February 5, 2021 • 22 mins
Stephanie is joined by New York Times financial columnist and author of "The Price You Pay for College" for a deep dive into one of the biggest financial decisions families and students will make in their lifetime - choosing and paying for college.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know, if you look at any industry, any product,
any service out there in the marketplace, there aren't that
many that have changed as little in a generation as
residential undergraduate education. I would like to believe that all
of your listeners, they can be system beaters and they
can be system burners. It is possible to have both
(00:23):
goals in mind, existing and not clashing by the way
in your head simultaneously. Right now, many students are stuck.
If they go to their dream college, they could be
hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts. They don't know
if come fall their classes are going to be online
or in person. And for those already in school, they
(00:44):
don't know if there's a job waiting for them when
they graduate during one of the worst financial crisis is
our country has ever seen. Then there are other kids
who don't really have any idea what they want to do,
don't especially want to go to college, but end up
there because there's not really other options in the United
States of America, and the only thing they end up
(01:05):
with is a lot of debt and less direction than ever.
This pandemic has put a spotlight on a lot of
problems in our education system. And our workforce, and one
of them is higher education. How do we pay for it?
What's the value of it? I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC Anchor,
NBC News Senior correspondent, And this is Modern Rules, a
(01:25):
podcast from NBC Think and I Heart Radio. We've got
a moment. We're in crisis. Can we do better? Ron
Lieber is asking that very question in his new book,
The Price You Pay for College is the author of
the New York Times personal finance column Your Money. Ron.
(01:47):
For years and years and years, we weren't thinking about
the price of college, the value of college? Is it
worth it? Well? I think you have to start by
asking yourself what college is? All right? What is called for?
I wasn't sure what the answer to that question was,
and so I asked, you know, scores of families and
I heard the same three things over and over again.
(02:08):
College is for getting an education, for having your mind grown,
in your mind blown. It is for kinship. It is
for finding the people who will carry you through life.
It is for getting a credential, whether it's the gold
plated one that will open doors or just the degree
that will allow you to grasp hold of the middle class.
And hopefully stay there. And so in order to answer
(02:29):
the question of whether college is worth it, you need
to define it for your individual family. It's not something
that we as a nation can dictate for any given individual.
But then, how did we get to this place? Right?
My dad worked in the summer and put himself through
school and had a tiny bit of debt after How
did college get this expensive? There are so many more
(02:52):
things pulling on our household incomes than there used to be.
We are entirely responsible in most instances for our own retirement.
We are paying more and more out of our own
pockets for healthcare. Many people are paying off their own
student loaned well into their forties or fifties. Right, so
people don't have the same kind of disposable income as
they might have earlier. States have reduced their subsidies towards
(03:14):
higher education, which means the price of those state schools
has gone up, and then the private institutions they've gotten
more and more expensive. So the middle class there is
being squeezed. This whole idea of I want to go
to a liberal arts college and better myself, and then
the world is will be my oyster. It's kind of
an antiquated thought. Sure, I'd like to enrich myself, but
(03:35):
not if it's going to put me in hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of debt. I remember when I
was a senior in college. I went to Lehigh and Lee,
I could absolutely help you on the career services front
if you wanted to go work in an accounting firm
or be an engineer. I wanted to work in investment banking.
So I drove to New York City with my mother
and I snuck into the career services office at Columbia
(03:59):
University and I borrowed these giant binders that had every
piece of information that you needed for every bank, every
financial institution, so you could apply for the summer internships.
And I went to the photo copy machine to start,
and you needed to have a school. I d to
use the photo copier. I got caught and I got
kicked out. The reason I bring this up we send
(04:21):
these kids to college, but the best jobs are directly
linked to only a few schools. So do we need
to start looking at here's a college, What is the
job my child is going to get on the other side,
because otherwise they will be sitting here in hundreds of
thousands of dollars with a deck Yes to all of that.
First of all, that is the most badass career services
(04:41):
story that I have ever heard. Your description of this
as quote unquote best jobs, right, I mean, it is
true that the best jobs in investment banking very narrow field,
only higher from uh certain institutions, right unless you beat
down the door. But are those the best jobs in America?
Are they the best jobs for anyone? Goldman Saxes is
(05:04):
hiring all these people in Salt Lake City now who
do not come from Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and
m I T. So then we have to ask ourselves, well,
these are iconic jobs in in certain social classes, but
are they really the best jobs out there for any
given twenty two year old. I don't think so. Before
the pandemic, we knew there was a skills gap in
(05:25):
the United States. We were at full employment, yet we
had millions of Americans who are not making enough money
to support themselves. We had people who had jobs, but
not good enough jobs. But you hear people making that
argument saying you cannot afford to support yourself and your
family working in a fast food restaurant but that job
(05:47):
was never intended for someone who has a family to support.
Is there an opportunity to actually create a real jobs program,
a skills retraining program. So it's not just about raising
minimum wage, it's about retraining people to qualify themselves for better,
higher paying jobs. Yes, and that infrastructure already exists. We
(06:09):
can use the community college infrastructure to provide that skills training.
But we also have, you know, a shortage of qualified
instructors to teach some of these skills. Why because the
skills are so in demand that the people who would
be doing the instructing are making five times as much
money being actual practitioners. If you're a master plumber, you're
not going to spend twenty hours a week teaching at
(06:31):
a community college, even though it be a service to
the community. If you are, you know, a welder with
twenty five years of experience, right, same thing is true.
So how are we going to create the budget that
allows for more people to be pushed through rigorous training programs?
And so we need to do more um I think
(06:51):
from a state perspective and from a federal perspective, not
just to provide the money, but also to ensure equity
and access to these programs. Now that kids are home
and you're Duke, m I T or Lafayette college experience
is no different from the University of Phoenix. Could this
(07:12):
actually press pause for a revisit on the price of college. Well,
look at it this way, right, everybody gets sent home
the second week in March, and by the fourth week
in March and the second week in April, there's a
clamor for refunds, and then by the first week in
May there's a couple of dozen lawsuits right where people
(07:32):
are freaking out and demanding their tuition back to But
then something really weird happened over the summer. All of
these colleges were fundamentally dishonest about why they were reopening
in September. They were arguing it could be done safely,
But what they really should have said is, look, we
need the revenue. If we don't get the revenue, we're
gonna have to cut this place to ribbons, and then
it won't be the place that you'd want to come
(07:52):
back to um eighteen months from now. So we gotta
make a go of us here and when we want
you all in. But strange families and the students were
all in any way right because they had lost so
much in the spring. They all wanted to come back
and pay full price for what was clearly going to
be a compromised experience socially and academically. And then a
(08:14):
bunch of them got sick to right, and yet they
still came. Why did they still come? Because the residential
undergraduate experience in the United States of America has become
a rite of passage for the middle class and above.
So it's not clear to me how we dismantle that
when so many people were desperate to come back and
(08:35):
pay for a compromised experience, which I don't think they
should have done, by the way. Yes, but in generations prior,
more and more members of the middle class could go
away to college, and that college experience in a different
state with different people was what led you on a
path to pursue the American dream. And today those same
(08:59):
students are either not getting into those colleges, or they're
getting into them and are saddled with so much debt
they never get to pursue it. Given the cost of college,
are there enough jobs that pay enough money to justify
the price of college. Families that get into trouble. The
(09:20):
families that express regret are the ones where the students
max out their federal student loans. So let's call that
thirts of federal debt. The parents co sign for private
loans with the undergraduate. Call that another twenty grand, and
(09:42):
then maybe the parents borrow tens of thousands of dollars
more just to make it all work because the child
just desperately wants to go to LEI, right, and they're
not getting much merit aid, and they're not getting much
of a discount based on their financial need. At that point,
you know, you are dealing with the after effect of
that decision financially for a minimum of ten years as
(10:04):
um as a young adult, and perhaps longer as a parent,
right if you need to work longer in order to
keep making those loan payments. The way that it's changing,
I think for that kind of family is that they
are looking at the kinds of schools that they might
not have looked at a generation ago. So you know,
there's a family in my book where both parents went
(10:25):
to Princeton and one of their kids went to one
small college in the Midwest that offered an enormous discount
on the basis of merit, and then the other one
went to the College of Worcester, another school that generally discounts,
even for affluent families, to a price just you know,
five thousand dollars more than what it would cost to
go to Ohio State. And so, you know, families are
(10:48):
making different choices generationally and are happy about it. Both
these Princeton graduates are professors, and they were thrilled with
the quality of what's on offer at a slightly less
selective institutions that are are fifty thousand dollars per per
years than what they might have spent to send them
to Princeton. And I'm trying to normalize that type of
(11:08):
decision making because it leads to less debt and potentially
more happiness. Because the fact of the matter is is
that back in the old days, right if your parents
went to Princeton, you got to go to Princeton too,
and it was practically a birthright or an entitlement. And
that's not the way that it works anymore. You know,
Alumni legacy status does confer advantage, but these places are
(11:31):
just really difficult to get into, and so I'm trying
to model a form of decision making that cares less
about the Instagram sweatshirt reveal and more about value and
trying to define what college is supposed to be, not
just for your family, but for your individual child. We'll
be back after the break. So where do we go
(12:04):
from here in terms of education? There's this idea, let's
make college free. Does that take away the motivation to
go and respect college? Right? When you get it for free,
you don't treat it as well? So what would suggest
to us that some disruptive force is about to come
(12:24):
and make it go away? If the coronavirus just caused
people to crave it more, right, and not to demand change,
then what would really blow it up? This becomes a
political conversation. Because we want money to be less of
a factor in all of this, then we need to
become more like Scandinavia and a lot of the European
(12:44):
countries where this is subsidized, right, And that is going
to mean not just a little more taxes, but you know,
a fair bit more taxes. It is the case that
in most countries where college is free or close to it,
um access is much more limited then access is to
higher education here in the United States, Right, There are
all sorts of open enrollment schools in the US, not
(13:08):
just community colleges before your schools, dozens and dozens and
dozens and dozens of them. And the point at which
we make something free, you know, will people flock to it?
Will it cost more than than we think it will?
And what will our reaction be to that going forward?
And will we end up in a in a situation
where in fact, not everybody will be able to access it?
And then we'll just be stratifying ourselves further. So I worry.
(13:31):
I worry a little bit about that, this idea that
we should cancel student debt? What about all the people
who are able to pay it? I see this through
the lens of politics more than policy. The thing that
I'm pretty sure that Biden administration is worried about is,
you know, we've got a fifty fifty Senate and we've
got a House of Representatives that you know is close
(13:52):
to fifty. There is absolutely no consistency to this whatsoever.
And you are right. What seems to matter most too
careful policy folks in any given administration is how do
you keep your political advantage right? And if people with
college degrees are being bailed out. And what about the
little guy who's the plumber and the electrician and never
(14:14):
got to go to college. Will that swing um ten
purple districts? If that movement gets going, it's just might.
When you think about how the FED comes in and
rescues the market, stabilizes the markets, helps giant corporations were
down with that. But you can't simply help the little
guy because that little guy is just a lazy loser.
(14:35):
Do we need to change the way we think and
not think in a way of the guy who didn't
get a chance to go to college and became a
plumber and redefine this person chooses to go to college
because that works for them, and this person chooses to
be a plumber because it works for them. But you're
not a plumber by default because you weren't good enough
(14:57):
for college. We're all facing a isis right now because
of the pandemic. Could we use that to drum up
the will to revisit higher education. I consider it my
role in the world to be first and foremost relentlessly practical.
Right I'm trying to help people win and succeed in
(15:19):
the world as it exists. And I've got a whole
bunch of colleagues on the op ed page who are
working on the whole world as it should be a
thing for the seventy eight percent of you know, any
given listeners spare time where they're trying to figure out
how two navigate the world as it exists. I am
here for them, But for now, we're in the middle
(15:40):
of a pandemic and you can't get your parents a vaccine.
Your credit score got all screwed up because they didn't
figure out how to put your student loan pause on correctly.
And that's what I am here for for that, in particular,
the system burners, you know, I'm happy to talk to
them all day long, but we also have to navigate
the world as it exists. Then, I guess my only
(16:01):
hope is people can try to stay true to themselves
and their priorities and their kids and don't let the
fear of missing out or brands or society influence you,
because they're not going to pay your tuition and they're
not going to help your kids pursue what they actually
want to do with their lives. I think that's right.
(16:21):
And you know, one interesting question that fell out of
my research is how do you be a principled shopper
for residential undergraduate higher education? Right, there are plenty of
larger universities that employ a large number of adjunct teachers,
(16:42):
and many of those instructors are living at kind of
near poverty level in terms of the wages they're making,
or they have miserable lives. Right. Then there are a
whole host of supposedly really good schools that you have
heard of, many of which are well endowed, where the
percentage of undergraduates who receive pell grants, which is a
(17:03):
proxy for being lower income, is abysmally low. Right, so
there is no commitment to equity at these places. We
can ask better questions as part of this process that
will put these schools on notice, um that these are
things that we care about, and I endorse that. Yeah,
I mean, these really well endowed schools are very very
(17:24):
proud to take students from some of the most vulnerable
communities and potentially give them sizeable scholarship money. But then
when they get there and maybe room and board is
covered along with tuition, what about everything else? Financial insecurity
and food insecurity is a huge issue that's actually sending
a lot of kids home from school. Yes, um, these
(17:47):
are not rhetorical questions, and there are definitely practitioners that
are well aware of it. Right at the more elite institutions,
there is at many of them a level of granularity
to the understanding of the issues that you call out
what is supposed to happen to And for the students
from California or Texas who come up to the Northeast
on a full ride but they don't have snow boots,
(18:09):
and then you know, a tier or two down in
terms of levels of selectivity. You have people like Professor
Sarah Goldrick Grab at Temple University, who has done a
ton of work on food insecurity, and in the most
recent relief pill of the past, some of her research
was brought to bear on the question of under what
circumstances can undergraduates qualify for food stamps, And through the
(18:33):
work of her and people like her, some of those
rules have changed to allow undergraduates a bit more generosity
and flexibility. So this is happening around the margins. But
we're not asking enough of those questions, and we're not
asking them loudly enough. Do you believe the American dream
is still alive, and it's higher education the best vehicle
(18:56):
to use to pursue it. I don't want to define
the American dream for anybody, but the way that I
have seen it define most often is am I going
to do better than my parents did? Which then leads
to a natural question define better? Right? Is it income?
Is it inflation adjusted income? Is it relative prosperity? In
(19:17):
other words, how am I doing compared to the people
around me? Is it a world that is cleaner or
dirtier in terms of the air? Right? I mean, there
are lots of different ways to define that, but if
you believe in the simplest definition, which is just income,
um uh. You know, the rash Chetti group at Harvard
has the best, has the best data on this, and
(19:40):
they think that it's a fifty fifty coin flip, And
that to me is depressing a right. America used to
be better than that, and I think it can be
better uh in the future. And I will say what
depresses me most? I think for so many of us,
my number one goal is to try to deliver a
(20:01):
world to my kids that's better than the one I got.
I think that's sort of the unspoken contract we all
think we're entering into and I can say right now,
I'm not so sure about that. However, every day we
can work on changing that. It's true, and in twelve
months we'll all have shots in our arms and hopefully
it'll feel differently. I sure hope so, Ron, thank you
(20:23):
so much for joining me today. Congratulations on the book.
I hope everyone reads it gives it to a friend.
This is really complicated stuff, and I so appreciate all
of your work. Thank you so much for having me. H.
(20:46):
So much of what we do is shaped by what
we think we're supposed to do with our lives, by
what our parents are, teachers are friends. It's like society
has deemed this is the right path and this is
the wrong path. Is that actually serving us? When it
comes to higher education, which takes an enormous amount of money,
an enormous amount of time, it might not put us
(21:06):
or our kids on the path to success on modern rules.
You know, we like to get straight to the point,
and Ron certainly left me with a lot to think
about what is success? If we took the norm or
the standard away, could we actually create an education system
that works better for more people, that could give more
young people a chance to succeed at things they love.
(21:29):
Maybe redefine how we characterize success, because I'm pretty sure
success and happiness are closely aligned, but I know an
awful lot of people on paper would be considered successful
and they're quite the opposite of happiness. I'm Stephanie Rule,
and you're listening to Modern Rules, a podcast from NBC Think,
(21:52):
MSNBC and I Heart Radio. This podcast is hosted by Me,
Stephanie Rule, Mike beet In, Katrina Norvell, our executive producers.
Meredith Bennett Smith is Senior editor for NBC Think and
our editorial lead. The podcast is engineered and edited by
Josh Fisher. Additional production support provided by Charles Herman, Rachel Rosenbaum,
(22:13):
and Lauren Wynn, and special thanks to Katherine kim Are,
Global Head of Digital News right here at NBC News
and MSNBC. For more thought provoking analysis, visit NBC news
dot com slash Thing
You know, if you look at any industry, any product,
any service out there in the marketplace, there aren't that
many that have changed as little in a generation as
residential undergraduate education. I would like to believe that all
of your listeners, they can be system beaters and they
can be system burners. It is possible to have both
(00:23):
goals in mind, existing and not clashing by the way
in your head simultaneously. Right now, many students are stuck.
If they go to their dream college, they could be
hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts. They don't know
if come fall their classes are going to be online
or in person. And for those already in school, they
(00:44):
don't know if there's a job waiting for them when
they graduate during one of the worst financial crisis is
our country has ever seen. Then there are other kids
who don't really have any idea what they want to do,
don't especially want to go to college, but end up
there because there's not really other options in the United
States of America, and the only thing they end up
(01:05):
with is a lot of debt and less direction than ever.
This pandemic has put a spotlight on a lot of
problems in our education system. And our workforce, and one
of them is higher education. How do we pay for it?
What's the value of it? I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC Anchor,
NBC News Senior correspondent, And this is Modern Rules, a
(01:25):
podcast from NBC Think and I Heart Radio. We've got
a moment. We're in crisis. Can we do better? Ron
Lieber is asking that very question in his new book,
The Price You Pay for College is the author of
the New York Times personal finance column Your Money. Ron.
(01:47):
For years and years and years, we weren't thinking about
the price of college, the value of college? Is it
worth it? Well? I think you have to start by
asking yourself what college is? All right? What is called for?
I wasn't sure what the answer to that question was,
and so I asked, you know, scores of families and
I heard the same three things over and over again.
(02:08):
College is for getting an education, for having your mind grown,
in your mind blown. It is for kinship. It is
for finding the people who will carry you through life.
It is for getting a credential, whether it's the gold
plated one that will open doors or just the degree
that will allow you to grasp hold of the middle class.
And hopefully stay there. And so in order to answer
(02:29):
the question of whether college is worth it, you need
to define it for your individual family. It's not something
that we as a nation can dictate for any given individual.
But then, how did we get to this place? Right?
My dad worked in the summer and put himself through
school and had a tiny bit of debt after How
did college get this expensive? There are so many more
(02:52):
things pulling on our household incomes than there used to be.
We are entirely responsible in most instances for our own retirement.
We are paying more and more out of our own
pockets for healthcare. Many people are paying off their own
student loaned well into their forties or fifties. Right, so
people don't have the same kind of disposable income as
they might have earlier. States have reduced their subsidies towards
(03:14):
higher education, which means the price of those state schools
has gone up, and then the private institutions they've gotten
more and more expensive. So the middle class there is
being squeezed. This whole idea of I want to go
to a liberal arts college and better myself, and then
the world is will be my oyster. It's kind of
an antiquated thought. Sure, I'd like to enrich myself, but
(03:35):
not if it's going to put me in hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of debt. I remember when I
was a senior in college. I went to Lehigh and Lee,
I could absolutely help you on the career services front
if you wanted to go work in an accounting firm
or be an engineer. I wanted to work in investment banking.
So I drove to New York City with my mother
and I snuck into the career services office at Columbia
(03:59):
University and I borrowed these giant binders that had every
piece of information that you needed for every bank, every
financial institution, so you could apply for the summer internships.
And I went to the photo copy machine to start,
and you needed to have a school. I d to
use the photo copier. I got caught and I got
kicked out. The reason I bring this up we send
(04:21):
these kids to college, but the best jobs are directly
linked to only a few schools. So do we need
to start looking at here's a college, What is the
job my child is going to get on the other side,
because otherwise they will be sitting here in hundreds of
thousands of dollars with a deck Yes to all of that.
First of all, that is the most badass career services
(04:41):
story that I have ever heard. Your description of this
as quote unquote best jobs, right, I mean, it is
true that the best jobs in investment banking very narrow field,
only higher from uh certain institutions, right unless you beat
down the door. But are those the best jobs in America?
Are they the best jobs for anyone? Goldman Saxes is
(05:04):
hiring all these people in Salt Lake City now who
do not come from Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and
m I T. So then we have to ask ourselves, well,
these are iconic jobs in in certain social classes, but
are they really the best jobs out there for any
given twenty two year old. I don't think so. Before
the pandemic, we knew there was a skills gap in
(05:25):
the United States. We were at full employment, yet we
had millions of Americans who are not making enough money
to support themselves. We had people who had jobs, but
not good enough jobs. But you hear people making that
argument saying you cannot afford to support yourself and your
family working in a fast food restaurant but that job
(05:47):
was never intended for someone who has a family to support.
Is there an opportunity to actually create a real jobs program,
a skills retraining program. So it's not just about raising
minimum wage, it's about retraining people to qualify themselves for better,
higher paying jobs. Yes, and that infrastructure already exists. We
(06:09):
can use the community college infrastructure to provide that skills training.
But we also have, you know, a shortage of qualified
instructors to teach some of these skills. Why because the
skills are so in demand that the people who would
be doing the instructing are making five times as much
money being actual practitioners. If you're a master plumber, you're
not going to spend twenty hours a week teaching at
(06:31):
a community college, even though it be a service to
the community. If you are, you know, a welder with
twenty five years of experience, right, same thing is true.
So how are we going to create the budget that
allows for more people to be pushed through rigorous training programs?
And so we need to do more um I think
(06:51):
from a state perspective and from a federal perspective, not
just to provide the money, but also to ensure equity
and access to these programs. Now that kids are home
and you're Duke, m I T or Lafayette college experience
is no different from the University of Phoenix. Could this
(07:12):
actually press pause for a revisit on the price of college. Well,
look at it this way, right, everybody gets sent home
the second week in March, and by the fourth week
in March and the second week in April, there's a
clamor for refunds, and then by the first week in
May there's a couple of dozen lawsuits right where people
(07:32):
are freaking out and demanding their tuition back to But
then something really weird happened over the summer. All of
these colleges were fundamentally dishonest about why they were reopening
in September. They were arguing it could be done safely,
But what they really should have said is, look, we
need the revenue. If we don't get the revenue, we're
gonna have to cut this place to ribbons, and then
it won't be the place that you'd want to come
(07:52):
back to um eighteen months from now. So we gotta
make a go of us here and when we want
you all in. But strange families and the students were
all in any way right because they had lost so
much in the spring. They all wanted to come back
and pay full price for what was clearly going to
be a compromised experience socially and academically. And then a
(08:14):
bunch of them got sick to right, and yet they
still came. Why did they still come? Because the residential
undergraduate experience in the United States of America has become
a rite of passage for the middle class and above.
So it's not clear to me how we dismantle that
when so many people were desperate to come back and
(08:35):
pay for a compromised experience, which I don't think they
should have done, by the way. Yes, but in generations prior,
more and more members of the middle class could go
away to college, and that college experience in a different
state with different people was what led you on a
path to pursue the American dream. And today those same
(08:59):
students are either not getting into those colleges, or they're
getting into them and are saddled with so much debt
they never get to pursue it. Given the cost of college,
are there enough jobs that pay enough money to justify
the price of college. Families that get into trouble. The
(09:20):
families that express regret are the ones where the students
max out their federal student loans. So let's call that
thirts of federal debt. The parents co sign for private
loans with the undergraduate. Call that another twenty grand, and
(09:42):
then maybe the parents borrow tens of thousands of dollars
more just to make it all work because the child
just desperately wants to go to LEI, right, and they're
not getting much merit aid, and they're not getting much
of a discount based on their financial need. At that point,
you know, you are dealing with the after effect of
that decision financially for a minimum of ten years as
(10:04):
um as a young adult, and perhaps longer as a parent,
right if you need to work longer in order to
keep making those loan payments. The way that it's changing,
I think for that kind of family is that they
are looking at the kinds of schools that they might
not have looked at a generation ago. So you know,
there's a family in my book where both parents went
(10:25):
to Princeton and one of their kids went to one
small college in the Midwest that offered an enormous discount
on the basis of merit, and then the other one
went to the College of Worcester, another school that generally discounts,
even for affluent families, to a price just you know,
five thousand dollars more than what it would cost to
go to Ohio State. And so, you know, families are
(10:48):
making different choices generationally and are happy about it. Both
these Princeton graduates are professors, and they were thrilled with
the quality of what's on offer at a slightly less
selective institutions that are are fifty thousand dollars per per
years than what they might have spent to send them
to Princeton. And I'm trying to normalize that type of
(11:08):
decision making because it leads to less debt and potentially
more happiness. Because the fact of the matter is is
that back in the old days, right if your parents
went to Princeton, you got to go to Princeton too,
and it was practically a birthright or an entitlement. And
that's not the way that it works anymore. You know,
Alumni legacy status does confer advantage, but these places are
(11:31):
just really difficult to get into, and so I'm trying
to model a form of decision making that cares less
about the Instagram sweatshirt reveal and more about value and
trying to define what college is supposed to be, not
just for your family, but for your individual child. We'll
be back after the break. So where do we go
(12:04):
from here in terms of education? There's this idea, let's
make college free. Does that take away the motivation to
go and respect college? Right? When you get it for free,
you don't treat it as well? So what would suggest
to us that some disruptive force is about to come
(12:24):
and make it go away? If the coronavirus just caused
people to crave it more, right, and not to demand change,
then what would really blow it up? This becomes a
political conversation. Because we want money to be less of
a factor in all of this, then we need to
become more like Scandinavia and a lot of the European
(12:44):
countries where this is subsidized, right, And that is going
to mean not just a little more taxes, but you know,
a fair bit more taxes. It is the case that
in most countries where college is free or close to it,
um access is much more limited then access is to
higher education here in the United States, Right, There are
all sorts of open enrollment schools in the US, not
(13:08):
just community colleges before your schools, dozens and dozens and
dozens and dozens of them. And the point at which
we make something free, you know, will people flock to it?
Will it cost more than than we think it will?
And what will our reaction be to that going forward?
And will we end up in a in a situation
where in fact, not everybody will be able to access it?
And then we'll just be stratifying ourselves further. So I worry.
(13:31):
I worry a little bit about that, this idea that
we should cancel student debt? What about all the people
who are able to pay it? I see this through
the lens of politics more than policy. The thing that
I'm pretty sure that Biden administration is worried about is,
you know, we've got a fifty fifty Senate and we've
got a House of Representatives that you know is close
(13:52):
to fifty. There is absolutely no consistency to this whatsoever.
And you are right. What seems to matter most too
careful policy folks in any given administration is how do
you keep your political advantage right? And if people with
college degrees are being bailed out. And what about the
little guy who's the plumber and the electrician and never
(14:14):
got to go to college. Will that swing um ten
purple districts? If that movement gets going, it's just might.
When you think about how the FED comes in and
rescues the market, stabilizes the markets, helps giant corporations were
down with that. But you can't simply help the little
guy because that little guy is just a lazy loser.
(14:35):
Do we need to change the way we think and
not think in a way of the guy who didn't
get a chance to go to college and became a
plumber and redefine this person chooses to go to college
because that works for them, and this person chooses to
be a plumber because it works for them. But you're
not a plumber by default because you weren't good enough
(14:57):
for college. We're all facing a isis right now because
of the pandemic. Could we use that to drum up
the will to revisit higher education. I consider it my
role in the world to be first and foremost relentlessly practical.
Right I'm trying to help people win and succeed in
(15:19):
the world as it exists. And I've got a whole
bunch of colleagues on the op ed page who are
working on the whole world as it should be a
thing for the seventy eight percent of you know, any
given listeners spare time where they're trying to figure out
how two navigate the world as it exists. I am
here for them, But for now, we're in the middle
(15:40):
of a pandemic and you can't get your parents a vaccine.
Your credit score got all screwed up because they didn't
figure out how to put your student loan pause on correctly.
And that's what I am here for for that, in particular,
the system burners, you know, I'm happy to talk to
them all day long, but we also have to navigate
the world as it exists. Then, I guess my only
(16:01):
hope is people can try to stay true to themselves
and their priorities and their kids and don't let the
fear of missing out or brands or society influence you,
because they're not going to pay your tuition and they're
not going to help your kids pursue what they actually
want to do with their lives. I think that's right.
(16:21):
And you know, one interesting question that fell out of
my research is how do you be a principled shopper
for residential undergraduate higher education? Right, there are plenty of
larger universities that employ a large number of adjunct teachers,
(16:42):
and many of those instructors are living at kind of
near poverty level in terms of the wages they're making,
or they have miserable lives. Right. Then there are a
whole host of supposedly really good schools that you have
heard of, many of which are well endowed, where the
percentage of undergraduates who receive pell grants, which is a
(17:03):
proxy for being lower income, is abysmally low. Right, so
there is no commitment to equity at these places. We
can ask better questions as part of this process that
will put these schools on notice, um that these are
things that we care about, and I endorse that. Yeah,
I mean, these really well endowed schools are very very
(17:24):
proud to take students from some of the most vulnerable
communities and potentially give them sizeable scholarship money. But then
when they get there and maybe room and board is
covered along with tuition, what about everything else? Financial insecurity
and food insecurity is a huge issue that's actually sending
a lot of kids home from school. Yes, um, these
(17:47):
are not rhetorical questions, and there are definitely practitioners that
are well aware of it. Right at the more elite institutions,
there is at many of them a level of granularity
to the understanding of the issues that you call out
what is supposed to happen to And for the students
from California or Texas who come up to the Northeast
on a full ride but they don't have snow boots,
(18:09):
and then you know, a tier or two down in
terms of levels of selectivity. You have people like Professor
Sarah Goldrick Grab at Temple University, who has done a
ton of work on food insecurity, and in the most
recent relief pill of the past, some of her research
was brought to bear on the question of under what
circumstances can undergraduates qualify for food stamps, And through the
(18:33):
work of her and people like her, some of those
rules have changed to allow undergraduates a bit more generosity
and flexibility. So this is happening around the margins. But
we're not asking enough of those questions, and we're not
asking them loudly enough. Do you believe the American dream
is still alive, and it's higher education the best vehicle
(18:56):
to use to pursue it. I don't want to define
the American dream for anybody, but the way that I
have seen it define most often is am I going
to do better than my parents did? Which then leads
to a natural question define better? Right? Is it income?
Is it inflation adjusted income? Is it relative prosperity? In
(19:17):
other words, how am I doing compared to the people
around me? Is it a world that is cleaner or
dirtier in terms of the air? Right? I mean, there
are lots of different ways to define that, but if
you believe in the simplest definition, which is just income,
um uh. You know, the rash Chetti group at Harvard
has the best, has the best data on this, and
(19:40):
they think that it's a fifty fifty coin flip, And
that to me is depressing a right. America used to
be better than that, and I think it can be
better uh in the future. And I will say what
depresses me most? I think for so many of us,
my number one goal is to try to deliver a
(20:01):
world to my kids that's better than the one I got.
I think that's sort of the unspoken contract we all
think we're entering into and I can say right now,
I'm not so sure about that. However, every day we
can work on changing that. It's true, and in twelve
months we'll all have shots in our arms and hopefully
it'll feel differently. I sure hope so, Ron, thank you
(20:23):
so much for joining me today. Congratulations on the book.
I hope everyone reads it gives it to a friend.
This is really complicated stuff, and I so appreciate all
of your work. Thank you so much for having me. H.
(20:46):
So much of what we do is shaped by what
we think we're supposed to do with our lives, by
what our parents are, teachers are friends. It's like society
has deemed this is the right path and this is
the wrong path. Is that actually serving us? When it
comes to higher education, which takes an enormous amount of money,
an enormous amount of time, it might not put us
(21:06):
or our kids on the path to success on modern rules.
You know, we like to get straight to the point,
and Ron certainly left me with a lot to think
about what is success? If we took the norm or
the standard away, could we actually create an education system
that works better for more people, that could give more
young people a chance to succeed at things they love.
(21:29):
Maybe redefine how we characterize success, because I'm pretty sure
success and happiness are closely aligned, but I know an
awful lot of people on paper would be considered successful
and they're quite the opposite of happiness. I'm Stephanie Rule,
and you're listening to Modern Rules, a podcast from NBC Think,
(21:52):
MSNBC and I Heart Radio. This podcast is hosted by Me,
Stephanie Rule, Mike beet In, Katrina Norvell, our executive producers.
Meredith Bennett Smith is Senior editor for NBC Think and
our editorial lead. The podcast is engineered and edited by
Josh Fisher. Additional production support provided by Charles Herman, Rachel Rosenbaum,
(22:13):
and Lauren Wynn, and special thanks to Katherine kim Are,
Global Head of Digital News right here at NBC News
and MSNBC. For more thought provoking analysis, visit NBC news
dot com slash Thing
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