday school. We look at hybrid models. So it's really changed our entire outlook on how we offer our classes. Now we have full classrooms on campus, whereas before they were dark because we're meeting the needs that they have. That has invigorated our campus. We have reached out to 33,000 adult learners, which is a pretty unprecedented scope and scale. And if we were able to get in touch with you, about 20% are in college right now. Put that indicates is adult learners want to go back to college. I came from a poor girl on a tobacco farm to being the president of the Community College. All of my students can go from wherever they start to wherever they dream they want to be if we can just help keep them on a pathway that's moving them forward. Education is the key.
