916: LIVE From the 2024 ⁠Career Education Convention⁠ - with The Honorable Loretta Sanchez, Fmr. Congresswoman & CECU Board Member

Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We're doing that here from Indianapolis, Indiana at the Career Education College and University annual education convention with, I don't know how many people, probably close to a thousand amazing vendors and supporters of the space here as we celebrate the work by our colleagues in and around career education, an important part of the higher education sector.

Of course, with me as always for every episode that you'll hear from CQ, my guest co-host, Douglas Carlson. He is head of partnerships at Lead Square. Douglas, welcome back again. This is fantastic. We have had such a good day so far. How are you feeling on the coffee piece here? Are you hitting the after-lunch wall or how are you feeling? 

Douglas: You know, I'm being good. I switched over to caffeinated tea, which is a little easier, but still got that caffeine going.

Joe: So your energy level is high because we've done I think now eight or nine of these and we have four or five more to go. It's a day, my friend. We have a guest that stopped by and then we started talking and we're like, okay, perhaps we should interview you with all of this knowledge that you contain. And why didn't we know about you earlier? Let's bring her in.

She is Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez and she is from California originally. Welcome to an EdUp mic. How are you?

Loretta: I am doing great. And what a wonderful place Indianapolis is to hold the CQ conference. 

Joe: And you are also on the board of CQ. Is that correct?

Loretta: That's correct. There's a public member on the board of the Association's Board of Directors. And that would be me. After I left Congress a few years ago, they asked me to be the public member and I have been for several years now.

I basically ensure that everything's on the up and up, that we're serving the public. CQ is obviously the association for all the career colleges and their main membership is these colleges that teach not just people coming out of high school, but people making changes in their lives or older adults. They're teaching them a real career so they can make a good living. And so my job is to stay on top of things and get to come to conventions like this and really see the real work going on, the people who really make things happen.

Joe: Amazing. Well, before we go there, I want you to tell us about your background. You were in Congress, you were in California. Where did you represent? Tell us about your history in Congress and how you got here today.

Loretta: I was an investment banker. I moved back to my hometown of Anaheim, California. I'm a Disneyland kid if you will. I come from a family of seven. My parents are both immigrants from Mexico. I decided to run for Congress, won, and became a Congresswoman for twenty years. In year seven of my being a Congresswoman, my younger sister ran for Congress and she got in.

My parents are the only parents in the history of the United States to send two daughters to the United States Congress. That's a great fact. It kind of gives me chills that in one generation, as my dad used to say, "I have two daughters on the board of directors of America Incorporated."

Education really made the difference for my family. We're all educated because my parents didn't have an education but really pushed towards it. The district that I represented in Orange County, of all 435 districts in the United States, was the district with the most career colleges in it. And so I would visit them. I would laud them. I would talk about how important they are to our communities.

And that's, I think, when I retired from Congress, they said, please come over and be the public board member.

Joe: Well, I'm curious, as a Congresswoman, when you first started, were you already familiar with this space, or did you become familiar with this space?

Loretta: Both. I was familiar because I'm Latina, and a lot of our students decide that they want to be mechanics or electricians or what have you. I was very familiar with the trade unions like the IBEW, etc., which have apprenticeship programs where you can become an electrician, welder, or whatever through our trade unions. But I was also familiar with the career colleges because we need everybody to help us with education. 

If somebody is willing to put in the time and wants to make their life better, to find a skill set that's going to allow them to own a little home and have a family and make sure their kids get beyond what they got - if they want to do that and they want to put the work into it, then I think as taxpayers, as a community, we should be a part of that. We should encourage that, support that, and actually help them.

So when I was a Congresswoman, I really pushed to ensure that not just the kids who were going to four-year universities would get a Pell grant, but if you wanted to become a mechanic, I was behind you to help pay for your education in that way also.

Joe: Especially for the homeless crisis in California. This is a big, big deal.

Loretta: Education has to be the solution. There's some kind of formula to solve the homeless crisis. And part of that formula has to be educating these people who maybe are educated and they need to look up. Maybe they came in from another country as immigrants, but they haven't had access to education. There's some formula to solving that. And I believe that education has to be a part of that foundation for it.

You know, it was really interesting because, of course, as a Latina Congresswoman, one of the things I worked on every day in the United States Congress was immigration. We have maybe fourteen million people who are here and are part of our community. They're the deacons in our church, they're the Little League coach, they're the PTA mom, but they don't have the right paperwork. They've been here for a long time, their children are born here, etc.

I just recall that while I was working on this immigration issue, some of my colleagues would say to me, "Well, they don't even learn English, right?" And the answer was, well, they want to learn English, we just don't have enough programs for them. At the community college, there's a 40-seat classroom to learn English as a second language, and there are 300 people on the waiting list. It's not that these people don't want to learn, it's that we don't make it easy for them to learn. 

And that's one of the important things about the career colleges - they fill the gap where the public schools don't get the job done. The career colleges pick up those people who can't get in, where there isn't a public program to help them do what they need to do, whether it's learn English or become a mechanic, an electrician, or the person who cuts your hair. All of these pieces make our world better.

Joe: If that's true, and I believe it is - everything that you said I do believe is true - but there are some that do not believe what you say is true, particularly that career colleges are a worthwhile endeavor or that they are educating students and/or that their intent is positive and not intentionally negative. I'm speaking politically here because you know that there is a lot of feeling and opinion around the sector and its value in the broader ecosystem. What's the hang-up?

Loretta: You know, if you would really look at data, if you really analyze the data, you would understand that the career colleges do a great job. Are there poor bad actors in the field? Absolutely, there are bad actors in everything. Every field. There are bad doctors, there are bad lawyers, there are bad electricians, there are bad contractors for your home. It's a bell curve, right? 

So the answer is that the majority of these universities and colleges are really filling a space that our students and people who want to better their lives need in order to thrive and to move on with their lives in a very positive manner.

Joe: How do we fill the gap? I'll pass it to you, Douglas. If we know that there are members in Congress in the political sphere that are not supportive of career colleges, if you go to a career college and you see smiling, happy faces holding hands, and those people are loving their education and even loving the job that they're getting afterwards, but in the middle, we can't seem to get these people there. It's almost like you want to take those students and set them in front of people and go, look.

Loretta: You know, once a Congressperson or somebody goes to one of these colleges and they see the performance level of our students, they get to talk to the students, they begin to understand that, hey, you know, maybe what I thought about for-profit colleges is not valid in my mind anymore. We do change a lot of minds. When I talk to them, I pick up the phone all the time and talk to my colleagues and say, "Listen, you need to come and see a school. You need to understand what's going on." 

Or here's the other thing - I will tell my Latino counterparts in Congress, "Hey, a lot of our students go to these schools. Otherwise, they wouldn't get a shake at becoming something." There wouldn't be a place for them because, quite frankly, universities don't accept them or they didn't do well in the university because it wasn't the atmosphere, it wasn't teaching them the structure. They didn't want philosophy. They wanted to learn how to run your heat and air conditioning unit and how to fix it and how to install it. And that's just what they want to do. Everybody gets a choice.

And then I tell them, you know, there's not a lot that Congress can do with respect to these career colleges in the sense that career college education is really in a lot of ways based on accreditation of becoming a nurse or becoming an electrician. It's all at a state level issue. So you have to go state by state. But the place where the federal government plays the biggest piece, aside from some regulation, etc., is the regulations they put around the money that flows to the student who is able to pay for their education with some federal assistance.

So if you go to a four-year university and you get a Pell grant, let's say you get $18,000 or $6,000, whatever the amount is, and you get to use it to go to your four-year university, they have no qualms about that. But if you have a student who wants to go and become an electrician at one of our career colleges and then they say, "Well, you know, I need help paying for it so there's this Pell grant and they're gonna give me $6,000 towards a $10,000 tuition or whatever," all of a sudden you have Congress people say, "Well, no, we shouldn't be giving them money to these private universities." Well, let's start the insanity. Why are you hurting the student?

Joe: Why are you hurting the student, the Latino student who wants to become a mechanic simply because he wants to become a mechanic and not go to a four-year university? Why are you picking and choosing the winners?

Loretta: Right? Good question. Because we're paying our taxes too. That money that is flowing to Washington DC is coming from everybody. So why are you saying if my kid goes to a four-year, we'll give them help, but if my kid decides he wants to be a mechanic, we won't give him help? Don't pick and choose on my kids. My kids want to be whatever it is they want to be. I have a niece who's an aesthetician. Great career. I get facials.

Joe: I bet you do. And I get a 10% discount.

Loretta: But yeah, I mean, you know, under the guise of what a lot of the Congress people want to do, she would have to come up with the money to have made herself go to school and become an aesthetician. If she had chosen a four-year university, maybe been bored to death in those classes, could have dropped out, you know, they would have paid for it. I mean, don't pick and choose on what people want to do. If everybody wanted to do the same thing, our world would not work. And what a boring world we would have.

Douglas: That's true. So I'm really curious because you have a really incredible perspective on sort of a longitudinal perspective. You understand Career College as well. You were a Congresswoman for a long time. You obviously are working with CQ. What we've heard a lot today, and I'm thrilled to hear this, is two trends, and I'm wondering if you're seeing this as well. So trend one is all of a sudden trades, cosmetology, welding, automotive, et cetera, are starting to get some momentum. They're starting to be pretty cool. They're becoming sexy.

Loretta: Yes. We were talking about that a lot. Sexy, very sexy. I saw this young Latina. She had to be like 28. She was maybe five foot. If she was 100 pounds, it'd be a lot. And she's at this, talking to other young Latinas in high school, we'd bussed them in at one of those schools, and she said, "I'm a diesel mechanic. I'm a diesel mechanic." She goes, "I crawl all over these motors." And then she said, and my jaw dropped, she said, "I make over $200,000 a year."

Douglas: Wow, good for her.

Loretta: She says, "We are in such demand." She has an A20 out there. Look at me, she said. I'm a diesel mechanic.

Douglas: I love that. And it's amazing. It really is. And that's in the, so one, thank you. You definitely confirmed that trend. And then trend two, which I think is interesting is even in my kind of recent memory is often schools would really have to work hard to place students. And that seems to have flipped completely. What we heard today is, you know, students being hired before they've graduated.

Loretta: You know, you need to get them across the finish line so they can go start a job. Hospitals, auto mechanics, the companies, Penske, these others, they put up scholarships. You get through the program in a year, we'll pay off everything. We'll pay off everything for you as long as you're willing to come and work at least two years for us. 

I mean, and here's the other thing. I saw this statistic. We were looking at an aviation issue and I fly, I fly a lot. And so we're looking at just one little piece, one little piece of the whole aviation was stuck into, I think it was Hawaiian Airlines, and they're showing us what it takes to be a mechanic on the airplanes, right? And they were showing a graph, and one of the things they were showing, you know, like what ages their plane mechanics are. And the biggest one was over 65.

Douglas: Interesting.

Loretta: And so it was like, and the lady looked at me and she said, "These guys are coming out, they're going to retire." She said, "We don't have enough now." And she said, "If you don't help us get more and train up more through career colleges, there are going to be fewer planes up in the air. You will not be able to fly all the places you have to go to, Congresswoman."

Joe: It's amazing. The number that Jason quoted was 40% of aviation mechanics come from the for-profit proprietary space. Insane.

Loretta: Absolutely. So if you think about all these retirements and stuff going on, we need to build more aviation schools as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to just have one choice of plane to come into Indianapolis for the day. I got to have three or four because my schedule changes all day long.

Joe: You know, you said something earlier. I just want to double down on the point because this is something that is said so much. You said when we're talking about the for-profits as if it's Darth Vader speaking every time and then a nonprofit institution makes a surplus of however many millions of dollars. They take some of that money, maybe they reinvest it back into their business. Not like a for-profit wouldn't do that. They do the same thing. One's called a profit, one is called a surplus.

Loretta: Well, the nonprofit takes that surplus and they invest it, they put it into bonds, they put it into long-term annuities, and they put it in all of these things to make it make more money for themselves. It's not like they give it back to the United States government, right? If you really want to talk about a school that was non-profit, that was tuition-driven, taking the same Title IV from the federal government that a for-profit takes, and that they didn't make a profit, it's complete - all it is is a tax status designation. It has nothing to do with the operations of the college.

Joe: Yeah, you know, people think that because it's a nonprofit, it's sort of like everyone's benevolent in the system, right?

Loretta: Well, I sit on university boards, not career colleges, you know, non-profit university boards, right? And I'm going to tell you, I mean, so if you're at a Cal State system, you know, and it's a non-profit and people think, you know, they're so benevolent and everything. No, no, no, but wait, that president is making $2 million a year. Not that they don't deserve it. Do you see what I'm saying? I got nothing against any of the schools. I love them all. I love education. I love them all. I sit on various boards and stuff. But you know, it's, they're not working for peanuts. You know, it's not this nonprofit where, you know, the person is so benevolent, the president's making $50,000 a year. No, no, no, no, no. You know, they're making probably more than the for-profit. And their goal is to make more. You know, more money for the institution.

Joe: Well, I would hope that their goal is to train and teach and educate as many students to the best of their ability so that they lead more productive lives and are more productive in our communities.

Loretta: But to do that, arguably, you have to have enough resources.

Joe: Yes. And it's just how you look at them. By the way, shout out to, I think Dr. Millie Garcia runs the California State system.

Loretta: Yeah, I love Millie. We've interviewed her on the podcast before. She's a fireball. She's great. She's Puerto Rican. And you know, we're like sisters, man. It's so great. Quick, she was the president of Cal State Fullerton.

Joe: Yes, when I was a congresswoman.

Loretta: No kidding. And then she went to run the association in DC and now she's back to run all the Cal States. So I know her very, very well. She is a fireball.

Joe: There's not as many, if you look at the makeup of the student, the modern student who will dominate our population moving forward. You're talking about people of color. You're talking about Latino population is growing exponentially in this country. There is not as many Latino or Latina presidents in higher education, professors or anything really.

Loretta: You know, I mean, believe me, I sit on boards, you know, and I always have to say to these people as I look around the room, "Really? You're gonna make me the DEI police? Diversity, equity, and inclusion? Really? You're leaving that to me? Really? You're giving me this role again by default because none of you understand really what's going on here?"

I mean, here's what we found out. I sit on this one university board, great university, right? And about five or six years ago, we identified the fact that because of the recession, this year, starting in September, the amount of students at a university, so graduating from high school, you know, the pool of which you can pull applicants for higher education was going to drop demographically, just by demographics, was going to drop 25%.

Joe: Wow.

Loretta: Yeah. So it's hitting now. It's hitting now. Right. So what do you see? Well, we saw this last year. We're going to see it even more this year that a University of California at Irvine, the top public school system, right in California, isn't having as many people to be able to grab the whatever many - the 10,000 students they need or what have you. So they're going down lower into the people who are applying. And then those people aren't going to go to the Cal State Fullerton now, the next level, and Cal State Fullerton is going to have to dip down even lower. And then the community college, well, they're not going to get those people because now they're going to Cal State Fullerton, they're dipping even lower, you know?

So everybody's trying to grab students because there's 25% just by demographics. But here's the second sort of blow to this whole thing. The students who are grab-able, the people out in the pool - there are more Latino and more African American than ever before. And they have less family resources to pay to go to university. So we now have a crunch of not enough students into the system, but we have this crunch of the students that we do have, they can't afford it the way we traditionally have thought of universities or career colleges or anybody. There's a lot of disruption going on in our system.

Joe: And at every level.

Loretta: Yeah. At every level. It's hitting everybody. And I'll just say, this is an anomaly. It's just hopefully, hopefully just a once in a lifetime kind of thing. But the federal government screwed up its FAFSA issue, right? So that has thrown this whole wrench for these six months, you know, and everybody is scrambling because of course, when especially a Latino family, we get accepted to university but the question is, well how much is it gonna cost us as a family? And I really don't - well, when your FAFSA is three months behind and the university or career school can't tell you, "Well, you know, this is how much the federal government's putting in and some of the state's putting in, so much your family requirement is" - if you can't tell somebody that, then guess what? They're not signing up.

So right now we are in a crisis, if you will, in trying to figure out how do we get through this time period. Again, I hope it's just once that we messed up the FAFSA at the federal level. But you have all of these things coming together. And the other thing that you have is inflation. People are feeling poor. Housing prices. I mean, you know, I mean, I go to the grocery store. You can tell me it's 3% inflation, but when I'm spending, you know, for the same bag of groceries - eight, nine dollars for a carton of eggs. Hello. You know, I'm saying like, I feel like it's 100% inflation going on. It's a very basic thing called food, you know. 

So families are feeling less settled, right? Financially speaking. FAFSA's screwed up. Less students to grab from, you know, less resources in families of the students who can go there. And so higher education is really in a disruptive mode right now.

Joe: Well, we appreciate your insight, Congresswoman. Thank you for stopping by and our ability to get you on this podcast, of course, with my guest co-host. He's Douglas Carlson. He's got the coolest walk-up music of the week here. Thanks to Lead Squared for being able to bring us here and have these incredible conversations with our guests today. I can't remember what I played for you at the beginning of it. I'm going to play for this. I don't know. But thank you so much to everybody for listening about CQ. Yes. And this is, of course, Career Education College and University Education Conference with Loretta, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. And we thank you very much for being here. It's been an honor, ladies and gentlemen. You've just ed-uped.