 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Well ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again, it's time for Mises Weekends. We're very pleased, very happy to be joined by Dr. Greg Thornberry. He is not only the president of the King's College in Manhattan, he's also himself a professor of philosophy and someone who is familiar with the Mises Institute as the head of a very unique school, a school that I would lump in somewhat with Grove City College and Hillsdale College in that it has a very sort of unique outlook and unique offerings. He's someone that we asked and reached out to talk to us about higher ed because those of us who are in the sort of Austrian end of economics tend to view the state of higher education with a lot of alarm. So that being said, Greg, thanks so much. Welcome, great to see you. It's great to be here and I love Von Mises to pieces. So it's a privilege to be on Mises Weekends. Okay, well, let's start with sort of a big picture question. Peter Klein, one of our PhD professors at academic here, he teaches at Baylor says, you know, it's interesting that at least the undergraduate university model has not changed much since medieval times. It's kind of a lecture hall and a one directional. There's an expert up front, a guru of sorts speaking to a passive audience in a one directional manner. And a lot of people are starting to question this mightily in a digital age. So let's start with that. Let me get your thoughts. Well, he's absolutely right. It's a model from a time long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. It has been a relatively stable model. It's got that going for it. I mean, there was something to the Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. It did give birth to the sort of spirit of inquiry that has characterized Western civilization up until this time. A place that is above the fray in at least theoretically in terms of being, you know, obviously Socrates had to drink hemlock because it was perceived that he was asking questions and saying things about the gods that either the state or the church or the religious establishment at that time did not want him to. So, but you are correct that given the advent technologies of our time and given the curious deliverables that higher education has, it's a model that is very, very at risk. Like think blockbuster video. Right. When you say deliverable, you mean the degree and if we might be a bit coarse, we'd even say return on investment. Absolutely. Which is what every family ought to be thinking about. I mean, there used to be a time where in an economy such as ours, people didn't know what to do with 18 to 22 year olds. They weren't out of the oven yet. So you parked them at a university, but increasingly that is no longer the case. And the reason is, is that we don't know what to do with 23 year olds. And the 23 year olds are not prepared for the economy that we do have. But let's also talk about the scandal of tuition. Sure. There are universities charging $50,000, $60,000 a year for an undergraduate degree. And I would argue that the student loan debt industry is not much better than pawn shops or subprime auto lenders. That it's a real calamity for families. It absolutely is. And it is something that has been, it's almost to the level of the real estate crisis because a student is not able to be on, if they are able to be entrepreneurial, they are often not in a position financially to be entrepreneurial because they're wanting to play it safe. They are wanting to pay off sometimes 50, 70, 80, over $100,000 in debt. So it's in effect to buying a house. So they will just stay at a certain level so that they can pay off those student loans. And that becomes their job. Their job after graduation is to pay off student loans rather than if, I hope this doesn't sound right, but live the American dream. Mm-hmm. Well, it's shocking how many millennials are not marrying, buying houses, et cetera. Our friends on the left would say the answer to this is to make education free. How would you respond to that? There's nothing as expensive as free college education because there is no such thing as free college education that would be paid for by taxpayers and we would only be pushing up into higher education, the disaster that has befallen K through 12 education in the country where the average student winds up getting about $40,000 in taxpayer money for an abysmal education in many circumstances, not all. I don't wanna paint with a broad brush but does not make them college-ready and we would just be further perpetuating the arrested state of adolescent development and unreadiness for college that currently exists. Well, at the Meese Institute, we like to talk a lot about cultural matter, civilization, philosophy, things that are beyond just pure economics. So obviously we're biased in favor of what we might call a liberal education. Yeah. Is that still valid for kids? Do average kids still need a liberal arts education regardless of even if they wanna go into a pure trade technicality? Well, first of all, it's important that we define liberal arts and technically and historically, the liberal arts meant the things that liberate one from tyranny and that is what the liberal arts are. They are those disciplines where you learn the lessons of history, you learn the numeracy and the literacy that has kept societies free. And so is that still needed to use a phrase from Laffin in the 1970s? You bet your sweet Bippy that's still needed. Unfortunately, what has happened is the university industrial complex is not doing that anymore. They are not teaching ideas that liberate people from tyranny. They're giving an education on usually, in most circumstances, you listed a couple of institutions at the top of the show that would be bucking this trend, but that are well poised to keep people in tyranny for long periods of time. So I do think the liberal arts are more necessary than ever and there's been quite a lot of research done on this in a lot of articles written recently that liberal arts graduates tend to be more attractive to employers because they tend to be the kinds of people who can think their way around a problem. William Derizowitz, the erstwhile professor at Yale wrote Excellent Cheap and he talked about the fact that unfortunately even Ivy League schools are now places where students are taught technique and skill but are not able to think for themselves which may make them employable but also useful idiots for bigger powers that are at work in culture and society. That may sound like a conspiracy theory but I think it's probably true. Well, are you shocked at all by how quickly it seems that universities, undergraduate universities have morphed into these ideological, seemingly illiberal places for young people where free speech is under attack. It seems like there's this tremendous shift to the left among academics teaching kids. It seems like it happened very quickly and that it feels shocking or maybe we're just more aware of it now. No, I think that there really has been a sea change because as my friend Peter Thiel says, the university has now become the atheist church. So it's not really, it is not really education. It's a religion unto itself and every PhD that I know of unless they have taken the blue pill or the red pill, I can't remember which one Morpheus gave but unless they've opted out, unless they are really trying to buck the system, there's a Freudian element. Their job is to try to please their PhD mentor and become accepted in a guild and it's a very esoteric series of motivations that they have. So they're actually not going into college, university, education to teach anybody. Their goal is actually not to do that ideally, which is to become a hoary headed academic and think great thoughts. But insofar as they do have to teach, they want to create people in their own image and to twist a phrase from Bob Dylan, everyone must get cloned. Well, how do we change this motivation? How do we make professors care about teaching and stop worrying about this phony publishing racket, academic journal articles, nobody reads? Yeah. I mean, this is certainly what I thought was the first order of business when I came to Kings. I mean, I'm saying that this all is a college president and the reason why I feel like I'm not perjuring myself by saying this is that the appeal of coming to a place like Kings is the networking effect that you come to New York City and what you really get out of the education, even though you get a first class liberal arts education, we teach Austrian economics. I must say one of the few schools that leads with the front foot forward on Austrian economics. Von Mises and Rothbard are in the macro economics intro syllabus, those sorts of readings. So we are bucking the trend. I do think that's important to waking people up, but student comes here and they are juxtaposed to businesses, financial firms, media organizations and it's the networking effect and the internships and the experiences that they have, that's what makes them competitive in the marketplace and the college education is a vehicle toward that end as opposed to going to some leafy green campus out in the middle of nowhere that's 75 miles from the nearest sin and so how do we change it? I think we need to go into an era where employers and businesses are looking at micro-credentialing and abilities and skills and looking at the person rather than the degree and I think that we've got to get rid of this US News and World Report and the ranking system as a way of determining a person's value or worth. I think that they should be judged upon the content of their character and the chops that they bring into the marketplace and frankly that's a problem right now. I hear employers complain about it all the time and right now that the Chronicle of Higher Education, just to say one other thing, the Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey two years ago of a thousand employers and they asked for the top characteristics that they were looking for out of a college graduate and what came back shocked them. Employers did not care what someone majored in, they did not care what college or universe they went to, they looked at the resume and said, what can you do? What have you done while you're in college? And so that's where the emphasis needs to be. So insofar as colleges and universities can give packages rather than degrees, I think that's the wave of the future. Like you come and you get this piece and then you really allow students to craft their own experience and let the consumers decide how much of this they might wind up getting a bachelor's, they might wind up getting a package of things that they think will get them to the next stage in life. It's something that needs to happen. Yeah, I know, I love what you're saying about micro-servivification, that sort of thing, but it will be heavy lifting and as you know, employers can't rely on a degree, they can't rely on grade point averages which we know are inflated and now meaningless. And now we're even doing away with standardized testing. So what does the employer have to look at on a young person's application or on their resume? One thing I would question is whether they can write. I mean, all professions require at least some degree of writing and in the world of accounting and law, I've seen some of the worst writing you can imagine. Right, no, it's really shocking the low level of literacy and numeracy on any standardized test or measure that you can possibly imagine. So yes, I do think that that's a very important one. The other thing is are they able to speak in intelligent sentences and paragraphs? So writing is important, but also to be able to think in concrete sequential fashion. This is another thing that our electronic soul-molesting devices known as iPhone and Samsung or whatever device you have are eating away at is the ability for speech. And I don't care if you're talking about Stephen Pinker or Roger Scruton or Charles Taylor, what makes human beings human is their ability to communicate and that's something that we're seeing quickly dissipate, which is discourse. So I think that is something employers should look at. And then also what have they, again, what have they done? Where have they been? Who can you pick up the phone and call? And what sort of commendation, letters of commendation can they get from small tests? This is why Stanford, for example, is going to, like David Evans at Stanford is talking about prototyping. So what sort of prototyping has a student done? Quick bursts of experiences where they can prove that they can do X, Y, or Z. And it happens, the reporting is much faster. And I think an employer can tell that in a very short amount of time through either a CV or a quick interview. Well, before we wrap up, I wanna get back to a point you alluded to earlier. And that is, regardless of how obtained, how important it is for people to understand history and classics and rhetoric and language and what we might call the humanities or more broadly, liberal arts, because it doesn't do us much good if we have a bunch of young people who can code or even unclog a toilet, both very, very important, but they don't know anything about World War II which leaves them vulnerable to demagogues or worse. Absolutely. The real threat that we face is that there is no point of reference for the coming generation Z. They do not. I used to say when I taught religious history, church history, there are a few people between Jesus and your grandmother that you might need to know about. This is one of the reasons why a liberal arts education is so important because it is important to know at what date things happen. For example, just this week, the New York Times ran a report or a story that had something along these lines as a title. Despite its shortcomings, the Chinese Revolution taught women to blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was almost unbelievable. I mean, one of the greatest catastrophic humanitarian disasters that makes World War II and the Crusades look small just in terms of the body count in the upwards of 100 million people taken during Mao's Revolution to say, despite its shortcomings, comma, I mean, a person who has read and known history would never set up a lead that way. And those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Well, as Naseem Talib would call them, idiots, yet intellectuals. And with that, we're out of time. Dr. Greg Thornbury, thank you so much for your time. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.