The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: Cut Public Spending for Universities. It's a Waste of Time and Money.

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Is university a waste of time and money? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, Bryan Caplan, author of The Case Against Education, debates Professor Nicholas Dirks, the former Chancellor of UC Berkeley, on the motion Be it resolved, cut public spending for universities. It's a waste of time and money. SOURCES: CNN, Newsweek, EWTN, Global News.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesman to statesman like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Our mission every episode is to provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation. The goal of this podcast is to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind about the issue up for debate.

Today's debate? Be it resolved. Cut public spending on higher education. It's a waste of time and money. We understand that in the face of greater and greater global competition, in a knowledge-based economy, a great education is more important than ever. A higher education is the single best investment you can make in your future. And I'm proud of all the students who are making that investment. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudier-Griffiths. A university education is commonly viewed as an essential stop on life's journey

to a successful professional career and becoming a well-rounded adult. Proponents of higher education argue that universities are essential to creating a workforce of lifelong critical thinkers who have deep knowledge of the cutting-edge subject areas that will power the 21st century economy. Lately, however, there's a growing call to re-examine the role of higher education and its real-world benefits for graduates and society at large. It's hard to know whether I would do it differently. I'd still go to college and law school.

But a mistake I made was never thinking about what the purpose of it was or why I was doing it. It was just this automatic thing that you did because you were told if you did it, you'd have all these options that would get created. That's entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal. Many share Teal's concerns that we are spending billions of public dollars on universities that are failing to teach students' employable skills and, weighing them down with unmanageable debt obligations for years to come. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by

debating the resolution, be it resolved, cut public spending on universities. It's a waste of time and money. Arguing for the motion is Brian Kaplan, author of The Case Against Education. Arguing against the motion is Nicholas Dirks. He's the former chancellor of UC Berkeley. Brian Nicholas, welcome to the Monk Debate podcast. Thank you. Great to be here.

Great to have you with us today, both gentlemen. We're going to have Brian speak first as a person arguing in favor of our motion today, be it resolved, cut public spending on universities. It's a waste of time and money. Brian, two minutes on the clock. We're going to hand the microphone over to you. How could universities possibly be a waste of time and money when we see with our own eyes that people, People who go to college and do well, on average, wind up making much more money and having much better careers.

So how could this possibly be? And my answer is that you really have to look at what people study. So if you actually pay attention what people are learning in school, you notice that a large share of what they do is not relevant to the job markets. It's highly impractical. So then there's a puzzle. Why would it pay if what they're learning is so irrelevant to what they're actually going to do?

and here there is an answer that I push very strongly in my book, the case against education, say a lot of what you're doing in school is you're showing off. You're trying to persuade or convince employers that you're worthwhile, that you're smart, that you're hardworking, you're conformist. From the point of view, the student, it doesn't really matter why it is that education helps you out so much in life. But from the point of view of taxpayers, it matters tremendously.

Because if people are going to school and they're actually getting useful job skills, then going to school enriches the student by enriching society. On the other end, if you're going there in order to get fancy stickers and degrees and say, look at me, I'm so much better than other people, this is not actually a path to prosperity. Right. So there's been quite a bit of work trying to understand what's been going on in the U.S. labor market since World War II. And the punchline is very consistent with my story. What we see is that there's been massive credential inflation, credential inflation.

Credential inflation. This means that for the very same jobs that your parents and grandparents were able to get right out of high school, you now need to get a college degree. if you want to be viable in the competition. So when you go and look at these numbers, it very much looks like a large majority of the rise in education is explained not by people doing fancier or more cognitively demanding jobs. It's just that we keep ratcheting up the education requirements. So I say that really funding education is an exercise in utility.

The more education people have, the more they will need in order to look impressive. And therefore be better if we were funded less, people got less education and started earlier. Now, of course, I'm well aware that many people say, well, the point of college isn't to get a good job anyway. It's not to make a lot of money. First of all, I'd say that for almost all students, that is the most important reason.

And we're kidding ourselves if we say otherwise. But then even if you do think the main point of it is just to enlighten people and enrich their lives, but I say there is that's a noble goal. But when we actually look at the research, there's very little sign that any such enlightenment or enrichment is going on. Instead, students are highly empathetic. even the very best teachers very rarely inspire them. And the cost that we are spending on this is just nowhere near worth it for the very small

amount of enrichment and enlightenment that we get. So again, what I say is that the best thing to do is less. We have made this futile effort to give everyone's society great jobs via higher education. And the main result is not that everyone gets great jobs, but that you now need to spend many years your life in school to get the same job that your parents or grandparents could have gotten without it. Brian, thank you for those opening remarks. A provocative argument to set up this debate. I now want to turn the program over to Professor Nicholas Dirks, who's going to be making the case against our resolution, be it resolved, caught public spending on

universities. It's a waste of time and money. Professor Dirks, your opening statement, please. Sure, and thank you, Brian. I should start by saying Brian's an economist. I'm an historian. I'm going to give a little bit of background here to make my point about the importance of public funding for higher education. One of the most important moments in American history was back in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Moral Act, thereby making available funding on a theretofore unprecedented scale for the establishment of public institutions of higher education across the country, including the University of California at Berkeley, where I teach and where I was Chancellor until recently.

And in my view, this really transformed American life. And in the decades after that act, with the establishment of many flagship public institutions and many others, increasingly funded by states, America began to develop the finest system of higher education anywhere on the globe, displacing Britain and Germany, learning from both, but then becoming a system that is now today the envy of the world, in which many other countries are seeking by massive levels of public funding to replicate and then surpass. Now, the benefits to higher education were obviously going to be debating. It's clear that students who go to college as opposed to students who don't make much more money across their

careers, and I think Brian conceded that. But it's also the case that many of the things that students learn in college are critical for the very functioning of our democracy, for the nature of civil society for an understanding about the rudiments of science and the fundamental factors that govern our planet. Right now in the middle of a crisis around the global pandemic around COVID-19, we see a huge disparity between those who have some understanding of what a pandemic is and those who don't. But the kinds of things that a college education provides are not only, in this view, good for individual students. they're critical for societies and they're critical for America. They're critical for our present.

And I believe, given the transformation of our economy, the steadily escalating nature of technology and what that is going to do to the job market, it's going to be even more important in the future than it was. And the idea that we could simply rely upon the jobs that our parents and grandparents got, you know, I don't think this is an argument about the importance of public funding that will stand any scrutiny either in the present or certainly in the future. Well, great. Let's bring some scrutiny to this discussion now. And Brian, I want to give you an opportunity, another two minutes on the clock, to provide a refutation of what you've just heard from Professor Dirks. Is there a particular argument that he's made that you want to challenge

that you'd like to assert a countercase to? Sure. So let's just focus on what it is that students actually learn. Now, it's true that higher education, claims that they're trying to fill students' heads with knowledge of science to prepare them for democracy, civics, as well as get them ready for the high-tech jobs of the future. But when you actually measure what college graduates know, it's extraordinarily disappointing. There's been a good amount of research on what American adults know about science. Even college graduates have, at best, a very rudimentary level of knowledge. If we look at their knowledge of how democracy works, again, it's a just,

a very low level. The way that I'd describe this is imagine that you just make up the easiest test you possibly could on these subjects. You'd still be lucky to get college graduates getting two-thirds of the questions right. And again, this is something where the questions are so easy. You might say, how can they possibly get them wrong? But when we look at the data, they do. And the reason is that students sometimes just don't learn the material in the first place, but mostly it just goes in one year and out the next. They learn it for the exam and then they forget it. So while I agree it would be nice if we were able to create a society with very high levels of knowledge of science and civics and so on, we simply have not done this. Now, it is true

that in many ways the U.S. system is the envy of the world. I just say that the world is wrong to envy us. Countries like Switzerland and Germany actually have a more functional system where they have far fewer people going to college. And instead, in high school, most students are being trained for practical tasks. And again, this is ultimately what every functioning economy has to do, since schools actually don't provide a lot of useful training in the classroom, what you really do is use your degree as a passport to the real training, which happens on the job. When we really look at what it is that people are learning, it's just very disappointing. And the way that people actually go good to their jobs is through practice. And the main function of our system is really just in rationing who gets the opportunities to practice.

And if that's so, then why not just start doing the real thing sooner? Brian, thank you for that. So Professor Jerks, you can choose to engage with. what Brian's just said. You can go back to his original opening statement. What do you want to rebut coming out of the opening minutes of this debate? Well, the first thing I want to say is that the truth of the matter is that this country has been defunding our institutions of public higher education now for the last 20, 30 years. And I think we've seen some of the results of this. For example, the high levels of indebtedness on the part of students, it's clearly a major

issue right now. It's been an issue for at least 10 years. Once student debt began to get close to and then crest over a trillion dollars. $1.6 trillion. That's the total of student loan debt in this country, and those loans follow borrowers well beyond graduation day. The Policy Journal, Education Next reports 37% of U.S. adults' ages 18 to 29 carry student loan debt, as do 22% of adults age 30 to 44. But much of the reason for that, leaving aside for-profit schools that

explain a huge percentage of it. A large reason behind this is the fact that places like Berkeley had been underfunded by the state in 2004, when my predecessor began as chancellor, 34%, 35% of the university's budget came from the state. When I left my role as chancellor in 2017, it was only about 11, 12%. And that required us to raise tuition and so on. But to your point, Brian, about what do students actually learn? I mean, first of all, students at Berkeley, for example, and that's where I sit, have the opportunity to learn things in data science applied to a wide range of fields, and this is the fastest growing major, by the way, applied to fields ranging from history and English to epidemiology, bioinformatics, and so on, that position them at the top of the curve in terms of the job market. And we have recruiters from just about every possible company coming to find these students who they believe actually. do know something, did learn something in college that is a great importance for the jobs they'll

have. We also know, however, that jobs are going to be changing right now. The average graduate is looking forward to, say, six different kinds of jobs or even careers across their lifetime. That number keeps going up. What we really need to be able to teach students is how to learn, how to keep learning from a variety of different kinds of educational opportunities, including online, but it's not something that you just are born with or learn at earlier stages of life and certainly not in schools that are under-resourced. So I think the truth of the matter is that we can talk about ways in which we might want to improve education, and I've been working for my entire life to do that. But everything from the technical, scientific, engineering skills

on the one side to what are called the soft skills that have to do with critical thinking, reading, literacy, and learning at least some fundamentals about the world of science, democracy, and civics are really critical. And they do constitute what we would call the public good and therefore are worthy of public funding. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. Cut public spending on higher education. It's a waste of time and money. Arguing for the motion is Brian Kaplan, author of The Case Against Education. Arguing against the motion is Nicholas Dirks, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley. Now, back to the episode.

Now we get to move into our conversation between the three of us. And I want to kind of break this up by first focusing on the institution, the university itself, and then second on this student. And look at both of those through the lens of our resolution today, which is be it resolved, to paraphrase, we should be cutting public spending on universities because it's a waste of time and money. arguably, Brian, you're seeing this in the case of both the public taxpayer but the student potentially also. So, Brian, to come back at you with the first question here and to build a bit on what Professor Dirks was just saying, if you look at the growth of the technologies that are now powering the American economy,

that are arguably kind of geostrategic assets to the United States, Silicon Valley, isn't there, a case to be made that those technologies emerged out of universities, out of the University of Berkeley and California. And that that is just an inherent value that universities have created for the American economy. And in the future, they're going to create other Silicon Valley's and other reservoirs of value that will power economic growth and geopolitical significance. Yeah. So first of all, STEM majors that are doing this kind of work or a very small share of total majors, engineers. It's about 5% of college graduates. So there is a standard bait and switch the defenders of higher education will do.

Well, they'll find something like data science and say, look at how great data science is. Never mind that we have vastly more people majoring in communications or psychology or other fields where to have any hope of ever getting a job, you need to have multiple other more advanced degrees or, of course, you could be super good looking in communications, something like that. And then the other thing is to remember that what would our tech people be doing if they weren't spending this time in school? I say they would actually just be going and working at an earlier age and would begin being learning on the job and getting training on the job, which right now we delay by making people spend years doing things like their general education requirements. So again, there's just a great gap between the official story and what's really going on and just a failure to appreciate that while right now this is the way that our tech. people wind up learning it, but there is a much better way, which is just to get people

out of the classroom and into the workplace earlier. Just remember that most people are not doing anything remotely like data science. Instead, they're doing pseudo-vocational majors like communications where they offer people the illusion of becoming a journalist or a broadcaster, even though the number of jobs in these areas is so low that almost no one who gets a major in communications will ever work in that industry. So, Professor Dirk's come back. on this point of Brian's about a kind of misallocation of, effectively, of human capital by the university, within the university, but then also having an impact on society. What's your pushback to that? I think the proposition here is about public funding for public universities. In that domain,

it's important for me to say that some of the great centers of STEM education, engineering, and the like are actually public institutions and would not have developed to the point that they have without public funding on a very large scale. The Ivy League, and I taught at Columbia for almost 20 years, was less well known for its work in engineering. It was much better known for its work in general education. And those students, I would argue, learned a great deal too. But looking across the board, I think it is important for us to really break down what Brian is saying here. Now, I agree that there are programs, and they have of late become increasingly attractive to some students in areas that promise jobs immediately upon graduation. Turns out,

and studies have been done of this repeatedly, that show that students who are prepared for very specific careers tend to get those jobs, but in 10 years are what we call underemployed. That is to say, they don't advance either in those career areas, nor do they have opportunities to move elsewhere. Students in the liberal arts actually do much better. They've typically learned how to think, how to figure things out, how to look beyond the surface. And in 10 years, it turns out that majors in fields like English and history and philosophy are actually doing better and better and better. And better I grant than, you know, some of the programs that prepare students and lower levels of business administration. And I think the real differentiating

factor here in terms of student learning and student success is how much we really focus on the rigor of the programs that we offer. Brian, do you want to come back on that? Because I think part of a listener tuning in here would be saying, you know, Brian, you have to come up with an alternative. I mean, yes, this is an expensive system. Yes, it requires public subsidies, but it is a system. It does produce a result. It graduates millions of people a year across the United States, Canada, North America. And you could argue, yes, maybe in certain degrees, certain certifications, people are challenged, but in others, they thrive.

So what is your alternative institutionally to the university and where, if anywhere, would that public funding be diverted to? My alternative is just less. And what I'm saying is that almost all of what colleges are giving you is just certification to stamp on your forehead. And then when you graduate, you finally start learning how to actually do your job. And I say it would be better if, as in the past, people just started working at an earlier age, and then you start learning the job at a sooner point. On a bunch of the last claims, I just think most of what he said is just wrong.

So, I mean, for STEM majors, about 80% of STEM majors don't even have STEM jobs. So clearly they're not being pigeonholed or trapped into those occupations. What we do know is that people with degrees like that wind up making more money throughout their entire careers. The idea that liberal arts degrees are problematic at first, but eventually become awesome. Again, quite wrong. The real story is liberal arts majors make a lot less money initially and then gradually gain. They close some of the gap as they actually acquire some more useful skills. But on average, it is totally untrue that English or philosophy or history majors ever approach the earnings of people in engineering or computer science or anything like that.

Now, on the more general point of teaching people how to think, this is just the kind of wishful thinking that defenders of the system resort to. But there is a whole field called educational psychology where they've been trying to measure this learning how to think stuff for about 100 years. And the people who do this research are very pessimistic about it. Their general view, which surprised me when I first started reading about it, is that at best, schools teach you exactly the content that you're supposed to learn. and usually they fail at that or you forget it.

But in terms of like finding measurable changes in thinking ability, those are very few and far between. It's more of propaganda that schools provide to justify themselves when the students aren't even learning the material it's taught. Professor Djerks, I have to come back on that. But when you do it, maybe respond to another sub-argument of Bryans here, which is that universities, or universities potentially like Berkeley, are elitist, that they allow a certain group,

within society, often the children of alumni, access to a credentialization process that gives them advantages over others who have not been allowed into these institutions. And that this is part of the case against education is that it's not a meritocracy. It's perpetuating cleavages and inequality within society. Well, indeed. And of course, you know, we all in the field of education recognize the kinds of problems that were surfaced, albeit in very extreme ways, in the Varsity Blue Scandal. So I realized that- Could you just remind the audience of what the Varsity Blues scandal was?

Well, the Varsity Blue Scandal is the case where parents have paid this guy, Mark Singer, to arrange for their kids at a very high price to have somebody else take their SAT or ACT or to be photoshopped into a sailing boat to show that they can get an outside. Athletic Scholarship. Operation Varsity Blues culminated early this morning when approximately 300 special agents from the FBI and the IRS criminal investigations set out to arrest 46 individuals across the country for their roles in an international college admissions bribery and money laundering scam.

We believe all of them. Parents, coaches, and facilitators lied, cheated and covered up their crimes. at the expense of hardworking students everywhere. And many very high-profile parents are finding themselves confronting courts and juries and now jail time as a result of this. And all universities and colleges across the country have begun to reevaluate everything from legacy admissions, that is to say, admissions that favor alumni or donor children to even the kinds of athletic scholarships that are given. And this speaks to the heart of the proposition we're debating. The importance of public higher education comes out in very important ways.

At the University of California, we have no, I repeat, no legacy admissions. Students simply do not get any advantage if their parents are alumni. Many alumni, in fact, are upset about that, but that's the way it is. The other thing to say about the University of California is that roughly 45 to 50 percent of the students across the nine undergraduate campuses of the university, including Berkeley, UCLA, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and so on. are on Pell Grants, which means they come from families that make less than typically $50,000. We have considerable numbers of students from low-income backgrounds actually getting into and then benefiting from top-notch education.

We also know that students who come from the lower quartile of the socioeconomic spectrum tend to benefit more than any other kinds of students, depending on where they come from economically, tend to benefit from all other students in terms of the advantage that that education affords them. So getting access to high-quality, higher education is a huge social good, and public universities, both in terms of scale and in terms of the commitment they have to open access, really perform a vital function for our society. So in terms of the question of elitism, getting rid of public funding would actually make the few private universities that survive after that, even more elitist, far more elitist than they are

than they are right now. But, you know, again, I'm not sure that I heard Brian give us a real alternative aside from just sending kids into jobs that they won't know how to do and go back to a kind of apprentice system that basically was well suited for the pre-industrial era that has been discarded by every nation, including Switzerland, by the way, which does invest a lot of money in its system of higher education, it tracks students earlier. But in the U.S., we decided, even going back to the late 19th century, that we didn't want to track students precisely because it tends to reify and then solidify the socioeconomic divides that we know are a major problem in our society today. And we can't go back to that kind of heavily tracked system if we did. So inequality

will become even worse than it is today. So look, Brian, you know inequality is a big topic right now. the growth of it. Professor Dirk's laying out a case here, why universities are a solve to deal with inequality and social preference and privilege amongst groups. The whole basis of my argument is that there's a big difference between the effect of education on an individual and the effect on society. If you go and let one more kid into college, that's great for his mobility. But what happens when you create a society where you can't get a good job without college, which is basically what we have done over time? So I say rather than focusing on how to let every kid, kid get into college. We should focus on how to make it possible for people to get good job straight

out of high school. You can say them to modern technological society that's simply infeasible. I say that actually the amount of training in modern technological society that kids are getting in college is minimal, except in a few majors. And again, when you say, like, you're just going to send kids into a job that they don't know how to do. That's what we already do, because most college students leave college, not knowing how to do much of anything. But then they are able to get an entry-level job using that degree as their passport, and then they get their training. And I say it would be better to simply cut out the waste of years. So, again, the way that I often put it is this.

So if you could either be high school dropout today or 1950, which would you rather be? Right. And the answer is clear. Well, 1950 high school dropout would still have a whole lot of options because there wasn't much stigma against it because there were so many people in the same boat. Today, the stigma is extreme. Right now, again, you say, well, but like, how could they possibly? do jobs without even a high school degree in 1950. And the answer was that it was not that the

jobs were so much easier than they are today. Some were easier. Some were actually harder. But rather that the quality of the students that were going in there was greater because you had a lot more talented people that weren't going to college. And employers are much more open-minded when there are talented applicants without fancy credentials. So it is very easy to just go and look at the plight of one student or helping one student and say, look, there I helped him. But it's very different at the social level. As I said, educational psychologists have been studying this for about 100 years. They really wanted to find that people learned how to learn. But most of them come away from the actual evidence shell-shocked. And that's a lot of what I say in my book, The Case Against

Education. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. Cut public spending on higher education. It's a waste of time and money. enjoying this podcast, please write a review on iTunes. We also welcome your ideas for debates and debaters. Please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. Now, back to the episode. Before we move to closing statements, let's look at this a little bit through the perspective of the potential university student. And Maybe Professor Dirks, what would your advice be to, you know, an 18-year-old today who's trying to figure out what their pathway through life is to a successful career to adulthood? And why would you urge university as a preeminent choice for that young person to consider?

So first, I want to go back to something Brian said and segue into responding to your question. But in 1950, of course, if you were a high school graduate, you had many more kinds of jobs that you could do. In 1940, only about 5% of the adult population in the U.S. had a college degree. Of course, there was a massive increase in terms of funding foreign access to higher education after the war, and that was the GI Bill. And that led to a position today where we have slightly more than a third of our adults with college degrees. In my view, that's way too low still. But, you know, again, in 1950, the jobs really were different. When you actually look at what we're confronting today across our entire economy,

we are seeing just an almost exponential increase in the complexity, sophistication, technical requirements, the knowledge barriers to actually getting productive jobs that will produce important things for our society, important things for our economy, But also, importantly, you know, the ingredients for a well-lived, fully realized, happy life. So I just can't buy this notion that because a high school graduate did fine in 1950, if you just cut out college right now or if you cut out public funding for college, we could go back there. My point here is that since we're arguing about public funding,

we're really arguing about the importance of having a system of public higher education. And without that, I would say private colleges will become much more exclusive, educational opportunities, life opportunities for young people, and indeed for adults who need to be able to take advantage of lifelong learning, which will require access in one way or another to college and university offerings, whether it's indirectly through some kind of online degree program or just some kind of online refresher program or directly than ever before. Professor Dirks, thank you. So, Brian, similar question to you. I mean, you've probably talked to a lot of 17, 18 year olds. What is the advice that you give them? And how do you paint a picture for them of how they can achieve their life goals and forego the university experience? If I'm talking to a student for what's best for them, I don't tell them to skip college. I say we have a crummy system where if you want to do well, you have to get this degree. Otherwise, the world will hold it against. you, even though you're not going to learn very much that's useful. And then my next question is just to find out how well they did in high school. If they did very well in high school, then I say you're likely to do well in college and it's probably your best path. On the other hand, if they did poorly in high school, that's where I say, hmm, in that case, you probably aren't going to be able to go and get this certificate at the end. And so then you really should look at some other more vocational options,

right but you know i always try to carefully distinguish between what i think is best for society and what i think is best for the individual my two older sons want to be professors like me and i've given them a lot of training on how to game the system the whole time telling them that it's a corrupt system but uh it is never nevertheless a very nice one if you can get into it thanks brian okay let's move to closing statements so uh professor dirks we can give a couple of minutes on the clock for you to to sum up your key arguments if there's a point or two of bryans that you want to draw a line under, now's your opportunity to do that. So I'll begin with what I think has been Brian's major point, which is that students go to

college and they don't really learn anything. But nine years ago, there was a book that was published called Academically Adrift that argued that students don't learn enough, use the collegiate learning assessment to do that. But subsequently, the authors of that study have gone back. They've looked at more data. They've done more sophisticated analyses. and they've seen that what they were really measuring was performance on tests and not actually what students have learned. That's infiltrated a certain kind of educational psychology landscape

that, you know, is read and approved up by, I guess, you, Brian. Peter Thiel started a program where he gave students a lot of money not to go to fancy colleges and to go get jobs and start off as apprentices. Many of those students actually have gone back to college afterwards because they decided they really did need a college education after all. And I think we're seeing in front of us the consequences of disinvestment in public higher education that is already causing far more, I think, challenging outcomes than the opposite, which is to actually begin to restore funding for our public colleges and universities that have played such an important role in our history,

but which, more importantly for this discussion, are going to be absolutely vital for our future. I don't think you can get around the fact that the fourth industrial revolution is creating a completely different landscape for the knowledge that we will need to be successful, not only as individuals, but as a society. And I don't think China, for example, is misguided in the way in which they're investing in universities because they've seen very clearly that in order to become a creative, imaginative, productive, but also innovative kind of economy, they require. the university and not just having people go into jobs. So at the end of the day, I believe that one of the most important functions of government funding is education. If anything, what we need to do is focus on educating our students better and learning what works better than some of the things we've done in the past. And that will include, as we're learning in the current pandemic, a better use of technology, which will make things, I think, actually work better in the end,

but not without major public funding for our colleges and universities. Thank you, Nicholas Durk. for those closing words. So, Brian, we're going to put a final two minutes on the clock for you to sum up. Let's hear your closing argument today in favor of our resolution, be it resolved, cut public spending on universities. It is a waste of time and money. Over to you, Brian. Yeah, so after listening to me and Professor Dirks, I can easily understand if listeners would just say, well, they're talking about a lot of research. I don't know what the research really says. I'm confused. Now, fortunately, there is actually a way out of this problem because if you're listening to this, you almost certainly have. have at least 10 years of firsthand experience with education. I bet in fact most of your listeners have gone to college or even graduated from college. And so you don't really just have to rely

upon what we're telling you. You can go and reflect upon your own firsthand experience. And I strongly encourage you to do that. So if I'm right, then when you think about what you actually studied in school, you will tell yourself that didn't seem very relevant to real life. And furthermore, I forgot most of it. So my experience, this is actually. actually what most people say when I talk to people about their college experience. So how relevant was what you had to study? And even, most people say, yeah, not very relevant. And then how about your memory? Do you actually remember most of what you learn? No. I'm like, well, how could you have forgotten it? Because I never use it. Ah, further confirming how irrelevant it really is.

So I'd encourage listeners just to think about that. Now, if what I'm telling you does fit your experience, then I say that you are very, very much on my path. Because once you accept that what you learned in school is not in fact very useful in the real world, then it takes you the question of, well, then why is it so helpful in the job market? Once you think about that question, my answer, namely that you're trying to get a certification, a stamp on your forehead so that your application doesn't get thrown away by employers, then it makes a lot of sense. And once you start picturing higher education is primarily this passport to the real job training, then there is the question, well, what's the point of handing out more passports? Right. Because if you just

multiply the certificates the people have. Are employers going to then go and hire everyone for a good job? Of course not. They're going to expect you to have even more degrees, which is just what we've seen, this credential inflation, where jobs were used to need a high school degree, you now need a college degree. It used to be a college degree was good enough you need a master's or a PhD. Now, for this fourth industrial revolution, I actually wish it were happening.

I say that the transformation is actually overstated, and there are great many jobs that have barely changed over time and don't seem like they are changing. But in any case, I would say that, that if you look at people that are doing these jobs, almost none of them have gone back to college in order to adjust or adapt to the new situation. Instead, what happened is people already have these jobs have gone and learned how to do the new things. So I just rented a car today. So 20 years ago, they wouldn't have been using tablets when running cars. Now they are.

But the workers that were there, it's not like they went to college to learn how to use a tablet. They taught them that themselves. And older workers, again, would not go back to college to find out about tablets. They would just learn by doing, which I say is actually overweight. the way that people really learn how to do their jobs. This question of enriching your life again, you can ask yourself, how many people that I know actually were inspired with the love of Shakespeare or opera or any of the other kinds of high culture that schools push on students. I actually like this stuff, but in my experience, it's a very tiny fraction.

And so, again, while schools can say they're trying to enrich you and enlighten you, if they may be trying, but they hardly ever succeed. and to keep giving them all this taxpayer money, despite their obvious failures in this regard, is a big mistake. Well, Brian, Nicholas, thank you for the opportunity to hear both of you today. This is an important issue, a complicated one, and you've both approached it with civility and substance, and that's what this podcast and the Monk debates are all about.

So on behalf of our listeners and our audience, thank you both for your thoughts and analysis. Thanks a lot. Thanks, everyone. That wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants. You certainly gave us a lot to think about on a controversial and important issue.

The Monk Debates podcast is a place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find show notes on today's debate

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