 Let me just welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you today. Today is a special session of the forum and I'll explain why and how important this is in just a minute. Now let me explain a couple of things. First, this is a special session, and that is we are creating this session because something very dramatic, very significant, has just happened. Two major Supreme Court decisions. So I think of this session, which doesn't take place in our normal slot, as a kind of emergency meeting. This is where we can quickly explore, try to understand, and start thinking about one of the most salient events to happen in higher education in the past few years. We haven't really done this before very much and I'd be curious at a meta level what you think about it. Now, the subject that we're looking at is, of course, two very recent Supreme Court decisions, one of which shut down affirmative action as an admissions criterion in elite higher education, and the second one which shut down the Biden administration's effort to try to forgive some student debt. Now, what do these mean for higher education? What do they mean for individual academics? What do they mean for academic programs, for questions, and for all kinds of choices heading forward? That's what we're going to be exploring today. And we're in the hands of two excellent, excellent people, two great professors at two great universities, both of whom specialize in, among other things, law and what it means for higher education, both of which might be familiar to you before. Zack has been a guest in the program and Mark has been a redoubtable participant. So without further ado, let me just bring up the first of these. Zack Blamer, and I'll bring you, just mentioned, as I'm bringing him up, as I was trying to build out the website for this program, Zack's entire life changed. He was at a small college in New England called Yale, and just this past month shifted to another small joint in the East Coast called Princeton University. Zack, welcome aboard. Great to see you again. Hey, thanks very much, Brian. Good to see you all. Oh, I'm really glad you could make it. I'm really looking forward to what you can add. I'm, I'm curious, I've asked you this before, but your life has changed a bit. So I guess the question, your answer might change too. What are you looking forward to for the next year of your work? What are the big ideas and what are the big projects you're going to be focusing on? Yeah, so I think I should probably set people's expectations for the next hour beforehand, because I've spent the last couple of years thinking about race-based affirmative action and other race-neutral alternative emissions policies. I'm not sure, I mean, I have so much to say sort of outside of that scope. I think there are a lot of possible things that have pretty dramatically changed higher education the last week that we ought to talk about, but that's sort of, that's what I've thought about, and I think we'll be able to best contribute with regard to. For the next year, I'll be thinking a lot, well, we're moving to a new institution, but also thinking a lot about the sort of integration ramifications of ending race-based affirmative action, as well as thinking about what happens inside of universities, especially around college major choice, when kids from different backgrounds come in and are either choosing what to major in or, as is the case at many public universities, these choices are being made for them using GPA restrictions and other policies that limit kids' access to certain college majors, which interact in interesting ways with emissions policies. Oh, fascinating, fascinating, especially majors. I haven't heard anyone talk about it. We're going to have to ask you about that in just a minute or so. Let me right now put on stage your fellow panellist and our great friend, Mark Rush, and let me bring him up on the stage as well. Hello, sir. I can see you, but cannot hear you. Your microphone seems to be turned off. Yeah, Wesson, I think you get to swing into action here. And Mark, while you're working on that, just make a noise when it's back live and we'll rope you into the conversation. Mark is, among other things, a wonderful advocate for liberal arts, liberal education, and he is also a major advocate for international education. And he is also someone who has done a great deal of work on the law. And so I always turn to for legal and policy questions. While he's working on that, Zach, in fact, let me just get him off the stage so he doesn't have to keep me ogling at us. Zach, just to begin with, thinking about this huge decision, what's the shorthand for referring to it? Are we going to call it the Harvard decision or the students decision? Yeah, exactly. It's either the SFFA decision or the decision against Harvard and UNC. Okay. Okay. And friends, before I dive in, let me just say this is a... I'm going to ask our excellent experts a couple of questions, but then I want to get out of the way so that you can perform your questions and your queries. So please, don't at all be shy. This is a place for you to explore. And again, this is a very, very fast moving topic. This has just appeared in the world. So if you have questions and you're nervous about them, don't be nervous. There's a lot to talk about here. So I'll call it for sake of argument now. I'll call it the SFFA. SFFA, Students for Fair Admission. Fair Admission. Okay. So the SFFA case, the majority of the court, 63 ruled that Harvard and North Carolina can no longer consider admissions as an open and explicit category for shaping their admissions process. How am I doing so far? Is that right? Please. Totally. What does this mean for higher education going forward? How do we get to respond? Are admissions offices across the country throwing up their playbook? What's the next step here? It's very interesting, you know, 10 states had previously faced affirmative action bans at public universities, though one, in the case of Texas, it was invalidated years later. And so we have a sense of, you know, sort of from a bird's eye view, what happens when universities year over year suddenly are unable to use race as one criterion for admitting undergraduate and graduate students. But in each case there are differences both in the kinds of institutions and policies they were already implementing to provide race big preferences and differences in the specific wording of the policies that were implemented. So, you know, we have this new wording and it's something like 45 pages of summary and decision that was provided by John Roberts last Thursday that gives a substantial amount of guidance to universities about the reasons for which they are not allowed to use race and admissions but also some guidance on how the risk or risk related criteria are still permitted for use in undergraduate admissions. I think the clearest question is there's sort of like a wait and see period as there's now an active negotiation at each of the public and private universities where these policies were implemented between admissions offices, administration and legal offices trying to decide exactly what is permissible and what the admissions policy will look like this coming fall. Oh, that's interesting. So, this really becomes even harrier and more complicated as we try and set this up. Yeah, I suspect we're going to see a lot of different kinds of changes happen at a lot of different institutions. So, one primary difference is going to be between the super selective private universities that received a lot of public attention but which in full a very small number of students. We've never banned certain admissions practices at those institutions and so I think it's sort of unknown the degree to which they'll be able to continue basically so resulting in the same admissions class that they have in past years just making pretty minor changes in either admissions decisions or in admissions justifications to end up with the same resulting class. That's unknown. What we have a better sense of is what happened at selective public institutions, flagship schools in states that have highly selective institutions. What we've seen in states like California, Texas and Michigan, the states with the most selective flagship publics that have previously implemented affirmative action bans have been seen pretty substantial declines in black, Hispanic and Native American enrollment on the order of 30 to 50 percent at those flagship schools year over year immediately after these policies are implemented and then sort of a very different stories at other institutions. So, you get this cascade effect where there's no net enrollment change at mid-tier and less selective public universities because those schools are both losing students and that they're affirmative action policies and gaining students from more selective schools who are no longer able to get into those more selective institutions. So, in expectation we would see that kind of cascade pattern in many of the public university systems that we're still using race based affirmative action. These are schools like UVA and UNC and the University of Wisconsin, Penn State, Georgia Tech, et cetera, but exactly what will happen in private schools I think is somewhat less known. That's interesting. This is even more complicated because so private school, well like your two schools, you know, Yale or Princeton, but versus the leading publics, you know, the Michigan's and the UT Austin. Well, there's other interesting things that could happen. So I think one thing that is possible is that the states that have already seen affirmative actions implemented could get in Hispanic students because those schools were already not doing affirmative action. Now there's a bunch of other schools that have stopped doing affirmative action like Hispanic students who had previously gone to those other institutions are still in large part going to enroll somewhere and many of them could flow back to schools that had implemented affirmative action bans years earlier. So, you know, think of one example, Berkeley and UCLA saw a relatively small but meaningful net outflow of black and Hispanic students to the Ivy League after Prop 209 ended affirmative action in 1998. And it's possible that some of those students will now return to selective flagship public institutions that have become no more admissively welcoming to them, but whose counterfactual options may no longer be available. Oh, that's interesting. So this so we won't just have the I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but the simple story of ending affirmative action missions and then black and Hispanic everyone that drops. But this may actually play out differently across the nation. Hang on one second. I'm going to bring Mark rush back up. Let me see if his audio is live and mark. Are you there? Is it working? It is. It's it as everyone says it is so good to hear your voice. Mark, where are you coming to us from today? I'm coming to you from Lexington, Virginia in my office. Excellent. Yeah, you can talk about some of the Red Sox paraphernalia in the background. Oh, I'm not going to go down. But are we likely to be ambushed by your puppy today? No, no, no, he's at home hanging out. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, that's that's too bad, but I understand understand that's that's very good. Listen, Mark, what's just to carry our tradition of introducing people? What are you working on for the next year? What are the big topics and what are the big projects? Really, I'm working on right now. It spins out of some of the discussion we'll touch upon today, but just the working on a couple of essays talking about, you know, the courts reliance on notions of tradition and how that really compares to Thomas Q's notions of scientific revolutions and I'm arguing that basically the court has to consider how it relies on tradition because on the one hand, you certainly appreciate that. On the other hand, the legislature needs to break from it. Otherwise, you're stuck in antiquated paradigms. So we don't want to navigate by flat earth technology, nor should we continue to administer and interpret the law based on 19th century visions of liberal constitutionalism. So that's what I'm working on. Oh, wow. Sounds very exciting. And then are you and then you're teaching this well for the spring? Well, I'll be teaching a course, our introductory global politics course. A colleague and I are trying to rework that really again and make it look more as a forward-looking global politics course, breaking away from old notions of conflict and whatnot. And then I'll be teaching a course just on the intersection of law science and technology. Which is always great. If you do it with the first year students, they're wonderful. Excellent. Excellent. Well, welcome. I'm so glad that you can that you can join us and bring this expertise to bear. I'm curious. Have you have you heard our conversation so far? On and off, I had to go back out and come back in to get the mic working. Well, I guess I can build on this a bit. Zach has been great about explaining the ways this starts to impact different institutions and different ways. I'm curious. What what could an institution that wants to really support black and Hispanic students or increase the number of black and Hispanic students? What can they do now following the Harvard case? To tell you the truth, I'll be I'll bring a skeptical response and approach to this. I pretty much disagree with most of what I've been reading in terms of commentary. I think this is going to have very little impact at the very end of the opinion. Justice Roberts left open a couple of loopholes that were very vague. I think essentially admissions offices will have to do a little more homework to demonstrate that they're relying on something other than race specifically. So class or whatnot, SES status will become more of a proxy for it. I don't think it's going to make a whole lot of difference to tell you the truth. In the sense that, you know, when you think about it, you read the decision, how are we going to police this? How will the federal government police and how much, you know, manpower is the government really going to dedicate to making sure that we now what admit 10 more students of one background and 10 fewer of another metaphorically speaking in a class of 1600 to Harvard and then you multiply that by all the universities across the country. I think this is really going to be a tempest in the teapot. I think the more important aspect of the decision honestly is what yet and and the decision about student loans really exposes or highlights about the current state of American politics and really the history of race relations. You know, there was there's been some great writing recently in the times and whatnot saying, yeah, let's blow up the admissions process and really work on not just higher education. At the upper micro sliver of the higher ed structure and let's focus on what's not happening K through 12. Let's focus on, you know, resources that that should be directed perhaps to non elite schools so that fighting to get into Harvard and Yale becomes less of an issue as there are more quality options out there at least as as are perceived by, you know, students and their parents when they're applying to schools. There are a lot of great schools, but we only hear these conversations with a handful and that's really a problem. I think so. That's my quick response. Well, that's a that's a great response. Thank you. It seems like this this problem just really becomes even more complex and now I mean it stretches from the tactical deployment of a given admissions office all the way through to how we rethink all of the education system in the United States, not just graduate schools and universities, but also K through 12 in the chat. People are thrown in a couple of really, really good points. Our good friend George station responding to Zach's point about different states shared a story from inside a higher ed about how one American state, Missouri, just their attorney general just set a letter to colleges both private and public and told them to start changing up their affirmative action policies and admissions as well as scholarship. I believe George. Thank you for catching that and that that does sound more like one answer to the policing question is for a general to do it again. That's just one state to question if that's going to be echoed elsewhere. We also had Patricia Suarez, Patricia, I hope I got the last name right. I'm always dreading mispronouncing that points out that time is ticking quickly along as the common application opens August one. So the timing here is very, very interesting. Let me let me stop throwing questions at you two for now. And I'd love to hear questions from everyone in the group. And again, friends, if you're new to the form the very bottom of the screen at white band, the press the raise hand if you want to join us on stage and of course press the question mark if you'd like to type in a question as an example of the letter. Let me bring up a question from our good friend and polished polished questioner, Tom Haymes who asked why has higher ed resisted income based affirmative action for so long, it's legally simple and would do a better job at diversity than a race based admissions. I'd love to hear from both of you on this. So I can speak to the story in California. That's I think what I know best. So when California passed the ballot proposition in 1996 ending the use of race based preferences, its public universities had to put a lot of thought into how to reform their admissions policies to reduce the preference explicitly on race, but otherwise maintain diverse campuses across the University of California system and some of those policies were made policy changes were made very publicly. So in 2001, three years after the band was implemented in 98, the state implemented this top percent policy guaranteeing admission to most UC campuses for the top 4% of students from every high school. That functions effectively as a class based affirmative action policy and as a policy that tends to increase black and Hispanic enrollment, not by changing admissions in any way at the most privileged high schools in the state. All of those top 4% kids could already get into selective universities, but first kids coming from the least privileged high schools in the state, even whose top students would have otherwise not enrolled at most UC campuses. It pulled those students in those students tended to be lower income and from minority backgrounds and so this had a diversifying effect though, not to the same degree as affirmative action either in terms of race or class, but the University of California also implemented a number of policies that were not as publicly known. So there was a substantially increased preference for students coming from low income neighborhoods for students who came from high schools with larger minority populations as well as high schools with lower income backgrounds and explicitly an admissions preference for students from lower income backgrounds. And so what you see if you just look at like the average income composition of students that say UC Berkeley or UCLA, after Proc 209, the average proportion of students coming from lower income backgrounds fell because race-based affirmative action had been in tendency pulling in lower income students, but it quickly rebounds and you end up with roughly the same number or same share of low income students at Berkeley and UCLA starting in about 2002, five years after race-based preferences ended, that has now persisted through the present. That being said, while the number of low income students is roughly at those universities long-run equilibrium, you nevertheless have much smaller black and Hispanic shares on the order of 30 or 40 percent lower relative to the state population or the high school graduating shares of black and Hispanic students at those schools, as you did before race-based preferences ended. So in tendency class-based preferences pull in very different groups of students. Race-based preferences only slightly increase lower income enrollment, class-based preferences only slightly increase net black and Hispanic enrollment, but we do see universities very explicitly going out of their way to target those students and I think it's very likely that we would see such policies implemented around the country in the next couple of years. There's nothing in the Harvard decision which would make class-based, economic class-based affirmative action. No indeed, I think John Roberts explicitly calls out that class-based preferences would be permissible. It's only raised the protective category. Of course that said the same thing and called out. That's something I think the that was what, excuse me, really informed some of the protests about legacy admissions too. Gorsuch came out and said, hey, just reallocate your funding and your admissions preferences away from legacies and athletes to lower income kids and you can take care of this problem. Which I find intriguing really is essentially what Clarence Thomas said back in 2003 and his opinion in the Grutter and Gratz decision. He said, look, you want to solve your problem and achieve diversity. He told Michigan, you don't have to be so elite. It can be less selective. And again, this gets us then into the question of admission of a university should be. Is it to be selective or is it to educate? I think, you know, when you think about it, if you do a radius around every university in the country metaphorically of say a hundred miles, every university in the many universities could diversify quite easily. So if you change some of the criteria and you decrease the competition for selectivity, you can achieve these outcomes as well. Again, is that something the universities want to do? Obviously not so far. But again, getting back to Zach said, yeah, Robert's, but especially I thought Gorsuch very quickly stated this, that you can solve this problem very easily if you want to. But it sounds like at least in the case of California and that the economic class based solution did not work. If we accept that if we use the high school top 4% of the high school as a proxy for economic class, it seems like there's something while a lot of Latino families are disproportionately located in the lower classes economically, it seems like something is being left out. So it depends what you mean by didn't work. It's true that these policies did not increase Hispanic enrollment as much as race affirmative action, though they did indeed bring in a larger number of low income students. I think it surprises a lot of people for exactly the reason you just mentioned that providing explicit income based preferences doesn't increase black and Hispanic enrollment more than it does. The reason for this is that even within income group that test score gaps between races are very large. So even if you just compare kids with the same parental income backgrounds, lack students have substantially lower test scores than white students who themselves have substantially lower test scores than Asian students. And so what this means is you can sort of think of a test score as being maybe a measure of academic preparation, but also as being strongly influenced independently by both income and race. So being a lower income student means you tend to have lower test scores being a black or Hispanic or Native American student tends to mean that you have lower test scores and these things are sort of additive such that if you just target on the base of race, you tend to get middle income or even in some cases upper income black and Hispanic students on the margin of admission, whereas if you target on the base of income, you tend to get lower income white and Asian students who are primarily academic score margin for admission to universities. And so getting back to what the, you know, the excuse me, analogies in Virginia having their way with me. The, you know, the very end of Roberts's opinion leaves them, you know, leaves it open, you know, I think pretty big loopholes essentially achieve, you know, the diversification of universities across the various lines that we're talking about income, SES, race, whatever, the, they'll just have to be a little more creative in how they explain what they're doing. So again, and again, I think it's important to keep in mind what are we arguing about here or discussing. We're talking, you know, these cases with pretty elite universities. Right. I think there was a great piece what in the times couple of weeks ago. I know just a few days ago by Aaron Stevens talking about how for the most part this hasn't made too much of a difference because if you get away from the elite schools, the impact of our discussion today has been a different sort of phenomenon. So I think again in the long run, this will be tempest in the teapot. I think what's more important is the debate is set off already though, students protesting outside of Harvard about legacy admissions and so forth and asking really, what is the mission of the university? So this, this lets this is drawing attention to admissions as a whole and other admissions issues. Sure. I have more thoughts on that, but I'd love to instead to hear from our community and dear Roxanne Risken has a comment. She says chat gpt mentions as good as decisions on Fisher versus the University of Texas of Austin 2016 using halitions. Sorry, using holistic admissions policies. I have no idea this is accurate. Can you discuss more about holistic admissions? So I can talk about how holistic admissions works. And again, sorry to be a sort of broken record here, but I may be talking about California today. So let me tell you about it's okay. Lots of lots of evidence. Yeah, it's cool. Like you see Davis so you see Irvine highly selective University of California campuses. So so the University of California through the 1990s admitted students using point-based admission systems. So students those applications got points for say GPA times a thousand plus SAT score plus your scores out of eight hundred on three SAT subject exams. And then they would have application readers go through and say give you out of five hundred points on extracurricular activities or you got at the time explicit bonus points for coming from a black for being black Hispanic Native American for being lower income for being disabled etc. You add all points up. You order all your applicants. You have cutoffs first just an academic cutoff and second a cutoff based on all of these different points altogether and you can you've composed your class just on the basis of these point schemes. Universities since the grass and gritter decisions even in public universities have largely moved away from these points based systems because race became unavailable as a target for these points. And so you see Davis switch to holistic review in 2011 what this would have meant that you see Davis is rather than having this elaborate point scheme. Instead applicants send in applications and application readers to for each application will go through the full application throw out lots of applications that are seen as really having no chance of admission to the university and then have like overall point systems or points associated with each application. So you might have a score out of seven of how competitive the application is at the university and then after all of these applications are scored on this relatively core scale high scores are admitted. Now what this allows readers to do is to say oh this kid has a relatively low SAT score but there are compensating differentials. They came from a one parent household or they went to a high school that was relatively low preparation on average and so we're going to give the student a high score despite the fact that in traditional measures of academic preparation they're relatively low performing. The case yeah as as Mark has said the case rules out using in you in sort of evaluating these compensating differentials but leave some room for universities to for example say that while this student got relatively low test scores they faced discrimination earlier in life on the basis of race and that discrimination itself provides this compensating differential allowing universities to target and admit some of those students and so I suspect we'll see more of that happening. Now it is sort of unclear in the 10 states that had previously whether these kinds of sort of second order were used explicitly but using ramifications of people's race and their application sort of unclear whether prior to see it prohibited those uses in the dates with the form of action bans to the degree that that was sort of the national band now looks sort of like these state bands but I think we would still expect to see large black Hispanic enrollment declines at schools even those already implementing holistic review because this explicit race information again the only evidence I think that we have to suggest that that's what would happen is looking at what happened that I've highly selective schools in California, Texas and Michigan but but there's a lot of sort of criteria that universities can point to in holistic review that in many places in many cases replace the informational content that race provides and so especially it's super selective private schools it could just be that these things sort of cancel each other route if if you will that that's that's on the demand side where the the university admissions office and and their associates but also I mean I think on the supply side is it not just kind of an open secret now we're best practice for the any students who is a black or Hispanic by identity that then they should emphasize that in their personal statement or in other ways that's for some of the criticism is said you know in the various and Sunday postmortems of the decisions is that this will simply gamify the application process or there were everybody will be looking for you know looking for a hook in that respect one thing to keep in mind to speak in the spine demand side Brian you know again for whom is this a problem and again I refer you to having Aaron Aaron and Stevens again on the fourth of July for schools that again I hate the terminology but for schools who are less selective who take more of their application sure much less of of a problem it's the ones like a Harvard despite their resources where you have 60,000 applications or what 600 600 600 to 1.5 you know applicant to seat ratio on this more holistic though this will be holistic cubed you know application reading process is going it's going to make an already expensive process extraordinarily expensive again tell the faculty who are always complaining about the hiring of too many staff that we're now going to quintuple our admission staff so we can give ably every application though bananas so follow what you will this again is really going to make a real difference at that micro sliver of elite schools where they have to deal with extraordinary number of applications if you're less selective you have more seats this will it'll be much less of a problem to diversify your student body so if you're in if you're in middle tier state university or lower tier private college you're not going to be able to quintuple your admission staff in order to do a serious list of reading on the other hand you aren't necessarily having to do that holistic reading because you might as selective by definition and again that's not a judgment it's just simply looking at the numbers and whatnot of course 60,000 applications for 1600 seats or you know shrink the fraction you've got a much easier process out of you well first of all Roxanne thank you for the great question and I'm delighted to see you using chat gpt in that way and gentlemen both of you thank you for the this is this is a decision that seems to have just further and further ramifications the more we look into it we have another question or comment by our friend keel dumps who ask or states this the problems of both admissions and debt are mostly caused by higher as control credentialing elite degrees given preference and hiring alternative credentials could help solve this so what do you what do you think the use of alternative credentials how might that change things wow I think it's cool but which alternative credentialing outfit is going to compete I think it's great I suppose go back to Wayne and Garth in their garage and they probably had all sorts of funky credentials but who is going to respect them except you know the guy hiring at the local record store and I'm not being snarky there I think it's important in it it's a great question raised you look at higher red people have called it a bundling cartel with regard to credentials and whatnot does it need to be rethought sure who's going to do it but it does raise the question about whether or not especially in an age of social age and did access to so much in the way of digital resources will students or whatever young people decide there are alternative way pathways to education and employment but will employers accept that I don't know know good point I did so you know there's a long economics literature trying to distinguish between the degree to which education provides labor market benefits because it credentials people right the degree to which it provides labor market benefits because they learn something while they were in school right and at least my read of that literature is I think we have growing evidence that actually a lot of what's happening does really seem doesn't seem to be very well captured by things like the exams that we use to measure that learning which is to say the labor market return to alternative credentials has not yet been shown to be substantial that may be because employers don't understand them or maybe be because whatever the valuable thing is that happens inside of universities that transforms 18 year olds into adults isn't happening in these alternative credential programs but is that the value of I I a for your degree and especially a for your degree from a research university in the labor market appears really large and so at least impartial equilibrium given taking the labor market as it is is a lot of value and sort of thinking about how to best allocate that that higher education system to students who can most benefit from it so the sheepskin effect is still there it's what's at least the least we can say is that there are very large labor market returns to degrees though I'm not sure how large the sheepskin effect is per se if I can spoil it too please I'll feed in the horse but it suggests as well again what's the alternative credentialing I mean in some ways there's credentials and there's credentials and right now if you look at the applications processes and whatnot you know there's a cartel within the cartel because you read about the literature and the pressure I mean my kids went through this you know invited to apply you know and so forth and then you know here again what you know there are the elites who seem to be conveying one set of credentials and then there are the non-elites who are conveying solid credentials but they don't happen have the right name of the sheepskin so the alternative credentialing actually fits into just trying to build and expand upon you know whatever we want to call it the elite base of higher ed in the states and we have the resources for that but it's just you're trying to sell a non-elite school to an applicant who honestly believes he or she needs to go to an elite school how do you do that? and I'm not being sarcastic I'm just simply saying that's the nature of this game my kids went through it we had just several kids from where we live were invited to apply to one school actually there were two different ones they never were heard from again they got into actually better schools but clearly all they were you know they were invited to apply to jack up the rejection rate we you know we were joking the parents of those schools so the nature of the game what isn't is not an elite school plays into this as well no that's a that's a very good but keel you're you're steady focus on credentials is terrific and I'm really grateful for you to be doing that and I think Mark and Zach have given you some really interesting ways of developing that further thank you both we have more questions that are still coming in and George Station had a really really good point let me just bring this up on the stage so you can see it public universities have HR affirmative action plans and policies if they take federal funding so all of them do these plans disappear or do they stay pending a SCOTUS case about staff and faculty I'll flash that on the screen again so you can see it so HR affirmative action for hiring rather than admissions Mark I think you know the answer to this question you know we'll wait until see we'll wait and see what happens when the case comes along you know again this would suggest that this is problematic will be problematic it's you know again higher excuse me higher ed public schooling and so forth have always been sort of one sphere of this as opposed to employment being another so I don't know but you you're right I think the logic of the case would suggest then that affirmative action hiring now could come under the microscope as well so we might be back to to Zach's earlier point about this appearing in all kinds ways the whole ecosystem of higher ed and many states unless you can come up with the just an explanation you know I mean one good yeah I think I was about to say exactly what Mark is about to say so I'll make one point here which is that the the first set of peace Brian I lost Jack am I the only one no Zach I think you froze up can you refresh your screen just reload that in the chat folks that anybody else getting seeing Zach freeze up or make sure that's that's happening the system level Western can you can you think yeah looks like a connection a serious connection issue yeah Western's on it here I'm going to bring I'm going to bring Zach down right now so that we can take care of that the we have more questions that have come in and I'd love to hear more of the Zach's thought and we'll bring him back but I want to make sure that we get a chance for everybody asked her questions and so Mark this one's up to you now hope you're ready and this this is from Brooke Kyle who asked this decision is focused on admissions any insight into if financial aid leveraging models may be impacted if points are assigned for diversity as well as test scores GPA etc great question Brooke I suppose this would be after the fact once we've gotten once we have finished our process of admitting folks now presumably in a holistic virtually colorblind way you know is someone going to be snooping around to say aha but the money is being allocated differently I don't know where this will go because frankly if you look Gorsuch and Roberts both said well move money away from athletics and legacies towards you know lower income folks or whatever again Roberts left open won't be a problem again we'll have to see and in order to do this remember it's going to take somebody with the resources to go and get the evidence to make a case and work their way up to the Supreme Court so this even so this that questions probably several years away from us at least because that's a lot of resources and a lot of proof you've got to get through the court system and quite a process to to win through oh that's waiting can we touch upon just I want to I don't know if anybody wants to talk about it but the student loan decision to yes just just one second Brooke I I wanted to thank you for that excellent question and just note for everybody before we transition to the second decision that we're talking about again a very complex series of effects as a result of this decision that will play out in many ways and Mark's point about researching this as well enforcing it I think are especially important yes so the other decision Mark what's the name of the decision about financial this is a Biden in Nebraska okay so the Biden decision and that sounds weird to say the so the Biden decision basically clobbered the Biden administration's plan to forgive student loans scale using the heroes act and now the Biden administration's on to what they call plan B so what to what is this what is the Biden decision we do to my gosh just to higher education and to all the people who have people who are those call well I think you know this this is critical and in in teaching con lawyers or everybody do not read the news do not read the pundits go read the case what this case is about is actually has nothing to do with loans financial aid higher education or anything else that's everything to do with separation of powers and how much money excuse me online how much power and discretion do you want to give the executive branch the president and how despite what may or may not bear to have been Congress's intent and allocating power to them and the court has read this is saying well no what the heroes act said was okay was making modifications and what not two loans and what not but it did not give the secretary of education the authority to cancel loans that's a big jump and the court is saying this is going to be clear Congress gave you power a did not give you power be and so you can't claim power be okay well wait a look at this is simply to say okay fair enough um two responses if Congress wanted to give the president power be it could get up and rewrite a lot tomorrow it has that power this Congress isn't likely to do it it's so polarized that's another matter the other question that comes into play honestly as well if the president goes and does this under the ostracities of the heroes act and Congress doesn't do anything I complain can we not infer that Congress is saying this is okay that's a question that does pop up in criticism of the court when it renders such decisions but back to this closing quickly I see on the time Congress can do this tomorrow they can give the secretary of education the power to suspend or cancel loan payments they just have to say it clearly that's all this decision said if Congress says that secretary of education can do it so this doesn't say outlaw the idea of student non-forgiveness it's just said as the chief executive didn't have the power to do it this way and that Congress should really be the one to do it as they have the power of the purse right and to put it in partisan terms if you don't want President Trump to have had this power you can't give it to President Biden that's what this is about you fear the authoritarian the dictator and waiting whatever if you worry about the state of democracy you want this to be coming from the people through the elected representatives in Congress and the executive branch just can't expand its power so in this respect Congress can do this tomorrow it just has to get up and do it we should be quite a lift Zach you're back good to see you uh-oh very sorry about that it's a little hard with wife like a Wi-Fi problem that does not remember ah well that's that's that's that's always a problem I mean I just had a wonderful friend who is a podcast creator it is wonderful podcast music and just moved to another European location and the upload speed zero two I mean p.s. um so Zach I'm wondering do do you have any thoughts about the Biden decision about the admissions that you'd like to add I know you're focused on the first of action but I'm curious or yeah yeah on student debt actually to be honest do not have thoughts um it's Mark just described one way in which this is fundamentally not a decision about education there's another way in which this is fundamentally not a decision about education which is that it's it's it's retrospective it only impacts or almost only impacts students who were educated long ago uh and so had very little you know in very few ways changed the calculus for current students who are making choices about whether and where to go to college and and what to study uh and so for that reason it has a as an economist being through exactly those choices either on behalf of institutions or students this really wasn't a choice that sort of had very much for us to grab on to and there's a follow-up though too and for the audits this is important again to see you know you got to look and see who's writing the opinions what else is going on there was the companion case of this and I forget the name of it but it was two folks challenging the heroes act for not covering their loans and nine zip led by Alito the court said no you all don't know standing no one has to write a loan for giving this act that includes you too this can be a specified loan for giving this act oh interesting so it's very interesting in the sense that and this is getting no play whatsoever the court said the heroes act is fine you don't have standing you so because you don't like it the only problem here was simply and this is it constitutional democracy is all about this abide by the rules and separation of powers if you want to do this do it right please do it right um it's important to keep that in mind it just can't be interpreted beyond according to the court what seems to be its fair interpretation Congress is free to fix that so what what happens next I mean is that you mean you made the very very good point that this is not a case really about current students but about older students people who have already had some college experience some have degrees some dumb um what's the what's the next step I mean that's that's a whole you know tens of millions of people who are going to start some are going to default or try to default uh the New York Times helpfully remind us that death does clear the slate which uh I think sure absolutely nobody um what uh what happens next do we have to see if the Biden administration can try their plan be to try and pull this down a little bit or otherwise are we just in for a big slew of repayment yeah I'm not sure I have so much to add to exactly what you just said what happens next is and who don't have lower credit scores and I in some cases wage garnishment well I'm sorry to be right um you know my job here is to is to help facilitate the questions uh Doyle asks in in a a good question any thoughts of what plan B will be Doyle there's actually a page on the Department of Education site uh um it has three prongs to it as far as I recall um but please if if no one comes up with us in the chat in the next couple of minutes um email me and I'll give you a copy of it um let's let's circle back then um a bit more to the admissions question um I think we may be seeing a major blow to a lot of ambitious uh and talented black and Latino students who really want in the creme de la creme of American higher education as we rank that who want to get that seat at UT Austin or at Harvard um and it sounds like we'll be you know that population is going to then shift to other schools which may be as Mark pointed out to other schools that are equally excellent um and it may be that they shift somewhere else or perhaps see their career stymied um well as we scramble to try to try to think about this let's let's look out a few more years say you know four years you know the course of a theoretical undergrad degree uh where's some of the other impacts that we should be expecting uh what's going to happen to these students how are these where's some ways the university to go to respond yeah so actually I'm going to look at a little further than that and the sense that what happened over the 20 years after California banned affirmative action in 1998 and I think this is a sort of useful way of thinking about this take um uh people black and Hispanic workers in the state of California who are earning at least a hundred thousand dollars a year and are in their early 30s so like 15 years after the affirmative action ban is implemented because you can imagine like the first group of 31 to 35 year old none of whom had access to affirmative action in the state of California when they went to college say 15 years earlier so this has occurred in about 2014 2015 uh-huh and so you can just count out okay how many high-earning 35 35 five black and Hispanic professionals were there in the state of in uh 2014 2015 the answer is about 22,000 such individuals this is a big state there's a lot of high-earning black and Hispanic young professionals and then you can ask okay how many more would there have been if affirmative action had lasted so when these young professionals had applied to college they had had access to more selective universities because all of California's public universities still had active affirmative action programs and so that's estimable you can see how many successful young professionals there were who were coming out of universities a couple of years before affirmative action was banned you can see how many there were after and so it's pretty straightforward number to estimate and the answer is there would have been something like seven or 800 more black and Hispanic successful young professionals in 2014 2015 and there were actually so so we're talking about like 3% is the number of successful young black and Hispanic professionals who disappeared who ended up earning less than a hundred thousand dollars a year or who left the state of California because they didn't have access to the UC Irvine or the UC San Diego or the Santa Barbara or whatever it may have been because those schools affirmative action policies ended and grand scheme of things it's a relatively small number what this suggests is that there are a lot of ways of succeeding in America that don't run through elective universities and that most of these kids were still going to college many of them are going to this school they would have otherwise gone to as Mark said only some share of them ended up going to a less selective school than they had previously enrolled at and so what you see is like there is this net effect right the fact that university preferences ended had long run implications for these young black and Hispanic workers but it wasn't like a radical transformation of the California labor market it just meant that there were fewer successful black and Hispanic workers by about 3% than there would have been us. So if we if we just crudely multiply that number say roughly we're talking about say 30,000 black and Latino you know 18 year old to across the U.S which is which is a below and needs to be addressed but but but I have to stop there because it is 4 o'clock on the East Coast and we have ran through our hour the two of you gentlemen have given us a wonderful way of thinking about these really really challenging rulings you've you've covered everything from practical politics to constitutional law to how institutions work in the academic scale so much especially for doing this of the job of a hat Mark what's what's the best way for people to keep up with you and to you know follow you know what you're what you'll be doing email for now I've got to get a website up and running but you know I'm available I'd love to trade notes with anybody I can put my email in the chat please to please I don't I don't I need I would love to be you know one one percent of the blog I could actually email I'd love to trade notes and I don't JD you had a a great question up in the chat you might want to email Mark and and bounce idea off and Zach it's I seems like keeping up with you is like tracking an electron as a whirls around a nucleus what's what's the best way to keep up with you is your website so I'm easy to find on Twitter my websites available I write I have this new book out metrics that matter that I think has by Google will lead you excellent and we'll do that we'll do that for much and congratulations on your and your new situation and and thank you both very much but friends don't leave yet because we have we have to tell you about what's happening next on the forum but I do want to also ask you well I hope that this emergency session was helpful for you please let me know what you thought if you'd like us to do this for any similar situations or for any similar problems please let me know this was an experiment and you will will participate and you all very good now if you'd like to keep talking about this experiment but specifically about the Supreme Court decisions and their impact on higher education please turn to social media as you can just use the hashtag FTTE you can find me on Twitter as you can see here and you can find me and of course you can find my blog right there so please keep talking about this if you'd like to look into our previous sessions including ones where Zach was a guest and market participant as well we've talked about race and higher education as well as finance and higher education take a look at tidyurl.com slash FTF archive you can find them all there if you want to look ahead to our upcoming sessions on everything from AI and campus economics just going to forum the future of education that us and you can see it there and of course please thoughts about what I'm finding and forecasting about AI and education and once again thank you all for submitting a terrific range of questions it's great to think together with all of you I hope you're all well I hope the summer which is unbelievably hot this week I hope it treats you safely take care everyone and we'll see you next time including tomorrow online bye bye