 All right, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, I'm your host, I'm your catherter, and I'm your guide to the next hour of conversation about the future of higher education. This brings together two very, very important developments that we've been working with. Over the past few years, we've talked about how income and wealth inequality has been rising in the United States and other nations. At the same time, we've been talking about how higher education has been producing more and more students. Gary Roth has written about these two problems, by bringing them together into a powerful, powerful book which I cannot recommend enough. The Educated Underclass, very short, incredibly accessible, ruthlessly researched, makes the argument that higher education is producing some pretty lousy outcomes for a disturbing number of people. If you haven't had a chance to read it, you should have a button on the bottom left of your screen. You can click that and be taken to the Pluto Press page for it so you can buy one right away. We're gonna be talking about this today. Gary is, among other things, an emeritus professor, former vice chancellor for academic programs and policies, and deaning in the graduate school at Rutgers University. He is, as well, a very, very humane, very direct, and I think a very, very powerful thought leader in this field. I would love to introduce you and get a sense of where he is headed in this program. Hang on one second. I'm having a browser glitch that I'm trying to solve, and I'll bring Gary up as soon as I get this fixed up. In the meantime, take to the chat box, make sure you've introduced yourself, and see about thinking about questions you'd like to ask Gary, ways of accidentally closing off the entire session. Sorry about that. Let me bring Professor Ross back up on stage. Hello. Hi, Brian. It's really good to see you, Gary. Yes, you too. Thank you so much for this invitation. Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. Your book is, as I said, very, very important. We have a lot to discuss, and I'd like to begin by asking you to introduce yourself by answering an unusual question, which is, what are you gonna be working on for the next year? What are the big projects and topics that are uppermost in your schedule and on your mind? Yeah, so I've stopped by your call on A1A. I'm hearing an echo, I don't know if that's from my end. You don't hear the echo? No, there's a little bit of background noise on your side, but it's okay. We can hear you. Oh yeah, okay, fine. Oh, it seems to have disappeared, so good. So anyway, I've started on a new writing project that picks up on themes that I started to develop in educated on the class. And so this relationship between social mobility and higher education is one that continues to interest me. And I kind of stumbled across this information about college graduates. Graduates of four-year colleges who wind up in jobs for which you don't need a college education. And this data is produced by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank. And they put together a fair amount of very useful information. But when I first came across their data, I mean, I'd always wondered, I spent most of my career as an administrator in higher ed and then the last decade, excuse me, turned to teaching. And I would teach occasionally along the way as well. And I always wondered what happened to students after they graduated. Because you would hear from students periodically, you might need a letter of reference for graduate school or for work. But otherwise, the bulk of students just kind of disappeared afterwards. And so when I ran into and uncovered this data from the Federal Reserve economists, it really kind of put into context some of what I had suspected anyway. So I want to pick up on that theme and the new work is tentatively titled, Access and Exclusion, College, Class and Social Mobility. And so situation, on the one hand, we have about one third of all college graduates. So, excuse me again, college graduates between, all college graduates between the ages of 22 and 65 wind up in jobs for which you do not need a college education. And it's just the number of graduates in that category is kind of staggering. And so I think it prompts then a rethinking of the value and the purpose of college education, how we think about the relationship between education and social mobility, and especially in terms of upward mobility. And college education in terms of upward mobility was until really the post-World War II era, no one spoke about upward mobility in terms of education. I mean, the purpose of higher education from really when the university and college system really kind of gets going in the late 1800s, right up until the post-World War II period, its function more or less was to provide lateral mobility for portions of the middle and upper middle and upper class. So it was a way in which families could more or less guarantee that their children would continue to live the kinds of lifestyles and have the type of status that they had grown up with. But starting in really the late 40s and then through the 1950s and 60s, higher education community expands greatly, much faster than population. So a bigger proportion of the population goes to college and for the first time, large numbers of students from working class backgrounds enter the university system, right? So really the first generation students is a phenomena really of the 50s and 60s. And this kind of socioeconomic reshuffling of social class, it's also accompanied at that time of big discussions of whether social classes are disappearing, of whether it's just one big middle class with pockets of the very wealthy and pockets of the very poor on either end, but more or less this universal middle class. And then, so and higher education does this by expanding enrollments. And then in the 1970s, it turns its attention as well to underrepresented minorities, African-Americans and Latinx students in particular. And so the multicultural agenda is added to its kind of socioeconomic agenda in terms of economic uplift. And then in the 90s, immigrants and the children of immigrants are included. So in this immediate last 70 years or so, we see this on the one hand, this very rapid transformation of society itself in terms of the social fabric and the role that higher ed plays in terms of educating groups that had educated before, but now also new groups as well. And so a very progressive social mission, but that at the same time it runs into economic barriers which undercut the level of success that it might have had otherwise. What are those economic barriers? The most job or a good portion of job creation these days happens at the very low end. The three biggest areas for job growth projected over the next 10 years are home care and personal aids, restaurant employees and hospitality and leisure employees. And those are the three biggest growth areas in terms of numbers of employees, all of which pay less than what's been accepted as the living wage of $15 an hour. And many of those positions besides a part time end without benefits. So there's a tremendous growth of kind of low wage work. And at the other end a lot of the work that's many of the positions that are developing are very high end in terms of technical computer scales or healthcare scales. But the high end and oftentimes involved not just a bachelor's degree, but a training in either sciences or in mathematics or in the technical fields of computerization and also a graduate degree. So we have a stratification happening both in society and also within higher education and higher education is making that stratification happen. Yes, and I think it's part of what I attempted to do an educated underclass was situate higher ed within those larger economic forces. It's higher ed isn't free to just decide on its own what it wants to do and what directions it plans to go in. And in fact, a lot of the enrollment growth was propelled because beginning in the 1970s when there was a major kind of economic meltdown and also reshuffling of the global economy, government support for education started to fall away. And it's been very erratic since that time and institutions of higher education have had to depend on themselves more and more. And so enrollment growth was one of the ways that they could compensate for the lack of government funding. And buying large enrollment growth is very easy to do because if you have, for instance, if you have planned a class already, you've already paid, counted for the instructor's salary, you have a classroom. And so then admitting additional students to that class is really just marginal costs. Yes, there's some more processing in terms of the registrar's functions and a bit more advising that needs to be done to get students into classes and so on. But it was a very kind of, yeah. And enrollment growth allowed higher education to accommodate all groups. It did not have to, for instance, reduce the number of white students coming into the university system in order to admit students from other backgrounds. It expanded so rapidly that all students, in a sense, could find a place within higher education. And so it was really, growth makes that kind of diversification process simple on that level. I mean, there are other issues that then come to bear. But in terms of a strategy which, you know, one universities and colleges had to follow in terms of raising revenues, but a strategy that simultaneously allowed it to have a very ambitious social mission and a very progressive one, it was really, in a sense, ideal circumstances. Let me pause just for one second. Just, first of all, I'll give you a chance to catch your breath and get some water. Also, I wanted to make sure I welcome a few people who've come in lately, but also just to say, again, this is the Future Transform. We have our guest, Gary Roth. And I want to do a shout out to my friend, Don Charlis, who introduced me to Gary's work. Hi, Don. If you'd like to check out Don's own work, he runs the Higher Education Inquirer on blogspot.com. And I'll share that in the chat box. Don does really, really great work, passionate advocate, and I just wanted to give him a shout out right now. Also, if you're new to the forum or if you haven't been with us for a while, we've had programs that cover some of these topics in the past, including two sessions with Chris Newfield, who is the leading scholar of how state governments have defunded public higher education. Again, if you're new to the forum, now the floor is yours. If you have questions you would like to ask, please just use either the Q&A box to type them in so I can flash them on the screen or click the raise hand button to join us on the stage. I promise Gary and I are very nice and we're happy to have you on the side as well. And as I say this, there are already some questions and I want to share one of them from someone who's logged in under the pseudonym Overeducated. And she says, because I know who it is, is the only mission of institutions of higher education to prepare a future workforce. Well, no, I don't believe it is. And particularly if you're working in the humanities, most certainly it's not, you know, the kind of the idea that higher ed would prepare students for any kind of profession as you know, gives prompts quite a bit of discussion. But I think from student's point of view, yes, there's a, and family's point of view, there's a direct connection between education and the future. And the future means that you must, I mean, everyone basically, unless you're extremely wealthy or really very, very poor, everyone must work. And by and large, everyone does work unless they can find some alternate way of supporting themselves. So I don't think you can get around the issue of work. And, you know, and it's, you know, no matter what a student's major is, I think that issue of what they'll do after graduation always hangs over them. I got in an interesting Twitter fight with a much older professor who told me that I was overestimating the economic value. And I pointed out just the enormous costs of higher education right now. And he wasn't interested in that. We have questions that have come in all over the place, including from Charles Finley. So let me just flash this on the screen so you all can see it. And Charles asks, is the growth in new outreach for the survival institution to the detriment of newer groups of students who will not get jobs? Yes, I mean, that seems to be the irony of the situation. I mean, I mean, underemployment is a phenomena that isn't widely discussed in higher education. There's a, you know, a handful of academic studies that you can turn to to get information about the underemployed. But by and large, the interest has been in students up until the point that they graduate. So there's been lots of research in terms of the recruitment of college students and making sure that, you know, the entering classes are representative of the population as a whole. And then kind of quickly following that interest in the higher ed community was an interest in retention, given kind of historically low retention rates as you go down kind of the, you know, if you rank institutions of higher ed in terms of the socioeconomic background of the students that they attract, you know, graduation retention and graduation rates tend to get lower and lower, the kind of less wealthy that the student body is. And there's also then gender dimensions in terms of majors that students choose. And then there's the racial and ethnic and, you know, statuses of students as well. And so there's been lots and lots of focus on what happens to students while they're in college, how to retain them and how to make sure that they graduate. But kind of once you get to graduation and they leave the door, there's not much information about students. So one of the value of what the Federal Reserve economists has done is that they've taken a very good look at some of the relevant information. You rely heavily on that data, which is crucial data. That's really, really important to say. Thank you for that great answer, Gary. And Charles at Northeastern, thank you for a typically penetrating question. We have more questions coming in. And I wanna make sure we get a chance to for everyone to weigh in. This is from Gretchen Haskell, the University of Missouri, who asks, what experiences with students led you to research the overeducated underclass? Well, what really did it for me was that I began to teach an internship class for students. This is in the Department of Sociology or Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark. And some of the class, we only met once every other week and then otherwise students were placed into internships non-paying, for the most part, non-paying internships, so volunteer work, but a chance for them to take a look, mostly in social service agencies is where they wound up. And so we would spend the time together reading about the future of the economy, particularly in terms of technology and automation and what was coming down the road. But also we'd spend a lot of time talking about their experiences at their internships. And I was kind of taken aback by one, how little students understood about how to work, how to conduct themselves in a workplace, how to deal with situations at work. And then also, as they got, we spent a certain amount of time then trying to get them ready for applying for jobs, kind of how lost they were in that process of where to apply and how to apply. And so increasingly, I did this course for a few years, I re-oriented the course more towards practical skills just because it made me uncomfortable that they were as unprepared as they were. And this is at a time where there's a very good very understaffed career development center, which was increasingly offering services online. And that's, so it meant it was offering more things to students, but at the same time, the impersonality of it meant that students did not know fully how to take advantage of the situation and how really to kind of orient themselves. I mean, I think it's a lot about kind of internet experience in which you can just be overwhelmed by the amount, by the number of possibilities there. And so yes, so when I came across this data then about the underemployed, it clicked then also with what I was seeing in the classroom with students. Thank you for that deep answer. I love how your integration of research and your experience with students. Also, if you get a chance, everybody, the first introduction to this book offers an autobiographical introduction as well, which is really important. Thank you, Gretchen, for the question. That's a very good question. Indeed, indeed. We have a macro question from Chris Delarocas at Boston University, he's an associate provost. And Chris asks, one often hears that a society with more educated people is going to somehow generate more jobs requiring educated folks. Are there any examples of this happening anywhere in the world? Yes, that idea comes from supply side economics, yes. Oh, yes. It goes back to JB, the economist JB say in the late 1700s that supply will create its own demand. No, I think you're perfectly right. There's not any or not many examples of that happening. I will say though, what seems to be is that there are many employers who have job openings for positions which do not require a college education, but who will prefer to hire a college graduate anyway and will also pay that college graduate thousands more than they would pay a non-graduate even though they could hire a non-graduate for the job. So there's an employer preference and one person explained, the employer preference comes from the fact that the overwhelming majority of employers are themselves college educated. No, whether that's the reason or not, I mean, employers I think value a college education because it means that these future employees have spent more time in a classroom. They've had to be self reliant, self disciplined. They've learned how to work in teams. They've learned how to remove their ego from kind of business decisions and they can work on their own. They can read instructions and follow instructions. They know how to ask questions, that they don't necessarily see asking questions as a reflection on their own ability to work and so on the college environment. So they've had years of practice at these kinds of skills and it then makes them attractive as potential employees. This is a, first of all, I just have to say, Chris, that's a beautifully phrased question. And I think Gary, your work in macroeconomic history really plays out here, where this is, why this is a historic mistake. Let me see if I can beam another questioner up on the stage. Let's see if Judith can join us. Judith. Hello. Hello, I'm planning to listen, not talk. This is a wonderful talk. It's great to see you. It's great to see you. It's good to see you too. Gary, I just wanted to know if you have any data that you could speak to you about the shift from employers expecting to train their own staff to employers expecting higher education to train their staff. Because my question was to the point of my own mother who had a master's education really was onboarded at Wang at a point in her career when Wang expected to be able to do that and not fuel the rest of her career. My impression is that employers now don't want to do any onboarding, any training, any staff development. And I don't know if you have any data about that. I don't know that data. And I think it's a mixed bag in terms of employers. So certain areas, you're expected to have particular kinds of skills. For instance, if you're in a technical area, there's a whole level of technical skill that you can learn in school and employers expect that. In terms of if you're in manufacturing though, the manufacturing processes oftentimes are so specific that you must be trained on the job. So you can have the general skills in terms of the work being done. And with so-called white collar work, then there's a kind of a generic set of skills that one brings with you in terms of communication and teamwork and decision-making and so on. And again, those are things that educational institutions are expected to provide students with. So, and how that works out then in terms of the workforce, I think is very hard to determine periods in which employers squawk that college graduates aren't prepared and there's other periods in which don't prepare them too much because we'll train them once they get here. So, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I'm interested to see how your research in that area develops. I attended an interesting panel in Washington, DC some years back when manufacturing companies were complaining that our higher education, especially community colleges, were not graduating the types of people that they wanted to just go into their jobs with their own certification. So I think there's a lot of pressure there. Yes, and I think that situation over the last couple of decades has changed quite a bit too because at one point, the business world and parts of the political world were both criticizing higher ed for not teaching relevant skills for the workforce. And so part of what happened within higher ed was this kind of reshuffling of programmatic offerings. And so whenever there's kind of a perceived need for graduates in a particular area, higher ed institutions tend to be very nimble these days in terms of creating programs, both on undergraduate and even more so on the graduate level that cater to employer needs. So the gaps between kind of business needs and educational training has narrowed because institutions heard that criticism and then became much more versatile in terms of responding to those needs. Great answer. Judith, great question. Thank you so much. If you're new to the forum, that's an example of video question. You can see how easy it is to do. Just let me know by pressing that raised hand button if you'd like to join us on stage. We had a quick observation I just wanted to share from Joseph Robert Shaw in the chat. He mentions that Huntsville, Alabama is in the middle of such an economic swing, much like Silicon Valley and Seattle went through in the 80s and 90s respectively, thanks to the military industrial complex and of course the new interest in space. Good point, Joseph. Thank you for sharing that. We also have a question from Don Charlis and I want to make sure that he gets his question because I'm very grateful to him. And this has to do with employers from another side. What do you think about gainful employment rules for college programs? Obama had those regulations for for-profit colleges. Yeah, and first let me say, I am also a big fan of Doran's writing and follow his blog. And so very pleased that he's joined us and is posing this question. If I can, I'd like to pose that question within a wider context. I mean, one response to the knowledge that so many college graduates could have applied for their positions without graduating college is the idea to somehow rationalize the college experience. If there's too many, too many graduates are employed in jobs for which you don't need a college education, then in one way or another, then let's educate fewer students. That seems would be a very rational approach. The problem is, is how do you decide who gets excluded? And so through really up until the post-world war, well, up until certainly the late 1800s, higher education was all white and it was all male. And then late 1800s, special schools start to be founded for women students, special schools for African-Americans. So, and then this kind of ongoing struggle of the higher education community over the last decades to eliminate those kinds of biases in how higher education functions. The problem though, so in part of the response to those kinds of gender or race or ethnicity-based prejudices was to turn to a merit system. The problem though is that merit systems also produce their biases and that system based on merit then produces a bias in terms of socioeconomic factors. So, the wealthy or the family situation of the college applicants, then the greatest degree to which adults have overseen and channeled their upbringing in terms of the kinds of skills and competencies that higher education prefer, particularly in terms of mathematics skills and then writing and speaking skills. And so, because there's that socioeconomic bias within merit system, then merit doesn't become a way to, merit itself is not a way to rationalize education. So, if education, if the idea is to shrink the number of college students, someone's going to suffer. And then the question becomes, who is it that's going to be targeted? You can do it socioeconomically through a merit system or you can do it in terms of cruder and gross, prejudices towards one group or another. That's a devilish question. And I'm really glad you put that in the table because that is one way forward. That is one way we may be added in fact. Yes, and if I could add just one more piece of that. I mean, it's also the case that since 2010, enrollments in colleges and universities has been more or less stagnant. So, for a decade now, and this is the first time since the early beginnings of the college and university system, that enrollments have stagnated for such a long period. There's been downturns before, but usually it's just one, two, three years and then enrollments back up. A bounce back and enrollments continue to grow. That's not the case now. They've been stagnant, the population continues to grow. So overall, then access is already shrinking during the last decade and two groups in particular have been affected. One group is black students, African Americans, and there's been fair amount of discussion about the factors behind that, rollback of affirmative action programs and the just general nature of racism in this society. But the second group that's already on the decline in terms of numbers of students enrolling in colleges and university is white students. And I haven't seen any discussion about that phenomenon in turn. I mean, there's lots of discussion about what's happening to, for instance, the white working class. But I haven't seen any discussion about why white college student enrollment is declining. So access for both those groups is already shrinking. And that's why the societal processes at work. True, true. I wanna make sure that everybody gets a chance to share their thoughts and there are a few more questions that have come in. A couple are more at the kind of almost philosophical or conceptual angle. And I wanna put these together because these are very important and they take us in a little bit of a different direction. Long time friend and supporter of the program, Tom Hames asks this, is there a question of quality versus quantity here? If students are not graduating with skill was to make them successful human beings, the degree is just paper. Is the degree a useful metric? Yeah, and it's not that the underemployed don't have skills, it's just that there's not jobs there. And so they tend, and the data that's been done, of the underemployed college graduates, about half of them wind up in jobs, which the Fed economists term good non-college jobs, meaning jobs which pay on average $45,000 a year or more. And so, you know, so income wise, those graduates aren't doing so badly. But there's a kind of ricochet effect then at work because the college graduates are taking jobs that non-college graduates would have taken otherwise. So there's a kind of downward pressure on the workforce in terms of, you know, who's getting what jobs? Because if the high end non-college jobs are being filled to a substantial degree by college graduates, it means that non-college graduates then have to, you know, dip lower in terms of the kinds of jobs, meaning the quality of the jobs, how interesting they are, versus how repetitive, whether the jobs that have a future attached to them or not, and in terms of the wage scale. So I think we hear a lot about the terrible economic pressure that the working poor are under. But inadvertently, I think that, you know, higher education's desire to educate as much of the population as possible has this kind of negative effect of actually contributing to the deterioration of employment conditions for people who don't have that education. Thank you. Tom always asks very, very powerful questions. And Gary, I really appreciate the answer there. The chat box is blowing up. People are arguing about how to arrange higher education and talking about different forms of critical thinking and economics. So if you're, folks, if you're not paying attention to the chat box, take a look, there's a lot there going on. And we have Ken who wants to join us on stage. Let me see if I can get his podium working. Hey! Yeah. Hold on, I'm getting my camera going here. I don't know why my camera's not working. Yeah, I can see your photo, but I can't, but I can hear your voice. So let's go with that for now. All right, thanks. Hey, I just want to ask, I know, I've been in this here for 40 years, started as a dorm director, moved my way up to university president. And the one thing that really frustrates me, and now I like to see myself recovering university president, one thing that really has bothered me for 40 years is the fact that we have a requirement, 120 semester hour requirement for bachelor's degree that was established in 1906 by a group of Ivy League institutions for the purpose of establishing a pension system has nothing to do with academic achievement. We sit around as quote experts and advocates for our profession and we talk about lowering costs, lowering costs, free this, why don't we have an honest and open conversation about the fact that the current 120 semester requirement is unsubstantiated, it is just a hodgepodge of stuff for many kids that means nothing that's not connected. The Brits have been doing a three year degree program for generations. And why can't we talk about a three year, 90 semester bachelor's degree moving forward and save people a lot of time and a lot of energy? I throw the question back to you. Just first, Ken, I want to thank you for that. You've got a bunch of fans in the chat box. So I just want to make sure you know that. Go ahead, Gary. Yeah, I'd just like to say good luck having that discussion with faculty. So I wish you, yes. It's not really a response. I mean, again, we have a commitment to educate the masses, but we have a system that was never set up to do that. And all we can talk about is cutting costs. Why don't we cut time that we can truly create if we can put a man on the moon, can we create a meaningful, the Brits have been doing it. I know there's issues with the unions, but it is about the kids, it is about our country. And so I'll stop and get off my soapbox, but I think ultimately if we don't do it, the pressures from outside state and federal will do it for us. Yes, I mean, I can just add something a little bit to that. I mean, at the school that I've worked at, there are general education requirements, which I'd say most undergraduates don't, you know, you have to take so many credits in social sciences and so many in the sciences and composition and math and so on and so forth. And many, you know, I'd say most undergraduates I've ever spoken to about the Gen Ed requirement do not like them, do not understand them. But one of the things that education does for people, I think, is that it makes them much more versatile intellectually. And so, you know, they're aware of so many different things that introduce to many, many people and types of people they're involved in different situations. And so it makes them kind of socially and intellectually much more versatile than they would be if they simply kind of grew up in a family and then transitioned from that family into the workplace. I mean, workplaces tend not to be particularly, you know, educational experiences. It depends on the workplace, of course, but by and large, you know, one doesn't go to work in order to get an education. And so, you know, the general education requirements even, you know, that I think their rationale isn't very well explained to students or if it is, it's explained to them before they can really appreciate it. But so there's something to be said in turn, even though college education turns out to be somewhat chaotic in terms of the mix of causes that students are exposed to, nonetheless, and given how rapidly this economy and social life changes, you know, it seems to be on an ever-increasing treadmill, the college experience in that sense is quite useful to everyone who goes through it. Well, thank you. Ken, first of all, I'm glad you are the first forum participant to have identified yourself as a recovering president. And I'm also conscious that we only have about nine more minutes and we have a couple of great big questions that people would like to raise. And I wanna make sure that Gary has enough time to tackle them. You could see what I mean about the shift towards more conceptual or strategic questions. Here's another one that comes up from Brent Aurenheimer, California State Fresno, who asks, are we about to give up on the Jeffersonian ideal of a social compact of a liberally educated citizenry as necessary for democracy? Oh, that's a very ponderous question. And frankly, I'm not sure where to begin. I suspect a pint of a good quarter for everyone might be very helpful for us to respond to figure out that question. Well, I mean, this has come up before in previous sessions and one of the arguments is that if we assume universal access to K through 12, which we legally provide, is not sufficient for giving citizens a full education in order to participate in democracy, then it becomes the job of higher education to complete that education. The American Association of Colleges and Universities, ACNU has made that into a key point. And this came up after the 2016 election where a lot of people argued that this is one of the jobs of higher education to build a democracy. As Charles Finley just put in the chat, I feel like such a failure as an educator, sorry, I felt like such a failure as an educator after this election in 2016. So that's one argument, which is independent of the economic argument. Brent, we may have to return to that. It's a powerful question. We have a few more coming in and I wanna make sure that a couple of them get up here before we have to go. And this is from Chris Delarocas, who follows up with another killer question. If there are not enough jobs for college educated people and we should not limit access to college education, what is the solution you propose? Yes, I mean, that's precisely the dilemma. I don't see that there really is a solution to, you can either continue to educate as many people as you can, despite the outcome, or you can have some sort of a restrictive process in place to keep people out. And neither alternative is attractive. And I think that's exactly the kind of the dilemma that higher education is caught in. It's, yeah, there are no clear roads forward. Would, I mean, I'm just thinking out loud and would a massive expansion of federal and or state financial support to higher education then perhaps be one way forward because that might take some of the financial staying out of this and give people easier access to college education without having to go in debt and worrying about it changing their lives for the worse. Yes, I mean, certainly that if it reduces people's debt loads that would be very positive. Although keep in mind that the students who default on student loans most frequently are the students with the least amount of debt. So students with less than $5,000 worth of debt, oftentimes they went to for-profit schools or they didn't complete their degree or they received an associate degree that turned out to be not particularly useful. But yes, so federal funding for higher education would certainly allow higher education to continue on its mission of educating the population. But the other aspect then is what do people do when they graduate college or is a college education going to be seen as a kind of warehousing of young people as a means to keep them out of the workforce for as long as possible because the workforce can't absorb them. This is tricky. You're really hitting a terrible dilemma right now. Denet Long from Northern State has a question which touches on this in detail. Is ultimately, is it the accreditation groups that keep the number of hours in place? How do they impact the proposed change? Maybe the accrediting agencies are a place to work. Yeah, it's the accreditation groups but it's also financial aid requirements which have those accreditation requirements built into them. So it's kind of the structure of higher ed is built around the notion of four, even though most students don't graduate college in four years, it's still a four year model that's in place. An institutional change is very difficult in education. I mean, there's been these kind of big efforts to go around the higher ed institutions themselves. Charter schools, big effort to transform public K-12 education and then massive funding by foundations on the college and university seemed to see what was possible there. And I think higher education institutions have shown themselves to be quite flexible but there's limits and kind of the humanistic model is as much as humanists complain about the job focus of students and how the humanistic mission of institutions have been replaced by business motives and so on. That core remains pretty much intact and it's what distinguishes the higher education situation from other aspects of society. I just wanted to handle a good friend of mine, Ruben Plentadoura who says that we should support a pint of porter for everybody everybody in the forum. Joseph Robert Shaw from UAH has another question, a very precise question about this from the K-12 side. Is there a correlation between a K-12 emphasis on STEM and the growth of the overeducated class? I don't think so. I mean, the kind of math deficits and math phobia that's pervasive through K-12 education and then is also true for higher education institutions is certainly one that all the STEM programs push back against. Right. So, and students who major in STEM fields tend to do better job wise than students, for instance, in social sciences or the humanities or the kind of the worst parts of the curriculum in terms of under-employment tend to be non-technical, pre-professional majors like criminal justice, business management, public policy. I mean, in those fields, the level, if you look at under-employment and unemployment of graduates, the anywhere between 60 to 80% of graduates in those fields wind up in jobs for which you didn't need a college education. That's a huge number. We have time for one last question and this is from Don and I think I understand the question but I may be interpreting it incorrectly. So let me give you a shot at this again. How about spreading labor hours like requiring overtime for salary managers? Yes, I mean, certainly one of the trends over the last really 50 years has been this big intensification of work and part of that happened by transforming hourly employees who entitled then to overtime into salaried employees in which there's no limit in terms of the amount of time that they need to spend at the job, either pre-pandemic, it was at the work site but then when you weren't at work, then evenings, mornings, weekends, you were expected to be accessible through email and texting and technology. And so a conversion away from salaried employees back towards hourly employment would be a very good thing for the workforce but yes, it's another proposal that one has to say, well, yes, good luck with that proposal. It's difficult enough even just to get Uber drivers acknowledged as employees rather than independent contractors. One thing some of us in the futures community have been talking about is mandating smaller hours per week, down to 30 or 25 or something. But speaking of smaller hours, I'm afraid we are at the end of hours today. This has been a fantastic discussion, Gary. I'm really, really grateful. Yes, thank you very much for inviting me, yeah. Oh, my thanks to everybody for terrific questions. Before we go, Gary, what's the best way for people to follow up on your new project and on your thinking as a whole? Well, hopefully at some point it will be published. So stay tuned. I'll be glad to spread the word on that. And once again, Gary, thank you for this research. Thank you for your time and keep up a fantastic work. Yes, great. Thanks for the conversation. My pleasure. Don't go away, friends. We have to tell you about what's happening for the next few weeks. So I want to make sure that you all get to see that. But once again, thank you for fantastic questions and fantastic comments. This has been, I think we ended up on an incredible dilemma that we need to follow up on, where we can take higher education. In a question that Gary didn't get to ask, he asked, where does this take us? The timeline is not good for this. Looking ahead, we're hitting some other issues, including equity, active learning, academic mergers, open access, rethinking teaching. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues, please just use the hashtag FTTE on Twitter or anywhere else you'd like. You can always tweet at me at Brian Alexander or at Shindig events. If you'd like to go into the past and take a look at our previous sessions on job placement, careers, economics, just head to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. We have a whole stack of sessions and the recording for this one will join them shortly. In the meantime, once again, thank you all for your thoughts. This has been a terrific, terrific discussion. I hope you all keep thinking about this and I hope you keep thinking about them with us. In the meantime, stay safe, take care as the fall semester comes close and we'll see you online. Thanks again to Sam Houston State for letting us use their network at office. Bye-bye.