 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. Matthew Feeney And I'm Matthew Feeney. Trevor Burrus Joining us today is Richard Vetter, Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University and Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Richard. Richard Glad to be with you. Trevor Burrus So a lot of discussion happens about higher education, cost, quality. It's been a hot topic recently. But maybe we just need to get a scope of the problem. How bad right now is the problem for how expensive higher education is, student debt, quality? Is it pretty bad or is it overblown? Richard Vetter Well I think it's a pretty serious problem. I mean it is an area of human endeavor. We spend 3% of our national output on, which is to say $500, $600 billion a year involves the lives of 20 million students at any moment of time who are going to college, which is not an inconsequential number of people. There are three huge problems that I can outline and I could do it in 10 words if I was compelled to, but being a college professor I'll take 100 probably to do it. College education is too costly. It's too expensive. That's the first problem. There's second problem is there's too little learning going on in college. It's a little harder to substantiate but I think it's real. And the third problem and it's also a big one is that too many recent graduates of college are really underemployed. They're not getting the kinds of jobs that they expected to get when they enter college nor the kind of jobs that traditionally college graduates have gotten. So on all ways you look at it, it's not doing too well. And all of that ignores several other problems that many of your listeners are probably interested in, namely the lack of intellectual diversity and higher education, the lack of tolerance of diverse views, the trigger warnings and speech codes and all of the abominations around those things. Scandals and intercollegiate athletics would be another example and I could go on and on buildings that are opulent and extravagant that are subsidized indirectly by taxpayers that have a little educational function or purpose. There's a whole variety of what we might call secondary areas but I've sort of outlined the main problems I think. Well, I think we would love to talk about all three of these points but I have a question about the first one which is how did we get to a point that it is so costly? I often hear from people older than me of course who say, you know, I went to college and I paid for it with summer jobs and working part time. What went wrong? How did we get here? Well, let me as a historical background say that the tuition at Harvard in 1840 was $75 a year which was about a little less than one year's income of the average American at the time. The tuition at Harvard now is pushing $50,000 which is about one year's income of the people. It's the only thing that I know of that I can think of that is burdensome to people today. In fact, it's probably a little more burdensome today than as an expense item than it was 176 years ago in 1840 and how do we get there? Well, there's a lot of theories and reasons and not all of it is related to public policy but a good bit of it is the biggest culprit in terms of public policy probably is the massive expansion of federal student of financial assistance programs which in today's dollars were far less than $10 billion in 1970 and today are closer to $200 billion so there's been a 20, 25-fold growth in those programs in 45 years and you would think well gee, that'll make college more affordable for students. Colleges have raised their tuition levels accordingly and I think most of the benefits if any of those programs have gone to the colleges themselves, there are professors, people like me who have lower teaching loads now, earn more money, have more trips to Europe and all the amenities we like. Administrators are excessive in number and excessive in pay and excessive in stupidity. Well, I shouldn't have said that but I just did, I guess. A lot of it is related to that problem. I would, traditionally, some people say that education is like theater, really, like take King Lear, which I'll use Shakespeare since he died 400 years ago this year. It takes as many actors today to perform King Lear as it did in 1610 or whenever it was that Shakespeare wrote King Lear and teachings like that, you know, I'm a professor, I'm an actor, I get up in front of 30, 40, 50 students just like I did 50 years ago when I started teaching. I'm still teaching. I'm teaching the same course the same way to the same number of students today as I did 50 years ago. That's the truth. I'm making that up. So zero productivity growth and yet wages and the economy are going up with general parent productivity growth. So you have to pay professors more and that in other words causes some inflation. There's some truth to that argument but only a little truth. I mean, we have faculty are only a quarter of the employees at a typical university or a third, maybe a third of the budget goes for faculty salaries, two thirds goes for other things. So that can't explain all this inflation in its entirety. We have MOOCs and we have online education. We should have technological advances to help lower those costs and, you know, technology is lower the cost of doing business almost everywhere else in the economy. Why hasn't it in education? Indeed, in education many colleges say we have to put a technology fee on. We have to charge them more because we want to use new technology. Well if the Ford Motor Company said they were going to put a technology fee on because we have to put new machines in to build our cars, they would be bankrupt shortly. So it's a different world. But the American economy, as you said it's a different world, the American economy has changed a lot just in terms of the kind of labor that people do, the kind of jobs that are required. My parents, my dad was the first one to graduate college and he ended up going to law school and I think at about that time in 1969 it was about 11% of people had college degrees. And so you could differentiate yourself as a high school diploma but then you need to get college and now increasingly you need to differentiate yourself through graduate degrees because more people are going to college and that just seems like a good general growth in the education level of Americans could do the kind of jobs that are required. Dude, less breaking rocks and more programming computers. Yeah, you're raising an interesting point. It used to be that college was a signaling device. You had a piece of paper. I am a college graduate and even if you went to, I hope I don't offend some of your listeners, if you went to slippery rock state college in Pennsylvania, which is not considered to be one of the leaders in American higher education and maybe have a sort of a middling reputation or even below middling reputation, people would say, yeah, he's pretty cool or she's pretty cool. Part of the top 10 percent, it wasn't top 1%, but at least the top 10% or 11% and so even people going to schools of mediocre reputation, getting a bachelor's degree with mediocre grades still was somehow special. They were at the minimum, they're in the top quartile of the population and smarts and general ability to perform in the eyes of employers and everything. Today, when you got over 30% of the population with college degrees and over half the population, at least going to post-secondary schooling of some sort, it's no longer special and a person who's at the bottom of their class at a sort of a mediocre quality school maybe even below the average of the American population as a whole. So, no longer does that piece of paper, is it a good singling device, so you get a master's degree. I've been predicting we will offer a master's degree in janitorial science, which is being mopping floors. There are over 100,000 people in the 2010 census with bachelor's degrees who were janitors and there were over 5,000 with master's degrees who were janitors. So, I think that will be the thing, you will need a master's degree to wash windows or mop floors and is that make any sense, I think you can ask that. Well, that brings me onto the second question I had which actually relates to the second point you made about too little learning. So, is that professors still want to teach the right kind of things but they're doing it poorly or is it that they're not even teaching the right kind of things? And I suppose a tag on question at the end of that is what do you think a university or college should be for? What role should it play in society? I was afraid you were going to ask that question. I'm sorry. Let's get philosophical. Yeah, let's get philosophical. No, it's an excellent, the latter part is excellent but even just starting out with the earlier part of your question, are we teaching poorly or what is the problem and it's a little bit of everything. There's data from the U.S. Department of Labor that says that in the mid-60s the typical college students spent 40 hours a week on academic pursuits, full-time student. Today they spend 27 hours a week, one-third less time to get the same number of college credits as they did 50 years ago and why? Well, we are not asking as much of our students. So does that mean we're doing our job poorly? I think you could argue it does mean that. And of course the major, the most obvious manifestation of that is our grades that we give. In the mid-60s the typical grade in a college course was about a C grade or C plus grade. So truly average. The GPA, if you have a grade point average of all students in the United States, undergraduate students are about a 2.4, 2.5. Now it's about a 3.1 which is above a B average, it's between a B and a B plus. In some disciplines, I'll pick education as one. We do have colleges of education, which I, by the way, just as an afterthought, I think we should abolish. I think if we're going to have military training and we're going to bomb things, we ought to bomb colleges of education of existence. Something of a pacifist by the way, but if I would make an exception for bombing colleges of education, but the colleges of education, a typical school, the typical grade is a B plus, about a 3.6, 3.7 average. They just don't believe in giving grades. So why should a student work very hard? Why should they study very much? Why shouldn't they spend time going to the local recreational center or go drinking or engaging in all sorts of wild hedonistic activities, which we won't go into detail here, some of which are very fun, a lot of fun. But should we be subsidizing them as taxpayers? And I question that. Well, that's an interesting point too, because college has created an image, I would say, since about the 60s of having, it's a consumer good, just being there, being in a frat, going to your parties and playing beer pong, making sure you make a lot of mistakes, it's the kind of find yourself kind of mission, which is maybe partially what we're paying for, that we have wealthier parents who paid for their kids to go find themselves while getting an English degree and a religious studies degree. Is that something that's bad? I mean, should we be condemned that, giving them a four-year kind of club med? I think it's not only not bad, I think it's sort of a natural byproduct of a more affluent society. People get wealthier, they want their children to live better than they did, and part of that is, oh, sometimes people will send their kids off to do a gap year after school, of traveling around Europe or Asia or something like that, which earlier generations could not afford to do. And some people send their kids to something we call colleges for a gap five years, it used to be four, but it's increasingly five or six, where you dabble in education a little bit and you dabble in having fun and you dabble in drinking and you dabble in sex and you dabble in drugs, but we argue that that's part of the acculturation process, part of the maturation process of growing up. Those are things that you do, and there's nothing wrong with it. Where I have some problem, though, is who pays for it, and should we, for example, have free college for all, as Bernie Sanders argued, or a variant of that, Secretary Clinton is arguing right now, and should we subsidize that, should hardworking people who maybe didn't go to college and are from families with $30,000 or $40,000, $50,000 incomes be subsidizing people making twice as much money, whose kids are going off to college and doing a little learning, they're getting some learning done, but they're also spending a lot of time doing these other things. I don't mind people having fun, but I don't want them to do it on my dime, I wanted them to do it on their dime. For trying to separate these cultural, the way I think about this problem is that we can have a cultural economic change, and then we have a public policy change that is not necessary. Some of these are just a good growth of an educated society, of a very rich society where people's adolescence is now extended to 30, I mean 30 is the new 20, correct? We need to all spend five years in Europe finding ourselves after four years of college finding ourselves, and you might end up finding yourself in a coffee shop in Amsterdam or something like that, but that's what an affluent society does, as you said. So that's the cultural side and then the governmental side, so what we can actually do about this. So we talked about federal funding, and I couldn't tell how much the federal student aid, how much you put on very, very easy to obtain federal student aid. Is that a big part of this? Well, let's first of all look at the numbers, and how do you define the money? A lot of this, our kids are paying back loans, so is it really government or not? But since it's guaranteed by the government, even the college board counts it as federal student aid, and those numbers add up to a number close to $200 billion each day. The total spending on higher aid is a $500 billion enterprise, a little over that close, getting gone towards $600 billion, so it's a big deal. It's not a little deal. That's more than state governments giving subsidies to universities, so it's a big factor. And one wonders that even if you believe that there ought to be some special provisions for egalitarian reasons to provide opportunity to lower income people, for example, that whether this is very efficient, because that's, many of those $20 million, many people are forgetting tuition tax credits. Now, I'm a low tax guy, as anyone at the Cato Institute would test, but I don't believe giving tax credits to go to college as opposed to doing something else is the optimal use of money. And at least when you're giving those to people from families with $150,000 a year, is that an appropriate use of federal subsidies? And there's about $20 billion or so of that money given out. There's another $40 billion, $30 or $40 billion given out in Pell grants, which are grants. But even those grants are not given right to the students. They're given, they're sent to the financial aid offices of these schools. Then you have to come in and kind of beg for them, even though that's money that's in your name. I've always argued that even if you're going to do that program at the minimum, give the money to the students directly so that you empower them a little bit. So maybe they'll decide they don't want to go to your university this semester. They want to go to some other university, or if they get turned down from classes they want to take, they go somewhere else. So I think there's a lot of problems with the program. But if you had, how much is the interest rate guarantee on the federal system? How much is that a subsidy? Because it seems to me that if you had to go to a bank and take a loan out, they might actually, let's just say there were no federal student aid whatsoever, or only very little amount of it, they would ask you things like, well, what are you planning on majoring in? And if you said puppetry, they may give you a 12% interest rate. But if you said engineering or business, they may give you a 5% interest rate because that's the way the market would work. Instead, the government just gives you one interest rate. That's right. The government programs have no commercial, no economic basis to them. There is an idea, by the way, that is gain favor for something called income share agreements, which is sort of a private approach to funding college, which is kind of appealing because under this scheme, a student would go to, say, a bank or somewhere and say, I want you to finance half the cost of my going to college. I have enough cash and so forth to finance half it. I want to go to such and such a university. I'll need $40,000 for the next four years. What will it cost me for you to get to pay that $40,000? And instead of giving the student a loan, they'll give, they'll say to the student, sell us 5% of yourself for the next 10 years or 7% or 10%. You will pay us 5% or 7% or 10%. Whatever the amount might be of your income, it might be for five years, it might be for 15. And picking up on your point, picking up on your point, an excellent point, is if you had an unimpeded market in that, you would get great information, enormously useful information. The MIT kids even will be able to borrow that money or they're not really borrowing their money. They would be getting those funds for a very small hunk of their income for a very few years. And the kids majoring in gender studies at Chicago State University will be paying 30% of their income for the next 200 years or, well, for the rest of their life, till death do us part. And that provides information. And the market then is saying, we don't really want many gender studies. And I'm making that up. I don't know what the data really would show. But I have a feeling that electrical engineering major from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would be a pretty solid investment perceived by markets that way. And I have a feeling that MIT would be looked at better than the University of District Columbia. And I'm not picking on that institution, but it just doesn't have as good of an academic reputation. So this reminds me of a question I had coming in here, which is, what other options should exist? Because it seems to me that there are universities and colleges that train people for professions that you didn't even need a degree for. So is the answer more trade schools? Is the answer apprenticeships or other vocational training? What do you think would be? Well, I think we do need some more of that kind of stuff. I think there's too much emphasis on bachelor's degrees and not enough on providing just useful educational opportunities for students that often would be technical schools, career colleges, learning how to braid hair, welders make tremendous amounts of money, I am told. Driving these big 18-wheel trucks is very remunerative. I mean, it's at least a page reasonably well. And you could learn to do that in a year, probably rather than four years or five years. But there's another option too. I agree that those are part of one way. Maybe we should have a Nash, I'll just throw an idea out and you can blow it up if you want. Let's create something we'll call the NC. And NC is actually N-C-E-E. That stands for the National College Equivalence Examination. We give exams, colleges thrive on exams. We evaluate our students' exams. We just accept them in the first place. You have to take the collegiate aptitude test or the ACT test or something. When they graduate, they will take the GRE, the graduate record exams to see if they fit for graduate school. Let's have all our students and not anyone, 12-year-old kids, kid in grade school could take the N-C-E-E. And then, I mean, let's say all the kids who go to a certain university, let's say we said as a national standard of 60, if you have less than a 60, you're considered less than bachelor certified, bachelor's degree certified. If you have more than that, you have a bachelor. So people instead will ask, where did you go to school? They might ask, what did you do on the N-C-E-E? You might say, well, you can't make a single test up that covers all disciplines. And that's true. But, I mean, we somehow deal with this and other things. So we give them a two-hour general test, give them a little few questions in history and literature and mathematics and foreign languages. General knowledge, what an educated person should know, an hour and a half would do it, actually, to be honest. Critical thinking skills, have them write, answer an essay a little and then a couple of hours of questions. So test them on critical thinking and then have them have a segment where they're their major field, where you ask them questions in their major field. You could do all this in three and a half, four hours. We do it all the time with other tests. To be in the foreign service of the United States, you take a test, something like that. So why not do this? And that might be, you know, charge a kid 100 bucks to take the test. And the employers might catch on, well, hey, we want kids who do well on that test. It correlates very well with the kind of skills we want as employees. And so maybe we could change the whole name of the game. And yeah. So in a world in which there is the NCEE, there would still be a place for universities to teach the liberal arts and the hard sciences for those more academically minded. And I think, you know, we couldn't have this conversation without mentioning at least once the state of the liberal arts. And before talking before this question, we briefly discussed the state of trigger warning, safe spaces, things like that. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what you think the state of the liberal arts is, even the sort of things universities should be doing. I'm an economist and so I'm accused of being very vocationally oriented. But the reality is I'm very liberal arts biased, pro liberal arts biased. I spent a lot of time in college doing seemingly silly things like studying French literature in French and, you know, things that, but I think back on it now and I think those are some of the most rewarding moments of my life. And I think we have de-emphasized the liberal arts too much as a general proposition. The data tend to support this. Students are spending far less time taking courses in the humanities, philosophy, languages, literature, history, and even the social sciences, I feel a little less warm and fuzzy about the social sciences because some of them I don't think teach very much. But I think as a whole, people do need to have some, I think people can think better and think more critically and have a better context in which to evaluate human situations if they've had a sort of a broad range of study that includes a little bit of philosophy and a little bit of, you know, everyone should read Plato's Republic and everyone should read a little bit of Shakespeare and maybe everyone should take an economics course. I kind of think probably. But I'm less excited about that than I am about the Shakespeare. And so the data show a decline in the humanities and even the so-called liberal arts colleges are now emphasizing business majors and all of this sort of stuff. And I think a little bit too bad. And if you look at the data, by the way, this is my favorite statistic from payscale.com, mid-career earnings of philosophy majors versus business administration majors, the philosophy majors past the business administration majors about 15 years in their career. So even if you look at education as nothing more than a vocational exercise, which I don't, I think there's a case to be made for the liberal arts. Well, both Matthew and I are philosophy majors. So we liked the statistic very well. Well, Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education and another fellow that I know, Alec Pollack, both graduated from Williams with a philosophy major about 40 years ago, both did extremely well. When I got a PhD in philosophy, the other one became a successful banker. One of them made a lot of money writing books and so forth. And they both think that the reason it all happened was their philosophy major, I'm not sure Williams College is the right place, although it's a good school. But that's the interesting question back to what you had said about sort of choosing the right majors for human capital for actual job skills because we talked about, we kind of threw gender studies under the bus a little bit, which I'm all for. Maybe religious studies, we can talk about all these other majors that might be bad. But then there's a lot of people who would say, as you just said, that the liberal arts, even if it doesn't give you job skills, is just good for you. I don't think Shakespeare gives you job skills, but it's just good for you to read Shakespeare. So maybe your Bernie Sanders supporter would say, I think the government should be subsidizing that for America's youth in the same way they think that high school should have, you should read John Steinbeck in high school. And job skills be damned. This is part of being a good citizen. Well, you raise some very interesting questions. Where do you draw the line about what the public sector or what the government should do in providing education? Should they provide any at all? The industrial revolution, when it happened in Great Britain, it was most interesting. You had a late colleague here at the Andrew Coulson, who was a friend of mine. And Andrew pointed out, and I teach this stuff, that in Great Britain, which had an industrial revolution between 1750 and 1850, that began the greatest change in the betterment of human welfare that the world ever had and ever will have, that that happened in school. Kids were learning in private schools. There wasn't a dime, not a, or I should say a farthing, I guess, or a shilling. You sound like you might have a British empire. He has an idea. Oh, giddy, it would be another possible one. One of the above, I'm sure. You look like you're a part of the vast British empire of some... What remains of it? Anyway, to 1830, there wasn't a penny spent. And there was a little sort of an intermediate stage. It was about 1870 that the education was thoroughly made public, nationalized, if you like, in Great Britain. And the country fared pretty well. In the United States, in as late as 1940, most kids going to college and universities went to private schools, not to public schools, as late as 1940. And this was long after our, you know, we had achieved supremacy, economic supremacy. So I am one who sort of questions the very basic assumption that education is a public good that therefore needs to be publicly financed. It's certainly though, if you do, and you can make a case for it. But if you do, where do you draw the line? Where do you stop? Does everyone have the fundamental right to a PhD? I mean, why is it at age 17, we will pay your way through school? And at age 18, you will say, it's time now for you to start paying some of your way. And why there? Why at 18? Why not at 12? Why not, or why not at 25? Bernie Sanders would say, why ever we're at 25. Others would say 12. I think there's, we ought to be looking into the true everyone, the positive spillover effects of education. Shortly before he died, Milton Friedman and I had a conversation on this, if I may share this with you, because it seems like that might be an appropriate person to reference. Friedman in his book that he wrote Capitalism and Freedom said while he was generally very skeptical of government interventions in human life, he did think that there was a role for some public fund financing of higher education because of the public betterment, the positive spillover effects and so forth. Around 2000, 2002 actually to be precise, I wrote him, sent him an email. I said, Milton, do you still believe this? And he wrote back and he said, well, there probably are some positive spillover effects for education, but there are sure a lot of negative spillover effects as well. And he says it is an interesting empirical question whether we ought to be subsidizing higher education or taxing it. And he had, he was clearly become very skeptical of the view that government should be involved in the financing of higher education. And I think he made a very valid point. When we're talking about the, you mentioned the National Collegiate equivalency exam, which I think is a really interesting idea, because we have to, if we're going to try and not blow up the system, but at least unpack it into more useful constituent points and not have this monolithic bottle that might be a little bit antiquated for the modern age, we might have to do things like we need to get a signaling device that signals that you know enough. But there's another problem here. We need to, part of the college diploma signals that you know how to get up at 9am, turn in a paper when it's due, attend class. I think those are the job skills. My dad always jokes that college diplomas really should say this piece of paper certifies that this person can do the kind of things that a person needs to do to get this piece of paper, which is, but is a valuable signaling device for possible employers beyond just do you know who the king of England was in 1540. How do we give those signals if we're going to try and extricate ourselves from the pure college model and have more, how can we give those signals to prospective employers aside from just knowledge? Well, somehow in the middle of that question, I got thinking of a friend of mine who owns a series of McDonald's restaurants. And my friend, most of whose employee about I'd say half of them never go to college, half of them go, you know, most of them are 16, 17, 18 years old. He always asserted to me that he probably did more to help persons become equipped for job markets than colleges did because he said you will be at work at X time, 12 p.m. And if you're here at 12.03, I'm going to dock your pay because we are expecting you here at 12. If you're, have dyed your hair yellow overnight or pink overnight and put three rings in your nose, which is offensive to our customers, I'm being very politically incorrect here, no doubt. We're not going to employ you anymore. So there's a dress code. There's a time code. We don't want to hear you use swear. We don't want to swear. We don't want to see you chewing gum while you're serving customers. There's a set of rules and do's and don'ts that we teach some in college. But I think we teach at least, I think most of that is learned on the job. And even college graduates learn most of it on the job. Most college graduates, you know, they get up. Well, sometimes they get up at 7, 8 o'clock in the morning. But more often than not, they get up at 10 or 11. And on Fridays, they don't go to class much anymore. So they sleep in or they're out partying till 4 in the morning. And so they are hungover. And when they go to work, I love to talk to kids six months after they graduate from college and they're coming back from their first job. Oh, my gosh. Oh, this is a different world I'm in. You know, it's different. I got to, you know, I got to dress up for work. I can't wear t-shirts and so forth. And so I think a lot of what we need for the workplace is really nonformal education skills. I don't want to denigrate the importance of college. And colleges do teach some real skills. I mean, accounting has, has specialized knowledge that you need. Colleges are a good place to learn. Engineers have specialized knowledge. There's, but I, you know, I don't know what is a, I'm going to get myself trolled. Communications, majors, education. I think those are the athletes, right? I mean, the communications degree holders are the athletes. Yeah. That's the joke. Yeah. And, and, and there are a lot of mushy major. And even things like art, which I think it's a legitimate for the university to teach the arts and fine arts. In fact, I think that's a nice part of the, I'm a supporter of that. But really how much of art is learned, you know, through formal instruction and how much is learning in another way. There are, in other words, other ways to teach besides the formal education process. So some, some listeners might think it interesting that the three of us who have all benefited from higher education are bemoaning the state of affairs. And we are a bit pessimistic. Right. And, and some listeners might, for the younger listeners might be interested to hear what, what you think they should do if they are academically minded. But they realize getting one of these degrees will be very expensive. And when they finish, there will be thousands of other people with the same sort of degrees. What, if any advice you have for the 18 year old who wants to go to college? Well, that's the bottom line question, really, for many people. And I think the answer varies from individual to individual. I don't think there is a one size fits all answer to that question. That's why I very much disagree with what I call the college for all crowd who says everyone should go to college blanket. The kid who is graduating from a good private school or even a decent suburban public school or a high quality inner city public school, it doesn't matter. Good quality school in the top 10% of their class who does very well on tests and so forth who is who has excelled in student activities. In addition to studying both athletics and non athletic activities, those students are going to be able to get into a very high quality school and they're going to excel. The average graduate of Duke University earns more than twice as much as the average earnings of students at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro which is located less than 100 miles away. The life experiences are, if you get into Duke, you're going to do well. 95% of the kids who go to Duke graduate from Duke at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It's 50-50. You've got a 50% chance of graduating, a 50% chance you won't graduate. So people learn very early still in high school whether what they could do and if the best they can do is get in a school of some marginal reputation. They maybe and their high school grades were in the bottom one-fourth a quarter of their class. They might ask themselves, maybe do I really want to go to a traditional four-year college? Maybe to hedge my bets. I'll go to a two-year community college where, by the way, the dropout rates are huge, very, very high. Or I'll go to one of these for-profit schools for a year or two years if I do well. If I don't do well, I am at least minimize my losses to one year or two years rather than four years and maybe 10 or $20,000 instead of $100,000. Or they might say, let's go to truck driver's school. I always wanted to drive a truck or I love working outdoors. I want to be working construction but maybe I ought to go to one of my great former students learned how to build houses. He just built houses for a year. I think it's great. Someone has to build houses and three, four years later, doesn't have a college degree but he's making good money of probably $40,000, $50,000 a year and happy as a lark. Is there a status problem that could develop here though? Maybe that's the problem we look down on to some extent truck drivers. I hope I don't but I think generally society does. If someone makes a decision to go to truck driving school or go to plumbing school, there could be a class to status difference here that could be. Why does that exist? You're absolutely right. That does exist to some extent. But part of it is our political leaders and even our high school guidance counselors maybe and our Lumina Foundation and the Gates Foundation, all these foundations founded by Yuppies, most of whom by the way do not graduate from college. Or they got like an English degree. I don't mean to make fun of Bill Gates. He's a brilliant man but he didn't graduate from college. They say you've got to go to college, you've got to go. And that adds to the stigma if you don't go to college. So we have encouraged that. Some say and there's some truth is I am usually not one to promote European values in the, because I think Americans have a whole higher quality of life than Europeans. But it is said that in Germany and I think there's some truth to this that the German vocational education system is much, much better than ours because that stigma problem is far, far less. It's much less obvious. And I think there's something to be said for that. So 50 years ago we did have vocational high schools, vocational post high schools, we still do to some extent but they weren't looked on quite as negatively as they are today. They've become more and more shando. That's just for the people who can't make it in life. What should we think about plans or suggestions to do student loan forgiveness? I am very much against student loan forgiveness. It sounds, you know, heart hearted. It sounds like you're mean. You don't like people. But if we start becoming very generous in forgiving student loans, you first of all have what us economists call the moral hazard problem. You're going to college. You take out, you'll say your parents will probably tell a kid, borrow all you can. The government's not going to make you pay it back anyway. So you look at the borrowing almost originally as a grant rather than a loan. And so then we have a massive problem. The more you forgive loans, the fewer people who will willingly make payments on them. So that's a problem. It says the wrong message to people. It says if you fail in life, we'll cover yourself. There's no downside to poor. And many people who don't pay back their loans because they do poor academically in school, they don't graduate from school. Now, do you want to see these people literally die of starvation? Of course not. We're a compassionate society. But, you know, even the, you know, the Salvation Army and the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the Habitat for Humanities, a lot of private philanthropies help these people and maybe even arguably the government itself. But you don't need to forgive them their loans. A loan is a loan is a loan. And you made the point earlier, very valid point, is we really ought to commercialize loans more. When you go to borrow, we ought to tell people what you're proposing to do is risky. And we perceive it as risky. And so we're going to charge you a little higher interest rate on your loan. And or what you're you're want to go to MIT and engineering, you've got a off the wall SAT score, and you were number one in your class in high school. Go for it. We'll give you a 2% loan because we want to encourage that. I mean, if the government's going to get in the lending business, which I'm against, they're in it. I would prefer them to get out. But at least take account of the differences here. The government is encouraging people to linger around school. Let's suppose, let's talk about Pell Grant. Can I real? Please, please. Let's take a Pell Grant person. Here's two students. One of them is brilliant, hardworking, works day and night, graduates from college in three years. Easily possible, by the way, go to summer school, etc., take overloads during the year. You can graduate in three years. I had a son that graduated three years. It wasn't unusually brilliant, but he graduated in three years. No, no difficult. Graduated five beta cap, a very good student. It can be done. So here you got a student graduates in three years on Pell Grants all the way through. Let's say he gets a $5,000 annual Pell Grant. He gets 15 or she gets $15,000 in Pell Grants. Here's student number two. Student number two fails half the courses she takes or he takes. It has a drug problem, alcohol problem, etc., etc., takes six, but does graduate in six years. That student will get 30,000 in Pell Grants. The good student will get 15. The poor student will get 30. That's just the way it works. The federal government rewards poor performance. If you perform poorly, we'll give you more money than if you perform well. Now, that is sheer craziness. It's idiocy. And you say, well, we ought to have put more money into need-based aid. But if we're going to even want to go that route, at least put in some standards. We have 40% of the kids who enter college don't graduate. Don't graduate. That's madness. We waste those resources. You're getting me all excited. You're getting me. I want to start. Let's go to war against the college. DOE is down the street. We can go up there with the pitchforks right now. Let's start a demonstration. That's the end thing to do on college campus. Exactly. So what can we, in the immediate near-term future, if you were to advocate for some public policy changes that could not burn down the DOE or something like that, but just things that might have a big effect if we make some changes, maybe some better requirements on Pell Grants and Student Loans or reaction time. We could cut the costs of the government expenditures by 40% in the Student Financial Assistance Area without fundamentally reducing A to a regular full-time student who has genuine need at all. First of all, 10% or more of the money goes for these tuition tax credits. A lot of that goes to middle-income families. 10% or so the money goes to parents, not to the students, to parents who, by the way, don't have to start repaying loans until six months after their kids graduate from school, which is crazy. What does the kids graduating school have to do with the parents' capacity to repay the loan? That's dubious. Why are you giving money to parents rather than to students? We have a lot of students who take six years, borrow money from five and six years. Maybe we should put a time limit on. Five years, period. The degrees are advertised as four-year degrees. Maybe we put four years on. Maybe I'd be generous and say five. That still would save a fair amount of money. What about law school MBA programs? What about a kid going to get an MBA? An MBA, I have nothing against people having MBA degrees, but that's a degree. It's almost purely a vocational degree designed to increase one's income. Why should the government be financing those kind of degrees? Maybe a bachelor's degree. Now, I'm middle-eak when I say that. Where do you draw the line? I don't know. But a lot of the money that we give out in lend out is for graduate education. It's not under graduate education. Maybe we ought to put some limits on that. You could say 30%, 40% of what we're spending on doing these things. It would be hard to get it through Congress. Well, we have an impossible situation in Washington here. As they do over much of the western world these days, Britain isn't any better really, maybe marginally. There are things that can be done. What about making colleges have some skin in the game? What if you say, the reason these kids borrow all this money, and the colleges have to accept them. The colleges are complicit in this, in that they lure kids to their campuses. In some cases, knowing that the kid is very unlikely to succeed, but they want to collect tuition revenue from the student, sometimes state subsidies from the state government. They do that. Knowing there's a high probability that the students will not graduate, and a high probability that they will default on their loans. Knowing that, maybe that's undesirable public policy to allow that to happen. At least the colleges should. If they have an abuse of this, and they have a 20% or 30% of their students not paying back their loans, maybe we should say the college is okay. You pay some of that back. I'm a great believer in skin in the game as a sort of an intermediate solution to my long run desire to just get the federal government out of this business completely. But that would be a nice, you know, intermediate step.