cc
returning for the Educational >>Policy Studies Departmentfor
Conference on the public
public higher public education interest and the future of
I'm Sara Goldrick-Rab of in the 21st century.
I'm going to be introducing the panel for this morning, which is
on the future of academic work
We have a really nice lineup for in public universities.
taking place between Sheila tSlaughter who is the Louisebe
McBee Professor of Higher Education at the Institute for
Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
She's a distinguished scholar of
graduate of Educational Policy higher education who is also a
A stellar program. Studies at UW Madison.
[LAUGHTER] >> Wonderful plug.
work on academic capitalism, She's perhaps best known for her
including the book Academic
Capitalism and
States, and Higher Education the New Economy: Markets,
Some of you may have seen Gary with Gary Rhoades.
ago. when he was here a few weeks
the relationship between Her scholarship concentrates on
out in higher education policy knowledge and power as it plays
global levels. at the state, federal, and
Professor Richard Vedder, who is She will be in conversation with
and columnist, and a professor an economist, historian, author
No. a>> I'm sorry, I did it..
Ohio University,
And also serves, and I won't at Ohio University.
scholar at the American meEnterprise Institute inct
Washington, DC. He has a degree in economics
from the University of Illinois,
history, particularly as it relates to public policy, and
has a center that some of you might be familiar with, a center
on college affordability and
The conversation will be productivity.
professor emeritus in educational policy studies and
philosophy. He is an expert on the
philosophy of education, ethics,
topics that I think will and a variety of important
interesting moderator to have in actually make him quite a very
So, Fran has structured the discussion, and I believe that
each of those in the
with about 20 minutes, and then have some Q&A as constructed by
Fran, and then opening it up to the audience as well.
And we an hour and a half for this time.
So, thank you all for being here.
So Sheila, why don't you
Okay. I'm going to talk about academic
work, and if I had to give this a title it would be American
Higher Education in the 21st
Segmentation, and Fragmentation. Century: Stratification,
argument is that, particularly And I think that my basic
although certainly in all universities, but more so...
Can you hear me?
All right. >> You need to get closer.
Okay, but more so in research universities, we have a changed
human resources profiled that we
We can't just look at professors have to consider as a whole.
of them if we're to understand because we have to consider all
the 21st century. whaSo, research universitiese in
consume and inordinate amount of
There are probably about 70 research intensive universities.
Certainly, there's only about 70
federal R&D dollars. that get probably over 80% of
revenues that are double those Those public universities have
have to remember that not all research universities are equal.
Private universities have 2.5 times greater resources than
public universities.
picture of higher education revenue generally, the federal
dollars spent on post-secondary education are about as much,
spent on all of education are about as much as we spend on
research. And when you look at federal
research, the money that goes to
years, larger than all the money those universities is, in most
federal student financial aid. that goes for all kinds of
concentrated on these areas. So you can see how the money is
an extraordinary amount of education resources,
I'm not exaggerating. And I think we have to,
ultimately, consider whether
so different from every other kind of university that we have
to think about them differently,
think of them all as part of a whether it even makes sense to
field. loosely constructed same sort of
more, on average, at these Of course, professors are paid
at privates than at publics. research universities, much more
a mark of how much money they And I think receive.ain, that's
But there's also tremendous stratification within public
research universities, and
fields that are in high-end markets, close to the market,
they earn sometimes three times more than professors who are not
close to the market, and those
arts and female dominated are largely fields.ies and fine
So, that's an enormous
So, if you look at the difference.
constant dollars, the gap dbetween the highest and lowest
fields in '87 was $48,000 at
and in 2003, $56,000. That's not an inconsiderable gap
among what people are paid in the different fields, especially
when you consider that in 1975
$10,000 difference between any there was probably not more than
universities that salaries are one field at research
universities, public about flat in four-year
they're unionized, and the same uis true with the community
college.
that it is not unusual, despite the average pay being higher att
research universities, for
actually have people in prcommunity colleges make moreo
than they do. So, we have this great
stratification within research
segmentation. And I think that's most clearly
saying, well, there are a number
buildings here and there, and they're very different and their
quality at some places, not here, you have this absolutely
wonderful education building, but this is not true at all
places. But I'm speaking here of the
growth of centers and institutes
interdisciplinarity. and the growth of
grown exponentially so that they And centers and institutes have
work. rOf course, they're most markedf
in the sciences.
greatest number. That's where they have the
and the life sciences have, by We did a little study of that,
amounts of centers and far and away, the greatest
We did four universities, two public, two private research
universities, and the number of centers in life sciences ranged
from a high of 104 to a low of
And two of those four universities, in the centers
there were dedicated lines which
becoming their own place rather than there necessarily being a
department home because if
you don't have a department you've got a home.ated line then
So, I guess for me, it raises the question of whether centers
and institutes have become a
incenting certain segments of the faculty, who I would assume
would be entrepreneurial or high
generating because there's many grways to generate externalnue
revenues. So then they're located by
themselves so they can be more
monitored. highly rewarded and more highly
places where they can be, as I And perhaps they're located in
administrative priorities such said, incented to pursue
of revenue generation. as tech transfer or other forms
Revenues come in many shapes and Perhaps even distance education.
departmental service or undergraduate teaching.
Faculty may choose to participate because they accrue
resources for research and
and, again, they may be favored by administration because it's
an easy way to incent certain areas.
And I think it helps solve the
have, senior managers, and that has always been in universities
how to manage experts.
have knowledge and expertise In other words, research faculty
That's why they're valuable. that managers don't.
manage and tell them what to do That's and things. hard to
And the knowledge isn't codified, especially when it
comes to things like innovation and entrepreneurial science and
discovery.
separate relatively small numbers of faculty from theiry
discipline or professional home and offer those faculty rich
rewards and align them with administrative priorities in a
way you can't do for departments
This is what I would like to as a whole.
I don't have empirical evidence rof that.
There's some. People study centers and
institutes a lot. Barry Bozeman has done a
wonderful job on that with
This is certainly a plausible interpretation of what is
happening.
and engineering into I think the flip side of science
the interdisciplinarity of disciplinarity is what I call
And that's where things are pushed together because they're
not funded anymore. And I think you see examples of
that in the humanities. Recently, a lot of women
studies, African American studies, and Latino Studies have
been pushed together to become
like that. diversity studies and things
different sorts of segmentation that are taking place, and it's
really something to look at.
because departments, whatever we And I think it's important
basis of faculty organization maand power in universities.e
And if you're concerned about faculty work and you divide
people into centers and institutes and into fragmented
areas, it becomes much harder to
department where you have a cohesive response to issues that
face the university as a whole. So that's one of my great
concerns with the move toward centers and institutes and
transdisciplinarity.
issues and they have grown by Taccretion and we have very
rarely cut any of them, which I don't think is plausible over
the long-term that you can have and maintain everything, but I'm
not sure whether I see centers
transdisciplinarity as the way and institutes and
about faculty work. tThen I think some fields,ns
although they're not gone, are
And if we use, as a marker of fragmentation, the number of
contingent faculty in the field,
how fragmented any particular I tfield is because the moree of
usually part-timers, although not always, are accompanied by
decline of faculty positions. And, also, I don't know if you
have it here, but many
differences in graduate student stipends which I also see as a
marker of fragmentation.
numbers of part-timers, but there are fewer part-timers and
the lowest rate of increase in
sciences and perhaps the health sciences, but that's because of
the way they classify the health
tell. And the fields with the highest
rate of fragmentation as marked by contingent faculty are, and
I'm sure you already know the answer, the liberal arts, the
humanities, the fine arts, as well as women's professions.
I will spare you the tables.
decline of faculty positions on offer in these fields and the
low graduate stipends.
is number of PhDs granted. Another marker of fragmentation
I think, which data are Aavailable for, although therer,
should be data again this year, the number of PhDs awarded in
the liberal arts and sciences general studies and the
humanities are steadily diminishing.
And the social sciences combined
STEM field, and some social sciences, sociology for example,
there are more joint and outside
discipline itself, which I take job to be a real marker of the
fragmentation.
I believe there is empirical And sociologists always say, and
point, that there are more evidence that addresses this
than there are in sociology sociologisdepartments.ss schools
So, I think the increasing
fields raises the question of deghow long highly fragmentedme
fields will remain viable at
whether they're going to be recombined in other ways,
combined themselves, or cut.
cutting, as I mentioned Althougpreviously.t big on
So, what happens, I think, so that we can have this big
stratification as universities
profile, which means we pay some is we have a new human resources
able to do that we have to pay people very highly, and to be
otherwise we can't pay the high some ppeople high.ittle,
And I think that also we have this greatly expanded managerial
capacity in universities. Historically, faculty salaries
were the greatest salaries, and people would always say, oh, you
can't cut universities because
people, and you have to cut the thfaculty and that's where alled
your costs are. That is no longer true.
While personnel is still the
full-time faculty are no longer greathe largest component.ies,
Full-time faculty are now only
of the human resources 27%, track faculty are only 27%
non-academic professionals are professional profile, and now
profile. about 55% of the human resources
are people who do business, most And non-academic professionals
function of the university and of them are in the business
I think the second one is information technology..
And the student personnel is
advising and personnel, but you actcan look at the charts andnt
see exactly what they are.
it's a changed human resources But the point is that, again,
that there's sort of in many profile, and that means, again,
it also means, and I think this wis the biggest thing, it meansd
at research universities faculty
Faculties do research, they don't do, I mean, you have
contingent faculty, you have
students, and graduate students leare relatively expensivete
compared to lecturers or
So what you have is this contingents.
mainly doing research. specialization where faculty are
more likely to be graduate They do some teaching but it's
What? >> Three minutes.
Okay. And so, again, I see huge
changes in faculty work where we've become very specialized
and we're not allowed to do these other things because we
have to do the things, those
research and actually teaching special things we do which are
juniors and seniors. graduate students and sometimes
that here, and Wisconsin is probably good, but if you look
at it nationally, that's the way
And I don't think these changes are driven by market
rationality.
they're relatively flat. For example, STEM fields,
with the infusion of very large numbers of foreign nationals.
Rather the growth is due to federal research subsidies tied
to industrial research interests
And we can't get undergraduates ato go into STEM, and we can'th.
teach STEM, as we all know from our K-12 failures.
I see little market discipline. Instead, I see state subsidized
entrepreneurship with very few
And I think that the changes penalties for failure.
tied to stratification processes that have occurred are closely
also not market rational, but I anthink I don't have time forare
that. So, for me, I think the
important thing for you to think
work has really changed. about is that I think faculty
specialized, and I think we have I think we have become very
where we are far from being the only professional workers at the
university. Thank you.
Professor Vedder. >> Thank you, Fran, and thanks.
I want to thank Sara
me, and Sara and I have battled back and forth for 10 years, but
she still puts up with me so I
One of the few advantages, and appreciate it.
old is that you do gain a good there are very few, of getting
based on your own personal bit of historical perspective
So when I was a young professor, experience.
best students that they should say in the late 1960s, I told my
themselves, as it was the best consider becoming professors
I went on the job market in 1965, at the time a surging
demand for professors, falling
budgets, and widespread public teaching loads, growing state
It was a great job. Made all the better, in my case,
because I was a man, and I got
that effectively kept me out of an occupthe Vietnam War.ferment
Where else could you get a job
work, where a good bit of your where you had no set hours of
that you were interested in, and time was researching a thing
were probable if you did your wjob in a halfway decent manner
and where you could then, therefore, live a nice, middle
class lifestyle with good prospects that income would rise
meaningfully, if not
Cool job. By the middle of my career, say
the late 1980s, I told top
satisfying job as a professor, students that I had had a
want to consider as they planned that it was something they might
had cooled just a bit. their future, but my enthusiasm
for college professors, the hot labor market environment of the
'60s was long past. One consequence of this was a
large increase in tenure
expectations for publications. requirements with enhanced
describing employment conditions Publish or perish had moved from
public flagship universities to becoming part of the academicw
landscape at a majority of
of higher education. America's four-year institutions
best and brightest students that In recent years, I have told my
but I wouldn't recommend it as a they would make great professors
risk that the future posed, not to mention some deterioration in
the contemporary work environment.
And I'm disturbingly close to agreeing with Sheila on nearly
everything. [LAUGHTER]
Uh-oh.
very dull hour and a half. >> Which is going to make for a
we'd have a fight before it was And I promiover.om Mortensen
[LAUGHTER]
previously virtually assured In particular, new PhDs,
somewhere, now no longer find of tenthat the case.tions
The situation is particularly disastrous in the humanities
where only a small minority of
positions, and many others lead a nomadic, low income existence
with little job security as part
underclass, the adjunct faculty. of the vastly growing academic
striking feature of the present era is the sharp divide between
the relatively high paid
job security and low teaching facloads, and the rest of theood
teaching core, those not on tenure track appointments.
A rough sort of egalitarian culture of college teaching that
was fairly prevalent when the Higher Education Act was passed
in 1965 is now gone at the great
think is beginning to disappear at the less renowned colleges of
the world as well.
about the enhanced risk of So let's talk a little bit more
enthusiasm for the future is becoming a professor and why my
This is probably a bummer for some of the students in this
room. [LAUGHTER]
Why don't you go home?
Is Sara making you stay? [LAUGHTER]
realities. The following are three
both to students and to society, First, higher education costs,
time, and the possibility of have increased dramatically over
university model simply by maintaining the status quo
toward zero. hiking fees is low and declining
also, that has dominated So the lecture discussion model,
for centuries, if not millennia, collegiate instructional life
declining productivity of those using that teaching approach
compared with those utilizing new or alternative technologies.
While this productivity decline has gone on for centuries, the
increasing availability of good alternative ways of instruction
and certifying skill
to an increasing shift away from competencies likely will lead us
technology which is, roughly the existent prevalent
used 2400 years ago, the lecture speaking, the same as Socrates
Compounding this, there are growing questions being raised
about the other main duty of
research. And, particularly outside of the
hard sciences, questions are
productivity associated with being asked about the
I've heard competing estimates these efforts.
papers written on William Shakespeare since the 1980s,
but the lowest estimate exceeds 21,000.
As an economist I must ask, at
gained by the 21,001st paper the margin, what is the insight
anniversary of whose death is writtefast approaching?e 400th
Does not the Law of Diminishing Returns apply to academic
research? I knew that would be a little
bit provocative.
one. I could get her going on that
I was an English major. >> Second, state of federal
direct and indirect funding for higher education likely will
grow at a sharply lower rate in the next decade than it grew in
the past, in part because of a
to increase financial commitments, in part because ofs
what appears to be a long-term
American economic growth, and perhaps also because of growing
doubts about the integrity of the higher education enterprise
and the need for increased
The crowding out of spending educational attainment.
known, and the stealth within state budgets is well
universities shows no signs of privatization of state
The central problem ultimately reversal.
and public policy. is a twin issue of demographics
American population increases the need to allocate resources
to healthcare, a problem that is
American welfare state and a aggregated by the growth of the
that it is a collective responsibility to care for the
aging.
healthcare for senior citizens Given a choice, withholding
kids for fairly prosperous and subsidizing education to
will win out. If for no other reason than they
vote more.
increasing college subsides Gifinanced by raising taxes oror
reducing subsidies without tax
job security will usually prefer increases, politicians wanting
While the federal government, over the past generation, has
shown a vastly increased
higher education costs as the wilnegative consequences ofent
increased deficit financing and a rising debt to output ratio
become apparent at the federal
put some brakes on their aid level, even the Feds likely will
And I think, also, research programs too.
Third, technology is increasing the possibility of meaningful
capital labor substitution with respect to teaching.
Aside from the significant
see the efforts to find new approaches to certifying skills
competencies growing, and who knows, perhaps it will be
successful enough to reduce at
the services of traditional least somprofessors.emand for
The possibility of low cost Internet-based instruction by
English speaking low paid professors in, say, India is
real and I think could impact on
market. Low cost online education based
on open source materials is coming.
Wikipedia University will be
One can see the possibility, here before you know it.
the traditional residential colleges and universities from
that. On that point, however, there is
a countervailing tendency.
Higher education is both a Thank god.
investment good. consumption as well as an
places for socialization and Residential universities are
The Wisconsin Union was the first union in the country to
serve beer, I think.
And still does. Providing students a pleasant
transition between parental adolescent oversight and the
real world of adult responsibility.
With rising incomes, students crave and demand more, not less,
of this.
residential colleges and So the upscale, high reputation
survive, and in their relative universities will probably
rise, but I expect at a slower price might even continue to
There are limits to how much the rate than in the past.
As budgets are more constrained, price of something can go up.
to face tepid levels of state aand perhaps federal studentue
support, they will be forced and
and fancy moves. are being forced into efficiency
best met by doing something like To the faculty, this usually is
the administrative and support loping off maybe 25% or more of
the last third of a century. costs that have been added over
happen, I suspect pressures will And while some of this may
and serious questions will be gasked about the need for somes
academic research, particularly outside the hard sciences.
Battles over university governance will grow.
And I must say, I see the faculty more likely to lose than
win most of those battles.
this, of course, could be Whincreased unionization.all
Public school teachers went almost overnight from being
almost entirely non-unionized to
It could happen in higher ed. The fact that a good bit of
higher ed is private however, many professors rely heavily on
externally generated research grants for some of their income.
Student fees play an important
unionization possibility far role and other factors make the
an uptick in union efforts will fhappen, although the nationalt
environment for unionization is not particularly good nor is it
likely to become so.
changing competition and the Moreover, given the nature of
certifying competency, I doubt emerging of alternative means of
effective in changing the work unionizations can truly be
materially. The places at which faculty, at
which professors work may change
I see it continuing, if not a completely certain future, for
the great private universities
colleges. The Harvards, the Stanfords, the
Northwesterns, Amherst, Williams, and the like.
I believe that also extends to
institutions like the great Big Ten research universities which,
Wisconsin is one. I think two types of
institutions have a distinctly
The first is the poorly endowed private liberal arts college
with a limited local reputation.
arguably belongs on the endangered species list.
A second category of schools
state schools with so-so with an uncertain future is
support in the form of research grants or private endowments and
gifts.
be in for a period of somewhat, Thand by this I mean Madison,ay
Wisconsin, may be in for a
state funding continues to period of some austerity as
support stagnates, but with some shrink and federal research
revenues and some added private philanthropic endowment support,
they will survive.
significant regulatory The for-profit schools face some
dependent on federal loan dollars, but in principle their
future is relatively bright.
cost to society, basic They offer, at a relatively low
demand, and they are, frankly, educational services in high
schools in a variety of ways, including more sane utilization
of their fiscal plans.
will survive again in Thconsiderable part because ofy
their relatively low cost.
I don't know if I'm out of time. I'm almost out of time.
I have tenure, I can do anything Five minutes?
[LAUGHTER] I want.
tenure, I'm retired with tenure. I've even got better than
Five minutes. >> Five minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
budget, believe me. I am a product of a classical
liberal arts education. Myself, with strong core
requirements and such, currently
western civilization, foreign unlanguages, and Englishs
literature. To this day, I believe that
those trained in this tradition develop skills that serve them
well in the workplace, such as
think critically. Graduates of our liberal arts
colleges do well vocationally,
in marketing or accounting. Yet, higher education has moveds
away from this emphasis on the
vocational training in subjects like business or communication
studies.
this trend will continue or not, Frankly, I'm not sure whether
dunk that it will. but I don't think it's a slam
have changed a lot over time, and the continued success andy
prosperity of any of the
colleges suggest that model still has a good bit of life
left in it. It's easy to over generalize
and oversimplify about higher ed, and there are a lot of
things I have not talked about
For example, the academic arms this morning.
go into at some length. rIt has produced the phenomena,
for example, of the academic
The celebrity professor who makes hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year and does, roughly
when he or she wants and for speaking, what he or she wants
I don't see that going away whom he soon.e wants.
I haven't spoken about other
affirmative action, diversity, issues relative to, say,
sustainability. These impact some on the
professoriate in significant
policies are constrained by relatively unpredictable swings
in public policy and judicial actions.
The Law of Diminishing Returns
I'm piling speculation on top of is setting in.
Let me ultimately conclude by noting that higher education
today resembles Russia in 1939. Speaking about Russia that year,
Winston Churchill said, and I quote, "It is a riddle, wrapped
in a mystery, inside an enigma."
American higher education today. Maybe to some extent that is
Russia, "Perhaps there is a key, But Churchill also added about
Perhaps the key to American thehigher education is how it."
adapts to change in pursuit of
However higher education does change, albeit sometimes slowly,
looking at American higher
1912, I would note that there educationwas no tenure. today in
That no school in the United
students. The largest school was Columbia,
by the way. That teaching loads varied all
over the map. That the faculty played a very
small governance rule.
of that started at the By the way, a lot of the change
American Association of UnUniversity Professors and sohe
forth.
education was transformed with Half a century later, higher
students. mThe modern research universitye
had been established with,
faculty presence in making the generally, a relatively powerful
And it was the center of the decisions.
enterprise. Today, higher education has gone
from being an opportunity for the wealthy and academically
gifted to serving, one way or the other, a huge portion of the
population. As the French say, the more
things change, the more they
Thank you. remain the same.
Aren't we a cheery bunch. [>> Yeah.]
These people ought to be
So, I would encourage you to chat with each other.
[LAUGHTER]
We agree on most things, >> But what are we to say?
We do, yeah. don't we?
deal with is that these very, the universities that are likely
to survive are also the universities that have largely
an upper middle class student clientele.
And I think that also reflects
large, and that the places, the Matthew effect, the places thatt
have things continue to get things as do the students who go
there.
mobility, but I believe all empirical studies show that the
students distribute themselves
at private elites and flagships and then it goes down with poors
kids at community colleges, reflecting again the society as
a whole.
problem. And I think that's a real
successful in making access available to a broad spectrum of
society when we had low tuition and the GI bill.
May I pick up on that?
continue between the two of us This love fest is going to
[LAUGHTER] for at least 30 more seconds.
And, indeed, my latest academic research has been on the
relationship between income inequality in the United States
and higher educational
And what I find is a little bit along the lines what Sheila
said. And the evidence is pretty good.
There was a period in our post-war history, a long period
in our post-war history, where
what it was advertised to do. highIt promoted equality.y did
The evidence today, as I read it, and this is regression
equations, it's a Tom Mortensen type thing.
He's back there.
about all this is sitting in By the guy who knows the most
he's not even on the program. The evidence is clear that today
we have what Tom sometimes calls
education gated communities, and gated communities, higher
Princetons, but it's also the iflagship state universities.d
There aren't enough places at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
No, there aren't. And so Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton say we don't want you.
the next class at Harvard. 5.9% is the acceptance rate for
They're not industries. They don't expand to meet market
demand. >> So, yeah, the difference
between McDonald's and Harvard
an admissions committee. is this: McDonald's doesn't have
McDonald's wants all the That's the difference.
Harvard wants as few customers customers they can get.
higher US, they don't have to aworry about US News rankings.et
It's the wannabes that worry
And, frankly, it's the about US News rankings.
It's the second tier publics. WiscoEven the Dukes and the it.
Northwesterns and the...
Emory, Vanderbilt, they worry >> Emabout them.bilt.
We've got to turn more kids away
And the kids we turn away tend so we can be better.
Now I'm going to cite Mr. Mortensen again, and he can
destroy me if I'm wrong.
publications looking at recent In one of his recent
think around 1970 about 12% of college graduates, he said in I
graduates came from the bottom higher education recent
distribution. qNow it's about 7.2%.
It has declined so one of the great things that we subsidize
universities, higher ed for,
this a land of opportunity, the usiAmerican dream for all.make
It's a bunch of bull. >> As two economists once
famously said, Samuel Bowles and
is a frail vehicle on which to Herbert Gintis, higher education
I think, though, one thing I hang equality.
is, where is Gary when I need him, 60% of public colleges andt
universities are unionized. I can't remember whether that's
the number of professors or the number of universities.
Do you know?
They are unionized, and they, as But it's high.
successful in stopping increased I said, while not being
keep salaries relatively equal contingency, have been able to
them over the years. among their faculty and raise
and you used the STEM >disciplines in this, and the,
STEM disciplines are critical in
The STEM disciplines... >> For those who don't know what
STEM is, could you? >> Science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics. Sorry about that.
Education jargon, it ought to be
colleges of education. abolished, particularly in
me us a more, is the thing The scientific disciplines, let
money on. And Sheila said something that I
agree.
It is. I call it STEM scam.
biologists. >There are more unemployedat
biologists probably than there
graduates of colleges of are unemployed, dare I say,
I don't know that. education.
How Economics Shapes Science, really has all the numbers >> Paula Steponn's new book,
that, and you're quite correct. >> I wrote a column called STEM
Stand for the Chronicle Higher
indignant people mad. >> You want to talk about
lobbies.
drop money out of airplanes over >> Yeah, and these people, we
science buildings, I don't know Unwhere they are, and we don'the
drop money out of airplanes over
rest of the campus, and you look the humanities buildings or the
Average salary at schools with at the data.
schools with little in the way high research grants versus
have widened over time. You look at any indicator, you
look at US News rankings, which,
there and they've been around 25 love them or hate them, they're
The state universities are years.
Another area we didn't talk about, and I have a piece out
that claims that Princeton
subsidized university in the University is probably the most
Hopkins which has so much research money coming down, the
overhead on the research money
for 50 years if they wanted to. theOn the cheap, of course.ool
[LAUGHTER]
public subsidy per student Princeton gets $54,000
Trenton State, which is now called College of New Jersey,
12 miles away, gets $2,000. And a lot of this is federal
science policy, a lot of it is
high endowment schools to make tax exemptions for grants to
And let us know forget the them bigger endowed.
which are quite substantial. federal incentives for donors
Meg Whitman, have you heard of >> That's part of it.
She's the head of Hewlett-Packard, founded eBay,
billionaire.
2003 to build a luxury dorm that Gave $30 million to Princeton in
It houses 350 students. That's $350,000 per student.
More than any Donald Trump
And she probably got a 40% resort ever cost.
Her tax bill was reduced by $10 million by doing that, as I
calculate.
denied it. I claim that and she has not
I did it on Bloomberg which you have to pay $20,000 to get a
terminal to see so I want to be sure she read it, and she's one
of the few people who can afford
[LAUGHTER] a Bloomberg Terminal.
out there, this is a progressive So there are some stuff
by the way, a dyed in wool reputation school, and I am,
I'm to the right conservative.
[LAUGHTER] of Attila the Hun.
progressives, if you want to get But I think you
this stuff. r>> I'm curious, how do youf
explain the fact that a far right conservative and a far
left liberal agree so much? What does that tell us?
Well, one this is we're looking at the empiricism.
And then the question, as Lenin famously said, is what is to be
done? >> Would you each say a word
about that? >> Dare we might disagree but we
might not, that's what's really scary.
Do you want to start? >> Could you say each a word
about what is to be done then?
would do something very different than what Sheila would
do. I want the federal government,
for one thing I want, I think if
or no about the federal pgovernment getting out of thes
student loan business, I would
There's intermediate solutions vote yes.
Do I think the government is that might be better.
these days, be it either state serving higher education well
I would say no. Do I think we're better off in
American higher education when
college? we had fewer kids going to
Mr. Mortensen a total heart This isattack.to give
He's going to leave the room and
I think too many people, yeah, he may shoot me.
me, but I can still duck, Tom. he's going to throw something at
I think too many people go to college, not too few.
I think, we have 107,000
with college degrees. jShould we be spending moneys
educating janitors? Soon we'll have a master's in
janitorial studies. >> Why not?
Yeah, why not?
not a PhD in janitorial studies? A master's in janitorial, why
audience involved. Okay, now we're getting the
Sheila, you want to say [a word?R]
Then we'll open it up to the
Okay, I, too, think probably audience.
but my big thing, and this is probably where we disagree, is I
think we have no alternatives to
destroyed a variety of ways the wages we pay people who do not
go to college who still work
do important jobs. eight hours a day and very often
less income inequality, and then I would pay people more, have
for people wanted to go to college would probably be more
And the college I would have college than not.
lifestyle enhancements and would be low tuition without
professionals, so non-academic without lots of academic
So that would be my approach. And if you had low tuition, then
whether you wanted to be
you wanted to work or whether janyou wanted to write theher
35,000th article on Hamlet, you could do it.
And then you would be able to work afterward, but you probably
wouldn't be able to expect super
on which you could live and have high wages but presumably a wage
Sheila, how are we going to get these high wages?
Should we just, why don't we
Why not a $50 minimum wage. Why not a $100 minimum wage.
What the hell are you going to
I lived in Australia when there was a minimum wage.
This was in the '90s so it
to a $25 minimum wage. would have been equivalent
And it was a place you wanted to It was like $12.
There were rich people live.
Why don't we open it up to and no poor people.
I will come around with a mic. the audience.
with a question or If you would raise your hand
comment.