Equity Shaping Federal Policy

Foreign.

Welcome everybody, everybody to another episode of MU Talks back in the studios of Multoma University. As you are already used to, we have brought special guests for you for what I think it's going to be a very, very informative conversation. So, Renee, no further introduction.

That's right. Today on MU Talks, we are welcoming Dr. Bob Ndringa is the managing partner of the Ndringa Group and specializes in all aspects of governance and the relationship between boards and their chief executives. He's also served as the president of the Council for Christian colleges and universities. Dr. Andringa, we are so excited that you're here. Thank you for coming today.

You're very welcome. I look forward to the conversation.

And another surprise for you today we have another co host for the day, co host for the day, our very own vice president of student success, Dr. Joe Slavens. Joe, welcome with us. So excited to have you with us.

Yeah, happy to join Alain and Rene as well as to join my friend Bob. Happy to be here.

And I'm going to let, I'm going to let Joe introduce. Furthermore, our guest of the day for MU Talks. Joe, you have the microphone.

Happy to introduce Bob. Look, you know what, I'm also happy to introduce another name that Bob and I know. Well, that is Dr. Karen Longman. It's because of Dr. Longman at Azusa Pacific that I met Dr. Bob and I told Karen recently, if you know Karen, it's a small world. And I hope she listens to this podcast because she knows everyone. I was actually looking for a doctoral gown and Karen let me know through Facebook that there was the doctoral account available through Dr. Bob and I reached out to him. We met and I now have his doctoral gown. And through that we actually developed an acquaintance and we spent some time over zoom. And so I got to meet Bob that way and then introduced him to you. And so I'm so thrilled that he's joined us here at mutalks today.

So it is, it is good to say that I think you are, you've stepped into a very large robe. From everything that we have learned about Dr. Bob, you have now you're filling, you're trying to fill a very, very large robe of accomplishments. So good for you. But I want to ask you, Joe, to introduce the topic and launch us into the discussion that we are really eagerly and looking forward to with Dr. Bob.

Yeah, well, another connection that Bob and I have are our connections to government. So Aline, you may know that I used to work for US Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon in A previous life. And Dr. Bob, he worked with the US House of Representatives. And so we made that connection that way. And I think Karen knew of my interest in government. And so the more I learned about Bob's history and what he did, I'm so excited for him to share with us today about his work on the creation of the Pell Grant, because he was on the ground floor of that. And so I want to introduce the topic and ask Bob a question in that space. For those who don't know what the Pell Grant is, I want to share with that real briefly. The Pell Grant is the largest federal grant program offered to undergraduates and is designed to assist students from low income households. A federal Pell Grant, unlike a loan, doesn't have to be repaid except under certain circumstances. And to qualify for a Pell Grant, a student must demonstrate financial needs with a Free Application for Federal Student Financial Aid, also known as fafsa. I am a recipient of Pell. I went through college through Pell. And so thank you to you, Bob, for that. I've already thanked you for that before. I actually walked away, and I am, I think, the poster child for Pell. I walked away without any loans from my bachelor's degree. And so, Bob, I'd like to start our conversation with you. We have said the Pell Grant is the largest federal grant program. So can you tell us the story of how the Pell Grant came to be? Can you just give us the background?

Sure. It's a fascinating background, Joe. And we didn't know anything about DEI back then. That's 50 years ago the Pell Grant became law. So I've been googling and trying to understand more about diversity, equity and inclusion because it's sort of the in thing the last couple years in corporations and government agencies and in higher education. So I was thinking of that and I think, well, you know, if we were doing that today, we would have said, what does equity look like when it comes to shaping federal policy? So I was invited out of the blue by Congressman Al Quie of Minnesota to join the Committee on Education and labor in the House of Representatives. And I thought, well, that would be interesting. My PhD is in higher ed and I never thought of working for Congress. This sounded interesting. So I said, I'll do that for a year. So I got up there and learned that the reason he invited me was that the Higher Education act of 1965, which came as part of the Great Society programs, was up for renewal. And it's a major bill with lots and lots of different programs. There would be new programs. And he wanted me to get acquainted with the Higher Education act and to staff the committee through the adoption of what became known as the education amendments of 1972. So the way it works in Congress is usually the House is first because members are on fewer committees. They have more time to delve into detail. So guess who the chair of the Post Secondary Education Subcommittee was from? Oregon.

Yeah. Yeah.

Edith Green. And the ranking member we call the minority party, the ranking member was from Oregon. Guess who that was is Representative John Dellenbach. Yeah. So al Quie was Mr. Education in the House of Representatives, and he came to all of the hearings. I bet we had a hundred hearings on everything under the sun, including what we now know as Title nine, that was part of these amendments. So we're going to focus today, though, on how the Pell Grant came to be. Well, Edith Green, a Democrat, she had the idea that we ought to invest more in higher education. And her way of doing it was to give federal grants to the institutions and they could do with it whatever they wanted. Well, we saw a lot of billions of federal dollars going into buildings and into new staff, so forth. So one day I'm sitting in a hearing next to Mr. Quay, and I just started doodling on an envelope, actually. We know this is how it's done sometimes. And it came to mind, I think it was a God thing, but it came to mind that why would we give billions to institutions and just let them do whatever they wanted with it? Because America wanted more from higher education. And they thought, well, more federal dollars, we can do that. And I thought, what if we gave the money to students? And I actually drew a little chart on this envelope and said the poorest ones would get the largest grants. And then as their income, family income, part of fafsa, increased, they would get smaller grants. And we put in there the maximum grant would be fourteen hundred dollars a year for the poorest students. We thought that was more equitable. We thought students ought to have a choice in where they go to college. It turns out that Mr. Quie, later, two years later, Senator Powell, they went to private colleges, and they thought, yeah, you know, if we gave the money based on enrollment, private higher education is going to lose. So Edith Green comes in with this huge bill, give it to them based on enrollment. He introduced a bill that would later become an amendment that we would offer that the money should go to students. We called that the Basic Education Opportunity Granted. Well, at the subcommittee level, after days of marking up this huge bill. We lost our amendment. The democrats stuck with Mrs. Green and the higher ed community, not wanting to offend Mrs. Green. She had a lot of power over higher ed. They too supported her at that point. Stay tuned. Well, then we went to the full committee. We marked it up again. We offered the amendment again. It lost along party lines. So then we went to the floor of the House with this big bill and came time for amendments and we offered our amendment on the floor of the House. Edith Green said, you know, no way. And all the Democrats followed her because they respected her. We lost in the House. So we thought, okay, we lost. We gave it a good college try over two years. Then during Christmas break, I got a call from a guy named Steve Wexler, who was the senior counsel to Senator Pell. And he said, Bobby said, the boss is skiing in France. And he said, it's time to put a Senate bill together. He said, I heard something about what Al Quie was doing in the House. Go over and find out what he was doing. Well, this never happens anymore. It's partisan. People don't get together. So Steve comes over and I explained to him that we're going to give money. We'd like to give money to students and let them choose where they want to take their money. And it would be equitable because the poorest students will get more money than those that had more resources. He said, I think the boss would like that. So he left. A few weeks later, the Senate bill is introduced and lo and behold, our program was in the Senate bill.

Yeah.

So we thought, we still have a chance. After the House and the Senate passed these massive bills, they joined together in a conference committee, as you know, and they wrestle with all the differences. We had three booklets, big booklets, House version, Senate version. What the difference was, et cetera. That staff wrote. We had 350 differences to reconcile. So we went through them. The House gets some, the Senate gets some. We find a medium place, we rewrite it and merge it and so forth. And this bill includes, you name it, everything, libraries, facilities, vocational ed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The 59th day of the conference committee, at 4:30 or 4 or 4:30 in the morning, because the chairman of the conference committee said, we're going to finish tonight whether we have to stay here all night or not. The last of 350 items was what's now called a Pell Grant back then, the Basic Education Opportunity Grant. And the House either recedes to the Senate or the Senate recedes to the House. That's the language. And we're sitting in this small room. Back then, people could smoke in the room. It was a disaster. Hot 4am we come to this last issue because we knew it was important and we had been lobbying three liberal Democrats meeting in a closet in the Capitol for weeks, trying to convince them that, hey, you're a Democrat. Why wouldn't you give more money to poor students than wealthier students? And gradually, three Democrats said, well, when it comes to a vote, we'll stay with you. Al qui came to a vote. Alqui moved that the House recede to the Senate on this point. And lo and behold, we had enough votes, the three Democrats to win it. We receded to the Senate. Mrs. Green stood up, went out, left the room and was so upset. She had defended this for two years now. She lost her approach. So a couple years later, I think when Senator Pell died, they changed the name of the program from Basic Education opportunity grants to the Pell Grant, which is more than worthy. So Biden is proposing something like a 2,600 increase. It'll never happen, but it shows that the Pell Grant is still a very, very popular program. If that increase went in, Joe, help me out here. I think the total would become close to $8700 versus the maximum 1400 that was in the original bill. It hasn't kept up with tuition, but it's still, I don't know, 50 billion a year. It's some huge number. And that's how we got the Pell Grant.

That's fantastic. Yeah, I think. Exactly. Looking right now, I think it's 8,000, 670 is what he's proposing it to. Bob, that's not. That's an episode of West Wing right there.

You just showed us how the sausage.

Was made, at least in the collegial days. Right. Of the House. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have another question, but you know what? Alain and Renee, that was so much. I feel like you might have a question.

Yes. Well, I want to. I want to thank you for your part in history. I want to thank you for your commitment to actually give a voice, because money is voice ultimately becomes a voice of the students that would never have a chance to actually go to higher education and then impact this country in a positive way. I want to thank you for your idea on the envelope. Never underestimate something that starts in such a humble beginning and for putting up a fight, really, for, For. For the voiceless. I think that's godly work. I think that is important work. And I, I can only pray for more and more people to carry the standard of the fight that you put up. So thank you for that. We, unfortunately, I can't believe I'm saying this. We're getting to the half point of our, of our podcast today and with your permission, Dr. Bob, I'd like to move our conversation into the nonprofit area and, and I want to qualify it a little bit before we have a good conversation on, on your work in non profit, where your passion comes from, that you, you wrote books on this, you are really passionate about this space. I think we, we underestimate and we sometimes devalue the works of nonprofit until we get to a point. And I've, I've, I've worked and partner in China in a few instances, and China is heading towards a massive crisis because you're gonna get close to 250 million elderly people coming towards a system that has no, no pension fund and no systems in the society to care for the elderly. And this is a crisis that is really impacting this country because there's no, there's no non profit sector, there are no charities, there's no ministries that are, are thriving in this country to kind of keep the, the, the, the population there and serve the population in a selfless way. And then you have a pension fund that is inexistent and, and all this, and then you have 250 million aging people hitting that system. So until you, you, you operate in that space and then you look back towards United States of America with a very solid and thriving nonprofit sector, and then, and then charities and all that, then you realize many, maybe we have not paid significant attention to the value that the work is being done in this country in that space. So I'm just curious to hear more from your passion about this space, your history with it, thoughts that you would have about that, and maybe we can have a few questions for you in that space.

Okay, well, that's a big question. The United States has 1.8 million nonprofits. 1.4 million are what we commonly think of as a nonprofit of 501c3. The only other nation that has more is India, interestingly enough, and Poland and the eastern former Soviet bloc countries, they have been moving into the nonprofit space pretty aggressively for let's say, 25 or 30 years at least. China, given its government structure, there would be a question whether or not they could embrace the independence and the freedom that would go along with an independent corporation called a nonprofit. So my sense is, Alan, that My sense is that it would be US based nonprofits focused on the needs of China. Not only to raise money to demonstrate how the need is great, but somehow I don't have an idea on that. Somehow begin to convince the government that it's going to face a massive uprising and their desire to be well respected in the world is going to go down because the humanitarian crisis is going to be well known and probably documented over and over and over by US based nonprofits. I think as China, once we get past Russia, China will emerge as a primary focus. And I would think that the major foundations would be interested, you know, in million dollar grants, five million dollar grants. The human rights organizations, the welfare organizations, even like World Vision and World Relief should be interested in that topic. So I commend you for being aware of and interested in serving the needs. I think that's a very God ordained work. It's like this dei, I happen to embrace it. I differ on some of the ways people would implement it. But God created us all right? He created us as equal in his image, worthy of respect and dignity. And so country, national boundaries are not the way to look at it from a kingdom point of view. Those are his people.

And I don't know if Joe, you wanted to ask follow up questions but what's fascinating to me is most universities in America function as nonprofit. And somebody said recently to me the politics are so high in higher education because the stakes are so low. And when he meant stakes I think he referred to that in business world the stakes, the profit is so high so they don't spend so much time with politics. I thought the stakes are higher in higher education because we're dealing with destinies, we're dealing with people, we're dealing with transformation and education. And we don't want to have very well informed evil people in this world. We want to make sure that we have transformed educated people and, and with ethics and values and so on and so forth. But I'm curious on your take with because we're seeing a decrease in, in charities and donations which in in turn will actually impact somehow higher education as a non profit position. They are positioned. Most universities that are especially most Christian universities are established as non profit. Any thoughts that you would have in that space? What would be the difference of having a profit or non profit and what's the value and the difference between them?

Well, let's round out the numbers but maybe 80% of students go to public government sponsored. So they are non profit but they're government. And then there are about 1600 private, not for profit colleges, but they only have about 20% or so of the of the students within that 1600 incidentally, because we're talking from Multnomah, 900 of those were originally Christ centered, religious sponsored campuses. Wow. And today, depending on how you want to define it, out of 1600 it's no longer 900, it's more like 150, 200 if you stretch the definition. So the issues that Multnomah and other Christian colleges universities face are not so much willingness and ability to compete for students. They are to retain government funding through student aid primarily and still retain the values and the convictions that we have as Christians. That's our challenge. Now the for profit sector has taken on a bad brand name in recent years both under Bush and Obama and under Biden. And they're trying to squeeze that because hey, you're for profit. What's your goal? To make a profit for your owners. And so there's more of a tendency to push student loans and many students have no idea what the impact of taking on all those loans are going to mean to them down the road. And the default rate is so much higher in the for profit schools. Proprietary, we call them vocational and there's a place for them. But the community colleges often offer similar programs. And I started a scholarship program here where I live and except for flight training and a few things like that, you can go to a community college for much less money, take out much less in the way of loans, still get the education you want. Where the for profits sell their admissions is they put a lot of money in placement so they can say 97% of our graduates have a job within nine months or six months. And that's attractive these days to a lot of students. But while there are some very good ones, you know, I push people more toward the community colleges and then if that's fit for them, then onto their choice of a four year institution.

Bob, this is fascinating and I feel like we've only like lightly touched on each of the topics that we've brought in and you're just pouring out such great information for us. Thank you so much for, for sharing with us today. Yeah. Here on mutalks we want to communicate well about education, about why it's important, and talk about the issues that are facing education and those who are thinking about going to college or thinking about helping their kids go to college. Because education has been such an important part of all of our stories of Joe and Eileen and myself and obviously for you as well, and so as we wrap up today, we want to pivot just a little bit and talk more about you. You just for a bit. So would you start by answering just some quick questions about yourself? The first one is, would you tell us about a time during your educational journey? It can be childhood all the way up to present that was really memorable or formative for you.

I love education. I'm a learner. I find that you're learning every day no matter whether you're in a school, school or college or not. But maybe for me, since we're higher ed oriented today, I would say Dr. John Hanna, he was president of Michigan State University for, I think, 28 years. I gave my life to Christ as a freshman, was very active in student affairs even then. So for four years, we went to a spartan roundtable in the president's home with him and his cabinet and 25 or 30 student leaders. We could ask any question. They briefed us. And when I was late, sophomore, junior year, I just looked at him at one of those dinners three times a year, and I said, I want to be like that guy. I think he's doing something really important. He's leading the education institution. And so he became kind of a mentor. And I said, you know, if I want to be president, what do I have to do? And he said, well, he said, you're already in a public institution, so you probably aren't going to get offered to be president of a private school someday. So instead of majoring in history or sociology or something like that, he said, I would major in higher ed because it's going to become more complex, more sophisticated. There's going to be more government regulations. So this was. This was 1960, 61. And I took his advice, stayed there with his help, and finished my graduate work.

He was a prophet. He was a prophet.

Little did I know. I thought I was going to spend my life on the rest, on a campus, you know, where I could go play racquetball at noon and take the summers off and all that. Never got back to a campus. Wow.

All right. Well, if you could change one thing about education in the US what would it be?

Well, thinking again of higher ed, I think we somehow, we need to discover a recommitment to intellectual integrity where scholars and teachers seek the truth more than trying to be popular with a peer group or, you know, chime in on all of this, what people are calling the woke world. I think intellectual integrity needs to be modeled for the nation and for the students for sure, to have what we value most in higher ed.

Great. And what is something that you are currently learning or the last thing that you. That you learned?

Interesting. I am learning from my two sons and a daughter in law who are in more charismatic churches than I am and they seem to be oh so much integrity from the heart. So I've been studying what does it mean to love the Lord your God with all of your heart. I've been on the mind maybe too much and I'm trying to learn to listen and to have the Holy Spirit feed my heart. And that's led us to explore what church means for us at this age. Whether to start a home church or join a small church. We love, we love a multicultural church. So what we do with church is big and it started when I started focusing on loving the Lord with my heart.

We cannot thank you enough for today for being with us. I would like to thank the co host for the day, Dr. Joe Slavens for the connection and for blessing us and Multnomah University and our listening group the the growing audience of MU talks with such a wonderful and special guest. And we learned from you. I'm so thankful not just for today. I'm thankful for your legacy, for your work, for. For really fighting for DEI before DEI was formed in our mind minds and fighting for equity and for access for education. I'm very thankful for that. Thank for. Thank you for answering our questions so kindly and directly. And can I ask if somebody wants to follow your ministry, follow the work that you do, where can they go?

I'm staying off from social media. Someone's interested in governance related things. I have a simple website that my seventh grade grandson put together in a couple hours. I've never wanted to change it. He's now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. But the Andringa group A N D R I N g a group theanderingagroup.com would have some of the things that I found over 35 plus years of working with boards, 65 or so Christian college boards. That's where they would find it.

We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you.

We'll have to. We'll have to do that. Once again thank you for coming. Thank you Dr. Slavens for being with us today as a co host and thank you so much for your thoughts today.

Fun being with you.

Lord.

Bless you all.

You too. Thank you. As you already know, the views and opinions expressed on MU talks belong to the speakers and to the guests of MU Talks do not represent fully or even partially the views of Malawi University. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Sam.