 Well, good morning, everybody. I'm Jamie Marisotis. I'm president of the Lumina Foundation. And I want to welcome all of you to this event. You're going to hear in a moment from the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly Paul Glastres. But I wanted to take a few moments to welcome all of you and to say how pleased we are to be here and to be a part of this important event. And there's going to be a terrific conversation that follows shortly here. I want to say just a few words about both the Monthly's efforts and also about the issues that I think we're going to be talking about today. Beginning first with the important work that the Washington Monthly has done through its annual college guide and through the work that they've done in partnership with our colleagues from New America Foundation. I think Washington Monthly has done more than perhaps any other national publication in our regard at helping to deepen and broaden the coverage of higher education in these issues, issues in this country. And we think that that kind of coverage is sorely needed. Lumina has been proud to have been a supporter of this work for the last four or five years. And this marks the second consecutive year that we've actually helped launch the college guide. I've been involved in some of the other things before then. Most of you have seen it, so you know. This is not your typical college guide, right? It takes an entirely new approach to identifying what we mean when we say high-quality institutions of higher education in the United States. And we think that this approach that the Monthly has taken is a huge improvement over the traditional rankings. Certainly, Joe Nocera and a lot of others also agree with that if you've read any of the press in the last couple of weeks. One of the things that I think is important about the guide and the Washington Monthly rankings is that it points families and students in the right direction away from these definitions of qualities that are rooted in status, or reputation, or institutional resources, and towards schools where genuine learning really matters, where efforts geared towards helping students complete their programs are valued, and where productivity enhancements can actually lead to that true educational value. So in short, as the issue itself suggests, it points students towards what it calls the best bang for the buck colleges. And I think this issue of getting the best bang for the buck is not just a good line for a magazine to use. In fact, it's never more important than it has been historically than it is today. We are in a time when high-quality post-secondary education is critical both to individual success for our country and to the nation's short-term economic recovery and, I think, a long-term economic future. In that sense, these rankings, I put that in quotation marks, are much less like what we've seen from things like U.S. News and World Report or Forbes or some of the others. In a way, I think the Washington Monthly rankings feel much more like a report card than traditional consumer rankings in the sense that they state what should be the expectations of colleges and universities and therefore offer a model of accountability, not just the traditional consumer-oriented sorting. And I think that issue of accountability is something that we're gonna get into here this morning because it's critically important for our country's future. Constraints both on governments as well as families are making it evident and painfully clear that we simply can't afford to waste resources or, frankly, time as we push to increase educational attainment among our citizens, particularly the population of citizens who are most important here in the 21st century, those low-income, minority, first-generation and adult students, the largest growing groups of our society, and those that represent the greatest opportunity for us going forward. To prosper as a country, we're gonna need to see higher education outcomes improve dramatically and soon among those students in particular and among all students more broadly. So at Lumen, how many of you know, we've sort of crystallized our thinking on this into a single clear goal. We call it goal 2025, much like President Obama's goal. We want 60% of Americans to hold high-quality college degrees certificates and other credentials by the year 2025. We're at less than 40% today. Clearly for this goal to be reached, significant changes are gonna be necessary, changes in the way that federal and state policymakers finance higher education, changes in the way institutions deliver instruction, changes in the way learning is assessed and accredited, changes in just about everything that touches the student experience. And I think that this issue of the monthly is a wonderful window on those momentous changes, the three main issues that we'll be highlighting here today at this important forum, loan repayment, the technological transformation of higher education, and I guess what we'd call the value for money. They're all very well covered in this latest issue. Steve's piece on the college loan repo man, I told him I've read a lot of his stuff over the years, it's one of my favorites. The pay as you earn concept on student loans, I think raises really provocative and vital questions about the current system of financing higher education. Kevin's piece, like all of his pieces, very provocative and insightful on the siege of academe. That piece essentially says, look disruptive technology is not something that's happening over here on the margin. I think it's changing the delivery of curriculum forever. And you can see that in the way in which Kevin has laid out some of the things going on. And then of course, there's the broader issue of performance and accountability, which is reflected in the actual rankings themselves. I think what each of these pieces and the other really good work that was done in the current college guide shows is the path forward in terms of our national post-secondary education agenda and how that national agenda relates to federal policy and to state policy in the future. In my view, and I'll insert my own opinions here before I sit down, I think that agenda will need to help build a new system in higher education. We need to redesign this system and that new system is gonna need to have several dimensions. The system is going to have to provide innovative, simplified technology driven ways for students to earn degrees in other credentials, like those that are already taking places and some of the examples you've read about like Southern New Hampshire University, a system in which states and the federal government increasing allocate resources based on performance, not simply time in the classroom or other input measures. A system that creates incentives for colleges and universities to actually support student success, especially for those least well served students. A system that encourages colleges and universities to do all that they can to look for and act on efficiencies that generate savings that can be redirected to serve many more students. And a system that uses financial aid and tuition policy and other financial incentives as a means for encouraging students to actually finish their studies and to finish them on time. So thank you Paul for all of the work that you've done into our colleagues at New America for the great work that they're helping to do to frame this agenda and laying out the parameters for that new redesigned system of higher education. We're really excited about the work that you've done and we're very anxious for this dialogue and looking forward to seeing it moving forward. So without further ado, I wanna introduce the editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly, my good friend Paul Glaster, it's Paul. Thank you, Jamie Marisotis. We are delighted and pleased always to work with you all and appreciate Lumina's support. What Jamie didn't tell you is that not only is he president and CEO of Lumina, he's the founder of and past founding president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy here in DC and got his start with me as an intern at the Washington Monthly Magazine back in the 1980s. So a lot of years of working together. Thank you, Jamie. So we all think that college is a great investment, but it's a great investment if you don't pay too much and it's a great investment if you graduate. And those are two big ifs and they're ifs that are getting bigger and bigger. A higher and higher percentage of kids out of high school are entering college. Graduation rates have barely budged. So more kids are going to college and not graduating every year. And of course tuition costs have been going up at two or three times the rate of inflation for decades, getting to the point now where kids are graduating with an average amount of debt of $25,000. So we're conducting this grand social experiment in which we push kids through a higher education system and leave them with a ball and chain of debt and hoping that that system will lead to upward mobility and it's clearly a crisis that we're beginning to see played out now in our politics where students with high debt were prominent members of the Occupy Movement last year and issues of student loans are front and center in Congress and perhaps even in the debates today between the president. So this issue of college affordability and college success, which when we started working together, no one was talking about, at least in the mainstream press, is now really front and center in the United States. And so when we approached doing this latest college guide, we wanted to do a little something different and since we started it, we thought that one of the major flaws in all the other college guides is that they tend to measure how prestigious institutions are rather than how effectively they serve the students that they have so that the easiest way for typical college to move up the US news rankings is by abandoning the students it traditionally serves and recruiting a better sort by raising their admission standards. So since we've been doing this since 2005, we think that we should be incentivizing colleges not to abandon the students that they serve but to serve those students better and so we've had these measures, different metrics on social mobility, producing research, inspiring public service, that schools regardless of their students' backgrounds or SAT scores are graded fairly on. But there was always something missing from our measures and that was a measure of cost effectiveness. So Kevin Carey and young man Robert Kelchin at the University of Wisconsin devised a new measure which is in the guide this year. It's the, we call it our best bang for the buck measure and it essentially looks at what the graduation rate of a school given its students would be and what it actually is and then divides that by the net cost of the college. So it's a cost adjusted graduation rate and it's produced some very interesting results which you're gonna hear about today. And as Kevin told the New York Times recently, if you figure out how to do the same service for less money, your US news ranking goes down. For the Washington Monthly, your ranking goes up. We think this is the right incentive for American colleges. We hope that all the universities out there are scared to death of our rankings and start changing their systems to do well by us. So let me just introduce very quickly the panel today. We have Steve Byrd who is a senior policy analyst with New America's Education Program. He's worked at the think tank education sector and for 15 years as a reporter and senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education and has received multiple national awards from the Education Writers Association. We also have Kevin James, the legislative assistant to representative Tom Petri and on the Education and Workforce Committee. And previously, Kevin worked for Congressman Frank Wolf and he's gonna be telling us a fascinating piece of legislation that the congressman is working on. Kevin Carey, director of the Education Policy Program here at New America and the guest editor for several years running of the Washington Monthly's annual college guide carries. Kevin has published articles on education and other topics and magazines, including the New Republic, the American Prospect and Democracy and he writes monthly columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education in the New Republic. And we also have Jordan Goldman. Jordan is the founder and CEO of Unigo, the world's largest resource of information to find, get into and pay for college. Terrific site. He was named one of the top 30 young entrepreneurs in America by Ink Magazine and one of the 100 most influential people in New York business and technology by Silicon Alley Insider and is a regular guest on ABC. But to start us off today, we have Robert Gaines. Robert is the special assistant to the chancellor of Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. In that capacity, he's basically overseas enrollment, retention, facilities management and about eight other things, I think Robert. And he's been there for five years. He's previously at Winston Salem State and at North Carolina Central. Robert's gonna speak first and let me just tell you a little bit about why what they do at Elizabeth State, City State University rocked my socks. When we did our measures of best bang for the buck, Elizabeth City just shone to give you an idea. First of all, it's the number one ranked school among baccalaureate institutions in this year's guide. Second, given the students that it gets, it ought to have a graduation rate of 19%. It in fact has a graduation rate of 42%, more than double what you'd expect given the students that it has. And it does this for $1442 a year, which is a fraction of what the average state school, much less private school, charges. So I don't know how they do it, but we're going to find out. So let's begin with Robert Gaines. Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you very much for the invitation to come today. I certainly do for what it's worth. I certainly do endorse this new ranking system that the Washington Monthly has devised. We at Elizabeth City State, I'm extremely proud of the things that we do. Just to give you a little bit of the history on Elizabeth City State, we are located in the northeast corner of the state, very close to the Virginia State line. We were founded in 1891 with 23 students, two faculty members and a total budget of $900. Currently, we have a budget of approximately 58 million. We have a faculty staff of approximately 215 full-time staff members and the 2,900 students that we serve there. Some of the things that, when we talk about the system there in North Carolina, there's also, we're part of the entire UNC system. In the UNC system, there are 17 institutions. We are probably the smallest of the 17. Of the 17, 16 are regular colleges and universities all the way from Chapel Hill down to Elizabeth City State. There is one science and mathematical on school that's included at high school level. When we talk about our catchment area is very, our catchment area is what represents some of the poorest counties in the state. Our catchment area contains 21 contiguous counties and those counties are the poorest in the state. We are again in that stream northeast corner of the state and if you haven't been to that part of North Carolina, you probably haven't heard of us before. Probably the thing that people know most about the area that we're in is that we are very close to NAG said, to those beaches just south of us. But that's the general demographic of the area that we serve. We have approximately 60% female population, 40% male, 90% are Afro-Americans and the other 10% being others. Because of our catchment area, 90% of our students come from in-state, 10% come from out-of-state primarily from the Virginia, Washington, D.C. area. This past year we had, this past year, this past fall rather, we had an enrollment of approximately 2,900. We do have a graduate school as well as a undergraduate school. The graduate school has approximately 115 students, the balance being in our undergraduate programs. In addition to our graduate school, which is primarily in education, various areas of education, we also offer what we call a Farm D program. Our Farm D program is a doctor or pharmacy program that is in conjunction with UNC Chapel Hill. They serve, the students come to our campus for three years, then they do their final year there in Chapel Hill and they get a joint degree from the two universities. You know some of the things that, some of the accolades that we have received for the work that we've done, such as being included in the, being ranked number one in the baccalaureate oncologist here. We graduate in the, we were recognized as ranked number two in terms of graduating African-American math majors here in the country. And as we look at STEM programs and STEM opportunities and the future direction of where we need to go, of course those STEM areas are gonna be critically important. Number three in top public universities with the US News and World Report. And then we're number 20 when you look at nationwide at all the HBCUs. We talked a little bit about all costs of attendance. And in North Carolina we've had a number of different models that we have that we have undergone in terms of funding for the state institutions. We've gone from funding based on total enrollment to retention and retention being measured from the freshman to sophomore retention. Currently we are exploring which will come into effect next year performance model which will look at, which will look at persistence through graduation. One of the things that becomes a real challenge for us is that as I mentioned earlier, so many of our kids are so poor. 90% of our kids receive some sort of financial aid which reduces their net pocket, especially when you consider pale grants, et cetera, et cetera. So 90% of our kids receive some sort of financial aid and that of course reduces their actual cost of attendance. But that's only one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is once we get them there, how do we change mindsets? How do we change behaviors? How do we modify the processes so that we can engage the students to be actively involved and committed to their own education? We have a number of programs that we try to do that through. A couple of the programs I'll just mention because they're really important when you talk about persistence and graduation. A couple of those programs that we are extremely proud of there at Elizabeth City State are our merit program. Our merit program is geared toward our men. Merit is an acronym for men engage in real issues together where we mentor incoming students and those with GPAs, we identify students with who are at risk. Those with GPAs less than 2.0 who may not persist until graduation. We partner them with the faculty members. We are very careful in terms of how we select those faculty members, our staff members who work along with those students. Another program that we have that we're extremely proud of is our model scholars program. Our model scholars program is again a program that's geared for the type of population that we serve. Those kids come to our university with less than, with less than the required state requirements for admission into the university. We engage those kids during the summer. We provide a complete system of support in order to encourage and to ensure that they're successful in the transition from high school into the college life which includes not only the academic, but also having to deal with the family, financial, and the social issues that come with kids that are from a disadvantaged neighborhood. The other thing that we do with those kids is that we target those kids is that we target them as a part of our strategy to ensure that we wrap our arms around these particular students. We have those students assigned to specific mentors and these mentors are their freshman experience instructors and they monitor them very, very closely to ensure that one, they're attending class, that they're getting the material, that we have all the supports that these students need because when you think about the fact that they're coming from rural backgrounds that very often they are first generation and they haven't had that type of support before. So we wrap our arms really tightly around this particular populace in order to make sure that they're successful and that they do succeed. This upcoming year will be our second year that we will be graduating students from our model scholars program. We just started our merit last year so we haven't seen it too fruition yet, but we do have promising results from it. When we talk about the cost of attendance, we also need to talk about how the university has struggled to maintain such a low cost of attendance for our students. For a number of years, we capped tuition, we capped costs, we did not expand to the extent or we didn't increase our fees to the extent that we were allowed to by the state. That in a lot of ways I can say probably has a two-edged concerns for us. One, it was a great thing that we monitor our costs and we wanna make college affordable for all of our students. At the same time, it's one of the problems that we also have run into and I'm sure that some of you also have who are actually at an institution often when parents and kids are shopping around, they're looking for comparable amenities. So we may not have all of the fancy dormitories that some of the other facilities have and we still have a couple of dormitories with gang bathrooms and they're the last ones to get filled, of course. But again, our overall approach has been looking at what's best for the student in order to ensure that one, we can keep that cost affordable and then two, that we can provide the support that that student needs in order to be successful. None of this would be really possible without the enrollment management team that we have there at ECSU. I realize that a lot of folk have enrollment management teams and that you have retention teams. The difference that I've found, however, is in the commitment of the individuals that do the work. We have individuals who we have to beat away from the university. They're just that committed to student success and when you have individuals, faculty members, staff members who are that committed to individual success of each and every student that we have there at the university, that translates into a better relationship and which is what we're trying to develop with all students. And on terms of enrollment management, we have a couple of things that are really, really key to us. First of all, you probably can imagine that providing quality services is one of our hallmarks. One of the things that we are really are interested in that we really expect from this group. And then we want to also keep our students connected. We want to enforce our customer service, our customer focus changes and we want to create a culture, not just a behavior, but actually a culture within the university where students feel that they are first and that they really matter. In order to do that, we have a sort of a four-prong approach that we talk about. The programatically, I've mentioned a couple of the programs that we have, such as our model scholars and our merit program. In terms of outreach, which is another one of our prongs, we have early alert intervention and initiatives where we get out and we talk with the actual instructors to ensure that all students are on track. And again, although I mentioned a couple of our programs, we do this for all students, regardless. Any student that comes to us, whether they're in one of all special programs or not, all of this culminates in the higher than expected graduation rate that was mentioned earlier. We establish contracts with the students. We maintain constant contact with the teachers. When a student first comes to the university, there are certain tests that we do. I'm sure that a number of you do those things too, like Acroplacer and we look at those who are, again, with less than a 2.0. And then one of the other things I find really valuable in terms of establishing that rapport with all students is that we visit them in their venues. That means going to dormitory, finding them when they aren't in class. Hey, what's up? Why didn't you go to class? What can we do? How's that homework assignment coming? And making sure that we bridge that gap. And again, it's all of these tools that we use that increases our graduation rate and which leads to a persistence through graduation. Although you don't, although you don't see the, you don't have a huge number of, I'll say, really outstandingly famous graduates from ECS, you wanna say outstandingly famous, we don't have the movie stars and maybe the major politicians probably the most exciting person I've met since I've been at Elizabeth City for the last four years is one of our graduates, Warren Judge, who was the director of communications for the president. So I got to meet the president first a number of times because of that. And that's about as exciting that, I guess in terms of all famous graduates that I can identify with. However, the thing that we do best, I think, is that we create the teachers, we create the lawyers, we create the doctors, we create people who have impact in the lives of the communities that they live on an everyday basis, which I think that when you consider the entire spectrum, in terms of impacting that next generation, that's what we do really, really well. Thank you. Yeah, I don't think I need to keep coming up here, but I'll just kind of put out the order here. We're gonna have Steve Byrd and Kevin James talk about Steve's fantastic piece on getting rid of the college loan repo man. And then after them, Kevin Carey and Jordan Goldman will be talking about Kevin Carey's piece on the Siege of Academies. So we'll start with Steve. So first, I wanted to check, are there any college loan repo men here? Okay, then I feel a little bit safer going on. Over the past 25 years, our country's system for collecting undefaulted student loans has become extremely punitive. Its goal is to prevent deadbeat borrowers from ripping off the federal government by failing to repay their loans. With that goal in mind, policymakers have made it nearly impossible for borrowers to discharge their debt in bankruptcy and have removed any statute of limitations on the collection of that debt, allowing the government to unleash an army of student loan collection companies to pursue these borrowers to the grave. They have also empowered the government to garnish a wages of defaulters without court order and seize tax refunds and other federal benefits such as social security payments from elderly and disabled borrowers. As I wrote in my article for the Washington Monthly, it's certainly unacceptable for students to take out loans without having any intention of repaying them back. The reality, however, is that many, if not most of the people who go into default do so because they don't have the money to pay. They're not looking for a free ride. They just don't have the money to make the payments that the collection agencies are demanding. Yet our system for collecting on defaulted student loans does not recognize this critical distinction. Borrowers who deliberately skip out on their loans and those who are too financially distressed to repay them are treated just as harshly. Many lives are being ruined as a result. In my article I focused on Gregory McNeil, a 49-year-old who took out $15,000 in loans in the late 1980s to attend a trade school that made big promises but failed to deliver on them. His training in electronics was inadequate and he didn't receive any meaningful help from the school to find a job. He ended up remaining stuck in the low-paying factory job he had before he enrolled. And life has dealt McNeil many setbacks and although he says he wanted to repay his debt, he just hasn't earned enough to be able to do so over time. Yet interest continues to accrue on his debt and has already tripled the amount he owes. For years private collection companies have under contract with the education department, have hounded him. The government garnished aid his wages for time and threatened to sue him. He tried to escape his debt through bankruptcy but was unable to do so. And today, again at the age of 49, his only source of income are the social security disability payments that he received because he underwent quadruple bypass surgery and he fears that the government will attempt to seize a portion of those payments as well. The reality is no matter how hard the government goes after Gregory McNeil, he's never gonna be able to pay off his debt. He's probably never gonna be able to even catch up with the interest that has accrued over time. And these days, the kinds of troubles that a person like Gregory McNeil has experienced are no longer just the province of students who attended shady for-profit schools. With college prices ever rising and undergraduates leaving college in the worst labor market in decades, more and more middle-class students attending traditional public and private colleges are finding themselves in trouble with loans they've taken out. And they too are getting caught up in the brutal gears of the system that manages those loans. Democrats have gone along with the crackdown on student loan defaulters, but they've tried to ease the burden on borrowers who through no fault of their own simply cannot repay their loans by introducing an income contingent loan concept that gives borrowers the option to repay their debt as a portion, as a percent of their income. Bill Clinton made income contingent loans a central plank of his 92 presidential campaign. And in 1993, he signed legislation giving borrowers in the direct loan program that option. 15 years later, Democrats in Congress created the income-based repayment program to give all federal loan borrowers this option. And in most case, allow struggling borrowers to pay even a smaller share of their income. Income contingent loans and income-based repayment are good programs that have provided relief to financially distressed borrowers. But they are very complicated to get in and they're complicated to stay in. And most struggling borrowers through no fault of their own just don't know about them. Up until now, borrowers could only get into IBR, income-based repayment, through their servicers. Companies that the Department of Education has hired to handle the paperwork on student loans. And these companies include Sallie Mae and Nellnet. But these companies have little incentive to spend the time helping borrowers to access the income-based repayment program and instead often promote stopgap measures such as forbearance, which may not be as beneficial for borrowers. The system we have now is clearly not working for the majority of borrowers who find themselves in trouble on their student loans. But there is a better way. And as I argue in the Washington Monthly piece, I believe that we should follow the lead of other countries like Australia and New Zealand and the United Kingdom and create a single student loan repayment system that is entirely based on a borrower's future income. Under such a program, employees with federal loans would see a portion of their income withheld by their employers and used to pay down their debt, much as we see payroll taxes withheld today. Self-employed borrowers would use a simple schedule on their federal income tax forms that would tell them how much they owe. And when a borrower's adjustable gross income goes up or down, so would their monthly payment, with the only enforcement mechanism being the IRS. Defaults would be mostly eliminated along with the need for the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars paying collection agencies for their efforts, a hundred millions of dollars a year. And borrowers with high incomes would simply be able to pay off their loans quicker as long as their incomes were higher. While such a system would provide much needed relief to those who are financially distressed, it would not absolve borrowers of their responsibility to repay their debt. In fact, with the IRS automatically reducing payments for borrowers paychecks, it would become substantially more difficult for borrowers to skip out on their loans. And in fact, in the other countries that use income contingent loan system, there are very few borrowers who fail to meet their repayment obligations. Under this new system, borrowers would no longer be left on their own to navigate among a dizzying array of repayment options as their debt spiral. And above all else, borrowers who run into trouble would not have to face the hell that people like Gregory McNeil have had to because they simply haven't been able, they simply don't have the money to pay back their loans. Now this could be a fantasy solution, but we actually have a legislative effort that's underway right now from Representative Petri's office. And we have Kevin James who will tell us how this can become a reality. You guys hear me? So as Steve said, I'm Kevin James. I work as a legislative assistant in Congressman Tom Petri's office. Tom Petri is a long term member of the Education and Workforce Committee and he represents the sixth district of Wisconsin which is on the eastern part of Wisconsin kind of sandwiched between Milwaukee and Green Bay on the Great Lakes. I want to thank just New America and Washington Monthly for holding this. It's been a very helpful panel. I'm glad that everyone took the time to come out. I was, as Steve mentioned, invited to come here to talk a little bit about income contingent loans and a legislative proposal that we're working on. This has been a long time interest of my boss going back over two decades to when the original income contingent repayment option was created in the early 1990s. So given a lot of the issues that have been coming up with our sort of being discussed with our federal student loan system in the press in the last few years, my boss asked me a while back to look into this concept again and sort of given where we are in the state of our federal loan system and sort of see what we might be able to do to fix some of these problems and just sort of to talk through some of the problems that we see. The first is just the complexity of the system and Steve's already hit on this to some degree. The system is dizzily complex. I mean, I'm sure you're all aware and even as a Hill staffer and someone with a master's degree, I've had to take federal loans myself and it's very, very difficult to navigate and the CRS report describing the terms and conditions for these loans is 85 pages long. The second is the default rate. As Steve highlighted, defaults both cost the government money and they put borrowers through hell as he described and to mitigate defaults as much as we can would save the government money and avoid as much of that human misery as possible. And the third is just simply the cost of subsidies. We spend an enormous amount of money providing in school subsidies on the interest rate as well as trying to keep the interest rates down on federal loans on the front end as evidenced by the big national debate we had on the 3.4% interest rate for federal student loans earlier this year. That's a very expensive way to provide subsidies and it's not clear from research that that's the most effective way to promote college access and completion. There's been a number of reports done in the last several years, one rethinking student aid that was done by a number of experts and sponsored by the college board and the Lumina Foundation and another one sponsored by a commission of financial aid administrators and others that have argued that we should be focusing subsidies to provide protections to borrowers in repayment who need them as opposed to trying to provide protections to everyone, many of who will do just fine and can repay their loans in repayment. And so the third thing is just targeting subsidies more effectively in the system so we can make better use of our scarce taxpayer dollars. So in light of all these, we do think as Steve said that there is a better way to do this and sort of this road has already been paved by a number of other countries including most prominently New Zealand, Australia and the UK. I think Australia is the oldest of those systems. As Steve described, income contingent lending is basically paying a fraction of your income instead of paying like a mortgage style loan would have you do, fixed payments over a fixed term and it's intended to be a system that's responsive to borrowers circumstances without forcing them to navigate a complex array of repayment options and deferments when they run into trouble after graduation. And so its primary virtue is just that being simple and flexible. And so just to give you a sense of how this might work in another country as opposed to our system of repayment options and deferments in New Zealand, for example, if you go to school, you take one loan as a student loan and when you graduate, you pay 10 cents of every dollar over 19,000 New Zealand, which is roughly 15,500 US dollars, 10 cents of every dollar above that amount each year until you repay your loan. And that's basically their repayment system in a nutshell. And so from what I can tell the students understand it, it makes perfect sense, they know what their payment obligations are and a very high majority of them are repaying their loans. So that describes one of those systems. So let me talk about what we think how a similar system might work in the US and might deal with some of the issues that I mentioned. We've, this is sort of a rough outline of a legislative proposal that we're looking at. It's not set in stone and so we welcome your feedback. But in general, the first sort of thing that we're trying to do is to move closer to this idea of a single loan instead of the array of loans that students are faced with right now when they're applying for school. So we're looking at combining subsidized Stafford, unsubsidized Stafford into grad plus the three primary federal loans into a single loan option. And having that single loan be repaid on a simple income contingent basis, probably something like IBR 15% of your discretionary income. And because of the income nature of the repayment, you really don't need the complex array of repayment options and forbearance and deferments that we have now because it basically accomplishes that goal automatically. As Steve said, payments would be made through the withholding system. For the few bars who have non-salary wage income that's above a certain threshold, they would, as part of their estimated tax process, make estimated payments towards their loans. And essentially at the end of the year, if you had any underpayment or overpayment, you would get a statement from the Department of Education basically with a reconciliation. But one of the key here is if you keep the obligation simple enough, you can avoid most of your borrowers even having any kind of reconciliation at the end of the year. And it seems to be how it plays out in a lot of these other countries. Two things, one thing I should mention is that in Australia and New Zealand, they do not offer forgiveness. You might be aware that in our current income contingent options like IBR and ICR, there's a forgiveness option after 25 years and now 20 for IBR. We are thinking about not having forgiveness and in exchange having two protections against negative amortization. One is that the interest on the loan would not capitalize, it would only accrue. And a cap on the amount of interest that could accrue through the life of the loan that's set at 50% of the loan's initial principal balance. And the fundamental thinking behind that was that we wanted to provide protections for borrowers, but we wanted to sort of shift the discussion about financial aid away from forgiveness. This is as college costs continue to rise and we hope that some of the solutions we've talked about today can stem that rise, but we don't think it's feasible for people to continue to borrow as much as they wanna borrow knowing that there are options for just pushing it off onto the taxpayer. That's not a reasonable solution to our higher education costs. And so we're looking at an option that would provide protections and mitigate the financial risk of pursuing post-secondary education while not just pushing all of it onto the taxpayer and encouraging borrowers to look at these guides that have been put out and think carefully about their educational choices that they're doing, knowing that even though there are protections, this is a loan that they're gonna have to repay. And so that was sort of the thinking that we had behind not including forgiveness. And again, this sort of mimics what's already done in some of these other countries. The only other big thing to say is that we'd probably look at doing like a variable fixed interest rate, something New America, Jason O'Liles talked about and CBO is advocated for. It's fixed over the life of the loan and but varies with the origination rate. So it might be something like the 10 year treasury rate plus three percentage points. And again, the reason for that is to do when loan rates are low, students should have access to lower rates and when then in rates in general and the market are very high, student loan rates should reflect that to some degree. But at the end of the day because of the interest rate cap, students who really struggle after school are gonna hit the interest rate cap which has the effect of lowering their effective rate of interest over the life of the loan. And so it's a mechanism to target subsidies based on student performance after school instead of targeting those subsidies to everyone before school, which is very expensive. So again, that's sort of the process that were the rough outline of the proposal that we're looking at. One difference from what Steve said is that we are focusing this mainly with the Department of Ed, we feel like IRS has enough on their plate. So other than sort of building into the withholding process, we're trying to leave the IRS for the most part out of it because we know that with the healthcare bill and everything else, they have a lot on their plate already. So again, just to sum up, we see this as a way to accomplish many of the goals of the current system but in a way that's much simpler in a way for that students don't have to navigate that sort of complex labyrinth that we've created, reduce default significantly. In the UK, 98% of outstanding loan borrowers in 2010, 2011 were meeting their obligations. And again, target subsidies more effectively so that we can put scarce taxpayer dollars to the best use that we can. So again, this is not set in stone and we certainly welcome any feedback you guys have. Thank you. I'm gonna try to keep my comments relatively brief because I think it's more interesting to hear from people who are actually doing stuff like Jordan than people like me who just watch people who actually do stuff and then write about it. I feel like we're at an interesting moment in the development of higher education, not just in the United States but worldwide. On the one hand, today, the large majority of students are enrolled in traditional colleges and universities, places like Elizabeth City State, if they're lucky or someplace else. And we're in an environment where the higher education price trends are alarming and getting worse. And there seems to be little prospect of that problem being solved in the near future. So we need to figure out how students enrolled in traditional colleges and universities can be more successful in graduating and how those universities can operate in an environment where they have incentives to, so all universities approach their job from the perspective of putting students first, as I think you said, and frankly, I don't think they all do. And we need to find a way to mitigate this really kind of just out of control debt system that we have that nobody would ever in their wildest imaginations have invented from scratch if they had decided ahead of time, yeah, let's have a system where the US taxpayer is paying over a billion dollars in a year to debt collectors to basically ruin the lives of people who have no capacity to pay their loans back at all. And I think it's worth noting, you said 98% in Great Britain are keeping, here in the United States it's like half, right? About 50% of students are paying principal back on their loans right now. And default is not a fact of nature. Default is a decision that we make about people who can't pay their loans back and we can make different decisions. But at the same time that all that we have this sort of established system and this established way of financing we need to improve both of them, we see this whole other thing happening in the online education world. And the reason I wrote this article was, it seemed like every day I would open up my email, look in the newspaper and there would be some new company starting up somewhere with some kind of funny sounding name that was a combination of two words into some sort of third word. And somebody who seemed very, very much smarter and much younger than I was with some really interesting ideas about what their company could do. And rather than it just be one or two interesting people in the space there were more and more interesting people. And sure enough when you go and look at some of the data the amount of venture capital money that has been flowing into the education space as I think quadrupled over the last five years. So I was curious, well why is that? What's happening? And so I decided to fly out to Silicon Valley and I spent about a week just kind of driving around with a guy named Michael Staten who's in the article who's the founder and CEO of a company called Integral which does basically social networking for inbound college students actually is an enrollment management tool. And so, and again, I also am curious to hear from Jordan about his perspective as an entrepreneur and as someone who lives and breathes in this space and as a recent college graduate himself. But to sort of sum up what I saw when I was out there first of all, you have a group of people who are not respectful of the traditional way of doing things in higher education at all. They live in a culture that says you find big expensive inefficient industries and that's the way that you get rich by going after them. You figure out what they're doing and you do it better for less money, you provide, you create brand new services that are far, far better than anything that exists. You basically give them away for free. The world beats a path to your doorstep and next thing you're on the cover of Time Magazine and you have billions of dollars in your pockets and everybody, there are plenty and plenty of examples of people who of course have actually done this. They're the kind of cultural heroes in our society now, these entrepreneurs and so they see education as a huge opportunity. It is a multi-trillion dollar global market over a trillion dollars here in the United States. It is dominated by institutions that were organized a long time ago in a very, very different set of circumstances. It is becoming increasingly unaffordable which is why we're having this whole conversation about debt and loans in the first place. It is not a particularly efficient system. As we've noted, a lot of people who go into higher education needing credentials do not get them and they see this as a major, major business opportunity. I of course have no idea exactly how long that's gonna take or who the company is gonna be. If I did, I wouldn't be sitting here. I'd be funneling my money into that company and trying to be that guy on the cover of Time Magazine I suppose. But again, I don't claim to have that kind of persuasivity. But it does seem to me that we are entering into a new moment and the reason is, I think another thing that came up a lot in these conversations and as you talk about this, is well, a lot of these ideas about education being online are not brand new. You can go, I'm again old enough to remember the dot-com boom in the mid to late 1990s when a lot of these same points were made about the availability of the internet and the opportunities to basically provide a whole new set of services to people for far less money. And basically everyone who put their money made that bet 10 or 15 years ago, lost all their money. Very few people came out of the first dot-com era having invested money in education and actually made their money back. And to the extent that companies did make money, it was really more serving the traditional higher education market and not challenging it. So you think about a company like Blackboard for example. That's a real business. They have clients and revenue streams and but they're not really trying to put colleges and universities out of business. Far from it, traditional colleges are their clients. So the reason I think that people think that this time is different, that there are new opportunities that weren't there before are the conversions of a couple of trends that have sort of been building over time. One is the fact that the information infrastructure is much better than it was before. Education, if it's gonna be good, requires a fair amount of bandwidth. Back in the late 90s, we were all on our dial-up connections. All we really had was the ability to sort of exchange texts. We couldn't really interact with other people or couldn't do it in more than a certain number of ways. And so there weren't enough people out there that were really in a position to be educated well. The second thing is the pedagogy has changed a lot over time and I think that's something that's missing or is just being started to be talked about now. Way back when the movie camera was invented, the first thing people did was set up a movie projector in the back of an auditorium and they would film a play because plays were the way that we communicated drama up until movies were invented. And so that's what the first movies were, just a tape of a stage play. And then people started to figure out that there were things that you could do with this new medium and we invented editing and montage and perspective and all these different things and we created essentially a new art form. Well, originally when people started talking about using the internet for higher education, they basically thought the same thing, we'll put a camera in the back of a lecture hall and we'll tape a lecture. And that didn't really go very well and it's because frankly a lot of lectures are terrible. They're really boring. They don't engage people. We've all been to college. We all remember or more to the point don't remember sitting through kind of long lectures but did not engage us and didn't teach us very much. Well, what we've learned through a lot of very smart people, learning scientists, experimenters, people on the sort of the forefront of things is that good online education is not sitting at your computer or even in front of your iPhone looking at somebody talking to you passively for 45 minutes. It is a much more interactive process. It involves a lot of real time assessment of what you, the learner know, tools that react to that kind of assessment, opportunities to interact in a variety of ways both with teachers and learning professionals but also other educators. And it all kind of came together I think in the last 12 months with the very high profile rise of these so-called massively open online courses where now you have literally the world's most famous universities designing courses that are being used by hundreds of thousands of people and all of it is for free. That really is I think shaking the economic foundations of higher education and there are all kinds of people who are in a position either to do that or to do many of the other things that are involved in kind of a comprehensive learning process. So it's an exciting time and we are pleased to have Jordan Goldman who is the founder and CEO of Unigo, am I pronouncing that correctly? Not to be confused with that big store in Soho that sells all the sweaters, well, I like them too. We actually would get calls to her office people being like, do you have those skinny jeans? All right, they're at the front, just come in, say your name, they'll be waiting for you. So Jordan we would love to get your perspective both on the sort of the education technology space in general and then also of course your company specifically and what it does. Sure, well thanks everyone, nice to meet y'all. The work that I've done it has kind of benefited simultaneously from economies of scale and kind of my own personal story and it might be worthwhile to just go through that really quickly because the two things have been interestingly tied together. So I grew up in Staten Island, which is right outside of Manhattan. I went to a high school with 5,000 kids, got to meet with a college counselor when I was applying to college once for about 10 minutes and my family didn't have that much money so they couldn't really take me to visit too many colleges. So I started emailing kids at all the schools that I was interested in going to and saying, hey, tell me what your school is like because I can't actually visit. And they wrote me back these really long detailed responses and by the time I was a freshman in college I'd gotten 30,000 kids to write me back. So I had all this content and at the time I was like, what do I do with this? So I did a Google search for a book proposal. I wound up writing a book proposal, I sent it into the top couple publishers in the mail. I got a call from Penguin Books, they said, we like your idea, let's turn it into a book. So it became a series called Students Got to Colleges that came out every year for six years and I started saying to Penguin, we should really put this online. There's more interesting things we can do with this content if we move it to an online format. And at the time they were terrified of the internet. They said, no, we're a publisher, like we have no interest in online, it's gonna cannibalize our revenue streams. No, no, no, no, no. And at a certain point I just realized that the cost of putting something online and doing it yourself had come down pretty dramatically and that Penguin was essentially a platform to reach a mass audience and you didn't really need that anymore. So I wound up killing my book deal and launching Unigo a couple years ago at this point. And Unigo, we were able to say, hey look, don't just give us college reviews from kids all over the country, give us college reviews, give us photos, give us videos, make it online, make it interactive. And we were able to grow that to hundreds of thousands of college reviews. We were able to get our site to attract more than a million people a month coming and learning about schools. We also have live video chats with students at different universities so you can find out what it's really like. Stuff that I kind of wished that I had when I was first applying. And we wound up talking to a lot of big mainstream media companies so we supply a lot of the college information now for a US News and World Report, the USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, kind of backing into that because we just got so much content from building this platform. And the next thing, and basically just the economy of scale of being able to build a platform that allowed so many people to contribute. The next problem that we moved on to was we said, okay, college search was one issue but the other side of that coin is the actual process of applying and getting in and paying for college. And when we took a step back and then we looked at that space and what was going on in it, so you have really expensive consultants that charge anywhere between $5,000 and $40,000 to help you get into college. And on the other side, there's a college counselor in every high school in America. But on average, there's 450 students for every one college counselor which is crazy. The average student gets about 30 minutes of college counseling per year. If you look at states like California, that number goes down to 14 minutes per student per year. And even more granular than that, the first three minutes tend to be like, hey, how's it going? Like catching up with you, like two minutes or gossip about your fellow classmates. So you wind up with 10, 15 minutes of college counseling and that's it. To go through every part of picking a school and every part of the admissions process and every part of financial aid, most people get about 15 minutes, which is a real problem. And schools are not likely to hire more college counselors if anything, that they're cutting support staff and then they're hiring less. And when we looked at that problem, we said, okay, on an individual basis, it's gonna be hard to get more college counseling into schools. But there's 97,000 college counselors in America collectively. And can we get more counseling out of those counselors and redistribute that in a cost-effective way to the masses? So we wound up building both on our site, an entire curriculum that takes you through every aspect of choosing and applying and paying for college. And we also built up a network of about 1,500 college counselors, which represents about one and a half percent of all the college counselors in the country. That said that they'll do live video chat college counseling through our site on a really cost-effective basis. And then we also partner with nonprofits to make that free so that we can get more college counseling out of these counselors and redeploy it and redistribute it. So this kind of comes back to the economy of scale issue where now it's very cheap for anyone to create a website. And if you have an interesting idea, you can reach out to lots and lots of people to be part of your website. And effectively, yeah, just redistribute something to the masses in a really big way. And in the EdTech entrepreneur space, it's something that's been really exploding over the past couple of years. And a lot of people recognizing there's inefficiencies in the education system. But with a little bit of money and kind of a lot of drive and a lot of outreach, you can get educators to interact with students in new ways. And you can get them to create things that you can then redeploy really effectively both on your own platform and what I think has been interesting through a lot of these big mainstream media channels. Like the fact that we now work with USA Today and US News and World Report and a lot of these companies, you wouldn't have thought that a company that someone founded two, three years ago, coming right out of college that these big media companies would then be saying, I want you to help us. But the reality of the situation is you can create really interesting things very quickly and get a lot of people to contribute to them. And then the bigger companies are basically starting to take notice and then starting to want to play together. So I think that's the overall, the education ecosystem. There's more money flowing into the space which is prompting more people to do their best to get into it. There's a lot of money at stake. And the potential for disruption is high because in a lot of cases the schools themselves, there's a lot of bureaucracy and there's a lot of politics. And I think there's a new generation of ed tech entrepreneurs who are saying, I can create something pretty neat that shortcuts all of that. And at the very least, I can get the attention of these guys that there might be a different way to do it. And in the case of like Coursera and a lot of these new courses, like they're now getting Stanford and Wesley and a lot of these mainstream top tier education institutions to say, okay, we'll try it your way. We'll try something different. And they might not have done that on their own, but they're increasingly gravitating towards that, which has been fascinating. Yeah, I think another dimension of all this, not only is there a lot more money flowing into, investment money into these kind of companies, but the amount of money that each company requires to start up is much, much less. So the two are kind of multiplying. More investment times, the sort of startup costs are far, far lower than they used to be because everything is in the cloud now. I mean, the second day I was out there, I went to visit a venture capital firm and I kind of walk in there and it's like, it's in Palo Alto and it's what you would think. It's all kind of glass and brick and all the rest of it. So we're sitting in a conference room and outside the conference room, there's a table and sitting around the table, there are five people, all of whom have the identical, like 17 inch MacBook Air because they all have the same computers out there. It's very fashion kind of thing. Yeah, and they've got their headphones on. They didn't even look up there, just kind of doing this a very intense. And so I asked, it was one of the junior investment people. I said, is that, are those analysts? He said, no, that's one of our companies that we're investing in. And I mean, the whole company was sitting at that table. The company is five people, a table, five chairs, five MacBooks and a Wi-Fi connection. There's no other infrastructure involved in starting up a company. All of their, everything that they actually own and do is just out there in a server farm somewhere. In fact, I mean, some of the companies that I talked to are so inexpensive, they've never even taken any investment money at all. So that, when I say there's a quadrupling of the amount of money going in, you don't necessarily even have to take VC dollars anymore. If you can build something interesting and get a lot of people attracted to it at once. And so, all of which kind of, I think, supports the idea that we may not know exactly who it is that's going to develop the application that really starts to eat away at these traditional business models. But I feel like with more confidence, we can say it's gonna be someone just by almost kind of the sheer math of it all. And I mean, like I was saying before, right now the average student gets 15 minutes of college counseling per year, that's it. My team is 12 people. We get a million people a month come to our website. The average person stays about 10 minutes. So we're effectively, I mean, it's not the same thing, but we have 10 million minutes a month of people that are doing college research on our site as compared to you get 15 minutes in your school system and that's it. So yeah, I mean, you can start something very, very cheaply and staff it very leanly, but still have this amazing impact. Well, you all launched into the discussion which I was supposed to spark. So thanks, I'll just kind of blow on the flame here a little bit. I wanted to ask, first of all, Jordan, now that we know you're providing content to all of my competitors. First of all, we have to talk afterwards. But I have a question. So what is the missing data, the missing information in your opinion that would allow more people to make better choices for college? What would you like to have that you don't right now? Because it sounds like for Unigo, a lot of it is anecdotal and the mass of anecdotes leads to maybe better choices in a general sense, but what specifically would you like to see that would make the business of picking a college more precise and useful? I mean, our focus is we think that institutions kind of fail at the pivots and I'm amazed at high school. You train students and you take them all the way through to the very, very end and then you basically say for the process of actually applying to college, which not unlike the process of like doing your taxes, you wouldn't do your taxes without working with an accountant who understands the individual pieces of this process and can walk you through it step by step. But for the most part, we say to apply to college, we just figure it out, like wing it and then figure out like both the individual aspects of the process and your own decision-making, just go with your gut. And when you actually get like the financial aid portion, there was someone, Kim Clark who used to work at US News and World Report did a really interesting project where the financial aid letters you get when you get into different colleges all look different. There's no standardized format. They all use different terms. They refer to the same things in different ways. The placement of your award is on different places on the page. So it's not only the kids miss out when they're actually filling out their applications and they don't know whether they're making the right choices and they don't know enough about the colleges, but when they actually get that financial piece, they're on their own to figure it out and then there's not really, because college counselors on the private end have priced themselves so high. There's not even a conception that there's help out there where, and that's one of the things we're trying to solve where we have these, we basically have at a fixed rate, we do it for between $15 and $100 an hour and you can have a live video chat with college counselors through our site on demand, but yeah, there's not even a conception that there's someone you should go to for help. They just say, figure it out and I think that leads to kids going to the wrong school and them getting discouraged and dropping out. They don't get the most financial aid. They don't know how to translate the financial aid they are getting. They don't know how to properly compare the two. So I mean, there's big systemic problems, but the piece that we focus on is help kids make the decision up front and help them understand their options, because right now we're not doing nearly as good of a job as we should be. Thanks. Kevin, I know the answer to this because I know your piece, but I think it would be helpful for the audience, for you to explain if you can, what you think the fall of the current higher education system will look like, right? I mean, Rome is being challenged by different Visigoths or whatever. We know something's happening. Maybe you can't pick the particular firm that's gonna do it, but how in your estimation is this going to unfold? No, that's a great question. I'm gonna partly paraphrase something my friend Hal Plackin said to me one time, so credit were due. There's a lot of ways to draw analogies between the higher education system and other things. And on some levels, it's so big that it's not perfectly analogous to anything. I know I once, in the Washington Monthly a few years ago, drew an analogy to the newspaper industry, which there are a lot of parallels in the sense of big kind of conglomerate organizations that were making a lot of money doing some things and losing a lot of money doing other things and there was a lot of internal crash subsidization between the two and someone comes along and attacks your profit making business and all of a sudden the whole kind of house of cards falls apart. And I think all those things are true and those parallels are the case, but there are differences and among them are the fact that colleges and universities are highly publicly subsidized. I know some of those subsidies have been declining but still the federal government's been kind of filling the gap a lot with federal student aid, which is also a subsidy to higher education. And they're regulated and protected from competition in ways that newspapers aren't in other ways. And so that combination of subsidy regulation and I think also a very, very deep social investment in the idea of college and almost an inability to think of what a post-secondary credential could be other than a degree will sustain the system for a while, which again is why we needed to do this and come contingent loan stuff and all the rest of it until we get to that point. But what I see happening now in the growth of these MOOCs, one of the most important thing about these MOOCs is that the vast majority of the students enrolling in them are not American students. I think it's Sebastian Throon who's the guy who in a way sort of kicked off at least the public conversation about it. He's the founder of Udacity, noted that in his first course, which he was teaching at Stanford, but then opened up to the world, there were more people from Lithuania enrolled in his course than all of the undergraduates at Stanford put together, just to give you a sense of the relative scale of things. And of course the reason that it's because people in Lithuania, there's not only no Stanford there, there's just not even anything like the higher education infrastructure that we have much less kind of more developing countries. So those are the people that are gonna really be the first adopters and gonna get out there and are going to basically be the participants. And what I imagine will be for a while the development of a parallel post-secondary universe. So rather than, I mean, some people will try to make money serving the existing system. Some people will try to make money challenging and kind of eating the lunch of the existing system. But for a while what's gonna happen is in this whole other unregulated arena on an international scale, we'll have this parallel system of courses being developed, credentials being developed. And there's a person, and the kind of people who do that will be people like, one of the people I mentioned in this article is a young man, not that young, but named Aaron Bali, who founded this company called Udemy, which is a platform where anyone can sell courses to anyone else. And they just sort of sit in the middle and take a cut. And that's by the way what everybody wants to be as a platform, because you just sit in the middle and take a cut. Facebook is a platform for social interaction. Amazon is a platform for selling books and CDs and all kinds of things. And so Aaron Bali grew up in the southeast corner of Turkey near the Iraqi border. And he was a math prodigy. And there was no place for a math prodigy in a village in the southeastern part of Turkey, western part of Turkey, eastern part of Turkey near the Iraqi border. And so he kind of got online and found a way to learn, and eventually kind of made his way here to the United States. There are a lot of people like that in the world, even if you take the top 1%, it's a big world to take the top 1% of, much less the top 1%, 5%, 10%. These are the people that are gonna be out there. And eventually what's gonna happen is they are gonna earn things that look kind of like credentials. They're gonna, and this is the how thing that Helen said to me, they're gonna compete on the global labor market. And they're gonna be good at their jobs. And once people sort of start to see that and the proof is made when people start making money, that it turns out that you can just go and hire a bunch of people who never went to an accredited college at all, never paid a dime for their education, so they don't have loans to pay back, which means they're probably willing to work for less money because they don't have to pay their loans back. And they're just as good. That's what's going to provoke a reassessment and a reimagining of what college can be. And I think that's what's really going to lead to this downfall you talk about. I think it'll take about 10 years. Well, one thing that I think is really interesting is colleges are charging more and more money and it's dramatically outpacing the rate of inflation. Someone was saying recently that if the rate currently continues in 20 years, it's gonna be a million dollars for a college degree. And what they're creating, I mean, this is kind of a blunt way of saying it, but colleges are basically interactive content and they're delivering it in person, but as their prices are going up at this disproportionate rate, the cost of content is going way, way, way down everywhere else and the cost of distributing that content is also going way down. So you have this weird system where great stuff is becoming free and widely available and the traditional producers of that stuff are charging more money that students can't pay back and they're having difficulty getting jobs even after they get out and when they get jobs, entry-level jobs are paying less than ever before. And the fact that those two things aren't speaking to each other more is a little... And people don't have a million dollars. They just, they don't have a lot of money, so they either won't pay it or they'll borrow it and they won't be able to pay it back, but it doesn't exist. So we've got some time. I wanna get as much time as we can for audience questions. So Claire back here is the keeper of the microphone and we're gonna, I'd like for you when you get the microphone, please be brief, no long statements, and if possible, tell us your affiliation. The gentleman right there, Claire. Son? Okay, Al Fausenberg, I work with the U.S. Congress but I've also taught at many universities. I wonder if Mr. Goldman can take this further. You said we have about 15 minutes we get with high school counselors on the way to college. Once in college, you get none. I have yet to see a rating of any universities that look at two things. What the placement is of graduating seniors, what the earning income is, and maybe 10, 15 years out, what they are, how many are in their fields, what are they waking then? I say that because, well, we have these wonderful monoliths you've described. It may take 10 years for them to realize they're out of gas, but still they get lots of government support, lots of corporate support, and the assumption is someone will pay the tuition somewhere. The parents, the federal government, their interest help, scholarships, the whole shebang. Yet professors push their majors on various people, esoteric majors, with no help or no idea of what this fancy major is going to be when they get out. So are there any thought of that? I remember when we were all in second grade we had this National Defense Education Act. Maybe Mr. Petra would like to look at that. If you wanted to go into physics, engineering, astrophysics, things we need again. The government will just pay your college, end of it. If you want a major, interesting fashion design in 14th century Spain, go ahead, but you're on your own. My point is there's no link to what the return on investment is when they get out. And there are consumer guides for parents on this. Those students are not gonna go to Princeton and Yale and people, places like that. Is there a way colleges can compete? Now I know North and Eastern has done some great things. And trying to marry seniors to industries or even sophomores, interns, to try to do this to place 100% of the class. But a lot of this has been on the way in and then dealing with the debt. But what have been on the way out trying to find a job? I think two interesting things. One is just like there's not enough college counseling in the high school level, the support services within a college or university, guidance services and career counseling and all that, they exist but they're not being utilized fully enough. We actually have a product now that we're working with McGraw-Hill where we're working with colleges to help connect students better to support services. But yeah, they don't do a good enough job funneling students. There's actually a lot of research on outcomes of students that do go to the Career Center and the earlier they go to the Career Center, the better. And they actually do have a history of if you start going to your Career Center freshman, sophomore, junior year, you're more likely to get a job, you're more likely to be more satisfied with your job but no one does it. It's really hard to actually get the students there. So the schools need to do more to not just have these support systems in place but to make sure students are using them and potentially have new innovative systems to connect those two things. On the other end, actually LinkedIn just launched something recently where they made available the data they have about people that went to particular colleges and because they have a lot of information about people with careers, alumni of particular colleges, what cities they migrate to, what career professions they go into, what the actual path winds up being like if you went to Cornell, how many jobs did you have to take before you got to this particular level in this particular industry? And that's been really interesting. A lot of online companies that have access to all of this data are making it visible. And you'd think like you'd think why doesn't a college who in a lot of cases for fundraising reasons has a vested interest in keeping up with alumni? Why aren't they gathering that data and outputting it and displaying it in interesting ways? But they're not for better or worse. I was talking, I went to Wesleyan and I was talking to Wesleyan recently. And I was saying like why don't you do more about yeah, the pathways of alumni so that courage students can track from this major, where am I likely to go? And they said, well, we don't really know where a lot of our alumni are. And I was like, go on Facebook and do a search for people that self-identify as being a Wesleyan alumni. If you look at the size of their alumni database, I could double it in a week just by going on Facebook and building Excel. The schools themselves need to embrace this technology too and they could be doing a much better job. Right here, my friend Tom Tocke. Thanks, I'm Tom Tocke with the Carnegie Foundation. Kevin, how do companies that supply courses to thousands of Lithuanians for free stay in business? It's a good question. Not one that they're particularly preoccupied with right now. I think they are very bought into the idea that you build a service that lots and lots and lots of people will want to use. You build a reputation, you build a customer base and if you get big enough and your service is good enough, you'll find a way to make money. And that's plausible. That's what Google did. That's what Facebook did. While I was there, actually while I was in that meeting with where the people were sitting outside, that was the day that Instagram got bought by Facebook for a billion dollars. Instagram had, I think, 11 employees at the time. But they had built a platform for people to share photos using their mobile phones. Never, I don't think anyone has quite thought about, they don't think they ever thought for a minute about how they could charge anyone for that. They just figured a lot of people will want to use it and it will work out for us. And Facebook has revenues now, Google has revenues now and all those things. So when you ask them, there are a couple of things. What they may do is charge for assessment. Because while basically the marginal cost providing access to a video or to another person is zero, assessment actually costs money and assessment is what you need on some level for credentialing. So they may, it may be like a freemium model where you can get all the education you want for free. But if you wanna go through some kind of certified assessment process that will get you a credential, you'll have to pay something for that. They also talked about, I think explicitly, that people at Udacity have talked about getting money from employers. That they basically can say, look, we'll open up this thing where millions and millions of people will get on there and what we'll do is introduce employers to the top 1% of our graduates on the theory that employers are always on the hunt for talent and they'll pay us for that. I actually saw a very small company while I was there that did an in-person educational training in computer programming where they charge you money and then if you get a job, they refund all your tuition. So if you get a job, it's free because they make more money in the employer referral than they were charging students in the first place. So I think it's all yet to be worked out but I think it's not crazy to think that it couldn't work out. Let me just quickly ask my own question and that is to Jordan, in your mass of information about, the gentleman was asking about counselors on campus, is the kinds of services that Roberts, Evergreen City, providing common or uncommon? In other words, is what this college is doing which is engaging young people early, at least in a graduate mode and maybe Robert, you can answer whether you're also doing this to guide kids in their career paths but we talked mostly about graduation this time. You're saying that there's not a lot of engagement on careers, is there a lot of engagement just to give kids the information they need to go from freshman to sophomore year or pick the right majors or pick the right courses? I think they both have an uncommon level of support and also an uncommon level and a lot of things you were talking about of making sure students actually use that support, that they actually reach out and do a lot to ensure that these services are being matched with the students because yeah, a lot of schools, they had it but they don't have it at the same level but no one uses it, they just sit there and they basically have a system that says we'll have it and maybe students will go and maybe they won't and they're satisfied with that and students don't go and they go okay and they're not willing to try new things and I think some of the, there's a lot of amazing things that you guys are doing. So Robert, how do you make them do it? Well because we again are committed to that and we follow up and ensure that they do follow through that they do go for career counseling, that they do take various types of placement tests and then we talk about it. We try to bring in people with those types of experiences out in real life to be some of our guest speakers to bridge that collegiate academic environment with real life experiences that people have out there doing what you wanna do and you're so proper, and that some schools do have these huge counseling centers and no one ever goes to them. My daughter goes to one of the major universities and I always ask her, well have you been to counseling center, have you been here career, have you been, well no, I haven't been yet and she's graduating and I'm like okay, what are we gonna do next? What's that next step now that you haven't done this. So you're absolutely right. A lot of these universities do have these places, these support services but they are support from the point of view that we have it and let's check it off versus it being an interactive part of that students' progression and education. So make sure. So I'm sorry, go ahead. I think that's something I mentioned earlier that we have this new product that we're building with McGraw Hill. It's something that technology can solve too. So we're basically building a product that can measure and articulate how many times current students are actually meeting with the support service staff and allow you to have those conversations virtually and generate reports so that the school knows in real time who's making use of them, who is and what tactics are working and if physically going and meeting with the support staff isn't something that students are likely to do, had it be more virtual, had it be something that they can do it 9 p.m. from their dorm room. The important thing is that they're having those meetings because all the data shows, if you have the meetings, your students are more successful. Great, great. Next question. A lady way in the back there, Claire. Hello, my name is Sarah Wunder. I recently finished a master's in politics development and democratic education at the University of Cambridge and I'm interested in this income contingent loan repayment plan based on the UK. While I was at Cambridge speaking with my British colleagues, I was jealous as they described the loans they were receiving and the repayment plan for it. But I see one large difference between the two countries that may pose a problem in the medium term. In the UK, recently prices tripled but still an undergraduate year at the University of Cambridge is comparable to a year at a state public university in the US. So the prices are far lower, people borrow less, fewer students borrow. And I know the UK's worried now that prices have tripled, that this will greatly increase the spending. So I'm wondering if you think this is a problem for the scale of the US, how many students borrow? And also in the medium term, in six years after being enacted, when repayment is very slow due to high youth unemployment, will it still be able to defend this choice to help students when the dollars and cents and spending look dire? I guess I would start by saying that, yes, the amount that people borrow is higher than in all these other countries. It's not as far away in, for example, New Zealand as it is maybe in the UK. In New Zealand, I think the average debt for someone who comes out sort of of an equivalent undergrad is at least in the $16,000, $17,000 range, which is not too far away from the United States range of 25 or 26. So I think it has been demonstrated that this can work for pretty moderate debt levels and the US obviously has higher debt levels than that. But I think even when you run the numbers with some higher debt levels, you don't get unrealistic time frames for repayments for people, for example, who are average undergrad debt again is $25,000, $26,000. Repain under system like this, I don't think has to take more than 10, 15 years for the vast majority of those borrowers, which is not an unrealistic time frame to pay a debt like that. And so I think it is workable and I think by targeting the subsidies more effectively to just those people who need them and having them kick in after a period of time in the form of an interest rate cap is a way that minimizes the cost relative to our current system, which is very expensive in terms of giving subsidies to everybody or at least a large portion of a population through subsidized loans. If I don't know how many of you know but it costs us $6 billion a year just to extend that 3.4% interest rate for one year. And so even if you have, for example, periods of unemployment, I think you would still have savings relative to the amount of money that we invest in the subsidies now. Steve, do you? I mean, I think that Kevin answered that pretty well. I mean, I think the problem is that people are taking out debt that large and they're struggling to repay it now and I think that we need a system that recognizes that some people just aren't gonna be able to pay it with the incomes that they have. And so I think the level of debt actually helps bolster the argument for an income contingent system. Kevin, I wanted to ask you though, in your plan, would their borrowers who have higher incomes, would they be able to, is there a prepayment penalty or is there ways to go above the income if they have the money? Absolutely, yeah. These are settings sort of what your minimum obligations are and anyone can prepay at any point without penalty. Great. This gentleman sort of halfway through here, Claire, gets some folks up. Oh, it's fine, yeah, go ahead. She's got our eye on somebody. Hi, my name's Wes Huffman with Washington Partners and this is actually a follow-up on the income contingent loan question or on the proposal. You mentioned combining it into one loan program, including grad plus. Does that mean that we would have undergrad to a full cost of attendance? Are we talking, would there still be some level of limits on there? And then the second question would be if the panel or perhaps Mr. Byrd and the staffer up there could talk to the state of legal education, we're starting to see grad plus and IBR right now and it doesn't seem to be going so well. So, yeah, just if you could respond to that. Yeah, I should have clarified that in my opening statement. As we have looked at it right now, we incorporated it all into a single loan, but we left the loan limits the same as they are currently. So if you would have been eligible to borrow undergrad plus, you would be eligible to borrow a higher amount under this loan proposal. That being said, loan limits are certainly something that need to be discussed over the next year as we get closer to a HEA reauthorization and so, you know, the cost of attendance borrowing for grad plus and then the loan limits for staffers certainly are something we need to look at and I'll let Steve answer the other question. The proposal that we were talking about in the article is a lot less specific obviously than Kevin's and we were not talking about going to a single loan program under this proposal, we were simply talking about going to a single repayment system so that, you know, the loan limits would stay the same, the options would stay the same. Kevin and I did not confer on coming up with a single plan so, anyway, so that's... We don't have a vote in the house. Yeah, we don't have a vote. This gentleman, this distinguished gentleman right here, Ben. Thanks, Paul. I'll try to level up to that. I had two quick questions if I may. The first has to do with, I want to come back to the rankings, your ranking, which I think is really intriguing, but one has to do with your part of your sort of premise as stated earlier today and in the magazine is that you reward spending and that drives up tuition. But, of course, one of your categories is research spending and, as I understand it, you spend a lot on research, it's not size adjusted, you do better in the ranking. So, presumably that's an incentive to spend money and if you are able to do the same research for less money, improve productivity, going back to one of Kevin's points, presumably you do worse in the rankings. So, isn't that problematic number one and number two? It seems to me this is really a ranking of social policy, of academic policy. It's not a ranking of academic excellence in my view and I want to just ask quickly, if you were to try and do a ranking that's really about not how good a college is at getting students to completion, although that's very important, or getting more bang for the buck, although that's extremely important, but how good is it academically? What would you do to create such a ranking? So, I should say this is Bedelord Asky of Kaufman who has written a book on rankings internationally and knows a lot more about this than I do. So, I will endeavor to answer your smart questions and I'm going to bring Kevin Carey who also knows more than I do about it, but on your second part of your question, since we've been doing this, we've been adding language to the introduction of our rankings saying, boy, we wish we had better data and our issue with U.S. News and some of the other ranking systems is that they pretend to measure things for which data is not available, which is best or excellent and what is excellent? Well, excellent is learning, right? With schools we have to measure learning. There is not as of yet measures of learning that are available for all colleges that the public can see and that we have any kind of confidence in. We think there should be and there's lots of different ways to do that. None of them perfect, but in total, if you had several of them, at least give you a sense of what actually happens in the classroom. The second data chunk that we'd like to have is an outcome measure. What do students do when they graduate? What is their income a year out, five years out, 20 years out? Are they working in the fields that they got their degrees in? Income after college isn't the only thing we look forward to judge whether a college is working, but it's what 80, 90% of students go to college for, so it's a fair measure. Those outcome data, those income figures were not that far away from getting and it could happen very quickly if the higher education institutions hadn't blocked previous efforts by the Bush administration to allow individual student identifiers to be connected with unemployment insurance databases that follow people in their careers and have that information. If you connected those two things, then every university and every department within every university would be able to provide to us and to US News and to other ranking publications some measure of output. So we await the day when that data is available. On the research, I think I know the answer to your question, but I'm going to duck it because Kevin knows more. No, it's a fair point. I guess I would say I think implicit in the two, the varying approaches is the idea that and maybe this is, one could probably challenge this, but that there are more opportunities to achieve productivity gains on the teaching front than perhaps on the research front. So think about the US News rankings, which Ben of course is very familiar with. 10% of those rankings are just based on spending per student period. Another part of the rankings are based on the percent of classes that have I think fewer than 100 and fewer than 50 or fewer than 50, small class sizes. So explicitly the US News rankings are pushing colleges away from adopting any and another part is percent of faculty with PhDs away from adopting any kind of productivity enhancing innovation. If they could figure out a way to steer students into a Coursera class that's not taught by someone with a PhD or do a better job with the same number of faculty, they would be penalized. I guess implicitly we're not seeing those kind of obvious not taken or bad incentives on the research front. Maybe there's some kind of whole crowd sourcing approach to research that we should be pursuing, but I don't think it's something that we've been focusing on. Yeah, I think that's fair. This lady right here, Claire. Thank you, Amanda Brown with Public Education Network. So given the technological disruptions that are going on in the higher ed space and perhaps also the financial but I'm interested in the MOOCs and so on. How do traditional institutions stay relevant? What if the president of Georgetown comes to you and says, you know, what's your advice about how we survive this next 10 years, 50 years? What would you advise? I mean, I'll take a crack at that but I'll just certainly weigh in. I think a lot of institutions have sort of ridden along on a lot of larger societal trends, right? So if you're to be a higher education institution located in a country that is experienced the hollowing out of its manufacturing sector and being moved into a position where all the good jobs are going to be information focused was essentially to be experienced great fortune, right? Like they didn't predict that. It just kind of happened. And so colleges and universities have been in this great position of being the only institutions that are allowed to offer the only credentials that really matter in the labor market on a long-term basis. And so they haven't had to really look hard at their own value proposition. They haven't had to really examine whether what it is that they're providing is worth what they're charging. Just a lot of things kind of move them along. Georgetown's not going to change very much because Georgetown is offering a very specific, expensive, residential experience that sends a lot of signals about exclusivity on the front end. It employs a lot of very smart scholars who are in the scholarship business. Those things will persist. I think 50 years from now Georgetown will still be Georgetown. Harvard will still be Harvard. But that's like 5% of the market maybe, if that much. I think it's everybody else that is going to be that is ought to be thinking very hard about what kind of advice they need. American University, which just sort of looks like Georgetown in some ways, but really isn't Georgetown in a lot of other ways. I think it'll be harder for them to charge exactly the same prices that Georgetown charges, particularly if we're going to like a million dollars over time. But even because of that, like Georgetown and the top tier universities are going to be insulated. Like there's going to be changes in the education market, but because they offer an experience and signifiers, they're not really going to be affected, which gives them even more leeway to kind of double down on the digital revolution and basically say like the amount of content that's created at Georgetown at any given day across all the professors giving all of their lectures. And I mean you can't just videotape a lecture and call that content, but if a school was to say, you know what, we're going to train our professors on what good digital content looks like and we're going to create a roving team that every day is going to film five lectures. At the end of a month and a half, they would just have this enormous amount of really useful content that's not actually going to challenge. Someone's not going to not go to Georgetown because they watch this stuff online, but it contributes to kind of a broader educational community. It helps more people learn. It extends the brand. Like the fact that they're not doing that, I find really surprising, and the fact that they haven't been doing this for years now. And I would say too, I think what I thought was a really interesting and compelling story about what Elizabeth City State does is also a very specific identifiable value proposition. So you have a certain kind of student, first generation college students from rural areas may not be coming to higher education with the kind of academic preparation that an Ivy League student would have. For them to succeed, they need a community. They need attention. They need support. They need mentorship. And so we see an institution that's been organized around those ideas. That's a real value for us. It turns out not that much money. I think actually those kind of institutions that are in a lot of ways very different than Georgetown will also continue to have a place in this new world. It's the people that sort of have really nothing specific to their students to offer, but are expensive that will have the artist's time. And then they'll become condos one day. Yeah, exactly. Nice condos. Very nice condos. The lady over on the, your left, my right. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Morgan from the National College Access Network. And we work around the country to help more low income and first generation underrepresented students enter in complete college. To answer your earlier question, we'd very much like to see Pell Grant graduation data by institution. That would be incredibly meaningful to the students that we serve in terms of making decisions about where to attend higher ed. And now my question is, we would also be thrilled to see rankings more like the Washington Monthly's supersede ones more like US News and World Report. Unfortunately, my students don't read Washington Monthly. They've never heard of it. They don't read US News and World Report either, but those have, that's become so well known. It's like it's just in the air, those rankings. What might your plan look like to get, to get the word out about what you're doing and try to, try to compete at the consumer level? You know, that's a great question and we ask ourselves that every year. And we, you know, with the help of the Lumina Foundation, we've, you know, hired a wonderful public relations firm that's been helping us harbor the Hatcher, I'm sorry, Hatcher Group. And these events at New America Foundation, the fact that Joe Nocerath in New York Times wrote a column about us over the weekend and slowly but surely if you follow the coverage of college rankings as we do, you'll see that when the stories are written about the US News College Guide coming out, more often than not, they mention the Washington Monthly, they'll mention Forbes, they'll mention some of the others, but they'll mention the Washington Monthly quite favorably. And, you know, the colleges that do well on our rankings that tend not to get noticed by US News, they're very motivated to get the word out too. And they use their considerable local press leverage. And so a lot of local press has been writing about it. So I think year after year, we hammer away at it and I think we're making a little bit of progress every time. This lady right here, please, Claire. Hi, this question is probably best for Jordan. I'm just wondering, given the current climate, American students are looking for quality education, but not at such a high cost. Is there any discussion about going to other countries, looking at Canada, the UK, or elsewhere as a different option? There's some, I mean, it's, it winds up being expensive and your local college counselor is much less likely to be able to guide you there. I mean, it's hard for them to guide you period, but to guide you internationally, a lot of them just don't have that expertise. And you're also not going to get any federal aid if you go internationally. So even though in some countries it might actually wind up being cheaper, it's harder to decipher that process. And I think for a lot of families that particularly need money, the parents might never have gone abroad before, the child might never have gone abroad before and it feels daunting. I mean, education is becoming increasingly internationalized. And I think even things like what we were talking about as courseware goes online, the idea of studying in a different country becomes relatable because you can, you can see a teacher at Oxford or you can see a teacher at, I mean, in any number of countries and that might become more and more of an option, but I haven't seen a big push of that. What I have seen is, and I mean, I'm sure everyone's seen is people from other countries coming to America and that's growing at enormous rates. And there's different economic reasons why that's for the good and the bad, why something colleges are encouraging in some ways. But yeah, there's a big influx to hear. There's less of an influx out. We've got just a few more minutes. So I want to, what I want to do is get as many questions asked in a row as we can. So Claire, I'll just ask you to, as people raise their hands, folks just ask a very quick question. We'll do a kind of this lightning round and then we'll have some final answers from our panel. This lady right here. Hi Jordan, this is another question for you. How do you ensure the quality of the information you're providing on your website? And then we'll just take them all. This gentleman up here had a question. Right here. Bob Reischauer, Urban Institute. I'd like to ask Kevin the viability of these online courses in areas that are not computer science, math, engineering, things you can measure output through problem sets. The vast majority of people of students not at the elite universities are still in humanities, social sciences, pre-professional journalism type degrees where the value added is measured in your improvement in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, ability to communicate and write. All of which are very difficult to measure credential in these types of environments. So, you know, will we really be turning out the lights on the second tier of educational institutions within a decade? Great question, Bob. Thank you. And one more. Jamal. That's Jamal of the Dalim reporter with diverse issues in higher education. One of the criticisms of the U.S. News and World Report rankings was that it might push colleges to not serve students, you know, raise admissions. I'm wondering if, you know, as Jamie Marisotus stated, he was promoting a performance-based financing for colleges. Is there any concern that moving to a performance-based finance structure would have the same effect? In other words, push colleges to raise admissions in order to boost their performance? Another good question. So we have a question about, to Jordan, about how we can, you can assure quality and to the group, Kevin, most precisely, on how do you measure output in the humanities and from Jamal, how do we, will performance-based financing make schools more selective? So my really quick answer, all of the content on our site comes from either a college student or a college counselor. In the case of a student, you can search through reviews of a college by different demographic info, so you can search for a review by major or ethnicity or gender or political affiliation or religion. So in that respect, it's not really review of the college, it's one individual student's experience at that school. So we don't really vet that. It's, it's, you're searching for a particular experience and that's their experience and you can see that. On the college counseling piece, counselors apply to become part of our network and we verify their credentials and then all the advice comes from them and it's tied to them with like their profile and their video intro. So yeah, we bet that they're professional but at that point it's kind of their advice which is attached to them. I'll respond to Bob Reichard's question. Also someone far ahead of his timeline, income contingent loans if I'm not mistaken. No, it's a good question and I don't think that, I think you're correct that certain kinds of disciplines lend themselves more easily to the online environment particularly if both the way that you provide evidence of learning and the way that you learn is very tied up in working through problem sets. You know, if you're teaching computer programming, speaking of someone who's done it myself, you learn to program by coding like but you do it and then you run it and it works and it doesn't and you figure it out and so these things are not only things that can happen online but they're very visible and you can extract information from them and you're right that there are large numbers of people who don't engage in those kinds of fields. Now, I would posit two things. One, we should be optimistic about the potential for the technology and the learning processes to grow together. We're really only in the early stages of them. I think that this world that we live in where people basically if they need it can get access to broadband internet less than a decade into that world. If you look at the whole array of online classes that are being taught, many, many of them are in fact in the humanities, including these new MOOCs and all the rest of it. I did a radio program the other day with a classicist from Penn who's teaching a course through Coursera on Greek enrollment mythology. So pretty far away from computer programming. Assessing whether or not people those courses were any good. You know, he and I had an interesting conversation about that afterwards and it kind of goes to this difference between free, not free and what cost to go to Penn. And I asked him, I said, look, you know, if you, you know, you employ teaching assistants, right? You know, and so, I mean, you don't great in your own, this is a version of his own class. He doesn't grade all of the papers and he has people that work for him. The colleges don't pay them very much money. And I said, look, if people in your class wanted the option to actually write a paper and have it graded by a teaching assistant who was trained to do that, how much would it cost? And he did the math and said, well, we pay the teaching assistants this much money and they can do this many papers. So the amount of money was a whole lot less than what colleges charge in tuition now. It wasn't nothing, but it was a dollar figure that might be in reach of a fair number of people. Finally, I would say that most of the evidence, if you look at, you know, Richard Ahram in a hosporosis study, academically adrift, one way, not the only way, but one way of trying to get at this question of gains in critical thinking skills in college, it suggested an awful lot of the people out there that are in those sort of middle institutions and taking those humanity courses are not being very successful. So we're not competing with something that for many students is going gangbusters right now. So there may be a lot of room to provide something that is pretty good and a whole lot cheaper. And I don't know if we can address the issue of whether performance financing might increase selectivity. If I'm badly, you could, yes. I think that's a good question. Yeah. All right, folks, thank you very much. Before we go, let me, a few thanks, a few thanks. I want to thank the New America Foundation, Stephanie Gunter, who always makes these things work out great. John over here in audio for making sure you can hear us. My own staff, Claire and Carl Isley, our great publisher, Deanne Strauss Tucker. Ryan Cooper, who's on the cover of the Washington Monthly and he's signing copies of the Washington Monthly out front. And to you all, thank you for coming and really enjoyed it.