 Welcome to this webinar. My name is Kevin Carey. I'm the vice president for education here at New America. We're so glad that you joined us this afternoon. And we are glad to be here again with our longtime partners at Washington Monthly Magazine to talk about some of the fantastic journalism that's featured in this year's annual Washington Monthly College Guide. The College Guide has become, I think, something of an institution. It's a combination of great forward-looking journalism, and we're gonna hear from some of those great journalists later in this presentation, including James Fallows, who's come here to join us today. And in addition to the journalism, Washington Monthly also sponsors an annual series of college rankings. And I do wanna just take a moment to note something about those rankings. One of the pillars of the Washington Monthly College rankings has been focusing on social mobility, rewarding institutions for the efforts they make, not just to enroll the students who have the highest SAT scores or to reject the largest number of applicants, but actually to work hard to enroll a broad array of students and not just let them in, but help them graduate and get a great education. And as we've noted through the years, there's a real difference in perspective when you rank colleges based on social mobility. And so I think it's worth noting that I think we're winning this fight. I think it's working. And I say that because U.S. News and World Report, another organization that does college rankings made a change this year, where they increased their weighting in the rankings to wait for it, social mobility. And as a result, some of the colleges that we've been saying all along are really good colleges were elevated in the rankings. And some of the colleges that we've been saying all along don't perhaps deserve the kind of prestige that U.S. News gave them declined. And we know they were paying attention because they got very upset about it and issued a series of intemperate press releases, essentially complaining that it wasn't fair that their ranking went down just because they enroll so many wealthy students. True back, that's what they said. And I think that shows something important about reform and change in American higher education, which is that there are different ways to do it. There are budget ways and public policy ways and those are important and those are things that we work on all the time. But reputation matters too. These are institutions that are very reputation conscious. They compete in a marketplace. The way that the world sees them is important to their own image of themselves. And the fact that U.S. News finally came around to our point of view, struck such a nerve, just shows that we're on the right track and we need to do more and more of that. So we're just very glad to be here to share this information with all of you. I'm gonna turn the mic now over to Katie Berger who is the strategy director for federal policy at Lumina Foundation. Lumina Foundation is a long time supporter of both New America's higher education word and the Washington monthly college guide. We're very, very pleased that they were once again able to support this great effort and that Katie is with us today. So with that, I will hand it to Katie. Thank you so much, Kevin. It's great to be with you today to celebrate another edition of the Washington monthly college guide. Now, as in years past, this is a great compilation of useful data for students and families, policymakers and institutional leaders. As you said, it's a great way for institutions to see whether or not they're actually contributing to economic mobility and those values that we espouse for higher education. And as you all know well, capturing the value of higher education is not an easy task. Just putting that data together and boiling it down into a single score is a pretty big feat. But I would suspect that the harder task is putting all of that value into terms that's actually gonna resonate with students and families, particularly knowing that in recent years, the public's trust in higher education has continued to erode. And we know that it's not that a college degree just suddenly stopped paying off. Countless studies, including our latest Lumina Gallup report show that education beyond high school is continuing to provide a range of benefits to individuals and to society more broadly. We know that college is advanced knowledge and innovation that contribute to a strong workforce, foster national prosperity, uplift communities and increase civic engagement. And we know that those with a four year degree on average are going to go on to earn a million dollars more over their working lifetimes and even live an average of eight and a half years longer than those without a bachelor's degree. But it is also clear that those facts just aren't proving to be as persuasive to the public as they used to be. And we know some of that is gonna be politically motivated driven by cynical efforts that are designed to undermine the idea of higher education as a public good. There are those who would like the public to see college as nothing more than a consumer good or a frivolous pit stop for the wealthy or a source of economic gain for somebody else's kid. And to push back on that, we have to tell the story of higher education better. That means lifting up the colleges that strengthen and serve their communities just like the Washington monthly ratings do every year. But we also recognize there's a harder problem at the heart of higher education's plummeting public approval ratings. And that's the very real fact that for many students, higher education is a riskier proposition today than it was in the past. And in the worst cases, it can leave students with low wages and burdensome debt. Those risks are widespread and well-documented. For example, only six in 10 students who start at a four-year college go on to complete a degree. Millions of students have been defrauded and misled by predatory institutions and debt scammers. And more than seven and a half million student loan borrowers were in default before the pandemic. But even in cases when it seems like everything is going right, there are longstanding flaws in our education and workforce systems that can conspire to undercut the benefits of post-secondary education. In fact, a recent study by the St. Louis Federal Reserve found that for students of color born in the 1980s, earning a bachelor's degree had no statistically significant impact on family wealth. I'll say that again, earning a bachelor's degree had no impact on wealth for students of color who were born in the 80s. These college graduates who are now under 30s and 40s entered and even excelled in a higher education system that was marked by rising tuition and declining public investments. The fact that their efforts didn't pay off in the same way as prior generations or as their white peers is a predictable result of policy decisions made before they ever set foot on campus. So this moment needs to serve as a wake up call for all of us. We have to accept that the only sustainable way to reverse public opinion on higher education is by building and uplifting a system that is actually worthy of the public's trust. We need to make good on the stories we tell about higher education and ensure that our colleges are serving the interests of our communities and embodying the values of our nation. This means colleges doing more to take on the challenge of delivering real and lasting value, focusing on the relevance of learning and creating reliable pathways for economic mobility for all students. It also means redoubling efforts to advance racial equity and justice through higher education. Rather than shrinking in the wake of recent court rulings, colleges must take a more expansive view of what it means to embrace equal opportunity. At the same time, policymakers need to embrace a new vision for funding colleges and universities, one that doesn't rely on unreasonable and unsustainable levels of student debt. The path forward won't be an easy one, but we're fortunate to have some outstanding speakers here today to help provide a roadmap for the future. So on that note, I wanna close by giving my thanks and congratulations to everyone who has had a hand in producing this year's college guide. The rankings and articles in the guide are continuing to change the conversation about quality and value in higher ed. That's a vitally important conversation and one that my Lumina colleagues and I are proud to be a part of. So with that, I'll hand it over to our first panel. Hello, everybody. Thank you, Katie, for those remarks. Thanks for your service making some of the best policies we've seen out of an administration, the Biden administration in a long time. Thank you for your luminous support now. So not only Lumina, I wanna thank the Gates Foundation for helping get the word out about the college rankings and our journalism and also to Kevin and the folks at New America. We've been working with you all for, as you said, for many years and Kevin is the guest editor every year of our college rankings. So thanks to our partners at New America. In the three months since the Supreme Court outlawed race-based college admissions, there's been endless speculation about the degree to which the court's ruling will diminish diversity on America's campuses. The purpose of the panel today is not to rehash all those debates or diminish the difficulties the court's decision presents. Instead, we're gonna hear some evidence that to riff on Mark Twain's famous comment about premature news of his own demise, reports about the death of diversity on campus are greatly exaggerated. The truth is that there's a vast well of commitment in higher education, not only to defend racial and ethnic and other diversity but to expand it for reasons of both morality and self-interest. And there are ways of doing so that the Supreme Court is unlikely to be able to stop. Today, you're gonna hear about two such programs from writers who have investigated them and a new frontier for diversity by an academic who has scattered it out. So let's begin with our first panelist, Jamal Abdulalim is education editor at The Conversation. He's also a longtime contributor to The Washington Monthly and was named chess journalist of the year for his coverage of that game, man of many capacities. Jamal is gonna discuss the story he wrote in the 2023 Washington Monthly College Guide and rankings issue entitled When Colleges Apply to Students. Jamal, take it away. All right, thank you, Paul. And good morning to everyone. Yeah, it has been a long time. I think the first time I contributed to the college guide was 2013, if I'm not mistaken. So here we are 10 years later and I'm grateful for the partnership that we've had over the years as well as with New America and New England Foundation. I wanna talk a bit about an initiative or a new approach to college admission. It's called direct admission and it differs from the traditional way of applying to schools. Whereas traditionally students might fill out applications to X number of schools. Sometimes they say you're supposed to fill out applications for like 10 or 12. Some of the schools you know you're not gonna get into something that you're likely to get into something that you pretty much guaranteed to get into. With this direct admission approach, it's different in that students upload their information profiles, if you will, into a platform and colleges basically they access the platform they access the platform and look for students and then offer them, they make offers to them through that platform. So it just flips the whole process. There isn't like the anxiety or the weight and I'll share a few details that kind of illustrate that. But I wanna back up a bit and just say that. So I first learned about direct admission maybe a year or so ago, reading about it in an outlet that covers higher education and they mentioned a new company that was on the scene for a concourse that had basically flipped the admission process. But the thing that struck me was that there were no students in the story and anyone who knows me and my approach to journalism knows that anytime I write and I believe that anytime anyone writes about a program or an initiative that's going to affect students or change the way students are served that it really behooves us to talk to those students who are being affected to get their perspective. And I know sometimes there can be limitations especially with a program like this in terms of like so I don't have access to the entire universe of students that is using this platform and in fact had to go through the platform to get access to the students. But I think I still think there's value in hearing from students even if they might be quote unquote handpicked because there's some elements of their story that are just going to come through and tell you something about the program no matter what. And so that's how we come to the story of a young that I wrote for Washington Muffy by a young lady named Olivia Galloway she's out of New York. And I just want to call your attention to one paragraph in the story that I think kind of tells the story of direct admission and that is that hardly 24 hours had passed before she started hearing from colleges. And the quotes she gave me is that it was so surprising and truly amazing to see all my options open overnight. I was contacted by 12 different colleges and all of them gave me amazing scholarships. I think that says a lot, you know if you've covered or are familiar with college admission you know, I've not heard of anything that happens overnight like that much less having generous scholarships to go with it. And so, you know, she ultimately accepted an offer from Damon University. And one of the things that I've done in terms of writing about direct admission is, you know I want to take a look at the colleges that the students are getting offers from. And, you know, you look at, you know there are things like salary and debt afterward these are schools that fare pretty well and then you couple that with the type of offers that the scholarships that they're getting through direct admission, you know I think that can make a big difference. One thing that was kind of, so it's been described as like a low cost alternative, you know a game changer, that's another description that some experts have said and you look at the research at least the research that I was able to cite for the story, you know so that it was making a discernible difference in terms of, you know, students applying and enrolling with something kind of strange happened with this particular story was that, you know a study came out like around the same time saying that direct admission didn't really make a difference in enrollment just applications, but there's one caveat and I think it has to do with the level of aid that colleges are offering. So it's one thing to flip that mission process but if there's not, you know the type of amazing scholarships that Olivia Galloway spoke about then, you know, maybe this won't be the type of game changer that people thought it was. So I'll just end with that and you know, if there's more questions more to explore, we can get into that later. Thank you. Thank you, Jamal. Yes, a lot more questions that I wanna ask and I hope our audience will too. Our next panelist is Raquel M. Raul. She is assistant professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California Riverside. By the way, one of Washington Monthly's favorite schools and a perennial high score on our college rankings. Dr. Raul is gonna tell us about the story she co-authored along with Demetri Morgan of Loyola University of Chicago and Richard Chase of Chate of Harvard entitled Does Your Board of Trustees Reflect Your Student Body? So over to you, Raquel. Good morning and thank you and thank you for the shout out for my co-authors. I was gonna do that as well. So, Dick and Demetri, I know you're listening somewhere so thank you for that. I do wanna just say, because I worked hard for this, I am an associate professor, not an assistant professor so I'll put that out there and I think that's really important to note and those of you who've ever had tenure, you know it's a struggle sometimes but thank you for the opportunity to just share a few tidbits high level insight about our article. I'm hoping you all will read it. It's a quick read, a short read and thank you Paul and your team for helping us to get to where it is. But so basically what we wanted to do and Dick Demetri and I, we love studying about boards. Dick has been doing it way longer than we have and we hope one day we'll do him justice and take on the mantle. But if you know anything about higher education boards, there are a lot of things that make this study that we did really important. One, and this is not hyperbole, every research article and all these different pieces, AGP will tell you that boards have traditionally been wealthy white men, right? That hasn't changed. They still dominate as far as numbers, right? So you have that. Then you add to that the fact that there's typically no, really, or minimal, I'll say, there's really a minimal amount of socialization that board members get to higher education. And then the third kind of trifecta piece is that most board members don't have a connection or don't have a really strong background in higher education outside of, most of them have gone to higher education themselves. And so when you think about that, we have to think about, well, how do then these board members govern on the best on behalf of their institutions, knowing that they may not have as close of a connection with the student bodies and understanding the nuance of higher education, which we know higher education is a very unique enterprise, right? And so when you think about that, think about the caliber of decisions that boards get to make, setting tuition, picking presidents, making sure that institutions are aligning with their mission, it's necessary that we think about the role of boards in kind of propelling issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, right? And it's really important to think about prior to maybe a few years ago, we would have diversity, equity, inclusion conversations that didn't include boards, right? And then we also have decision-making conversations that didn't include boards. Boards have primarily been on the outside of these conversations. And so it's really important to think about how do we make them come into the middle, knowing that they have such important decisions to make. And we argue, right? Like you really can't maximize diversity, equity, inclusion on any campus if the boards aren't involved. And so with this study, we just wanted to look, right? There's no causality here in any way, shape or form, but we wanted to look, so we just sampled a hundred institutions from the top, middle and bottom of the Washington monthly list, right? And we wanted to see, you know, is there alignment at all with the student body, right? And so we just picked and we understood there are so many different markers of diversity, right? Today, but we wanted to just look at race and ethnicity. We started with two, two simple things to see if the board is aligned with their student body. And the reason why we wanted to look at that is because one would think, right? So if you wanted to govern on behalf of these individuals, right? And if you wanted to understand different perspectives and all these different things, maybe there would be some alignment. And so we're not saying like, hey, if you have a certain board of all, a student body of all women, then that you need a board that would have diversity of all different types. What we really wanted to look at and why we think it's really interesting is we just wanted to say like, hey, if you're boarded, if your student body is all women, it's okay for you to have all women on the board, right? If your board, if your student body is all white, then we would expect that there would be an all white board. So we're looking at alignment, right? We weren't looking at percentages. We weren't thinking about critical mass or tokenization or any of these things. We wanted to just see the percentage-wise, right? So if you have 50% white students or male and white and male, then we would expect to see 50% white male board members if there was alignment, right? And so we found that of the 100 institutions that we looked at, only 19 were well-aligned, right? And so that's really interesting to think about. And that just meant that either there's the perfect alignment or in some cases, right? The boards were better aligned than the student body. But then in most cases, the student body was more diverse than the board. And so it's really interesting to think about. And so we kind of had three big takeaways from that. So we talk about politics, politics matter, right? And you think about, and you look at the institutions that were well-aligned, 14 of those were in blue states as you will. And then the other five were in purple states, which oscillate between being a Republican or a Democratic state. So that's interesting. And why that's interesting? You think about the majority of public institutions, the governor appoints the board. And so that's important to think about. Like, so who the governor is matters, right? Because often they pick people who their ideas align with theirs, right? And so we also talk about how quality matters. And oftentimes this is a really important one because folks think that diversity, equity, inclusion are mutually exclusive from quality. And what we saw in the sample that we took is that that's not the case, right? We had a lot of really reputable institutions by different lists and rankings and all of these different things that did really well with their alignment, with their race and gender, right? And so then the other piece is really just sort of like gender, race and power, all of these different things matter, right? And so boards were better aligned with race than they were with gender. So that's really interesting to think about. How could we change what's happening, right? We have to think about the selection process, the appointment process and all of these different things. And so we offer in the piece, some of these different ideas that folks can think about. But what I'll leave it with, and so we can pass it on to the next person is really to think about, we can't mandate. We don't support mandating. And I know other industries are starting to think about like, how could you mandate certain diversity, equity, inclusion pieces for their board members and their composition? We're not saying that. But we do think it's really interesting, right? Like if you have a board that's at an institution that exposes these virtues of diversity, right? And then you can add equity and inclusion. Shouldn't that also be held true for the board themselves, right? It's sort of this idea, often for boards, it's like to do as I say, not as I do, they want folks to be diverse, but then they're not diverse. And so that's really important to think about. And the same thing holds true is like we have this equity talk, right? Well, we don't match it with the equity walk. And we really think it's important that we start to look at those questions, right? And ask these questions. And the last piece I'll leave you with is the fact that most boards do not report this information. And so we did a lot of digging and a lot of searching for this. And that's a problem, right? We should be able to know who is on our boards, what their gender, what their race, all of these sorts of things because these are questions that matter. So thanks. Great, thank you. Thank you, Raquel. Our next panelist is my colleague, Will Norris. Will is an editor at the Washington Monthly. And I'd like to turn things over to him so he can tell us about the story and the furniture, the magazine that he wrote called How the Military Can Save Affirmative Action. Will. Thanks, Paul. And good morning to everyone. So this piece really started with Paul and those of us at the Monthly, sort of thinking through what options might be available to elite colleges with the overturning of affirmative action for maintaining or improving diversity. And in the course of taking up that question, I did this dive into what the Military Academy at West Point does. So what West Point does, they have traditional affirmative action that resembles what prior to the June decision of civilian colleges, selective civilian colleges did for their general pool of applicants. But what they also have is something that makes them very unique, which is this PrEP program. So out of the general pool of applicants every year, West Point selects about 240 or so very promising and sort of high character applicants who don't necessarily have the grades and test scores to compete in the general pool of applicants. They assign them instead to this one year PrEP program, which is held at a nearby satellite campus. And students there are a little bit over 50% black and Hispanic and this has always been, for a number of decades, this has been really the main way that West Point has achieved racial diversity about 40% of black students at West Point went through this program. And over the course of two semesters, they have this really intensive education and study skills and regular academic courses. And at the end of that year, students retake the SATs and other testing and reapplied at West Point. And what we see is that about something like 80% of the students who go through this program are accepted to West Point because they've shown through their testing, through their performance over the course of the year that they are at a level commensurate with other applicants. And so we're advocating for this idea as one that might work well or seems like it would be likely to work well at places like Harvard or Brown or selective schools that have traditionally relied on affirmative action. And this is, I think the reason this intervention, this idea is especially pertinent now. It's not only because this is like a really great way to empower students. You know, students who went through the PrEP program at West Point, they perform well over four years. They graduate at high rates, they're routinely in student leadership positions. And these are students who would likely not have otherwise ended up at a school like West Point, which is very competitive, super selective, similar to maybe a school like Georgetown. And so the reason we're advocating for this idea to be adopted more widely is not only that it opens a door for students who maybe went to a subpar high school, have a non-traditional background for competitive higher ed, but also because it's our suspicion that this idea is much more resilient to conservative lines of attack. And what I mean by that is the plaintiffs in the June case or the two cases, Harvard and UNC have always made this argument that what affirmative action is, is a compromise on merit, that what you're doing is you're allowing students to have maybe like lower academic performance into the school ahead of some students who have higher performance. This has always been the sort of crux of their argument. And what we see at the PrEP program at West Point is that the PrEP program at West Point is evidence that a race-conscious program can be compatible with no compromise on merit. That these students are raising their skills to a level that allows them to succeed at the school. And we recently got sort of support for this hypothesis in the form of another lawsuit. So Edward Bloom and students for fair admissions who were the plaintiffs in June filed another suit against West Point because those original decisions carved out an exemption for the military academies allowed them to continue using race. And this recent lawsuit is against West Point's affirmative action program, which of course it has. But what's so revealing and noteworthy about it is that in this long lawsuit that goes into a good amount of detail about their admissions process, their historic use of affirmative action, there's not one mention of the PrEP program. And that's because it doesn't conform to this idea that race-conscious admissions programs are incompatible with a rigorous standard of merit. So it feels like to us, this is further evidence that at a school like Harvard or Yale or what have you, a program like this would not only really benefit disadvantaged people, young people, but also might be more resilient to litigation and these lines of attack. So I'll just leave it right there. Okay, thank you, Will. I am gonna ask some questions and because I was involved in these stories, I know the answers for pretending not to know, but I think that our audience would benefit from knowing them. And I'm gonna start Jamal with you. The struggle of every student who applies to college is that it's stressful. As you mentioned, you have to apply to more than one school, maybe a dozen schools. There's a lot of stress to it. There's a lot of work, there's expense. In your story, you write that that's tough on every student, but it is particularly tough on lower income students, first generation students, minority students. And those are the ones who this program most helps. And therefore, the reason that I think the program, the direct admission, reverse admission program factors into this discussion we're having is, you could see more diversity rather than less in higher education because if more schools adopt this direct admission approach, Jamal, tell me about that. Yeah, so two things. One is in terms of it being easier, less stressful, more efficient. That's kind of like a yes, but there's a caveat. And the caveat that some of the experts I quote in the story point out is that, if this just becomes another thing to do in addition to the common app or just the whole thing about trying to apply to 12 schools, things of that nature, then this could actually become more burdensome. So I think we're at an interesting juncture to see which one is which approach is the most viable. And then maybe some decisions have to be made about which ones can go to the wayside. I think it's also important to point out that at schools, at public schools, counselors, the student to counselor ratio is pretty horrendous and counselors have a lot of other things to do that don't have anything directly to do with college admission, such as administering tests and dealing with different issues that might arise in a student's life. So you ask yourself, where are they gonna get college guidance from? Will it be the counselor? I mean, they might, but that's gonna be tough just due to the sheer numbers. I wanna point out one other thing because we've been talking about this in a quote unquote post-affirmative action world. So there might be a question about, well, is direct admission something that can be used to achieve diversity when race cannot be considered? And one of the things I point out in the article is that yes, because at least the platform that I featured most prominently, they don't include race in the profiles. So as long as the program is operating in schools or in school systems where there's diversity in colleges can be assured that they'll get a diverse group of students that they can admit. Yeah, let me just bore down on that a little bit more. I had forgotten that part of your story. The students who most benefit or in theory, and I think maybe in fact, based on your reporting are not the middle and upper class students, but that lower income first generation minority student who for whom the current way of applying to schools is harder. They may not have parents who have gone to college. They don't have money for test prep. They don't have money to travel to six different colleges. They may be just doing it more or less on their own. And the difference is them reaching out, researching schools, applying to schools versus schools applying to them as you say in the story. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it just saves a lot of time in that regard. But I guess I would add that I don't think this really removes the need to research the school after you get an offer. You should still take a look at it. But another thing just to really stress, I know I said this earlier, but I think one of the most important considerations is how much aid will they get in addition to the offer. It's one thing to have a streamlined process that's more efficient and you get answers overnight. That's one thing, but if the aid isn't sufficient, then it might not be the solution that we think it is. So if you read, for instance, about the study that came out right after we published, there's a school official, a college official who mentions that, yeah, we got more applications, but when it came time to pay, some students who were admitted through direct admission decided not to, that it costs too much. So again, it just puts the onus on colleges to make sure that they're offering the type of aid along with those swift decisions. Good point. Raquel, let me ask you a question. You had said that the purpose of your study was not to mandate more diverse boards, but just to research, because there's really no information on the diversity of boards. And it took you and your colleagues months of painstakingly going to websites of colleges, looking at the bios, trying to figure out the race and gender of the board members. And with the Supreme Court stricture on race, I think you would agree that mandating more diversity is unlikely to be a good route, but you do offer a solution of sorts. And that is for the federal government to mandate the release of the information. That seems a small thing to ask. How would that help? How would that lead to more diversity on boards? That's simple step. Yeah, well, with boards, they're really unique in that they most don't have a formal accountability structure, meaning that if they do wrong or go right, there's no checks and balance for them. Like oftentimes you hear about something happens to the president, they go into a room with the board and the president comes out and they resign, because there's a checks and balance system there that the board is able to check. We don't have the same thing for the board. And so what we do have though is sort of these informal structures that would make that accountability real. And so when folks know about these things, which they don't know about, won the board or how diverse the board is or all these different pieces of the board, we think that that probably could help sort of do that, that nudge, that public persuasion, right? Like what's really important or shaming, right? Sometimes Dick Chate talks about that a little bit. Like if you had a board that had no diversity whatsoever, and everyone knew it and you're standing up next to some of these institutions that are doing it well, what does that mean for you? Does that propel you to want to make a change? And so we think the answer would be yes, right? We also think like maybe there's a reason why that information isn't there, right? It's one of sort of these last territories where we haven't seen diversity move and really intentional and quick ways in higher education. It's often because out of sight, out of mind and I totally understand that. So we don't want and don't think that we should mandate, because as most of us know when you're forced to do something, right? It's only because you have to do it. And you go through these. We want folks to understand that this is really important because it matters, right? We understand and most people are, I think, are reasonable enough to understand that when you have different people in the seats, right? Regardless of what that difference looks like, we get different ideas. We get that dynamic tension that we need. We don't want that group think. We don't want everyone to think the same way. Everyone having the same background, all these different things because we want to be better. We need to have that difference in the room. And often we don't have that because we have some boards that don't have term limits. So imagine if you can just be on the board for perpetuity, right? Like it just kind of just sits there. We can't make changes on that. So things like term limits would help some of this, maybe some changing of the seats, but absolutely we think if you had to reveal this information, then it would help us, right? Because then people would know if you were out of compliance, quote unquote, and that would be just an informal opinion of what folks think diversity should mean for that board. So yes. Fascinating. Will, let me turn to you. Devil's advocate here, the US government has pretty deep pockets and it is able to pay the full freight for the students who go to these prep schools at West Point, and I should say the other services, the Navy, the Air Force, et cetera, also have similar prep schools with similar impressive results. Why do you think that this, wouldn't the cost be prohibitive for non-military selective colleges? I don't think so because affirmative action has only traditionally been in use at a fairly small group of selective colleges. The overwhelming majority of students in America go to schools that aren't selective enough to make race a factor in admissions decisions. And those schools that have traditionally used affirmative action are pretty much exclusively really wealthy and have similarly deep pockets, maybe not as much as the federal government, but all of the Ivy League schools have endowments north of $6 billion. Harvard's is like something like 60, maybe more. And so they're not really off the hook on cost because we don't have great estimates. It's not public information for what the prep school at West Point costs, but it's not like tens of billions of dollars. There's a, it seems reasonable to expect that deep pocketed schools could develop programs like this. It's in the interest of, if they're public-minded institutions, which they purport to be, it is in the interest of the country. This is a really proven way to bring in lower-income students, black students whose family goes back, go back multiple generations in this country. Harvard and some of the other elite schools have what they sort of proclaimed to be, even before the form of action decision, proclaimed to be a really impressive racial diversity figures in their student body. Maybe that's true to an extent, but the overwhelming number of students of color and obviously also white students at schools like Harvard, they're predominantly come from wealthy families. And it's achieving real meaningful, a cross-section of America in higher ed, which is what we want, is not just about sort of cherry-picking students of color who went to prep schools and come from often upper middle-class immigrant families, although they obviously, the representation among those groups is good too, but there's so, so few lower-income and working-class background students of color at the top schools. And this is a means by which students who had inferior high school education, which many lower-income students did, get the sort of academic skills necessary to not only get into the school, but actually succeed. And that's really demonstrated by West Point's program. Yeah, I wanna say to Jamal, who I know is gonna have to leave us pretty soon. This is kind of what you were getting at, right? With your concern that it's one thing to be admitted, and it's another thing to have the scholarships to actually go to that school. And by the same token, the students who at least get in are approached, are offered admission by the direct admission system, are not necessarily upper middle-class students. Yeah, I mean, if there was a way that I could get access to the whole database, and look at the socioeconomic backgrounds of the students, as well as the level of the offers, what type of scholarships they're getting. Yeah, that'd be great. Is a private company gonna give that? Probably not, but I think if there's a way to somehow get that information, maybe I don't know, get a sample of some sort, I don't know, that's what I would be looking at. Let me also ask you Jamal, because I'm gonna ask you in case you have to leave. A lot of these programs are not through private companies like the ones you profile. There are whole states doing this. I believe Idaho is the first, but there's more and more states. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, that's a good point. And that could be one of the solutions is for state government to do it. So Illinois was headed in that direction, but those efforts are kinda stalled. But the evidence out of Idaho was that it was making a difference. I think the stat was something like 11% bump in enrollment. I'd refer to the story, don't help me to that. And then another, I think it's, if there are journalists on the call, that could be one of the best stories to look at is actually how are states doing in this regard because that could be a solution. But again, it's gonna depend on what type of aid students get. So maybe with states that dynamic might be a little different. Yeah, and again, it's early in this experiment, but our aim wasn't to say, this is a finished perfect solution, but to kinda shine a light on something that sounds very promising. Raquel, one of the things that you do aside from deep dives into the diversity of college boards is for a while, you oversaw a prep program of a sort. And not at some fancy elite school, but right there at University of California Riverside. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so it's a program that's still going on, Legacy Roundtable Program, and it's in a partnership with UC Riverside, as well as the Council of African-American Parents. And UC Irvine has also been a partner in the past, but just recognizing that there are sort of these still to this day, gateway courses, gateway subjects that are really keeping black students from attending schools that are more rigorous, right? Attending schools that have these opportunities, talk about, you know, like Will and folks are talking about these more elite schools, and math is one of them, right? And so it really started with this idea of initially for black men, we need a more black men to get to calculus, right? And then now it also caters to black women as well, but it's a program where the whole community comes, right, there's parts for the family, right? It's not one of those drop-off programs. So the family comes and they have to be engaged. The students have to come. And so it's not just, you know, it's helping them with homework, understanding, going back to, you know, where they miss different things. Our tutors are people of color, right? A lot of black tutors, as well as other people of color and that sort of thing. So that the students see what's happening. And so it's a program that talks about math, but it also talks about culture and understanding like, hey, you know, math is ours, right? Who started math, right? They think about Egypt and the pyramids and all these different really great thought leaders and thinking about mathematics. It's not something that's foreign to being black, right? It's something that is part of your DNA. And oftentimes we talk about these things don't go together, right? This is not what you excel in. And so really helping the students to understand the mathematics piece, but also understanding the cultural piece and the history of it that this is in their DNA, right? That they are going to be successful that you can't say, you can't look at someone like you, you know, as my mother says, whose skin has been kissed by the sun and say, you can't do this, right? Because your people helped to create this, right? It's really important to think about in the ways in which math isn't so much of our community. You think about, you know, how we braid our hair and all these different things. And so it's one of those affirming things. And then it's sort of, we also have this cohort model where students get to go through this with other students who look like them. And it's really made a world of difference, right? And so you think about the Council of African-American Parents is one of the key partners in the UC system, entire UC system, it's on the UC app now. And it's for all these programming to advance African-American students to be able to go not just to and through but also through higher education. And CAP really helps prepare people so they understand that finishing high school is not the same as being prepared for college, right? Like there is a distinction in that. And so they help students to really prepare and focusing on math. This is one of the great barriers and helping people to understand that they can go in to be engineers and scientists and mathematicians and all these things and be great. And then the big piece is going back and pulling other folks through the exact same thing. So it's a model that's cyclical. Fascinating. So we'll give us a little bit more of a sense of this idea of colleges having as a way of maintaining or increasing their diversity an obligation to provide opportunity for prep, for increasing the academic capacity of promising young students who haven't yet gotten into the university, paint a little bit more of a picture of how that would operate. Let's, you know, Raquel was saying, you know, this is how they do it at the UC system or at least some of the UC schools. Paint a picture of how it could be done at the more elite level where we know the money exists. And in particular, like what is it cost for a student at the West Point Prep School? What is a year of, cause these are room and board, they're at the university. These aren't online programs, right? So it's gotta be costly. Walk us through what it would look like if universities said we're gonna do what the military has done. Sure. Yeah, I'm seeing a message in our chat from the New America folks that we're a little over time. So I'll keep it quick. But yeah, so this hasn't been tried. It's something that sort of checks all the boxes of what the West Point Prep Schools really doesn't exist anywhere. Our best estimate is that because there's no public information about the cost per student at the prep program at West Point, it's probably similar to the cost per student for cadets at the school in general, which is about $62,000 a year. So that's a meaningful amount of money, obviously, but wouldn't be prohibitive for the wealthiest schools. And I think that for a school to design an effective equivalent, they would need to design it closely on the prep program and sort of meet all of the criteria, meaning it should be run by the school itself and go over an entire year. I think it's really, but my reporting suggests is a really important dimension of the West Point Prep Program success is that it's specifically preparing students for West Point, not for college generically. So the curriculum is based closely on that at West Point, professors have a lot of overlap. There's this sort of saying among teachers in that environment that they're trying to encourage students to get down the hill. So it's all, there's this real orientation towards the re-application process. And that's another really important piece of this, that the way it works is there's this alignment of incentives where unlike something like summer school, traditional summer school, the traditional summer school model, students who are in the prep program at West Point haven't already been admitted. So they need, there's this alignment of incentives where they have to work really hard over the course of a year to prepare and they have a specific sort of threshold that they're aiming for on their test scores, on their grades. And what we see is that the overwhelming majority of them then get in. So I think those aspects of it are really important for schools like Harvard to consider. Gotcha, gotcha. Well, listen, I wanna thank Will, I wanna thank Raquel, I wanna thank Jamal. I'm gonna hand it over to another colleague who's gonna take on the, manage the next panel. And that is my friend Ann Kim. She is a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly and the author of the book, Abandoned America's Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection. She has two terrific and related stories about Google career certificates and the current issue of the Washington Monthly that I really can recommend and she's gonna take over the next panel. All right, thank you so much, Paul. My name's Ann Kim. I'm a contributing editor at Washington Monthly and I have the distinct privilege of introducing James Fallows and Jonathan Zimmerman who are the speakers for our next panel. Jim is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly also and a board member at New America Foundation among just a few of the many hats that he wears. He's got a dozen books to his name and also writes the Substack newsletter, Breaking the News. Jonathan is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. He too is a widely published author and is one of the nation's foremost historians on education. So both John and Jim have also contributed must read pieces to this year's college guide and that's what we're going to talk about in today's panel. Before we dive in just to set a little bit of context what Jim and Jonathan's pieces have in common is that they both look to the history of higher education in America for clues about both its future and frankly it's survival. Katie spoke earlier today about the current crisis in public trust in higher education and both of their pieces speak directly to this challenge. Jim's piece in particular is titled What's the Matter with Florida? And what he does is he surveys this long history of anti-intellectualism in America. As he points out, there's been this long running conservative siege on higher education and what we're seeing today is not new. John's piece meanwhile looks at the modern college affordability movement in the context of what I think might be a surprising history of how we as a nation have historically financed higher education. His piece is titled Higher Education's Founding Promise. And as I said, both of the pieces use this kind of long lens of history to divine some important insights for how higher education is going to survive the current crisis in public confidence. So Jim, if we could start with you, as I mentioned, your piece tracks this epic history of anti-intellectual, anti-elitist populism and how it's often put higher education in the crosshairs. Can you talk about the current moment and how it's the same and how it's different from what we've seen in the past? And can you also explain the optimism you ultimately end within your piece? Thanks very much, Anne. Thanks to you and to Paul and to Katie and to the Washington Monthly where I started my magazine career roughly 2000 years ago in New America which I've been with from the start and Lumina and Gates and everybody else and my colleague Jonathan on this panel. And Anne, your pieces in this issue are great. I recommend them to everybody. So I view the conservative assault on higher education now as being very much like the conservative movement in general or the Trump era in particular where both you can see where it came from. You can see what the long historical roots are and what is particular. When people ask how did Donald Trump get going, the answer is partly it has to do with Trump himself and partly these are seeds that have been planted over the past few decades or longer than that. And so I think when we think about part of what I lay out in my piece is some of the fact that there are a number of more or less eternal divides in American life. Race is of course the most fundamental of them, gender and class and region and immigrant status and rural versus big city. And that's, you can write people have written hundreds of books about each one of those things as an axis of American politics and American opportunity and American success and failure. Education has always been one of those as well and has become a more acute one of them. I say it's always been one, even though America is only recently a higher education society because at almost any decade in American life you can see one of these sources of friction. All you have to do is look back at the know nothing party of the pre-Civil War era that its name newly relevant today was about some of these same tensions. After World War II when of course higher education became for the first time a mass phenomenon with the GI Bill which sent my father along with many others to college. There was a resistance by many higher ed experts of that time to the, one of them called the hobo jungle that might invade universities. The McCarthy era in the 1950s involved a lot of sort of real people versus university people tensions when Ronald Reagan became governor of California one of his main talking points was the way the University of California system had gone a muck, et cetera. So we can say on the one hand there has always been this tension as there have always been the sentiments that have given us Donald Trump as there has always been race as an axis in American life, et cetera, et cetera. And yet there are new things now. The new things I think there's one of them that is a sort of fundamental tectonic issue and the other is more performative. The tectonic issue is the way that relatively recently higher ed status has become one of the main markers of national voting preference. It's surprising to realize that even as recently as the 2016 Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump race that the non-college white vote was still relatively evenly split between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump then even though for a long time non-college whites had been trending to vote on sort of tribal issues rather than class issues. Now, as we know, most Republicans assume that the margin for Trump among non-college whites and others is substantial. So there are these shifts that mean that a kind of sea break that had been there for the Republican Party of the first George Bush and even the second George Bush of thinking there was this white shoe Ivy League component to it. That is much less of a break than it now than it used to be. So there's a fundamental shift. There are performative issues too just as Trumpism could not possibly have been the same without Donald Trump himself in his decades of being a TV performer so too the way that Ron DeSantis and JD Vance and others have chosen to exploit this moment even though they have long Ivy League pedigrees themselves it's something where they have learned from Trump that trying to rile up sentiments against the college people can be they think good politics for them. So, you know, there's a much so I'm saying that is this old yes? Is it new? Yes. What is happening to the politics of higher education are similar to what's happening to politics in general. Longstanding tensions are being exploited by one party. What does this mean for the optimism? I think again there's a parallel between what is whether one has faith in the long run for the resilience of American democracy as I basically do in a aware of the difficulties moment and whether one has that same faith for higher education. I argue in my piece that essentially higher ed should stay the course recognizing that time is on its side. And just for four reasons I'll just itemize sort of a sentence a piece. One of them is that more and more a healthy higher education establishment is a fundamental of community, regional and statewide economic success. What Florida is doing by lobotomizing its higher education establishment under Ron DeSantis is bad for Florida and what other and I think that is rhetorically left out of a lot of DeSantis speech but it's recognized by people around the country. A second long-term fact is that even if sentiments that people of the sort of now people who now vote against higher education if they're choosing Trump versus others most of them in my experience and according to polls still hope that higher education will be there for their children and their grandchildren. This part of the American dream still exists and motivates people. Third I'll say that there are changes in higher education to recognize the way that universities can work with new industries, with new opportunities for working people for they can create more opportunity for people who need opportunity. I think community colleges for all their flaws have done a lot of this. Innovative colleges starting with Arizona State and many others are doing so too. And fourth I think there is a movement among college leaders to recognize that their community success is their success and that they are, so I describe also in the piece the way a number of them are trying to invest in the success of their community, their region, town and gown rather than gown separate from town. So are we optimistic about America? I say conditionally yes. Are we optimistic about higher education for the same reason? I think some of the fundamentals are moving after this difficult time in higher education's favor. Terrific. John, Jim used the word tension in his remarks and I wanna bring up use that to your piece examines another attention and that's it's long-hand standing historical tension between on the one hand, the promise of higher education as you write as a public good that should benefit all of us. And then on the other hand, the financing of higher education which has largely fallen to individuals. So can you talk about what we can learn from the relative quote-unquote affordability of college in the past, how that's changed and then why do you think it is so much more important today to think about higher ed as public good? Well, first of all, thanks to you Annie and thanks to Paul and the others for hosting this, for hosting me. I've always been a big fanboy of Jim Fallows and now I discovered that we're also the last guys who wear ties. So that's another thing we have in common. Also, I like his optimism that reminds me of Hubert Humphrey and the happy warrior and Kim Fallows probably voted for Hubert Humphrey. I was too young. And anyway, Annie, to take your question, I think- I was also too young in that election. I got to vote for George McGovern as my first vote. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. You probably voted for Woodrow Wilson also or yeah, Abraham Lincoln. You know, I think the, to pick up on a couple of things Jim said, I think that the painful irony of all moment is that we've now created a polity and a society where post-secondary education is a sine qua non for self-sustainability. And I think sometimes we forget how recent that is. When my wife and I lived in Baltimore in the 80s, our next door neighbor was a guy who had worked at Beth Steel his whole life, you know, just south of the Inner Harbor. He had an eighth grade education and he owned his home. That's never gonna happen again in America except for your occasional pop music star, pro athlete. Nobody with an eighth grade education will be a homeowner. That's not because education back then was so good by the way, because we have no evidence that it was better and we weren't better as people. It's because the entire economy had a different structure and the rule of education had a different structure. The painful irony of all this is at the same moment that we made post-secondary education essentially a requirement, we actually made it into a private good. So we're saying to our citizenry, everyone needs this, everyone needs it, but you're gonna have to get it on your own. You're flying by the seat of your pants. We will help you in various ways, but often you won't know about that help or won't be able to access it. So it's a very curious and painful moment where we say to people, we need this, but we're not going to help you or we're gonna help you in highly inadequate ways. Now, one of the reasons I wrote the piece was we do have traditions of help. The Morrill Act during the Civil War, which a lot of people think that it actually, the federal government actually gave land to make colleges, not how it worked. They let states rent out or sell land that had been granted if the states would use it to create colleges and universities with what was called both a liberal and a practical side and to quote the language so the sons of toil could go to college. Jim mentioned the GI Bill, of course, and it's, I mean, the GI Bill is remarkable. By 1947, half of the people on campus were veterans. And they immediately made lots of babies. And so all the universities had places like Fertile Acres. That was the name of the graduate student house in Minnesota. And then of course, the higher education acts of the 1960s, you know, when Lyndon Johnson said, anybody who wants to go to college should be able to do so. So this is a great ideal. And I think what we need to do is we need to celebrate that ideal, but also recognize all of its limits. So, you know, historians love to do this. They love to puncture balloons and it gets very annoying, but sometimes you have to do it. I mean, the Morrill Act, actually, it didn't do what it was going to say. It didn't help the sons of toil to go to college. Some of them did for sure, but most of them couldn't because even the Morrill Act gave money to create these institutions, it didn't really help people attend them. And although the tuition was quite low, it was still extremely expensive to send your son and we're still only talking about men to go off to college. So I think the reason I wrote the piece was both to recognize this tradition of public assistance, to acknowledge its limits and to also argue that it's never been more important that we as a polity figure out ways to help everyone who wants to go to college to do so without, you know, living a life of penery and debt, which is what we've saddled lots of people with. I would recommend that everyone who's interested in that subject read Kate Saloom's book called, Indedit. My students are tired of me saying this, but most really good books and good ideas are simple. They're not complicated. And what Kate did was he interviewed 160 families about how they paid for college. And it's very sobering on many fronts, but one of which of course is how much debt people have taken on. The other thing that's interesting about the book though is in about half the cases, she finds out that her interview with the family, multiple generations, is the first time they've talked about it with each other. That is the entire matter is so shrouded in confusion and often in shame that we don't really have a vocabulary, even for talking about it to people who are most intimate to us. So let me just end with a couple of thoughts about what will have to happen for this to happen. The first thing is, and I think this is a really another important lesson from the history, is we'll never be able to create the case for this. If higher ed is associated, and I think the brilliance of Klim's piece is he shows how all of this has been refracted through red and blue. And the Republicans especially have coded education as a blue thing. We can't make the case for a collective commitment to higher ed if the citizens perceive higher ed as assisting one party or the other. But I wanna also emphasize that on this score, higher ed itself has not done itself proud. You don't have to be Ron DeSantis to argue that at different times, higher ed or people in higher ed have contributed to this problem in very real and problematic ways. So the wire this week brings in the news that the American Anthropological Association had rejected a panel about the differences between gender and sex. This might seem somewhat irrelevant or off point to the listeners. I think it's exactly on point. I think actually it feeds DeSantis's narrative about kind of the way that higher ed is politically marked, but it's not DeSantis's fault, it's our fault. The other thing I'll say is if we wanna make the case for more because that's really what we're talking about, more public commitment to higher ed, we also have to do better with what we already have. And we have not done that. One of the books that I wrote was a history of college teaching and it's a very sad story. The story is in how the 20th century every institution decided it should be a research institution because that's where the incentives were and that's where the dollars were. And we, the professoriate responded exactly the way that any economists would predict. We put most of our energy into research and we diminished deeply diminished the teaching function. To this day, the best predictor of a professor's salary and their rank is the fraction of their week that they devote to research. Their salary and rank is also inversely related to the fraction of their week that they devote to teaching. If we wanna make a case for a deeper public commitment to this institution, we need to change that. And again, I would emphasize, I don't think any of that is the fault of Ron DeSantis or Moss for Liberty. I think it's our fault. Thank you, John. Jim, I wanna pull something that John said in his remarks about higher education belonging to one party or another, education being refracted through red and blue. One of the things you mentioned in your remarks and in your piece is this importance of colleges and universities in their local communities. And that's indeed pretty banal roles as purchasers or employers. Can that local presence and that local impact help undo some of this refraction that John is talking about and should colleges be doing more to amplify the impact they have? So, Anne, thanks very much for that question and the connection to what John was saying, which that's what I was hoping you would ask because I do agree very much with John and the premise of the whole discussion that higher education has become in this moment politicized and it's become people like Josh Hawley of Stanford and Yale Law School find it expedient to position themselves as being against higher ed. And so the question is, there's a long-term question of whether that will endure and then a shorter term, a medium term questions about what higher ed can directly do about it. You can imagine a world in which despite the advantages to communities and individuals of higher ed, the sine qua known as John was saying for people getting ahead in life, you could imagine despite that, that this party coding lasting for a while because other self-destructive behavior continues. That was the whole premise of Thomas Frank's book what's the matter with Kansas long ago? It's the premise of sort of the political coding of vaccination these days and of healthcare and all the rest. My belief is that both on the community level and on the individual level, the long-term rationality prevails. In the long-term families will think it's better for our children and grandchildren to give them these opportunities. It's better for communities to think that we are better off if we are embracing higher ed rather than trying to ridicule or hamstring it or all the rest. And so I believe that in the long run, even though you can see the long, well, the long run can take a long time as it has in other fronts. In the short run, the question is what colleges can do to accelerate this? And I think the two great avenues, number one are affordability and inclusiveness as all the panelists have talked about and as John was just referring to. And the other is purposeful efforts by college leadership to make them visible parts of the town. And for, I did a piece last year for the Monthly's College edition about the way Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana had decided that Muncie's future was its future and they run the community newspapers now from the university newspaper and the school system and all the rest. I think that more and more this will happen and the main token that this can pay off is that the same opinion polls that show lots of non-college whites and others resenting higher education showing a much more positive view of the institutions in their locality. People feeling as if this is an even stronger version of the Congress is horrible but my congressman is okay trope where universities are already seeing and can do much more colleges and universities about making themselves part of the community. And I think this can pay off both in the standing of the colleges but also the welfare of the community. Picking up this thread of an unaffordability in particular, John, your piece actually mentioned some pretty practical non-political alternatives. You don't go all out on the Bernie Sanders free college thing but there are a couple other alternatives that you mentioned that could make college more affordable but do so in much more pragmatic consensus driven kind of way. Can you talk about some of those? Yeah, I mean, and just to be clear I'm not an economist and I don't even play one on the internet but Kevin Carrey of course knows more about this than any of us. And one of the things that's pointed out in response to Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders is if the federal government really did just take over and bail out all these states you'd really be rewarding the states that were the most parsimonious. I mean, the big story at the state level of course is that they stopped funding higher ed. I mean, not literally but radically decreased it in favor of doing things like building prisons. And then Kevin's pointed out accurately if you just had the federal government say, okay you know, we're gonna absorb this now you would basically reward the states that had done all those cuts. And I think he has a much better idea of the federal government actually giving per student assistance to state universities on conditions, right? Which the federal government does with a million things, right? This wouldn't be any different from things that does in transportation or health or anything else. You don't just get money the money comes with strings and the strings might be for example you have to create a system where you're promoting people based on their teaching ability. I mean, I haven't seen that particular proposal but we could do that. So, you know, the feds would be assisting but they wouldn't simply be bailing out the states that had made these cuts. What they would be doing would be doing it in a targeted per student way and also in a way that incentivize the institutions to behave in better ways. And you know, I also mentioned that my friend Paul Glasters has also written a piece and has been shouting this to the ramparts for a very long time or rather from the hilltops that, you know, we can also make deals with students whereby you do get a free college education but it's on the condition that you do a certain amount of national service. And when I was researching the piece that I wrote for Paul for the monthly I actually found out that I had never read this but that William and Mary in the late 1800s had actually done precisely this that it said, we're going to get rid of all your tuition charges if you'll teach in the state of Virginia for two years after you've graduated from William and Mary. So I think there are all kinds of things that we can do. And I think that, I mean, some of the people in this call propose them and there are many others. I think the most important thing though to remember is that we need to make a political case for those things. We're talking about politics now we're not talking about education. And I think the political case begins with making arguments like Jim has done about the benefits of this for everybody. But also, I think it does have to involve an acknowledgement of how far short many of us in higher ed have fallen that is short of our own ideals. How do the two of you see the debate over higher education playing out next year, 2024, presidential election? And for better or for worse, the ones who are going to be defending higher education are going to be more likely to be Democrats. And how do you not worsen the political coding of higher education when you have basically one party coming to the defense and the other side doing what they've been doing? Where do you see this headed next year? So, John, would you like to take the lead on this? Like I offer you the baton. Oh, sure. I mean, my students are tired of hearing this too, but I'm a historian. I study dead people. It's hard enough to figure out the past without prognosticating the future. But let me just say a couple of things. I think that people like Ron DeSantis are betting that these education issues, both at the K through 12 level, if you haven't discussed it, at the higher education level, are going to have a kind of national resonance, right? And I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that. And in fact, I think that in the past couple of months, DeSantis himself as a national candidate has tempered some of his rhetoric around this. Like you haven't heard him talk about woke very much recently, for example. And I think that may be some sort of tacit admission that perhaps these education issues don't have the kind of national electoral resonance that he's hoping. I mean, for all the reasons Tim was talking about, even higher ed in very tangible ways is really a local issue. It's about community and K through 12 education. Of course, the most important decisions, especially around finance are all local. The irony of Ron DeSantis is he now has a lot more power over education in Florida than he would have over education in the United States if he were present. So in the optimist spirit of Jim Fallows, I'm gonna say that I don't think that DeSantis is kind of anti-education pitch is going to be as successful as he had hoped. And I think his own tempering of his rhetoric in recent months as an industry of that. The other thing I'll say though, just at the most basic and strategic level is I think all of us on that broad thing called the left who deeply care about higher education. We have to avoid the trap of stigmatizing and demeaning people that don't have it. So remember when Trump said, I love uneducated people? Alec McGillis had a great tweet where he said something like, derision of Trump's comment about loving uneducated people explains why uneducated people love Trump. And I think he was exactly right. I think a lot of people on the left still work on the idea that if you shame people they're going to change or agree with you, right? It's like, oh, Professor Zimmerman, you're right. I am a new nothing bigot and misogynist. Thank you for enlightening me. I'm definitely going to vote for your team in November. I mean, I really think some people still they might not say that because it sounds so ridiculous but I think operatively they work on that principle and it's just, it's a cul-de-sac. I mean, it's worse than that. I mean, it's, it's, it's harry-carrot, right? We're not going to be able to make the case for higher education if we demean people that don't have it. So I'm neither an economist nor a historian just a mere journalist. So I avoid even, even more trying to make predictions. But I think there is again, one more. Well, here's how on, based on current evidence here's how I think the politics of higher education are going to play out in the short term next year's election. For reasons that are partly Ron DeSantis' magic as a candidate himself, partly the fundamentals we're talking about. I think his idea of making America into Florida and the politics of woke and all these things are burning out. I believe it's the case he did not use the word woke once in this latest so-called debate and he just is going nowhere with that. And I think the ways in which, you know, to the extent the culture wars are dampened down so-called culture wars as main voting issues next year I think that is better for America's future. If I, I think the two fundamental issues that will drive voting a year from now are abortion and the Dobs rolling and it's aftermath and the state of democracy itself. I think those two are just on a platform that dwarfs everything else. After that it will likely be inflation. After that will likely be Ukraine and all the consequences there. Then I think you can have a tranche of things involving higher education, affirmative action and student debt. And other questions, you know, maybe culture war sneaking in there. But I think that is probably good for higher education that it's not likely to be a sort of galvanizing issue as it was safe for Ronald Reagan and when he ran for governor of California in 1966. This was one of his main issues. I think the war of our higher education will be a second or third tier issue in national debate. And that probably is good for higher education. The only thing I'd add, since Kim mentioned affirmative action is whatever you think of the decision on that, the SCOTUS decision, whether you think it's good for higher ed or not. I think it's probably good for the Democrats electorally because one of the things that my friends on the left really acknowledged is that race-based affirmative action has not been popular in the United States. Even among its beneficiaries, that is even among the racial minorities that it was designed to assist and give a leg up to. The polarity is pretty strong in this. When you ask people, including racial minorities, should we use race in college admissions, the majority of them say no. And so again, whatever you think of the case, I do think in a way it removed something that was fairly unpopular from the Democrats play. So we're running out of time. So I wanna ask both of you one last question. We've been talking for the duration of this conversation about the long-term and the long-term optimism. What particular advice do you have in the short-term for higher ed administrators now? Like what can they do in the next three months, six months to accelerate this shift in perception in higher education that needs to happen? I will jump in here and say that they adopted and implement all the plans that have been discussed in this issue of the monthly and I've discussed for the last session here. But I think there is tremendous leeway and pushing on an open door for higher education administrators and leaders to present themselves in their own communities as part of that community, helping the community deal with the tensions of this moment where they are economic or environmental or divisions of any kind. And I can think right now of 25 illustrations, I know personally where that has had a payoff and places ranging from Mississippi to Idaho to Vermont to Arizona. I'm not aware of any places where it has backfired. So I think the more that university leaders think of themselves as having a cooperative responsibility and opportunity for their communities, the better they will serve themselves in the short run and long run too. Look, I think that's absolutely right. I think because all politics is local, like Tip O'Neill said, I think that's easier and more manifest in some places than others. I guess the other thing that I would say is, although I don't think this is gonna happen, I think that something that higher ed leaders could do is just place a cap on executive salaries. I think that higher ed has received a lot of very bad press that it deserves for that. So in my own institution, as Amy Gutman departed, she received $23 million, 20 million of it in deferred compensation. And here's the thing, and this tells you something about higher ed too. We're also running scared a little bit. I don't think most of my colleagues like that, but almost nobody has spoken out against it. I have, but it seems to me that what we need is a little more courage on the part of leaders to acknowledge that our standing in the public has decreased. That's not an opinion. That's a fact, right? To Jim's point, it's not that everyone hates us because obviously there are all sorts of local situations and contexts in which they don't, but our overall standing and our overall rep has declined. There are many reasons for that, some of which are not our own doing, but I think that we need to attend very closely to that. And every time there's a report about a retiring president getting millions upon millions of dollars, the case for everything we're talking about now becomes more difficult. So I'd really like to see somebody to step out and say, look, and I say, and I've said this in print, I think Amy Gutman was an excellent president. I think she's one of the best academic leaders that we've had in the country. And I think we've been able to say that and we should be able to say that she should be very well compensated and people like her for the incredibly hard jobs that they do and $23 million is obscene. There's nothing inconsistent about saying those three things. And so we should say them. Terrific. Well, thank you very much, John and Jim. This has been an amazing discussion and thank you to everyone in our internet audience for joining us today. If you haven't had a chance to be the college guide this year, please do. Have a terrific rest of the afternoon and thank you again for taking the time to join us today. Thanks, Anne. Thank you. Take care.