 Thank you very much for showing up even later on a Friday afternoon, and I know that as Dr. Klein said earlier that weariness does tend to set in toward the end of the week, but you're doing a great job. And I'm hoping to keep you awake here a little longer. With a talk on something I imagine most or all of you are personally interested in which is higher education, and I'm going to focus here on the United States, although a lot of this would apply to other countries that have similar policies to the United States. Last year I gave this talk and I had three separate crises affecting higher education in the United States. One was that college doesn't do what it advertises. It was that government subsidies are messing up the educational process. Third, that there's this cancel culture, I didn't call it that at the time, but that there's a problem emerging on college campuses with speech and protests oriented around trying to get certain speech cancelled. Now I've got another crisis to add to the list. So I'm going to probably not say very much today about cancel culture, and I may say a few things toward the end, but higher education is in trouble. It is in deep trouble. It's been in trouble for a while, and I think the recent events have exacerbated those problems. And a lot of what I'm going to do here, especially with respect to the first and second crisis, comes from Richard Vedder's book that came out last year, Restoring the Promise. It's a great book. I'm slowly writing a review of this book. It should have been done a long time ago, but it's a great, great treatise on a theme that that Professor Vedder has written on before. Lots of updated statistics, some of which I'll share with you here today. The first thing I'm going to talk about, though, with you here is what college does versus what it is commonly reputed to do, which are two very different things. You have likely been told that you need to go to college because this is good for your long-term career and income prospects and so forth. And you need to go because you're going to learn things. This is what you're going to learn, right? So what is it that college actually does? Now what college advertises is that we're in the business of transferring knowledge and wisdom and the ability to think carefully and rationally and wisely about social issues and conveying, conferring some technical skills as well. So this is what college is advertising, but that may not be the only thing that it does, and in fact it may not be the most significant thing that college does. College may be a signalling mechanism, that is, it may simply be a way for people to display to a potential employer that they have certain characteristics. Maybe college is less about stuffing things inside your head and more about getting a certificate that says this is the kind of person I am, a person that you might have been when you walked in the door the first day in the freshman year. So maybe this is about signalling or maybe a third possibility is that it's a consumption good for higher income individuals, which would be borne out if we look at the way colleges have spent great sums of money on recreational facilities for their residential students and athletic events and concerts and essentially spas and very luxurious dormitories and other things for their students. So social activities are a big reason that people might attend college as well. So these three things are part of the college and university experience. Now, colleges and universities, defending their existence, will say, well, you know, look at the difference between incomes for those who went to college versus those who did not. And so this chart or graph here shows the probability of being in a certain educational group for a given income level over a several-year period. And that large purple area at the top is the area designating college graduates. And you can see that that is approximately 80% of those making over $150,000 a year. They're college graduates, whereas if you go down to the lower end of the income spectrum, only maybe 15% or 20% of those in that low income group are college graduates. Those who are high school graduates only, that would be the red group, are a relatively small number or proportion of those making high incomes and a much larger fraction of those making low incomes. So this is part of the defense of college as a human capital kind of process. You're getting the knowledge necessary to have the skills to earn a lot of income. Also if you look at mean or median earnings, this is from 2016. You can see that those who have higher levels of education, masters, doctors, professional degrees tend to earn much higher incomes than those who have only a high school diploma, who attended some college, but then dropped out. And so this, again, is the kind of things that college admissions offices will mention and your relatives will probably tell you you need to go to college because that's what you'll need to do to earn a high income and so forth. And also it looks like, although Vetter addresses this somewhat critically in his book, it looks like college is a good investment. You spend four years of your life or more, you spend a lot of tuition money, you forego the money that you could have earned in some job that you could have had or entrepreneurial venture you could have had right out of high school. That's four years that is quite expensive and yet it looks like the rate of return is pretty high. Consider the higher incomes that are available to people with higher levels of education. However, there are some problems with this. One is that we seem to be educating a lot of people more than what is actually necessary for the jobs that they ultimately end up doing. So this is a chart, one of several that I'll show you from Vetter's book, showing that the education requirements of occupations held by college graduates are almost half less than a college education. That is, you could do that job with a high school diploma or less or maybe some college but not a four year degree. So we're over educating for the kinds of work that people are doing. Here you see the number of jobs requiring a college degree versus the number of college graduates. On the left there you have the jobs requiring a college degree, 28.6 million. The number of employed college graduates, 41.7 million. We've got a lot of people who are in the workforce with a college degree that did not need a college degree to do what they are doing. We keep churning out more and more of these college graduates for what exactly? And here's what some of them are doing. And by the way, let me just issue a caveat here. This is not a, you should drop out of college speech, okay? I'm not saying this process doesn't make sense for some people. I'm suggesting that this doesn't make sense for as many people as are actually going through the process, okay? So here we have taxi drivers, shipping and receiving clerks, sales clerks, firefighters, carpenters, bank tellers. In 1970, that's the dark bar or column there, you had very, very few taxi drivers, shipping and receiving clerks, firefighters, carpenters, etc., who were college graduates. That's 50 years ago. In 2010, 40 years later, we have enormous numbers of people who are doing these jobs that don't require bachelor's degrees that have, in fact, gone through an expensive four-year process. So, Vetter thinks about, you know, why is this? Why are we spending so much, so many resources? Why are we encouraging people, why are guidance counselors in high schools encouraging students to go to college when, in fact, this may not be necessary for many of them? Part of it is a kind of an over-bidding, if you are a fast food, not maybe not a fast food restaurant, but you're some kind of restaurant and you're looking for employees and you get, you know, 100 applications for a job and you're trying to filter through the applications. Well, one easy filter is, who's got more education? Just throw out all the ones that have less than high school education, even though less than high school might still be perfectly fine for the kind of job that you're hiring for. So, maybe part of this is just, it's a filtering process from the employer standpoint. You don't really need to have somebody who's got an anthropology degree to be able to manage the Panera Bread Company, but, well, you know, we need a manager and this person here has the four-year degree. So, we're going to take that as a signal that this person is a go-getter to some extent, because they could stick with this four-year project of getting a college degree. And even though the subject matter is completely irrelevant to what we need this person to do, at least it demonstrates this person has some stick-to-itiveness. They can stick to a long-term project, carry it out, they probably are literate. They have some skills that we think might be important for being a manager. Just, we know this just because they've got this certificate that says they went through this process. It also means this person is able to show up on time, at least somewhat, although I can tell you as a college professor, not all of my students have that skill. So, here's what college education might be doing. It's a filter to some extent, and to the extent that we're not actually conveying knowledge. I'd like to think, maybe I'm deluding myself, but I'd like to think we're conveying knowledge too, but it's a filter, at least in part. So, you have the population, general population, and some of these have red characteristics, some of them have blue characteristics, this is not political, the red states and blue states kind of thing, this is just different characteristics. I think the way I'd set this up, the blues are people who are motivated, who are persevering, who are intelligent, the reds are people who are not so motivated, they're rather undisciplined with the use of their time, maybe their intelligence is not so great. So, you've got these two groups in the general population. So, some of them end up going into this filtering process, this filter for motivation, perseverance, and intelligence, and they either pass or fail. Either they get filtered out, or they pass through the filter. So, those who pass are being certified as motivated, persevering, and intelligent. Now, some people may get through the filter that are not, in fact, motivated, persevering, and intelligent, but it does at least help. Someone who doesn't know anything about the job applicant in front of them, to know something about whether this person is more likely or less likely to be motivated. Some people fail the filter. Now, you know, Bill Gates dropped out of college too, doesn't mean he was unmotivated or unintelligent or anything, I mean he quit and he had better opportunities. There's nothing necessarily wrong with making that decision to drop out of colleges. People regard that as being a, you know, you failed something, but when I say you fail or drop out, that's not necessarily saying anything about your character or your abilities. There are other people that bypass the filter completely. We used to have a lot more people that just bypassed the filter. They said, well, you know, I've got enough motivation, intelligence, and so forth to make it on my own without having to go through this certification process to prove or at least to indicate that I've got this set of characteristics. So, this is the way the system might work if it is about signaling, but what we've seen happen, especially since World War Two, but in several instances since then, the government has injected large sums of money. One of the first injections from the federal government was the so-called GI Bill. And this injection of federal money began to alter this system, change the incentives, so it taxes people and then it subsidizes those who decide to enter the filtering process. So the filter becomes less effective. If you can imagine in a kind of an engineering or hydraulic sense, you put a lot of pressure, air or water going through an air or water filter, you're going to get a lot more stuff that gets kind of forced through that doesn't really, you don't really want to be forced through. So you maybe get a lot of people who end up passing the filter who are not actually motivated, persevering, and intelligent, but nevertheless they get certified as such. And the colleges and universities are incentivized to pass these people through, at least to some extent. You fail that person out, you no longer get those tax subsidized tuition payments. And colleges that, especially colleges that are very enrollment driven, which many of them are, you lose that enrollment, you lose that student, and you lose that tuition payment. So colleges have an incentive to bend over backwards to get this person to stick around and maybe they're one of those people that stays around an extra year or something, but we're going to try to get that person through because that person has federally subsidized or state subsidized dollars. And the only way to get those dollars is to keep that person enrolled as a student. I realize this is a cynical perspective, but bear with me. Of course you're used to this kind of thing. Fewer people end up trying to bypass the filter because now the people who are at the margin otherwise would say I don't have much to gain by trying to go through this filtering process now because they are not having to pay the full cost, they end up going into the filter. Ryan Kaplan wrote a book on this kind of thing a couple of years ago saying once workers have been ranked, giving everyone extra years of education is socially wasteful. Furthermore, since the status quo is supported by hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies, we are probably underusing alternative certification methods like apprenticeships, testing, boot camps, and so on. Some of you are getting a certification coming to Mises Yu. I saw some of you as certificates that indicated that you had gone through Judge Napolitano's course here. That's an alternative certification mechanism, but federal and state subsidies discourage people from seeking out those alternative certifications and encourage them to go through this kind of process that I've described. Kaplan says signaling explains why students are far more concerned about grades than actual learning. They want easy A's, not professors who teach lots of job skills. Signaling explains why cheating pays. A successful cheater profits by impersonating a good student, and signaling explains why students readily forget course material the day after the final exam. Once you've got the good signal on your transcript, you can usually safely forget whatever you learned. Kaplan says we don't need as much education, and I would substitute the word schooling here. We don't need as much schooling as people actually are pursuing. He says the cleanest way to get far less education or schooling is to sharply cut government education spending. Employers will no longer expect you to have the education you can no longer afford. In other words, spending cuts will cause credential deflation. You'll again be able to get a low and middle school job with a high school degree or less. My maternal grandfather had an eighth grade education, and he did fine. He provided for his family with three kids. They did all right. He grew up without a lot of wealth. His family was Alabama tenant farmers who had grown cotton in rural Alabama for years and years. They actually lost a lot of money in the Great Depression, essentially lost the farm in the Great Depression. He got an eighth grade education and went to work. At that time, it was not nearly as uncommon for someone to be able to do that. So, what does education actually produce? And for the next little bit here, I'm going to rely on my friend Jonathan Newman, who wrote a great piece from ESA's wire several years ago on why college degrees are becoming useless. Strange headline for people like us, Jonathan and I, who are college professors. We make our living off of this. And here I am telling you that what college professors do is not as valuable as commonly reputed. What he says, graduates have little to no improvement in critical thinking skills. At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years. And employers, especially some of those that are highly reputed employers that people want to work for because that looks great on their resume, they don't care if hires have a college degree. They are looking for other characteristics, measurable characteristics that can predict job performance. Mind staying as Google had billboards that with complicated math problems on them that said things like, if you can solve this, give us a call, give our HR department a call. They're looking for those kinds of skills and the degree to them does not matter as much. At Yale College, where 62% of grades are in the A range, some of you don't probably never heard of Garrison Keeler and his radio show and NPR for many years about Lake Wobagon. And his description of Lake Wobagon was that, all the children are above average. And so, Arthur Levine found in a national survey that 41% of students had grade point averages of A minus or higher in 2009 compared to just 7% in 1969. Is that because everybody is smarter now than we were in 1969? I've been around higher education for a while now. Not as long as some people here, but I've been teaching in higher education. If you count my grade, in higher education, if you count my graduate school years where I taught as a TA, almost 25 years. And I don't think my students are getting smarter than... I mean, I don't think the raw materials sitting in front of me in the desks are smarter than they were 20 years ago. So, just to put this in graphical terms, the red line is what I want you to pay attention to here. This is the grade distribution and the red line are the A's. This goes back to 1940. And then there's a big jump there of 21 years to 1961. But from 1940 to 1961, about 15% of students were getting A's. You had to really be in the top of your class. But by 2012, that had increased to like 45%, almost half of students are getting A's. Now, there's a lot of pressure, I can tell you, there's a lot of pressure on college professors to give high grades. Students will show up in my office and say, you know, if I don't get a whatever in your class, I'm going to lose my scholarship, which is a scary prospect. My college is not cheap. They might lose their eligibility for a government subsidized grant or other source of funds because third-party payments, as in medical care, which I discussed earlier this week, third-party payments have become very important in college education. Many students almost have to borrow or get a scholarship. The intense competition for scholarships is something we once did not see as much of. People or students are not spending as much time on their academics. I know this is shocking to you. You all study 30 hours a week, I'm sure, when you go back to your colleges and universities. But actually, we find that students are not spending as much time. In 1961, students spent 40 hours a week studying. About 2003, then I dropped below 30 hours a week. And that would count not just time out of class, but time in class as well. So, all right, moving on. Second crisis, government subsidies, which I mentioned already, are backfiring. And part of the reason I say they're backfiring is that the students themselves are not seeing lower post-subsidy prices for their higher education. Now, according to Bloomberg, college tuition and fees have increased 1,120 percent since records began in 1978. The rate of increase in college costs have been four times faster than the increase in the consumer price index. Again, very similar to what I mentioned earlier in the week about medical care. Medical care prices have increased much faster than inflation. And again, for similar reasons. All right. Last night, I was putting the final touches on this presentation. So, I pulled a screenshot of the student loan debt clock. Last year, when I gave this talk, I showed the debt clock and it was $100 billion less. And in fact, if you pull this up, and the link is at the bottom of that slide there, but if you pull this up, you'll see a larger number than that. I don't know how much. But I was, I was screenshotting this and it's like, okay, this, do I wait another minute for this to tick over another $100 million or to, you know, I'll forget it. I'll just screenshot it. So, I mean, just moving as I'm sitting there, this $1.7 trillion of student loan debt. And this is a problem, partly because of default rates, which I may mention later. Back to something from Jonathan Newman on Mises.org here. Jonathan, I'm borrowing a lot of your work. I appreciate it very much. Here's tuition, the red line, versus the consumer price index, the blue line. You can see there the rapid increase in tuition prices, especially about, I guess that's about first decade of the century. 2000 to 2006 or so, you're seeing a pretty substantial increase in the slope of that, of that tuition line for public four-year institutions. Here is, if you want to think about affordability, and not just the raw price, this is a chart showing the average tuition related to median household income. So, household incomes have been rising too. So, that would mitigate some of the impact of a higher tuition. But we see that even if you're looking at college tuition as a fraction of household income, it's still rising. Now, part of this, you can probably see those kind of blue shaded columns there, which tend to connect a bit with recessions that we've had, where household income was not increasing very much, but tuition, in fact, household income was falling, and tuition either kept rising or stayed the same. It didn't fall to match the lower incomes of households. And so, we're seeing this increase so that by 2011-2012, tuition and required fees for four-year degree granting institutions were over one fourth of median household income. I've got three kids in college right now, and it would be impossible for me to be able to afford to pay the tuition the only thing that saves me is that I teach at a college where my kids can go for free, well, tuition-free for other fees. But otherwise, there's no way. I mean, three kids in college, all at the same time, financially, it's a nightmare. So, households are finding colleges less and less affordable. And again, this brings in the third parties, you know, people are borrowing more and more money to go to college. And part of this is troublesome because of the default rate. These are different kinds of loans going back to 2004 up through 2017, different kinds of loans, and the delinquency rates on those loans. So, we got student loans, which are the red, credit card loans, other kinds of loans, mortgages, car loans, home equity lines of credit. And we can see, of course, during and immediately after the last recession, or I've got to stop saying that because we're apparently in a recession now, but the 2008-2009 recession, you can see that the default rates spiked for a lot of different kinds of loans, but about 2012 or so it looked like student loan default rates shot up and have not really dropped very much. And they are now the highest default rates of all of those categories of loans. And part of this is again because federal aid and the federal loans don't take account of creditworthiness in the same way that private sector loans, fully private sector loans do. So, you can qualify for student loans where at a rate that you couldn't qualify for those same loans of other types. And so colleges respond to this just Niagara falls of cash flowing into colleges and universities by what? Giving students discounts? Lowering tuition? Oh, look, all this federal money is coming down the, down the pike. We can give students a break now. No, tuition has gone up. Now, there are several studies. I'll go through these here with you very quickly. Some research to try to figure out how much is tuition rising in response to dollars of federal, federal aid. Now, William Bennett proposed what's now become known as the Bennett hypothesis, which says that you increase financial aid. Colleges and universities will simply follow by increasing their tuitions. And have we seen this? Well, one 2007 study says that they did not find very much evidence of the Bennett hypothesis for in-state tuition for public universities, but they did find evidence of it for private universities where Pell grants appear to be matched nearly one for one by increases in list and net tuition. Results for out of state tuition for public universities are similar to those for private universities, suggesting they behave more like private ones and setting out of state tuition. A more recent study 2012 by Nicholas Turner says that intended cost reductions of tax based federal student aid are substantially offset by institutional price increases for four year colleges and universities. Tax based aid crowds out institutional aid roughly dollar for dollar, whereas the university might have given students kind of an in-house scholarship. Now they cut back on those in-house scholarships and require the student to give over the federal or state or federal aid in this case. So the student is left with no real break here. The tuition is going up at least as fast as the federal student aid. A 2013 study published by the NBER says we find that title four institutions charge tuition that is about 78% higher than that charged by comparable institutions whose students cannot apply for federal financial aid. A 2017 study, we study the link between student credit expansion of the past 15 years and the rise in college tuition. We find a pass through effect of about 60 cents on the dollar and smaller but positive effects for unsubsidized federal loans. The subsidized loan effect is most pronounced for more expensive degrees. Those offered by private institutions and for two year or vocational programs. Another study, oh I guess I skipped that, but so what are what are colleges and universities doing with all this money? They're reaping the benefits of this federal aid. College is not becoming more affordable for students as a proportion of median income and in in absolute terms. So what are they doing with the money? Well part of it is going to non-academic student amenities. So colleges are as a proportion of your tuition dollar less and less of it is going to learning things and more of it is going to make sure you have a great time while you are on campus. So Princeton University spent $136 million on a student dormitory with leaded glass windows and oak dining hall $300,000 per bed. NYU has provided $90 million in loans many of them zero interest and forgivable to administrators and faculty to buy houses and summer homes on fire island in the Hamptons. It's nice to be in college administration evidently. Former Ohio State President Gordon Gee earned nearly $2 million in compensation this is last year this would have been 2012 this is from another earlier work by Richard Vetter. While living in a 9600 square foot Tudor mansion on a 1.3 acre estate $673,000 in art decor $532 shower curtain in a guest bathroom $23,000 a month for his parties half a million dollars for him to travel the country on a private jet. Now I have nothing about nothing against private jets or expensive shower curtains but where is this money coming from? Colleges have also used the gusher of taxpayer dollars to hire more administrators. Administroids as I think better calls them. The University of California system employs 2358 administrative staff in just the president's office. If you look at the number of administrators at a typical college or university and the number of faculty you will find the number of faculty especially in a pursuant sense have has not increased all that much maybe even declined a bit but administrators, deans and dealets and we're multiplying these these these people. Now I'm glad for some of them I'm glad to have many of them around they help me when my I need help with some you know technological problem in my classroom or there's a person I can call if I want to apply for a grant and they'll help me with that and that kind of thing is that's I'm not bashing all of them but the increase is just stunning how many of these people there are now and and many of them I think well what is exact it's like that office space what would you say you do here and I I'm I'm just I'm befuddled frankly and what what do they how do they justify their existence Vedder says 30 of the adult population has college degrees the Department of Labor tells us that only 20 or so jobs require college degrees we have 115 520 janitors in the United States with bachelor's degrees or more why are we encouraging more kids to go to college so he says in housing we had these artificially low interest rates before the last housing market bust government encouraged people with low qualifications low bad credit to buy a house today we have low interest rates on student loans we're encouraging people to go to college who are unqualified just as it encouraged people to buy a home who were unqualified with with regard to their credit so he suggests that we need to we need to disinvest in higher education this takes us to for-profit education which got a bad reputation number of years ago because many of the students who end up in for-profit institutions are students that you might you might say are non-traditional students they're not the 18 to 22 year old residential students who are still likely being supported heavily by their parents these are students who have a lot of things going on in their lives they may be married they may have kids they may have a job that takes 40 50 hours a week they're trying very hard to get ahead and they're trying to get an education to help them with that and they've got a lot of stuff going on in their lives a lot of commitments that they can't easily ditch to just study so these are students that are of a different category and they've got a lot of challenges and sometimes those challenges are financial because they've got all these commitments but and so for-profit institutions were seeing a lot of students go through they get their degree but then they end up defaulting on their student loan debt and the many people were looking at these for-profit institutions and saying aha see it's the profit motive that's the problem here if you weren't just after the almighty dollar then you wouldn't be giving degrees to people who um had these financial challenges you wouldn't be creating these financial challenges with the student loans that that they're qualifying for we have a long history of for-profit education in the united states in 1897 more than 92 percent of college students were enrolled at for-profit institutions in 2016 while 15 percent of for-profit student borrowers in a federal loan have defaulted since 2013 seven percent of students at private schools and 11 percent of borrowers at public schools defaulted in the same period so it's a there is a disproportionate default rate for students that have come through for-profit institutions but again it's apples and oranges in a sense because we're looking at a different kind of student with more they've already got financial challenges in many cases so it's not this to look at default rates without considering that I think is to treat for-profit education unfairly so the wall street journal um uh sorry this this is uh this is this is uh a g smith and on mises.org said that the giants of for-profit education have grown fat on a steady diet of government credit by cleverly maneuvering their way through a vast field of regulatory landmines to take advantage of federal aid programs aimed at helping those they ultimately hurt that is the aimed at helping the students that the federal aid programs ultimately ultimately hurt as expected many have ignorantly aimed their weaponry at the profit motive instead of unleashing their fury on the root cause which is government interference in the market so you can expect that if you've got a massive third party payer funneling large amounts of taxpayer dollars into education you're going to distort the educational process that profit motive may end up being distorted in in a manner similar to what we sometimes call crony capitalism where you have a firm that figures out how to extract as many taxpayer dollars as they can and as with again as with medical care sometimes the doctor the hospital is paying more attention to what medicare or medicaid want rather than what the patient wants and needs what is in here we ought to be thinking about what does the student want and need but that's being distorted by the federal aid not by the practice of trying to achieve profit here um may i showed this last year it's this this particular thing is not new but it's it's a concern we may we may have a kind of bubble developing and we now have a new concern which i'll take the last couple of minutes to talk about here which is the stress being placed on colleges and universities and and i don't mean the institution itself alone i mean the students are being stressed by this kind of um this pandemic that we are now dealing with universities and colleges were already struggling in many ways before any of this and the economic consequences of government lockdown and now it is it is creating you might even say a perfect storm of trouble for these institutions jenna robinson from the james martin center said before covid 19 universities were already beginning to experience an enrollment decline mostly fueled by demographic changes fewer kids in that age group the current crisis will raise existential questions for small and mid-tier institutions only universities with math with massive endowments and highly competitive admissions will escape the effects of the coming enrollment cliff we are having to fundamentally change some things in education um content delivery is having to change where i teach wafford we have had no online only courses until this past summer where summer school courses had to be delivered entirely online and and half of the spring semester was entirely online this is very new for a lot of people many of my colleagues are just struggling to try to get up to speed on the technology and and i think we're making a lot of progress in that way but it's it's been it's been difficult it's been difficult for students i mean zoom fatigue is a real thing and it's hard for us to kind of gauge from looking at a one inch by one and a half inch square a rectangle on a on a screen whether that student is getting what we're saying or even if they're there uh apparently there was this trick that some students learned in k through 12 crowd and maybe it linked over or leaked over into the higher ed where students created a background that said something like logging in and they posted that up and it looked like they were trying to log in apparently but they just never showed up for class and my uh my wife was teaching online she's k through 12 teacher and she uh she said there were students that would try to participate participate in class while on their trampoline out in the backyard you know holding their phone and uh i had i had what i called a rule of verticality you had to be vertical on on the screen i had to see you and you could not be like on your pillow you had to be vertical i mean is it i'm like a bare minimum requirements to show up be vertical uh but it was interesting and i think i've learned a lot and i think a lot of us who are not accustomed to teaching that way have learned a lot and students have certainly learned a lot uh about the process um if not the content so um some fields of study are really having a more difficult time i can teach economics i think pretty well online compared to say somebody trying to teach chemistry with no lab uh you can simulate some lab experiments i'm told but that's difficult uh residential colleges and universities are facing constraints on some of the activities that make students want to attend on campus this is really bothersome to to those who are you know part of why they were going to college was they wanted to learn something or at least get a signal as we discussed but they also wanted the social events the athletic events they wanted to you know get away from their parents and live in a dorm instead of living in their parents house they wanted to have opportunities to meet other people face to face uh they wanted greek life they wanted um all of these kinds of opportunities that you can't get sitting in your parents dining room staring at a laptop screen for several hours a day i don't think that face-to-face education is going to be killed off by COVID-19 partly for that reason i think the fundamental demand is good or bad is i mean whether it's signaling or knowledge acquisition or i think that that that that is still going to be around for for some of those reasons students really want those kinds of opportunities colleges and universities that have already had an online program have an advantage there are some universities that have truly massive online programs and they they'll fare relatively well in this and i think the time is ripe for online education to really shine where people can try to do that well i'm very pleased to see the mesas institute creating a master's program and i'm i'm very excited about that and i hope that things improve for online education partly because i want to see these alternatives succeed i don't think the underlying demand for higher education has really changed all that much some students may be taking gap semesters or gap years or something to try to wait out the coronavirus but um let things get back to normal and certainly it's going to be an interesting year academic year ahead of us but anyway i i have i really like doing what i do as a professor i think my students enjoy the process of going through a college education for a variety of reasons some good some not quite as noble but i'm very pleased frankly to see you here and many of you watching this online that are seeking out those alternatives that we need to have to a system that is being broken by government thank you very much