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about our society and what we value and how it works. That is mind-boggling to me. Yeah, well, I think it's one of those things that's kind of like, like, mortgages aren't ideological, right? Like, then, which, you know, the thing about ideology is that it races itself as an ideology. Like, it just sets itself up as the way things are instead of the way
things are that we should interrogate how they came to be that way. And so student loans have almost normalized as, oh, of course, people graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. That's just how things are. Nothing to see here. Yeah, that's interesting. Like, this is just the way the world works instead of like, we made deliberate choices that
have us arriving at this point. Yeah. I do think that there was a point when I was taking out my student loans that I was like, oh, this is just what we do, that I had normalized it in my brain instead of thinking about like, oh, isn't it kind of weird that in order for me to get a PhD, I have to become this deep and dead. And I think part of that though rate is like how the system is designed to work. The system is designed to make it so
that you have to think that this is normal. Because if you don't think it's normal, if you think this doesn't make sense, why do we have such high tuition for public universities and why do our states fund institutions at such a low rate and all these sorts of things? When you start to question that, then you probably wouldn't be on board with taking out these large loans. This is the Culture Study Podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson and I'm Dominique
Baker, Professor at the University of Delaware. Just on a practical level, if we're thinking about how student loans affect our cultural lives, I think that they affect how we think about education and value education or like the right to education. I think on just a monetary level, they affect the choices that people make every day. For me, that is even just that is enough to think about something that affects so many people every day and
the choices that are available to them, the options that are available to them. That's part of culture to me. Yeah, I think it's like, there are those sort of micro pieces that you were just describing where in the everyday people are being affected, but it's also this big piece of like, you cannot create the system of funding for higher
education that we currently have and not think that that is an expression of culture. If you had an orientation toward higher education, it was a public good, that it was there the same way that libraries exist in our world. There is no way that we would have created
this type of system. So it's sort of like 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. So along these lines, a couple of months ago, I interviewed you for the newsletter about
a study that you recently published with several co-authors. And I feel like it's a good way for us to kind of talk about the ways that student loan discourse, thinking, ideology, manifest in our culture. So can you tell me, tell the audience a little bit about this study just to refresh? Sure. So some colleagues and I were really curious about how the news media talks about student loans. And then we decided, let's study that systematically.
And 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, given 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.
And what we seem to find was this curious pattern. As we were doing that study where, oh, well, that reporter, we know who they are and they went to Harvard and, oh, well, that reporter, we know who they are. And they definitely went to Yale and this person went to Columbia and that person went to Columbia. Oh, my God, that person also went to Columbia. And so we decided, what if we would like systematically explore that? Oh, we have
the space to do that. And so we did and we found that 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 undergrad. But do require people to rely a lot on student loans when it comes to graduate school. And 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 high-falutant types of institutions, these institutions that are sort of steeped in prestige and things of those that I made. You can think of it as like ID plus, right? So it's like specific I.V. schools, but then also a school like Northwestern, which is like a Midwestern I.V.
And like the thing that connects them is that they are all generally smaller undergraduates that have a significant amount of endowment money. And they are sort of seen as what we think of sort of like these elite institutions that convey something really particularly special about the people that attended those institutions. And 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. And 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? But we can 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. And in order to be able to get these opportunities, like all of that gets wrapped up together and we can see it. All of these different types of research approaches are like really valuable because they're things that we wish we could know about the actual process of news reporting and things like that that we can't get to, right, 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. And we try 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? Yeah. 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?
Because I think the part that really aligns really well with the show is that it's not about the individual author and it's not about the individual newspaper. It's about thinking broadly about our society. Yeah. So personally, I was radicalized by having student loans. I became a radical, what we can think of as radical when it comes to student loans through the process of having them. That is an understanding that is shared by not all, but many people. But how do people
who, for whatever reason, have not experienced student loans? Their partner has an experienced student loans. They don't have that sort of close interaction with the reality of the culture of student loans. How do they learn about it? Talking to people, reading about it, right?
And so I even, like if we're going to zoom out a little bit more in my writing, especially at Buzzfeed, which is where I first started writing about student loans, generally student loan culture, you had me who had over $100,000 in student loan debt from graduate school.
And then my direct editor also had over $100,000 in student loan debt. And I can imagine a different scenario where the form of my article, even the idea that it was greenlit, like all of these things would have been very different or might not have happened at all if I had an editor who didn't have a sense of student loan debt. So it's even, it's not within any of these scenarios, it's not just the writer, it's also where they in this apparatus, right?
So I just, it's so interesting and I'm so glad that you gave us this place to start talking about, like how does this information get disseminated in that here? Here's some real information about what happens, like at the Wall Street Journal, why is no one talking about the racialized components of student loan debt at the Wall Street Journal? What
might be happening there? Who could say, who could say what's going on? Can you say a little bit about what you did find about the Wall Street Journal and authors? Yeah. So one of the things we did is we explored, let's just look at anybody who ever wrote for our different newspapers that are in our study. And let's see what their language is like. And we found that the Wall Street Journal is particularly different than the
rest of the newspapers that we looked at. So we found that the Wall Street Journal, anyone who wrote for the Wall Street Journal, had fewer articles that ever mention race, racism, sort of, any of this racialized language that we were interested in exploring. Which, to us, says, this is not so much about the people that choose to work at the Wall Street
Journal of things like that. That has to be something about the actual culture and norms within the Wall Street Journal that say that certain articles are allowed to be published. And when they're published, they probably are allowed to attend to certain parts of a story. Right. And that maybe that reporter had put a paragraph in there mentioning the
discrepancies, the racial discrepancies, and who takes out student loans. But can you talk actually about what sort of language could be added that points to some of these discrepancies in terms of who takes out the loans, how much people take out in loans, default rates, right? That's the one that I often look at. And also private loans versus public loans. Yeah. So there are a lot of different ways that we could imagine incorporating race, racism,
and student loans. So the things that we explored were looking at sort of, do you ever talk about racial groups? Do you ever explicitly say something about like black students, white students, et cetera? We look at types of institutions, right? Do you talk about HBCUs, which are most definitely a racialized institution, literally institutions created because black students could not attend the other institutions in the United States. So we also look just
explicitly, do you talk about racism? Do you talk about racial equity? Do you talk about these actual issues? Because 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, this is a part of who defaults on their student loans, who struggles in repayment to be able to pay back, which has a larger implications around racism within our job market
and the larger labor market at large. And 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. And sort of all of those pieces can align with our sort of larger schisms within society around things like racism.
And 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 on to like the moment in time when education expanded beyond white men in particular, but white people just in general, like it's not a coincidence,
like these things are happening at the same time. So yeah, 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. Isn't that interesting? Why would that happen? Okay, so we're going to answer some questions about this broader topic of student loan culture, or they're all over the place and I'm
really excited for them. So the first question comes from Bridget and it's about what's next when it comes to a 14 higher education. As someone who graduated with a Master's in 2007, I still have significant student loan debt. Even 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. How do we start fixing this giant mess that is requiring kids to pay thousands of dollars to go to school for a few years and potentially paying it back for 20 plus years? Is it greed that normalize this? What actual steps can we start taking? I know that higher education is no longer considered a public good, but how do we turn the corner back to? I don't know, maybe making it that way again.
So the first thing that I have to comment on this is I just go back to so many thinkers whether it's you or Tressie McMillan-Con or Louis Seamster. There is this refrain of, well, the student debt cancellation won't fix things. They will fix things right now and then we can also do these other things, right? It's not just one and done. We can hold in our heads that we can do cancellation and also try to figure out how to reform. What's your response here? Yeah, so 100%.
100%. I'm a big believer of a yes and. Right? Never taken an improv class, but I'm a supporter of a yes and. So, yes, 100%. When I'm thinking about this in my head, I like to arrange it as there are sort of two phases to college affordability. One phase is a little bit of what Bridget is talking about, which is what is the cost? What's the tuition? What does it mean for people to have to figure out how they're going to pay for this? And then the back end is, okay, if I've taken
out loans, how do I repay them? So, I think of it as sort of like a front end and back end of what is college affordability. And so, debt cancellation is incredibly important for thinking about this back end. That we accept that our system is not working the way it should be. It is not working optimally. Too many people had to rely on student loans and at rates that they never should have had to. And so, we've got to do something for the people who've already been harmed.
Yep. The second thing, of course, is then what do we do to make sure that people aren't harmed in the first place? And so, to me, it's always been that we then have to think about what is college affordability? What does that mean? What does that look like? Is there a way that we could potentially push to say, what would it look like for us to go back to a
primarily state-funded higher education system, especially through public institutions? What would it mean for Congress and state legislatures to come together and actually adequately fund colleges and universities? I think that is where I spend a lot of my time and energy thinking about things because the reality is institutions like community colleges and regional public institutions are the ones that educate the bulk of students in the United
States. But their funding is the most precarious and they are often seen as afterthoughts for other institutions when they should not be. Well, it reminds me in some ways of how we keep having these conversations about free speech at Harvard when Harvard represents the tiniest percent of the college experience in the United States and globally. So here's a thing that I like to say to help frame this a little bit. I'm currently
doing a research study and it's focused on admissions. And 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. And that was 185 institutions in the United States. There are thousands of institutions in these United States. And when we said, we're going to cut it at 50%, which is nothing compared to the Harvard Stanford. We accept 4% of our
applicants. We're just saying, if you accept 49% of the students who apply to you, you're in our sample. And that's still only 185 institutions. That 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 Harvards and the Stanfords and the Yale's
and whatever. They 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. Right. Right. Yeah. And as you point out, the precarious funding model is particularly, but not exclusively in Republican-led states. Like this is affecting so many more
people on a daily basis. Yes. And I think we sometimes skip over just how connected funding and tuition can be. And so, you know, I think I always try to remind myself, because I can do it too, because I try to remind myself that the cost of attendance is subsidized. For the majority of students, that cost is subsidized. Those funds can come from several places. It can come from the state. It can come from portions of the endowment, et cetera,
et cetera. But the price that students pay is not the full price of educating them more often than not. And so if that's the case, then I'm always wondering, so who is going to pay? Because we don't want to go the root of we just cut the overall amount of money. And we say we're going to reduce how much money we're putting. We've seen some other countries that are heading towards that. And it's not good. What we see happen when we start reducing
the amount of funding that we're putting towards the educational experience. That's when we start seeing that faculty members are fired, that faculty members can't do these additional things to support student success. That there is not money that's available to help with finding childcare, to help with wraparound services like bus services, all sorts of
pieces start falling by the wayside. And so if we are serious that we think that this education matters and that this learning experience matters, and our question is not like, well, we want to cut the overall amount. It's, well, who's going to be responsible for the different amount? Like if we're going to say that families are going to contribute less, someone else has to contribute more to ensure equality education.
So how much of this? Because when we say who's going to cover the rest, right? Our current thinking is that the individual should take on the cost of making up that discrepancy. And if you don't have the family wealth to cover that cost, then you should take out loans. And historically that wasn't the case, right? We 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. That is something that matters. So I feel like we've lost sight of that in so many different ways, right? It's not even just with education, it's with health care, it's with child care, it's all these different ways. So 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? Yeah. I think, 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. I think, yes, voting matters and we're going to go right back to my improv, yes, and 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. There are also small grassroots efforts that can be made in order to help think about mutual aid for people as they're experiencing hardship.
But I also think that a lot of this is about advocacy within states, not just the federal government. I think that we can sometimes get really focused and I'll also say, I think we sometimes get overly focused on the feds and I think beyond that, we get overly focused on the president. And that's in some ways a reaction to the fact that we see a fairly intractable Congress and that because of that, we see that we don't think many things are
going to happen. Right. We sort of see news articles that talk about how few bills are coming out of our current Congress. And so because of that, we think, well, we will hyper focus on an area that actually does seem to have some movement. But part of the problem is our country was designed so that Congress would be the one that would create rules. And similarly, our country was designed such that through federalism, these states would
play a substantial role in how college and universities run and work. So I think there are a lot of spaces that even when we say that there is research evidence that we want to communicate about to the Department of Education is one example. That's great. That's awesome. There are also several different state departments of education and I'll just
all along that have a lot of power that we want to be thinking about. I think really seriously about like in West Virginia, where they have over a billion dollars in surplus in their budget, but are cutting majors at West Virginia University. Like that to me tells me that this is culture. That to me tells me, right? Like this is as if money was ever not, but you know, the dollars and cents argument of like we're cash strapped and that's why
we have to cut things at the university that simply can't be the case. So 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. And 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. Yeah. 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. And one of the things that was mentioned was someone attending community college in order to learn different skills to be able to work with wind turbines.
And like that, that right there is thinking about the public good of higher education. That is thinking about a way for our world to literally exist in the future and help people to be able to have a steady job and income while also helping to try to protect our environment. That to me is the type of focus that we should be thinking about within higher education. This is a great segue to our next question, which is about where all
of like the money, the endowment money, the funding money, like where it goes. This is from Nadine. Many educational institutions have huge endowments that are invested thus making millions each year. Is there a reason these monies can't be used to pay for or subsidize educational costs for the students who are unable to pay or pay off all or a portion of student loans for alumni? There are institutions whose endowment
is now wielded in a way that makes them need blind for undergrad. So essentially there is very little tuition for anyone who can't afford it. There's little that they have to pay. Why can't this happen on a larger scale? Yeah, so to start from the endowment. We often think of the endowment like it's like a piggy bank. It's a spot where we put in money though correctly to the question. It's
the interest bearing piggy bank. So we can grow and all those sorts of things. But I think the big thing to keep in mind is the way that endowments actually function is like they are several piggy banks. And certain ones of those piggy banks have a specific rule about how they're allowed to be used. And that gets really tricky. If a donor says that I'm going to give you $100 million and the way that you can use this is for faculty recruitment
then the only way that you can use that $100 million is for faculty recruitment. You cannot repurpose those funds to use them to pay off student loans or do other things, use them for financially. If you cannot do that, that is in breach of a contract basically. So it's really important to keep in mind that we talk a lot about sort of these top lines of like how much money is in their endowment. But all of that money is not available to be
used for sort of everything that you could want to. In fact, donors rarely give a little bit of money. No strings attached donation. The hubris of saying like you can only use it for this very particular thing unless there are places at times when someone uses it in a way that I think is smart. Like the recent donation from the billionaire to the Bronx medical school that made school free for all, right? Like that's an interesting here mark to me. This can only be used for trips to
Greece during the summer to study philosophy. A less useful earmark, right? Or maybe a short side. A niche earmark for sure. That is an actual endowment at you. I know this. So okay, go ahead. Well, but I think that stands the point of like the people that donate are not doing it just to say like the institution will decide how to use the money. More often than not, they have really particular thoughts about how this money should be used. And they're
willing to put that into contractual language. So that a makes it really challenging to just use the funds however you want. I think the second part that really matters when thinking
about endowments and need-based aid. So I'm actually in a sort of unique position. When I used to work in admissions, I would do a lot of work on what was then our sort of no loan program, which guaranteed that for students who had below a certain income threshold their their family, that we would use some of our endowment money to basically cover when they would have had to take out loans. And I worked at a public university that does
not have as big of an endowment as the harbours of the world. It let's be clear. It has a substantial endowment compared to the rest of higher education. Yes. Yes. But it is not hard, 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. What happens is the more low income students you enroll, the more expensive that program is. Right. And so you can imagine that at a certain point it starts becoming very, very expensive. And so then it comes
back down to do you have enough money to be able to cover all of these students. What you don't want to do is say something like, oh, I guess we should enroll fewer low income students. Right. That's not right. So it comes kind of back to this money space of most institutions do not have the type of money that Princeton has. I say Princeton because they were sort of the first to push this type of no loan program. But I would say realistically
we're talking about less than 50 universities in the United States. Yeah. So that money just doesn't exist in any of their piggy banks to be able to cover what is necessary for their students to not have to take out loans. Okay. So our conclusion for Nadine is that relying on the endowment is not the solution to our problems with student loans. It would be
nice. And 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. Because there are, right. I said it's like maybe 50. Let me tell you, those 50 are not enrolling like an astounding number of low income students. Right. Right. It's like it's
not what it could be. I'll say that because you're also still using a lot of the same criteria for admission, which means that you are largely accepting a student body that has resources in the first place. Right. Correct. Text me back is a new weekly podcast where two real-life best friends catch up on the news, their lives, pop culture and politics. It's hosted by Lindy West, whose author of
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Okay, this next question, this is kind of a throwback to something we were talking about earlier. It's about collective action. This is from Hannah and Melody's going to read it. What do you think about the potential of collective action and advocacy organizations like the debt collective to influence the narrative and put pressure on the federal government to advance more forgiveness schemes for borrowers?
All right, what do you think? I'm so curious. Yeah, 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. It's funny, I was talking to my husband recently, and one of the things I was telling him was like, it's a real pickle when you study things that 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. It was funny because he was like, do you remember when you first started doing this, when everyone thought it was so weird that you would study
race and student loans? I was like, no, you're right. I thought about it. 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. So I'll say that I think it's movements that
help make that information that research that I'm doing more legible. It's a two-way street because seeing those movements also helps me to think about what's the research that I need to be doing, what does that need to look like? I think it's always interesting
that I'm solidly a professor. I teach my classes, I do research, and I am a professor in both an education school and a public policy school, which means that I do a lot of thinking about really applied topics, what is actually happening in schools, what is actually happening in our policy system. So I want to communicate with that, but I recognize that my role is not... The role that I have chosen for myself is not always the one
where I'm doing all of the communication for something. Right? 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 text forms for universities. I'm doing all that at the same time that
you have people who are advocating on the hill and things of that nature. So I don't think we would be where we were without collective action, and I don't see a way for to a more just society without more collective action. And I think that you're totally right that like when you started doing this work, this is not something that people were talking about. I don't even think people were talking about like student loan debt as, again, as culture.
I 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. Where will we be in 10 years in terms of our thinking about the ethics of student loan debt? Higher ed is a right or as like a public
affordability thing. There are so many ways the conversation can continue to change, and I think it's important for both of 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.
And I thought that that program was absolutely doomed. I thought there was no hope that it would never recover that all of these people who were involved in it were never going to get their loans forgiven. And that's not the case anymore. And I think part of this ties into one of the earlier questions of thinking about like, if we can talk and make this type of shift, can we also talk and make this type of shift when we're thinking about healthcare,
when we're thinking about childcare? I 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? What must we believe to be true for this system to work? If we don't believe that that's true, then what's the new system that we need and pushing for finding that?
Okay, great segue. You teed us up perfectly for our last question. This comes from Aubrey, who is one of our beloved paid subscribers, and she asks, How much worse is the cost of college going to get? Will we ever reach a breaking point? I wonder about this because of how the cost of college for me would have been unfathomable to my parents' generation. Is my kid going to have to pay $200,000 per year if they want
to go to college? I hear people say that there's a breaking point. I think a lot of colleges are going to go away. Oh, I completely, I mean, we're seeing it happen. Yeah. I've spent a lot of time talking about public universities and a lot of parts because I'm thinking about public good and all these sorts of things and what the levers are for public institutions. There are a lot of smaller, private institutions as well. I do think a substantial number will merge or close because
it's not financially viable for them. I think we will see less closures, but mergers on the public institution side. The state of Pennsylvania has been fighting for a number of years about how they are thinking about merging and reshaping their state public higher education system. I think that when we are interested in what our sort of breaking point is with our current scenario, I think that part of what we are seeing is a backlash
to the fact that things had been changing a bit. I say that because it must be clear. I am not a polyanna when it comes to higher education. Higher education has issues and most of my research is on thinking about those issues and trying to think about what we might be
able to do differently. I don't believe that we would see these types of concentrated systematic attacks on higher education, the way we have seen them, unless it was changing in some ways, unless it was starting to take seriously that you don't just have to be rich to come here, unless it was starting to take seriously, you know, there's a white man to come here. That had to be happening and spoken people so much that all of a sudden
they had to start doing these types. So at a certain point, it is likely that when it comes to sort of from a tuition standpoint, the feds have a role in that they control access to financial aid. And basically, the feds, especially Congress, can create a lot of rules to say you are allowed to get access to federal financial aid if, and they get to fill in
the if however they want. So at a certain level, you could definitely imagine a world where tuition increases to a certain point and Congress decides that they want to say you are not allowed to receive access to financial aid if the amount exceeds x, y, z. That is one way that you could see that sort of breaking point happening. I think higher education is at an interesting point in its life cycle. Yeah, I feel like we're in such flux, right?
Like we are in such a transition place and there's so many ways it could go. And right now we have to like watch and also try to influence. Yes, I think that's I think that's part of it. And 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. We've probably been talking from the public standpoint, but I do think that there
is a role to play for faculty and staff. And I think especially for tenured faculty who are sometimes comfortable and don't necessarily think that the mob is coming for them. For all of us to have conversations about collective action, what that means, what that looks like, and to better understand things like the finances of our institutions, because I think that is another way to start thinking through how are we pricing these things, where is our
funding coming from, what does that mean, what does that look like. So I think those types of things can potentially be helpful, especially in places where you can actually unionize. Right, like I started this job January 1. And before January 31, I had signed all the
paperwork necessary to join my union. So where you can, having those unions work with other unions, right, because I think when we are talking about higher education issues, when we want to think about the culture part, those are the pieces that unite beyond the institution of higher learning, whichever one it is that we might be talking about. And those get more at the ideas of labor and capital and how they interact and work with each other.
And I think those are the types of pieces that can matter the most, because solidarity across occupation structure and across class lines is incredibly important and valuable when it comes to thinking about what a more just society can look like.
You know, in wrapping back to the question too, I think as tuition costs have continued to rise at public and private institutions, there's this like frog and boiling water scenario where every year it's like, yeah, that's a lot more of, but we'll figure out how to make it work for our family in some way, right? And like sometimes that means taking out a second mortgage or a reverse mortgage, like really difficult decisions, sometimes that means asking
your student to take on more student debt loan themselves. Sometimes it means private loans, like all sorts of things that say, I can make it work, right? Like it's like this gritty muscling through instead of actually, no, I can't make it work and most people can't make it work. And so how can we figure out a way to not make it work, right? To say this
doesn't work, this is broken because it's not just the cost, right? Like I look at the institution of higher ed and I see graduates who did to feel exploited, faculty members who feel precarious, right? It's not like anyone's happy. Like this isn't working for most people. So if it's not working, how do we decide we don't want it to work this way anymore? And it is through, as you said, like collective action in so many different meanings
of that word. But I think also trying to avoid that like, well, I guess 200,000 a year now, that's just the way things are, right? And this wraps us back to the beginning of the conversation that like student loan culture doesn't have to be normalizing 200,000 dollars
in loans. That doesn't have to be our new normal. It doesn't. And it comes from, I think, when we are able to have the types of shifts that you and I've been talking about over recent decades, recent decade in particular, we can push to say things like, no, I don't think that that makes sense. The way that we have organized the system doesn't make sense. And I think that that can create space for change. It doesn't, it doesn't guarantee that
change will happen or the change that you're interested in. But that's not why we do, right? Like we do collective action in parts because we believe that this thing matters. And so you have to sort of be in it for the marathon, not the sprint. And I think that's part of where so often one of the big issues that comes up is like people burn out. They just sort of say like, I'll pay the $200,000 man. Like I just, I just, I'm tired. I don't
want to deal with this. We have structured this society at present to say that like you sort of need this one degree in order to have hopes of stability in this life. And so that's what we're going to do. And we're going to go from there. But I do think that there's another way possible. And you don't necessarily have to say that like I think that by doing this one type of collective action, I think that this will definitely have changed this
thing for some people that works for them. But like to me, I'm committed to wanting to be able to have discussions with people about what our world could look like with an understanding. This is like probably very dark. But I am sort of a general believer that like I sort of accept that I probably will not see this sort of promised land as it were. Right? Like I think a lot about the people who were fighting to enslavery. And there are a number of people
who never, never saw the end of slavery. But they gave their lives for that cause. And 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?
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 it. I just won't. Okay. That 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. Well, and that's I think why people
who don't have student loans should care about this too, right? Because do you want a more fair and equitable and just world, an easier world for everyone, right? Not just you, but everyone, even if you never meet them, that's my hope. And I think, you know, I'm going to pay off the end of my student loans on my birthday, on my forty-fourth day this year. Yes. I thought about doing it as a stunt during this podcast recording.
But I thought I knew that like the higher ed, like I would glitch in some way, right? I'm doing familiar with the infrastructure to trust it, to do it on air. But I'm very ambivalent about that act, but at the same time, very, very excited to use my continued energy to advocate for a world in which someone, everyone, doesn't have to do the same thing
that I did. So I think that's a big thing. It's like you don't, when you talk to people who've paid off their debt, none of them seem to say like, no, oh, I want people to, okay, that's not fair. They're a small share of people. There's a very small people to suffer as well. But most people are like, oh, I don't want anyone to go through what I went through. And I think that when we connect that to, I don't want anyone to have to
quit their job because childcare is too expensive. I don't want anyone to have to make a go fund me in order to pay for their cancer treatments. Like, these are, these are pieces that tie all around to the culture that we've decided for how people are supposed to be resilient and individualized instead of in and among community. You just wrote the thesis for the next book, which by the way, that's how I'm paying off
my student loans. It's my advance for my next book. I'm so excited for it. I can't wait to buy my copy. Okay. If you're a Bade subscriber, stick around for asking anything. Dominique's going to help me answer a question about big student loan feelings, especially when it comes to relationships. So Dominique, if people want to find out more about you, a way I want to follow your work, where can they find you on the internet? I
don't even know anymore. I know, right? No. I found you on Twitter and like, that's not a resource for me anymore, but I'm glad that we still know each other. Yes, I'm very, so I'm very happy for the friends that Twitter gave me. Yeah. So if you do DominiqueBaker.com, that's my website. And typically on the Connector 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. Look, I don't, I'm not a platform specialist. I can't do this. But if you find me through those avenues, I will still be talking about random reality TV and higher education policy. This is the content we want to hear. So thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure. Always pleasure.
Thank you so much for listening to The Culture Study Podcast. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We have so many great episodes in the works and I promise you don't want to miss any of them. If you want to suggest a topic, ask a question about the culture that surrounds you or submit a question for our subscriber only advice time segment. Check the show notes for a link to our subs. If you want to support the show and
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