 Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see so many of you here today. We have a terrific guest on a very, very powerful subject, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. This week's guest is a leading thinker and a leading convener in higher education. Kevin Kerry works at the New America Group, where he's the Vice President for Education Policy. And I've been trying to get him as a guest for years because he's a fascinating thinker, an elegant writer, and just a really, really great person to talk to. Most recently, he published a piece, which you can find linked to the bottom left of the screen. It's a kind of lozenge color, kind of bronze color, where he argued using a lot of data, a lot of evidence, that higher education in the United States has just started a period of decline. That decline is more or less irreversible, and we have to prepare for it. We have to try to navigate our way through it. I'm fascinated by this claim. It resonates with a lot of the research I've been doing, and I would just love to have Kevin talk with us about how it goes. So then, any further ado, let me bring Vice President Kerry up on stage. Hello, Kevin. Hey, Brian. How are you? Oh, great. Now that you're here, I'm wonderful. It's great to see you. How are you? Where are you today? I'm coming from my living room in Arlington, Virginia. Very nice, very nice, where we're enjoying the sunny weather that seems to not make things any warmer. Kevin, we like to ask people to introduce themselves by not talking about their past, but about their future. What are you going to be working on for the next year or so? What are the big projects and the big ideas? That's a great question. So my day job is as Vice President of Education Policy at New America. So I will be doing a lot of managerial things involving zoom calls and fundraising and performance evaluations and all the things that you do to manage. But I also will be engaged in a fair amount of federal policy work. There's a lot going on. I mean, you know, New America is in Washington, D.C. and so there's a lot going on with student loans right now. I actually am just putting finishing touches on a new article about the by demonstration student loan forgiveness program, not the one that's held up in court, but the other one that was announced in August, where they're going to be creating a new version of the income driven loan repayment and forgiveness program is actually kind of an amazingly generous change from prior versions of that, that I think could have some interesting economic effects, particularly on the community college sector. So there's just a lot happening right now in the various iterations of policy change and loan forgiveness. And so our higher education team that I'm fortunate to work with will be very focused on that. And, you know, maybe also longer term, figuring out whether we can actually start to get to some of the root causes of student debt, which so far Congress has followed pretty short in terms of doing that. So as I tell people, even though we stopped the student loan collection machine in March 2020 coming up on three years from now, we never stopped the student loan making machine. The loans have been going out like clockwork ever since then. And so until we find some ways to reverse those trends, we're going to be continually confronted with these questions of what to do with the large mass of loans that are payable or unrepayable. So that's one thing we'll be working on a lot, I would say. Well, that's a great topic and we'll keep an eye out, definitely. Are you going to be holding any meetings or either online or face to face about that? I'm sure we will. We finally got back into our office in downtown DC just a few months ago. So we're getting back into habit of having in-person meetings. We've had online meetings the whole time, great forums like this one. But yeah, I think there will be a lot of opportunities for public discussion. Well, excellent. That's a terrific topic to be working on. I'm really looking forward to what you all do with it. Kevin, we're interested in your ideas on so many topics, but I want to start off with your recent box piece because it's so provocative, but it's also so extensively researched and so clearly argued that it's very, very powerful. And friends, if you haven't had a chance to read it again, just click that link and dig in because it's a very, very powerful piece. I'm curious, are the main drivers of this decline? And by decline, I mean, this is a decline in enrollment and also a decline in finances. Are the main drivers really demographic, or is it also a kind of cultural shift in the United States about the value of higher education? Yeah, I think it's mostly demographic actually. And I think that's an important thing to keep in one's mind because enrollment has been declining overall for more than a decade, right? But that's basically purely for demographic reasons. The millennial generations, the largest generation in American history, and which might remain so, the peak of millennial enrollment in college was around 2010, and it's been kind of slowly going down since then. So sometimes I'll read something that says, oh, there's few people going to college just because people don't value college anymore. And mostly, I think it's just there are fewer people to go to college and that the value of the college has, I think, been an interesting place, but not as steady and not as clear as what has been driven by just the sheer fact of how many people there are. That's a good point. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, what role has the, and this is a big generalization, but the decline in state funding for state institutions, we can talk about how that varies from state to state, not changes over time, but what role has that kind of privatization had in driving this decline too? I think it has varied a lot by state, and this is something I also try to get across when we talk about this. There is a kind of a conventional wisdom that in its broadest sense I think is incorrect, which is that there has been a widespread and severe state disinvestment in American higher education over time. I don't think that's true. It's true in some places, but if you look at the data that's published by the state higher education executive officers, the SHEO organization, which I think is regarded to be definitive, they're the officers of state higher education. They put out an annual report every year. They've been doing this for decades, and they track state investment. And they do all the right adjustments. They adjust for inflation. They actually adjust for not the consumer price index, but a more aggressive deflator that's based on the cost of higher education, which is more labor intensive. And on a per student basis, et cetera, et cetera, you see this cyclical pattern where finances go up and down with the business cycle. They decline during recessions and then kind of come back up. But on a per student basis, they're about where they were about 30 years ago. You can make this argument in different ways, depending on your starting point and your stopping point. So if you go from a peak to a trough, it's been a big decline. If you go from a trough to a peak, it's actually gone up. I think if you kind of look in the middle and are reasonable about these things, you find that it's declined a little bit. But there are two important pieces of context to that. As a percentage of university budgets, absolutely state budget has declined, because university budgets have increased quite a bit faster than whatever price measure one might choose. Again, not just the CPI. So that's one thing. So it declined as a percentage of university budgets. And in some states, there's absolutely been a significant overall decline severely. And I think they're pretty familiar. Arizona, for example, Louisiana, increasingly since the Great Recession, which we'll talk a lot about as we talk about demographic changes. This is a partisan phenomenon. There's been quite a bit more decline in Republican-dominated states than in Democratic-dominated states, I would say part of a larger trend of the increasingly partisan valence of higher education policy, which to me is kind of acute and ongoing and very troubling. There's kind of a fracturing of the bipartisan consensus around the need to support public higher education. But there are also states that have not really severely disinvested and remain fairly affordable. And so it is a mix of those things. And so it really depends on which state you choose. In the article that you mentioned, I chose a state, Pennsylvania, that is both for kind of illustrative reasons, is both a state that has experienced pretty severe public disinvestment. Frankly, the investment itself was never that good to disinvest from. And that also has been experiencing the demographic issues earlier and more severely than in other places. So but it really depends on which part of the country you're talking about. Pennsylvania might be a canary in the coal mine, but again, it depends on where we're here. We have questions that are starting to come in, Kevin. And again, friends, if you're new to the forum, on the bottom of the screen, just click the question mark to type in a question. Or if you want to join us on stage, just click the raised hand button. And this is a question that comes from our friend Glenn McGee. And Glenn asks, oh, hang on a second, if I can press the correct button this time. So Glenn asks, what would Lawrence Veezy say about this, if he were alive today? That's a great question. It's great to hear a question from Glenn McGee. Glenn, I miss you from the comment threads on Inside Higher Ed, the late limited Inside Higher Ed comment threads. Yes. There's always a reliable commentator on issues of accreditation, so it's nice to see you again in this forum. Boy, I wish that I could ask Lawrence Veezy so many questions. He's something of an intellectual hero of mine, and I wrote a long article about him a few years ago. I think he would be unsurprised. I think he was a very far-seeking analyst and historian, someone who, in his ability to look backward, was able to look forward. And I've argued that he identified many of the underlying stresses and contradictions in American higher education more than 50 years ago in his seminal book, The Emergence of the American University. And this very much connects to the conversation we're having today. The system was able to survive and thrive despite those contradictions, basically because it was lifted upward by a tide of demography and investment in research. An organization can be as dysfunctional as all get-out, but if it has enough money and customers, it will persist to kind of keep going. We find ourselves in a less generous world in many senses, and I think a lot of those same issues that he identified a long time ago are very much still with us and harder to manage now because we don't have some of the advantages we had before. Glenn, thank you for that great question. And Kevin, thank you for that very rich answer. That covers a lot of ground. And again, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a Q&A box question, so you can always throw more of those in. We're looking forward to them. And everybody else, again, this is a time for you to ask your questions. I promise Kevin and I will be very, very polite and very kind. We have another question here which comes in that takes this more of a global perspective because your article is focused in the U.S. And this is from Philip Lengard. The future for higher ed is growing globally, and now the Trump administration is behind us. The attraction of higher education is rebounded exponentially. Isn't the future for U.S. higher education as the University of the world? Yeah, that's a great question. I misread one line. He said Trump aberration, not administration. So thanks, Philip. That is an interesting question. And one of the things that I note in the article is that from a forecasting standpoint, maybe the biggest wild card might be immigration. We can probably forecast with a fair amount of certainty what internal growth will look like from a birth standpoint and also what internal migration is likely to look like. And internal migration has also been an important thing. Immigration policy is, as noted, as we've learned far more subject to sudden changes based on political majorities. And the changing winds of political sentiment, which come and go in terms of what people really care about, as well as how the approach that the United States takes to it's not just immigration permanent, but also students coming here. And I did get a couple of comments which are fair on social media over the last couple of weeks since I published the article, that maybe there should have been at least a paragraph talking about the changes in the number of foreign students who come into American universities. And as we know, there's been big, big changes over the last couple of decades, dramatically so from China, almost overwhelmingly so just in terms of how it's affected in many institutions that have never really been in a position to have as many students as they might want, have kind of balanced the books through a healthy supply of, if I'm not using that word in the dehumanizing way, of full-pay Chinese students, right, people who don't get any financial aid at all. You know, I think about a Washington Monthly magazine, an article, a magazine that I write for, frequently published an article about Purdue University, you know, which has been kind of, I mean, a prominent university in its own right and more so because of the political position of its president, Mr. Daniels, and who's, you know, I think taking a lot of credit for some of it deserved, probably for trying to maintain a good fiscal stewardship of the university. But there's like a couple thousand foreign students at Purdue. It's a big student population, and we sent a reporter to interview one of them and the quote that really stuck out was, somebody said, you know, one of the advantages of being here was I really learned, I had a roommate who was from a different part of China, and so I really learned his dialect. He came out with the middle of Indiana to basically have the experience of learning the differences within China, right? That was how many Chinese students there were there. So how that's going to go, I don't know, you know, I mean, again, immigration is an extremely live wire issue. It's very salient. People have strong opinions about it. As we've seen, if an election goes a certain way, there can be dramatic and sudden changes, both in our government policies, but also the message that we send to the rest of the world about in general our hospitability to other people. And I think that if the message from American leadership is, you know, we hate you, don't come here, that will probably have an effect on who chooses to come here. And, you know, and I think probably from a global standpoint, there are more countries that may see that as an opportunity than there were once like 20 or 30 years ago, more countries who want to be a destination for students with money. So all which is a long way to say that I don't really know, and it's one of the biggest X factors in trying to figure out how determinative these demographic trends will be. Thank you. That's a great question, Phillip. And a really great, great answer, Kevin. I appreciate the complexity of that. Again, you do so much research continuously that it's just, it's extremely useful to have that with us today. We have more questions coming in, friends. So I just want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask them. And here's one from a former student of mine. So she's definitely brilliant. This is from Annelle Albertel, who asks, what about universities sticking to traditional habits and practices if you do not adjust to meet the needs of the 21st century? How can you stay viable? Yeah, I find as an outsider, and I don't claim any membership in the community of university-based scholars. I work for a think tank in Washington, D.C., which is an industry of perhaps deservedly questionable reputation. But it does give me, I guess, at least that outsider's perspective, that I find universities to be very interesting as organizations, very conservative, small-sea conservative in some ways, but also like very adaptable in other ways, in ways that one ought not, you know, discount. I mean, you know, I always think of, you know, Clark Kerr's famous observation from the uses of the university that if you look at like all of the institutions in the world that exist now that also existed 500 years ago, it's like a few Swiss cantons, the Catholic Church, and 20 universities. And there's a reason for that, I'm probably just quoting him, but in general, right, that these are in some ways the most durable human institutions. And they're also, you know, they're institutions that have very strong roots in their communities. And it's not like the people who work there are unaware of the enrollment clip. You know, and I feature in the article, Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, again, because Pennsylvania is kind of a bit of a canary in the coal mine from a demography standpoint and from a public financing standpoint, but I also talked to community college presidents and private college presidents, they all know about this. They're all thinking about what they can do. Now, some of what they're talking about is essentially competing with one another. And I think that that's, you know, that starts to get zero sum pretty quickly. You're just getting into like winners and losers. And I think that the techniques that they have are pretty similar. I didn't hear anyone. I wasn't really like surprised by anyone's answer. They're going to do more enrollment management, right? We're going to try to see if we can squeeze more money out of price discrimination. You know, we're going to, you know, get better at marketing and recruiting and we're going to do more sports programs. Sports, you know, it's a bit of a tangent, but we think of college sports mainly in terms of the sports that we consume on television, right? Oh, this coach got a $10 million contract and who's going to be in the bowl championship series. But the biggest sports schools in America, measured by the percentage of students who play sports, are not the big division one schools. They are division two schools, division three schools, NAIA schools. They are often, there are small private colleges in the United States where half the students are varsity athletes. And that is done very explicitly for enrollment reasons. It is a recruitment thing that these colleges offer their students. Like, hey, you put a lot of time and effort into high school sports, which is a very specifically like American phenomenon. You know, continue playing. Come here. And by the way, you'll need to pay money to do that. Or we'll offer you like an athletic scholarship, which is actually just the tuition discount we give everybody. But and so they'll be focused on that. And then the thing that I really came to conclude, and I do talk about this in the article, is that people are going to be very focused on the job market. Colleges are going to rightly conclude the colleges that are most affected by demographic change, which is not the most selective colleges. It's just kind of a matter of market power, right? So being a selective college is just another way of saying that you have a lot of power in the higher education market, and that you can choose which customers you want. Right? So as long as you're saying no to half the people who apply, if there's a decline in the number of students, you just say no to 40% of the people who apply, and you get the same number in the end, right? So this is really an issue for institutions that don't have strong market power, which is most of them. Again, they're just not that many selective colleges from a number. In terms of how many students are enrolled there. And they know that if you're kind of right there in the heart, the tough part of the higher education market, the most important reason that people go to college is because they think they need to in order to start a career and get a job. We can have lots of debates about whether they should think that way and about the purposes of higher education and the very many risks to the enterprise of vocationalizing everything. And I agree with all those, but I'm just saying as a matter of fact, that is why the biggest reason why students are going, it's why their parents want them to go for kind of obvious reasons, right? Because that we all know. I imagine this is a form comprised mostly of not entirely of college graduates and probably mostly not entirely of people with graduate degrees, which puts us in a very narrow bit of the American population. So what I heard over and over again is that we are going to, and what they said was I had a great conversation with Dan Greenstein, who is the head of the Pennsylvania, the PASI system, the Pennsylvania System of Higher Education, P-A-S-S-H-E. He's, he oversees Shippensburg University. He was the person who was spearheaded the process of consolidating some of the public institutions in the North and East of Pennsylvania. They had whose enrollment has already shrunk so much that they essentially were headed toward dissolution. And so now he's had to take six institutions and turn them into two. And he said, look, you know, what his thesis in all of this is, he says, if you look at traditional age students in Pennsylvania, there are too many seats. Because Pennsylvania is also a state that has a lot of private colleges, as many states in the Northeast and the Midwest do. Many of which are competing for the same students. But he said, but if you look at the number of jobs that Pennsylvania employers will require that need college degrees, we don't have enough seats. What we need to do is retool our approach to education, retrain our faculty, and be much more about adult education because we can't change the number of students who were born 20 years ago. But there is this much bigger market out there of adult people returning students who need skills and need credentials. And so we're going to go where the market is. And I think over and over again, that's what we're going to see. I think that's going to have some real consequences. Some of them could be positive. Some of them could be negative. Sorry, that was a very long answer to a question. So I will pause there. Oh, it's a great answer. And again, a great question. And our chat room is just lighting up. People are going in all kinds of directions. And I did want to share a question from one person who couldn't be here today. This is a friend of some of ours, Don Charlis, a longtime friend of the program. And he asks about the other end of the demographic spectrum about the boom in the number of seniors, people 65 and older. And he wondered this in two ways. One is how does that impact public support for higher ed? I mean, you think, for example, about the state costs for retirees competing for public funding. Let's go back to an earlier topic. But also to what extent we see higher education teaching and otherwise serving more and more senior citizens. What do you think about that? I think the first of those two is probably the bigger issue. You know, the United States is an aging society as basically all similar societies are. We have sort of these very present issues of the ratio of working people to non-working people, of older people to non-older people, the cost of income support and health care, which we've been talking about for decades, but we've been talking about them because they're real issues and they are coming and they're approaching. And so you do run into prioritization issues. So for example, one of the things, getting back to your question about state disinvestment, like another thing that's true about state funding for higher education is that it's declined as a percentage of state spending. So colleges are, even if the amount of money is basically kind of in aggregate, mostly kept up with inflation and student population growth, the amount of money that states have is grown because we have productivity growth. We don't just increase state revenues by how many people we have and by prices, we also have just like more money to spend. We're a wealthier society than we were 20, 30 years ago, quite a bit wealthier. And colleges haven't gotten sort of their share of that increase in wealth. I think one could fairly argue. Where has it gone? It's all gone to Medicaid. It's all gone to Medicaid. I used to be a state budget person like a long time ago. Right, right. Like K through 12 schools, higher education and Medicaid is most of the budget. Everything else is kind of details after that. Prisons, I guess. And Medicaid is, you know, while we do have Medicaid and Medicare for seniors, a lot of Medicaid goes to nursing homes, right? So, and that is just, there's a real kind of mechanical process there, right? That is also driven by demography. Just more people become eligible. The funding is there. There are the state matching requirements. And so Medicaid was just, you know, and also technological change, you know, people invent new drugs, which is a good thing. You know, like not all healthcare spending is bad. Sometimes healthcare spending is because we invented really, you know, cool things to spend money on that save people's lives and make them healthier. But they're expensive, right? You know, the FDA can like increase the entire Medicaid budget by a percentage point just by approving like one drug if it wants to. I think he did that a couple of years ago. So that may put further stress on the public funding issue that's already pretty present. Will colleges serve seniors? I'm not sure, you know. I know, like, I will say that, like, I think it was Goldie Bluestike, the great reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, like once joked to me that, like, you can find articles about how colleges are going to provide classes to, you know, seniors going back like 50 years and it never really tends to happen that much. So I don't know if it's happening, but I imagine it's more the economic issues that will be the real thing. Okay, well, thank you. That's a great answer and thank you, Don, when you hear this recording for the really, really good question. We have more questions coming in and I'm trying to arrange them in ways that really, really fit. And this is one from our dear friend and the awesome editor, Greg Britton, coming to us from Johns Hopkins University Press. And Greg asks, the other demographic shift we are talking about, the majority of college students are now women. How will this change the nature of institutions, the curriculum, faculty, athletics, et cetera? Yeah, that's a great question. The majority of undergraduates have been women since 1978. But the percentage who are women continues to change. And to the point that there have been some pretty recent articles, there was a big Wall Street Journal article written about that a couple of years ago, or maybe it was about a year ago, sort of saying there's been a new uptick and are we crossing some sort of like threshold? I've always been a little skeptical of some of the way those trends get framed because the overall enrollment rate in higher education has been positive. So, I mean, this is one of the big reasons, kind of going back to the demographic issues. The post-World War II history of American higher education and demography is basically a story of first the baby boom and then a decline and then the millennial generation, the children of the baby boom. And it's really striking how much, even though we've had a lot of population growth as a country, how much it's been, how non-steady it's been, how cyclical it's been. And one of the numbers I talk about in the article is that in 1957, there were 4.3 million babies born in the United States. And that's when the population was half the size of this today. It was about 160 million now. It's about 330 million. We did not reach that number again until 2007, and we've never reached it since. So, 1957, there were, you know, and so that's how, that was the level of like, the sundity or facility or whatever the right word is, that was kind of going on in the peak of the 1950s. And, you know, the people who have been in higher education for a while will tell you that there was an enrollment cliff crisis conversation happening, you know, about 40 years ago, right? Because people could see the same numbers, right? You know, and you would look at it. It's always very difficult for institutions because the students come 20 years later. So the generations overlap by one. So you're in this situation where you're expanding, you're bursting at the seams, you don't have enough dorms, you don't have enough people at the same time that the demographer is telling you that you're looking at a long-term decline, right? And so you have this real kind of push and pull in terms of how, and colleges tend to sort of be very comfortable, I think, in fairly narrow ranges. You know, like there's not a college out there that would be fine with being, you know, half as big or twice as big generally. They kind of want to be what they are. Which is a long way of just noting that we basically dodged the last enrollment cliff for a couple of reasons, one of which was the big change in the number of women who were allowed to have jobs and therefore allowed to go to college or had reason to go to college. And the same thing with the decline, although by no means the end of racial discrimination in a higher education. And that combined with the change, economic changes that really wiped out like millions of non-college educated, non-college credential requiring blue college jobs increased the percentage of high school graduates who went to college from basically a half to two thirds. And that saved the industry's bacon in the last dip. And one of the things that I talk about in the article is that there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that that will happen again. It went from half to two thirds, it got to two thirds by like the 90s and it's never really gone over 70% since then. And it was dipping, kind of starting to go down right before the pandemic as the job market was really heating up for non-college educated workers. So to kind of get back to the gender question, women go to college because they need to. We don't offer job opportunities, good jobs for women who don't have connections. We have a very, very gendered labor market in this country. There are a lot of professions that are like 80, 20, one way or the other, almost all women or almost all men. And the single thing that distinguishes them is that the almost all women jobs are either very low paying like a hotel cleaner, for example. I'm sure we've all spent a lot of time in hotels. Ask yourself how many times your hotel has been cleaned by a man in your life. Or their jobs that require education and credentials and education in healthcare. And so women are at this like real disadvantage. They have to basically get more credentials to earn the same as men and they have to pay more for those credentials than they have to take the time. So I think that that will probably continue and in some ways that's in a weird kind of way a supporter of college enrollment, the fact that we continue to do this. But it's also a very kind of, it's also like a long-term trend that I don't think is changing really dramatically. The other thing that it will kind of, and then I'll stop, I promise, the other thing that just sort of happens is that it's like well understood that another thing that selected institutions do is gender balance, right? They discriminate against women in the applicant pool because they don't want the gender ratio to be more than X to Y. Well, what that does is it just pushes the gender imbalance down, right? Into the institutions that don't have the opportunity to do that. And that's the same thing that's going to happen with the enrollment book, right? So whatever your overall number is, basically the top 20% of institutions are going to immunize themselves from it. But that just means that everyone else will feel it by 20% more. And I think that will probably exacerbate those gender issues for the same reason. What a fantastic answer. A small seminar after you have an answer and a response to what a great question. Greg, thank you so much. And again, Kevin, thank you as well. If you've been with us for the past 40 minutes, you know that Kevin is happy to answer your questions and do a deep dive into them. So this is a great time to share them. And I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask. I don't know if we'll be able to get to everybody. So I'm going to do my best here. There's one coming from Steve Ehrman, one of our favorite writers, thinkers, and a great guest. And he asked a typically deep and thoughtful question, which is reaching out to students older than traditional goes back a long way. Online learning is one prominent way to do it. How does that relate to the prediction of decline? Sorry. Yeah, I mean myself. What about online question is an interesting one. And I don't know that I feel like I don't have a really solid answer to that. And I'm someone who wrote a whole book about online education and what it means and what it, the future might hold in that regard. I think that, you know, there, there, there has been a little bit of reporting about whether or not the pandemic increased the number of people who are comfortable and wanted online education. Not big numbers, but a positive trend, right? You know, if you're an institution where a lot of your cost structure is, so it goes both ways, right? So you could have a new market. And I do think there are, I think by and large, the effective online on higher education has been to convert existing people into either hybrid or fully online, but not really open up like lots of markets for credentials that weren't there before. I think most of the students who are online students now would have been in-person students before. Not all, but like most of them and probably, probably in the places where there's differences, it's for shorter term credentials, either pre or post-baccalaureate. So, you know, if you could find a way to serve an older student population, that could be a source of funding. Again, a new market, I think institutions not wanting to get locked into sort of like a depth struggle for the shrinking pool of traditional students would just say they're just a lot of other people who aren't 18, but let's go serve them. Let's find reasons for that. The flip side is if you've got buildings to maintain, you know, and more than that, like a culture and an institution that is built around a place, if that's sort of, which is, you know, most institutions are very place bound, both in terms of themselves and also who they serve, right? They basically tend to serve regional markets, not national markets. Subversion. Serving students online who aren't paying rent in your dorms is like a tricky place to be. If the dorms are still sitting there, particularly if you like borrowed money to build them, as I think some institutions did, and you know, I noted some colleges that opened up new dorms at the peak, unwisely, at the sort of peak of the demography in the 2010s and they're now trying to like sell them, you know, or can't make debt service payments. Lisa Durf mentioned that she thinks that Shippensburg was opening new dorms when she last checked. You know, I went up to Shippensburg and they said that they're doing okay on the dorm occupancy. I mean, I asked about that. And they said they've managed to do that, partly because they, I think they did some smart things with their foundation. You know, they have a pretty active local foundation. And so they had the foundation like build some off-campus housing that was like more readily convertible back into market housing, and need to be students as opposed to the university like having, you know, owing bond holders like a hundred million bucks. I talked about like Edinburgh University, which is now, which was consolidated, borrowed like a hundred and thirteen million dollars to build new dorms in, you know, they made the decision in 2008. The dorms opened in like 2012 and they're now empty and on the market in 2022. And they, and that's the university that whose enrollment dropped in half before the enrollment cliff, right? So this is, you know, this is, if I could just divert a little bit, this is another important thing to understand about these demography issues, which is they have, you know, there are national trends, but the trends really vary by region. They really vary by institution type. And I'm all just referring to Nathan Graw's work, The Economist from Carlton College, he's written two very good books that I just cite directly in my article. They vary by racial ethnic group and they vary by education level. And the biggest declines in birth rates have essentially been among certain kinds of middle-class white people in the northeast part of the United States. And so which happens to be the kind of people who send their students to passing colleges, right? You know, and so if you're, if that's your market, the enrollment cliff is a much bigger problem for you than if you are more selective or if you're in a part of the country with population growth. Although the population growth is, tends to be driven more by racial ethnic groups that have a lower propensity to go to college. And that's what Graw does a good job of getting into. So they kind of balance out, right? There's more people in certain groups but they're less likely to go to college. There are other groups that are more likely to go to college but the population decline is greater among them. So you have to just kind of figure these things out. It's complicated. Well, another plus here for anything Graw, he was one of our earliest guests and I taught his first book a lot. He's a great and important thinker. Kevin, we're coming in the last 15 minutes of the program and there are more questions bubbling up and I want to make sure people get a chance to ask them. And these are coming from a few different directions and they're all from great people. And so let me bring up one from our good friend, Sarah Sangregorio. And Sarah asks, what effects do you think commodification efforts will have in trying to save higher education? And by commodification she means online program management companies, outsourcing faculty, micro credentials, et cetera. I think it's a big problem. You know, I think when I went to, when I was talking to the president of Shippensburg, you know, there was a very about what they're doing now. Cause again, they're, they're dealing with an enrollment decline now and they're trying to think ahead about it. There was a very direct dialogue about, you know, the idea of a quote, like under subscribed majors, you know, like we need to look at the, start, you know, having some frank conversations with departments and majors where, where, you know, not enough people are enrolling and that is going to have an effect on faculty. I think that all goes to intellectual diversity. I think it really creates a heightened risk that to the humanities, to the liberal arts, to the non-locational missions of institutions as teaching institutions, but also as institutions that are homes for research and scholarship, right? And, you know, like it's all well and good. And I don't blame anyone for doing this, for setting up a new program in supply chain management. Supply chain management, if that's where the jobs are and that's what students want and also like you live near as I, you know, live near a bunch of like warehouse industries, which is what these colleges I talked to did because they were right in your IED one, which is this big kind of fucking corridor. But, you know, like that's not the same as some of the things that we really expect from our colleges and universities. It's just, you know, I'm happy to say that. Everything about online program management and issue that I've written about quite a lot is market driven. In two ways, partly labor market driven and partly just like what students will sign up for driven, which are not always the same thing. I mean, sometimes there's a real mismatch there, but in either case, there's certainly kind of a commodify, a commodification element to all that. And, you know, candidly as much as colleges will always tell you that when they sign up with an online program manager, that the OPM is just doing the back end stuff. They're just doing marketing. They're just, you know, kind of helping out on the, you know, we, the essential stuff, that's still all us. That's all we're doing. That's not always true. You know, there's real blurry lines, frankly, in a lot of these cases, particularly when you basically turn over hiring to the OPMs, which I know is something that happens either formally or essentially. You know, if you're hiring the folks and you're the ones who are kind of, you know, running them through the curriculum and all the rest of it, they just sort of start to stamp out versions of the same thing in different places. And so, a long way to say, I know all of my ways are long to say, I think it's a real risk. And I think that was a risk that was present regardless of the demographic issues. I think the fiscal stress that these demographic issues will create is going to heighten that risk and make some of the sort of very present issues that we have in the academic labor market more present still. That's a great answer. Great answer. And Sarah, of course, thank you for another great, great question. I want to make sure everyone gets at least one chance to ask. And here's one just comes back to kind of practical question. And this is from Marcella Garces. I hope I mispronounced that too badly. What do you recommend for people who work in institutions likely to be most negatively impacted that you mentioned? So those are tuition driven, regional, the Northeast, Midwest. What about the people working there, the faculty, the staff? Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, be as engaged as possible, as early as possible. I would not trust that the, you know, administration, and again, I'm not trying to be like reflexively anti-administration here in any way. I think there's a lot of great administrators who are, you know, trying hard under difficult circumstances. But, but, you know, I say this as someone who isn't an administrator himself and the nonprofit that I work for, right? You know, so, so I live this all the time. Like the budget matters, you know, like your job is to kind of make sure that the numbers add up and, and the, the fiscal health of the institution has a very, very, you know, kind of strong constant effect on management and decision-making. And sometimes that can lead you to make some decisions that seem practical, but could be at odds with like the, the broader values that the institution was created, right? You know, it's easy to lose track of that if you're like, well, I don't know. I got to do what I got to do to make the numbers out of it. And I think in times of plenty, which we had in many ways, maybe it didn't feel like that then, but we did. A lot of students, you know, relative economic prosperity, good, good environment in terms of public support for higher education. It's maybe easier to just kind of focus on the, the, you know, what's happening in your field or what's happening in your departments and just kind of trust that everything was going to kind of go the way it needed to, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't make those assumptions anymore. Obviously, you know, the conditions for faculty share governance vary a lot, depending on what state you're in and what the laws are and whether it's public, private. And so the mechanisms of engagement, I know are, are very different. But, but I would say, you know, like speak up for a broad range of potential solutions to this problem, because there will be some set of options laid out on the table and some of them will be chosen. And if the only options are, you know, let's just kind of put a profit loss statement against every department and manage that way. Then the, the, the consequences are kind of predictable. Right. Or if it's, if it's some kind of cock and maybe scheme to, to, you know, we're going to be the, we're going to kind of go off in some like weird direction or do some, I mean, you know, people are just going to try to make sure that, you know, people who are accountable to the board in times of fiscal stress, that's the only thing you talk about. Right. Like if things narrow, right. So, so the more options they have, that seem like good options, the better. Sorry. I'll just one more example. I will, I was talking to someone the other day from the Tegel foundation nonprofit foundation that really focuses on the liberal arts and the humanities. And we were just taught, you know, they're doing a lot to get people to sort of adopt, you know, a strong core curriculum in the humanities in addition to, you know, the more sort of often job oriented majors that many colleges have. And I just said, you know, this has to be part of the sales pitch for these colleges. Right. It can't be something that they're doing because they'd like to, they have to see it as something that they are, that differentiates them in the market. Yeah. So you have to also start to be able to speak in this, speak the business language of higher education or translate the scholarly language into the business language because that business language is the lingua franca of these discussions about how to, to deal with the enrollment cliff. And there's got to be some translation there. When you're at a table with the like, you know, vice president for enrollment management, which is like a job that, you know, a lot of these places have that just kind of have to, yeah. Well, this is, thank you. Thank you for, first of all, thank you Marcello for a terrific question, which we really appreciate. And Kevin would a great multifaceted answer. Thank you so much. We have more questions that have been coming in. And we have a couple from Bobby Baggio, and I want to make sure that I get the right ones. I hope it's Baggio and not Baggio. I'm sure you can, you can let me know. And this is, I'll pick this one, which I think is really direct. What do you see as a timeline for mergers and closures, five to 10 years, one generation out? I mean, there's the kind of the whole, like attributed to Ernest Hemingway, cliche about how did you go bankrupt, like slowly and then all at once. And I think when you see private colleges, because we have seen some closures, that's kind of how it's gone, right? You know, it, I mean, I, an example I give is in the, I actually had a chance, I was on vacation coincidentally, but this is how my head works. A few years ago up in Vermont over the summer, it was like during the pandemic. So we just wanted to find like a cabin by a lake and I just happened to be in a Vermont town the same day that the local college was being auctioned off. I drove through and I was like, oh, there's a college here. Like I'm interested. I'm a higher ed person. And so I Googled it and it was like, tomorrow it's being auctioned off. So I went there and I saw an auction for a tiny amount of money, like $5 million. There's green mountain college. And I mentioned it in the article. You know, a tiny fraction of, of its worth. But what struck me was it looked just like, it didn't look like a college in decline. It, you know, was it, it looked, I mean, it had been empty for a year and it still looked fine. You know, everything about it was okay. Like colleges tend to not like slowly deteriorate. They just try to keep it going until the moment that they can't anymore. And then they just stop in the for-profit world. That means that the students sort of show up on Monday and there's a chain on the door. In the nonprofit world, it means a teach-out agreement, you know, but usually over the course of, you know, no more than like 69 months. People don't plan to close three years from now. Right. They keep it going. And then they say, you know, the, the most anyone, you know, notice there is, is the end of whatever academic year the decision is made. I mean, that's happening now. That's already happened. Right. And so I think probably inevitably, like very unfortunately inevitable, if nothing else changes, we're just going to see more of that among tuition dependent private colleges that just don't have much in the way of endowments. They don't have much financial margin. They are just being squeezed and they can't make the numbers add up. So I think that's ongoing and will continue to happen. Consolidation is a sort of like very interesting question. It makes a lot of sense. I think it's, but it's obviously very difficult. The circumstances for it in Pennsylvania were kind of ideal. In this very obviously they weren't ideal for anyone. They were ideal for consolidation in the sense that you had some very severe enrollment decline in a number of institutions. And so it's sort of like, well, we have no choice but to do this. You know, it's not something that anyone tends to do super proactively from a position of strength. They tend to do it from a, well, it's this or Armageddon kind of thing. I'm sort of interested in whether or not there could be public private consolidation, right? Which is not really a thing that happens very often, but there's no reason that I know that I think in a couple places it has, but it's not like a big, there's not tons of precedent for it, but it seems way preferable to me to figure out some deal to do it that way as opposed to just like literally sell it to like some guy, which is sort of what's kind of happening right now where you can preserve the intellectual heritage and the faculty and all of the things, the intangible things that colleges possess in addition to the facilities until the moment that they go away. I mean, all that stuff just sort of disappears. You know, I think it could be done in a couple of years like start to finish if everyone is committed to the process. I don't think it has to take longer than that, but it's also been very controversial. You know, like I know there have been proposals in some southern states to do consolidation that seem, you know, like very suspiciously targeted toward historically black colleges, right? You know, that has been where you have state legislators saying, well, you know, like your enrollment is down, your finances are bad. I guess we should just consolidate you. And it's like, right, our finances are bad because of like a hundred years of obvious structural racism and under investment. That's why we're in the situation. And now you're consolidating us and not, and people I think have very rightly pushed back on that. And so these are, you know, these are often definitionally marginalized communities, economically marginalized, often culturally marginalized institutions that have not received the level of public support. That's why they're in this situation. You know, and so it can be, I think, difficult to say, well, now you've got to like give up part of your identity. You've got to be subsumed into something else. So it's not, it's not an easy process, but I do think there are probably a non-trivial number of institutions for whom the choice will be consolidation or dissolution over the next couple of decades. Let me, first of all, thank you. That's a really, really good answer for a very direct and practical question. For our last question, and this is, almost under the wire here. Let me try and bring together a few themes that have come up in the questions and in the chat. We seem to be at a kind of moment of realization that we've overbuilt American higher education, that we have, as you said, the Pennsylvania person, that we have too many seats for the students that we traditionally go after. And that either we have to reinvent a lot of higher education in order to account for that, to try and pivot and do better, or we have to get used to consolidations and closures. But people ask, is this a kind of dawning realization that's rippling out across the United States? What prevents us from thinking of this? What's keeping us going with the same mold, same mold? Why haven't, you know, are we actually on the edge of such a realization? Yeah, I mean, the enrollment cliff isn't a vertical cliff, right? It's an inflection point that is tied to the Great Recession, which is where we absolutely saw birth rates dramatically reverse themselves and begin to decline. Again, I said 2007 was the year for the very first time that we matched 1957 for births, and then we just never did again, and may not ever actually. The fertility rate has more or less gone down steadily since then. It crept up a little bit during the Great Recession, during the pandemic, but that might be people who are just stuck at home together. So we'll see how that goes. So to some extent it's just, and I asked this question about the place that built all the dorms. I was like, what were they thinking? I mean, you could sit in, none of these numbers were unknown then about the future. We didn't know what was going to happen with births, but you knew that the peak of the millennial wave was going to happen when it happened, right? And I'm like, why did they do that? And the answer that I got was, no one is going to tell themselves or their trustees that they are going to be the loser in this context. No one's going to say, well, we just don't have what it takes. So we've got to prepare for decline, because we are not going to be able to compete. We are not going to be able to attract students. We are not going to be able to succeed. There is no opportunity for thriving. The best we can do is steady state. The most likely occurrence is a decline that we need to manage gracefully. That is just not in the vocabulary and mindset of a lot of institutional leaders. And there's probably a lot of virtue in bringing a sense of dynamism and optimism to your job. But there's a risk to it, which is that you just can't see what's right in front of you. And there's a time horizon element to this, too. If you're not attributing bad motives to anybody, but it's a little hard to make incredibly difficult decisions that are going to make your job hard today and are going to pay off for another 15 years. Particularly if you can pair that with some plausible and positive rhetoric. But most of the people who are college presidents right now or a lot of them will still be college presidents four years from now. I don't know what the average turnover rate is. Quite a few. And certainly trustees and certainly anyone who's in a policy standpoint as a steward of these systems. And so I don't think it's avoidable now for people. All people I talked to were like, yeah, absolutely we know about it. Absolutely we're thinking about it. Here's what we're doing. There was no lack of awareness of the issue. Well, that is a very nuanced answer to my fumbling synthetic question. And you've been giving us nuanced, rich, well-informed, deeply reflective answers, Kevin, for the past hour plus. Thank you so much for being a fantastic guide, teacher and respondent. What's the best way for people to keep up with you and your work at New America? Sure. I mean, follow me on Twitter for as long as it exists at Kevin Carey one. We'll see about that. I have not yet migrated to an alternate social platform. So, you know, my email is just Carey at newamerica.org. You know, it's in my profile. Feel free to email me. I have a LinkedIn. I don't use that as much. Best way is to email me at Carey, just C-A-R-E-Y at newamerica.org. Or you can direct message me on Twitter. I try to respond to those as well. Those are probably the two best ways to... And I have a website, kevincarey.com, which is just to collect all the stuff that I write if you are curious about that. Excellent. Again, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and good luck with your work on loans and debt. We need to see that. And above all, take care. Okay. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, everybody. I appreciate your great questions. Thanks again, Kevin. Let's second what Kevin just said. These are terrific questions, friends. And the ones that we haven't asked, I'm going to share with Kevin afterwards. I think he'll appreciate that. If you'd like to keep talking about this stuff, as Kevin said, as long as Twitter stands, we have the hashtag FTTE, and we also have me and also Shindig available. If you'd like to hit my blog, BrianAlexander.org, we'd be glad to talk about this. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions, including our one with Nathan Graw, covering all kinds of related topics, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive, and you can find them there. We have sessions coming up on still more topics. Just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to see those. And if you want to share with me your work that you're up to, just email me. I'd be glad to share it with the whole community. Thank you again for a great hour of conversation, friends. Thank you for wonderful questions, wonderful thoughts. I've really appreciated it. The 2022 is slowly coming to an end, but we won't stop. Good luck with all of December. Above all, friends, stay safe and take care. We'll see you online next time. Bye-bye.