SIO521: The Daily Is Sane-Washing Trump's War on Higher Ed

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:13 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 521. I'm Thomas Smith. Let's talk about the Trump administration's policy, in quotes, if you can call it that, around student loans and education more broadly. There was an episode of The Daily a while back, a couple weeks back now, where they talked about his plan to shake up student loans and also shake up higher education by threatening to withhold student loans from programs that didn't perform as well. And they define that by people getting careers that pay a certain amount or at least pay as much as tuition. So it's a lot of stuff that my guest today is going to argue is sane washing of something that's really not sane and also really doesn't account for how we got here. It turns out I have a personal friend, David O 'Brien, who is an expert in this field. He works works in higher education policy for the state of California. He'll explain what he does. I don't totally understand exactly what he does. Don't tell him that. But that's just when you work for the state, you know, there's the titles get, you know, deputy vice chancellor, president, something. But either way, he knows what he's talking about. And I'm excited to learn more about how not only Trump, but the daily is full of crap. We'll take a quick break and then get right on over to it. Hey, support the show, patreon.com/seriouspod. If you'd like to hear more conversations like these and avoid the horribly annoying ads that I think are getting worse. After this, we'll get to it.

0:01:50 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:01:50 Thomas: David, I don't know how the hell to introduce you. How are you doing and who are you and what are you?

0:01:57 David: I'm doing all right, sir. You can certainly introduce me as your friend David if you want, but for purposes of today's podcast, I suppose I am David O 'Brien. I am a part -time higher education policy scholar, so I have a master's degree in higher education policy. I've written about it for a couple of peer-reviewed journals and publications. And I guess in particular, and this is super wonky, Thomas, and I don't want to scare off if your listener is too early. My specialty is sort of what's called critical policy analysis. And I promise you, if you stick with me, give me a little patience, I'll break that down in a way that it makes sense to you and your listeners and why we should all be doing a little bit more.

0:02:34 Thomas: You're listening to the nerdiest audience in the world. There's like five people in the audience who know more than you about whatever this is.

0:02:38 David: Okay, good. Right.

0:02:42 Thomas: Like that's usually not me, but like other people.

0:02:46 David: Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Yeah. But so in my day job, I work for, I'm a higher education advocate. I'm not quite a lobbyist because I technically work for the state of California as a government employee, but I work for a system office overseeing the largest system of higher education in the United States, the California Community Colleges system.

0:03:05 Thomas: Now, is that separate from like just government-wise, separate from from, like, the UC system, and it's bigger than that?

0:03:11 David: It is separate. Yeah.

0:03:12 Thomas: Oh, shit,

0:03:12 David: Volume of students is different, right? So we have three systems in California, University of California, the Cal State University or CSU, and the community colleges. Yeah, well, I'll be mentioning them.

0:03:20 Thomas: I forgot about that one. Wow, yeah, that's a lot. Why do we have so many? Why are they different? What the hell?

0:03:25 David: Why do we have so many? Oh, man, that is a long story and a much longer story. Yeah, sorry for a different show. It goes back quite a long time, though, by the way. So my employer, the California Community Colleges, we serve 2 .2 million students at 115 community colleges up and down the state, basically every corner of the state. If it's got the name City College in it, e .g. Sacramento City College, Fresno City College. Los Angeles City College is one of our public community colleges. But I'm here today more just to speak a little bit about higher education more generally and why I think it matters in this Trumpy moment of public life. Life in this moment with the media that we have and the questions that we're asking about the people in charge who are, in my personal judgment and opinion, probably the most sort of bad faith group of grifters and con men that we've ever had in this country.

0:03:28 Thomas: Different show, okay, sure. Yeah. Oh,

0:04:18 David: I guess I wasn't alive for the robber barons era, but this is really important stuff. And something popped up recently to me that I thought was really worth discussing in this context.

0:04:28 Thomas: Yeah. You mentioned The Daily, which I am always a fan of hearing about why they're covering something wrong. It's so weird. It's such a love -hate relationship. Nah, it's more like tolerate -hATE relationship. There's no love, really, at all for me. But it's also it is really important journalism, especially now that there is no Washington Post. So it's like there's like one paper that's even close to. And I know there's some others, but like it is the paper of record. I still listen to it. It's still important. And every time I complain about people, I quit, just quit listening. I don't think you can just do that. Like, I also think it is important for people to critique it, to have any chance of, you know, maybe try and influence. And they are responsive to if you send them a bunch of emails, if you cancel your subscriptions, it can do something. But there was this episode recently, July 1st episode, why Americans will get less help paying for college. And you mentioned that there's possibly some inaccurate coverage involved. And I love that because this is perfect. Normally, I'm the one yelling about how inaccurate something is when

0:05:33 Thomas: It happens to hit something. Not that I know, you know, this is one out of, you know, 20 when it hits something that I care about. But this one I listened to, I have no reason as a lay person or as someone not involved in this industry at all or whatever you want to call it. Nothing like hit my obvious BS detector, really.

0:05:51 Thomas: So I think it's going to be really fascinating. I'm curious to hear what they might've been getting right or wrong. Do you want us to start by, well, it's up to you, but do you want me to start? Do you kind of summarize kind of what it is or how do you think you should go?

0:06:01 David: Yeah, yeah. So, and I'll say that I have kind of the same tolerate slash respect slash occasionally very annoyed with relationship with the New York Times that you and many others probably have. I think that for the most part, they provide solid, accurate news coverage. Coverage I think they have some opinion columnists and others associated with them who are very valuable I would not be sane through this second Trump administration if not for my man Jamel Bowie who is without a doubt me too right because he does these great YouTube videos he's one of the best political commentators in America if you ask me oh

0:06:28 Thomas: Oh yeah. I always forget that he works there. It's the best. Yeah.

0:06:36 Thomas: Yeah. He's my favorite. I don't even know if we've talked about this, but he's been my favorite since 2015 or so. And that's funny because he used to be with I think he was with the Washington.

0:06:41 David: We've never talked about that we can certainly Bowie out uh as it were or Bowie down he was with somebody else

0:06:48 Thomas: He was with a different paper before. It might have been the Washington Post, actually. But anyway, point is, we're on the same page there. I know we have a lot of your expertise to get through, so we should get to it.

0:06:57 David: Yeah so the July July 1st episode of The Daily discusses the Trump's administration's recently enacted regulations concerning what they call the value of a college degree. And specifically, what went into effect this July 1, just a couple of days ago, are some rules by the U .S. Department of Education, which, of course, this administration still insists they're trying to get rid of, even though, paradoxically, the department is somehow more active at enacting new rules and regulations than they've ever been. But that's neither here nor there. There's these new rules that are going into effect under a framework called financial value transparency and gainful employment. And that's a really wonky sort of government bureaucraties way of saying that starting this July 1st, and this will be first enforced, I think about a year from now, all colleges and universities in the United States that get federal funds for financial aid. So that's the Pell Grant, That's federal student loans. That's programs like federal work -study programs. That is the overwhelming majority of public and private colleges and universities in the United States, including all the Ivy Leagues, all the way down to the flagship systems like UC, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the state -level universities like Cal State, the community colleges, as well as, of course, our friends, and I say friends sarcastically, in the for -profit college sector, which

0:08:24 David: Do still exist and which have some pretty strong allies, I'll say, in there. Administration. But in plain English, these new rules require that colleges and universities are going to have to demonstrate through what's called an earnings test that the average salary of someone who graduates in a given program, so let's say you graduate in the 2026 cohort from the psychology bachelor's program at Sac State, for instance, they're going to be paid a certain amount of to demonstrate that the averaged graduate of each given program is earning more a certain period of time after graduation. I believe it said four years after graduation, but I could be wrong about that. But they have to demonstrate that they're earning more than they would be if they hadn't gone at all and all they had was a high school diploma. Or for graduate programs like master's level programs, they're going to have to illustrate to those graduates are earning more than they Would have if they only had a bachelor's degree and had never enrolled in the master's program. Programs that fail this metric in a certain period of time, meaning students are earning less than the average high school graduate, will be at least temporarily, potentially on an ongoing basis, ineligible to receive federal student loans for students in that program. They'll be labeled by the federal government as a low -earning college program. So it's like a government list that's going to tell students, hey, don't go here. You'll earn less than this program.

0:09:43 Thomas: Think they're going to shout obsolete in the big old shadowy courtroom.

0:09:47 David: And in certain cases, those programs could also lose their access to the federal Pell Grant, which is the number one form of grant aid. So not a loan that has to be paid back, but just a grant directly to the student that's money to use on their college education. In certain cases, those programs could lose access to the federal Pell Grant as well. This would be existential for the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in the United States, public or private, losing that access. I mean, those funds sustain a significant percentage of the college student population. And to your point, Thomas, the main argument in favor of these new changes, these new rules, goes something like, well, why should taxpayers be forced to subsidize programs that leave students worse off than if they hadn't gone?

0:10:29 Thomas: Right there. I already am like, are we subsidizing? I thought we made money on this. It depends on what it is, I guess.

0:10:35 David: Yes, we do make money on student loans. It depends on, yeah, exactly, it depends on what it is. In the form of student loans, of course, students do pay interest on those. The federal subsidized student loans—the word subsidized in that program refers to the fact that the loans don't accrue interest until after the student graduates.

0:10:51 Thomas: But it's still like they still eventually, I have to imagine, based on having paid off some student loans, they still are going to net the government more than they started Right. If you pay it off.

0:11:01 David: In most cases, yes. Yeah, for students who graduate, for sure, because the overwhelming majority of college degrees in this country are linked to higher earnings. The Department of Education themselves admits that as of the most recent data they have, about 96 % of programs in the United States would pass this metric. Trick. So you're only talking about four, maybe 5 % of college programs in the US where the student is earning less coming out than they were going in. Those tend to be the programs where you see students resorting to default, where you See, you know, a need for programs like some of the Biden era student loan forgiveness, which has mostly been struck down by the courts or overturned by the Trump administration by now. But for the majority of students, especially those who don't go to, again, some of these predatory for -profit colleges, the so -called degree mills, they're going to be able to pay those back. And yes, there will be some net return to the federal government. There's also a broader net return, I would say, in the form of the economic activity those students generate.

0:12:00 Thomas: Thought you were going to talk about like knowledge and being better citizens. Yeah.

0:12:03 David: Yes, there is that too. There is that, too. I think it's pretty important for a democratic society. Probably most people agree with me. But for instance, just going back to the economic return on investment, you know, my system, the community colleges, we've commissioned research that shows the average student earns something like $11 ,000 more per year after they went to community college and graduated with some sort of degree, either like a bachelor's from a university or an associate's from one of our colleges than they would have had if they'd never gone to begin with. And that comes back to the public in the form of increased tax revenues, growth in GDP, and so on. You can say this, there was just some research about the University of California, which affirmed the same thing for them. So these are positive returns for the most part to the public, to society, to taxpayers. It's still, I think, a reasonable enough argument on its face. Like you said, you listened to the episode. Why should we subsidize, you know, a student who's going to go into a program where they're going to earn less, they're going to maybe default on those student loans. Now, let me just start off by saying one major caveat to this is that this is so often applied to fields like higher education. Many of the people who make this argument don't point to things like the massive subsidies we give to big agriculture, to big oil. How many times have the airlines come to us and said, oh my gosh, we're going to go under, we've

0:13:27 David: Bailed out airlines with taxpayer dollars.

0:13:27 Thomas: If we're giving money to Elon Musk in any form that ruins the argument for me. There's no other. Then what do we care about money for? It doesn't matter. Not to mention bombing Iran for no apparent reason.

0:13:41 David: Right, yeah, not to to mention your tax dollars paying for the bombing of Iranian school children or what's going on in Gaza or any sort of thing, right? But if we want to be finicky and picky about tax dollars, okay. I would also point out an interesting fact that maybe a lot of people haven't heard is that last year in California, our state budget provided a one-time subsidy to a private college in San Francisco, California College of the Arts. This was a historic institution that had been open in San Francisco for over 100 years. It was a very well-respected university in terms of fine arts education and things of that nature, but it was going through some major financial struggles, as just about anybody trying to get by in San Fransisco might be. Last year, the governor and the legislature allocated California College of the Arts a $20 million one -time subsidy out of the state budget to try to keep them afloat and operating long-term. About six months ago, January of this year, California College of the Arts announced they were closing anyway.

0:14:43 David: They couldn't make that work. So there's certainly precedent. You know, I mean, Republicans love to use to talk about what was that solar company,

0:14:51 Thomas: Oh yeah Solyndra and I think that

0:14:51 David: Solyndra, that Obama's government invested in, right?

0:14:53 Thomas: I remember that ended up actually being fine for like it was overblown. Yeah.

0:14:56 David: Right. Yeah. There was some example of it where they were looking at the data too early or something, right?

0:15:00 Thomas: Or maybe it was that that same program produced a bunch of other stuff. Like it was maybe that was something like that, where it's like you're not going to win every time.

0:15:04 David: It did. Yeah, right.

0:15:07 Thomas: But like it overcame the losses.

0:15:10 David: Yeah, look, the federal government has a lot of money for at least what, since the World War II era, it's been a priority. The federal government to sort of try to fund economic experiments that may or may not work. The internet is a pretty big example of one, right? The original technology that led to what we now call the World Wide Web was developed as this military experiment called ARPANET. So the federal governor has this long history of subsidizing things that may not end up working out or working out in the immediate term. And this one is getting a lot of scrutiny right now, student loan payments to individual students, right. So let me get back to the podcast. In this episode of The Daily, going over this new rule, its implications for colleges and universities and students. The Times reporter Ron Lieber, who I have to just note, this is not a knock on him, but his beat is personal finance reporting, not higher education. Maybe they could have brought in a higher education reporter or an education reporter to talk about this on the podcast, but he's talking about this from a personal finance perspective, which is actually in its own way kind of a microcosm of what I think is part of the problem here.

0:16:15 David: He gets the basic facts of the current situation, right? I mean, he doesn't blatantly misstate anything or say something that's totally false, like the 2020 election was rigged or anything. The host, you know, Rachel Abrams, thankfully I have to say not Michael Barbaro, because just on a personal note, cannot stand the man's voice. Yeah, it's just a voice thing for me. Rachel Abram seems fine as a host. So she asks Ron Lieber, the reporter, to talk about this new rule from the the perspective of student loan debt, most of your listeners, most of the general public is likely familiar with the very, very high level sort of facts around it, which is that total student loan debt held in the United States has really surged in the last several decades, last couple of decades. At some point in the Obama administration, it actually surpassed total credit card debt. Yes, they do. Yeah. Which admittedly, I find as alarming as anyone, right? It's somewhere in the neighborhood of of one and a half to $2 trillion worth of debt right now. And it's often seen, I think accurately as a drag on the economy and really a hindrance to folks from younger generations, millennials and Gen Z to doing things like buying a home, starting a family, starting your business, et cetera. A lot of them are held back by student loans and working to pay them off. The reporter Ron Lieber provides this abbreviated history of the growth of student loan debt in the U S that this is where I think it's a very problematic, but all too common framing that says a lot about society and the media. So he basically says that starting in about 1980, the federal government realized that some students attending college were coming up a little bit short on their final bill, right? A little bit short on financing. They were piecing together the

0:16:15 Thomas: Hate that guy. Can't stand it. I don't like anything about him. Yeah. Right.

0:17:02 Thomas: They play that clip of Obama saying that. Yeah, sure.

0:17:55 Thomas: Yeah. I remember him saying like the last couple thousand dollars or something was.

0:17:59 David: Last couple thousand. Yeah. You know, they got scholarships. Maybe their parents are paying a little Bit. Maybe this is back in that golden I can't tell you how many times I hear this, Thomas, the students flipping burgers to work their way through college. People love to latch onto that example. When you talk about, you know, we need to make college more affordable in 2026, they'll go, well, I flipped burgers back in 1982. What's the problem, right? Or I should say some people do. Do. But this is about when he says that the federal government started to promote the idea of these federally subsidized student loans. The government would guarantee the loan. The student would take it out, maybe with some backing from their parents. And in particular, in 1980, they also added the option for parents to take out loans under their own name and credit to support their child in college. That's called the Parent PLUS loan. This was intended originally to sort bridge the gap in his reporting to basically say, okay, that last little bit that you can't afford, you can take out as a loan and then pay off at a government subsidized interest rate over a period of time. He then makes this big jump all the way forward to the late, I guess, late 2000s is what we'll call it. I'm not sure if that applies to the decade or century of the 2000s, but whenever Whenever Barack Obama took office, 08, 09, 2010, he makes this jump forward and points out again, correctly, accurately, that one of the things President Obama did early in his term was he expanded federal student loan eligibility. He lowered interest rates and the government took some steps to sort of streamline the process by, among other things, reducing the role that private lenders, the banks and financial services companies play and actually having the federal government directly guarantee the loan debt.

0:19:43 David: These were pretty big changes that in their own way expanded access to availability of an incentive to pursue student loans. And then, of course, Obama took office, as we all know, at the very beginning of the Great Recession, which caused this massive spike in unemployment, this massive loss of wealth. I guess I should characterize it not as a loss of health, but as a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class, to the very wealthy, to the banks, to the real estate companies and so forth that repossessed all the homes. But what happens during recessions, nearly always, this is very well documented going back, going back several generations, is that typically a lot of people go to college. The demand for higher education increases when unemployment increases and the economy goes into recession.

0:20:34 Thomas: It's interesting you'd almost think it'd be the

0:20:36 David: You would, right? But this is some combination of folks who may be high school graduates that never really bothered with college in the first place. Now they're realizing that they've lost a job. They need to go get some sort of degree or like a certificate at their local community college or technical school to get a higher paying job. It's also older folks who go back to college to learn some new skills, right? There's some new industry that's emerging and they want to have a credential or certificate on their resume to show that they're skilled in that. And it's a lot of folks who I think this episode focuses on probably maybe more than is necessary, who already have a bachelor's degree, but go back to college to pursue grad school. And all of these, you know, have the same exact reason in common, which is that these are people attempting to increase their incomes, right? Increase their economic opportunities by learning new skills, by getting a new degree that they can put on their resume to make themselves more employable. So in this reporter's telling, and some of this I'm inferring or sort of threading together from things he said. This isn't all direct quotes, but the episode is there to clip or for people to listen to. In this reporter's telling, the federal government's expansion of student loan eligibility and easing of access, combined with this increased demand for higher education caused by the Great Recession, led to this spike in student loan debt, in particular when colleges started to see that there was a revenue stream available to them. So he talks, for instance, about how many colleges have added master's degrees

0:22:06 David: Over the past 20 or so years. You remember him saying there's something like 14 ,000 new master's degree programs. He does quote a very well -respected higher education scholar, Robert Kelchin, who I've met and worked with and who, name dropper, the Robert Kelchin, Seton Hall University. Actually, he may be somewhere else now, maybe at Vanderbilt. But, you know, he quotes this whole idea that colleges started adding these master's degrees in and around and after the Great Recession because they saw there was a stream of federal revenue they could get from federally guaranteed student loans. And essentially what they do is they play some news clips. You remember the news clips of universities announcing new master's degree. There's one that's like a master's in medical cannabis science. What I get from that, and everybody can interpret this on their own, is that they're trying to make those degrees seem kind of frivolous and unnecessary.

0:22:06 Thomas: Opposite kelchin yeah

0:23:01 David: I can certainly think of examples why somebody would need some sort of formal education in medical cannabis or things related to the science of cannabis, given that it's now legally available throughout the United States in a way that it wasn't 20 years ago. But yeah, exactly. Talk about a growing industry, right? But the implication is that there's no market demand for these degrees, right, and that they're not really necessary.

0:23:12 Thomas: Yeah plus it's not is that not making money yeah yeah but um yeah they might as well have done Done the underwater basket weaving stupid thing that you hear forever.

0:23:29 David: Underwater basket weaving. You hear that all the time, right. And this is all part and parcel of the podcast host and guest, along with the Trump administration, kind of pushing this narrative that universities started bilking and taking advantage of these these poor students who are just trying to enhance their earning potential by pursuing a new degree. And the colleges went and convinced those students rightly or wrongly that their income would go up if they get this new master's degree. And don't worry, by the way, there's federal loans available for you. They're now much easier to get. Just sign on the dotted line and take out this massive federal loan.

0:24:03 Thomas: Now, that's interesting right away as you lay that out. First off, I do want to say just again, as a person who doesn't know anything about this, it does feel like higher education, absurdly expensive. I don't know why it costs so much. Maybe it's another topic for another show, but it's relevant to this, I guess. So, yeah, it feels like, OK, it costs a lot. So there might be something there. It also feels like colleges, universities, they do seem to get like tuition for UOP where I went to school. It might be double what it was when I went there.

0:24:20 David: Actually, we'll talk about that.

0:24:34 Thomas: And I'm getting old, but I'm not that old.

0:24:34 David: Yeah, right.

0:24:37 Thomas: It wasn't the 70s. So there is a feeling in which intuitively you're like something could be going on. At the same time, when you lay it out like that, part of me is like, well, for one, if they really were just inventing useless majors and degrees, like wouldn't people have just been like, Well, I'm not going to get that one. Like, wouldn't the thing to do be how about we get more people in the degrees that are good that we already have? You know, couldn't they just expand? So there must be demand or a reason that they're doing that.

0:25:05 David: Absolutely. Right. And And to your last point in particular, I mean, this idea that students don't have any agency, that they're just being sort of taken advantage of here by these unscrupulous universities. You know, again, you're talking about students with bachelor's degrees. Obviously, there are people, heck, there were people in the Trump administration who have degrees higher than bachelor's degree. So not every bachelor's grade makes you a genius. But these are, for the most part, adults who have some level of education, who I'd like do you think could have the benefit of the doubt of maybe having some agency and responsibility over their own decisions? I tend to think that this narrative infantilizes them to a certain extent. If somehow, and I guess you can't really go to college when you're like 13, but if somehow these were like kids going to college who had no idea what personal finance or loans was, but I do sort of think that there's this tendency to sort of patronize the students a little bit. It. A lot of them know what they're doing.

0:26:00 Thomas: Yeah, I was making a slightly different point, not to disagree per se, but I I'm willing to go with like maybe these universities could be predatory in some way. My point was more the fact that like, I do think students would have made that rational decision widely is a reason that I doubt the premise is I doubt that it was just some money making thing because I doubt they would fall for that.

0:26:23 David: That's fair. Yeah.

0:26:23 Thomas: I think I'm making a slightly different point, which is that's why I sort of doubt what he's saying.

0:26:27 David: I think your point is fair as well and very well taken. And I think you're onto something there, but this is the premise of this entire podcast. Essentially. It's never challenged. An alternative narrative is never offered. Hopefully we're doing that a little bit here with this conversation, but nearly all of the facts stated so far, at least are accurate up to this point of the podcast. Anyway, I will talk about one that I think is pretty inaccurate and outdated. But all of this, in my opinion, is fair game for a conversation about the value of a higher education, the role of taxpayers in subsidizing higher education and this overarching question that societies does seem to be asking a lot these days, which is, is college worth it? The problem that I see with the dailies assessment here and with so much of the national conversation around this topic is to the point you raised about tuition going up, it leaves out this really, really critical context about how we got to this moment. So much that I actually think it requires a complete and utter reframing of how we view higher education and its role.

0:27:46 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:27:46 David: So let me start here with why I think this narrative is so wrong and in a way dangerous. And most people listening to this can probably relate to this because everybody almost certainly has a relative, maybe a parent or an aunt or an uncle, or maybe folks Folks are themselves old enough to be able to say that they attended some sort of well -regarded, probably top notch public university back in the day, which tends to mean like 60s, 70s, 80s for basically free or for very little cost. Right.

0:28:17 David: As I'm narrating this, I can hear the voices of friends and family members of mine saying, well, I went to UC Davis back in the 70s. All I had to pay was a couple hundred bucks for a parking pass and some textbooks. Right. And the thing is, those stories you all hear, they're basically true. I was astonished that this reporter never once addressed the question of why there was this sudden demand for extra revenue coming from the government and the former student loans to pay for college right around the end of the 1970s. The best analogy I could think of, and I'm sure you can think of a better one, was like if a parent decided cold turkey to stop buying any snacks whatsoever for their kids. And then a week later, they were just like, why are my kids always angry at me and demanding for snacks all the time?

0:28:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:01 David: What's going on with that? I'll lay it out very clearly. Starting in the 1960s and then accelerating in the 1970s, higher education in the United States, in California, New York, and a bunch of other places. And I mentioned the states, by the way, because higher education tends to be a very state function at the state level. There is federal support in the form of grants and loans, but there's no like University of America, like there's a University of California or a University Of Florida. Trump University doesn't count, unfortunately. But starting 60s, 70s, as America politically began to turn to the right, higher education was subject to this wave of austerity measures. In simpler language, budget cuts. California, we had our two public university systems, University of California and the Cal State. They were both completely tuition-free to state residents for most of their first several decades. We had, in 1960, a group of higher education leaders get together and enact this big sort of framework called the Master Plan for Higher Education in California that was very influential, that laid out kind of all the functions of the universities and the community colleges, what type of students they would go to, what sort of degrees they would specialize in. It was a planning document, right? But it was very influential, and 20 or more other states over the course of the 60s adopted similar master plans for their higher education systems. And one of the core elements of our master plan, I have it open right here. It's a 246 -page document. People don't need to read it. But right here on page 14, it supports keeping the principle that the long -established principle, quote, that state colleges and the University of California shall be tuition -free to all residents of the state.

0:30:44 David: This was 1960. As of right now, I looked it up. Undergraduate resident tuition at the UC is just over $15 ,000 per year. And at Cal State, it's a little under $7 ,000, depending on campus. That's quite a jump from $0.

0:31:00 Thomas: That's not free.

0:31:00 David: I mean, right? I feel like if you put that into a calculator, you'd get some error. Like, what percent increase is that? Well, well, infinity, I think, right?

0:31:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:10 David: What happened? Well, if I could summarize in two words for you, it's going to be something that I think Ronald Reagan, exactly. Yeah, you got it. Yeah. So there's a great YouTube clip of Reagan campaigning in 1966, claiming that, I'll do my Reagan for you here. A small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought shame on a great university. So Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966. And one of the the main elements of his platform was kind of pushing back on all these protest scenes that had broken out at the state's universities and colleges, right? Started with the famous free speech movement at UC Berkeley. That sort of morphed into an anti-war protest movement, which began to incorporate elements of feminist protest, other forms of social justice protest, racial justice, eventually the LGBTQ plus rights movement sort of merged into that, right. And yeah, yeah, some of these campus protesters could get a little radical. They could do a little kind of light vandalism, occupying administration buildings, things like that.

0:31:14 Thomas: Ronald Reagan. Yeah. The culture wars happen. So the same shit we've dealt with for at least, well, forever, but in my knowledge and coverage, at least 15, 16 years.

0:32:23 David: It's exactly the culture wars, Thomas. And I mean, in this case, and in a lot of cases, what happened is that the culture war sort of merged or made convenient bedfellows, I guess, with this kind of economic right wing of folks who wanted to strip down the New Deal, strip down The Great society and all that, have the free market reign. You know, in academia, they spend a lot of time studying the phenomenon that they call neoliberalism. So Reagan runs for governor in 1966, talks about the spirit of permissiveness that has been encouraged by the faculty on the universities. He claimed that these universities were overrun with radical Marxists indoctrinating the youth and that there were, at one point, this was interesting, his advisors kind of shut him him down, in part because, sadly, there was no evidence for this. At one point, he claimed that the universities had these rampant drug -fueled orgies going on.

0:33:15 David: Yeah, I know. I was disappointed to learn that that wasn't true, and also that that was a part of my college experience, but Reagan was able to at least claim it was for purposes of campaigning. This was red meat to his base, to kind of white, middle -class suburbanites, many of whom were upset, it should it should be noted that their own children, who they might have viewed as like clean -cut, good, wholesome American kids, couldn't get into a UC, but they were making space for these long -haired radicals and hippies. That was the anxiety that Reagan played upon in his campaign. It, to this day, is one of the things that sometimes fuels resentment of higher ed. But not long after taking office, Governor Reagan more or less went to war with the the University of California. So he pressured the UC Board of Regents, which the governor is a part of. He pressured them to fire the longtime system president, Clark Kerr, the architect of the master plan and easily one of the most respected and influential leaders in the history of American higher education. But to Reagan, he was, you know, just another big government liberal. So he had to go. He made sure to be on camera getting into these loud shouting matches with students and professors he would confront them always with a camera present sort of has echoes of remember kind of ron desantis when he was just emerging on the scene he loved to get like videos of him like harassing students for protesting or wearing masks or

0:33:14 Thomas: I missed it. Yeah, yeah.

0:34:40 David: Whatever reagan did kind of the same yeah

0:34:41 Thomas: Was it like Charlie Kirk -esque kind of?

0:34:44 David: A little bit yeah yeah reagan felt that it bolstered his image with his base again the the middle class, kind of silent majority, white suburbanites, if he could be on video shouting at some long -haired, bearded professor telling him that he's failing the youth of our state, you know? This was around the time that Reagan also proposed, for the first time ever, that UC impose tuition on California residents. And also for the Cal State system, by the way. And it's worth noting that I've also studied a lot about the student protest movements of the 1960s. They were everywhere. It's kind of a classic case of academic classism to sort of situate them just as happening at elite public institutions like Berkeley and UCLA. San Francisco State was a hotbed of student activism and protest. So were many of our community colleges, including many in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. So that is worth noting. But having capitalized. Right.

0:35:40 Thomas: It's also so dumb. Like where else would it happen? Like, are people going to stage their little protest at work? No one gives a shit. And they're worried about getting fired. Like, it's the same reason I've been almost meaning to do an episode on this. There's the New York Times op ed about how the Democratic socialists, like they don't have any actual workers.

0:35:58 Thomas: You know, it'S all well off white. And it'S like, well, for one, not quite true. But also for two, it might be a little bit true. But that's who has the resources and the privilege to be able to like have the time to advocate for stuff. I can't think of who would fit that more than probably disproportionately well off relative to the entire population.

0:36:17 Thomas: Kids who are going to college. Yeah. And who are learning, you know, meeting diverse groups of people like obviously that's going to be true.

0:36:18 David: College students. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:36:26 Thomas: It's not it's not going to Be any sort of like indoctrination like it's just would be naturally where any of that stuff would be.

0:36:32 David: And by the way, many of those same people who criticize the DSA also look down on people like AOC for having been a bartender before entering Congress. So pick your lane, right? But you're absolutely right. Right. Yeah. College is kind of a natural place to situate protests. It's where young people are first starting to learn about what's going on in the world and some of the reasoning behind what's going on. And learning how to express their own voice. They can vote, right? They're at the age where they can vote. During the 60s, they were at the edge where they could be drafted into this really unjust and dangerous and unnecessary war where thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese people died for seemingly no reason. So of course it's a natural place.

0:37:13 Thomas: Yeah, I think to be against that, you'd have to be brainwashed.

0:37:17 David: Exactly, right? Yeah, yeah, of course.

0:37:17 Thomas: I think you'd be brainwished. There's no way. No rational person could be against a pointless word.

0:37:22 David: Domino theory, baby. So Reagan was able by about 1970 to muscle through tuition. So it was about 10 years that the no tuition pledge at the universities lasted. And the amounts were modest. If you adjust for inflation, it was between about $1 ,700 and $2 ,400 a year in modern day dollars. But the point being that that broke the dam, that broke this seal for for the first time ever, right? The state officially abandoned its commitment to providing public higher education tuition -free. Reagan initially claimed that this was purely for budgetary reasons. He'd inherited this deficit from his predecessor. They needed to close some holes in the state budget. They didn't have enough revenue. He did actually raise taxes. Ronald Reagan, Ronald Wilson Reagan, enacted the largest tax increase in the history of the state of California when he was governor, but not enough to fully fund the universities.

0:38:10 Thomas: What a liar. I'm not going to vote for him.

0:38:12 David: Exactly, Exactly. You shouldn't. He said that they needed to plug this hole and charge tuition. It was going to bring in more revenues to the state to ask students to bear some of the costs of their higher education. Seems perfectly reasonable. Again, it's worth noting, though, there were probably other motives here. Shock, right? Shock emoji. He says, in one press conference early on, that the purpose of college was workforce development, not taxpayers subsidizing intellectual curiosity, quote unquote. I don't know. I kind of think that higher education, institutions of higher education should embrace intellectual curiosity.

0:38:46 Thomas: Yeah once again, where else are you doing it?

0:38:49 David: Right. Maybe we're woke Marxist radicals for thinking that intellectual curiosity is a part of college. There were also Reagan administration officials who said privately that they viewed the tuition charges as kind of a moral punishment to the universities for the the radicalism and the protests that they had encouraged.

0:39:03 Thomas: Makes sense to me.

0:39:08 David: Many states followed their example. Another really prominent one was the City University of New York, which has the goofy, horrible acronym CUNY, C -U -N -Y. I hate it in higher ed every time I have to talk about CUNY and SUNY, the State University of New York.

0:39:16 Thomas: I don't know why, but I think of it as CUNY. I have no no reason for that I'm just realizing that that's what I've always thought of it

0:39:24 David: I guess CUNI is probably, maybe that's a little better. Yeah. I'll start saying CUNE and see if I get negative stares from people in New York. Yeah. Well, CUNY had been very proud of its status since the 19th century, actually, as this system of community supported, tuition free and kind of open access colleges, kind of like community colleges in California, except they did have baccalaureate degree programs, four year programs. They were very proud about it was seen as like a source of civic pride for a lot of New Yorkers, kind of like, you know, the way that a lot of like Brits have this kind of nerdy civic pride in the National Health Service or whatever, right? It meant a lot to New Yorkers that we have this system of city universities that will take almost anyone as long as you went to college and are willing to work hard and will not charge you tuition or taxes fund them. But then we had all these oil shocks and economic crises in the 1970s. New York entered a fiscal crisis. There was a very famous case that people may be familiar with where New York City was asking the federal government for a bailout. President Gerald Ford at the time said no. And so the New York Daily News printed their famous headline, Ford to City, Drop Dead.

0:39:31 Thomas: As it feels less weird yeah what

0:40:35 David: That was a great sort of sarcastic way of summarizing this. They did eventually get bailouts from some banks and creditors, but those came at the cost of steep cuts. And so starting in the 1970s, New York City, which had really been kind of a prime example of how a local government could fund all manner of public services and a strong social safety They had to make deep cuts to education, to public safety, to parks, community clinics, all of the above. This austerity agenda that the creditors kind of forced on the city.

0:41:06 Thomas: The what the fuck why like what we're just not charging enough in taxes or

0:41:11 David: Yeah, it was some mismanagement. There may have been some bad financial decisions made. But the important thing is that it was not elected officials or voters who chose these cuts. It was an unelected board of state officials, bean counters, we'll call them, imposed by the state. Just kind of like we had in Michigan the past several years. Flint, Michigan was taken over, if you remember, by this kind of unelected board of State Auditors. It's the dark side of Ben Wyatt and Chris Traeger from Parks and Rec. Every state does actually have some version of like state auditors who go around to cities and sometimes they have to say, we're going to take you over for a little bit of time, readjust your books, balance your books and get you back on track in the black financially. In this case, one of the things that the creditors and the unelected board demanded as a way of raising revenue was that CUNY, we'll call it, drop the no tuition policy and start charging tuition. This was happening in a lot of other states at the time. And it should be noted that this was also occurring at the same time that there was a series of so-called tax revolts around the country, late

0:41:40 Thomas: Something wow sorry where are we now years wise late 70s

0:42:19 David: 70s. So there's a very famous California initiative, Prop 13. This was an initiative funded, it should be noted, by a wealthy investor. It's often portrayed as this like grassroots revolt of the taxpayers. No, Howard Jarvis was a wealthy investor. He was a millionaire businessman in Southern California who funded this initiative that did a couple of things. It slashed the property tax rates in California, as we all know, and it also sharply curtailed state and local governments from raising taxes any further. So if you've ever had one of those taxes on your ballot that says it has to pass by two-thirds, which is 66.7%, and your community comes together and like 65% of people in your community say, yes, we want this tax, we're willing to tax ourselves, but 35% say no, Howard Jarvis is the reason why that initiative failed, because it didn't get two-thirds.

0:43:11 Thomas: I know nothing about this That's crazy. Wow.

0:43:14 David: So that was one of a series of such initiatives around the country that really decimated state and local revenues. You had wealthy elites going to the people and saying, hey, here, you can vote to cut your own taxes.

0:43:28 Thomas: Hey, fellow kids. We all need this.

0:43:30 David: Conveniently leaving out that they were all also voting to cut their own services, because property taxes pay for libraries, police, parks, K-12 schools, which most people know. And then a thing that not everybody realizes, they also fund community colleges in California.

0:43:46 Thomas: Oh, property taxes, too?

0:43:47 David: Yes, they do.

0:43:48 Thomas: Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

0:43:48 David: Yeah, at the local level. Yeah. It's a blended share of state and local revenues. Right in the middle of all this, so I'm kind of adding a third element here, is that the whole world, really large parts of the Western world, moved to the right politically. Britain elected a conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, whose attitude towards social services and the safety net and services provided to poor people can be summed up by the fact that as education secretary, she cut the program that gave free milk to poor British schoolchildren, earning her the nickname Maggie Thatcher, the milk snatcher.

0:44:23 David: So that's a good example of the type of conservatism that was kind of ascendant at the time. Reagan was elected in 1980. You had this sort of wave of neoliberalism, which was this new governing philosophy that said that free markets should operate with minimal regulation and low taxes.

0:44:39 Thomas: Is that neoliberalism? Because that just sounds like assholery. I don't know. That would technically be cutting milk from kids. Is that neoliberal or is it just like Ebenezer Scrooge?

0:44:44 David: Assholery is kind of a more, yeah. If the kid's parents want them to have milk, they should go earn it. They should go get a job and earn the money to buy their kid's milk. That's the neoliberal philosophy.

0:44:54 Thomas: Yeah. So that's insane. Like free market conservatism. Is any liberalism to you? Okay.

0:45:00 David: Exactly. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I don't really know how or why the origin of the term became neoliberalism.

0:45:06 Thomas: Yeah I don't know where you draw the lines on that, I guess.

0:45:07 David: Yeah. But it essentially became the governing philosophy of, I would argue both parties in the United States for a long time. Certainly, Bill Clinton operated according to kind of small government free market principles. Obama, a little less so.

0:45:16 Thomas: Well, yeah, because we had to, to get elected at that time. The Democrats had not won the presidency in a billion years. And so if the populace is all aligned with bad ideas, it's like, well, I guess I have to do some of those bad ideas. Otherwise, no election.

0:45:37 David: That's completely fair. Yeah. Absolutely. To me, neoliberalism is less a set of policies and more a philosophy. To go back to Thatcher for a second, Maggie Thatcher, the milk snatcher, there is a legendary quote of hers. She was asked by a reporter what the impact of some of her policies, her sort of austerity policies, these cuts to social services programs, what these would mean for society. And Thatcher famously interrupted the reporter and said, but there's no such thing as society.

0:46:03 Thomas: What?

0:46:04 David: Society is made up of individuals. Rejecting the notion of such a thing as a public good or a common good.

0:46:11 Thomas: Okay, asshole. What will your policy effect have on a bunch of individuals.

0:46:16 David: Right. Yeah. You could easily reframe that, right?

0:46:16 Thomas: Just rephrase the question then. Sum up the experience of all the individuals and tell me on average what it will be with your stupid policies.

0:46:25 David: There you go. Make it a math question. I would fail that question.

0:46:40 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:46:41 Thomas: All Right. And we actually ended up going so long that there's a part two. Really interesting conversation. I learned a ton and it just was truly too much for one episode. So we're going to pause it here with David. Get part two right away at patreon.com/seriouspod. And also probably, all right, right. I'll give part two to everybody pretty much right away because these episodes are a little overdue. So we'll see you real soon. Thanks for listening.