You know, if you look at any industry, any product, any service out there in the marketplace, there aren't that many that have changed as little in a generation as residential undergraduate education. I would like to believe that all of your listeners, they can be system beaters and they can be system burners. It is possible to have both goals in mind, existing and not clashing by the way in your head simultaneously. Right now, many students are stuck.
If they go to their dream college, they could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts. They don't know if come fall their classes are going to be online or in person. And for those already in school, they don't know if there's a job waiting for them when they graduate during one of the worst financial crisis is
our country has ever seen. Then there are other kids who don't really have any idea what they want to do, don't especially want to go to college, but end up there because there's not really other options in the United States of America, and the only thing they end up with is a lot of debt and less direction than ever. This pandemic has put a spotlight on a lot of problems in our education system. And our workforce, and one of them is higher education. How do we pay for it?
What's the value of it? I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC Anchor, NBC News Senior correspondent, And this is Modern Rules, a podcast from NBC Think and I Heart Radio. We've got a moment. We're in crisis. Can we do better? Ron Lieber is asking that very question in his new book, The Price You Pay for College is the author of the New York Times personal finance column Your Money. Ron. For years and years and years, we weren't thinking about the price of college, the value of college? Is it
worth it? Well? I think you have to start by asking yourself what college is? All right? What is called for? I wasn't sure what the answer to that question was, and so I asked, you know, scores of families and I heard the same three things over and over again. College is for getting an education, for having your mind grown, in your mind blown. It is for kinship. It is for finding the people who will carry you through life.
It is for getting a credential, whether it's the gold plated one that will open doors or just the degree that will allow you to grasp hold of the middle class. And hopefully stay there. And so in order to answer the question of whether college is worth it, you need to define it for your individual family. It's not something that we as a nation can dictate for any given individual. But then, how did we get to this place? Right?
My dad worked in the summer and put himself through school and had a tiny bit of debt after How did college get this expensive? There are so many more things pulling on our household incomes than there used to be. We are entirely responsible in most instances for our own retirement. We are paying more and more out of our own pockets for healthcare. Many people are paying off their own
student loaned well into their forties or fifties. Right, so people don't have the same kind of disposable income as they might have earlier. States have reduced their subsidies towards higher education, which means the price of those state schools has gone up, and then the private institutions they've gotten more and more expensive. So the middle class there is being squeezed. This whole idea of I want to go to a liberal arts college and better myself, and then
the world is will be my oyster. It's kind of an antiquated thought. Sure, I'd like to enrich myself, but not if it's going to put me in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt. I remember when I was a senior in college. I went to Lehigh and Lee, I could absolutely help you on the career services front if you wanted to go work in an accounting firm or be an engineer. I wanted to work in investment banking.
So I drove to New York City with my mother and I snuck into the career services office at Columbia University and I borrowed these giant binders that had every piece of information that you needed for every bank, every financial institution, so you could apply for the summer internships. And I went to the photo copy machine to start, and you needed to have a school. I d to use the photo copier. I got caught and I got
kicked out. The reason I bring this up we send these kids to college, but the best jobs are directly linked to only a few schools. So do we need to start looking at here's a college, What is the job my child is going to get on the other side, because otherwise they will be sitting here in hundreds of thousands of dollars with a deck Yes to all of that. First of all, that is the most badass career services
story that I have ever heard. Your description of this as quote unquote best jobs, right, I mean, it is true that the best jobs in investment banking very narrow field, only higher from uh certain institutions, right unless you beat down the door. But are those the best jobs in America?
Are they the best jobs for anyone? Goldman Saxes is hiring all these people in Salt Lake City now who do not come from Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and m I T. So then we have to ask ourselves, well, these are iconic jobs in in certain social classes, but are they really the best jobs out there for any given twenty two year old. I don't think so. Before the pandemic, we knew there was a skills gap in
the United States. We were at full employment, yet we had millions of Americans who are not making enough money to support themselves. We had people who had jobs, but not good enough jobs. But you hear people making that argument saying you cannot afford to support yourself and your family working in a fast food restaurant but that job was never intended for someone who has a family to support. Is there an opportunity to actually create a real jobs program,
a skills retraining program. So it's not just about raising minimum wage, it's about retraining people to qualify themselves for better, higher paying jobs. Yes, and that infrastructure already exists. We can use the community college infrastructure to provide that skills training. But we also have, you know, a shortage of qualified instructors to teach some of these skills. Why because the skills are so in demand that the people who would be doing the instructing are making five times as much
money being actual practitioners. If you're a master plumber, you're not going to spend twenty hours a week teaching at a community college, even though it be a service to the community. If you are, you know, a welder with twenty five years of experience, right, same thing is true. So how are we going to create the budget that allows for more people to be pushed through rigorous training programs?
And so we need to do more um I think from a state perspective and from a federal perspective, not just to provide the money, but also to ensure equity and access to these programs. Now that kids are home and you're Duke, m I T or Lafayette college experience is no different from the University of Phoenix. Could this
actually press pause for a revisit on the price of college. Well, look at it this way, right, everybody gets sent home the second week in March, and by the fourth week in March and the second week in April, there's a clamor for refunds, and then by the first week in May there's a couple of dozen lawsuits right where people are freaking out and demanding their tuition back to But
then something really weird happened over the summer. All of these colleges were fundamentally dishonest about why they were reopening in September. They were arguing it could be done safely, But what they really should have said is, look, we need the revenue. If we don't get the revenue, we're gonna have to cut this place to ribbons, and then it won't be the place that you'd want to come back to um eighteen months from now. So we gotta make a go of us here and when we want
you all in. But strange families and the students were all in any way right because they had lost so much in the spring. They all wanted to come back and pay full price for what was clearly going to be a compromised experience socially and academically. And then a bunch of them got sick to right, and yet they still came. Why did they still come? Because the residential undergraduate experience in the United States of America has become a rite of passage for the middle class and above.
So it's not clear to me how we dismantle that when so many people were desperate to come back and pay for a compromised experience, which I don't think they should have done, by the way. Yes, but in generations prior, more and more members of the middle class could go away to college, and that college experience in a different state with different people was what led you on a
path to pursue the American dream. And today those same students are either not getting into those colleges, or they're getting into them and are saddled with so much debt they never get to pursue it. Given the cost of college, are there enough jobs that pay enough money to justify the price of college. Families that get into trouble. The families that express regret are the ones where the students max out their federal student loans. So let's call that
thirts of federal debt. The parents co sign for private loans with the undergraduate. Call that another twenty grand, and then maybe the parents borrow tens of thousands of dollars more just to make it all work because the child just desperately wants to go to LEI, right, and they're not getting much merit aid, and they're not getting much
of a discount based on their financial need. At that point, you know, you are dealing with the after effect of that decision financially for a minimum of ten years as um as a young adult, and perhaps longer as a parent, right if you need to work longer in order to keep making those loan payments. The way that it's changing, I think for that kind of family is that they are looking at the kinds of schools that they might
not have looked at a generation ago. So you know, there's a family in my book where both parents went to Princeton and one of their kids went to one small college in the Midwest that offered an enormous discount on the basis of merit, and then the other one went to the College of Worcester, another school that generally discounts, even for affluent families, to a price just you know, five thousand dollars more than what it would cost to go to Ohio State. And so, you know, families are
making different choices generationally and are happy about it. Both these Princeton graduates are professors, and they were thrilled with the quality of what's on offer at a slightly less selective institutions that are are fifty thousand dollars per per years than what they might have spent to send them to Princeton. And I'm trying to normalize that type of decision making because it leads to less debt and potentially
more happiness. Because the fact of the matter is is that back in the old days, right if your parents went to Princeton, you got to go to Princeton too, and it was practically a birthright or an entitlement. And
that's not the way that it works anymore. You know, Alumni legacy status does confer advantage, but these places are just really difficult to get into, and so I'm trying to model a form of decision making that cares less about the Instagram sweatshirt reveal and more about value and trying to define what college is supposed to be, not just for your family, but for your individual child. We'll be back after the break. So where do we go from here in terms of education? There's this idea, let's
make college free. Does that take away the motivation to go and respect college? Right? When you get it for free, you don't treat it as well? So what would suggest to us that some disruptive force is about to come and make it go away? If the coronavirus just caused people to crave it more, right, and not to demand change, then what would really blow it up? This becomes a
political conversation. Because we want money to be less of a factor in all of this, then we need to become more like Scandinavia and a lot of the European countries where this is subsidized, right, And that is going to mean not just a little more taxes, but you know,
a fair bit more taxes. It is the case that in most countries where college is free or close to it, um access is much more limited then access is to higher education here in the United States, Right, There are all sorts of open enrollment schools in the US, not just community colleges before your schools, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of them. And the point at which we make something free, you know, will people flock to it? Will it cost more than than we think it will?
And what will our reaction be to that going forward? And will we end up in a in a situation where in fact, not everybody will be able to access it? And then we'll just be stratifying ourselves further. So I worry. I worry a little bit about that, this idea that we should cancel student debt? What about all the people who are able to pay it? I see this through
the lens of politics more than policy. The thing that I'm pretty sure that Biden administration is worried about is, you know, we've got a fifty fifty Senate and we've got a House of Representatives that you know is close to fifty. There is absolutely no consistency to this whatsoever. And you are right. What seems to matter most too careful policy folks in any given administration is how do you keep your political advantage right? And if people with
college degrees are being bailed out. And what about the little guy who's the plumber and the electrician and never got to go to college. Will that swing um ten purple districts? If that movement gets going, it's just might. When you think about how the FED comes in and rescues the market, stabilizes the markets, helps giant corporations were down with that. But you can't simply help the little guy because that little guy is just a lazy loser.
Do we need to change the way we think and not think in a way of the guy who didn't get a chance to go to college and became a plumber and redefine this person chooses to go to college because that works for them, and this person chooses to be a plumber because it works for them. But you're not a plumber by default because you weren't good enough for college. We're all facing a isis right now because of the pandemic. Could we use that to drum up
the will to revisit higher education. I consider it my role in the world to be first and foremost relentlessly practical. Right I'm trying to help people win and succeed in the world as it exists. And I've got a whole bunch of colleagues on the op ed page who are working on the whole world as it should be a thing for the seventy eight percent of you know, any given listeners spare time where they're trying to figure out
how two navigate the world as it exists. I am here for them, But for now, we're in the middle of a pandemic and you can't get your parents a vaccine. Your credit score got all screwed up because they didn't figure out how to put your student loan pause on correctly. And that's what I am here for for that, in particular, the system burners, you know, I'm happy to talk to them all day long, but we also have to navigate
the world as it exists. Then, I guess my only hope is people can try to stay true to themselves and their priorities and their kids and don't let the fear of missing out or brands or society influence you, because they're not going to pay your tuition and they're not going to help your kids pursue what they actually want to do with their lives. I think that's right. And you know, one interesting question that fell out of my research is how do you be a principled shopper
for residential undergraduate higher education? Right, there are plenty of larger universities that employ a large number of adjunct teachers, and many of those instructors are living at kind of near poverty level in terms of the wages they're making, or they have miserable lives. Right. Then there are a whole host of supposedly really good schools that you have heard of, many of which are well endowed, where the percentage of undergraduates who receive pell grants, which is a
proxy for being lower income, is abysmally low. Right, so there is no commitment to equity at these places. We can ask better questions as part of this process that will put these schools on notice, um that these are things that we care about, and I endorse that. Yeah, I mean, these really well endowed schools are very very proud to take students from some of the most vulnerable
communities and potentially give them sizeable scholarship money. But then when they get there and maybe room and board is covered along with tuition, what about everything else? Financial insecurity and food insecurity is a huge issue that's actually sending a lot of kids home from school. Yes, um, these are not rhetorical questions, and there are definitely practitioners that
are well aware of it. Right at the more elite institutions, there is at many of them a level of granularity to the understanding of the issues that you call out what is supposed to happen to And for the students from California or Texas who come up to the Northeast on a full ride but they don't have snow boots, and then you know, a tier or two down in
terms of levels of selectivity. You have people like Professor Sarah Goldrick Grab at Temple University, who has done a ton of work on food insecurity, and in the most recent relief pill of the past, some of her research was brought to bear on the question of under what circumstances can undergraduates qualify for food stamps, And through the work of her and people like her, some of those rules have changed to allow undergraduates a bit more generosity
and flexibility. So this is happening around the margins. But we're not asking enough of those questions, and we're not asking them loudly enough. Do you believe the American dream is still alive, and it's higher education the best vehicle to use to pursue it. I don't want to define the American dream for anybody, but the way that I have seen it define most often is am I going to do better than my parents did? Which then leads to a natural question define better? Right? Is it income?
Is it inflation adjusted income? Is it relative prosperity? In other words, how am I doing compared to the people around me? Is it a world that is cleaner or dirtier in terms of the air? Right? I mean, there are lots of different ways to define that, but if you believe in the simplest definition, which is just income, um uh. You know, the rash Chetti group at Harvard has the best, has the best data on this, and they think that it's a fifty fifty coin flip, And
that to me is depressing a right. America used to be better than that, and I think it can be better uh in the future. And I will say what depresses me most? I think for so many of us, my number one goal is to try to deliver a world to my kids that's better than the one I got. I think that's sort of the unspoken contract we all think we're entering into and I can say right now, I'm not so sure about that. However, every day we
can work on changing that. It's true, and in twelve months we'll all have shots in our arms and hopefully it'll feel differently. I sure hope so, Ron, thank you so much for joining me today. Congratulations on the book. I hope everyone reads it gives it to a friend. This is really complicated stuff, and I so appreciate all of your work. Thank you so much for having me. H. So much of what we do is shaped by what we think we're supposed to do with our lives, by
what our parents are, teachers are friends. It's like society has deemed this is the right path and this is the wrong path. Is that actually serving us? When it comes to higher education, which takes an enormous amount of money, an enormous amount of time, it might not put us or our kids on the path to success on modern rules. You know, we like to get straight to the point, and Ron certainly left me with a lot to think
about what is success? If we took the norm or the standard away, could we actually create an education system that works better for more people, that could give more young people a chance to succeed at things they love. Maybe redefine how we characterize success, because I'm pretty sure success and happiness are closely aligned, but I know an awful lot of people on paper would be considered successful
and they're quite the opposite of happiness. I'm Stephanie Rule, and you're listening to Modern Rules, a podcast from NBC Think, MSNBC and I Heart Radio. This podcast is hosted by Me, Stephanie Rule, Mike beet In, Katrina Norvell, our executive producers. Meredith Bennett Smith is Senior editor for NBC Think and our editorial lead. The podcast is engineered and edited by
Josh Fisher. Additional production support provided by Charles Herman, Rachel Rosenbaum, and Lauren Wynn, and special thanks to Katherine kim Are, Global Head of Digital News right here at NBC News and MSNBC. For more thought provoking analysis, visit NBC news dot com slash Thing