Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Okay. This is House Education on 01/09/2026. This morning, we're gonna learn about issues in higher education and really specifically the impact of the big beautiful bill on a lot of the programs that the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation operates. So with us, we have folks from VSAC. I'm going to turn the floor over to you in just a second, but just a note to everybody, we will if everybody would just we pull the PowerPoint up from our website today's date to just hit the to see the the main issues there. Anyway, welcome. Introduce yourselves and look forward to your testimony.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Great. Thank you very much. My name is Scott Giles. I'm the president and CEO of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation. Morning everybody. My name is Patrick Leduc. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Vermont Student Assistance. And Patrick, amongst other things, is responsible for both our financial aid programs and for our education. So kind of integral to all the things we're engaged in. So thank you for the opportunity to come testify. I thought what we would do is provide an overview of what is going on within the higher education space and community, identify the things that we are paying particularly close attention to. I do wanna offer just a little bit of a lead in that in some ways Vermont is better prepared to navigate some of the changes that are happening at the federal level because of actions that the legislature has taken that are yielding results that are really starting to be very exciting, particularly with eight zero two opportunity and the Freedom Immunity scholarship at VTSU that you all supported. And then some work that VSAC has been doing in preparation for this. I will say that one of the things that a challenge in your environment does is it creates really strong partnerships because everybody has to come together quickly and put their interests aside. And so while I'm happy to talk about the things that our higher education partners are doing, there may be some value in having them as well come in at some point. Our goal today is to highlight some things that will start to phase in over the next two years. You may not hear about some of them immediately from the schools, but you will two years from now. And they'll have some fairly significant impacts. So let me kind of jump in. Second page of our presentation, which I described as higher education that are in the crosshairs, is really an attempt to just acknowledge how many things are happening. Demographic changes that are taking place, federal policy changes with regard to immigration that are having a dramatic impact on our schools, changes in federal research policy, which affects UVM and Norwich and many of our schools, changing attitudes about the value of post secondary education, and then some pretty dramatic changes, both positive and negative with regard to federal financial aid and I'll touch on what that does and So it doesn't I'll start with demographics. Some of this is really familiar to you, but I wanna highlight a couple of things that we are watching. Nationally, our region has been in the midst of a demographic shift for the last fifteen years. You see it in terms of the number of students within our K-twelve system. But this year, the report suggests that at the national level, we're beginning to see this as well, which will have a bigger impact on those institutions that are competing nationally for students. This reflects kind of the high watermark and that we are about to begin a ten year decline nationally in terms of the number of traditional age graduating high school seniors who would be eligible for post secondary education. Many institutions have dealt with those demographic shifts by increasing the enrollment of international students. And that's true at the University of Vermont. It's been true down at Castleton through the years. And the immigration policies that we've seen implemented over the course of the first Trump administration, but then again are being enforced now, are having a pretty dramatic impact on the international students' choices. They're choosing other institutions or they're unable to get visas. How does this matter? Well, what has been happening is that if a highly selective institution like Harvard starts to pull off of its wait list or students that it otherwise wouldn't take, this cascades all the way down the system so that a Middlebury starts to pull students that might have gone to the University of Vermont and further down. So those changes in international students are affecting institutions without regard to whether or not they had an international strategy because the institutions above them in selectivity are pulling students. Young men, this is something that we have talked about at the committee before, but coming out of the pandemic, our research is showing some pretty substantial declines in both the aspiration, which is when we survey high school seniors and we ask them whether they plan to go on to post secondary education, I think we're gonna be releasing some data within the next several months that will, and Patrick will correct me, that suggests that there's about a 10% decline in their aspirations right now. And part of what we are seeing is that this conversation, it's just one that lacks nuance about the value of post secondary education is resonating particularly with young men.

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: Yeah, and I would just say, I would add to that that it's exasperated with young men that would be first generation college. That number was always a challenge to move up. So that group is even more challenged to see what's going on next for them.

[Representative (member unknown)]: Then the other thing, Peter, should we, if we have a clarifying question, should we reach?

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Yeah, please. I mean, since we're a small group right now, anyway, just jump right in.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: This is

[Representative Leanne Harple]: just about this. That's why I didn't mean

[Representative (member unknown)]: to interrupt. I'm curious because in your PowerPoint, it says, Hospitiveness of Higher Education. Do you explain that?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: There is a conversation taking place upon young first generation men about whether college is a place that is welcoming to them. And part of that is an outgrowth of what they perceived with their experience within the K-twelve system. That's important. You. Is that a fair description? And Patrick identified, we have been watching this as a challenge with first generation men. One of the things we are starting to see is what we refer to as second generation young men. These are young men whose parents have a post secondary education are starting to respond to surveys with the same sets of concerns. And we are starting to see them at least say that they're not gonna pursue post secondary education at higher rates than we have seen before.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: Thank you.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: And then the last demographic piece I wanted to touch on right now is graduate programs. This is important for a whole variety of reasons. We've talked about workforce, but over the course of the last decade, many institutions expanded their graduate offerings as a way of offsetting undergraduate declines. And one big beautiful bill made some of the, well, not I should say some of the largest changes to federal student financial aid policy, particularly on the loan side that we have seen in twenty years. Some of this is a result of Congress having not acted, but these programs are increasingly gonna be under threat for reasons that we'll touch on a little bit later in the presentation. And that will potentially create some enrollment strategy challenges for our institutions. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this. I know that you'll be hearing from the University of Vermont. They'll talk about their experiences. But one of the things that we are seeing is an effort to pretty dramatically change what I describe as the compact between the federal government and higher education. And it's taking place in multiple forums and multiple formats. The conversations that have been the most public have been concerns about institutions policies with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as impactful as that have been changes in the research area where the federal government has either been canceling research programs or research ramps. We've seen a lot of this in the National Institutes of Health. But just as importantly, historically, World War II, the federal government has paid a share of the costs of actually administering grants. So I might get a million dollars to do a cancer study, but the institution will have negotiated an additional amount that they would receive that would cover the costs of special instrumentation, equipment, the security that might be needed around a lab that has sensitive information and materials. And the federal government is actively engaged in trying to either eliminate or constrain that funding fairly dramatically. To put things in perspective, I think Harvard Med School's indirect cost rate is in the 52%, 53%, the most visible in this. And the administration is proposing ratcheting that back for all institutions to between 1015%, which is substantially less than the cost of actually administering those programs. Harvard can probably afford that, but an institution like the University of Vermont will be challenged with those policies. You'll be hearing at some point, it won't be this year, but next year, eligibility to participate in federal financial aid historically has been done through a process called accreditation, which some of you may be familiar. This is kind of a peer reviewed process that allows higher education itself to police itself and with some oversight and approval by whichever administration is in charge. The Trump administration has made it very, very clear that they view the accreditation process as something that is deeply broken, that it has contributed to what they see as the problems that they are identifying from a cultural perspective in higher education. And they see the accreditation process as a way to reverse that. And I put a quote in here, the deputy secretary Kent was just kind of speaking this past week actually in Washington as they were kicking off conversations with the accreditors about what reform would look like. His observation to them was just buckle up. So you'll be hearing more about that in probably two years. So let me pause there before I turn to financial aid.

[Representative Joshua Dobrovich]: Go ahead, Josh. So the first and second generation men who are not going into post secondary, are you tracking or able to find out where they're going? Are they going into certificate programs, training programs, workforce falling off the radar? Do you have data that would show that?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: That's a great, great question.

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: Yeah, it's really hard data to come across. That is the big challenge. Yeah, think anecdotally what we're seeing is a little bit of everything, but we are concerned that we're seeing more and more that just really have no plan. Some of our survey data asked, are you going do in the military? Are going to go right to the workforce? And the military number really hasn't changed over the last couple of years. The workforce one has, but that is kind of a catch all as well. We don't have to be prepared to go into the

[Chair Peter Conlon]: workforce is the question.

[Representative Joshua Dobrovich]: So those questionnaires, are you having the high schools throughout the state administer them to the students before they leave? As an exam interview kind of

[Representative Leanne Harple]: a thing?

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: Yeah, BEASAC for many years has done what's called the senior survey. So we work with all the high schools across the state, we have a really high percentage of students that fill it out. And that's some of the data in your data sheets that come from that. And so we generate senior survey reports back from the schools so they can see what's going on. And the last few years, we actually had a lot of really great professional development opportunities with schools where we sit down with our research team and their leadership team and walk through those reports and discern what it really means to them. But yeah, we can share some of that data.

[Representative Joshua Dobrovich]: That'd be great. Yes.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: I will say that this question that you're asking is one. We made a method change about fifteen years ago in the way we do the follow on senior survey. So we tend to survey every high school senior every two years. The schools administer it for us. Usually oftentimes it's a graduation related requirement. We get about 80% roughly up a little bit, up down sometimes participating. So it's very robust in that sense. We used to actually go out to the students who had filled it out a year and a half later and do a survey to them. We've been using clearinghouse data, which is more accurate with regard to where they've gone to school, but we lost some of the information regarding the non traditional degree related programs. And we've had internal conversations about whether or not we might try and do some kind of a spot survey to try and get better at

[Representative Joshua Dobrovich]: It could be any technical thoughts or just not noticing.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: We would be celebrating and it's important too because in this intervening period we've added things like the trades forgivable loan program. So we have some tools available for them which is inviting us

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: to the The challenge is making the dots because this is an anonymous survey. So we don't know who said what, but we also administer, as you know, the advancement grant program, right? Which funds a lot of especially lower income, modest income families to go into those training programs. So we have that data, but we really can't connect them one for one yet. Thank you.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Great question, thank you. So I'll turn to one big beautiful bill, the reconciliation bill and the changes. There are three kind of what I'll call broad buckets of changes that that bill made. The first was on student loan policy with regard to student loan limits, generally. The second one that I think you'll be hearing about, and I know the Commerce Committee has expressed interest, the Workforce Development Board is active we involved in this area. The creation of what is called Workforce Pell. The Pell Grant is the base, need based grant that the federal government administers. Historically, that was only available to students that were pursuing degree programs. And there has been a lot of energy, particularly coming from the community colleges and from kind of for profit kind of technical trade schools to try and open the access to that federal Pell Grant to short term industry recognized credentials. And we'll come back and talk about that. Vermont actually has been in this space. Well, this is new to the federal government, the advancement grant, which Patrick just referred to. We've been administering a program just like this for over forty five years at this point. And our program is broader. We've got experience that the Feds are interested in learning from us as they do their negotiating. And then the third thing that I want to touch on is the accountability measures because this could have some fairly significant It's hard to read right now, but there are some places where I think it will have some pretty dramatic impact on some professions that may be high credential but low compensation. And we'll talk about that. So if I can start with the student loan policy changes that have taken place, part of the context for this at the federal level has been a debate never resolved about whether or not the availability of federal student loans, and in particular, the ability of parents to borrow unlimited amounts for education up to the total cost of attendance. I should say it's unlimited, but it's the total cost of attendance has had an inflationary impact on post secondary education. And a similar debate is taking place at the graduate level. So I'll start with undergraduates.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I'm just gonna translate what you just said. I assume you mean that because current law allows parents to borrow whatever they need, that's allowed colleges to say, they can charge whatever's bond. That is a theory that folks have been debating, yes.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: You've described that very accurately. And you put two economists in a room together on this particular issue and they will each draw a different conclusion about that. But what reconciliation did was House Republicans had originally proposed eliminating that parent loan program entirely. What was negotiated in the end was a cap that allows a parent to borrow up to $20,000 a year with a lifetime cap of $65,000 per student. So if you've got three kids, you've got a $65,000 limitation that you can borrow against for each one of those kids for that. Families who need additional funding. Who would that be? That may be a middle income or middle class family. Could be an out of state student coming to the University of Vermont, as an example. If they need to borrow, we'll need to get that money either from a state based loan program like the one that VSAC offers. Be happy to talk more about that if there's time and interest. Or they'll have to go into the kind of commercial credit market and borrow under a commercial program from a bank or from Sallie Mae. And the challenge that we are anticipating, we'll just flag this now, is that the federal program has not had any credit criteria whatsoever. It's one of the reasons why the default rates on the federal program are high relative to what you see in any other program. And the group that we are just going to flag for now is students coming from families with credit scores of less than six eighty or six seventy. These are individuals that from a VSAC mission perspective, we have always argued really ought not be borrowing in large amounts because you're not setting them up for success. And so I'll say as a side that we're having conversations with Vermont schools about this particular population and how it is that we work together to find other non loan solutions to help them be able to pursue their education. And I'll say going all the way forward to the bright spots, this is where those programs like eight zero two Opportunity and Freedom and Unity in particular, which is tuition free education for the regular tuition programs at the state colleges for individuals coming from families earning really 60 to $65,000 or less is gonna be a key part of the state's mitigation strategy because it gives us an opportunity to support those families with a path that doesn't require borrowing. On the graduate level, this is This is gonna be where some of the biggest changes take place. Much like parents, a change in federal law was made going into the financial crisis in two thousand and nine because of concern about access to student loan debt. And that change allowed graduate and professional students who prior to this had been subject to loan limitations. If they were gonna borrow, they could borrow up to a certain amount with the feds and then if they had to borrow, go to get a private credit. They were given the ability to borrow unlimited amounts. And I think if you put policymakers in a room, this has been really good for some folks. But again, these loan limits were offered without regard to credit, so the financial ability of students to actually repay. And in that period from 2010 to 2025, only 20% of borrowers are graduate and professional students, but they now have 52% of the entire outstanding student loan portfolio. Because it's been the only growing part of the student debt portfolio at the federal level. So if you put people in a room together, I think everybody acknowledged that there was changes that needed to be made at some level. The debate has always been what was the right solution and is a broad brush kind of cap on borrowing the right way to approach this problem that I think we would argue no. But One Big Beautiful Bill did a couple of things. One, and I know you're hearing about one piece of this. So if you graduate were in program, you will be able to borrow up to $20,500 a year from the federal government compared to the unlimited amount that you had before. And you will have a lifetime limit of $100,000 for graduate borrowing. If you are in what is defined as a professional program, you will be able to borrow up to $50,000 a year with a lifetime cap of 200,000. Again, that's compared to unlimited total cost of attendance borrowing that had been allowed before. One of the arcane things that happened in the drafting process was what is a professional program? And I suspect that you have already heard from the nursing community and others about the fact that nursing was not designated as a professional program. What they did was they attached to what is a fifty year old definition of professional programs that had no relationship to whether or not the program requires licensure or it's professional in any traditional sense and attach these loan limits to that as part of an effort to constrain and to meet their budget targets. And so that definition of professional program, as it was put in statute, includes things like MD, pharmacist, lawyers. Well, a law degree, I should be careful because there will be some exceptions there. Theology, Doctor of Theology, for whatever reason, made that old historic list going back fifty years. So there are basically 11 of these. And this has created a lot of consternation within the community because of the perception that by virtue of not being in that group of 11, on the one hand, you won't be able to borrow as much. But people are also reacting understandably to the kind of psychological impact of being described as not being professional.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Reverend Harple has a question.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: I'm just curious, what are sort of the parameters that they use to make those decisions that this is and this is not? Is it the amount of money it takes for those programs or?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: No, they were having Honestly, what happened is they were in conference and they were negotiating. Senate had a more generous set of provisions with regard to loan limits. House had a more draconian one. And the thing that they all circled around was what are we gonna do about med school? And so what they did was they identified a part of the Higher Education Act that's unrelated to any of this that listed 11 professional programs, including med school. Right,

[Representative Leanne Harple]: but my question is why those because lawyer is not med school and theology is not med school. So what do all those have in common that say nursing and teaching don't?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: A history of amending that part of the Higher Education Act over fifty years.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: It was probably somewhat arbitrary to start with.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: And it's

[Chair Peter Conlon]: arbitrary. I mean, probably looked at what's the return on investment for the money you're borrowing. You can earn a lot of money if you're gonna be a doctor or a lawyer, but perhaps not a chaplain. Honestly, I think

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: this is a 01:00 in the morning drafting decision. Having been there in that position, this is for better or worse, this was a late night drafting decision that reflects a compromise between the House and the Senate where the House wanted basically the lower cap for everybody and the Senate wanted a higher cap. And when they grabbed it, it shouldn't take it.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Because it's federal borrowing, there is still the private market. Do

[Representative Leanne Harple]: we have any demographic information about the breakup of people that go into all of those different kinds of professions?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: That's a great question, and I'll come back to the beginnings of that. The answer is we have partial information about Fed just came out, New York Fed just came out with the first data that we, I believe, have with regard to how many graduate students are attending programs that require going above the limitations that have been put in place. And then the second part, which is just as important, is of that percentage, how many of them will not be able to access loans in the private market because of their credit scores. So this data has just been released, I think, two weeks ago or maybe a month ago.

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: You're talking about the American University research report? No, I think about the Fed one. American University just generated one too recently. They say about 28 of graduate students borrowed more than the new caps, generally speaking. So it doesn't speak to the specific programs. And about four in 10 of those borrowers have some private credit. So that's the problem area that we

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: can help resolve. There's gonna be this 12, even if we just look at the practical side, not the policy side, we are thinking that there's like 12 to 15% of these graduate students.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I'm going to go to more of the details, your comment makes me think, I mean, a graduate student had been an undergraduate student, they don't have any credit, right? Mostly.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: And in most cases, we will require a cosigner is required in that. And the group that won't be able to access will be the individuals, families, the doctor. And I will just add to the question that you're asking. There's gonna be wide geographic variation this has. And it's gonna be really twofold. One, higher college costs are coastal and Midwest and Northeast, which is why the college cost conversation plays out differently in Texas, Utah, and other places where they've got lower cost public institutions and most students go to those institutions. But the other side to it is that there's wide variation in average credit scores by state. So the average credit score in Vermont recently reported like 730 or seven forty. Credit criteria for this would be in the six eighty, $6.70 range for this market for reasonably priced loans. If you're in South Carolina, those numbers look much more like hearing 690 to seven So this is gonna be an area that's in a lot of flux. They're doing the regs right now. I do think professional schools in regulation or professional programs will be expanded somewhat, but it won't be expanded.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: It won't be expanded a lot. The

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: third thing, and this is the other kind of unknown that we're gonna face, but I wanna highlight it again, given what I said about high credentials, low wage positions, is new accountability measures. So one of the things that One Big Beautiful Bill did, and we're going to step back philosophically so that at least we understand what the context was for this, there is this overarching debate about the role that federal aid plays in inflation and a concern that the risk of those decisions, because of the way the student loan programs were structured, were not borne by the institutions, but they were borne by students and they

[Representative Leanne Harple]: were borne by the federal government, which

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: had to deal with the cost of defaults. So there has been a debate for the last fifteen years about how it is that you involve the schools in risk sharing in this. In the end, that more or less fell apart because it's too complicated to try and figure out how you're going to do that. But they came up with something almost as complicated, which is to say that for a program to retain eligible for the student loan programs, And when I say program now, I'm not talking like bachelor's degree, I'm talking thinking major, like psychology major institution. That program will have to demonstrate that its graduates on average are earning more than students would have if they had a high school diploma. The same thing will be true at the graduate level. So the question that will be asked of any individual program could be early childhood education, it could be music, it could be a licensed clinical mental health counselor, flagging a couple that we worry about. In order for those programs to retain eligibility to participate in the federal student loan program, they're gonna have to demonstrate that they're graduates. Now, if I'm, let's say I'm a licensed clinical mental health counselor, I've gotta be able to show that my graduates are earning as much or more than they would have earned if they had only a bachelor's degree.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: There are defined deltas in there, right? Like it has to be 20% more or are there not?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Right now there are not, but there's talk in the regs about whether or not there will be some adjustment to

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I think right now it basically says that as much as if not more. Yeah, as much or more, you have

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: to prove that you are producing more economic value than the prior degree. You have some time to come into compliance so that there are some nuances there. But the core of it is an argument that any program that's offered needs to be able to demonstrate that it is producing better economic results than the than the student degree, would have had if they had not pursued that term by the law.

[Representative (member unknown)]: Just quickly, timing of this is really important because a graduate from high school spends four years in a job. So where is the timing in this? Is it a bond? It's all

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: being worked out even as we speak right now.

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: As of today, I think.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: As of today, I As

[Chair Peter Conlon]: listen to this testimony and I think, okay, what's our role? So much of this is just between the feds and the colleges and VSAC. The people who determine, and correct me if I'm wrong, Scott, but the people who are gonna determine whether the degree, the graduate degree earns more than the undergraduate degree, the undergraduate degree earns more than the high school diploma is the Vermont Department of Labor. And they're the folks who we need to check-in with to see if they are up to the task.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: First, correct me if I'm wrong. They'll be providing some of the data, but not all of it. But yes, they'll be contributing portion of the data. I guess I'm

[Representative Leanne Harple]: a little bit about how the average works because that seems so random to a certain extent. I know that some of my students that have recently graduated from my own classes and immediately gotten enrolled into like electrician Some people are already making more than I am.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Has to be somewhat similar. But you're right, between the undergraduate and the high school graduate, don't know how you compare, I think of more of a graduate to the undergraduate.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Yeah, what we believe that they're going to do, and to your point, negotiated rulemaking is happening this week. I just came back from DC yesterday for part of it. So these details are gonna be worked out. And the complexity of this is such that while they would love to have this in place next year, they're not going to. You're not gonna have five year, what are earnings? Won't be able to calculate what those averages are because they're not just looking at year one, they wanna look at what it looks like in year five. And so that is going to take time. But the reason that we are Well, I shouldn't say that it's going to take time. It's incredibly complicated. There's going to be data quality questions. This is work that has really only been done in the abstract by some researchers before. I will just kind of flag as something that we will probably be looking at. It turns out there has been a The Department of Census started a partnership with the Higher Education Board in Texas and with a couple of large institutions like the University of Michigan to actually begin to generate some of this data. Researchers have always wanted to know what the return on investment on individual program investments have been. The researcher in me would love to have access to all of this so that we can do some better targeting and counseling. And so there is a pilot where some schools have access to this information. Vermont has not been participating in that, but it's something that we are taking a look at. And to your point, the Vermont Department of Labor actually provides unemployment comp information to census as part of supporting what has been this private research collaborative effort. And I know that the chancellor, when she comes in, you may wanna ask her. Chancellor of the state colleges is actually interested in maybe participating in this in part to be able to get ahead of and understand what the implications of these kind of rights are gonna be.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: To your point about the regulation negotiations that are going on right now and how complicated it is, I mean, yeah, it seems like there's no way this could be implemented in a year when you bring in all the factors like, well, what's the earnings after five years? Or did group of people take time off? It just seemed like a bear to wrestle to the ground.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: The only thing I will say, this is simple relative to what they had proposed the first time, for those of us living it, they had something that was even more complicated than this. This is kind of where the intellectual and the practical side didn't fully align. So there are a couple of things, as I would say, what is it that VSAC is gonna be monitoring and paying attention to? When I say monitoring, that almost sounds too passive. We are going to be really interested in working. We're already working with Vermont schools, but our focus is on students and how our students can navigate this, make sense of it. And so the first thing we're gonna be looking at is what impact does this have? Because schools will have an opportunity to make adjustments in their program costs and how they do offerings, what aid is available. But we're gonna be looking to see what happens with low income students in particular. Is it that we start to see them, what I'd say fall through the cracks would be the because anytime you add complexity like this, it's really the students that don't have the full range of supports that will pay the price. As the accountability measures come through, we're gonna be paying attention to see whether or not there are some, what I would describe as workforce critical programs within the state that we need to find a solution for. Because if some of those programs were to lose eligibility for the student loan program, those programs will likely not survive in the absence of students being able to access. And I don't think that I will say that the preliminary And we provided some charts that the Department of Education actually just released this week. That was some of their preliminary analysis in the appendix, which you can look at. They think nationally that the biggest impact is going to be on for profit institutions that have some programs that have historically not yielded great outcomes. We'd probably celebrate some of that from a consumer perspective. But there are programs that we worry about that I describe as being high credential and relatively low wage. And I'll pick, I served on the board of allied mental health for a bunch of years, licensed clinical mental health counselors. We require a master's degree for that program. You can't bill effectively, you can bill, but you're not going be fully paid until you're licensed. You need 3,000 of supervised clinical practice. I see a nod here. And during that period of time, your earnings are not particularly substantive, but no one would argue that that's not critical need within the state. And I think part of our attention is gonna be looking for those high credential, lower wage positions because there may be other solutions that the state wants to employ, much like we have with nursing. We've got a nursing forgivable loan program in place that allows us to be able to kind of support a very specific workforce need within the state.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: If you don't mind, I'm gonna add one more thing

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: that obviously Scott and I talk about a lot that we try to be active in is that is in all this chaos, we know that's when bad actors show up and creditor lending shows up in cases and magical solutions that really get people in a big jam. So that's the other big risk that we had, watching what some of the bad actors or

[Chair Peter Conlon]: the predatory lenders are doing out there. Yeah,

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: yeah. That's a great point. So we've talked about the bad news. I'm gonna try and I think I'm of gonna bring out The chairman has seen my squishy stress cap, my US capital stress ball. Anybody who would like one, we will come with a supply.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: You should come

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: with a supply. I'll bring a supply. So starting with, as we take a look first at undergraduate students, eight zero two Opportunity, together we have worked to make CCV tuition and fee free for students from families earning 100,000 or less. We've turned that into a true access point. That's two thirds of all Vermont households. It's become an incredibly powerful pathway for students transferring to both the University of Vermont and to the Vermont State Colleges. Freedom and Unity, which you all supported last year, which allowed us to be able to make the regular tuition programs at PTSU tuition free. And this is stacking together all of the aid packages that we have for families, is it 60,000 or 60? 65. 65 now. We are not surprisingly coming back to the legislature with a request, which we'll share with you when we talk about our budget for a relatively modest increase to that. I think that that program is more important now than it was before. And in particular, it's important with regard to those first generation students that are seeking a four year degree, but who come from families whose financial challenges are such that they would not be able to access the parent loan program or the commercial loans, that program will actually allow them not a loan free, but a very loan light option for them to be able to pursue their four year degree.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Can we just pause one more to just kind of review what we have out there? So eight zero two Opportunity is a program that you all administer. It provides free tuition and fees for Vermont families with a household income of 100,000 or lower to attend CCV for free. UVM offers a similar program, I don't know what the name of it is. Is that the Vermont Thomas?

[Representative Leanne Harple]: They've got a

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Catamount Commitment and they've got a new name for the That

[Chair Peter Conlon]: offers tuition free attendance at University of Vermont for household incomes of 75 or under?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: I think they're trying to move that to 100,000. One observation that I'll make is that the work that you all did with eight zero two Opportunity has really encouraged institutions because St. Mike's is now offering a program that's debt free.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: So then free immunity is the state colleges same, but they have only had funding sufficient enough for this program up to a household income of 65,000. That's correct. And I'll just preview that we're proposing an $800,000 increase in that, which we think is a reasonable amount in kind

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: of, we know this is a tough budget environment. So I'm not sure. What

[Chair Peter Conlon]: would that do to change the household income level?

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: We're still running some data on that, but we're thinking it might get us up to 75.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: But we think that this is an inappropriate response to the changes that we see coming at federal level. The other bright spot here, I'll use nursing as an example, are the state funded workforce forgivable loan programs. For those of you that are not familiar, many of these got stood up during the pandemic. But particularly in the healthcare space, we've been able to use global commitment dollars. And nursing is the best model for this because we've been running it the longest. You receive up to a full scholar, an amount that is equal to the full tuition fees at the University of Vermont is the upper limit. Think of it as a scholarship with a work requirement. So that amount is forgiven if you work in Vermont for a year for each year of aid that we provided to you. And I'm gonna get my numbers wrong, but I think we supported last roughly three fifty to three seventy Yep, nursing and turned away about that many. And turned away about that many, which is part of a budget conversation we're having. I'll say as just a sidebar, we are working with the agency of Human Services. They've been talking to us about that Rural Healthcare Transformation Grant. And there are some workforce components to it that we have traditionally administered their workforce programs for them. So we'll be looking at how these intersect, but these do provide a model. Going back to nursing, having been identified as a professional program, the state has already put in place a state funded program in place that helps to meet some of that need and demand. We used to administer one for mental health counselors. I think we've been talking to the members team about whether or not we can reinstate that program given some of the changes that we see happening.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Just to sort of answer an email probably other folks have gotten it. There's also been a call from at least somebody to have a program for respiratory therapists. Does it exist already and it kind of phased out of money?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Yeah, yes. I think that part of what I will just say is that we have seen with the nursing program, success with these programs, both in terms of generating interest in the profession, but more importantly, 90%, at least some of the most recent numbers we have is that 90% of the nursing students were fulfilling their obligations through work,

[Representative Leanne Harple]: having to pay them.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: And you all will recall that we encouraged a teacher one as well. There was money allocated for it during the COVID dollar times, but has since run out of money. And we were very fond of that program and we're disappointed when in the end it wasn't funded because you build momentum and just talking with a student. I wanna be mindful of your time. So I think we'll wanna touch on maybe two things. The third thing that came out of one big beautiful bill we talked about, Workforce Pell. I will say that this program, I think there are strengths and risks to it. It will be less transformative in the early years in Vermont than it would be in other states because we've been running the advancement grant program for the past forty years. With the workforce Pell, because you may hear from lots of folks what they have done, every student has effectively a lifetime limit on the amount of Pell Grant eligibility that they can obtain. The concern amongst some about creating workforce Pell was the fear that individuals would use some portion of their Pell Grant eligibility, because these are low income students, to pursue a credential that offered relatively little value. And then when they discovered that it offered relatively little value and they wanted to go to a regular program, they would have then used a portion of the eligibility that they had. What Congress did was they said, Okay, we're going to limit this to only accredited programs. And this will become important because there's this question as to what role career and technical education and others can play in this. It's an area that the regs are gonna be published, I think we hope, in about two months. The negotiations have been done. There was a lot of concern in the congressional level that institutions of higher education might partner with entities that Congress had intentionally excluded from participating in the program and used their accreditation almost as a pass through to allow a proprietary school that was not accredited to partner with an institution that was offered the program and access workforce Pell. So there is a limitation that has been placed on the amount. We don't know how this is gonna be defined or how it will be implemented, but no more than 25% of the programs can be what we're referring to as pass through programs where a non accredited provider is the one actually delivering the funds. The State Workforce Development Board has been the entity within the state tasked by the law with identifying eligible programs. So this will be something that the Workforce Development Board is working on. I do serve on that Workforce Development Board. We're gonna be working with the team that is going to be doing the program identification to make sure that we share any lessons that we have learned with the administration of our program, which is broader and slightly more generous. Then I think the last-

[Chair Peter Conlon]: You know, Rich has a question?

[Representative Rich (last name unknown)]: So we have that advancement grant that we've been doing for forty five years, and you're saying because of that we're going to see less impact initially from the workforce health and the workforce health being used as an enhancement

[Chair Peter Conlon]: to our program?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: So our program is more expansive because we don't limit our, our program does not exclude non accredited organizations. We have an oversight model that interestingly is very similar to the regulatory regime that they are now putting in place for the accredited programs in the world. So we try and have our money be less dollar in so that our dollar goes further. So once we have a clear picture as to what programs are gonna be approved, I do think that there is the opportunity for the state dollars to go further than they did before. My observation about the transformation is that many of these students are currently being funded in some capacity. And so in a place like New York or New Hampshire where they had nothing, this is gonna be a brand new opportunity for students. This is just an area that the mom pioneered. I'm gonna jump ahead all the way. We provided some slides. I mentioned one of the headwinds that higher education is facing is that the community has not been as effective as it could have been in articulating its value. And without spending too much time on this, we wanted to share some recent data that came from the Fed and what that return on investment looks like. I will say that the way I like to describe it is it remains a really good, strong investment. We can articulate why, but there's also a but associated with that. And that's the acknowledgement that roughly 24% of the individuals who pursue post secondary education successfully don't, for whatever reason, obtain the full economic benefit that everybody else 24%. Yeah, it's roughly about 24%. Feds Actually, would you say that again? Roughly 24% of college graduates, when you look at their income history of accounting, don't see the full income benefit that the average student does. The internal interest in the Fed just came out with a study of the internal rate of return on an undergraduate degree nationally, is in the 12% range. Has that been,

[Representative (member unknown)]: sorry, has that been separated by gender?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Can you hear me? So.

[Representative (member unknown)]: Women leaving the workforce and other.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Yes, interestingly. So yes, and I can come back with more detail on

[Chair Peter Conlon]: that and

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: pull that out. What I will say is that more often that 24%, some of it is people pursuing what are lower wage professions and some of it is just the other life happening, health and other things that we see happening with these students, because when we're-

[Representative (member unknown)]: I understand, I feel like 24 is high. A number of Maybe

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: some, I don't know, but it's

[Chair Peter Conlon]: a little loud, Well, that's

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: and the other thing that is negatively impacting this that is, and I'll just say, so what are the other factors that matter? Major now matters increasingly in a way that it didn't used to before. So the internal rate of return, depending on what you studied. The other factor is that if you graduate in four years, your return on your investment is a lot different than if it takes you six. And we are seeing an increasing number of students taking six years or more in order to graduate, and that's a 50% increase in the cost of that education.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: And you would account for liberal arts majors in terms of Down the bottom. If you're history major Right there. I

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: wrestle with So I'm going to do true confessions. I was a religious studies major and a psychology major, and my PhD is in religious ethics. And you're new to And I will say that religious studies is at the very top of the list of programs that the department just released data suggesting will not pass the accountability income threshold there. So I personally wrestle with that because I do think that an education offers you a set of skills outside of the knowledge that you provide and that that is not fully understood. And one of the concerns I have about the accountability measures is if I have a consumer interest in accountability measures where I think from a consumer perspective, more knowledge about what the economic returns is a good thing. People should be able to go in with some knowledge of that. But am I prepared to measure the value education solely in terms of the salary that I get on the outside of that? No. So how we, from a policy perspective over time, find a balance there, I think is going be important.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: That was kind of my question too, because I see here that education is at the bottom, right? So like, as it, it gets lower and eventually maybe doesn't meet that threshold, like what are we going to do with the country stop having teachers get degrees? I mean, the impacts of that are incredible.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Mean, it's getting around YouTube.

[Representative Leanne Harple]: You'll love to hear it serious. I

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: do think that these are the questions over time that we're going to end up really wrestling with. From a policy perspective, is the largest kind of social experiment in federal financial aid that we've seen since maybe the GI Bill a And different the question is going to be how amenable are folks to making corrections as they go along.

[Representative (member unknown)]: Just really quickly, the overall message that I'm getting, not just from you folks, but from across the board in every area that we're looking at is as funding decreases from the federal government, the need to replace that funding from the state is growing. Do you really think that that is true in your area as well?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Boy, I mean, I argue against that. That's a tough one to argue against,

[Representative (member unknown)]: but You actually gave examples of it, right? Yeah, so I'm asking if you think it's broad. Yes,

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: I do think that there's truth to that. And

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I'm

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: just now speaking from a VSAC perspective. I think that it's also incumbent upon us, whether it's a VSAC or anyone else at the institutional level, to take a look at the changes that are taking place and ask what it is that we ourselves can do to And that's maybe a great segue into a new initiative. Maybe I'll just set the table and then turn it over to So we as an organization have always seen as part of our mission helping students be good consumers of education and training. So helping them make smart choices. The changes that are happening at the federal policy level make that more important and at the same time more complicated than ever. And complication is fine if you've got a trusted support who likes to spend two hours on the phone navigating the faster problems and things of that nature. But for the students that we support through our outreach programs, first general income students across the state, We are that support for them, but we are also only serving a portion of the eligible population. So the question for us has always been, what is it that we can do that's scalable given how expensive one to one counsel is? And so we have actually just launched a new technology tool that we're extraordinarily excited about that I'm going to ask Patrick because Patrick is really the creator of this that is designed to help us do exactly that. And it will work at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. It is very disruptive in the sense that higher education has turned into an art form presenting their financial aid award letters as marketing tools to allow you to make choices that may or may not, when you actually have all the information, be optimal for you.

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: Great. So one more thing I would add to the kind of value proposition here is, our counselors that are working with first generation, modest income kids are using this tool and are gonna be using it through the spring. School School counselors are going see a tremendous win from this too because the same situations that our counselors are dealing with and kids that are in our caseload, high school counselors across the state are also dealing with the same challenge. They're getting students coming in, I got these five award letters, I have no idea what they're telling me. And so that's been a problem for a long time. You get five different award letters from five different colleges. They're all using their own terms, own language, their own jargon. And you're trying to figure out what's loan if you even can acknowledge that question. What's free aid? What's my actual cost? So what we've done is we've designed an app that students can use. We're actually going to partner. We're partnering with a bunch of our peers across the entire country. This will be a national rollout. Students can scan those award letters with this award advisor. They give us very little information because we don't need to know a lot about them to provide this service. They add colleges, they scan those award letters in through a trained artificial intelligence and machine learning module that we've created. It translates all that different jargon into common terms for every one of those award letters. So now I have a couple of options. I can use this app now to compare in a really simple way. What is my true cost? What is the actual obligation for me as a student family versus what is other aid in this letter and compare that against all those different colleges that I applied to. I can actually print out five now a new award letters that all look the same with the same structure and the same term, but I can sit at the table and talk through that with my parents and do that. I can bring those into the school or I can export that into an Excel spreadsheet or some kind of a CSV for sheets so I can do more analysis if that's what I wanna do. All we're still transparent. We don't lose the language that's done the award letter. So if you print it off or if you wanna look at the details, we'll show you the language that whatever college used and we'll tell you what we're calling it at a higher level. So you can kind of see what's going on. And this is gonna allow students to really see and families to see what is the true cost to each of these? How do they compare against each other? What's a good choice for my student?

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Will it flag things like, hey be aware that you're only getting this amount of aid for one year?

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: There's a lot of financial literacy pieces that we're trying to build in. Some of it's going to be in our first generation, not as robust as we would like because we need to get some legs underneath us a little bit. But those are the types of things that we really hope to be able to do. A great example is Scott is going to use this. He's going to go to St. Lawrence. And then I know a little bit about Scott now, if I can get him to tell me a little information. Next year, Claire wants to go to St. Lawrence. She looks a little bit like Scott from those kind of traditional demographics, but she didn't get that special presidential merit scholarship. This app could say, you probably are eligible. You should make a phone call and find out why you didn't get it. So there's all these kind of proactive things that we can start doing over time. Really exciting opportunity for us to serve students and families, especially in Vermont, in a much more robust way and a much more cohesive and everybody gets to use this tool.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Makes sense. Yeah, looking for something positive about AI. Yeah, and one of the advantages that we've had is because we've been running outreach programs and we've got a large archive of financial aid award letters that we could train this on. And again, kind of bringing this all the way back full circle. I'm mindful of the question that you asked about kind of additional aid. But what I would like to say is that I think at least in the near term, Vermont has taken some steps that position from a student perspective, and that the institutions are going to have a different council of challenges, but from a student perspective, we've taken some proactive steps together that position us to be better able to help families navigate this than many other states. We have more to do. I'm not suggesting that we're completely done there, but if you think about the opportunities that we have created at the scholarship level, and I do want to close on kind of a trades piece there, we think about the award advisor. We didn't really talk student loans. That's a conversation that we could spend a lot of time on, but VSAC does offer a supplemental student loan program. It requires a cosigner. It does have a credit component to it. We think it'll probably meet 75 to 80 of the demand that we are seeing, knowing though that just looking at graduate borrowers, there are going to be students pursuing graduate school who don't have the credit for this and will want to work with the schools to try and find

[Chair Peter Conlon]: alternate solutions. Is your loan rate better than the banks or do you work with banks and just use their loan rate?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: No, this is one of the sorest points in our, if you're from an organization, we are dramatically better. We actually offered in the appendix, if you were to go all the way to age 16, talk rates. We raise money in the bond market. We use tax exempt financing. Because we're using tax exempt financing, we can keep 2% of the interest that we earn or that we collect on a student loan. That pays for the administration of everything that we have just described. We don't use any of our public dollars for the administration programs. We're able to kind of do this. But four years ago, if I'd answered this question, I think we were all focused on what I would call the low end of the interest rate. And it looked to everybody like every single one of these student loans was largely the same because we would go into the bond market, we would set our rate, and then Sallie Mae and the others would set a rate that kind of undercut us. The truth of the matter, though, is that they're offering a rate that is so exclusive that almost nobody is getting those particular low rates, and they are making up for it by offering on the high end rates that are twice what it is that we are And in fact, their weighted average rate in their last investor call was 10.5% for a fixed rate loan. For us, that would be like 6.6% for that weighted kind of our portfolio. And interestingly, because we are only allowed to keep 2%, if we earn more than the two percent, which happens because of the way the rating agencies stress test the bonds, we rebate that back to borrowers. So we've done over $195,000,000 worth of loan cancellation in this core loan program. We are not alone in doing this. There are nonprofits like us in other states, and we're kind of banding together to kind of share best practices to understand how we can support the graduate student changes. The undergraduate, have a pretty good handle on it, the graduate students that'll be new. But we are proud of the work that we do in the student loan side. No one loves their student loan. I'll just say that. Vermont is in a unique place because the product that we have available is in many cases actually cheaper than what the federal government is charging. So

[Chair Peter Conlon]: just to sort of recap in terms of the work that we do, you're obviously going to come back with new budget requests, and that'll be probably the key thing. We'd probably be premature to bring in the Department of Labor and say, Are you ready for this? They're gonna say, Well, we don't know

[Representative Leanne Harple]: what we're supposed to be

[Chair Peter Conlon]: getting ready for yet, right?

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Yeah, I think that's right. If I could just say one thing that with your support, while this has always been true, but it's been particularly true over the last decade, we're just kind of wrapping up the celebration of our sixtieth anniversary. Many people know us as the College Access Organization. Today we've done nothing but talk about that. But I just wanna kind of reemphasize that with your support, we are much more than that now. And that as we ask questions about what are happening to boys and we're engaging in conversations about the value of postsecondary education, we also recognize that the traditional path to postsecondary education is not the path that is right for every student. And our goal is to help every student chart the course that is right for them. And that you've given us some really powerful tools for doing that. And so eight zero two Opportunity, we think about that as the degree side, but remember, CCV is offering apprenticeships too. And so eight zero two Opportunity is leaning into and supporting those trades related programs. The trades forgivable loan program that you funded four years ago has really taken off and is having an incredibly powerful impact. And importantly, as we navigate these uncertain times, you've given us tools that we did not have before to be able to go into a high school and say to a student, Regardless of what you think your future looks like, we've got something that we can offer to support you on your way. We're grateful to you for that. And we think that you've given us tools that we're excited to leverage during these challenging and kind of uncertain times.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Thank you very much.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Any other questions before we wrap up? Oh, I had a quick

[Representative Leanne Harple]: one, sort of related, but a little bit off topic. Did you participate in the documentary Gone Guys? I saw you pop up in one of

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: those interviews. So I was not interviewed in the show, but our data was part of the data that kicked off the conversation. And I participated several times as a panelist around the state. If you've kind of participated in that. I do get mentioned and one of our members of our team is actually interviewed in there, but

[Representative Leanne Harple]: I think you'll be

[Chair Peter Conlon]: signing autographs when we wrap up.

[Representative (member unknown)]: Yes. I do my best.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: I hate looking at myself on TV or anything else.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: So I

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: try and avoid that where I can, much rather be the source of information that supports. Is, I think, I think Richard Reifs has said, we've to learn, we've got to get comfortable that we can both do all the work that we continue to need to do to advance opportunities for women and not believe that the only path towards doing that means that we can't acknowledge that something is going deeply wrong for that. And I will say I was so struck among guys by, for all the work that we do encouraging people in regards to gender proceedings, taking a look at the suicide rate amongst the traits was just shocking and just heartbreaking, right? So how do we as a society find to provide the supports that are needed to make sure that all of our students are surviving? Well said.

[Patrick Leduc, Chief Operating Officer, VSAC]: Thanks again.

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: Thank you very much for this opportunity.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Right, so maybe just a reminder on the

[Scott Giles, President & CEO, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)]: agenda, we do

[Chair Peter Conlon]: not