House Standing Committee on Higher Education

Good morning, everyone. We're now convening the House Committee on Higher Education for the purposes of an informational briefing. I am the Chair of the Committee, Andrew Takia Garrett. With me are a couple of Members. Thank you for your dedication to the cause Amslyn from Kauai, from the best side, the west side. Okay, so in terms of today's.

So before we get into the purpose of today's meeting, Members just want to let you know we do have a new AV system. No longer have the mics, everything is in the ceiling, so don't. It'll automatically pick up your voice, but it is very sensitive.

So just might want to minimize the sidebar discussions unless you want the entire public to hear it. Okay, so the purpose of today's informational briefing is to receive a presentation from the national center Higher Education Management Systems, commonly known as N Chems or NCAMs. We'll ask Brian which he prefers.

I wanted to note that this study was actually commissioned by the former President of the University of Hawai'i and presented to the Board of Regents in August of 2025.

While this Committee did not request the study, its findings raise issues that fall squarely within the legislature's interests, including access, affordability, governance and the long term alignment of the University of Hawaii with the needs of the state. Today's briefing is informational only.

It is not intended to signal endorsement of the study's conclusions or recommendations, but rather to ensure that Members and the public have a clear understanding of what the study says and how it was developed. We are joined today by Brian Prescott, President of NCCAM's/ Ccchems.

In this role, Mr. Prescott's leads NCCAM's national work on higher education, finance, governance, system design, workforce alignment and student success. His work supports governors, legislatures, governing boards and higher education leaders as they navigate enrollment decline, demographic change and questions about how public higher education systems are structured and funded.

For today's format, we will begin with a presentation from Mr. Prescott summarizing the study and its key findings. We're also pleased to have President Wendy Hensel of the University of Hawaii system in attendance to share her thoughts on the report and to discuss any steps the University has taken to incorporate recommendations suggested by any candidates.

We will have a Q and a session with Mr. Prescott after his presentation and again with President Hensel after hers. So without any further ado. Oh, sorry. One last announcement. We do have floor session at noon today, so we'll try to wrap up by 11:30 to give Members time to prepare for that.

So with that Mr. Prescott, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you all. It's a little bit chillier here in outside Boulder, Colorado today than I suspect it probably is where you are. But we'll do our best to stay warm and keep the conversation flowing.

I want to say hello to you, Representative Garrett, also to the folks I can sort of see on the side there from. Good morning, President Hensel. Or good, I guess it's still good morning for you all, Yvonne Vasily and the others as well. I'm going to share my screen.

I do have a presentation and I hope I. I'm able to get this going correctly. Does everybody. Can everybody see that?

Not yet. Brian, wait.

Not yet. Okay, hold on. There we go. I gotta finish pushing buttons before I ask that. Okay, perfect. All right, hold on now. I gotta get y' all back. Okay, I think I've got it now. All right. So as, as the chairman said, I'm going to do a quick overview of the study.

I'm going to focus on those pieces of the report that we made, where we made recommendations to the state in particular. But to begin with, I wanted to provide a little bit more detail about N. Chims. We are a small nonprofit organization headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, and we've been around for 56 years.

We have a background of doing all the kinds of work that the chairman described in his introduction of me personally. It's a pretty fair adaptation of or representation of the kind of work that we do around post secondary finance, affordability, governance and organization, statewide strategic planning.

And we also have a particular more recent interest in the attributes of ruralness as it applies to post secondary education, whether that's of institutions or of students.

And we find that in throughout the country, the challenges that we're heading into in higher education, around demographic decline, fiscal constraints and the like, are more acutely felt in rural spaces in our country. And that would hold true in Hawaii as much as anywhere else.

Distances may be smaller, but there's an ocean in between some of the places that you all need to serve. And then and mountainous ranges and the lack of roads. And so it's still very important that we think about the ability of the university system to deliver on the needs of individuals wherever they are in the state.

Anyway, NCHEMS mission is to partner with states, with institutions, with government leaders and others to effectively use evidence to drive strategic decision making for the needs of communities and individuals and the state as a whole.

And like I said, we've been involved in a lot of these high profile questions these days about governance and organization and structure and funding.

This study originated, as Representative Garrett said, with President Lassner reaching out and saying we need to take a look at some of the challenges we're seeing in our demo, in our enrollment patterns and various other things.

And I think he was probably thinking of his impending retirement when this conversation started and wanted to tee up these kinds of conversations for the next President.

But at any rate, we got started at the beginning of 2024 and we concluded with a I came to the board meeting in August of last year and delivered the full suite of recommendations in the report.

But the real key purpose of the report was to assess the challenges that I just described around demography, around workforce alignment, around the distribution of educational opportunities and for relevant programs throughout the state and how that, how those challenges are evolving for Hawaii. Looking into the future.

And we were particularly asked to look into key areas such as the delivery of high quality and relevant programs, the various different kinds of local needs we see through the state, and then looking ahead to the future.

Of course, as I've sort of already alluded to, all of these are common concerns that we're seeing in a lot of places throughout the country, but they are concerns that are complicated by Hawaii's unique geography as well as its history as well as its colonial history. In some respects.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time walking through a whole bunch of data slides. Certainly it's part and parcel of often how we present these things. And there's ample data presentation in the report should you care to review it. But I did want to set the context with just a couple, a few pieces of data.

So here we have a picture of Hawaii and its educational attainment and how varied it is across the state state where we're able to measure it. And then on the right, we see the rates of participation of individuals 18 to 44 measured at the, at the zip code level.

And you can see for example, that it's persistently lower edge levels of educational attainment and participation, for example, along the western coast of Hawaii Island. And so we, you know, and then there's also some pockets in on Oahu that, that aren't as well served as well.

So as we look at these, this kind of data, we understand that the response of the university system to these various needs and these highly varied needs needs to be really sophisticated and comprehensive and sensitive to local conditions. And so the, the university system is in a unique position to be able to do that.

Additionally, there were there was a clear sign of declining enrollments everywhere in the system except for Manoa, which itself even experienced a decline after 2012 or so. Only west Oahu had been generally up, even though it was relatively small and often, as described to us in our visits, not particularly well populated during the day.

I do think that these data you may. If you looked at more recent data, you would see a slight uptick. There's been somewhat more positive news on the enrollment front nationally.

But I think that Hawaii's got a long way to go, particularly in its community college sector, to bring it back to the levels that it had back in the 2012 era. Worth noting too, for community colleges and broad access, regional comprehensive institutions, institutions even to some degree for Manoa, which is pretty broad access for a flagship institution.

These institutions as public institutions are almost required to respond to increased enrollment demand by growing. And it's much easier in higher education, no matter where you are, to grow, than it is to find ways to return to maintain the same level of staffing to student ratios as you might see when enrollments are in decline.

And so there is a common concern that institutions are not responsive to declining conditions of declining enrollment, not just in Hawaii. But it is a very difficult task to take on given tenure protections and shared governance and collective bargaining and other features of higher education that make it difficult to to do that.

It's also the case that in community colleges in particular, enrollments are very countercyclical. And as soon as the economy starts to shift and perhaps shows some sign of weakness, students will come back into community colleges quite commonly. And as a result, there needs to be some ability to sort of be responsive to that returning student as well.

Looking forward to the future, there's some very troubling demographic trends headed Hawaii's way. If you look on the left of this graph, these data I think might be a little bit older because we pulled these data before which he updated its projections of high school graduates.

But Hawaii is likely to experience the least growth in high school graduates, according to witchy. I know there are there are folks in Hawaii that dispute that. And I think that even witches more recent data is drearier than this.

But it is I think unquestionably the case that the number of high school graduates in Hawaii is unlikely to be climbing anytime soon. And so that will be. That's the foundational core of where colleges and universities get their students. It's the most predictable population.

It's the population that's most likely to enroll full time and therefore pay full costs and so as a consequence, there's a serious challenge ahead for Hawaii. That being said, on the right, you can see that there are, there is relative stability or even growth among some age ranges within the state.

And that is primarily between those of the peak working age between 35 and 49 years old, where individuals are likely increasingly over time to need retraining or upskilling. So there's a likely shift necessary in the types of students that Hawaii's public institutions are going to be serving going forward.

The approach beyond just telling, that's just the setup, right? So the approach of the study was to really pull on a ton of data. And I just showed you a little brief glimpse of that. We did an exhaustive request to the University of Hawaii's Institutional Research Analysis and Planning Office.

And I want to say, you know, having done this work in I don't know how many states across the country, that operation, the Institutional Research Analysis and Planning Operation, was consistently responsive, super fast and quite accurate at a level that I'm not going to say was unmatched anywhere else.

But it really stood out and deserves special mentioned by somebody from outside who has seen a few of these places operate before. Proprietary sources as well.

We pull on some data for, on the workforce side and on the student interest side in particular, we've done a, we did an assessment of governance structures nationally as part of this and we were in Hawaii.

We had the very hard duty of coming to Hawaii and spending a week there in April 20202024 we, we visited all 10 institutions as well as the Palama Nui location on, in, on west on the Kona side of the Big Island.

And at each of these visits we talked with, we had deep conversations with institutional leaders, with faculty staff, with community and business leaders because we wanted to understand what's the demand of, of the institutions from the community and business, not just from students, and to sort of try to match that workforce side.

So we've got, and to sort of flesh out our data picture. So we did all that. Then we built the report. We asked UH to fact check that report and, and so ultimately we delivered it last August. I'm going to talk about two big broad topics here. One's structure and one's funding.

That's what the focus of my finding, the findings that I'll report on are. First off, it has been a persistent question in Hawaii about whether or not there should be one person in charge of both the system as President and the Manoa campus as chancellor.

And we come down pretty convinced that those are two different and often unrelated jobs with inherent conflicts for one person to handle on their own. This is both conceptual and as you'll see, there's some evidence that we can bring to bear that Hawaii is extremely distinct in how it has historically done.

This President Lassner, who commissioned this work originally, is a friend. I will say that he is one, possibly a uniquely capable person with a very long history of having worked at the university and in Hawaii for a very long time.

But I would say that anytime you're trying to do a replacement of leaders at that level, you want to do at least a national, if not an international search. And it's just unlikely that you're going to find somebody that can balance those jobs as well as they should effectively. And you without the.

And if you're looking for somebody with that deep kind of Hawaii experience, then you're really limiting yourself to the kind of person you're able to attract. But in terms of them being different jobs, I would describe the system president's job as being much more externally focused. It's the statewide policy leadership activity.

It's paying attention to broad goals of the, of the system in terms of contributing to the health, economic, social and civic health of the state. It's about figuring out where the gaps in services and where are the chasms that exist between institutions and trying to fill those things with the combined resources of the system.

Whereas the Chancellor's job at the, at the flagship institution is about day to day operations and operational excellence and what are the institutional interests and how best can I advance those things and what are the problems that I have in my pipeline for graduation rates, how do I solve those things?

It's prioritizing the institution's needs and addressing the problems that the institution MANOA has that are going to be distinct from HILO or any of the community colleges. And it's about raising as much fun money from ANOA as I possibly can.

These are not the same jobs and they exist in, if they exist in one person, they exist with a considerable amount of tension. And that's tension that others can see, observe and feel as well.

And anytime we see these kinds of jobs being done by one person, it's quite often it's very difficult to not let the day to day operational realities, you know, what crisis am I responding to today overwhelm the policy leadership function that's really essential for having carried out.

And when we look across the country at governance structures on this, on this subject, we see some clear patterns. And those are, first off, there's a ton of variety around this and context is really crucial.

The second thing is that there are no systems that include all the public institutions in the state as Hawaii's does that operate with a joint role anywhere in the US and there's no system with a joint role that exists in a state that does not have an umbrella sitting on top of it in the form of a coordinating body that is expressly charged with the task of carrying out state policy leadership with respect to public post secondary education.

And in fact even the systems that live underneath the coordinating agency in those states have assigned separate roles to the system leadership and the campus governance.

Even states that have historically weak coordination structures like Michigan and Pennsylvania are finding it necessary in the context and in the climate that we're looking at going forward, forward to strengthen those capacities.

And so ultimately I think if you look across the 50 states, you'll see that states themselves recognize the importance of policy leadership at the statewide level that is distinct from the operational oversight of the flagship or any institution.

So to explain these two, the table that you're seeing there, without going into detail, what you have on the left are those institutions that have their multi campus institutions or systems that have the head of the flagship campus, the main campus also runs everything for the system.

And so for example, the University of Missouri has a President and a chancellor over the Columbia campus who also is the final decider for three other campuses in addition to Columbia in that system.

But there's a whole bunch of other four year institutions in that state and a whole community college system, all that operate underneath the coordinating agency that has the task of doing state policy leadership for Missouri.

And in those other cases, you know, CUNY and SUNY and, and down that left side of the list, you have a system leader who is looking after all of the interests of higher education in the state separate from the flagship or an institutional leader there.

So those are just evidence that, you know, Lasnar was a and Mortimer before him was an N of one, you know, in the way in which the higher education structures itself.

Around this topic, we also identified several structural challenges with the system that I think are the challenges that are becoming more acute as we see enrollment decline and these other problems that higher education is going to be needing to deal with.

And they are about, you know, how do you really know where the boundary lines are between, let's say Manoa and Hilo or West Oahu? How do you make the community colleges, except geographically work together more effectively and stuff like that?

One of the key questions that I don't think is asked often enough in Hawaii or in many other states is what is the, what should the flagship institute not be doing? Because another institution in the state might be able to do it, if not better, at least there's a comparative advantage, if you're familiar with that economic term.

And so there's a key question to be asked about that. We see terribly underleveraged universities and education centers. These are the policy tools that were created to solve for some of the unique Hawaiian, the unique features of Hawaii's geography and population disbursement. And by and large, they are under leveraged.

They are not commonly the place where lots of institutions are delivering programs to the degree that they're busy, it's because one institution feels attached to it. And so there's just, there's a lot more that could be done on that front. We're seeing in part because of the way Hawaii funds its higher education system.

There's a growing amount of competition over programs and resources, which gets into particular challenges related to mission differentiation. And then there's mounting challenges for board leadership. And let me say a thing or two about that.

If you look back at the witchy data to the beginning of 1990 or so 1990 to 2012, it's been, it was year after year after year of growth in every kind, every state, almost everywhere throughout that entire period.

And to be kind of blunt about it, leading a higher education institution when growth was so automatic, I mean, it wasn't easy. It's never been easy, but it also wasn't very difficult. You didn't have to, you didn't face the same kind of challenges about. Right. Sizing, downsizing, cutting programs or those kinds of things that today's leaders do.

And when you were a board member under those conditions, it was a cushy opportunity to like, the key question was, where do you allocate new resources to build capacity? And those could get contentious.

But it's not the same thing as saying where do you trim some things that are lower priorities in order to make sure that we're making these other priorities that are higher on our list healthier. Board members who are volunteer volunteers, they're not paid to do this.

They have often other jobs that are, that actually pay their, their own, you know, pay for their own living. This is. And we're in a highly politicized environment we've created. It's really hard to be a board member at this day, in this day and age.

And we've asked them, without any additional resources to shift and to take on some of these extremely controversial challenges. And so we just, we just know we have.

I have great sympathy for people who elect or are willing to serve on these voluntary boards because I'm hearing about some of them having their homes vandalized and stuff like that over some of the contentious topics that we face today. Anyway, all of this leads to brewing conflict and unproductive competition among Hawaii's institutions.

It creates inefficient and effective use of state resources. The joint role in particular contributes to what I think is going to be. Is a persistent problem and not one that's likely to go away, but could be at least reduced around Manoa's dominance as well as Oahu's dominance. In the conversations around statewide priorities, I think that there's been.

We can document evidence of service gaps in both terms of the kinds of programs that are needed, as well as populations that are underserved and geography. Sometimes those latter two are quite closely linked. I'm going to say it wrong, but I think, I mean, the Waianae, western side of Oahu is a particular case in point here.

And then we. It was striking to see how many, how much market share is being lost by the University of Hawaii system, particularly to online providers like Arizona State Grand Canyon and Western Governor's University. And you know, an example there is Kamehameha's decision to go with. I forget the name.

There's a Hawaii Pacific University for some of its dual enrollment. I might be misremembering that, but at any rate, there are enrollments that are being left on the table in the way in which Hawaii, back when we were doing this work, was engaged in online delivery. So that's the structure stuff.

The funding stuff I wanted to call out is that the approach here for funding the UHS operations is disconnected to state policy or state priorities. It's pretty out of date and it's really protective of the status quo over what innovations are really needed. And this goes to again, the future is going to look different.

We've got to be able to figure out ways in which the base plus model that most states have relied on and continue to rely on, it's not well fitted to the kinds of challenges that we're going to have coming forward. What we really need is better data and benchmarks.

We need to have some sense of what the cost drivers are of higher education institutions.

We need to be intelligent and deliberate about how we're trying to direct funds so that they incentivize institutions to, to go after state priorities and In Hawaii's case, because you have one institution covering all public higher education really sort of leveraging that systemness and getting all those assets to work in concert to meet those geographically dispersed needs.

I think to some extent, if you can, if you can provide the funding and the flexibility in the right way, you have the governance model that is best equipped to meet some of those needs most directly because President Hensel has ought to have the authority to direct those resources where they can be best utilized to meet the needs that have been identified by the system.

Hawaii's practice of appropriating positions and putting ceilings on the position numbers by institution doesn't have compare in the. In the US it's unique and it is absolutely a problem for the flexibility and the ability of the system President and of the institutions to resolve problems that exist between institutions here.

And, you know, our report strongly urges the elimination of that practice.

There are examples where that Hawaii has figured out how to work around this problem, but it involves negotiation and that requires the system to occasionally say, well, or an institution that's involved to trade off things that aren't necessarily creating the most efficient or effective approach in the process. So we made some selected recommendations.

I think this might be my last slide. We'll see. But we made some in the full report. We made them to the regents themselves. We made some recommendations to the system President. When we were putting this together, she was just starting her role. And so we made some.

We had the audacity to make some recommendations to her as she was stepping into the role. And then we made some reservations to. To the state and in terms of the Governor and the Legislature, the one to the regents was.

One of the ones to the regents was just categorically to split the dual role and to make it evident that there's an understanding that these are two different jobs. We've talked about that for the state. We suggested Hawaii is lacking. The University of Hawaii system has a strategic plan.

But Hawaii as a state lacks, or at the time we worked on this, it lacked a public agenda for higher education. These are the kinds of things where you're looking about beyond just, you know, throughput, graduation rates and workforce alignment alone for the university.

You're talking about, you know, the societal health, you know, health outcomes, income outcomes, and, you know, what's our mobility in and out of the state look like? Are we a healthy state and what's the university doing to contribute to that? We suggested that Hawaii could benefit from having had that conversation.

We further suggested that the university system could help Lead and facilitate that. But it really helps them understand how do they fit their strategic plan within this broader agenda that they've helped to facilitate around legislators, the governor's office, business leaders, Members of the media, and others who are really paying attention to what the state needs.

We also recommended that this Legislature revise its approach to funding.

UH I think in the report there was a conceptual framework that we were advancing that really talks about the importance of mission differentiation in the funding approach, that explicit in terms of the programs being offered and their varying costs, that explicitly talks about the kinds of student support funding that are needed to meet the needs of first generation students, let's say, or low income students.

There's also, how do you line all that up with the incentives that you need in order to achieve the state goals? And again, eliminates the appropriation of positions to institutions. And then back to that point I was making earlier about the challenges and opportunities, maybe of being a board Member.

You know, we made some suggestions about board Member selection around orientation, training, and really performance evaluation, not of individual board Members, but of the board itself. Some of this stuff is happening.

The bits and pieces of it that I saw, I would say was checking the box and not really doing the kind of rigorous, externally driven, sort of evaluative analysis that would be most appropriate given the challenges that the board is facing going forward. And so we suggested that be something useful.

So that's sort of what I had prepared to talk about. I want to thank you all. Again, welcome questions. And for those in the room who don't know how to get ahold of me, this is how you can do that. So with that, I will be happy to answer questions.

I'm looking forward to President Hensel comments after I'm done.

Thank you very much, Brian. Members, any questions for Brian? Okay. Well, the Members, kind of. Okay. Representative Evslin.

I have a quick question. Thanks for the presentation. I was surprised to hear you say that we are the only system where positions are appropriated in the budget and salary caps in the budget.

So how does the budget process work for other public institutions in other states as far as salary positions go for universities?

So lots of times there are. Most of the time, the salaries are not necessarily appropriated by the Legislature within the institution or within the institution. There is some understanding of the degree to which positions are funded by through the General Fund or our soft support or some combination.

But the Legislature in other parts of the country don't say, Thou Shalt have no more than, you know, 100 FTE of generally funded positions in your in your, in as part of the appropriations bill. Okay.

And one more question, Chair, you might have said it in there and I might have missed it, but as far as the declining enrollment goes since 2012, how much does that differ from, you know, maybe national average for declines or are we an outlier in that regard?

So that gives me a chance to answer a question you didn't ask, but it's germane and I'll do that in a minute. But your enrollment level declines in some of the steepest ones, like I think it was leeward and one of the others, I forget which one are steep in comparison to what we're seeing nationally.

But community colleges all across the country have seen a significant drop over that period of time. It is largely, in our judgment, due to the, the persistently good economy that we've been working in, where, you know, full employment has been more of the order of the day than not.

People, the opportunity costs of attending college have become quite a bit higher. And in a lot of industries, employers are snatching students from the class, from the classrooms during the, during their programs of study at, at community colleges, sometimes even in high school. So that's part of the problem.

There's also been the pandemic had an effect, and it had a more of an effect on institutions that are less selective than those that are more selective as well.

But the, but one of the things that I think is worth pointing out that I didn't is that in the last five or six years, college going rates among high school graduates have dropped and that has been uncommon as well.

So you're starting to see the combined effect of the economy on recent high school graduates, but also adults that would be enrolling in college to get a leg up. The decline in the number of high school graduates that we're starting to see in a lot of places, just so the pool is smaller.

And then questions about the value of higher education and a variety of other things is helping to contribute to a decline in the rate at which students are enrolling in college after high school for the first sustained decline of that kind in 20 or so years. So it's, it's a combination of all those things.

And my hope is that I mentioned that there's been a slight brightening of that picture just in terms of enrollment. And I think that that's partly, we're starting to see a little bit of an improvement in that. But it's been a combination of things that have led those numbers down.

My final question, and you mostly answered it there, but so what you're saying is it's our declining enrollment is not because more kids are going to college on the mainland. It just mostly reflects declining enrollment in General.

But do you have the data to show number of Hawaii graduates who are going to college on the mainland and what the number.

I did. I did. And I might have to get that, get that back to Representative Garrett later because otherwise I'm going to be scrolling around in this big report that I've got. But I'm. We can we either put it in there or I can get it.

But the reason for our declining enrollment, as you said, is just generally more, less kids are going to college and it's not because we're shipping more of our kids off to the mainland to go to college. That's.

Well, it may be a little bit of the shipping the students the kids off to college on the mainland, but that's going to be marginal in comparison to some of the other factors here. Thank you. Yep, sure.

Can I ask a question.

Rep. Muraoka then, Rep. Kapela.

Okay. In case I missed it in there. So you your recommendation would be to run the tool the flagship as well as the communities as separate entities, basically. Right. With leaders of each. Would that. How would that, how would that system identify? Would that still be.

Would one report to the other with a system identifier of the communities schools report to a chancellor? And what would that identity look like?

Yeah. So what I would assume would be the structure would be President Hensel would be her direct reports would include members of the system office staff, as well as the chancellor of Manoa and the community colleges, either individually or as a group, as well as the chancellor of Hilo and West Oahu Leeward. So she would be.

She would report to the regents. Everybody else would report to her.

Okay.

I think the way it currently works in the org structure is that the chancellors of the community colleges report to the vice President of community colleges, who in turn reports to the President. Seeing nods in the audience. Glad I got that right, Rep. Kapela.

Thank you. I'm thinking now about Rep. Muraoka's question threw me off a little bit. But going back, I think tagging off of what Rep. Evslin said, is it consistent, the decline in Enrollment, is that consistent with what you're seeing across the nation?

Do you have any data that shows that or is it just Hawaii students specifically that are choosing not to choose the university path? Because I think that that speaks to a broader question.

Yeah. Yes, it is. It is. It has been documented in across the nation that These patterns that we're seeing are not inconsistent in Hawaii, are not inconsistent with what we see in other parts of the state, the country. It's variation in degrees.

Community colleges have been down, flagship institutions and highly selective institutions are stable or up, and the regional comprehensive institutions are struggling also. And that's. I can't think of an example state where that isn't the general pattern.

Okay, thank you Chair.

Rep. La Chica.

Thank you, Chair, for putting this informational briefing together. It's been very informative. Dr. Prescott, the state is heavily invested in looking at our career workforce pipelines and really directing our resources in areas of need for our workforce challenge to address our current workforce challenges.

Different shortage areas like teachers and healthcare providers and other types of careers. In your review of the system and community colleges, have you seen that what is being presented in terms of the offerings or development of offerings reflect what it is that the state is in, the direction that the state is investing in?

And if not, have you seen examples from other states where there is like a strong, you know, partnership or return on investment in how the, you know, state and the university can partner in terms of addressing workforce challenges?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's the question of the day kind of everywhere in Hawaii. I think that there's a real interest among the institutions quite often to be responsive to what they see as important as student demand.

But the way in which a lot of them have been going about trying to do that is to stand up the programs on their own. And then they, they, they've been engaged in a little bit of tension and conflict over who gets to award which kinds of degrees.

And so you have confusing things in Hawaii like the, the attempt to expand nursing programs. Is that a Manoa job or is that a West Oahu job or to what extent? At the bachelor's degree level particularly, and so on. There's also dental hygiene. Manoa offers that. So is Kapiolani.

It's not entirely clear why you would have those two competing over those kinds of resources. This is the challenge that we're seeing in a lot of places because setting up these programs is costly.

We're working in Iowa right now trying to figure out for them how to meet the educational demand demands of parts of their communities that are, that are struggling to get their workforce needs met. But in that case, it's about how do you keep the people in the state rather than a giant supply problem.

The typical challenges that are the hardest to crack are around clinical instructors for nurses and teachers. And that is a challenge that we encounter almost everywhere we're going now, good examples. We're starting to see states trying to put together collaborative approaches to that. And Hawaii actually has some good examples of that.

I'm going off of memory here, so I will be corrected by the audience members, I'm sure. But it, but there are some, there are some cases where Kauai Community College is working with Honolulu or Kapiolani to do some training in paramedic instruction and that kind of thing.

That's the kind of approach that I think is going to be needed more often and particularly in Hawaii because of the distance and the oceans and all that. And those are the sort of responsive, statewide, efficient asset deployment approaches that I think are going to be the order of the day going forward.

Okay, Rep. Evslin, go ahead.

Thank you. Chair, One final question.

I, as a neighbor island representative, anecdotally, one of the things I hear often about students who opt not to go to University of Hawaii or from their parents is that the cost of housing is so high and then it makes some mainland or even international options much more attractive comparatively.

The two tuition costs might be more, but the housing costs are less. Or as you said, they can make really good money staying locally and getting a job on island without a college degree. Do you have any, again, that's all anecdotal.

Do you have any survey data showing those who opted not to go to the University of Hawaii? What some of the driving factors were other than low unemployment rate and good employment options without meeting a college degree?

I don't, we didn't do a survey as part of this. I would believe those, those anecdotal stories to be pretty good. I mean they're anecdotes, so are they represented or not?

But it's, it's something that we, we heard a little bit of from the students that we spoke to in the, in the groups that we, we visited with. We have heard this, this problem in other parts of the country where, you know, you don't have the crazy cost of living challenges of the Manoa Valley.

So I would, I find it very plausible that that's a particular problem in Hawaii. I also, I also think that if we do, if we were to do this project again, we might, we're playing around with some experimental data to be able to have a better answer to that question that wouldn't, that doesn't require a big survey.

But we're not, we're not done figuring out what we've got on our hands with that data. But had we had more, had we had that data when we did this work, we would have asked that question particularly.

Hey, Brian, just a couple of questions from me as we transition to President Hensel here in a second, but just want to thank you again for this high level presentation of what you present back to the Board of Regents last summer. And I particularly appreciate your recommendations to the state.

You know, one, creating a public agenda around higher education. Two, recognizing that we need to revise the, consider revising the funding approach of the university. And to that end, you know, we do have a bill we're going to hear in Committee probably next week.

It is House Bill 2519 that would create some fiscal autonomy for the university and transition period for that. Also appreciate your focus on enhancing board selection and orientation. So we did introduce a bill, House Bill 1873 that would specify that regents have certain specified skill sets just again, to make sure we have a well rounded board.

And I know I do want to acknowledge the vice chair of the Board of Regents, Mike here with us today. Thank you for flying in for this.

So just regarding the issue of governance, you know, of course you emphasize the importance of strong leadership amongst the board and what are some of the reforms from your vantage point that we could undertake that would help us recruit and retain high quality board Members? You know, you mentioned the challenge about this is a public position.

There are instances on the continent of people being physically threatened. We've heard personally that one of the biggest challenges is the financial disclosure requirements and how people don't want to have that information shared publicly. Are there some best practices you can share with us to get a high performing board?

Yeah. So for. I don't, I don't think that that financial disclosure process that you all have currently is, is of much help at all to being able to attract and retain the top sort of lead. I mean, I think the board of Regents that you currently have, I have no quibbles or qualms with that.

But I would imagine that you are limiting yourself from the selections that you might be able to garner if that wasn't a barrier. I think that part of the problem of board selection these, you know, has been, we've been able, like I said, it's been a feather.

It's more than this, but it's also been a feather in one's cap to do, to be on the board, to go to the, you know, the president's box and at the football stadium and all that. And I'm speaking about, you know, other places too, like the SEC, that's a big thing.

But what we really need to do, and you get there often by contributing to the governor's election campaign, I don't think that that necessarily is disqualifying at all.

But you ought to have a set of criteria for how do you get various different kinds of skills and abilities as well as some representation covered in the selection of your board members.

In our report, there's a matrix that sort of lays out, you gotta, you need to, if you were to put this matrix down and put all the board members together, there should be a heat map with, without any really obvious cool spots that would be represented across this matrix. And so that I think is a useful way.

There's also the appointments process itself. There's some utility in trying to, to sit, to Create a process by which the governor's office and the Legislature and maybe representatives of the public in some meaningful way or the existing board come together to advance candidates for the Governor to nominate.

And so there are some, there are some, I think, reforms that can be done to sort of shore that up. But I really think it's going to be important to do that kind of orientation that may not be exclusively the job of somebody like President Hensol.

And then the board evaluation process should be one that has some external legitimacy to it.

Okay, thank you, Brian. I think at this point we'll transition to President Hensel. If you wouldn't mind coming to the podium. Brian, of course. We welcome you to stick around for the next 10 or 15 minutes.

Thank you. I'd love to hear what President Hensel has to say. What she's going to take issue with that I said too.

Oh, no, no, no. Always great as a new President to have as much information as possible. In thinking through the structure I did want to address just briefly, one of the questions you had, we had since 2022, the enrollment has gone up, so we are at the highest percent that we have now since 2017, I believe.

So there is progress in that. Where you see a real decline for a reason is in the absence of online programs, ASU governors, those different ones. You can see that there's been a 22% increase in the number of Hawaii residents choosing online out of state providers.

In part, I'll be frank, because we have not provided the flexibility and the programming that's been necessary in order to retain that type of enrollment. So that is a major focus of what we're doing right now.

So I just, you know, I know we have 10 minutes before you all have to walk out, so we could spend all day talking about most of these things.

But I did want to make sure that you knew we actually are addressing that particular issue quite strongly as well as our direct to, UH program this year, which at the moment, as of now is up 18% in new applicants, discrete applicants, and 45% in terms of applications. So.

So lots of, lots of different reasons to get the enrollment, what it will say and then really just take your questions because this really is a very complex issue is what I've seen as the President coming in is an absence of system level coordination between and among the 10 campuses that lets us create the highest maximum efficiency and effectiveness for the state of Hawaii.

And those things are amplified, as Brian said, by the fact we're the only system of higher education that's public and there's no state higher education system that's doing statewide coordination.

So the confluence of those things mean that what we have are 10 campuses that are pulling in 10 different directions instead of focusing very narrowly on how do we create an integrated strategy with an integrated infrastructure that drives that strategy and then is able to hold accountability across the leadership.

And the way it's currently situated is not optimal for that. And so we have the Board of Regents created a pig to follow up on some of these conversations and made a recommendation, which I agree with, to split my job, which is currently the President and the Chancellor of MNOA into two separate pieces.

Many of the other pieces that flow from that are necessarily hinging on that separation.

So for example, the community colleges, as you heard the Chancellor's report, into a vice President at the system who then reports to me, I think there are some problems with that because it dilutes the voices of the islands and also precludes some integration and orientation with the 34 year campuses that we have.

But the communication that I received pretty much to a person was we don't have faith in the enhanced systemness until there is the devolution of the role of leadership of the MNOA campus because of the fear that that will always drive the decision making across the ted.

So we have talked about what would come next for the community colleges that will be the secondary act after we split the MANOA Chancellor, we expect that that will be completed by the end of this calendar year and are proceeding with the national search. So in terms of the funding, you all have heard me say this before.

In order to create that system wide strategy, that means I have to have some control and the regions have to have oversight over levers, incentives and accountability that can move different pieces across the 10 because we do not have lump sum budgeting to the system, but instead it is by the campus and all the way down to at the level of positions.

It makes it very, very hard to execute widespread strategic initiatives. There are certainly ways that we can do that behind the scenes by moving things around, but it is not optimized for that.

And so, you know, on the plus side, I think, you know, we have a surplus of cash balances at this moment, which is a wonderful thing for us as we're losing federal money and as we're trying to identify where that strategic investment needs to go.

But I'd be the first person to tell you that amount of money is not optimal in a system if it's sitting there and not productively employed at the Problems at the system, where it needs to go across the system, then we cannot guarantee every student that we have a common level of care, an investment in their ability to succeed.

So, you know, it's great to have the money, but it's not good that it's sitting there. And so trying to create this more centralized vision that's developed with the 10 campuses and then strongly executed in a single wavelength I think will make an enormous difference for the state of Hawaii. So I'll stop there.

I'd rather take five minutes of your questions than keep telling you information you may not be.

Okay, thank you, President. Members questions?

It's so big, it's hard to know where to start. I know. With these questions, I just have one question about we are losing, as you referenced a number of students to these virtual programs on the continent.

But the university has also done a tremendous job in trying to amplify the virtual offerings that you have specifically around like social, the social work program and some of the political science programs as well. What are you folks doing to share that information with our local students?

Yeah, so the problem is it's not that there aren't pockets of excellence in these online programs, it's that they're not coordinated across the 10 to allow someone who begins in an associate's degree to build to a bachelor's degree in an online format master's. And, and it's also driven by faculty at the moment.

And so if a faculty Member decides this should happen, then it, then it takes new curriculum, sometimes three to four years for it to come online, which is an extraordinarily slow process at a time of such massive change in technology.

So what we did, and this actually answers your question about workforce development, which will be a major focus for us this year year, including creating a position of associate vice President for workforce development to bring all of the campuses into a single point.

But we did a market study that compared workforce demand in emerging areas across each of the individual islands overlaid across what programs do we have and what modality do we have them in? And so literally we have this 150 page report that has prioritized these. These are the major areas that need investment right now in this format.

And instead of waiting for faculty from a ground up perspective, we will go out to the campuses and say, here's the opportunity, here's the need, here's the money to incentivize the develop of that as quickly as possible.

So again, that same kind of 10 campus coordination, rather than leaving it at either an individual faculty level or an individual campus level. And so the goal is everything that we do is streamlined so any student in any location can pursue their goals and their dreams and not have to leave home in order to do it.

Thank you, President Hensel, for being here for that workforce report. How far out does it go into projecting in terms of population and like, you know, some of the communities where there could be a need? And second, would that be our report be made available to our Members?

I'm happy to show you the report. It's really pretty fascinating, but it is, it is deeply steeped in data. And really the entire approach we're taking is data driven to find impact based on what is working as opposed to how do we feel about it. Right. So that we can really direct the resources.

But happy to share it with you. It was detailed on labor data, individual island data. So it wasn't even just a Hawaii study. It was this island this time, these objectives. Yeah, it's a great study. Thank you.

I know we're almost out of time.

I would be sad if you didn't ask. You asked so many times.

Well, yeah. My takeaway is that you're doing a superhero's job in doing all this. When the world should be, you know, split seem like a key finding. You know, you kind of addressed it in talking about possibly need for better coordination and reporting directly to you.

But what are your thoughts on that key finding of like the issues with having one person doing this superhero job and whether the role of university President and chancellor of assistants.

Well, I have recommended the separation and what I've said is it can be done. Of course that anything can be done. It's the question of. What is the question? Cost of doing it. And typically we focus on the cost of having two different people in these roles.

What I would hope that you all would take a close look at, and we're happy to share with you, is the cost of not doing that. The foregone opportunities, the lack of coordination. You know, these things that we're talking about in workforce and academic curricula. There's nobody that owns that space as that space.

And so what I've seen and you know, as. As Provost Cirmos has seen as he's come in and looked at these, is there have been significant areas where there's been a non optimal level of attention paid to where the money is going and how it's being spent. That in my mind more than pays.

Not just my mind, I know it more than pays for the cost of the additional personnel to implement the strategies and the oversight. So I think it's quite costly for us not to do it. I understand where sometimes the initial investment is the. Is the issue, you know, do we have.

But frankly, with the resources that we have, I am absolutely confident we will come out of this having saved significant resources as opposed to costing money.

Thank you. Okay. In the interest of time, I just want to thank you, Brian, again, for joining us, accounting for the time zone difference. And, President Hensel, thank you for your time and participation today. Of course, we look forward to working with you and your team in the coming session to advance higher education in Hawaii.

So with that, this briefing is adjourned. Thank you, everyone.