 Okay, we've got people, we have guests, we have everything we need, so let's begin. Welcome everybody, welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm really glad to see all of you here today. We have a couple of terrific guests on a very, very important topic, a lot to discuss. Okay, it's a little hot in here, so I'm gonna go back to my business casual here. For the past, oh gosh, at least three years on the Future Trends Forum, we've been examining, among other things, two crucial topics. One is the question of financing higher education, especially the United States, how we do it with a massive amount of student debt. At the same time, we've been exploring race, racism, the anti-racism, and how that shapes not just society, but higher education. Today, I'd like to connect those two streams. I'd like to have us look into what it means to be black in this country and to take out student loans. How is that experience different from the experience of students of other races? What does higher education do to make that worse? And what can we do to improve it, to reform this, and to make it better? In order to do that, we have two wonderful scholars who have just recently published a new book. If you look in the bottom left of your screen, you should see a little button that says a dream defaulted. That's the title. And let me bring each of our scholars up on stage. First of all, let me find Professor Otto and let me add her to the top of our screen. Good afternoon. Hi, good afternoon. Good to see you. I'm saying afternoon. I know you're on the road. Which time zone are you in? Oh no, I'm still on the East Coast. I'm in the, I'm not, yeah, I see, I am. It's two o'clock here. We'll have to two o'clock here. Yes. Great, great. Well, I'm so glad to see you. President Otto, we have, I'm sorry, Professor Otto, we have all these ways of introducing ourselves in the Academy. But the one that we do here is forward-looking. I'd like to ask what are you gonna be working on for the next year or so? What are the big projects? What are the big ideas for you? Yeah, so I have several new or fairly new projects that I'm working on, all kind of still related to this topic on higher education. I'm working with a team that's looking at system-wide data here in North Carolina, kind of trying to do like a demographic landscaping of their financial aid and student debt profiles. Like, you know, comprehensive data to kind of figure out what's been going on over the last few years here. I'm also still doing some work on social mobility or higher education and college degrees as a mechanism of social mobility for poor middle-class black Americans. And I'm also working on a paper more recently on how student debt might be thought of as a form of reparations and whether or not we can make that claim, so. Wow. Wow. Well, that's all amazing. I would love to see that paper whenever it gets out. Yeah, that sounds good. What a great idea. Well, welcome. And let me add your colleague to the stage as well. I don't wanna leave him completely out of everything. No, no, no, we can't leave Jason out. Now, if he's in New Hampshire, I lived in Vermont long enough to know that I don't have to be nice to anyone from New Hampshire, but let me see if I can be polite at least, you know. And let's say how that'll work. Professor Hul, welcome, welcome. Hey, how are you? Good to see you, good to see you. Here, let me actually make things a little fancier. Let me make the video a little sharper here. Professor Hul, you heard our unique method of introducing ourselves. What are you gonna be working on for the next year? Yeah, so I think like a lot of us who just lived through the last three years, I'm really interested in understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic has either exacerbated all the problems we care about as social scientists or perhaps maybe made some of them better because historically we saw, you know, direct aid to families be higher than it has been in previous recessions. And particularly given my interest in debt, more broadly than just student debt, we're really interested in how this has impacted borrowing for rich folks, for poor folks, and particularly the kind of borrowing we tend to worry about that is like really high interest loans that we think of as being predatory, like payday loans and those sorts of things. So it's really understanding the landscape of debt and inequality kind of during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. People usually say that the pandemic exacerbated economic inequality. Do you think that idea still holds up from what data you've seen? I think it does in some ways. We saw what looked like a very K-shaped recovery. So it was really working class folks and folks of color who were in service sector industries that were emergency workers. It was also these folks who were more likely to get laid off and quite frankly, folks like me who were able to keep their job and just do it remotely, even though it was mildly uncomfortable, we were pretty secure. And in fact, the upper middle class made a lot of money in the stock market boom that came after the COVID-19 pandemic and made a lot in the savings. What we also saw was kind of this grand experiment that I think a lot of progressives and liberals have been wanting to see, that is an expansion of welfare benefits. We saw the kind of the most generous unemployment benefits we've seen in decades, the most sort of the generous aid to most generous aid to children that we've seen. So child poverty, for example, was I think close to cut in half. That's just like slightly wrong during the pandemic. So there's ways in which it's sort of like a little bit of both. And so that's why it's sort of merits investigation because I don't think we have a good handle on this yet. Oh, that's a good product. Thank you. That's a good answer to like my clumsy question. And I look forward to seeing your results. Thank you very much. Friends, now that we have our two guests on stage, what I'm going to do is ask them a couple of really basic introductory questions to get things going. But then I want to get out of the way and make this space available for your questions in your comments. So as professors Ado and Hul describe their book and as you reflect on what you've read of it or read about it, and what you can do as you respond to their words, think of the questions you'd like to ask. I can promise we'll all be as kind as possible and we look forward to hearing your thoughts together. So just to begin with, in the course of your research in creating this important book, what are the main differences that you see that distinguish black student debt from everybody else's debt with student debt? How's the black student debt experience different from those of Latinos, from whites, from Hispanics, and from Asians? Should I start, Jason? Okay, I can start and then you just fill in where I miss, so what we really saw, and I think some of our earliest work speaks directly to this, was that black borrowers on average were accumulating more student debt, so they were taking out more debt, accumulating more debt, and struggling to repay it or have higher rates of loan default and delinquency. So really one of the strongest predictors of student debt was the racial categorization of the borrower. Second to that was usually the institutional sector that the student went to. So if they went to a for-profit college or so on, for example. So like I said, some of our earliest work was really quantifying that disparity, that the student debt disparity that black borrowers have. And when we compare it to other groups, whites or Latinos, it was always, the black numbers were always the highest or the most extreme. So our book really is focused on black borrowers because they had the highest and the most extreme levels. So I'll start to stop there and let Jason go from there. Yeah, so I think Fennabae did a great job sort of telling us sort of like the nitty gritty of why we focus on black borrowers in particular. It's, as a sociologist, I think of like if we wanna really, we wanna zoom in on the social situations or the situations in which there is great pain, and that is quite frankly, where we see the greatest pain. But I think I would back up also and just to kind of give a more 30,000 foot picture is that when we do better talking about the student debt crisis today than we did say five years ago. So in some ways our book's a little bit too late. But we often would hear debates about is student debt really an accumulation crisis or is it a repayment crisis? So if we look at student debt accumulation, we might see stories in the New York Times or the Chicago newspapers or what have you about like these baristas at 120K and student debt and they're struggling to repay it. But in reality that's usually not super representative of the people with high amounts of debt. People with high amounts of debt are people like, people with PhDs, people with medical degrees, people with law degrees who end up in really high paying professions where they pay it down pretty easily. And so a lot of folks have said like, we should ignore maybe the eye popping numbers of student debt. Instead they would say what we need to focus on is the fact that there's a student debt repayment crisis and these look very different such that the folks on average who have $120,000 in debt are not your baristas, they're your lawyers and doctors and they're not defaulting on their loans. They're not having a hard time paying their loans. Instead, the people who are defaulting oftentimes have small amounts of loans, $1,000, $2,000, $3,000. And they're through a negative aim organization they might end up having more debt later. And that's how it was kind of framed in the media and in even in a lot of policy debates about student debt. And I think one thing that Fennaba and I have really been trying to do is like that's almost thinking about that's basically a white lens of thinking about student debt. As you know, you're white doctors who are making a lot of money but in the reality of the case is even though the people struggling to repay their loans typically aren't, at least when you look at like white folks the same people who have high amounts of debt for black borrowers they're overrepresented in both groups. That is black borrowers have way more debt just as Fennaba said but also much more difficulty paying that debt down. And you could think about the default rates in terms of if we look at four year college graduates so these are the folks who we might say hey, these folks did everything right. They got a college degree they kind of have their meal ticket to the middle class. If you look at white folks maybe 3% are defaulting on their loans like 12 years out of college virtually nothing basically. One in five black borrowers who graduate from a four year college are defaulting on their loans even after they've gotten that. So that is this idea to college going to college and graduating and this is paying off and giving us access to financial stability and security seems to be true for white folks but in an era where we're sort of debt financing higher education it doesn't seem to be as true for black folks. Wow. Okay, well those are very, very important differences. How did this occur? What are some of the mechanisms by which this awful bias appeared in black student loans? Is it mostly due to black over representation among students and for profits or are there other factors we should consider? So there are lots of mechanisms or explanations as to what has been going on. One thing that we can certainly point to and some of them are better explained than others that I should say that one is has been the defunding of higher education at the state level. So that we see this cost shift or privatization that there's many different ways that you can refer to it where the cost of college has increasingly been was subsidized more by the state and federal government and that costs have shifted more to students and their families. And as we've seen growth in the number of people that are pursuing higher education and also growth in the racial representation or diversification by race at higher education we've seen increasingly the percent of that they've had to carry or the cost that they've had to carry pushed on to these families that just don't have the soxial economic or the economic resources to afford the cost, the world cost of college. So tuition fees, room and board, whatever all the costs, not just always tuition but also a lot of the associated costs with completing a college degree being shifted to students and families at a time and financial aid packaging is becoming less grant based or we're organizing grant based and more loan based. We can just speak to the Pell Grant which didn't keep up with inflation. So over time, which was the grant program that was supposed to increase representation of lower socioeconomic status students within higher education also taking on debt to complete their degrees. So something that was supposed to prevent them from going into debt increasingly having to turn to credit markets to make up the difference between the cost of college and what they were supposed to or are supposed to contribute as well. So all the big things, Jason did I leave anything out there? I think that's right. I would just, I mean, I know this audience is very a higher education focused audience. And so, you know, you are all really familiar with the defunding of higher education and we can pin that on Reagan or we can not, it's everyone's favorite bookie man here but, you know, the defunding of higher education really happened at a time when colleges were becoming more diverse racially on campus. And as my, our colleague, Laura Hamilton argues this diversity came without funding, right? And that's a big part of the story. And then we could get into how that's like, if anyone was saying how that financing was then shifted to families and then what that meant for a lot of black families who lacked the wealth and the socioeconomic standing and how we even think about things like wealth. And, you know, for example, white families who might tap into their home equity to help send junior to college, you know, black families historically don't have that wealth. And so wealth, which is really rooted in these historical injustices of racism in the U.S. are really, I think for us, like a big, big part of the story and for us also are reproducing racial disparities and wealth among this generation of folks. Thank you, this is, you can see friends why I didn't invite these two professors to our program. That last point, especially Professor Lule about having the reinscription and perhaps expansion of racial disparities through higher education, especially brutal and vital. I was about to exhort all of you to ask questions and I'm gonna do that. But before I can even finish saying that, we're gonna start saying that questions have piled up. So let me just start putting a little screen so you all get a chance to hear them all. And this- Sorry, can I interrupt one more? I didn't want to ignore your for-profit comment because I think of like Tressie Cotum's work as being some of the most important work on for-profits. And so for us, for-profits are part of the story but they can't explain all of it. But they are particularly predatory and particularly alarming. I would say that's where the greatest pain really is. And so I think Tressie's book remains sort of undefeated in that regard and its ability to understand this. This is the excellent book, Lower Ed, which I teach my classes and I recommend to everybody. We've also read it in our book club and I can't recommend it enough. Thank you for equating that. This is a question that we have from Charles Finlay. Oops, hang on a second. And Charles asks, I'm wondering what is the correlation between degree completion and debt accumulation and repayment? Yeah, so I'll speak for the focus of our group for Black Barrowers. So what we find is that independent of degree completion, Black Student Barrowers have significant amounts of debt. So that was a strong predictor of whether or not they had debt. So Black Barrowers, non-completers, Black Barrowers with two-year, four-year degrees and grad students. I see some comments in the chat about grad student debt as well, all being correlated with student debt accumulation. We do also know that non-completers struggle the most with repayment. So as Jason was making that distinction about the differences in the debt distribution. So there are a lot of people who are concentrated at the lower ends of the debt distribution with less than 10,000 amounts of debt. A lot of those people are among the people who don't have the college degree. So they have the debt and no degree and they struggle, when we say struggle, have history of default and delinquency and they're up and overrepresented amongst those people who are struggling the most. So it's a little bit similar to debt, but we can also, they are more likely to also be debt burdened. So the amount of debt that they have relative to their income is quite large. I'll just add like two points to that. So I think to answer the question directly sort of about broadly the correlation between degree completion and debt accumulation or repayments, we know that kind of broadly speaking, people who complete their college degree, these folks tend to accumulate more debt, which makes sense, because they're sort of going to college longer, right? They have very little trouble repaying it. Non-completers accumulate less on average, but they're much, they have a much harder time repaying it going back to that discussion that Fennaba mentioned before, like a lot of folks who are defaulting have very little loan levels and in part because they're having a hard time in the labor market finding jobs, high paying jobs. But I want to also stress that, which I think Fennaba stressed again, but I always feel like it's worth bears repeating everything, because that's, I always tell people that's 90% of my job as a professor is repeating myself. That's really not enough to explain the racial disparity. So there's been some really good work on this. And so we have a piece in the chronicle that's like basically the introduction in first chapter of our book, but essentially what the research tends to show on this is that race is actually a stronger predictor of default in college completion, like it explains as much variance in default as college completion does. And we see these massive racial disparities even among completers and non-completers. So while that might be part of the story about like risk of dropping out of college, when we think about the racial gaps in student rundown, it's certainly not all or even I think maybe Fennaba, I can say the majority of the story. Yeah, yeah. So race is a stronger predictor of student debt default than non-completion of degrees. Or it's about as, sorry, it's about as, it explains as much variance just about. They both explain around 20-ish percent of the variance. Okay, thank you, thank you. And Charles, thank you for that question. If you're new to the forum, by the way, that's an example of the text question. You can see how it works. Meanwhile, in the chat, we had a couple of really good comments from Ed Webb and Ariana Curtis about how tuition is not the entire picture of costs for students, which is very, very true and definitely worth repeating. Now that we've had text question, let's bring up the video question and I'll just have a Lynn Sibolski join us. Let's see if we can bring it up on stage and, Hello, Lynn. Hello, hello, can you hear me? Very well, thank you. It's always a win. Wild Horses could not have dragged me away from today's presentation. So thank you to the presenters for this work. It's near and dear to my heart. I just wanted to make a comment and then ask the question. My comment, I'm thinking back to my very first job in financial aid that was on the school side versus in student loan servicing and that was as the director of financial aid for a for-profit medical assistant school, predominantly black students and unbeknownst to me, it was already being shut down for Title IV violations. And I regard my year and a half of that institution as one of, if not the most pivotal extended moments in my life in terms of learning what I did not understand as a white person born and raised in coal country, Northeast Pennsylvania, 18702, coming from a place that was problematic, having moved out to New York City and saying, hey, I'm here to embrace all of the things that the world has to offer. But what that job taught me in terms of working with that student population were advantages that I took for granted, even as the child of a first in college father. My students didn't have homes. And it made a big difference in terms of, did they have a meal to eat? Did they have a place to do their homework? Did they have money for the Metro card the next day? Was a parent gonna be around to fill out their piece of the FAFSA so that they could finally get that loan money so that they could get that stipend for their transportation and so on and so forth. The issues of trauma that required professional judgment that required reaching out to other people in the community to confirm some of just the terrible experiences that some of these students went to in and out of class because they're in and out of homelessness, you know, kids bringing guns to the school. I mean, I could go on forever, but just in terms of understanding what that student population was up against, to this day, I still feel terrible about all of the student loans that I signed off on and the financial aid packages because I have so much of a better understanding of what really happened to those students, whether or not they graduated from the program and how easily they were taken advantage of because they just didn't have the background and the resources and support that even someone like me took for granted. And so my question going forward with the advent of technology now that students can take classes online, knowing that my black colleagues feel better going to work, working from home versus attending in person, what are the implications of that for this population in terms of, you know, hey, we're gonna go online shopping for some schools that are cheaper, we won't have to take out as much in student loans, but is it a fly by night thing? And is that a space, the online space given, you know, just racial tensions, is that a space that we should be focusing on or is there a real disadvantage to putting the focus on online education? Whoa. Thank you. Do you want to start or do you want to start? I mean, I have some thoughts. Jason, feel free to just jump in whenever. I guess my initial thought, I honestly thought you were gonna ask a different question so I'm recalibrating because thinking about what we know about online courses is a lot of the work that's been done on that was prior to COVID, right? So we have, you know, there's a lot of work that's in progress of like what online teaching and online environment, of course that's conflated with COVID as well as what happened, you know, the events that happened, especially in the spring and summer of 2020, with regard to a lot of the mass murders and killings of black men and women. So I think, I'm saying all that to say is that what we know about in the past, especially with regard to online degrees and even like they tended to be predatory, there was a lot of evidence that the returns to a lot of those degrees and programs were equivalent to some of the non-online programs and traditional institutional programs or how they were evaluated and seen, especially within the labor market. So I'm starting there to say that when we try to think, and I think this moment is definitely a moment where we should be thinking innovatively and thinking about what else could we do, you know, beyond what we've always done. But we also want to make sure that we're creating products and creating returns with equity and, you know, with equity focus and are ensuring that they're not recreating inequalities. And so that would be where I would go with that question. I think, and so what we saw a lot, especially like with the for-profits is these kind of predatory actors who prey on the most vulnerable, especially in particular black borrowers in particular. So a lot of like, you know, I'll give an example, like black women are overwhelmingly represented within for-profits because they meet a need, right? For women who are working, maybe women with small children, the abilities that kind of have flexible schedules, but, you know, enormous amounts of debt that these, a lot of these women accumulated by pursuing those types or by attending those types of institutions and getting degrees from those places. And then when you turn to the labor market, not being amply compensated or being questioned about the quality of those degrees. That's just one example. Thank you. That's a great answer for a powerful question. Professor Hool, did you want to weigh in? Well, I always like to say when I'm sort of outside of my wheelhouse and expertise, when it comes to online education, I'm decidedly out of my expertise. Although, you know, like the rest of us, I just spent the last two and a half years of my life learning how to do online education poorly. So I think I would just echo what Fenomba said, is it sort of depends what it looks like. I know my own institution has now kind of said, well, we can't always do stuff online. We are not accredited for this. So you see a lot of institutions kind of backing off for this on, from this online focus. But I think it really depends with these, what a lot of quote unquote non-profit institutions do with this new kind of like online technology they have. Do they turn like a part of their campus into something that looks very much like a for-profit university? Or do they use that new online technology and online infrastructure to actually give us education that is more affordable and can be accessed more easily? I'm a little bit pessimistic as to what the answer to that question is. It's probably more the former than the latter. But I think it really depends on where we go in the next five to 10 years, I would guess. Well, Lynn, thank you so much for that question. Did you want to say more to build on that or? Oh no, I'm good. I'm ready to sit back and listen now. Well, I think you're fantastic. So thank you. Thank you. Again, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a video question, as you might have guessed. So please, if you'd like to follow Lynn and joining us on stage, just click the raise hand button. Or if you'd like to follow Charles and ask a test question, just type in that Q&A box and fill her up. We've got more and more questions coming. And by the way, thank you, Jason and Finabo. Those are terrific, terrific answers. And if I could, much as I like to make fun of Dartmouth in New Hampshire, Dartmouth has long been a leader in digital technology. Dartmouth Congress is where the term artificial intelligence came from. There's a lot of great stuff there, a lot of great people. But let me get out of the way and bring up some questions. We have a detailed question, a sociological question from our wonderful friend, Roxanne Risken, who asks, I find that family members like parents and grandparents often take on student debt for family members. What are your findings and views in this area? I guess I'll just say the findings are everything we talk about in our book is racial disparities being massive, multiply that by some other huge factor. And that's what we're talking about with parents and grandparent borrowing. So plus loans have really taken off in the last 10, 15 years. And you see a huge proportion and growing proportion of plus loans that are now in the six-figure territory. So we're seeing this a lot, like we talked to a lot of folks who we talked to for this book, who were like, yeah, my parents and my grandparents took on some loans for me to the key of like, this student may have taken on 30, 40 grand. Their parents were in it for 70, 80, 90 grand. Not being any loan limits for plus loans. That's a big deal. It's also why this loan forgiveness package, even though plus loans might be eligible, isn't gonna do as much to move the needle there. We don't have as much data on plus loans, but I would say, I would venture a guess that the racial disparities we have that Fenneba and I are observing in our work and that others are observing too are much, much, much bigger for plus loans. Wow. And I'll just add that we actually spent some time in the book. I think it's chapter three, chapter two and chapter three, like when we go into the background of a lot of the people that we spoke with and talking about the background of how, that like, essentially what we kind of think of as a accumulation piece, the story is not a story of individuals. It's a story of families. Of families wanting to figure out a way to make college happen for their children. And so we've had lots of, in the course of writing the book, we had lots of different terms. One was all hands on deck. I think that was one of the things we floated and just thinking about how, and in hearing from our respondents, how it really became making a way out of no way to make this happen. And even when they tried, a lot of, and oftentimes a lot of times when our respondents tried to avoid taking on loans, it became increasingly difficult one not to avoid them. And then parents taking on the loan to try to prevent their children from going into excessive debt as well. So I'm gonna make a plug for the book, if you wanna, you know, that we really built this family, the ideas of how families worked together to try to make college happen for their children. Yeah, the only thing I'd add here to build on what Fennaba would say is that like it's partially a story about what parents and grandparents or families are doing to get their children to college or their family members to college. But once there, a lot of these young people in college are then taking on debt and maybe getting a refund check or working and then sending money back home to help their parents who are now cash strapped because why? Because they've taken on all this debt to send them to college. And so there really is this feedback. It's not just flowing from grandparents and parents to children, but it works the other way as well. Roxanne, thank you for that great question and thank you both for this answer. This is a story not of individuals, but of families. Wow, this is huge. We have more questions coming in and I wanna make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask. We have two kind of information or clarification questions from our good friend, Glenn McGee. First, this is a question for you, Professor Hull. Can you share the five by five mobility matrix that you use? How does it compare across races? I guess I don't think I have a five by five. I guess I'm having a hard time understanding the question. I used to do kind of traditional social mobility work way back in the day in grad school that doesn't really factor into this research. Mobility tables are a bit old school, but it's for lack of a better term, that sort of my former self did a lot of sort of traditional social mobility contingency table analysis. But I don't think that really comes up in this book in particular. Okay, thank you. And he also follows up with a quick question. Are you tying this work with Viviana Zelzer's work with Black Dead? And Viviana Zelzer is new to me, so I don't. She's a sociologist, I believe at Princeton, or she's been there for quite some time. Does a lot of work about the value of money or about the trends and values within society. So she's a economic sociologist, if I'm correct. I would say we probably engaged some of our ideas, but really we think about, we're also tying work by like Louie Simster as well, who has made some distinctions between Black Wealth and Black Dead and White Zet as well. There's lots of, you know, one of the great things about being in this space is that not only has it grown quite a bit over the last few years, but a lot of new ideas incorporating a lot of new ways of thinking about the rule of debt within our society and especially the racialization of this debt, which Louie's Black Dead, White Dead work is really speaks to how white, especially wealthier people have been able to use debt to make more, to become wealthier and how debt for Black families has been a way to kind of position them lower at the lower ends of the wealth distribution. So just becoming something that keeps them impoverished and indebted. So I think that's slightly different than thinking about the way that Zelizer has thought about these. But I know, Jason, I know I'm kind of thinking also maybe a little bit about the work on like relational debt. Is that so? Yeah. I think of Zelizer's work as very much being like squarely in the social meaning of money and sort of thinking about these things as relational processes, which is a super valuable way to think about it. And we actually do have some of this in our book because there's, oh God, I'm blanking on their names and I feel terrible about it. But there's some folks who've done work on debt among law students that talk about like sort of the relational work that it creates. Berman? I mean, Berman, he's like, Berman. Yeah, it was the thought Berman. And the first author on that paper, I am blanking on their name and I feel horrible about it. But we do have a little bit of that in the book. It's sort of like, these are some of the burdens that debt creates as it causes all the political work. Abby Stivers, yes. But I would say if you want someone who's really taking Zelizer's ideas and applying them to debt in like the most interesting way since that's sort of not our background, check out Frederick Weary's work, also a professor at Princeton. He's very much kind of in that Zelizerian sort of world, if you will. Yeah. I just shared a link to, let's see, Black Debt, White Debt Seamster? Louise Seamster, is that it? Yeah, that's correct. Okay, so there's a link to one article by her in the chat. And that's Frederick Weary at Sociology. Thank you. I'm just nodding at the, I'm sorry, I'm reading the chat and nodding, so people will think that I, what is she doing? I'm just following along the chat. I'm glad you do. The chat is really, really active. And Glenn has an incredibly broad knowledge of sociology literature going back a ways. We also have more questions coming in. And here's one from our friend, Tom Ames, who asks a question about institutional types. Why are more of these families leveraging community colleges and more cost-effective options? Is the lack of institutional flexibility to meet their needs? Do you wanna, I don't know, Jason, are you gonna? I mean, I guess I can start, like, you know, I think we could think of part of this story, like, it might be tempting to think of the story of sort of like an educational mismatch story, like people are kind of making the bad, like, long decisions about where to go to college. And I just, I haven't found like an explanation there that seems like to hold water in the data to me. Again, when we look at racial disparities, we see them at community colleges, at for-profits, at for years, even at places like Dartmouth. I'd hate to say it. So we're seeing these everywhere. And one thing that we kind of, you know, we're quantitative researchers, so we're always crunching the numbers and all that stuff. And one thing that this book kind of opened our eyes about when we sat down and like, you know, talked to a lot of borrowers is people agonized over what the right decision to make was, where should I go to school? That is a lot of people were staying in state and maybe starting in a community college or starting at a place where they could stay at home and save a little money. And, you know, they blame themselves at the end for making the wrong decision, when in reality, we really see these disparities kind of regardless of where people are going. So from our sort of more broader perspective, it's the sort of individual choice question. It's one that is hard for me to sort of think of as like as an answer to this is sort of, maybe if people just made better decisions, there wouldn't be these racial disparities. And I think that's sort of the central thesis of our book is that's not the case, I think is how I would think about it. Okay, thank you. And thank you Tom for the good question. And friends, we are coming up to the last quarter of the hour. So I wanna make sure if you have any thoughts, any comments, this is the time to really get them in. We have a comment from Jordan Davis, who is a wonderful person among other things, a great student at Georgetown where I teach. And I'm just gonna bring this up from the chat box. He says, the thing is that a lot of black students who attend community college don't have finishing. So choosing those cheaper options doesn't really help the issue because cheaper options are not necessarily better options per se. So thank you. Better than I put it. And then there's an exchange between Lisa and David. Lisa there for David wrong. Lisa asks, shouldn't the first of the list I think be what I want to be in life? And David's response is yes, and will it provide a family sustaining wage? So as usual, the foreign community is bouncing ideas around very, very quickly and from a wide range of perspectives and domains. We have a question that came early on, and I think this is a good time to bring it up. This is from John Hollenbeck up in Wisconsin. And John asks, flat out, isn't debt the new slavery? Especially those who borrow would do not get a degree. What is the set of it do they have for fixing this? I think John can correct me, but the quotes around they means the institution or a site in general, not the students. I'll put that back up. It's a good question though, so you can say it. Thanks John. I mean, I don't think that that's very far off from ways that we'd have seen debt kind of, like I keep saying the word position, but kept to black Americans at the lower ends of the socioeconomic distribution across generations, right? We have slavery, we have sharecropping, which is like that pianist, I mean, just it's inequality in new forms, right? And so Jason and I call student loans at a new stratifier because it is concentrated among recent cohorts of young adults, but what is it really doing? It's recreating economic inequality within our society that positions black families at the lower ends of the wealth and income distribution as well. What we're seeing, as we're seeing today, I was gonna say something else, but I think, yeah, I'll pause there for now if Jason wants to add something. I would just add that like that's not an invalid argument in the social sciences and thinking about debt right now. And if you kind of wanna see that argument taken to its logical conclusion, I would really recommend this great book by my colleagues, Kevin Light and Scott Fitzgerald. If there's two different versions of the book, one is called Middle Class Meltdown, but the one that actually gets your question in the first edition of that book actually has a different title and it's called Post-Industrial Peasants. Basically saying like sort of like working class and middle class folks who are saddled with debt are not unlike peasants or serfs who were tied to the land in sort of feudal times. That's their argument and I would say if you wanna see that argument taken to its logical conclusion, it's a really wonderful thought provoking book. I don't know that I'm brave enough to call that the new slavery personally, but I think if you wanna see that argument, they do an excellent job, kind of enumerating sort of the logic behind it and the evidence for it. Well, thank you. Those are two great titles, by the way. Middle Class Meltdown, Post-Industrial Peasants. I put a link to Goodreads on that. Poor fellow's real name is Scott Fitzgerald. Oh man. I hope I didn't get his first name wrong and it just came up because I was thinking it is Scott, it is Scott. And there's also, in the chat, we had a link to one of my favorite recent books, David Graber, The Late David Graber's book on debt. We seem to have quite a bibliography coming out of this. But we also have a great video question. I mentioned Jordan Davis and now it's his time for the spotlight. So let me bring him up on stage. Hello, Jordan. Hey, Brian. Hey, Professor Ado and Professor Huul. Good to see you all. Thank you so much for joining today. And I'm really glad to be a part of this conversation I've read. I wrote a paper for one of my classes last year about this exact subject. So I'm really engaged. And the question that I have is actually about making college more affordable and potentially making college free in the US. Is that a conversation that, like how close are we to that conversation being proliferated on a national level? Like who is talking, is anybody talking about that? And, you know, there's a lot of things that would be complicated by that. But I'm just curious, are there any organizations, politicians talking about, you know, making college more affordable and potentially free in the future? Absolutely. There are lots of conversations. I'll say more or so at the state level, state, if we're looking at public institutions, it's very highly state dependent on where you are and whether or not your state is doing more innovative things with higher education if they're offering these, let's say, we've seen a proliferation of these promise packages, which are non-merit financial aid based kind of programs as opposed to merit based aid programs that are, we have Michigan, Tennessee, I mean, there's just everywhere. Even North Carolina has one, Wisconsin had one while I was there as well. So, and though these are all programs that are meant to make it more affordable for low income families to send their children through these institutions. I'll also say that, you know, what we also find is that some of the most innovative financial aid is happening at private institutions. So, or when I say innovative, I mean places where students can go and kind of low income students can go and leave without a lot of debt or with no debt. The problem is, is that as they become more innovative in their financial aid packages, they haven't really increased the number of students that they're admitting, right? So, these are the highly selective institutions that we can think of the IVs are, you know, small selective arts colleges as well. So, if you are lucky enough or, you know, are able to get into one of these institutions and you're low income, it is highly likely that you may be able to leave with reduced debt or a little to no debt. That being said, like Jason has said earlier, you know, there's still a high correlation between still going to these institutions and having debt, but that's really where we see kind of more of the innovative financial affordability programs happening, except they're not open to all students, you know, that you have to get in. Yeah, going to a school where the huge endowment makes a difference and they have the money to kind of be experimental as Venoba said. I think, you know, if you told me 10 years ago that debt forgiveness would be a central platform of the Democratic Party, I would have told you you were nuts. If you said about that $10,000, I'd be like, I'll take that bet, whatever. And then now it is, and I think we're seeing free college, just as Venoba said, we're seeing it at the state level and the state level, the devil's in the details, like, is it first dollar, is it last dollar? Some ways of doing these free college programs seem to work better than others. We talk about this a lot in the conclusion of our book, but on the national sort of level, we are seeing it. So I think it was when Bernie Sanders was running in 2020, that was part of his platform, forgive me, but I don't remember if this was part of Elizabeth Warren's platform or not. If you wanna kind of read like sort of a techy, wonky policy brief on like, how would we make this work given how we fund higher education? That is, how could we make college free or the first two years of college free, you know, without spending more money? Cause that's always, you know, a non-starter at the federal level, right? There's a really great white paper by Sarah Goldberg-Rabb and Nancy Kendall called FC2O, which that was really the paper that launched. I mean, I think it was that paper and everything that came after it that sort of became Bernie's platform here. So I think this is becoming part of a national conversation. And again, 10 years from now, maybe this is looking very different just like debt forgiveness. And not to switch the subject too much, but if we are starting to talk about debt forgiveness as this, and I would say important downstream solution to the student debt crisis, we better be looking at upstream solutions like affordable or free college. Cause if not, we're gonna find ourselves right back to where we started five or 10 years from now, even after this forgiveness is up. Yeah, exactly. I couldn't agree more. I was just about to echo the last, the very last sentiment you just made and you made it for me. So thank you so much. I saw somebody in the chat too, talk about credentialing inflation and like how credentialism would increase as a result of more people going to college. And I think that's a whole another part of the conversation that deserves unpacking, but I'll let someone else ask their questions to share the spotlight. So thank you so much for answering the conversation. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you. Great question and a great answer. We have a bunch of comments are just coming up and down the chat right now. So I can save that. And if people in the chat don't mind, I can post it to my blog along with a recording. So if you're chatting right now, if you don't want me to post this, please let me know. I can also anonymize it and just remove your names. So just let me know in the chat. We have all kinds of questions to bring up and we're starting to run low on time. So I wanna make sure that we get to the ones that have come in earlier. John Hollenbeck asks, he returns to his first question and he wants to press on this a little further. Who would free tuition? I'm sorry, who would free college benefit? I doubt it's quote them, quote. So that's a good question. I guess that's another way of saying, what are the politics of this? How could that work? Yeah, I mean, my understanding of most free college programs and even the federal, what's going on at the federal level, it's a proposal to make the first two years of college free at the public level. So this wouldn't affect the Dartmouths of the world. This wouldn't affect the Stanford's of the world, the Dukes of the world. So I suspect that a lot of people would not necessarily, a lot of wealthier folks wouldn't necessarily take advantage of it, which could also be why we see political blowback to this in the same way we're seeing political blowback for debt forgiveness. So in fact, one of the Republican challenges to the new debt forgiveness law is basically, and I think it came out of Wisconsin actually, is that this disproportionately benefits black folks and therefore it's racially motivated and therefore this should be struck down. All these legal challenges and they're all trying to prove that they've injured their defendant in some way because they have to do that. But I suspect we would probably have these same conversations because these are the conversations we've had for a hundred years over any social program that might benefit anyone in society. That is, yeah. We, years ago, we hosted Chris Newfield on the forum who's done several great books on the defunding of public universities. And he makes the case that the defunding started in California in the 60s and 70s, specifically in response to the growing diversity of the student body. We have, I'll leave it another way. Another question asked, we've been talking about that, the Biden forgiveness plan. I'm wondering if we could hypothetically make a scenario where if the debt forgiveness plan succeeds, it survives legal challenges, it survives logistical hunts and all, it manages to progress, say five years out, how does that impact the student debt situation overall? Do you think the student debt bubble reinflates? Do you think this will adjust the preponderance of debt that black students disproportionately have? I mean, how might that play out, do you think? I guess that means starting from where Jason kind of just left off, you know, if we just think of downstream instead of fixing the upstream, such as in particular the accumulation part, then we could very much see us back in the same place where we are today, you know, in particular thinking about how, well, I'll say, what hasn't changed is the need or an entirely in the credentialing discussion for a college degree in order to achieve some form of financial or economic security within our society, right? So it's not clear to me that people are changing their risk profile as a result of the student debt cancellation because not having the college degree is, it makes it hard just in the market. So I'll just say that there. I also, yeah, so we really need to think about, at least multiple places that need reform and in particular the accumulation of the affordability piece. I'll also say that, you know, I'm a part of the camp that while the plan was a great start, it was definitely not an end, right? And so there were a lot of, in particular, black borrowers who were not going to be able to meet or were not going to fit the criteria, right? So they may have, because of their income, they may not qualify for debt forgiveness. You know, they may have over $150,000 and so forth will not be receiving any relief, but they don't have the wealth profiles, right? Or they're still struggling with or paying massive amounts of debt. And so thinking about, you know, who, you know, this, it's going to help a lot of people, but not all the borrowers. And I really would like to see more done for the people who are still having lots of outstanding debt and just don't have the economic profile to improve and pay off that massive amounts of debt that they hold. Thank you. Then I would add, I guess a couple more things is because I just want to, again, this is sort of plugging what we say in the last chapter of the book, but I just also wanted to point out, if you're interested in sort of a more wonky back of the envelope, how much debt forgiveness would we need to kind of like eliminate racial disparities and debt? Two papers I really like by Charlie Eden, Adam Goldstein and Laura Hamilton. That was basically a paper that informed some of Elizabeth Warren's stuff, as well as Tom Shapiro, Louise Sam, Simeester and Raphael, Chiron Chenier, both kind of show that these sort of smaller debt forgiveness things like 10, $20,000, which is what we got, are going to move the needle, but not as much as 50,000 or full forgiveness in part because black borrowers have these huge balances, right? So that's part of it. So this is going to make a dent. It's not going to be a silver bullet. The second thing is like what you said, like what happens five years from now? Like sort of what Feneva said, I'm probably, I'm kind of a glass half empty guy because I'm a sociologist. So by definition, I sort of am pessimistic, but I'd worry about where we will be from for five or 10 years from now. My colleague, Charlie Eden has a really good piece in the AAUP newsletter this week in Akadim today, I think it's called, where he basically argues what this could do and he takes a real graver style argument for those of you who like graver, that this could be the start of a virtuous cycle where we're going to see repeat debt jubilee sort of like we did in the middle ages. I like, I love Charlie and I hope he's right, but I'm not as optimistic about that, but that is one way we could continue to be out of this is, and we're good at that as Americans is to keep fixing downstream problems without addressing the root causes. So I guess that's a possibility as well and some people think it really is. Well, thank you. Well, thank you both of you. We are at the end of our hour. We actually overshadowed it because we have so much to talk about. Thank you both for offering such a fantastic masterclass in this topic. I'm just in awe of how much knowledge you've, not just accumulated and shared, but shared so elegantly and so passionately. Thank you both. What's the best way to keep up with both of you? I mean, I'm fascinated, Professor Otto, about your paper on student deserperation, for example. How do we keep up with all of you? You can find me. I think I'm the only phenobioto out there, so you just Google my name, but I'm here at UNC Chapel Hill on most days. You can find me in the classroom or in my office around UNC. Sounds good. You can see me at jnhool.org. That's my website, and also there's not many Jason Hools out there, so I'm pretty easy to follow on Google Scholar. Because phenobion I've been writing about student debt for well over a decade now, and we're very kind of happy to see people caring about it a lot more than when we started this work, when we were grad students, when people seemed less interested in talking about it. And I'm one of those people who quit Twitter in the pandemic, so you can't find me there. Well, I'll have to find you where we can. Thank you both. And this is important work, because we really look forward to where this goes next. But I have to wrap things up, but thank you again. Thank you both. Dear friends, don't leave yet. We have just information on what's happening next. We have coming up over the next few weeks. We have a whole series of sessions. If you want to keep talking about student debt and the racial dimension of this, please on Twitter, if you still are on Twitter, you can ask TTE as a hashtag. You can follow me, Brian Alexander, or at Shindig events, or you can go to my blog, BrianAlexander.org. If you'd like to look ahead a bit, or if you'd like to look into the past rather, to our previous sessions on debt, as well as into race and racism, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTFarchive. You can see all of our sessions there. Looking ahead, we have more topics coming up, including free speech, redesigning universities, campuses of local inequality, and the impact of COVID in the higher ed. Just go to forum, thatfutureofeducation.us, if you'd like to see those. And if you want to share any of your own work, just email me. I'd be glad to share that with everybody else. Now, thank you again. You all asked terrific questions. It's been wonderful talking with you. Thank you all for all of your work. As the fall semester goes on, please work hard, be safe, and take care. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.