¶ Paul Glastris joins the Chuck ToddCast
So joining me now is somebody for many of us of a certain age in Washington, is that I would deem an institution. It's Paul Glasters, the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. Many of us count the Washington Monthly as one of the first magazines that published us. That would be me. So when I started seeing could I do this? Could I write long form after all of my sort of wire copy years at the National
Journal and doing the hotline. And Paul was an extraordinarily generous editor and a great mentor to a lot of writers and reporters around Washington. So this is a real treat for me. Paul, It's good to see you, Chuck.
What a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. And I remember that story well by John Kerry.
I think, yes, yes it was, And so I have you on because you did something that I love and it's something, frankly that I remember. The Obama administer wanted
¶ Best colleges for the buck?
to make a bigger deal out of which was how can we create a list of best colleges for bang for your buck? Essentially, you know what's going to provide you the education that you need without making you have to go into debt for the rest of your life or to do blood oaths to people that maybe you don't want to give blood oaths too, because you want to get into this Ivy League university, that Ivy League university. I will note the irony that you once worked at
US News and now you have a competing list. But this is and look where I want to talk about the future of journalism and and sort of and where that goes to. But talk to me about the decision to do this list and for the Washington Monthly, and how would you describe it and what what what motivated you to do it?
Well, you're right that that I used to work at US News and the U S News College rankings paid my mortgage, all of us Right, there was always a kind of undercurrent of concern about the adequacy of the numbers. And when my friend Jim Fallows became the editor, he commissioned internal study by a very reputable organization that found that the use of their metrics, I think the quote
was something like made no logical or methodological sense. And when he reported this to the owner, Mort Zuckerman of the US News, and this was the major revenue driver of the publication, Jim was shortly escorted out the door. And it was not too long after that I quit
when Jim was fired. And it was a couple of years later that, miraculously who knows that in study made its way into the Washington Monthly and we did a couple of deep dive investigative pieces about US News and I determined the idea of ranking colleges is fine, right, often,
¶ US News ranks colleges in a horrific way
how dare you rank colleges? Nobody can compare us? Well, you know, we ranked football teams, we ranked students, we can rank colleges. But that basically US News does it in a kind of a horrific way. And I'm going to simplify their metrics, but it's basically this. They reward colleges in their metrics for three things. Number one, exclusivity. How few students do you let in? It's sort of the idea that, you know, college is like a country
club lectures instead of golf and velvet rope. Yeah, and you know, which is kind of wacky when you think about it. If you few restaurants. They don't count country clubs, right, They say, the best restaurant in the city is this country club. Well, I can't get into that country club. Why are you telling me this, it's kind of useless information to anybody who isn't you know, at the very upper level of the SAT range, and you know the
way that thing works out. It's mostly people from affluent, wealthy families who go to the best high schools, who have years of prep. Those are the ones again into the IVY League. So for ninety percent of Americans, they
¶ Schools prioritize wealth when doing admissions
don't even consider those schools. They're not for them, right. Exclusivity is how US News And there's about a dozen other rankings out there, and they all, almost all of them do the same thing. They say, who do you How many people can you say no to? That must be you're good. The second thing they reward is spending is wealth. How much money do we spend on our students? Which if you're only mostly letting in wealthy students, you've got a lot of money, right, so you can spend money.
And then the third is reputation. US News does this survey of college leaders and they ask you what do you think of that other college, as if that leader knows anything about what's going on in the classroom one thousand miles away. But it's sort of like, you know, high school who are the cool kids. Everybody else the cool kids are. So the cool kids are the cool kids because everybody say they're the cool kids. We said, these are really terrible metrics. They're not useful for most students,
and they're very bad for the country. Right. They drive inequality, they drive snobbery, they drive expense. They make college more expensive. Every college president and system wants their college to go hire on the US News list. And so they, wellt's throw some more money at it. Let's tell you know, our constituct our students. No, you can't get in. Let's deny people at education. It's crazy. So we said, all right.
I actually hired the woman who had done the study right for Jim Follows, and I said, help me design a different set of rankings. And so we said, what is it that the average person, not the most affluent people, not people who went to Harvard, but the average person wants out of their investment in higher education. And when I say investment, I don't just mean tuition dollars, I
mean your tax dollars. Government at every level, Chuck spends half a trillion dollars a year on higher ed. That is seventeen hundred dollars out of pocket for the average taxpayer.
Right, whether you go, whether they go to college or not, they have contributed, right, they've contributed dollars to the college is providing some value for the country and for ourselves specifically.
So what is that value? And so we came up with three alternative metrics. Number one, what you alluded to best bang for your buck upward mobility? Does a college recruit and graduate students of modest means? Right, working class students, middle class students.
Boards, students, first gen basically first gen college?
Right? Does it recruit and graduate students of modest means with degrees that don't cost you much, don't load them down with debt, and that means something in the market such that they earn middle class or better incomes.
They've moved up the latter, they're making more money than their parents exactly.
¶ Upward mobility matters more when ranking colleges
Number two research, Do colleges create the scholarship and scholars that drive new economic growth, solutions to global problems, you know, cures for diseases, et cetera. And number three what we call service. Open up the mission statement of just about any college, and there's going to be a sentence in there that's saying point of this university is to create, is to educate young people to take their place as
engaged members of their democracy. So we're the only ranking that holds schools to account for their own mission statement in that regard. And so a school gets extra points in our ranking if they have a robust ROTC program serving in the military, if they students go on into the Peace Corps, if they are friendly to people financially who serve in America Corps. If their voter registration numbers are high and they do what they need to do
to make voting easier for their students. If they use some of their work study money to provide community service opportunities rather than just you know, free free labor for the college, that sort of thing. And so when you put those three things together, you get an entirely different ranking. All the other rankings, it's all the top thirty or all the colleges that are always there, right, they're almost never changed, harvardt Stanford, maybe a couple of stories.
They freak out if they lose a notch er two. I mean, you know, you hear about it. I mean,
¶ Schools freak out when they lose ranking status
you know, I think Georgetown got all freaked out that they went from twenty five to twenty seven. Yeah, they're like, oh my god, you know this guy's falling. No, this is huge for these colleges.
And again, so you go to the top twenty or thirty, and they're all schools most people can't get into, right, they're all country clubs and look elite schools. They do a good job. I wound up, you know, transferring to one and got an elite degree after going to state school. More power to it. If you can get in, you'll make a lot of money, you'll have a great network. But most people can't, right, that's the point. So yeah, so the top schools in US News this year barely
budged the top thirty schools in Washington Monthly. Half of the worried these elite schools. Well, and you know, Duke and.
Say your Rice is your Vanderbilts, They're on there. I was looking at the South, but then you got a school like that's number I was just looking, right, the number one school in the South for best bang for your buck, and the number one liberal arts college is Brea.
Yeah, it's the number one school among fourteen hundred colleges that we rank.
That's I mean, nobody would have had that where's Brea in the US news rank? Oh?
I mean, you know, if you off to the side and some side ranking, they probably give it, you know, some lip service. But we're the only ranking in the country that says Berea University in Barrack in breat Kentucky. Berea,
¶ Berea College is best bang for the buck school in America
by the way.
I mean, excuse me, yeah, I know we're both is the.
Number one school and and why because they do an astonishing job of providing a grant education to students of modest means. Most of their students percent of their students, by the way, are on pelgrams. That's the federal Where is where is Brion? Bria is in Borea and it's I don't know, seventy five miles from Lexington, if that puts you in the.
So it's in that side of Kentucky.
Yeah, Lexington, and almost all their students are from the Appalachia. Colige was founded in eighteen fifty five by abolitionists, and it was the first college south of the Mason Dixon line to educate both blacks and whites and women. And for more than one hundred years it's had the aspiration to charge no tuition to anybody, and they don't quite get there, but the vast majority of the students pay little to nothing and they do that. How do they?
Yeah, how do they do it?
It's fascinating. I did. We would do a podcast and I interviewed the president Cynthia Nixon is her name.
Number one, that's not that Cynthia Nixon, Yeah.
A different they think that's her name. A very bright woman, and she explained it to us Number one, very what really designated work college meaning all of their students get work study money, so and then some of that money goes to pay their tuition and some of it goes in their pocket. Number two h And really the biggest reason is for one hundred years they've been building a a endowment through small donations that's now like a billion and a half dollars.
Well, they just are really smart investors.
Smart investors. And if you start a hundred years ago and you keep going magical compound interest and instead of like using it to build sports stadiums or endow you know.
Or beautiful dorms, right, that becomes the arms race at
¶ Berea has a massive endowment, but it's used for education
these universities for dorms that look like they look like midtown Manhattan apartments exactly.
It all goes or not. You know, the bulk of it goes to keeping costs down for students and then the students. It's it's, it's, it's it's a selective ish university. Not everybody gets in. It's not like Yale, but it's an academically rigorous institution. When you go look on the student reports, it's like, wow, I'm working my tail off here.
But when students leave, they earn five thousand dollars more per year than their peers, their demographic peers who will go to colin So you know, that's just our idea of a great school. And if you look at like just the top five the most the highest ranking elite school is Princeton at number five. I think Harvard's down at twenty six or something. But above Princeton are three
campuses of the California State University system. The number two Fresno State, which I'm going to guess most of your listeners and viewers don't know much about it, maybe have never heard of, but it shows up on a Saturday night in college football.
It does bully, you do see that.
But they are a fabulous institution. They charge very little. The students come from that Central Valley of California, many of them from very poor backgrounds. The president of the university grew up working on a farm in the area. The students when they graduate tend to stay in the area. They don't jet off to New York and work for a you know, hedge fund, and some of them go back to work for agricultural companies where as children they
pick crops. That is upward mobility, my friend. Right, And so you know, these are the colleges that are really the ones we should all elevate and try to support, and unfortunately they are. They are underinvested in. They don't get anywhere near the money that schools that you know, catered to the wealthier student and it's it's kind of a crime.
You know. It's interesting if there's a pattern, loose pattern that I've noticed a lot of colleges, meaning these are schools that don't have graduate programs right in many cases they are just focused on the four year I assume that's not a coincidence and how your rankings work that that those that these these colleges that are just focused on there are not worried about because many many universities
¶ Schools focus on post-grad programs rather than undergrad
it is the graduate programs that pay the bills. Right, you know, in some ways undergrad is a loss leader, and so is there. Do you get a sense that those without the graduate schools, without the the the postgrad you know, whether it's med schools, law schools, et cetera, that it it sort of concentrates the administration on running a better four year undergrad system.
I think there's a lot to that. You know, there are tiers of universities that are classified by an institution called the Carnegie H Classification for Institutions for Higher Education, and we used to follow them kind of rigorously. Because US News did funny you should mention this year they really switched up their rankings and that and that allowed us to kind of free ourselves from how we used
to do it. And one of the things we did, uh afropop what you said, is we pulled all the research data out of our main rankings and just made a best Colleges for research because that's where the grad programs are really really are and those are those are the universities, and there's maybe a couple hundred of them that have very big robust med schools, law schools, engineering schools, and so forth.
¶ Research institutions should be put in their own category
You look at your list, and it is the big These are the school the big schools. It's Michigan, it's Stanford, it's Berkeley, it's pur New Texas A and M one through five, all of them huge research institutions.
Right, So we said, let's just put those guys in their own category.
By the way, Texas A and M over. Mit, you know how much some Texans would love seeing that.
They do. They they brag on it, and you know, not to get too political here, but these are the
¶ Trump administration is going after schools with research grants
schools that the Trump administration is really going after cuts to research grants. One of the things we found in doing this exercise, and it's in the story, is that sure he's gone after the big research universities in blue cities and states, but the ones that are also being hit. There are a lot of big research universities in red
states and in rural areas, and they're getting hurt. And and it's like a lot of Trump administration policy, it is aimed at his enemies, but it winds up damaging his vote.
There's a whole Paul I can tell you this. There's a whole bunch of lobbyists making money right now off of universities who've hired them to say, hey, get us off this target list. We're not what I don't think he mean. And and what you find out, I happen to know of one very public university that that's having some success doing that because they got as you just said, they lost some stuff that was aimed at punishing a Northeastern school and it ended up punishing the southern big
state school. And that is it wasn't the intent. And so like just like the farmers, he's trying, they're trying to create carve outs now you know, which of course just got gum up the whole works.
Yeah, yeah, no, And it's and it's a it's a politics truck that we've never seen in this country.
¶ We've never seen an administration target college research
As the weaponizing college research. Right, Like that's another.
Level specific targeting of your political enemies on funding that was never intended to be anything but given out on merit, right given out.
And it's and not even really political stuff. I mean, you know, whether it's health funding, whether it's research. I mean, this is stuff that is arguably for the masses.
Yeah yeah, so so so I hope that people take away from our rankings. I mean, I think our rankings resonate at this moment, because there's so much fury at higher end, and the fury is in all directions, from all quarters. And you know, a lot of it is political and partisan, and I think, you know, maybe have has grains of truth in it, but is also you know, kind of hypocritical. People. I'm furious about elite universities and college in general, and absolutely desperate to get their kids
in there. But part of the fury is is real.
¶ It costs a ton of money to send kids to college now
Is it costs a lot of money now to send a kid to college or send yourself to college. I mean real inflation adjusted spending for two year schools has nearly doubled since nineteen ninety four, and more than doubled for four year schools. And you know, people are saying, you know, is college still worth it? Well, you go to the Washington Mother, you see hundreds of colleges that are really very much worth it. But in general, you know, at Toyota is a great buy at thirty thousand dollars, yeah,
roll or whatever. At one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, it's not worth it. Right, So until we can get the cost of college down and prove the quality, because a lot of colleges are not delivering quality. You're going to have this this fury, this this distrust.
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¶ Do colleges prioritize hiring researchers or teachers?
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a campus. But what kind of professors? What kind of teachers do they have? How do they hire their professors? Do they demand professors that do research and prioritize their own work or do they hire teachers real coaches? When I mean a teacher, I mean like a coach you know who becomes that mentor you know? I mean, look, I teach part time. I'm I'm on use USC's campus right now, and I did an event last night and three of my former students showed up and it it
brought a ton of joy to me. Right It is that there is a joy you get out of it when you feel like you've you've been able to pass something on, you've been able to inspire a student. And not all people are motivated by that or have that. Is there a way to measure what kind of because you could you look at a resume of somebody, well, what a great resume, but you have no idea if there are any good at being a teacher and they know how to be a coach, you know, that sort
of mindset, you know, is that researchable? Is that rankable?
So we've really struggled with this, and there are there is some data that you can use to measure the quality of student engagement, quality of teaching, but we are sufficiently doubtful of it to not We've written stories about it.
We've you know, is this what sort of the student reaction to professors? Is it?
Using those rate of professors professor? There's something called the National Survey of Student Engagement. You know, they ask students and you know, faculty, how many times during the course of the week have you met with a professor outside the classroom? Right? How many ten page or more papers did.
¶ We overproduce academic talent in America
You have to write?
They try to measure the degree to which actual evidence based practices that we know lead to learning are happening on the ground. Not bad, but it's not of a quality that we've been felt comfortable to put in our rankings. But you're asking the right question anecdotally, Like I went to the University of Missouri my freshman year. It's good,
good school. The flag that I transferred to Northwestern. Honestly, the quality of the teaching at Northwestern wasn't any better than the quality teaching that I had at MISSOI I bet that's.
Just how to pay higher rent that they did.
I've given lectures to, you know, many at many colleges. I've been doing this college ranking thing for twenty years. And you landed some small, Bucolic, you know, not well known college in the middle of nowhere, and you know, you meet these professors who are just wonderful, and they're very smart, and the students adore them, and they have degrees from very prestigious universities. The thing is, we overproduce academic talent in this country. Right. Most people that get
PhDs struggle to find teaching jobs. And that's tough if you're in that profession. But it's great if you're a college in some far flung place. Sure you got your pick a great talent.
Yeah, you get a Harvard train, Princeton train, Michigan train at you know, at a small college in the middle of Canthus. Yeah.
And the less research they're doing, the more time they're all right, I'll just put my my my mission is to is to educate these kids. So I do think that the quality of teaching between elite schools and non elite schools is very narrow, is very similar.
¶ Smaller schools face massive financial challenges
So one of the challenges that's coming. I say this. I serve on a board at GW, so I hear these admissions concerns, meaning it's the so called demographic cliff that we are at the beginning of that. I guess it's I guess it's my generation's fault. I didn't have enough kids. I only had two, right, we didn't have there were and you did your job. Yeah, I replaced right, we replaced.
The environment i'd had to, and we can better close them back.
So but there's I look at a lot of your the colleges that made the rankings, and I know many of them are financially strapped, and I think there is going to be a a you know, in the next ten or fifteen years, we're gonna see colleges. I have a friend of mine who is the former well somebody you know Hobart who worked in the Clint administration yep, back in the day. And I remember Mark gearan great guy.
And I remember Mark telling me this fifteen years ago when he was at Hobart and then he left and then he came back that there's real financial challenges for these smaller basically the schools that performed best in your list. You know, Bria has sounds like they have a good endowment. Many of these smaller colleges do not. And if you take away international students and you take away some of these things, there's gonna be some good colleges that go
bankrupt in the next ten years that just disappear. What are you sensing, you know, have you been able to pick up on how are some of these smaller colleges trying to survive in this in this tightening financial climate.
Well, I'll add one one more piece of news for you. In the big beautiful Act that got passed, Uh, there is uh statutory language that is saying colleges that don't demonstrate bang for the buck, that don't demonstrate a good return on investment will eventually get cut off from federal financing.
Mmm.
So there's going to be in addition to.
The interesting reckoning.
¶ Many schools border on predatory
Yeah, and honestly, the Washington Monthly has been calling for something like this for years. You know, whether this bill got it quite right, we can debate, but the the the.
Spirit you like the spirit of it a hundred. Look, I remember the Obama administration couldn't get anything passed, so they decided they were going to put out their own best bang. It never really took you remember.
That, the kind of they we're going to make it a ranking, and in the end they said, no, we'll just put out.
The data that I both know what happened. You know, I both know what happened. There so many of those they all had connections to some higher institution, like don't you rank us? Don't you do that? Yeah?
Exactly. They went about as far as they politically could. But uh so, so if you look at our fourteen hundred plus schools and our best best uh colleges for your tuition and tax dollar ranking. We talked about the good ones, the great ones, the you know uh you know, uh President, there's a lot of colleges down on the blow.
That really should go, should disappear. Huh. They need some radical reform.
They charged too much, their students don't make that much money, they don't graduate a there there almost predatory.
Now, let's let's name some names. What's what's a what's one that.
People but you know, you know, liberty University, right, Yeah, just a terrible college too late, right, people think is
¶ We need a "new deal" for higher education
a terrific Yeah.
My kids loved that was on the list.
At least by our reckoning. Right, I'm sure if you're yeah, you know it has its But but so there's a lot of schools you hadn't heard of, a lot of you know, the arts schools and the music schools where you know, students go knowing they're never going to make any money.
Berkeley School of Music, Yeah, one of those very expensive and and and selective and no guarantee you're going to make it all right. Look, I was a I was a musician, yeah, and I did get a music scholarship. But I remember toying with Berkeley and thought, man, I'm not that that's a you're you're, you're, you're going for the dream. And literally it's one percent that makes it exactly exactly.
But so there are a lot of towns kept alive in part by their university, and those are the places my heart goes out to because one of the great things about the American system of higher education is it's dispersed. It's all over the country, and you know, you think of.
The every European marvels at this. Yeah, you just marvel at it that we have these institutions everywhere.
And I think we need a new deal. And we've written about this. Kevin Carry, one of our guest editors, have written extensively about it. We need a deal, a new deal for higher ed. We need to reach out to colleges and say, on a voluntary basis, if you're willing to control costs, to share your data so that we can monitor what's going on and improve quality and charge little to nothing to students of modest means, we're going to cover you all your costs up to a
certain modest amount. This is an oversimplification shot, but the average cost spending on a student, non accounting, room and board, it's about ten thousand dollars a year to.
Go to college.
To cost to college. If you offered colleges ten thousand dollars per student, that's the deal. And oh, by the way, any credit at any college from a class transfers over if that student goes to another college in the network.
¶ Most people get their BA's at local & regional universities
That could save thousands of hundreds of these schools anyway, And I think a lot of state schools would join in. The elites would never do this, but that way you could deliver free college or virtually free college to the working middle class American. Save these schools, save these towns, save these regions, have better quality at lower cost, and I could be transformative for the country.
Well look, I mean I can already hear you essentially making this pitch so that left and right both could embrace it. Which is that's as much as to save these rural towns that do love that.
You know.
It's funny, you know, there's this sort of war on higher ed on the right, but locally they love you know. It's like, frankly, it's like you're a member of Congress. I can't stay in Congress, but I like my guy, you know, right, I don't like these higher ed guys. But you know, we got a nice little university right down the street here. It's a good you know, you know, they produce really good people. I get my babysitters from there, you know, type of mindset.
Yeah, yeah, And they have they have the local radio station, and they have right a lot of times they provide the local news exactly exactly. And you know, there are a lot of these regional public universities. The Fresno States the northeast Missouri state or Southeast Missouri state. These colleges that are known regionally but have no national profile. That's where most people get their BA degrees, right, and they're underinvested in I think they get about one thousand dollars
¶ America didn't get to making 2 years of college free
per student, less than the flagship universities in those states, and maybe half or a third of what gets spent for these elite schools. And they're doing the yeomen's work. They are the up the engines of upward mobility in this country.
If we had had a conversation in the early nineties the question, I would have assumed back then that we were going to get what I call mandatory thirteenth and fourteenth grade, meaning that the first two years of if essentially community college was going to be free, that it was going to be available the way public Essentially, we were going to extend public education two more years. It
seemed inevitable. It's where I remember, you know, one of the smarter strategic things that Bill Clinton did in ninety two, I remember was prioritizing campaign events at community colleges. Yeah, and you know, it was just you know, that could why do you do that? That's where the people are right, like it was a you know, and he was. He was making an economic argument, and what better place to do that where people are looking to make it to the middle class than there, And he took.
¶ The state of the community college system
The he began the process of getting the banks out of student financing because they were making a footload with no risk and making it some college could offer directly. No, he was absolutely right. And I don't know if you were, but.
We're not there. I don't know. I was. I was shocked. I am shocked that we didn't get the and I know it was in the I think it was in the initial draft of one of the bills, Bill Better Yeah, Back.
It was one of those different versions. It was doing for community colleges what I just said we should do for colleges. It was. It was basically a set of funding and regulatory UH offers that said we're going to make community college free in America. And it came very close. No Republicans voted for it. I think Joe Manchin voted against it. But what really killed it was the four year elite schools didn't want all that money because it's
a fixed pie. They thought they wanted the money for themselves, and so they quietly but non publicly bad mouthed it, and it didn't make it became mack close.
Where what is the state the state of the community college system? You know, I grew up in Miami, and I grew up at the time Miami Day Community College was almost a model community college. It except it's now a college. It's a four year college, you know, but
¶ Florida never built a good state system, has no prestige schools
it is a tremendous I mean, it is your path, you know, out of out of struggles, and it really is. It's a I'm you know, I think it's it's I'm glad to hear it. Still it hangs in there because I have always been really proud of how successful it's been. What is the state of the community college system in general? Because it still is the best path out of the out of poverty.
I'm going to answer that question, but before I do, one to say, I hope you'll go back to the Washington Monthly and read the story about I think we call it Florida's Fresh Squeezed Universities. It's about Florida, all about the history of how Florida managed. When you think of Florida, you don't think higher education, right, No, And.
I've always been personally frustrated that Florida doesn't have a UT system, a Sunni system or the UC system. And it's been they've they toyed with it a few times, but they never they never quite you know, built those
¶ Florida standardized passing courses counting at every school
type of systems like Texas and California New Art.
I invite you to read the story, because what Florida doesn't have is Harvard level prestige schools. You know, for Florida's good school but nobody thinks of it as elite. But the system that they do have is more like UT or the California system or the New York system than you realize. And I'll give you one example. First of all, the end result is you can go to Florida and go to a four year school. And the Florida schools do extremely well on our rankings.
By the way, they did really well in the US News Wrean Kings this year too. Yeah, because they are a good price.
They are a very good price, and that is engineered into the Florida system. They give you one example. In nineteen the nineteen sixties, they passed a system whereby every course at every public university in Florida was had the same course number and if you pass that course, you passed that course at any other school in Florida. Right. As you may know, when you go to community college, you take English one oh one and then you transfer
to a four year school. The four year schools like you to say, we don't think that the coge No, but you're right.
In Florida, Santa Fe Community College, which is next to Gainesville, it's automatic TCC Tallahassee Community College automatic to Florida State.
Yeah, so Florida has more as I think a percentage of its students getting the first two years at a community college and then transferring than any other state in the Union.
Well, it's it's more affordable. I mean, look, if I didn't get a scholarship, that was going to be my path. Yeah, you do the two years and then transfer because you know, it's a more affordable way to get a four year degree.
I got a son, you know, at Montgomery College on and off, so it is a great way. And to
¶ There's a wide disparity of outcomes between community colleges
answer the question, community college has benefited some in this big beautiful act because they're going to get they freed up money for short termsificates.
These are kind of trade schoolish type of right, they.
Do trade school stuff as community college. That's where most trade school stuff happens. And you know, people don't quite get that, but it's been the case for decades. But
¶ Community colleges offer community building activities
these are usually the federal government won't give you a PELL grant if it's not at least a year long program or two year long program. This is for six weeks, eight months. I can forget what the timeframe is. We'll see if it works because the quality, there's a question of quality. But this is a potential gusher of new funding for community colleges. But community college is like four
year There's just a vast range of quality. Some of them have very low graduation rates, some of them much higher, even holding demographics studies. Some of them are well supported by their regions and states, some of them not so much.
So it's a wide disparity, is what you're saying. There's not a consistency to it.
Correct, correct, And there are some states just don't have a lot of community colleges. So it's they are fantastic as an institution. We need to do more for them, we need to ask more of them. But I completely agree with you. They are they are the working end of higher education.
Talk about community connection. I mean, I just you know, we had a the way the Miami Dade Community College has multiple campuses all around Dade County, and those campuses
also served as sort of host for community events. You might you know, you might take a yoga class there, you might take a quilting class there, like you know, look, because they had to make money, right, they would offer sort of classes not for degrees, but just sort of community interest classes to yeah, make a couple of bucks to support the education part of things.
And the partnerships you find between community colleges and employers, oh yeah, find these at some of the regional public universities too, but even more at the community colleges. If you're an employer, you're you know, an airline, right, and you need people you work with the community college to structure your classes such that they're getting the certificates that they need to then work you know, in the logistics part of your airline or in the accounting or whatever.
And you know, maybe they have a paid internship program. So that's where a lot of that academic to employment connection happens or doesn't happen, again, depending on the leadership
¶ College rankings are an important example of service journalism
and the quality of the community college.
Well, look, I want to pivot now a little bit to sort of where the state of journalism and nonprofit for profit all that stuff. But I will just say, I mean, I think this is this is what I call service journalism, and it sort of gets at something that I think is overall missing in the conversation that we're having about the future of journalism, and I think sort of where we lost our way collectively, which is
just this, there's not enough service journalism. We you know, I'm curious what you think of this statement, But I have a friend of mine named Richard Gingris who used to run the Google News Initiative, and he said, you know, the worst thing that happened to journalism was all the president's men. And you know where he's going, because ninety percent of the work of a journalist is in service to their community if they're doing it right. It's ten
percent of your work over a lifetime. That is that accountability, right. That is the stuff you want to put in your resume, the stuff you might show up at your obituary, right, the stuff that, yeah, you might apply for an award for, but it's not what most people are going to know you'rejournalism for. And it's not the impact, right, it's and it's it's one of these where this ranking system is more helpful to the average person than doing a a h an audit of of just how campaign spending is
working these days between the NRCC and the NRSC. Right, I'm not saying it's an unimportant story, but it's it's not service journalism. And I will tell you in my conversations with young aspiring journalists, they're getting in not to help people figure out how to save money in their life, right, They're getting in because they want to get Joe Biden or get Donald Trump. Right that that they're gonna you know, they're gonna be the next Bob Warder. How do we
¶ Local journalism was the foundational piece of the profession
inspire people to to to want to be in service that that journalism is both a service and that part of the public service gets you to the point where, yes, you you're trying to build some trust so that when you do the accountability they believe you.
Yeah. Look, there's always been a hierarchy in journalism. The people who are out there doing the yeoman's work, right, covering the school board, covering you know, government agencies, covering services.
You know, snap benefits. How is that going to work? You know things like this. Yeah, you know, the.
Beat reporters, they get their they get their share of love from the editor. But who rules the roost. It's the political reporters, right, It's the big time investigative reporters. That's where the glory is. That's where you know, you make your most money. And when you compound that by the utter devastation that has taken place in the last really ten years but really more like twenty of local journalism, Chuck,
¶ The economic underpinnings of local journalism have been wiped out
it's dead. They've it's been deoyed.
I think it's the single I think it is the it. If you look at the proverbial house of journalism, it turned out local was a foundational right, and you knock out that it collapsed the entire structure. Right, nobody trusts anything because they lost that community tether and that turned out to be the single most important connection we had with the public.
So so you know, there's good publications, you know, online nonprofit publications trying to bring back local reporting, bring back not just accountability reporting like political and bureaucratic, but as you say, the service journalism.
Where do I save money? Where can I take my family out of four out to dinner without breaking the bank. I know that seems not like the greatest scoop, but that's actually how you help your community.
You know, what are the scores at the high school basketball game? People care about that, and you know it's you can't just get the data there. There was a game there, Somebody tell me, tell me what happened. Uh, you know, weather Best drives within three hours of my town. I mean there's a thousand things that people want and need.
But again, the economic underpinnings of that kind of work have disappeared, primarily because of Google and Facebook, and you know there's other reasons for it, but it is primarily the advertising dollar has been hoarded by the Silicon Valley platforms, and without advertising, it is really hard to make it in this in this business. And I run a publication that for a while was doing very well producing online content that was supported by advertising, and then it disappeared.
So I've lived, and you don't even know why it disappeared, right, because they never were transparent about how the algorithm worked, right.
Correct, But you know, in a general sense, we know, right they monopolized. I mean Google has lost an anti trust case this year monopolizing the ad tech infrastructure, and and they you know, the connection between readers and advertisers
¶ Government and philanthropy can underwrite local journalism
at the local level has largely disappeared. There's still some and I think you can come back with the right policies, but boy, it's tough out there. And anybody doing local service journalism I agree with that. My hat's off to them. Well, you know, it's interesting the what what I've discovered. I mean, I'm trying to throw.
Myself into this issue a little bit and working on a few projects of trying to is it possible to bring back a to create a for profit local news environment, And what you do find is, you know who else hates the Google ad network? Local businesses. Yeah, they don't like it either. They prefer a personalized connection. They prefer to advertise in an entity that they that they know.
Rather there's quote unquote programmatic advertising, you know, et cetera, or you just sort of find people that stumble upon your stuff. And I do think that, But the I don't know whether this is whether you can do this without the help of government, And I'm and I'm torn on it because I don't know how much we want government involved.
So there's two ways government can help. Government can and philanthropy, right can underwrite some of the costs, or government can change the rules of the marketplace from the ones that wrote yesterday or ten or twenty years ago that destroyed the AD dollars two new ones that bring the AD dollars back.
Right, Yeah, you can. You can incentive. You know, there is some work being done on the state level trying to you know, you might give a tax break to a local business that advertises in a local publication. So it's not a it's not a direct subsidy to the media. It actually you're helping the small business. So it's a frankly, it's a way to write, it's a way to make
¶ National opinion journalism undermined local journalism
it a bipartisan ia to be frank Yeah.
Well, I hope you know the work of my friend and maybe yours, Steve Waldman.
Oh well it's Steve. Yeah, Okay, Yes, it's Steve's work. He's he's been he's been going legislature by legislature, making this argument.
On my board. He's one of my best friends. His organization is Rebuilt Local News, and and you know, I think he's making real progress in this.
No, he has, I mean, I I we we've been at a couple events together as we sort of are pied pipering this stuff, and it is it is. Unfortunately, there is a I do think it's still seen through a political lens, right, He's not making the case politic through a political lens, but it's unfortunately local media is being punished for the perception of cable news. You know, I used to scream about this that. You know, actually the state of journalism is quite good over the last
ten years. It's amazing some of the work that's out there. The problem is our curb appeal, you know. Right, the most prominent news organizations were the three cable channels that really gave journalism a bad reputation. All right, I'm not going to sit here and say one is bad. I'm not going to get into that. It just the the opinion debate drove the perception of all journalism and it really harmed local more than anybody else.
I think that's right, And I think what happened is,
¶ Small towns can't afford good journalism
you know, when I was a kid, when you were a kid, I'm a little older, you you lived in a medium sized city or a small town or rural area. My parents, you know, I grew up in Saint Louis. They read both the Saint Louis papers, and you were getting a lot of local news, and you were getting political news if you if you had a sizable town like Saint Louis, you had your own reporters in Washington covering the industries, covering government.
But through the prism of somebody that lived in Saint Louis. Yeah, you know, and that's important.
It's important to know what the you know, localizedeers going to do to the rivers, right, And so the best guy covering the Army Corps of Engineers was a Saint Louis Post dispatched reporter. But every town in Missouri, you know, was carrying a p They were carrying Post dispatch reporting
and then they were doing local reporting. And a lot of those small towns they were very conservative, datorially sure, right, but but the news that they were covering, the national news that they were covering was whatever every you know, it was kind of everybody else read differences from writers from from ape, from you're I'm it's back, and it was allitable checked. Those small towns no longer have national news, right, they can't afford it, and and a lot of them
just disappeared completely. And so where do people small towns get their news. They go to Fox right, or maybe they go to MSNBC, and that's not news. I mean they're getting bits of reformation, but in a package of partisanship.
No it and it's so in some ways when you're trying to salvage local news, people look at it. Yeah, but if you have an agenda right like that, you know, they've been convinced that that that every if the media is manipulated, it must be up and down the entire ecosystem of media, not just on the on the on the national cable side.
But you're I'm really fascinated about what you said, Chuck, that businesses want a relationship with their customers. If you run a hospital and a you know, rural or vault in area, uh, you know all of your business or most of it comes from the region, right, you run an HVAC company, if you you know, uh, a grocery business, you need that relationship with the local and and the local papers aren't there to provide it. And I think there's an opportunity there. I keep following that trail.
I'm like, no, I I am, and look, I'm a huge believer that that look we've got. As I joke, a man named Craig decided classifies ought to be free. YadA, YadA, YadA. The entire local news industry got destroyed every big But I still think that it's possible local sports and even youth sports below high school could be the connective tissue that starts the rebuilding process. It may not be the elixir, I mean, might it'd be as helpful as classified advertising is, but boy, the one I just look at it as
what can bring red and blue together kids? Right, and we love sports in this country, and now sports is going to be a pipeline to college more than ever before. Right with the variety of you know, with this, with this nil, we're making a limp. We're sort of it's possible this new world of nil and sports might actually expand the opportunities of people paying for college with sports the way frankly the arts were used to pay for college,
you know, previous generations. And and that's maybe that's a good thing, let's hope. So I know, I'm not going to sit here and say it definitely, but it's possible, well that this is a that this is a it's a hand up the ladder not necessarily. Uh uh. You know, I'm not saying some universities aren't going. I mean, what we're seeing in college football is a little insane, but if you go to that next level down, you know
it's really serving as an opportunity for young women. Yep, you know in ways that we've not seen before.
And and you know, the Silicon Valley keeps throwing punches. And right now, what's happening to local news is their contents being scraped by AI. Right and and there's a pretty fascinating movement happening, uh with a company by the name of cloud Stream. I think it's called you may have looked about it, where they host media sites. It holds all kinds of sites and they give you the ability to say, I don't want AI scrape in my side, and you don't have to do anything. It's done automatically
for you. Well, that's got the AI folks freaked out because the inability to have real time, fact checked information in local areas turns AI into mush. Right, they've already scraped all the old stuff and so they've got a lot. But things change, right, Downtown's changed, roads change, people move, and if you can't get that information, and that's what the local you know, press has, so they've got more leverage than they think.
No, it's it's look, I'm not you know, I'm one of those who just views AI neutrally. It can be weaponized for good or weaponized for bad, or frankly, probably a little bit of both. We just have to be smart about how we use it as a tool. Okay, Yeah, Paul, this was great. Washington Monthly is as innovative as ever, and what I like about it is that there's always it's a home for sort of different ideas. It's you know, it's not always the conventional, not just in some ways
left right debates get conventional. And I hate to say this, but there's certain editorial pages that, ah, the editorials new, but I've read it one hundred times.
You kind of know where they're coming from and play in a different version of the same song.
Yeah, I mean, you do seem to have a you know, what is it that makes a Washington Monthly story that doesn't make it into the Washington Post? What would be your what's the secret ingredient in your mind?
We're not afraid to put the same reporting energy into figuring out solutions as slothing out problems and conventional journalism, you know, the opinion section may have a piece or two on some new policy idea, some new way out right, but mostly they feel that that's not their job. No, let me find problems, and we find problems. There's no politics there, you know, every but solutions have a kind of political valance, or they might. And we do this
twenty four to seven. That's what we did. We're more guided by figuring out how to fix things than slew the outw I mean, obviously we uh, you know, one of my colleagues says, you know that the problem with the monthly is we provide solutions to problems people don't know they have. Oh, there's not much of a market for it. But yeah, and I think that's the big, the big difference. Yeah, No, I know.
It's like, I think one of the big solutions to some of our political distrust is to expand Congress. Many people don't think that's a problem that needed to be solved. I've I've had a hard time getting lay people to see that right a way. And it's like just you know, but but I take your point. And yet, you know, a lot of Times, what you read today in the Washington Monthly will be a solution that government eventually agrees to in about five years.
That's how it works, and we have a lot, we have a long record of that.
Yes you do, yes, you do well, you recognize it. Paul Glaster is always pleasure. Thank you, sir. Great to see it.
Thanks for having me on.
Buddy H.