 Thank you all for Showing up. I know it's late in the week and everybody's getting maybe a little bit of fatigue But glad to have you here this morning for a talk that I hope will be of interest to many of you Since many of you are in higher education for better or worse as we'll see and so so maybe I can Help you see what what is going on in higher education a bigger picture some of you see maybe what's going on at your college or university and some of you see what's going on with a few of your friends and and I Would say that true to the title of the talk that higher education really is in a crisis today There are three Crises that I'd like to focus on really the first two are the ones that I'd like to spend the most time on We have time I'd like to go through the third But they are first that college Doesn't do what it advertises Some of you may have figured this out already And for that matter that's why some of you are here It's because you are not getting the kind of thing that the Mises Institute is providing through its Mises University program and You are you are buying books and reading materials online and listening to podcasts that is is Educating yourself beyond what a college or university is is is doing with you In fact you you may find yourself countering some of what can only be described as propaganda coming out of out of Colleges and universities and the second crisis I'd like to spend some time on here is the cost of college We've seen a rise at least in the United States and I think in in other developed countries as well in the amount of Government funding or that is taxpayer funding that's going to higher education. I gave a talk yesterday on medical care Economics and the finance of medical care and we see a very similar thing going on there that the government has funneled more and more money into medical care and This is this has happened over some decades and yet we see medical prices rising and it Doesn't seem that that medical care is more affordable than it once was I would say that higher education also is suffering an affordability crisis as well people are finding themselves in massive amounts of student loan debt We have got a slide to give you the exact number But I think it's about one point six trillion dollars right now just in the United States and student loan debt and Default some student loans are a real problem. And so I think that's an important thing to discuss and then finally if we have time I'd like to go through just briefly some of the problems with academic discourse today some of you have seen some of the stories the politicized classrooms where if and and professors are sometimes running scared because they are Worried about something that they might say in the classroom being Misconstrued or this this idea of academic freedom of being able to say what you believe is correct in the classroom If if that's not politically correct, then you may find yourself out of a job or at least persecuted Substantially because of what you have said in the classroom. This is afflicted both left and right the Professors who may have thought themselves safely Safe from criticism from the left may find that they're just not left enough and and they they have criticism from From all sides. So I think that's a problem as well as if you look to a university as a place to freely discuss ideas then What's happening when we find that certain ideas will be shut down Certain speakers will be deep platformed Simply for voicing something that is that is different from What others believe should be should be permissible speech? So we'll talk about that if we have some time. So the first crisis I'd like to mention here is that college does not do what it advertises. It's it's it's not Providing what people expected college to provide So let's think a little bit about what college does do Does it transfer skills? I think that's the the Typical perception that that college is there to teach you something that you're supposed to walk out with your degree at the end of the four years or have along the program is and you're supposed to have some more knowledge in your head than you had when you started and therefore be a Better rounded person or a person who has more skills that are applicable in the workforce Or whatever it is that you were seeking when you went in the door, you came out with more knowledge and you came out with a better Understanding of the society around you than you had when you when you went in Or is it possible that college is simply a signal apparatus that it's a way of Communicating to a potential future employer that you are a person who works hard You're a person who has the ability to think at a different level You're a person who can engage in a four-year long project and complete that project Is that what you're communicating when you get a degree and there's been some recent work and most notably I think by Brian Kaplan on that Idea and then third perhaps it's just a consumption good I mean we've all heard of party schools, but perhaps Colleges and universities in general are turning into a kind of a party environment for young people to sort of stretch out their their Their dependency on their parents a little longer. Maybe get some government subsidized fun out of the experience So that's certainly a possibility as well that maybe if you've got enough money to go to college Then you enjoy that four years to sort of socialize and you can maybe take some classes that seem like they might be somewhat interesting to you, but not necessarily classes that would generate a wider range of opportunities once you graduate now we have seen that there is a connection between The amount of education a person receives and the income that that person will have Later in life and maybe that's immediate and maybe that takes some time to sort of manifest in a person's income or Their their their job Prospects, but what we see is that for the highest Brackets of income here a hundred thousand dollars and up it is It is much More likely that people in that income range will have a college degree Then that you would be in that income range and not have a college degree There are very very few people as you can see here who are making this kind of income who have only a high school diploma and so this is sort of the Exhibit a for saying this is why you need to go to college if you want to have a high income after you By the time you're in your 30s or 40s, then you need to go to college in order to get that higher income and so people with lower incomes on the left-hand end of the of the diagram here interestingly we see some people that have College degrees that are in that low income category and and yet people who stop after high school and don't get any College education at all are much more likely to be in that income category. So Also, you can see this is a chart from Richard Vedder's book, which I'll be referring to several points at several points today a brand-new book called restoring the promise which I recommend it's Richard Vedder's Been working in this area for a long time and and has some Interesting things to say about the problems with higher education. So this is a chart from his his book and You can see here that this is divided by male female and then median and mean So let's just look at mean workers over 25 Male and you can see high school diploma about $47,000 and then if you go to professional degree That'd be like a law degree or something that would be about a hundred sixty one thousand dollars people with a bachelor's degree about eighty five that eighty four eighty five thousand It does look fairly clear from this that if you're over 25 You can expect male or female. You can expect to see a pretty big income jump because of a four-year degree So this is this is what you would see from perhaps a high school guidance counselor or somebody who says well You need to go to college because see you can earn more money Well, there's some problems with this Vedder points out for instance that One of the problems here is that this is aggregating the entire u.s. Population Over 25 includes people who are quite a bit older than 25 and who went through the higher education process back in the 50s or 60s And these are individuals who? May have gone through their four-year program back before the sort of higher education bubble that we may be in the middle of today They may have gone to college back when having a college degree really did set you apart from the general population in a significant way But what about people who are? Just out of college is it possible that this group also would see this kind of of major income? Disparity that they would see a big jump in their income potential after completing four years of College a one more slide sort of the guidance counselor type of slide here And that's this one you can see this is college compared to alternative investments again looking at kind of an aggregate of all of the the college graduates and what kind of rate of return did they get on their college investment and So having an associates or bachelor's degree has a pretty high rate of return compared to say the stock market or high-quality Corporate bonds or gold or long-term T bills or housing so it again It looks like this is just a no-brainer. Of course, you should go to college, but again, it's not quite that simple Here's another chart from Vedder's book and Vedder is pointing out here that college education is actually not providing What we think it is for younger people particularly This is the education requirement of occupations held by college graduates now what we do see here is about half of the College graduates are in a position that requires a college degree okay, but then we see that over a third of College graduates are in a position that requires a high school diploma or less a High school dropout could get that job and yet we've got someone with a four-year degree in the job Why is this and then we've got people who about 11% here who have more than a high school Diploma but have less than a bachelor's degree and yet they've got the full-blown four-year degree so what's what's happening here and part of this is that you've got let's say you've got a Coffee shop and you're you own a coffee shop and you're trying to hire workers and you have a position for a barista in your coffee shop and you have 30 application applications for your barista position And you think well, how am I going to sort out the 30? 30 Applications here. I got to have some way to ground file some of these and and sort of cut out the chaff before I get to a top Top five or so. So what what will I do? Well an easy way to handle this is to just find whoever's got The less education and formal education and drop drop them from the applicant pool So you say well, okay? I've got 12 applicants here for this position who have college degrees That usually indicates that they're pretty well motivated people there They'll they'll be my first pick and I'll just narrow the pool to those 12. There's nothing about being a coffee Mixer barista or whatever that requires a four-year college degree in sociology or something So nevertheless that might end up being one of the margins on which the employer decides to sort their Their applicants so we end up with people who have Four-year degrees that are working in jobs that very clearly don't need those degrees And in fact people may figure out that even if they want nothing more than a coffee barista level kind of job There are opportunities for getting such jobs or better if they have a college degree And if government or other parties are subsidizing The attainment of that four-year degree and if the four years that they spend in college is a Fun time anyway, then why not spend a little extra time in college? Other people may be paying the bill The the experience is is entertaining to some degree So just enjoy your time and then go out and get a job that yeah Maybe you didn't really need the knowledge you might have gained in college anyway before you got that job So here's another chart from Vetter This is jobs requiring a college degree versus the number of college graduates Note the significant disparity between the two Two categories here. We've got jobs requiring a college degree about 29 million of these jobs and Then we've got about 42 million employed college graduates So again, we've got people filling jobs that don't require that level of education This I thought was one of the more interesting charts in his in his book and I've Then we'll move on to some things from Brian Kaplan and others, but This is from 1970 to 2010 Taxi drivers shipping and receiving clerks salesmen and sales clerks firefighters carpenters and bank tellers people that Require in order to do their job and do it very very well. They may need only a high school diploma Or maybe less and yet in in the period of time four decades from 1970 to 2010 we've seen the percentage of taxi drivers and chauffeurs who have a a A bachelor's degree or more not a two-year degree, but a four-year degree has soared from around one or two percent in 1970 to over 15 percent in 2010 Salesman and sales clerks from about four or five percent in 1970 to nearly a fourth of these individuals who have bachelor's degrees Today is that is the job has the job changed in that amount of time that you really need to have that kind of education in order to do Those jobs well, I'd suggest not Carpenters firefighters bank tellers similar kinds of stories to tell there. So we seem to be Over-educating for the kinds of jobs that people Are getting when they when they graduate now I've mentioned the signaling hypothesis here this predates Brian Kaplan's work, but but he's got a recent book out on this in which he sort of elaborates on this idea that Higher education is not so much the conveyance of knowledge as it is a sorting process a filtering process so let's say you've got a population here and You've got two kinds of people you've got highly motivated Intelligent hard-working kinds of people and you've got people who are not so highly motivated intelligent or hard-working and The blues here are the highly motivated edgy highly motivated Hard-working Intelligent and the Reds are the others. So if that's the general population then maybe you have Some of that population that ends up going to this filter we call college and If the filters doing what we expect the filter to do in a signaling under the signaling hypothesis Then those who are not so highly motivated or intelligent or hard-working end up failing or dropping out And they end up in this box here with people who are unmotivated undisciplined and unintelligent And You've got others who simply say well, I'm not going to go to college at all Maybe I'm hard-working, but I'm just going to go apply my hard work to some business that does not expect me to have a degree and That puts them also in this box. They're uncertified motivated persevering and intelligent people Okay, and then the filter passes some people through and these are certified Motivated hard-working intelligent people all right, so that means that you've got a four-year degree you have Certified yourself and you've communicated something signaled something to a potential employer that says hey I'm hard-working. How do you know I'm hard-working? Well, I did this four-year project here and May not matter whether I did this in in electrical engineering or civil engineering or mathematics or physics But any of those programs require someone to be persevering and hard-working. So There you have it. My GPA is 3.6 or something and so therefore I I have Evidence that I'm that sort of person talk is cheap But this four-year project sorts out those who are just saying that they're hard-working and those that are genuinely of that nature Well, what does government? subsidization due to this kind of process So when the government especially after World War two or I guess it was actually technically in 1944 right before the end of World War two When the GI bill was passed we had government subsidization entering higher education in a big way and that's that's continued so now we have taxes being extracted from the population and Used to subsidize those within the population who would like to go through this filtering process The filters don't remain unchanged if you're a college or university and you've got all this You know people suddenly coming to you with piles of money because they've been Made eligible for some kind of government subsidy or a Pell Grant or whatever Then you're if you're a college or university You're inclined to open your doors a little wider to make it more possible for these people who are offering offering wads of money to you to to go through your filter process and the incentives are there for for you to accept more students so Then the filter may end up still failing some students who end up in this box as before But it probably passes more as well. It passes students who otherwise may not have made it through the process and Vetter also goes through some of this in some detail that colleges have seen a Change in their threshold for passing students that they're willing to pass students through that Previously would not have made it wouldn't even made it to college in the first place Wouldn't have been accepted and now they're not only accepted but make it through and perhaps make it through with a what looks like a very good GPA So we end up with people who are being certified as motivated persevering and intelligent who are in fact not you see a couple of the red dots made it through the filter now because the college has Effectively lowered its standards in order to collect more of this largesse From the taxpayer that's funneled through these various kinds of government programs Brian Kaplan says once workers have been ranked Giving everyone extra years of education is socially wasteful Furthermore since the status quo is supported by hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies We're probably under using alternative certification methods like apprenticeships testing boot camps and so on I would I would Love to know I don't actually have data on this how many of the graduates of Mises University Put this on their resume and get a boost in their job opportunities because they've been certified as having gone through this kind of process or What happens if you? Take the moon look I need my water moon liquor moon like somebody say that moon Thank you. Yes. Thank you to the parents apparently it's easier for Lithuanian tongues, right? So good the test yes, so So Yes, so I'll be interested to know if that if that produces a measurable boost to your opportunities after you you take the the test and And if that if that is something that may grow in importance people seeking out some alternative to higher education Moon licker still can't say it Moon lick a proof on There we go. I'd said it before I knew I could say it again. All right Signaling explains Kaplan says why students are far more concerned about grades than actual learning They want easy a is not professors who teach a lot of job skills Signaling explains also why cheating pays a successful cheater profits by impersonating a good student and Signaling explains why students readily forget course material on the day after the final exam. I know that never happens to any of you, right? Once you've got the good signal on your transcripts, you can usually safely forget whatever you've learned so Kaplan's arguing that higher education has become kind of an arms race that The thing is not so much How much knowledge you've collected? But whether you've collected more than the other guy or at least have a signal that looks like you've collected more knowledge than the other guy so if you've got more education more formal years of schooling with a GPA that looks pretty good if you've got that and the other person who's applying for the barista job does not then that Gives you a leg up in the job market so We get credential Deflation if we were to switch to a system that That Didn't have this level of government intervention right now. We've got credential inflation So what a bachelor's degree might once have gotten you in the job market and now takes a master's degree to attain? My my grandfather on one side had an eighth grade education Did quite well lived a middle-class comfortable middle-class existence? raised a family and And so forth in the mid 20th century with a an eighth grade education Today that would be very very difficult to do the eighth grade education The the credential inflation is working against that possibility and perhaps you heard Lou Rockwell last night mentioning Henry Haslett who had I think he said a sixth grade education and Yet did very well and was able to educate himself in a way that put him on a level with Those who had four-year college degrees and even doctoral degrees at the time Kaplan says there's little sign that education causes much enlightenment or civic understanding even at top schools most students are intellectually and culturally apathetic and most professors are Uninspiring and don't hear me as saying that this is all the fault of Students not being smart enough or motivated enough because it's also professors who have gotten Sucked into the same kind of system and are apathetic. I mean there are all kinds of colleges and universities where the professors Don't read the papers that students write if the students are still writing papers at all They're not reading the papers as well. It's easier for me to just give an a Students not going to complain. I saved myself 30 minutes I'll just assign it in a this the paper in a now this kind of this is fraud if we're to be honest about it. It's fraud and The students are going along with it the administration is going along with it the faculty are going along with it. It's fraud and Yet, this has become widespread Jonathan Newman Wrote an article for Mises wire. I think this is from a year or two ago on Why college degrees are becoming useless? And he points out something that that vetter has also pointed out more recently that graduates have little to no improvement in critical thinking skills He says that some of the most prestigious flagship universities test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years Employers are beginning to discount the degree signal as well Google for example doesn't care if potential hires have a college degree They look past academic credentials for other characteristics that predict job performance at Yale College where 62% of grades are in the a range Proposals to curb grade inflation are in doubt following student protests and faculty concern Arthur Levine found in a national survey that 41% of students had grade point averages of a minus or higher in 2009 compared to just 7% in 1969 This is from grade inflation comm. It's the change in four-year college grade distributions nationwide from 1940 to 2012 The red line there that you see that's that's gone up so much That's a's A's now about 40 well now that's 2012 But the trend has continued then it's probably close to half of the grades being assigned or a's It's like I don't know if you remember the garrison keelers a radio show and you probably don't you're too young but he had a radio show about this fictional town called Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average and and Bees have dropped somewhat but only because a's are rising faster and Again, this is this is part of that fraud. I mean, I think professors are saying well I know the students aren't going to show up in my office and just Complain and they're not gonna they're not going to object if I give them an a if if I give them a B Then I've ruined their 4.0 You know, they've been in school for three years They've collected all of these easy a's and now I'm gonna be the one to I'm gonna be the target of their wrath and professors just don't want to deal with that and So they end up Perpetuating this kind of a problem f's by the way, that's the purple F's have dropped to less than 5% of all grades assigned This is again from Vedder's book So maybe people are getting more a's because they're working harder, right? Learning more spending more time studying We have more intelligent students in the classroom the first place. So they're just working hard and they earned those a's, right? No 1961 40 hours a week spent on academic work in colleges per student on average By 2003 that had dropped to what's that about 27 28 hours a week on academic work so And I've seen this and it's it's it's not just at my college. It's I think it's at many colleges where students are expecting To not have to work as hard to get an a all right Let's look at the next crisis Government subsidies are backfiring now. I mentioned student loans student debt so That's the debt clock as of yesterday This is that if I in a id.org you can find the debt clock, but I Kind of be curious how much has changed in 24 hours, but Anyway, 1.6 trillion dollars and Climbing I gave this talk Or similar talk last year, I think it was under 1.5 and It was just it seems like only about three or four years ago that it crossed a trillion dollars. So it's rising So according to Bloomberg College tuition and fees have increased 1,120 percent since records began in 1978 the rate of increase in college cost has been four times faster than the increase in the Consumer price index again similar to medical care we've seen rapid increases in the cost of medical care in the United States and It's one of the more subsidized regulated Industries in in this country So the CPI here the consumer price index and can I say consumer price index without being There okay, all right All right We understand disclaimer here We understand there are massive problems with trying to aggregate prices like this and Nevertheless, these are the statistics that I was able to locate the statisticians are not Austrian economists So we make do with what what's available In a case so here's the CPI rising price levels and a rising cost of tuition now some of this is is is Misleading because colleges are engaging in more price discrimination than they once did and price discrimination means you're charging students different prices for the same product So some students are on a full scholarship their price is zero Some students are paying the full sticker price and many students are paying something in between so colleges have figured out That they can have a very high sticker price and then study a student's financial Information their household income and so forth and then match the price to their ability to pay now Where do you where where you ask do they get all of this private financial information? Free application for federal student aid FAFSA where the the income tax information the income tax information from a household's tax forms is cross-loaded onto this FAFSA form and All of this information isn't made available to the universities So that they can then tailor the price according to your ability to pay now This is not all bad. It sounds terrible, especially because we've got a negative connotation with the word discrimination Which I would argue this is very different from the kind of the use of the word that we normally would would see the context we normally see that word used in so price discrimination Does have at least one salutary effect, which is that Students who are low income may have access to college that would not otherwise have had access to college if everybody had to pay The sticker price even if the sticker price is lower You're going to exclude students from college that may otherwise have been able to attend so This is the percentage of median household income required to go to college and we can see here that College is requiring a larger and larger fraction of median household income That is college affordability is declining in the United States even though government aid has increased How can this be could it be because when the government? Subsidizes college education The colleges and universities say well They've got access to this much more money. We'll just raise our prices and so colleges and universities have seen increases in or Have instituted increases in their tuition on a par with The access to federal and state dollars that students have So this is not really improving affordability of college education when they can simply Rake off that taxpayer money into the coffers of the college or university And and they're all kinds of battles being fought within the administration. Who's going to get all of this extra money? student services student medical clinics and and entertainment facilities and athletic facilities for students have all Exploded in size over several decades Spending a lot of this money that's been been taken in it's not exactly going to Student education primarily but to these other things that make college education more of a consumer good So students end up in many cases borrowing money to fund their Education and we find with they find themselves burdened with debt This is a chart showing all kinds of debt and the delinquency rates on that debt the The student loan line is the red here as you can see big increase in Delinquencies in about 2011 2012 Just a couple of years after the official end of the last recession in the United States Probably related to that If you look at other kinds of debt, here's credit card debt big spike About the time of the last recession and then a decline But the highest Delinquency rate now among all of these different kinds of debt is student loan debt and the consequences of this for individuals Are very serious So William Bennett writing many years ago said that increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and Universities blithely to raise their tuitions and so they have And there's a there are a number of studies that indicate that this is exactly what colleges and universities have been doing They say oh, well you've got more money. We're going to charge you more And of course the student doesn't really have the more have more money. They're simply Qualifying for these federal and state aid programs Larry single and Joe Stone in 2007 Right that the Bennett hypothesis was not Supported for in-state tuition for public universities, but for private universities Increases in Pell grants appear to be matched nearly one-for-one by increases in list and net tuition out of state tuition for public universities Behaves very much like private universities. That is one for one approximately one for one increase dollar for dollar You increase your student aid by a dollar the tuition goes up by a dollar Nicholas Turner Turner in 2012 Said intended cost reductions of tax-based federal student aid are Substantially offset by institutional price increases for a sample of four-year colleges and universities Tax-based aid crowds out institutional aid roughly dollar for dollar Selene and golden in 2013 Title IV institutions charge tuition that is about 78% higher than that charged by comparable institutions whose students cannot apply for federal financial aid Luca Nadal and Shin in 2017 There's a pass-through effect on tuition of changes and subsidized loan maximums of about 60 cents on the dollar Smaller but positive effects for unsubsidized federal loans Most pronounced for a more expensive degrees those from private institutions and for two-year or vocational programs I mean the evidence for this is really stacking up. I won't go through this one here But again, if it's not dollar for dollar, it's pretty close that we're seeing this increased student aid offset so that the student is perhaps burdening himself or herself with added debt but not Not Seeing as as as much of a benefit in the college degree itself So where does the money go as I said there's a lot of infighting within Administrations and other interests groups within colleges and universities as to who's going to get this largesse from the taxpayer Dorms one egregious example here is Princeton University. Do we have anybody from Princeton here? No, okay spent a hundred thirty six million dollars on a Student dorm with leaded glass windows and a cavernous oak dining hall the dorms cost approached $300,000 per bed NYU has provided 90 million dollars in loans many of them zero interest and forgivable Which is sort of like a giveaway? To administrators and faculty to buy houses and summer homes on fire island in the Hamptons Ohio's former Ohio State President Gordon Gee earned nearly two million dollars in compensation last year while living This is would have been 2012 while living in a 9600 square foot Tudor mansion Columbus Camelot includes 673 thousand dollars in art decor and a five hundred thirty two dollars shower curtain in a guest bathroom Ohio State also paid roughly twenty three thousand dollars per month for mr. Gee's Suarez and half a million for him to travel the country on a private jet University of California About twenty four hundred administrative staff just in the president's office of the University of California Richard Vedder says thirty percent of the adult population as college degrees But as we've seen this doesn't mean that this is where This is improving the outcomes for these students upon graduation. So the money is being soaked up by these administrative Salaries and by these dorms and the the other lavish facilities for students improving perhaps the consumption value of a college degree but not Notably improving the outcomes for students upon graduation So Vedder argues that in in housing we had all these low interest rates created by the Federal Reserve The government encouraged people to buy a house even if their credit wasn't so good We're doing the same kind of thing with student loans We're encouraging people to go to school who don't really have good qualifications You might be better off in some occupation that doesn't require a College degree and so Vedder suggests the best thing for us to do is to Disinvest or get government out of a college education stop this kind of arms race in degrees Just a couple of minutes that I have left. I wanted to mention for-profit education This was hammered by the Clinton. I mean the the Obama administration recently with arguments that for-profit institutions are Taking advantage of students by encouraging them to get student loans and then giving them degrees that are that are dubious value But I think the problem is much larger than for-profit education. And in fact, this is nothing new We've seen for-profit institutions lately, but they've been around before in fact in 1897 more than 92 percent of college students were enrolled at for-profit institutions the default rates for Those at for-profit institutions or after graduating from for-profit institutions seem to be higher But the kinds of students that are going to these institutions are probably different than those who are going to the traditional Not-for-profit institution. That is they may be more likely to have credit problems to begin with Than students who go to not-for-profit institutions So it's not at all clear that it's the fault of the institution itself There have been a couple of cases maybe more than a couple of cases where The for-profit institution is engaged in a kind of fraud, but as I've indicated I don't think that that's that's unique to for-profit institutions and the target to the the target for these for-profit institutions is Students who might otherwise not go to college at all So as AG Smith pointed out in his Article the bubble in for-profit schooling which is available in Mises.org He says as expected many have ignorantly aimed their weaponry at the at the profit motive instead of unleashing their fury on the root cause government interference in the market Let's see I'm gonna have to skip one or two things here. This is kind of entertaining anyway, I Have been teaching in higher education for 22 years My first classes that I thought were here when I was a graduate student teaching assistant at Auburn and I've taught at mostly at private Institutions I'm now at a small Private college in South Carolina and I've seen the development I haven't done a lot of research myself on higher education I've done I've been in the classroom for a long time and I've seen the changes in higher education. It's not encouraging I Hope you won't see what I hear what I'm saying here as a Discouragement to not go to college although that may be the the best route for some individuals. I'm not I'm not suggesting that it's a bad idea to go to college many of you are in programs And I think that's that's probably a good move for many of you I hope that you will Get your formal education that you will begin to make contributions to the Kind of scholarship that the Mises Institute is trying to encourage and and sponsor The programs like this will be an important part of your education Even though your college or university may not recognize it or encourage it I think this kind of thing is really vital to Giving people the education they need it's it's outside of the mainstream It encourages a breadth of thought that you may not get in the in the classroom in a typical college or university So I'll just close by saying I'm really happy that you're here I think you're doing the right thing if you're interested in talking to me later on about your Higher education prospects or a decision you're trying to make I can't promise that I've got the the answer for you but I'll I'll try to help you make a more informed decision. So thank you very much