 Yeah, welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm glad to see you here today. We have a really good guest on a really important topic. I'm looking forward to our conversation. We've been talking for the past seven years about the economics of higher education, about the increase of prices, about changes in the student aid, about how university budgets are altered, about federal financial aid, all aspects of it. Today, I wanted to dive into how students and their families can pay for college tuition and expenses. And we're doing that with the help of Mark Salisbury. Mark is a fascinating fellow, a former dean, a former athletic school, a college athletics coach, and now the co-founder and CEO of a company called Turnit, excuse me, Tuition Fit, that tries to help students pay for college. This is not a promotional event. This is a serious discussion to figure out what's going on with the difficulties that students face trying to pay for college and what we can do to make it work. So without any further ado, let me welcome our guest and bring him up on stage. You have to imagine if you like the Star Trek transporter noise and maybe you'll kind of shimmering light on the screen. And there's Mark. Hello. Hello. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you. Where are you today? I'm in my home office in Glum, Davenport, Iowa. Clouds as always in the winter, apparently. So like many folks, experiencing something less than sunny and warm. Well, that seems to be the track. Lisa Durf mentions freezing rain, which is the worst. And she's staying inside like a smart person. And Molly Cheax says that she's a transporter or transplanted Iowan there. So you've got a colleague. All right. I hadn't realized this would trigger the Iowa mafia, but there we go. There we go. Well, we do have a slogan here. The last one to leave Iowa, please turn off the lights. I've seen that in Ohio and in Michigan too. Well, I'm glad that you're there keeping the lights on in all kinds of ways. So Mark, we have a tradition on the forum. We don't ask people to introduce themselves by talking about their career or their past. We ask them to talk about what they're doing in the upcoming year, what projects, what services, what items are you working on, and also what ideas are top of mind for you? Wow. I like that question. The thing that's top of mind for me is, and starting with the dramatic given my improv background might be boring, but if we don't have a successful, thriving, tremendously diverse higher education ecosystem in this country, I don't think our democracy is going to make it. I just think that is so critical, and I don't necessarily think everyone grasps that to the degree that it is. Where I live, obviously it's corn and soybean country, and there are hundreds of small towns that have a small college in them, some of them are over private, and at this point they are the most stable employer. They pay quite well, and in those small towns, those small colleges are the reason why there's some entrepreneurial thought in that town. Those small colleges are the reason why cultural values have progressed and moved to a place that's the kind of ways that we want to be as an accepting and welcoming country. If those small colleges start going down one by one, especially in some sort of mass closure, I'm very concerned for where those small towns end up, and I'm not just talking about businesses closed and people moving, but I'm talking about things like tribalism, and I think I'm talking about this sort of sense of we have nothing and we got to protect our own, come hell or high water. For me, one of the things that is so important and drives me to do the work that I do is we have to save American higher education. As much as we can be annoyed with what we see and what's going on and get down right angry sometimes, we have to save it somehow. So is that the animating thought behind your work? Very much so, and by no means do I want to suggest anybody that I'm some sort of I've got a magic bullet or a wand, but one of the really core elements behind all of the work that I've been doing with the tuition fit project was in order to get this whole space to a better place, to make it possible for the public to not be so uncertain about pursuing higher education options and worrying about if I get this wrong, I'm going to end up in debt for decades. And in order to help the colleges make it easier for them to attract the students that oftentimes want to find them, but just can't. Right now, there's no solution. There's just a giant log jam, and that log jam is the utter lack of transparency and pricing. So if we can fix that, then at least we've got a fighting chance, because I've sat through more faculty meetings than I care to recall, but I know that when you walk into one of those gatherings, and it's not just faculty, I think it's organizations general, it's human beings in general, and you tell them, hey, there's a huge problem and we got to fix it. Unless you give people a way to see, find their way to a solution, what do people do? They all sort of gather in their small group and, well, we better protect ours, because that's what happens all the time when college presidents or somebody else says, hey, you guys all have to get cheaper. And obscenities. And there's no way to answer that question without having some sense of, well, if we got cheaper, how much cheaper do we need to get that would allow us to then thrive more than we are now or turn around our budget somehow to go from being in the black to being in the, or sorry, go from being in the red to being in the black or green or whatever color people like to use now. There has to be a way to get there. And if you can't show people what that is, you're dead in the water. Can I can I ask you just to take a step back for a second so that everybody's on the same page? What, say more about the lack of transparency and higher ed pricing, what makes that happen, just just how opaque is higher education pricing? Well, it's, to say it's opaque is, let's just say that it's it's entirely murky on two dimensions. The one dimension is something that some might have noticed in the news recently that the actual letters that students get when they get what they call a financial aid award offer that tells them what their actual price is. Those are notorious for their somewhere between difficult to make sense of to downright misleading. Those documents are the document that a student will go to to see what's what's the price that I'm going to pay. It's not uncommon at all for there to be a bottom line number that says here's what your price is. And that bottom line number includes an assumption about the student borrowing the full slate of federal loans. It might even include a whole bunch of plus loans in there that the parent would have to borrow that the parent might not even qualify for but it's somehow woven in, right? So the award letter is a problem on its own. One of the attempts to solve this was the net price calculators that was implemented a decade ago. The net price calculator problem started with folks creating the net price calculators that produced essentially the same thing that the award letter did. Make it look as rosy as possible what your price would be and then people would find out later that it's not all that accurate. The second thing of course is that the net price calculators are not required to be accurate. So nice to have them but the whole notion of them sort of implies that they would be, right? So the public can miss all of the fine prints underneath and be really stuck. So there's two points at which you might be told the price but it's really difficult to know whether that's accurate and whether it's even correct and whether you interpret it correctly, right? So that's one of the dimensions of the lack of transparency. The other dimension though is I think maybe even more important because that is a dimension across time because when college was a lot less expensive than absolute dollars decades ago and a lot more of the aid that was given first of all there's a far smaller amount of money given out in aid anyway but it was primarily in need. The sticker price functioned as a pretty simple way to decide is that a school that fits my price range or not. Fast forward several decades the embrace of the high price high discount model the reality that nobody really realized that once you embrace that model you really can't go backwards, right? You can't come back the next year and say just kidding everybody it doesn't cost us that much to do this and we're going to give you a different price the PR nightmare there is not good. So that then that horse gets out of the barn and there's no way to chase it down and the fact though remains that people are still trying to decide which schools fit their price range a year before they apply to college, right? So the lack of transparency there sets up an environment in which you're that much more vulnerable to all of the emotional selling points that would happen in a marketplace, right? If you've got a regular marketplace which this is right you've got schools selling education and degrees and consumers wanting to buy access to that if you're the seller you want them to make an emotional decision because the likelihood's higher than they'll pay more, right? Bayer wants to make the rational decision to get the best value. So the sellers have sort of constructed over decades this entity in which students and families are obliged compelled coerced into making all kinds of decisions that are based on emotion narrowing their options down eliminating a whole bunch of choices and then at the very end of the process when they've eliminated from thousands down to five they're all of a sudden you have a set of prices that now you have to pick one of them and because emotions driven what you've done that set of five is very likely to be something that you're going to have to at least borrow for it to pay for and sometimes sometimes it's five that you couldn't possibly afford in the first place and you are stuck. So you've got transparency problems in two dimensions I should probably add a wrinkle to that that's this price transparency is not just knowing your own price and it's not just knowing your own price at some point in that process What do you mean? Real price transparency is also being able to see that you're not the one Rube who's being asked to pay 10,000 more than everybody else but you actually can see prices across the marketplace and decide oh yeah by comparison that's a pretty reasonable price I'm not being asked to pay more than anybody else and by comparison oh wow I'm getting a really good deal I'm really excited about that now price transparency is knowing prices across the marketplace and all of that is why I started the tuition pit project to crowdsource that solution because that dataset just simply did not exist Well thank you for that excellent answer to to my question the high tuition high discounting model is you know one of in some ways I think one of the great secrets of higher ed that people aren't uh aren't fully aware of and of course and I think you've done a great job and you've done this repeatedly and in public of exposing how award letters can really just be misleading uh friends I have some more questions for Mark Salisbury but this is a forum for all of you uh so I'm going to ask one quick question but I would love to hear your questions and thoughts so please just go to the bottom of the screen click the uh raised hand button if you want me to beam you up so that you can talk and appearances aside you do not have to have a beer to be on the screen today or you can click the the question mark button and give us a give us a Q&A and the the question I was going to ask is um I mean you're describing a very challenging situation uh but the research of scholars like Sarah Goldrick-Rabb and others have shown that it's getting more and more difficult for students to be able to pay for higher education especially students who are marginalized for various reasons uh do you want to say a bit more about that well they're absolutely right and and some of the some of the issues that come up are simply you know when colleges have to report their prices they report their direct costs with they call tuition fees room and board but then there's this other idea called cost of attendance and that's supposed to be essentially what they call indirect costs and that's everything else right and that can be books and lab fees that can be uh just the ability to afford food when the residence hall isn't serving food on Sunday morning or Sunday night or Saturday morning um it can be all of the other costs that come like insurance it can be the cost of travel to the campus and back um all of those other costs and that's kind of a wild west area of where institutions just sort of pick a number throw it out there well that cost of living number that they report may not have changed in a decade because it's a lot to dig into and figure that out and if you live in an area or a school is located in an area where the cost of living is dramatically high that cost of attendance number isn't going to account for that so even when financial aid is is set to work from the cost of attendance number even in the best cases for the students where cost is everything and barely affording to be able to pay for college as it is yeah that creates tremendous problems and tremendous pressures and those are the students that feel it first and feel it right away and the way that the reporting numbers are set up colleges report and people see in every place that you would go to search out college prices um that stuff sort of sits under way under the radar and doesn't really get recognized and you don't report it doesn't exist right sure if you don't see it tree falls in the forest no one hears it um well thank you that's a that's a very good answer and a very sobering answer um in uh in the in the chat um we have keel doom mentioning that the credential inflation goes on and on um but we have a question that comes from uh ed fin and i want to bring that up i'll flash that on the screen for us all um so if um what do you think the role is of amenities and the sheer amount of federal loan funded what do they play in driving students going to schools they cannot afford is this forcing campuses to build irresponsibly there's a whole layer of very funky and just bizarre things that go on and how buildings are funded how amenities are funded and paid for and um it probably would take a much longer than an hour to sort of dive into all that but this is what i'll say to that it's really important for people to understand the sticker prices that colleges charge so across the country maybe one out of ten students actually pays that sticker price and there's the majority of colleges on camp colleges around the country um nobody's paid that sticker price for years so it's not true to think that well these sticker prices are going up and they're being driven up by all of this building that's going because what's happening is if you look at the actual price that students pay that actually revenue that institutions bring in that number is barely going up at all so it's not like tuition increases are funding all of this growth um it's certainly true that colleges have thought that we need to add buildings and facilities and that there can appear to be some sort of arms race there and there was a stretch probably a decade ago where there was an awful lot of growth in building but it's kind of i think it's important to just separate it's a totally valid question to ask was that the right use of those funds and the corollary question to that is would that school have been able to get those funds if they didn't build the building that the donor wanted them to build the name on and celebrate infinitely right but that is oftentimes something quite separate from the money coming in from tuition because the reality is is for most colleges universities their costs are going up faster than their incomes their revenues are sometimes dramatically so and that's even if they're just very good at sort of maintaining uh their expenditures which many are not of course well um thank you for that for that great answer and ed um ed of alparez university thank you for that really good question friends if you're new to the forum that's an example of one of those q and a questions so if you'd like to ask one of those just head to the bottom of the screen hit the q and a box and start typing we'll be glad to share um and we have as well a question from charles finley but charles also wants to join us on stage so let me just beam him up see if his camera is on and charles charles we cannot see you nor can we hear you so let me just i'll just grab your text question and use that charles asks a very very solid and experienced question what is the overall price what did vary based on cost of living in different locations and it's a good question now every college when they report prices to the federal government they'll report their direct costs their tuition fees room and board and that of course assumes that the students living on campus and there are certainly schools where the cost of living on campus the room and board are higher than others and some of that's driven by cost of living and some of it's just not it's just a way that the college decides to organize their funds and costs but then there's the whole other sort of estimating what it would cost to live off and a lot of times institutions don't have a great sense of what that is and it doesn't hurt them to sort of not know what that cost is either because they like to pretend that it's the same as living on campus and oftentimes it can be far more expensive in fact I wish I could remember if it was USC or UCLA but one of them bought a whole bunch of real estate next to campus and is building a whole bunch of apartment buildings cost of students living off campus run by the you know private real estate market was far beyond what they could afford and it was hurting the school and hurting the students so they finally sort of had the acquiesce not every institution is in a position to be able to do that of course well thank you that's Charles as usual that's a great question and thank you thank you mark for the solid answer just by the way friends if you're having any technical difficulties with audio with visuals or anything else our wonderful westerner domsky is here and they can help you just ping them and they will give you a hand if you have any any questions or challenges now let me bring up another video question and this comes from our good friend michelle miller hello professor miller I hope you're staying dry and warm oh it just makes them worry I don't mean that the snow in a bad way just makes a beautiful place more beautiful and fills a reservoir so see if my attitude holds up for another week this is this is so wonderful I I'm coming to this conversation as sort of an old veteran of the course redesign movement that you know kind of trying to see how can we break down the cost of delivering one course to one student and it's and it is amazing you know how the conversation has taken root but the solutions are still if they'll want to go out there so I guess what I'm going to work up to is a question of like have you seen like really radical deep change models that even if they're not fully fleshed out that did you like and you know like in the chat people were bringing up like health care and how you know cost has had its own runaway issues over there I mean I I think about this this one little weird example of community acupuncture like it's this model where they treat people in groups and and so instead of you know $100 for an hour it costs $20 and it costs less because it costs less they radically changed at a fundamental level how they delivered this one service and I know that's a bit of a bit of a stretch but you know have you seen anything out there that caught your eye even something nascent that was not just like well let's accept more traps for credits or this or that but really changed it at a fundamental level so thanks so much yeah well that's that that is a great like let's cut to the cut to the core of the problem question and to be frank no I have not seen let me back that up to be frank in the traditional higher education model right of the on campus lots of students live on campus for at least part of the time many of the students are full time the sort of traditional model of how we used to do higher ed I've not seen a great deal of change and I've seen a lot of institutions try to do things where they're like what's the cost per major or a cost per course I've seen those analyses from their business offices and many times their analyses aren't great in large part because they just don't have a sense of how to figure that out right you've got five you know take one course and you've got 20 students in it and five of those students are there for that major five of them are there because they're checking off something that works for a general education requirement five of them are there because they got it fit their time block of when they were on campus and could get back in time for childcare and then five of them are there because they don't know why they're there to be honest but that and that may be a different issue for that student but the point still is um those analyses often treat all of those students as exactly the same and those analyses oftentimes come at this whole thing like the assembly line mindset right and um so they don't really work very well now to the degree that this is starting to filter in you know some of the online offerings whether they're institutions like western governors or whether they're some of the hybrid places that you can both do in person or online and the degree to which some institutions now coming out of the pandemic have recognized their students need some combination of both and are starting to do that stuff I think some of them are starting to see that there's a way to apply that and then have it affect on the the whole financial model because the reality isn't that institutions for a long time we're trying to just get more money get more money get more money the reality is is no you're you really have to cut costs and so where do you do that right um that requires not only some really really difficult interactions on campus right um and navigating all the constituencies you have to navigate navigate but um it also requires some sort of fundamentally rethinking you know uh or sort of freeing yourself from that old monastic model of higher education right as we're an institution that within this institution we have to offer everything that is related to cultural knowledge right so we have to have everything from a swimming pool to an art gallery right like we do um even if there's 10 of them within a block of your campus right so those are really difficult things to sort out and um I don't think it's in some ways if you've been in higher ed for a long time it's probably not a big surprise to realize how hard it is to make that happen what kind of campus leadership you would need to be able to get people to think that way and sort of shift without chasing you off campus with pitchfork so Michelle great question thanks thank you thank you and uh and mark another good answer uh friends if you're new to the forum that's an example of a video question and and you can tell that uh uh we're welcoming everybody on stage so just click the raised hand button if you'd like to join us and uh and we'll beam you up meanwhile we have more questions coming in mark and uh by the way if anyone's having any technical issues please uh talk to Wessum who will help you um and if anyone's having any audio issues just let me know in the chat too if there's a if there's a widespread problem I need to know about it uh we have a great question from our great friend um long time friend uh Roxanne who asks doesn't lower ed k through 12 have some responsibility for helping students and parents navigate the wild west of educational expenses has lower ed been responsive or should they have been more responsive well it's in in high schools right now the traditional expectation was that the school counseling office would be able to help students with the college search the school counseling profession is a is a rough situation in that oftentimes school counseling is the sort of we'll assign everything at this high school that doesn't happen in a classroom to the school counseling office we're not going to add a whole lot of people corresponding to whatever we add to them but we're still going to do that um so the amount of time that counselors have to work with each student is limited the second problem then is that the way that college planning as a as a field as a knowledge that one gets that one distributes that whole frame has been sort of turned into something that is very time intensive at its you know at its sort of like um stereotypically best and i'm not sure that is best but stereotypically most um full developed it's this deeply introspective experience that is find yourself find who you are find what you want to be find what content fits you and all these things and that's multiple hours with every student counseling staff simply doesn't have that add on to that the pandemic and now the counseling staff is essentially frontline workers five alarm fires going off every five minutes so it's very difficult for them to have to do this the other larger issue or other very important issue is this the college planning or the the sort of knowledge that is to be delivered has always ignored price price has not been a thing that you talk about go find a college that fits you apply get in then we'll figure out how to pay for it well when the sticker price was what most people paid fine and when the sticker price was a lot lower fine but over several decades that's blown up and so now that lack of talking about price is drives people bananas and the one thing that counselors could do is wait they can't because none of them know what the prices of the colleges are so they can't help students in the one area that the student in the family needs in addition counselors are trained to be sort of ask reflective questions and help you to come to decisions they're not financial planners and there's certainly not somebody who's supposed to know the line by line answers to the FAFSA nor do they get any of that in their graduate programs or in their professional development it's sorely lacking so should hire should hire high high schools have a better more important role to play yeah do they know is it their fault I don't know well that's a very sobering and sad answer to a brilliant question again that transfer that lack of transparency seems to just really go everywhere and we have some some comments and questions Mark I wanted to throw in Saras Agregorio our good friend says as a millennial a lot of us can't afford to take on mortgages because we're still almost 20 years later trying to pay down student debt we were told that we had to go to college in the early zeroes so I wanted to share that yes absolutely true everybody was told they had to go to college and it wasn't entirely wrong that you should go to college right it wasn't like nobody should go to college but the question was at college generally it was which college right nobody ever said that part right and you know people have written about this and in my days as a researcher on college student outcomes and and college success 60 years of data tells us the same thing that where you go doesn't make nearly as much of effect as what you do while you're there because it's a four year stretch before you get that degree but that's not what the colleges would want you to hear oh no no right and and again I spent 25 years working in colleges and universities I'm married to a professor I love my people like I'm not yeah higher education is bad people but if you're the seller and you got to pay the bills you approach this thing in a certain way like for a long time you had a lot of people saying colleges should be more run like a business okay that's what you got now not very well wow so do you like it I don't think it's that good well we have a another question from and this is from someone who couldn't make it this hour but this is another great friend Don Chalice he asked a very specific question about the application process I think we have a couple more like this too so let's start off he's asking about FAFSA and says do 18 to 22 year olds have to get parents financial info to complete FAFSA and if they don't does that lead to debt the presumption underneath the FAFSA is that a student under the age of 24 is a dependent that's the 24 under the age of 24 so given that you're a dependent then yes you're going to be bringing in data from your parents tax returns this is another issue that Don raises that that is a whole nother show but the assumptions that underline so much of the financial aid system and so much of higher education generally about the kind of people that are coming to college and the kind of families they come from and the kind of socioeconomic status and stability that they have just doesn't match up with the majority of people that are in higher ed that are in that are taking courses that are trying to get a degree so it's it's very interesting and and to that point if you're a student who is 20 years old and you are consider yourself independent proving that takes a bunch of work and the school is the one that gets to decide if you actually have proven it to them but the school's motivation isn't to necessarily believe you because if they do that means that you're independent that you cost a lot more it costs you a lot more money to live that they probably won't be able to charge you as much but if they can charge you as a dependent then they can use your parents tax returns to dictate this what is now sort of in sunsetting this EFC expected family contribution changing that term to student aid index but the same concept the it's a bad but it is the proxy everybody gets stuck with that proxy for that family's sort of broad socioeconomic status well that's a that's a great answer and Don again as always you ask terrific questions Don does great research work too big fan we have another video question and we'll see if we get this to work Lynn Sibolski is coming in and we'll see if video and audio work otherwise we'll take it to text let's see Lynn hello hello can you hear me we can hear you perfectly okay okay well you'll just have to imagine what I look like I am I am now thanks for the presentation today Mark um I have kind of an on question that ties into the responsibilities of lower education and for the viewers today I just wanted to mention um having had 15 years experience in the financial aid office this is not really an issue that the financial aid office can fix they are so overburdened with administrative tasks and required reporting that it's not really an office that has a say or has any sort of leeway to fix this and so if we're counting out the financial aid office and we're counting out school counselors my next you know eyesight is really really small children and I saw something on Instagram that I'm going to post into the chat and it's it's really bizarre and I'm sorry for that um Snoop Dogg has children's affirmations and it was this big thing um you know he he sings these affirmations for children I am responsible I get better every day I'm surrounded by love and Instagram for a minute was like blowing up with all these adults being like hey this is something that was made for children but I'm listening to it and I'm feeling good about myself and psychologically I'm feeling more balanced and so what are your thoughts on approaching financial literacy from a very early age from the perspective of creating boundaries and if you want my money and you want access to my you know finances that's a boundary psychologically and you need to respect you know kind of like my core basic things you know I'm interested to see what your perspective is on taking that approach and and targeting the audience way way younger than we have been great question thank you well the the movement to educate uh to bring financial literacy education to school um has if you some people may have paid attention that it it has really gained a lot of steam in recent years a number of states have now required it in high school or middle school um and that train has got a ton of momentum right now which is probably really good um I shouldn't say probably meaning I'm not sure about financial literacy it's probably really good except for I mean probably because it depends how they implement right as with lots of things but one of the things that folks find when trying to teach financial literacy is that young people come to a certain point at which they finally are able to grasp abstract ideas right and at some point they're just not able to grasp that stuff the other thing about learning with anything is that unless the student sees how it's valuable to them in some sort of some of the short term um some students just say well I don't want to learn it and one of the challenges with uh financial literacy has been if you take ninth graders and start teaching them about mortgages they some ninth graders say I'm not going to have a mortgage for way long time this doesn't matter for me um but if you teach financial literacy in the context of paying for college and college planning that's actually a lot more present so we're not seeing as much of that yet but that's starting to come around um to the point that you're I think going at just the need for better financial literacy training and teach education that's huge um our sort of capitalist system doesn't necessarily make room for requiring sellers to abide by a set of financial literacy standards unfortunately but um part of the effect that is produced the tremendous debt problem and student debt is just a lack of understanding that when you borrow this much that's what's going to happen a decade from now thank you oh Lynn thank you and thank thanks for fighting through fighting with an old laptop um it's a great question uh and uh Mark again uh you you are a sage on this point um this is terrific we had we're coming up in the last 13 minutes of the program and we have a couple more questions I want to make sure that they get they get asked uh so let me bring up a couple of these uh from the q&a box uh and this is from mark belota he says what do you consider to be a reasonable amount for a student to borrow for a bachelor's degree um well one reasonable is going to be something that it's partially the student's decision right like the family comes from different socio-economic backgrounds so a different socio-economic grant fairly affluent versus uh zero e fc those are two different animals but I will say that a reasonable amount absolutely depends on what kind of profession the student plans to pursue after college if and even if they if they don't know that fits into the calculus as well if a student is going to pursue a field in which you that pays a lot right out of the gate and they're sure that that's what they're doing well then I think the amount of money that a student can borrow is a little bit higher but if if I wanted to be a musician coming out of college I can speak from some experience here that I have to be entirely unencumbered coming out of college because the opportunities for me to be a musician starting out are going to be I auditioned and I got into summer stock as in the pit orchestra so it's three months and just gonna get paid a little bit and then that's it I'm done but those are the only opportunities I'm gonna get that help me build up the ladder and build up the network so maybe someday eventually I get into an orchestra somewhere same way if you're a rock drummer right like same thing right you have to be unencumbered and there's other professions that are maybe less nomadic early on but if you want to be a teacher you're not you can't go to a college that's going to charge you so much that you're borrowing thirty forty thousand dollars a year to then go be a teacher that's just not going to work but there's plenty of places where a student can go and get a teaching degree and the cost of going to that school isn't that high and the problem isn't that all teachers have a bad ROI it's just that if you choose the wrong institutions so I think the question about reasonable amount of debt is more nuanced than just the conventional wisdom of don't have your total amount of debt over your four years of college or six years of college be more than the salary that you're going to have because most students change their major change their sense of direction while they're in college anyway so they couldn't make a choice picking a school with that net or that sort of metric in mind in the first place well that was an elegant subtle question in just a few words and marker love how that brought out so much of an answer we have a question from keel again who always always asks a question keel just is on fire and keel asks what do you think of alternative credentials potential to break the degree monopoly and thus make college more affordable I think there's tremendous potential there but there's a that space between potential and realized is this right there's a lot of surveys of companies and CEOs that ask about you require a college degree and everything else but as keel knows it's not the CEO that's doing the hiring of the sort of entry level employees it's some middle manager in the HR office right so to the degree that the idea that those alternative credentials are valued all the way down to that HR office that's a bit more of a stretch and we're not I don't think we're really there yet but there's tremendous potential there I think that you know if we can get some really great examples of folks succeeding not just right out of school with a job but 10 years later having been promoted and grown and taken on new responsibilities and shows that yet not only did that person just learn to code in this thing but it turns out they learned how to lead how to manage how to do other things that traditional liberal arts colleges have always said well that's what we all do you learn this that there's this person just had this other credential but they learned all this other stuff in our environment and now look at what they can do you get to that point now I think you really have something with the potential for those credentials and even micro credentials that have an impact great question and I love mark the range there especially the the importance of the HR weighing of businesses actually taking this seriously we have another question that comes up and that brings up another sense of lower ed in a different way this is Ryan who asks about what role does for-profit higher education play in the change and lack of transparency of costs well for-profit didn't play much of a role at all in the embracing of the high price high discount model that came from private colleges started with the more prestigious ones then trickled down to the less prestigious ones and then was embraced by the public institutions particularly for their out-of-state fees and the folks have seen how many for public institutions are recruiting out of state far more than they ever used to because they can then get it take advantage of that high price high discount model in their out-of-state fees the for-profit industry didn't play a lot of role in driving up those costs it certainly played a huge role in the debt problem but that was a sort of different you know call center problem right that the motivation to just get students to sign up no matter what we don't care if they graduate we just care if they come so I don't think the for-profit has played a played a particular role in the pricing lack of price transparency in fact today they're probably the most transparent is that because they've been sued so often it may be because we just have an entirely different landscape of for-profit institutions than we did two days ago right two decades ago it was phoenix phoenix phoenix right now we don't talk about them that much we talk about other institutions and some of them especially in specific fields like nursing are actually quite good at what they do but the lack of transparency issue that part of it a non-profit folks get to own that one hook line and sinker well Ryan would a great question and mark would a surprising and powerful answer we have one more question which is a really specific one and I love this and I think I think you'd be ready to grapple with this one and this is from luz my east throat luz who says what about a student who's now 26 who also returned the same university for the masters how could be the financial aid because of his age the student already has a debt for undergrad you know I'll flash that on the screen again say okay thank you um yeah this is where there's a couple of things going on there we graduate level financial aid is different than undergraduate financial aid and and operates sort of in a different planet sometimes and the master's program as a space I know you've talked about this before and you've had people talk about it here in the and the forum um that's been a cash cow for an awful lot of schools with tremendous collateral damage on students because of the way that you can you know the the the plus loan the graduate school version of the plus loan the grad loan and the amount of people just borrow borrow borrow but I'm wondering if the Louise could sort of expand on is this because the student trying to come back for the at the same institution and they've already exact exhausted the need-based aid because they're at the same institution or is there another issue going on luz if you if you want to follow up with another question just just just type it in and I'm sure also you could follow with mark after after the session and while luz is doing that let me just ask a question of my own as a moderator you you've did a great job of sketching out how things have changed recently over the past generation basically of higher ed looking ahead to say 2030 where do you think that the problem is headed of students paying for higher education do you think we're going to see the debt the pile of debt get even higher or do you think the stresses of this are going to force some structural changes well the debt the big big number the 1.7 trillion that number can go in a different direction it can go up and up and up as a function of the interest yeah without it necessarily meaning that students are borrowing more the amount of students borrow coming down do borrow coming down but that thing is just going to keep ballooning just based on the interest alone right and we're going to you know people have been following the student debt forgiveness issues and all the other thing that that that spaghetti is going to be there for a long time I think that's not going to get solved anytime soon uh colleges and universities they're starting to be this trend toward uh tuition resets says and it's only schools for which nobody's paying the sticker price can do this where they say well nobody's been paying it the sticker price scaring people away so we're going to just drop our sticker price a bunch we'll shrink the aid that we provide in merit accordingly so that the amount of money that students actually pays about the same but now the sticker price is closer to the actual price um without a change to the basic funding model of higher ed the basic business model okay you've just reset and then you're probably going to end up back on the same train eventually right because you still have costs that you haven't been able to pull down and you are still going to be in a position where you're going to have to give people more and more money every year because family incomes aren't going anywhere no so um that doesn't really ultimately solve stuff it would be really nice to see a group of schools just say you know what we might as well just put our prices out there and make it much more simple but now we would have to talk about the degree to which the enrollment management consulting and financial aid modeling industry has much of higher ed by a sort of very vulnerable parts of their body and um that industry isn't so much interested in the success of each individual institution as they are in selling their own products right and making money their own way so they don't really want to teach a man to fish they just want to give the man a fish for one day the next day right their nation isn't necessarily as altruistic as we'd like so i i think we're still in for an awful long stretch and i don't think the higher ed the federal government's going to solve anything with some wonderfully redone higher education act because well because we haven't renewed it and or really substantially fixed it in forever yeah um so i think we're we as a public we're the ones that can solve this and i don't think anybody else has a shot at it unless we do it and that was the motivation behind what i started uh intuition five years ago well i'm so glad that you did that and i'm so glad you could join us uh i am the opposite of glad that we were out of time um we have we have just hit the top of the hour and and this is the point of the program where i ask people mark how can people keep up with you how can they keep learning from you and learning about your work well they can find tuition fit at tuitionfit.org people are welcome to email me mark at tuitionfit.org we are trying to make it possible for colleges and universities to participate in the same project so people can just because you work in enrollment management don't think i think you're the bad guy you can talk to me too um they can follow me on linkedin i tend to post there from time to time that's the sort of only remaining social media space that i find anything useful in but otherwise um they'll probably see me pop up in a few news articles from time to time well you have a habit of doing that um and you also have a habit of enlightening thank you so much mark for your passion for your deep knowledge and i really appreciate how you answer all these questions so so thoroughly and um powerfully thank you very much thanks for having me um friends don't leave yet i just want to let you know where things are headed over the next uh a few weeks if you want to keep talking about this we already have some action on twitter please uh follow use the hashtag ftte or tweet at me or uh shindig events if you'd like to continue this conversation on mastodon there's my mastodon link at brian alexander at mastodon.social or hit up my blog brian alexander.org if you'd like to look into our previous sessions having to do with families having to do with students paying tuition and the economics of higher ed just go to tinyurl.com slash ftf archive and you can see them there if you'd like to look at our upcoming sessions on everything from ai the department shares to enrollment and climate change just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more and if you've done any work on these topics or any other topics that you want me to share just send me a note and i'd be glad to share it with everybody and in the meantime thank you all for the great questions and great thinking today i really really appreciate that as the new semester begins i hope you're all safe and well and wish you best for the year 2023 and until then we'll see you next time online take care bye bye