Factually! with Adam Conover - How the Student Debt Complex Crushes Students Potential with Caitlin Zaloom

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

NYU professor Cailtin Zaloom joins Adam discuss the student debt industry, why we shouldn't force students to think about finances when pursuing their education, and what steps we can take to change higher education for the better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And hey, you might have noticed there's an election going on right now. We've got one of those happening again right on schedule. And in the election, there's a debate going on in the Democratic primary about whether or not college should be free. And if so, for who or whom, depending on how grammatical you want to be. Now, to some people, free public college sounds like a radical idea. I mean, college is more expensive than ever, so the idea that it should be free instead seems like an out-there fantasy, like a hobo dreaming about the Big Rock Candy Mountain. But the truth is, you might be surprised to learn, college actually used to be free in the United

States, or at the very least, accessible. See, college attendance in the U.S. exploded after World War II, and that was because we created a wealth of programs aimed at making higher education affordable and accessible. First, the GI Bill made college cheap for a generation of veterans. It provided money for tuition and books, along with counseling services and even a living allowance. And it enrolled almost 8 million people, 10 times more than were expected. So suddenly, college wasn't just something for country clubbers with weird

collars on their shirts. It was for everybody. Of course, the word everybody in the 1940s and 50s overwhelmingly meant men, and especially white men. But then in 1965, President Johnson signed the Higher Education Act, which promoted greater access for women and minorities as well, and it devoted government funds for things like tuition grants, guaranteed loans, and work study. And it wasn't just the federal government. States kicked in a ton of money as well. And as a result, state schools grew explosively. The University of California system, for instance, built four new campuses in the 50s and 60s. And in 1968, college tuition at the University of California was free for California residents. You only had to pay a $300 yearly registration fee, which was less than 4% of household income at the time.

So you could literally send your kid to school for 4% of your income. And the UC system became a model for state universities as engines of social mobilities for the students in those states. And many other states followed its example. The result was an America where college was cheap or nearly free for anyone who qualified to go. And in the decades following the Higher Education Act, American college enrollment would triple. But sadly, the generation that benefited most from this massive public investment in higher education would preside over its demise.

States started reneging on the commitments that they'd made to their own populations, cutting funds devoted to public universities. Between 2008 and 2017, states collectively cut spending to colleges and universities by 16 percent just in nine years. And sometimes those were dramatic changes. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker cut 250 million dollars from the system in his state in 2011. But his policies were just an extreme example of a decades-long trend that we have seen across the country. And to make up for those missing funds, public universities jacked up tuition.

While the UC schools are still some of the best engines for social mobility in the United States, adjusted for inflation, a year of tuition at the UC costs six times as much today as it did 40 years ago. Another way they tried to make up the shortfall was by admitting more and more out-of-state students who pay higher tuition. So now the student body of public schools increasingly looks more and more like those of private schools, privileged out-of-state students who can pay rather than the homegrown kids in need of an education that the schools were designed to serve. The result is that tuition at public schools has

increased 213% in just the last 30 years, and private schools have gotten way more expensive as well. At the school I went to, Bard College, the cost of tuition has more than doubled since I went there in the early 2000s, just 15 years ago. And hey, remember those federal grants that made college accessible or nearly free to so many in the boomer days? Well, they have since been replaced by private loans, which are now the main source of college funding for middle class and poor students. And combine that with the fact that tuition is rising almost eight times faster than wages, and you have the college debt crisis we're living with today.

Today, our collective student debt totals almost $1.5 trillion, an amount that is burdening and diminishing the lives of adults across the country. We've gone from a world where college was once basically free to anyone who wanted to go to a world where in order to go to college, you have to saddle yourself with massive amounts of destructive debt. So how do we get here? How do students and families traverse the challenges of paying for college in this world? And what can we do to fix it? Well, to answer that question, our guest today is Caitlin Zaloum. She's a professor at NYU and the author of Indebted, How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. She has conducted

extensive research and interviews with folks out there. She knows exactly what it is like on the ground today, and I'm so excited to have her on the show. Please welcome Caitlin Zaloun. Caitlin, thank you so much for being on the show. Great to be here. So you wrote a book called Indebted about the incredible burden that students and families are taking on and how that affects their education and their lives going forward. Tell me about that work, what you discovered and how you came to it. I came to it because my students brought it to me.

I work at NYU, one of the most expensive universities in the country, and it kind of showed up again and again in my classroom, in my office. Students would come to me to tell me about the challenges that they were facing, both trying to get an education and carry the debt they took on for that education. And how does carrying that amount of debt affect their educations and their lives going forward? It must be an enormous effect. It is an enormous effect. In part, they take on the debt because they participate in building a dream with their parents. They want to go to a school where they can really explore their interests, get to know what their talents are, to kind of figure out who their people are going to be in the world. But that is very, very expensive today. And it

then puts limits on who they can become. So they end up changing what education they pursue as a result of the debt? They feel a lot of pressure to do things like major in business or in economics or to do things that are, you know, quote unquote, practically minded because they understand that they will graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt that they will have to repay. Others sort of bracket that reality while they're in college, but then face the consequences of that debt afterward. So the debt both puts pressure on what students feel they can study, and then it also puts pressure on what they feel that they can do with their education once they graduate. And that, it seems like that changes our entire notion of what education is for,

if we're looking at it that way. Absolutely. It focuses us very closely on jobs and income and restricts our ideas about education to a very narrow band, which we haven't had traditionally in the United States. We've really thought about education in a much more expansive lens. And that also doesn't even get into how much of the debt is for an education that might not be worth the money. I mean, I assume if someone gets, like if someone takes out $100,000 in debt to go to NYU, that's a good education. Or at least we can debate exactly how good it is, but hey, it's NYU, right? But there's also now private colleges or very much fly-by-night colleges that are receiving funds from the government and from tuition that students are taking out loans in order to go to these schools. And the degrees may not be very good. And those, I imagine that those schools are also exploiting marginalized communities as well.

Absolutely. One of the worst parts of the higher education sector are for-profit colleges, which essentially take the loans that students have available to them. They deliver a very dubious quality of education. them. They deliver a very dubious quality of education. They have abysmal graduation rates, and they take the funds from the students and they put them into the pockets of investors. And so you see people who are like, oh, I've got, you know, $80,000 in student loans, and I actually don't have a degree worth anything. That's right. I mean, that is certainly too frequently the case for for-profit colleges. Now, for the kinds of non-profit four-year universities, again, if we talk about averages,

then a graduate from those schools will, over the long run, make enough money to pay back those loans on average. But again, people don't experience their lives as averages. And so the question for me and what I spoke to students and parents about for Indebted was how does the amount of money that parents and students alike are committed to paying change their relationships? And also, how does that change young adults' ideas about the future and future possibilities? Because we can draw averages that say that over the long run that a degree will pay off in terms of income, but also, of course, education is about much more than income alone. And the fact that we talk about it primarily as income is already a kind of switch that didn't always hold true. So you're saying it can change your view of what education means generally.

Is that the idea? Yes. So we have really restricted the idea of what college education is for. When we debate college education publicly, it's about the value of a degree and the value of a degree almost exclusively. value of a degree almost exclusively. So that the question is, does this amount of money that I am putting toward an education pay off in terms of my income later on? That is a really, really narrow idea about what higher education is for. And it also focuses us primarily on the idea that an education is a private benefit to a private individual.

Now, that wasn't always the way that we thought about higher education in this country. And I think that that's something that we should question. Rather than a public benefit that all of us derive some good from, like if I'm, if, if the kid down the block is educated, that actually does benefit me a bit because I live in a society with that kid and that kid is gonna, could grow up and discover a great invention or I don't know, do whatever the fuck, go work for NASA or, you know, do something great,

right? Is going to contribute to the world in which I live. And it's a worse world for me if I live in a world full of people who only have high school or sub-high school educations. I think that having people with broad college educations does benefit us all. And it's not only these kind of moonshot investors that you might think about or that might come to mind in a kind of Silicon Valley model. Let's talk about teachers. Teachers have to go to college. Teachers come to our communities when they finish school and they educate our children. And they also build the communities. Schools are communities. There are places where people come together to decide together how to raise the next generation and how to educate them. We need teachers. And so when we we talk about a college education as only a private benefit, we're ignoring that whole

contribution that people like teachers make. Right. And so what I think you're drawing attention to is that we used to have more of that ethos in the United States that, you know, the history that I talked about in the introduction about how, you know, this massive investment in public higher education that was made through the GI Bill, the states did it, was really about like, hey, it's a better world for everyone, the more people have access to an education that was like a pretty bedrock American belief for 100 years. And it led to really incredible social mobility and like a flourishing of what Americans were able to do. You said before we started rolling that you went to UC Berkeley, right? I got my PhD at UC Berkeley.

Got it. Well, our, you know, a guest we had on the show earlier a few months ago, Scott Galloway, I think I've even mentioned this before. But he, something that he said really stuck with me, this before, but he, something that he said really stuck with me, which is that he said, you know, he was the recipient of the greatest like gift that a society could give because he was like a mediocre student and a child of a single mother, didn't come from money, right? And he was able to go get a world-class education at, I think he said UC Berkeley. It was a UC school for a very affordable amount. He was able to pay for it with lower middle class funds, as so many people in California have been able to do.

And now it seems like that is no longer our ethos. We no longer are investing in our own fellow citizen, in kids that way, the way that we used to. Why is that? You're completely right that that has been a major, major shift. I mean, for instance, today, the University of California at Los Angeles gets 7% of its funding from the state of California. Wow. So it is a public university in name only.

Really? Yes. So that's just an illustration of where we've landed. And where's the rest of its funding coming from? Is it private donations? Is it tuition? You don't obviously need to do the whole pie chart, but. Yeah, it's basically philanthropy and tuition. So what we've seen is that for decades,

states across the country have been cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting higher education budgets. Now, where are colleges and universities going to get the money to deliver the education they're committed to from students? Right. And from philanthropy, if they're the kind of school that can attract philanthropy and has wealthy graduates. And, you know, luckily, UCLA is one of those schools. UC Berkeley is also one of those schools. UC Berkeley is also one of those schools. Another way that schools have come up with funds is to attract out-of-state and out-of-country students who are paying very high tuition rates. But this then squeezes the seats that are available for in-state students, or it dilutes the student population. It means that

the faculty are serving more and more students. So, you know, there is a real consequence to changing the way that we pay for college. And, you know, this is not necessarily how it had to go. And that's changed the way that we think about college too, right? Like the more that the cost has been pushed onto the students, the more we see this as, like, as you said, a private service that the students are buying for their benefit. Like one thing that always strikes me is anyone who's followed my work knows that I've railed against the NCAA for not paying athletes that, you know, honestly, I find it. I was just watching an NCAA game with my dad over the Thanksgiving break.

And, you know, I'm like, these people are I'm an entertainer. I'm on TV. People are selling ads next to my face. I expect to get paid. These folks are doing the exact same thing. We're spending Thanksgiving, you know, spending two hours watching this game. We're watching Carl's Jr.'s ads in between. Why aren't the people providing the service that we came here to watch getting paid?

Very basic, right? And what people will say, the first thing they always say is, well, they're getting a free education. That's what they get. They get a free education. Now, first of all, if you compare that to tuition, well, what school are they going to, right? Because if they're going to, you know, Cal State versus Harvard, then they're receiving a very different amount of money. But but B, that didn't used to be something that we saw as what is what is included in the premise of that question included in it is the

idea that going to college is a luxury good that is supposed to be expensive. And you either need to be rich or you need to get like, basically you need to accept it in lieu of wages where like, that's a new idea. Like we didn't use to think about education that way. It used to be something that no, everyone should have access to, um, that was like good for us. And we're gonna, you know, like a public library or a public high school, we're gonna like make it something. No one ever, no one ever says that about a high school player, right? About like, why are like, oh, well, they're getting a free education. No, because we just expect that people get that education. So that's right. It's really changed our, our psychic like orientation towards what

this thing is in a way. And it's done that in, in other ways as well. So when students have to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to attend college, it also reorients how they think about figuring out what you're good at, what you like, who you want to participate in the world with, and how you're going to change the world to make it closer to your vision. When students come in with a heavy load of debt, then what they see in their minds is whether or not this education is going to allow them to pay back that debt. So then you have people coming into my office saying, well, I would love to major in anthropology, but a business degree is going to allow me to pay down my debt. Right. I would love to think about history, but I have to major in economics because it's practical.

So the pressure of the debt starts changing a calculus for students when they walk in the college door, but it even works on families before that too. How does it work on families? Well, for families that have the intention of sending their kid to college, they sometimes start thinking about the cost in the days after a kid is born. So it is one of the earliest waits that parents feel, and it is a kind of goal that is 18 years out. Now, there are many messages that parents get about college, particularly middle-class parents who are presumed to be able to pay some of this enormous cost that we've been talking about. Those parents who have jobs like teachers and nurses and social workers and career military

people, these people have to start figuring out how to both save money, because that's what they're being told they have to do, save money for the tens of thousand dollars they'll have to spend, and then also to spend money on preparing their kid to be ready for college. Spend money on crazy things like a house in a decent school district where their kid can get the best education that they can afford. And so they end up looking at it entirely economically, though. So the parents as well look at this education as, okay, this is something that we are sinking money into. And the kids are like, this is like, I'm taking on debt for, therefore, this education must have

economic output, otherwise we've all wasted money or burdened ourselves with debt. I mean, that's not, you know, if you're in that situation, you're not entirely wrong to say, okay, I need to make a fucking salary or I'm not going to be able to, you know, pay off this loan. So why shouldn't we think about education in those economic terms? What's lost when we do that? Well, one thing that I found doing the interviews with parents and students for Indebted was that they do think about the economics of it very carefully. other side to the issue, which is that parents and students alike want those college years to be about students finding their talents and skills. So my focus on the importance of education for

developing talents and skills and for bringing them to their communities, that is something that I got from the parents and students. I was actually more concerned on the economics side of it before I did these interviews. But it was parents and students who really showed to me that they wanted more than anything for these young adults to be able to figure out who they wanted to be and how they wanted to contribute

and to not think so much about the finances. In fact, many families would mask how much they were paying from the students because they didn't want the students to be in college thinking about how much burden their education was putting on their parents. Wow. But I'm sure there are some folks who say, though, if your criticism is that this financialization pushes kids towards economics degrees or business degrees or maybe law school, although that's even more debt, but maybe it pays off even more, right? Well, some might say, well, those are the jobs that society needs done the most. That's why they make so much money, right? It's supply and demand.

There's more demand and less supply for these jobs, and we need more economists and more MBAs and more lawyers. That's why they're paid more. So therefore, a system that incentivizes kids to take those jobs is doing its job, right? That would be the very, I imagine, blunt economic view of it. What would be your answer to it? Well, I would say that for some kids, they would find that that is what they wanted to do. But again, I would go back to teachers, one of the bedrock middle-class occupations that we have that does not pay particularly well. Teachers across the country are facing not only constrained salaries, but eroded jobs. It doesn't just not pay particularly well. It pays badly.

It pays badly. I was underplaying that. It pays very badly given the level of training and the level of significance that teachers bring to our lives. Yeah, how important it is. Every single person in America, I think, agrees

teachers are very important. Right, right. So I don't know why we would take students who might be interested in becoming teachers and shuffle them off toward business. That to me doesn't make sense. was a young woman who was really interested in politics and kind of getting involved in her community and in organizing and who, because of her debt, ended up taking a job helping companies outsource employment beyond the boundaries of the United States. Yeah. beyond the boundaries of the United States. Yeah. She came to my office in tears,

and I was completely shocked because she was about to graduate, and I thought that she was going off into the world that would welcome her with open arms, and there she was crying on my doorstep because she'd been offered this high-paying job that was going to allow her to pay down her debt, but which was also going to undermine exactly what she wanted

to do. And her family, and particularly her mother, had really rallied to try to make her education possible so that she wouldn't have to face those constraints. Yeah. Like, her family didn't want her to take the job either, or that wasn't the sort of future that they wanted for her. That was not the future that they wanted for her at all. And that was not the future that she wanted for herself. And more than anything, what they wanted was for her to be able to discover her talents and to use them.

Which is, yeah, I think that's what most people want from their kids when they send them to college. Right, it's not that shocking. Some parents are like, you're going to be the doctor. I went to school with kids who had parents like that, and that was a struggle for them, but that's not really the majority. It's not necessarily the majority at all, but once we pile debt onto these young adults' lives,

it shifts the kinds of decisions that they feel like they can make. I mean, we know, for instance, that young adults who have college debt delay marriage, delay buying a home, and make other kinds of big decisions in relation to whether or not they're going to be able to do it alongside paying off their debt. I mean, it's one of those things that it seems utterly commonsensical, but we need kind of reams of Federal Reserve report data to confirm what we should already know. reserve report data to confirm what we should already know. Yeah. I mean, just thinking about the ways that that amount of student debt, I know folks who are struggling with debt. I'm 36. I have friends who are my age and still have six figures of student debt in some cases. And the way that that affects all of your choices in your life in ways that are not optimal, right? Even if you're looking at it through a narrow economic lens, right?

You end up making choices that don't maximize your productivity or your desires in the world or that fulfill what you think of as a good life because you've got this albatross on your back. Yeah, have you seen that as well? Is that in your book as well? Well, so that is absolutely true. I mean, there's no question that debt is an albatross that young adults carry into their lives. I mean, my concern in Indebted is really about the years that lead up to the college decision, because I felt like that was the time of life that was even covered less. Like we know in some ways about the albatross that young adults have to carry and what that does to them. Although sometimes we have to kind of restate it over and over to get ourselves to believe it. But it was these years leading up to the college decision that I wanted to focus on more.

So, for instance, families have to deal with the pressures of this college cost from very early on, but it also extends this dependence that they have on each other for years afterwards. So this is a condition that I call enmeshed autonomy. And it's kind of ironic because what college is supposed to do is to give young adults independence. It's supposed to help them figure out what they want to do, how they want to shape their lives, and give them the ability to go off and do that, to take their own path. But when it costs not only them so much, but also their families so much,

what that means is that they're enmeshed with their families for many, many, many, many years afterwards. So, for instance, now in their 20s, there are more young adults taking money from their parents than ever before. And that's on top of the payments that those families will have made to get them to college. And living with their parents. That's a trend we all know about, that more and more young adults are having to, after college, move back in with their parents. So yeah, so they become, basically it continues that dependency relationship for a

longer time. Is that the argument? are redirecting money that could be used to secure their own retirements. Now, why it is that we- Which is an entirely different financial crisis. The retirement crisis that is coming because of all the boomers who are getting very old and don't have any money, who are going to be living off of a combination of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. But it's not enough to have the life that most people would want. And yeah, that's an entirely different issue that this is exacerbating,

you're saying. Exactly, exactly. It's very much playing into it. You know, I would actually even say it's the same issue that the parents who have to direct so much money to supporting their children and do it at the cost of their own future security are going to be part of this retirement crisis, as we call it. But again, I feel like it's a shock that we shouldn't be so surprised about in the first place, that parents want to support their children first. Yeah. You talk about this idea in the book called social speculation. Can you tell me about that? That's sort of enmeshed with the idea of social mobility, that that's what we've counted on colleges to do is provide social mobility. But yeah, there's this related concept you've introduced. Yeah. So social speculation is the idea that parents and students have to commit money now

for an uncertain future. Now, that is a really different kind of idea than social mobility or something that feminist scholars have called social reproduction, like the idea that you can be pretty much like your parents were. And what we've seen is that it's become actually more and more difficult for people to be like their parents were, and that college is essential and even trying. So in order to take a shot at either getting to the top of our incredibly unequal society or even to remain in the middle.

Just to tread water. Just to tread water. People have to put money down now in order to take their shot. Yeah. And we've seen that over the past couple of generations, I believe, I don't remember an exact statistic, but that, you know, the young people now are one of the first generations that is not doing better than their parents. That social mobility is working backwards and that that's new and bad. Yes, it is new and bad. Just if anybody wasn't clear, it's bad.

But it is also very, very particular. So if you are a middle-class parent and you want to raise a middle class kid, not only is your job and your life probably more precarious than your parents, you might make a similar kind of income that they do, but there are things like health care and education that will simply cost way more than anything parents ever had to pay. So that results in a kind of precarity for the middle class that we have to think of as the kind of baseline from which they then also have to pay for their children's college education, for trying to allow their kids to have opportunities. So yeah, just to give you, just to take that example, personalize it a little bit.

Like my grandfather, you know, was in World War II and really reaped all the benefits that we've talked about. My mother is, you know, got a PhD, you know, et cetera, lived a middle class life but the cost that she has to pay like college, like retirement like healthcare are so much higher than my grandfather had to deal with that even if she's able to prosper in exactly the

same way or have exactly the same amount of income, the costs have gone up so much that we've still backslid in a way That's right And how are things going to be for me? have gone up so much that we've still backslid in a way. That's right. And for parents- And how are things going to be for me? Exactly.

That's where I was going to go. So parents who might be your age, that's going to be another enormous break. I mean, that's what I found in my interviews with parents for Indebted that they oftentimes were really taken aback by how much college was going to cost. They found themselves really kind of shocked by it because their own experience had been so very different. Yeah. Well, everything you've been saying puts me in mind of a question that I've been struggling with myself about my own life, my own history, my own college experience that I would really love to put to you. But let's take a quick break first. I'll give it

to you after the break because right now I've got to read some ads. So right back with more Caitlin Zaloum. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. All right, we're back with Caitlin Zaloum talking about college, college debt. So here's the question that I've been having. I went to my 15-year college reunion earlier this year. I went to a really wonderful school called Bard College, private college, one of the most expensive in the country. But I had the experience that when you've been talking about, here's what we would like

our students to have, that's the experience that I had. I was so thankfully able to graduate with no debt because my folks, my dad's a college professor, they saved up like the exact amount that they needed, took out some, you know, midsize loans. But, you know, it was only in my 30s that I started to realize how much they lived beneath their means in order to save like this amount for me and my sister to be able to go. And so I was able to, you know, while I was there, not have that pressure on me of, oh, I have to figure out what my career is going to be. I can explore, you know, and I remember having the experience of, you know, the first year trying to choose my classes. And they had this really crazy ass system at Bard where like instead of like signing up online, all the professors would sit behind tables and you had to like run to the table to like sign up for the class.

And people like make lines and stuff like it was it was like black friday of signing up for classes it was really weird i hope they don't do it that way anymore um but uh in any case so so i missed a couple classes i wanted to take and i in a panic it was like sign up was ending i ended up i was like i'll take a philosophy class right and uh i fell in love with that philosophy class i fell in love with the discipline and i was like, I just want to learn everything I can about this. And that's what I ended up spending the rest of my college career studying. And that is, hey, that sounds like, oh, you know, it sounds useless. Sounds like a poetry degree or not that a poetry degree is useless, but it sounds like the archetypical, you know, airy liberal arts education. But really, that led me to doing comedy,

right? That comedy is so similar to philosophy in that you're always asking why, you're always undermining what you think you know, you're always asking why, you're always saying, why do we do things this way? You're always looking for the ideas that underpin our actions. things this way. You're always looking for the ideas that underpin our actions. And so that ability to explore is what led me to the career that I have. And that was so, so, so formative to me. So when I was there for my reunion, I was walking around the campus going, wow, this was so incredible to be here. What an incredible experience I had. And the question that came to my mind was, what was this experience? Was this something that, you know, because I was there with another friend of mine who's a college teacher now. She's a college professor at a smaller school. And she said, man, that's not what it's like for my students. You know, my students aren't having

the experience that we did going to this school. And that made me ask, well, this experience that we had, was this the educational equivalent of a first class seat? A first class seat is really nice. When you sit in a first class seat on a plane, you think, wow, this is so super sweet. Everyone should get to fly like this. But the fact is they can't because the first class seat exists. Because the first class seat exists, everybody in the back is more cramped and is more jammed in, you know, and has worse access to everything, et cetera. The first class seat actually makes stuff worse for everybody else. And ideally, we should get rid of the first class seats and just make sure everybody has enough room.

You know what I mean? So was this education like, obviously, I was lucky and privileged to have it and I can go to my reunion and wish, God, I wish everyone could have that experience. But is that an experience that we can provide to everybody in the education system? Is that a pipe dream or not? Well, we're really lucky in the United States to have a lot of different kinds of colleges and universities. I mean, Bard is definitely one kind of campus-based, four-year, really intensive liberal arts experience that is amazing and formative, obviously. But there are many, many different kinds of college education.

Now, what you're talking about in terms of learning how to think, learning how to question, learning how to take apart an idea and also to consider, like, why do we do things this way? And how might we do them better? That's not a barred education. That's just education. Right. And it is something that is absolutely available to everyone. It should be available in all classrooms everywhere. And it's not a luxury to be able to ask those kinds of questions. In fact, it is...

Or it should not be a luxury. Right, right. Sorry. It should not be a luxury to have space and time to not only ask those questions, but to understand that confronting how we do things today and questioning how we might do them differently and better is part of what it means to be a participant in our democracy. And that is a part of an educational philosophy that goes all the way back to the early 20th century. That is a foundational idea about what higher education is in this country. John Dewey taught us those lessons in the progressive era. Right. And we lived them out and fulfilled them to a large extent.

Yeah. And that has been a continuous part of what educators and students have been committed to together as a project. Now, it really wasn't until this kind of idea about a very specialized idea of education came in with the Cold War and the need for kind of more scientists and engineers on the one hand. And then in the 80s, when we started to say education isn't really about this questioning thing, education really is a private benefit that we can measure in income. That we kind of sidelined that lesson about the importance of higher education for democracy. And also the lesson that higher education for democracy and also the lesson that higher education is a public good.

It provides the materials that people use out in their communities to help build communities. It isn't something that we only take home to our little suburban house and use it to generate dollars. Yeah. That actually really helps me answer my question because it's as though the sort of rarefied experience that I had, right? Obviously, not everyone can go to the very same school that I did. And obviously, we can't just create a lot more schools like that. I think anyone who works at Bard would tell you the president would tell you this sort of education should be available to everyone. It's a little bit like a country club, right?

Like if you go to a country club that is very expensive to get into, you got to be really rich to go to the country club and say, well, am I so privileged that I have the to an open space with trees and clean air you know is well we can't let everybody into the country club and not everyone can be rich so what's going on here like no everyone should have access to that space we should have parks we should have public parks right that's something we all agree that we should have and

that doesn't mean country club can't exist necessarily to as long as it's not the exclusion of public goods as well. But you're saying that component of it is something that – the component of the education itself really is something that can and should be a public benefit and has been. It has been in American history, and it is only in recent years that it has become not that. That's right. And it absolutely has been a part of American history and even continues to be. And I think that it's so important to recognize all of the ways in which educators, parents, and students together commit themselves to this project every single day in their classrooms. I mean, I'm here in New York City, and this happens at the City University

of New York, at City College, at Brooklyn College, at one of the places where I had one of my first jobs, Borough of Manhattan Community College. These are all places where students and teachers together work to create environments where they question the status quo, where they take apart philosophy and learn to think about concepts in new ways and to think about how we can do things differently. You know, the issue isn't that we've completely changed why education exists or even that there is a commitment to it. I really saw how committed parents and students are to education for Indented.

The issue is that now in order to get that education, we have saddled people with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and this incredibly high cost that their parents have to pay so that they now have to think almost first about how they're going to pay back the loans that they've taken out rather than to exercise all of these new muscles that they've built through their education. Yeah. So I'm sorry. I didn't mean to overstate it. It's not that educational culture and commitment is extinct in America. It's just that the structural, we've added this like structural burden that gets in the way of many, many people experiencing. I was so fortunate and privileged as to not have that barrier between me and the education and to not have that burden placed on me. But it is being placed on so many people in America today, and it should not be.

It should not be. So what are the, what can we do to make sure that it isn't? What should we be changing in order to make sure that the education that we all, that I had, that I want so many other people to have, that people want for themselves, that people want for their children, that it's accessible. Right. So the first thing that we need to do is to focus on the cost of the education. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, tuition in public colleges and universities should be free. It should be free for all four years, and it should be free for people whose families make $25,000, and it should be free for people

whose families make $250,000. I agree. I believe that it is a public good. We should think about college education as an extension of the public education system that we all agree should exist in K through 12. Yeah. And we should think now about K through 16 public education.

That is such a good way to put it. Just call it K through 16. Like everyone understands. We've built an economy where you need more than the 12th in order to prosper. And honestly, we end up with better educated citizens, with better voters, with better communities when we do that 16. So let's just extend it. And yeah, this idea that, this is the most I'll ever wade into contemporary politics on this show.

The idea that like, oh, we should not make that available to everyone, that it's going to be a problem if rich people are able to benefit from it. That is so, that is not the essence of a public good. We don't say like, hold on a second. Now you can only go to Central Park if you don't have a backyard. You know, we don't, we don't test it that way because the point is a public good is for everyone. And that is one of the ways that I can buy books. I still go to the library because I get a lot of benefit from the library because then I'm with other people and because I'm introduced to books I wouldn't encounter otherwise

and because they have programs. A good that benefits everyone is better than a good that only benefits a few, and it's safer from being destroyed by political interests that want to destroy it. Exactly. Or the other alternative would be to set up little booths at the entry to public parks and say, excuse me, but I need a copy of your tax return. Right. Exactly. Thank you. That was a really good heightening of my joke. You should consider a career in comedy writing. Yeah, so I absolutely agree with that. But let me ask you a question

about the cost of tuition. How much should we be blaming the schools themselves? Because a lot of these schools will tell you, and I've spoken to folks from my own school saying, hey, the cost of this school has doubled. Yet you say, the administrators of the school, that you are committed to reducing the cost of education, yet the sticker price has doubled, right? And one of the things they'll tell you is, well, that's just the sticker price, right? We discount it, we have aid, we have benefits. That's like just – that's just the starting. Now, that's kind of weird because what if you don't qualify? Then you end up – if you're a middle-class person, you end up getting stuck with that higher bill.

But is there validity to that argument and is – are the people running the schools to blame, or is there another source here? There are parallel developments that have happened in colleges and universities. First is that the tenure-track faculty has gotten squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. There are many fewer of us now than there used to be, and more and more and more students are now taught by adjunct professors. Now, adjunct professors can be completely committed to their students. They can be excellent instructors, but they are paid at a pittance of what tenure-track faculty make. They make money per class, and they're much cheaper for universities overall.

There's even been a unionization movement among adjunct professors at some schools, I remember, correct? Yes, there is a movement for unionization among adjuncts. And I think that that makes a lot of sense. precarious teaching labor, the administrative tier in universities, the kind of highly paid sort of executive level people have created more and more and more positions that are filled with others like themselves. So while the teaching staff is getting paid worse, the administrators are getting paid more and there are more of them. Is that though – I mean, okay, so that's a bad trend. But when we're talking about how much tuition has gone up, right, it still seems to boggle the mind.

Like, again, my school more than doubled since I graduated in 2004, which is not that – 15 years ago. Now, the number of staff hasn't doubled. The cost of keeping – they haven't built that many new buildings. You know what I mean? The cost of heating the buildings hasn't doubled. I went to the reunion. I'm like, nothing around here looks twice as expensive as it did in 2004, right? And, you know, I'm sure, hey, let's say they doubled their administrative staff. Well, that's not a doubling of tuition either. So what is driving

this cost going? I mean, what else has doubled in 15 years in American society? Almost nothing. So what is driving it? Well, I mean, there are a lot of different inputs into this issue. But the reason that I went to the expansion of administrations is because labor is almost always the most expensive ticket. There are other issues like the fact that colleges and universities feel the need to compete with each other for ratings and for attracting high-paying students. And that pushes toward fancier gyms and food facilities and all that kind of thing. And that is also a real concern. And there must also be a lack of federal investment as well

and state investment that's causing, as you said earlier, probably answers my question as well, pushing the burden onto the students when it used to be covered by our tax dollars instead. Right. I mean, so at public colleges and universities, when they feel the need to compete for out-of-state students and out-of-country students who are going to pay a high tuition, they need to have facilities that will, you know, match that kind of population. that kind of population. So it isn't only confined to fancy schools that are like small liberal arts colleges. When the model for funding the university depends on high-paying students, then you get into that game for sure.

Okay, well, we're getting close to the end here. I want to make sure I touch on a couple more points. You wrote a really fascinating piece recently about how STEM education is overrated. That was the headline at any rate. And I found that really fascinating because you hear so much, oh, STEM, STEM, STEM, We got to get kids started on STEM. We got to get girls started on STEM. We've got STEAM. Sometimes they extend it to STEAM in order to add art as well. But yeah, walk us through that. Why do you feel STEM education is overrated? Right. Yeah, that headline gave all my astronomer friends fan tods. But I am, of course, a complete proponent of science and math and engineering. I think that we should have all of those things.

But I believe that the focus on STEM education is part of a political game that we also have to understand as such. When we hear about STEM education, what it usually means is that we need students to train themselves for the jobs that corporate America currently has. Right. And there are plenty of students who are going to want to go study the Big Bang and the formation of planets, you know, and God bless them. That's fine. But what concerns me is that the that education be reduced to serving corporate interests. You know, and now this is also a very long standing debate in the United States. I mean, going back all the way again to the progressive era and John Dewey, this was something that he was writing about in the early 20th century. You know, he said, you know, I don't want education to be confined to serving

the industries of the time. I mean, he made statements that sound completely applicable to today. And even on its own merits, if you train people for the jobs of today, those jobs may or may not be there in another five, 10 years. Those are the kinds of jobs that are currently being targeted for elimination and replacement by artificial intelligence. Even talking about the hot field when I was in college, computer science was the field that, oh, if you go into computer science, you'll get a job right away.

But when we're talking about AIs that can write their own code or et cetera, that's a skill that can, really replaceable. And also, you know, I took some computer science, everything I learned in the specific computer science classes I took is no longer applicable forms of coding, right? I could not get a job with the PHP and JavaScript skills that I would have gotten in those years. Now, hopefully I would have also gotten some general purpose computer science that would have, you know, enabled me to continue with the times. I'm sure many people have, but like your point is well taken that that narrow technical education, uh, is, uh, is, is pretty limited. If you only know how to repair a certain brand of air conditioner, when that, when that company goes out of business or when we're all using different forms of, uh, climate control because climate change is here, uh, you here, you're going to need to be retrained.

But is the argument that a more general education that teaches you how to think, how to think nimbly, how to pick up new skills, how to make your way in the world, how to think in complex ways is going to serve you better and serve us better as a public good? Absolutely. you better and serve us better as a public good? Absolutely. And to be able to take that education and contribute back into the process that you work on. So I'm for technical educations, but I want those technical educations to also be within systems that allow, you know, that allow refrigerator repair people to figure out what's a better machine. Right.

Not just whether or not they can fix this whirlpool in front of them. Right. That's the value of a, in some places called a liberal arts education, that if as you're learning to HVAC repair, you're also learning some math, you're learning some engineering, You're learning some engineering. You're learning perhaps how to, you're doing some creative writing because writing is a general skill that will benefit anyone in their lives.

You're getting all of these other, you're being elevated mentally in all these different ways. That's going to serve you better than just that narrow focus. That's right. And it does require a kind of broader vision, too, because the kinds of companies that would then hire those people would have to be open to hearing their input

and to actually helping them participate. And that is a giving up of control that many companies don't want to do, which is why, you know, when we've really reduced what education is for and how people can participate. And we've limited the horizons of what participation means to simply doing a job in front of you instead of becoming part of the process of creating and reimagining what corporate life might be like. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't prepare you to come up with a new job, right? It doesn't teach you how to come up with new ideas or to innovate or to analyze or to be a critic of the systems you're enmeshed in. It only trains you to do a better version of sorting widgets for a big machine in a way. Whereas what we want is people who are empowered to look at the machine and say, hey, maybe we should do this differently. Maybe we could structure our society differently. Maybe we could make changes that would benefit

anyone. That's the promise of a real education. Yes. And at minimum, how might we make a better widget? Well, so let's return at the end of this to talking about what a better future or a better education system might look like. You've already said that public college should be free. And I agree wholeheartedly with that, or I'm in favor of any policy that increases access and reduces costs for education of any kind. I'm absolutely on board with that being our, you know, with public education as a good in that way. What are other programs we might pursue that'll help make that reality? And how will it benefit our society to do so, to increase access and to reduce those burdens? And individuals. How will it benefit individuals as well?

So many beneficiaries I have to cover here. I know. I'm sorry. I really loaded up this last question. I'm sorry. I really loaded up this last question. I'm sorry. Well, one thing that I am very concerned with is that students have to work so many hours at the same time that they're taking classes. Now, I am very happy to have students working.

I think that it benefits them in all sorts of ways, both educationally and in terms of building their careers. But when students are working 20 hours a week and more in order to make ends meet while they're in school, it is a clash with their ability to get the classwork done that they're also committed to. So one thing that I think is really important is to have a loan system that students can go to to support themselves while they're in college so that they don't have to work so many hours. And that means having a loan system on reasonable, non-punishing terms. Because even if you have free tuition, you have plenty of other costs that are going to come up during college.

And you have to be able to cover those at the same time that you're focusing on your education. Right. So you're talking about loans for incidental expenses, like for living expenses beyond tuition. Yeah, cost for living expenses beyond tuition. Cost of, yeah, cost of living. And you make a good point that we could have loans, we could structure these loans in such a way that they're easier to pay back and that they're less punitive, like we've kind of done for mortgages. Like we have a terrific system.

I mean, the housing crisis is a whole other issue, right? But we've got the mortgage interest deduction. We've got these various like federal agencies that work to make sure that mortgages are accessible. That's a value that we've had. It's not something we've had for student loans in the same way, even though education is as big a public good as housing. big a public good as housing. Yes. One of the issues, in fact, that we should think about is how mortgages and student loans are actually often part of the same thing for families, that families buy houses not only to get a roof over their head, but to get their kids an education in a school district. So mortgages are education loans.

Student loans are education loans. We're paying education debt across decades already. And just, oh my God, the way that you have just illuminated the fact that, yeah, people are taking on mortgages in order to go to a specific school because what school you go to is determined by where you live in terms of our primary education, which is the most bizarre, distorted system possible. That we literally pay for schools with property taxes and not with any other form of tax so that it's rich areas have better schools is so bizarre.

The worst system, if you had to come up with one, that you possibly could. Yeah, it's a system that puts enormous stress on families because, of course, families want to buy into school districts or to rent in school districts that are higher cost, that stretch what they can afford because those school districts are oftentimes better than the ones that have a lower tax base to draw on. So that is just the kind of fundamental reality of what raising children in the United States is like today. Yeah.

in the United States is like today. But, you know, in terms of the college education loans, you know, we do also have a completely weird system. For instance, the standard repayment schedule for student loans is during the first 10 years after college graduation. That is the most vulnerable decade of any adult's life. So why is it that that is the standard repayment block? Yeah.

Now, you can get into other programs, but they have proven to be extremely difficult and also punishing, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which teachers should be easily eligible for as obvious public servants, but which is, that program is now being sued by the American Federation of Teachers for denying access to public service loan forgiveness to teachers who have been in their jobs for years and years. Wow. There's also income-based repayment options, but those things also have to be certified and recertified. have to be certified and recertified and the issue of how much interest you're going to have to pay or when, and it is also extremely complicated. What we need is a simple and clear system where people can understand what they're going to have to pay, make it over many, many more years,

establish a threshold where people who make less than, say, $30,000 don't have to start paying. It's only when you cross that threshold that repayment begins. Yeah, I mean, look, here in Hollywood, right, in my industry, there's so many entry-level jobs that pay absolutely nothing, that pay minimum wage, right? There's currently a labor movement among Hollywood assistants called Hashtag Pay Up Hollywood, which is really incredible because these jobs, you know, these are some of the most intensive jobs in the industry. These people are working, you know, 18-hour days,

but they're being paid, you know, $10 an hour, that sort of thing. And what they're told is, well, you're making that little money because these jobs will lead you to make a lot of money later, right? You'll become a big time agent, you'll become a big time producer, and then you'll get the big house and you'll get the big salary. Now, if that's true, right, if we take that promise of face value, which is another issue, right? But a lot of industries work that way. In comedy, I had to do open mics for 10 years before I ever got paid, right? Et cetera. Lots of industries work that way in comedy. I had to do open mics for 10 years before I ever got paid. Right.

Um, et cetera. Lots of industries work that way. Entry level doesn't pay well. Um, well then yeah, delay when people have to pay their student loans because the fact is that, uh, those folks who are making that low wage while they're running to get coffee are also paying loans back. Um, and they're, this is the time at which the loans are coming in the most full force. So it only makes sense to say, hey, let's delay it a little bit in that way.

Right. And of course, I mean, what you're describing only reinforces unequal access to those jobs in the first place. Because who can afford to make $10 an hour while they're paying their student loans? Oh, and also live in Los Angeles. Right. It's people whose families have enough money to help support them during those really crucial years of building a career. So if we think that making, for instance, like Hollywood more diverse as a goal,

then changing those structures is actually really, really important. Absolutely. Well, so, again, what are the benefits to society if we remove these barriers, right? I just want to know what is your utopia look like, right? Like what is your pitch to, you know, you can go talk to anyone running for president and you can say, hey, look, institute these programs I told you about and let me tell you how great it's going to be and why you're going to get reelected or whatever. Right. issue. And it's that right now, the education that should be giving them freedom, that should be enabling their independence, is the thing that fetters their development. Now, so my utopia is pretty simple. It's that young people should be free to figure out what they want to do and to

go out into the world and find the job that they want, figure out how they want to participate in their communities, and do it without having to worry about paying back exorbitant loans. I think that enabling young people to experiment and to figure out who they are, both individually and then also together, like with each other, that that is how we're going to move the country forward. It is also true that when people feel like they are being invested in, that they have more inclination to participate in civic life. Like, for instance, participate in civic life. Like, for instance, the GI Bill that your grandfather participated in. When the GIs came back from the war, and of course, this is really for mostly male white GIs, but when those GIs came back from the war, they got education. They got access to inexpensive home loans. They got the tools that they needed

to launch themselves forward into the middle class. And that was together a kind of partnership with their government, with the government that they had served in the war. And those GIs, that generation also had incredible levels of civic participation. You know, they joined clubs, they worked in schools, they really saw themselves as part of our democracy. And I think that that is incredibly important. Yeah. And if we are able to invest in our fellow citizens in that same way, or in other folks living in this country, I don't want to just say, I don't want to just limit it to citizens. I want to, you know, fellow members of our society, then they'll be inclined to repay the favor. And that's part of what a strong society is, is people who feel that way

about each other and feel that they have a collective goal and investment in each other. That's right. They're paying it forward. Yeah. Well, I thank you so much for coming on to share that vision with us and to tell us all these incredible stories. Thank you so much. Thanks. It's been fun.

Well, thank you once again to Caitlin Zaloum for coming on the show. Her book, once again, is indebted. I hope you pick it up. And that is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our researcher, Sam Roudman, our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineer, Brett Morris, Andrew WK for our theme song. You can follow me on Twitter at Adam Conover. You can sign up for my mailing list at adamconover.net.

And until next week, we'll see you on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. That was a HateGum Podcast.