 I think we should begin. So, let me welcome everybody. Welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm your cat herder for the next hour. I'm your host to our conversation. We have a terrific guest today who's written a very, very powerful book. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Now, we've been talking about inequalities of all kinds since the beginning of the Forum. Racial inequalities, gender inequalities, class-based inequalities. But our guest today, Professor Evan Mandarin, has done some really extraordinary stuff. He's done some great research into not just how campuses reproduce social inequality inside, but also how they make the world more unequal around them. His book, Poison Ivy, is fantastic. It's extremely passionate, data-rich, really powerful, hard to stop reading. I can't recommend it enough. And rather than telling you about it, I'm going to bring the author up on stage so that I can ask him some questions or better yet, you can ask him your questions. Professor Mandarin, hello. Your mic is off. Let me make sure we can hear you. No, that's still silent. Tell you what. Why don't you just relaunch this page and I'll bring you back up on stage. So, this is always an interesting challenge, even in our age of ramp and video conferencing, where we have machines that are struggling to talk to each other. And let me see if I can bring Evan back up. How about now, Evan? So, in the meantime, while he's doing a quick reset to bring everything up, let me just remind you that the Forum is here for your questions and your conversation. So, if you haven't had a chance to read this book, that's no problem. We'll be talking about it and Professor Mandarin will get a chance to say more about it. Hello, can we hear you? No, we cannot. There are a couple options here. And one is to make sure, of course, that your headphones are plugged in. But also to make sure, can you hear us? Okay. Okay. So, one thing to do is to also check to make sure that no other application is running, that might be grabbing your sound. Zoom or Skype or anything else. No luck yet. Tell you what, try relaunching this page. But when it relaunches, keep an eye on the browser window to see if a permission to use your camera and mic come back up. In the checkbox, John Hollenbeck says, technology are things that don't quite work yet from Daddy Hill's. Well, this actually works pretty well. I find Shindig to be very powerful. But in this case, I think his laptop or desktop might be having issues and trying to keep everything going. In the chat, Vanessa and John, thank you for the kind words. I really appreciate the thoughts. Let me see if we can, I'll say more about that later. Now we can hear you. You can. Perfectly. All right, great. Sorry about that. No problem. No problem. It's just the headphones. That's okay. That's okay. I'm so glad you could join us. And I'm so grateful to you for having written this fantastic book. Evan, we have this tradition on the forum where we ask people to introduce themselves by describing what they're going to be doing next, rather than what they did in the past. So I'm just curious, looking ahead to 2023, what are the big ideas, but also the big projects that you're going to be working on? Well, I'm thinking about my next book and I have two main candidates, both of which are related a little bit or in some way to the book I just wrote. One is I'm very interested in in cancel culture and I'm definitely a civil libertarian and worried about embracing of free speech and free expression in the academy and society. I'm also focused a lot on elites and I'm wondering if I can come up with an accessible way in to talking about who gets to become an elite, which is obviously a question that's related to the book. Do you mean an academic elite or an elite in general society? Right. What are elites? You know, one example that's on my mind a lot is who shapes the who controls access to like, you know, the op-ed page of the New York Times. And I think those type of opinion leaders and agenda setters have an enormous influence on society and I'm very worried about whether diversification of access or, you know, the lack of diversification of access, how that's shaped the trajectory of things in the country. But, you know, movie critics too. It's it's all kind of related. Interesting. Well, these both sound like terrific project. They're obviously huge topics and a lot that you can do about them. And you'll be teaching next year. What are you going to be teaching? Well, next year, I will teach I have an ethics class which I teach comes up in the book and I wrote about in the context of my article of where I was teaching at Appalachian State. So I'll teach that and I'm a deaf penalty person. So I'll I'll teach an honors ethics course and I'll teach about the deaf penalty. Oh, wow. Oh, and that's such an issue in New York State. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. And that gives us a sense of your wide ranging mind. Friends, I'm gonna ask our guest a couple questions about this book to get him to comment on it. And as he responds, please start thinking about your own question in your own comments. To begin with, Evan, it's you making a wonderful case drawing on the research of people like not many will say is I'm just blanking on his name. But you're thinking about Chetty and Friedman? Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Chetty was the one I was thinking of. You know, establishing that higher education overall does this really powerful job of protecting wealthy families and making sure that their their progeny are able to remain in economically elite society and does a much worse job of trying to advance people's status in life. And this is especially true of elite universities. You focus on Harvard and Princeton, a great deal, but also Stanford and others. And I think this is in many ways non controversial, the fact of it. I think we see people discussing this in different ways. But when you when you really, really drive home and and I think is really powerful and not talked about enough is is the sense that higher education contributes to social inequality. I think part of it is the reproduction of inequality that you described. But also how this changes the communities where where universities are. And I'm wondering if you just say a few words about about your sense of how higher education reproduces broader inequality. Right. So thanks for that generous reading and accounting of the book. I mean, I think I make kind of, I mean, I like my book. And I think it tells a very interesting human story, which I tell about a lot of people. But I think I make kind of two main intellectual contributions. So the Chetty and Friedman data has long been used to talk about upward mobility. And we've understood that public colleges, so eight of the top 12 or City University of New York colleges in terms of promoting access out of poverty. But I reshuffle their data to show how elite colleges are particularly and almost uniquely good at protecting people against downward mobility, and exclusively good at promoting people to a sort of top end mobility, which is related, like the question of elites that I talked about. So if you want to go work at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, you really better go work, go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton. And then the interrelationship with communities is I argue that affluent people, mostly white people, understand this. They have an intuitive sense that they're certainly chasing status, but they're also really concerned about passing on their class status to their children and getting them access to type of super elite jobs. And they move through the country accordingly. So the standard life courses you live in the city, until you have kids, and then you either send your kids to private schools, or you go to an affluent suburb. And what they're doing is they're chasing access to money and to the narratives that colleges choose to value. And those communities therefore really protective of those advantages that they have. And it dramatically exacerbates class and race segregation in America. That's a very, very powerful argument. And this is one I think you'll find a lot of a lot of support for here in the in the forum, not that we think this is a great thing and a wonderful thing that we want to see more. I knew you weren't endorsing segregation. But agreeing agreeing with this effect. It was I think President Obama's last Secretary of Education, they referred to higher education as a part that I determined that you use yourself. Well, how does this? I mean, this sounds like an argument for a role that higher education plays in decreasing social mobility in the United States, especially upward mobility, and you make a very important distinction between upward and downward mobility. I mean, how has this changed in the in say in the past 20 years? How has this problem been exacerbated? Well, I mean, we don't have as detailed information, right? We don't have a great longitudinal data of the quality that Chetty and Friedman have, right? So you know, I tell this story in the book of how I kind of settled the dinner table bet with a friend, and it was basically relying on self reporting data from the Harvard Crimson. We do I have this interesting, John Kennedy gives this interesting speech, which I close the book with at Amherst. And if his data is accurate, income inequality in colleges is more extreme than it was, we certainly know that income inequality within the population is more extreme than it was 50 years ago, and it's about as extreme as it is anywhere in the country. There's no evidence whatsoever that things are getting any better. And it's really important that no college in their kind of seemingly commendable reforms over the past years, like making the essay, like, you know, going test optional or Amherst ending legacy preferences, that they haven't stated an explicit goal of promoting socioeconomic diversity. So I'm sure people will ask me about kind of, you know, how I think the world gets better. Let's just start by saying, let's double socioeconomic diversity. So if we want to use Pell grants as a number, wherever we are now, let's get let's get to twice what it is. And I'm very, very confident that these colleges with their massive intellectual and financial capital could achieve these goals. And the solutions will look different in different places, but nobody has committed themselves to really, really changing the status quo. So we remain, we become even more conservative institutionally, as the society becomes ever more unequal economically. I mean, that word has a lot of significance to me because, you know, I think one of the central paradoxes of American higher education is that the professors and, you know, the administrators are all almost all former professors, they're as left leaning a sector of society as there is, but they're conservative in the truest sense of the word, which is that they're resistant to change and protective of the status quo. So conservative in a non political or non partisan sense. Yeah, they're they're liberal progressive in the political sense, but conservative in the institutional sense. I have a couple of questions I want to ask beyond this, but our foreign members have already leaped out of the box with questions. And our good friend, John Hollenbeck, coming to us from Wisconsin has won a lot of flash on the screen here. Wasn't higher education originally designed only for the social elite? It's optimized for rich white males. Don't we need a different institution to support social needs like moving out of poverty? Well, I mean, my first answer to that would be who cares? I mean, it was originally, you know, an institution that only served the interests of whites. They were racially segregated and anti Semitic. And I mean, so whatever their original intention was doesn't have any force with me. And to the second part of the question, do I think that, you know, Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford acting on their own could end poverty in the country? I do not. But, you know, and people, people, some people will see this differently, but I'm, you know, I'm very, very scared about the future of America, maybe like 7% less so after Tuesday. And, you know, one of the pathways that Trump really exploited on his pathway to power was fomenting antipathy for elites. You know, it's a page he took out of Adolf Hitler's playbook. And part of why it resonates is because look, if you're born into the bottom income quintile in the United States, your chance of ending up at an elite college, which Chetty and Friedman define as a top 80 in the Barron's index is less than 0.5%. So, you know, why shouldn't you trust the mistrust in New York Times? I, I, I comp the Harvard Crimson with like five different people who are on their masthead. But if you've never met somebody who works there or knows somebody who works there, well, it's easy to believe that these organizations are just run by, it's just a, you know, a Jewish cabal, which is deeply, deeply frightening. Well, I'm very frightened. I have to say, John, thank you. Thank you for the question. And friends, if you're if you're new to the forum, this is an example of a text question. So again, the very bottom of the screen, along that white band, that's that question mark button. And before I can finish that sentence, we have another question that pops up. And this is from Keele Domesher, good friend. Elite colleges have more power in hiring with their degrees in alumni network. Third party credentialing would put a stop to this. So that somewhere someone goes to college, doesn't matter. So that's not, that's my question. That's a, that's an idea that Keele is putting forth. Yeah, no, no, I got to just, I mean, I'll say this, there I mean, there are lots of other institutional actors and actors who are at have lots of plenty of blame to go around. So, you know, I spend a whole chapter just lambasting the US News and World Report rankings. And I really, really think that they're basically evil. But none of that, to my mind, relieves elite colleges of doing their bit. And they are the beneficiaries of massive tax, tax advantages. The sociologist Charlie Eaton of UC Merced estimates their collective benefit of $20 billion per year. That's a lot of money. So John Jay's entire operating budget is $200 million. Right. So, I mean, there's a lot of good that we could do a lot of opportunity that we can promote people. But I'm not pretending like elite colleges are the only problematic actors, just that they're much more problematic than has heretofore been acknowledged and that they're more cause than effect than certainly than they would like to admit or has been commonly said. Yeah, there's a there's a great chapter in Thomas Paquetti's book, Capital in the 21st century, where he wonders if the simply if the endowments held by elite universities in the United States contribute to economic inequality in America as a whole. And it concludes kind of maybe so, which is which is very, very challenging. I just say, I mean, like it's hard for people to have a sense of big numbers, right? But, you know, Harvard's endowment is $50 billion a year, $50 billion a year. And one of the questions I asked, they all basically draw down four and a half percent on their endowment. What could they do if they drew down five and a half percent? Either way, the endowment would still grow enormously. They'd still cross a trillion dollars, you know, just take them an extra 20 years or so. And, you know, that's running three or four colleges of that size, just with the goal of promoting opportunity. So what if I mean, one, all right, I'll ask one more question. And then again, I'd love to hear from everybody else, please. One question is what we shouldn't would one response to this problem be to refocus America's investments in the non-exclusive, even open access institutions to double down on community colleges, on the non-flagships institutions and just to, you know, reinvest at the state level, the private level, because those are the ones who are doing the work of actually elevating poor people economically. I mean, you point out, you know, your own college doing that very well. Wouldn't that be a good decision to make? Well, my answer to this is a lot. Amatya Sen has this concept of the nitty in the Naya, and it's kind of perfect justice and realized justice. And I don't actually worry so much about perfect justice, because I know what injustice is. So I know that investing more in the wealthy colleges that don't promote access than the public colleges, which do promote access is wrong. I'm I think a just solution involves some lowering of the ceiling and some raising of the floor, which means stop disinvesting and investing in public colleges and not investing quite so much in the private elite colleges, or if we are going to invest in them to demand much more in return. That would be interesting to try to figure out how to do before I can say anything more about this. We have Glenn McGee wants to join us, but I'm not sure if his if his video is out. Let's see if we need this. Glenn, I don't think we have either your video or your audio. Why don't you reload this page? And and when you do that, your browser should ask you to authorize your camera and your microphone. Give that a shot, give that a shot, because I'd love to hear from you. We have more questions coming in. And this is this is one another one from John, who asks, how could an elite school benefit a victim of poor inner city schools? They have no experience of that level of need. The question is directed to the no experience is that the elite college has no. I mean, they they they do a lot. They do let in some poor kids. I mean, some says you have economically disadvantaged kids. And in terms of economic outcomes, it's transformative for those people's lives. I mean, I think what's very poignant when you talk to socioeconomically disadvantaged students who do make it there is they feel very much like outcasts. There's lots of kind of discussion of this and certainly from the students that I speak with, they tend to see it much more in class terms than in race terms. And part of the problem is that there just isn't a critical mass of students. But I mean, you know, the thrust of those questions, if all elite schools are our elite colleges are finishing schools for the rich. Well, that's fine. I don't think they would be worthy of our praise, but they certainly wouldn't be worthy of our tax dollars. And they do get both tax dollars as well as spending tax breaks. We have a question from Glenn who can at least ask a task question. And I think I disagree with the question. Let me just make sure I understand that he asks, why is there no mention of credential inflation in your book? I think you refer to grade inflation a couple of times. But but here I think Glenn is referring to the the growth of production of undergraduate credentials and graduate credentials around the U.S. and the increasing demand for them. Can you speak to this theme? I don't I'm sorry. I don't I don't I don't understand the question. It's not a concept, I know. Oh, OK. Well, the Glenn will will no doubt jump in in the chat or or in another question to say more. But the idea that we have more and more jobs that require more and more post-secondary credentials. And we've also been producing more and more graduates up until about 2012. And that this is an overall kind of sense of credential inflation. Glenn, if you want to if you want to say more, please, please add more. And I mean, my direct answer to the question would be just, you know, I mean, I've written about a lot of interrelated social problems, certainly not every inequality or inequity in society. And I'm sure there are many others. OK. Well, thank you. And Glenn, if you want to follow up, please, please do. I want to come back to the question town-gown relations and you begin this in your book by describing the physical journey as well as the economic journey from from where you live and as well as from Harvard to John Jay and describing the huge huge differences between them. And I'm curious if you could speak to how elite universities impact their immediate communities. You know, what Yale does with New Haven, for example, what what Harvard does with Boston and Cambridge, how do these how does that, you know, the local neighborhood change happen? Does the equality ripple out in the immediate neighborhood? Well, I mean, I would slightly reframe that to say that I think they have a significant ethical obligation to their surrounding communities. So if we talk a bit about affirmative action, I believe and actually neither Harvard nor University of North Carolina articulated this as a basis for their affirmative action programs, but compensatory affirmative action is a long recognized justification and needs to be specific to the institution or the geographical jurisdiction. And all of these elite colleges have benefited in some way from a combination of slavery or profits from slave labor and residential segregation, regular residential segregatory practices. And so I think they have an affirmative commitment to their surrounding communities. And, you know, one thing I think of many improvements over the status quo, you know, imagine if Harvard offered ten or twenty transfer slots a year to students from Bunker Hill Community College. I actually think that would be a very meaningful pathway of access students who excel in community college have proved that they, you know, both statistically and morally that they have the capacity to do well in college. And I think it would be one component of a of a just solution. That's a nice comparison. Isn't that the. If I remember this dimly, isn't that the pairing of institutions that we saw in that Matt Damon movie? Yeah, good. Well, hunting. Well, hunting, that's it. That's a great. You know, MIT, it's worth pausing on MIT for a second because. You know, by virtually every metric that Chetty and Friedman have and the ones that I created based on their data, MIT is very significantly the best of the worst. And if all Harvard and Princeton did was get their mobility rate up to MIT's level. Well, that would between be promoting two to three times as many poor students out of poverty as they do right now. Would that be perfect? No. But it should be nice to see a world in which MIT was the MIT's mobility rate was the floor rather than the ceiling. Comes back to the raising the floor and changing the ceiling again. The John in the chat says that's because MIT teaches people to do something, not about something. And that is interesting, since it's a technical institute, a polytech rather than a university. But I actually think it cuts. I'm not sure exactly what the intent of that is, but I actually think it cuts the other way. MIT is the one of the 12 Ivy Plus colleges that I think has the greatest claim on limitation of access. So MIT requires students to have done calculus before they admit them. We could debate that, but I can understand that, right? For a math and science and engineering college, why they would want that capacity? Now, access to calculus instruction is not nearly uniformly distributed. So, you know, they're excluding massive swaths of the population. And yet MIT still manages to get a mobility rate, which is five percent. And Princeton's is one point three five percent. And they're, you know, you don't need calculus to study history. But Princeton, let's in plenty of people who go on to be history majors. That's that's a good comparison. And it's the best of the worst. I guess then and friends, this is this is again the place for for questions. You can see clearly a professor Mandari is happy to answer your questions. And please, if you want to join us on stage, just click the raise hand button and you can be there. And it's also proof, evidence proof that you don't have to have a beard in order to be on stage here. So, I mean, there's an interesting fellow from NYU, Scott Galway, who has been saying for years now that the that a really great thing to do before schools like NYU and Princeton and Harvard and Yale to double or treble their their class sizes and to do so with an eye towards people who are not in the top quintile socioeconomically. He predicted that would happen during covid. It did not. And I'm curious, do you think this is something that would be a good idea if they could actually widen their classes and clear they can afford to? And and why haven't they done this so far? So I cite him in the book and I talk about this possibility a lot. I I think it's it's very difficult to imagine. It hasn't happened, right? Class sizes haven't changed since I went to college. They really haven't changed in the past 50 years. And it's hard to imagine this not being a key component of a strategy to actually improve access. And what you could do, right? Part of what the problem here is there are lots of settled relationships involved. Now, of course, you know, no admissions director is going to say this. But, you know, Harvard runs 42 sports teams and they don't want to cut the one of their four skiing teams or any of the squash programs because there's a very vocal, you know, cohort of alumni that would really kick and scream if they did that. But, you know, right now one third of Harvard students are in D.C. And when you look at like small D three schools like Williams and Swarthmore, you know, sports are taking up a huge part of the class. Well, if you don't want to undo that and if you don't want to go to Groton and say, hey, you know, you're not going to get seven people a year and anymore. What you could do is dilute their interests and the way that you could do that would be by significantly expanding capacity. Because if you doubled or tripled it, you don't need to double or triple your sports programs. So I actually think it's the smartest, it's the smartest numerical way to approach it. And, you know, Harvard and Yale and Princeton and MIT would all still be great schools if there was a Harvard, Detroit and an MIT, Ethiopia and, you know, they could afford it. Well, that definitely is a case in the chat. People have said they think this is unlikely. Sarah San Gregorio says elite colleges have participated with partners like EDX, but feel it's more of a credential generator that doesn't carry the weight of the traditional degree. So that's not really an option. And Glenn says EDX has been bought out as well. Yeah. I mean, I think they have to offer a real degree. I think offering like, you know, I think offering an online degree is different than what we're talking about. I mean, nobody says that about NYU Abu Dhabi. And, you know, I think that's got to be the model not NYU online. Well, let's let's go back a little bit further in the educational spectrum. In the chat, people have been asking about high schools and high school arms races. And you mentioned Gruton, the famous prep school, for example. So and in your book, you you have this. I found just just really eye opening description of La Crosse. And how that sport became a differentiator for wealthy high schools to basically keep up in the channel to to the elite universities for their for their undergrads. What do you think about how high schools and of course, junior high middle schools, elementary schools, how they should change in order to produce more equitable higher education? Well, I think they should change. But in terms of the will, right? I actually think there's a lot more hope with respect to elite colleges and kind of like a wagging the dog kind of way. I mean, this is an argument by college educated liberals to college educated liberals. And, you know, I think the case I've presented is is unassailable in this sense. Maybe you won't agree with my overall judgment that elite colleges are unbalanced, harmful to society because of their net effect. I can't imagine that anybody could read my book and not think that they should be doing significant more than that they're than they're doing. Now, it is true if residential communities diversified and soften borders, which are in fact very hard and very segregated, that that would have a positive effect in terms of diversifying college students. But colleges also have the capacity to create incentives for the communities to soften the borders, which is to place less value on some of the experiences that encourage hoarding, like sports and, you know, really high end science projects and Model UN programs. There's nothing that stops a college from saying, hey, one of the things that we're going to be looking at in our recruitment is whether or not you are actually your community actually is integrated. And so creating incentives for programs like Metco, which I actually think in the thought that they did suggest worked very well. So if the universities were to stop saying your model UN experience is decisive or we really want your participation of the cross and we don't care as much if you played soccer, that might change the game quite a bit. Oh, well, I'm sure with respect to niche sports that it would change the game dramatically. I'm not a fencer, but yeah, well, I think a lot of people are getting good at fencing because, you know, I mean, I'm a big sports fan, but in terms of whether you pick X or Y, I think a lot of people are affecting their choices based on whether they think it's going to help their kid get into college. Well, this sounds like, and of course, that's a terrible collective action problem because K through 12 in the United States is so disaggregated, you know, it's broken out the state level and the community level and the sub community level. What happens if if we don't make any changes, Evan, and we just let's just hit fast forward on this. What does American society look like in, say, about 15, 20 years if everything you document that keeps happening and and deepens? Right. I mean, well, again, I don't want to make out colleges to be the only, you know, only thing that's going wrong in America right now. But I will say what has changed in our lifetime is mistrust of elites. And so, you know, I've read the New York Times every day for, I don't know, 37 years or so. And, you know, the Times was unassailable at one point. And today, you know, I think 35 percent of Americans would say the Times is engaged in disinformation. And it's really, really important to have exposure to journalists so that you understand that journalists make mistakes. But journalism is an enterprise of integrity. And I think we're making a massive, massive mistake if we allow education, elite education, which is a principal pathway to membership in the elite if that remains the province of the rich exclusively. So if we do that, if we make that mistake, you see, this is going to lead to more distrust and perhaps unrest. I mean, for sure, I mean, elite colleges are not doing their part on this count. And I just don't understand. I don't understand. I mean, I thought the endowments were conceptualized, at least in some part, is rainy day funds. But boy, COVID sure disproved that. And I don't really understand what the point is of having a race to get to a trillion dollars unless there's some object to it. There is Malcolm Gladwell was interviewing the president, I want to say of Stanford and asked him, when would you say no to it? It's in my book. It's it's great. And, you know, he says, would you ever say at a certain point, well, we've got enough and you should give your money to the University of California system, which does tremendous good. And it's John Hennessey and he goes, you won't do it. So that would be a hard thing for that would be a hard thing for a president to say. And actually, he says something which is so condescending and classist as could the University of California system be trusted to use the money well? Well, how much worse can they use it than Stanford, which is using it to promote access to affluence for rich people. And that's what we're stuck with. We have another question that came in from from Glenn McGee has to do with a specific law. If state and higher education are joined to the hip, as some note, what happens if and when title four ends? You mean if the Supreme Court were to rule it? If Supreme Court were to rule it unconstitutional, why would title four end otherwise? Yeah, good question. Glenn, if you want to if you want to drop back a response, that would be good. In response to Evan to your to your recitation of of the Stanford story, John Holmbeck responds, Cal would get better football players and trombone players. It's a nicely sarcastic response. OK. Yeah, and Glenn responds this is his scenario that he anticipates that the Supreme Court will end title four. So what happens next then, in that case? I mean, if the Supreme Court ends race, this is the only way I can understand it. If the Supreme Court ends race based affirmative action, both under the Equal Protection Clause and Civil Rights Act, you know, I think the universities are going to respond differently, you know, from each according to his abilities and means. But I think and we've seen some evidence from this in the California system. I think there will be some retrenchment in terms of racial racial diversity other than at the most wealthy colleges. So the truth is, right? Harvard and Yale and Stanford have black representation around 15 percent, but most of the other elite colleges have hovered around 8 percent and it will get somewhat more expensive for them to preserve that number. I don't know. I mean, one would think this would be a massive wake up call to engage in class based socioeconomic affirmative action. But I don't know. I don't I don't know. And, you know, part of what some what's really saddens me is that, you know, I think when the Supreme Court rules against Harvard, as it will, that people are going to get angry at the Supreme Court, that they should be angry at Harvard, because if Harvard had curtailed LDC preferences, they have the case could have been settled, would have resolved differently at the district court. And is there kind of indignant commitment to doing affirmative action for rich whites that's going to lead to the end of affirmative action for poor people of color? And just to make sure A.L.D.C. stands for athletes, legacies, donors. I mean, it's tricky because the C is for children of alumni. So the C becomes children even though they're all children. Yeah, yeah. So if only they'd done that, then that they could have made some more difference. Friends, again, I have a couple more questions for our author, but I would love to hear some more of your questions and thoughts. The chat box is just rippling back and forth with all kinds of ideas. I like to hoist some out if someone can frame something as a question. But I would love to to hear more for a guest who's clearly thought deeply about this and very passionately. One question I would like to put to you is about a big long term trend, which is that enrollment in American education has gone down for the past 10 years, bit by bit for the first eight years and then really steeply during the pandemic. Now, obviously, enrollment and application enrollment in an application to lead institutions hasn't changed. In fact, it's gone up applications, that is. If this continues, if we continue to see our enrollment shrink, which does for all kinds of reasons, but if we continue to see that shrink, does that make the elite power of these top end institutions even greater? I mean, I was just going to end your question. I thought that was going to be your question. And I think that's the answer is, I mean, I just think it even increases the disparity and influence more. It's a tragic, tragic result and consequence of the pandemic. It's just heartbreaking. Yeah, the pandemic and also some anti-education animus, and there's a lot, a lot going on in the reduction of this, including, of course, the specter of student loan debt, which is immense. Then let me let me ask another question. I'm going to guess your. You grew up as a kid with some of the Cold War programming, right? That the Soviet Union is evil. Socialism is evil. You know, that kind of thing. I mean, I certainly did. And yet people who are younger than us, especially people, you know, the citizens of the 21st century grew up without that kind of programming and seem now to be more susceptible to various forms of democratic socialism and left-wing thinking. Scholars like Chris Newfield argue that what we should expect is a kind of sea change, a cultural change where American society returns to a love of public good. If if we see such a generational shift happen, if Generation Z remains the Greta Thunberg generation, do you think we'll see any public action against these universities, for example, might we see more laws to to tax or otherwise control massive endowments or any other state actions or federal actions? So I think it's a very smart question and we see the world you and I see the world in very much the same way. I mean, you know, I'm around young people all the time and I look at data about them and there's there's no doubt that we've seen massive generational shifts in value from my standpoint, all the better. Young people, especially young college graduates are not climate deniers. They're embracing of diversity. I always tell students like, you know, I don't I don't think I'm an old man who walked uphill both ways to school. But when I went to college, I was like, you know, when I went to high school, being gay was like a death sentence, right? And for the most part, it's much, much better than it used to be. Now, what's, you know, what's terrifying in the United States is that I do think of most questions were presented to people as kind of simple up and downs. For the most part, I think people get them right. And in fact, you know, Democrats have won the popular vote in every election, almost every election in our lifetime, but we have significant countermajoritarian institutional forces at work. And so the question is whether our progressive generation is going to be able to effectuate their much more virtuous beliefs about the world. To the second part of your question, look, the elite there, the elite college's status is being challenged. That's inevitable, right? So Trump put a 1.6 percent excise tax on endowments over a certain threshold. And the poor students of America got for that nothing. So the question is whether the left can take on this issue and say, hey, we actually want to leverage the tax break for good and force the colleges to say, OK, we're actually committed to increasing socioeconomic diversity or to let the challenge come from the right, in which case it's just going to be the equivalent of ending the state and local tax deduction, just punishment of people that voted against Trump. Who deserve what they get. There goes the argument. It says he, right? Yeah. Do you? Well, thank you. I mean, that's that's one hope. There's hope. There's lots and lots of hope. Look, I talk about this stuff all the time. Young people, if I gave this, if I when I give this talk to young people, I get a standing ovation. They all understand that the status quo is ethically indefensible. That's not to say that all turn their alternatives are perfect. Just that what we're doing right now is clearly unjust. Yeah, yeah. I run into this in my own work in various ways. And I'm speaking to you right now from a convention or conference on textbooks. And someone was just showing a poll asking students, what do you think about open education resources? It was like 100% said, great idea. Save this money. But then you ask the faculty and faculty, maybe not. We don't, you know, but that's a that's. It's such a good example because it's just common sensical. It's just obvious, right? I mean, I think if you just if you're just appealing to people's just kind of core sense of right and wrong, who would be against open access to knowledge? And then you get institutional mechanisms. Like I said, that are sort of counter-majoritarian or protecting vested power interests. And all of a sudden you're like, don't we want the kid to be able to get the textbook? Right. Well, let me ask a kind of foundational question. And this has come up a couple of times in the chat. And this is the thing which you hit on in the book in multiple ways, both through your research and also through the wonderful stories you tell about some students and also in some of your autobiography. Where where does American higher ed do social mobility right? Where what are the schools? What are the practices that really get the people from the bottom socioeconomic quintile up in life? Well, CUNY is magical, right? I mean, I happen to teach at an institution that just is producing massive amounts of upper mobility. What does it look like? Well, I know what it doesn't look like because I went to a college like that. CUNY is not filled. The hallways aren't filled with a bunch of people who went to prep schools and, you know, whose moms and dads went to that college. I mean, I'm teaching first generation students. I think 60 percent of CUNY students come from families making under $30,000 a year. I think it's open access as possible among people who are who meet some minimum level of qualification and can do the work. And, you know, there's one thing that sticks in my head. Yale admissions director has asked what percentage of applicants to Yale could do the work. And he says 98 percent, which is probably right, right? If you have a lot of people applying with thirteen hundred on their SATs or something, could they do the work? Sure. I think when you get into math and science, it may be a little bit of a different question. But, you know, could you read and write a paper and and, you know, do well in the liberal arts course, of course. And so there's going to have to be some sacrificing of control. And that's what they don't like. Michael Sandell talks in his book. Actually, I could argue Michael Sandell, I a lot of people in advance, the idea of a lottery among qualified applicants. I think that's part of what should happen because it's changing. I think what people cling to in higher education is they don't want to surrender the myth of meritocracy. They really don't want to admit that it's rich and the richest or the lucky and the luckiest. They want to say it's the best and the brightest. And they don't like the necessary implication of that is if I'm the best, you're not. Yeah. And that's really tough for America. Well, remember, the term meritocracy was actually coined in a British satire. Michael Young. Yeah, which is which is very, very interesting to say. We have more comments that have come in about status anxiety and questions about ranking. But it sounds like you're describing a strongly, increasingly two-tiered American higher education system, an asymmetrical one. We're at the very, very top. We have these institutions that are lavishly supported, have incredible status and meticulously reproduce and exacerbate inequality. Whereas the other tier is schools like most state schools with community colleges, CUNY, a lot of SUNY, which do their best with fewer resources to basically lever up students from the bottom parts of socioeconomic spectrum and to improve them. It seems like unless we do something about this, this divide is just going to continue to increase. Even if we have a lottery system in the chat, Patrice points out even a lottery system is instituted, the school can determine what is important to consider before spinning the lottery wheel. Yeah, it seems like this is a very, very dire situation, one with potentially disastrous implications for American society as a whole. What's the what's the besides is the positive takeaway the next generation of students? Is that where we should find our hope? For sure. I'm still with you on what you said, Brian. Young people get it. I mean, sometimes like there's parts of this that resonate against something personal where somebody will be like, well, I'm a legacy, but I worked hard. But it's not a personal argument. It's an institutional argument. It's what the pathways for access should be. And I'm I'm telling you. Overwhelming majority of young people understand that the status quo is indefensible. Well, I keep coming back to this. I keep coming back to this idea of the much despised, much mocked Generation Z as actually the the root of of improvement. Evan, it's been terrific talking to you. It's just a delight and we've burned past the entire hour. So I've got to ask, what's the best way to keep up with you and your your new books and your new writing and your thoughts? Well, I'm on Twitter and gosh, if you're interested in I love talking, love talking to students. That's my favorite thing to do. Just email me at John Jay. I don't charge anything. I just want to engage as many young people in this conversation as possible. It's just E-mandry at JJAY.CUNY.edu. I'm easy to find. Fantastic, fantastic. And once again, thank you so much. This is a terrific book. I recommend that everyone grab a copy and read it. And Evan, I'm looking forward to your next one. Thanks so much, Brian. I really appreciate this. My pleasure, my pleasure. But friends, don't go away yet. I need to point you to where we're headed next. And I do want to thank you all for the spirited conversation that we had going along. Looking ahead a bit, we have sessions coming up. If you want to keep talking about this, these questions of meritocracy, want to talk about inequality, just follow us on Twitter on Brian Alexander or Shindig events. Use the hashtag F-T-T-E or head over to my blog, Brian Alexander.org, where we discuss these kind of issues. If you'd like to look back into the past into our previous sessions on related topics, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. And this recording of this session will be there soon. We have sessions coming up on reimagining higher education, on enrollment data and still more. Just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to find more. And if you want to share what you're working on, your own new books, your own new projects, just shoot me a note so I can spread the word. Above all, thank you again, friends, for participating in this conversation today. It's always a pleasure. Thank you for all your pushbacks, your ideas, your conversation. Please everybody, take care of yourself. I'm still fighting COVID. I'm no longer positive in terms of testing, but I am still very tired. So please avoid that. Work hard to your rest of your ability and we'll see you online next time. Take care. Bye-bye.