 Welcome. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm your host, the forum's creator and chief cat herder, Brian Alexander. I'm glad to see you all here today. We have two great guests for a terrific subject. Since the beginning of the Future Trends Forum, we've been tracking the economics of higher education. We've looked at everything from student loans to changing labor conditions. And now I'm so grateful to host two scholars who have written a really, really powerful book. If you look on the bottom left corner of the screen, you'll see a kind of lozenge colored box, or kind of yellow colored box. And one of the buttons says, wealth, cost, and price in higher American higher education. That will take you to a new book by Bruce Kimball and Sarah Eiler. And the book is a wonderful history of how American higher education has been funded. It has a deep dive into endowments, a careful, careful look at how labor and how other expenses have changed over time. I can't recommend it highly enough. So if you haven't grabbed a copy, just click on that button. And if you type in four letters, you'll get a special discount from Johns Hopkins University Press. And I'll put those four letters in the chat right now so you can't miss them. Now just rather than talking about them, let me bring them up on stage one by one. So let me begin by finding Sarah and beaming her up on stage. And again, this is the kind of thing where you want to hear a Star Trek transporter noise. Although Sarah, from where you are, it might be a Wizard of Oz sound. Are you still getting all that wind? Yeah, we sure are. It's died down just a little bit, still feels like a blustery day, although it's warmer than it's been in the past couple weeks. Well, that's good. That's good. And where are you? We're in North Carolina. I am. I'm just outside of Raleigh, in the forest. Excellent. Excellent. We have a tradition on the forum, Sarah, when we ask people to introduce themselves, we ask them not to talk about what they've just done, but what you're planning on doing for the next year. So, you know, what are the projects and what are the big ideas that are top of mind for you in the next 12 months? Looking at student loan data and other kinds of institutional data, particularly enrollment numbers, I work for one of the UNC institutions. And so, that's what I've been playing with a lot lately. Excellent. Did you see Phil Hill's recent piece when he was comparing National Student Clearinghouse and iPads enrollment numbers? I did. I did see that. I thought it was really interesting, because you know, in institutional research for a lot of people, iPads is the gold standard. Yeah. And he talked also a lot about if it's the same article that I'm thinking of Common Dataset. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very interesting. We've hosted the National Student Clearinghouse before. And they've been great guests. And we'd love to have iPads on there to talk to me. The general shape of your data is similar, but it's still very different. Well, good luck, Sarah. That's crucial research we need to see. And before I ask you any more questions, let me bring your great colleague, Bruce Kimball upon the stage and join us too. Hello, Dr. Kimball. Hi, Brian. Thank you very much. Well, it's good to see you. Well, where are you today? Outside Boston, Newton, Newton, Massachusetts. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. And just how much snow do you have on the ground? None. None right now. It's been extraordinary, representing late, late snow. Wow. Wow. That's unusual for Boston. Yeah. It's been trending that way with the climate change. Exactly. Exactly. A major subject of us. Bruce, I just asked Sarah to introduce herself by looking ahead to the next year. And that's my question for you as well. What are you going to be working on for the next year? What is 2023 hold for you? Well, actually, Sarah and I have been talking about collaborating on another book project that looks at the decline of the or the capture of the learned so called learned professions, historical learned professions, that is clergy, lawyers and physicians, and are captured by essentially market forces in the late 20th century. And actually, and this is news for Sarah, and I've been thinking about the relationship of that with the liberal arts. The learning professions were often defined by having a liberal arts education before one went on to graduate school in the learning professions. And those two liberal arts have also been captured by market forces. So it's a kind of a book or project that looks at the relationship between this capture by market forces of learning professions and the liberal arts. Oh, we'd love to see that. We'd love to see that work. Just just to put a bug in your ear. When that project is done, we want to have you back. So thank you. It takes a long time for these projects to develop. Just completely understand. I completely understand. I'll have the book launch for my new book actually in about two months. Looking forward to that. Oh, looking forward to congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Well, I just want to say your book is so powerful in so many ways. I mean, one is that it is crammed with data. And yet, it is so lucid, so elegantly presented that we just really at every page, it's clear where you're going. And you make so many important arguments, like the best critique of Bowen's model of just blanked in the name. Cost disease theory? Cost disease. Yeah, Bowell's Cost Disease. You just, I mean, that's a solid critique. And also you managed to cover a wide range of history starting in the 19th century and bringing it up to the present. If I could, just to throw the gates open, you explain the rising costs as opposed to prices for higher education in terms of this intertwining of rising tuition and other supports, like federal supports, for example, as well as rising costs of operating the institution. And for you, it's a combination of personnel costs, but also capital costs. And you have this great phrase where these two keep escalating as a kind of helix, a double helix that escalates over time dragging behind rising tuition. How am I doing so far summarizing why costs, why colleges cost so much? Did I nail it? Or you are bringing some more? Yes, yeah, yeah, no, that's great. I'll just chime in. I was trying, you know, the title Why is Higher Education So Expensive? I think, as we do in the book, a first point is to distinguish two senses of expenses or two senses of cost. One is the cost of the institutions to produce the education, which economists often call production cost, and we clearly distinguish in the book. The other way cost is used, but we call it price in the book is what students are paying and their families are paying. And so those kinds of costs are cost and price, production cost and price are two very different sort of things. And they are, and I'll just briefly say they are distinguished by subsidies. Actually, an important factor in this often gets lost in the public and private public discussion is that the cost of higher education, that is what the production cost has been subsidized by half, generally by two thirds over the course of the past 130 years. So when we talk about the price that people that students pay, it's about one third, generally speaking, broad historical generalization over that time period. So there's very different forces that operate on the two different levels of cost and price. Sarah, yeah, no, I think that that covers what I that's very comprehensive. I would I would actually accurately excuse me captures what we what we set forth in the in the book. And I think that, you know, originally, when we talked about this idea of the double helix, there's a little tentative about it. But as we talked about that kind of complex interconnection, it came to make a lot of sense. And so I like that as a metaphor was it was helpful to hold, I think, in describing this complex interplay, because it's very easy, I think, to flatten price and cost. Really is. I can just pitch in again about the double helix, because I got off on the definition of expense and cost. So the double helix we talk about in the book, the spiral upward, spiraling, double helix is the idea that since for 130 years, colleges and universities have pursued more revenue and wealth, and that has driven more spending. And then the spending requires more revenue and wealth. So that is the double helix. So the other one half of the double helix is cost. But then the other half of the double helix is the spending that they drive each other upward. Very good. Thank you. Thank you both. Bruce, you mentioned subsidies are mostly subsidies from governments, both federal and state, or do you also include other sources such as philanthropic donations? Yeah, no, the subsidies include annual gifts, endowment income, and local, state and federal appropriations over time and also grants and contracts. And each one of those is sort of a different a different kind of subsidy that contributes to power and cost. Very good. I have a couple of more questions for our guests. But start revving up your own comments and questions again, go to the bottom of the screen, and either click the raised hand button if you want to beam up on stage and put the question live, or click the question mark and start typing your question. By the way, also on the bottom left of the screen, there should be two buttons. One of them is to a really, really nice article by our two authors called Rising Production Costs to Resentment, a topic we're going to get to in just a bit. I'm curious about some arguments that you built to by the end. And again, you have such great historical sweep that one of my favorite bits is around the 1910s, 1920s, when you have different wealthy institutions competing to use the word democratic in fundraising. You know, we're more democratic, we are the most democratic, it's just brilliant and very funny too. But looking at the present day, you suggest that we're seeing a kind of hardening of hierarchy within American institutions, that we have some institutions that start off in the 1800s and some just after that, that are really kind of cemented in place at the very top of the academic pecking order, and that they have committed everything, at one point you mentioned to reputation that they would do everything for that. In fact, they were like the cookie monster, they would eat all money, all income coming in. Are we, do you think we're really stuck with that, with that kind of frozen elite? Is that where we are now? I think Bruce may have frozen. So Sarah, you go ahead and answer, and I'll help Bruce out. So one of the things that we talk about in the book is is how the, the, there's this kind of inertia that develops as the stratification of wealth among these institutions becomes increasingly calcified. And so there is this inertia, if I understand your question correctly, in fundraising and spending, right? There's a constant cycle of alumni fundraising campaigns, appeals to wealthy donors, and these fundraising drives. And it's incessant. And part of the reason we argue for that is because you can never have, you can never accumulate enough money to plow back into endowment. You froze, Bruce. Yeah, I, you all froze. So maybe I froze. Sorry, I'm back here. Sarah's probably addressed it. So yes, that is one of arguments at the end of the book, that the cast of higher education today are sort of etched in stone. It's very difficult for a lower, a institution with less wealth, by what you mean endowment, to rise into an upper caste or upper strata, stratus of, of education. And the reason is because of certain wealth advantages that we identify that have developed over the past 130 years. And I might say, Sarah and I published a op ed piece in the Boston Globe. And Harvard was used in it. And we got some pushback, I have personally, from a number of Harvard affiliated people who said, but Harvard, and these wealthy places, they earned this, they deserve this place. So what you're actually so critiquing their, their wealth is kind of unjustified. But in the book, we, we itemize several what we call wealth advantages that institutions have developed. And I can just itemize those briefly. One is, which is intuitive, wealthy schools tend to have wealthier alumni. So they give more. But second of all, wealthy schools spend less per dollar raised and fundraising, then do less wealthy schools, wealthier schools spend less per raised than less wealthy schools. Third, wealthy schools have greater access to portfolio managers and finance years, and they pay less and they can afford the money to pay for those more expert financiers and actually scholars in the 1920s already identified those two points as endowments began to stratify. And then another wealth advantage is that the wealthiest institutions by virtue of the fact that they have larger capital can afford to take more risk. And by taking more risk, you get more return risk and return are highly correlated. So as with per as within us as individuals, if you have more capital, you can take more risk and that over the long term guarantees you higher, higher, higher return. And fourth is I think beyond that was Sarah was just alluding to is that wealthiest institutions, and this has been hugely a point of controversy, have generally maintained very low spending rates for their endowment called the spending rules. So spending rules throughout the last century have generally range between four and 5% of the annual amount spent. But meanwhile, over the 40 years from 1974 to 2014, the mean of the average average return on endowments was 12%. So they're earning 12% and even for inflation and management fees, you're spending percent, well, you have another 4% left over to plow back into your endowment. So that means a larger endowment grows more, it has a higher rate of return and a larger base, so it returns more. And then finally, if if a wealthy institution stumbles, as Harvard did during the Great Recession, they afford to borrow issue bonds, as Harvard did in the Great Recession of $2.5 billion to bail themselves out so they don't have to sell depreciated assets in the short term. But lesser less endowed or unendowed institutions, particularly HBCUs pay higher underwriting costs and have greater trouble accessing the bond market. So that's the final wealth advantage, you might say. Wow. Wow, that really hardens that cast shell so they're in great shape. Friends, I have so many questions, but I'm going to defer to you all now. You can see why I'm a big fan of these two authors in this book, because there's so much going on. And let me bring up a few of these text questions. And the first one is from Lee Nichols. And let's say here, Lee Nichols asks, what effect, if any, do you think there's been on price due to the increased availability of financial aid, scholarship, Pell Grant, etc. Sarah, you want to? Yeah, so I think what you see, especially mid 20th century is an explosion of all different kinds of an influx of cash from the federal government in the form of financial aid. And so in the midst of that, Tuitions could could fluctuate without families or Americans necessarily feeling the crunch. It may have increased intensity for tuition, although I think now it's kind of leveled out. I don't think colleges increase their tuition because of increased financial aid. What what actually I think happens is, you know, they get one price as a list price and then discount that tuition so that students aren't necessarily paying that using some internal subsidies like scholarships or other forms of discounts. Discounts. And Bruce, I'm sure you have where you'd like to add. Sure. Yeah, well, I'm behind the question. I don't know Lee Nichols, but some have suggested that it is the federal grants or other grants financial aid that drives up the tuition price. Now actually, economists such as Michael McPherson, who was the former Spencer Foundation, have studied that issue and concluded that there's no causal relationship between those. Although, although there is there is a correlation, certainly. And there is a body of economic thinking, propounded by Howard Bowen, economist Howard Bowen, different from William Bowen, Howard Bowen in 1980, who argued that more revenue drives more, more production cost. As to whether it actually drives tuition is difficult to determine because, as I said, there's these issues of subsidies. So it's so in other words, the rising federal or state government appropriations, there is a strong argument, and I tend to favor it, that it drives up spending. It drives up production cost, but not necessarily price. So those are, as I said, two quite, quite different things. And the economic research that I've read, which suggests that there's not a driving force there of financial aid policies. Thank you both. Lee, that was a great question. And it sounds like the benefit hypothesis there. And thank you both, Sarah and Bruce, for terrific answers. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a text question. Now, let me give you an example of a video question, because a very nice Paul Cook offered to ask his question on stage. So let me bring him up. Hello, Paul. Hi, everyone. This is my first time on stage. Oh, my gosh. First of all, let me just say this is fascinating, excellent conversation. And I look forward to reading the book. So given this kind of calcified caste system, and how hard it is for institutions to break into that, how do you explain what I think is a fact, or at least a trend, that so many institutions are aspirational, they're trying to be the next Harvard, or if not the next Harvard, then you know, the next University of Michigan, right? And I'm thinking here specifically of a book that came out about a decade ago by Gay Tuchman called Want to Be You, where she makes this argument very well, that so many institutions have this kind of they want to be these other kinds of higher caste institutions. How do you explain what seems to be kind of a paradox there, or at least a contradiction? Well, thank you. That's a that's a great question, Paul. And actually, at the end of the book, we just say, Yeah, it's a stupid paradox. It's part of the it's part of the cultural drive. It's part of the ideology of higher education, that we argue in the book was begun over a century ago, that a way to increase your quality is to compete for more money. And yet we've gotten due to these wealth advantages, historically, to a point where you can't actually improve yourself. So you have all of these institutions continuing to pursue these financial metrics, but they really can't get anywhere except for extraordinary circumstances like Grinnell College in Iowa that Warren Buffett, you know, sort of catapulted is is is kind of an exception of this calcified cast, as you as you said. And so the and so at the end of the book, we we argue that for a change where our proposal, perhaps naive, perhaps laughable, is a change in ethic, a new financial strategy, as it were, in higher education, is the only thing that can unlock this, because government responses, the federal government responses, like the TCJA act, where they tax the excite, the slapped an X punitive excise tax on endowments, or there's talk of rescinding the, the tax benefits of higher education. Those are not going to solve the fundamental problem. If the fundamental problem, as we as we argue, is this competition among institutions to try to advance themselves by acquiring more revenue and and wealth. You know, I just want to throw in here. I'm sorry, Sarah August is, we talk about the AAU and I have a, you know, I've spent most of my career in AA and Association of American Research One universities. And I talked to my colleagues, I'm retired now. But there's so much pressure in the top Research One universities among department chairs to go back to your future company to generate more money, generate more fundraising, generate more grants. It's like they're doing it to themselves. Sarah, do you want to weigh in here? So I was going to just bring in a historical quarreler that we do talk about in the book. And it's some of what I think we see is a holdover from the Gilded Age social Darwinism, where money was a hallmark of fitness, right? It is just a kind of revival, in a sense, a tech age revival of this idea that whoever has the most money is the best, because for some reason, financial resources are an arbiter of quality. And so, and so I think, I think some of the calcification is due to that kind of that. I don't want to say rigidity and thinking, but but a clinging to that kind of idea. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, great. I mean, it's a great observation. But it's a dysfunctional. It's a paradox of dysfunction. In high appreciation. It is. Thank you so much, Paul, and welcome aboard. Glad to see you. Again, friends, that's a video question. We've got another one coming up. And if you want to follow Paul's great footsteps, just press the raised hand button, and it will beam you up when it's time. Speaking of which, we have a question from our good friend, former guest, a wonderful writer, Steve Ehrman, when we bring him up on stage from Maryland, I think, how are you doing, Steve? I'm doing well, Brian. Thanks. Yeah, I'm in Silver Spring, Maryland right now. Good to see you. So I've written a book which sort of overlaps a little and complements, maybe even more, the work that you two have been describing. And one of the things where maybe I've added something useful is to take a look at that. The revenue theory of costs from a different angle. To observe that it also implies that if there is the will and pressure, spending can be reduced. You know, if you're the one of the one of the things that adds to the just how serious that cost disease is, is that when people are isolated in their own institutions, they tend to believe that anything that's been true for the last five or 10 years is universally true. You know, you need to do X in this particular way at that particular cost. And if somebody else seems to be spending more money, they've got to be wasting some of it. And if someone else wants to do this with a little less money, they're bound to fail because you can't do it. But what he proved was that there is no production function in that sense in higher education. There are all kinds of ways to be good, all kinds of ways to be bad when it comes to spending. For me, it kind of links up with Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time available is very closely related to spending expands to fill the revenue available. And it sort of shows us what we're up against. We really can potentially do things that improve quality, while also controlling costs. And the most important part of controlling costs is reallocation from this part of the institution to that part of the institution without somehow running into this hard barrier that says, Well, you just can't afford that. We can't. Now, there are limits somewhere, but they they aren't anywhere close to where people usually think they are. So anyway, I hope that's I hope that's helpful. Yes, thank you very much, Steve. And I have to say, I know we drew on some of your your work. I've, your name is familiar to me. And I've seen publications and they've, they've informed that I can't think of the work right off the top of my head or articles that we're live. Anyway, we so we do address Howard Bowlin's Revenue Theory of Cost quite extensively. And in fact, actually, we argue that it we sort of what we regard as clarify and elaborate the theory. Because his book, his Revenue Theory of Cost, which is very famous, is described in about seven pages in the first chapter of the book. And if you go through the book, the other nine tenths of the book, he doesn't even relate to his theory. So you if you read the book, you most people read the first chapter and draw on that. But he has he has extensive data and actually qualifications and emendations of the theory. And even a kind of we argue reconciliation with cost disease theory, he kind of incorporates it in a way. But he only refers to his theory two other passing times in the rest of the book. Anyway, so we're but we, we are very favor, favor that. What I wanted to pick up on was your point, which I think is very well taken about spending money within a silo of an institution that's very hard to spend it elsewhere. And I would broaden that because as we suggest the end the book, this change to the sort of competitive ethic, if you will, that Paul Cook, we talked about Paul, Paul Cook, we talk about a collaborative model, urging a collaboration outside of institutions. So it be like not only within the silos of an institution, which I totally agree with you, but also a kind of sharing of wealth advantages across institutions to strengthen higher education overall, because higher education has lost so much esteem and political support over the last 40 years, which we document in the board. And that's an important effect of these wealth problems. So higher education has lost public esteem, lost political support. And that's a result of this dysfunctional paradox referenced by Howard Bowen's Revenue Revenue Class Theory. Sarah, do you want to weigh in? No, I think that I think you you covered what I was going to what I was going to say. But I would like to know what Bruce said about about your work and us encountering it and using it as well. Thank you. Thank you. Steve, thank you so much for coming back. And I hope you I hope you stay warm and dry. We have we have some more questions in the queue. And I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask them. And this is a really interesting question that has come from bring up here. This is from Joseph Robert Shaw. What happens to the conversation if we only look at public universities and leave private universities out of the cost and price question? Well, the decline in government subsidies over the last 40 years, and what I should say, I should clarify this. It's a decline in the proportion that government subsidies cover the total production cost of higher education, because actually, the subsidies have increased in but not increased as fast as the production cost has grown. And this decline in government appropriations has largely impacted public universities more than private universities for for obvious reasons. And economists, again, such as Michael McPherson, have studied this and in several books. And the aphorism that site is is often a shift from the burden of paying for education from tax from the taxpayers, the individual student. And that has been a story of higher education, certainly the last two decades. And and and even more. And I think it's actually goes back to the Reagan's presidency in 1980, when David Stockman, his financial advisor, said very memorably, students have students want to go to higher education, want to go to college, they can find the resources to to pay for it. So that was a great shift in ideology of public government support for higher education. So that's the decline of government appropriations has a huge impact on the public universities. Sarah, do you want to follow up with that? So I also think what we see alongside a decline in subsidies is a to Bruce's point, where he's talking about David Stockman and the Reagan administration. And I think David Stockman and the Reagan administration, we see an increased popularization and increased acceptance of not just hyper individualism, or the individual is the center of public life, but we also see next to that, an embrace of anti tax rhetoric. And so as taxes declined, subsidies also were impacted. And, and I think public institutions were especially hard hit. Let me just follow up on that, if I may, is that segue to the debt problem, which we, which we do not, we touch on at the end of the book and have written other pieces on. But the among undergraduates, who attended non profit institutions, okay, let me first in debt, over half of the debt of $1.6 trillion, it's rough to hear about is debt by graduate students, including medical law and business students. Okay. So we're going to kind of bracket them, there are different forces driving why they went into debt and the return they may get on. There's about another quarter of the debt that comes from for profit institutions, which we do not address in the book, and frankly, as a cesspool. And I apologize if anyone's here. Okay, so what we're talking about with undergraduate debt, at non profit institutions, which you focus on, it's about a quarter of the total debt. And most of that debt that's borne by students who cannot afford repay comes from students who attended public institutions that are little endowed, and do not have the resources to support their students. That's where the great source of problematic student debt arises in our opinion, a problem that understood as undergraduates at non profit institutions. And, and so this goes back to the question about the subsidies. So the decline proportion of subsidies that results in higher tuition prices at public institutions is connected to the student debt in that respect, in that respect of students, largely from the middle and working classes, who attended public institutions that have little relative little endowment or, or no endowment. I saw this, I was trying to connect the issue of the sub of the public appropriations and public institutions. Well, between the two of you, that's a great set of answers to the terrific question. Thank you so much. We have more questions coming on in. And I want to make sure that we get as many of these as we can. This is a video question from Gregory Shuckman. Let me bring him on stage. I think he's audio only right now. But let me just give him a shot. Hello, Greg. Oh, audio and but actually no audio. Okay, no problem. I can ask the question for him. He wants to know if we had discussed the Shiva regal effect. And I just that was a big smile from you, Sarah. Do you want do you want to give that a quick answer? It's one of my it's just one of those terms of praise that I really love that I was my grand, the the idea that, you know, your your lower end alcohol brands are trying to be the highest end or your top shelf. I we do talk about in the book, kind of trying to find the right words. The tendency of lower tier schools to emulate the practices of the higher tier schools, particularly in terms of fundraising, and another work that the Bruce did on his history of Harvard Law School, he calls it isomorphism, which, which is also, you know, similar here, right, like the tendencies and the practices that are so successful for Harvard, you know, state schools want to emulate that lower tier private schools want to emulate that. And so, so I do think if that's what we mean by Shiva regal effect, yeah, there is some of that. Although I think now the inertia, you know, it started probably late 19th, early 20th century, and now it's just become part of the fabric. We don't even necessarily realize that that's what we're seeing anymore. Yeah, actually, and Sarah taught me the Shiva's regal effect. She came up, she brought that term we were taught when we were talking about this. And I would just I would distinguish two kinds of Shiva Shiva's physical effect. One is intuition, which logs you operates in the private sector, which is to say that tuition increases in the private sector of higher education, and this is widely acknowledged are driven by the wealthiest institutions. And they're driven by the wealthiest institutions, because when Princeton raises its tuition to $50,000 a year, lessen out institutions want to try to raise raise their tuition up that much, because it makes them it gives the sense like buying a higher quality car or better whiskey, right, that is good as the higher product. The problem there is you run into tuition discounts. So since tuition discounting started a little bit in the 1970s and then expanded 1980s and then just went rampant in the 1990s and early 21st century. To the point where as of 2009, at private institutions, students were paying 45% of the list price. Overall, when you when you incorporated financial aid and also tuition discounting policies. And the reaction to that as we've recently seen if you saw the story and I think Washington Post or whatever about Colby Sawyer College in New Hampshire, very significantly exemplified a trend where they cut their tuition dramatically from I think close to 45,000 down to 17,000. They just cut it because the tuition discounting got so bad that the price tag list price was preventing students from enrolling. So there's a kind of obverse or converse phenomenon. I don't want to go too on but the other chivis reveal effect ramifies into public institutions in the sense that the privates or higher tier, they introduce ancillary programs and amenities and all of higher education institutions need in order to attract students, salad bars, dorms, you know, career offices, whatever. Swimming pools, yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you. We have it's a great topic and I'm glad that we've gotten into the urban dictionary part of the program. Let me see if I can get if I can get Gregory on audio. Greg, is your mic on? Looks like it. It can you hear me, Brian? Yes, perfectly. Very good. Sorry, sorry about that. So, um, so the discussion about Bowen's law happened to be one of the questions that was asked for my qualifying exam. So I spent a fair amount of time looking at it and just wanted to expand on it and get your your feel for it, especially since you were talking about working with our one universities. But I don't know if you came across a few of these quotes, but Ron Ehrenberg, the former VP for planning and budgeting at Cornell, said that talking about the pursuit of status and prestige, he said the institutional leaders are engaged in the equivalent of an arms race of spending to improve its absolute quality and to try to improve its relative stature in the prestige pecking order. And then that's sort of built on what Charles Elliott, who was the president of Harvard said back in 1906. Oh, you got to read our book. Yes. Okay. So, so, so I haven't read your book yet and I'm looking forward to reading it. I'm just kidding. I'm just but for those who hadn't read the book, Elliott, Elliott said back in 1906, he said the in the competition between American universities and between American and foreign universities, those universities will an evidently win, which has the largest amount of free money. So in 1906, the president of Harvard was making this argument. What's changed in 117 years? Well, David, you should you should have written the book because Greg, because actually, we we every quote you've made is in our book. And we argue that actually, Howard Bowen's revenue cost theory identified in 1980, he never talks about the historical origins of it, nor do other commentators about it. And we are given the book that the roots the origins of the of the phenomenon that Bowen Howard Bowen described as revenue theory and cost comes from Charles Elliott's free money strategy in the in the 1890s. And that it proliferates from their partly due to the first national fundraising campaign in higher education, which was run by Harvard University between 1915 and 1925, and adopted the quote of Elliott's quote that you just quoted as its motto. And so it this strategy of pursuing free money by which he meant unrestricted endowment. And well, which we define as well, proliferates throughout higher education from there. And actually, also, the Aaron Berg quote, we also quote in the book. So you should read the book, right? Is too late to get to a great point, because in the book, we talk about the influence of the cost disease theory of William Bowen, economist of Princeton, who, who established the theory cited the theory in 1960. And Howard Bowen's revenue theory of cost, which was expressed in 1980, and those compete for influence in higher education in the subsequent decades. And so Aaron Berg's often noted book that he published in 2000, sites as as you say, exactly the revenue theory of cost of Howard Bowen. But in that book, Aaron Berg never sites, never sites Howard Bowen. And the same time that he pays, puts, devotes three pages of attention to describing William Bowen's cost disease theory. Why is that? The reason we argue is because William Bowen, the economist from Princeton, his cost disease theory had great deference among economists. And so you get to Ron Aaron Berg in 2000, who is an economist, they sort of have to tip their cap, tip their cap to William Bowen, but actually what their actual interpretation of higher education fits with Howard Bowen's revenue theory of cost. And this continues in other economists. Brian, can I ask just a very quick follow up? Please, please go ahead. So what I found really curious, I'm curious to get your take on it. So Bowen Harold Bowen published this revenue theory back in 1980. US News comes out with their first rankings in 1983. Do you think that that prompted the creation of the whole rankings industry? Well, we argue in the book, the first ranking of endowments to focus on that of wealth was issued in May 1970 by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The first time the Chronicle issued its famous annual listing rank listing of endowments was in May 1970. And we argued that that is a turning point. And then Nacubo, the National Association of College Business Officers and whatever began ranking endowments in 1974. And of higher education started using the Nacubo data, which is the standard in higher education that others rely on. And so we would point rather than to 1983, although your point is well taken about the rankings. But the core of the importance of wealth ranking related to academic quality begins with the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1970. And the US News and Nacubo report is kind of piggyback on that, if you will. Thank you. An influential self-certain. Good question, Gregory. And thank you for persisting through to ask really, really solid good stuff. And thank you both Bruce and Sarah for really, really thoughtful answers. We're getting a lot of information here. But we are coming up on the end of the hour and I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask the questions. Mark has been very patient. Let me bring him up on stage. Hello, Mark. Great. Thank you. First time. Welcome. This is fascinating. I appreciate this. And I'm wondering with all the research and I'm no expert in this, I've been in higher ed for 22 years. But for 15 years, I've chaired the student committee that oversees student fees. And what I'm wondering from your research or anything you're aware of, when we think about economics, right, I took two econ classes and learned about supply and demand. And what I'm wondering is, how do we get students to understand that they have power in this? And that so for example, at the last institution I worked at for 15 years, 40% of the students were Pell eligible. When you sat down and talked to them about what they wanted in their next residence hall, guess what they all wanted? Separate rooms, separate bathrooms, high end amenities, organic food, local food, right? We all could probably write the list. Sure. Well, guess what that does to your cost of education, right? And yeah, so I guess that's what I'm wondering like how do we engage students in this level of discussion. So it's not just about well, this is what creditors do. And this is with the federal and state governments. But that students, hey, there's 16 million of you, and you're making choices that impact what you're paying. I guess I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Marco. That's that's very well said. Toward toward the end of our book, when we're talking about the emergence of student debt, I described before about the relation of student debt to subsidies. But it's important to understand that the net price that is tuition and academic fees that go to the academic enterprise largely remained level from 2006 to 2016 virtually level. And you can see this in in College Board pricing studies that they get. Okay. So what drove the price overall was the what we call ancillary fees, that is room board, travel, entertainment, recreation centers, okay, and so forth. So the you're absolutely right. It's the students, it's the desire for this, as it were. And the institutions willing to cater to it, that has driven up the debt because it's driven up the price, but it's the price of the ancillary expenses, not the actual the price of academic tuition fees. So I think I think it's hard to explain to students that, you know, universities have used things like well, like advanced wellness centers and indoor pools and water slides like those are selling tools, right? So they're a way for you to come to that institution. I don't I don't know that I think they'd have a hard time separating the fact of like, Oh, this sounds really exciting. These dorms are so much nicer than this other, you know, institutions dorms, I'm gonna go with the other institutions forms. Because like, I don't think they make the connection between those amenities and the extravagance or quality of those amenities and the size of their fees. So I would say if you can show them those numbers, if you can show them that data, maybe they'd be more inclined to let it go. But I think in part because it's a competition, a marketplace competition for students, especially mid declining enrollments, it's hard for universities and institutions to let go of those amenities that drive up ancillary fees. And even let me say in addition to amenities, I mean, there are things that have grown enormously over the last 40 years such as career advising centers. Now, probably everyone parents think, well, you've got or students, I mean, what could be more necessary at a college university than a career advising center? But those are those have grown tremendously. And often first term freshmen, my son went to the University of Rochester, and the first semester of his freshman year, the career advising center was come on in and we'll get you an internships and help you find a job. So is that really necessary? Is that a function? Is that a necessary function of a college university? I don't know, you could argue either ways. But those centers now, as I'm sure everyone in the audience in the here knows, have they have great numbers of staff. I went to Dartmouth College in 1970 and 1970s. And the career advising center was it was a little room and had a secretary in it and leaflets all around the room. There's a pamphlet for that. What? Yeah, so I'm not saying maybe you don't know, well, you know, maybe that was underprepared. But that was not a big school. So these kinds of staff increases, non instruction, F increases have have contributed honestly. I think that's a really good point. Because as the the infrastructure of universities have expanded to cater to to override all manner of student needs. That's also driven up those kinds of indirect production costs for lack of a better description. Right? The administrative costs that don't necessarily pay for the textbooks or the teacher in the classroom. But all of the other things that make the institution as a whole run. Well, that's a great pre set of answers. Mark, thank you for the great question. And friends, I hate to say this, but we're out of time. It's the it's the top of the next hour. And Sarah, Bruce, you've been fantastic. Let me ask, how can we keep up with the two of you and your new research and your new work? What's the best way? Well, happy to have you email me. But we continue to try to write we're I've given a couple of Zoom lectures, I have a Zoom lecture scheduled in the middle of February for a retired faculty group. So we'll continue to try to be, I don't know, be as we'd love to hear from anyone who would be interested in communicating with us about this. So are we glad to speak to to people as well? You can find me on LinkedIn. I usually post things that we're publishing on on that that place. And again, I welcome, like Bruce said, emails, and any kind of conversation, I'm always happy to engage in that. We do have another another online article coming out inside Higher Education in a couple of weeks about this solution aspect to some of these problems, which you've already please let me know when that's live so I can share it as well. Thank you very much. Bruce Kimball, Sarah Heiler, thank you so much for this for this conversation. Much appreciated. And good luck with your new research. Thank you, everyone. Thank you all for for sharing your time. But don't go away, friends. Let me just point out where things are headed next. If you want to keep talking about this kind of these topics about college cost and college price, please over on Twitter, use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me, Brian Alexander or at Shindig events, you can find me a mastodon, there's the link there, or my blog, Brian Alexander.org. If you'd like to look back into our archive for previous sessions talking about this topic, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If you want to see some sessions coming up, we have a whole set of them for the next two months, just go to forum that future education.us. And if you have anything that you've been working on that you'd like to share, please email me so I can share with the community. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for your great questions, everybody. This has been a terrific discussion. I hope everybody's doing well. I hope you're staying warm where you need to stay warm and you're staying dry where you need to stay dry. Take care, everybody. We'll see you next time online. Bye bye.