University Place  Harry Brighouse Social Justice and the Flagship Public Universities  November 12, 2012 UP819  cc >> It's not some grand theory or anything, it's just three basic guiding principles of social justice that I think we should use when we're thinking about institutions and change in our society, maybe not in all societies, maybe some so-- Maybe some don't have inequalities that they should have. Basically, in our society, we've got too much inequality of outcome, and justice requires that we try to reduce inequality. We also have very unequal opportunities. I'll talk quite a bit about that in a while. And justice requires that we try to equalize opportunities, not completely equalize them, but equalize them some, equalize them more than they are equal at the moment. The third principle that I think should guide us is, thinking primarily, when we think about how to move forward, thinking primarily about the interests of the less advantaged people in the society. What happens when we live in-- We live in the richest country in the history of humanity, right, where the last, let's make it ten years, since people aren't as rich as they were five years ago, but the last ten years. We're phenomenally rich. Norway may be a bit richer, and they've got all sorts of other things, but we're very rich. The least advantaged people in our society don't get a great deal out of it. 

They don't get, you know, they're not dead. I suppose the most disadvantaged are dead, but I'm not really interested in them. [laughter]  But they could do much better. The other thing in my title, one is social justice, you remember, and the other one is public flagship universities. So, I've got to be totally honest about this. I'm not really that interested in public flagship universities. I put that in the title because I thought that well, if I told them what I'm really interested in, they won't come. [laughter] But they'd be wrong, too. So what I'm really interested in is elite universities. I'm interested in elite higher education. 

But I thought if I put elite higher education in the title, you'd all think, oh, that's got nothing to do with me, that's like Princeton, and Yale, and Harvard, and maybe some college on the West Coast. But that's not what I mean by elite, just so it's clear. I am interested in about 400 colleges, and a standard division that people make is between the 150 most selective, so that would include most probably, almost all of the public flagship universities, not absolutely all of them, but pretty much all of them, and most of the private universities or research universities, and most of the private, small liberal arts colleges that you, well, some of them you know. Then there's another 250 which would include some more state universities, probably most of the UC schools would be in the top 150, but other UC schools would all probably be in the next 250, and the rest of the small liberal arts colleges that you know. Why am I interested in them? This accounts for about 25% of all undergraduate students. Now, just to say, about 60% of each cohort spends some time in college. But only about 25% of each cohort actually graduates, right, so far more people go to college than ever graduate college. The vast majority of that 60% go to institutions where all you need to go to the university is pay money and have a high school diploma or a GED. So, most students go to institutions where there is no selection at all. I'm interested in the 25% of students, which accounts for, I'll try to work it out, about 12%-15% of the cohort, because these 25% of students, most of them are graduating, the vast majority of them are graduating. 

So about 12%-15% of the cohort each year, who are bound for the most advantaged positions in our society, the sort of, you know, the 10% or 15% of the labor market. They're either bound for it, or they can go there if they want to. They don't have to. Some people go off and become, you know, become musicians. But I'm sort of thinking of people, many of them could have more privileged jobs, if they wanted to. I'm interested in them. I'm interested in all these institutions, because these are the people that these people educate. I'm interested in that layer of privilege in our society. So, most of the students here, most of the people here are undergraduates. I know, because I know most of you. 

[laughter] Most of you can go into that. I know things don't seem good right now, but you can go into that part of the labor market, and you can probably stay in that part of the labor market if you want to.  I'm interested, basically, in you. What do elite colleges actually do? There's a missing slide here, I should say, I have a note here to make another slide, and I failed to. So just imagine this slide on there. There are two slides in a row, both of which should say, "What do elite colleges do?", but the first one is missing. The first one says "Reducing inequality?" This is one you're imagining. And the answer there is "No." The answer is no, because how would they? Inequality is set by the levels of technology, the way the labor market works, the way capital markets work, the way the tax system works, the way the benefit system works, all those things. Our institution can't do a lot about inequality, nor even Harvard. Harvard could give away all its money. 

Actually, they're not allowed to. Harvard couldn't even give away all their money. If they did, they might make a tiny dent in inequality, but otherwise, they can't. That's not really what we expect of colleges, and it's not what we should expect. What we do tend to expect of them, this is the slide that is here, maybe. I knew I was going to have problems. Okay, so what we do expect of them, or the story we like to tell ourselves, remember, I'm talking about 400, I'm not talking about the Ivy League plus one university on the West Coast. I'm talking about the 400 colleges that include all of the flagship public universities that you know about. We like to tell ourselves a story about how those colleges equalize opportunity. They sort of provide a possibility of social mobility. 

That would be really nice. I think that's what we like to think we do, and it isn't. So, let's just have a word, first of all, about social mobility, just a simple slide. What this slide shows you is the income elasticity in these different countries. So income elasticity has the following property. If there's no relationship at all between somebody's income and their parent's income, in a country, then it would be zero. That would be zero elasticity. That would be total elasticity, sorry. I'm getting it wrong here. That would be zero elasticity. 

If there's complete correlation, if the income of the child exactly correlates, if every child correlates with that of their parents, then that would be an elasticity of one. So what you see there, is you see Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, all have very low levels of correlation between parental and children's income. Your chances of being somewhere else in the income distribution than your parents are much, much higher in those societies. What you can see, there are two countries united in their title, which vie, so the basic shape of this is familiar in all studies. The US and the UK tend to vie for the top position, among rich countries in the world, for correlation between parental and children's income. You'll notice here that the UK wins. Oh, and if you hadn't noticed, that's where I come from. [laughter] But I always think the UK has a really unfair advantage in social immobility stakes, because we have that monarchy, you know, and they just get, they just get, I mean, there's just nothing going on there. They even get to be, somebody even gets to be king without having to do anything.  Don't you like, because my name's Harry, I've always been a bit resentful... 

[laughter] ...about them calling him Harry. But I will say there's one thing that's nice about Harry, which is, it's better to see him naked than in a Nazi uniform. [laughter] So. So there isn't a lot, in fact there's remarkably little social mobility in the US. There's remarkably unequal opportunities. So it's not really that surprising that that pattern is replicated in higher education. So let's look at the top, yeah, let's look at the top 150 elite colleges, and look at where students come from. So you can see that from the bottom quarter of the income distribution, that is the lowest 25% of the income distribution, just three percent of students in these elite colleges come from that bottom 25%. Just three percent of students in these colleges come from that bottom 25%. Seventy-four percent of students in these colleges come from the top 25%. 

Remember, this includes all the public flagships that you know about. The next 256, I don't know why I have that at 256. But 46% of students in that next 256 come from the top quartile. And 70%, so it's a real bump up, come from the bottom quartile. Almost all students from that bottom quartile are in fact going to non-selective colleges, non-elite colleges. And you'll see something about the rate at which they graduate in a little while.  Most of the students at elite colleges come from the top 25% of the income distribution. Let's just, in case you think, well, that's just elite higher education, and that's really bad, but the rest of higher education is all right. That's not entirely true, either. Let's have a look, if I can get it to work, at all of our higher education, and see where the students come from. 

I've got deciles and quartiles here. I have this very bad habit of pointing at something that nobody can see, when I'm doing a PowerPoint. But you know, I guess I could walk around, couldn't I? [laughter] So, what you see here is just now the share of the total. It says the share of 18 year olds in any given birth year that graduate high school. So from the top decile, from the top 10% income distribution, nearly everybody graduates high school. From the bottom decile, about half of the people graduate high school, and the other half don't. When it's quartiles, it's not quite the top 25% of the income distribution. You know, the vast, vast majority, slightly fewer than in the top decile graduate. And from the bottom quartile, the bottom 25%, it's 64% graduating. That's, you know, that's not as bad as in the bottom decile. 

But it's not a lot better. Now let's look at college attendance. So remember what I said that about 60% of the cohort go to college in some way or form, but only about 25% graduate. So, less than half the people who have some experience with college graduate. So, this is from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which is, it's old now. It's students born in the '60s. But there's no reason at all to think this has gotten better, and some reason to think it's gotten worse. So, 19% of the bottom decile go to college in some way, 78% of the top decile go to college in some way. The graduation rate is the real kicker here. Only one-third of students from the bottom decile that go to college, graduate college. 

 Whereas among the top decile, you know, not a vast majority, but a substantial majority graduate college. In the deciles, compare the 56.8% graduating high school with a 6.3% graduating college. Then compare the 97.7% with the 49.1%. So you see the chances of graduating college once you've graduated high school are radically lower if you're in the bottom decile, much, much, much lower if you're in the bottom decile than if you're in the top decile. Something happens. It's worse than your chances of going to college. Something happens in college over all, higher education over all, that isn't so great for that group of people. They're the group of people that we would be moving up, if what we were doing was equalizing opportunity. Okay, so you see what I mean about not being a very nice story? It doesn't, you know, it's not cheerful. Anybody who, I was thinking about this last night, you know, anybody who is cheered up by the debate last night, I thought I can depress them today. 

[laughter] It'll be really great. Now, college produce real-- Let's think now about what college does. College produces real benefits for the people who attend. I think there are three, you know, the benefits can be divided into three. The big thing that people think about is the increased competitiveness for desirable positions and the benefits attached to them. I'll say a word about the benefits attached to them in a moment. Some people get enjoyment in the college experience, so I will just say, when I think about the three great benefits to college, I did not really get this. I was miserable in college. So I always feel a bit better about it because of that. At least there's something good I didn't get. 

[laughter] Some people enjoy the intrinsic value of learning. I would like to think that lots of people do. I certainly did. I got a lot of the last --, not a lot of the middle one, and the top, I did get, I guess.  The premium two, actually, this is graduation, not participation, the premium that's attached to it is really quite big. So, over your lifetime, if you graduate college, you can expect about 70% higher earnings than high school graduates, and about 100% higher than high school dropouts, which is, again, this is, you know, we don't know, because we don't know what happens. Your generation hasn't happened yet, so we don't have the numbers, right? Probably, in your generation, the people think the premium probably will be bigger than that. Professional degrees, your lifetime earnings, three times that of a high school graduate. A professional degree is a masters, that leads to some sort of professional qualification. It includes law school. 

It includes medical school, etc. I will just say... [laughter] If you want to get at this premium, that's not a good investment. But you get a lot of intrinsic value of learning, see? [laughter]  If it were just money, I wouldn't care. People who care just about money, they are frivolous, right, materialistic. Who cares about that? We're better than that. But it isn't just money. So, people who graduate college, especially elite colleges, you know, the more elite college, the more effect you get. You get higher status. You get jobs in higher status, as well as higher incomes. 

You get more interesting jobs. The really interesting jobs don't necessarily have the best income, but they tend to go to people who have graduated college, and graduated elite college. You get more control over your daily life. The bottom 30% of the labor market in the US, because we don't really have effective unions and workplace regulation is quite weak, and we have a lot of poverty that's sort of built into the system, the bottom 30% of the labor market is pretty miserable. You don't get much control over your daily life. You don't get much control over what happens to you during the day. You're under the control of low-level managers, who have very little incentive to care about you, and very little incentive to sort of do well by you, and to think about your future. If you're in the top 10% of the labor market, things are pretty good. If you're a college professor. That's great. 

You get loads of control, just less money. Better health and a longer life. So, there's a very steep social gradient to health and longevity. It's not just where you come from, it's what happens to you during your life that affects that. I think caring about, maybe status, but certainly interesting jobs, control over life, health, we all care about those things. It's not just materialistic, shallow people who care about those things. I'm kind of joking about the money and the status, too. I do understand why people care about those things. I don't really think people are shallow for caring about that. Unfortunately, so, we've got all this. 

We've got a lot of inequality of opportunity, and it's inequality of opportunity that really matters, right? And it looks as though college doesn't do anything about it. The kind of institutions we care about don't really do anything about it. Indeed, they may make it worse. That's not surprising. The inequalities of opportunity are written in very early in life. There are other features of our social environment that make opportunities very unequal. So, this is a study by Snow. It's very well known, if you ever read Paul Tufts' work, you'll have seen this study referred to. It's a fairly large study. What they did, is they looked at children, three year olds, and watched them and saw how many words an hour they were exposed to in the home. 

The working vocabulary of the children in the professional homes was larger than the working vocabulary of the mothers in the welfare homes, okay? Math, learning math in the home, the schools seem to have a real effect on that. You can teach math. Vocabulary, reading, schools don't actually do a great job of teaching reading. I'm not criticizing the schools, it's just we don't know a lot about how to teach reading. We know how to teach decoding. We know how to get people to be able to read words. But reading for comprehension, especially context comprehension. We're not very good at that. We don't really know how to do that well. That seems to come largely from the home. 

That turns out to be a really important skill in our society. Has it always been an important skill? Or has it been as important, or has such a premium attached to it as it now does? It turns out that now it does. So, you've got it set very early. This is a lovely graph. I know, it's not beautifully replicated here. It's not lovely in some sense. You can't even see the dates. [laughter] But this is from Sean Reardon. You've probably may have read about this. There have been various articles in the New York Times about this study, which he did with Spencer Foundation money, I should just add. 

What he did, is he took 13 longitudinal data sets and he compared the black-white test score gap, this is the raw black-white test score gap, with the gap between the top 10% of the income distribution and the bottom 10% income distribution. So what happens over time, the first of those dates, sorry about this, the first of those dates is 1940, and the last is 2000. He traces this over time. What you see, the dotted line is the black-white test score gap. And what you see is the black-white test score gap reducing dramatically over that period in a very straightforward way. Now, there are some questions about it, but by and large, that looks reliable. What you see, also, is you see the gap between the lowest 10% in the income distribution and the highest 10% in income distribution widening just as dramatically. Look at where that widening begins. That widening begins with children born in the late 1970s. That is, children who are born right at the time that income inequality starts to radically increase. 

So between 1950 and 1970, you get a reduction in income inequality. In 1970-80, it increases a little bit. 1980 to now, all of the gains of growth have gone to households in the top 5% of income distribution. All of the gains of growth in our economy in the last 32 years, is it 32 years, yeah, have gone to the top 5% of the income distribution, none to the other 95%. You know, there are gains, like we have better computers, and you know, nicer vacuum cleaners. [laughter] Right, that's very important. But if you look at constant dollar amounts, that's where it's all gone. So I don't think state flagships or elite universities can do a lot about equalizing opportunity. They can do some. This graph is actually from a study that Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, commissioned. 

They looked at the 15 institutions to which they lose students, when they've admitted students. These are the 15 institutions that students go to instead of Penn. And they looked at themselves. What the study does, it looks at the numbers of highly qualified students. Highly qualified students are students who are admissible to these institutions, students with SATs of 1200 or more, I don't know anything about the SAT. My daughter took the PSAT this morning, but she didn't tell me anything about it, so I know nothing about it. I know about the ACT, but not the SAT. 1200 or more on the SAT, plus very high GPAs, you know, plus all those requisite things you have to have, like having gone and volunteered here, there and everywhere, and you know, run lots of miles, or whatever it is you have to do. [laughter] And the blue blocks are the numbers within that quintile, within the 20%, that are highly qualified. Then the red is how well represented those quintiles are within the institutions. 

So what you can see, actually among highly qualified kids from the lowest quintile, almost all of them, they're represented extremely well in these institutions. It's only slightly fewer than are highly qualified that are going to these institutions. What you see, is in the top quintile, lots more have gone to these institutions than are highly qualified. There's a really significant gap there, and it's a significant gap because of the deficits that you see in the middle 60%. This is the squeezed middle class that's very resentful and pissed off, because they think their children are not going to be able to have the opportunities that they have. This is somewhat realistic. There are things, the reason Gutmann commissioned the study was to show there are things that we could to equalize opportunity some. We could do a better job than we do. These are all private institutions. They could do much better than they do. 

I don't know how much better we could do than we do. There's a very detailed study of in-state students at UW Madison. It turns out that the median income of the families of in-state students is only 10% above the median income of those kinds of families in the state as a whole. It's really not that much higher. We have about, I think, 18-20% students on PEL grants from in-state, which is way better then anything else. It's 15% of these 15 schools. Oh, and by the way, that's been constant over decades. It hasn't changed. The profile of our in-state students hasn't changed much at all over the last 50 years. When I found that out I was really delighted and proud, but it is an indication that there's not an awful lot more that we can do to equalize opportunity. 

We'll not do that. I should just say this then. All right. What is it that elite universities really do if they don't equalize opportunity? This is what they do. I told this to a good friend of mine who used to be a president of a small liberal arts college, one of those small liberal arts colleges. He said-- we where discussing this is some detail. This was about four years ago when I was really first thinking about this. And he said, what, you're telling me that my life has been completely wasted? I said, No! I said no. Because the rest of the talk will tell you why it hasn't been completely wasted. It may well have been. 

[laughter]  His son is a hip hop artist. [laughter] So what more can you ask. Just a word about this, I was really struck by this quote in Bob Zemsky, Greg Wegner and Bill Massy's book "Remaking the American University." There's this puzzle among all of us that why it is that higher education has become so much more expensive relative to other things over time. They just say, well, it's obvious. People mistake the purpose of higher education. Most believe the task of universities and colleges is to supply quality educations at reasonable prices. Their real business is to sell competitive advantage at necessarily high prices. What we're in the business of doing is not educating, but credentialing. All right? The reason I decided I would talk about this, they don't think this is a good thing. Just so you know. 

They think this is a really bad thing. But it is what's happened. Since all of the gains of growth have gone to the people in the very top part of the income distribution, and what else do they have to spend all this stuff on? Cocaine? They're going to spend it on their kids getting competitive advantage. They're going to bid up the price of the credentials that give you competitive advantage. That's what they've been doing. So there you are. Okay, public flagships are a little bit different from other elite institutions. They are established by the state, they're more heavily subsidized by the state, not hugely subsidized anymore. How subsidized they are varies from state to state. But they're not really that different. 

Maybe we should abolish them. Why not do that? Or privatize them. We nearly did that a year or two ago. Why would we have these public institutions which are playing this un equalizing opportunity role that I think they play? Well, I've got a very quick answer. One is, do you think that would make anything any better? The injustices would be just as bad without them. I think that we can use flagship state universities and state universities in general to exert pressure to diversify access to elite positions. And this is what I'm going to talk about for most of the rest of the time. They can do a better job of orienting developed talent to socially valuable ends. Remember, the last principle was prioritizing the interests of the less advantaged. That's what I'm going to focus on. 

Then there's just the general conservative principle which I basically believe, that it's easier to destroy good things than to create good things. It's just much easier to do damage than it is create good things. There's lots of good things about Harvard. Don't get me wrong. There's lots of good things about state universities, flagship universities that I think we should preserve. By abolishing them we risk losing those things without creating anything better. I'm going to skip this slide. I don't want to go on and on and on, even though there are enough people in this room who know that I can. Really, you did take the risk of coming here. How does our current undergraduate education system serve the less advantaged? That's what I want to talk about. 

Obviously, not directly through the students we teach. By and large, the students we teach are not the least advantaged, and in more elite institutions, they're not even the less than 50% advantaged. That's not directly how we do it. And whether we do it depends on a variety of factors. Let's go back to Zemsky, Wegner and Massy's comment about competitive advantage. Look, I like to think that we do actually educate people here, as well as credential them. I think we educate them less well than we could. That's one of my key points. But the extent to which we might benefit advantaged depends on whether we're building their human capital or not. If we build the students' human capital, as least it's there to be used to benefit the less advantaged. 

Of course, they can just use it to benefit themselves, maybe as well, but at least there's something there. If we're just credentialing, we're not doing anything to benefit the less advantaged. The extent to which the human capital is used to by the students for the benefit of others rather than themselves matters. I'll come back to this, but, you know, I risk offending people. The thing about being English in this environment is that if you smile and you keep the English accent, people don't notice quite how offensive you're being. [laughter] Though I will say, I tried that out with the TSA the other day and it really did not work well. [laughter]  The last thing is to the extent to which the social capital is developed by the use the undergraduates make of the education that we give them is widely dispersed.  Our undergraduate education focus should be on two things. One is building human capital. That is, we should be trying to instruct effectively and mentor effectively. 

I'll talk about that later. This comment about "later" must be really bothering to you. It's not going to be much later. And we should shape their identities. This is going to be controversial, or might be controversial. I'll talk a bit about that. Before I do I want to tell you some depressing thing again. This shows the decline in state funding for public education over the last 20 years. This is the amount of money per $1,000 of personal income that is being devoted to public higher education. You can see the decline of about 20-25% over the last 20 years. 

If I went back 30 years, the curve is the same however far back you go.  I found this neat set of statistics. This is in constant 2011 dollars. I even found it for public research universities. Over the last ten years, or that's an eight year period, you get a significant, not a massive, but a really significant decline in state and local funding of public colleges. That money is not coming back. All right? That money is not coming back. I'll just tell you one reason why it's not coming back. Suppose you were a legislator in the Wisconsin assembly right now. Suppose suddenly there was a billion dollars. 

Just a billion dollars appeared out of nowhere. Where would you spend it? We just took $600 million out of k-12 education, and even k-12 education is less effective at building human capital than early childhood education. I would, I'll be honest, I would put $400 million into new early childhood, and I'd put the other $600 million back into k-12. I would not give a penny to any public college. Now I might if I were a Republican. If I were a Republican and I was getting lobbied by my constituents who have money and who really want an elite education on the public dollar for their kids. Then I might think about it. But if I were beholden to other interests, and if I really think about human capital development I would not be putting it here. What counts as human capital development? I told some people there was going to be a joke in this talk. This is it. 

When I talk about human capital development, you know, we need an account of we should do for undergraduates. I just give you very quick, a seven point account a few of the students here have just read. Derek Bok's "Our Underachieving Colleges" with me. It's a seven point account of what we should be doing. What counts as building human capital is doing these seven things well for students. Now we'll just say, this is not my account, it's Derek Bok's account. It's not the only account you could have. There's another seven point account which is very popular, especially among high school guidance counselors. You know, the truth is that most students come to college, among other reasons, largely because they want to prepare for a career. They want to go into the world of work. 

They think it will give them an advantage in getting the goods that good work that gets to you. And they're right. It's not the main reason that most of us teach here. It is the main reason that most of our students come here. I think sometimes the labyrinth of our requirements and the labyrinth of the way we do things is quite hard to navigate because we're sort of mismatched between what we want and the students want from us. I've mentioned this account because I think it's important. I think that preparing for a career, one of the things you want to do, if you think about benefiting the less advantaged. You want to find pressure points. We have to serve the students. That sounds reluctant. 

We want to serve the students who come here and we're obliged to serve the students who come here, and what we should be doing is we should be looking for those places where their interests are aligned with the interests of the less advantaged. So how should we think about ourselves? I'm just going to ask a set of questions. What do we do as a department? The university is basically instructional units, which are divided into academic departments, which are organized around disciplines, by and large. There are professional schools too. But what is it that we should be doing? Should we be thinking about our curriculum and our instruction in terms of perpetuating our discipline, or producing future professors? I will just say, in my undergraduate education that was all they were thinking of. And that's what happened to me. I was kind of unimaginative and just did what I was told, and there I was. Or producing future lawyers or Wall Street bankers? Some institutions, basically, that's their role. Or contributing to the enhancing and development of future public servants. Public servants may be in the public sphere, but also in business. 

America's business is business. I don't mean to denigrate the private sector here. There are really important things that are done in the private sector. The 0.05% of our best students who are going to become professors should indeed consume some of our focus, but should not consume most of our focus when we're thinking about curriculum instruction. In my opinion we should be thinking much more broadly about that. Improving the quality of instruction, this is just for the faculty here. Who looks at and provided feedback on your research? Other faculty, people you really respect. You are in a world of continuous improvement, continuous life-long education. You're always getting other people to look at stuff and give you feedback on it. You're always looking at their stuff. 

You find people who you admire, who do it well. You watch them. Who does this about your teaching? -- is a philosopher at UC-San Diego. I don't know if this sounds rude. He said, teaching is rather like urinating. The thing about urinating is that you do it in private and nobody watches you. And you don't really remember whether anybody taught you to do it or not. [laughter] I get feedback on my teaching. Post-tenure the feedback I get on my teaching is all solicited. It's through evaluations. 

It's also through me saying to students, daring them basically, to criticize me. To say, okay, I think this went wrong. Did it? And they'll say, yes. I have hired somebody to criticize my teaching. I hired a student to sit in my classes and tell me what I'm doing wrong, which she did with great aplomb. It was a lot of fun. No, I mean, it was fantastic. I hired her because I knew she would tell me the truth. I actually think the people in this institution who know the most about teaching are all undergraduate students. Undergraduate students have a much-- Sorry. 

All of them are undergraduate students, but it's not all undergraduate students. My guess is about 10% of the undergraduates really know a lot about teaching. The problem for us is to figure out who they are and then get them to tell us the truth. Those are two really difficult things. But you see a lot of people teaching, you see a lot of different kinds of teaching. You know what worked for you. You know what worked for your fellow students, who are not you. Lots of whom are unlike you are. You might think, as I did with some of my teachers, wow! This is like it was set up for me! It's like somebody built an entire institution thinking, we've got somebody who's reasonably smart, unimaginative, compliant and interested in philosophy. We'll do the whole thing to that person. 

Not everybody's like that. Thank goodness. Knowing that somebody's a good teacher for me does not tell me they're a good teacher for somebody else. So lots of students have a better understanding of their peers than I do. I'm going to skip through this because I want to get to comments about-- Well, this is about mentoring. I'm nearly done, by the way. I promise you. You didn't give me a time limit. I sort of gave myself one, but-- And it was shorter than this. [laughter] No more than five minutes more. 

This is just about mentoring. We sort of mentor people by our decisions. All the micro-decisions you make when you don't even think your making them. We make micro-decisions about, am I going to talk so-and-so. Am I going to not talk to so-and-so? Am I in a hurry? Am I just going to hang around in this room until I get pushed out of this room? Some of you are familiar with that in a current class I'm teaching. Am I going to ask this student who walks into my office and says, I want to go to graduate school, am I going to ask why? Or, that sounds interesting. Or am I just going to say, no, I've got the next thing to do. Are we going to mentor the people who are really interesting in what we're interested in? Or are we going to mentor people more broadly. Faculty who only mentor the people who are interested in what they're interested in, that's about 5% of the students and the rest are left out. Those really interested in the stuff you're interested in. 

And we mentor by default. We make decisions by-- Sorry. We make decisions about mentoring by default. This is all a criticism of me for the first ten years of my career. I was not reflective about this stuff for the first ten years of my career. I'm not criticizing anybody else. I'm criticizing the me that had an even stronger English accent. I'm just going to skip through to something that somebody said to me. This really stood out for me. This is one of the reasons I love teaching here. 

You meet students who are smarter than me. A lot of students are smarter than me. I'm not bothered about that. A lot of students are sort of humblingly better people than I am. This is a student who wanted a letter of recommendation from me to go to a social work program. I said, why do you want to be a social worker? This is what she said. There was no judgement here. There's no judgement of other people. It's not even a judgement of me which there bloody well should have been. I found this very moving and very humbling. 

When I was thinking about what to do with my life I think I though things like this but I did not think them in the way that she does. I knew about this student, with the "experiences I've had," I knew what those experiences where. I knew that the experiences she was talking about, all the ones that presented obstacles to learning and success in life that I know I would not have overcome. I know that a whole bunch of people in this room wouldn't have overcome them. I'm not going to tell you what they were, but I know I couldn't have overcome them. That was very moving for me. I learned a lot. I've learned a lot from this student about what my job is. Okay. Last two things. 

Stanley Fish. Let have a word about Stanley Fish. It's always nice to talk about Stanley Fish. He says you should save the world on your own time. Professors should not be moralists, therapists, political counselors and agents of global change. I love the agents of global change bit. [laughter] They should only "produce and disseminate academic knowledge and train those who will up that task in the future." Now, if only 0.5% of people went to college, this sounds great to me. And if that 0.5%-- If graduating college had no relationship at all to the competition to the unfairly and unequally distributed goods in our society, it would still sound great to me. Fantastic, let's go for that. But that's not the world we live in. 

Actually, in that world I would have this job. Just to be clear. There would not be very many college professors, and I certainly wouldn't be one of them. It might be a better world even, but it's not our world. In our world we basically require people to go to college in order to have access to good, well-paying jobs, interesting jobs, etc. We should be sensitive to that in the way that we go about our jobs. Now I'm at the last slide, I promise. You can tell because it's got a little crest on it. I just wanted to say-- oh bugger, it didn't come up right. [laughter] I should have-- Oh, I haven't animated it properly. 

I'll just tell you. This is just something about how public colleges are indeed, or can be, special. Howard Gardner told me this, and I've actually seen several different estimates of the percentage of Harvard graduates in 2007 not going on to law school or graduate school, but graduates who went into Wall Street. He said 65%, but I've read elsewhere 47%. Howard is a little bit prone to exaggeration. Then I went to the UWM school of nursing. I said, well, how many of your graduates have got jobs on Wall Street. It turns out, zero percent, not any of them. It turns out that 95%, more than 95%, have got jobs in nursing. Now, capital markets are very valuable. 

Having capital markets be efficient is very valuable for everybody. But the idea that the most talented, most privileged people in our society will be all going into making capital markets efficient-- I would be embarrassed if I ran Harvard University, which I never will. I would find that embarrassing. Howard Gardner does find it embarrassing. He's been at Harvard all his life as far as I can tell, and he finds it embarrassing. I'm pretty proud to be in an institution where 95% of the graduates where becoming nurses. Nurses, they're the ones by the way-- I'm not going to offend anybody here. They're the ones who make you better. They're the one on whom health actually depends. They get paid less than the other ones, you know, the doctors. 

So I'm done. [applause]