Wisconsin Public Television University Place Future of Public Higher Ed  The Future of Academic Work in Public Universities  March 30, 2012 UP708   cc >> I want to thank you all for returning for the Educational Policy Studies Department Conference on the public interest and the future of public higher public education in the 21st century. I'm Sara Goldrick-Rab of Educational Policy Studies, and I'm going to be introducing the panel for this morning, which is on the future of academic work in public universities. We have a really nice lineup for this conversation that will be taking place between Sheila Slaughter who is the Louise McBee Professor of Higher Education at the Institute for Higher Education at the University of Georgia. She's a distinguished scholar of higher education who is also a graduate of Educational Policy Studies at UW Madison. >> A stellar program. >> Wonderful plug. [LAUGHTER] She's perhaps best known for her work on academic capitalism, including the book Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, States, and Higher Education with Gary Rhoades. Some of you may have seen Gary when he was here a few weeks ago. Her scholarship concentrates on the relationship between knowledge and power as it plays out in higher education policy at the state, federal, and global levels. She will be in conversation with Professor Richard Vedder, who is an economist, historian, author and columnist, and a professor at Ohio State University. 

>> No. >> I'm sorry, I did it. Ohio University, at Ohio University. And also serves, and I won't mess this up, as an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. He has a degree in economics from the University of Illinois, and has studied US economic 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 productivity. The conversation will be moderated by Fran Schrag, professor emeritus in educational policy studies and philosophy. He is an expert on the philosophy of education, ethics, and a variety of important topics that I think will actually make him quite a very interesting moderator to have in this particular conversation. So, Fran has structured the discussion, and I believe that each of those in the conversation are going to begin 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 begin. >> 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 Century: Stratification, Segmentation, and Fragmentation. And I think that my basic argument is that, particularly in research universities, although certainly in all universities, but more so... Can you hear me? >> You need to get closer. >> All right. Oh, it's a moveable one. Okay, but more so in research universities, we have a changed human resources profiled that we have to consider as a whole. We can't just look at professors because we have to consider all of them if we're to understand what academic work looks like in the 21st century. So, research universities consume and inordinate amount of revenues for higher education. 

There are probably about 70 research intensive universities. Certainly, there's only about 70 that get probably over 80% of federal R&D dollars. Those public universities have revenues that are double those of master's universities, and we have to remember that not all research universities are equal. Private universities have 2.5 times greater resources than public universities. So, when we put this in the 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 those universities is, in most years, larger than all the money that goes for all kinds of federal student financial aid. So you can see how the money is concentrated on these areas. When I say they consume an extraordinary amount of education resources, I'm not exaggerating. And I think we have to, ultimately, consider whether these research universities are so different from every other kind of university that we have to think about them differently, whether it even makes sense to think of them all as part of a loosely constructed same sort of field. Of course, professors are paid more, on average, at these research universities, much more at privates than at publics. 

And I think that, again, that's a mark of how much money they receive. But there's also tremendous stratification within public research universities, and professors that are close to 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 are largely humanities and fine arts and female dominated fields. So, that's an enormous difference. So, if you look at the difference from 1987 to 2004 in constant dollars, the gap between the highest and lowest fields in '87 was $48,000 at public research universities, 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 there was probably not more than $10,000 difference between any one field at research universities that salaries are about flat in four-year universities, public universities, especially if they're unionized, and the same is true with the community college. And the differences are so great that it is not unusual, despite the average pay being higher at research universities, for professors in the low fields to actually have people in community colleges make more than they do. So, we have this great stratification within research universities, and we also have segmentation. And I think that's most clearly saying, well, there are a number of ways people have there 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 and the growth of interdisciplinarity. And centers and institutes have grown exponentially so that they really take in a large amount of work. 

Of course, they're most marked in the sciences. That's where they have the greatest number. We did a little study of that, and the life sciences have, by far and away, the greatest amounts of centers and institutes. 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 24. And two of those four universities, in the centers there were dedicated lines which means that the centers are becoming their own place rather than there necessarily being a department home because if you've got a dedicated line then you don't have a department home. So, I guess for me, it raises the question of whether centers and institutes have become a means of supporting and incenting certain segments of the faculty, who I would assume would be entrepreneurial or high grant or high external revenue generating because there's many ways to generate external revenues. So then they're located by themselves so they can be more highly rewarded and more highly monitored. And perhaps they're located in places where they can be, as I said, incented to pursue administrative priorities such as tech transfer or other forms of revenue generation. Perhaps even distance education. Revenues come in many shapes and forms unconstrained by departmental service or undergraduate teaching. 

Faculty may choose to participate because they accrue resources for research and there's status and prestige, 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 greatest problem that managers have, senior managers, and that has always been in universities how to manage experts. In other words, research faculty have knowledge and expertise that managers don't. That's why they're valuable. That's why they're hard to manage and tell them what to do and things. And the knowledge isn't codified, especially when it comes to things like innovation and entrepreneurial science and discovery. So, centers and institutes may separate relatively small numbers of faculty from their 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 as a whole. This is what I would like to research. I don't have empirical evidence of that. There's some. 

People study centers and institutes a lot. Barry Bozeman has done a wonderful job on that with empirical evidence. This is certainly a plausible interpretation of what is happening. I think the flip side of science and engineering into disciplinarity is what I call the interdisciplinarity of despair. 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 diversity studies and things like that. So, I think there are lots of different sorts of segmentation that are taking place, and it's really something to look at. And I think it's important because departments, whatever we may think about them, are the basis of faculty organization and power in universities. 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 have any work within your 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. That said, departments have issues and they have grown by accretion 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 and institutes and transdisciplinarity as the way to go because of my concerns about faculty work. Then I think some fields, although they're not gone, are fragmenting. And if we use, as a marker of fragmentation, the number of contingent faculty in the field, I think that gives us a sense of how fragmented any particular field is because the more 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 universities have sharp differences in graduate student stipends which I also see as a marker of fragmentation. So now all fields have large numbers of part-timers, but there are fewer part-timers and the lowest rate of increase in engineering and the natural sciences and perhaps the health sciences, but that's because of the way they classify the health sciences that that's hard to 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. This is the details of the decline of faculty positions on offer in these fields and the low graduate stipends. Another marker of fragmentation is number of PhDs granted. 

And in 2007-2008, the last year, I think, which data are available for, although there 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 awarded about half of any single STEM field, and some social sciences, sociology for example, there are more joint and outside job offers in 2010 than in the discipline itself, which I take to be a real marker of fragmentation. And sociologists always say, and I believe there is empirical evidence that addresses this point, that there are more sociologists in business schools than there are in sociology departments. So, I think the increasing degree of fragmentation in some fields raises the question of how long highly fragmented fields will remain viable at research universities and whether they're going to be recombined in other ways, combined themselves, or cut. Although, we're not big on cutting, as I mentioned previously. So, what happens, I think, so that we can have this big stratification as universities is we have a new human resources profile, which means we pay some people very highly, and to be able to do that we have to pay some people very little, otherwise we can't pay the high people high. 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 they're high professionally used people, and you have to cut the faculty and that's where all your costs are. That is no longer true. While personnel is still the greatest cost at universities, full-time faculty are no longer the largest component. 

Full-time faculty are now only 27%, track faculty are only 27% of the human resources professional profile, and now non-academic professionals are about 55% of the human resources profile. And non-academic professionals are people who do business, most of them are in the business function of the university and from the administration. I think the second one is information technology. And the student personnel is actually quite low, the student advising and personnel, but you can look at the charts and see exactly what they are. But the point is that, again, it's a changed human resources profile, and that means, again, that there's sort of in many ways less money for faculty, and it also means, and I think this is the biggest thing, it means at research universities faculty work has been specialized Faculties do research, they don't do, I mean, you have contingent faculty, you have lecturers, you have graduate students, and graduate students are relatively expensive compared to lecturers or contingents. So what you have is this specialization where faculty are mainly doing research. They do some teaching but it's more likely to be graduate school. 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 special things we do which are research and actually teaching graduate students and sometimes juniors and seniors. 

And you may say you don't do that here, and Wisconsin is probably good, but if you look at it nationally, that's the way it is. And I don't think these changes are driven by market rationality. For example, STEM fields, they're relatively flat. There's not high demand, even 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 concern for economic growth. And we can't get undergraduates to go into STEM, and we can't 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 penalties for failure. And I think that the changes that have occurred are closely tied to stratification processes and the broader society that are also not market rational, but I think I don't have time for that. So, for me, I think the important thing for you to think about is that I think faculty work has really changed. 

I think we have become very specialized, and I think we have a new human resources profile where we are far from being the only professional workers at the university. Thank you. >> Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> Professor Vedder. >> Thank you, Fran, and thanks. I want to thank Sara particularly because she invited me, and Sara and I have battled back and forth for 10 years, but she still puts up with me so I appreciate it. One of the few advantages, and there are very few, of getting old is that you do gain a good bit of historical perspective based on your own personal experience. So when I was a young professor, say in the late 1960s, I told my best students that they should consider becoming professors themselves, as it was the best job in the world. I went on the job market in 1965, at the time a surging demand for professors, falling teaching loads, growing state budgets, and widespread public support for higher education. It was a great job. 

Made all the better, in my case, because I was a man, and I got an occupational draft deferment that effectively kept me out of the Vietnam War. Where else could you get a job where you had no set hours of work, where a good bit of your time was researching a thing that you were interested in, and where promotion and advancement were probable if you did your job 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 extraordinarily, over time. Cool job. By the middle of my career, say the late 1980s, I told top students that I had had a satisfying job as a professor, that it was something they might want to consider as they planned their future, but my enthusiasm had cooled just a bit. While depression had not set in for college professors, the hot labor market environment of the '60s was long past. One consequence of this was a large increase in tenure requirements with enhanced expectations for publications. Publish or perish had moved from describing employment conditions at the elite private and a few public flagship universities to becoming part of the academic landscape at a majority of America's four-year institutions of higher education. In recent years, I have told my best and brightest students that they would make great professors but I wouldn't recommend it as a career because a significant 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. 

>> Which is going to make for a very dull hour and a half. And I promised Tom Mortensen we'd have a fight before it was over. [LAUGHTER] In particular, new PhDs, previously virtually assured of tenure track positions somewhere, now no longer find that the case. The situation is particularly disastrous in the humanities where only a small minority of trained PhDs get tenure track positions, and many others lead a nomadic, low income existence with little job security as part of the vastly growing academic underclass, the adjunct faculty. Indeed, I think the most striking feature of the present era is the sharp divide between the relatively high paid faculty, who hold jobs with good job security and low teaching loads, and the rest of the 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 research universities, and I think is beginning to disappear at the less renowned colleges of the world as well. So let's talk a little bit more about the enhanced risk of becoming a professor and why my enthusiasm for the future is dim. This is probably a bummer for some of the students in this room. [LAUGHTER] Why don't you go home? [LAUGHTER] Is Sara making you stay? The following are three realities. First, higher education costs, both to students and to society, have increased dramatically over time, and the possibility of maintaining the status quo university model simply by hiking fees is low and declining toward zero. 

So the lecture discussion model, also, that has dominated collegiate instructional life for centuries, if not millennia, is imperiled, in part by the 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 competencies likely will lead us to an increasing shift away from the existent prevalent technology which is, roughly speaking, the same as Socrates used 2400 years ago, the lecture discussion approach. Compounding this, there are growing questions being raised about the other main duty of professors, namely their research. And, particularly outside of the hard sciences, questions are being asked about the productivity associated with these efforts. I've heard competing estimates on the number of scholarly papers written on William Shakespeare since the 1980s, but the lowest estimate exceeds 21,000. As an economist I must ask, at the margin, what is the insight gained by the 21,001st paper written on the Bard, the 400th anniversary of whose death is fast approaching? Does not the Law of Diminishing Returns apply to academic research? I knew that would be a little bit provocative. I could get her going on that one. [LAUGHTER] >> 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 declining ability of governments to increase financial commitments, in part because of what appears to be a long-term slow down in the rate of American economic growth, and perhaps also because of growing doubts about the integrity of the higher education enterprise and the need for increased educational attainment. The crowding out of spending within state budgets is well known, and the stealth privatization of state universities shows no signs of reversal. 

The central problem ultimately is a twin issue of demographics and public policy. Specifically, the aging of the American population increases the need to allocate resources to healthcare, a problem that is aggregated by the growth of the American welfare state and a growing acceptance of the view that it is a collective responsibility to care for the aging. Given a choice, withholding healthcare for senior citizens and subsidizing education to kids for fairly prosperous families, the senior citizens will win out. If for no other reason than they vote more. Given a choice of maintaining or increasing college subsides financed by raising taxes or reducing subsidies without tax increases, politicians wanting job security will usually prefer the latter alternative. While the federal government, over the past generation, has shown a vastly increased willingness to finance student higher education costs as the negative consequences of increased deficit financing and a rising debt to output ratio become apparent at the federal level, even the Feds likely will put some brakes on their aid programs. 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 growth in online instruction, I see the efforts to find new approaches to certifying skills competencies growing, and who knows, perhaps it will be successful enough to reduce at least somewhat the demand for the services of traditional professors. 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 the traditional education market. 

Low cost online education based on open source materials is coming. Wikipedia University will be here before you know it. One can see the possibility, therefore, of some decline in the traditional residential colleges and universities from that. On that point, however, there is a countervailing tendency. Thank god. Higher education is both a consumption as well as an investment good. Residential universities are places for socialization and enjoyment. The Wisconsin Union was the first union in the country to serve beer, I think. >> And still does. >> 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. So the upscale, high reputation residential colleges and universities will probably survive, and in their relative price might even continue to rise, but I expect at a slower rate than in the past. There are limits to how much the price of something can go up. As budgets are more constrained, as state universities continue to face tepid levels of state and perhaps federal student support, they will be forced and are being forced into efficiency and fancy moves. To the faculty, this usually is best met by doing something like loping off maybe 25% or more of the administrative and support costs that have been added over the last third of a century. And while some of this may happen, I suspect pressures will grow to increase teaching loads and serious questions will be asked about the need for some 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. When faculty responds to all this, of course, could be increased unionization. 

Public school teachers went almost overnight from being almost entirely non-unionized to the opposite extreme. 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 role and other factors make the unionization possibility far from a certainty, but I suspect an uptick in union efforts will happen, although the national environment for unionization is not particularly good nor is it likely to become so. Moreover, given the nature of changing competition and the emerging of alternative means of certifying competency, I doubt unionizations can truly be effective in changing the work life of a faculty member, materially. The places at which faculty, at which professors work may change as well. I see it continuing, if not a completely certain future, for the great private universities and first level liberal arts colleges. The Harvards, the Stanfords, the Northwesterns, Amherst, Williams, and the like. I believe that also extends to the top flagship public schools, institutions like the great Big Ten research universities which Wisconsin is one. I think two types of institutions have a distinctly more uncertain future. 

The first is the poorly endowed private liberal arts college with a limited local reputation. That category of schools arguably belongs on the endangered species list. A second category of schools with an uncertain future is state schools with so-so reputations and little outside support in the form of research grants or private endowments and gifts. The Wisconsins of the world may be in for a period of somewhat, and by this I mean Madison, Wisconsin, may be in for a period of some austerity as state funding continues to shrink and federal research support stagnates, but with some ability to raise tuition revenues and some added private philanthropic endowment support, they will survive. The for-profit schools face some significant regulatory challenges and are extremely dependent on federal loan dollars, but in principle their future is relatively bright. They offer, at a relatively low cost to society, basic educational services in high demand, and they are, frankly, more efficient than traditional schools in a variety of ways, including more sane utilization of their fiscal plans. The community colleges probably will survive again in considerable part because of their relatively low cost. I'm almost out of time. I don't know if I'm out of time. Five minutes? I have tenure, I can do anything I want. 

[LAUGHTER] I've even got better than tenure, I'm retired with tenure. [LAUGHTER] >> Five minutes. >> Five minutes. [LAUGHTER] This is on time and under budget, believe me. I am a product of a classical liberal arts education. Myself, with strong core requirements and such, currently unfashionable subjects as western civilization, foreign languages, and English literature. To this day, I believe that those trained in this tradition develop skills that serve them well in the workplace, such as an ability to write well and think critically. Graduates of our liberal arts colleges do well vocationally, even if they haven't had courses in marketing or accounting. Yet, higher education has moved away from this emphasis on the liberal arts to emphasize vocational training in subjects like business or communication studies. Frankly, I'm not sure whether this trend will continue or not, but I don't think it's a slam dunk that it will. 

The fields that students study have changed a lot over time, and the continued success and prosperity of any of the traditional liberal arts 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 this morning. For example, the academic arms race itself is a topic we could go into at some length. It has produced the phenomena, for example, of the academic superstar. The celebrity professor who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and does, roughly speaking, what he or she wants when he or she wants and for whom he or she wants. I don't see that going away soon. I haven't spoken about other issues relative to, say, affirmative action, diversity, or the fad du jour, sustainability. These impact some on the professoriate in significant ways but not others, and future policies are constrained by relatively unpredictable swings in public policy and judicial actions. The Law of Diminishing Returns is setting in. I'm piling speculation on top of speculation. 

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." Maybe to some extent that is American higher education today. But Churchill also added about Russia, "Perhaps there is a key, the Russian national interest." Perhaps the key to American higher education is how it adapts to change in pursuit of its self interest. However higher education does change, albeit sometimes slowly, looking at American higher education 100 years ago today in 1912, I would note that there was no tenure. That no school in the United States had as many as 10,000 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. By the way, a lot of the change of that started at the University of Wisconsin with the American Association of University Professors and so forth. Half a century later, higher education was transformed with many schools with 25,000 or more students. 

The modern research university had been established with, generally, a relatively powerful faculty presence in making the decisions. And it was the center of the national higher education 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 remain the same. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> Aren't we a cheery bunch. >> Yeah. These people ought to be depressed. >> So, I would encourage you to chat with each other. [LAUGHTER] >> But what are we to say? >> We agree on most things, don't we? >> We do, yeah. 

I think one thing that we didn't 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 stratification in the society at large, and that the places, the Matthew effect, the places that have things continue to get things as do the students who go there. I'm not denying there's mobility, but I believe all empirical studies show that the students distribute themselves with upper middle class students at private elites and flagships and then it goes down with poor kids at community colleges, reflecting again the society as a whole. And I think that's a real problem. As a country, we were most 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? This love fest is going to continue between the two of us for at least 30 more seconds. [LAUGHTER] I quite agree with you. And, indeed, my latest academic research has been on the relationship between income inequality in the United States and higher educational attainment. 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 higher education genuinely did what it was advertised to do. It promoted equality. The evidence today, as I read it, and this is regression equations, it's a Tom Mortensen type thing. He's back there. By the guy who knows the most about all this is sitting in the, he came here from Iowa and he's not even on the program. The evidence is clear that today we have what Tom sometimes calls gated communities, higher education gated communities, and it is the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons, but it's also the flagship state universities. >> 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. 5.9% is the acceptance rate for the next class at Harvard. 

It was just announced yesterday. >> They're not industries. They don't expand to meet market demand. >> So, yeah, the difference between McDonald's and Harvard is this: McDonald's doesn't have an admissions committee. That's the difference. McDonald's wants all the customers they can get. Harvard wants as few customers as they can get, so they can get higher US, they don't have to worry about US News rankings. It's the wannabes that worry about US News rankings. And, frankly, it's the Wisconsins that worry about it. It's the second tier publics. 

Even the Dukes and the Northwesterns and the... >> Emory, Vanderbilt. >> Emory, Vanderbilt, they worry about them. We've got to turn more kids away so we can be better. And the kids we turn away tend to be lower income. Now I'm going to cite Mr. Mortensen again, and he can destroy me if I'm wrong. In one of his recent publications looking at recent college graduates, he said in I think around 1970 about 12% of higher education recent graduates came from the bottom quarter of the income distribution. Now it's about 7.2%. It has declined so one of the great things that we subsidize universities, higher ed for, using public funds, is to make this a land of opportunity, the American dream for all. It's a bunch of bull. 

>> As two economists once famously said, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, higher education is a frail vehicle on which to hang equality. I think, though, one thing I wanted to say is that I think it is, where is Gary when I need him, 60% of public colleges and universities are unionized. I can't remember whether that's the number of professors or the number of universities. Do you know? But it's high. They are unionized, and they, as I said, while not being successful in stopping increased contingency, have been able to keep salaries relatively equal among their faculty and raise them over the years. >> You made the point, Sheila, and you used the STEM disciplines in this, and the STEM disciplines are critical in this. 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 abolished, particularly in colleges of education. 

The scientific disciplines, let me us a more, is the thing everyone thinks we need to spend money on. And Sheila said something that I agree. I call it STEM scam. >> It is. >> First of all, you look at biologists. There are more unemployed biologists probably than there are unemployed, dare I say, graduates of colleges of education. I don't know that. >> Paula Stephan's new book, How Economics Shapes Science, really has all the numbers on that, and you're quite correct. >> I wrote a column called STEM Stand for the Chronicle Higher Ed, and I got a zillion indignant people mad. >> You want to talk about lobbies. 

>> Yeah, and these people, we drop money out of airplanes over University of Wisconsin over the science buildings, I don't know where they are, and we don't drop money out of airplanes over the humanities buildings or the rest of the campus, and you look at the data. Average salary at schools with high research grants versus schools with little in the way of research grants, the gaps have widened over time. You look at any indicator, you look at US News rankings, which, love them or hate them, they're there and they've been around 25 years. The state universities are dropping out of the list. Another area we didn't talk about, and I have a piece out that claims that Princeton University is probably the most subsidized university in the United States, except for Johns Hopkins which has so much research money coming down, the overhead on the research money they could operate that school for 50 years if they wanted to. On the cheap, of course. [LAUGHTER] Princeton gets $54,000 public subsidy per student if you look at tax breaks. 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 tax exemptions for grants to high endowment schools to make them bigger endowed. >> And let us know forget the federal incentives for donors which are quite substantial. 

>> That's part of it. Meg Whitman, have you heard of Meg Whitman? She's the head of Hewlett-Packard, founded eBay, billionaire. Gave $30 million to Princeton in 2003 to build a luxury dorm that cost $120 million. It houses 350 students. That's $350,000 per student. More than any Donald Trump resort ever cost. >> And she probably got a 40% write-off on her taxes. >> Her tax bill was reduced by $10 million by doing that, as I calculate. I claim that and she has not denied it. >> Then it's probably true. 

>> 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 a Bloomberg Terminal. [LAUGHTER] So there are some stuff out there, this is a progressive reputation school, and I am, by the way, a dyed in wool conservative. I'm to the right of Attila the Hun. [LAUGHTER] But I think you progressives, if you want to get riled up, pick up on some of this stuff. >> I'm curious, how do you 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? >> To make it very clear, I would do something very different than what Sheila would do. I want the federal government, for one thing I want, I think if push came, if I had to vote yes or no about the federal government getting out of the student loan business, I would vote yes. There's intermediate solutions that might be better. Do I think the government is serving higher education well these days, be it either state or federal? I would say no. 

Do I think we're better off in American higher education when we had fewer kids going to college? This is going to give Mr. Mortensen a total heart attack. He's going to leave the room and he may shoot me. I think too many people, yeah, he's going to throw something at me, but I can still duck, Tom. [LAUGHTER] I think too many people go to college, not too few. I think, we have 107,000 janitors in the United States with college degrees. Should we be spending money educating janitors? Soon we'll have a master's in janitorial studies. >> Why not? >> Yeah, why not? A master's in janitorial, why not a PhD in janitorial studies? Okay, now we're getting the audience involved. [LAUGHTER] >> Sheila, you want to say a word? Then we'll open it up to the audience. >> Okay, I, too, think probably too many people go to college, but my big thing, and this is probably where we disagree, is I think we have no alternatives to college because we have so destroyed a variety of ways the wages we pay people who do not go to college who still work eight hours a day and very often do important jobs. I would pay people more, have less income inequality, and then college would probably be more for people wanted to go to college than not. 

And the college I would have would be low tuition without lifestyle enhancements and without lots of academic professionals, so non-academic professionals. So that would be my approach. And if you had low tuition, then whether you wanted to be janitorial science or whether you wanted to work or whether you wanted to write the 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 high wages but presumably a wage on which you could live and have a life. >> Sheila, how are we going to get these high wages? Should we just, why don't we have a $25 minimum wage. Why not a $50 minimum wage. Why not a $100 minimum wage. What the hell are you going to do to raise wages? >> I lived in Australia when there was a minimum wage. This was in the '90s so it would have been equivalent to a $25 minimum wage. It was like $12. 

And it was a place you wanted to live. There were rich people and no poor people. >> Why don't we open it up to the audience. I will come around with a mic. If you would raise your hand with a question or comment.