Debra Satz moderates a conversation with Nina Bandelj, Jonathan Jansen, and Caitlin Zaloom on the COVID-induced pressures faced by colleges and universities, and their to struggle to balance their students’ education with public health concerns and financial sustainability.
Social Science for a World in Crisis
Panelists
Moderator
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Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. How can colleges and universities more equitably and ethically serve all members of their communities? Today on Human Centered, another episode in the CASBS webcast series Social Science for a World in Crisis, which broadcast originally on August 21st, 2020. This episode of the series is titled Higher Ed at the Crossroads, and it features panelists Nina Bandel, professor of sociology at UC Irvine and a 2019-20 CASBS fellow; Jonathan Jansen, distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and a 2016-2017 CASBS Fellow, and Caitlin Zalom, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and also a 2016-2017 CASBS Fellow. Moderating the conversation is Debra Satz, the Vernon R. and Lisbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities and Science at Stanford University and a 2017-2018 CASBS Fellow. Satz engages the panel in discussion on the COVID-induced pressures faced by colleges and universities and their struggle to balance their students' education with public health concerns and financial sustainability. As pandemic fears persist, so too have fears that the combination of remote learning, digital disparities, and rising costs will keep students out of higher education. Given the role of colleges and universities as vital cultural, intellectual, and employment engines woven into local, regional, and national political economies, how should institutions use this moment to transform themselves to better address the challenges they, their students, and the students' families face. You can learn more about this conversation and others in the CASBS series Social Science for a World in Crisis by following the link in this episode's notes. Now join Human Centered as we listen in to the CASBS event Higher Ed at the Crossroads.
Debra Satz: Welcome everybody, um, and thank you for joining us today. Uh, I'm Debra Satz. I'm a political philosopher at Stanford. I'm a former CASBS fellow. Um, and in my day job, now my day and night job, I'm the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, and so I'm extremely interested in the topic of today's panel, Higher Education at the Crossroads. This is the 6th episode of CASBS's webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. I want to acknowledge and thank the co-sponsors for this episode, Public Books, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. So the topic, very timely. This year, higher education institutions across the United States are facing declining student enrollments as large numbers of students defer admission and their families ask whether there's much value in attending college especially when the experience part of the equation will be virtually zero, uh, for many, many students. Now most colleges, um, in the United States depend on tuition, and I expect that quite a few of these colleges and universities won't make it through, um, this crisis. And almost all of us who make it through the crisis will be changed by it and probably should be changed by it. And that's because the crisis, although acute, is really revealing trends that have a much deeper origin and go further back than COVID-19. Colleges have just become, in the United States, increasingly out of reach for most American families because of their costs. And this is a time when everybody is asking, what justifies spending $65,000 a year for private institutions like Stanford and about half as much, uh, for public institutions, uh, like the UC system? And at one level, there's a clear answer. There's an earnings premium associated with completing college, a very high earnings premium, which is rising and has continued to rise since the 1980s. People who graduate, students who graduate from college do better across a whole variety of indices from life expectancy, mortality, morbidity, income earnings, you know, life satisfaction, and so on. So rationally, If you can go to college, you should go to college. But the operative word here is can. And while there are tremendous benefits to going to college, funding for higher education has declined more than 16% since 2007. And the costs per student have risen and continue to rise greater than inflation. This is what's sometimes called the cost curve of education. The inputs that go into education, the salaries of the faculty, staff, the resources, the lab equipment, keeps going up. But the output, the number of students that we reach and educate, is not going up at a similar pace. So there's an efficiency issue. Stanford itself today educates not many more students than it educated 50 years ago, although the cost is extremely higher than it was 50 years ago. And so in many ways, we're still in Plato's Academy. We just have better facilities. And that leads to an affordability crisis. And that crisis affects who goes to college, what kind of colleges they attend, who graduates from college and what happens to those— and that's a very large percent of those who attend community colleges and public colleges— who don't graduate. In addition to these questions of equality of opportunity and fairness, the crisis we're in provides an opportunity for us to think about whether technology like we're using today with Zoom, could help bend the cost curve of education and whether it can do it in a way that doesn't lead to a market decline in the quality of the education we're delivering. So big topics, important to the future of higher education in this country. And to discuss these, I'm joined by three scholars who've made outstanding contributions to our understanding of these issues. I'm not going to go into details about their bios because otherwise we would spend the entire session with my reading of their many accomplishments. So I'm just going to quickly introduce them so we can jump into the discussion. So we have 3 panelists and I'll introduce them in the order that they're speaking. Caitlin Zalom is a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and was a 2016-17 CASBS Fellow. Jonathan Jansen is Distinguished Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and was a 2016-17 CASBS Fellow. And he was also Vice Chancellor Rector of the University of the Free State. Nina Bendel is a Professor of Sociology and Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development at UC Berkeley. At UC Irvine and was a 2019-20 CASBS Fellow. So here's how we'll proceed. Each of the panelists will speak for about 5 minutes, giving their take on the challenges that higher education is facing. We'll then have some follow-up back and forth between the panelists with an opportunity for them to ask questions of each other. For me to ask questions for them. And of course, we'll be giving an opportunity for the audience to ask questions. So let's begin, and we'll begin with Caitlin.
Caitlin Zaloom: All right, thank you, Debra. It is just wonderful to be here with you and Nina and Jonathan at this CASBS event. I was able to write my book Indebted How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, because I had a quiet place to think and to engage with Jonathan over lunch when we were fellows together. So it's wonderful to be back. I want to pick up on some of the things that Debra said to emphasize just how much the meaning of college has changed. So I take as given all of those details that, that Debra described about unaffordability. But for my parents' generation, college was a place for academically aspiring students who needed a challenge and whose families in general could actually afford afford it. That was a moment in the United States. But for my students today, in their generation, college is a necessity. So if they want a shot at a good job, a well-paid job, if they want a shot at a stable life, they need a college degree. And this means that students and their parents alike are willing to sacrifice many, many other elements of their lives to come up with the money and pay for young adults to get a degree. That is, um, a kind of shocking thing, really, that college is as important as it is for young people. But it also means that college is today one of the key fault lines in the United States. It is a fault line between those who have a strong chance at a good life and those who will be subject to low pay, to the whims of employers, and to instabilities of many other kinds as well, like that Debra mentioned, for instance, health, and also marriage instability. So college is something that benefits private citizens greatly. But it also has a critical public component to it. And that is another essential element for college education that we don't pay enough attention to. So citizens with college educations contribute to the well-being of everyone, not just to their own well-being. And to recognize this, all we have to do is to think about the pandemic. Doctors, you know, gastroenterologists who lead COVID wards despite their specialized training, and nurses who not only work with insufficient PPEs but also arrange for family members to have Zoom visits and calls with their, with their loved ones while they're hospitalized, and medical technicians who swab and sterilize and make our health possible. All of that is because of college educations that help citizens to contribute, not only to their own personal well-being, but to the well-being of us all. So that is a view of higher education that has not been at the forefront of our understanding in the U.S. For decades. It began to change really strongly in the 1990s and has only become a much more key piece of thinking today, that what college education is for is for getting a good job and making good income. And as educators, we all know that it is for much, much more than that. So it's time to recover that sense of education as a critical piece of the public good. And we have an opportunity to change that right now. And I hope that our conversation is a little piece of that.
Debra Satz: Thank you. Great. Jonathan.
Jonathan Jansen: Thank you very much. And first of all, just a warm welcome from the Southern Hemisphere, where in my part of the world, it is now cold, wet, and dark. And I'm delighted to be part of, in a way, to return to CASBS from a distance. I've been struck in our preparation for today at how similar and also different the higher education system is in the US and in South Africa. Particularly during this pandemic. And the one thing that's very— that is very, very clear from research is that the rates of return to higher education, both private and public rates of return in a place like South Africa, is the highest or among the highest in the world. In other words, there is a sense Year 2, Caitlin, that whether I get into university— we don't talk about colleges here, we talk about universities— whether you get into university or not, you know, has huge consequences both for the domestic economy but also for the country, and then of course also for the individual. So that led in 2015 to a massive uprising of students in South Africa, close to a billion rands in damage to campus properties and so on. And students demanded under the hashtag #FeesMustFall that they get what they called in shorthand a free decolonized education. I don't know about the decolonized part, but certainly the free part then became a reality for about 45% of the student body in South African higher education, where government decided under pressure, despite the fact that we had a flagging economy, despite the fact that this was just clearly unaffordable for a developing country like South Africa, but under huge political pressure Government healed it and then made sure that anybody whose parents earned less than $20,000 a year would get a very generous free higher education. I use the word free with some reservation because, as you know, education is never really free, if only in terms of the indirect costs. But what that means for students is you've got tuition, you've got accommodation, and you've got subsistence. So the university became a place for 45 about 50% of the students where you could actually study without the incredible burden of the past. Here's the problem: apart from the rich, about 10% of the system that had to pay for everything, there was a group called the missing middle in South Africa. That is, those students for whom the combined family income was above 20,000 $100,000 per year, but clearly not enough to sustain a family with 2 or 3 kids at university, for example, and so on. Now, this middle class is a fascinating— I think the political scientists call them the precariat, you know, they live on the edge, they live from check to check. So they're sort of middle class in a South African sense, but they're not wealthy people, they're not people that have You know, there are people like me, first-generation student going to university. My parents had nothing except they, you know, they put me through university with their sweat and their love and care and so on. But, you know, and now comes this thing called the black tax, where whatever you earn as the first-generation kids, you now also have to make sure that the broader family also benefits. So it's not middle class in the sense of you know, that Americans might talk about, about this particular group. It's really people that have just come into a first degree and really struggle to support the much broader family. So those are the people who borrow from banks. Those are the people for whom I hope Kate writes a follow-up book on indebtedness, you know, with all its politics in this part of the country. So, but what that massive funding of higher education did in South Africa in the wake of the student protests, it was to keep the wobbly lid on the boiling pot. So I'm not sure politically we're out of this in any sense, but at least for the moment things appear to be calm. I just want to mention two other things very briefly apart from the cost to families, and that's the cost to the education system. So if you're in a poor country and you shift massive amounts of state resources towards where the noise is, that is towards higher education, to where protests are, something, someone else in that delivery chain is going to lose out. Guess who lost out? Early childhood education. So a lot of the public funding that goes into the foundations of education, okay, goes to the few that happened to make it through this system. And in a country that, by the way, in all the international comparative tests of achievement, South Africa is dead last. We compete with Guinea-Bissau, the poorest country in the world, okay? And so on. So there isn't— so my argument has been, in a rational sort of, you know, system, you would really want to build the foundations of your education system in order for you to have you know, for want of a better term, a pipeline of students who go to graduate and all of that. But this is the politics of the day. And just one more thing, there's also the cost to institutions themselves. So there were two visa that shut down our universities, violent shutdown universities in 2015-16. And what that meant was that the universities, the former white universities, were able with their advantage to move, to make fairly major investments in online learning. This is long before COVID okay? So that when COVID came along, they could move seamlessly into not emergency remote teaching, but into fully online education, you know, combining some videos, some days, there was no problem. The problem was that historically Black universities, the poorer universities, many of them dysfunctional, couldn't make that shift because they didn't have the infrastructure. They couldn't give students data and devices, you know, within a day of lockdown, etc. And so, in conclusion, my sense is that post the pandemic, the major shake-up here would be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, if you know what I mean. The institutions that are fairly well placed will be able to continue to be competitive in research and teaching and league tables and all those nonsense. And the others will continue to exist, but barely, and offering, if I may be bold, really just degrees certificates without the depth, the quality of education that you require in a system that will, if the epidemiologists are correct, shut down and open up again into the years ahead of us.
Debra Satz: Thank you. Nina.
Nina Bandelj: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me. It's such an honor to be on this panel with my esteemed colleagues Jonathan, Kate, and Debra, and thank you to CASBS for organizing I'm an economic sociologist. I study money and the emotions and social meaning of money, and my current project is about the economy of parenting. That's all the monies that parents spend, invest, save, and borrow for the sake of children, because we love our children and we pay for their college. I would urge us to understand the issues related to inequality in higher ed in this broader perspective of what it means to raise children these days. I heed Kate's call that we need to think of education as a public good. But here's my message for today. Before we can re-envision education as a public good and address issues of inequality that also Jonathan spoke about, we need to reimagine children as a public good. So the big challenge then is how, how do we do this? How do we have ideas to move forward? And what structural change is needed? Over the course of the history, we've treated children differently. So change is possible. Not too long ago, children worked and contributed to economic welfare of families. They were economically useful. And then at the turn of the century, they became what Viviana Zelizer, brilliant sociologist, called emotionally priceless. She traced this transformation from a useful to a priceless child in her book, "Pricing the Priceless Child." Kids became sacralized, put on a pedestal. Child labor was completely out of question. But we've seen further development since, in a way assigning a price to that pricelessness. Children are treated as investment, I would say. Even parenting as a verb actually very relatively recent, common since the 1970s. So parenting means not only providing for children, but it means an intensive engagement to support children's cognitive development and enrichment, education broadly defined. And that requires investing time, emotions, and money into their education. All parents pretty much believe these days into this norm of intensive parenting. Which is what sociologists have broadly documented. I will mention two things that brought these trends about that are different from what most people discuss. Most people focus on big transformations in the economy and structural change. I will call attention to ideas because I think another challenge that we're facing is that we need new ideas in how we think about our society, about our world. And what brought this change into an investment child about, um, One I will mention is economic theory of human capital investment. This idea that productivity of people is changed by investment in education. Gary Becker, Chicago economist, received a Nobel Prize for that. And that has re-envisioned what does it mean that education does and how do we treat economies and what people are there to do. The other finding is— the other idea are really findings from the 1966 report, Equal Education The Brown v. Board of Education Opportunity Report by James Coleman, the sociologist who was commissioned to do this for the Johnson government. And this report was supposed to help remedy racial segregation and underfunding of schools in the South, but it really established that parental background, not funding of schools, is crucial for children's educational achievement. And I think this further solidified that it is parents who should invest in their own children not the state. So if I give a couple of examples in how this, this relates to higher education specifically, we've seen increasing marketization, privatization of higher education, and rise of finance in society, which has made widely accessible multi— different financial instruments that support monetary investment in children. Some of you may have heard the 529 savings plans, which are Financial instruments really pre-tax dollars for college, like, you know, 401(k)s for retirement. And there are also Federal PLUS loans, the parent loans for undergraduate students. All families— and we hear that in the interviews we do with them— want to sacrifice everything for their children. They follow these valiant goals. But because they don't begin in the same place, this has perverse consequences for increasing disparities. So the richest really leverage financial instruments for children to make more money out of money. So the reality is, if I may call it the parenting 10%, they make money from saving for people's college, to get properties in high real estate areas, for good schools. But in contrast, other families take on debt, loads of debt. A trillion, we know, college students take, but now increasingly more parents also to take. These PLUS loans have increased. Private loans for funding education, home equity loans to fund education. Most starkly, it's American Black families with children that have disproportionately large amounts of education debt when they have minimal assets. Just to tell you, for parents, households with children, families with children, Black families have 125 times less wealth That's less than 1 cent for a dollar when you look at households with children, these families that make decisions about college and trying to do the best. The last point is the third challenge I would like to identify, and that has spoken loudest to me when talking to families, and that's silence, what they don't say. They don't question whatsoever that raising children is on them. And on them only. They don't question their sole responsibility and demand more of the state, of the political change that is needed behind these transformations. So it really is a wicked problem that when we hear those silences, should we expect that they will voice political demands for reforms? This is something for us to discuss, the wicked problem of requiring not only structural and political change, but also the change in ideas. I hope we can harness some ideas from this panel, and I think now it's time to turn to some questions, Debra.
Debra Satz: Great, great. So let me just start off with an observation about something that I found was going through all three of your comments, which is So there's inequalities in higher education. And Jonathan really focused on, you know, some of what we're seeing, a shakeup which we're going to see in higher education may simply lead to even more inequities within the distribution of resources to colleges. And that's a problem. Colleges are not the engines of equality. That we would like them to be, partly because some people are never in a position to even apply to college in the first place because their prior education is so poor that they're not eligible really for— they're not equipped for a college education. So there's inequities inside, but maybe we're asking college to do too much to solve that problem because all of you are pointing to inequities outside education. It's a little bit like with healthcare. We've learned that a lot of the determinants of health are not healthcare, but there are things like housing and sanitation systems. And so in education, a lot of the challenges we face around inequity, I mean, some of them are of our own doing and and you pointed to them. I've talked about the cost curve. Those are inside education. But there are lots of inequities outside education which we can't really by ourselves control. And I'm just wondering how you think about how we should position ourselves in this moment when some of the problems we're focused on that are affecting higher education are really problems outside higher education. You know, I include something Caitlin mentioned, which is the high stakes that, you know, attach in the United States to getting a college education. And it's a really good thing to have so much riding on this one gatekeeper in a system of so much inequality. So I just wanted to throw that open about inside, outside. How do you think— what's the levers we have? Where should we look?
Caitlin Zaloom: So I am an advocate for free public college education, and maybe in a similar way to what Jonathan has described in South Africa. And I think that that is important in addressing some of these issues of inequality that come from outside of the university, in part because What free public higher education does is signal to students who are coming from low-income backgrounds or aspiring, or even aspiring backgrounds of any sort, that college is a place for them. That even our, even the flagships are places for them. For instance, we know that the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor was suffering from very depressed levels of low-income students applying to Ann Arbor. And there was a sense which was shown experimentally that this was a place that was going to cost them a lot, despite the fact that it was actually through some kind of very complicated mechanisms going to be free. But that is not a message kind of upfront. Now, I want to give an example because it used to be that our— that public colleges and universities were free or very low cost in the United States. So, you know, my stepfather growing up in New York City, just before World War II, he went to CUNY for no money. A poor kid from the Bronx whose parents were not college educated at all. They didn't even really know what CUNY was, but he knew. He knew what was a place for him. And that's really, really critical. Then the next question is always like, how are you going to pay for it? And, you know, if colleges are supporting, are putting in free education, then that is a, that's a high cost. But my sense of it, is that we will not be necessarily paying for students whose families may make very little, but also might make a lot of money, because we have a taxation system, which is where redistribution should be happening, okay? Education shouldn't be for redistribution. Education should be for education. That's what we do, okay? If we ask our colleges and universities to be the engines of redistribution, for this broader system of inequality, we are already dead in the water as far as addressing those sources of inequality goes. So I think that we have to really come to terms with the fact that our broader taxation system is where that equalizing really needs to happen.
Debra Satz: Other comments? I mean, of course, there's always the question, what do we do when the tax system doesn't do that? And how to think about some of the trade-offs that Jonathan was mentioning about, you know, the investment in early childhood education. This also connects with some of Nina's comments, which I think if you're looking for the, you know, maximizing the marginal return, you're better off investing early and a lot than later. And you'll get more equity that way, you know, in terms in terms of the outcomes. And yeah, so what do we do? I mean, you know, higher education is really important. On the other hand, there is a private aspect to higher education. It's not only a public good. And so part of the problem with thinking about higher education only as a public good is that, you know, some people will rightly say, well, why am I paying taxes to subsidize that billionaire's kids to go to school.
Nina Bandelj: They are big, big issues. I just want to echo your characterization, Debra, with sort of external inequality that's not directly linked to higher ed. So important because any of the changes will have to take this into account. And basically just to reiterate, the starting point of families. We know inequality has increased, but inequality in households with children has increased the highest. It is the highest. And that's not only according to class and wealth— and by the way, wealth inequality much higher than income inequality— but racial, racial inequality and racial wealth inequality. And so we're starting at such different starting points. Always need to— I don't have solutions, but these external aspects of inequality and internal ones due to education have to be thought of holistically. That would, again, just to reiterate and to echo that this is so important to view it as such.
Jonathan Jansen: I recall a very— an exchange with Caitlin when she did a presentation during those CASBS talks. And the question that I posed, I don't know if you remember, Caitlin, was why is it in the United States so difficult to pose the problem in structural or systemic terms rather than predominantly in terms of individual responsibility? And And, you know, it's a country where my children were born. I follow the news there. I want you to do well. But I must say I'm deeply disturbed by how even with the health, you know, system issues that have been blown— COVID, as you know, didn't cause any of this. It just blew it wide open. And we can't look away. When I look at criminal justice reform right now, I mean, this is not solvable by dealing with individual policemen. I mean, this is something we have to deal with. And so too for higher education, you know, with the enormous burdens that families bear on both sides of the Atlantic. There's just no way you solve this, you know, by appealing to individual, you know, commitment or individual common sense or that kind of thing. Stuff. You have to deal with this at the level of the state. You know, what is the role of the state in making education available, freely available? I share that view for all. Yes, yes, I just want to throw a little spanner in the works here. So, so I think we do that reasonably well within the capitalist economy of South Africa, um, but here's the downside. Okay, when that shifts over— I don't want to sound like a Republican here— but when that shifts over into the expectation that the government must provide, and not just provide, you know, for tuition and accommodation, but provide for my welfare as a whole— now, I do think that is an important set of issues, but when you then don't have the resources to do that you cool off the kids, as the economists might call it, you know, within higher education, it then becomes, as I wrote in a chapter in the book I have submitted to CASBS, As By Fire, you know, really the welfareization of the public education system. I don't think that does any good either. So, on the one hand, I think there are deep socioeconomic issues that must be resolved, but how does one do that? In a way that balances the very important role of the state with the encouragement, you know, of especially young people and their families to, to not just demand those changes but also to contribute in a way that makes it possible. Let me just give you one concrete example. So we give away scholarships, we call it bursaries here, but the scholarships are given on the basis, on this, with this understanding, the way I studied teacher education, I get a scholarship or bursary, I then teach, and I teach for the same number of years that the bursary or the scholarship was worth. In other words, by giving back, my brother and sister and my neighbor can also go. And, and, and study. That system has fallen completely flat. There's no sense of responsibility backwards once you have achieved— I just throw that in there not to disagree with the need for structural changes, but to look at something that also brings in responsibility for the greater good on the part of graduates.
Debra Satz: Well, well taken point. I'm going to turn to a few questions So Margaret, uh, Livi has a question. Um, so in this, uh, Jonathan responds to your, um, point about the stratification among rich and poor universities, which also is often along racial lines, certainly in South Africa, but also in the United States. Um, and she asks, do you think the current movement for racial justice could influence the provision of higher education in the future and lead to changes that will bring about greater inclusion? Or are the systemic biases, and I would add the outside forces at work here, just too impermeable to make those kinds of changes?
Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, I have to say I'm not too optimistic. Let me just talk about South Africa. South Africa that I know quite well, there has been a massive redistribution of funding in favor of the historically Black universities. But the meaning of historically Black here is simply a question of origins. That is to say, if you look at the former white universities, they are in fact Black universities in terms of student enrollments, just because of the massive opening up of admissions mission after apartheid ended formally in 1994. So now you have the odd situation that you're giving money to institutions that are not doing very well, in which the throughput rates of students are very, very low, in which the quality of education is sometimes quite dubious. And, and your former white universities that are your top research universities, you know, places like University of Cape Town are the top universities in the world, and you now shift money from them to the bottom. And I can tell you, Adam Abibu is the vice chancellor of Wits University. He has a fit when he says, but we're doing exactly what you told us to do, which is to produce the top graduates in the country, and they're all Black and women and so on, mainly women and Black students. And now you take away the money with a logic of institutional you know, sort of reparation, but not taking into account the changing demographics of the institutions themselves. That's slightly different if you're talking about Howard University in Washington, for example, and University of Michigan or Stanford, etc. So, I don't know whether, you know, I really do think that we need to have a discussion here about political economy and not just discussion about higher education policy and funding, because I think this is largely in a much bigger set of agreements that we've made about, you know, the nature of the state and the nature of the economy. And that's a difficult thing in both our countries to redress.
Nina Bandelj: Can I just add the hopeful? This is the moment. It's hardly imaginable that outside Well, that we cannot harness this energy. What else can we do if we don't harness this energy that we see these days? We have moms who go in the streets. I talked about parents. So maybe, you know, when you're in the comfort of your own home talking to a researcher, the world is taken for granted. But when you go out and you see what's going on in front of your eyes, the atrocities, violence, hopefully this will be harnessed in a positive way.
Caitlin Zaloom: I'd add too that this has to be, this has to be the moment. And if we look at American history, then we would also see that following major crises, we've had the opportunity for major structural change. Following the Depression, we got Social Security. Following World War II, we got the GI Bill, and on the heels of that, the Higher Education Act. There is an opportunity here. And, you know, like what Jonathan was saying, that the only way to get advancement is to push. It has to be a coordinated political efforts. And really, I think in terms of higher education, it's going to have to be a coordinated political effort of young people. And, you know, I do see this, and to some degree, and there are advancements at state levels across the country for shifting to a model where families, particularly families who make under $125,000 a year, will have access to a free college education. So we need to put more air beneath those— the wings of young people and of politicians who are already moving in this direction.
Nina Bandelj: Can I add a data point here that if Pew's research is correct, when they ask who's in favor of college tuition, there is a partisan divide. But if you look at young people, there is much much less of it. So I would say this is also important because we know these days how divisive political lines can be. But if we can find common ground, there is hope for young people across political lines to be in support of free college.
Debra Satz: I'm probably more myself on the pessimistic side, which is that the changes we see depend on an ideology or a belief that we're all in this together and that we have a common purpose. And I think that sense has been incredibly attenuated. I'm sure you're all aware, like in the United States now, parents can form pods in order to take care of the education of their children, but that gives them an out to not be thinking about the children who can't be part of those pods because of their family circumstances, can't form them. So I do worry that the degree of inequality that we have in this country is a threat to this idea that we're all in it together. And unless we get that idea that this is important for us as a society, it's really hard to move the needle. Let me turn to another question. Claude Ezrin asks, runaway college— well, he states, runaway college costs are not sustainable, which I agree with. Should colleges completely revisit how they operate and commit to stay at inflation or below? And if they should do that, how do they do that? What would be the mechanism for bringing down the costs of attending college? Because even if the state provides it, the runaway costs are just going to mean that the state will have to be putting in more and more money. And we need to control those costs. So ideas about making college sustainable, even if you're going to make it free, you have to deal with the underfunding. Underlying costs because you've got to fund it through taxation and you don't want all the taxes going to either healthcare or to education.
Caitlin Zaloom: Well, one thing that I would do, because I think that the issue isn't so much, you know, what lever do I tweak here, button to push there, but really the issue is kind of what are the core functions of education, right? So in order to decide what button or lever, you have to have a rubric for making that decision. So if it's educating young people, then the question is, how do you start at the classroom level and build up? And I think that that's a really important thing to keep in mind, because one trend that we have clearly seen in the last few decades has been that there are extras that get piled on in order for universities to compete with one another for rankings and for students who are going to help those rankings. And then there are, you know, more and more salaries of people who are running the extras. In a high-stakes system that we have today, where not only where— for individuals, where you go to college matters, and it can matter a lot, and for universities, whether you get funding, we need to start to strengthen the middle, right, and not have everyone trying to be going for this kind of extreme— it's a— that's a product of a high-stakes system, and we really need to be focusing on education for undergraduates.
Nina Bandelj: Yeah, I would just add that not to have a solution, but where the rising costs of tuition have come from, there are different explanations. Kate has mentioned two. And one is the amenities of college that, you know, an extra pool or this service or that service, that has really increased and changed, as well as salaries for administrators. Not so much professors.
Debra Satz: I'm not sure that is totally—
Nina Bandelj: I'm mentioning where the debates are, right? So people are thinking along those lines, but I'd like to hear your take, Debra.
Debra Satz: Yeah, as I said, I think the inputs have just been growing on the cost inputs. And yes, there are some amenities for sure, but the cost The cost of doing research has skyrocketed. The cost of recruiting talent has skyrocketed. People are much more— again, it's this— people are much more mobile and much more willing to kind of play the market. You talked about a kind of marketization, but of course people, you know, we don't want to prevent people from moving. So we face a dilemma about that. I think the costs have been going up across the board and will continue to rise even if the state is the funder. And we've got to address that just as we do in healthcare. We can't give healthcare to everybody at every level they demand. We have to think about how we operate within a budget and be fair and equitable. In meeting the need, you know, central needs of the population. We have to figure that out in education too. And so I guess one thought is whether, you know, there are technologies that could help us drive down the costs. I mean, of course, one way it would do this is it probably would drive down faculty salaries. So thoughts about that? Anything we can do to—
Jonathan Jansen: I was just wondering whether the question is not answered by how we come out of the pandemic. That is, what does higher education look like after this pandemic? I cannot imagine a scenario in which we go back to largely face-to-face teaching. I can see see a scenario of more and more blended learning. I can see parents saying, why must I pay? What am I paying for? If in the way we reopen that young people aren't on campuses every single day as in the past, and suddenly that is completely completely within our control, the question of runaway costs, because that's working with the mental model of the previous image of the university. And so, certainly in South Africa, I think there's going to be a major shake-up post-pandemic in ways that creates much more distant online learning with new models of financing. But also with much greater scaling of the provision of education, that could quite fundamentally change the way we think about costs.
Debra Satz: So could we wind up with a system, and would this be a bad thing? I'm not prejudging the answer here, where you had like the Harvards and Princetons that offer this very expensive, high-touch education and everybody else gets a blended or more online that's more—
Caitlin Zaloom: So I would add to that, that the issue to me is not exactly the mode of delivery, whether it is high-touch or blended, but really how the people who are teaching are integrated and treated. So if we make it clear that the people who are delivering the education are skilled educators trained in the mode of instruction, then I think that, you know, there's actually probably quite a lot of flexibility we have with the different technological options that we have. But for instance, with the expansion of adjunct teaching in this country over the last several decades, what we've seen is an erosion of education, not because adjuncts themselves are— there's anything wrong with their teaching skills. But in fact, those are some of the most dedicated educators out there, but they're treated terribly and they're horribly overburdened. So, you know, I don't— like, we're never going to fix that by throwing some online classes at it. We need to actually be supporting educators to educate, and then they can do that with the different tools that they have available to them.
Debra Satz: Great. I've got a whole bunch of questions, so let me— so this is for Nina. If you could— this is from Abby Rumsey. If you could elaborate on how ideas about children have changed in the past and how that might point to a different way forward of how do we get to really value children as public assets and how do we create that kind of culture change and move in that direction.
Nina Bandelj: Thank you. It's a million-dollar question, right? How do you achieve cultural change? But among the things I mentioned in my remarks, I forgot to say the role the role of experts and the role of people who give advice as to how to go about raising children. And that has also changed. Used to be doctors and pediatricians and good food and health was most important. And then, you know, you actually have an expert now on raising children, gives you advice about emotional attachment. Going back to Dr. Spock, who gave advice at the earlier period. We have now some of those who have come up, like free-range children, right? There's a movement where less control, less obsessiveness with safety, and sort of high-touch, hands-on parenting. But as a broader lesson, and trying to be cognizant of time and more questions, I would say sociology tells you that not like Margaret Thatcher, there are only families and individuals, but that there are structural forces in their society. So these parents going to get classes, be educated, understanding that it's not only individual's responsibility in the broader mindset that we have to change, that Jonathan also talked about, I think that would go a long way. So it's not just about children, but it is about society, how it functions. How do we see it?
Debra Satz: Okay. I have another question from Daniel Garoff, which is under the nice rubric, going comparative. So our university friends in Europe, he writes, might caution us to be careful about precisely how we call for and accept federal help, along with lots more government money for higher education may also more government control. We're certainly seeing in the United States right now a lot of interventions from the federal government in higher education, particularly around international art students, that are not conducive to the mission we have of educating, right, for the broad public benefit. Particularly when you're talking about private institutions like Stanford, which don't see themselves as serving just a state function, California or even the United States, but having more of a global function. So what are the downsides of state intervention in the higher education system?
Caitlin Zaloom: Well, what I would say, I mean, in the, in the US case, and I would love to hear what Jonathan has has to say about this too. But in the US, we have tons of federal intervention all the time. I mean, so funding students through debt and through Pell Grants, this is federal support of higher education really broadly, and it's both private and public. It's not just one or the other, it's both. So I mean, just that basic fact, and we're not even talking about the incredible role of the federal government in research, corporations. The thing about funding higher education in the US is that, well, it— like in many other areas too, federal intervention happens through kind of private means, or it happens kind of subterraneously so that you don't really see it up front, but it is absolutely 100% already there. The issue is about making it explicit so that we can talk about it and make some political decisions about it, which we do anyway. But we hand it off to people who are working kind of behind the scenes in the Department of Education or at the National Science Foundation or at the National Institutes of Health. But we have to bring it out into the public so that it can be debated. It is already 100% there.
Jonathan Jansen: I think one of the really great advantages of the US higher education system, which I hope we never lose, is its diversity. In other words, You know, when I was a student in California, I was absolutely amazed that you can go from Stanford to Berkeley to the MCO Community College, you know, within a day of driving. And it provides in different ways access, you know, to people and also with the potential for transfer across those institutions. When you in a country like mine where you really have, you know, public universities and where depending on, you know, who the political thinking at any one time where the giving of money is tied to greater and greater control. And as a Vice Chancellor, I can tell you, I fought running battles with the government to sort of say the fact that you give money is for universities to be able to produce, to generate the kind of talent, the kind of thinking, the kind of leadership that we all need. And so don't make this sort of, you know, economic calculation. We're giving you more money and in return for greater control. So, I mean, fortunately in South Africa we have a, you know, a tradition are fighting for institutional autonomy, as it's called here, during the apartheid years, that serves us well. But you've got— I agree with whoever asked the question. If I read the question correctly in the chat room, it's about how you ask and how you receive that federal funding, as opposed to— because if you're not cautious, You know, once the state gets in, it doesn't quite know how to get out of it.
Debra Satz: Here's a question. Can we connect individual-level inequality with institutional-level inequalities? And I— it's a question very close to my own heart. Can the major research universities help underfunded public colleges and universities? So how do we think about the responsibilities of the— Stanfords and NYUs and actually the UCs even to some of the much worse funded, although I believe the UC shouldn't be in that same, they're not as well endowed as some of the private universities are. So what are our responsibilities and what can we do?
Caitlin Zaloom: Debra, I think that you've actually been thinking a lot about those issues. Can we offer it back to you?
Jonathan Jansen: Yeah, yeah. Let's hear from you.
Nina Bandelj: We want to hear.
Jonathan Jansen: Yeah.
Nina Bandelj: That's the way to go, it seems.
Debra Satz: I think it's actually the ability to partner with the public universities is really important. So I'll just give you— this is on a small scale. I was a first-generation college student to City College of New York. And, you know, had a huge influence on my life. And we have a program at Stanford where we partner with City College of New York and Hunter College to identify very talented undergrads who would be good candidates for graduate school but are just kind of so outside the system, they're not even thinking about it. And we bring them here for the summer. Now, this is a high-touch, small-scale program. And we introduce them to living on a college campus, and they work one-on-one with professors on research topics. And we've had a tremendous success rate in diversifying the professoriate by getting these— helping these students launch into graduate student careers. Our medical school partners with the University of Maryland, which has a very good record on producing Black PhDs. And they have a pipeline program that brings these students here freshman and sophomore years to work with them. And so I mean, these are small scale. The question is, can you scale that up? I definitely think we should try to think about ways to scale up, but in ways that don't worsen the division. What you don't want to do is worsen or denigrate the incredible work that is going on in our community colleges. You want to help use resources to make it better. And some of that may be advocating for state funding, that it's in everyone's interest. The whole ecosystem, actually, of higher education is threatened. By the disinvestment in public institutions. Our graduate students can't get jobs if there are no institutions for them to go to. You know, there's a pipeline and output, and we're an ecosystem. And so we have a lot of reason to be strong advocates and partners with the public universities. But I'm interested in your any thoughts you have of ways we can be helpful.
Nina Bandelj: I agree, and that just got a thought came to my mind when you mentioned community colleges. A lot of my students who come to upper division classes are transfer students from community colleges. So not exactly perhaps in this strong collaboration line, but at least a pathway, a pathway for students to come through community college to four-way institutions. I have a student who studies this, and it's pretty stigmatized still. And high school counselors are reluctant to give this advice. PTAs are reluctant to think of going to community college before coming to a four-year school. But, you know, half of our population at UC Irvine are first-year— first-generation college students, and partially this is due because of that. Strong pipeline.
Debra Satz: Yeah. So that actually raises another— we're talking about affordability. And of course, affordability interacts, although it's somewhat distinct, from completion rates. Because one of the huge challenges in the US are the number of students who go into debt to go to college because it's a good investment, but then don't get the support they need, or they're just one crisis away from being swept aside and they wind up with debt but no degree. And so, you know, ways— I mean, I know Caitlin, you probably thought a lot about this because in Debted, I'm sure a lot of those students are students who also never graduated and are saddled with debt. How do you think about that?
Caitlin Zaloom: First, I would say, because focusing on community colleges is so important in this discussion. I'm so glad that we've ended up there. I want to kind of note first the kind of regionalism of even the idea that community colleges should be a pathway into something like the UC system. And that's not necessarily true in the rest of the country. It was something— I mean, so I came, I, you know, did my graduate degree at UC Berkeley. I came from the East Coast, and there was not a sense that the think that community college was anything other than, you know, that education in itself, those two years. It's completely different in the West, and I think that that is a good thing that we should be thinking about bringing beyond the West. Of course, like, the very worst thing that you could end up with as any individual student is lots of debt and no degree. I mean, well, there's some benefit if you have an AA degree, but I mean, if you've paid an enormous amount to get it, that's terrible. It really raises a lot of questions about external inequalities because there are conditions, I mean, very much exacerbated by the pandemic, like childcare, like caring for older parents, that are going to stop young people and aspiring people from going to school, because those things are immediate, they, you know, and the love is deep, and that's where responsibilities lie first. So the fact that we don't, that we're, that we've levied all of this on students who are aspiring and who don't already have support supports is really drastically, drastically unfair. And I think one— there's a really wonderful book by a young philosopher called Moving Up Without Losing Your Way, which is actually— yeah, Jennifer Morton. It's a terrific book. It's about CUNY. We keep coming back to CUNY. But it really gives you a window onto the lives of some of her students and the ethical ethical challenges that they face when on the one hand, college is saying you need to be here, you need to be dedicating your time to finishing your classes. And at the same time, their parents need them at home to help with younger brothers and sisters or to contribute funds to keep the household going. Those are the kinds of ethical, just terrible, terrible choices that we've levied on low-income people. So when we talk about noncompliance, completion rates, you know, that sounds very abstract, but really what's inside that is a set of ethical challenges that no one should have to face.
Debra Satz: Yeah, and I think the pandemic will make this worse, these challenges worse, as more people lose their jobs and we see more inequality, unless the optimists are right and we can get our society together to move the needle forward.
Jonathan Jansen: I think this is a major problem and we've seen it in data at the moment about how many, not just traditional undergraduate students, but also faculty who are studying towards a master's master's or a PhD degree are discontinuing their education precisely because it is so incredibly difficult, a) to pay for it when a family member has lost a job on the one hand, but then also just by being so incredibly dispirited, you know, by the extended lockdown and childcare demands and what have you. And I think one of the things universities can do is to really, you know, first of all pay attention to that, the falling out of people from studies in this pandemic period, and make it easier for people to— for students, and particularly those who are studying and teaching, to come back into the system, and change the rules, you know, that govern those kinds of— those who are left who leave the system, because if we don't do that, the pandemic impact on discontinuation is going to be huge and it's going to be costly.
Nina Bandelj: Just to say that we need compassion, right, both as professors who are having students in our classes, but also as faculty and administrators who need to support our colleagues through these very, very difficult times.
Debra Satz: Yeah, absolutely. Hard for everyone and I think we also need to be advocates for the public infrastructure that would diminish these inequities. The fact that we don't have universal broadband, you know, access in the United States, huge issue. I'm sure that's also an issue in South Africa.
Jonathan Jansen: For sure.
Debra Satz: Right. And, you know, we see with some of our students who just can't, don't have reliable internet. They have no access. So I think at this point I'm going to bring this very interesting discussion to a close. You've given us a lot to think about and a lot of attention, I think, both on the in-college obstacles we face or ones that we can control ourselves, and then the broader social context that we're facing, which just exacerbates the problems and may be critical pieces of the solution. So I'm really grateful to all of you for that, and also for pushing us to really think through the public benefits of education, that while many people treat education solely as a private good, It is a critical public good for our country and our world. We've got big problems and we need an educated population who is going to help us find solutions to those problems. So I want to thank you. I want to again thank the co-sponsors, Public Books and the Stillembosch Institute for Advanced Study. I'm going to give to the audience a heads up that registration for episodes 7 and 8 of this series, Social Science for a World in Crisis, will happen on September 13th and 25th. September 16th will focus on the transformation of work and workers during COVID and the event on the 25th focus on rebuilding social cohesion and social infrastructure, uh, pieces that have been unearthed, uh, as really critical in our own discussion. Uh, there are, uh, so please look forward to that. Uh, CASBS has at least a dozen more episodes in store for you. So if you're not on the CASBS event notification list, go back to that webpage casbs.stanford.edu and sign up. And until then, uh, uh, um, you can learn more about the series by clicking the webcast series on that home page. So thanks again to the panel, uh, for raising some really wonderful and complicated issues, and, uh, to everybody for, uh, participating. Thank you for attending and joining us in this discussion.
Narrator: That was Nina Bandel, Jonathan Jansen, Caitlin Zalome, and Debra Satz discussing Higher Ed at the Crossroads. Again, you can learn more about this event and others in the CASBS web series Social Science for a World in Crisis by checking out the link in this episode's notes, or you can always visit to the CASBS website at casbs.stanford.edu. While you're there, go ahead and sign up for the newsletter. There's always great stuff. And we've got more CASBS Live events coming at you in the podcast feed. And of course, more original episodes of Human Centered with host John Markoff. So be sure to subscribe, review, tell all your friends. I'm sure they'll love it. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.