00:02:10.140that I had normalized it in my brain instead of thinking about like, oh, isn't it kind of weird
00:02:16.140that in order for me to get a PhD, I have to become this deep in debt?
00:02:21.220And I think part of that though, right, is like how the system is designed to work. The system
00:02:26.080is designed to make it so that you have to think that this is normal. Because if you don't think
00:02:31.600it's normal, if you think this doesn't make sense, why do we have such high tuition for public
00:02:37.020universities, and why do our states fund institutions at such a low rate, and all these
00:02:42.340sorts of things. When you start to question that, then you probably wouldn't be on board with taking
00:02:47.340out these large loans. This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
00:02:56.240And I'm Dominique Baker, professor at the University of Delaware.
00:02:59.760Just on a practical level, if we're thinking about how student loans affect our cultural lives,
00:03:05.060I think that they affect how we think about education and value education, or like the
00:03:10.880right to education. I think on just a monetary level, they affect the choices that people make
00:03:16.560every day. For me, that is even just that is enough to think about something that affects
00:03:21.840so many people every day and the choices that are available to them, the options that are
00:03:27.060available to them. That's part of culture to me. Yeah, I think it's like, they're those sort of
00:03:31.860micro pieces that you were just describing where in the everyday people are being affected. But
00:03:35.760it's also this big piece of like, you cannot create the system of funding for higher education
00:03:41.300that we currently have and not think that that is an expression of culture. If you had an orientation
00:03:47.260toward higher education, it was a public good, that it was there the same way that libraries
00:03:52.060exist in our world. There is no way that we would have created this type of system. So it's sort of
00:03:58.360Like in the small pieces of how people live and process their world and then in the big pieces of how we've structured society at every level, the way that we think about how whether or not college is affordable is impacted.
00:04:14.740So along these lines, a couple of months ago, I interviewed you for the newsletter about
00:04:19.020a study that you recently published with several co-authors.
00:04:22.480And I feel like it's a good way for us to kind of talk about the ways that student loan
00:04:28.100discourse, thinking, ideology manifests in our culture.
00:04:32.340So can you tell me, tell the audience a little bit about this study just to refresh?
00:04:38.140So some colleagues and I were really curious about how the news media talks about student loans.
00:04:44.680And we decided, let's study that systematically.
00:04:47.880And as we started exploring and thinking about sort of, oh, as an example, how do reporters and news articles sort of talk about race and racism when we think about student loans,
00:04:58.740given all that we know about the very real ways that racism has an impact on who relies on student loans, how much they borrow, the struggles that they have with repayment.
00:05:08.140And what we seemed to find was this curious pattern as we were doing that study where,
00:05:13.640oh, well, that reporter, we know who they are, and they went to Harvard.
00:05:17.100And, oh, well, that reporter, we know who they are, and they definitely went to Yale.
00:05:21.300And this person went to Columbia, and that person went to Columbia.
00:05:23.880And, oh, my God, that person also went to Columbia.
00:05:26.200And so we decided, what if we would, like, systematically explore that?
00:05:33.240And so we did, and we found that, A, a lot of reporters who report on student loans attended places like Columbia and Northwestern that are places that, generally speaking, do not have students rely a ton on student loans as undergrads, but do require people to rely a lot on student loans when it comes to graduate school.
00:05:57.940And at the same time, that this sort of concentration of a certain type of educational experience among reporters was related to the language that these reporters actually used in their news articles, where we would see that the reporters that didn't attend these very highfalutin types of institutions, these institutions that are sort of steeped in prestige and things of that nature.
00:06:24.940They think of it as like Ivy Plus, right?
00:06:26.680So it's like specific Ivy schools, but then also a school like Northwestern, which is
00:06:51.220And so we seem to find this relationship where when people attended those institutions, they were less likely to talk about race and racism, especially in their articles about student loans.
00:07:03.420And of course, it's not the case that we say sort of like, if you go to Harvard, this is what you're less likely to talk about, right?
00:07:08.540But we could imagine a world where there's all sorts of cultural forces at work, where who gets to go to Harvard, who leaves Harvard and has the ability to take an unpaid internship at one of these types of places, who has the family resources to be able to take underpaid journalism positions that are highly precarious.
00:07:30.740And in order to be able to get these opportunities, all of that gets wrapped up together and we can see it.
00:07:38.280All of these different types of research approaches are really valuable because there are things that we wish we could know about the actual process of news reporting and things like that that we can't get to with our really big data set of years worth of articles that we're looking at, the language and how they're using it and stuff like that.
00:07:57.980And we tried to supplement that a little bit. I had several off the record conversations with reporters across the country who covered varying beats, but in order to just try to get a feel for like, how's an article get published? Who plays a role in this? How do pitches happen? How do things get assigned to different reporters? All sorts of things in order to try to better understand what this process is.
00:08:23.220Because I think the part that really aligns really well with the show is that it's not
00:08:29.800about the individual author and it's not about the individual newspaper.
00:08:35.200It's about thinking broadly about our society.
00:09:07.540Talking to people, reading about it, right?
00:09:10.080And so I even, like, if we're going to zoom out a little bit more, my writing, especially
00:09:15.560at BuzzFeed, which is where I first started writing about student loans, generally student
00:09:18.840loan culture, you had me who had over $100,000 in student loan debt from graduate school. And
00:09:25.660then my direct editor also had over $100,000 in student loan debt. And I can imagine a different
00:09:32.640scenario where the form of my article, even the idea that it was greenlit, like all of these
00:09:39.340things would have been very different or might not have happened at all if I had an editor who
00:09:44.580didn't have a cent of student loan debt right so it's even it's not within any of these scenarios
00:09:51.000it's not just the writer it's also where are they in this apparatus right yes so it's i i just it's
00:09:57.500so interesting and i'm so glad that you gave us this place to start talking about like how does
00:10:03.060this information get disseminated and here here's some some real information about what happens like
00:10:09.060at the wall street journal why is no one talking about the racialized components of student loan
00:10:14.560dead at the Wall Street Journal. What might be happening there? Who can say? Who can say what's
00:10:19.940going on? Can you say a little bit about what you did find about the Wall Street Journal and
00:10:25.180authors? Yes. So one of the things we did is we explored, let's just look at anybody who ever
00:10:30.000wrote for our different newspapers that are in our study and let's see what their language is like.
00:10:34.380And we found that the Wall Street Journal is particularly different than the rest of the
00:10:41.600newspapers that we looked at so we found that the wall street journal anyone who wrote for the
00:10:47.320wall street journal had fewer articles that ever mention race racism sort of any of this racialized
00:10:55.500language that we were interested in exploring which to us says this is not so much about the
00:11:02.420people that choose to work at the wall street journal things like that that has to be something
00:11:05.980about the actual culture and norms within the Wall Street Journal that say that certain articles
00:11:13.600are allowed to be published. And when they're published, they probably are allowed to attend
00:11:18.480to certain parts of a story. Right. And that maybe that reporter had put a paragraph in there
00:11:24.660mentioning the discrepancy, the racial discrepancies and who takes out student loans.
00:11:29.920But can you talk actually about what sort of language could be added that points to some of
00:11:35.880these discrepancies in terms of who takes out the loans, how much people take out in loans,
00:11:42.380default rates, right? That's the one that I often look at. And also private loans versus public
00:11:47.440loans. Yeah. So there are a lot of different ways that we could imagine incorporating race,
00:11:53.420racism, and student loans. So the things that we explored, we're looking at sort of, do you ever
00:11:58.120talk about racial groups? Do you ever explicitly say something about like black students, white
00:12:02.540students, etc. We look at types of institutions, right? Do you talk about HBCUs, which are most
00:12:09.300definitely a racialized institution, literally institutions created because Black students could
00:12:14.500not attend the other institutions in the United States. So we also look just explicitly, do you
00:12:21.220talk about racism? Do you talk about racial equity? Do you talk about these actual issues?
00:12:25.980Because these can all play a role in how we see things like the disproportionate share of students who take out student loans, whether undergraduate or graduate school.
00:12:36.780This is a part of who defaults on their student loans, who struggles in repayment to be able to pay back, which has larger implications around racism within our job market and the larger labor market at large.
00:12:51.400And then we can think sort of even more broadly about things like who attends institutions that are less likely to benefit the students, things like for-profit institutions, or who's more likely to take on risky financial products, things like private student loans.
00:13:10.800And sort of all of those pieces can align with our sort of larger schisms within society around things like racism.
00:13:19.500And even, like, the one that I think about all the time is just looking at the moment in time when, as a country, we decided that, like, we should stop spending as much money to fund public institutions neatly maps onto, like, the moment in time when education expanded beyond white men in particular, but white people just in general.
00:13:48.260Yeah, it feels very glaring that we would start thinking that higher education is primarily a private good around the same time that people who were not white men would have access to colleges and universities.
00:14:04.080Yeah, isn't that interesting? Why would that happen?
00:14:07.740Okay, so we're going to answer some questions about this broader topic of student loan culture.
00:14:14.020They're all over the place, and I'm really excited for them.
00:14:16.220So the first question comes from Bridget, and it's about what's next when it comes to affording higher education.
00:14:23.860As someone who graduated with a master's in 2007, I still have significant student loan debt.
00:14:29.300Even with the excitement of the Biden-Harris proposal that was ultimately blocked, I still couldn't help but think, that's great and fine and would help a lot, but it's not fixing the problem.
00:14:40.180How do we start fixing this giant mess that is requiring kids to pay thousands of dollars
00:14:44.520to go to school for a few years and potentially paying it back for 20 plus years?
00:17:46.500So here's the thing that I like to sort of say to help frame this a little bit.
00:17:50.640I'm currently doing a research study, and it's focused on admissions.
00:17:53.840And one of the things we did is we said, let's look at all colleges and universities that have – they accept less than 50% of the students who apply to them.
00:18:02.640And that was 185 institutions in the United States.
00:18:06.560There are thousands, thousands of institutions in these United States.
00:18:13.020And when we said we're going to cut it at 50%, which is nothing compared to like the Harvard, Stanford, like we accept 4% of our applicants.
00:18:20.920We're just saying if you accept 49% of the students who apply to you, you're in our sample.
00:18:27.660And that's still only 185 institutions.
00:18:30.380That, to me, very explicitly says that the majority of people in this country are not experiencing the things that we're talking about at the Harvard's and the Stanford's and the Yale's and whatever.
00:18:44.220They experience a very different part of higher education, and I don't understand why we would spend a significant amount of our policy, time, interest, resources focusing on those institutions, except beyond, quite frankly, thinking about what proper taxation might look like.
00:19:04.000Right. Right. Yeah. And as you point out, the precarious funding models, particularly but not exclusively in Republican led states, like this is affecting so many more people on a daily basis.
00:19:19.460Yes. And I think we sometimes skip over just how connected funding and tuition can be. And so I think I always try to remind myself, because I can do it too, is I try to remind myself that the cost of attendance is subsidized. For the majority of students, that cost is subsidized.
00:19:40.760those funds can come from several places it can come from the state it can come from portions of
00:19:46.540the endowment etc etc but the price that students pay is not the full price of educating them
00:19:53.040more often than not and so if that's the case then i'm always wondering so who is going to pay
00:19:59.120because we don't want to go the route of we just cut the overall amount of money and we say we're
00:20:06.840going to reduce how much money we're putting. We've seen some other countries that are heading
00:20:12.380towards that and it's not good what we see happen. When we start reducing the amount of funding that
00:20:20.460we're putting towards the educational experience, that's when we start seeing that faculty members
00:20:25.680are fired, that faculty members can't do these additional things to support student success,
00:20:32.160that there is not money that's available to help with finding childcare, to help with wraparound
00:20:37.080services like bus services, all sorts of pieces start falling by the wayside. And so if we are
00:20:44.940serious that we think that this education matters and that this learning experience matters, then
00:20:50.020our question is not like, well, we want to cut the overall amount. It's, well, who's going to
00:20:54.600be responsible for the different amount? Like if we're going to say that families are going to
00:21:01.120contribute less someone else has to contribute more to ensure a quality education so how much
00:21:08.060of this because when we say who's going to cover the rest right our current thinking is that the
00:21:13.480individual should take on the costs of making up that discrepancy and if you don't have the family
00:21:19.400wealth to cover that cost then you should take out loans and historically that wasn't the case
00:21:26.300We said the additional cost should be spread amongst many millions of people because educating people and getting people who are specialists in different areas and who make up our civilization, that is a greater good.
00:21:54.040So how do we, I think sometimes, at least for me, there are a lot of like liberals who look at this problem and say, this is insurmountable. How do we change the thinking? And my argument is, well, we changed it the other direction, right? Like there was a bunch of policy changes and a bunch of ideological changes that facilitated us changing the way that we thought about who was responsible for education. So how do we change it back?
00:22:19.100Yeah, and I think to me, changing it back requires a lot of different collective action movements that are targeted at different parts of our society. I think it is a necessary but insufficient step to say that voting matters.
00:22:37.380I think, yes, voting matters. And we're going to go right back to my improv, yes, anding. So there are also things to consider when it comes to things like collective action around debt and student loans and pushing the people that are elected to do things about that.
00:22:56.620there are also small grassroots efforts that can be made in order to help think about mutual aid
00:23:03.360for people as they're experiencing hardship. But I also think that a lot of this is about
00:23:12.520advocacy within states, not just the federal government. I think that we can sometimes get
00:23:19.040really focused. And I'll also say, I think we sometimes get overly focused on the feds. And I
00:23:24.980think beyond that, we get overly focused on the president. And that's, in some ways, a reaction
00:23:30.680to the fact that we see a fairly intractable Congress. And that because of that, we see that
00:23:38.620we don't think many things are going to happen, right? We sort of see news articles that talk
00:23:44.120about how few bills are coming out of our current Congress. And so because of that, we think, well,
00:23:52.960we will hyper-focus on an area that actually does seem to have some movement. But part of the
00:23:58.720problem is our country was designed so that Congress would be the one that would create
00:24:04.580rules. And similarly, our country was designed such that through federalism, these states would
00:24:11.120play a substantial role in how college and universities run and work. So I think there
00:24:18.820are a lot of spaces that even when we say that there is research evidence that we want to
00:24:23.780communicate about to the Department of Education is one example. That's great. That's awesome.
00:24:29.480There are also several different state departments of education and just all along that have a lot
00:24:38.020of power that we want to be thinking about. I think really seriously about in West Virginia,
00:24:45.920where they have over a billion dollars in surplus in their budget but are cutting majors
00:24:53.640at West Virginia University like that to me tells me that this is culture that to me tells me right
00:25:01.720like this is as if money was ever not but you know the dollars and cents argument of like we're cash
00:25:08.060strapped and that's why we have to cut things at the university that simply can't be the case
00:25:14.100So then that means that we need to be thinking about what are strategies at the federal level, what are also strategies at the state level that push people to think about their role in adequately funding and supporting the system of higher education.
00:25:33.360And I do think one of those ways to sort of tie into what we were talking about a little bit earlier is actually around the fact that we should talk about more than Harvard because it matters when the only image that people have of higher education is of this one incredibly unique experience instead of, you know, I was just reading about the transition out of coal jobs to renewable energy jobs in West Virginia.
00:26:01.860and one of the things that was mentioned was someone attending community college in order
00:26:06.020to learn different skills to be able to work with wind turbines. And like that, that right there is
00:26:12.820thinking about the public good of higher education. That is thinking about a way for our world to
00:26:19.540literally exist in the future and help people to be able to have a steady job and income while also
00:26:27.680helping to try to protect our environment. That, to me, is the type of focus that we should be
00:26:34.000thinking about within higher education. This is a great segue to our next question, which is about
00:26:39.420where all of like the money, the endowment money, the funding money, like where it goes. This is
00:26:44.740from Nadine. Many educational institutions have huge endowments that are invested, thus making
00:26:51.060millions each year. Is there a reason these monies can't be used to pay for or subsidize
00:26:57.640educational costs for the students who are unable to pay or pay off all or a portion of student
00:27:04.100loans for alumni? There are institutions whose endowment is now wielded in a way that makes
00:27:11.560them need blind for undergrad. So essentially, there is very little tuition for anyone who can't
00:27:18.280afford it there there's little that they have to pay why can't this happen on a larger scale
00:27:23.800yeah so to start from the endowment we often think of the endowment like it's like a piggy bank
00:27:29.320it's a spot where we put in money though uh correctly to the question uh is the interest
00:27:36.340bearing piggy bank uh so we can we can grow and all those sorts of things but i think the
00:27:41.460big thing to keep in mind is the way that endowments actually function it's like they
00:27:45.460are several piggy banks and certain ones of those piggy banks have a specific rule about how they're
00:27:54.100allowed to be used. Yeah. Yeah. And that gets really tricky. If a donor says that I'm going to
00:28:00.340give you a hundred million dollars and the way that you can use this is for faculty recruitment,
00:28:07.420then the only way that you can use that hundred million dollars is for faculty recruitment. You
00:28:12.180cannot repurpose those funds to use them to pay off student loans or do other things, use them
00:28:18.920for financial aid. You cannot do that. That is in breach of a contract basically. So it's really
00:28:26.120important to keep in mind that we talk a lot about sort of these top lines of like how much money is
00:28:30.880in their endowment, but all of that money is not available to be used for sort of everything that
00:28:36.300you could want to in fact donors rarely give a no strings attached donation the hubris of saying
00:28:46.220like you can only use it for this very particular thing unless there are places i think times when
00:28:51.860someone uses it in a way that i think is smart like the recent donation from the billionaire
00:28:56.980to the bronx medical school that made school free for all right like that's an interesting earmark
00:29:04.300to me this can only be used for trips to Greece during the summer to study philosophy a less
00:29:11.800useful earmark right or maybe a short-sighted short-sighted niche earmark for sure that is an
00:29:19.080actual endowment at you know I know this so okay go ahead well until but but I think that stands
00:29:24.840the point of like the people that donate are not doing it just to say like the institution will
00:29:32.440decide how to use the money, more often than not, they have really particular thoughts about how
00:29:38.620this money should be used. And they are willing to put that into contractual language. So that A
00:29:44.200makes it really challenging to just use the funds however you want. I think the second part that
00:29:50.180really matters when thinking about endowments and need-based aid. So I'm actually in a sort of
00:29:54.900unique position. When I used to work in admissions, I would do a lot of work on what was then our sort
00:30:01.500of no loan program, which guaranteed that for students who had below a certain income
00:30:07.660threshold, their family, that we would use some of our endowment money to basically cover
00:30:15.440when they would have had to take out loans.
00:30:18.180And I worked at a public university that does not have as big of an endowment as the Harbards
00:30:31.040But it is not Harvard, it is not Princeton. And so eventually, they actually shut down that program. And on the website, it just said sort of flat out that like, this was because of fiscal reasons. And one of the things that a lot of institutions don't talk as much about is that it gets really interesting when you commit to say that students won't have to take out loans, you're going to cover whatever would have been from loans from your endowment.
00:30:58.480what happens is the more low-income students you enroll the more expensive that program is
00:31:07.320right and so you can imagine that at a certain point it starts becoming very very expensive
00:31:15.840and so then it comes back down to do you have enough money to be able to cover all of these
00:31:23.300students. What you don't want to do is say something like, oh, I guess we should enroll
00:31:28.740fewer low-income students. That's not right. So it comes kind of back to this money space of
00:31:36.120most institutions do not have the type of money that Princeton has. I say Princeton because they
00:31:42.480were sort of the first to push this type of no-loan program. But I would say realistically,
00:31:48.900we're talking about less than 50 universities in the United States. So that money just doesn't
00:31:54.620exist in any of their piggy banks to be able to cover what is necessary for their students to not
00:32:03.640have to take out loans. Okay. So our conclusion for Nadine is that relying on the endowment is
00:32:09.100not the solution to our problems with student loans. It would be cool if there was. Unfortunately, yes.
00:32:16.500And I will say, I'll throw out there, right, it's kind of weird that the places that do have the endowment size have such a small share of their students who are low income.
00:32:26.660Because there are, right, I said it's like maybe 50.
00:32:29.520Let me tell you, those 50 are not enrolling like an astounding number of low income students.
00:32:36.240It's like, it's not what it could be, I'll say that, because you're also still using a lot of
00:32:44.380the same criteria for admission, which means that you are largely accepting a student body that has
00:32:51.180resources in the first place, right? Correct.
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00:33:36.000Okay, this next question, this is kind of a throwback to something we were talking about
00:33:42.980earlier. It's about collective action. This is from Hannah, and Melody's going to read it.
00:33:47.780What do you think about the potential of collective action and advocacy organizations
00:33:52.640like the Debt Collective to influence the narrative and put pressure on the federal
00:33:57.220government to advance more forgiveness schemes for borrowers?
00:34:01.100All right, what do you think? I'm so curious.
00:34:02.880Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of potential within collective action. I think most of my faith is in collective action. I don't think that we would have even been talking about a Biden Harris plan without that collective action.
00:34:18.680Yeah. You know, it's funny. I was talking to my husband recently and one of the things I was telling him was like, you know, it's a real pickle when you study things that like everyone wants to opine on. Everyone has a sort of opinion regardless of the personal experiences they've had or the research they've done on it.
00:34:37.420And it was funny because he was like, well, yeah, but do you remember when you first started doing this, when everyone thought it was so weird that you would study race and student loans?
00:34:51.220And I thought about it and I was like, I remember people thinking it was weird that my dissertation would focus on HBCUs and student loans, that I would be pushing so much to try to explore and understand what was going on around race, racism and student loans.
00:35:07.480so i'll say that i think it's movements that help make that information that research that i'm doing
00:35:18.460more legible it's a two-way street because seeing those movements also helps me to think about like
00:35:26.440what's the research that i need to be doing what does that need to look like and so i am not uh
00:35:33.000I think it's always interesting that like, I'm, I'm solidly a professor. I teach my classes,
00:35:38.840I do research and, uh, I am a professor in, uh, both an education school and a public policy
00:35:46.260school, which means that, um, I do a lot of thinking about really applied topics and like
00:35:52.120what is actually happening in schools, what is actually happening in our policy system.
00:35:56.900And so I want to communicate with that. But I recognize that like my role is not the role that I have chosen for myself is not always the one where like I'm doing all the communication for something or I am right.
00:36:11.220Like, I think that to me, true collective action means that you have different people who have different roles and responsibilities who are contributing to a larger goal, that you have people like me doing analysis work and combing through tax forms for universities and doing all that at the same time that you have people who are advocating on the Hill and things of that nature.
00:36:38.580So I don't think we would be where we were without collective action, and I don't see a way forward to a more just society without more collective action.
00:36:49.260And I think that you're totally right that, like, when you started doing this work, this is not something that people were talking about.
00:36:56.160I don't even think people were talking about, like, student loan debt as, again, as culture.
00:37:01.320I just think the conversation has changed a lot, and that makes me hopeful that the conversation will continue to change even in the next decade, right?
00:37:10.160Like where will we be in 10 years in terms of our thinking about the ethics of student loan debt, higher ed as a right or as like a public affordability thing?
00:37:21.700Like, there are so many ways the conversation can continue to change. And I think it's important for, like, for both, for you and I who are so inside of this to remember how much the conversation has changed, even though it feels like, you know, especially with a lot of the cancellation getting canceled, like I have to look at something like public service loan forgiveness and how much movement there has been in public service loan forgiveness.
00:37:46.200And I thought that that program was absolutely doomed.
00:37:49.780I thought there was no hope that it would never recover, that all of these people who
00:37:54.020were involved in it were never going to get their loans forgiven.
00:37:59.360And I think part of this ties into one of the earlier questions of thinking about, like,
00:38:03.820if we can talk and make this type of shift, can we also talk and make this type of shift
00:38:09.160when we're thinking about health care, when we're thinking about child care?
00:38:11.720I think part of – this is how, when we talk about what does it mean to turn back to thinking about a public good, it's exactly things like this where we question what are our assumptions?
00:38:22.660What must we believe to be true for this system to work?
00:38:26.700If we don't believe that that's true, then what's the new system that we need and pushing for finding that?
00:38:34.460You teed us up perfectly for our last question.
00:38:36.860This comes from Aubrey, who is one of our beloved paid subscribers.
00:38:40.020and she asks how much worse is the cost of college going to get will we ever reach a breaking point
00:38:46.220i wonder about this because of how the cost of college for me would have been unfathomable to
00:38:50.920my parents generation is my kid gonna have to pay two hundred thousand dollars per year if they want
00:38:55.840to go to college i hear people say that there's a breaking point i think a lot of colleges are
00:39:01.160gonna go away oh i i completely i mean we're seeing it happen yeah i've spent a lot of time
00:39:07.180talking about public universities in a lot of parts because I'm thinking about public good and
00:39:12.860all these sorts of things and what the levers are for public institutions. There are a lot of
00:39:18.160smaller private institutions as well. And I do think a substantial number will merge or close
00:39:30.120because it's not financially viable for them.
00:39:35.180I think we will see less closures but mergers on the public institution side.
00:39:40.940The state of Pennsylvania has been fighting for a number of years
00:39:44.300about how they are thinking about merging and reshaping their state public higher education system.
00:39:51.140I think that when we are interested in what our sort of breaking point is
00:39:58.940with our current scenario, I think that part of what we are seeing is a backlash to the fact that
00:40:09.480things had been changing a bit. And I say that because, let's be clear, I am not a Pollyanna
00:40:19.000when it comes to higher education. Higher education has issues, and most of my research is on thinking
00:40:25.200about those issues and trying to think about what we might be able to do differently.
00:40:29.720I don't believe that we would see these types of concentrated systematic attacks on higher
00:40:36.320education the way we have seen them unless it was changing in some ways, unless it was
00:40:42.620starting to take seriously that you don't just have to be rich to come here, unless
00:40:46.980it was starting to take seriously you don't just have to be a white man to come here.
00:40:49.520that had to be happening and spooking people so much that all of a sudden they had to start doing
00:40:55.700these types so at a certain point it is likely that when it comes to sort of from a tuition
00:41:01.400standpoint um the feds have a role in that they control access to financial aid yep and basically
00:41:13.540the feds especially the congress can create a lot of rules to say you are allowed to get access to
00:41:23.220federal financial aid if and they get to fill in the if however they want so at a certain level
00:41:29.440you could definitely imagine a world where tuition increases to a certain point and congress decides
00:41:35.980that they want to say you are not allowed to receive access to financial aid if the amount
00:41:41.540exceeds xyz that is one way that you could see that sort of breaking point happening i think
00:41:48.940higher education is at an interesting point in its life cycle yeah i feel like we're in such flux
00:41:55.940right like we are in such a transition place and there's so many ways it could go and right now we
00:42:01.080have to like watch and also try to influence yes i i think that's i think that's part of it and
00:42:06.600And right, like a lot of what I have been thinking about is what does it mean for faculty and staff to do collective action, which is not a thing that we've talked about.
00:42:16.280We probably have been talking from the public standpoint, but I do think that there is a role to play for faculty and staff.
00:42:22.960And I think especially for tenured faculty who are sometimes comfortable and don't necessarily think that the mob is coming for them.
00:42:32.580for all of us to have conversations about collective action, what that means, what that
00:42:38.720looks like, and to better understand things like the finances of our institutions. Because I think
00:42:45.140that is another way to start thinking through how are we pricing these things? Where's our
00:42:53.160funding coming from? What does that mean? What does that look like? So I think those types of
00:42:58.280things can potentially be helpful, especially in places where you can actually unionize, right?
00:43:05.780Like I started this job January 1. And before January 31, I had signed all the paperwork
00:43:10.980necessary to join my union. So where you can having those unions work with other unions,
00:43:18.900right? Because I think when we are talking about higher education issues, when we want to think
00:43:26.740about the culture part, those are the pieces that unite beyond the institution of higher learning,
00:43:34.280whichever one it is that we might be talking about. And those get more at the ideas of labor
00:43:38.700and capital and how they interact and work with each other. And I think those are the types of
00:43:45.820pieces that can matter the most because solidarity across occupation structure and across class lines
00:43:55.180is incredibly important and valuable when it comes to thinking about what a more just society can
00:44:03.100look like. You know, and wrapping back to the question too, I think as tuition costs have
00:44:09.480continued to rise at public and private institutions, there's this like frog in boiling
00:44:15.480water scenario where every year it's like, yeah, that's a lot more, but we'll figure out how to
00:44:21.060make it work for our family in some way, right? And like, sometimes that means taking out a second
00:44:25.960mortgage or a reverse mortgage, like, really difficult decisions. Sometimes that means asking
00:44:31.280your student to take on more student debt loan themselves. Sometimes it means private loans,
00:44:36.080like all sorts of things that say, I can make it work, right? Like, it's like this gritty
00:44:40.820muscling through, instead of, actually, no, I can't make it work. And most people can't make
00:44:46.980it work and so how can we figure out a way to not make it work right to say this doesn't work this
00:44:52.200is broken because it's not just the cost right like I look at the institution of higher ed and
00:44:57.900I see graduate students who feel exploited faculty members who feel precarious right it's not like
00:45:05.060anyone's happy like this isn't working for most people so if it's not working how do we decide
00:45:12.180we don't want it to work this way anymore and it is through as you said like collective action in
00:45:17.500so many different meanings of that word but I think also trying to avoid that like well I guess
00:45:24.220it's 200,000 a year now that's just the way things are right like and this this wraps us back to the
00:45:30.120beginning of the conversation that like student loan culture doesn't have to be normalizing
00:45:35.300$200,000 in loans that doesn't have to be our new normal it doesn't and it it comes from I think
00:45:41.800when we are able to have the types of shifts that you and I've been talking about over, you know,
00:45:46.680recent decades, recent decade in particular, we can push to say things like, no, I don't think
00:45:52.580that that makes sense. That the way that we have organized the system doesn't make sense. And I
00:45:58.440think that that can create a space for change. It doesn't, it doesn't guarantee that change will
00:46:05.920happen or the change that you're interested in. But that's not why we do, right? Like we do
00:46:11.940collective action in parts because we believe that this thing matters. And so you have to sort
00:46:19.200of be in it for the marathon, not the sprint. And I think that's part of where so often one of the
00:46:26.920big issues that comes up is like people burn out. They just sort of say like, I'll pay the $200,000
00:46:32.780Smith. Like I just, I just, I'm tired. I don't want to deal with this. We have structured this
00:46:37.060society at present to say that like, you sort of need this one degree in order to have hopes
00:46:43.180of stability in this life. And so that's what we're going to do. And we're going to go from
00:46:47.980there. But I do think that there's another way possible. And you don't necessarily have to say
00:46:54.300that like, I think that by doing this one type of collective action, I think that this will
00:46:59.200definitely have changed this thing for some people that works for them but like to me i'm committed
00:47:05.340to uh wanting to be able to have discussions with people about what our world could look like um
00:47:12.640with an understanding this is like probably very dark but i am sort of a general believer that like
00:47:18.700i i sort of accept that i probably will not see the sort of promised land as it were yeah right
00:47:24.240I think a lot about the people who were fighting to end slavery, and there are a number of people who never, never saw the end of slavery, but they gave their lives for that cause.
00:47:40.420And so I by no means am equating to say that these are like the exact same topics, but I think that there's a point here of like, you can do and advocate for things that you think make sense, that are important, that are valuable, and that you don't have to be the one who experiences the good, which is part of where I guess, again, we come back to culture, right?
00:48:07.640Yeah, I'm done with college. You cannot force me to get another one of these degrees. We're done with that. Okay. We have wrapped up on that one. So I will never benefit from a lick of any sort of cancellation that comes through. I just won't. Okay.
00:48:28.680That doesn't mean that I don't push hard to think about what the research shows and what people tell us would be really beneficial in their lives.
00:48:38.020Well, and that's, I think, why people who don't have student loans should care about this too, right?
00:50:51.940No, I found you on Twitter and like that's not a resource for me anymore.
00:50:56.920But I'm glad that we still know each other.
00:50:59.160Yes, I'm very happy for the friends that Twitter gave me.
00:51:03.620Yeah, so if you do DominiqueBaker.com, that's my website.
00:51:08.860And typically on the connect or contact me page, there'll be some sort of way that people can find me. I think at present I am on blue sky at Baker D PhD and then whatever the other arrangement of letters is after that, because it's federated or something.