 Well, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator. I'm the host. I'm the chief cat herder for the next hour. And I'm delighted to welcome you to another hour of conversation. Since the beginning of the forum, we've been exploring how higher education is financed, how higher education institutions pay their bills, and how students and their families and their communities get to support them. One of the features of American higher education that is almost unique, but definitely extraordinary in the world stage, is our reliance on student debt. And the total amount of student debt you've probably heard has shot up right now to around past $1.7 trillion, the second largest amount of debt that Americans hold, second only to house nuts. And it's still growing. How did this happen? How did we decide to call up with such a system? Where is it going? And what can we do about it? These are the subjects of a book that just came out written by our spectacular guest this week. Elizabeth Shermer is the associate professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago. And her recent book, Indentured Students, gives us the full story. So without any further ado, let me bring Professor Shermer up on stage. Hello, Professor Shermer. Hi, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me and for giving me an opportunity to join you on Future Transform. Our pleasure. Our pleasure. This is a great topic and you've got a lot of fans already in the crowd happy to hear more and ask more. Now, you told me that I can refer you to you as Professor Shermer, but that you'd like me to become a little less formal. Sure. What should I call you? You can call me Ellie. I go by Ellie. I always joke that I publish under because since you're now in my native state of Virginia, I publish under my great big long southern name, but I just go by Ellie in my real life. That is a southern name. That's a spectacular southern name. Well, I'll try and I'll try and Ellie you as often I can. It's good to see you. It's good to see you too. Well, we have a tradition here in the forum. We have people introduce themselves by exploring not what they've been doing, but what they hope to do in the next year. So I'm curious, looking ahead to the rest of this wild year of 2022, what's uppermost in your mind? What are the topics? What are the projects, the books, the classes, the articles? What's going to be you for the next year? I appreciate you actually mentioning the classes that I think that too many professors don't admit that, you know, we do have to worry about teaching. And my concern right now, like so many of us is we started online and we're getting ready to pivot in person. And so my number one goal is to try and support my students. And I am lucky enough right now to be I'm doing a special class for students who are interning in Chicago public schools, they're hoping to be future teachers. So my number one goal is to keep them motivated and energized because, you know, they were just in the middle of a big workshop this year in Chicago. And I just want to keep us all healthy, mentally, emotionally, physically as we get through this wild academic year. I do have other things that I'm working on is, I mentioned it very briefly, if anyone is read the book, I always tell people to read the acknowledgments, that's how I told, I get to the story about how I came to this project. But I was actually originally working on another book called the business of education, which was actually looking at campuses, looking at all the ways that campuses have had to adapt to just how poorly this country has funded higher education overall. And I'm actually returning to that project and I want to finish it and I want to get it off my my desk. And indeed, I have a draft of it. It looks quite impressive. It's a mess, but here it is. And I would love to get that out into the world and just sort of relieve these two things on my shoulders for sure. Well, I'd love to see that. Good luck getting a contract to a publisher and getting it out in the world. Yeah, editing it. Editing is always double in the details, right? Yes, I hear that completely. Yes. Well, that sounds like a great year. Well, friends, I like to begin the sessions by asking our guests a couple of intro questions to get the ball rolling. But let me get out of the way as soon as possible so that you can take the floor and put forward your questions and your thoughts. To begin with, I have to ask you this is Professor Sherman now. I mean, thinking about the history of how we got to this point, I mean, your book outlines a whole series of kind of jigs that drove us in this direction, the different commissions like the famous Truman Commission, the impact of funding in the 1950s, the different attempts to recompense veterans, including the GI Bill after World War II. But the real, I mean, boom in higher red debt has really been since the 1990s. Why is that taken up? Why is the 21st century such a century of student debt for us? I think it's the question of one, I mean, it's a couple of things. I do actually want to mention, I'm really glad that you mentioned the Truman Commission. It's the 75th anniversary of that incredible report. And that talking about a moment of a trend. Yeah, actually, I just published something on it. It's actually, we published it open source. I'll give you the link afterwards if you remind me. To commemorate this incredible moment, this lost opportunity when the dream was to have a country with community colleges free, the first two years of college free, community colleges all over this country, and not just recognizing as not just for an individual student, no matter the age, but actually, that the country as a whole, it's democracy depended on access to higher education. And I just, I just, it's just one of those lost moments when we're so focused because of the cost. Well, since you asked me about the cost and why specifically the 90s, one thing I do like to remind people is that there is a big shift in how we actually collect data. We didn't actually have decent data on the higher education, assuming that, yeah, the financial aid industry and it isn't industry until 2008. And even before that, it wasn't actually until the late 90s that you actually saw the Federal Reserve break out household debt from non-profit debt. So we don't actually have a sense, but you can see it exponentially increases. It's not until the late 90s. And then we don't start breaking out household, assuming student debt and household debt until the early 2000s. So it kind of masks it. But I think a real issue in the 90s is the pigeons coming home to roost with a prolonged disinvestment in higher education and cutting what support there actually had been. But I also think more and more assumptions, and we all know what happens when you assume, asked you me, that just a higher education policy, just getting more people into college would be enough to deal with the systemic inequalities in terms of the wages brought home and what we now call wealth gaps. And I think it's just really seeing that, that you can see in the 90s, building off of a lack of disinvestment for decades. That makes all kinds of sense in a horrifying way. By the way, friends, twice in the forums history, we've hosted Chris Newfield, who is a wonderful scholar. And if you look in our archives, he did sessions on specifically states disinvesting from public higher education. Oops, did I just mute myself perfectly? Did I do that? No, I can hear you. Okay, good, good, good. I was just terrified of that. Well, then the second question to ask is, I guess another historical question to us. The idea was that student debt would pay for itself, that people would, that the debt would be a temporary measure that would lever them up into higher professional status. And then they'd be able to pay it back. And then this would be a win for everybody all around. It would grow the economy. And it would just be a kind of wonderful investment machine. And to some extent, that still happens. I mean, we have a lot of people from higher education debt did lever them up into much more highly paid careers. We know that overall, generally speaking, I mean, there are many exceptions, but the college premium to some extent still exists. And we know that in many ways, some of the hardest hit people economically in the US are those with a high school diploma or less. How did this go wrong? It sounds a big, great idea. Well, I think, gosh, how did it go wrong? I mean, I think, I'm going to actually start with something that you said very at the beginning. And you're actually the first person who ever mentioned this, that this was supposed to pay for itself. But that was actually always the misunderstanding about how student loans worked. So one of the things that I always like to tell people is that you have to think about this is the worst financial product of all time. I'm going to give you a loan for something that I can't repossess. And even if I could repossess, I can't actually sell it to someone else. And even if I could, if someone could sell my degree to someone else, I would no longer be able to compete in the job market to try and actually earn back what I owe. And by the way, my entire collateral to get this student loan based on was based on a college university that needed my tuition revenue. So we need to step back and think about the dangers in this financial product. But the first, if you think about the dangers of this risky financial problem, it just epitomizes risk is that the only ones really offering it for much of American history were actually the college university's wealth enough to have them. And so we actually have a record of student debt back to the early 19th century. I talked about the Dartmouth case in the very beginning of the book. But these things were always built on interest, not quite accruing, but the always the assumption was that they would pay for themselves. But you cannot actually predict how well someone will actually do, or the challenge of collection has always been there. It has always been an issue, which is why you didn't even see banks really thinking about it until the 1920s. And that should make all of us remember that we think about the 1920s as the epitome of speculative risk. And so that was the assumption. And by the way, that was also the assumption built on a technically the first student loan program the federal government offered in the National Defense Education Act of 1958. They changed at the last minute a scholarship program for undergraduates and talk about roads not taken. What would it have meant if we had started with a scholarship program? They changed it to a loan. And the assumption was that it would perpetuate the interest accruing after a student finished and then repaid. We just keep it solvent and keep it growing. And it didn't happen. From the beginning, we have had an issue with with bankruptcies and defaults, non payments with student loans from the very first. But unfortunately, we don't have the frigging records for it because that would require actual data collection. Wasn't that one of the arguments for making student loans not as chargeable in bankruptcy that some there were stories in the 70s about people not paying? Oh, absolutely. Yes. Because from the very beginning, and actually, one of the arguments used against the creation of the more famous of the student loan programs, the guaranteed student loan program in 65, that's in the buried seemingly buried in the 65 Higher Education Act, was just the default rate already rate with the I call them the Sputnik loans, but with the National Defense Education Act loans. And you did actually have data being brought forth and shown that this was an issue and known to be an issue. But the issue that or see the the idea then was they were modeling this entire and I'm so glad you pointed out our two biggest sources of debt in this country are mortgages and student loans. The student loan, the guaranteed student loan program was modeled on the federal mortgage program that we now know has exacerbated inequalities in this country since its start. And the model was that you're going to not guarantee people a home, but guarantee that bankers would be repaid on a mortgage. Very similar, the guarantee and the guaranteed student loan program was a guarantee that bankers will be repaid on these inherently risky financial products. And also talk about the data not collected and how much we didn't know they hid how expensive it was, how they calculated the cost of it, they didn't on purpose, the Johnson administration did it on purpose. I talked about it in the book. Leigh and he did it with a lot of the great society programs. That's exactly what they did. So we haven't had it's one of the challenges of showing people and talking about how this is college affordability has been a historic problem. Kennedy himself before his assassination warranted 62 that the the guaranteed student loan pardon me the National Defense Education Act that was only about $1,000 a year that students had to keep applying for to get. But that was at the time that would be $4,000 over the course of four years when the average family income was $5,600 a year. That starts to change our understanding about the cost of college, which might seem cheap now. At the time it was $7,000 was the was the average cost, including everything. But if the average American family is only making $5,600, it brings into focus how unaffordable college has always been. Wow. Wow. I'm so glad I asked. Friends, let me stop asking. I have so many more questions, but this is a form for you to put your questions. And we already have a couple. So remember, if you're new to the form on the bottom of the screen, that white strip, where you can click the raised hand to join us on stage or the question mark, if you'd like to ask a question. And we have one already from our hard working friend, Don Charlis. Let me put this up on the screen so you can see it. In 2018, Judith Scott Clayton Bookings estimated student loan defaults would reach 40% by 2023. When consumers must start paying on the federal loans, what kind of default rates might we see? That is exactly the prediction. That is on the upper range of the prediction. There's others that are closer to 30%. And I think that's exactly right. And if I might actually just add something, if it's okay, one of the great pleasures of how I wrote this book. And again, I talk about the journey that I took with it, is that I got to write portions of it when I was abroad. And I actually did a forum with the architect of the Australian Loan Program. And when he sat down to work on it in the 70s, he said, our goal was not, we were under pressure to do a loan program. Our goal was not to do what the Americans did, but built into their higher education contribution. And I love the language of it, not that a guarantee where you hit it that it was for bankers, that students would just be doing a contribution to the overall cost of higher education, not just the teaching, but the research, the public service, all these things. That there was this expectation that about a third may never earn enough to pay it back, and that they would do it through the tax collection, which would deal with a lot of the problems that we have in this country. And I just think that that's so powerful that already in the 70s, other countries were looking at what we were doing and seeing the problems that have only become apparent to us now. And I think I love that question about the default because there is a bipartisan bill right now to enable people to discharge the student loan debt into bankruptcy. And no one wants to go through bankruptcy proceedings. But I think it's an important, tiny step that might be possible now when everything is so gridlocked in Congress. That's a great point. And by the way, if you don't know Don Charlis, in fact, I'll just put this on the screen for people to see or put this on the text box. He is the organizer of the high rate inquirer. There's a link to it there. As he says, data driven, asking tough questions about higher ed. I strongly recommend it. Thank you, Don, for the great question. And thank you, Ellie, for the really, really good answer. Speaking of other questions from other countries, maybe not countries that have a kind of interesting history in relation to the US. We have a question coming to you from Quebec. Metsia Plurid asks, we always hear about administrative bloat in academia. How much of the increase in the cost of higher ed comes from there? Oh, it's a challenging question because it definitely is there. But I think one of the things that we have to watch is what is actually under administrative. So for example, I think one of the hearts and souls of a college university is its library. That's actually the second title of the higher education act that's often under administration. We also have to look and see writing centers are also under administrative cost. So I do not want to distract or distract from it. Is it a question that we should ask ourselves about the how much these these deans and offices are being paid? Although the other thing that can add to this administrative bloat, if you need to have offices dedicated to, for example, financial aid to fundraising, to all of these things, how much is the American approach to not funding higher education robustly and relying on all these different things adding to that as well. The other thing you kind of watch about administrative bloat too is it's a way of actually avoiding unionization that if you're putting people into managerial roles, putting them under admin, then they are not covered because of the 1948 amendments to the National Labor Relations Act and that has been upheld by the Supreme Court. So I do think it's an important problem, but I think it's also something that we should think very carefully about too in terms of it. I mean, I think I have to be honest right now, and check and see if you're particularly university, because they all do it differently. If, for example, the student health centers are under admin, because we do actually need them at the forefront of keeping students healthy right now in all phases of the word, meaning to the word, as we deal with the COVID crisis. And I think about, talk about the administrative bloat, how do you start laying rolling out in our cases, we have testing centers and things like that, recognizing just the challenges of running something that are basically cities onto themselves at this point. Yeah, the book, the coin, the term administrative bloat has in it what I can only hope is a tongue-in-cheek recommendation that how do you put it? Well, faculty used to just kind of do all these functions on the side. We should just do that again. Yeah, it's a wild book. It's a wild book. But thank you. Thank you for the really, really good question, Metia. And again, at least you were just the right person for these. Now, those are examples, again, if you're new to the technology of text questions. Now let me bring up somebody to ask a question through video. And let me pick on our dear friend and great supporter from Texas, Tom Hames. And Tom will join us from the blue room to ask us a question about money and finance. Go ahead, Tom. Well, I mean, it's not necessarily, I want to go in the deeper question of finance and the meaning of education. And my question is this, how much of this is growing out of this idea that education is an individualized benefit, that it should be therefore monetized around the individual as opposed to contributing to the community as a whole? I think the Australian example you just cited implicitly acknowledges that community benefit of having more educated people, as opposed to you're just in this to make a little bit of money. Of course, that also cheapens education. I just need to get through these courses so I can make a lot of money out the other end. And as a final addendum on this, the college benefit, I don't know how much the college benefit has been studied as a cause versus an effect. I'm also a political scientist, so I have some sense of how difficult it is to separate that kind of data. But I mean, is the reason that people make more money because they come out of college is because they come for more money and therefore go to college? Or is the college actually providing that boost in a way? It's probably a mixture of the two, but I think that the undiluted college benefit in terms of your salary coming out the other end ignores the Donald Trumps of the world who got through college. Yeah, okay, great. It's a huge surprise for some reasons, but not for others. So, throwing a lot at you there. Oh, I love it. And actually, I'm loving the color of your room. I have my yellow room. There's a purple and an orange one back there, too. That's how I get through the Chicago winters. Excuse me, I'm going to actually, I think I'm going to tackle them in backwards order in terms of it. How much is there a boost? There is definitely a boost for some students, depending on the school that they go. And that's where I love the Raj Chetty report cards. I'm messing on the full title of it, where he actually showed the quality of what low-income students are getting and what it actually takes to really make it possible for them to have that boost is so important in recent years. And I thought that it's such an extraordinary study of getting the data both from the IRS as well as the education department to really start to get us to see. But I also think that there's also something very important about the networks. And I actually hate that word, but I know it is a real word. But the connections that the students are making, and I think about that a lot, because I work with and I'm blessed to work with a lot of commuter students. They're working really hard. But if they're commuting or like me working so many hours that they're actually missing out on those opportunities to do chances, or in my case, actually run a resume and cover a little workshop for our history majors and minors, that's another opportunity to give them the skills that will serve them afterwards for that question in terms of actually having that economic and social mobility. But I really am so glad that you asked this question about what happened to understanding it as this is just an individual benefit as opposed to a national quality. And I think for me is the sad thing is that that used to be something that was recognized. It was something that was the justification for it. I actually give the Roosevelt administration the Franklin Dillon Roosevelt administration a really hard time because they initially assumed, like a lot of elites that the majority of Americans couldn't go, it wasn't worth investing. It was actually the work study program, the workers education program for adults that proved them not only does this have an individual benefit of having a more, does an individual benefit from having more education, and but also that people didn't just want vocational needs, that there was a civic-mindedness, there was an engagement that came from that. And that was besides the labor market considerations that they were thinking, we need to improve the overall quality of the American workforce. They understood it to be about democracy. So you would get by 48, that incredible report, Higher Education for Democracy, the Truman Commission, I call it the Zook Commission, would to really highlight that this was something that was seen as that this might benefit, this will benefit individual Americans, but the country as a whole will benefit from opening up all of these opportunities, not just for the workforce question, because to me, the question you bring about the workforce and that hopes of getting the jobs, it really speaks to an overall decline in the standards of the American jobs. And we're watching that, that's some of the arguments why we're having this great resignation, but what's frustrating for me, that instead of tackling, tackling the terrible, assuming the declining wages, the declining benefits, all these things, instead the assumption is that if you fill out the FAFSA and go to college, that will solve the nation's problems. It will solve yours and the nation's problems when that does not actually ensure the kind of basic job standards to actually give people a decent life, or to provide, be able to for them to raise a family, care for other extended family members, any of those things. And that's something that we're putting so much, my friend Kat Vermeer, as Santa Cruz always says it, like, we are inspecting K through 12 in colleges to do more and more with less. They're expecting college universities to solve the quality of the American jobs, but not giving them any tools or recognizing the deeper structural issues. Right. Yeah. And by the way, back to the network thing real quick though. Networks are a very different situation in terms of benefit at Harvard than it is at Houston Community College. Yes. You know, the people you're going to get to know there are going to be. And we can't send everybody through Harvard. And so how do you do that? I mean, that's kind of the myth that's been sold to the middle class. Those who can just sort of barely get their kids into the Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and so on, Yale's that and Georgetown's that make those connections for you. And then you mortgage everything just to be able to do that. But then what's the payoff? You know, is that, you know, can you, and then if you fail to get in there and you end up going to a different, you know, or you're academically not there, you know, this is a complicated, it's a social issue as much as it is anything having to do with teaching and learning. Absolutely. And I think the, and I think that goes to, again, to flag Ross Shetty's important work on this. And it was a team of investigators, I'm sorry, I just remember him is that, is actually showing how well do those elite universities do in actually giving the support needed from students coming, first generation college students, coming from such different backgrounds. Because we do actually know the reports of the many, I shouldn't say the many, of the students who sometimes struggle to adapt to a college university environment when they are first-generation, when they don't understand at lingua franca. I think about it a lot as someone who is, I'm technically not a first-generation because of my biological parents, as opposed to the person who really raised me. But I think of it in terms of, I was a fish out of water in graduate school, I didn't understand what this was. And it's one of the reasons I work when I do have a chance to work with graduate students to actually break it down in a way, because it took me a while to understand how this whole system works. And I had the benefit of, my father's university professor, so I had the benefit of growing up in this environment. So I have the opposite thing, is that I struggle with my community college students sometimes to get, wrap my head around, the cultural things that they're dealing with. They don't even understand what the point of school is. And then they fail out and they have debt too. Can I also add the sort of material, is that how, it stares me, how many college university professors, despite the good reporting that we are now getting on it and that incredible work coming out of the Hope Center, which is now at Temple, about food and housing and security. And in my mind, because I had mentioned to Brian yesterday when we were checking and doing a tech check, I grew up just a stone's from through George Mason. George Mason has a lot of students living in college. But how well are we aware of that reality? The startling findings, this is pre-pandemic, that a third of American college students across the country in different types of institutions had food and housing and security. If you listen to the students, if you take that, you could, that should not have been a surprise to anyone. It should be outrageous, but it should not have been a surprise. The pandemic has made that glaringly obvious. I mean, that's where you, I mean, there's no hiding it there, right, in a way that used to be the case. Quite true. Thank you, Tom. Absolutely. Thank you. If you're, that's an example of a video question. You can join us, even if you don't have a beard, you're welcome to join us on video. Otherwise, we have more questions coming in, in the Q and A box. I want to give everyone a chance to have their shot. Thanks again, Tom. We have a question from a former student of mine, Jordan Davis at Georgetown University, who asks, what are your thoughts and implementation of ISAs as a potential nationwide solution for lessening the risk of student debt? You know, Income Share, I read, I read just, I know we have a couple of this right, but right now more, most famous is the, um, the back of boiler program coming out of Purdue that Mitch Daniels promotes. Back of the, you know, so the first person to talk about Income Share agreements was actually Milton Friedman back in the 1950s. And I love talking about that essay because in it, he talks about how having a sort of investor by the share and the student and taking on the risk, he says, this might be uncomfortable for people because it might seem like them too much like slavery. So my thought is, if Milton Friedman in the 50s is telling you that this might be a little bit too much like slavery, this is not a solution, that we should be going, that we should be embracing. And I just, I'm going to leave it at that. And I think especially like, you know, I've been looking at that the department, some of the department of education officials have actually read my book and they were talking to me about it. And one of the things I told them is like, we have to think about the complexity of these student loans, student loans that we're dealing with right now. But ISAs, as many of its sharpest critics point out, these are also incredibly complex financial products. And I just hesitate asking, in my case, I talk about it in the acknowledgments of my book, I was 17 when I signed those documents. I had no idea. And so you want to ask now 17, 18 younger people. And it's true, old people also go back. You want to, you want to sign on something, it kind of sounds like an indenture. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a great title for a book, but not necessarily a career. Look, I got the book from listening to people. That's exactly how they described it for me. Yeah. And if you read the chat, people are tearing this up. Don Shaw is saying this is awful, human capital contracts. And Elizabeth, you mentioned Sarah Golder grab. So we had a great, she was a great guest on the forum a couple of years ago. She's amazing. Yes. He is. And here is, here is a link to our reading of her great book on paying the price. Jordan, great question. Very forward looking question. Thank you. We also have a question coming in from Doyle, who takes us back to the international dimension. Which country has the best model for student loans? And why do you support that model? You know, and it's, so in my ideal scenario, I would prefer that we not have student loans. So I'm going to put that out there. But if we have to have student loans, I actually, I do think I do actually prefer the Australian. And actually the British model has become closer to the Australian model. Those are the ones that I would get. And I think especially the importance of, and I do understand that they're going through some changes and thinking about changing the pricing in terms of different majors paying, they do single subjects in Australia, but paying different amounts and things like that. But I do think the idea fundamentally, this is just supposed to be a contribution to all of the services that higher education provides a country, not just a city or a state, but a country at this moment in time, is really important. I also like the way that it is built in coming from the tax system. In fact, when I was talking to the Australian architect, one of the things that he talked about, he actually, there were some folks reaching out to him from the States about having employers collected here in the States. I don't like that because we have such a huge problems with wage theft in this country, but using the IRS, using that tool and doing that, and then also having an understanding that fundamentally after a certain number of years, if this is not collected, then it goes away. And that could have a real impact in terms of being collected through the IRS, understanding that it may not, all of it may not be taken back, but then more importantly, I think also, giving the flexibility for the many people who come in and out of the labor market for many reasons for their health to provide care. Broadly, not just to the children, but to the elderly, just a recognition of the realities of just how uncertain life can be to pay back our debt of this magnitude. Okay, thank you. That's really, really helpful. It gives us another vision for how to proceed. And Doyle, what a great question. What a great question. We have another question from Glenn McGee who takes us back to politics, and we have a few more political questions. I'm going to try and put these in a row. He mentions the FSA and the ED are refusing to release student loan valuation reports to Congress. What's going on here? Oh, the answer is that I don't know, and the answer is like having to confront the actual data involved, and is it in the political population because it does seem very clear that those in the education department are not in favor of, I prefer, by the way, cancelling students that. I don't think anyone needs forgiveness for going to college. We need it as the wonderful person who joined us on the stage said we need it not just for an individual but also for the public good. No one wants forgiveness for this. And my question is I'm wondering if they're just holding back that data because of there is some impetus to do something either in the question of bankruptcy or the continued hopes for a presidential executive order. That actually brings us to another question which follows up on that. And this is from Jamison Miller from Lumen Learning, who I was pointing to before. And he says, do you support cancelling it? Well, yes. Further, what barriers do you see in doing so? And do you have thoughts on how to overcome them? Oh, well, and actually the question is what do you mean by barrier? Because my first thought about a barrier is my fear if I could only have one thing, I actually wouldn't have cancelling student debt. I would have a complete restructuring of how we pay for higher education so that people don't go into paralyzing debt. Because if again, because often times you don't have one thing. And my fear is that if we do have a widespread cancellation, it will lose the political momentum to fundamentally fix the terrible way that we fund higher education. That we are putting all of the many uses of the university that Clark Kerr first enumerated in the 60s. And there are so many more since then on the shoulders primarily of students and parents. That is unsustainable when there are so many who depend on this. We're basically, if you think about what's going on, the distraction in UC Santa Barbara, my alma mater, and of course Chris Newfield is also from there too, of the Godzilla dorm. I forgot what they called it. That's reflecting in the fact that the University of California, Santa Barbara is being asked to confront a housing crisis. But it's a college university. The research should be done, but they should not be asked required to do that. And then having to rely on a donor speaks to an entirely different question. But I think in the question of cancel, yes, I think it should be canceled. I think it would be have an immediate benefit, especially since we have wonderful work because of the data now collected, that the student debt is disproportionately hurting borrowers of color, especially women. This could go a long way to actually confronting historic inequalities now, but it is not a long-term solution. And I just worry the fact of the matter in the politics of this country is that we tend to go for short-term solutions when we need long-term reconstruction. Jameson, you really hit a nail on the head. There's all kinds of responses in the chat. I just want to pull a quick clarifying question came from Lisa Durf who says, when you're speaking of canceling, is that all student debt or just undergrad debt? Oh, I mean, I think the thing is like, I would actually cancel it all because I do actually think right now when our doctors have been on the front lines of COVID, whether it is that they're developing diseases, whether it is they're doing it, I do also realize that the nurses too, there's many actually who are having all sorts of different degrees. And some of them are actually associate degrees who are doing also a lot of the primary care work as well. I do actually think I'm tired of means testing. I'm really tired of it. I just want a recognition about how essential so many people are and how much this country has relied on them to get the educations so that they can do so many different kinds of essential work that we're only now recognizing as essential. The economist had a cute line about this. They said that tuition discounts are how American higher education does means testing. So I thought it was pretty, pretty clever. Thank you, Lisa, for the question and thank you, Elizabeth, for the quick answer. We have a Tom who is a government specialist mentions two political problems. One is that he says, quote, my kid chose a cheap option for college and incurred very little debt. Why should I pay for kids around debt institutions that cost 10 times as much? That's one. And Tom also mentions, I think Tom, I've got this right. Elizabeth, when you said that the majority that students of color are disproportionately bearing debt, and Tom says that's the political problem casting debt outright. So those are two major political issues. Jordan has a very good follow-up question. Ellie, is cancellation just for domestic students or also for international students? My understanding, the focus right now is actually being on domestic students on the actual, that's who it would actually touch. And I think this is an interesting question. I apologize to say this, I haven't actually given it thought, so I actually will actually sit with this because one of the interesting things, the reason that there has been an increase in international students and a real fear that fewer of them are applying to college universities is because that college universities have been using them to do what they call scholarships, what the rest of us call discounting in order to make it more affordable for actual residents and citizens of this country. I'd have to sit with it more, but I think right now my main concern is because student debt can be so crippling to the people of this country, I do think that where the priority is, to be sure. I also think, I mean, one of the challenges too of the public service loan forgiveness program, the way that it is working is that I actually was working for a nonprofit, before I started working at Loyola, a nonprofit institution in another country, but those years of paying off the student debt are not actually being recognized because my employer was not US based, but I was still doing public service work. So I think it's an interesting question about what kinds of work again is this country recognizing as being essential? Yeah, that's a very good point. The one quick question from Mark DeFusco, let me just ask him to clarify before I float it. He says, we are already near a civil war. How much resentment would we fulment among those who paid off when loans are canceled? I'm sorry, just to... Mark, do you mean resentment among those who pay the cancellation or who those who are, whose debt is paid off? Sorry, I just want to make sure before we... Just let me let us know in the chat so I can get that clear. I can answer it both ways if you want. This is the thing I always talk about. He says those who paid. Thanks Mark. For those who paid, you know, my answer when people have asked these questions, I've already paid my debt. It's like, yeah, but you're going to have to pay it again, pay off the debt again for your kid, perhaps for another relative, that this is a debt that is going to keep accruing unless we confront it. I mean, that is one reason why I think changing fundamentally the way that we pay for higher education has to be the number one priority. But that is my answer, is that none of us benefit from continuing a system that continues to leave the next generations in debt. And indeed, when grandparents are taking out loans for their children and all of these other kinds of questions. And I think if it kind of goes back, I didn't get a chance to refer back to it, is this question about like, well, my kid chose a different option. Well, it's good that your child had that option, because not all students actually have low cost options near them. And there are students who, again, because of Goldrick Robb's really important work, not all students can actually go the traditional route, especially if they're not what we think of as now being college age. And I think that we need to sit with it. I also think that Goldrick Robb's work is so important in showing how opaque, how it is impossible for people to understand the actual cost of college, because a lot of times they're they're basing the reports online or the reports that college universities give are based on living expenses below the poverty line. And I think that we need to sit with that and consider that as well. And also that student who went to a more expensive college or university for whatever reason, and maybe they got confused, like many would be, that they were being giving a scholarship, which we all know is discounting. But we might need them to be our heart surgeon or to be the nurse. In the case, in the end of my book I talk about, I had a after I finished a draft of this book, I had a really horrific bike accident. And the only reason I have my hand back, it's not my surgeon, although I loved my surgeon, Dr. Shaw, but my occupational therapist who pays $800 a month in her first student loans because of the extra training necessary because the hand is ridiculously complex. I would not have been able to finish this book without Amy, which is why she's in the acknowledgments. And I think we need to sit with that. We don't know. And we don't know why that was accrued that way or anything else. Well, sorry, I'm just, just gave me a cardiac moment with your hand there, that OTP. Oh, it's horrible. Actually, the sad thing is like, it was because I was being like, like one of those inventive instructors who was trying to show my students that the past is a lie around them. I was actually on, taking my students on a field trip. Oh, no, oh, oh. Why you should not be, you know, a really like engaged professor, right? No, no, that's not it. I got my second concussion on a bike accident, which I can tell you about another time. But we have another creative suggestion coming from our good friend, Mark Rush. Mark says, would it be helpful to advocate for a shorter college experience? How much debt is run up in electives is four years really necessary. It's an ancient model within the three years, though. Well, in the three years, actually that is the single subject model that the British use. And so we do have different models of it, for sure. But actually kind of, I actually think elected, one of the things, because I've had, I've been, I've benefited from being able to teach in the British system, the single subject system. I do love the American elective system. It gives people an especially sense, you know, we are no longer in an age where you might be in a career for 25 years in a war. But those electives are an opportunity, right, to go beyond and take courses that might actually serve you later. We never know when something might be beneficial to take that writing class, or to be honest, since a lot of those electives I have to admit, it isn't the humanities where I am, as a historian. But as the humanities, so it's the sciences that gave us the vaccines, right. It is the social scientists who taught us how to, how to best distribute. It is the humanities and the arts that kept us sane for this pandemic. And I really don't, I would, I don't like the idea of focusing on humanities, but I do think the thing that's interesting about shortening it and reimagining it is, why are we assuming that college should only be four years of your life? And I don't mean actually to talk about graduate school or anything like that. But where is the understanding that if most Americans now are really only in a career, it's now, it has to be less than seven years now. I'd have to go back and look at the Labor Department data. But why wouldn't we be expect, why would we want to make college more accessible for people to come back at different points in their life, for different reasons? How would it help with the question of, for example, postpartum depression for a woman to be able to come back, to have this opportunity when her child is young and there's a flexibility in how college courses are offered, to have that support, right, to build a new community at that. I think it's an interesting to think the question that we're so narrowed, going back to this idea that we think is a college is just for one person's job, as opposed to understanding it as a public good. And I can't wait to... It's in the next book. Clark Kerr damning Nelson Rockefeller for embracing student loans at the state level before the national loans are passed. He said, you are going to turn a public good into a private luxury. And that means reimagining how we offer college classes. In my case, the pandemic, we're never going to go back to normal. And I flip my classes now. And I want to actually have those moments when I am with my students in person to have a chance to actually have the real discussion that could actually mean something at whatever age they might be. That was that one answer was about three forum sessions worth of topics. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, no. This is so rich. This is great. I think people right now are at. Oh, my gosh. What can we what can we act? Also, the I'm going to save the chat afterwards. I can share with people. I do want to publish it because a lot of it's personal. But there's a lot of great stuff in this right now. I'm trying to see. I just don't want to get overwhelmed because I'll just get distracted by all the cool things that are going on. Matthew mentions in Quebec, they have a two year gen ed model. They cut a year off of high school and bachelors are three years. And that's a much cheaper model for the students. And then Steve Ehrman mentions that there's different ways of talking. There's experimentation for divergent learning within required courses for majors. We have another question that's come in. And and this is from Jordan Davis who asks, do you believe that the U.S. can or will offer a free four degree year college for all system this century? Oh, my God. Well, and especially annoyingly, as a as a historian, you should know that I almost never been quite sure what year I'm in. But I do know that I am in. I just increasingly remember that. Well, because I'm constantly writing about like the 19th and 20th, but I am in the 21st century. So we got less than 80 years. It's possible. And let me tell you why it could be possible. One, besides the fact that there is a building college in Congress called the College for All Act. Two is, you know, the states can either be laboratories for democracy or laboratories for democracy, depending on how you want to think about it. We have states trying to experiment this, we have New York state and we have New Mexico. And there's also pressure right now in California, but the pressure is building on California to do something like this. And that is exactly where we got. Although it was modeled off of the mortgage program, it was the states who experimented with student loans first. And so I think that there's interesting things there. There's pressure for it. There is a bill in Congress. It keeps getting reintroduced. It's called the College for All Act. But I think what it really comes down to, as always does in this country, is it comes down to people demanding it and being organized and acting and not just electing the politicians who say what they want to hear but holding them accountable. And I say that and I say that knowing we're all wondering what, I'm sorry, I'm not going to curse, what is going on with our basic voting rights. And I think for me, when I've been asked in forums before, if I can only have one thing, what would I have? I would actually have voting rights. I would have a genuine overhaul of representation in this country starting with increasing the number of seats in the House of Representatives because it's ridiculous that it was frozen in 1929. If we want to be able to listen to what the American people are telling lawmakers that they need and electing them hoping for that promise and not just the President but the ones in Congress want to say we have got to confront the specific misrepresentation, unrepresentation of how our system is. We need a 21st century constitution for a 21st century democracy. And that is what it will take not only to get a reform in higher education but to sustain it because it's all well and good to get that passed, like when they finally created the SUNY system in 1948, but it actually took 12 years later with the election of Governor Nelson Rockefeller to actually do with something which was basically just a paper university in all honesty. And that comes from public pressure and it comes from people empowered to make their voices heard. That's a huge, huge call. We have a few different responses. A couple of people here in the chat are skeptical about the Senate. Paul Hamlin, in 18 years 30% of Americans will choose 70% of senators, vice versa too. I do have a if I can, since we're almost out of time, if I can sneak in one of my own questions, the American high red enrollment peaked in 2012 and it's been down every year since. We're about 10% down from that height. Is it possible that we're kind of changing our collective minds that the late 20th century idea that everyone should get some post-secondary experience that we're kind of turning away from that? If that's the case, I mean does that make it harder for us to have that kind of groundswell of demand for accessible high red? I'm not actually sure that's, I don't necessarily see that it it necessarily means that you won't have that groundswell of demand because people have aspirations for their children is one of those things, but also when people recognize the important work that college and universities do that they were are also essential part of, for example, just one example of fighting COVID-19. That actually is very helpful. But the other thing about it is I think that we need to think about is you know we're, the you know birth rates plummeted during the Great Recession. Absolutely plummeted during the Great Recession. And so we're going to be coming on to that age cohort now. So some of it, some of it is absolutely that we are having an issue very similar to after the baby boomers graduated when they they cycled through higher education. We're doing that kind of creation. One of the interesting things that happened after the baby boomers, the majority of them had graduated is the college universities became more adaptive to the needs of those who are not that what we now consider the traditional college age thing. So there's there's there's room here to do it. And the question is will it be need and especially as we're all trying to understand what comes next in the new normal that comes after the pandemic when it looks like more and more workplaces are likely going to be hybrid, both remote and in person. What are the new needs that are coming out of that? As we confront something that you cannot actually ignore no matter how people try climate change. These are the kinds of questions that will require universities and colleges to be a part of that, both for job training, both for research, both the public services, these kinds of things. And so I think that the question there is is that we as we confront that and also thinking about the terms that drop off the college population, fewer international students have been wanting to come here, not just because of the expense, but because of our immigration policies. The Canadians, love the Canadians, that's a pathway to citizenship. Well, Canada has more international students per capita than any other country in the world. Last I saw that's a great answer, Elizabeth. I really appreciate that. We had a couple of responses that came in from that. Scott Meyer asks, and this is a good final question I think. I think the hard part of this conversation is that we have this big problem in student debt, but solutions feel so big. Is there a message that we can share as succinctly to normies as a way to make a positive impact? I think doing what it seems like low hanging fruit right now is actually the bankruptcy bill, the bipartisan bankruptcy bill. There is hope actually that getting that passed might also lead, provide the impetus for for some additional cancellation, things like that. That is absolutely low hanging fruit that could actually be done, especially since the only thing Congress seems able to pass because of the Senate. Thank you for the first new point of that out is budget reconciliation. And that is something I'm thinking again, I don't know the Senate parliamentarian, but that seems something that could actually be put under unlike voting rights for it. And I do understand the frustration that I do think in bigger terms, but I do think that there are smaller steps that could be meaningful. I also really appreciate the person who said that they also would like a haircut after the pandemic too because we've all been there. Well, some of us have been there, but the we are allowed to wear in the form, right? It's too late for that. What we are not allowed is to keep going past the top of the hour because we have, we have just at lightning speed shot past our session's time. Elizabeth Scherber, I am so glad you could join us as a guest. It's just been a pleasure to learn from you and you're incredibly passionate while deeply, deeply skilled mind. So much knowledge about history and current politics. It's astonishing. What's, what's the best way for people to keep up with you if they want to follow up with your documents? Oh, actually, the, the answer is I've been trying to get better because my publicist gives me a hard time about it, about updating my website which is etshermer.com and I, I have public events and doing a public event tomorrow. It's actually just a more traditional talk for New York state public libraries at 11 a.m. Eastern time. And that is actually up on the website and the things like that. So I've been trying to do it. I am good, got getting better about tweeting when I do events and I, again, at etshermer is, is the best way to find me for sure. Okay. Well, some of us have been tweeting at you during this hour because we're this kind of high octane multitasking fiends. Once again, thank you so much. Your book is vital for us all and I really want to see that next book. Good luck editing it and getting it into a readable form. Thank you. And thank you for everyone for being here today. Oh, it's, it's, it's our pleasure. But don't go away, everybody, because we need to let you know what's happening for the next few weeks in the forum. And let me just thank you all for a fantastic range of questions. Looking ahead, we've got sessions coming up like climate crisis, libraries and careers. Next week is eco media literacy, minority students on campus, public higher education, web three, and our six year anniversary. Just go to forum.futureeducation.us to get more on that. If you want to keep talking about these many, many questions about the purpose of education, about three year programs, about how to restructure student debt, you can hit my blog, bryanalexer.org or hit us all at Twitter, use the hashtag FTE. If you want to go back into the past and visit our session with Sarah Goldberg-Rabb or Chris Newfield or any of our sessions about student debt or the financial woes of higher education, just go to our archive at tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. And all of you, thank you so much for a fantastic questions. It's been a real pleasure hearing from all of you and thinking with all of you. I hope you're all well as we exit January and head toward February and this really a new year of 2022. Above all, stay safe. We'll see you all online. Bye bye.