SIO522: College Is Impossibly Expensive. But It's Not Because of Bogus Degrees.

Transcript

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

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 522. I'm Thomas Smith, and this is a part two. Make sure you caught part one. We're digging more into higher education, why it costs so much, why it's always Ronald Reagan, and we're speaking with David O 'Brien, who I think is the governor or something. What does a chancellor do? Do they chancel? He's a chanc - he chancels. He chancles with the best of them, David O. Brian. We're of course talking more about Trump's higher education student loan policy, which is depriving people of higher education and student loans, I think, is the policy. None of that. My policy on cookies is no cookies, I guess. It is a policy. And we're going to see where that leads us. Hey, if you'd like to support the show, patreon.com/seriouspod. Get the ads, get the goodies. Thanks again so much to everyone who makes this show happen. It's more important every day with how this crazy media environment is. All right, we'll take that quick first break, which those patrons will avoid. Then we'll be on with David O 'Brien.

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0:01:22 David: This is when people started to frame, policymakers, I should say, started to frame acquiring a college education, the choice of student to go to college, as a consumer choice that is purely a choice of private individuals to go and get a degree if you want one that you should probably pay for mostly yourself out of your pocket. Not something that benefits society as a whole, no such thing as society, not something that, you know, benefits communities communities or regions of the state as a whole, just a pure personal choice. Like what type of car are you going to buy next year, Thomas? You're going to go to college or not? It started to be seen as just this market choice. Reagan started to act out policies when he was president to implement that. So going back to this whole thing about 1980, and that's when the federal student loans really ramped up. It is true. And that was the year before Reagan took office that they added the ability for parents to take out the loans on behalf of students, right? In 1980. And once in office, Reagan strenuously resisted any increases to the Pell Grant, which again, is just the free grant that low -income students can get to attend college. It's kind of like a voucher. You can take it to any qualifying college. His administration tried to steer more federal policy towards loans and away from grants. Again, the logic being we'll get that money back at some point, right? In the form of interest, in the form of payments. Why waste our money on just a free grant to a student who's going to take and go to who knows where college, we could loan them, give them a loan, they'll be on the hook for years to pay us back. This is sort of identified though, this 1980 action in this daily episode as either the sole source or the only source the reporter really wanted to talk about of this massive growth in student loans and college costs. There's no discussion, for example, of the fact that when it was first enacted in the 1970s, that Pell Grant covered about 75 % of the average student's total cost to attend college. And today, because it has not kept up with inflation, it only covers about 30 % of

0:03:20 David: A student's Total Cost to attend college. So the Pell Grants lost more than half its value over the years. Meanwhile, when Reagan was president, back in his home state of California, there was an economic recession. There were more cuts to state revenues, which meant more cuts to higher education, UC and CSU, community colleges, is necessitating more tuition increases. Remember the master plan for higher education I mentioned that committed the state to being tuition -free at all the systems?

0:03:46 Thomas: Hmm.

0:03:47 David: By the 1970s, UC and Cal State had tuition. And by the mid -80s, 1985 specifically, even our community colleges were through this like paragon of the egalitarian ideal of free, open higher education for residents and taxpayers. By the mid 1980s, even the community colleges had to start charging tuition. Again, a modest amount, but any amount that's greater than zero tends to be a noticeable and significant amount worth talking. This higher education commitment in the master plan lasted all of 25 years. By 1985, all three public systems were charging tuition. Tuition. You won't hear any of this in the daily on this take on these new Trump administration regulations around student loan eligibility and the so -called financial value of college. You will hear, you know, this reporter, he calls out colleges and universities across the board for becoming overly reliant on revenue from student loans. And I wish he would have separated it out a little more, but it's certainly true that in the growing for -profit sector of colleges, colleges starting around the turn of the century. Certainly many of those predatory for -profit schools, which were, I have to say, a lot of them don't even meet the bar to be called a school. They're little more than just a corporation that offers something they call classes and get students to go deep into loan debt in order to pay them revenue. So that's certainly true. And many of them have been credibly accused of essentially misleading students, withholding certain details about loan repayment from students, et cetera. And I'll say that these are are all, in my opinion, fair enough criticisms to talk about, right? What the reporter and the host of The Daily don't do here is they don't talk about how universities got to this point. I mean, think about it. If you're operating a public university and universities, you know, in general begin treating student loan revenue as the sort of crutch that they can lean on to help sort of pad out their bottom line, this is almost certainly happening at many universities, the public ones anyway, I know you referenced a private university earlier, but at the public universities, this is happening after several rounds of major budget cuts every time there's an economic recession that forced them to raise tuition. The alternative to this, and we have experience with this in California, because in California our community college students famously don't really take out loans at very high levels, the tuition is low enough that they don't need to, a significant percentage of them are living at home with their parents, so they don'T have a need for like extra financial aid to pay the rent, things like that. In California, after the Great Recession, when there were significant cuts to the community colleges and paradoxically spiking demand for community colleges, we had a situation at one point where there were hundreds of thousands of students on wait lists throughout the state to

0:06:32 David: Get into courses. We were rationing access to higher education.

0:06:35 Thomas: Well, I was just going to say, I mean, it would raise the concern if it was free. I mean especially if it had been free this whole time. How would we have dealt with just how many people would want to go?

0:06:47 David: Yeah, that's a fair concern. And I mean, certainly there are ways to address that through finding additional sources of state revenue. I mean, the state of California voted to tax millionaires some years ago to fund mental health services, which I voted for. I think it's a worthy cause. I don't see why, for instance, we couldn't find ways to apply some sort of small tax on those who have benefited the most from our higher education system, Silicon Valley and others to say, hey, we're going to ask you to pay it forward. Our universities and community college students generate thousands and thousands of well -trained workers for your industry and you benefit from that. So we'd like to ask you to please pay some sort of tax or something to keep tuition low. That's just one example. And I mean, it's a fair example of how we would have dealt with that if we didn't have to. But just to give you some kind of top level facts, and I'll try to keep the math minimal here if I could, but about how much state governments have really disinvested in and underfunded public higher education over the years. So one study done by a scholar combined together three public universities as a representative sample, Michigan State University, the University of Illinois, and UC Berkeley, and found that across those three, from the period 1987 to 2012, so that's crossing a couple of recessions, that's Crossing 9 -11, that're crossing the Great Recession, across that 25 -year period, those three public universities, their share of state funding was reduced by half over that 25 -year period. Over that same period, the funds that the state of Oregon gives to fund this University of Oregon in Eugene dropped from 36 % of the university's revenues to 9%. So that's a three -quarters reduction in the amount that that university was getting from the state government. And another one right here in California, to give give you the home example. In the early 90s, the state budget was contributing on a per -student basis. If you kind of add together all the costs of educating a student in public higher education, the state budge was contributing 78 % of the total cost to educate each student. And by 2015, that had dropped to 37%. So it's half.

0:08:59 David: So these are happening all across the country, these long -term consistent funding decreases that have happened in public high education. And again, truthfully, I don't have the answer as to what could have been done or what should have been gone to rectify the situation or to identify that funding. But back to the Daily Podcast and to this broader media narrative, the reporter sort of goes through the Obama administration, how they worked with Congress to streamline access to federal student loans and reduce the student loan interest rates, and did something that I think was personally very very beneficial, which is reduce the role of private banks and creditors in servicing student loans. And that, in my opinion, helped reduce some of the red tape and burden and administrative costs. And then combined with those actions by the Obama administration, the increased demand caused by the Great Recession leads to this narrative on the reporter's part that a lot of colleges were just kind of offering these frivolous, maybe phonier, made -up master's degrees. That's not a direct quote, but I think you're pretty clearly supposed to get that from the episode. They talk about these cannabis science degrees and so forth. All of this is presented with minimal to no context as to why and how universities around the country were in this position. It seems to me that a really critical reporter, a journalist who wants to ask questions about power and who benefits and who loses from a certain policy about the inequities and injustices that are built in would be talking about decades of state funding cuts or the culture war attacks by right -wing politicians and billionaires, you know, they're really just kind of seeking to gatekeep higher education. Or maybe they could say, which I think is a fair criticism, that more universities should probably open up their books and evaluate how much they're spending on things like these high -level administrative positions, private consultants, the fancy new gyms, all that sort of thing. That's all fair criticism. But it just seems that the Daily and the New York Times want you to think that universities around the country started raising tuition in a vacuum, as if this was just some choice they made autonomously to sort of go and grab more of this federal money.

0:11:06 David: It seems like on higher education, the Times, like nearly all of our mainstream media, is just not interested in reporting critically so much as they are interested in kind of reiterating and reinforcing the narratives that those in power want them to do. Right I mean we talked about at the beginning of the episode there are certainly far worse publications than this I would not listen to a washington post podcast about this because I know it would just be Bezos propaganda right yes they did yeah

0:11:30 Thomas: Well, you couldn't because they got rid of their podcast because he decided to just kill the newspaper. Although they have a really pathetic YouTube channel. I don't know if you've heard about that. Very funny.

0:11:40 David: I have heard don't they get like a couple hundred views on some of their videos Yeah

0:11:42 Thomas: Yeah. They literally less than me, which I can't, I can'T believe that's insane. Insane.

0:11:46 David: I'm Sure you're doing better than Ben Shapiro these days buddy yeah

0:11:51 Thomas: Absolutely not. You have no idea. Even the worst, uh, worst off right-wing grifter is making tons of money. Yeah, exactly.

0:11:59 David: The grift pays right the grift pays

0:12:02 Thomas: Well, so I hear all that. I'm curious. So it's more about the backgrounds, at least so far, in terms of what you think this got wrong. And I guess that's, so would that be relevant in terms if the Trump administration is diagnosing a problem and this podcast is like, yeah, see, everybody kind of knows there's a problem them and they're diagnosing the wrong problem, different solutions might appear more feasible. Is that kind of what you're saying?

0:12:29 David: Yeah more or less I mean first of all, to this question of diagnosing the problem, you know, there are multiple points throughout this podcast where the host and the reporter kind of blindly accept the Trump administration narrative that they're trying in good faith to solve a legitimate public policy problem. This is the second Trump administration we're talking about, man. Like, how many times have they really done anything since January 2025 in good face or with an honest and non -corrupt lens towards making actual effective public policy.

0:13:03 Thomas: Yeah, it drives me nuts. One thing I had to yell about so much was that they did this exact thing all the way worse than this with everything that Doge was doing. They have to do this hand way. Well, of course, people acknowledge that there needs to be some sort of reform with this thing. So therefore, Elon Musk is burning it down.

0:13:21 Thomas: And it's like, that's just shut up with the first part. It doesn't, there's no connection. Like someone saying, oh, I maybe have a good faith reason why something should be different in whatever it is. Department of Education has actually no bearing whatsoever on a bad faith attack to just burn something down. Like it, it isn't related really.

0:13:42 David: Absolutely and we see this in virtually every this sane washing right that it's so often called in so many policy areas. I would love to see an actual sort of honest administration well gosh I'd love to just see an honest administration in general wouldn't we all but I'd like to see a future administration one day try to tackle this problem in a realistic way. My question to to reporters and others, if you trust this administration is trying to do that, is why? What drugs are you taking? And can I have some? Because they sound really, really fun. This is the New York Times. I know that the reporters, I want to give the listeners of the New York times a little bit of credit. They probably know some of these things. They probably have maybe in the back of their mind, like, oh yeah, this isn't this the administration that's kind of gone after all these universities and withheld all this funding and initiated all all these lawsuits and some of the universities have settled. They're really trying to kind of get higher education to sort of bend the knee to them. But I would think it's an obligation of a paper of record like the New York Times to make those connections for its readers, to say that, hey, if the Trump administration is telling you something in higher education is broken and we're going to fix it, we should all be asking, what is it you were defining as broken. How do you define broken? How do you propose to oversee it? How do you propose to fix it? And what do you and your buddies gain from it? Right.

0:15:07 Thomas: Yeah, That's a good point. I mean, at the very least, I don't remember in this podcast, I'm not having a perfect memory, but I don't remember any, even like a lot of times they'll at least do a gesture toward like, and of course Trump has had a, you know, a grudge against hierarchy. I don't think they even did that, that I remember.

0:15:20 David: I don't really remember it. Again, you could open this podcast and listen to it. If you were an extraterrestrial visiting Earth for the first time, you would think that the U.S. government is led by a perfectly reasonable man and a perfectly reasonable group of people who are intent on finding a solution to a very real public policy problem here. Again that would require you to have no knowledge or intentional willful ignorance of all that they've done, including in higher education, where they've withheld funds from so many universities, where you've seen wave after wave of layoffs and institutions censoring students because they're afraid of the federal government coming after them and claiming they're anti-Semitic because they allow students to say, free Palestine or whatever. You'd have to ignore a whole lot of things to buy into that narrative. The other thing that they don't do that you referenced very early in the podcast and that we've talked about a couple of times is talk about the culture wars. And I do sort of think I won't go to this in detail because, again, a lot of people are familiar with the culture Wars in higher education. But one of the things I think people sometimes have a short memory of is acting like even today's culture wars are something new.

0:16:32 David: Going back to at least the 1950s, higher education has been a lightning rod that the political right has exploited uh William F. Buckley the founder of National Review magazine he got his start publishing a little book that was all about how he went to Yale and he was shocked at how Yale was full of a bunch of atheist communist freaks I think it was called God and Man at Yale Yeah stupid name but nothing we wouldn't hear plenty of times later there was also the Red Scare and this implication that the universities were full of you know Marxist secret agents trying to indoctrinate students. And there was a big battle over a loyalty oath and whether we could force not just university professors, but actually K through 12 teachers. My grandfather was a refusenik, refused to take

0:16:50 Thomas: Yeah. What is that called again? It says some stupid name. Oh yeah. At Yale. Yeah huh. Oh,

0:17:21 David: One, but there was a big battle over whether people could be forced to take a loyalty oath as a condition of becoming an educator, which says like, I swear that I will uphold.

0:17:29 Thomas: Yeah, I think I've covered that on OA I want to say yeah because I think there was probably a big case about it wasn't there

0:17:34 David: Yeah, there were many, many cases about it. It's absolutely not the type of thing that would withstand, in my opinion, even the most generous interpretation of the First Amendment. You had the culture wars continue through the 60s with Reagan and the attacks on higher ed right up to now with our friend, Mr. Chris Ruffo, and all the things that he's trying to do and say about universities and culture issues and indoctrination, Marxism and all that. But again, that's highly relevant to all of this and this administration's attitude towards higher education and completely unmentioned in this daily episode. So I just sort of think it's a little bit of abdication of their duty as journalists not to question the people in power, not to blindly accept their narratives, particularly when it comes to this administration, to ask critical questions about who benefits, about how we got here.

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0:18:34 David: If I could sort of loop back and kind of relate this to an experience in my personal life that made me especially eager to talk about this. As we have spoken about, I did recently complete my master's degree from Macau State University, Sacramento State, in 2024. And for me personally, full disclosure, because I'm at a point in my career where I am earning enough, you know, I went much later in my career to grad school than a lot of people do, I was able to get through without having to take on any additional student loan debt, which was especially nice because I was still paying off my undergraduate loans when I started grad school. I did not want to be paying two sets of student loans at once, and I was able to avoid that situation. But I had a lot of classmates who were younger professionals, much closer to their undergraduate education than I was, and they did rely on loans. And I can just say, I know this isn't empirical data. I know I haven't done a formal survey on this. I've kept in contact with many, many people from my cohort. Not a single person has said a couple of years later that it wasn't worth it, that they wish they hadn't taken out loans. And I can say that a majority of the people I've kept in touch with have in fact gotten promotions or moved into higher earning jobs since getting that master's degree. Now, what's happening now as we record is that due to some enrollment issues, some state budget issues, the Cal State system is taking some budget reductions, some statewide funding reductions. And they also have to contend with the Trump administration making loans and other forms of federal aid

0:20:03 David: Harder to get. And so I anticipate that my program over the next couple of years is going to have to start increasing tuition. I was able to afford it in large part, not just because of my own personal situation, but because the state of California and the Cal State system funded that program, subsidized that program to keep tuition low. As those subsidies go away, as tuition goes up, I imagine future students in that program that I graduated from are going to have to increasingly rely on more and more student loans. What I don't want to see is several years down the road to hear about how student loan debt has been increasing since the mid -2020s and people asking why,

0:20:03 Thomas: Shit right

0:20:45 David: Right? Because we've gone through this ride many, many times now. We know there's direct correlations between things like how much colleges charge in tuition versus how much public funding they're getting that has a direct downstream impact on how how much students take out in loans. And yet we're still doing this sort of ignorant, just asking questions thing about like, well, why, why is it? And even the daily doesn't ask that question.

0:21:10 Thomas: That's interesting so I mean all of this is ostensibly under the justification of reducing student loan debt so you think this will end up with uh leading to more student loan

0:21:20 David: I think that combined with a number of other things that this administration is doing and cuts that states are going to have to make, because again, a lot of California's budget now, just to use our own state as an example, California is having to increase spending on Medi -Cal, our version of the state Medicaid program, because of all the cuts Trump and And the Republicans made it the one big, beautiful bill to mitigate.

0:21:42 David: And so you're going to see as well as in SNAP, aka CalFresh in California, they wrote in a series of cuts that have states taking over more and more of the operational costs of that program. And so what you're gonna see is that combined with possible recession on the horizon, who knows, you're almost certain to see more and More states having to make cuts to public higher ed, at a time when the federal government is making federal financial aid in the form of these loans, as well as Pell Grants and others, harder to get. Combine those things together, I think you have a recipe for probably a greater overall undertaking of student loan debt. Now, as it relates to individual programs here, I certainly will not shed a tear, and nobody should, if some of our predatory for -profit colleges all of a sudden find that they can can no longer draw down thousands of dollars in federal taxpayer money for worthless degrees in, I don't know, cosmetology. That's kind of the thing that gets brought up a lot as the example of the for -profit, quote unquote, bad degree. Not saying all cosmetologist degrees are bad, not saying society doesn't benefit from cosmetologists. Certainly anybody who's looked at me too long would say that I could benefit from one. But that's something that I I think we should all celebrate is the idea of greater scrutiny over actual situations where students may be kind of getting scammed. But before we go down the road of, and I'm not saying the Daily did this, I'm saying they came kind of close to doing this. Before we go down the row of accusing our public universities and community colleges and others of scamming students in order to get more federal dollars, I think there's a lot of questions we need to ask that the New York Times and our mainstream media don't seem willing or interested in asking. So at about 25 minutes into this podcast, the host, Rachel Abrams, asks this question about whether colleges have a responsibility to kind of not lock their students into taking out debt for these low quality or lesser demand degrees. And the reporter responds by saying, well, colleges prefer to sort of sidestep that question or not be held accountable for it, is what he's really saying. But when they're backed into a corner, the defense colleges will raise is, well, we don't force people to take on debt. The federal student loan program exists for a reason. It's a matter of public policy. That's the quote. I mean, yes, it is a matter of public quality. And yes, the federal student loaning program does exist for a reason you think you could use your podcast to talk about that, Mr. Reporter, man, but but you don't. But as a quick side note, the implication here, when he says colleges prefer not to have to confront this issue of their perceived value of their degrees or whether or not, you know, they're providing an adequate return on investment to students, whether their degrees do lead to higher salaries. That's complete and utter BS,

0:21:41 Thomas: Debt yeah

0:24:35 David: I have to say. That maybe was true about 10 or so years ago. But in recent years, as somebody who works in higher education, I can tell you there has been extensive focus on this question of ROI, return on invest. The Obama administration actually was the first one to implement regulations on this. They were called gainful employment regulations. Does your program lead to students being gainfully employed? We've seen so many examples in recent years of schools cutting programs in the arts and humanities because the numbers don't show that they necessarily lead to the return on investment students want. We have seen statewide cuts. The University of West Virginia system just made a wide swath of cuts to a number of programs. So when reporters like this say that it might be valuable for colleges to look at sort of lower earning programs and look at cutting them, they are absolutely doing that. And they're doing it in response to a lot of these pressures. And They're doing it, in my opinion, without always necessarily asking the right questions or considering the implications of it. One more quick implication that I'll leave you with, and it's something that may or may not be worth addressing in a podcast like this, is that the reporter talks later, this is at about 27 and a half minutes in the podcast. The host speculates that, well, in this sort of just asking questions way, could it be that these actions are a necessary course correction for universities? And she says that, you know, should have been looking for a long time at closing programs that, quote, don't benefit students or civic society. And then she moves on to something else or the conversation goes in another direction or, you know, they address that question, but they don't really talk about what's in those phrases right there, programs that don't benefit students for civic society, it's a little bit like giving a taxi tour of Paris and speeding by the Eiffel Tower and going, hey, there's a really big building over there now anyway, way. You know, like there's a lot to unpack in that sentence. Don't benefit students or civic society. A lot of programs and things like teaching, what we call the care economy,

0:26:40 David: You know, paramedic type jobs, child care type jobs. Those do unfortunately have low salaries, at least at the entry point for students. A Lot of teacher salaries sort of start to really ramp up after four or five, six plus years in the role. But you do have a lot of these jobs that society kind of depends on. I think we all need childcare workers. We all love for them to get paid what they're worth. That might require parents paying more for childcare, which I'm sure you as a parent and lots of other parents wouldn't be enthusiastic about. Right.

0:27:08 Thomas: Not where the money can come from it's already so much Talk about tuition money. We're basically putting Remy through what my college costs like just for daycare.

0:27:19 David: It is. Yeah. And they don't have subsidized federal loans for childcare yet. I hope we're not giving them an idea here by putting it out into the world. Be surprised if any Trump administration members want to listen to me drone on about higher ed policy, to be honest. But I think that it is worth asking those questions about programs, colleges, universities, et cetera, that benefit wider civic society and whether or not we want to just tie that to what do you earn when you come out of college. That's a problem. For one thing, the college doesn't control. I mean,

0:27:21 Thomas: Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah

0:27:52 David: Most colleges, when the student leaves, the most the college hopes to get is like a donation to the alumni fund right after they're are gone. And please keep paying your loans, by the way. But I think just tying it to that.

0:27:58 Thomas: Well the college, the university doesn't care about that do they? They've already been paid.

0:28:05 David: Yeah, that's true. Actually, to be fair, there are certain regulations that if colleges have a certain percentage of students, of graduates who default on their loans after graduation, they can also lose their access to federal and state financial aid. Right. Yeah. There's some sense to that there's some sense to all of this. It's just not considering some of these broader questions. It'S kind of putting everything into this box of personal choice. And you, the consumer made a choice to go to college. We, the taxpayers, were generous enough to give you some aid along the way. And we're going to reduce your college experience down to, well, what did you earn coming out of college? There's also the fact that sometimes students graduate into a bad job market.

0:28:17 Thomas: Right. Yeah that makes sense.

0:28:45 David: I mean, my wife graduated UC Davis with a bachelor's degree in political science. UC Davis is quite a fine school. I think that's quite a worthy degree. And for a couple of years, she was working at Starbucks because that was the only job she could find. Is that UC Davis's fault? Did they give her a bad education and that's why she couldn't? No, it's because she graduated in 2010 and it was 2010 job market.

0:29:07 Thomas: And all this, I mean, we didn't really dig into it as much. I know you're talking about the funding side and all that. I don't really remember what we touched on that because I guess we really haven't like on the cost side, why does it cost so much? Like it's one thing to say, because this program, this stuff they're doing, my sense of it from, you know, the podcast I just listened to is, hey, we're getting rid of these or we're going to strongly disincentivize these degrees that just, if it's a degree that doesn't make money, we're not going to help students get loans to go to it. Sure. But that's on one side of it.

0:29:42 Thomas: What about the side where, why does it cost so much? Like couldn't, isn't that another part of it? Like people still might need loans and it might be good to loan students money or not. I don't know, but maybe they just shouldn't need so much fucking money to go To college. Like what is that part of Yeah.

0:29:56 David: Yeah, right? Well, for instance, if we increase the Pell Grant to what it was worth in the 1970s, if it had been indexed to inflation adequately, I'm confident that students would be taking out less in loan debt. On the cost side specifically, I think there's a few factors. It's not as simple to boil down as it seems like it ought to be. Right? I mean, fundamentally, the very basic answer to your question, if you want the simplest answer, is that the reason it costs as much as it does to go to college is because colleges have calculated that that's the revenue that they need to stay afloat and stay in business, right? Why do they need that? There are certainly critics on the right who will say that colleges have started to move into a lot of what they might call ancillary or activities that are periphery to higher education in recent years. Colleges now mostly have like on -campus centers for veterans, for foster youth, for LGBTQ plus students, right? They have added some more kind of administrative positions. There's a famous sort of quote in higher education circles that the longer your title is, the less you do. So you, you know, people like to make fun of the colleges with the associate under vice president for student achievement facilities programs and operations right I mean

0:30:30 Thomas: Supply and demand. Yeah. Boy,

0:31:15 David: This idea of administrative bloat that's a very common criticism and I think some of it is probably as a result of that I think you also have things like when there's inflation but colleges have to buy the same supplies that the rest of us buy colleges have to build their buildings out of the same materials that the resto f us build anything Anything that increased, you know, we've had a lot of headlines the last several years about home construction costs going up because the materials, the raw materials, and the labor that go into building homes is going up. Guess what? Those same raw materials and that same labor are constructing that new study hall at your local university or community college. So those cost drivers are present.

0:31:54 Thomas: That doesn't feel like much, though. Like, it just feels like the car. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, it it sort of feels like and again, not exactly the point of the episode. I'm sure that we could talk more about it. For one, this has to be something that's been studied like extensively.

0:31:59 David: Those are elements of it. Yes, it has been. Yeah.

0:32:11 Thomas: I means, it's been such it's such an issue. And so I don't know if what What conclusions people come to?

0:32:15 David: Yeah, well, yeah, for the most part, people tie it back to those reductions in state funding, right? Right? Remember when I said that at the University of California, it increased

0:32:22 Thomas: Well, no, that's still not touching on the number because that's still how is that increase that it does? Okay, go ahead. Sorry.

0:32:29 David: What they have to charge. The costs were always there. I mean, the costs vary with any costs.

0:32:33 Thomas: Okay. So, okay. So on that theory, it's like the costs haven't changed as much as the.

0:32:39 David: The cost haven't changed as much as the inputs, right? In the early 1990s, for every dollar the University of California spent educating a student, 75 cents of that dollar came directly from the state budget. Now, or by 2015, I should say, I don't know what the current number is, for For every dollar the University of California spends educating a student, about 38 cents came from the state budget. So the amount of state funding that public universities have gotten to educate students has gone down so much that they're forced to make it up by raising tuition. Fundamentally, I don't know that the actual sort of raw costs, if you will, have gone up more than inflation has gone up. Again, you can point to the fact, as some people will say, that, yeah, OK, the elite elite public universities like the UC Berkeley's, UCLA's, they've got some professors that are making pretty good salaries, if you don't mind me saying so myself.

0:33:29 Thomas: Yeah, and this wouldn't explain the the other facility stuff you talked about. They're building the this center and that center that wouldn't explain that exactly and it does feel like just having gone. It does feel I feel like those things that people point to, oh, they're building a new this or a new that. That really feels like after the fact that they're able to make much money. That doesn't feel like a cost driver. That feels like, holy shit, we're raking in money. What do we do with it? Is what it's felt like to me. And I don't know if that's just because it might just be that demand is so high that they'RE just able to charge what they can charge.

0:34:04 Thomas: And it's not really, I don'T know. No. And then it's like, after that, they're spending the money to justify it. I really just don't know. And I, again, I guess I could be talking about just private universities and it might be a totally different situation.

0:34:14 David: No, that's very much a factor. That's a factor with public and private universities, the sort of the competition for students, the ways in which, you know, just here in Sacramento, for instance, President Luke Wood of Sacramento State, he has come under some fire and some criticism for the amount of university funds he is spending on athletic facilities. So they're building a new football stadium. They're moving into division one in the NCAA. He's introduced a new sort of martial arts and boxing programs to their range of sports that they offer. And those come with facilities that they have to upgrade. He gets a lot of heat for that. What he would say if he were here, he's not, I can't speak for him, but what I've heard him say in the media and other university leaders say is I have to try to attract students. And if UC Davis is building a shiny new gym just down the road, maybe Sacramento State doesn't see UC Davis. Well, UC Davis doesn't see Sac State as a direct competitor.

0:35:11 David: Sac State would like to be seen as a direkt competitor of UC Davis, right? But whatever it is, he's going to say other universities are building shiny new football stadiums and gyms and new facilities and incorporating all this technology and adding all these dining options on the campus and rebuilding the lecture halls that are kind of falling apart heart. I've got to do that just to keep up with students. The question is, and I'm not equipped to answer this, how much does that may be driving costs? Yeah.

0:35:35 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I would be curious if the sports programs, I mean, do they pay for themselves? I mean that's always been the justification.

0:35:42 David: At the big colleges they do, right? University of Alabama's football program makes more than you and I will make probably in our entire lifetimes, although I wish that weren't the case, right. University of Indiana's basketball program pays for itself several times over. That's a small minority of colleges though. So I would be really shocked if like the softball program at Sacramento State is a self -sustaining program. Not that they shouldn't have softball, not that they should find ways to pay for students to have those opportunities. But those are all sort of cost inputs along with the professors of the faculty, along with the administrative quote unquote bloat, the growth of administrator positions. And those also add up to those declines in state funding. I think one of the things that I marked down to just sort of make sure to emphasize here is that I have had, again, with this sort of snarky name drop or whatever, I've had many conversations with university presidents during my time working in higher education. I've yet to hear or talk to a single university president that would not love to lower their tuition if they could.

0:35:44 Thomas: Yeah hmm hmm hmm. Interesting.

0:36:46 David: They would love, especially in the private sector where a lot of smaller private schools are going under, on the verge of going under experiencing very precarious financing, financing, they would love to be able to charge students less so that they could bring in more students. But they tend to feel that their financial situation is precarious enough that they have to rely on those tuition dollars they get. There is research on what's driven the cost of college. There's research on, you know, what has driven more and more students to get student loans. I was quite disappointed to hear none of that even acknowledged in the daily. So I guess that's kind of my take on it here is that it's a very complex issue. I respect the daily for boiling down some very complex issues into 30 minute bites. But when those 30 minute bytes leave out critical context, that in this case, and a lot of cases with the New York Times and other mainstream media, that context kind of sane washes the people in power and the things they're doing, then that's when I think, you know, folks need to speak up, we need more independent media, like your podcast and others to sort of take a critical look at, OK, what is this thing the government's proposing to do? Why are they proposing to deal with this way? How did we get here? Who benefits from what they're proposing to doing? Who loses? And what might the downstream impacts of that be? Instead of just the personal finance reporter for The Times saying, yeah, college has figured out a way to screw a lot of students with master's degrees, and now they're getting stuck to them like they deserve. That was a paraphrase.

0:38:18 David: But he didn't say those exact words. But that's kind of an exaggerated version of, I think, the sentiment that The Daily was conveying here. And I just think it's all wrong.

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0:38:38 Thomas: Well I think that's a good good place to leave it. Is there anything else you want to make sure to say? Anything we didn't get to cover? And I guess, is there anywhere you want point people?

0:38:47 David: I do have a blog. It's on Medium. I'm going to be writing a piece about this. And yeah, I would love it if folks were interested in reading about it. I've got a blog, I've had a couple of pieces published about higher education. Just continue to seek out sources of your news that, you know, question the folks in power, particularly the Trump administration, where so much of the media is complicit and be willing to be critical. I know a lot of my fellow folks on the center left who love the New York Times and are kind of defensive of it because Trump and his ilk attack it so much. Look, I think that Trump's attacks on the press are terrible. I think that, you know, this is a man who's done so much to harm independent media in our country, encouraging his supporters to beat up reporters, all that crap, all the way up to allowing crazy mergers, Ellisons and all that. So I hate to sort of align myself or want people to think that I'd be aligning myself with those who kind of reflexively bash the New York Times, but we need them to do better in these situations. We need them to ask real tough probing questions because we can't simply have all of them going on your podcast, Thomas. That would just, that would crowd up your schedule too much you're like never mind yeah actually I would love them all to come on my podcast right but

0:40:00 Thomas: Well, yeah, we don't have enough people to listen to my podcast is the problem.

0:40:03 David: Well in any case I'm glad to be able to talk about this with you and any of your listeners who want to listen to it I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come on and talk a little bit about

0:40:15 Thomas: Absolutely. Pleasure having you. And also it would be interesting if we do want to tackle the increased cost of college in a more formal way and getting, you know, make sure we have, yeah. That, that, that would be really cool.

0:40:22 David: It yeah I'd love to yeah

0:40:27 Thomas: I'm very interested in that. So David, thank you so much. People can check out the blog. I'll make sure to put it in the show notes.