 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a great guest covering a vital topic. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Since the first month of the Future Trends Forum, we've been focused on the finances of higher education. Why does higher education cost so much? What are the cost structures? What is student debt? How might this all change going forward above all? Well, this week we're really grateful to have as our guest, Professor Brian Powell. He's a sociologist at Indiana University of Bloomington. We've done a lot of great work on the family in the past, but right now he's the co-author with Professor Natasha Quadlin of a book called Who Should Pay? And this is about the public attitudes towards who should pay for college and how those attitudes have changed. If you're curious about the book, you should see in the bottom left hand corner of the screen a kind of mustard colored box which says Who Should Pay? Click there and you can find out more. But in the meantime, let me bring up on stage another person named Brian and we can begin our conversation. Hello, Brian! Hi, Brian. Thank you for inviting me. So, I will just start off by, I've been told I should show what it looks like. Here's the book. I have some friends who are children are trying to figure out what's going to happen in terms of college in the next few weeks. And this is, I guess, National Decision Day for many, many students. And part of that decision is going to involve, you know, how are they going to be able to afford to go to college? The question about a 40 college is, you know, obviously an issue that I imagine almost everybody in this group is really interested in. And my interest as a sociologist has, folk has been on public opinion and in this case public opinion regarding who should be responsible for the funding of college. This topic is something that I studied a long long time ago. In my early career, many moons ago, I analyzed some national data that asked the question, who should be responsible for the funding of college? Should it be the president? That's a different issue at the end of the day. Should it be the person, the student? Should it be the parent? Should it be the state government? Should it be the federal government? And when I wrote several articles regarding that, that data, and these were data from several decades ago, the final was a very, very clear pattern. And that is the public plays primary responsibility on parents followed by students. And the government was like, you know, really trailing far behind with something like 16% of the population saying the government should take primary responsibility. I pivoted away from this topic. And, you know, as Brian noted, I've been doing a lot of work recently on not parental investments in children now, but it's just public opinion regarding what counts as family and in the issues regarding same sex parenting, adoptive parenting, things like that. Several years ago, more specifically about about 12 years ago, I was just, it dawned on me that no one had actually asked that specific question. Who should be responsible for funding since the NCS data from several decades ago? So I decided that I would, you know, have a, my research team would end with the Center for Survey Research at Indiana University would do interviews, national interviews, approximately 800 people asking people that very same question. But I was also interested in not just who they think should be primarily responsible. I wanted to know who they thought should be secondary or responsible because when you ask this question, who should be responsible? The response I can imagine some of you are saying is that's too complicated. It's not one person who should be responsible. It should be some type of combination. And so I was also then interested in what would be, he had come up with a tandem. Would it be students and parents? Would it be parents in government? Would it be students in government? Or what should it be simply state government and federal government? And those represent very different visions of how we think about funding. If we think about parents and students, we're taking a very individualistic view regarding funding. Basically, funding is the private good that should be privately funded. If you take the position that the state government and federal government in either order should be responsible, we're taking more of a collective vision in which there's an emphasis on the public good of higher education. And then there are people who would say government, whether it's state or federal, and either parents or students. And that represents this idea of some type of shared responsibility. Some idea that there is a contract between the government and individuals with one or the other taking on more responsibility, depending on many different situations. For example, who should pay? I mean, who can pay? When we conducted the survey, original survey in 2010, and we got our results simply asking the start of the question, who should be primarily responsible? The findings were eerily similar to the data from 1980. It was virtually identical. 16% said the government should be responsible. Remember a few minutes ago, I said 16% in 1980 said the government should be primarily responsible. When I was done with that survey, I remember I gave a talk at Notre Dame University. And I ended up giving a talk about the stickiness of American values and the stickiness of American values as regarding education. Because at that point, the findings seem to be shockingly like, you know, decades apart, virtually identical findings. And at that point, I figured that would be my story. And it's a very different story than some other research I've done that actually talked about changes in people's use of that family. But I don't trust data for any one time point. And so we conducted the survey again, we did the interviews again with it was a different panel group of people. So it's not longitudinal fund the same people, but we're doing a national sample, they should be about, you know, they should randomize out. And we conducted the survey, the interviews in 2015. I was fully expecting based on the 2010 data that we get pretty much the same findings. And we didn't. We were I was completely wrong about my expectation at this point. The government, the deft, the emphasis on governments had almost doubled to almost a third. The emphasis on students and parents both went down. The combinations I thought were the most interesting because in 2010, two thirds of the people gave the individualist vision. It should be the parents and the students. By 2015, went from two thirds to about 50%. Now, some people may think 15% reduction change is not that much. Well, if people study public opinion, this is a huge change. public opinion regarding most social issues are pretty glacial. And they go up dramatically point them and go down. But the overall pattern is pretty consistent. If you look at attitudes, even attitudes like you know, the controversial topics like the attitudes regarding abortion, for example, things have not changed that much in a long long period of time. And so we were really surprised by how much that had changed. I still wasn't fully trusting of this. So we conducted the survey we conducted, we can we we ask these questions again in 2019 and 2020. There's one difference between these two years and the other two years of data collection. And that is by 2019, doing phone interviews, basically had become an unfeasible, it just something that's no longer feasible. The days of doing phone interviews for public opinion really are going, it's too expensive, people don't respond. And so what's been happening has been the increase in online panels and national panels. Now, there are different modes in technology, and you have to be very mindful that changes over time can be a fun can be the results of different modes. But with every type of adjustment, we try to correct for it. We still found a continuing shift towards away from an individual's vision, and towards either more of a shared vision, or a public vision of funding. In other words, what's going on, it's really clear. Americans are really moving away, or large number of Americans are moving away from this very individualist notion that education is private, individuals should be responsible. And they've been moving towards at least a position saying that government should be more involved. Now, I actually I don't know regarding timing if you want me to stop and answer questions, or should I go on? Well, I'd like, first of all, I just want to say, that's a great phrase. See, that's incredible finding. And let's pause for one second. And let me just say, I've tweeted out a few notes about this. This is just, I have a bunch of questions. But let me just say to everybody in the audience. Sure. Welcome. This is obviously great research that's really vital for how prior education. I'd like to ask Professor Paolo question, but then I'd like to clear the deck for all of you. So again, please use you on the bottom of the screen, that white band running along him, either click the raised hand, if you want to join us on stage, or type in a question in the question box, and then I'll get to air those. In fact, before I could ask my question, people already have come up with questions, which is great. And a wonderful guest, one of my favorite demographers in the world, Nathan Graw from Carleton College is here. And he has a question I want to put on the screen. So this is an example of a text question. Interesting. At the same time, the share of higher rate paid by families has increased according to Shio. Might people be responding relative to present funding? I'm sorry, I didn't get that last part. Might people be responding relative to present funding? I'll put this up on the screen again. So you can see Okay. I think they are. That's an interesting question. I don't think the public thinks that way. I think the public, you know, when you're asking questions regarding higher education, you know, for example, if you talked about Pell grants, and asked people about Pell grants in a survey an interview, most people would have no idea what you're talking about. If you're talking about FAFSA, they would have no idea what you're talking about. People's notions about how funding operates, and who's paying and how much. It's not. People think on more of more of broader holistic views. And they don't think as clearly within terms of details. So I suspect I suspect they're not thinking of it in terms of how things have changed over time. That's a really great interview with you and and Tressie McMillan-Caldem. And so that was one of her major takeaways from your work that that people in general are just massively under informed about these details. Well, I don't want to say they're massively uninform. I mean, that just sounds, I mean, I just think that people, people have so many other things in their lives that they're thinking about. They have so many other issues within their lives. And, you know, things that we may really focus on because it's so much of how we think about higher education. And we're so we're so immersed in it. It's just they're not going to be thinking in, you know, as as detailed. This is true about whatever policies we're talking about. If you ask people, for example, about, you know, like about, you know, insurance, if you talk about the ACA and health care, people don't necessarily they know what they might be paying or have to pay. But they don't necessarily know what the policy is that doesn't keep them from having a very clear opinion about it, though. And it doesn't even doesn't prevent them from saying, I like ACA and I hate Obamacare, or the other way around, even if it's the same thing. So I think we just keep in mind that the public thinks in more broad terms, and not in terms of very specific details, or to put it a different way, if people focus solely on the details of policy, their voting behavior would not correspond as what would correspond with what their voting behavior would not be the voting behavior today. Okay, and then and so if not not focused on those details includes not focusing on how some of those details change over time. Yeah, yeah. And answer, Nathan, that's a great question. And friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of the text question. And before I can invite you to send more already a two more have showed up. So let me bring these on the screen for you, Professor Bell. This is from This is from Tim Neuber. I'm curious to the survey differentiate between different occupations, such as public school teacher, when asking who should pay for higher education? Oh, what we did is we looked at multiple characteristics along the way. Okay, we looked at education. We looked at education, or we looked at age, we looked at race, we looked at gender, we looked at political ideology, we looked at religion, we looked very briefly at occupations and the reason for that is relatively very few people are in any particular occupation. You got to remember that when you're doing 800 people, you're gonna end up with a really tiny number of let's say public school teachers. So but I can talk about some of the other patterns, because I think it's sort of speaks to the same general issue. Because people it views on this topic really are uneven first by some characteristics. To me, one of the really interesting findings was age. And the age finding was, you know, that if you looked at different age groups, and the question is, are they it's in an age group? Or is it the generation they grew up in? We just had a side just for a moment. If you looked at people as a 65 and above, overwhelmingly, their top choice was parents. Overwhelmingly, it was, and that you know, and the very few people had government or students as primary responsible. The vision for this group of people, it is the responsibility of people to sponsor their generation of children. And you know, some people know, and I, you know, and one thing that we're thinking is, well, maybe this group of people just have this idea that tuition is so low, and just have, you know, underestimate what the cost of tuition is. So we actually asked people how much they thought tuition at public universities cost. And there was no, we did not find that older people underestimated or overestimated compared to other groups of people. So on the flip side are younger people. And, you know, I can imagine most of you say, Oh, of course, younger people can say government should be responsible. And yes, they were more likely than any other group to say the government should be responsible. But they also were the group least likely to say the parents should be responsible. And they were as likely, pretty much as likely as any other group to say that students should be responsible. And the student part, I thought was really interesting. Because, you know, we have this vision of young, young adults, you know, the public discourse is young adults are, you know, they, you know, they, they, they don't want to contribute, they want things to be provided to them. And yet, this was the group of people that was really much more likely than many other age groups to say students should be responsible. We found out in our open ended comments why. And that is a lot, you know, part of the discussion about who should be responsible deals with this idea of, you know, who's an adult. And a lot of people said parents should be responsible said, well, parents have to be responsible, because college kids are not adults. We found for younger adults was lying, we are adults. And therefore, we should be responsible. And so they're very different vision of how age links to these things. I think it was one of the really interesting one of the surprising pattern for us. The other pattern we found very surprising is a non pattern. And that is education. Now, you should think there and you can different explanations. You might think that people with a college degree would say, Well, of course, education is a good. And it's a good that people that we benefit by that society benefits by. And you may think that this would be the group of people say, Yeah, the government should be more responsible. But there's also this notion of what's known as opportunity hoarding. And that is people who have more of whatever want to hold on to it and not don't necessarily want to share. Turns out that those two phenomenon must have balanced each other out. Because we find no difference by educational level in terms of where they place responsibility. Not Wow, that's a very, very interesting finding. Yeah. Now, as you know, you often hear this idea that researchers, you know, I've heard this so many times, well, you just find what you want to find. It's like, no, in this case, it was like, there were lots of surprises for us as we work analyzing our data. And that's always that's always the delight and in research I find. And I can see that coming off of you as you as you grin and get excited. These are good questions, friends, please feel free to share more of them. We have a question coming from the Houston area from Tom Hames, who asks, How does equity of access play into these findings? Is there more support for Community College with open admissions being paid for or helping private helping people go to private institutions? Merit is equity? Okay, I think that's a great question. And we dealt with that issue in certain ways. The first thing is, for all the discussion about private institutions, and for all this discussion we often see in the media about elite private institutions, in particular, this is not typically what the public is thinking of. People tend to think about public universities. They think about community colleges, they think of public universities. Very few people in our interviews will actually make me reference to private schools. Oh, that's interesting. And so I so so I think that so so when when people are most people are really thinking in terms of, you know, like, and I think it also may vary by where you live. If you live, you know, one of the patterns we found, the links to this is, if you're in Indiana, for example, you know, public institutions are really the key part of the university systems there. I mean, yes, there's some very strong liberal arts colleges, or private universities like Notre Dame. But if you are in Indiana, it's the public school system, public university system that really is the really what people think of. This is also true in University of California, University of California system. In fact, it is pretty much true. If you go through the Midwest, through the West, and even the South, the exception here is the Northeast. Northeast, I grew up in the Northeast. And where I grew up, there seemed to be a liberal arts private college about 30 minutes from each other. You know, and so the how people think about you, how people think about things in the Northeast is very different. We saw that actually in terms of how people responded to the question about government, because we asked people should the state government be responsible? Or should the federal government be responsible? Well, when we say should it be the parents of students, the state or the federal government? Most of the regions, all other regions, if they chose government, we're more likely to say the state government, and then the federal government. These more people said the federal government instead of the state government. And I think it has to do with in the Northeast, how people think about public universities in the Northeast is just very, very different than the rest of the country. And it really was a huge I mean, when I moved here, it was just so different on how people were talking about education and talking about universities, you know, how people it wasn't like, well, what liberal arts college do you want to go to? It's sort of like, do you want to go to Indiana or Purdue? I mean, I believe the difference on it. Um, I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, if you saw this, I used to work with a nonprofit that worked with small liberal arts colleges. And half of the membership was in New England, for the entire country. Half were scattered across the whole US, but very much. Now, on the equity issue, I think that the equity issue is really important. In fact, we have one chapter on this particular issue. And you can address questions of equity in different ways. We did, by the way, ask questions about community college. There's pretty strong support for, you know, free tuition for community college. That's a pretty clear strong finding. I should know we barely mentioned it in this book. But that is one of the key findings. But we have a chapter asking people about how equitable is the system right now? You know, do most people have the opportunity to be able to go to college and afford to go to college? Or is it that some people do and most people don't? And then we also ask questions about do people think, for example, that the middle class has greater opportunities, less opportunities, or the same opportunities of others? Do the poor have more lesser or the same? Do racial minorities have more or less or the same? And what we find is, you know, that there's a clear link between people talking about inequities and inequalities with the exception of talking about inequities for the middle class, you know, if people said less access for many people, or less access by the poor, or less access by racial minorities, that mapped on very closely to people's greater support for either a shared or collective form of funding. The middle class is an interesting one. Because with the middle class, one of the questions is, who are middle class, when you ask, do they have more or less or the same compared to home? Are people comparing the middle class to people, you know, who can make a lot of money and clearly afford high tuition and other costs to college? Are they comparing it to people who are making less money? Or are they doing some type of, you know, the idea that they're, they're stuck both ways. And what we found actually is many, many people, many people were talking about this donut hole phenomenon, that they are, you know, that people are stuck, they don't make enough money to support, pay for college, and they make too much money to get enough support by the government. So that's that that donut hole problem, as some have called it. Oh, this is well, first of all, Tom, Tom always asks great questions. So Tom, thank you for that. And again, Brian, that's a that's a terrific answer. This research just unfolds so much depth to it. We have another I'll follow up comment. This is from Tim Neubarty is a clarification. I'm not asking what the occupation of the respondents. Oh, okay. If they think that a high rate should be funded by government depending on occupation. So I guess the occupation of the student who graduates. Yeah, that that's that's okay. I think that's a really great question. We didn't ask that. We are by the way, we are actually planning to feel the study fairly soon on people's views on loans and really focus on issues alone in the conditions under which people think that loans should be forgiven or shouldn't be forgiven. And one of them is we're going to ask specifically about certain type of jobs that people go into certain types of jobs. Should there want to be forgiven more, you know, compared to others, but we did not ask that here. Well, Tim, appreciate the follow up. And, and Brian, I appreciate that. That's always a problem when you do a survey, you will come up with great questions for you asking the next one. You know, it's, I mean, there's, there's always a limit, you know, there's just, you know, it's like, you know, there's always the, you know, it's like, right now, I'm working with my graduate students on completely different projects. And it's their questions for that we're fielding on a national survey. And, you know, and they gave me, it's like 300 questions. I said, no, you cannot ask 300 questions from anybody. You know, and so you have to, you know, you know, there's, there's a lot of triage going on in terms of making decisions regarding what questions to ask. Well, the kind of parallels are, are, are your modeling of what people know about education policy details. One thing that helps us figure out what questions we're going to ask later on, though, are the types of comments that people may control open ended questions. You know, we'll start giving an explanation. You know, those may sometimes lead us then to ask questions in the future. Friends, this is again, your forum. So this is a place for you to ask your questions. In the chat, we just had a, there was a running discussion about where people decided to go to college based on price and also geography. So there's a small ethnography we just witnessed there, which is great. But again, I wanted to come back to Tressie Codham's interview with you because she's a terrific interviewer. And the answers are great. She zeroed in on two identity issues that I don't think we've discussed today. She was struck by the fact that let's say racial minorities for her, including Asian Americans, Latinos and African Americans saw college as a collective value. And I infer from this that more of those populations saw college as a collective value than did white populations. And then yeah, sorry, gone. But now alongside that was the null finding she described that there was no difference by gender that women view responsibility pretty much the same way. Right. The gender finding was one real surprise. That's a little bit too. You know, this was the case of just no significant difference by men and women. And you know, when you think about it, though, it may make sense. You know, when you think so, you know, for women, you know, the idea, one thing we generally have, one of the patterns is that women are more likely than meant to think college education is important. If women think it's more important, they may think then that well, then they may think that the government should be responsible, but they also may take a very different position. These are my children. And so we should be supporting them. For men, you have a different thing where education may not be that important. But at the same time, they may be making the argument that as parents, as fathers in particular, who should be taking care of the financial needs of a family, that parents should be responsible. It turned out that they just completely washed each other out. So there was no gender difference on that. There was a huge difference on race. And this finding that did not surprise me, because I wrote an article decades ago that had exactly the same, that had exactly the same finding. And basically, the finding here was that, you know, it may not be surprising that white parents are more likely to say, or at least likely, less likely than racially or other persons of color, to say they're less likely to say that government should be responsible. Fine. That's clear. And that's a finding we found, you know, black, Latinx and Asian American respondents were all more likely to say the government should be responsible. But I think the interesting pattern was more about combinations. So, so what we found is the majority of white respondents, the group they are, they are very much more likely to say it should be parents and students, very individual sufficient. And for for for black respondents, for Asian responses, for Latinx respondents, the combination was either it was government, and more often than to be like government and parents, or to put it differently, white respondents thought that students should be really involved and have to take responsibility. Whereas persons of color did not. And in our interviews, we got one explanation for that. And that is for, let's say, black respondents, the idea is that it is the job of the government and the job of parents to support students. And it's the job of the student to be a student. It's their job to do well in school. And that's where their energy should be directed. And so so it's a very different vision of it's not that well, students should just get everything they want. No, it's their job. Their job is not we should take the burden of thinking about money away from them, if we can. And it should be some combination of parents and government. So the students job is to be good students and succeed. Students job is to, you know, if we want students to do well, the the the argument is then there, they shouldn't have to deal with the strain and stress of trying to deal with the financial components of it. That's interesting. That's very, very interesting. Well, I'm we have a few more questions that are just bubbling in. And I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask. And this is one from here. Let me just bring this up. This is from the chat. So I'll have to just read this one out loud. This Joseph Robert shop. Why should a degree or even an advanced degree amount to an entire adult lifetime insurmountable debt? If the choice is education versus no education due to financial burden for middle and working class, does it also mean financial slavery versus freedom? I'm not sure we disagree. You know, um, I mean, people have, you know, there are lots of different reasons we can think that education is really important. You know, many people talk about the economic return to education. Many people talk about how education as is useful, not just for the individual, the society is large. Many people talk about the the how education enables people to think in ways that they would never be able to think in other types of settings. And the idea of, you know, one of the questions that we see one of the responses we see from our interviews is that people want the system to be fundamentally fair. Now, that what that means may vary. But people do agree that that the education should be something that will just be in just a barrier that just just not at all available for some many people, or something that becomes just a burden for the rest of their lives. So yeah, I agree with your with your comments. Do you think I guess I'm coming back perhaps to Nathan Graus point, and I'm sorry, I believe someone else mentioned this in the chat, and I maybe wish I don't want to I don't want to misattribute. Please jump forth if I haven't said so. But it do you think part of the change that you described in your survey after 2000 after 2010 is just due to the media coverage of the sheer amount of student debt how it crashed past one trillion and, you know, right now stands around 1.7 trillion. I think there's several factors and we're we're trying to try to we're trying to figure out what's going on there. I think certainly the discussion about student debt made people more aware. And so more discourse about that certainly led to a change. I so I think that that's certainly one part of it. I think another reason for the change is, you know, the recession 2008 and there was clear carryover effect. It took a while. I mean, you know, people, you know, there are several things that happened. First of all, there was a recession. People were just strange in so many ways. And at the same time, they saw certain institutions being subsidized by the government. You know, whether you think that's fair, not fair, people saw that and may think about well, you know, may be aware of the inequities. And at the same time be aware of the government can play role. I think another factor in this is one we didn't think about, but it was mentioned by enough of our respondents that, you know, it it made us really it gave us pause, made us think about it. And that is people did talk about a lot of care. People did talk about the ACA and they talked about it was really interesting because they talked about they basically were making the argument and they weren't necessarily saying in the way I'm saying it right now that health care had always been viewed as this individualized thing that you're individually responsible for. And the ACA sort of moved it to either shared or governmental responsibility. And people saw saw that and saw and saw that as a potential benefit for many, many people. And so several people basically made a comparison of ACA to the idea of government support. There may have been some type of spillover fact that if some type of social program does get some type of support, governmental support, it may carry over in terms of how people think about other programs. That's interesting. So that starts to move the needle a bit from individual primarily to more collective. We have a question that came from Mr. San Gregorio, who always asked great questions because she's a genius of people need to hire her. She says that a lot of the things to be talking about traditionally undergraduate 22. What about adult learners, which is a big chunk of the population that one that seems to be growing a bit? I think this is a great question. I mean, and actually when you when I saw the question, I just saw the question right before. I said, I think I'll talk about this. I agree. Education, higher education, you know, is not just called traditional students. But I will say when you ask the public about what a student is, they don't think of the non traditional student, the non traditional student. I imagine if you included an older stead, a non traditional student, a person going back to school. I suspect, you know, I suspect that the overall pattern wouldn't change that much. That wouldn't be my hunch. But we didn't ask that what I can tell you in our interviews, almost no one mentioned the idea of a non traditional student. Almost no one did. And we didn't say traditional age student. We just said the cost of college, you know. So but I, you know, and that actually, and you know, I must admit, I sort of worry about in terms of our book because, you know, truth is non traditional students are a huge part of the population. And if we think about the future demographics in terms of this country, it's going to be increasingly thrown so through the years. You know, I, you know, this may be a cop out, but this is something I would like to study in the future. I don't think it's a cop out at all. I think that's that in the open ended qualitative responses, people tended to speak about traditional age undergraduates, I think is an important finding. Yeah, or let's put it this way. If I haven't done this recently, one thing I like to do sometimes in one of my sociology classes is to go to Google visuals and to look at a word, what kind of pictures come out? I suspect if you do this right now, and you write down college students, yeah, probably you're gonna find you probably, I'm not going to do a bet right now because I haven't checked it, but you probably are going to find pictures are very relatively young people. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's it. And if you look at university homepages, that's who you get. Absolutely. I mean, that still is the image. Thank you, Sarah, for the excellent, excellent point. I do. Man, I have a few more questions, but I'll make sure that everybody else gets a chance. So friends, if you haven't had a chance yet, either click the raised hand if you want to join us on stage and you can tell that both both brains here are very friendly. Or if you prefer to ask a text question, just put it in the Q&A box and I'll flash it up on the screen. I'd like to ask one question of my own while people are chewing on that. You've described a very, very important change in American opinion over the past 20 years. And I mean, in my mind, I'd like to link that to, for example, some of the interesting changes in religious belief as well. I mean, it seems like we're in the middle of a apocle change. But I want to focus on this looking forward a bit. What happens 2025, 2030? If these numbers grow, so that 16% becomes 30%, becomes 40%, do we see, for example, should we anticipate more programs like New Mexico's free public tuition program that just started last week? Or should we expect the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren tuition forgiveness or tuition support at the federal level to take hold? Or is that still a bridge too far? Well, public opinion is a tricky thing. Public opinion is a reflection of where we are in terms of policy, and it could also be shaping policy. And we also know that there are lots of policies that if you it was really determined by the public and say, well, do you really want this? A lot of people would say no, even though we have it or the other way around. But I can give you some parallels on this. To me, one of the there are two real clear parallels to the education to change what's going on. And one parallel is the change in people's views about same six couples and same six marriage. You know, I wrote this other book called Counted Out, which was about public opinion regarding same basically what living arrangements counts as family and how that maps onto people's views about same six marriage. And this book came out in 2010, right at the time I was collecting data for this one. And the pattern was a really interesting pattern. The pattern basically was dramatic shift in time over relatively short period of time from people saying the same six couples in any form do not count as family to they do counts as family and same six marriage, absolute disapproval to shifting. And so there's just been a complete flip from 34% of the population saying same sex couples should be able to get married to now 34% of the population saying they should not get married. That corresponded when it hit around the 50% mark. That was exactly the time that Obama announced that he was in favor of same six marriage coincidence or not. It does talk about how public opinion can, you know, either as reflecting or is driving certain things going on. So that's one example. Another example is changes in views about legalization of marijuana. In terms of views about support for legalization of marijuana, very, very similar to what we see here in very similar to what we saw, what we saw for same six marriage. It is not surprising that there has been a continuing move towards legalization, although unevenly distributed across this country. So do I think that if public do I think public if public opinion continues to shift in this direction? I my sense is it will have an impact on the idea of government support, whether it will take place mostly at the state level with free tuition and public universities, or whether it's going to occur more at the federal level with either, you know, complete loan forgiveness or free tuition, you know, somehow supported at the federal level. I can't, I don't know. What I do know, though, is the public clearly has made has changed. You know, I just be anecdotally, when I first tried this, you know, one thing I know my family, you know, they always they always whenever I have these family gatherings, they do okay, ask me the questions for your survival. You know, and I do. And so I did this right. You know, and I remember asking my relatives, you know, in 2010, what they thought about funding. You know, and then, you know, I asked them several years later. And it was really interesting. It's like, you know, I hate to be the, you know, I sound like my students who say, I know a case that this happened this way. But this in this case, the anecdote seems to correspond with my with my research. But people would say like, I might one of my brother said, you know, I think students should pay. And that's the only group we should pay. Parents shouldn't pay. The government shouldn't pay. Five years later, he said, should be the government. It should be the state and the federal government. Now, I didn't interview him for this book. He's acknowledged in it. But I think but that type of change, that anecdotal change, you know, you know, a lot of people have anecdotes. And but it, it it makes sense to me because this was not just one case, it was multiple cases. The way we talked about this topic in my sociology classes in 2010, it's very different than the way people talk about it today. So I really think there's something there's clearly something happening. And I don't think it's going to just plateau off right now. Okay, well, I appreciate all the hedges and qualifications because I mean, it's a tricky question. And then I appreciate the very rich answer. I love those parallels of same sex marriage and marijuana legalization. We have a couple of more questions bubbled up. And I want to make sure that we get to share them. And one comes from Amy, Bert, I think of Hebert. But she, she asks a question about geography. I think you touched on this before. Maybe you want to say a bit more about this. Did you see differences in the respondents answers based on where they lived in the US. You mentioned the West was more people in the West were more towards the state governments, people in the East more towards the federal government. Yeah, well, if for the people who said the government, for people who chose the government, the East Coast, the northeast was very much more likely to say the federal government. And it and there are two possibilities on this. Okay, you know, one of them is the one I just mentioned, that is the Northeast is so filled with private schools, the meaning of public education, public higher education is very different. There's another factor as well. And that is the Northeast is the most likely to take a more liberal position regarding federal about the federal government investments in everything. You know, we think about just the voting pattern in the United States. But that doesn't explain California, because California, you know, we know the voting pattern in California. But in California, there are more likely to say state government or federal government. That's interesting. In the chat, at least one person has mentioned the California master plan, which if you don't recognize the phrase friends, that's the triple combination of having the University California system, the California State University system and the community college system, all aimed at the California population so that everybody in theory would have access to some post secondary education. Yeah, no, I mean, the California, I mean, you know, there are lots of criticisms about the California system right now within California and challenges going on. But, you know, it, it is that's what people think about in terms of higher education. I mean, they're, you know, yes, there's Stanford, yes, there's Pomona, but there is basically, it is the public university system that they're thinking of. Well, Amy, what a great question. And thank you for letting me so brutally massacre your last name. And thank you, Brian, for the, for the really interesting answer. I love that with this, this breaks up into so many different nuances. We also have a question from Joseph Robert Shaw who asks, is there anything in this research about the compounding generational effect of students' debt today? Well, okay, my research is about public opinion. And it's not about what the effect of student debt is going to be on life, on what happens to people on the way. So, so I, what, but I can say a few things regarding this. The first thing is, you know, people, you know, in the interviews, many people talked about this idea of staggering debt. It's clearly in the minds of a lot of people. The other thing that's very clear is that student debt and the potential student debt, you know, has certainly lifelong effects. And that's not what I'm studying, but we know that can have lifelong effects in terms of wealth. You know, you know, one of my graduations, for example, is working on a master's, his master's thesis, you know, on the implications of, you know, what is the pattern of wealth today for college students, people 10 years after they graduate versus 10 years versus 20 years ago versus 30 years ago. And, you know, and the findings are, you know, certainly correspond with the idea that college debt has made it much more difficult for people, for many people to, you know, to basically have some type of equity. There's another aspect about college debt today that is, has an interesting, I think, a really interesting impact. And it's work that my co-author and Natasha Kwotlin, who's at UCLA, did. And some of her work has looked at how the cost of college has an impact on what kind of majors people choose to major in college. And basically her basic finding was it's only people who come from, it's people who come from pretty wealthy families who have the advantage of being able to choose whatever major they want. In contrast, people who are going to have to be mindful about debt may have, may end up thinking of college choices that correspond more with what kind of economic return there's going to be. And so it creates a very bifurcated notion of what education should be. For people who don't have to worry about debt, education be the way that many people have thought about what education should be about exploring different possibilities and developing the tool, you know, developing a wide range of skills, but not just being limited. Whereas for many other people, the specter of high debt may direct people in certain ways that really limit how they view college. That's first of all, I appreciate the question, Joseph. And also, I appreciate your beard, which is, which is magnificent. But that's, this is, this is yet a crucial, crucial part of the topic. And Brian, I thank you for again, the really candid answer. We are almost out of time. And this, this gives me two questions to ask you. But the first is, what are you going to be following this research up with similar projects and, and, and work on this topic? Or are you going to be branching off into another direction? Well, my plans are, well, coming up real soon is where we're working on developing a survey that we want to feel that's pitched specifically on questions regarding loans and debt, college debt. You know, I mean, it is, it is so, I mean, it, I think this is, you know, this is an issue that I think that is really important. It's incredibly timely. And I think people we haven't, we don't quite have an idea. We don't quite know what people are really thinking on this topic. It's not, I, and, and I think it's going to be much more complicated than people are in favor of forgiving people are not favorite. I think there's going to be huge context going on. I think people are going to be thinking of people are going to have lots of qualifiers in their visions regarding loan forgiveness. This is not unlike what people think about in terms of the question of free tuition. We did ask that question. And we asked people whether or not they were in favor of free tuition public universities. We made a very clear public universities whether or not they understood that this different issue. Overwhelmingly, people said there should be free tuition overwhelmingly. But in our numbers are no different than what you see in other national surveys. But we asked them then why? And what we found was there were many people who said I'm absolutely in favor of free tuition. And then in their sentence, they say, but the students should pay for some of it. It was basically it was free, but you have to pay something. I can imagine going to dinner. So you have a free dinner. Oh, but you're paying for this. It's making that type of idea. And people are saying it should be free, but the parents can pay some. They should pay some. And so what we realized is when people are answering question, even about free tuition, they're not taking it completely literally. They're taking it as a general idea of whether there should be more support for everyone to be able to go to college. On the side, the people who said I'm opposed to free tuition, there were many people. So for that first side is there should be free tuition, but for the people who said, no, there should be free tuition. Many of them also did, but and there is it shouldn't be free tuition, but we still should be doing something to make it better and easier for people. I think the long situation is going to be even more complicated. And so that's one thing we're thinking about. And then we're going to feel the same general questions again in the couple of years to continue your longitudinal progress. Yeah. Keel dooms in the in the chat had a lot of a lot of points about this. And I can't share them because it's time for the last question, which is we're trying something new here on the forum. Professor Powell, you're the first guinea pig on this, which is to ask you if as a way of wrapping up, could you recommend something for all of us, something that you found especially useful, exciting, and that could be a book, a podcast, a video, a way of life. What's what's the what's the pick for today? OK, I guess would be presumptuous for me to say, well, you should really read who should pay my book. Of course, you should. And and before I go any further, if any of you have questions, you should feel free to contact me at powellatindiana.edu. It's a pretty easy one. I got here before when they started doing email that I used. So I got Powell and or you can just go online and find me on that. I think there's several books you might want to take a look at. One of my favorite books that's come out fairly recently is a book called Broke and it is about the California system of education, funding and education. And it looks at how California, how the funding situation in California, even in a public system, has become privatized in many ways and its impact, especially on especially on the more underfunded schools or programs that are directed for, you know, to increase diversity. I think it's a fascinating book. It's a book by Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen. And I just think this it's a really, really good book. And then the other book and I'm blanking out on the name is the books. The name of the book is a book by Tony Anthony Jack Tony Jack. Yeah. And it's the advantaged. Let me look it up. Give you the name. I can't believe I'm forgetting the name. Tony Jack book. It's the poor and this is, you know, whereas I'm really thinking about the public school, the privilege poor is this beautifully written book and a really passionate book about the experiences of people who cannot afford to go to college, but people do get into college and they get into the elite institutions and how the challenges that they face within the even in the private setting where they're, you know, supposedly being fully funded. So I think those are two very different ways to think about the experiences of students. I'd encourage you to read those. Thank you. Thank you. That's that's a two great, great answers. And we have feelers out to Tony Jack to bring him out of the forum as a guest. Professor Brian Powell, thank you so much for being a fantastic guest. This is great work. Our hats off to your wonderful colleague. Is it quadlin? Natasha, welcome. And I hope to hear from you in a couple of years when you have your next round of these surveys through. I hope so, too. Thank you very much for inviting me. And again, if you have questions, feel free to email me. Take care. Very kind. Thank you, Brian. Friends, don't fall. First of all, take advantage of our guests. Wonderful generosity and do reach out to him with your further questions. But also I would like to just let you know where things are going in the next few weeks. If you'd like to keep talking about this and all these questions about public attitudes towards higher education finance, please just tweet at us using the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me, Brian Alexander or Shindig events or hit up the blog, Brian Alexander.org. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions on economics of higher education as well as cultural attitudes, just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive. Looking ahead, we have topics coming up from climate change to public higher ed to web three. And if you want to share something that you've done, research you've done or some project or something that you are just really proud of, just email me, Brian Alexander gmail.com. And I'll start letting people know. In the meantime, thank you all for the great questions. Thanks for thinking together about this. It's always great to be together with you all. Enjoy the end of this semester. Good luck with all of that. And above all, take care and be safe. We'll see you next time online. Bye bye.