 Ever since the beginning of the Future Trends Forum, nearly seven years ago, we've been looking at the economics of higher education. We've been looking at how higher education is financed, how higher education intersects with macroeconomic trends, like inequality, but above all, we've been looking at jobs. What does it mean for a college or university to prepare a student for the marketplace? How is the labor marketplace changing? What is higher education doing well, and what do we need to do a lot better? I'm so absolutely delighted to be able to welcome whom I think of as the world's great expert on this subject. Tony Conor Valley is the director of the Center for on Education of the Workforce at Georgetown University. He has a starvingly impressive resume. He publishes a tremendous amount of cutting-edge research which influences policymakers and thought leaders around the world. I can't praise this man enough. All I can do is bring him on stage so that we can all meet him. Welcome, Joey. You've been talking to my mom. Well, she'd be welcome, but I'm especially glad to see you. Where have we found you today? Are you in the DC area right now? I'm in DC, not on the campus. I figured out a couple years ago that working off campus saves money. So one of the things that universities are learning is that people like me will figure that out. But I'm off campus as is all my colleagues at the center. Understood. Very good. Well, I'm not too far from you. I'm coming to you from Manassas, Northeastern Virginia. So COVID permitting, someday we'll have to meet each other for coffee. I mentioned to you, Tony, before, that we have people introduce themselves in an unusual way but an appropriate way on the future transform. We ask you about what you're going to be working on for the upcoming year. That is, what are the ideas that are going to be the top of your mind? What are the projects and tasks that are going to be taking up most of your time for the next year? Well, I kind of know, and that answer stems from the fact that the center pretty much reserves 30 to 40 percent of our time for issues that come up over the transom. Is one way to put it. That is, we're fairly open to questions from policymakers, media, practitioners and so on. So there's a fair amount of that. And then when an issue comes up, we are often encouraged or decide ourselves to do work on that issue. So our race-based affirmative action is the obvious one at the moment, where we're striving to get something out fairly soon on that. And then there are the usual, for us, there are products that we produce on a regular basis. Once every three to four years, we do projections and we're doing that this year out to 2031. And then we do good jobs projections. We decide which of the jobs that are going to be produced are good jobs using a standard we created with a group of economists. And so we're doing work that people would expect a lot of or some of what we're doing is that because essentially we're part of what is, I think, in the history of higher education, a major event, which is that the purpose of higher education is clearly to allow people to live more fully in their time. But what has changed in that long-term mission is the relationship between higher education and the economy. So that we're now living in a world where the most traveled pathway to the middle class is through higher education. So that our work tends to focus there and will probably increasingly focus there. Well, thank you. Thank you. I admire the practical smartness of having a 30-year time available for things to develop over the course of the year. And things are moving very, very quickly indeed. So there's quite a bit. And everything you said so far is these are all reasons that so many of us benefit from these. Friends, I have on the bottom left of the screen a link to a recent set of publications from Tony's Center. You can see on the header the uncertain pathway from youth to a good job. And that actually points you to a budget of research, which looks at a whole bunch of different factors. I'm going to start off by asking Tony a couple of questions to get everything rolling, but this forum is here for all of you. So as he and I speak, please start thinking about your questions, your examples, your comments, your ideas. And again, just use the buttons at the bottom of the screen in order to put them forward. I guess the first question I had for you that I'd like to ask is kind of the most popular question, which is how is higher education not doing a good job in preparing especially young students for the workforce? How are we falling down on that job? I mean, almost by definition, higher education is doing a good job in the sense that most of the access to good jobs is created by some form of post-secondary education in America now. The exception to that is that about 30% of good jobs end up being jobs for high school graduates, but only 20% of those jobs end up being good jobs. Whereas a much higher share of jobs that are attached to post-secondary education and or training oftentimes both those are where the good jobs are and higher education performs that function. Now it does that in a extremely powerful way, but as it does so in any economic shift, you tend to reinforce the underlying sociology in a society. So what we know about higher education since the 80s and especially since the 90s is that higher education, if you want to pick one institution, higher education is probably the most powerful institution in American life now, higher education and training, it's the most powerful institution in American life determining whether people make it or not. And that is reflected in a reinforcement, especially since the 90s of the underlying race, class and gender inequality in America. So higher education is making things more unequal, not less so. It almost can't help do that, unless it specifically attempts not to do that and for a variety of reasons, it's fairly limited in its ability to buck sociology in America. Wow. So on the one hand, we are a powerful gateway, we are in a sense a major production or production force for the middle class in America. At the same time, we're also reproducing and accentuating the inequalities that are with that riddled this society within which we're embedded. I was going to follow up with another question, Tony, but questions have just popped up all over the place. So let me just share these because I want to make sure people get a chance to ask them. John Hollenbeck asks a quick question. This is a good definition question. What's the definition you're working from before a good job? We, not we, the Gates Foundation gave us money and we convened a group of economists, labor economists, mostly the ones that we would worry about if we did it on our own to try to figure out what a good job is. I suppose predictably we could only agree on two things after months and months of conversation. And that is that the wage defines a good job. That was the de minimis employment and a wage employment in Ireland. And what we came up with that everybody agreed to and disagreed on everything else was that and the numbers have changed literally because of the current inflation. The numbers as of several months ago was that if you, when you boil it down, it's a complicated analysis. But when you boil it down, what it says is if you can make a minimum of $45,000 a year before you're in your 40s, you've got a good job. We don't have benefits. We're criticized a lot for that, but and we're thinking about changing that, but it gets incredibly complicated anyway. So that's our definitions basically about employment. That's very clear definition and I appreciate the Sisyphean task of trying to get a bunch of economists to agree on something. Well, we got them all to sign off. That was the real goal all along. It came down to two numbers. And you got it. Well, thank you, John, for the question and thank you, Tony, for the clear answer. We have other questions that have come up. One is from keel dooms great fan of the form and he asks, are he thinks alternative credentialing will make college affordable. I wonder what Dr. Carter Valley's view is on alternative credentialing. What we know when we're going through a period in which what I think of as alternative credentialing, which is training work experience and so on that has become very popular in the last few years. Popular with legislators so that means it's going to be part of. It'll be an increasing share of our higher education system that is training is growing. And support for work based learning and so on. So there is that's the closest thing we've got to an alternative credentialing system, but it includes certificate certifications. They're all sorts of badges. The whole notion of using work experience as credit and so on. So the alternative circular certification is becoming more about training than degree level education, although it's very hard to separate the two. And it's clear that going forward. There's a lot of political support for training as an alternative to degrees, or as an accompaniment to degrees. That makes a lot of sense. That's a very clear answer keel. Thank you for that question. And friends if you're new to the forum that's an example of a text question. I'm going to give you another one right now. This is from Anne Fenzie University in Maine where she's a PhD candidate. And she asks, you describe three of the challenges that young people facing getting good jobs in your report. How are the challenges different for adults who need post secondary credentials to get a good job. And I suppose you probably want to mention those three big challenges are that has in mind. I'm reading to you. I'm from Hodgden, probably north of you. The challenges that are uppermost at the moment are the I think in the end the challenge that is uppermost is the is our ability to integrate specific education in the United States that is to make it simple the humanities and specific majors attached occupations or industries, which is about 70% of the eight degrees by the way and much more than that a graduate degrees and so on. So the that integration is crucial. We know how it works because of a lot of good basic research. And that is that both general education, let's call it humanities and specific education in particular fields of study that they both have power unto themselves in determining earnings. We also know that they substitute for each other so I can get a certificate and heating ventilation and air conditioning and out earn a whole lot of the A's and even a lot of graduate degrees. On the other hand, I can get a very strong bachelor's degree in the humanities. And although I will certainly well almost certainly begin at a much lower employment earnings prospect. Over time, my earnings will gain, because there's an interaction always between general and specific. So what you really want if you're trying to grab the brass ring is you want the richest mix of general and specific and those are the big winners in the game. That sounds like a call for a very careful core curriculum overhaul. Now a lot of places including I mean George we're doing this at Georgetown always have I guess although it seems more intense now it's more intense everywhere I think. And that is a lot of the people in the counseling operation here although they don't do what they don't do labor market counseling but in the educational counseling operation you're trying to figure out how you integrate those two kinds of education. That's a lot of work and thank you. Thank you for that great question and good luck on your PhD. And Tony I'm going to bring up a question from a young gentleman that we both have the good fortune to know, which is Jordan Davis, who is a student and brilliant young man at Georgetown University. And he asks, what other countries around the world do you believe exemplify both a strong economy and a strong higher education infrastructure. I would say that the United States and here I'm on touchy ground. I'm not an expert on this, but in my, you know, my free trips to Europe to sit on panels. I learned that the United States and say and nations like France. We're very good at elite education that as our system is profoundly the leaders, and basically sorts the population for us. Other nations, and the usual examples, Germany, the hot one now is Switzerland. They are much, much better at providing education which tends to be more occupationally specific for non college people but in the end of course that means that they track people from a very early age on in a diverse country like the United States especially since the 1983 nation at risk report and all the K 12 education reform that followed that we have banned tracking so to speak. So that, but there's still an issue we're graduating people from high school we say their college and career ready. They're more college ready than they used to be over the drop out rate is huge. And there's certainly not career ready there's nothing in algebra to it's going to get you a job. So maybe this is something where the US, we can be proud of the US. If not complacent and Jordan good. The other thing that's worth saying because it doesn't get said enough because it's kind of an academic finding but it's a consistent finding is that the American model which distinguishes itself sort of because the BA and the two year tries to amplify the same characteristic which is you mix general and specific education. It turns out that I think this is accidental but it turns out that when you look at the economic effects of mixing general and specifics. It both creates higher earnings in higher levels of technology change and adaptability in our economy versus the European so arguably the American degree especially the BA degree is the best thing going in the Western world. Thank you. I appreciate the extra dive into that question. And we have still more questions coming in. This is great. You just let the let our group on fire, Tony. We have a question that has come in from our longtime supporter Don Charlis. He couldn't be here today. So he asked me to ask this for him, which is what do you foresee as the educated underclass continues to grow and more working class people are disaffected. And Don here is referring to Gary Roth's excellent book on the subject of the educated underclass. We as a nation is going to sound a little harsh. United States has always been characterized in education but in our economy before education became higher education became truly important in the 1980s. But in our economy we've always exhibited, but I think you can only call brutal efficiency. That is we only invest in people who have already been proven successful. They tend to be the people who come from higher income families and white families. And so the brutal efficiency in the American system is because of our real estate structure. We have these two streams constantly and have for quite some time, especially since the 80s. But we have these two streams. The way we protect ourselves, those of us who succeed is we don't live anywhere near those people who don't. So that we sequester people geographically, literally. And we the people who pay for less education are the less educated terms of their earnings, their employment, crime rates, public services on and on and on. That brutal efficiency is, some would argue, a lot of economists argue, they call it flexibility, is at the core of the American competitive advantage. We produce very high value human capital in the cheapest way possible. That is we don't waste money on people who we don't already know are going to make it. So that's the sorting mechanism. Higher education as a sift of pre-existing terms. Yeah, it is a, and you know, I think as Americans in the League included, I'm schizophrenic on this. That is, I'm very happy, or I see as a positive thing, that the economy, capitalism, values human capital much more than it used to. Now, that's a great achievement. It's the continuation of the long arc and the growing value of human capital. That's a good thing, especially Republican and democracy. The equality question gets it, might set up considerably, but that's a good thing. But the bad news is that increasing power is not equally distributed. And perhaps as our national economy becomes more and more unequal, that higher education plays a stronger role in widening those gaps. Well, there are, when you look towards the future, it looks like those gaps will widen. That is, I don't know of any trend that says they won't. That is when you're talking about higher education. When you're talking about training jobs, that's different. The infrastructure bill makes that different. So the, in the end, looking forward, the other thing is that our demography, if you take the increase in earnings inequality since 1983, which is when it started to increase after the 8081 recession, more than 70% of that increase can be attributed to differences in access to post-secondary education and training with labor benefit. So higher education is performing very efficiently and doing that particular job. And when you look forward, the most worrisome thing, I think, in the context of other worrisome things, is the demography, which is to say we're getting more and more families with two bachelor's degrees at the head of the household. So in Georgetown, where I work, enrollments are doubling every year. That is, applications are doubling every year. More and more rich kids out there, very smart rich kids. And then the demography, however, in general, but as the college age population is going down, especially after 2025, it'll go down most in New England and the East. It won't go down so much in the South and the West, but more and more of the population will be from families that don't have parents with higher education at the head of the household. So, and there are people who can afford higher rate on their own, least of all and so on and so on. There are more loan averse and so on and so on. So the division is going to increase because if you're a private, for instance, if you're a private college, and there are a lot of Jesuit colleges like this, so I hear about this a fair amount. If you're a private, a little private college somewhere and you're not that selective, if you do teach people who could use your help a lot. If you're not selective, you can't sell that and which is status and higher spending and higher graduation rates and some other things. But at the same time, you're then in a situation where if you're anywhere near selective, it's either climb or die because the population, your population is going down and your success rates are going to go down. And so in the end, that division in the United States by itself, unless things are done about it, by itself will grow naturally through demography. So we are already skewed towards the elite and we will become even more so. I mean, look what's happening in the Supreme Court. It is a complex issue and it's a very unpopular one. African-Americans and Latinos don't like race-based affirmative action in the majority, for example. So, but we've decided not to, or we're about to decide, I think it's fair to say, that we're about to decide that we're not going to make any special exceptions anymore. Some people believe that what will happen then, Rick Collenberg is a friend of mine and I have a lot of respect for his work. He gets a lot of heat for it. He says, well, it'll be a good thing because we'll shift to class. Colleges will prove they're progressive by focusing on class. I don't believe it. No. Well, I would hope that we'd be more attuned to class, but you... Well, I think that you can't get money from poor kids. There we go. Or not so poor kids because half of your enrollment, sort of ideally, depending on the college, the business model. But half of your enrollment is discount tuition to what are relatively advantage kids. Yes. It's called meridate. It's not meridate. It's a discount. So, in the end, there are people who can almost afford it but they can choose between you and three or four other places and you're in a bidding war. So, you know, it just strikes me that the incentives to move on to move on class are just very, very weak. That makes sense. That's awful, but that makes sense. We have more questions coming in. I invoked Gary Rolf before and he appeared and he asked a good follow-up question. I think, Tony, you've already spoken to this a bit, but if you want to say anything more about it, is higher ed a pathway to the middle class or are the majority of college students already middle class by background, that is lateral mobility rather than upward mobility? There is upward mobility due to post-secondary education and training. In the short term, I think it's going to increase actually, in part because of infrastructure and some of the training bills. But yes, when you're talking about the top 500 colleges, you're talking about essentially talking about educating the middle class. Once you go below that to the non-selectives and the two-year schools, it's a whole different game and there the dropout rates are horrendous. So, I mean, one of the only ways out of this and it's not a satisfying solution, I understand that, but is to sort of embrace the problem and decide that we're going to get serious about what happens to people after they graduate. After they graduate. Yeah, it is a, we know if you give me the name of any college, any college that gets Title IV funding from the federal government. It's just pretty much every college in the game. If you give me that college, I know for every, virtually for 80% of the programs in that college, what will, I can tell you what will happen to you when you graduate because I know it happened to all the people who graduated in that program before you did. Now, of course that can change, doesn't very much. But we know this, we're just not telling the students. Well, that's, thank you. That is a useful thing to add to this. And by the way, Gary Roth is a fine writer and we've had a session with him about six months ago on our archive, so I please recommend that. We have more questions and Tony, this is normally the point of the program where I encourage people to ask more questions. And now I don't have to because they're just all over the place. So I want to bring them up and give everybody a shot. This is from Ben Halland at Western Governors who says in the likely upcoming recession, what breaks first in the tension between bachelors as a common requirement for jobs and employers needs for labor. It is a special moment in the relationship between education and the economy. There are some confusions that will reign for several years. To some extent the shift to training away from the VA, let's say. The VA is getting a lot of bad press at the moment, which is not borne out by the data, by the way. But the support for training is sky high most since the Carter administration on Capitol Hill and in the administration. We true for a Republican administration as well. So we know that over the next, let me give you one example. On the infrastructure bill, we don't know how many jobs it's going to create. It's gotten very confused. But in any event, we know it's going to create a lot of jobs for high school graduates with no post-secondary and they'll be good jobs. We're going to get a bit of a shift. It won't be much actually. It depends on what you believe. Some people believe infrastructure will create 7 million jobs for high school graduates. Other people believe it will be 800,000 because of inflation and a whole series of other factors. But we're in a moment in which the assault on the VA or whatever you want to call it, if you're a journalist, you're going to go a local journalist, let's say. You're going to go to politicians and anybody who's important is going to be on a stage somewhere for the next six years cutting ribbons. And in every one of those ribbon cuttings, a good reporter will say, doesn't this mean people don't need a VA anymore? Politicians in both parties will say yes, that's what it means. They're already doing it. It's what Joe Biden says, Pete Buttigieg says, certainly the Republican Party says that. So we're going through a bit of a false dawn on alternatives to degrees. Not to say that they aren't valued because many of them are and will continue to be 7, 8, 9, 10 years out. But 7 years out or so when the infrastructure spending ends, we're going to have a retraining problem. Now, a lot of people, when you raise this in conversations with policymakers or politicians, the answer you get, which is not stupid. I've done enough working politics to understand this. What they say is that's two, that's eight years is two presidential terms. That's for house terms. Go to governor and the state legislature, same thing. This is going to go on for a while because you can go to those, you can vote for this stuff and you will be helping people, you will be creating good jobs. Just that there's a cliff out there. And that's a cliff we need to anticipate. Well, this is, this feels like a moment for a station identification. Welcome to the Future Trans Forum, where we look at the future of higher education, cliffs and all. We have more questions coming in, one from Marty Tillman at the Gateway International Group, building off of what you were just saying. Marty asks, your research has always revealed the ROI of higher degree is a real benefit. But what, why do you think the popular culture now denigrates the degree? That's a good question because it does. We just saw some polling very recent by I forgot the group, but a very good polling outfit that shows, and I may get this slightly wrong, that only 40% is less than 50. Think that higher education has an economic benefit. It's absolutely untrue. So in a lot of ways, my one of my biases and it's a bias is we want that to be true. That is, we all want opportunity for plumbers, electricians. We, we have traditionally not focused on that part of our economy. The new vogue for training will do that. That's part of what's going on there. And it is a good thing. We haven't focused on training since Jimmy Carter. So the, but there is a tendency not to want to go on to college, both parties, if you're a Democrat, you're trying to build the blue wall in the north. And that means you got to get the white working class. You've already got the minority working class pretty much. If you're a Republican, you want to keep the white working class. So training is going to be very popular and everybody is saying, you know, in training is truthfully an alternative. That's, that's part of all of these arguments. There's no nuance in them. These things are all sort of half true. It's very hard to communicate when things are half true. Agreed. Agreed. Thank you. That's a really, really good answer. We have, and thank you for that question. By the way, that's something we're going to be looking at for some time to come. We have a question from our good friend George station at Cal State Monterey Bay. And he asks this, can higher ed continue fulfill its purpose if a significant portion of its teaching workforce may not meet the definition of a good job. And here George is referring to the adjunct professoria called sessionals in Canada. Well, I'm going to reveal my biases here. I used to be the political and legislative director for AFSCME, the biggest public employee union in America. And maybe the biggest union the FLCIO at the moment, I think. But anyway, the answer there is that public doesn't want to pay people. You work in the public sector, your bosses, somebody probably makes less than you do. So there is a, and it is a first professional job was in my family. The, it is part of a pathway, an intergenerational pathway. So I don't know. I think that we're facing shortages again. They've been pretty persistent, but they look like they're going to get a lot worse. On K-12 teachers, the professoriate, we used to try to organize them. In fact, we used to try to organize Harvard every year. We were just being vengeful, truthfully. We were never going to organize them. But in the end, higher education professors don't want to be organized. I can tell you that I run those campaigns. So they're all little private businesses. And their loyalty is to their discipline. So there is a, they're very difficult to organize. If there's ever a moment for them to organize, it is now. Because the struggle in higher education is going to be largely focused on reorganizing the public systems. Private systems will go their own way. They may get sort of attacked for legacies and stuff like that. It's just revenge politics. But in the end, we're going to reorganize the public systems. And the way we're going to do that is now that we know how the system works at the program level. If you're a state legislator, you can reorganize your system at the program level. If you've got one legislator said to me years ago, and it's always stuck with me. We, and I don't know if these numbers are right now, so I won't say the state. We've got 20 places in this state where you can go and major in English. How come we don't just have 10? And if you, and this was years ago, this guy said this. And if you want to major in English, you go to one of those 10. You don't want to major in English and you got to take English to get your degree, take it online. I think that's where we're headed in the public systems. You can't reorganize the private system unless they learn. Because the private system competes on the basis of the cafeteria model. You got to have everything for everybody. If there's a new program and environmental insecticide or something, you're going to get it because you're using it to attract students. The privates all have to have the full cafeteria. So they have a very difficult time rationalizing their product and selling it in the way a market would generally demand. So once you know how the system works with the program level, you can start to organize it at the program level. And that is an efficiency move. The states are beginning to, some of them are doing it in ways that are not acceptable to a lot of people. And that is, you know, you don't do this by cutting out the French program. That's not the point. Cutting out programs ain't going to cut it. I mean, you're not going to get enough money doing that first of all. But reorganizing is a different matter. And my own bias is you want to reorganize because we need more money. And we need more money for wraparound services for students, especially less advantage for mental health services, which we all have to own up to now, I think. And for career counseling, we know how the system works economically, but we don't tell the students. I mean, why don't we do that? They're not children. You can talk to them. You can tell them Santa Claus is real. But when they're 18, 19 years old, they get scared to tell them the truth. Friends, this is a question for everyone in the chat. Would you mind if I publish the chat and the questions to a blog post anonymized? I'll just remove all of your names. Just let me know in the chat or DM me if you have any requests because the chat box, Tony, I'll share this with you afterwards. The chat box is exploded. It's huge. And I don't think we can get to all the questions in the time we have. So I want to make sure that we can share these. Vanessa, John, Lisa, Roxanne, Mark. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you. We have one question that's historical and then a couple that point to the future. And the historical question is actually about the Truman Commission. And let me see if I can put this up carefully. Hang on a second. This is from Greg Shuckman. And they just put us in two different boxes. You see what I mean. And 75 years ago, the President's Commission on Higher Education released a six bond report entitled Higher Education for American Democracy, given the challenges that we're seeing today to American. Here's the second box. Democracy should the Biden administration dust off this report and learn how higher education can once again strengthen American democracy. One of the questions is over at Brookings, and I'm forgetting his name, but he wrote a piece and I'm happy you didn't mention my center. But he wrote, I thought a brilliant piece talking about, you know, we've been so focused on getting people jobs and education. We forgot about citizenship. It's hard to refute that in my judgment. So that in the meantime, the economy, in part through education, has created a society of winners and losers. And the losers are very angry. It's not just because of their wage. There are some uglier issues in this, I think it's fair to say. So the no, we the system itself doesn't do that. Any attempt to do that. I mean, there's certain things that are legitimate like service learning. Any kind of internship or applied learning or work based learning is now very prized service learning is a substitute for that it's not as effective as work based learning and economic terms. But the, I think that there'll be, I think there'll be more of that. Oh, it doesn't show up. If you look at build back better, which was kind of a, it was one of the first what was unique about it to me. Because I see this elsewhere. It's the new era in education reform, which basically says what we really have here is all one system. That if we're going to help disadvantaged kids starts in preschool, we know that we social scientists have always known. So, but policymakers know that now. So when they write stuff, if you look at the education platforms of the two parties, the Democratic Party is much stronger on this because it has a big education plan. There's as well, there's a general recognition that systemic reform is required. So you got this guy Newsom, running in California, who's running on, I think his phrase is literally cradle to career. In some ways, I hope it isn't because he's going to get whacked on that. But people call him communist and all that. So I think the, that realization is here now. Now, education in all, we all work for somebody, although I'm a professor. So that's our goal. But in the end, so in the end, the, the system is compartmentalized and subdivided in, you know, it's a very difficult thing to comprehend reform across a whole system. And you don't want to do it the old fashioned way. That's we're way past that, you know, you don't turn American education into General Motors. You don't have an education czar who runs that that is never going to happen. So the way you do it was is with information services support systems. It's a tough fight because you're asking people to give up their advantages in many cases. It's a fight that's still alive in the courts. That is, we lost on the Rodriguez case in 1973. The Supreme Court essentially said there's no right to education in America. Basically, that's what they said after they said there was one in Brown and the Board of Education. But anyway, the going forward, there's no help, no hope for the federal government on this. But in the States, what happened after Rodriguez was the lawyers, not a lot of them, but a bunch of them shifted to the States and they've been suing the States. And they've had a lot of people think not terribly successful. I think it's successful. That is you end up what it tends to argue the cases tend to argue something that's very hard to measure, which is educational adequacy. And then the question becomes adequacy by itself doesn't say anything. You have to know if you're talking about adequacy, you got to say adequacy for what? And for what increasingly, you'll have the citizenship language in there. Almost always we've got this for, we've pulled this in court cases from 50 states. But the adequacy stuff, it always includes the citizenship thing, but it's almost like a throwaway. And then it will include to make people ready for careers in a modern economy. That's what fights because you can prove it doesn't. So my own bias is that we ought to be mounting a lot of court cases in a lot of states because the K-12 system, its claim, there's a history to this, its current claim is that they're going to make people college and career ready. They don't make anybody career ready. So except for 30% of American workers at any given point in time and only 20% of them have a good job. And they're over the age of 40 or 50. So there is a, I think there's a pathway here in the courts, which is something that everybody's forgotten about. So that's one way forward. Friends, that last question was a point at General Democracy, so expanding our purview today from economics, but I think quite rightly. Now we have a burst of questions which look ahead a little, almost apocalyptically. So let me just put these up here. One is from our wonderful friend, guest and supporter, Tom Hames, who asked, what happens when the economic model that supports this system, higher ed, no longer makes sense? What's next when people say the emperor has no clothes? Capitalism, after having a hell of a run since in the post war era with notable exceptions, you know, Germany, Germany in the 70s and so on. The sessions, et cetera. So it's still having a hell of a run. I mean, what we just saw with COVID is the breakdown in supplier chains. All of that was built and it'll be rebuilt. I feel quite sure as it works. All that was built because of a technology revolution in combination with globalization in the 1980s after the 8081 recession. And that will still prevail. But what is happening, I note that last week, something that I used to do a lot of work in politics, and this is shocking to me. The bill that we use to compensate workers dislocated by trade, trade adjustment assistance, it expired. Now, it's always had a hard time because, but what it tells you is we don't have the votes for trade anymore on the hill. That is trade can be seriously challenged. You can beat a trade bill in my day. You couldn't do that. I used to log against them all the time. Then when I worked on the Hill, I helped write them. But the, you know, the, you can now beat a trade bill. And the fact that TAA went down is very telling to me, incidentally, as a labor lobbyist, I lobbied against training. Because one of the things I didn't want to say to my members or the UAW or more so the industrial unions than my own members, but was nobody wants training. They want their job. And if you stand up in front of, and I've seen this and been there. If you stand up in front of an audience of American workers and you talk about your education and training bill, what they think you're saying to them is you're going to be fired. Yes. You, you do that once, never do it again. That's why you'll notice you don't hear politicians doing that, except for training for young people. That's where the popularity is now. So I think the, I think we've come to the point and a lot of conservative economists agree with this remarkably. It's just logic. That is, we've come to a point in capitalism where it's going to have to change shape. That is, the environmental questions alone are enough to force us to deal with externalities, environmental externalities anyway from the economy. And there are a number of other issues like that. So I don't know that capitalism is going to go away. I hope it doesn't. I mean, I'm a bit of a hybrid. I'm a classical liberal. I think I like strong markets and strong governments. And I think that's what we're heading for. Now, how you make strong markets just have to be, there's going to be an issue about externalities, common subject and economics classes. But it really is up now. I mean, it's up in a very meaningful and obvious way. Tony, first of all, thank you for that impassioned response. We have in the chat, people have been digging up links on TAA. Thank you, Eileen. But also Tom Hames has a genius for asking very, very deep and productive questions. Thank you, Tom. Friends, we have five minutes more, which is ridiculous that we have so little time left to go. I want to share a couple more questions. And this is a personal one that comes from our friend Jill Yashakawa, who is a creative marvels. And Jill asks a really good advice question. What's your advice for a generation Z-er nurtured with a college or bus mindset, worried about their increase in college costs about higher ed, where they don't expect to earn more than their parents? I think the only reality-based message is education is going to be key in your future. Make your choices carefully. Obviously, because you won't, if you're like most people, you won't choose based on which is the field of study that makes the most money, which is petroleum engineering, by the way. So I never wanted to be a petroleum engineer. I mean, I was an intellectual and cultural history major, an Asian studies major in college, and then I decided I'd be an engineer, but I read a piece that was probably wrong in Newsweek a hundred years ago where they said they were laying everybody off at NASA. So I became an economist. I figured I'd cash in on the economics program, and I did. But you just got to think that way. You got to figure out who you want to be. Now part of the problem is you're not going to get much help with that. But to figure out who you're going to be, what that means about what you want to do, you need counseling and good information. We're almost at the point where we have good economic information on higher ed. That alone, of course, we publish a lot of stuff that puts numbers on this. And the worst possible thing is that somebody's making a decision based on our reports, because that's not the way you should think about it. And if you do think about it that way, you're going to be sorry. At some point, you're going to be sorry. Well, first of all, thank you for the terrific question. Jill, I really appreciate that and the heart in that question. And Tony, thank you for that rich answer, which combines personal advice with the macro structure really elegantly. We've got a question now from Anne Fenzi again, and I'm putting this one up because I think it's a great one to end on. And I appreciate you asking this one in. So much of this sounds bleak. I'm a pragmatist and an optimist. What's the good news? What actions can we take to improve degree completion, especially from marginalized learners? That's always what I say to my daughter when she calls. Good news anyway. So the good news is, and I think, you know, it's maybe shows my age, but the fact that human beings are becoming so much more valuable. We could be living in a world and we all thought we might be back in the 70s when everybody got, you know, Mac jobs, or we all took and we all made our living as people used to say by taking in each other's laundry and all that didn't happen. Turns out a service economy is can be a high pay high skill economy. And I'm one of them. We didn't think that I didn't think that back then. Not many people did beginning after 83. There were a bunch of economists that sort of figured this out. But the I think it is a fairly hopeful as we are very wealthy people. We can do whatever we want. The question is what the hell do we want? And education has the power. That's what's so remarkable about it's good and bad news. As always, in my view of the world. The good news is it has the power to do the things we want it to do. That is to give opportunity universally to allow people to live more fully in their time in a number of respects, part of which is being a worker or a professional or whatever you want to call it. But that we have that capability. The question is, and we do know how to keep people from dropping out of college. Now part of it is a K 12 problem. There's no doubt about that. But and there it gets down to the old issue of financing funding programs for less advantaged folks and that sort of thing. But it's not like we don't know about this stuff. We're not as it used to be back in the day when during the riots in the late 60s, early 70s, Princeton and a bunch of colleges brought in a bunch of African Americans and just dropped them on the campus. Well, most of them flunked out. Of course they did. They didn't know where they were. And so what we've learned since then is that with supportive services and so on, we can do these things. This is not brain surgery anymore. People understand. The question is, does the business model in higher education, which is a very tough business model and is unforgiving, it doesn't allow us to do those things. So my bias is free community college was a good idea because we can't get people college and career ready with K-12 education anymore. We need a couple more years. A couple more years at the front end, these poor little beggars are going to go into school all their lives. But the I think we know how to do this. This is not brain surgery. It's the will to do it. And I think we'll do it. Frankly, I think people are. I tend to be part optimist, part pessimist, but I think both are real. I agree. Bravo for that fantastic answer, Tony. And thank you for that great question. Friends, much as I hate to say it, we're out of time. We have blitzed through an hour of intense conversation and thought. Tony, this is fantastic. Is the best way to keep up with your work going to the CEW site and signing up for updates? Oh, yeah. It's not my work. It's me and 22 other people. All right. Well, that was a good work, Matt, because it's my work. Well, thank you. I'd help us. It was my work. Well, you've helped us. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. Thank you for your work. It's my pleasure. We'll follow up with you. Take care. Have a good weekend. Thank you. Yes, you too. Don't go away, friends. I've got to point you to the next, the next couple of weeks of the forum, but let me thank you for a fantastic hour. I am going to follow this up with a blog post, anonymizing your comments and your questions. If you want to keep talking about this, if you're really curious about how to reboot higher education, if you're interested in what Dr. Conor Valley said about the questions of our fittedness for this new economy, please use the hashtag FTTE at Twitter or follow me at Brian Alexander or at Shindig events and go to follow my blog, BrianAlexander.org, which is where I'll post a recording of this along with some comments. If you'd like to look at the recording, as well as the recordings of 300 plus sessions, just go to tinyworld.com. If you want to look at our previous sessions to come, rather, go to forum.futureeducation.us, and you can see all of our topics ahead. And if you'd like to share with me some of your work, especially along these lines, just email me, and I'll be glad to share it with the entire community. Once again, thank you all for a fantastic conversation. Thank you all for contributing your thought, your hopes, your keen intelligence. As Director Conor Valley said, have a good weekend, stay safe everyone, and we'll see you next time online. Take care. Bye-bye.